Don’t you miss the weekends where the existential dread didn’t set in? Me neither, now let’s talk about Wonder Woman. And this is an evergreen character for the moment as she is meant to represent hope, compassion, and the goodness that we can find in most people. Most, of course, being the key word there. But for this final volume of Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad’s run on the character, we’re finally seeing where some of that compassion can end as we come up against the machinations that have been building up for the past two years with their final story, Revenge of the Gods. 

After we last left Diana, she was dealing with the death of her mother and the uniting of all three Amazon tribes to beat Chaos back through Doom’s Doorway. Without getting any real time to recover, she’s back to stop Dr. Cizko’s newly minted Villainy Incorporated and the mind-altering chemicals they’re mixing into batches of milk. But this isn’t the only villain for these last few issues as the crux of this milk scheme isn’t Cizko’s at all—he was only a single piece being moved by the goddess Hera as a means of subjugating the Earth once more. For this run, we’ve been seeing the gods in the background and in Diana’s afterlife, but their demise is imminent as they lose their faithful. But with mind-controlling milk and a floating temple in the middle of Washington DC, Hera plans to turn the planet back to believers in the old gods.

But, of course, Hera can’t succeed and it takes all the powers on Earth and the Rock of Eternity to stop her. This is where the run slows down. Instead of ending things on bombast in the lead-up to Wonder Woman #800, we’re instead treated to something wholly different: a series of dream sequences. Diana has to recover after her fight with Hera and this deep meditation allows her mind to wonder into those of her friends. We see her across the eras as a variety of artists bring us back through history to show just who Wonder Woman was and will become. It feels like an earned ending more than anything—one final rest for this character before a new team takes over—but also the thesis of their entire run. Diana was only ever just one person, but it was everyone around her that helped make her the character that has become so iconic. 

There haven’t been many long superhero runs I’ve read in the past as they were happening and this feels like what many of those old trades I would check out at the library would feel like when I got to their final volumes: a story that feels complete. So often we read about runs being truncated due to outside factors and what the team has to come up with in order to wrap things up in a couple issues. Here, we get what this ending was meant to be and it does feel nice to get that sense of closure. 

Get excited. Get into the next pile I have on my shelf. 

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