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.
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.
Investigating eventually leads Donna and 
Or here.
It looks ridiculous, as if Byrne were swiping from Marvel’s Medusa. And while I normally don’t worry about the drawbacks of Diana’s shoulder-length hair in battle, this much hair reminds me of Foz Meadows’ critique of the 
The second reason I took a dislike to the run is that it opens with the Amazons battling Darkseid and the forces of Apokalips. Darkseid is a great character but way overused — as Keith Giffen once said, DC editors pass Darkseid around like a bong — and most of the time not used well. He’s not used well here, where he could be almost any alien tyrant.
former base of operations for the Silver Age Hawkman and Hawkgirl — becomes friends with a local museum curator, meets the Phantom Stranger and the Demon and battles Morgan LeFay who hopes to steal Amazonian immortality. The final arc has her battling a clone of Doomsday, giving Byrne a chance to show Wonder Woman is truly in Superman’s league.
