Written and Illustrated by Joelle Jones
Published by DC Comics
Remembering back to DC’s Future State when we were first introduced to Yara Flor, the Brazilian-heritage Wonder Girl of the time beyond, my top question was: Who is she?
Add to that: What is she?
Now we get to travel back to a more recent future in DC’s everything-counts-now (?) continuity to what appears to be Yara’s journey to picking up that Amazon mantle.
I’m happy that Joëlle Jones is back as writer and artist to further explore Yara and her world. And she quickly sets up Yara as a figure forged from many gigantic forces that are watching, and soon will act.
The issue opens with a flashback. Of violence and war.
The panels shift in perspective.
One series of panels stay on a young child and a woman, Yara and presumably her mother. Another series shows warrior women: archers, indigenous people from the Amazon rainforest, armed against armored men on horseback with swords.
The women are losing. The blood, the carnage – Yara the little girl sees it all.
And before all is lost, including her own life, another warrior woman snatches Yara up and runs off with her. We see those eyes looking back on the end of her life as she knew it.
All the while, we get voiceover of a flight attendant giving pre-descent instructions, and then we cut to an adult Yara on a plane. She’s arriving in Brazil for a heritage tour, nervous about what she’ll find.
You see, she was born in Brazil but left when she was very young, and her aunt who raised her in the USA never talks about life before. (As a grandchild of the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South to the North, I can relate.)
That’s just one of the ways in which Yara is living unknowingly amid other things in motion.
“I don’t know if it’s me or the jet lag, but it feels like the whole world is looking over my shoulder right now,” Yara says upon leaving the airport. Jones illustrates a spread page featuring a raft of images from across the DC Universe’s past, present and future, all circling Yara.
Meanwhile, the story flits to scenes with the Amazons at Themyscira, the gods on Mount Olympus, and the splinter Amazons of the Bana-Mighdall. Queen Nubia, Hera, and Queen Faruka all sense a disturbance when Yara returns to her native soil.
They each send an emissary to the mortal world to apprehend Yara – dead or alive for some, and just plain dead for others.
Why? We do not know. Yara, on her tour, is already proving herself willful and wont to run into flames and danger to help someone.
But before she knows what hit her, her first real challenger pulls her into the water. Things don’t look good for her heroine to be, but this attacker is using a golden bola that looks awful familiar to the weapon future Yara wields as Wonder Girl.
I honestly have zero idea of what DC is doing with Future State and now Infinite Frontier, but I’m down for any good stories. And I’m here for any Wonder Woman stories where Nubia is queen of the Amazons.
