Absolute Wonder Woman #1-3

So, yes, I have wrestled with the Wonder Woman. Not a pastime I’ve sought, over the years. It seems I am only ever interested in Wonder Woman when she’s someone other than Wonder Woman. I’m sorry.

I didn’t want to wake up on the shores of middle age encumbered by the realization that I was a Batman person, and yet I did. I don’t even like most Batman stories. I like Superman more, as a vibe, but his stuff is, well, intermittent. Batman attracts the best artists, that’s just commercial reality. If you want to own this Bernie Wrightson story, hey, Batman’s in it. Or Jim Aparo drew it. That adds up. Buy one Batman story because it looks good every year and suddenly by the time in your life you need to start walking more you find yourself in possession of a bookshelf and multiple longboxes boxes of Batman books. Unsustainable!

Wonder Woman, however. Give her a haircut and I’m on board. They switched her up with an angry redhead named Artemis for a memorable year back in the early '90s when the “real” Wonder Woman was wearing a leather jacket and a shoulder-length cut. Mike Deodato drew it, William Messner-Loebs wrote it. I adored that year. It’s rather remembered as a joke, I think. I stuck around for John Byrne, which says as much about me as anything else. I quite loved Wonder Woman: Historia, wrote a glowing review about it for this very website. But Historia is about Wonder Woman in precisely the same way that Fantastic Four Annual #6 is about Franklin Richards. Elementally but incidentally.

So, yeah, a word for another Wonder Woman story that isn’t really a Wonder Woman story at all. Absolute Wonder Woman, which is about Wonder Woman in the same way that Days of Future Present, the X-Men Annual crossover of Summer 1990, is about Franklin Richards. Incidentally. This isn’t a story about the Wonder Woman you know, which sounds like marketing copy but which is literally true. It is, strictly speaking, an Elseworlds, an "Imaginary Story," albeit, in the same substantive way that Ultimate Spider-Man was a What If.

The Absolute initiative is the company’s bald-faced appropriation of the Ultimate Universe model for its own purposes. Marvel’s also doing their own new Ultimate Universe. A couple of the books are even worth looking at, including a Peach Momoko X-Men. Some swear by the Jonathan Hickman Spider-Man. Who are some? They walk among you now.

That makes sense. In hindsight, the strangest aspect of the commercial ascent of the first incarnation of the Ultimate Universe was DC’s absolute failure to replicate the model during its first go-round. They brought Grant Morrison and Frank Miller to the All-Star line, which had as much to do with Brian Michael Bendis’ enduring reinvention of Peter Parker as hiring Charles and Ray Eames to outfox Lee Iacocca. You might walk away from the deal with a few chairs. They incubated a line of Earth One graphic novels across the 2010s that people resolutely refused to like. Perhaps they were unlikable? Who can say? Find me the man who has read Batman: Earth One. None of you will admit to such a thing.

So here we are, well into the twenty-first century, and enough time has passed and enough torpor fallen into the Direct Market retail model that a reinvention is called for. Soda War rules: it has to on some superficial level resemble the original while also being different enough to justify the new label. Bring in the kind of creators who can do some damage to a blank canvas. If it has any legs at all, bam, you just incubated a new merchandising stream. That’s how it works, for another moment at least.

Good work for the people who get the call. The reason we’re here is actually to talk about the people who made this Wonder Woman comic. Kelly Thompson wrote it and Hayden Sherman drew it, and either one is worth checking out in a vacuum. Together, they’ve made a genuinely interesting comic book that just happens to feature Wonder Woman. Or, rather, strictly speaking, a version of Wonder Woman. An Elseworlds variant, built around a slightly skewed premise in order to arrive at something slightly new but hopefully not too new. Just new enough.

Although I wasn’t always a big fan of the first generation of Marvel’s Ultimate line, it was worth respecting that those books didn’t originate from another storyline. There was no explanation for the creation of a new flavor of Coke, simply the assumption that people would show up if it were worth checking out. Imagine if we had to follow the details of interminable and impenetrable monthly storylines in order to figure out when the Big Cheeze-It was returning to Taco Bell. I mean, would I do it? Yes, certainly. But the new Absolute flavor is here preceded by the knowledge that the universe as it exists in these comic books looks the way it does because Darkseid did something or other at some point that made everything go pear-shaped. This exists in awareness of the fact that Marvel’s recently relaunched Ultimate line also exists in a state of perpetual dystopia because of something the Maker did. (The Maker is Reed Richard’s evil doppelgänger surviving from the first incarnation of the Ultimate universe, and if you didn’t know that I’m sorry to have so burdened you.)

Absolute Wonder Woman didn’t need the gimmick of Darkseid giving the Peoples’ Elbow to the timestream, but nevertheless. Not a completely blank canvas, unfortunately. Just like Carl Sagan said: In order to bake an apple pie you must first invent Dark Knights: Death Metal.

The Absolute initiative started with Absolute Batman, which seems to have its fans. I’m sorry, but a giant Bat-Hulk with tiny wings? That’s goofy. Goofy! It just is. The person who first drew that - Nick Dragotta, in all fairness - should probably have received a wedgie for drawing that in the margins of his math notebook. Is that unfair of me? Juvenile? Probably. I have decades of reputation to burn, let’s roll. Absolute Superman looks a jumble, without a sharp hook. The whole point is giving us versions of the characters who feel more contemporary, right? That’s your root exigency. What is this iteration supposed to communicate? Above and beyond “Q4 needed a bump,” which is the obvious answer.

For instance: this Wonder Woman grew up in Hell. No frolicking along the verdant hills of a Mediterranean paradise for this Diana, no bouncing along on giant kangaroos. Raised from infancy not by an island full of loving mothers and sisters but in the heart of inferno by a witch, Circe.

The divergence here, if you know the basic premise of the regular Wonder Woman, is a Wonder Woman who grew up more concretely on the losing side of a war before she was born. That’s the story of Historia: the origin of a nation, created through rebellion and allowed to persist under the victor’s express magnanimity. That story ends with the birth of Diana, a miracle of autocthonic reproduction and a symbol of the future allowed to persist under armistice terms dictated by the enemy. Absolute Wonder Woman picks at that premise by positing that the idea of the Greek gods allowing the Amazon movement to persist as a civilization under thousands of years of benign neglect was not actually the most likely outcome of that exceedingly brutal war. Far more likely – as Historia made painfully clear – for the movement to have been crushed completely, the survivors cast in perpetual chains and, oh, hey, this child born of clay can go die in Hell. Let’s all watch it get eaten.

Except, of course, that’s not exactly what happens. Apollo consigns the child to Hell, yes, given forth in the presence of the witch Circe. Circe herself leaves the infant Diana to be murdered on a cradle of stone, assuming that outcome to have been more or less ordained, no skin off her nose. A giant snake happens by to do just that. And then, as Circe watches, the infant Diana grabs the snake and gives it a swift toss into orbit. Circe is no fool, she’s properly a creature of myth in a time of raw story. She understands in that moment that she has borne witness not to a denouement but a prologue, and that she’s part of the tapestry now. Away we go.

Such a wonderful, thrilling reintroduction to such a hoary old bag, so to speak. Wonder Woman arrives in Man’s World in a gnarly helmet and swinging a big fuck-you anime sword, riding a skeletal Pegasus – she’s careful to point out, not just a random winged horse who happens to be a skeleton, but the actual undead Pegasus. Diana remains her mother’s daughter, but her mother is no longer the benign monarch of Paradise Island but an outlaw witch. Vibe completely different, her skillset no longer that of a diplomat but a sorceress. She is in the most strictest terms - and with apologies to the august Toei Spider-Man - a true Emissary of Hell.

It’s a strong hook, I think. I’m jazzed about a Wonder Woman comic, which is a place I didn’t expect to be in my >ahem< variable forties. It gets me to the comic book store on Wednesday, which in turn puts money directly into the local economy. Supporting multiple area small businesses! Why, that’s just simple civic responsibility.

Does the book flag a bit once the character leaves Hell, once we meet Steve Trevor? True story: I received an official warning from TikTok for saying I hoped Steve Trevor fell into a thresher. I appealed and the appeal was rejected. Storywise, it makes sense, I guess, inasmuch as Steve is the first man Diana has ever met, after living on a remote island in Hell for … what, three thousand years? The timeframe is a bit fuzzy since they’re operating according to mythological time. You’d probably be a bit hard-up too, in all fairness, but I hope to never be so hard-up that Steve Trevor looks appealing. Surely there are rocks scattered along the beach with more sex appeal.

As mentioned, Kelly Thompson is credited with the writing. I’m not unfamiliar with Thompson’s work, dating back to IDW’s Jem and the Holograms revival, which she spearheaded with Sophie Campbell back in 2015. That was a bit of a buzz book for a hot five minutes ten years ago. She’s risen through the ranks, so to speak, walking across the street to DC after a fat four year run on Captain Marvel. She’s currently writing my favorite monthly book, Birds of Prey, which started preternaturally strong with art by the preternaturally strong Leonardo Romero. I wish I could say the book doesn’t suffer for having lost him after the first arc. It’s still very good, but inconsistent art remains a problem across the American mainstream. Even an issue with so-so art is worth reading for Thompson’s delightful scripting, however, and that’s just not something I’m prepared to say about very many comic book writers. I don’t think I’ve read every comic book with the Birds of Prey but I’ve read many. I love the characters and she does well by them. I hope she writes the book for ten years.

All well and good, of course. But the book being written well, thought provoking – sticking to your ribs so speak – well, that’s just gravy. The main event is how it looks, and the reason it looks so good is because of Hayden Sherman.

I wanted to get everything else out of the way before we got to them. I’ve been following Sherman for a little while, but they’ve been busy across the last half-decade with work for a number of smaller publishers. The first book of theirs that jumped out at me was a 2022 psychedelic western called Above Snakes, with writer Sean Lewis. An absolute vision of a book simply on its color, worth checking out if you’ve never seen it. Sherman’s palette is riotous.

They’re prolific, too, which seems rarer than it should be. The circumstances of the twenty-first century comic book industry are such that few artists can actually afford to maintain a prolific output. If that seems precisely bass-ackwards you’d be correct, welcome to comics. Right now in addition to Absolute Wonder Woman, they’re also doing a Batman book, with Dan Watters - Dark Patterns. A rather gruesome number with a surprisingly Bronze Age, Aparo-esque Batman solving a mystery involving a masochistic serial killer. Grisly stuff, not usually my favorite mode for the Dark Knight, but so gorgeous you forgive the gore.

Now, the fact that Dark Patterns is shipping parallel to Absolute Wonder Woman strikes me as rather remarkable on the face of it. Are they only going to be on Wonder Woman for the opening arc? I don’t know! I’d love for Sherman to settle down and put a couple years on the board, one suspects they could do it in their sleep.

They’re currently also in the middle of another project, with writer Zac Thompson (no relation to Kelly, that I could discern): Into the Unbeing, split across two four-issue limited series, the first in 2024 with the second dropping soon. It’s horror, a dark environmental theme built around a trip underground to explore the corpse of a giant god. The closest referent that pops into your head is Paul Chadwick’s The World Below, an unfortunately abbreviated saga of another underground expedition into a bizarre world of Freudian dimensions that came and went on the cusp of the millennium. Nothing quite so terrifying as the idea of a hidden world lying just thirty or forty feet away, straight down. If I have one complaint about Into the Unbeing, it’s actually the coloring, also by Sherman. It’s good, but too dark and subtle to properly showcase Sherman’s line, which should be the main event. Into the Unbeing showcases Sherman’s debt to Moebius, as an artist who understands the importance of being able to properly manipulate the perception of scale on the page. You see this understanding of size in their Wonder Woman, featuring the infernal Diana facing off against a succession of massive behemoths. She looks tiny and powerless in the face of terrors so vast as to transact on ecological scales. It seems very pressing, in 2025, to be reminded of the relative size of the human organism in relation to a world that very much wants to kill us.

Speaking of the main event, if you walk away from this review with one thing, I adjure you, it should be a desire to drive down to your local comic book emporium and purchase the first issue of Thompson & Sherman’s Absolute Wonder Woman. But not the regular printing, no. Pick up the Noir Edition, which is DC’s way of tricking fools like me into double-dipping on nice looking books by subtracting features. Because, yes, I confess: not only did I buy the regular edition of the book, but I liked it well enough to splurge on the same book sans color. Becca Carey’s lettering remains, holding up Thompson’s terse script.

And I want to stress, that’s no shade against the colorist of Absolute Wonder Woman, the great Jordie Bellaire. Surely one of the top two or three colorists working in the American mainstream now, a period dominated in many respects by the newfound authority of the digital colorist. Bellaire does good work, but Sherman’s art simply doesn’t need the elaboration. The black & white Noir Edition of Absolute Wonder Woman is my vote for the best looking book of 2024, bar none. It announces the arrival of Hayden Sherman as a generational talent.

Why do we read comics? I’m sure you’ve all got different answers and I’m sure all your answers are better than mine. Me, I’m a simple person, petite bourgeois to the bone: I just like to see people drawing. I like to see the ink pushed around the page by brush or nib, a whole world created with the skill and ingenuity and imagination of the artisan. Sherman still works on the board and you can see that tactile nature in his work. Digital art allows for a great many feats of impressive technical legerdemain but has yet to replicate that sensation of seeing the pen scrape across the tooth of the paper. A universe of sensuousness.

Flip open the book to the new Wonder Woman’s dramatic entrance, astride the flying skeleton horse. What a spread! Horses are hard enough to draw. Subtract all the muscle and fur – you know, the stuff most artists use to cheat when they have to draw a horse – and you’re left with a spectacle to separate the men from the boys, so to speak, and then to violently shake the binary gender out of the shivering remainder. By any measure a hellacious challenge. But they get all the bones right, all the little tiny bones in the horse’s knee and feet, bam, right there on the page, in striking dynamic movement.

Seeing the work in black & white, you really feel the vigor of Sherman’s hand on the page. Look up close and you can see the motion of the arm, the flick of muscle in the wrist to draw the tiny little stipples on a rug, or the jagged fat blur of a speed line. Sometimes the close-up study reveals seemingly awkward or flat drawing, a sketchy detail that seems hurried or abstract. But pull out, look at the page as a whole, and you see the dimensionality pop right off the page. They know how to make it look real, in two dimensions.

What a miracle of a book, Absolute Wonder Woman. There’s an urgency here, from two young creators coming together in a moment of crisis, that seems starkly out of place next to so many mainstream superhero offerings. The regular Wonder Woman is a creature of compromise under normal circumstances and under the auspices of the best of creators. Subtext across the middle decades of the character’s career has been elevated to text under the auspices of many good artists, devoted to the adventures of an ostensibly, putatively revolutionary heroine who can nevertheless never be too angry, and must therefore remain polite even at her most potent. Because there is nothing more disqualifying in this world than female rage. This book will remain interesting to the degree it continues – or is allowed to continue – to channel this stridency.

The Absolute flavor of Wonder Woman arrives in our present moment at an apposite time with a potent message, one traditionally obfuscated by the picture of Paradise Island as a Utopia outside the progress of history. This Diana is not here to show us a better way, to light the path to a better future by teaching kindness and forbearance. She’s a refugee of Hell sent to remind us to exist in context with our own past. The genocidal dystopia isn’t new or imminent but a living reality across the breadth of human history for precisely 51% of the population. The regime was installed at the dawn of time and shows no sign of abating under its own power. The time for compromise has long since past. Grab your sword.

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