Category Archives: Wonder Woman

Unsurprisingly having finished the Showcase collections of Silver Age Wonder Woman I moved on to the late sixties reboot. Even though I’ve read the second and third TPBs of this period before, I’ve never read Vol. 1, nor the original books. Now that I have I think this would have made a good origin arc for someone, but like the New 52 reboot, it doesn’t work for Wonder Woman (covers by Mike Sekowsky, all rights with current holder).

DIANA PRINCE, WONDER WOMAN starts with a story in which Steve is framed for murder and Diana has to go undercover in the counter culture to find the witness he claims can clear him (this bears a strong resemblance to Cornell Woolrich’s classic noir, The Phantom Lady). This requires admitting how  much she loves him, and dressing in lots of hip fashion (again showing the romance comics influence during this period). Steve is cleared but next issue he goes undercover himself, posing as a traitor, to penetrate the crime cartel of a man named Dr. Cyber.

Simultaneously Hippolyta tells Wonder Woman that the Amazons have to withdraw from our dimension to recharge their magic, so if Diana stays to help Steve—she does, of course—she’ll be an Amazon no more. After giving up her lasso and other weapons and losing her strength, Diana quits the military and runs into I Ching, a blind Chinese martial artist with his own score to settle with Cyber (whom he says is supposedly half-man, half-machine). Then she witnesses Steve shot, perhaps fatally, by Cyber (who wasn’t fooled). I Ching trains Diana in the martial arts, then together with PI Tim Trench, they set out in pursuit of Cyber (Steve gets shot again, definitely fatally, the following issue).

As an origin for a new adventurer, this would have worked fairly well. Author Dennis O’Neill (replaced later by artist Mike Sekowsky) does a good job on the martial arts (at least as far as a non-martial person can tell) and I can hand-wave Diana mastering multiple schools in weeks as standard comics stuff. And Cyber (who turns out to be a woman, and despite the name is neither cyborg nor computerized at all)  is a surprisingly formidable adversary, running a Hydra like crime cartel of worldwide scope. In one story, the good guys track her to a small Alpine village only to discover everyone who lives there is a Cyber agent (it’s a nice little twist when it happens). Tim Trench turns out to be a selfish weasel which works well too.

On the downside, surely Diana should still have her Amazon fighting skills, even if she isn’t superhuman any more, so why does she need I Ching’s training? And there are two massive gaps in the story, which weakens it. O’Neill never shows her making the decision to leave the military, just tells us she’s done it—that’s a cheap dodge around what should be a dramatic moment (and I’m not sure why quitting military intelligence gives her any advantage in helping Steve). Nor do we learn why she decides to open a trendy fashion boutique—she talks about setting up some sort of small business in the store under her apartment, then presto, she’s selling dresses (while the standard critique of this era is that a dress shop isn’t a good basis for adventuring, it’s no worse than Black Lightning being a teacher or Black Canary a florist).

Then there’s I Ching, who despite being covered featured as “the incredible I Ching” is a stock Chinese stereotype, spouting wise thoughts in broken English (and also a stock disabled type, the blind man who’s even better than sighted people).

And after all the effort to dump the Amazons, I don’t see the point in bringing them back just a few issues later, when they call in Diana to help them fight off Mars, god of war, who’s suddenly retconned into her grandfather, Hippolyta’s father (um … no).

Still, I did enjoy it—but rereading the subsequent collections, whatever bloom was on the new rose faded pretty fast (more to come later this week).

So in my post on Essential Wonder Woman Vol. 4, I mentioned how much Kanigher seemed to be borrowing from romance books of the time in the way he was writing the Amazon in the late sixties. That stirred my memory … and eventually it stirred enough to know why.  Jacque Nodell of the Sequential Crush blog (and grandchild of Golden Age Green Lantern artist Mart Nodell) did a short monograph about that topic, Supergirl and Wonder Woman (and Lois) as romance-comics characters. You can download a PDF at the link.

Nodell goes into detail about how some of the themes and imagery popular in romance comics made their way into the various books so it seems I wasn’t imagining it. If the topic interests you, it’s a short read, and I think she’s spot on, though I definitely don’t think the tactic worked with WW.

Cover by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, all rights to current holder.

I’ve enjoyed reading the Robert Kanigher/Ross Andru/Mike Esposito run on Wonder Woman (volumes One, Two and Three) so I’m disappointed it ended so poorly with Vol 4. It opened with the infamously racist Egg Fu story, then followed with an insane but entertaining meta-story in which Kanigher fires most of the cast.

This set up for a new status quo rebooting to the Golden Age (as the stories and covers emphasized). A retelling of WW’s origin, her meeting with Lt. Diana Prince and an agreement to trade identities (freeing Prince to go off and marry her own true love), and the return of various old super-villains: Paula von Gunther, Cheetah, Dr. Psycho, Draska Nishki, Giganta. There was a lot more of WW being bound by her own lasso, and a couple of stories where she loses her bracelets (which symbolize brute strength under love’s restraint) and goes berserk, something I hadn’t seen in any of the previous Kanigher volumes. Hippolyta switches from blonde to her original brunette.

It’s kind of hard to figure out where the dividing line is when Kanigher stopped doing Golden Age (I guess it didn’t produce whatever sales bump DC hoped for). They’re not set back in the 1940s, so it’s mostly externals such as WW’s mother’s hair color, the choice of villains. But Wonder Woman 168 has Hippolyta blonde in one story; the next issue is a very Golden Age story with Mars and Aphrodite done a la the original WW artist, H.G. Peters.

All that said, the point is not that he shook up continuity years before rebooting was the norm, it’s that the results sucked. Not the Golden Age elements, but that in writing Diana/Steve Trevor, he also seems to borrow a lot from DC’s romance books.

As I said in my review of Vol. 1, part of what I enjoyed about the early volumes is that Wonder Woman is not all about finding a man (less so than a lot of more recent super-books). She loves Steve, she tells him she wants to marry him some day…. but only after she’s wiped out injustice from the world, sorry about that Steve honey. He’s the Lois Lane who wants the ring, she’s the hero with no time for that stuff.

Not this volume. She’s in looooove with Steve, always thinking about him, twice as worried about him, constantly mooning over him. While she sometimes played tricks in previous volumes to make up for Steve showing no interested in “Diana Prince,” here she’s getting very Lois herself. In one story, where Steve gets super-powers and Wonder Woman loses hers, she thinks how “it makes me feel more like a woman, being protected.” No. No. And no.

Steve, in turn, becomes something of a dick. In the Egg Fu story, he begs Lt. Prince to role-play as Wonder Woman for an hour so he can have a pretend romance before going off on a possible fatal mission. In two stories, the villain binds WW in her own lasso and compels her to make out; a furious Steve vows he’ll never forgive her for kissing the bad guy, never mind that she was magically compelled to do so! In Wonder Woman #167, Steve takes it a step further: he binds Wonder Woman herself, then order her to come with him down to city hall and tie the knot. This is presented as wacky rom-com hijinx—wow, can Wonder Woman outsmart her boyfriend?—rather than creepily coercive. And of course they forgot about it next issue.

In the end, none of it made a difference. Andru/Esposito left, then Kanigher (the last story in 4 is by Bill Finger) and Mike Sekowsky transformed Diana into the non-super, boutique-owning adventurer she became for the next few years. More reboots followed.

It would have been nice if Kanigher could have gone out on a high note, but that’s life for ya.

SHOWCASE PRESENTS WONDER WOMAN Vol.2 continues the Robert Kanigher/Ross Andru/Mike Esposito run on the book (cover by Andru and Esposito, rights with current holder), following the same style and tone as the first collection. The big change is that having introducing Diana’s teen self, Wonder Girl, Kanigher now not only adds “Wonder Tot” (the equivalent to Kal-El as Superbaby) but by having Hippolyta splice home movies together, allowed all three eras to fight together as the Wonder Family. This is fun, though as with the first book, not for all taste.

WONDER WOMAN: Love and Murder got a lot of press because it was Serious Novelist Jodi Picault writing (and only the third woman to write WW). Her five issue run took place when Wonder Woman had adopted a secret identity as federal agent Diana Prince, so Picoult’s idea of having Diana discover what it’s like to live as an ordinary human has some potential. Unfortunately it’s squeezed together between Big Events (resolving plot threads from Infinite Crisis and setting up for Amazons Attack!) which seems to have tied Picoult’s hands. But that said, Picoult doesn’t seem to have any idea what she’s doing: the emotional arcs don’t go anywhere, and Circe keeps running around spouting cryptic advice and plotting … well, I’ve really no idea what she’s supposed to be doing. Whether this would have paid off if Picoult had stuck around, I know not (I have no idea if she was jumped or got pushed off the book) but as is, something of a mess.

WONDER WOMAN: Land of the Dead is the sequel to Greg Rucka’s Eyes of the Gorgon collection as Diana teams up with Flash (the crossover part is written by Geoff Johns) against their respective arch-enemies, battling despite the loss of her eyes in the previous book. From there it’s on to the underworld, where Athena wants her and Wonder Girl (not the younger-self version) to rescue Hermes from Hades’ clutches. As I said of the previous volume, this fuses the Olympian and mortal worlds much better than the New 52 version; I could have done without Johns’ creation Reverse Flash showing up though, because I don’t like him much. And good though this is, it does give me a certain affection for the era (as in the Showcase collection) when super-heroes could just fight crime, then go home without it all being part of some huge arc).

As might be expected with a super-hero whose career dates back 70-plus years, Wonder Woman has had her good eras and her bad ones. A couple of comic-book TPB collections have convinced me to re-evaluate a couple of those eras.

SHOWCASE PRESENTS WONDER WOMAN Vol. 1 starts in the late 1950s, when longtime WW artist Harry G. Peter left and Ross Andru and Mike Esposito (who would work as a penciler/inker team for years to come) took over, joining Robert Kanigher, who’d taken up the writing reins after creator William Moulton Marston (AKA Charles Moulton)left.
I’d seen stories from this era in reprints and wasn’t impressed. They seemed much less feminist than Marston’s work (tangled and weird as Marston’s view of gender relations might be) and included annoying expansions of the mythos such as Wonder Tot, Wonder Woman’s super-powered toddler self (the equivalent of super-baby—in this period, WW’s powers were all a divine gift rather than the result of Amazon training).
Rereading the first volume (Andru/Esposito cover art, rights with current holder), I’ve got to admit there’s more to them than that. For starters, there’s Wonder Woman herself. Like most books of the day, she didn’t interact with the rest of the DC Universe, so she’s effectively the most powerful hero in the world. Which is sort of a feminist statement in itself. Time and again, alien invaders would decide that if they can only overcome Wonder Woman, Earth is theirs! Needless to say, that rarely worked out for them.
Kanigher also does a very good job making her fighting style distinctive. Rather than outright super-muscle, she relies a lot on her equipment—the magic lasso, her tiara (which doubles as a boomerang) her bracelets and her invisible jet.
The stories are definitely not art, but I do enjoy them. Where Marston gave Diana a good-size rogue’s gallery (Dr. Poison, Hypnota, Dr. Psycho, the Duke of Deception and Mars the war-god), they rely heavily on alien invaders, giants (a lot of stories with giants) and the occasional one-shot super-criminal. Her only recurring foe was Angle Man, a slick schemer who “always had an angle” (a good foe he was, too). A lot of the stories emphasize Wonder Woman having to compete or accomplish some sort of test or a series of challenges to prove herself.
The supporting cast feels reduced. Steve Trevor’s around, but unlike the Marston era, he rarely does much beyond try to talk Diana into quitting and marrying him (that works about as well as the alien invaders’ plans). I can see why one fan described him to me as this series’ Lois Lane. Heck, one story consists of Steve trying to convince Wonder Woman that his life’s in danger so much, she just has to marry him so she can keep him in one piece (several commenters on the DC Women Kicking Ass blog have said how much they love the idea that Steve’s confident enough that he’s willing to date a woman who outdoes him in every way).
Near the end of this volume, Kanigher also reintroduces Etta Candy and the Holiday College girls, who played an important role in the early Marston adventures. And, of course, the Amazons are always showing up.
One big change he made was introducing Wonder Girl—Diana’s teen-age self—as a back-up series. Living on Paradise Island, she still winds up battling alien invaders and other menaces to protect her fellow Amazons. Instead of Steve, we have Ronno, a teenage Mer-Boy who often finds it as hard to distract Diana from her duties as Steve would later. It’s widely believed that when Bob Haney created the Teen Titans, he threw in Wonder Girl as a member under the impression she was a separate character, which is quite plausible (writers and editors often didn’t follow other books). In one of the last stories, young Diana almost meets herself in the future, and it wouldn’t be the last time.
I was going to write about Greg Rucka’s run on the title too (much better than I thought when it first came out) but I’ll save that for a later post).
And in case you’re wondering, I’ve already started the Kanigher era’s Vol. 2.

“Like a crash of thunder from the sky comes the Wonder Woman …”—Sensation Comics #1
Having just read the TPB of DC’s post-reboot Wonder Woman, I thought I’d look back at her history. And why in this case, a reboot may not be a bad thing.
Wonder Woman debuted in the first issue of Sensation Comics, the creation of psychologist William Moulton Marston. Marston wanted to create a hero for girls the way Superman stood for boys; while the readership was mostly male, I’ve read some glowing tributes over the year from women who did grow up reading her.
The golden-age Wonder Woman was an odd mix: Oddly gnarled art by H.G. Peters, feminist themes, female-supremacist themes (women-ruled countries and worlds are always preferable to male rule), lots of bondage (apparently a personal interest of Marston) along with the super-heroics and mythology. Like Marston/Peters or not (I do) it’s certainly memorable.
After Robert Kanigher took over the book, it became less overtly feminist, though certainly any book with a formidable female lead (and one who consistently refuses to marry the male lead) has some of that. It was also insanely weird at times, giving us such memorable-but-not-in-a-good-way villains as Egg Fu, a giant, Chinese, super-genius egg with a stereotypical Asian dialogue.
That was the status quo until the late 1960s when DC shook things up by banishing the Amazons, stripping Diana of her powers and turning her into a fashion-boutique owner/martial artist under the tutelage of blind Chinese mystic I Ching (I review one TPB of that era here).
As I’ve noted before, Diana eventually regained her powers, then went on to be a translator, a UN crisis investigator and an astronaut (not to mention resetting to World War II to tie in with the 1970s WW TV series) before returning to her secret identity as Lt. Diana Prince. Then came DC’s 1980s reboot, which started Diana from scratch as an Amazon ambassador for peace and women’s rights. This stayed constant for years, with some odd and entertaining variations (Williams Messner-Loebs’ had her working at Taco Bell, and it was delightful).
Then came a reworking-but-not-reboot of the DC Universe in Infinite Crisis—and since then, Wonder Woman’s been in freefall. Various creators have tried her as a federal agent (Diana Prince again), introduced new boyfriends, dropped them, tried to work with the supporting cast or around the dreadful “Amazons Attack” crossover event (the evil Darkseid cons the Amazons into attacking the world). Even the talented Gail Simone couldn’t seem to do anything—the idea of Zeus creating “Manazons” to bring peace where Wonder Woman had failed just bit.

So the Brian Azzarello/Cliff Wu Chiang relaunch with Blood at least cleared out the deadwood. The premise is that the classic Wonder Woman origin—sculpted from clay by Hippolyta and animated by the Olympians—was to cover up the fact she’s a child of one of Zeus’s affairs and thereby a target for Hera’s revenge. Learning the truth, Diana finds herself embroiled in Olympian schemes and plots—and unfortunately, sees Hera wipe out Hippolyta and the Amazons (which makes the third or fourth time “The Amazons are gone” has been used to shake things up).
I have mixed feelings about the reboot. I don’t like dropping the classic origin, and by focusing on the gods, it seems oddly removed from human affairs (George Perez’ 1980s reboot and Greg Pak’s Incredible Herc at Marvel blended myth and super-hero better): It’s readable and interesting, but it’s not very involving without more ties to the human world.
On the other hand, it’s not like the pre-boot version was going anywhere good … At worst, we’re no worse off, but I’m not sure this is the reboot I’d have chosen.