Written by Becky Cloonan,
Michael Conrad, L.L. McKinney
Art by Jen Bartel, Alitha Martinez
Published by DC Comics
Who doesn’t love reading stories of immortals at the end of all things?
You’ve automatically set a grand stage for the gates-of-hell moment, when all seems lost, the enemy appears all-powerful and inevitable, and the heroes ride into the fray regardless.
In the case of Immortal Wonder Woman, it’s the end times as in the literal end of time. An unnamed force is ripping reality itself apart.
But if you thought that was plenty, then Darkseid shows up, with a gleeful skip in his step, because he feeds on oblivion.
DC’s characters lend themselves well to apocalyptic visions.
They’re idiosyncratic and strange and old-world mythological in that way, so many of them forged from pieces of Bible stories, classical mythology and 19th-century cultural memory.
Big things.
Immortal Wonder Woman hurls itself at those thematic depths while focusing on Diana’s sentimental heart – a tough thing to maintain when you live forever and see all you love die and pass out of memory and legend.
How does one love, how does one fight for the living, when so much of the world you experience is a tomb? Becky Cloonan and Michael Conrad’s script takes us there.
“This place is a tomb,” Diana narrates at the beginning of the story, in this far-future Earth. She’s referring to the Batcave – well, the ruins of it – at that moment. Diana being Diana, she can hear Batman’s ghost speak to her in the cave, as she takes his utility belt for whatever battle is coming.
She also has a Green Lantern power ring around her neck, and it still glows, though we don’t know why.
We meet some other familiar faces as the reality devourers take more worlds and arrive at Earth. Some of these moments are of desperate action. Others are just sad.
Jen Bartel has been illustrating Wonder Woman variant covers for years and years now. It is thrilling to see her take on the interior pages with that same clean, fantasy style with radiant colors. Page after page, the Bartel’s art carries a mixed-media feel, between the detailed linework, the textured painting, and the beautiful skies and star-filled expanses of outer space.
This is a comic to get lost in, folks.
But that’s not all! We also get a new story with Nubia
Yes, that Nubia – Diana’s twin sister who also is a Black woman. And she’s written not only by a Black woman, but L.L. McKinney. An acclaimed fantasy writer recently named to The Root’s 100 most influential African Americans of 2020, McKinney traffics in bona fides of creating three-dimensional Black female characters.
So now we meet Nubia, this future Earth’s bearer of the Wonder Woman mantle after the Amazons have retreated from man’s world … a second time? Diana is now queen of Themyscira, and Nubia sounds just as estranged from her sister and Amazon sistren as before.
Nubia appears just in time to stop Grail – daughter of Darkseid, serious baddie – from lobbing off the head of a security guard at an Atlanta museum. Grail succeeds in taking a mystic artifact, but not before Nubia clutches it by accident and unlocks a dizzying flood of memories embedded within the object.
It’s then that we meet the best character of the story so far, Aunt Nancy, a seemingly immortal sorceress who also runs a nightclub full of mythological creatures. I couldn’t help but hear Dominique Jackson, aka Elektra Abundance from Pose, voice in my head while reading her. So self-possessed, boozy and above your bullshit. Lovely character.
McKinney pulls off the unenviable task of using “magic-speak.” You know, that elevated speech pattern in fantasy work where folks use 27 words when they could have used 15 to say the same thing. It’s tough to avoid that dialog turning stilted, but McKinney largely succeeds.
Alitha Martinez’s art is clean, strong action comics. The panels in the fight scenes connect quite well, and Nubia’s mane of textured, natural hair is so big and beautiful and must take a whole weekend to wash and set.
And then, just as things are getting juicy post-exposition dump, Nubia is sucked into a portal similar to what Grail used to escape earlier.
Go pick this one up!
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