Diana fighting monsters isn’t interesting whichever time period she’s in, not least because she’s never in any danger and always defeats them without much effort. The book is basically just Wonder Woman walking around and fighting monsters that look like they’ve stepped out of the pages of BPRD: Hell on Earth. The latter action just underlines the gratuitously grim and depressing atmosphere of the book that only made me dislike it all the more. Diana has an absurd fight with Superman (he apparently keeps a container full of kryptonite next to his chair) and the way she treats Superman’s remains is both gruesome and disrespectful. The reasoning for why the Amazons continue to fight the surviving humans made them look petty and simple-minded (I guess that’s also a result of the nukes, eh? Sigh…) while Batman’s reasoning for putting Diana in that pod in the first place was even more nonsensical. So I guess it wasn’t magical defences, it was Wonder Woman? Eh, I don’t really care, it’s just another example of the bad writing in this book. Johnson isn’t consistent with this sloppy explanation though as Diana’s mom says initially that Themyscira’s magical defences deflected the warheads and it was the nuclear fallout that engulfed the island that damaged them all - then later we see Diana smashing all the warheads single-handedly.

Why there was nuclear fallout in the first place was so unconvincing: the humans have a war with the Amazons over global warming and instantly escalate to using nukes. I’ll accept the Amazons surviving because they’re god-like and don’t have normal human lifespans but Cheetah? She shouldn’t still be knocking around centuries later, should she?

Nuclear fallout mutation is a big feature of this book. The post-apocalyptic vision Daniel Warren Johnson presents is ridiculous - apparently in his dystopian future, humans live in a medieval-type society wearing knight armour, while spending their leisure time in Roman-esque coliseums, and there’s also some jeeps?! It doesn’t make sense. Wonder Woman: Dead Earth was dead boring and dead stupid. Reasons - but is Paradise Island the refuge she believes it to be?

In the wake of nuclear annihilation, Wonder Woman wakes up from a centuries-long sleep in a contrivance pod, I mean a sleep pod, to find the world has changed quite a bit while she’s been napping! Dangers are everywhere as she leads the surviving humans to her old home, Themyscira for.

Wonder Woman by Daniel Warren Johnson