You didn’t think the pile was over already, did you? That first run that I wrote about last week was only the tip of an old iceberg that’s been sitting on my shelf collecting dust between house moves. Since we have nearly four years worth of stories to catch up on, we may as well keep going through Wonder Woman and the new creative team that took over after Mariko Tamaki and the events of DC’s Death Metal event. This time around, we have Becky Cloonan, Michael W. Conrad, Travis Moore, Andy MacDonald, Jill Thompson, and Emanuela Lupacchino giving us Diana tumbling through the multiverse in Afterworlds.

This new arc finds Diana tumbling into a new pantheon as she finds herself in Asgard, locked in an eternal battle that will repeat in perpetuity so long as there are warriors to fight. With no memory of who she is other than that she knows how to fight, Diana takes a sword from the Norse hero Siegfried, and proceeds into the fray before catching an ax to her chest. Here, she is no longer invulnerable like she had been on Earth. But this is normal in the realm as she wakes up in Valhalla to enjoy the mead, meat, and company before fighting again the next day. But there’s a problem with the routine as more and more warriors are not reviving to fight. And this leads Diana and Siegfried on a patch down the World Tree and across the multiverse as they find a path of destruction created by the bifurcated Roman god, Janus.

There are dozens of instances of heroes coming back from the dead for next to no reason—Brightest Day as an event enshrined that sentiment—but this story arc makes Wonder Woman coming back from the dead after sacrificing herself during the Death Metal actually feel earned. This wasn’t simply dropping her back into the world as if nothing had happened, this was her clawing back to life with a head of half-memories and Ratatosk, the World Tree’s messenger, chirping on her shoulder. But this is a story too of Diana realizing that, even in death, she still has work to do after her ascension to godhood. That there is always some problem to be solved, that there is some injustice to right somewhere in the world, means that she can never let herself die or take her seat on Olympus. She has to live to keep the world going.

While this arc of Wonder Woman is another transition period, it is also giving us set-ups for what will come later in this team’s run. We’re getting new characters, relationships, small crises popping up along the multiverse, and a reintroduction of Diana into the world after her death. We start small with the threat of the past and future being erased from the world, so we can only get bigger from there. 

Get excited. Get through.

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