Marvel Comics has released the fifth and final issue of Wonder Man Vol. 4, closing Gerry Duggan's short run on Simon Williams just as the character's next life on screen is already moving ahead. The new issue puts an end point on a story that began earlier this year and was meant to work as both a comic-book comeback and a wink to the business that built Wonder Man in the first place.
That is why readers are searching for Wonder Man now. The comic run is over, but the character is not disappearing. Wonder Man on Disney+ arrived in January and has already earned a Season 2 renewal, with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II at the center after receiving the first acting Emmy nomination in five years for the MCU. The overlap gives this release a strange kind of urgency: one version of Simon Williams is finished on the page while another is being carried toward the screen.
Duggan's five-issue arc was pitched as a love letter to the history of Simon Williams and to Hollywood itself, and the final issue keeps that promise by mixing superhero chaos with show-business satire. Simon is still dealing with the fallout of being framed for murder. He has also stumbled into a whirlwind romance with Hellcat, while The Spot continues to menace L.A. The preview for issue #5 pushes the story forward with Simon dropping his terrible representation and flying up beside Matthew Walters on a plane after learning, through the Avengers, where Walters is headed.
Walters is not a harmless side character. He is Simon's client, a bad investor who bought into NFTs and a line of JPG monkeys before his schemes slid into embezzlement and murder. In Walters' version of events, Rudolph Chancellor leaped out of a Cessna to his death, and that detail hangs over the final issue as the kind of ugly, absurd confession that fits Wonder Man's mix of comedy and crime. The story keeps turning the joke back into a problem, and the problem back into a punch line.
That friction is what makes the ending matter. Marvel has not just wrapped a five-issue comic; it has closed a compact chapter in Simon Williams' history at the same moment the character is being handed to Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest for whatever comes next. The page version is done. The screen version is still coming into focus. For now, Wonder Man belongs to the ending Marvel just published, and to the longer future it has already set in motion.
