Yeah, it's a weird one. For someone said who didn't really much of anything WW, he had a surprisingly good voice for her throughout but while I was able to roll with the nuclear holocaust part, the skull flail thing just sunk the story like a rock for me.I've got such mixed feelings on Dead Earth. There are things I like about it and I think the artwork is great, and I'm willing to forgive a lot of it because I understand that it's meant to be dark and gritty and over-the-top violent, but some of it is just...ugh.
For one thing I loved DWJ's take on the clay origin. Getting the gods passed out drunk and stealing their blood feels very mythic. And I actually really like the idea that Diana is so powerful because Hippolyta was so deeply traumatized by her experience with the gods that she went overboard making sure no one could ever hurt her. It's a darker take on the story that doesn't betray the thematic foundations of the character or strip Hippolyta of her agency.
I also think calling it an "Amazons evil" story is reductive. It was far from a perfect take and they did kinda make Themyscira out to be sort of sad and desolate, but they were clearly very kind and loving to Diana. They also made a point to show that Diana was pushing for diplomacy until the very end, with the Amazons only attacking when it was clear that nothing else was working and their home was in danger, and in the end the US military came off a lot worse than they did. I did hate that he used Philippus and Nubia interchangeably though - other writers have done it as well (Grant Morrison in Earth One) and it's racist and ill-informed.
And Diana's voice was lovely. You really felt her warmth and love, I liked how she dealt with Cheetah, and I really liked her line about how immortality shapes her perspective on redemption because she thinks of things in lifetimes rather than years. Her brief decision to turn on humanity honestly seemed justified to me - she'd just found out the monsters she'd been killing were her people who'd been horrifically mutated after humans nuked them into oblivion.
Unfortunately the positive elements of her characterization are largely undermined by her, you know, ripping Superman's spine out of his corpse and use it as a whip.
And I like that DWJ really made her a powerhouse, but surely he could've done it without making Superman the good-hearted voice of reason to the end and her the one who snapped and lost control of her powers. She very much had a right to be angry, but I can't even tell you how sick I am of the "extremely powerful woman causes mass destruction because she's too emotional and has to be brought to heel by an equally powerful, emotionally stable man" trope.