Category Archives: Wonder Woman

Walt Simonson’s 1980s run on Thor is one of the comic book greats. His six issue Wonder Woman arc, “Game of the Gods,” isn’t in the same league, but it is entertaining. It comes right between Phil Jimenez and Greg Rucka but I didn’t get around to blogging about it until (obviously) now. Creative credit goes to Simonson for plotting, Jerry Ordway for drawing and Adam T. Hughes for the covers.

We open with a gathering of mystics in the late 1800s who discover signs that the Shattered God is returning to Earth. Then Trevor Barnes, whom she dated during the Jimenez run (he decided being a superhero love interest was more than he could handle) begins worrying when he can’t reach her.

Cut to a funeral that culminates in Diana, in the white pantsuit associated with her depowered years at the end of the Silver Age (though her clothes in that era had a lot more variety), emerging from the grave. The funeral party then turns to monsters and tries to kill her, but fails. At the end of the issue she’s alive but amnesiac, and holding a clay figurine of an infant that the monsters coveted — funny, when she smooths over a cut in the clay arm, a cut on her own arm heals. What’s with that? Simonson said in an interview the inspiration was Hammer’s classic Kiss of the Vampire which opens with an ominous funeral.

The second issue went boldly where no scripter had gone before. Putting Wonder Woman in civvies is one thing, but cutting her hair? Even the depowered years never crossed that line. But you see, Diana soon finds she’s being followed; her shadows are human but possessed, and they wither and die once the possessor leaves them. Fortunately she stumbles into the salon of Becca Doherty, hair stylist and diehard WW fangirl (“You kick butt better than Superman!”). She gives Diana a crash course in who she is even if Diana doesn’t remember it. With Becca’s guidance, Diana successfully turns into Wonder Woman, but devoid of tiara or bracelets, still amnesiac (her attempt to make sense of her superhero life is hilarious). Meanwhile, the Amazons discover that Olympus is empty, the gods gone — hmm, do you suppose there’s a connection? And to strange things happening on Oa, which is situated at the center of the universe?

To prevent the pursuing possessor tracking her, Diana has Becca give her a new look, as you can see on the cover, then sets off to find answers. In the following issue, Diana, the Roman goddess, arrives on Themyscira riding Scylla, the mythological multi-headed sea serpent. Amped up by divine power, it petrifies them. During the War of the Gods crossover event the Roman and Greek pantheons merged but Diana opted to stay free rather than fuse with Artemis. Now she’s on Team Shattered God. Diana arrives on Themyscira, regains her memories and battles Scylla; still only half herself, she does well but ultimately has to flee. Meanwhile, the goddesses of Africa endow Trevor with some mysterious power and direct him to find Diana.

Over the next couple of issues we learn what’s at stake. The Shattered God was a primeval deity; when the God created the universe, it shattered said deity. Who didn’t mind much: the new universe was glorious and he was a part of it all. Except then he realized that countless other gods had sprung up, and he didn’t like it. Now his plan is to reverse creation, restore the primal atom, then start over. His will be the voice that says let there be light, his will be the mind that shapes reality — and he’ll get it right! Diana is a key part of his plan because of her unique makeup: clay and flesh, mortal and divine.

The plan works … almost. That clay image retains the essence of Diana’s god-given powers; without it, she can’t fulfill her role in the Shattered God’s plan. Off to Earth to find the figurine but of course there are surprises waiting and cards the Olympians and other gods have yet to play ….

Simonson’s Thor run is a classic. His Orion is far and away the best Fourth World material not written by Jack Kirby. “Game of the Gods” isn’t in the same league. Like I said, though, it is entertaining, particularly in the early amnesiac period — and amnesia’s enough of a cliche that ain’t easy. It’s less effective as we see more of the divine scheming on both sides of the game; as the final issue points out, some things happened that appear to make no sense (and probably don’t). Still, it’s livelier and more entertaining than the subsequent Greg Rucka run has been so far (I’m in the middle of Year Two).

All rights to images remain with current holders.

Kate Gavino’s A CAREER IN BOOKS: A Novel About Friends, Money and the Occasional Duck Bun follows three Asian-American twentysomethings struggling to make it in publishing, and their discovery one of the tenants in their apartment building is a famous author. This suffers from too much New Adulting (that’s not a genre I go for, though that isn’t Gavino’s fault) but also from her art style. This feels less like a graphic novel and more like a collection of standalone one-panel cartoons. The story would make a good movie though.

Chris Gooch’s IN UTERO didn’t quite click with me but it’s better. Tween Hailey winds up in a holiday camp in an abandoned office building where she meets a kid who can walk through walls, discovers a kaiju in the basement — and meanwhile a hazmat team in the building is assuring their scientists that clumping these strange oozing organisms together in one big jar won’t cause any problems …

DC PRIDE: To the Farthest Reaches is the 2025 annual anthology celebrating DC’s LGBTQ characters. It suffers from me not being up on current comics: tie-ins to big events don’t work, I don’t know some of the characters (never met Circuit Breaker before which makes it harder to care he’s dating Pied Piper) and some things completely baffle me (Raven’s acting like a normal twentysomething?). However Phil Jimenez‘ Spaces about his lifelong love for Wonder Woman (surely an island where women ride giant kangaroos would welcome a weird little kid?) and the importance of that kind of fantasy space was incredibly moving.

BURY THE LEDE by Gaby Dunn and Claire Roe has an imprisoned, manipulative killer recruit a rookie reporter as the one person she’ll give interviews to, steering her towards a rising political star with a very dark secret. There was a lot I liked about this, even though the killer’s Hannibal Lector-style games felt unnecessary. However protagonist Madison gets seriously unethical over the course of the story; there are some kinds of journalism stories where that works dramatically, but this wasn’t one of them.

IONHEART by Lukas Kummer is the story of a knight in a parallel world where our technology, drifting across the dimensional borders, is seen as dangerous magic. This didn’t click with me even slightly so like A Career In Books I put it down unfinished.

Art by Gooch and Roe, all rights to images remain with current holders.

Cartography and the way maps shape our perception of the territory fascinate me and I’ve read several good books about them (here’s one. Here’s another). I thought Seymour J. Schwartz’s THE MISMAPPING OF AMERICA would be another with its look at how early American maps often got it wrong: California as an island, non-existent islands in the Great Lakes, a Northwest Passage and other fantasies that would make it easy to sail to the Pacific and thence to the Far East. Unfortunately the book is a dull catalog of “This person made a map, then this other person, then this third person ….” and I found it unsatisfying.

I read HISTORICAL STUDIES IN THE LANGUAGE OF CHEMISTRY by MP Crosland to see if it would help me understand some of Doctor Jekyll’s chemical terms when he explains his theories in the Stevenson novel.

It doesn’t, but it is fascinating to read how the chemical notations and abbreviations I learned in high school took so long to become definitive. Crosland starts with the alchemists and their enthusiasm for symbolic and cryptic writing that hid their knowledge from the uninitiated. Making matters worse, neither they nor the first chemists had the knowledge or skills to identify compounds and they had multiple false assumptions, such as color geographic location being significant (i.e., gold from Bavaria might be significantly different from gold from the New World). Trends in language also changed: mundane descriptors such as oil of vitriol, butter of arsenic or milk of magnesia lost out to technical terms, which eventually became standardized so everyone knew what they were talking about. Specialized but interesting. And someday I would love to work “butter of arsenic” or “vital air” (a one-time name for oxygen) into a story.

LAURA by Vera Caspary is the source novel of the 1944 movie, wherein a surprisingly educated detective is called in to investigate the murder of the free-spirited, strong-willed title character — could it be her rather wimpy fiancee? Waldo, the well-known newspaper columnist who feels she friendzoned him (I cannot stop seeing him as Clifton Webb in the movie, despite Caspary making it clear he’s built more like Jack Black)? The twist is — well, I won’t reveal it just in case you don’t know.

I prefer the movie. This is more a literary story than a mystery, told from multiple points of view; while the writing is good, “literary” is a tough sell for me. And I really can’t swallow the degree to which the detective hangs out and chats about the case with his suspects.

I’m a fan of Phil Jimenez’ run on Wonder Woman and his story “Spaces” was the highpoint of DC PRIDE: To the Farthest Reaches, an anthology for Pride Month (DC’s done several of these). Jimenez reflects on how the weirdness of pre-Crisis WW convinced him that if he could only get to Paradise Island he’d be welcome there, weird as he was, and how much it meant to him to work on the series. It’s lovely.

The rest of the book didn’t work as well for me, mostly because I’m only occasionally reading current comics. I don’t know most of the couples and some of the characters are complete unknowns (Circuit Breaker, master of the still force) or wildly different (why is Raven so normal and chill?). That’s not a fault of the storytellers but it did make it harder to get into, particularly when some of the stories tie in to ongoing plotlines. Still, it’s good DC has added so many more LGBTQ cast members; I do hope current trends and corporate takeovers won’t change that.

All rights to images remain with current holders. Cover by Jimenez.

Following Eric Luke’s departure from Wonder Woman, we had a string of one or two issue fill ins before Phil Jimenez came aboard as writer/artist (though with J. M. DeMatteis scripting the first few issues and George Perez co-plotting a couple).

It was the first time I’d picked up the series since John Byrne took it over. I didn’t regret it. The initial four-part arc has Bat-foe Maxie Zeus — pre-crisis a loonie who believed he was the mortal avatar of Zeus — summoning the Olympians to possess some of Gotham’s supervillains. This does not work out well for anyone, particularly when Deimos tries to possess the Joker, or when Phobos takes over Batman.

Part of what makes it stand out is the discussion of religion: Artemis and Huntress debating polytheism vs. monotheism, Huntress insisting the Olympians are just superhumans, Batman arguing that his becoming an orphan proves there’s no good. Another part is Jimenez’ art, which is terrific.

The next arc, co-plotted by Perez, has Themyscira explode into violence. Hippolyta, having taken over the role of Wonder Woman after Diana’s death during the Byrne run, has hung on to it — they’re both Wonder Woman now. Only Hippolyta’s a queen and she’s neglecting her duties on Themyscira — which erupts into violence between the Amazons who’ve been their for centuries and the Bana-Mighdall newcomers. Even though there’s a mastermind behind it, they’re working through real issues among the people, as Artemis points out.

Next up we have a one-on-one interview between Lois Lane and Wonder Woman — dialog heavy, but a good issue. In the next we learn Vanessa Kapetelis, a teen regular in the Perez years, has been warped into believing Diana abandoned her for Wonder Girl Cassie Sandsmark. That resentment has enabled billionaire Sebastian Ballesteros to mold her into the latest incarnation of the Silver Swan.

Then, unfortunately, we get Big Events. Wonder Woman and Hippolyta get embroiled in the Worlds At War crossover (Earth is invaded) and the WW annual ties in with The Last Laugh, a Joker-Centric Big Event. The Silver Swan issue was action packed and set a lot of stuff in play; the big events just stop it cold.

Things pick up as Wonder Woman and Trevor, a handsome black man she’s flirting with, go out on a date, wind up in Skartaris and discover it’s been conquered by Villainy, Inc., a modern day take on a Golden Age WW villain team

It’s a lively adventure bringing in DC’s Warlord, reintroducing Giganta — originally just a gorilla evolved into a human — as a woman who can turn into a giant (the same power set she had in TV’s Challenge of the Super-Friends). That’s been her template ever since.

From Skartaris, the heroes return home with the villains, all shrunk to ineffective mouse size. Unfortunately they land not in the present but in WW II, when a time-tossed Hippolyta was fighting crime with the JSA as Wonder Woman (something Byrne came up with). Diana has to help her against the Golden Age foe Queen Clea and Armageddon, a Nazi spy introduced in Gerry Conway’s Bronze Age run. It’s a good story and working with her mother (while hiding her true identity to avoid revealing too much about their future) lets Diana see her in an entirely different light.

In a backup serial, Troia (Donna Troy) runs into a modern version of Robert Kanigher’s WW villain Angle Man. The original was a slick schemer who “always had an angle”; In the 1970s, he was rebooted with a bad costume and an all-purpose weapon, the Angler.

Jimenez’ Angle Man is Angelo Bond, a charming, handsome Italian in Armani suits who’d really like to spend some time with Donna but hey, he’s got a crime to commit and the Angler’s ability to bend space lets him pull it off. Ballesteros has stolen the Cheetah power from Barbara Minerva; Angelo obtains McGuffins that let Minerva steal the power of the Furies from the Golden Age superhero Fury. The Furies are into revenge and Minerva wants some; who cares if a few civilians get killed in the process? Three guesses who.

Finally the Jimenez run ends (there’s a graphic novel, Historia, that I’ll get to eventually), with “Wonder Boys” a story in which Diana drops in on Trevor — who gave up on dating her after all the craziness — and meets his family. God help us, it’s the closest she’s come to having a relationship since she married Steve Trevor in the pre-Crisis, pre-Perez reboot era.

I really loved this run. Next up, Walt Simonson, one of my favorite writer-artists, gets a short run. I’ll blog about it soon.

The two Villainy Inc. covers are by Harry G. Peters and Phil Jimenez, all others are by Adam Hughes. All rights remain with current holders.