DC’s Absolute Wonder Woman has been a revolutionary re-invention of superhero heroine, while still retaining the core elements that have made Wonder Woman/Diana Prince a major icon for over 80 years. Absolute Wonder Woman’s latest issues have seen Diana leave her home in Hell to defend humanity against the giant Tetracide monster threatening Gateway City. During the first rounds of battle, Diana lost her entire right arm – only for writer Kelly Thompson to reveal in flashback scenes that Diana has been missing the arm for years, ever since she sacrificed it to bring Steve Trevor back from the dead. the red tattooed arm she fought
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In Absolute Wonder Woman #4, we get to learn more about the twisted sorcery that Diana learned in Hell from her adoptive mother, Circe. Diana has been wearing her ‘backup arm,’ a crude metal prosthetic limb that was “forged in fire by Hephaestus himself.” However, to face the Tetracide again Diana knows she needs the full power of the mystical arm she had forged for herself – and to re-conjure that arm, she needs to complete an intricate, bloody, spell.
Steve takes Diana to the shop of local amateur witch Etta Candy – the Absolute Universe’s spin on the iconic Wonder Woman character. Etta and her sister Gia find out that their shop holds many of the modern-day ingredients that Diana needs for the spell to re-conjure her arm. When the ingredients are collected, Diana has to ask Etta, Gia, and Steve to all wait outside a storeroom of the shop – because the spell is going to get VERY bloody.
Using a spell recited to the goddess Hecate, Diana reforges her crimson arm, but the spell comes with a cost: Etta, Gia, and Steve must all donate samples of their blood to the spell – blood that Diana slathers all over her body. When the spell is recited, Wonder Woman is hit with a bloody thunderbolt, and her arm is regrown from the combination of blood and fire. Diana herself is left covered in blood – to the point that Etta has to advise her to take a towel and clean herself up properly, before she heads into battle.
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The Witchy Wonder Woman
Absolute Wonder Woman continues to paint an intriguing portrait of Diana, giving her all the same noble core qualities of love and compassion – fitted over an entirely new framework. That framework is a much darker one than Diana’s typical Amazon upbringing: being from the Wild Isle of Hell, with Circe as a mother figure, Diana has mastered both dark magic and mystical weaponry that make her much more formidable than her main universe counterpart. That nature of the dark magic Diana is tapped into has already been shown to come at significant cost: giving an arm to save a lover, only to take that same lover’s blood to restore the arm. It feels like major foreshadowing to show what dark (or evil?) lengths Diana may have to go to in order harness the power to be a worldly protector.
Absolute Wonder Woman is on sale at DC.
