Did you expect the pile to be so easily finished? Even though it’s been a month since I last dove into it, that doesn’t keep the series from piling up further and further. But this is one that’s been sitting in the pile for a few years now—it’s been nearly four years since I looked at the first of three issues—but in my defense, the collected edition is only two years old at this point. Even still, I can’t not return to one of the strongest showings from DC’s Black Label with Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, Nicola Scott, Hi-Fi, Arif Prianto, Romulo Fajardo Jr., Wesley Wong, Annette Kwok, and Clayton Cowles.

While Wonder Woman’s name is on the book and she appears on the cover, the focus here is on the tribe of Amazons, their history, and how Hippolyta became their leader. But it has to start further back than that. As a punishment for the crimes committed to women, an assemblage of goddesses—Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Hecate, Artemis, Demeter, and Hestia—wishes for the eradication of all men. When Zeus and the other gods of Olympus see this as an affront, six of the goddesses meet in secret to create a way to balance the scales of the world. From this meeting, the six tribes of Amazon are created, each with a goddess as their patron with the exception of Hera. Under cover of night, these Amazons seek to punish the men who have enslaved and denigrated women across the world. Hippolyta in all of this, however, is simply a mortal tasked with dealing with an unwanted newborn daughter. And it’s this guilt that drives her to seek out something more.

While we have read the origins of the Amazons dozens of times in the past, Historia feels definitive in a way splash pages, back-ups, and special issues haven’t been able to in the past. The depth and humanity that the creators imbue every page with connects us more completely with the reason behind the history. It’s a history that feels organic in how it unfolds—not just as a story, but as a piece of a larger canon that has existed around it for nearly a century. And with the three artists illustrating each issue, the story feels more and more like that living history a story like this encapsulates as they bring their own variations on what we see.

Something definitive is slippery in comics. Every backstory can be modified; every death can become a chance at life; every character exists between canon and non-canon depending on the year. But with a story like Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazon, we have something that feels like it can’t be ignored—a story that slips straight into the canon of the universe like some of the earliest issues DC had put out. It’s a mythology for characters that are mythology themselves. 

Get excited. Get historic.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.