Having been heartily disappointed by a more recent version of Wonder Woman in 2017's The Lies, I decided to dip back into a more classic version: the George Perez reboot of the early 21st century. Having reread my review of the first collection from the Perez Era -- Gods & Monsters, which "introduces" the character of Wonder Woman to the world -- I was truly looking forward to this.

I was a little disappointed. The art is fantastic, but the tedious presentation weighs it down.

Perez and his co-writer, Len Wein, opted to insert tons of exposition into the story in the form of densely packed text pages. They're presented in various ways: a long-winded journal entry by Harvard archeology and ancient history professor Julia Kapatelis, a long-winded dispatch from Lt. Etta Candy to Col. Steve Trevor, a long-winded diary entry by Julia's teenage daughter Vanessa Kapatelis, a long-winded tour update by publicist Myni Mayer, and a false letter of introduction from the villainous Barbara "The Cheetah" Minerva. Some are formatted in a tiny typewriter font, others in barely legible handwritten scrawls. All of them make for extremely dull reading, particularly when you expect a comic book to be lively, fun and fast-moving. Ugh.

Every time I encountered one of these sections -- each spanning two to four pages -- I had to put the book down and walk away for a while, just to rejuvenate my interest enough to continue reading the story. And, I'll be honest, I ended up skipping most of those pages anyway.

And then there's the story, which has two major parts: The Cheetah wants to eat Wonder Woman (and fails), and Zeus wants to rape Wonder Woman and, because she resists his advances, forces her to fight a bunch of mythological beasts, with the fate of the Amazons contingent on her winning the contest. Meanwhile, Steve Trevor returns home an hour too late to say goodbye to his dying father, and Lt. Candy tags along to provide ... comfort.

Wonder Woman also comes face to face with her namesake, a World War II-era aviatrix with close ties to Steve Trevor, and she and her mother, Queen Hippolyte, face an endless array of Greek monsters who were allegedly slain in the original lore by the likes of Heracles and Theseus. Oh, and Heracles, after millennia of torture, is finally sorry for raping Hippolyte. So, everyone's cool with it now.

I still really like the Perez take on Wonder Woman, but Challenge of the Gods, specifically, is not a wonderful book. Maybe I'll try another one from that era and see if it holds up any better.