I’ve already written about some of my personal history with abuse, so I won’t go into details here, but as someone who has literally written a poem in the persona of Harley Quinn I can say that Cheetah feels like one of the most relatable survivor characters I’ve read. Having read it, however, I have become certain that I have been her, and sometimes am her still. Picking up this comic, I thought I knew who Cheetah was. More than ever we’re able to see how much she is so achingly everything Diana is not: vicious where Diana is gentle, erratic where Diana is calculated, beastly where Diana is beautiful. I’ll admit it, I wasn’t quite confident in the series switching artists so frequently, but just as surely as Scott’s art was the lynchpin for the previous issue’s tender atmosphere, so too are Sharp’s lines necessary to revealing Cheetah for who she really is.
There are no hot pants, crop tops, or luscious flowing hair to distract the reader from the horrific reality of Barbara’s curse at the hands of a brutal and unforgiving god. But of course, as Greg Rucka informed us in an interview at the beginning of the comic’s arc, “You think you know Barbara Minerva, the Cheetah? you’re just flat-out wrong.”Īt first glance Rucka’s Cheetah already stands out in her significantly more bestial design, an even more feral invocation of her nature than perhaps her closest counterpart in the DCAU. In some places you could argue that the dynamic has become almost too predictable. What can be said about supervillain Cheetah? Ruthless, cunning, proud, perhaps a dash of Eartha Kitt’s Catwoman for good measure, Cheetah’s relentlessly violent nature has served for decades as the struggle between the warrior and the pacifist in Wonder Woman, the temptation to forego the efficiency of savagery for grace.
Writer: Greg Rucka / Artist: Liam Sharp / DC Comics
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