Wonder Woman: Dead Earth

Call it “Wonder Woman Beyond Thunderdome.”  Call it “Last Amazon on Earth.”  However you want to look at it, the idea of Wonder Woman waking up into a post-apocalyptic world filled with monstrous creatures and fighting for the sake of the surviving humans is a powerful one.  Put into the hands of creator Daniel Warren Johnson, who previously gave us “Extremity” and “Murder Falcon,” and it has the potential to be a really great read.  Which, put strictly in terms of its visuals, it really is.  Johnson is one of the best artists working today as he’s got an excellent sense of style, scale, and energy.  This is to say that he’s someone who can draw a horde of monsters descending upon the audience at an arena as Diana fights a mutated Cheetah, and have it come off as epic as it sounds.  Other scenes, like the monster that descends upon the migrant caravan in the middle of the night, the reveal of what has become of Batman, finding out what happened to Wonder Woman’s mother, and Cheetah on a pegasus facing off against an armored Nubia are similarly striking.  Better still is the fact that this story is being presented in the oversized Black Label format, so it feels like the comic itself has expanded to accommodate Johnson’s ambitions.

The story, on the other hand, is much more of a mixed bag.  With such a simple and straightforward premise, the series could have coasted to a recommendation just on the art and fight scenes alone.  Johnson does have more ambition than that, even as it winds up complicating  what he’s set up here.  Without giving too much away, it’s revealed that these monsters Diana is fighting aren’t just monsters, and she may have had more of a hand in the apocalypse than you’d expect.  I get that Johnson is trying to present a more nuanced view of conflict in showing how both sides have their reasons for fighting and even our heroes can succumb to their worst instincts.  The problem is that he’s doing this in a story that positively revels in the glory of combat, and I get the feeling it would’ve been better had the creator just stuck to Wonder Woman and her followers’ fight for survival.  Though the potential for a sequel is teased at the end, I’m perfectly fine with Johnson moving on to other projects after this (like his upcoming “Beta Ray Bill” series for Marvel).