Wonder Woman: Earth One Volume One

Giant kangaroo mounts referred to as "kangas." The Purple Healing Ray. The robot plane. The Holliday Girls, and their zaftig leader with the "Woo woo!" catch-phrase. The exclamation "Suffering Sappho!" Bondage as symbol of love. Female superiority over men, and the submission of the latter to the former as the ideal societal construct.

These are among the components–some minor details, others pervasive elements–of William Moulton Marston's Wonder Woman that have sent just about every single person to try their hand at telling a Wonder Woman story in any media since creator Marston's death running and screaming from Wonder Woman's actual origin, the original half-decade or so of her adventures and the author's intent. And these are among the elements that writer Grant Morrison, along with artist Yanick Paquette, embraces in his telling of the Wonder Woman story, in the particular, peculiar format of DC Comics' Earth One line of sequentially published, original graphic novels.

The most remarkable aspect of Morrison's version of Wonder Woman is that the writer, unlike everyone else who has come before, doesn't attempt to reinvent this particular wheel, and he doesn't attempt to fix what was never broken. In essence, Morrison simply reshapes Marston and collaborator H.G. Peter's comics into a style and form more familiar and palpable to modern readers, the result being a fairly perfect packaging of Marston and Peter's Wonder Woman into a sort of ultimate re-mix. It's rather similar to what Morrison already did with Batman during a relatively long 2006-2013 run across a series of Batman titles, and with Superman in his 2005-launched All-Star Superman, although here he actually does less work than he did with either of the other two personalities of DC's so-called "trinity" of characters. With the World's Finest, he cherry-picked from their entire histories; here he sticks to Marston and Peter, with only a few minor tweaks and modifications consistent with the update in time period.

The book is structured in an unusually literary and complete fashion, not only for a comic book series, but when compared to the rest of the Earth One line (so far consisting of three volumes featuring Superman, two featuring Batman and one featuring the Teen Titans). After a 13-page sequence detailing the origins of Hippolyta and the Amazons' break with Man's World–in which she lost her girdle to Hercules*, stole it back, killed the hero and prayed to Aphrodite that they may "retire forever from Man's World"–the remainder of the book is set 3,000 years later in present.

Wonder Woman, dressed in a version of her familiar costume, exits a beautifully-designed "invisible" robot plane on Paradise Island and is bound in chains by Amazons and dragged before her mother for trial. The remainder of the book is told through the trial, with chronological flashbacks telling the origin of Wonder Woman, as she and other players in the drama are called forth to bear witness (the lasso of truth compelling them all to be perfectly honest).

That is not a format we see in superhero comic books, and is almost impossible to imagine in a superhero TV show or movie; I think that's notable because so much of the rest of the Earth One line seems to be written with at least one eye on multi-media adaptation. Writer Geoff Johns' Batman graphic novels read like comics adaptations of a few scripts from a Batman TV show that doesn't actually exist, for example. Morrison, who, unlike Johns has had little experience in writing for TV and/or film, just writes this like a graphic novel. And it's relatively late release all but guarantees that it will have little to no impact on future Wonder Woman movies, which have already cast their stars, something I'll return to in a bit.

In broad strokes, the story will be very familiar. Diana is the somewhat rebellious and adventurous only daughter of Queen Hippolyta, apparently a gift from the goddesses because, like all of the women in the all-female utopia of Paradise Island, Hippolyta can't exactly have a child the old-fashioned way.

One day she discovers United States pilot Steve Trevor, who has somehow crash-landed on the island, and she heals and cares for him, keeping him safe from her sisters (As in Renae de Liz's Legend of Wonder Woman, she does so in secret, keeping him in hiding). She wins a tournament, allowing her to take Steve back to his own world. She suffers an immediate and drastic form of culture shock, but makes fast friends with "Elizabeth" Candy and her sorority sisters from Holliday college (I find it amusing that, of all the stuff from Wonder Woman's Golden Age one might be leery to include, Morrison apparently drew the line at a character named Etta Candy; giant kangaroos? That's cool. But a joke name like Etta Candy? No way).

There is the expected tension between the isolationist Hippolyta and the Amazons and the expansive U.S. military, and between the way a society is supposed to work, "Man's" way or Marston's way.

Marston's Wonder Woman, despite what people have been reading into her since at least 1972, when Gloria Steinem stuck her on the cover of Ms., is not a feminist character, nor was hers originally a feminist story. If we consider "feminism" the ideal default it should be, and keep in mind that it is the belief that women and men are equal and should be treated as such**, then remember Marson wasn't really arguing that in his comics. He was, through Wonder Woman, arguing that women were better than men, at least in many of the most important ways (and please note that there was nothing misandric about Marston's point of view; he didn't think men inferior, he just didn't think they were as awesome as women, particularly his idealized Amazon women, were).

These are subtleties that are generally ignored, and they are ignored because they are pretty out-of-date, pretty particular to Marston and pretty much universally rejected in favor of the idea that men and women are equal, and neither should be master over the other. I don't want to get too deep into this particular rabbit hole, but Marston's brand of feminism, if we want to call it that, involved the loving submission of man to the loving dominance of a loving woman, which could conceivably be seen as a chilvalrous, noble act on the part of the man, who is very active in the act of surrender. Not to inject Christianity into things and further muddle it, but surrendering peacefully is actually a hell of a lot harder than fighting, something Morrison's Superman once alluded to in a throw-away JLA story in which he lectured some pro-active superheroes that not killing is infinitely harder than killing. At any rate, there are some confusing interpersonal politics involved here.

That was, essentially, the Amazon way, and perhaps it was a way that worked on Paradise Island, and could work in a Man's World that all came around to Marston's way of thinking. Wonder Woman herself was a lot more traditional in her views of relationships, being the only Amazon to fall in love with a man and then to pursue him for years, even decades in a weird love triangle reflective of the Clark/Superman/Lois one. Here she is also pro-Steve, and pro-engagement with Man's World. She wants to change it for the better, just as she wants to change aspects of her own, "Woman's World." She's a compromise character, a bridge between the two cultures--and the two modes of relationship between male and female.

The last page of the book, in which Wonder Woman begins her engagement in earnest. The words that precede those on the page above are "Hola! 'Man's World'!" That is her "final" costume, by the way, and her robot plane, Steve Trevor and "Beth" Candy in the background.

Wonder Woman is, at least here, a feminist character, a figure of equality, even if the culture Marston created for her (and so many aspects of his own psychological work and his own comic book work were of a feminism-plus line of thinking).

The other thing that Morrison and Paquette do that Marston and Peter did not, and could not, is make all the kinky undertones of the Golden Age Wonder Woman explicit. You need not read many of those stories to see exactly what it was that gave Frederic Wertham fits, or to refer to Wonder Woman as a veritable recruiting poster for lesbians. I think the tying up can be excused, and be read innocently–at least context-free and in the original texts themselves, until one learns more about Marston himself, anyway–but there's some really weird stuff in there. Like Amazon Christmas, "Diana's Day," a festival in which some of the girls dress up like deer, others dress up as hunters, and they "hunt" for the girls, tie them up, and then skin and eat them.

If you see something vaguely kinky in the above scene, you're not the first adult to do so.

Here that game occurs, at least in the corner of a splash page, but so too does all kind of libidinous behavior, with Amazons dancing topless (their backs turned to the reader, of course) and doing body shots off one another. If Marston and Peter implied kinky, pagan bacchanals and lesbian relationships, Morrison refers to them as such, and Paquette draws them.

Diana's Day = Amazon spring break.

Wonder Woman explicitly refers to Mala, a minor character in the original Wonder Woman stories, as "my lover," a step beyond all the slightly more equivocal reference between the women as "my love" and so on. Etta Beth Candy even uses the L-word when discussing Paradise Island (not the other L-word):

I'm...not sure if this is an improvement or not. There's certainly something to be said for the subtlety of the early 1940s Wonder Woman comics, which may have been borne out of conservatism and bias against homosexuals in general, but may also had a lot to do with the fact that they were comics for little kids. This isn't intended for little kids, and yet it's not a mature readers book, either (The book, unlike DC's serially-published comics, doesn't have any form of rating, but it the Earth One is generally considered to be meant for the YA and book-store reading audience; certainly the adult themes but lack of swearing, nudity and violence would seem to bear that out). Morrison's script is hardly crass or anything (Hercules calls Hippolyta a "bitch," but then, Hercules is a real dick), but I think there's something to be said for having to be slightly sly with such matters.

That, though, seems to be the biggest discernable difference from the original source material, the fact that Morrison can just come out and say words like "lover" and "lesbian" instead of implying them. Well, that and the art, which I've neglected to mention at this point, but is perhaps what makes this such a radical book since, as I've mentioned, Morrison's most radical act is in updating the original Wonder Woman comics rather than reimagining them.

Paquette, like Morrison, apparently paid very close attention to the work of Wonder Woman's creators, and it is evident in his work. One of the many things modern creators always seem to get wrong about Wonder Woman and her milieu is that they insist on grounding it in some sort of mythical, or at least ancient, style, as if the Amazons haven't changed or progressed in any way since they first came to their island, as if their society, culture and science remained perfectly stagnant. But what culture would? Certainly not one as progressive, forward-thinking and presumably more advanced than our own.

Paquette's version of an Amazonian firearm.

The original Paradise Island was as much Buck Rogers as it was sword-and-sandals, and that's evident here. Not only does Paquette draw Wonder Woman's doctor friend in an outfit similar to that of the one she wore in the original Wonder Woman comic, but these Amazons have firearms to play bullets-and-bracelets with a gun that looks so strange that it is apparently one they developed parallel to the firearms developed in Man's World), they have flying hover-bikes shaped vaguely like the shells their chief goddess was said to be born from, and then there's Hippolyta's TV-like magic mirror and the aforementioned robot plane/invisible jet, which is similarly redesigned to look like the sort of airship that might have been developed by a culture completely unfamiliar with Wilbur and Orville Wright.

I really can't overstate what an incredible job Paquete does in taking the craziest ideas present in some of the original comics–rideable kangaroo steeds, for example–and integrating them with a kind of sci-fi fantasy Ancient Greek + 3,000-years aesthetic. I have seen a lot of different versions of Paradise Island over the decades, and this is probably the best-looking one, with almost every single Amazon having her own look, costume and style. His Hippolyta, who here has black hair like her daughter, is probably the all-around coolest-looking Hippolyta I've ever seen, and I like the way that he and Morrison sneak in familiar characters in relatively minor, almost background roles, like Troia (wearing a new version of her old Wonder Girl costume) and Artemis.

Note Troia in the lower right-hand corner; she's in the background of the cover too, and part of a war party sent to Man's World to retrieve Diana.

Of the major divergences from the original story, there are two, the significance of which may strike different readers at different levels of importance.

The first is that Steve Trevor is no longer the blond-haired white guy of the 1940s, but is a black man–Idris Elba, from the looks of Paquette's drawings of him.

Idris Elba, right? Is it just me?

During my first reading, I thought nothing of it. Morrison, Paquette and company decided to "blind cast" a character, who doesn't have anything essential to his character that mandates he be a white guy...certainly not if the story is taking place in 2016 instead of 1941. It seemed like an easy and well-intentioned way to put a person of color into a story that is otherwise just a bunch of white folks; the only other black character with a speaking part is the Robert Kanigher and Don Heck-created Nubia, who is portrayed well in this but is, well, she's still named "Nubia."***

There is, in fact, one thing about a black–or, specifically, an African-American–Steve Trevor that does impact the overall Wonder Woman mega-story, although it took a second reading for the idea to really sink in.

During the trial, Steve is one of the witnesses called forth to testify, and he tells Hippolyta and the assembled Amazons that his "ancestors were enslaved and persecuted by men with too much power."

It's a simple line of dialogue in a panel or two, but it's suggestive in ways that complicate the themes beyond what I'm equipped to address here, and, I imagine, what Morrison intended. First, and less problematically, it occurred to me that with Steve now a black American man rather than a white American man, he shares something in common with women, as he himself points out. He is part of a group that was also hideously mistreated by white men. So Steve Trevor is no longer a representative and a member of those that have and would oppress the Amazons/women in the past, but now he is someone who has likewise been oppressed. Does that matter? Were Steve and Diana paired as representatives of the two world views, and their partnership and kinda sorta romance meant to serve as symbolic bridge between Man's World and Amazonia? Was Golden Age Steve Trevor the embodiment of Man's World, and Diana's ability to win him over emblematic of he eventual success of her mission?

But wait, it gets thornier. Remember that Earth One Steve explicitly mentions the fact that his ancestors were enslaved. How, exactly, does American slavery fit into this idea of bondage and submission? If the book, and Marston's philosophy in general, are pro-bondage and pro-submission, what becomes when we factor in such a repugnant, real-life example of the disastrous negatives of such relationship? (I won't go so far as to say that Marston or Peter were racist, but you need not read many pages of their Wonder Woman comics to see that their comics were racist, regardless of the intent of the creators. Non-white characters are all confined to wince-inducing racial stereotype in the Wonder Woman comics, not simply the Japanese that the characters were at war with, but everyone who wasn't a white American or Amazonian.)

Is Morrison attempting to compare and contrast "bad" enslavement (that which is forced upon the slave out of hatred or a complete lack of empathy) with "good" enslavement (that which is offered and accepted out of love)...? Is it the difference between man-to-man slave/master relationships and man-to-woman and woman-to-woman slave/master relationships? Is the difference simply between the slavery of Man's World and the slavery of the Amazons?

I don't know, and, like I said, I don't think Morrison even intended to go there–if so, I think a little more space would have been spared–but he took us there, even if only in a passing bit of dialogue.

The second big change, which is more significant to the Wonder Woman story, even if it raises fewer questions about its application to our world, is the exact origins of Wonder Woman–that is, how exactly she came to be. The traditional story, that of Marston, is that she was a sort of doll made of clay by Hippolyta, who was distraught that she could not have a daughter of her own, and that the goddesses brought that clay doll to life and imbued it with their blessings. The child then grew up to be Diana.

In rebooting the character's origins for The New 52, writer Brian Azzarello nixed that, and made Wonder Woman the product of a union between a man and woman. Sort of. In his origin, Hippolyta had her baby the old-fashioned way, and the seed was provided by the god Zeus, a well-known knocker-upper of women in myth. That made Diana a demi-god and part of the Olympic family, who dominated Azzarello's run on the title. It also greatly annoyed a lot of Wonder Woman fans for perhaps obvious reasons, but in the sins Azzarello committed against the honor of the Amazons, that was actually pretty minor compared to his explanation of where Amazons babies come from.

At the climax of the trial, Diana gets to question her mother, and asks her of what substance she is made. Hippolyta confesses the story about being a clay figurine brought to life by the goddesses was a lie, a fairy tale told to help keep Diana innocent. In fact, she was the child of Hippolyta and Hercules. She wasn't conceived either in rape or consensual passion though. Morrison has Hippolyta explain:

I took the egg from my womb. And the seed form the loins of the man-god Hercules. Blended in my alembics, seasoned with my fury.

You were my revenge on Hercules, Diana. That his line would yield no sons, only daughters bred to conquer and subdue Man's World. Of my anger you were born.

Your native Amazon vigor combined with the blood of Hercules makes you unbeatable. Yet also proud, rebellious, restless. His blood calls you to Man's World, and to battle.

What are we to make of this? You got me. In a sense, this feels less true-to-myth than her being fathered by noted philadering father of the gods Zeus, even if Hippolyta and Hercules were certainly better positioned within the history of Wonder Woman comics to have made a baby together. The "how" is a little confusing–I would have appreciated Hippolyta saying something about "and through Amazonian science and forbidden magic, I blended them in my alembics."

In essence, it sounds as if Diana was a test-tube baby of sorts (just like Morrison's Robin, Damian Wayne, whose mother Talia al Ghul stole seed from the unwitting Batman to create him****), although how exactly that would work with a Bronze Age man's seed and the sci-fi science of later Amazonia, I don't know.

It does make Wonder Woman fully human, rather than "less than human," as she refers to what she thought of herself due to her clay origins, although I'm not sure that's really that important (Superman's not human, and that's never really been a problem for the character). It also strips her of her unique status among the Amazons; no longer is she the only one born not of the union of man and woman, but she's as human as the rest of them. Ironically, Hippolyta speaks to that particular mingling of blood as what makes Wonder Woman unique, which seems to suggest that this Hercules really was a demi-god, and not just a man, as Hippolyta seems to imply throughout.

It works, but only so long as you don't pick at it, and is a rare example of Morrison trying to "fix" something that wasn't broken. That is the trap that all Wonder Woman creators seem to fall into. It may grasp at Morrison, but for the most part he and Paquette sail on it.

Together they've created the very best standalone graphic novel to feature Wonder Woman, and the one of the best Wonder Woman comics since Marston and Peter's first Wonder Woman comics.



*That's right, "Hercules," not Herakles; like Marston, Morrison doesn't seem to feel a need to prove how smart he is by distinguishing the Roman and Greek spellings. Just last week I was re-reading George Perez and company's "War of The Gods" storyline from 1991-1992, and it actually hinged on a conflict between the Greek and Roman versions of the same pantheon. Marston, meanwhile, had Wonder Woman created by Greek goddesses and battle the Roman war god Mars few issues later.

**Which means, in truth, no one should have be labeled or declare themselves "feminist;" it's everyone else who should be labeled "sexist," as you're either one or the other. It still boggles my mind that there are people, men and women, who resist or refuse to be called "feminist." Personally, I've long assumed–or maybe it's more like hoped–that this was because the people who claim not to be feminist are doing so out of pure ignorance and don't really know or understand what that word means.

***Of course, the decision of "casting" Steve as a black man rather than a white man here doesn't seem like the sort of thing that will have much impact in the pop culture in general, at least, not in the same way that Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch making the Ultimate Nick Fury black lead to Sam Jackson playing the character in all the Marvel movies...and the creation of a new black character with the name appearing in the "real" Marvel comics. In fact, this isn't even like having the New 52 Wally West be black, which I hear lead to his being black on The Flash TV show. Wonder Woman's movie is already in production, and its Steve Trevor is going to be played by white guy Chris Pine. Would that have been different had DC published this book just a few years earlier? I don't know, but possibly.

****Also like Robin Damian Wayne, Morrison's Earth One Wonder Woman wears regular old off-the-rack boots with laces.

Gloria Steinem on Wonder Woman (Pt. 3)

"How could Wonder Woman be interested in Steve, who seemed so weak and so boring? Did women really have to live in a community by themselves—a separate country like Paradise Island—in order to be both happy and courageous? The very fact that the ideal was an island—insular, isolated, self-contained, cut-off—both pleased and bothered me. And why, when she chose an earthly disguise, did Wonder Woman have to pick such a loser? How could she bear to be like Diana Prince? Did that mean that all women really had to disguise their true selves in weak feminine stereotypes in order to survive?

"But all these doubts paled beside the relief, the sweet vengeance, the toe-wriggling pleasure of reading about a woman who was strong, beautiful, courageous, and a fighter for social justice. A woman who strode forth, stopping wars and killing with one hand, distributing largesse and compassionate aid with the other."

—Gloria Steinem, from her introduction to Wonder Woman (Bonanza Books; 1972)

Kinda sorta liveblogging Wonder Woman, the direct-to-DVD movie

(Note: I posted the bulk of this with a different introduction at Blog@ late last week, but wanted to re-post it on EDILW just so I'd know exactly where it is and I'd have all my reviews of DC's direct-to-DVD cartoons in the same place. If you read it there already, feel free to skip down to the bottom, for a few thoughts on the "extras." Or, hell, ignore it completely, what do I care?)

—A presumably Amazon woman just took a battle axe right to the face and crumpled, her corpse just lying there on the ground in the middle of a battle…

—There’s that goddam cloud of arrows shot I was complaining about seeing in an episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold just the other day. I forgave the Batman cartoon, as its aimed at kids who probably didn’t see Hero four years ago and the dozens of homages since, but this is aimed at a slightly older audience who probably have seen it a few dozen times now. Surely there is a newer, fresher way to show a lot of arrows being shot during a battle scene.

—All of the jumping great heights and distances reminds me quite a bit of Troy and 300, to the point that I find myself trying to sort out which movie which image seems most like.

—Wow, there’s another dead lady…a horse just rolled over her and just destroyed the hell out of her legs. The horse gets back up, but not the lady. No cartoon horses were hurt in the production of this film. Cartoon ladies, on the other hand…

—My God, a beheading!

—A sex joke…? In less three minutes I think there’s been more violence and killing than I’ve ever seen in all of DC-related cartoons I’ve seen since Batman: The Animated Series put together… It’s definitely earned it’s PG-13 rating.

—The animation is really nice, by the way…quality-wise, this is right below Batman: Gotham Knight, and head and shoulders above the rest of the DC direct-to-DVD movie quality scale.

—Here’s a panty-shot up Ares’ skirt, for the ladies.

—Aw, the minotaur has such dainty little hooves! He’s darling.

—Rosario Dawson seems a poor choice for an Amazonian voice. Her voice is so recognizable, she just sounds like Rosario Dawson, not a different character, and it’s a little disconcerting seeing a slim white redhead and hearing Rosario Dawson. Dawson, by the way, would make a great Amazon in a live action movie.

—Oh women, always kicking men in the balls…

—Oh, there’s finally some blood. This battle has been surprisingly bloodless given the high body count.

—Aaaand there’s Beheading #2, before the six-minute mark…

—Hippolyte and Ares had a child together…? Did this happen in the comics? Or in mythology? I guess its been a really long time since I’ve read either.

—And now we’re on modern day Paradise Island. The design is really nice in general. The Amazons’ clothes, and the bits and pieces of their world, look like a nice, modern style of descended-from-ancient-Greek. They’re also a lot less nightgowny or toga-esque from what they were in the original comics, up through the Perez era, anyway.

—Horses? Diana’s going to go ride a horse? What, no kangas?

—Oh, it just occurred to me that this is Keri Russell and Nathan Fillion playing opposite one another again after Waitress.

—Feh. So, who’s this mysterious enemy with advanced-looking jet fighters shooting at U.S. jets? I assume they will remain unnamed. Which is quite lame.

This is one of those things that annoys the hell out of me, wherein a work is “mature” enough for all kinds of amped up action and fighting and beheadings and blood and sex talk, but not for, like, rudimentary acknowledgement of the existence of politics.

Interesting (to me at least) that while this story of Steve Trevor being shot down by enemies over Paradise Island was fine during World War II and would have worked just fine in the Cold War era, it doesn’t really work today.

Who could one possibly even imagine shooting Trevor down? Al Qaeda’s air force, which is just out patrolling the ocean…?

The Wonder Woman origin story, as presented in the original comics and re-presented by Perez during the Cold War, can’t contain the same elements and be seen as anything other than super-generic fantasy today. (Update: After seeing the rest of the movie, it occurs to me that these could be war planes from The Cult of Ares, which does have helicopters and uniforms and stuff, but if so, it’s never suggested, and it doesn’t make much sense for them to be dog fighting with the U.S. armed forces anyway).

—And another kick to the balls.

—Steve Trevor’s middle name is “Rockwell”…? I was not aware of that.

—“A nice rack”…? The Amazons are unfamiliar with the idiom “crap,” but they are familiar with the idiom “rack”…

—There’s a chariot race during the contest to see who should take Steve Trevor back to man’s world, but no kangas…? Lame.

No, that’s okay; I understand why they wouldn’t use kangas.

—“Castrate”…? Mommy, what’s castrate mean?

—Oh shit, Whatsherface just fucking impaled Wonder Woman’s bookish friend…! You know this is more violent and bloody than The Dark Knight was…

—The explanation of the Wonder Woman costume is elegant enough… (Update: Or it would have been, if Wonder Woman, like, met with any one in America in any sort of official capacity).

—The suiting up scene reveals that this Wonder Woman wears a pointy metal belt that would make it impossible for her to bend forward…

—What are you kids doing playing pirate at night in Central Park…?

—“Would you like you to teach you how to swordfight?” Man, Wonder Woman, you are a sucky babysitter…

—Mommy, what’s he mean when he says “arrested for solicitation?”

—That’s Etta Candy…the…uh…fuck…is…? Whuh…? Buh…?

—Hmm, why’s Wonder Woman super-strong? They skipped over the gifts of the gods bit. Maybe all Amazons are super-strong?

—Hey, this Nathan Fillion guy is a pretty good voice actor… (Update: I've really been enjoying Fillion's new show Castle. I've had it on while drawing the little 'Twas the Night Before Wednesday cartoons the last few weeks, and I think it is A-OK).

—Mommy, what’s tequila?

—Ha ha, Steve Trevor is drunk! And he tried to get Wonder Woman drunk! So she’d be easier to have sex with! And they drank a lot of alcohol!

—This Kerri Russel lady’s doing a pretty good job too… The voice cast is all very good, actually. Dawson’s the only one of the principals that stands out as not being subsumed into the character. Which, to be fair, might have as much to do with my being most familiar with her than anything else.

—This monster guy Demos has very dainty feet as well. Ares’ minions are all pretty big on top with slim little feet legs and doll-like feet.

—Holy shit, Wonder Woman just beheaded two snakes and stuck a shard of glass through dude’s hand…!

—And then she put a high heel! Into! Dude’s! Eye!

—You know, I was thinking this seems like an okay plot for a Wonder Woman movie, like a grown-up, live-action one, but this is so violent I don’t think it would get a PG-13 rating if it was live action. Certainly not without some changes.

—Hee hee, his beard killed him. That’s funny.

—Steve just threw a knife into a dude’s chest. I’m pretty sure that’s murder, since the U.S. is not actually at war with the Cult of Ares…Man, Steve and Wonder Woman are terrible role models…

—Hey, is that Abraham Lincoln that Ares is about to sacrifice…?

—I’m not sure what the magic words he intoned while stabbing Lincoln to death were, but they sure didn’t sound like “Sic semper tyrannis!”

Okay, so his blood pours into the door and it opens.

—I don’t like the Cerberus design. It’s not very inspired.

—Woah, Hades is fat as hell…And he snacks on grapes? Did he get that fat just off grapes? That’s an awful lot of grapes.

—Uh oh, there’s an army of mythological creatures in Washington D.C….I’m getting Amazons Attack flashbacks here…

—They never explained the invisible jet either, she just kind of has an invisible-ish jet.

—As with Amazons Attack, it’s kinda silly that, like a hundred people with swords and arrows can even stress out the U.S. military…at least here it’s unfolding quickly, so maybe the most powerful nation on earth didn’t have time to, like, find machine guns or whatever. One of the (many) weaknesses of Amazons Attack was how lopsided the two forces were, and that the weaker force seemed to be kicking the hell out of the stronger one.

—Hey, this Condi Rice is even hotter than our Condi Rice…

—Wow, did Bush just launch a nuclear missile form the White House itself…?

—Okay, this scene with the Steve flying through clouds of dragons? That would be very expensive to make in a live action movie.

—I like movies in which skeletons use swords.

—The zombie kung fu is pretty sweet; whatever the weaknesses of the film as a story or as a whole work, the action animation is all pretty great.

—And the invisible missiles gag was cute too.

—And there’s Beheading #3.

—Well, I didn’t expect to see The Cheetah in there like that, but that’s kinda neat…


Well, that’s that. In general this film suffers many of the same problems that the previous DC direct-to-DVD movies suffered from.

It’s way too short, so that characterization and motivation often feel forced and flawed. Certainly this isn’t true with the bigger, mythological business—Ares wants to cause war because he’s the god of war, Hippolyte wants to protect her daughter because she’s her daughter—but the relationship between Steve and Diana seems rushed and nonsensical, as does the way they go about her mission of stopping Ares.

It seems a little cheap too, which might seem like an odd criticism considering how genuinely impressive all the animation is, but a viewer can see the creators cutting corners and trimming costs. New York City, for example, looks like a ghost town; maybe 25 people live there, tops.

And, like its predecessors, it’s in a weird place where it seems definitely not for kids, but also not really for adults either, ending up in a place that, for me, is the most unsatisfying place, a movie aimed at no one. There’s a visible calculation about how violent, how bloody, how sexy something can be to get at the absolute edge of acceptable (whatever is defining acceptable here) without going over.

That said, I do think it was the best of these things so far, and I think the general structure, tone and point-of-view would have made for a perfectly decent big budget live action Hollywood blockbuster type superhero movie, assuming it had another twenty minutes to half hour to flesh itself out and perhaps better ground itself in the real world.


Bonus features!

—I listened to the audio commentary, by director Lauren Montgomery (an actual lady!), writer Michael Jelenic (Gail Simone gets a co-writer credit for the story), producer Bruce Timm, and maybe another person or two I can't remember. It's fairly interesting if you're curious about how these things get made exactly, and it's worth noting that a lot of time goes into discussing cuts. It sounds like the movie was at one point an actual not-terrible film, but had to be cut down to the insanely short run time of seventy-some minutes, so a lot of stuff had to go.

While the various filmmakers aren't like, openly bitching about it or anything, I get the sense that they know the movie is way too short and they know what it's lacking and where. Maybe given a longer leash—ninety minutes, more money—they could have made a great Wonder Woman movie. (Regarding money, I still don't understand the math of these things. Why spend money getting an all-star cast, instead of using cheaper, professional voice actors? If they had the lady who did Wondy's voice on JLU, for example, I can't imagine anyone would have not bought this thing.

—There's a short making-of featurette in which Paul Levitz, Dan DiDio and other comic book people appear. I think Denny O'Neil was in it, but he may have been in the Green Lantern featurette. Anyway, Paul Levitz says this is the best version of the Wonder Woman story ever. Paul Levitz is wrong, and he needs to re-read Wonder Woman Archives Vol. 1 again at his earliest convenience.

—What's with all the facial hair at DC Comics?

—There's also a making-of featurette about the next direct-to-DVD movie in the works, Green Lantern: First Flight. It features Hal Jordan, and will be set mostly in space, which is probably a good idea, since New Frontier already told the Hal Jordan origin story.

—Christopher Meloni, TV's Detective Elliot Stabler, will be playing Hal Jordan. I think having a professional actor whose career revolves around playing a police officer being cast to voice a space-police officer is a pretty good idea.

—In the part of the featurette explaining who Green Lantern is and why Hal Jordan is the imaginary boyfriend of so many DC comics fans, they first talk about Alan Scott for a while, noting he's just a regular guy who neither had superpowers or even had to work real hard like Batman to become super. I never really thought of that, but I guess Green Lanterns are like superheroes for lazy people. Anyway, then they talk about what made Hal so cool, how his being a test pilot really captured the zeitgeist of the time, back when so few people had ever even rode in an airplane. That is true. But isn't it also a good argument for why it was way past time to retire Jordan a decade or so ago when DC offed him in favor of a character who had what many Green Lantern fans then considered a cool job? Like, the mystery of riding in airplanes has sort of evaporated, now that more people ride them then passenger trains, right?

I didn't watch the entire thing, so I don't know if they ever got around to talking about John, Guy and Kyle, or how Hal Jordan became an insurance salesman at a time when kids thought that was the coolest job in the world.

Wonder Woman at her not-very-good-est

The ever quotable Rachelle Goguen of Living Between Wednesdays had this to say in her review of writer Gail Simone’s debut issue of Wonder Woman:



Now, a lot of people have said lately that certain writers have "ruined" Wonder Woman. This is simply not true. Wonder Woman was NEVER GOOD IN THE FIRST PLACE. Please tell me when exactly the Wonder Woman title was good. The way some people talk, it's like she's the greatest character of all time, and certain recent Wonder Woman events have reduced her to a two-dimensional, boring character who can't stand on her own. People...this is what she has always been like. I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying it's the truth.



Now, Wonder Woman actually was quite good before, even great. When was that? Well, around 1942 to 1947 or so. There have been high points since, certainly (Much of George Perez’s run, most of Phil Jiminez’s run), but Goguen has a point—Wonder Woman was quite often really terrible.

You know when Wonder Woman was really, really, really not good, though? May of 1958. That’s when Wonder Woman #98 was published, the first book to be collected in Showcase Presents: Wonder Woman Vol. 1, which is jam-packed with Wonder Woman comics that are no good at all.

(I had previously used the amount of time it took DC to get around to publishing a Wonder Woman Showcase volume as possible evidence that Wonder Woman just wasn’t as much of a priority for readers or DC as many of their other heroes are, but, having finally gotten around to reading Showcase Presents: Wonder Woman, I understand that maybe it was because they wanted to publish some volumes of good comics first to establish a market, even if it meant shining the spotlight on lesser luminaries like Jimmy Olsen, Metamorpho and Elongated Man first).

These comics are all written by Robert Kanigher (I know! Bad Kanigher comics, who would have thought such a thing possible?), penciled by Ross Andru and inked by Mike Esposito.

They kind of reboot Wonder Woman continuity, although I’m not sure the words “reboot” and “continuity” existed in 1958. And even if they did, it’s not like you could go online and complain about how Kanigher’s failure to include a giant kangaroo rodeo in his origin of Wonder Woman clearly contradicted Sensation Comics #1, because there was no such thing as the Internet. Back then, the comics blogosphere was actually a comics telegraphesphere, and it took forever to complain about shit.

Anyway, since World War II was long over, Wonder Woman no longer fought Nazis. Nor did she ride on kangas. Or hang out with sorority girls. Or do much of anything terribly cool.

After rescuing a horny, leering pilot from falling into shark-infested oceans, she travels to America to…actually, I’m not sure why she does. But she goes to America, and in the guise of “Diana Prince,” she gets a job for “Military Intelligence,” the branch of the U.S. government devoted to launching rockets, fighting flying saucers, judging costume contests and dealing with giant space birds, a bigger problem than you might think in the late 50’s.

Her supporting cast consisted mainly of Colonel Steve Trevor, whom she seemed to be dating. He was always trying to get her to marry him, and she’s apparently provisionally accepted his proposal, so long as he waits until her “services are no longer needed to battle crime and injustice.”

To most guys, “when all evil has been eradicated in the world” would sound like a brush-off akin to hen “not in this life time” or “when hell freezes over,” but it seems good enough for Trevor. Although he still checks in every other adventure to see if she’s decided to marry him yet.

(This makes me think Wonder Woman had a weird idea of what marriage entailed; even if she intended to tend house, cook Steve three meals a day, have sex with him one to four times a day, have a drink ready for him when he got back from the office every day and raise his kids, given her stupendous Amazonian powers, she should be able to do all of that and still have enough free time to fight evil with. It also makes me think that there would be a lot less hurt feelings in DC comics in the Silver Age if Wonder Woman and Superman would only have set Steve Trevor an Lois Lane up on a date. Those two are perfect for each other!)

Wonder Woman’s teenage boyfriend seemed like a slightly less needy guy, although he was sexually incompatible with. That would be Ronno or Renno (depending on which panel had the spelling error), whom Wondy always just called “Mer-Boy” (Which seems a litter harsh, considering he called her “Wonder Girl” and not, you know, “biped” or “air-breather” or whatever).

Then there’s her mother, the still-blonde Queen Hippolyta, who checks in often from Paradise Island (and plays a bigger role in her Wonder Girl adventures), and General Darnell, who’s not a character so much as the guy who occasionally shows up to tell Trevor to go do something or other with Wonder Woman.

Her Golden Age supporting cast, Etta Candy and the Holiday Girls, only appear in one story in this volume. They’ve been redesigned, so that Etta isn’t obese or wearing a cowboy hat and boots, and the others are each given a one-not personality. In addition to slimmer, smaller, less rambunctious and less funny Etta, there’s Lita Little, Tina Toy and Thelma Tall (When Wonder Woman asks what kind of story they’d like to hear, Etta asks to hear one about candy, Tina one about toys, Lita about a short girl who gets taller, and Thelma about a tall girl who grew shorter! Ha ha ha ha! Comedy gold!)

There’s a real repetitiveness to the stories, which seem to mostly revolve around Wonder Woman fighting different versions of herself



Or giants from different planets and dimensions



Or both at once





In fact, I’m pretty sure Kanigher just had a fishbowl on his desk full of 12 ping pong balls in it, each with a different word written on it, and when it came time to bang out a Wonder Woman script, he’d just reach his hand in and pull one out for a story idea.

Check it out. Now, Showcase Presents: Wonder Woman Vol. 1 is 527 pages long, featuring 20 issues of the Wonder Woman comic and 36 individual stories.

Wonder Woman fights different versions of herself nine times, or in one-fourth of the stories. There are more than nine different fake Wonder Women however, as in addition to robot duplicates and Dimension X doppelgangers, in one story the entire population of Paradise Island dresses up as Wonder Woman and competes against her in a variety of challenges, and in another hundreds of young women dress up as Wonder Woman and pretend to be her to win award money. She also fights a “Tracy’s Day” parade balloon-come-to-life version of herself and a wooden ship’s masthead-come-to-life version of herself.

She also fights giant birds and/or pterodactyls on nine occasions.

She fights aliens from different planets on six different occasions (not counting any of the giants, some of whom hail from different planets).

She fights octopuses five times.

She fights races of giants on four different occasions.

She fights giant electric eels three times.

She fights only two reoccurring super-villains, neither of which appears more than once in this particular volume. They’re the Duke of Deception, a servant of war god Mars who lives on the planet Mars and bedeviled her during the Golden Age, and The Angle Man, who’s menaced Wonder Woman and her fellow heroes since the 1940s, and continues to do so today.

While the volume proved pretty disappointing (Why did they start it after this comic, but end it before this one?), there are still some decent enough stories in here.

My three favorites include “The Invasion of the Sphinx Creatures!” in which Wonder Woman battles an army of four living sphinx-shaped monuments in the desert before they can invade civilization. The sphinxes make for some really weird visuals, particularly when marching all together over sand dunes or battling one another. See, in the peculiar rules of this stor, “Only by a sphinx can a sphinx be defeated!”

Wonder Woman solves the problem by rebuilding a sphinx around herself and somehow animating it to fight the other sphinxes. How she moves it around, I don’t know, but it looks cool as hell.

Then there’s “The Cave of Secret Creatures!” in which Mer-Boy tries to get Wonder Girl to like him, and takes the advice of a friendly mer-girl, and tries to make Wonder Girl jealous by taking her to a mer-person dance and then dancing with other girls right in front of her.

It’s only 12 pages long, but plays like a little crappy teen movie, only with added Wonder Woman weirdness, like the mer-teens having an underwater juke box in their underwater hang out, or the mer-people having underwater park benches to sit on (even though they don’t even have asses to sit on!), or Wonder Girl getting ready for a date by bathing in an “Amazon perfume geyser,” and expressing her frustration with Mer-Boy by throwing a giant clam at him. All is resolved for the best when Mer-Boy is trapped by a giant sea spider.

The most delightful story of all though is a nine-pager entitled “Wonder Girl’s Birthday Party!”, in which the Amazon teen is about to blow out the candles of her birthday cake when her mother tells her of all the trouble Wonder Girl’s had with birthday cakes over the years. When she was just two-years-old and still a Wonder Tot (actually, Wonder Tot would appear until Wonder Woman #122, but this is Wonder Girl as a toddler), she blows her cake so hard that it disappears into orbit, and is seen through a telescope orbiting the earth. In later years, earthquakes and freak tornados would keep Wonder Girl from getting to enjoy her cake, and, at the end of the story first a roc snatches this year’s cake, and she fights off the bird, but not before a giant whale can devour her cake.

These stories aside, however, Showcase Presents: Wonder Woman Vol. 1 really kind of sucks.

Now hurry up and ready Volume 2, DC!

Wonder Woman Wednesdays: The Exotic Exclamations of Steve Trevor

Great Caesar's Ghost. Holy Moley. By the Vishanti. Great Scott. Suffering Sappho.

Some comic book characters have their own personal expressions of shock or dismay that are so catchy and memorable that the expressions have become signature phrases over the years.




















Steve Trevor is not one of those characters.