August 19, 2026 · 5:15 am

Bad arguments for using AI, part the 1,000th

So recently one Sephera Goron sent out a pro-AI rant in her capacity as a Horror Writers of America board member. Which she no longer is, because the HWA board did not share her view that a)AI is inevitable, submit or die (it was phrased somewhat differently; b)as Amazon and spellcheck and Sched (the app for scheduling at cons) all use LLMs, anyone who objects to using it to write is a hypocrite! and c)everyone who’s anti-AI is engaging in a witch-hunt to make the lives of AI users a living hell! Chuck Wendig dissects this bullshit in detail if you’re interested.

As Wending and John Scalzi point out, using LLMs to write is not simply a tech advance like going from pen and paper to typewriter, or typewriter to a laptop. Scalzi: “Prompting, like playing with the Guitar Hero controller, doesn’t teach you how to do anything else. Prompting doesn’t give one the eventual skill to sit at a keyboard and write a short story or a novel. It doesn’t give one the ability to play a musical instrument. It doesn’t let you pick up a pen and create a drawing. The skill required for all of those — not to mention the life experience to create meaning with them — lives somewhere else.”

To put it another way, if I had to go back to using a typewriter that would be a massive pain in the butt. Particularly in editing — it’s vastly easier on the computer. However I could still write; even with pen and paper I could write, though I’d go bananas doing it (too damn slow). The creative process is the same. If you use LLMs and then have to do without them, it’s different. Not that I think LLMs are going to disappear, even if the bubble pops, but even so.

Plus, of course, there are umpty-zillion other reason to question the use of AI, such as the massive waste of energy, the negative effects of data centers on areas where they’re built (the Toddler says they’re awesome — and he’s always wrong), the cannibalizing of other people’s art and wrtiing, destroying books to feed them into the AI system, the deepfakes, using them to try and rig a court case, the increasing trainwreck of other legal uses … it’s true that laptops and other computers cause environmental problems but AI just makes everything worse. And even people in the AI field think it could be much worse than that. To say nothing of the problems caused by Congressional staffers using AI to write proposed legislation.

Nevertheless, Writing With AI does have defenders and not just Goron. For example, after a friend of mine posted about the HWA flap on FB, he got two AI Is Awesome commenters. One tried explaining the glories of AI Writing as a binary: you can be a penniless writer, starving and desperate, too stressed out to create, or you can use AI, make a good living and be happy.

Dude, what? This is absolute nonsense: not using AI does not mean you’re impoverished, nor that you’re dead. Even when I was working at shit day jobs and miserable, I was able to write. There are times I’ve been too stressed to write but you know what? I stopped writing until my shit was resolved.

Nor does AI miraculously guarantee anyone a good career, unless they’re simply flooding the zone with LLM-written books.

Then there’s well-established Hugh Howey parroting the standard There Is No Alternative argument:

The third was an author who asserted that she’s written lots of books using AI and all of them sell. Therefore, readers don’t care! This is no different than when we switched from typewriters to computers! Except, as noted above, it is different. And apparently her readers do care: when I asked if she acknowledged they were AI written … silence. I’m skeptical she’s making the six-figure income she claims (can’t be checked; she writes under a pseudonym) but even if she is, I think the issues remain.

In other LLM news, even Amazon’s employees laugh at their AI slop and one company offering 100 percent human-written medical research appears to be entirely AI.

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August 18, 2026 · 12:51 pm

Where the elite meet to grovel

In 2020 and 2021, Tina Peters was an election-denying Colorado election official. She broke the law by plotting to tamper with election machines. She was convicted, jailed, then recently pardoned by Colorado governor Jared Polis. He’s a Democrat but he apparently wanted to make the Toddler happy.

The Toddler is not happy: his administration recently yanked hundreds in millions in grants for Colorado to retaliate over Peters’ conviction. Which is the way it always works with the current president: he’s a double-crossing rat and even f you give him exactly what he wants — well, once he’s got what he wanted, he’ll want more.

That makes capitulating to the Toddler a sucker bet, particularly when he’s not invincible: Harvard beat back a recent lawsuit over alleged antisemitism, which makes the universities that collaborate that much more contemptible. They could have fought; they could have won. So could many others who’ve rolled over and provided the Toddler with whatever he was demanding: anti-trans measures, an end to DEI policies, etc. Consistently they took what they imagined would be the easy route. Buy him off. Humor him. Tell him whatever will make him happy. Vote for horrible cabinet officials such as Pete Hegseth, Todd Blanche and RFK Jr. Contrary to Elon Musk’s misogynist bullshit, big strong men don’t have some special ability to go against the consensus.

For some of them, it probably feels easy because their commitment to the principles at stake — equality, diversity, free speech, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights — is paper thin. Even so, as No More Mr. Nice Blog says, lots of these people have the money and resources to stand up to the Toddler.

Case in point, Jeanine Pirro is a US attorney who chose to file bullshit lawsuits against people who did not vandalize the Toddler’s precious reflecting pool. Sure, the Toddler telling himself that it was sabotage, not that he handed out a sweetheart contract to someone with no experience make him feel better (admitting he screwed up would hurt his snowflake fee-fees). Pirro had to know the case was bullshit; if she had any principles she sold them out, shitting on an innocent man to pacify the Toddler. As NMMNB says, she’s worth $11 million, she’s 75 years old. She can retire and live comfortably. Most of our senators are billionaires; they could retire too instead of catering to a senile lunatic’s whims. Jeff Bezos is a bazillionaire yet he’s following up the money-losing Melania documentary with a documentary streaming series.

NMMNB’s explanation: “Te world is run by people who aren’t merely ambitious — they can’t seem to turn off their ambition. They succeed at a level 99% of us will never attain and they still can’t stop. And because you have to please people more powerful than yourself even when you’re near the top, and because most of those people are colossal assholes, that means the people near the top still need to abase themselves, out of their compulsive desire to remain near the top.

Which leads to what I call the Fuck-You Money Paradox. Ordinary people, when they imagine being rich, think wealth would give them the clout to say “Fuck you” to anyone who wanted them to do something they didn’t want to do. But, paradoxically, the people who are ambitious enough to attain elite status manage to do it because they’re addicted to pursuing and attaining elite status — and because they’re addicted, they’ll never do anything to put that status at risk. So people at or near the top are precisely the ones who’ll never say “Fuck you” to anyone who might put even a tiny amount of their money or status at risk. In other words, the people who obtain “Fuck you” money or status would never use it as “Fuck you” money or status.”

It’s the same point I made last year: the mindset required to make $10 million is a mindset that never thinks $10 million is enough (more here). If you have to lie, cheat or steal or kowtow to someone in power to get that $10 million, or $10 billion for that matter — well, maybe you’re skating on the thin edge of ethics but you’ve got to have it, dammit! Our senators don’t want to lose the attention and status they get by hanging onto their position in congress; men wealthy enough to attract or pay for all the women they wanted still visited Jeffrey Epstein’s island. Or consider the White House press corps: no matter how much the Toddler belittles and insults women reporters, they say nothing. Piss the Toddler off, you might lose access and there goes your status in the profession.

As C.S. Lewis puts it, “you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world.” For some people, no amount of fuck-you money will compensate for that.

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August 18, 2026 · 5:15 am

Tuesday pulp covers

First one by the great Virgil Finlay

Two by Howard Brown

And one by Hans Waldemar Wessolowski, AKA “Wesso”

All rights to images remain with current holers.

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August 17, 2026 · 5:15 am

Mundus vult decipit: the world loves to be deceived

Mundus vult decipit was the motto of Manuel of Poictesme in James Branch Cabell’s Figures of Earth. It reflects that Cabell’s heroes are frequently liars and con artists, and Cabell’s general cynicism about everything. But it’s also got an element of truth to it.

In its ugliest form, we have people embracing patriarchy and racism. As I’ve written before, patriarchy makes people stupid. It’s a lie that tells men they’re entitled to have a woman provide them with sex and clean up after them. The same appealing (to some people) lie ripples through society in other ways. Shitbag misogynists such as preacher John Piper insist women’s submission is justified because her man will protect her; even if she can protect herself, he should do it. And if the moment he need to protect her never comes? Well, he was willing to do it, so her life of submission and housekeeping, day in and day out, is completely justified. And if the husband, instead of protecting her, is abusive, Piper is very concerned … that she not defy her husband by calling the cops unless the church gives her permission.

Then there’s Joel Webbon, hatemongering misogynist racist preacher who claimed once that MLK and the major anti-slavery abolitionists are burning in hell. He offers no evidence for this — there is none — but for people who want to believe in white supremacy, that might be comforting. More generally we have the idea there is a divinely ordained hierarchy and God has assigned us our place in it . Regardless of whether you earn a place on merit, “He made them high and lowly” tells you you still deserve it. That’s very comforting to people with privilege or unearned advantages: questioning them is questioning God!

Then there’s the ongoing anti-vax movement. I’ve seen occasional interviews where the parent of an autistic kid says they support the Toddler and RKF Jr. because the medical establishment refused to accept the kid’s mental state was caused by vaccines. Well, that’s because it wasn’t. There’s no link, no connection. But the parent wants to believe there’s a simple explanation and so they swallow the first one offered. And as I noted a week ago, so has the Toddler.

Or consider the endless claims that forcing women into tradwife homes isn’t sexist: It’s what women secretly crave. Which is the tip of a whole iceberg of lies: “We’re supposed to buy that the woman who makes chewing gum from scratch while her husband cosplays as James Dean wasn’t trying to capitalize on the tradwife trend? That Miller throwing hot water on his wife was just “horseplay”? That a desperate mother who called ER after ER and saw doctor after doctor was planning on killing her children? Really?

For decades, American mothers have been expected to eat lies with a smile—swallowing any anger and disappointment, and surviving on platitudes about our job being the most important in the world. (So important that we don’t need pesky paid parental leave, affordable child care, or the equitable division of domestic labor.) Still, for a minute there, it seemed like conservatives might just get the cultural shift they wanted: between the backlash to “girlboss feminism,” the rise of MAHA moms, and the Covid-era exodus of women from the workforce—the tradwife movement was being carefully positioned as something American moms might just want.”

Then you have Katie Souza, ex-con and former meth distributor, who’s reinvented herself as a preacher exposing the covert alien conspiracy to harvest women’s eggs and make alien hybrids. Plus “she said that she had to break a family curse connected to Adolf Hitler’s attempt to harness the power of a Satanic altar.” As Fred Clark says at the link there’s not an atom of evidence for any of this but plenty of people are apparently willing to believe her — after all, it’s such a cool story. The same, I think is true of fake Satanist Mike Warnke. It’s not just that much of his life story was obvious bullshit (the Freedom Riders were a Kennedy administration thing so he couldn’t have been one when at college in the late 1960s) but if, as he claimed, he’d participated in Satanic human sacrifices, he’s an accessory to murder. I’m pretty sure if his conservative Christian audiences believed him they’d have called the cops — but they told themselves they did.

Which shows why this stuff isn’t merely laughable: during the 1980s Satanic panic, prosecutors cited Warnke’s stories as proof that Satanic cults could indeed be sacrificing children. They weren’t. A number of people went to jail based on the lie, though. The Qanon nonsense follows the same path. Only it’s not just about the cool story, it’s about the fantasy that if Democrats are pedophiles, Republicans are heroes for fighting them.

There are multiple reasons people fall for nonsense. There are multiple reasons people spread them: fame, political advantage, money (and in the current political environment add one more: to keep President Crybaby happy). Underpinning much of this is one fundamental defense against reality: “We just have different facts” or the like. We do not, however, have different facts. While there are many cases where we might debate over the facts or how to interpret them, the examples I’m listing here are not among them. There is no vast network of Satanic ritual abuse, there are no aliens creating hybrids, vaccines work, and nothing justifies a hierarchy that ranks members of one race or gender or ethnicity above others.

In the words of George Orwell, “”The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.” And for some people, not even that will work.

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August 16, 2026 · 5:03 am

A master mage and evil monuments: books read

NO COMMON GROUND: Confederate Monuments and the Fight for Racial Justice by Karen L. Cox looks at how following the end of Reconstruction, Southern women began pushing and fund-raising for statues that would memorialize the Lost Cause and show black Southerners whose version of the war, and of racial relations, dominated. Putting a statue on the courthouse lawn, for instance, said which race dictated justice.

Cox does a good job showing the history of these monuments, the black protests against them, the ham-fisted attempts at compromise (We have a statute of MLK next to a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, isn’t that good enough?) and the renewed enthusiasm for toppling or removing them since Black Lives Matter became a thing (the NC State “Silent Sam” statue above got taken down). Unfortunately there’s very little new information to me so while it’s not a bad book, it’s not one I could get into (The Confederate Battle Flag worked better).

P. Djeli Clark’s RING SHOUT is an ethnogothic reminiscent of the Bitter Root graphic novels in that the three female leads are battling a literally demonic KKK in the 1920s — there’s the human but monstrous Klan and the “Ku Kluxes,” demons in human form, both drawing inspiration from the racism ramped up by the infamously racist classic film Birth of a Nation. Now the Klan is plotting to screen the film at the Stone Mountain monument as part of a ceremony to unleash something worse — can our heroes stop them when the narrator, Maryse, is haunted by trauma from past racism? This one was very good.

As my Genre Book Club’s theme for this month was “coming of age” I revisted Diana Wynn Jones’ first novel of the enchanter Chrestomanci, CHARMED LIFE. Our protagonist, Cat Chant, is an orphan with a sister, Gwendolen, who’s a powerful enchanter in a vaguely Edwardian English setting (with magic common). When Chrestomanci takes the Chants into his home to tutor Gwen — and Cat, though he has no magic — it’s a big deal. Except Gwen soon gets fed up Chrestomanci doesn’t appreciate her awesomeness and transports herself to another world in their multiverse, leaving Jane, her counterpart from our world, in her place.

Cat is terrified to tell Chrestomanci about this because Gwen’s bound to come back, right? And she’ll be punished sooo hard … But can they hide the truth about a girl who can’t work magic and thinks the continent of New Atlantis is named North America?

This was the first story by Jones I read and it blew me away. Having reread all her books about 15 years back, I’m not quite so blown away: she got better as she went along and parts of this are too much like the earlier The Ogre Downstairs. Still it’s a fun novel and the top-lofty, intimidating Chrestomanci (“He walked out of the room, a very long procession of one person.”) would return many times (he has a lot in common with Howl of Howl’s Moving Castle though Howl, as Jones once said, is more of a drama queen).

All rights to images remain with current holders.

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August 15, 2026 · 5:15 am

The men of New York: movies

Michael Cera is a Big Apple journalist in PERSON TO PERSON (2017) though it’s the kind of quirky indie where his plotline — working with a cute colleague on a story in hopes he can get her into bed — is only one strand of the story, alongside a record collector hunting a rare Charlie Parker disc and a teenage girl trying to figure out her sexuality (“I’m a lesbian … mostly … I think.”). This is nominally tied together by taking place on a single day in New York but more connection between the plot threads would really have helped. Or maybe having one upbeat protagonist instead of everyone being glum or nervous. The end result is competent but listless. “It’s not a good-looking penis because a good-looking penis does not exist.”


BOYS NIGHT OUT (1962) has married Howard Duff and Tony Randall nag divorced buddy James Garner into a plan to rent a swinging bachelor pad (it’s interesting to see how Hollywood imagined a swanky apartment back then) and then install a mistress they can each visit one night a week. By sheer luck, Kim Novak stumbles into this set-up and decides to let them think she’s a sex worker as it will provide invaluable research for her thesis on “Adolescent Sex Fantasies of the Suburban Male” (“This isn’t what they want, it’s what they’ve been told they’re supposed to want.”). Garner is horrified by all this, yet at the same time, Novak’s character is so cute … can he save her from this life of sin?

This worked better when I didn’t know all the twists and Novak’s too stiff to be funny; nevertheless, I enjoyed rewatching this one. It’s fluff, but it’s entertaining fluff. The cast includes Jessie Royce Landis as Garner’s disapproving mom, Oscar Homolka as Novak’s thesis adviser, William Bendix as a barkeep and Fred Allen as a gumshoe. “When it comes to sex, men can’t keep from lying. Women can’t keep from telling the truth.”


I’ve never liked Marvel’s decision to retcon out the Peter/MJ marriage in the One More Day/Brand New Day story arcs and had similar feelings about the MCU’s Peter Parker (Tom Holland) having to erase his relationship to MJ (Zendaya) in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Nevertheless SPIDER-MAN: Brand New Day (2026) makes excellent entertainment.

It’s been five years since the previous movie and the same amount of time has elapsed in the MCU. Spidey has become a Big Apple legend, taking down Scorpion, Tombstone and the Hand and forming alliances with the Punisher (Frank Bernthal) and Inspector Jean DeWolff (Liza Colon Zayas). As Peter Parker he’s alone, unable to rebuild his life after losing MJ and Aunt May. DeWolff warns him he needs to get a life instead of fighting crime 24/7 but what else does he have to do? Then a mysterious body-jumping adversary begins using random people to coordinate an attack on Damage Control, here something equivalent to DC Comics’ DEO. How does he stop someone who can be anyone, or distract him by making their victims jump off a ledge? And what about his own powers, which are spiraling out of control as he stresses out (I half-wondered if he’d briefly become the eight-limbed figure seen on Gil Kane’s cover here, but no)? Can Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) give Peter the advice he needs on controlling a dangerous alter ego?

The movie isn’t perfect. There’s one twist that’s not even slightly shocking and the mind-controller gets too big a pass on some of her actions. Peter has an apartment, food and a state of the art computer system but we never learn where he gets the money. Overall, though, an impressive job that does as good a job as possible not burdening new viewers with too much continuity. “Mind-control? Yeah, governments do that a lot — particularly the French.”

Once again TYG and I caught the annual CAT VIDEO FEST (2026) at the local Carolina Theatre and enjoyed shots of cats climbing and failing, wriggling through holes, stubbornly making things more complicated or a quartet of stray kittens getting caught by a rescuer. As usual nothing that we couldn’t find on the Internet and a few too many animated shorts this time around. Still, the second most fun film of the week.

All rights to images remain with current holders. The one Spider-Man panel is by John Romita.

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August 14, 2026 · 4:29 pm

You mean if I take time off, I get less done?

TYG is on vacation this week. She’s completely relaxed, which means I’m much more relaxed. Not that I’m normally stressed out but it’s always surprising how much of a difference it makes.

This weekend she’s taking part of the vacation at a local hotel, as she’s done the past couple of years. As I stay close to home to watch the pets I wouldn’t get to the new Spider-Man movie this weekend and our schedule didn’t permit it last weekend. So TYG suggested I go mid-week, and I did. So most of Wednesday was not productive (though it was fun — review tomorrow). Yesterday we had the housekeepers in it, which sucks up time (you try creating when you’re sitting and trying to calm cats about the strangers in the house), plus I had a couple of errands to run.

However … I did get some good work done. More on Savage Adventures. And finally, some fiction. I sat down Monday evening, started work on Let No Man Put Asunder and did more Tuesday. I’d been frozen at the point where the late-book plot of the previous draft absolutely no longer works as I’ve changed a key detail. Suddenly I was able to get past it. It doesn’t work as well as the last draft yet but it’s fixable. Or I can go back to the old approach, though I probably won’t.

I’m tentatively optimistic I can wrap up this draft by Aug. 31. Though I’ll need at least one more draft before I submit it for beta-reading.

That’s pretty much all I got done but it’s quite a good thing to have gotten done.

Also Con-Tinual has posted my panels on that old TV classic, The Night Stalker and on getting your fictional settings right to Facebook.

Cover by Steve Ditko, all rights to image remain with current holder.

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August 14, 2026 · 5:15 am

It’s Friday! Have a jellyfish!

I saw this in the nearest Durham Library branch recently.

It was gone next time I checked, so I don’t think it survived long.

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August 13, 2026 · 5:15 am

Thoughts on a couple of NYT articles

One was Ross Douthat interviewing Scott Galloway. It’s a gift link, though I’m not sure how long it lasts.

Douthat, you may remember, is a conservative Catholic, particularly conservative on sex issues. He believes rapists such as Harvey Weinstein and Roman Polanski are the product not of patriarchy but when the 1960s embraced free love: “If your culture’s code is libertine, don’t be surprised that worse things than libertinism flourish.” As noted at that second link, that doesn’t explain why very un-free love, un-libertine groups such as the Southern Baptist Conference are also rife with rape. His final column as he departs the Times for CBS news bemoans that as a moral conservative, living under “peak woke” is like the McCarthyite 1950s, with bonus civic and educational collapse happening all around him.

Scott Galloway? He’s the current male whisperer offering dubious critiques and dubious solutions to the problems of men falling behind women.

Sure enough, Galloway repeats the claims from his book that schools are biased against boys: “Think about the way we approach what we ask of students in school. Sit still, be a pleaser, raise your hand. You just described the activities that come more easily to a girl. Even push a pencil around, ask questions. Our prefrontal cortex is 18 months behind a girl’s.”

This is a standard complaint from We’re Failing Men types, that school is inherently female. Guys just can’t stomach the calls to Sit Still And Do As You’re Told. But hasn’t that been the way of school forever? All the way back to the medieval European days when student bodies were entirely male? Schools were if anything stricter in the past, when it was “reading and writing and ‘rithmetic/Done to the tune of a hickory stick,” So why would it suddenly become an issue now? For that matter, if following orders was unmanly, the military would be predominantly female.

(As this Bluesky thread says, why are people assuming boys simply can’t do better? Or as someone else put it online, shouldn’t we tell them to step up, look to the girls for inspiration and work to match them rather than conveying that falling behind girls is not their fault and we’re going to fix it).

Galloway is also worrying that liberals aren’t concerned enough about men’s plight — sure, much of the problem is that when you’ve been on top, equality feels like oppression. Though to his credit, he’s also emphatic that “one of the greatest victories in America and society, generally, is that women are thriving” and that he has no sympathy with the right-wing impulse ” to take women and nonwhites back to the ’50s.” However the idea that we’re simply ignoring male struggles is baloney. It’s just that for all the supposed tragedy of their lives, they still aren’t the ones worried about being raped when they’re alone at night.

Not a bad dude, in short, but I’m not sure he has great answers. For example, there’s this comment: “It’s a tragedy to me that women don’t feel safe on the New York City subway. Women shouldn’t cross the street when they see a group of young men. They should cross the street to be around young men.” Well yes, they shouldn’t have to worry — but how do we make that happen in our rape culture? Giving men a purpose in life, making them feel they can contribute — none of these prevent them being rapists.

I do, however, like this observation: “I think the whole point of America is to give unremarkable kids a shot at being remarkable or doing something important. I feel like I had that infrastructure, and I worry that in today’s world, a lot of that infrastructure has been crammed into the kids who had already demonstrated they’re remarkable at the age of 18.” However as Rabbi Danya Rutenberg points out, the left is the one with ideas how to help: free childcare, free college, free medical care. Those would help all of us, including the unremarkable.

Next from the New York Times Magazine, an article on the Heritage Foundation tearing itself apart. Unfortunately the gift link already expired (you can look it up under the title, “What the Crackup of the Heritage Foundation Says About the Post-Trump Right”). The gist of it is that the old guard conservatives in the Foundation have found themselves swept aside as Heritage struggles to suck up to the Toddler of the United States — suddenly tariffs are good policy! A bigger problem is the influx of even further right voices to the point the history of WW II is up for debate: “a lot of “rehashing and going through who was the bad guy and who were the good guys,” Richard Stern, who was then director of Heritage’s budget center and is now at Pence’s organization, told me. A sizable number of newer staff members were fans of Pat Buchanan, who wrote a book about how Churchill, not Hitler, was the instigator of World War II. A number of them, several former staff members told me, seemed to share this view.” One of the new people argued that the Holocaust was a lie, and that Jews controlled textbook publishing in the United States to hide the truth.

And Scott Yenor is far from the only misogynist there. No surprise: for conservative authoritarians, dominating women is always high on the agenda. As Heritage became increasingly staffed with far-right Catholics, “single women without children were deemed failures with ‘no skin in the game,'”

Overall it’s a good portrayal of how creepy the Heritage Foundation is. Which makes it surprising the article still deploys euphemisms in several places. The Claremont Institute is a right-wing creepy mess where several of its people supported the Jan. 6 coup. In the article it’s “a right-wing think tank that wants to restore America’s founding principles.” The Toddler’s OMB director, Russell Voight, is “a proponent of the maximalist view of executive power.” I think that’s “wants a right-wing dictatorship” Overall though, it’s a reminder that the Times, much as I criticize it for sanewashing the president’s gibberish, can still do great work when it wants.

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August 12, 2026 · 5:15 am

Wonder Woman: Two year ones and one of them’s amazing

Following the Phil Jimenez run on Wonder Woman, Walt Simonson took over for a brief arc which I somehow never got around to reviewing (soon, though). This post is about the first year under Greg Rucka, who took over writing next, and also about the first year of Absolute Wonder Woman.

Rucka first worked on Diana in a standalone story, The Hiketeia, which I haven’t read yet. Wonder Woman #196 (cover by Adam Hughes)started a run on the book that ended when Infinite Crisis rebooted everything. For the first year the primary plot driver is Veronica Cale, a Texas businesswoman who bitterly resents that Wonder Woman gets so much applause and acclaim — Cale is the real wonder woman, dammit! Employing skilled PR, Dr. Psycho and the Silver Swan, she sets out to destroy Diana.

In addition we have Eros prompt Zeus to lust for Artemis, leading to Hera hurling Themyscira into U.S. coastal waters. America is wary; the Amazons are equally wary to see US warships patrolling around them. Can the two nations avoid coming to blows?

And as the year winds to a close, Circe helps the gorgons resurrect Medusa. Cale then sends her to kill Diana …

I glanced Rucka’s run a couple of times when it was on the stand. It certainly wasn’t bad but it didn’t give me any urge to buy it. Reading it on the DC app, that hasn’t changed. The heart of the story isn’t the superhero battles, it’s the politics. The challenges on WW as an ambassador for Amazons and a speaker for women’s equality. The mundane day-to-day running of the embassy, with a minotaur as her chef. Cale’s PR maneuvers to discredit Diana. The gods are dressed in modern fashions, reflecting their connections to various modern spheres — our quest for knowledge makes Athena strong, our interest in sex boosts Aphrodite (Zeus doesn’t realize his power is fading by comparison). It feels like this is where Rucka’s heart lies (that’s my impression, not something I know for a fact) but it doesn’t work the way Astro City does with a similar approach.

Take Cale. Her resentment for Diana is the same as the Golden Age Cheetah (cover here by H.G. Peters). Her desire to kill Diana feels way over the top; it’s easier to accept such unhinged hatred when it comes from a woman crazy enough to dress up in a cat costume.

I didn’t expect much better from Absolute Wonder Woman by Kelly Thompson and Hayden Sherman (who does the cover here). The Absolute Universe is one where the creators strip characters of their usual accoutrements: who is Batman without Bruce Wayne’s wealth? Who is Wonder Woman without the Amazons? Yeah, right — like “Wonder Woman without the Amazons” isn’t a go-to for a soft reboot ever since the Diana Prince Years. When I checked V1 and V2 out of the library however, it turns out they’re as good as everyone told me they were.

In the first issue we meet Circe, trapped on an island in the Greek underworld. Apollo drops an infant Diana off, informing Circe that the Amazons are gone — and the very word ‘Amazon’ is forbidden.Years later, Gateway City is under siege by demonic forces when Wonder Woman appears, riding her winged horse Pegasus, as on the cover. Which she explains to Steve Trevor at one point is the real Pegasus, killed and damned to hell by Zeus for some reason. We alternate scenes of Diana’s life in the underworld with her efforts to defend the city from increasingly nasty demonic forces. We also meet her mortal supporting cast: Steve, occultist Etta Candy and reporter Barbara Minerva (so far a “name only” character with no similarity to the original).

In the first arc she saves Gateway City (I’m not sure if that’s a callback to her operating there in John Byrne’s run or the symbolism of the name), then descends to Tartarus for a confrontation with Hades. She wins her freedom at the cost of never returning meaning she’ll never see her mother, Circe, again. Persephone, however, has arranged for Diana to eat a pomegranate seed, which compels her to return for one month of every year. This is a running theme, even if we don’t know where it’s leading: the male Olympians are vicious, the goddesses are backing Diana covertly.

In the second arc we meet the Absolute Veronica Cale, here a hot-shot national security official who sends a version of Dr. Poison against Wonder Woman. This leads to the reveal of a magical maze in which Diana might be able to find other Amazons. Entering she battles against monsters and the Golden Age foe Queen Clea. The current arc involves Cale sending Zatanna against Diana — bad news as Diana is a sorceress like her mom and Zatanna has managed to tap her magic and use it against her (I’m now reading on the app but I haven’t gotten any further yet).

For my money, this is the best WW since the New 52 reboot, possibly the best in this century. Part of the reason is, of course, that it’s a solidly entertaining story. It’s hard to go wrong when Wonder Woman shows up riding a skeletal undead Pegasus. Part of it is also that they get Diana in a way many authors don’t.

A recurring tendency since the New 52 has been to treat Diana as an Amazon warrior first and foremost; there’s a scene in one JLA story where monsters attack and her response is “Yay, something to fight and kill!” In the “Tower of Babel” arc in JLA, the trap for Diana is a mental fantasy in which she’s battling as a warrior, endlessly, something she doesn’t want to break free of.

Not here. There’s a flashback where Artemis wants to test Diana in combat. The young Amazon refuses, having seen too much senseless violence in the underworld. A disgruntled Artemis considers hunting a passing turtle for sport and suddenly Diana’s in her grill: No. You do not hurt it!

In another scene she visits Prometheus for help and convinces the eagle gnawing on his liver to stop.

When she has to send Steve home from the underworld she needs a sacrifice big enough to work such a potent marriage. She sacrifices her right arm, replacing it with a prosthetic of magic.

This is who she is. This is who Wonder Woman should be. I look forward to reviewing Year Two in about eight months.

All rights to images remain with current holders.

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