Glory vol. 1: The Once and Future Destroyer

This also hails from the same Extreme relaunch that gave us “Prophet” but it’s not in the same class.  Briefly:  as Supreme was Rob Liefeld’s Superman analogue who later gave Alan Moore the license to tell the kinds of stories he wanted to but couldn’t with DC’s icon, Glory is his take on Wonder Woman.  Born out of a truce between two alien races and trained since birth to be able to keep the peace between them — by any means if necessary — she forsook it all to fight alongside humans after witnessing their potential.  As the story begins, it’s been years since she’s been seen in public and that’s what causes young Riley Barnes, an aspiring reporter who has dreamed of the character since she was a girl, to track her down.

That Riley finds the title character should be a foregone conclusion, as should the fact that it leads to lots and lots of subsequent fighting and bloodshed as Glory’s presence is made known to parties who have wanted her dead for quite some time.  The twist that writer Joe Keatinge has to this premise is that Riley wasn’t brought here to aid her heroine in this struggle, but to stop her.  Now I think there’s some interesting material to be mined from the idea of a character who is unaware that they’re trodding the path to self-and-world-destruction, but we don’t get a lot of that here.  Much of this first volume is spent on setup of the most generic variety as we’re introduced to the cast and Glory’s backstory.  

Problem is that most of the cast isn’t all that interesting.  Though Riley is our point-of-view character and it’s understandable to see that she’s in way over her head in this scenario, she doesn’t really have much of a personality beyond that.  Everything she does in this volume is just a fulfillment of that stock character type which makes it really hard to give a damn about the girl.  Glory herself is a bit more interesting as it’s clear from her actions that while she wants to change our world for the better, this woman warrior is far too vicious and lacks the self-control to do the job right.  Had Keatinge focused more on that in the six issues here, we might have had something.  Unfortunately that part of the story isn’t given enough emphasis and the rest of the cast is more of an afterthought, as they’re not developed enough to sustain the reader’s interest.

Ross Campbell provides the art and his work proves to be a bit more distinctive than the story.  His style is very anti-superheroic in nature, particularly in his depiction of the title character as a hulking, battle-scarred brute that has very little in common visually with her inspiration or any other female superhero ever.  That choice alone proves to be one of the most memorable parts of the volume.  Campbell also shows himself to have a vivid imagination as seen in the many unique alien designs that populate the extended battle in the book’s last third.  

Overall, he does strong work here, but it’s not enough to convince me to pick up another volume.  There’s just too much here that feels familiar and not enough emphasis on taking the story in new directions from your usual superhero genre fare.  Though the two are utterly unlike, I’m also going to compare it to “Prophet” anyway by saying that maybe if this book had a little of that title’s utter weirdness and adventurous spirit, we may have had something more worthwhile.  As it is, this is better left on the shelf.