I finished the penultimate chapter of Tom King’s Wonder Woman Vol. 3: Fury unsure if I’d reached the end of the book¹ or not, but hoping desperately that Fury would not end on such a cliffhanger that I’d have to wait months before it resolves. It might be sacrilege to say King’s Wonder Woman is this title’s best run since Greg Rucka’s peerless first stint, but I don’t think I’ve been this caught up in any comic for a while.

As King is wont to do, some of this book is ... I think “formulaic” is the wrong word and “repetitive” may not quite grab it either. That is, two of the six issues have an extremely similar shape, and arguably two others are not so far off the same pattern. Some might see this as problematic; to me, over the many times King has done this, I interpret it like the slightly changing verses of a song, the minor fall and major lift, if you will.² Further, what seems simplistic here is undoubtedly deceptive given Fury offers just so much to talk about.

[Review contains spoilers]

It was a fraught idea from the start, giving Wonder Woman a baby. The traps are clear because they’re unfortunately well worn — in times past (see Catwoman and Black Canary), the introduction of a child is a plot device that invariably circles back to the status quo, with the loser being said child (and the audience, following a plot whose conclusion is predictable). Even in an era where Diana’s parenthood would follow both her major male counterparts, Batman and Superman, proving one can still be a parent without giving up their superheroic mantle, it’s still different — the pregnancy, the delivery, if the writer chose to go that route. Even here, where King’s done everything right, we still see Diana doing more holding and calming and swaddling of newborn Lizzie than we ever saw Bruce or Clark do, and it can’t be denied that might be by dint of what we expect due to Diana’s gender.

Some of that King ducks with the right choice, that Lizzie Marston Prince should be born of clay just as her mother before her.³ This also solves one of King’s Wonder Woman’s pervading questions so far, whether Lizzie would be biologically (or spiritually) Diana’s, or whether Lizzie would be the daughter of the Amazon Emelie, adopted by Diana (yes, Tom, I did “notice who fell away from my tellings”; you’ve taught us too well). The end, we now find, is only the beginning — Lizzie is born and so is Emelie’s daughter Lyssa, and the latter is fated to be a pawn of the villain Sovereign that will murder Diana and all the Amazons, and whom only Lizzie can stop.

It seems wholly mad that Diana would choose to bring a baby into the world now, with the persecution of the Amazons ongoing, and indeed issue by issue we see Diana caring for baby Lizzie intercut with the various battles against the Sovereign’s forces. Of course, for one, the majority of Fury is Diana’s confederates dealing crippling blows to the Sovereign’s infrastructure before Diana herself delivers the final blow (so glad the book didn’t end ahead of that point!). Second, this “mad” move is entirely on brand for King’s Diana in particular, to meet the grievous injury of Steve Trevor’s murder not with immediate, uncontrolled revenge but rather with birthing a child — to meet an act of hate with an act of love rather than an act of violence.

Perhaps unavoidably, there is a problematic amount of which Fury becomes Steve’s story, in absentia. Diana is there, she can hold Lizzie, but in Steve’s absence, the characters must discuss him to make his presence felt, and that seems too much in the reader’s face. We know what happened, so when Hippolyta asks about Steve, the answer may be news to her but clear to us; further, Diana’s dialogue for a full chapter is recounting she and Steve’s first meeting (again) while she chisels his visage out of marble. “It is but a matter of time,” Diana says. “There is an order to things,” suggesting she has a plan for Steve’s resurrection, letting alone the backup story of his spirit’s discontent. That is to say, I even doubt Steve’ll be gone for too long anyway, though some of how Lizzie refers to him in Trinity: Generation S is interesting — “This preposterous if not farcical quest to find our frankly unmissed father” makes Steve sound more like a deadbeat than that the Sovereign murdered him offhandedly.

Good Wonder Woman stories are often cognizant that while Batman never kills and Superman was raised by law-abiding Midwesterners, Diana comes from a culture of Amazon warriors. As such, Fury’s ending is shocking and horrifying but perhaps not wholly out of character in retrospect, that Diana should make the Sovereign undress and then force him to carve a word, “Liar,” on his own chest. There is more to come, I’m sure — the dagger was for some reason mystical, that the Sovereign has not really lied (he was conspiratorial, yes, but he’s seemingly told “us” the truth) — but I appreciate King ending with a scene that makes the audience uncomfortable, as compared to the standard “hero thumps villain and takes them off to jail.”

Two of Fury’s issues see the collected Wonder Girls dismantling the Sovereign’s power base, interspersed with scenes of Diana and Lizzie; by the second, one can really set a clock to what’s going to happen next. Equally there’s a Columbo-esque inevitability to the (fantastic) issue where Detective Chimp repeatedly questions the Sovereign, and that penultimate issue simply involves Diana dispensing with challenge after challenge while walking across the White House lawn. There is tension, to be sure, as all the Sovereign’s protections crumble until all that’s left is he and Diana, but as with Wonder Woman Vol. 2: Sacrifice, I don’t disagree that this is a superhero comic only sometimes in the broadest sense, and other times more like a play than it is a serial comic.

In that fine line between the wants of a shared comics universe and the needs of an individual title, Wonder Woman Vol. 3: Fury is equally this title’s first volume in the DC All In era and also the finale of its initial storyline. Again, however, clearly not the end, but rather only the beginning. I’ve neither looked up “Mouseman” — though I wouldn’t be surprised if Tom King’s using an old Wonder Woman concept, and also what a swerve from political intrigue to high fantasy — nor whether there’s any news of King leaving this title. There is too much — Lizzie and Lyssa and on and on — too much to learn King’s going to wrap it up in a volume or so. I won’t hear of it. No, as they say, thank you.

[Includes original and variant covers]