Category Archives: Wonder Woman

GRAYSON: Agent of Spyral was the first in Dick Grayson’s New 52 solo series (I reviewed Volume 2 already) by Tom King, Tim Seeley and various artists as Dick goes to work for the sinister spy network Spyral in order to report back to Batman on what they’re up to. This is enjoyable, with some weird adversaries (like a guy whose optic nerves are hooked up to his guns) but not as much as the later stories. It’s also very disjointed — and Vol. 2 actually goes off on much more of a tangent than I realized reading it (no wonder some readers were confused).

THE FADE OUT: Act One by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (cover by Phillips, all rights to current holder) is a good noirish mystery in which a screenwriter wakes up next to a woman’s corpse, escapes the crime scene, then begins to suspect there’s something much more sinister than murder going on …. A good start.

BATMAN: I am Gotham kicks off Tom King’s run on Batman (with various artists)) as the Dark Knight accepts the help of new super-heroes Gotham and Gotham Girl in cleaning up his city, only to have a government scheme to “fix” Gotham City make everything go wrong. While it’s nice to see Batman not treating other super-heroes as if they operated only by his sufferance, but this feels like a hand-wave to allow them to get close enough for tragedy (like the way he finds the perfect girl in Mad only so her death can angst him out). Likewise his acceptance of Amanda Waller’s secret operation in Gotham doesn’t even seem remotely plausible, given how wrong it gets (nor do I see why he’d need to work with her in the endbit, other than to promote the Suicide Squad). Readable, but …

My problem with the New 52’s Wonder Woman series is that I’d like it much better if it were a completely new character, not a reboot. And as with Vol. 4, War, in WONDER WOMAN: Iron, Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang do a horrible, horrible job writing Orion of the New Gods. A shame since the story involving Wonder Woman and her fellow children of Zeus is actually excellent (with the exception that I hate making the Amazons “mutie haters” who despise Diana for being magically created from clay). Good, but with massive flaws.

WHAT COMES NATURALLY: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America by Peggy Pascoe gets its subtitle from Pascoe’s view that the efforts to determine which marriages crossed the color line required laws identifying whether the cutoff was one-eighth, one-quarter or a single drop of black blood. Pascoe looks at how miscegenation was coined in the 19th century as a more scientific sounding replacement for “amalgamation, and the various court cases, laws and rationales for banning intermarriage (a longstanding and eerily familiar argument being that there was no discrimination as the laws applies to blacks and whites alike). All of which took various forms around the country, expanding to anti-Asian bans on the west coast while Oklahoma exempted white men who married native women (it was one way for native land to pass into white hands). The rise of organized resistance was extremely gradual as the NAACP didn’t want to jeopardize other civil-rights goals (and other black leaders, such as Marcus Garvey, didn’t support intermarriage), and Pascoe does a good job showing that the Loving case was far from an inevitable victory (a recent similar case had freed the couple to marry, but hadn’t struck down the law). Very good.

THE WILDINGS: Book One of the Hundred Names of Darkness by Nilanjana Roy has a colony of stray cats in India cope with a new psychic in the neighborhood, their own internal struggles and a crew of feral cats threatening the neighborhood. This starts fun and ends fun, but bogs down in the middle — though I think part of that is that talking-animal fantasies are not quite my thing. If it’s yours, this is definitely worth reading.

So as I mentioned in my last Wonder Woman post, getting the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman show on the air convinced DC the comic should look just like it. In a two-part story, Diana goes back to Earth-2 in WW II and hands over her comics to that world’s Wonder Woman. Except instead of the real Golden Age continuity, it was changed so as not to distress anyone coming to the comic from the show: instead of General Darnell, Wonder Woman and Steve work for General Blankenship. Steve’s a brunette. Etta Candy a college student, is now in the military. Diana Prince is a Yeoman instead of a lieutenant.

This annoyed the heck out of me at the time: why should they muck up continuity just to make the TV viewers happy? For example, Wonder Woman’s run-in with the Cheetah (cover by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, all rights to current holder) ignored the character’s existing history in various ways. Reading now, after multiple Amazonian reboots, I find I appreciate this period a lot more. The Cheetah story (by Martin Pasko) may have been discontinuous, but Pasko captured the character well — an insecure woman whose repressed anger at people who make her feel inadequate manifests as a savage split personality (the current cat-woman Cheetah resembles her in name only). And it obviously did work for the bottom line, as Diana got a backup series in World’s Finest along with her regular book.

Martin Pasko started the run but Gerry Conway did the bulk of it. Conway’s Bronze Age work could be hit or miss, but he really seemed to click here. A running element is that even though Wonder Woman is in America to help win the war, she’s really uncomfortable with the American military machine, and prone to lash out at it. In one story, for instance, she tries to shut down the Manhattan Project out of fear of what atomic weapons can do. Later, after the villainous Duke of Deception (one of Mars’ agents) tricks her into apparently going berserk, she winds up on trial for treason (she beats the rap). We have guest appearances by the Justice Society and Sgt. Rock, old foes (Dr. Psycho, one of my favorites), and several new ones including Baron Blitzkrieg, a Nazi superhuman who became a running foe in the later retcon series All-Star Squadron.

And as often happens in comics, we got loose ends. Conway had introduced the masked Nazi spymaster Armageddon, whom I presume would have unmasked as someone in the cast (I’m guessing one particularly officious military intelligence guy). He also gave Etta a boyfriend whose thought balloons show he was up to no good — but we never learn what. The last couple of issues of this era (by Jack C. Harris) jump ahead to the end of the war, Etta’s single, the sinister beau forgotten.

After the war ends, the Earth-1 villain Angle Man winds up jumping from Earth-1 present to Earth-2 in 1945, thereby bringing both Wonder Women together and providing a smooth transition back to the present. The TV show had moved back to the present day, and the comic followed. However they stuck with the continuity from the previous period rather than turning Diana Prince into an agent for IADC (Inter Agency Defense Command, I think) as she was on the second season of the show.

I’ll be reviewing her next phase as soon as I read through it.

I’m still working through Wonder Woman’s Bronze Age WW II period (following the Twelve Trials phase), but I also picked up a couple of out-of-continuity graphic novels featuring the Amazing Amazon. So …

WONDER WOMAN: Earth One by Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette (cover by Paquette, all rights to current holder) starts with Hippolyta strangling Hercules (who enslaved the Amazons in WW’s backstory) with the chains he placed on her. The Amazons then butcher Hercules’ army, relocate to Paradise Island … and centuries later Diana stands trial there for violating their laws: after Steve Trevor crashed on the island, Diana saved him (men on Paradise Island must die!) and then went with him back to Man’s World. Not for love of him, as it’s shown she’s been restless for years to get away (it’s also shown that yes, she’s had lovers among her fellow Amazons). Despite such changes, it’s the Golden Age origin pumped up from a few pages to graphic-novel length, which is not a plus.

One change, making Steve Trevor black, works fine. Turning Diana’s WW II sidekick Etta Candy into a plump, confident, fun-loving bisexual woman works even better — Etta’s an absolute hoot (like Jimmy Olsen in Morrison’s All-Star Superman it’s the first time since DC’s 1980s “post crisis” reboot someone’s figured out something interesting to do with her). And Diana’s confusion in “man’s world” is decently handled, though not new. It’s also nice to see that she’s more a diplomat/caregiver than the Amazon warrior people have been writing her as in recent years. Other changes don’t work, like turning her into a child of Hercules rather than the magically created clay of the original (as in the Azzarello/Chiang version, that’s a lie to conceal her true origin).

And then there’s the Amazons. Morrison’s portrayal of them comes close at times to man-hating feminist stereotypes, which I could have done without. And at other times, they’re horrendously judgmental of other women’s looks — their first reaction to Etta is outrage that she’s fat, which they somehow blame on patriarchy (we don’t keep our women fit enough or something). Plus Paquette’s art is in full male gaze mode, from the sexy Amazons to Diana’s overgenerous cleavage.

WONDER WOMAN: Odyssey by J. Michael Straczynski, Phil Hester, and multiple artists starts out way better than Straczynski’s usual comic output (Babylon 5 I like, his comics work not so much). Diana’s hiding out in the sewers because someone has launched a genocide against the Amazons. Paradise Islands is ruined, the Amazons scattered or dead. Wonder Woman’s mission: protect and gather the survivors and stop the killing. Although “the Amazons are gone!” is a stock premise — this is around the fourth reboot to use it — it’s an effective premise. And now that we’ve been through the New 52 reboot, I have less of a “Great, another reboot!” reaction to this one.

But then Phil Hester comes aboard as cowriter for the last couple of issues and everything changes. When she’s not hunting the genocides, Diana’s living in an apartment with some other Amazons, helping out her neighbors (although intimidating a pawnbroker to get a fair price for an artifact is not as cool a thing to do as the authors think. Instead of the shock troops working for whatever cabal killed the Amazons, we’ve got the Celtic goddess Morrigan sending monsters and undead armies after Diana and her new chums. It felt a lot less fresh than the first few issues. The trousered costume isn’t bad, but I could have done without the artists giving Diana what appears to be a push-up bra.

I’m not actually sure this was intended to be out-of-continuity rather than a complete relaunch, but I know how it wrapped up and the end makes it such. Unfortunately Vol. 2 isn’t at the library yet, so it’ll be a while before I read further.

I must confess, my first reaction to the news that Wonder Woman is queer (several same-sex relationships on Paradise Island—I’m not sure from the discussion at the link if she’s only interested in women or men are an option too) was “but she’s straight!”

And certainly she’s always been shown in straight relationships in the past (though during the George Perez reboot she was pretty much celibate). But it sounds like Greg Rucka’s reboot (much as I could do without WW having another of those) will be truer to Diana’s character than the most recent Azzarello/Chiang version, in which the Amazons rape and kill men for reproduction and Diana’s a daughter of Zeus engaged in internecine Olympian power struggles far removed from the human world. Or the end-of-the-Silver-Age non-super Diana Prince. Or the recent portrayal of Diana in Justice League as a bloodthirsty warrior looking for things she can kill. Rucka, by contrast, describes her as having “a very active inclusivity. That’s just part of what she is. Her arms are always open wide. There’s room for everybody. That’s an active part of her. I mean, Batman doesn’t have an issue, but he doesn’t spend his days thinking about how best can he understand his fellow man.” That sounds a lot closer to Diana.

All things considered, giving her same-sex relationships on Paradise Island is a minor change by comparison. So my bad. As an acquaintance says online, writers can transform almost everything about a character without generating half the “that’s not the Super Hero I know” protests as making a character black, gay, etc. I guess I’m guilty.

I will make the minor caveat that the Perez reboot did establish many of the Amazons are in same-sex relationships (some do choose to be celibate, some follow “the way of Narcissus”) so that part isn’t completely new. But it sounds like this will be more explicit (hence my title). As noted at the Rucka link (and plenty of others have made that point), a lot of readers still assume heterosexuality is the default: if someone’s not explicitly QUILTBAG, they must be hetero.

So yes, this is a big deal in a good way. Though I’m slightly annoyed that while DC is open to established female characters swinging both ways (Catwoman, Harley Quinn, and I believe Black Canary has described herself as “80 percent straight”), it rarely does this with established male characters (Constantine is the most high-profile).

There was another point in Rucka’s interview, regarding Diana’s motives for leaving Paradise Island, that I’ll get to in a future post.

So after my last post on Wonder Woman, I thought I might as well continue posting as I work through her adventures. It’s relatively easy as DC kept soft-rebooting her over and over, so there are obvious stopping points.

When we last left the Amazing Amazon she’d recovered her powers and become an agent of the United Nations Crisis Bureau. She’d also volunteered to undertake twelve trials, monitored by the JLA, from Superman to the Atom (cover by Dick Giordano, all rights to current holder) to see if she was still qualified as a member.

The stories ranged from bad (the Dr. Cyber story I referenced a while back) to really good (the Atom story) with most of them hovering around the median (as I’ve mentioned when reviewing current comics, I’m under no illusion that mediocre stories are a new thing) The various writers included Cary Bates, Elliott S. Maggin and Martin Pasko, who become the regular WW writer. One story, by Maggin, answered the question of why men were forbidden on Paradise Island and did so pretty well. Another story by Maggin, otherwise amusing, equated “feminism” with “women opening doors for men” which is silly, but it does show how unconventional such little acts or the woman paying for dinner were seen  at the time)

Under Pasko, Diana Prince shifted from the Crisis Bureau to a more bureaucratic job on the diplomacy side. This was meant to be a case of institutional sexism — the Crisis Bureau’s new boss doesn’t think a woman can do the job — but as it was never explained except in a later letter column, that didn’t have any punch.

Then the trials wrapped up, Wonder Woman rejoined the JLA — and in Wonder Woman #223, Hippolyta got pissed. Angered that mere men were judging her daughter’s fitness, she stages an attack on Paradise Island to make that judgment herself — and as part of the adventure, Steve Trevor, Diana’s murdered lover, returns to life.

This was quite a shock. Back then the good guys in comics didn’t die often, but when it happened they didn’t come back, not from a death as fatal as Steve’s (it’s hard to fake getting shot through the chest multiple times). Yet through Aphrodite’s magic and Diana’s pleading here he was, alive again.

Pasko obviously had some ideas for where this would go. Steve has to adjust to a world that’s moved on for the seven years since Dr. Cyber killed him. He’s determined to stand on his own two feet and not be just an appendage to his girlfriend (“Wonder Woman’s Lois Lane” as comics writer Trina Robbins once described him). That includes barging into the HQ of S.O.S. — Spy on Spy, an organization that monitors other espionage groups on behalf of the president — and becoming one of their agents. But whatever plans Pasko had proved moot when Lynda Carter’s The New Original Wonder Woman hit the airwaves. For the first season it was set in WW II, so the comic book, as of WW #228, likewise shifted to WW II. A time-traveling Nazi from the parallel world of Earth-Two (long established as where DC’s 1940s super-hero stories took place) lands on Earth One and drags Diana back with him. She meets her Earth-Two counterpart, then returns to her own time and place; we stay behind with the WW II version. Synchronization with TV accomplished.

And so that’s the material with which I’ll deal next time.

So as I mentioned in my previous WW post, Robert Kanigher rebooted Wonder Woman when he took over in 204: she gets her powers back; I Ching is dead; the Amazons are back (without explanation) from the other dimension where they disappeared to at the start of Diana’s non-super period; Diana’s working at the UN and moves in with two women, one black, one Chinese. Plus she meets a black Amazon, Nubia, who challenges her for the right to the “Wonder Woman” title (cover by Nicholas Cardy, all rights to current holder).

All of this was less of a shakeup than it seemed. The following issue introduces UN trouble-shooter Morgan Tracy who becomes the focal point of a triangle with Diana and Wonder Woman (Diana is her own rival!), duplicating the dynamic with Steve Trevor in the late Silver Age WW stories. Like those issues, Kanigher imports some romance-comics tropes. At one point, for instance, Diana’s sexist boss sneers at her as a plain Jane who hates men, pretty women and herself because she’ll never get a man. As the words “plain jane” sink in, Diana tells herself they don’t matter, but then tears trickle down her face … (there’s no way WW ever doing that would work for me, but it doesn’t help that Don Heck draws Diana as a complete cutie ).

In issue 206, Wonder Woman learns Nubia is her sister, a second clay child sculpted by Hippolyta, but kidnapped by Mars and trained for evil. Diana frees her from Mars’ spell, and that was the last we saw of her except for a brief appearance several years later in the Super-Friends comic-book (too bad, she could have beaten Storm as the first black super-heroine at the Big Two). And then the following issue, everything changed again. For several issues Kanigher just recycled his WW scripts from the late 1940s, with new art by Ric Estrada. I have no idea why—did Kanigher get overextended, did he get bored, or did he just figure these would sell as well as something new? This has the jarring effect that Steve Trevor shows up alive and well (I didn’t realize this was an issue at the time as I hadn’t been reading the series back when Steve died).

Finally with #212 (cover by Robert Oksner all rights to current holder), scripter Len Wein brought all this into some coherent shape. After running into Clark Kent, Diana asks why she hasn’t received any JLA communications lately, and Clark realizes she doesn’t remember quitting, or losing her powers (this is driven home by her trying to meet the team at their old mountain-top HQ rather than the then-current satellite).  When the JLA invites her to re-up, Wonder Woman refuses for fear she might lose her memory in the middle of a fight or something. Instead she suggests Twelve Trials, like Hercules: the League members will monitor her next 12 missions to see if she performs satisfactorily.

Diana confronts her mother, who admits that when Diana came down with amnesia in #204, the Amazons couldn’t restore her memories from the period they were absent so they made up some adventures to fill the gap (hence Steve apparently being alive). Diana’s pissed her mum did that without asking, plus she now knows Steve is dead. It’s not a good day for her.

Over the rest of the issue, Diana moves to a new apartment (we don’t see her two former roommates, though she mentions them—and they never even got names!), goes to work for Morgan Tracy (no longer treated as a possible boyfriend) as a troubleshooter for the UN Crisis Bureau) and as Wonder Woman, saves Tracy from the Cavalier (apparently the Earth-One version of the 1940s Bat-villain). I enjoyed the story and I’m more impressed by Wein pulling everything together so well (as the letter column notes now we get a heroic Diana Prince a la the powerless period alongside the classic Wonder Woman).  The new status quo lasted three years, then switched to new WW II adventures to fit up with the Lynda Carter TV Wonder Woman. A year later the comic, like the show, returned to the present; Diana stayed at the UN until 1980 (after which she’d get rebooted a lot more).