Released on February 19th, 2020
DC started a mature line called Black Label awhile back. It was pretty much a complete disaster. Batman: Damned #1, by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo, was DC's first Black Label book. It also just happened to show Batman's dick. Granted, it was in shadow, but it still caused an uproar. DC refused to reprint the issue and in the collected trade paperback and digital edition they edited it out. So that's how Black Label started. I heard somewhere that they were going to end it this year anyway for whatever reason. The basic idea was to get big name creators to do different, R-rated spins on famous characters. They'd only be a few issues but they'd be a larger size (so...pretty much impossible to collect and find a bag and board for them) with more pages. They recently did two Joker series and now they're doing a Wonder Woman book. Daniel Warren Johnson, who did Extremity and Murder Falcon for Image, is writing and drawing Wonder Woman: Dead Earth, which is a four issue series. I haven't read his Image work, but heard good things about Extremity, which I actually have downloaded somewhere waiting to read. I should read his earlier stuff, as Wonder Woman: Dead Earth is great. The story has Wonder Woman waking up and realizing that the world has completely changed while she was out. It's basically Mad Max now...which humans struggling to survive in a post apocalyptic world filled with monsters. So Wonder Woman takes charge and decides to lead a group of humans back to her island. The big reveal in this issue is that while she was in a coma or asleep for centuries or whatever, humans tried to launch atomic bombs onto her island and kill off all of the gods. This radiation turned all of the female gods on the island into monsters. So Wonder Woman hadn't been helping humans to fight monsters...she'd been helping humans fight her own people! Daniel Warren Johnson is definitely a better writer than artist. The story here is very interesting but the art is pretty sloppy. The art isn't bad...it's just not as clean and vibrant as most comic books are. The art does work for some of this story since the world is a post apocalyptic hellscape and it should look messy, dirty, and ragged like the art. The story is so good that I didn't really mind the artwork not being high caliber. My biggest problem with this book is mostly the way it was published. This is a great Wonder Woman story. Granted, it might be difficult to do it in the regular series without everything going back to normal at the end, but when was the last time the regular Wonder Woman book was this good? Ever? They should have just done this story in the regular book. I hate when they do these excellent side mini-series when the regular, continuing book is a fucking joke that needs a boost. It makes no sense. It's not to sell more copies...because nobody buys Wonder Woman comic books. Wouldn't you want to give the main book a boost? And it would've gotten a huge boost. This might end up being the best Wonder Woman book ever. ***1/2
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