One of the most common mistakes writer’s make when dealing with female lead characters is in trying to make them tough and independent, trying to show the readers that they don’t need anyone else in their lives, tend to write rather unlikable characters. Yara Flor is no exception.

When we first meet Yara, she is traveling to Brazil for a “Brazilian Heritage” Tour. Attempting to connect to the land that she was born in, yet has no memory of. She is driven, and strong-willed, and at every opportunity she shows us that she is not a particularly nice person to be around. Sure she is heroic, and jumps at the chance to save a hapless man trapped in a burning car, but is is the smaller, personal interactions with almost every other character in the book that defines Yara as someone who is self-obsessed and uninterested in anyone else’s lives, to the point of being rude for no other reason than it keeps a wall between her and the world she obviously has contempt for.

To launch a new character with such a legacy name, I would hope the writer would be willing to give their audience a reason to cheer for the hero, and to come back for more. While Joelle Jones art is dynamic and page after page of magnificent, if not baroque designs, do a terrific job of setting the stage whether that be Mt. Olympus, Themyscira, or Brazil, there is an opaque rigidness to both the pages and the characters that inhabit them.

Launching a legacy book with a new character can be a tricky thing, especially if you are unwilling or unable to give the reader any reason to connect with the protagonist. While beautiful to look at, the ambiguous emotional connections left me wondering if I want to bother picking up issue two.
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Kieron Gillen is on a different level.