Wonder Woman: Dead Earth by Daniel Warren Johnson Review

SPOILERS

In the wake of nuclear annihilation, Wonder Woman wakes up from a centuries-long sleep in a contrivance pod, I mean a sleep pod, to find the world has changed quite a bit while she’s been napping! Dangers are everywhere as she leads the surviving humans to her old home, Themyscira for... Reasons - but is Paradise Island the refuge she believes it to be?

Wonder Woman: Dead Earth was dead boring and dead stupid. The post-apocalyptic vision Daniel Warren Johnson presents is ridiculous - apparently in his dystopian future, humans live in a medieval-type society wearing knight armour, while spending their leisure time in Roman-esque coliseums, and there’s also some jeeps?! It doesn’t make sense.

Nuclear fallout mutation is a big feature of this book. I’ll accept the Amazons surviving because they’re god-like and don’t have normal human lifespans but Cheetah? She shouldn’t still be knocking around centuries later, should she?

Why there was nuclear fallout in the first place was so unconvincing: the humans have a war with the Amazons over global warming and instantly escalate to using nukes. Johnson isn’t consistent with this sloppy explanation though as Diana’s mom says initially that Themyscira’s magical defences deflected the warheads and it was the nuclear fallout that engulfed the island that damaged them all - then later we see Diana smashing all the warheads single-handedly. So I guess it wasn’t magical defences, it was Wonder Woman? Eh, I don’t really care, it’s just another example of the bad writing in this book.

The reasoning for why the Amazons continue to fight the surviving humans made them look petty and simple-minded (I guess that’s also a result of the nukes, eh? Sigh…) while Batman’s reasoning for putting Diana in that pod in the first place was even more nonsensical. Diana has an absurd fight with Superman (he apparently keeps a container full of kryptonite next to his chair) and the way she treats Superman’s remains is both gruesome and disrespectful. The latter action just underlines the gratuitously grim and depressing atmosphere of the book that only made me dislike it all the more.

The book is basically just Wonder Woman walking around and fighting monsters that look like they’ve stepped out of the pages of BPRD: Hell on Earth. Diana fighting monsters isn’t interesting whichever time period she’s in, not least because she’s never in any danger and always defeats them without much effort. It makes for dull, repetitive reading.

Johnson’s art isn’t terrible, the grimy style just isn’t very appealing to me. This is also the homeliest-looking Wonder Woman I’ve ever seen - she’s Wonder Cavewoman and I don’t know why. Not that she has to look like a supermodel but she does have an established look that’s consistent across her numerous appearances and this is nothing like that.

Wonder Woman: Dead Earth is a dreary, monotonous comic. What’s amazing to me is that someone could take such a flimsy concept and create a nearly 200-page comic out of it. DC Black Label has its share of crappy books but Dead Earth is down there as among the worst.