Super-taunting at its finest.

Creative Staff:
Story: Barbara Randall Kesel
Art: Emma Vieceli

What They Say:
Superwoman thinks Diana’s concern for these human teenagers is the weakness that will allow her to take Wonder Woman down. But her lasso of thorns is no match for the Lasso of Truth! “Besties” part 2 of 3.

Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
After a fun if somewhat awkward first installment of this arc in just grappling with a different kind of Diana than we usually get, I came away really enjoying the book. Particularly because of Irene Koh’s artwork. With this installment, we get Emma Vieceli providing the art and she takes what we got in the first and applies her own brand of artistic magic to it, making it just as appealing in a different way. Kesel has certainly gotten herself some great artists to work with here and it helps to elevate the work as a whole and make it a lot more fun. With some good scripting and dialogue and just the surrealness of a fight on a beach that comes out of nowhere, it’s an odd dynamic that can be hard to make work.

With this installment, there’s the change of having Superwoman here now insisting on battling it out with Wonder Woman, though our lead obviously is keeping the trio of girls safe from harm by Superwoman. That’s not something that Superwoman processes since she just sees everyone as tools to be used for her own glorification. That, in turn, gets her into quite the taunting match with Wonder Woman as she does her best to shame her and how she interacts with the world, with men and with those that idolize her like the three runners. There’s some good snark that comes from this in general, even if it feels a little weird at times and kind of displaced from even some of the other arcs we’ve had in Sensation Comics.

The fight itself isn’t something that takes up a huge chunk of real estate in this issue but there’s a lot of posturing and playing by Superwoman that makes it fun to watch, especially as she fakes out Wonder Woman and then plays with her new pets with the girls. That shows a lot of Superwoman’s personality more than anything else after Diana heads off into the sky, since it’s pretty obvious what her plan is to deal with Superwoman while keeping an eye on the trio. That makes for a strong impact when it actually does hit and it’s rather enjoyable watching the walloping that Superwoman gets out of it – particularly thanks to Vieceli’s artwork and sense of layout and choreography.

In Summary:
Though a story like this would normally be a one and done kind of book, I’m enjoying the stretched out aspect of it as we rotate through three artists that play to similar but different and distinct styles. This installment lets Barbara Randall Kesel play with the dialogue in some fun ways once again as she puts our hero and villain up against each other with lots of posturing and some solid action. The real discovery for me here is Emma Vieceli, an artist that I hadn’t seen before from my somewhat limited reading. She’s got a great style that really brings things through in a fantastic way, making me want to devour a whole lot more of her artwork to see what else she’s up to and capable of.

Grade: B+

Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: August 6th, 2015
MSRP: $0.99