I’m British so I didn’t grow up with the Super Friends cartoon and only tangentially know about the Wonder Twins from Family Guy references, so I’ve no real nostalgia for these characters nor much prior knowledge about them. So the twins are aliens called Zan and Jayna who activate their powers when they bump fists: Zan can turn into water and Jayna can turn into any animal. Hmm. They also has a monkey! …
I appreciate Mark Russell did the impossible by making The Flintstones briefly relevant a few years ago but he’s not really written anything very good since. Not that I haven’t tried, but the same problem I had with abandoning his Snagglepuss and Lone Ranger books is similar to why I didn’t take to Wonder Twins: he writes really boring stories!
The characters themselves are not even remotely interesting, which doesn’t help, so I can see why they don’t have their own long-running title. And they’re high-schoolers, which is even more boring, to me anyway. But there’s no major storyline going on here, just a lot of done-in-one things - cosmic imp appears, jock turns out to be a dick - and the villains are a pack of groaners: the League of Annoyance.
Coupled with Stephen Byrne’s art and it’s hard not to shake the feeling that you’re reading a kid’s cartoon. There are no stakes, nothing really changes, the “drama” is very mild, and everything’s more or less resolved within a single issue: all hallmarks of a sitcom. In his afterword, Bendis talks about opening Wonder Twins Funko Pops with his 7 year old daughter who remarks that they’re the coolest characters ever - that’s about the ideal age range I’d put the audience for this series.
And yet - there’s also undeniably stuff here for older readers. A critique on the US prison industrial complex, animal abuse, substance abuse, and a reference to drugs (“Aunt Phetamine” from the League of Annoyance - Russell really enjoys his character name puns. The jock is “Red Flag”, wakka wakka, and “Polly Math” is another one for, yes, the science genius friend of Jayna’s - although a polymath is a master of multiple disciplines and Polly appears to only be a master of one). It’s akin to early Simpsons in that respect - there’s stuff adults will pick up on that’ll be lost on younger readers.
I somewhat liked the Scrambler’s story at the end - a supervillain whose powers enable him to switch people’s minds from their bodies - where he threatens to relocate the minds of a million random people so the laws of the land should be amended to be fair to everyone in society in case the president winds up in the body of an illegal immigrant working as a fruit picker. It’s a bit rushed but it’s also a thoughtful and clever idea.
The writing and art is fine but for me it simply comes down to continuing to not care a fig for the title characters and being almost constantly bored with the Saturday-morning-cartoonish stories. Wonder Twin powers... zzz…
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