Since the onset of Covid and how that affected my comic buying habits over the past few years—my home shop began shipping out pull lists early in the pandemic and never really stopped—my to be read pile had become uncharacteristically large. Here in 2024, when I pulled an issue from October 2020, I knew I had to start chiseling away at this edifice. And so begins the task of reading through four years of accumulation to lessen the shame of having the pile collect dust. And this just happens to begin with Mariko Tamaki, Mikel Janín, Carlo Barberi, Steve Pugh, and Rafah Sandoval’s ten issue run on Wonder Woman. 

After moving to Washington DC, Diana finds herself embroiled in something strange, yet familiar: people doing things against their will with no memory of what they were doing. This means it’s time, once again, to figure out what Maxwell Lord is doing from his prison cell. But when Wonder Woman discovers that Max can’t be the one behind this string of strange occurrences, we discover his estranged daughter, a woman named Emma who happens to live down the hall from Diana. With stolen Lord Enterprises tech, Emma was able to develop an app to amplify her own powers and remotely control anyone who happened to use it, including Diana. With the tech on the black market and only one person who knows how to use it, Wonder Woman and Maxwell Lord have to cross the planet to find the missing pieces of tech before their own eventual confrontation. 

As a quick, ten issue run on the character, Tamaki manages to fit in an incredible amount of story with each issue feeling like its own stand-alone arc for every character involved. And this condensing of story does help to transition us between some of the larger events happening in DC at the time without feeling as though it’s only a transitory series. What Tamaki and every artist who worked on the book do so well throughout is make this series feel like it does matter to the overall character of Wonder Woman—that her development here isn’t something that can be so easily swept under the rug when the next big event looks to wipe the slate clean again. It’s a macro-level character study told in five months that makes us feel like we have a better version of Diana at the end of it. 

While the event comics of the past feel like they’ve already been lost to the continuous stream of world ending events and reboots that superhero comics are plagued by, this run on Wonder Woman feels consequential. Even if we’re more than three years after it ended, we can see bits and pieces of character development into the next, even longer run, on the character. And being able to see that building up of this character over so long does give us that feeling that keeping up and reading all of these series is leading to something, even if we know the story can never really end. 

Get excited. Get wonderful.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.