Suffering Sappho! It's Wonder Woman vs Conan, By Crom!

Could there be two more kindred spirits that Diana of Themyscira and Conan of Cimmeria? It's too bad they are kept apart by years and publishers.

Waitasec, what am I talking about? This is comic books! And these days most publishers are willing to do a joint venture if they think it'll make them a buck. And the way to make a buck is to give the fans what they want.

And so from DC and Dark Horse Comics, we get WONDER WOMAN / CONAN, written by Gail Simone with art from Aaron Lopresti and Matt Ryan. With that team of creators, what could possibly go wrong?

Honestly, very little.

Conan, being Conan, allows himself to be bribed into saving a gambler, Kian, from a gang of Vikings, and has to follow him to collect his reward. Their destination takes them into the city of Shamar, where Kian promises to collect on a massive wager against the city's champion, solely because she is a female.

By now I bet you can guess who the female is.

And you can also probably guess Kian loses his money.

Conan is smitten with the female warrior, whom he believes to be a girl he knew in his childhood--a lost crush. And we're left to wonder if perhaps the woman is, for she has few memories. But chained in the dungeons, where Conan finds her, she knows she was called Wonder Woman, and her ragged fighting attire is painted with mud to be star-spangled. If she is Wonder Woman (and she'd better be -- the book's got her name on it!) then we are left with the mystery of how she arrived. Perhaps the solution is known to the two crows who have followed Conan, crows that are decidedly supernatural. And I shouldn't be a bit surprised if we learn Wonder Woman's nemesis, Circe, had some involvement in all this time-displaced sword-and-sorcery.

The artwork is top notch, and nobody beats Gail Simone when it comes to characterization. Wonder Woman has never been more popular than she is this year, so expect this one to fly off the shelves.