All the word is waiting for you...
Wonder Woman is a DC Comics ongoing comic book series, written by Tom King and illustrated by Daniel Sampere, launched as part of the Dawn of DC initiative. Taking over from the previous team, the run starts with a short preview in Wonder Woman #800 in June 2023 before launching in September 2023 with a new issue #1.After a mysterious Amazon is accused of mass murder, the Amazon Safety Act is passed, barring all Amazons from American soil. In her search for the truth, Wonder Woman finds herself an outlaw. Meanwhile, at some point in the future, Lizzie Prince, the daughter of Diana, is regaled tales of her mother's exploits.
Alongside the run is Amazons Attack depicting the reactions of the rest of the Amazons (and Mary Marvel) finding themselves hated pariahs now.
Wonder Woman (2023) provides examples of:
- Affably Evil: The Sovereign's diction makes it seem like he's politely offering suggestions to his underlings, like the President of the United States, but when he's actually resisted he makes clear that this is simply the etiquette of his upbringing and that all of his advice is actually orders.
- Almighty Janitor: This storyline demonstrates that Sarge Steel holds far more power than a mere sergeant ever could. He is assigned leadership over the government agency A.X.E., and is placed in command over an entire US Army battalion operating under the direct orders of the President in Issue #2
- Subverted by the fact that "Sarge" isn't his rank, but his name, short for "Sargent.". His actual rank was Captain.
- Big Bad: The main villain of this run is Sovereign, a mysterious man said to be the secret king of the United States with his own Lasso of Lies. He's the one behind the whole anti-Amazon campaign which has swept America and is trying to turn public opinion against Diana.
- Breather Episode: Issue #7, where it's just Diana and Superman spending a day at the largest shopping mall in the universe to look for a birthday present for Batman.
- The Brute: Grail basically functions as one for Sovereign. She doesn't seem to be the leader of his anti-Wonder Woman team nor does she have any close involvement in his plans outside of wanting to kill Diana for personal reasons. Her role is that of the muscle, being the most powerful supervillain that Sovereign has recruited and presenting the greatest physical threat to Diana out of her entire recruited rogues gallery in Issue #6.
- Bullying a Dragon: In Issue #1, Sarge Steel (an unpowered human with a simple prosthetic hand) gets the bright idea in his head to throw a punch at Diana's face while calling her a c-word. This is after he just witnessed Diana effortlessly take out his entire squad of state-sanctioned death troopers without breaking a sweat. No surprise Diana easily catches his prosthetic fist in her bare hand and crushes it after talking down to him like a child.
- Call-Back: Diana is shown keeping a picture of Jack from issue #4 in her apartment in subsequent issues.
- The Coats Are Off: When Grail steps up to fight Diana in Issue #6 after Diana has fought the rest of her rogues gallery, she is wearing a blue shawl which she whips off with one hand.
- Country Matters: Heavily implied to be what Sarge Steel calls Diana during their confrontation in a snowy graveyard. She sternly warms him not to call her that again, while breaking his steel fist.
- Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: A.X.E. agents are armed with guns that fire "froufrou bullets" which are shown easily penetrating Amazon steel like a hot knife through butter, which enables them to kill a ton of unprepared Amazons who were residing in the US when the Amazon Safety Act was passed. However, it's still not enough against Diana's Bracelets of Submission.
- Don't Create a Martyr: As Sovereign explains to Lizzie in Issue #6's narration boxes, the purpose behind the Legion of Doom he formed wasn't to kill Wonder Woman because "the dead can overthrow an empire the living could hardly touch." Instead their goal was destroy the public's image of Diana as an Invincible Hero by having her beaten down by her rogues gallery in the US capital for the entire nation to see.
- The Dragon: Tom King's run sees Sarge Steel take on this role to the Sovereign. He serves as Sovereign's primary enforcer in this storyline, is depicted as The Face for A.X.E., and is the field commander of the anti-Wonder Woman team Sovereign assembles.
- The Dreaded: As the daughter of Darkseid and a Justice League-level threat in her own right, Grail is feared by heroes and villains alike. She's the only one out of Diana's rogues gallery that Sovereign personally recruits for his anti-Wonder Woman team rather than have Sarge Steel act as an intermediary. Sovereign also carefully chose to approach her as an inferior begging for her assistance rather than as an equal or superior like he did with his other supervillain recruits. When Sovereign sends his Legion of Doom to attack Diana in Issue #6, he deliberately withholds Grail as a Godzilla Threshold contingency and only sends her in when all other options are seemingly exhausted. Grail is the only supervillain out of the entire anti-Wonder Woman team whose appearance elicits a genuine Oh, Crap! from Diana.
- Dressed Like a Dominatrix: Grail's general design, as expected. She's even introduced being waited on by male slaves.
- Enlightenment Superpower: Issue #5 retcons the Angle Man into deriving his powers from having discovered a singular geometric element of the Anti-Life Equation, deluding himself into believing he needs a powerless triangle to access his power. The knowledge has damaged his sanity and made him obsessed with triangles.
- Evil Counterpart: How Grail is juxtaposed to Diana by both the narration and art. Both being daughters of divine heritage but Grail sees herself as her father's daughter while Diana places importance on the being the daughter of her mother, Hippolyta (in addition, Diana's clay heritage is alluded to heavily in their dialogue).
- Fair-Play Villain: When it’s Grail’s turn to fight Diana after she’s Run the Gauntlet in Issue #6, Grail actually tosses away her scythe to fight Diana hand-to-hand after learning that Diana doesn’t have her sword with her.
- Flashback B-Plot: Issue #2 is constantly switching between the present where Wonder Woman is facing off against the massive US military unit under Sarge Steel's command, and the past where a disguised Diana is dueling Emilie as part of the tournament held by Hippolyta to determine which Amazon would leave Themyscira with Steve Trevor and act as the Amazons' ambassador to Man's World.
- Forced Transformation: When Sarge Steel goes to recruit Circe against Wonder Woman in issue five, he spends an unspecified amount of time transformed into a pig by her, complete with bionic hoof.
- Framing Device: King's run begins with a short story, in Wonder Woman #800, set some 20 years in the future with Diana's daughter, Lizzie, traveling with Jon Kent and Damian Wayne to a prison on Themyscira containing someone Diana fought against in the past.
- Fun with Acronyms: The government agency entrusted with carrying out the policy of removing Amazons from American soil is the Amazon Extradition Entity, or "A.X.E."
- Godzilla Threshold: Sovereign and Sarge Steel consider Grail to be one since she's the daughter of Darkseid. Unlike the rest of Diana's rogues gallery who were commanded through a combination of bribery, blackmail, and threats, Grail is acknowledged to be the only supervillain that A.X.E. has absolutely no control over because she's just that dangerously powerful. When Sovereign deploys his Legion of Doom to ambush Wonder Woman in Washington D.C., he explicitly holds Grail back as part of "Plan G", only sending her in after Diana has already beaten everyone else. And even then, Sarge Steel suggested giving up and trying again another day instead of relying on Grail, only changing his mind at Sovereign's insistence. Notably, Grail is the only supervillain in the anti-Wonder Woman team whose appearance garners a true Oh, Crap! reaction from Diana.
- Internal Homage: The cover of the first issue is one to issue #22
◊ from George Perez's run. - Just One Man: From issue #2 when Sarge Steel sends his men at Diana. Of course, this being Diana, they soon find themselves greatly outclassed.Remember! It's all of us and only one of her.
- Karmic Butt-Monkey: In this storyline, Sarge Steel is portrayed as a sexist, arrogant, and smug sociopath who uses his government mandate as an excuse to openly behave like a trigger-happy thug with a predilection for excessive force. Naturally, he finds himself being the Butt-Monkey a lot. Diana easily foils his initial attempt to capture/kill her in Issue #1 and crushes his prosthetic hand. In Issue #2, she drives him into a rage by defeating the entire US Army battalion he sent after her. She again humiliates him in Issue #3 by casually strolling into his office while dispatching all his A.X.E. agents and escaping with just as much ease. When he goes to recruit Wonder Woman villains in Issue #5, it's made clear none of them fear, or even respect, him. Circe makes him spend an unspecified amount of time as a pig, Psycho breaks into his office and invites himself to joining Sovereign's Legion of Doom, and Silver Swan drops him repeatedly from high up in the sky. And in Issue #6, he is seemingly captured by one of the Wonder Girls while observing Diana's battle with Grail from afar.
- Legion of Doom: Issue #5 sees the Sovereign and Sarge Steel forming a team of Diana's villains to take her down. This team consists of Circe, Grail, Angle Man, Dr. Psycho, Giganta and Silver Swan.
- Lets Fight Like Ladies: After taking out the rest of the Legion of Doom, Grail is the only one remaining. Once she sees that Diana has lost her sword during her other battles, Grail tosses away her scythe, and they fight unarmed.
- Love Makes You Crazy: The characterization of the new version of the Vanessa Silver Swan.
- Magnetic Hero: Diana is this to such an extent that even her attempts to push the Wonder Girls away fails and they insist on helping her anyway.
- Monumental Battle: Issue #6 is an entire issue of Diana battling her rogues gallery at the base of the Washington Monument. Giganta even rips up the obelisk and uses it to bludgeon Diana when she's distracted.
- Mythology Gag:
- Trinity's full name is Elizabeth Marston Prince.
- The bar where the massacre that sets off the events of the book is called "Kanigher's Cues". Bob Kanighher was the long running writer of Wonder Woman during the Silver Age.
- The desk clerk in #3 is doing a crossword puzzle which features the surnames of a few Wonder Woman createors such as Phil Jiminez, Adam Hughes and George Perez.
- "Ft. Simone" is made reference to in a few issues.
- When Giganta is recruited for Sovereign's Legion of Doom, his narration states they have contradictory info about her origin. Some reports saying she was gorilla who became a human (her Golden Age origin) and others saying she was a human who became a gorilla and then a human again (her Post-Crisis origin)
- In issue #5, Donna's wears a t-shirt with the Teen Titans Go! logo on it.
- In the same issue as the entry above, Donna challenges Diana to a contest via a DC-themed fighting video game. A clear pastiche of Injustice. Diana plays as Superman, Donna as Batman.
- Nemesis Weapon: Sovereign has a "Lasso of Lies" that as it's name suggests, is a counterpart to the Lasso of Truth. In this case, it can make anyone believe whatever lies the user wants.
- Non-Action Big Bad: The Sovereign, the main antagonist of Tom King's run, is the secret king of America who wields unchecked authority over seemingly the entire the US government and military. However, he's also a wrinkled, geriatric old man who seemingly possesses no fighting abilities or superpowers of his own aside from his Lasso of Lies. Hence why he doesn't directly confront Diana himself and instead relies on underlings like Sarge Steel and his recruited Wonder Woman villains to do the heavy lifting, while he acts as an unseen puppetmaster controlling everything from the shadows.
- Not So Stoic: The Sovereign, who up until this moment has been characterized as unflappable regarding the conflict with Wonder Woman, crushes his glass and yells "Damn it all!" when he is forced to deploy Grail against the Amazon heroine.
- Oh, Crap!: Grail gets this reaction from Diana when she enters the fight against Diana in issue six.
- One-Woman Army: Issue #2 has Sarge Steel sending a heavily-armed unit of 20,000 soldier with tanks, helicopters and jets against Diana. This being Diana, she smashes past them with almost contemptible ease.
- Politically Incorrect Villain:
- Sarge Steel has no problem being openly sexist to Wonder Woman.
- In Issue #3, Sovereign spells it out in the narration boxes that his whole motivation behind his nationwide anti-Amazon crusade was because he viewed the Amazons' very existence and way of life as an affront to his patriarchal belief system.
- Poor Communication Kills: Silver Swan tries to warn Diana about Sovereign's plans in Issue #6 by physically attacking Diana in the middle of her battle with Giganta, violently pinning her to the Washington Monument while talking like a Yandere, cussing Diana out while ignoring her Tranquil Fury-filled demands to be released, and finally screaming that Diana doest't understand what's coming (presumably referring to Grail). Of course Diana doesn't heed the crazed Vanessa's warnings and punches her unconscious.
- Post-Victory Collapse: In Issue #6, Wonder Woman has to Run the Gauntlet against the Legion of Doom team assembled by Sarge Steel in Washington D.C., culminating in a physically exhausted Diana punching out Grail before succumbing to her injuries and collapsing to the ground, allowing A.X.E. to move in and capture her.
- Precision-Guided Boomerang: Wonder Woman uses her tiara as a thrown weapon again, and to great effect. Issue 3 has a scene where she throws it into a room of armed soldiers, with panels focused on her waiting as she listens to them react to it flying around taking them all out.
- Psychic-Assisted Suicide: The Sovereign meets with one of the soldiers that fought Wonder Woman and uses the Lasso of Lies to make him believe he felt so emasculated by defeat at her hands that he was Driven to Suicide, writing a suicide note directly saying as much.
- Royal "We": How Sovereign speaks.
- Run the Gauntlet: Issue #6 pits Wonder Woman against Sarge Steel's newly-formed anti-Amazon team consisting of several of Diana's rogues gallery. First she fights Giganta and Silver Swan, who were able to ambush Diana thanks to Circe's magic. At the same time, Diana is experiencing a psychic assault from Dr. Psycho who is having Angle Man use his triangle to amplify his powers. When Diana prevails over all that, Grail is then sent in to fight a worn down Diana in single combat. While Diana ultimately triumphs over Grail, the battle leaves her so wounded and exhausted that she has a Post-Victory Collapse on the spot.
- Serial Escalation: How the first arc of the run, ''Outlaw" works with the threats Diana faces. The first issue has Diana facing off against a squad of highly trained government hitmen, then taking on the U.S. Army in issue #2, and then by issue #6 facing off against many of the heavy hitters from her rogues gallery.
- Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Each of the Wonder Girls challenges Diana to a contest of particular skill, with the condition that they will not help her in her war against the US government if they lose. Despite Diana besting them all and all three swearing an oath as Amazons to leave her alone, they still decide to help her anyway.
- Shadow Dictator: The story arc establishes that the United States isn't a true democracy, and probably never was, since a man got a hold of the Lasso of Lies and set his line up as the true Sovereign behind the government.
- Shoot the Bullet: Issue #5 has the Wonder Girls each challenging Diana to a contest of their choosing. Yara faces off against Diana in a contest of archery where they shoot arrows at each other, with the number of arrows increasing by one with each turn. Each round they shoot at each other clashes until they reach four and both of their fourth shots miss. Diana dodges in time, while Yara gets struck.
- Stepford Suburbia: While in the capture of the Sovereign, Diana is placed in false reality by the Lasso of Lies where she's a 1950s-style housewife with an abusive husband version of Steve.
- Token Good Teammate:
- Steve Trevor finds himself acting as one for the US government in this storyline after Sovereign's machinations see the country turn against the Amazons. He's portrayed as a Noble Top Enforcer under Sovereign and Sarge Steel, usually trying to deescalate things and it's clear he personally doesn't approve of what A.X.E. is doing.
- Out of all the recruited villains on Sovereign's anti-Wonder Woman team, Silver Swan is the only one who has no real intentions of harming Diana, having only agreed to join so she could later try to warn Diana about Sovereign's plans. Unfortunately, Sovereign predicted this and instead uses Vanessa as an unwitting distraction during Diana's big battle with her rogues gallery in Issue #6, allowing a magically-enhanced Giganta to sucker punch the two while Diana's guard was temporarily down.
- Tomboy with a Girly Streak: Cassie says meeting Diana gave her an appreciation for traditionally feminine interests.
- Transformation Sequence: Diana does the classic Lynda Carter "Wonder Spin" in issue #6 before going to battle with Giganta.
- Underestimating Badassery: Sarge Steel seems to be prone to this a lot in this storyline.
- In Issue #1, Sarge Steel and his A.X.E. death squad think that just because they managed to catch hundreds of regular Amazons residing on American soil off guard with their Depleted Phlebotinum Shells, this means that they can assassinate Wonder Woman herself with no problem. Diana quickly disabuses them of that notion and non-lethally dispatches every A.X.E. agent sent after her with zero effort.
- In Issue #2, both Steve Trevor and Sgt. Steel are under the delusion that normal artillery, tanks, and infantry will be enough to defeat Wonder Woman. You know, the same Wonder Woman who happens to be a millennia-old Flying Brick demigoddess with powers comparable to Superman? Not to mention Diana has fought literal Physical Gods like Ares and Darkseid, both of whom could (no, would) effortlessly annihilate whatever the US military could possibly throw at them. And no, this wasn't part of some distraction or greater strategy, Sgt. Steel seriously thought that Diana would instantly fold at the mere sight of military grunts armed with conventional guns and vehicles. This is especially egregious coming from Steve, given how long he's known Diana and seen what she can already do. Just to emphasize just how horribly outmatched the US Army was here, there is a Flashback B-Plot showing a younger, more inexperienced Diana who struggles far more to defeat a single Amazon in a tournament duel than the present-day Diana does against any of the US military forces.
- In Issue #3, we're shown that the US military task force entrusted with killing Superman should he go rogue (alongside the entire Justice League as Sarge Steel boasts) consists of a bunch of regular soldiers and some tanks whose strategy seems to be "throw wave after wave of our men against the target until they fall". For comparison, the army battalion that Diana singlehandedly defeated in Issue #2 was bigger and better armed than this. Obviously, Diana is not the least bit threatened by this and makes Sgt. Steel back down by threatening him with her Invisible Jet.
- Vigilante Woman: With Amazons no longer being able to operate on American soil, Diana finds herself this. She also finds herself in defiance of orders from Queen Nubia for refusing to return to Themyscira.
- Villain Respect:
- Grail is the only Wonder Woman rogue who Sovereign meets and recruits personally for his anti-Wonder Woman team, as Grail's status as an actual god makes her worthy of his respect, or at least feign showing respect.
- Grail also shows a little bit of this to Diana. When Diana states she abandoned her sword, Grail tosses her scythe aside and decides to battle her fist to fist. Though when it seems Diana is beaten, Grail doesn't hesitate to use the scythe for the finishing blow.
- Wham Episode: Issue #3 changes everything the audience assumed about Trinity: she is not Diana's daughter, but the daughter of Emilie.
- You Are Not Alone: Diana and Clark's birthday present for Batman is a photo booth picture strip of them and a small diamond. After dropping off the diamond at a Wayne-operated orphanage, Batman silently places the strip with his two best friends on the Batmobile dashboard with a smile.
