Every good book deserves a spin-off (I think that’s how that goes). Tom King’s Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Outlaw is a (very) good book, and so we have Josie Campbell’s Amazons Attack.

The book, collecting the whole six-issue miniseries, seems like one last bow for the extended “Wonder Woman universe” that sprung up in DC’s Infinite Frontier era, extending just a smidgen into Dawn of DC. Amazons Attack is really tertiary to King’s book, and arguably that line of stories could have ended where it coincided with Wonder Woman #800/Lazarus Planet: Revenge of the Gods instead of extending to here, just for the orderly minded among us. At the same time, the gumption of trying to redeem the besmirched “Amazons Attack” title is delicious. And if the book ends up mostly standard superheroics, I continue to enjoy these characters, and Campbell gets a few particularly good moments in.

[Review contains spoilers]

Campbell is a late addition to the Infinite Frontier-era Wonder Woman family of books — the Wonder Woman title, the serial Nubia miniseries, Yara Flor’s Wonder Girl miniseries, and various specials; largely these were by Becky Cloonan and Michael Conrad, Stephanie Williams and Vita Ayala, and Joelle Jones, through to the Trial of the Amazons event. Campbell joined up following her Mary Marvel miniseries, New Champion of Shazam, with Mary subsumed into the Wonder family as of the aforementioned Revenge of the Gods.

I enjoyed New Champion, and insofar as Amazons Attack makes references outside the characters' immediate plight, it’s mostly elements of New Champion that continue here. That’s Campbell’s purview, of course, but most interesting to me among all of this were the Nubia stories, that some newly formed Amazons had past “Man’s World” lives that they might yet encounter in their Amazonian forms; there’s an oblique reference in that direction but it’s hardly anything.

Attack, then, turns out to be one of those non-team team books, with Nubia, queen of the Themyscira; Faruka, queen of the Bana-Mighdall; Wonder Girls Yara Flor and Cassie Sandsmark; and Mary Marvel thrown together by circumstance and paring off to solve a mystery. Prickly Faruka has for a while made every scene she’s in better and so it’s fun to see her play off Nubia, as well as Campbell’s inspired choice to make Faruka have to negotiate Mary’s excitable magic rabbit Hoppy. By gender and ethnicity, the cast of Attacks is different from most every other book DC has on the stands; at first I thought Attacks went on a little longer — I was checking to see when the second volume came out, only to realize it was one-and-done — and I’d have been interested to see what this group got up to separate from the threat that brings them together.

Tom King’s Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Outlaw is visceral in its portrayal of everyday Amazons living in the U.S. whose lives fall out from under them at the whims of their government. That’s King’s writing, for sure, but also Daniel Sampere’s art, which is stark and realistic (when not, perhaps, exaggerating the anatomical). Artist Vasco Georgiev’s work on Amazons Attack is perfectly serviceable (and is probably great on Sinister Sons), though I wondered how someone like Sampere would have affected the tone of the book. At the beginning, when Nubia goes to meet the president but then has to battle her way through a building, I thought the animated bent of the art took some seriousness from the proceedings. Too, enough of the story is given over to fight scenes that it felt as though the book had less story to tell than it had pages.

At the same time, I’d be remiss not to point out a banger of a sequence in Amazons Attack’s fifth chapter proper. Nubia and Faruka are facing off against Amanda Waller’s Peacemaker; first we’ve got the assault on the ancient Amazons by Herkacles chillingly paralleled with Peacemaker’s taunts; then Hoppy, to comedic effect, begins teleporting the group among random locations. But over a couple of pages, the teleporting gets faster, the pages more chaotic, until suddenly — “Bang!” — a child has shot Nubia with Peacemaker’s gun, and Nubia and Faruka teleport one more time to the desert, where Nubia punctuates it all with a cry of anguish. The whole thing is fantastically choreographed by Campbell, from the rising tension to the shocking example of how far anti-Amazon prejudice has spread to the emotional denouement. When it comes to giant rampaging skeletons, Amazons Attack is sometimes too fantastical, but this sequence demonstrates the seriousness the book is capable of.

This story is meant to take place between the second and fifth issues of King’s Wonder Woman, which is to say, involving two of the three “Wonder Girls” but being sure to end ahead of their appearance in Wonder Woman proper. It doesn’t line up any more than spin-offs or tie-ins ever quite line up with their more prominent counterparts — none of the Wonder Girls appear in King’s book talking about how they just fought a rogue acolyte of Hestia amidst a Greek nightmare-scape. Campbell hedges loose ends to tie up later by having Nubia gain immunity for Mary Marvel, Yara, and Cassie — so as not, for instance, to have to explain Mary’s fugitive or non-fugitive status in Campbell’s Shazam run — but neither does that totally seem to match the characters' status in King’s book.

Josie Campbell doesn’t manage to get bees anywhere into Amazons Attack, which is really the callback to the earlier Amazons Attack! event we were all hoping for. But in “Amazons attack” ultimately being a positive rallying cry for the characters within the book, in this being a book advocating for hope and putting Nubia and the Amazons on the right side of history, perhaps Campbell manages to redeem that infamous title just a little.

[Includes original and variant covers]