I just finished the 2025 Wonder Woman Hugo nominee and, by Hecate, I’m still not sure how I feel about it. The artwork is fantastic and the portrait-style alternate covers scattered through the book are gorgeous. Visually it’s everything you’d expect from a Hugo finalist.
The story is basically Greek mythology with Diana pasted in. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s definitely not a traditional Wonder Woman narrative. Persephone shows up. Diana eats a single pomegranate seed “out of love,” which binds her to spend one month a year in the Underworld. I couldn’t quite tell if that was meant to be for her mother’s sake or just part of the general mythic logic the book is following.
They also changed her backstory so that she sacrificed her right arm to cast a spell. The reveal comes late, but it’s actually one of the more interesting choices. She’s an amputee, a witch, and still a powerful warrior. The book doesn’t treat the missing limb as a tragedy. It treats it as a mythic cost, which is a very different framing than superhero stories usually take.
Prometheus even shows up, which is when I finally gave up pretending this was a Wonder Woman story at all. He gives Diana some of his blood to forge the Nemesis lasso, and he also creates a zombie Pegasus. Yes, really. It still has feathery wings, but the body is a black skeletal shape, and Diana “feeds” it with magic like it’s some kind of Underworld rescue horse. At that point the book wasn’t even pretending to be DC canon. It was just doing its own mythic thing and letting Diana tag along.
Steve, the love interest barely registers as a character. He’s rescued (alive) in the Underworld for reasons that never quite gel. After defeating the enemy to live on Earth as we know it as an incarnation of Medusa - she appears "stuck" and Steve, the Wonder Woman Whisperer, steps up to remind her she’s actually Diana and she transforms back. They otherwise have zero chemistry.
The part that actually worked for me was the relationship between Diana and Circe. In this version Circe is her adoptive mother, not a villain, and the story keeps circling back to that bond. There’s a line about how you learn to love a child by raising it, and that feels like the real heart of the book. Everything else — the battles, the romance, the transformations — is secondary to that relationship.
I kept waiting for Athena to show up, since she’s the one who sprang from Zeus’s head, not Artemis or Diana. But the book isn’t interested in Athena at all. It’s interested in Circe, in chosen family, in the idea that Diana is who she is because someone loved her into being.
The ending is pure Greek myth. Diana shows mercy, tries to avoid killing, does what she has to do, rescues her mother, and leaves the Underworld. Then the story just stops. No epilogue, no wrap-up, no superhero-style resolution. The quest is over, so the tale ends.
I liked parts of it. The art is stunning and they have alternate covers sprinkled throughout that are stylistically different portraits of Wonder Woman. The adoptive-mother theme is lovely. The disability reveal is handled with more grace than I expected. But the whole thing is a bit of a mishmash. Some readers will love this version of Diana as a mythic heroine. Others will miss the clarity and grounding of a more traditional Wonder Woman story. It’s ambitious, uneven, and definitely memorable.
REVIEW: Absolute Wonder Woman, Vol. 1: The Last Amazon by Kelly Thompson
RATING: 3 stars
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