Wonder Woman: Dead Earth is a DC Black Label miniseries that has all the familiar trappings of an R-rated Wonder Woman film that should have been made yesterday. It’s got blood, it’s got gore, and it’s got lofty, mature themes galore, all topped off with more action than you can shake a Lasso of Truth at.
Between depicting a Wonder Woman that has outlived all of her Justice League colleagues and lost all sense of what is going on in this new, nuclear wasteland of a world, to a central protagonist that needs to atone for something she doesn’t quite yet understand, Wonder Woman: Dead Earth should be DC’s next R-rated movie for more reasons than one.
Written and illustrated by Daniel Warren Johnson, the first issue immediately sets the groundwork for what a movie adaptation of the series should be. Accidentally awakened from a long cryogenic slumber during a scuffle between a group of Earth’s remaining humans and a mutated species of monster called the Haedra, Diana swiftly ends the battle only to realize that she has been frozen in time for decades as the world around her died. To make matters worse, she was being held in the Batcave below the destroyed remains of Wayne Manor, the long dead skeleton of Batman slumped over nearby. Unsure of what is going on but determined to find out, Diana dons Batman’s trusty utility belt and begins her journey.
After duking it out with a grotesquely mutated Cheetah in a gladiator arena at the heart of the last city of humanity, Diana sets out to lead the remaining citizens to her homeland, the island of Themyscira, only to find a badly transformed and slightly insane Hippolyta, her mother and Queen of the Amazons, ready to annihilate the surviving humans. The Haedra monsters are revealed to be byproducts of humanity turning its nuclear weapons on Themyscira.
With Diana’s commitment to the last of the human race dwindling, and the growing burden of realizing that she has been murdering her own mutated sisters, Diana sets forth to find the one person that can hopefully help bring an end to this conflict: Superman. But when she arrives at his Fortress of Solitude, she finds Superman long dead, a massive hole punched clean through his chest. After conversing with a Superman robot left to tend to things, Diana is told that after the bombs dropped, she sought out Superman in a fit of rage stemming from his negligence and ended his life before knowing what she was doing. With the revelations of this dead Earth and her part in it finally revealed, Diana takes it upon herself to end the war once and for all and become the Wonder Woman humanity needs most.
In a comic landscape full of stories ripe with potential for the big screen, Wonder Woman: Dead Earth is already ahead of the game with an epic journey set in a post-apocalyptic world of humanity’s – and Diana’s – own doing. The series not only shows off the Princess of the Amazons as the true warrior she is capable of being, but also allows her to connect and reflect on old and new relationships alike throughout its four over-sized issue run, culminating in a finale that would have any movie-going audience cheering at the screen.
