Category Archives: Wonder Woman

August 31, 2017 · 5:10 am

The excruciatingly slow rebirth of Wonder Woman(#SFWApro)

As my three previous posts this week have been woman-centered, I figured I’d throw in one more. And conveniently, I just finished the first two TPBs of Wonder Woman Rebirth The Lies and Year One — by Greg Rucka and artists Liam Sharp (The Lies) and Nicola Scott (Year One). Cover by Sharp, all rights remain with current holder.

Rebirth is DC’s latest reboot, meant to restore everything they screwed up when they rebooted their post-Crisis universe into the New 52. It’s been a mixed bag include books that don’t reboot at all and those that soft-reboot the character back to some earlier incarnation. In WW’s case, Rebirth means retconning away the New 52 origin and apparently most of her New 52 adventures.

In The Lies Wonder Woman finds herself torn between the post-Crisis origin from the 1980s and the New 52 daughter-of-Zeus version. Trying to figure this out requires saving Steve and her old foe the Cheetah from a demon-god with plans for them both. At the end, it becomes obvious the New 52 origin is just an illusion, but who imposed it on her? And why? In Year One we get the Perez origin retold with minor changes: Wonder Woman had lovers on Themyscira (this is actually a big change in the character, but it hardly affects the story any) she didn’t get super powers until after arriving in the US, Etta Candy is a black military officer (good, but I’d still pick the fun-loving sorority girl from Earth One as the best Candy reboot).

The good stuff. Rucka really does write a good Wonder Woman and I really enjoyed Year One. There’s a sequence where Diana uses her bracelets to protect a mother and child during a terrorist incident and its really powerful. And this is the first time in years the post-crisis version of the Cheetah has been interesting.

And I’m delighted to get rid of the New 52’s origin and the Olympian adventures. As I’ve said before, they’d have made a great story for a new character, not so much for Diana. It’s also nice to see Steve Trevor (Rucka writes him well) and Diana as a couple.

The not-so-good. This is the fifth version of Diana’s origin in the past few years, following Bombshells, Legends of Wonder Woman, Earth One and Wonder Woman: The True Amazon. Not to mention the movie. It’s a good story, yes, but it’s not that good. And unlike some of those other retellings, Rucka’s not throwing much that hasn’t been seen before. And while I realize there aren’t many other “iconic” WW tales to retell, there’s always the possibility of, you know, telling new ones.

And the villain in The Lies turns out to be Veronica Cale, a villain in a business suit who’s never interested me much.

The bad stuff. Like I said, I’m happy to get rid of the New 52 origin (though using it in the movie probably means it’ll stick around in the public mind) but at this point we’re ten issues into Rucka’s run and we’re still working on the reboot. The end of The Lies where Diana realizes the New 52 Paradise Island is just an illusion packs a punch — but we’d seen her make the same discovery about Olympus a few issues earlier. I’d have preferred to see this resolved in three issues tops. Likewise the origin could be done in one. True, Perez took a half-dozen issues, but his version was a major overhaul of the 1940s original. Rucka’s just retelling Perez.

I’m very glad I read library copies instead of buying them myself.

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August 6, 2017 · 5:10 am

Wolfhounds, syphilis, Wonder Woman and more: books (#SFWApro)

WOLFHOUND CENTURY by Peter Higgins (cover design by Lauren Panepinto, all rights to current holder) is an excellent fantasy (which I learned about through some posts by Michal Wojcik) in a very different setting, an alt.Russian city of the twentieth century, but with magic. The protagonist, Lom, is a provincial cop transplanted to one of the big cities (the blog posts suggest Leningrad as the prototype) to crack a conspiracy that may have infiltrated the secret police itself. It turns out Lom is caught in a struggle between a fallen angel and the soul of the Russian forests for the future of the nation. I really liked this one.

POX: Genius, Madness and the Mysteries of Syphilis, by Deborah Hayden disappointed me. After spending a few chapters on the probably history of syphilis (there are large gaps in what we know — even the belief it came from the New World is still debated) focuses on various famous figures (Beethoven, Schubert, Van Gogh, Hitler) who had syphilis or may have had syphilis and reviewing their symptoms for evidence. I didn’t find anything terribly insightful in the results, nor even convincing in the speculative cases, though that may reflect I didn’t care that much.

WONDER WOMAN: The True Amazon by Jill Thompson is yet another retelling of Diana’s origins (in the past few years we’ve had Wonder Woman: Earth One, The Legend of Wonder Woman and now another version in DC: Rebirth. This one amounts to giving Diana a Peter Parker backstory: as the only child on Themiscyra, she grows up spoiled and selfish, leading to a tragedy in which her selfishness gets one of the other Amazons killed. And so she sets out into the world to redeem herself … I honestly never felt WW needed a redemption arc and this doesn’t change my opinion at all.

SIXTH GUN: Hell and High Water by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt is the penultimate volume as Becky and Sinclair engage in a last-ditch attack on the Grey Witch before she can use the Six Guns to remake the world. They lose, but it turns out the guns only open a gateway to the place where the remaking actually happens. Things were so grim I felt disappointed we didn’t get a finish, but I’m hoping for a spectacular wrap-up.

STITCHES by David Small is a good graphic-novel memoir in which the author recounts his uneasy life with his dysfunctional (what else?) family, the discovery of a strange growth on his neck, and his slow realization it might be something serious. Well done.

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August 3, 2017 · 5:45 am

Wonder Woman in Love (or Out of It) (#SFWApro)

Writing about Wonder Woman’s romance with Mike Bailey this week had me thinking about her romantic life post-Silver Age. Or more precisely, her lack of one.

After Steve Trevor’s death, Diana had a couple of romances in her non-super period, but in the time honored TV/comics adventure tradition of meeting a beautiful/handsome person in one adventure, forgeting about them the next. Then we had a brief hint of romance with Diana’s UN boss, Morgan Tracy, then the return of Steve from the dead. But then we jumped to the retcon WW II adventures, where Steve was largely a coworker, not a boyfriend. After the series returned to the present, we had Steve die again, and I don’t think Diana had a love interest until he returned (I’ll get to that story eventually).

When George Perez rebooted Wonder Woman, Steve was emphatically not a romantic possibility, but Perez didn’t offer an alternative. She didn’t get a guy IIRC until she had a brief flirtation with Nemesis (which didn’t end well), then in the New 52 she and Superman were an item briefly.

That’s unusual for a super-hero. Green Lantern lost Carol Ferris in the mid-sixties (she married someone else) but he found other girlfriends (he’s bounced back and forth between Carol and whoever the current GL writer picks as an alternative ever since). Cap’s great love since the Silver Age has been Sharon Carter, but when she’s been dead or disappeared, he’s had other women (attorney Bernie Rosenthal, not-so-bad villain Diamondback). When Iris West died, Barry found a new girlfriend eventually.

I’m guessing writers feel awkward working with such a prominent female character/feminist symbol. Should they show her having sex? What sort of man is appropriate? I know some fans love Steve Trevor precisely because he’s willing to date a woman who’s his superior in every way; other people favor Superman as someone who’s even more super than Wonder Woman.

Is it a good thing that WW’s not defined by her boyfriends or her romances? Certainly it’s preferable to the romance comics phase of her Silver Age adventures (from which the Ross Andru cover comes — all rights remain with current holder, of course). Or does avoiding the subject limit her as a character and a hero? Does it say something about how comics write female super-heroes? Now that I think about it, there are a lot fewer female heroes who date ordinary people than male heroes do. What does that signify — that it’s harder to imagine a guy in the conventional support role of the hero’s lover?

I have no firm conclusions, but I thought the topic was worth a post.

[UPDATE: Reading a later letter column I learned that during the space shuttle period they were thinking of hooking Diana up with Green Lantern but for various reasons it never came to pass. Which shows the risks of assuming comics are purely shaped by their creative teams and not by outside forces]

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July 25, 2017 · 4:59 am

Wonder Woman, space cadet (#SFWApro)

One of the things that make Wonder Woman’s Bronze Age run so messy is that not only did she suffer multiple soft reboots, but they came so damn fast.

Following the end of her powerless period, we got the start of the UN run with the non-white characters we never saw again. After just three issues, we got a year of Kanigher’s recycled stories, then the Twelve Trials, then WW II. Then new writer Jack Harris took two or three issues to wrap up Wonder Woman’s situation, killing off Steve Trevor again and having Diana quit her UN job. Instead, we got a whole new life for Diana Prince — as an astronaut in training to fly the space shuttle!

And that lasted all of seven issues, #250-6 (cover by Jose Delbo, all rights to current holder). I suspect this may be due to staff musical chairs. Ross Andru takes over from Larry Hama as editor and what looked like a long-running plotline suddenly wraps up. Paul Levitz replaces Harris and WW immediately starts dreaming of going back to the Big Apple.

The new setting, like the use of the shuttle in Moonraker reflects that the shuttle was insanely cool back when it was announced. Imagine, a rocket that can go back and forth into space, just like in movies, instead of launching a one-time-only missile with a capsule on it! Diana is on a training crew along with Stacy Macklin (The Female Friend), Mike Bailey (The Somewhat Macho Love Interest) and their gruff CO (The Gruff CO). And that’s about all there was to it, or to them, though that may reflect that Harris had little time to develop them. Mike puts moves on Diana, who despite just losing Steve, soon melts (after Stacy complains that Diana turned Mike down too fast). He’s written as much more forward than Steve so presumably Harris thought that would make a better romance for Di. But it felt awfully canned, in the tradition that the lead and the attractive member of the opposite sex must automatically get together.

In the opening arc, the grumpy male Olympians demand that Diana prove herself by competing again to prove she’s worthy of the Wonder Woman role. Diana wins, but gets denied on a technicality; another Amazon takes her place, Orana. Despite which, Diana flies back to Man’s World, not to be a superhero but to live her own private life.

It looked like this was going to be a running plot, like the Amazon Artemis replacing WW many years later, but we got that editorial change and zap, it was done (though that may have been the plan all along—I don’t actually know): Orana keeps screwing up, Diana intervenes to help out, Orana nonetheless dies and Diana reclaims the Wonder Woman mantle (Ares, declaring she’s acting purely from vanity, subsequently tries to punish her, working through her old foe Angle Man). There’s another two parter involving a long-lost sister of Hippolyta, then Paul Levitz takes over with #255. Diana visits the UN for a space conference, comes up against an assassin called Bushmaster, runs into Morgan Tracy again (she’s still PO’d at him for not looking out for Steve better) and triggers some sort of red flag which has the UN contacting NASA about her security clearance. She also spends a lot of time enjoying being back in New York.

The following issue, Diana runs into the second-banana crime team the Royal Flush Gang and discovers Mike is the current Ten of Spades. Frustrated, she quits the astronaut program (in a later story she wonders why a woman who’s traveled to the stars even thought space-shuttle pilot would be a fun gig) and in the very next issue is back at the UN. The security issues appear to have been dropped (we’ll see). It all had the feel of Levitz deciding “Well this reboot sucks, let’s go back to the UN!” (again, don’t know that for a fact).

On the plus side, Levitz is a better writer than Harris. I’ll be back to review his run as soon as we get to the next reboot. Sigh.

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July 5, 2017 · 5:00 am

Strong female characters (again) (#SFWApro)

In a June post on Deviant Dolls (hat tip to Magical Words), Steve Wetherell vents that he’s “bored of strong female characters.” As he sees it, “the Strong Female Character is a damned yawn fest and I’m sick of it” — just as much a stereotype as the Love Interest or the Mother. People talk about turning the cliche on its head by making the tough hero a woman, but that’s been done so often it’s now a cliche itself. There have been so many strong warrior women, they’re boring.

And a cliché that doesn’t make sense: if Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy is so badass, why isn’t she the team leader? If Hermione is so much smarter and better at magic than Harry, why isn’t she the hero? More to the point, because these characters are so awesome, invincible and flawless, they’re boring, just like men would be. What we need, Wetherell concludes, are more female protagonists like John McClane or Peter Quill, someone who sweats, gets beaten down, shows fear. Less awesome, more human. He ends wondering if Wonder Woman will prove the exception (cover by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, all rights to current holder).

First off, it’s certainly fair to argue Hermione could have been the hero. The Chosen One turning out to be the white male is an old complaint, and a valid one — as one critic put it, why is Neo better suited to be The One in The Matrix rather than Trinity or Morpheus? Hermione certainly qualifies to be the hero, but I’d disagree completely with Wetherell that she’s boring. As Sarah Gailey points out on Tor, Hermione has her own story. She’s not just competent, she’s an overachieving nerd obsessed with studying to the point of being comical — what school stories in my youth called “a swot.” While she fights alongside Harry she’s not just his support person/sidekick. And she’s hardly written as a flawless character: that she wants to liberate the house elves is presented as comical foolishness on her part (I don’t think it is, but that’s how it comes across).

And while I don’t doubt Wetherell would like more human male protagonists too, the fact is he’s written about female characters. This kind of argument always seems to be about female characters, and how they shouldn’t be too damn awesome.

I think having a variety of female characters is great. Tech nerds like Caitlin and Felicity on the CW shows. Cat Grant, Lena and Kara on Supergirl, none of whom I think are stereotypes. Bo on Lost Girl and Xena on Xena, both of whom have dark pasts that overshadow their present.The casts of Lumberjanes and Princeless. But I can’t see that Female Badass is such an overwhelmingly overused type it needs to be retired (and I doubt I will ever see as many calls for retiring Male Badass). And I don’t have a problem with Gamora being the straight man (so to speak) on the team.

If a Strong Female Character is boring, the problem’s the writing or acting, not that she’s strong. Wai Lin in Tomorrow Never Dies is every bit as kick-ass, and not particularly vulnerable or flawed. Played by Michelle Yeoh, she’s awesome.

I agree it would be a shame if every female character were a tough, no-nonsense action hero. But I see no reason not to have them in the mix.

Wonder Woman: Origin Redux (#SFWApro)

The new Wonder Woman movie (reviewed yesterday, of course) is an origin story. So unsurprisingly, that got me thinking about Wonder Woman’s origin in the comics. And that as Greg Burgas points out at Atomic Junk Shop, it’s been retold a lot lately.

The story of Wonder Woman being sculpted from clay by Hippolyta, then brought to life by Aphrodite, is certainly inspired for a female superhero — all the work of women, no men involved. It has, however, been tossed out more than once. Robert Kanigher suggested Diana had a long-lost father. The recent New 52 reboot reveals her father was Zeus. Wonder Woman: Earth One reveals Hippolyta made her by fertilizing herself with some of Hercules’ DNA.

Almost all retellings, however, stick to the same turning point: Steve Trevor washes up on Paradise Island/Themyscira and Diana returns to “man’s world” with him (George Perez’ 1980s reboot is the only one I can think of that dropped that). Even though Greg Rucka said he doesn’t want Wonder Woman: Rebirth to have her leave the island from love for Steve, I believe he still has Steve as the catalyst (my apologies to Rucka if I’m wrong).

Frankly I’d think Steve was more dispensable than the life-from-clay aspect. But apparently me and Perez are in a minority on that. Even the older Wonder Woman: Amazonia employs Steve, though in a very noncanonical role (it also works very well)

Now, as to the other matter, the origin retellings — like Burgas says, there have been a shit-ton of them of since the New 52 rebooted her:

•Rucka’s revamp getting away from the New 52 and back to classic WW.

•Grant Morrison’s Earth One.

•Wonder Woman: The True Amazon (2016) by Jill Thompson, which does dispense with Steve Trevor (and according to reviews does break fresh ground).

•The Legend of Wonder Woman miniseries.

•DC’s Bombshells series.

So why so many? Even as a Wonder Woman fan I’d hardly consider the story of her coming to America to be legendary material; it’s what she does afterwards that stands out. Is it the same logic by which we keep getting Spider-Man’s origin and Superman’s origin retold in the movies (which mercifully won’t be the case in Spider-Man: Homecoming)? Or what?

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June 6, 2017 · 5:21 am

Wonder woman: the movie (#SFWApro)

Although I had some reservations, I overall loved WONDER WOMAN (2017). (All rights to image remain with current holder). I don’t believe there’s anything spoilery here.

The story has Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) stumbling onto Themyscira during WW I, hotly pursued by Germans. He’s discovered that the German chemist known as Dr. Poison (a real Golden Age villain, though Japanese back then) is working on a devastatingly deadly poison gas and wants to warn the Allies. Defying her mother, Princess Diana heads back to the war, carrying a magic sword, the “god killer.” She believes this nightmarish war can only be happening because Ares is stirring up hate in the human heart, and wielding the god killer she intends to stop him.

The good stuff:

•Gal Godot does a great job as Diana (who’s never actually called Wonder Woman). And while she’s certainly beautiful, the film doesn’t make a great deal out of Look, Incredibly Hot Chick, Gaze On Her (though this review disagrees).

•The movie is actually upbeat and not grimdark, despite lots of death and bloodshed. Wonder Woman herself seems to delight in what she’s doing and all the people she’s able to help.

•Diana doesn’t exert herself. In the early scenes, like when she’s punching handholds in a stone wall, she’s clearly pushing her strength. But as she goes on and gains confidence in what she’s capable of, she starts doing things effortlessly. Smashing through stone walls. Lifting a tank. As Slacktivist said of Luke Cage, superheroes doing these things shouldn’t look like ordinary people trying to move a heavy weight.

•A solid supporting cast including Lucy Davis as Etta Candy, David Thewlis as a kindly peacemaker and Robin Wright as Diana’s combat mentor, Antiope.

•Like Captain America, this gets over the hump of having a WW II hero by setting one movie in the past, the next in the present (I presume setting this film in the Great War was so that it didn’t get compared to Captain America: The First Avenger)

But the movie is more than the sum of its parts — it’s not just a compilation of good bits, it works as a whole.

However, there were some flaws, mostly on the feminist aspects. Instead of Aphrodite as the patron of the Amazons, now it’s a male god, Zeus. Even given this ties in to a big reveal late in the story, it felt gratuitous. And beyond that, the Amazons are specifically identified as Zeus’s creation to break the warmaking power of Ares. Nothing about challenging the patriarchal status quo, protecting women, freeing them from bondage, all of which were essential to Wonder Woman’s original conception.

Some of my friends pointed out, too, that there’s little interaction between women once the story moves off Paradise Island, and even on the island, a lot of the conversation revolves around men (Ares specifically, then Steve).

But while flawed, I’d rank it as a flawed success.

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May 31, 2017 · 5:02 am

Wonder Woman, post-William Marston (#SFWApro)

In her book The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Jill Lepore is clear that everything done on Wonder Woman after his creator William Moulton Marston left is sexist crap (she also looks down her nose at female superheroes in general). And with the film coming up this weekend I’ve seen other articles making the same argument. I disagree with them.

It’s true that nobody has ever written the Amazing Amazon as overtly feminist as Marston did. She championed the freedom of women; her enemies (Mars, Doctor Psycho) were dedicated to putting women in chains (often literally). Women could and should be independent. Any woman from “man’s world” with Amazon training could be as awesome as the Amazons. Of course along with that we got heavy use of bondage, BDSM themes, and difference feminism (Marston strongly believed that women were better suited to run things than men), as noted in my Screen Rant article (link also goes to my review of Lepore’s book). But still, the feminism is very strongly there.

Where Marston believed deeply in feminism, Robert Kanigher, his heir on the title, did not (Lepore notes that when a sniper takes out Diana’s sidekick I Ching in #204, his first victim is based on DC Comics’ female editor Dorothy Woolfolk). And apparently he hated the book. Lepore’s take, which I’ve heard elsewhere, is that the series dissolved into a mushy muddle of dating, romance and WW pining for Steve Trevor.

And that may be true for most of the 1950s — it’s the period of Diana’s life I have least knowledge of. However, I have read Kanigher’s run from 1958 on (when he began working on the book with artists Ross Andru and Mike Esposito) and I don’t think it’s true at all. As I’ve mentioned in the past, while there’s no overt feminism,Wonder Woman is the world’s mightiest super-hero and Kanigher writes her that way (crossovers weren’t common at DC in this period so she didn’t share the spotlight with anyone). If alien fleets are going to invade, she’s the one they have to stop. If monsters run wild, she’s the only one who can save us. And so on. As her teenage Wonder Girl self, she’s so dedicated to training for her future heroic career, she often has to pass up chances to date. That’s light years away from Silver Age comics’ usual portrayal of teen girls (Donna Troy in Teen Titans was way more flirtatious).

That said, the Silver Age has its share of sexist stories where Diana acts (as they used to say) “just like a woman.” In #102, for example, an alien confronts Steve with Wonder Woman and two identical robot duplicates, forcing him to choose the real one. He finally succeeds by kissing each of them — but Wonder Woman only grumbles that Steve kissed the two ‘bots before he kissed her, the Lothario! These were only a minority of stories, but that changed in Kanigher’s ’65-68 run when he did import a lot of romance comics tropes to the book. This is the period WW really starts mooning over Steve and things get more sexist.

Then came the four year period (sans Kanigher) where Diana lost her powers. One of the articles I read pointed out, accurately, that this places a lot of emphasis on Diana’s taste in clothes, another element important from romance comics (fashion and style were a big thing there). But while accurate, it also distorts this period: Diana is a top-flight martial artist and globetrotting adventurer fighting against the conspiracy of Dr. Cyber. Plus cleaning up her new neighborhood in New York, visiting the Amazons and having other adventures. I think depowering her was a bad idea, but she wasn’t just a fashion plate.

Whatever those eras’ faults, they’re not as bad as you may hear.

Wonder Woman, screen rants and secret histories (#SFWApro)

So my new Screen Rant column is out: 22 Most WTF Moments in Wonder Woman comics. Such as the bondage-heavy story above from Wonder Woman #4 (art by H.G. Peters).

This isn’t meant to slam Wonder Woman — as regular readers know, I’m a fan of hers, even if the execution of some of her adventures is sub-part. As I note in the article, when you’ve been published for almost a continuous 80 years, it’s inevitable some stories will be WTF. More so when they’re overwhelmingly written by men. Not that a female writer is a guarantee of good WW stories (I wasn’t a fan of Jodi Picoult’s brief run), but I’d like to think they’d do better than some of the more sexist stuff in the later Kanigher run.

(Peters art again. This is a bad guy using Washington’s image to preach misogyny)

It wouldn’t have been as good a column (and I do think it’s good) without THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN by Jill Lepore, a book about how WW creator William Marston’s personal life and views (polyamory, submission and dominance, feminism) influenced his creation. While I was aware of much of this, Lepore shows I didn’t know as much as I thought. For example one angle of Marston’s menage a trois was Olive Byrne, niece of birth-control activist Margaret Sanger. And the birth-control movement frequently invoked women-in-chains symbolism to represent the burden of unwanted pregnancy (my wouldn’t that outrage the religious right today?). Marston’s WW stories likewise showed Wonder Woman bound, then breaking free — although as Lepore notes, sometimes the bondage is just kink. It’s an excellent book, though I’m not willing to write off the post-Marston Wonder Woman as much as Lepore does.

Check out the article and enjoy. Art below by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. All rights to all images remain with current holder.

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April 26, 2017 · 5:17 am

Wonder Woman: The Brief Resurrection of Steve (Trevor) Howard (#SFWApro)

So following the end of Wonder Woman’s WW II phase (intended to synchronize with the Lynda Carter TV series) Wonder Woman resumed Diana’s present-day adventures at the point they’d broken off. Diana Prince is a UN diplomat. Steve Trevor has returned from the dead using the alias “Steve Howard” and gone to work for the counterspy agency SOS (Spy On Spy). Both of them are struggling to get back the closeness they used to have.

I assume Marty Parsko, who set up this situation when he was writing the book, would have continued exploring it. By the time the WW II stories ended, Jack C. Harris was the writer, and he wanted to go in a different direction. Which is presumably why this phase only lasted a half-dozen issues, plus a couple of stories in Adventure Comics (as a result of the TV show’s success, Wonder Woman had a second strip for the first time in years).

They were not memorable issues. Even by the standards of my late teens, when I had almost no standards, I knew Inversion was a god-awful villain (cover by Rich Buckler, all rights to current holder). An accident with his experimental teleporter has rearranged his body to make him the “inside out man!” Completely mad, his goal wasn’t to cure himself but to turn all the world into inside-out people.

I can’t help wondering if Inverson wasn’t just meant to fill space, while the Steve Howard subplot advanced. While Wonder Woman battles inversion, Steve Howard is kidnapped by military intelligence, which has grown suspicious about ties between Howard and that other Steve. In the following issue, the operation’s boss man gets conclusive evidence Steve Howard is indeed Steve Trevor — perfect for his plan! Which is to drain Steve’s magically restored life force to resurrect the Dark Commander, an ancient, quasi-demonic being who once awakened will summon his demon forces to attack humanity! Which will be awesome because it will give America’s fighting forces what they need—war, endless war. Yep, it’s another madman villain (I think Harris was riffing off our military having no wars to fight in the late 1970s, but if so, it didn’t work).

Wonder Woman takes down the Dark Commander (he ain’t all that) but Steve’s life force is already gone from his body. Diana goes to Hell to reclaim it, but it turns out Zeus has honored Steve by turning him into a constellation, like some figures from Greek myth. Presumably Harris wanted to establish that Steve’s resurrection was a one-shot deal, so now he was gone forever (spoiler: he wasn’t).

It turns out Diana’s UN superior, Morgan Tracy, knew about the military capturing Steve, but wasn’t about to challenge US military authority. Disgusted that Tracy was too cowardly to look out for his people (Steve wasn’t technically his people, Harris is fudging a lot here), Diana quits the UN. So I suppose fudging Tracy’s authority justifies the upcoming soft reboot.

Before the reboot, we get yet another loonie, the brother we never knew Steve Trevor had. Greg Trevor works for the sinister federal “organization,” but he’s consumed with resentment for metahumans like Diana and the JLA, and for his brother, who actually won the love of Earth’s most awesome woman. Greg launches a series of assassination attempts on Wonder Woman before she captures him and the Organization takes him into custody. He’s the third loonie villain in a row.

All of which took place from WW #244 to 249, plus a couple of Adventure issues, then it was reboot time. Again. I’ll post on that when I finish reading the next phase — Diana Prince, astronaut trainee!

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