Best-selling author Leigh Bardugo speaks with Hypable about the lessons (and lassos!) of Wonder Woman: Warbringer, her new DC Icons novel.

Set in the modern day, Wonder Woman: Warbringer presents a teenaged Princess Diana hungry to distinguish herself on Themyscira. But when a mortal girl, Alia Keralis, is shipwrecked on the island, Diana finds that forging her own path requires sacrifices she never anticipated.

Alia is a Warbringer — cursed by her bloodline to plunge humanity into an age of cataclysmic violence. Determined to save the world from catastrophe, Alia and Diana set out on a journey that will take them through the modern world, and back to the birthplace of myth itself.

But violence can be seductive, and Diana and Alia will discover that the work of breaking a curse makes demands not only of their strengths, but of their souls.

Leigh Bardugo talks ‘Wonder Woman: Warbringer’

What stories inspired you in writing Wonder Woman: Warbringer? How deeply did you research both comics and the mythology of our own world to create the book’s atmosphere?

I had already done a deep dive into Wonder Woman canon for an essay I contributed to Last Night a Superhero Saved My Life, so my research for Warbringer was really focused on Ancient Greek religious practices and the cult surrounding Helen of Troy. I got a lot of help from K.A. Rask, a professor of archaeology at Duquesne University, who put up with some very long, very weird emails from me.

Warbringer is particularly joyful in the way it engages with modern reality. What was it like to combine cell phones and pop culture with the Diana’s magical mythos?

The joy of introducing Diana to Doritos and supermodels was pretty profound. And I actually really love writing fantasy set in our world. I’ve done it in short stories like “Head, Scales, Tongue, Tail” and I’m doing it again in Ninth House, which takes place at Yale.

I just like the sense of possibility that comes from building fantasy into the familiar, the feeling that something magical could be happening behind any door.

Tell me about crafting this very specific, still-growing version of Diana. Were there any challenges or unexpected developments in discovering her as a young woman?

I think the greatest challenge was finding her vulnerability. This is the moment in Diana’s life when she hasn’t yet proven herself, when she’s discovering her strength, and forming her own ideas about what it means to be a hero. But the big surprise was how much fun she is to write. I tend to lean toward characters on the darker side of the morally gray scale, and writing a hero with such a good heart was like a tonic.

It’s no small task to create a character who can share the screen with Wonder Woman, but Diana’s co-protagonist Alia does that wonderfully. What was it like to create her character, with her own combination of magic and realistic challenges?

Thank you! In some ways, Alia was more familiar territory because I didn’t have to worry about what came before. I could just let her be Alia — super smart, funny when she’s comfortable, quiet when she’s not, far stronger than she knows.

The rest came together as I wrote that first draft and got to know her and her brother Jason. Alia and Diana are meant to challenge and change each other, and its their friendship that drives the story, so Alia had to have a compelling journey of her own.

The concept of the Warbringer is fantastical, but also feels eerily possible. How did this concept develop for you?

Are you a Hamilton fan? There’s a line that comes up again and again in it: Who lives, who dies, who tells your story? I wanted to take apart the story of Helen of Troy — of a woman blamed for so much bloodshed and given so little agency — with that in mind. There’s a version of Helen’s origins that cites her as the daughter of Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution.

So what if Helen wasn’t just a beautiful girl, but a girl born with destruction in her blood? What if she passed that power on to her descendants? That’s where the idea of Warbringers began.

(Nemesis was also known as “the inescapable.” Tell me she doesn’t belong in a Wonder Woman story.)

It’s clear right away that Alia’s power makes good and evil very blurry, and that becomes only more complicated as the story progresses. How did you approach the subject of villains and antagonists in this book?

Like I said, Diana is at an age where she’s deciding who she is and what it means to be a hero. She’s defining right and wrong for herself as an individual, not just as an Amazon. So the choice to help Alia had to be a difficult one and have real consequences. And when it comes to villains, I really just try to think of them as characters who happen to operate according to a different moral code.

Inquiring minds want to know! Are there any plans for a sequel to Warbringer?

Not right now, but I’ll admit these characters were really hard to leave behind.

Wonder Woman: Warbringer by Leigh Bardugo is available now from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and your local independent bookstore.