Wonder Woman: Dead Earth

[knight_moves]

Read this on Kindle Unlimited, so I thought I'd post a few scans and have a spoilery discussion of it, if anyone's interested in.







The good: I liked the way this story was executed. Diana's characterization initially was very good: she's merciful, compassionate, loving. Art's good, plot is well-paced, they go pretty deep into Amazon lore instead of a more general DCU stuff--there's no other superheroes aside from Superman and Batman. I liked the new origin DWJ came up for Diana, which adds a Prometheus twist to Diana's existence which for me played well better than "she's Zeus's daughter" and dare I say improves on Perez's girlpower origin.

The bad: I'm so conflicted on how the story develops, because it gets very Zach Snyder. Diana turns out to be eminently corrupt, guilt-ridden, and brooding. The Amazons themselves are massively villainous. Wondy herself is largely responsible for destroying the world. Yeah, there are extenuating circumstances and sympathetic reasons--Diana going bee-zerk with her bracelets removed makes a reappearance from pre-Crisis continuity and really confuses the issue by making her not totally aware of her actions (so was she essentially brainwashed for all that? Should she not feel guilty? Why remove her agency, or put that agency on Hippolyta for telling her to do something she didn't/couldn't know the consequences of?). But the endgame of all of it seems to be to make Diana as broody as Batman, if not more so, and even in an AU... why? Maybe it's me, but I'm a bit sick of these tropes being overused: the Waynes being evil, Krypton being evil, evil Superman... seeing them applied to Wonder Woman doesn't do much to freshen them up.

The weird: Bulletpoints suddenly go!

*The usual role of Phillipus (Diana's trainer, Hippolyta's hard-edged general) goes to Nubia for some reason. I guess because DC was pushing her, but it just makes me feel like she has no real identity of her own if she's getting slotted into Phillipus's role just for the sake of it. And the Wonder Woman movie didn't include Phil either! What, is the bald black lady just too Black Panthery now?

*For a post-apocalyptic world where people have to walk everywhere, everyone sure is able to get from Gotham City to the Fortress of Solitude to Paradise Island in a hurry.

*It's implied/stated that the reason for the conflict is the Amazons worrying that global warming will flood Paradise Island like in Waterworld. I suppose I shouldn't complain about pseudoscience in a comic book, but melting icecaps would only rise the sea level two hundred feet. Inconvenient, certainly, but that's just about the height of one of those cliffs Amazons are always dramatically diving off of. Even if it screwed the rest of the world, well, since when have they been shown to care over much about that?

*On the media literacy website, TV Tropes, someone thinks that Superman redirected a nuke from Smallville to Paradise Island. It seems to me pretty obvious that Supes would just disable a nuke or throw it into space rather than ever throwing it at another populated area, and Diana was raging at him for 'abandoning' the defense of Themyscira to save Smallville, but I am cracking up at the mental image of Superman kicking a nuke away from Smallville and watching it fly towards one tiny island in the Atlantic like

Comments

[blueprintstyles]

My understanding was Superman couldn't save both so he stopped the one heading to Smallville over Paradise Island.

[blueprintstyles]

I hope there's a sequel to this one day.

[superfangirl1]

That what I thought as well. Superman was probably overwhelm with chaos going on everywhere.

[goodbyebird]

Very much solidifying my decision not to read this run.

[tcampbell1000]

Same.