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DC's freshly minted Absolute Universe begins its roll-out in October with the first issues of both Absolute Batman and Absolute Wonder Woman hitting comic stores. We chatted with Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta about the former a couple of weeks back, and now it's the turn of writer Kelly Thompson and artist Hayden Sherman to talk us through the latter, and the start of a five-issue arc that will introduce a whole new take on the amazing Amazon.
This version of Wonder Woman has a rather different backstory to the one we're all familiar with. Taken as a baby and raised not on Themyscira, but in Hell, the Absolute universe Diana has grown up surrounded by monsters. When gigantic kaiju-style creatures known as Harbingers attack Gateway City, however, Wonder Woman must leave home behind and make her (very public) introduction to the Absolute universe.
Newsarama sat down with both Thompson and Sherman to discuss this fantastic new series and find out how they reinvented such a beloved character for the new universe, while also keeping Diana, well, Diana. As Thompson says at one point, "Someone could tell a really great angry Wonder Woman story, but it wasn't going to be me."
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Newsarama: Kelly and Hayden, congratulations on a terrific first issue of Absolute Wonder Woman. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got involved with this book?
Kelly Thompson: Scott [Snyder] had called me a long time ago and mentioned that this [Absolute Wonder Woman] was a thing. Then he came back to me several months later, and he was like, so remember when we talked about that? I almost had to tell him no because I couldn't figure it out. This is a hard character. I don't know that she's harder than Batman and Superman, but I did find that there were very few takes that I was throwing at the board that I thought worked, because most of them de-powered her in some way, or made her darker, because you're trying to get to something new, and none of that felt right to me. Someone could tell a really great angry Wonder Woman story, but it wasn't going to be me. So I started stripping stuff back. Like, how do we build her a very different life where she still comes out with the same soul intact? She has different weapons and different tools and a different way of looking at things, but she has maintained that core that we all know and love and really expect and deserve from Wonder Woman. I was very lucky to have Hayden on board, because they fully got what I was going for.
Hayden Sherman: The whole process was very secretive up until the moment we really got running. I was working on Dark Spaces: Dungeon at IDW with Scott at the time and in one of our conversations, he brought up DC and asked how I felt about Wonder Woman. I had no context for what he was talking about, so I was just like 'I like Wonder Woman. What are you talking about?' Similar to to Kelly I had an instance where I was thinking, 'I don't know if I'm the person for this?' I had to get over that and decide that I was gonna figure out a way to be the one for it, because it was too cool an opportunity to pass!
You just touched on this Kelly, but let's break it down a bit more... This Wonder Woman is raised in Hell. When I first heard that premise I was expecting maybe a darker take on the character, but this is not that. If anything, I think her goodness shines brighter because she's contrasted with that location. Was that what you were going for here?
Thompson: Honestly, we've been working on this so long, it's thrilling to hear someone say that! Because that's how I feel too, that her compassion shines through, and is highlighted because of the contrast, which was 100% the goal.
We've been hiding our story a little bit more than Scott, because his book is much denser and longer. He's got more space to pack it with all that Gotham stuff that everyone is craving and I think that's the right approach to Batman, but that didn't feel like the right approach for this. So I was very happy when we started getting more out there and people started seeing more about who she really is. I was happy to see people starting to get that the compassion, the kindness, the soul of her is still fully intact. We've just rearranged how she got there, and some of her very cool weapons and some of her allies. We've made a sort of new mythology for her that talks to the old stuff, but I think puts a fresh spin on it.
For sure. There's a series of pages in this first issue where we see her with her mother that really speak to that intent.
Thompson: I think the mother is a very unexpected sort of swing. I don't want to say too much, but I think the point of all of that is to show that despite her circumstances, Diana still ended up raised in love, and that it was also Diana herself that taught that to the mother. It's sort of like an ouroboros, the snake eating itself where one of them is teaching about love, and then the other is reinforcing that love back at the other. And again, it seems more beautiful because of where it's set. But it was all up to Hayden to telegraph that. Those spreads are almost wordless, it's like six pages where there's only a handful of captions and some dialogue, and it's so powerful, and that's because Hayden just really knew how to build that and show the warming up of that world and that connection between them.
Let's talk about that a little. Hayden, what can you tell us about the design of Wonder Woman's new outfit and the look of the comic in general?
Sherman: Well, starting with the design, one of the touchstones for it was a sense of it being assembled without the illustrious means you would have if you were on Themyscira. It's got more of a self-made look to it, but also reinforcing the practicality. Her arms and legs are covered because the forces she's going up against could very well take them off! So you need to have them protected and covered and everything like that. We really wanted the sense that the way that she presents herself speaks to the threats that she's going up against.
And then for the look of the book as a whole... Usually, my work is a little more like cleanly illustrated, but lately I've been more interested in feathering and hatching things out, and in ways to give things slightly more of a classical look, which felt very in keeping with Wonder Woman. So it's taken me a bit out of my wheelhouse but also it's been fun to explore this whole other aesthetic quality, because no other book that I've worked on would have made sense for this style.
And you have the super-talented Jordie Bellaire coloring the book...
Thompson: It's beautiful, it's really powerful. And I would say it's more what I tend to like in comics, where it's more stylized. It's a big wild swing of a book from tip to tail, in the ideas behind it, in the way it's executed, right on down to the colors and Becca Carey's lettering – she did a lot of really incredible stuff. There's these incredible captions and she had to develop the magic language because I didn't want to write a bunch of rhyming spells for Wonder Woman. I feel like everyone really poured their heart and souls into it.
Can you tease a little bit about some of the threats that Diana is going up against in this book?
Thompson: She's going to come up against the US government, which is never super fun. She's going to be facing a lot of things like the public perception of her and things like that. But the obvious villains are some very big monsters with Cthulhu vibes. There's some sci-fi in there as well, but it probably does lean a bit more into fantasy. You put that big a sword on a girl with a flying horse, it's gonna feel fantasy! The monsters she fights in the first issue are called Harbingers and they signal something else that's coming. So as big as those things are, it's just the beginning.
Sherman: I was so thrilled that those are the opening antagonists for this first arc. I don't think I've gotten to talk with you about this, Kelly, but I'm a huge Godzilla fan.
Thompson: I can tell!
Sherman: Yeah, so when I'm drawing these things entering the city, I'm like 'Well, it has to be something Godzilla adjacent. It's fun to make those dreams come true.
Thompson: That explains why all the designs were so good. I mean, it was one of those times when multiple designs would come in and I'd be like: Well, these are all great, I would be happy with any of them. Sometimes you get an embarrassment of riches thanks to the people you're working with, and that happened in this book. So let's use them all, let's put them all in.
It was said in some of the run up to this book that Wonder Woman is the Absolute Universe's first superhero – is that correct?
Thompson: It's probably more accurate to say she's the first public superhero. I can't say for sure that she's chronologically the first – maybe Batman's been operating in Gotham before her, I don't know. But when she debuts on the scene, that's the first time the world has seen a superhero. There's literally news cameras there. It's a big debut and you can't put that back in the box. They live in a world where crazy kaiju things show up on the beach and a woman comes out of nowhere in a bolt of lightning and is fighting them. So it's pretty wild in that respect.
What aspects of Absolute Wonder Woman are you the most excited for readers to experience?
Sherman: We hinted at Diana's mother earlier – that's pretty high up there for me. I've seen a lot of people asking about the tattoos, so I'm really looking forward to the that being public knowledge.
Thompson: Issue three is when that's fully gonna start to make sense and begin to unlock for people. And I would say, everyone's been so excited about the sword, which is hilarious because I thought that would be one of the most controversial things. It was originally going to be an ax, but we couldn't use an ax because Batman had one, which is how we got to the Buster Sword. I thought we were going to get so much pushback on that, and people love it. I would also say that I'm excited for people to discover her lassos. They are different. It's sort of out there already because of some things that Scott said about a pain lasso, which isn't completely inaccurate, but it's not the name of the lasso – it's called the Nemesis Lasso. And just because that exists that does not mean that the Lasso of Truth doesn't exist. It just means she maybe doesn't have it yet.
Sherman: I love this alternate universe you're mentioning, with ax Wonder Woman and ax Batman. That means there would have to be an ax Superman too! [laughs]
Absolute Wonder Woman #1 is published by DC on October 23.
We recently caught up with Tom King to discuss his take on Wonder Woman over in the core DC universe.
