I'm a big Wonder Woman fan. Here's the one problem: Wonder Woman is a great character, but she doesn't have many great stories. Personally, I think it's because she lacks a quality rogues gallery. After all, one of the thing that makes Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and the X-Men so great is the sheer variety of colorful villains they're always fighting. Wonder Woman has...Cheetah? Ares? I'm not sure. Another problem is that back in the hey-day of comics, many of the best writers in the industry (who happened to be male) didn't want to work on a book with a female protagonist. Jerks. As a result, WW was written by a rotating lineup of second-tier talent for a number of years and never really established classic stories.
Thankfully, LEAGUE OF ONE is one of those rare Wonder Woman gems that fans hope for. This was a quick read, and a good one. The gist of the plot is an interesting blend of superhero and classic fantasy. A bunch of evil gnomes awaken an ancient dragon deeps in the mountains of Europe. Wonder Woman learns of this development from the Oracle, who foresees that whoever confronts the dragon will be successful in stopping it, but will perish in the process. Wonder Woman knows that if the Justice League discovers the dragon, they will attempt to help her defeat it and all seven members of the league will be killed. In order to protect her teammates, she deceives, preoccupies, and subdues all the other members of the JLA and faces the dragon herself.
My favorite part of this book is the characterization of Wonder Woman. The story portrays Wonder Woman as a being of immense purity who regularly subjects herself to her own Lasso of Truth in order to purge herself of lies and deceit. As a result of her enduring honestly, its interesting to watch her struggle to betray her teammates, even though she's doing it to save their lives. The action sequences in this book are a lot of fun, but its the character interactions with the rest of the Justice League that interested me most. The inclusion of dragons, gnomes, and other fantasy elements in a superhero story was also a fresh inclusion.
The author of this book is also the artist, and his painted panels are beautiful. It's rare to find a creator this adept at both writing and illustrating. My only complaint is that the characters are sometimes painted without much detail and their faces do not always look consistent through the entire book. Still, it's a small complaint and understandable given the amount of work required to paint 100 pages.
Overall, I was very pleased with this book and would recommend it to all comic book readers, but especially those looking for a great Wonder Woman story.