Wonder Woman: Eyes of the Gorgon (DC)
Written by Greg Rucka, drawn by Drew Johnson, James Raiz & Sean Phillips
Collects Wonder Woman #206-213

About this time last month I made my way through Greg Rucka’s first three Wonder Woman books. It took me a little while to get the next volume from the library, but I finally did and had a ridiculously good time reading through it and the final two volumes of his run.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Rucka’s working on a longform comics story with this run and I think it’s one of the best ones I’ve read when it comes to this character. He not only had a solid take on the character, but also developed a variety of obstacles in his first few issues that all came to fruition as the series edged closer to its Infinite Crisis/One Year Later-mandated conclusion.

As you might be able to tell from this book’s title, the major obstacle this time around is the resurrected Medousa, the snake-headed Gorgon who turns people into stone if she makes direct eye contact with them (even via cameras). Medousa not only attacks Wonder Woman at the White House, but also turns the son of one of her staffers into stone before challenging her to a knock down, drag out battle for the entire world to see. In the process of defeating the inhuman monster, Diana blinds herself with hair-snake venom. The rest of this volume finds her dealing with her new condition, including a variety of tests from her teammates in the JLA.

Meanwhile, Dr. Psycho’s still causing trouble, Cheetah returns, the goddesses arrange to take over Olympus from Zeus and the United States is particularly worried about Paradise Island to the point where they won’t move their warships away.

Wonder Woman: Land of the Dead (DC)
Written by Greg Rucka with Geoff Johns, drawn by Drew Johnson, Justiniano, Rags Morales & Sean Phillips
Collects Wonder Woman #214-217, Flash #219

Land Of The Dead kicks off with a crossover with Flash that establishes a relationship between Diana’s longtime villain Cheetah and the Scarlet Speedster’s nemesis Zoom. These two baddies would go on to become a big part of Infinite Crisis as members of the Secret Society, specifically and the group that attacked and murdered most of the Freedom Fighters.

After that, though, the book circles back around to deal with its own problems, specifically Diana, Wonder Girl and Ferdinand traveling to Hell for Athena. This might be the shortest book in the bunch, but it does allow Diana to fix a few of her bigger problems. This is definitely SPOILER territory, so skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want anything ruined. First, Diana did all this so she could bring her staffer’s son back to the land of the living. Second, she gets her vision back because Athena’s so impressed with this selfless decision. Also, Wonder Girl discovers that her dad is Zeus, which was a mystery floating around since Geoff Johns relaunched Teen Titans and seemed to be hinting that it was actually Ares.

One of the interesting elements that Rucka played with in this book is comparing Diana in all her righteous, fair-headed glory to the machinations and overall pettiness of the gods themselves. This aspect is showcased in this volume, especially given Diana’s desire to fix a problem she saw herself as the source of and do the right thing by the people she cares about.

Wonder Woman: Mission’s End (DC)
Written by Greg Rucka, drawn by Cliff Richards, Rags Morales, David Lopez, Ron Randall, Tom Derenick, Georges Jeanty & Karl Kerschl
Collects Wonder Woman #218-226

This is it folks, the one where everything comes to a head! We find out the truth about Jonah (the entryway character from the first volume), Diana fights a brainwashed Superman and does what she thinks is right to stop him, she goes on trial and an army of OMACs attack Paradise Island.

Alright, so let’s break this down. More SPOILERS ahead for the next two paragraphs. As it turns out, Jonah was a Checkmate spy. I don’t remember there being any indications of this up until the previous book, but that’s where that is. Rucka also wrote the OMAC tie-in mini as well as the Checkmate comic, so maybe there’s more of that character in those books that I’m forgetting.

When Wonder Woman fought Superman it was because former Justice League backer and Blue Beetle murderer Max Lord was controlling the most powerful person on the planet with relative ease. As Lord went on about how he’d never stop coming back to take over Superman, Wonder Woman believed him and snapped his neck, which just so happened to be broadcast everywhere. From there, she turned herself in, intending to go on trial, but that all got scuttled by the OMACs attacking Paradise Island. Their leader, Brother Eye was all bent out of shape because Wonder Woman killed Lord and made her public enemy number one. A massive battle ensued that only concluded when Athena decided to leave that plane of existence and take all of the Amazons — save Diana — with her.

It’s interesting looking back at this run as a whole because, for the most part, it was a Wonder Woman story that would occasionally cross over with other characters when it made sense. But, as it wrapped up, this was fully a DCU story. Infinite Crisis rewrote some chapters in the DC book and Rucka was one of the architects involved at the time. I had forgotten some of the timeframe going into this, so that was something of a surprise, but overall I think it was all handled really well.

Above I mentioned that all of the balls Rucka got rolling felt like they were well paid off in this series, but that’s not entirely true. I realized while going back through these books for this post that Veronica Cale wound up a bit on the backburner. I think she’s a super interesting character, but probably got pushed to the side as the more major players revved up towards the series’ finale. She does show up in 52, though, which might help fill in some of the questions I have about her character.

Anyway, aside from a bit of a rushed feel at the end and the fact that I wish Drew Johnson had drawn the entire series — the multiple changes in artist per volume in these last three books is kinda crazy — I’d give this entire run of comics a huge, enthusiastic thumbs up. This is what a great example, not only of a fantastic Wonder Woman comic, but a long form sequential storytelling work that shows how solidly a writer can use the long game when plotting out his work.