And this, this is perhaps the greatest expression of failure. Diana would kill Maxwell Lord, which would be publicized, helping set part of the stage for that event. And then, all of a sudden, the threads of Infinite Crisis worked their way into the run. Throughout it all, Diana ran her embassy and dealt with everything thrown at her – from libel and slander to all kinds of misogynistic rhetoric. It was also the most overtly political the book had gotten, opening on the premise of Diana writing a book of essays which triggered a whole right-wing backlash as conservatives lost their minds at the thought of Amazonian philosophy. Rucka’s run was a sprawling urban fantasy epic, full of Athenas with Laptops and other divine beings living in mundane modernity, arriving to a world enamored with American Gods, and lining up with the timing of a generation of young readers just picking up paperbacks of Percy Jackson novels. Even its very title is telling: Nothing Finished, Only Abandoned. This ending is entirely about failure, letting go, and acceptance even in the face of the harshest circumstances. So the ending here is deeply revealing, as it’s a heart laid bare. He had years worth of plans, plot points to address, messes to fix, and character arcs to complete, but none of that mattered, as he had been told he was done. Greg Rucka had been fired off Wonder Woman at this point. So for all intents and purposes, this one’s the big ending. The issue after needn’t even be a WW issue, but a separate one-shot, as it’s merely a lead into the event Infinite Crisis (which we’ll touch on a bit more). But while the latter operates as a stand-alone one-shot spanning Diana’s history and relationship with Superman, this is the actual ending.

#225 isn’t, obviously, the final issue of the volume, #226 is – and that, too, is written by Greg Rucka. It’s the numerous flaws and obvious failings and it’s all the things wrong, messy, and incomplete within the work. But now, looking back on it, and revisiting it, what fascinates me endlessly about it isn’t the supposed ‘perfections’, not the great big successes. When I first read it as a new reader, though, I certainly believed it was. And it’s also the run to finally cap off and end the long WW volume that began way back in the ‘80s under the stewardship of the legendary George Perez. He wasn’t blessed with artistic collaborators who were there from the start to the end, so there’s plenty of people coming in and leaving, and artistic inconsistency is baked in. Beginnings tell us who we want to be but endings tell us who we were, and there’s few endings finer than this one, wherein Greg Rucka bids farewell to Wonder Woman.

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