Category Archives: Wonder Woman

November 2, 2025 · 5:15 am

New adults, kaiju, reporters and more: graphic novels

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.

Maps, chemistry, a woman and Pride: books read

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.

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September 16, 2025 · 5:16 am

Wonder Woman: the Phil Jimenez years

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.

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January 17, 2025 · 4:15 pm

Thoughts on Facebook, then my work week

As I mentioned yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg has not only given up fact-checking on FB, he’s loosening the rules on content so that insulting women, gays, trans people will be easier. As someone said (I don’t have the link) it’s not just about kowtowing to FOTUS (Felon of the United States) it’s that right-wingers having their speech unrestricted gets them more engaged, which keeps them on FB rather than popping off to X or Gab.

I’m not leaving, at least not yet. There’s lots of people I stay in touch with on Facebook. For “Oh, my wife said a funny thing” or similar trivia, FB works better than an email newsletter or a txt, and I contact more people. The format works better for me than Bluesky though I’m there too. As with X, the whole threads thing feels very awkward if I have a long post to make. And screw it, Facebook is (practically, though not legally) part of my public space. I’m not letting people push me out if I can help.

As someone said years ago when FB started, we need a social medium like Facebook … just not Facebook. However that’s what we’ve got. So unless Zuckerberg works to make it as toxic as X, I’ll stick. But no clicking on ads of any sort.

Now, my work week. Wait, first here’s a photo of my master bedroom, taken at an odd angle.

This was a good week but not as good as last week. I wound up doing three Local Reporter stories which took up more time than I’d wanted. However one of them’s held over until next week so that means less work (hopefully—it’s a council meeting so it might run long). One of the two that ran this week was about Carrboro’s plans to turn East Weaver into a pedestrian mall. The other covered a discussion of how Carrboro can keep up its support for diversity and equity in the face of national trends against it.

We also had our housekeeping people in Thursday. They do good work (and get tipped accordingly) but having to shift the dogs and Wisp around so they’re out of the way and can’t run out through an open door takes some work. And invariably ends up with me sitting in a room with three pets for half an hour. The cleaners came earlier than usual, which is good, but then again it was disruptive enough I was off my balance the rest of the day.

(Our dogs in the master bedroom when they’re not freaking out about strangers in the house).

Wisely I spent Thursday on mundane matters that didn’t require much creativity or thought. That helped balance things out.

The rest of the week I did some work on Savage Adventures, though various distractions (most notably an overflowing toilet) hindered me from focusing. I watched one movie for Jekyll and Hyde and did some rewriting. However I also did some fiction, returning to both Let No Man Put Asunder and Impossible Takes a Little Longer. I made my word quota for January on each book — it’s rewriting the early chapters which is relatively easy — though I may put more time in, depending how the next two weeks shake out.Impossible was the more interesting and challenging rewrite: I’m trying setting it back in the 1980s. This requires changing a lot of the pop culture references, though it also simplifies some of the alt.history.

Over at Atomic Junk Shop I looked at ABC’s Saturday morning lineup from 1969, a bad Wonder Woman story pitting her against three eeeevil lesbians —

— and Roy Thomas on his efforts to shake up Marvel’s Captain Marvel.

Not a stellar week but satisfactory. Art by Mike Sekowsky, all rights to image remain with current holder.

Passed from hand to hand: Wonder Woman 151-163

I’m curious what was going on behind the scenes during this period. Following his initial Titans War arc, Eric Luke starts a new arc, leaves the book and we get multiple new writers contributing before Phil Jimenez, whose run I absolutely love, takes over as writer/artist in 164.

The new arc starts with Devastation working with Dr. Poison (daughter of the original WW II villain) to create the Pandora virus, something that unleashes the mythic archetypes we carry inside our minds. In #152 Diana thwarts the first manifestation but the virus is still out there.

Then comes a fun Mark Millar story (and I’m not a Millar fan) about Cassie Sandsmark dealing with her role as Wonder Girl, then a much less interesting story by Doselle Young involving the Zoroastrian deities (Ahura Mazda, Ahriman) running loose in Vegas. This arc also gives us Nubia, though this take is not Wonder Woman’s sister.

Then Eric Luke returns but no mention of the Pandora Virus. Instead it’s a plotline in which Devastation schemes to set Wonder Girl to kill Wonder Woman. Doesn’t work but it fits with Devastation’s manipulative nature shown in earlier stories.

Then comes a fun two parter in which Batman’s foe Clayface contrives to suck up some of Diana’s clay body, giving himself Olympian powers. Then comes a two-parter by Benjamin Raab that I can’t even remember.

It reminds me a lot the 1970s and the rapid-fire soft reboots as different writers took over the series. Fortunately Jimenez stuck around for a while — I’m five issues into his run and it holds up as well as I remembered it.

Covers by Adam Hughes. All rights to images remain with current holders.

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August 31, 2024 · 5:15 am

She’ll stop a bullet cold, she’ll make the Axis fold: Wonder Woman and other women on TV

While I’ve seen almost the entire Wonder Woman TV series, I’ve never seen THE NEW ORIGINAL WONDER WOMAN (1975) that kicked it off. Until a couple of weeks back. Damn, but it’s good.

After the Batman TV show ran out of steam, TV and movies spent a decade keeping comic books at arms length. The two Captain America TV movies rewrote the mythos, as did the Hulk TV series (though more successfully). Lynda Carter’s debut is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of her debut in Sensation Comics.

We have Steve Trevor (Lyle Trevor) trying to thwart a Nazi bomber attack, crashing on Paradise Island, Princess Diana winning the right to take him home. Then she thwarts a spy conspiracy involving Stella Stevens and Red Buttons (a theatrical agent who puts her on stage — unlike the original story he’s also a Nazi agent). At the end, she’s working with Steve as Yeoman Diana Prince (Yeoman Etta Candy hasn’t shown up yet).

The film doesn’t deal with the Olympian gods at all, nor does it explain how Diana got her gig in military intelligence. I think those are both forgivable. It also establishes Paradise Island as located in the Bermuda Triangle, something the comics subsequently adopted (they also, of course, switched to a WW II setting for a while)

The film’s biggest strength is Carter herself. Like Christopher Reeves a couple of years later she’s completely sincere as Wonder Woman, taking the role seriously while not forgetting the movie isn’t serious drama (in contrast to say, Jared Leto in Morbius). I imagine I’ll start watching the series now — you’ll get my review of the first season at some point. “I have a lot to learn about men — and devious women.”

For another Latina hero (while I didn’t know it when Wonder Woman was on, Lynda Carter is Latina), QUEEN OF SWORDS (2000-2001) stars Tessie Santiago as Tessa Alvarez, AKA the Queen of Swords — Zorro if Zorro were an extremely sexy woman. In the early 19th century, Tessa, having been sent from her father’s California estate back to Spain for education, returns after her father’s murder. She discovers the local governor, Col. Montoya (Valentine Pelka), is behind it as part of his ambitious plans (Montoya’s about one step from a megalomaniac Wild, Wild West villain). Fortunately, Tessa convinced the family fencing master to train her; now she uses her skills with a blade (not to mention a whip) to thwart Montoya’s schemes as the Queen of Swords, helped by her Roma maid Marta (Paulina Galvez).

It’s familiar Zorro-esque stuff but I don’t see that as a disqualifier. And yes, the eye candy factor doesn’t hurt (Peter Wingfield, Methos on Highlander, provides some eye candy if you prefer men, or so I’m told). “We had a bet, remember — double or nothing.”

The second season of THE VICAR OF DIBLEY (first season review here) is only four episodes, dealing with Reverend Geraldine’s (Dawn French) nitwit BFF Alice (Emma Chambers) finally landing her beloved Hugo (James Fleet), then follows them through the wedding episode. Short, but it’s an extremely funny four seasons. “Sex with poodles — is it always wrong?”

The first season of the 2021 Britcom STARSTRUCK has protagonist Jessie (Rose Matafeo) enjoying a drunken hookup New Year’s Eve with Tom (Nikesh Patel). So far so good, then it turns out Tom’s a movie star and he’d like to see her again — sure, he’s sexy and the sex was good, but can an ordinary woman deal with being part of a star’s life? Stock stuff, but I laughed a lot just the same. “I knew you’d be a problem because you wore ballet slippers and don’t think peanut allergies are real.”

Also from 2021, the first season of GIRLS5EVA has the eponymous 1990s girl group (Sara Bareilles plays the lead singer) reunite to see if they can finally become more than a one-hit wonder. Enjoyable and funny, though neither this nor Starstruck have me watching subsequent seasons as avidly as The Vicar of Dibley. “I want to be hand-fed by Gillian Anderson like a complicated rescue horse.”

#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders.

Wonder Woman battles the Titans (not those Titans)

Following John Byrne’s departure from Wonder Woman, we got three issues written by James Owsley that have completedly vanished from memory. Which may be a good thing — outside of Owsley’s Black Panther run, I can’t remember liking any of his work, including his last Wonder Woman script. Fortunately Eric Luke took over after that.

I don’t recall what I thought of Luke’s work back in 1999. I didn’t pick it up but that may reflect money was tight or that after dropping the book during the Byrne years, I saw no need to start again. My completist tendencies were long dead by 1999.

Reading Luke first year, from 139 to 150, it’s a mixed bag — more interesting than I thought, though flawed. The main arc involves the return of Cronus, father of Zeus, lord of the Titans. He’s decided he wants to resume his standing as god-king of the world and he’s spawned a new crop of Titans to help him do it. Most notable of his allies is Devastation, Wonder Woman’s evil quasi-twin. Taking the same clay that Hippolyta shaped into Diana, Cronus has created Devastation as his own warrior champion, the Amazon’s nemesis.

Not only is Devastation a nasty, cunning piece of work and a vicious fighter, she leaves Diana questioning her actions. If Cronus can create Devastation as an instrument of his evil does Diana have any greater agency? Is she just a puppet for Olympus. This gets resolved at the end when Zeus explains that in George Perez’ reboot origin, Diana has a clay body but a mortal soul, with agency.

The downside is that Luke draws on Byrne’s dreadful Godwave idea. Byrne decided it would be awesome if Jack Kirby, creator of so much comic-book mythology, literally created mythology. The Godwave, the energy from the final clash of Jack Kirby’s Old Gods, echoed out and turned ordinary humans into the deities of Greek and other mythology. Cronus’ plan is to kill pantheons, vacuum up all that Godwave energy, then attack Heaven itself.

Much as I have grown to respect Kirby’s New Gods work, I rate the Olympians much higher than the gods of New Genesis. Kirby creating them (and the Asgardians, the Aztec pantheon, etc.) didn’t work for me (Perez retconned the idea out during his run. Byrne wrote it back in, of course). The assumption that it’s power enough to take down God in heaven doesn’t work for me either.

I have mixed thoughts about bringing in the Hindu pantheon too (with Prince Rama as a possible romance for Wonder Woman). Comic-books invariably treat the Hindu gods as roughly at the same level as the Olympians or the Asgardians, rather than a religion like Christianity or Judaism. Even given that Cronus takes on the Christian deity, Luke still seems to set Kali, Shiva and the rest as more myth than religion (my thoughts at Atomic Junk Shop on the theology of DC and Marvel might be relevant).

Overall, I did enjoy Luke’s first year. I’ll get to his subsequent run soon enough.

#SFWApro. Wonder Woman covers by Adam Hughes, New Gods by Jack Kirby.

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November 28, 2023 · 5:15 am

Rebooting everything that isn’t nailed down: John Byrne’s Wonder Woman, Year Three

One of the things I dislike most about John Byrne is his obsession with continuity. This is a common trait with comics writers: they’re forever trying to straighten out some inconsistency or rewriting around a canonical detail they don’t like. Byrne, however, can be particularly single-minded. His oft-expressed view is that nobody understands a character like the creator, therefore every change by later writers hurts the character and should be thrown out. He throws them out with an almost vicious dedication

(Byrne never had any trouble, however, overriding the original concept to suit himself. Roy Thomas wrote the Vision as a synthetic living being capable of feeling, however much he hid it; Byrne insisted Vizh had no more feelings than a blender and as part of ending Wanda and the Vision’s marriage, made the Vision a machine that could be disassembled. To give one example).

That’s the dominant theme of Byrne’s last year on Wonder Woman, rebooting Donna Troy, the Golden Age Wonder Woman and the Demon. It explains why I thought of his entire run on WW as “continuity porn” as the phrase goes.The 1990s were a big time for killing/disabling superheroes and installing replacements: Death of Superman, Knightfall and others. William Messner-Loebs had already had Diana replaced as Wonder Woman but hadn’t killed her; Byrne killed Diana at the end of his second year, then had her mother Hippolyta step in as the new Wonder Woman. Diana went up to become the Goddess of Truth among the Olympians until she learned the Olympians planned to re-establish dominion over the mortal world. She objected and Zeus was about to smite her hard when Ares sticks up for her as the God of War’s granddaughter, him being Hippolyta’s pop and all.

?????? This comes completely out of the blue (and is hardly anything either William Marston or George Perez would have imagined for an origin) and is probably passed over. I wonder if Byrne was imitating a similar out-of-the-blue claim by Mars during Diana’s depowered years but I have no clue. In any case, Zeus sends Diana back to the mortal world as the Goddess of Truth, a status she lost a couple of writers later. This arc has a lot of pointless retconning to explain why the Olympians have different names under Rome. Because you know, what comics reader hasn’t been haunted by that profound question?Hippolyta as Wonder Woman leads into a plotline in which she travels back to WW II with Jay Garrick to battle the demoness Dark Angel, now allied with Hitler. “Polly” and the JSA win and Hippolyta opts to stay in WW II, thereby giving DC a Golden Age Wonder Woman again (the shapeshifting transparent thingumajig Diana acquired in a previous Byrne arc now becomes the classic invisible jet). This is one of Byrne’s better reboot ideas — I don’t feel it was necessary (Roy Thomas put a lot of work in to plug the gap left by the Golden Age Amazing Amazon being retconned out) but it works.This led into a new retcon revolving around Donna Troy. It turns out some of her recent tragedies — the death of her ex-husband and child — are the work of Dark Angel. Donna, an orphan rescued by Wonder Woman and adopted by the Amazon — an origin was later reworked to deal with the Perez reboot having WW show up after Wonder Girl — is really a doppelganger of Diana created so she’d have another child to play with on Themyscira. Dark Angel, misreading the doppelganger as Hippolyta’s daughter, has been tormenting her ever since, plunging her into one life after another, always making them miserable or tragic. Now, though, Wonder Woman and Hippolyta finally defeat Dark Angel and stabilize Donna’s existence, also restoring some of the powers she’d lost over the course of rebooting.

This feels like a work-around by Byrne to get back to the Silver Age concept of Donna as Wonder Woman’s sister. It doesn’t simplify continuity though — hers is still complicated — and if the goal was to regain her super-powers there were simpler ways to go about it. Still, it ain’t too bad.

The third reboot of this era, though, is just Byrne being Byrne. Back in the 1970s, Jack Kirby introduced Etrigan the Demon, bound by Merlin to fight against the forces of evil, while also giving him a human identity as Jason Blood. It was a mix of fun tales and forgettable, certainly not up to Kirby’s best. In 1987, Matt gave Etrigan a different origin and backstory in a Demon miniseries that led to new open-ended series that ran three times what Kirby’s did. Byrne devoted an astonishing amount of space to retconning out the reboot and getting Etrigan back to the Kirby version. I know Kirby’s a genius but sorry, Wagner’s take was an improvement. The reboot was a complete waste of space.

Overall, Byrne’s Wonder Woman tenure wasn’t as bad as I remembered but it wasn’t particularly good. But now we’re entering new territory for me as for whatever reason I stopped reading for the next few years. I’ll report on it when I’m another year or so in.

#SFWApro. Wonder Woman covers by Byrne, Demon by Kirby, all rights remain with current holders.

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November 22, 2023 · 5:08 am

Wonder Woman meets Hercules and Goes to Hell! John Byrne Year Two

The first year of John Byrne’s three-year run on Wonder Woman was, as I’ve said, better than I expected. The second year is also better than I remembered but I don’t think it’s good — way more bland than Byrne’s reboot of Superman and way, way below his X-Men work with Claremont (much as they got on each other’s nerves, they really brought out the best in each other’s talents).

His first story arc is a four-issue reworking of an old Hawkman story, “The Men Who Moved the World.” The story involves an ancient civilization buried under the Antarctic ice as conditions on Earth have changed; they want to change it back so their city can live again. Hawkman resolved that in one issue. Wonder Woman takes four. While I like the ending resolution relying on common sense and negotiation rather than fisticuffs, it’s not a threat that needed to take that long.

It’s significant because the civilization gives Wonder Woman a shapeshifting, transparent device that can shape itself in response to her mental commands. For example, becoming an invisible jet, just like the pre-Crisis WW had. This seems like a pointless retcon but I think it’s a sign of what Byrne had planned for his third year.

Second, we meet the Champion, AKA Harold Campion, a Gateway City millionaire who gets involved in the fight and proclaims his intent to make Wonder Woman his. She finds herself falling under his spell, an aspect that gets dropped without explanation. It turns out he’s Hercules, taking mortal form to get revenge on the Amazons for his centuries of imprisonment under Paradise Island (something we learned about during George Perez’s War of the Gods arc). However he realizes he was being a dick and apologizes for his intent to seduce and humiliate Hippolyta’s daughter.

Then comes a pointless two-parter bringing back the Cheetah and — typical for Byrne’s passion for retcons — pushing her back towards villainy after William Messner-Loebs made the effort to reform her. However this begins a new plotline which involves Wonder Woman turning back to clay. Trying to figure it out she talks through her life to this point, leading to an uninspired 10th anniversary issue (cover above) which rehashes the post-Crisis stories.

It soon becomes clear that with the Olympians departing from the mortal world, all the Amazons are turning into clay. Investigating eventually leads Donna and the resurrected Artemis into hell for a battle with the demon prince Neron. This gives Byrne another chance at a retcon: Artemis didn’t just win the Wonder Woman title because Hippolyta rigged the contest but because Hippolyta also transferred some of Diana’s power to Artemis. Apparently having Artemis even close to being a match for Diana was too much for Byrne to take.

Unfortunately the power-stealing is still in operation so things don’t go well in Hell, culminating with Wonder Woman getting a lethal blast of eldritch energy. Despite the best efforts of the Justice League and demonologist Jason Blood, it appears the second year will end with the Amazing Amazon dead. Say it ain’t so, Joe — er, John!

I’ll be back hopefully next week with the resolution.

#SFWApro. Covers by Joe Kubert, George Perez and Jose L. Garcia-Lopez, all rights remain with current holders

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September 26, 2023 · 5:15 am

“Song of the Dead? It doesn’t make sense.” Artemis: Requiem

William Messner-Loebs wrapped up his run on Wonder Woman by introducing Artemis, a Bana-Mighdall Amazon (a Mideastern group that splintered off the Themiscyrans) who replaced Diana as Wonder Woman. It turned out that this was an elaborate ruse by Hippolyta, who had visions Wonder Woman would die: if that was so, it wouldn’t be her daughter! The visions came true — Artemis died — but almost a year later, she returned.

ARTEMIS: REQUIEM by Messner-Loebs and Ed Benes opens with Diana having nightmares of Artemis’ soul in Hell rather than in the Elysian Fields. Wonder Woman of course sets off to rescue her frenemy only to discover Artemis is doing reasonably well: she’s become the wife of Dalkrig-Hath, a high-ranking demon prince, also serving as one of his generals. It’s a lux life and she has no desire to leave it … but dammit, Diana came to hell to save her! As in his WW run, Messner-Loebs makes the cliche of the superhero inspiring good in others work. The end result is Artemis returns to life on the mortal world.

Her emergence from a graveyard proves an unwelcome surprise to the Hellenders, a team of demon-fighting superheroes organized by the enigmatic occult expert Nathaniel. Although she helps the Hellenders on their mission, Nathaniel is unimpressed — until she points out that his right-hand woman is a demon (“Tell me more about this screening procedure.”).

Artemis takes the codename Requiem, to Nathaniel’s annoyance (“Song of the dead? It doesn’t make sense.”) and proceeds using her fighting prowess and her intimate knowledge of Hell for the benefit of the cause. In the final issue they take the battle to Dalkrig-Hath — he wants his woman back, if only to punish her for leaving — and get involved in Hell’s internal power struggles before returning home.

As you can see from the first-issue cover, Benes’ art suffered from the 1990s boobs-and-butt visuals. Nevertheless it’s a solid six issue run with Messner-Loebs’ trademark humor, albeit often black humor. In one issue Artemis goes on a tabloid TV show to be interviewed alongside a demon … who turns out to be a metahuman actor who uses his shapeshifting power to provide tabloid hosts with whatever they need (“Tomorrow I’ll be an irresponsibly pregnant Hispanic teenager — it’s really no different from playing Hamlet except the pay’s better.”).In the final issue we learn Dalkrig-Hath’s magic phrase is “Mip mip kazoo.” Artemis explains that at his level of power, anything can be a magic phrase — he just thinks it’s funny to choose a silly one. That’s the kind of magic system I enjoy reading about.