You know who else should do Wonder Woman? Paul Pope

If that pin-up from 1997's JLA Gallery doesn't convince you, for further evidence, please see everything else Paul Pope has ever done.

Wonder Woman Wednesdays: A Complete History of the Amazon Peoples

(Above: Or you could just read this, which features extensive back-up features written and illustrated by Phil Jimenez which condenses all of Wonder Woman's post-Crisis history into a few nice looking pages. Most of the character images near the end of the post are Jimenez's.)

Yesterday Newsarama.com ran a version of my Complete History of the Amazon Peoples (post-Crisis on Infinite Earths, post-Infinite Crisis/52). But in the off-chance that it just wasn’t wordy and/or nerdy enough for you, I’ve decide to present a previous, longer, more detailed version here, complete with some additional thoughts that just occurred to me in the last day or so, for the most masochistic among you. (Plus, it’s Wonder Woman Wednesday here at EDILW, so Amazon history seems especially apropos). Enjoy!

A Complete History of the Amazon Peoples

The history of the Amazons began over 30,000 years ago, but don’t worry, I’ll be sticking to the highlights only here. Not much happened those first 27,000 years of interest anyway.

The Amazons’ story begins with a pregnant woman killed by her mate. Gaea, goddess of the Earth, took pity on the slain woman, and placed the victim’s soul in a well, known as the Well of Souls. Because it was a well in which souls were kept, you see. Over the millennia, Gaea would place the souls of all women unjustly killed by men into the well.

In 1200 B.C., the Olympian goddesses Artemis, Athena, Aphrodite, Demeter and Hestia pooled their powers to create the Amazons, their very own, all-female race of human beings, each reincarnated from one of the souls from Gaea’s well.

Three thousand women strong, the Amazons founded the city-state Themyscria in Asia Minor, and looked to sister-queens Hippolyta and Antiope for leadership. The Olympian war god Ares sent Heracles and an army of men to Themyscria, where he proceeded to seduce Hippolyta, and, in short order, ransack the city and enslave it’s populace.

The defeat split the Amazons into two factions. Antiope lead the Amazons bent on vengeance into Greece after Heracles, while Hippolyta and her followers fled across the Atlantic, rebuilding Themyscira on an island in the Bermuda Triangle that was concealed by storm clouds. (It was a pretty nice place, and would later gain the nickname “Paradise Island”).

There, hidden form the rest of the outside world, Hippolyta’s Amazons were granted immortality by the goddesses and were charged with the sacred task of guarding “Doom’s Doorway,” which lead to Pandora’s Box, buried beneath the island. The Amazons took to wearing bracelets, symbols of their defeat and enslavement at the hands of men, and spent centuries in seclusion, with no man setting foot on the island.

Antiope’s faction, meanwhile, settled in Egypt, founding their own city-state of Bana-Mighdall, hidden from the outside world by sandstorms. They remained mortal, and devoted themselves to the arts of war and killing, renting themselves out as assassins and mercenaries.

A few millennia later, the Amazons started getting occasional visitors, perhaps the most notable one being U.S. pilot Diana Trevor, who crash-landed there, and joining the community, eventually giving her life in a battle against monsters from the island’s box. In honor of her, her uniform and medals were turned into a coat-of-arms (And that’s why Wonder Woman’s costume looks like the U.S. flag, got it?).




World relations took a giant leap forward when Ares launched a plot to destroy the world. Hippolyta decreed a contest to choose the single greatest warrior to send to so-called “Patriarch’s World” to challenge Ares. Her own daughter Diana, magically created out of clay and gifted by the goddesses and the god Mercury with life and super-powers, entered the contest in disguise and won.

She became known as “Wonder Woman,” fighting against Ares, joining the Justice League of America, and gradually becoming not only a superhero, but also an ambassador of the Amazonian way of life and, eventually, a political diplomat representing Themyscria in the United Nations. (For more on the contest, struggle against Ares and Diana’s debut in the U.S., see trade paperbacks Wonder Woman: Gods and Mortals and Wonder Woman: Challenge of the Gods by George Perez and various; and keep in mind Infinite Crisis knocked large swathes of these stories, out of continuity, and we’re not supposed to mentally rewrite them while rereading so that they’re set about a decade earlier than they are in the actual books. Or something).

Gradually the shores of Themyscira were opened up to the outside world, and Hippolyta and other Amazons journeyed into the United States, and the goddess Circe started causing no end of trouble, initiating a “War of the Gods,” reuniting the Antiope’s descendants with the Themysciran Amazons (which leads to a civil war), and sending the whole island into another dimension for a time—ten years for those in the dimension, about one year time for those not in that dimension).

She wasn’t the only evil divinity to cause problems on Paradise Island. Apokoliptian dictator and self-proclaimed dark god Darkseid invaded Themyscira with his armies, killing over a thousand Amazons (To witness the conflict firsthand, check out Wonder Woman: Second Genesis by John Byrne).

Not long after, the Amazons went to war again, this time in another civil war between the Bana-Midghdall faction and those who have lived on the island for centuries. The conflict was settled only when Hippolyta and Diana decided to end the monarchy, renouncing their queenship and princessship (um, is that even a word?) for a more demoractic form of government. Hippolyta’s longtime friend and confidant Phillipus becomes the island’s leader, under the title of Chancellor (This round of Amazonian strife can be read about in Wonder Woman: Paradise Lost and Wonder Woman: Paradise Found by Phil Jimenez and various others).

But wait, there’s more war yet to come! The Amazons joined force with the unlikely alliance of President Lex Luthor’s United States, Superman and heroes of earth, and Darkseid’s Apokolips in a battle against Imperiex in a sort of war of the worlds (That’s Our Worlds at War to us readers here on Earth-Prime; recently re-collected from two fat trades into one giant, fat Complete Edition). Many of them lost their lives, including Hippolyta.

Afterwards, Themyscria was once again transformed, this time into a sort of university devoted to cultural exchange and learning, open to men, women and intelligent creatures from all of existence. The architecture remained Greco-Roman, but had a bit of a sci-fi twist, accentuated by the fact that the island included an archipelago of smaller islands which floated in the air. Now rather than a single Wonder Woman attempting to spread peace and Amazon ideals throughout the world, the world could come to Themyscira, and the Amazons could promote peace through open engagement, their most open engagement since they’d left Europe millennia before.

This didn’t last long either. The floating islands were destroyed in a fight between Hera and Zeus, and the Amazons again began to draw inward, just as the U.S.A. was parking battleships nearby and contemplating invasion. They were beat to it by the armies of OMAC cyborgs, lead by the hidden, artificially intelligent Brother Eye, which sent them to Themyscira to destroy Wonder Woman, revenge for her killing of Brother Eye’s boss, Maxwell Lord who (Superboy punch!) it turns out was actually an evil scumbag bent on the eradication of metahumans and world domination by his own Checkmate organization all along, and not the slick but noble leader who legitimized the Justice League as a world power with official status years ago (These stories are collected in trade, but I can’t in good conscience recommend anything past the point in which Diana regains her eyesight because, come on? OMACs? Max is a villain? Pfft).

While the Amazons fought back against the OMACs with machine guns, swords and their own ultimate weapon, the Purple Death Ray, Wonder Woman brought an end to hostilities when she realized there were innocent people trapped inside the OMACs. She left the island, while Themyscria (and everyone on it) disappeared for over a year, a year in which Wonder Woman herself would be little seen.




Some Amazon heroines of note include:



HIPPOLYTA: Queen of the Amazons, mother of Diana and, in a time travel paradox the likes of which could only occur in the DCU, she became both her daughter’s successor and predecessor in the role of Wonder Woman. When Diana temporarily died and ascended to Olympus to become the Goddess of Truth, a death Hippolyta sought to avoid by stripping Diana of the title of Wonder Woman, Hippolyta donned a star-spangled skirt and golden eagle bustier to become the second Wonder Woman, serving a brief stint with the Justice League. She also traveled back in time to the year 1942, retroactively becoming the first heroine to go by the name Wonder Woman, when she helped the Justice Society of America in their battles against the Axis Powers. Known as “Polly” to her friends like Wildcat, Jay Garrick and Alan Scott, she fought battles against Stalker in the ‘40s (The Justice Society Returns! by David S. Goyer, James Robinson, Geoff Johns and about 40 other writers and artists), and fifth-dimensional invaders in the present (JLA: Justice For All by Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, et al).

When the JSA reformed at Sand Hawkins’ urging, Polly became a reserve member, helping out in their first battle against the dark lord Mordru (JSA: Justice Be Done). She died while leading the Amazons into the battle during the Imperiex War. She was next spotted in Jodi Picoult’s unreadable Wonder Woman and Amazons Attack, apparently brought back to life by Circe, totally insane and once again the queen of the Amazons.



ARTEMIS: A member of the mortal, Bana-Mighdall Amazons descended from Antiope, Artemis participated in wars against Hippolyta’s Amazons before her people settled their own part of Themyscria. When Hippolyta conceived of a second contest to see if Diana was still fit to be Wonder Woman (part of her plan to avoid Diana’s death in battle, which was prophesied to her), Artemis claimed the prize, and she journeyed to America to serve as the new Wonder Woman (Yes, this was about the time Kyle Rayner became Green Lantern, Connor Hawke became Green Arrow, John-Paul Valley became Batman and four dudes became Superman, why do you ask?), while Diana changed into a weird biker shorts, bra and jacket combo to lead her faction of the then-splintered Justice League, going as just plain old “Diana.”

Artemis, who lacked Diana’s super-powers and possessed a hot head and thirst for violence that no previous Wonder Woman was saddled with, died in a battle against the White Magician (Much of this era’s important stories are collected in Wonder Woman: The Contest by William Messner-Loebs and Mike Deodato). She was later rescued from Hades and returned to life. Since then she served as her people’s representative in Amazon government and as Themyscira’s Minister of Defense. She disappeared with Themyscira during the last crisis with a capital C, and has recently been seen in Amazons Attack, exchanging glances with Phillipus behind Hippolyte’s back and presumably, holding her finger to her ear and making the coo-coo sign whenever her queen wasn’t looking).



DONNA TROY: You know what, I don’t have any idea. And I don’t think anyone else does either, which has become a plot point in Countdown. Donna Troy’s existence was originally forced because Wonder Girl was appearing in Teen Titans along with sidekicks like Robin and Aqualad (Showcase Presents: Teen Titans Vol. 1, although Wonder Girl wasn’t actually Wonder Woman’s sidekick; rather, she was like the pre-Crisis Superboy, the star of Wonder Woman stories from when she was a girl. Oops. It’s a mistake DC has been fixing and re-fixing pretty much ever since, the last attempt being the Infinite Crisis lead-in DC Presents: The Return of Donna Troy (although, again, Countdown implies that wasn’t the last we’ve heard of Donna’s origins, perhaps for reasons discussed below)

At any rate, I think she’s still a magical twin of Diana, created to be her playmate, but captured by Dark Angel (recently seen in Supergirl) and forced to live a series of alternate lives, each full of tragedy. She was rescued by the Titans of Myth, who gave her powers and training before returning her to Earth, where she founded the Teen Titans as Wonder Girl, changed her codename and costume repeatedly (From Wonder Girl to Troia to Darkstar back to Troia to Wonder Woman for about a week and then back to Troia again), married, had a child, divorced, lost her son and ex-husband in a car crash, rejoined the Titans, was murdered by a Superman Robot, came back to life in deep space thinking herself one of the Titans of myth, lead a group of heroes to fight Alexander Luthor’s giant fingers in the middle of the universe, hung out in her swanky new space-faring base New Cronus talking to the late Harbinger’s continuity ball, took the name Wonder Woman for a few weeks around the time Black Adam was killing civilians by the millions, and she was last seen in the company of Jason Todd in Washington D.C. (New Teen Titans: Who Is Donna Troy?, Teen Titans/Outsiders: The Death and Return of Donna Troy and Infinite Crisis contain most of the pertinent parts of that complicated history, or at least readable recaps).

The interesting thing about poor Donna's origin is that, aside from needing to think up an origin to explain her existence in the first place, all of her complications as a character stemmed from Crisis on Infinite Earths, which reset Wonder Woman's timeline, so that she didn't appear until several years after the new "heroic age" had begun (that is, several years after Superman and Batman started their careers, and the Justice League was about to move into it's JLI incarnation). All the magical twin, abducted by Titans business was in reaction to the fact that Wonder Girl predated Wonder Woman (to solve all that, DC could have just rebooted Donna and the Titans alongside Wonder Woman back in the aftermath of COIE. One of the many rejiggerings of Infinite Crisis was that Wonder Woman was now a founder of the Justice League again, which meant she arrived in Man's World around the time Superman and Batman were debuting now. I didn't think much of it at the time, being so confused as to why DC was bumping all of their post-Crisis Wonder Woman/JLA stories out of continuity to replace them with all their older, worse stuff (I don't care how much anyone likes the Satellite Era, you can't honestly tell me the stories were better written than those of the JLI or Watchtower Eras). But if Wonder Woman was active during the first year or so of DC's second "heroic age," then that means she does indeed predate Donna Troy's Wonder Girl again, and we don't need any of that Titans of Myth/Dark Angel stuff anymore. DC can just revert back to their original origin for her. But...they haven't, have they? Or, if they have, nobody's mentioned it or did a story for it. In fact, the last Donna Troy origin story was the miniseries preceding Infinite Crisis, the awkwardly titled DC Presents: The Return of Donna Troy, but Phil Jiminez, Jose Garcia-Lopez and George freaking Perez, released just months before the continuity within it was going to maybe be altered, knocking it out of canon. Why on earth would you hire those three titanic talents to craft an excellent series (um, by Donna Troy standars, anyway), and then knock it out of canon immediately afteward? If it is out of canon. Like I said, there's been no indication that Donna's reverted to her pre-Crisis(On Infinite Earths) origin know that Wonder Woman's arrival was shunted backwards down the DC timeline, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to have Donna become Wonder Girl and not be inspired by Diana now that Diana was around as Wonder Woman at the same time she became Wonder Girl does it?



FURY: Helena Kosmatos’s father was killed during the Italian invasion of Greece during World War II, and seeking vengeance, she became possessed of the power of the mythological furies. Taking the name Fury, she donned a suit of golden mail to fight against fascism and the Nazis as part of the Young All-Stars, the probationary, youth faction of the war-time All-Star Squadron. Helena had super strength and the ability to fly thanks to the spirit of the Fury Tisiphone. The downside? The spirit would occasionally transform her, turning Helena into a winged, hooved monster. That big gray, bat-winged monster you see in Amazon battle scenes now and then? That’s Helena. While not an Amazon by birth, she's been living on the island for quite a while now. (None of these stories are available in trade because there is no God; that’s the only explanation for why All-Star Squadron is not available in trade that I can think of).





WONDER GIRL: Cassandra Sandsmark, daughter of Gateway City-based archaeologist Helena Sandsmark, assumed the role of Wonder Girl after swiping the Sandals of Hermes and Gauntlet of Atlas to help Diana take on a clone of Doomsday (Wonder Woman: Lifelines). Upon meeting Zeus in person, she asked for powers of her own, a request the god complied with, giving her superstrength and the ability to fly. After years of wondering who her real father was, it was eventually revealed why Zeus was so generous with the powers—he’s her father.

A former leader of the now-defunct group Young Justice, Cassie is currently a member of the Teen Titans. Though technically an American citizen and a demigod (an Olympian-American?), Wonder Girl was trained by Artemis and given the blessing to use the “Wonder” name by both Diana and Donna, making her something of an honorary Amazon.

You Know Who Should Write Wonder Woman? Adam Warren

I am not, nor have I ever been, a DC Comics editor. But I do have a lot of opinions about DC Comics, and I do have a blog, two things that, in combination, inevitably leads to a lot of armchair editing of DC Comics, which is practically the same thing, only I don’t get paid and my opinions and decisions are never reflected in the actual comics.

But other than that? Pretty much the same thing.

With my credentials thus established, please, take it from me—one of the hardest decisions DC editors have to make is which creators to hire to work on their characters, and these decisions become all the more difficult when it comes to a character like Wonder Woman, which is one of the company’s (and comics’) most recognizable and important characters, but lacks the resiliency of, say, Batman or Superman, characters who can support a dozen simultaneous titles.

For example, say you’ve just done away with your multiverse in a year-long series, and you’re going to completely reboot Wonder Woman’s fictional history, divorcing her from her World War II roots in an attempt to make her character as timeless as that of Batman, Superman or Spider-Man. Who do you trust with this monumental task? Whoever it was that said, “Why not let George Perez handle it?” seems to have chosen wisely; Perez lost a bit of the good stuff—Steve Trevor as love interest and Etta Candy as sidekick—but otherwise did a pretty perfect job.

Or say you’re relaunching your entire line of universe comic books with a reader-friendly event (Like “One Year Later”) flowing out of a soft(er) continuity reboot (The Infinite Crisis multiverse re-creation), who do you trust to make sense out of these various shuffles between what’s canon and what’s not, while simultaneously redefining the character for a new generation of readers? Maybe that guy who writes for TV, and did a 12 issue delay-plagued Marvel maxiseries once?

You see how simply choosing the wrong writer can lead to a real mess, like the one the Wonder Woman monthly is currently in (Relaunching with a new number one in June of last year, only three issues shipped in 2006, and an accelerated publishing schedule is just now catching the title up to where it should be—#12—although sales have fallen from over 130,000 with #1 to about 59,000 with #8).

Fortunately, there’s an easier way for DC editors to make these decisions. They could just ask me who should write their titles, and I’ll tell them.

For example, who should write Wonder Woman?

Adam Warren, that’s who.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know Gail Simone has already been announced as the next regular writer of the series, a state of affairs I’m eagerly looking forward to, and doing these Wonder Woman Wednesdays posts as a means of counting down to.

But I still say Adam Warren for Wonder Woman. If not the monthly, then certainly on a one-shot. Or miniseries. Or original graphic novel. Or as the next writer of Wonder Woman, after Simone leaves.

What would make Warren such an ideal Wonder Woman writer? Wait, did I say writer? I did, didn’t I? Well, I didn’t mean he should just write it, he should also pencil the title.

Let’s take Warren’s art first. I’ve always enjoyed Warren’s art style, which is obviously quite heavily influenced by anime and manga (and was decades ago, back when most of America’s biggest digest-devouring Naruto-ites hadn’t yet learned to read). I think it’s safe to say that American readers are now quite ready to embrace such an artistic style en masse, and that Warren’s manga-esque look is a style that is probably even more likely to appeal to more people than even the work of such popular past Wonder Woman artists as Perez, Phil Jimenez and John Byrne.

And it’s worth noting that, with Warren, it’s not just an affectation, a cynically adopted surface gloss to his work—the man understands the speed line, the big eye, the dewy eye and the reversion to super-deformity, but he also understands how to build a page, how to progress a story from panel to panel and how to lead a reader's eyes through his pages. He can draw the way manga artists draw, not just draw images that resemble those drawn by manga artists (If that makes sense).

What would a Adam Warren Wonder Woman look like?

I have no idea; I couldn’t find any images of a Warren Wonder Woman on the world wide web, but I did find these, all from his deviantART gallery, and they at least give us a good idea of how cool a Warren drawn Wonder Woman comic would likely be:



(There you have a drawing of a super-strong, flying DC superheroine who likes wearing red, white and blue.)




(Here’s Marvel’s Valkyrie, who wears a bathing suit and bracelets, not unlike Wondy.)




(And there’s a convention sketch of Medusa, a mythological character who has come to blows with Wonder Woman on more than one occasion.)


But let’s focus on writing for a second.

Warren’s latest non-Iron Man work has been Empowered, which stars a superheroine with an unfortunate habit of getting tied up and gagged during almost every adventure. In other words, her adventures tend to involve an awful lot of bondage, as do Wonder Woman’s. Or, at least, as Wonder Woman’s adventures used to—the innocent bondage of the Golden Age Wonder Woman was one of the elements Perez ditched in his relaunch, and which never seemed to return to the post-Crisis Wonder Woman’s adventures to the same extent that it was present in the Marston/Peters stories.

As anyone who’s read Empowered—and if you haven’t, you should; how many times do I have to recommend the damn book before you read it?—can attest, Warren has a fairly unique ability to be both sexually exploitive and respectful at the exact same time. His characters are in on the joke, and he lets us in on the joke, and his bondage and other sexual imagery is thus almost always of the sort that works on several levels simultaneously.

For example, there's this cover, from a Warren-written, Warren-illustrated Gen 13 story:

(Better drawn than Turner's Power Girl, less icky than that "Heroes For Hentai" cover)

Look, it's a sexy drawing of sexy ladies, naked, and tied up in what appears to be Hot Wheel tracks. That's hawt. And totally ridiculous. And isn't it ridiculous that people—inculding us—find it hot? And it's all a fantasy of that dunderhead in the foreground's anyway, inspired by exploitation films. And he's being punched in the face, and thus being punished for the sordid Hollywood-fueled fantasty. And look, there's Lucky Charms swimmng around his head, so this is like a cartoon, and thus not to be taken too seriously anyway.

Warren did the having-your-cheesecake-and-eating-it-too trick that he pulls off on almost every page of Empowered throughout his too-brief, 18-issue run on Gen 13. Which includes, for the completists out there, not only Gen 13 #60-#77, but also a two-issue fill-in (#43 and #44), Gen 13 Bootleg #8-#10 (the must-red “Grunge: The Movie” arc, available in trade, and the source of the above cover) and miniseries Gen 13: Magical Drama Queen Roxy. (All of which would add up to a swell omnibus, wouldn't it?).

He also repeatedly examined stereotypical tropes of various genres, particularly the superhero genre, but also manga, anime, and kung fu movies, as well as comic books in general, pop music and technology. It was a rib-tickling, navel-gazing comic book narrative about comic book narrative. All the while featuring sexy women, always scantily clad, and often in states of undress (That was kind of Fairchild's whole deal, wasn't it?). Warren may pack his stories with fan service, but it's the thinking man's fan service, and that makes all the difference.

I for one would love to see what Warren could do with the weird sexual politics—both overt and naïve—within the Wonder Woman mythos, as well as wacky Amazon technology and the DC Universe in general. (Is that single Titans Elseworlds special really Warren’s only DC work to date?)

And I'm willing to bet so would a lot of other readers, beyond the 20-30,000 people who will read Wonder Woman every month no matter who's writing and drawing it.

Finally, on a more superficial (and thus easier to communicate) level, there’s the fact that Empowered is by far the single best superheroine bondage narrative going, and doesn’t Wonder Woman deserve to have the creator of the best superheroine bondage narrative telling her story?

Similarly, Gen 13 featured an Amazonian bombshell with super-strength and super-smarts in Fairchild. And isn’t Fairchild but an off-brand version of Wonder Woman?

And, finally, if Warren could write so many well-realized female leads—Empowered, Fairchild and the other Gen 13 girls, the Dirty Pair—throughout his career, then certainly he could handle comics’ number one female lead, right?

Wonder Woman Wednesdays: Diana's Decathalon...of Doom!

The cover of Wonder Woman #148 teases "a contest the fearless Amazon cannot possibly win!...Olympics of Doom!"

Pfft. That just goes to show what the cover blurb writer knows.

Wonder Woman not only survived the Olympics of Doom but she thrives on the Olympics of Doom, helping the Themysciran team earn more than twice as many gold metals as their closest competitors, Atlantis (The Atlantean team generally dominates the swimming events, but can't hang with the surface-worlders in most other events, particularly in the Winter Olympics of Doom).

Diana's best event? The decathalon, which, in the Olympics of Doom, consists of ten very different sports than the decatholon you've seen in the plain old Olympics (the ones which have nothing to do with doom).

In addition to ESCALATOR DINOSAUR JOUSTING, there's







FENCING









SWIMMING









EQUESTRIAN










RIFLERY









BASEBALL









BOXING








SKIING










WHATEVER THE HELL THIS IS





and, of course, her personal favorite,







BOWLING

Wonder Woman Wednesdays: A Few Amazonian Inventions

Amazon Princess and young scientist Diana once invented a purple healing ray to save the life of grievously wounded U.S. pilot Steve Trevor. She named her fantastic invention The Purple Healing Ray, on account of the fact that it was a purplish ray that could heal people.

It is probably Amazonian science’s most well known contribution to World War II-era super-science, rivaled only by the mental radio, a form of artificial telepathy used by Amazons to communicate with one another (and with their allies).

Yet these famous devices are hardly the only examples of awkwardly named Amazon inventions, and the just-as-awkwardly named inventions of their allies and enemies.

Let’s take a look at some of the other fantastic examples of technology that Princess Diana had encountered in her earliest adventures:


The AS-R beam — Even more potent than the purple healing ray, the “atomic structure reassembly beam” can be used to reassemble the atoms of anything organic or inorganic which has been damaged or destroyed. The original beam generator, and the knowledge of how to build it, was apparently lost during the Crisis On Infinite Earths. Otherwise, Diana could have just reassembled her mother when she died during the conflict with Imperiex.


Amozonium – The hardest substance known to man. Well, women. This is what Wonder Woman’s bracelets were made out of. Clearly, it’s bulletproof.


Elastic Amozonium, a.k.a. Amazsilikon — A type of Amozonium that is more stretchable and verstaitle, and can be made invisible. This is what Wonder Woman’s robot plane/invisible jet were made out of.


Electro-chemical space transformer – An invention of Wonder Woman and her foe-turned-friend Paula von Gunther’s that changes the atomic structure of a human body and “rearranges its spatial relativity in the universe, as explained by Professor Einstein.” It’s also the easiest way to get Venus. See diagram above.


Amazon trans-materialization machine — A teleportation machine, based on principals similar to that of the electro-chemical space transformer.


Futuro-scope — A device that allows Amazons to see the future. Kind of self-explanatory, really. Built (and patented!) long before T.O. Morrow built his own looking-into-the-future machine.


Amazon omni-wave transmitter — A robot plane-mounted device that picks up any and all distress signals, no matter what wavelength they might be sent on.


Uni-televisior — A sort of television phone that allows for teleconferencing, invented during or before World War II…decades before Man’s World would invent their own version.


S-time bomb — A bomb capable of ending the world, once employed in a threat by which alien crystal creature Andro. While it remains unproven, some in Man’s World have hypothesized that the “S” stands for “Shit-hitting-the-fan.”


De-activating electronic generator – A device that generates “an interfering electronic wave that will stop any electric current in the world.” Developed and employed by a Mr. Keen, a former railroad magnate who adopted the colorful costumed criminal identity of “Anti Electric” in an attempt to hold the world hostage. Sorta like an electro-magnetic pulse, but Keen was generating them back before EMPs were cool.


The war-prevento machine — A machine that prevents war. Invented by the curiously named Dr. Cerebrum, the fantastic device used “somnatic rays to render warmakers unconscious long enough for us to capture them and their armies.” So I guess it’s not really a war-prevento machine as a “casualty-reduco machine” or a “sleep-inducing weapon.” Dr. Cerebrum learns this the hard way, when Dr. Psycho stole the device to, in his words, “enslave and kill the innocent people of the world!” Oh, Dr. Psycho!


Moron hormone — The hormone that makes people stupid. Swear to God. Don’t look at me. Talk to William Moultan Marston. What, he’s dead? Well, put him under the AS-R beam and then ask him.

Womania germ — An insidious form of germ warfare pioneered by Japanese scientists during WWII. The Womania germ is delivered by the bite of, um, “Jap gnats” and, when it enters a woman’s blood stream, it drives her into a murderous rage to kill all men. Oddly, though a Japanese invention, it has an English-sounding name. Huh.

I don't care what anybody else says,

this is totally hot:










And so's this:

Wonder Woman Wednesdays: More Free Advice for Gail Simone

Dear Gail Simone,

Congratulations on getting the assignment to write DC’s Wonder Woman ongoing! I can’t tell you how excited I am about your impending run, mostly because the last two runs on the book have been—how can I put this nicely?—wretched, and DC seems to have absolutely no idea what to do with the third point of their Trinity.

As you’re busy researching the hell out of Wonder Woman and trying to make sense out of the half-dozen reboots and retcons that she and her on-again, off-again sidekick Donna Troy have experienced, I thought I’d do my part to help out.

Last week, I suggested some of Wondy’s lesser rogues to consider using during your run.

But this week, I just have one word for you.

Well, actually, I have seventy-six words for you. Ready? Here they are:

Air pirates, kangas, telepathic radio, The American Adolf, bondage, Devastation, The Unknown, The Human Tank, Angle Man, Man-Fish, Seal Men, Cloud Men, Christopher Columbus and the Kronosaurus, Merman (formerly Mer-boy) vs. Zauriel as Bird-boy analogue, Queen Flamina, Queen Sharkeeta, Queen Clea vs. King Orin, Atomic Kingdom U-235, Villainy Incorporated, the Grenade Gang, Gundra, spanking, The Mask, Chang Tzu the Fifth, Jumpa, The Prairie Pirates, The Paper-Man, Veronica Cale, Eviless the Saturnarian Slaver, Pegasus, Captain Marvel team-up and Mouse Man.


Thanks,
Caleb

Wonder Woman Wednesdays: Rogues Requests For Gail Simone

I’ve been reading Ami Angelwings’ blog a lot lately, and despite the fact that I don’t really speak emoticon very well, Ms. Angelwings had a very good point about the usage of Circe in the DCU lately, which she made in discussing last week’s Amazon-related comics:



This is Circe's FOURTH "big reveal" scene in the past year. >:|

In the first Wonder Woman arc she was revealed as the villain. And then in the second arc, she was revealed as the villain. And then in Manhunter just last week, she was revealed as the villain.

And she's revealed as the villain again here. >.<;;

Does DC realize that Wonder Woman has OTHER villains!? >:O




That’s a great question.

A better one still might be does Gail Simone realize that Wonder Woman has other villains? Because Ms. Simone is going to be taking the title over soon, around about the time I like to refer to as When I Will Start Spending Money on Wonder Woman Comics Again.

The answer is, of course, yes. Simone surely knows about Dr. Psycho, as Simone has become the definitive Dr. Psycho writer over the past few years (Although, to be fair, there have only been, like, three writers to use him in that time).

And she definitely knows about Giganta, who she used in The All-New Atom, as both a villain and a love interest (and a woman whose power is to grow is a perfect villain/love interest for a man whose power is to shrink).

And I’m willing to bet she knows about The Cheetah, or at least the current version of the character, whom she briefly wrote during her short run on a Superman book.

But that’s only four villains, and probably four of Wondy’s least interesting bad guys. How deep is Simone’s knowledge of Wonder Woman’s extensively awesome rogue’s gallery? I’d like to think hella-deep, because Simone’s currently locked in a tower with every Wonder Woman story ever published, from Marston to Perez to Jimenez to Rucka, and everything in between.

But then, that may just be wishful thinking.

See, I once saw Simone confess to ignorance of who The Velvet Tiger was in a Birds of Prey-related Newsarama.com comments thread, and considering the fact that Velvet Tiger is, like, the only Barbara Gordon rogue, I don’t want to get my hopes up too much about Simone turning out to be some sort of Wonder Woman scholar.

So the focus of today’s installment Wonder Woman Wednesdays?

Wonder Woman villains other than Circe that Gail Simone should strongly consider using. (If you’re not Gail Simone yourself, please feel free to read along anyway).

Ready?

Hola!






(That’s The Fireworks Man on the far right, in his Catherine wheel form)

THE FIREWORKS MAN, aka THE HUMAN FIREWORKS: The Fireworks Man was a man with all the powers of fireworks, like the ability to fly through the air, and transform into a giant Catherine wheel, and, um, frighten dogs, and, uh, inspire large summer outdoor gatherings, and…hurt your eyes…if you look at him too long…?

Okay, so he’s pretty lame, but come on Ms. Simone, you do like a challenge don’t you? He’s never taken Wonder Woman out, but he did temporarily blind her, making it slightly less impossible for Mouse Man (more on him below) to get the better of her.







HYPNOTA THE GREAT: After an accidental gunshot wound to the head sent Hypnota to the hospital, a specialized surgeon was called in to perform a delicate operation which involved her “emotion centers.” While she was recovering, nurses noticed a blue ray emanating from Hypnota’s eyes.

The surgeon immediately diagnoses the problem: “Great zounds! That’s the blue electric ray of dominance from Hypnota’s mid-brain — my operations must have released it!”

I only have a bachelor’s degree in English, so I’m afraid I’m ill-suited to offer an opinion on whether or not Hypnota’s origin is medically sound or not. We’ll just have to take the comic book’s word for it.

At any rate, Hypnota disguised herself as a man with a French accent and cool goatee and moustache, and used her ray in her stage act—as well as to force her twin sister Serva to serve her, and to cultivate a lucrative trade in “mental slaves.” A particularly lucrative market for mental slaves was the planet Saturn, but after Wonder Woman busted up the Saturarian slave racket, Hypnota focused on trying to start a war between Saturn and Earth (Which, come to think of it, might have ended World War II faster, if the Axis and the Allies had to join forces to repel the Saturnarians).

Hypnota was a welcome addition to Wonder Woman’s Golden Age rogues gallery because she was essentially a cross-dresser, and, despite all the spanking, submission and domination in the Wonder Woman stories of the era, that was a kink that was sorely underrepresented. In fact, aside from Dr. Poison, I think Hypnota was maybe the first of Wondy’s cross-dressing foes? Also, her whole deal revolved around domination and submission like, you know, all Wonder Woman villains back in the good old days.

Once she was outted as a she, however, she pretty much just resembled a bearded lady. And as anyone who’s read Steve Rude’s The Moth or Linda Medley’s highly recommended Castle Waiting can readily attest, that’s hot.

I’m not sure if Hypnota ever made it into the post-Crisis DCU, but if not, you’re the woman to do it, Ms. Simone!

And considering what we know about Saturn from Jemm, Son of Saturn and John Ostrander’s Martian Manhunter, it would be interesting to see interplanetary relations between the two planet revisited now that Wonder Woman is set in a shared universe, instead of it’s own unique universe, as in the Golden Age.







THE BLUE SNOWMAN: Byrna Brilyant was a school teacher in the small, farming town named Fair Weather Valley. With a name like that, it was pretty much begging that someone attack it with a “telescopic snow ray” that creates “blue snow” capable of “freezing” everything it touches into blue statues. The only antidote to the freezing effect was a special chemical possessed only by an extortionist calling himself The Blue Snowman, who demanded the farmers pay him lots of money, or lose their crops to blue snow.

This is, of course, a very bad use of technology, along the lines of Mirror Master using his revolutionary means of transportation to rob banks. If you’ve got a blue snow ray, you could probably make more selling the tech to the U.S. military (or that of any country) or, if your heart’s totally set on extortion, extorting, I don’t know, Washington D. C. or New York City, instead of Generic Farmtown, U.S.A.

At any rate, when word of the freak blue blizzards reach the American military, Steve Trevor and his secretary swoop into action and Wonder Woman eventually unmasks the Snow Man, who turns out to be no man, but a woman, Ms. Brilyant, the daughter of a scientist who invented the ray.

This is cool because it introduces another cross-dressing villainess into Wonder Woman’s rogue’s gallery. Also the Blue Snow Man was a woman wearing a man-suit in 1946—Eat it, Ronin!

The Blue Snow Man was part of the original Villany, Inc. line-up (pictured way up top there), but I haven’t heard anything about him/her since. I don’t know if she even exists post-Crisis and, if not, she should.







THE CRIMSON CENTIPEDE: In Wonder Woman #169, Roman war god Mars unleashed crazy-ass villain “Crimson Centipede” upon Earth, with the mission to begin a “new Golden Age of Villainy.” It didn’t last long, as this was the first and only appearance of C.C. The only one until you bring us more Crimson Centipede action, anyway, Ms. Simone.

Points to cover in your story: Why is he called the Crimson Centipede, instead of, oh, Centipede Man? I have a hard time believing that name was already taken, and he’s clearly not actually a red centipede, but a green centipede man. Also, why is he the Crimson Centipede, and not just the Red Centipede? And where did he get that costume? A scene of him suiting up would be quite welcome; I envision a ten-page sequence of panel after panel of sleeves being pulled over arms, and feet going into boots.

I haven’t actually read this story, but I love the cover. At first I thought he just walloped Wondy with sixteen fists at once, but the more I think about it, I’m guessing he gave her a series of eight double-uppercuts, starting with the lowest set of arms and punching her up to the next set of fists until he runs out of fists, and then she goes down like a ton of bricks.






MOUSE MAN: If you’re anything like me, at one time or another you’ve probably found yourself wondering if it were possible for a set of super-powers to be more useless than those of the original Ant-Man, who had the ability to shrink to the size of an ant and the ability to control ants.

The answer is yes, it is possible to have lamer powers. You could shrink to the size of a mouse, which is small enough to be weak and easy to step on, but not small enough to be practically invisible, like an ant. And have the ability to control mice which, okay, is better than not being able to control anything, but at least some ants can fly, so you can keep up with other superheroes, whereas mice just kinda scurry around.

These are the powers of Mouse Man, who came face-to-shin with Wonder Woman a couple times in the late ‘60s.

He wears a dumb-ass mouse costume (if that’s not redundant; are there any totally kick-ass mouse costumes out there?) and commits crimes utilizing his tiny size and command of mice and rats (Much more useful, though it didn’t save the Ratcatcher in Infinite Crisis).

He even succeeded in capturing Wonder Woman once, but it ended up simply being a result of Wondy employing Classic Wonder Woman Crime-Fighting Strategy #1: Allow yourself to be taken captive so the bad guy will lead you back to his or her headquarters and/or superiors so you can beat them all up at once.

I may not be selling Mouse Man very well here, but I’d still like to see you take a crack at him Ms. Simone, mainly because you’ve proven to be quite a Catman writer over the course of Villains United and Secret Six, and I think there’s a cool Mouse Man vs. Catman story (or seven) to be told.





Finally, how about


THIS GUY:

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.

Wonder Woman Wednesdays: First Appearances vs. Last Appearances

I don’t know if I’m the first person in the entire history of the Internet to point this out or not, but Wonder Woman’s original Golden Age adventures were really, really, really, really weird.

I recently checked out Wonder Woman Archives Vol. 1 from my local library because, well, I can’t afford to buy $50 comic books (Let’s make with the Wonder Woman Chronicles, DC!), and while I went in expecting lots of Nazi-fighting, Steve Trevor-saving, kanga-riding, Etta Candy “Woo Woo!”-ing and images of girls getting spanked and tied up on almost every page, I still wasn’t ready for how deeply weird and oddly powerful the dozen or so stories in the volume were.

Tell me if this sounds anything like the superheroine we’ve come to know in the last 60 years.

On a mysterious island full of magical realism-like inventions dwell a race of women who dress in Buck Rogers ballerina outfits and engage in martial sports. There lives a beautiful young princess who has never left its shores. When a handsome stranger crashes there, she uses her scientific prowess to invent a means to cure him and nurses him back to health. At the command of her goddesses, she dons the colors of the United States to follow him back to his own home and battle against the evil represented by the Axis powers.

She gets a job entertaining people in a theater with feats of super-speed and super-strength until she’s amassed a small fortune. She uses it to buy the name of Diana Prince, a woman who looks just like her. The young maiden then becomes a nurse and secretary, serving under the love of her life, and routinely saving him from Nazi and Japanese saboteurs and spies, with the help of a small army of sorority girls, whom she contacts through a “mental radio” given to their leader, Etta Candy (daughter of Hard Candy, sister of Mint Candy). When not fighting female slave-owning Nazi operative The Baroness and Nazi cross-dressing scientist Dr. Poison, Diana functions as a freelance detective, investigating international milk companies and the working conditions at department stores.

Reading these stories, one gets the completely unfiltered picture of what the character of Wonder Woman was like at inception. Just as Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Superman and Batman seemed like completely different characters in their first few adventures than their current incarnations, the Wonder Woman of these first issues is in a lot of ways completely unrecognizable from the one who’s been running around the DC Universe for the last, oh, 40 years or so. (In some of the above cases, the characters would be refined and improved over the decades, but at the cost of something—no Batman story, for example, has been able to match the primitive, occasionally hysterical creepiness of his first few adventures).

Over the past ten years or so, DC has really pushed the concept of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman as a “Trinity” of heroes, the pillars of their fictional universe, each equally important. While they’ve gotten some good stories out of the idea of the “Trinity,” the concept's always been a bit forced.

Clearly Wonder Woman lacks the popularity of the other two heroes, never being able to support more than one monthly title, while the two men in capes have had as many as five monthly series running simultaneously, and the graphic novel lists at dccomics.com do a pretty good job of illustrating how few original graphic novels and trade collections Wonder Woman has in relation to the World’s Finest (Without actually doing the math, it seems that The Flash and Green Lantern greatly eclipse Wonder Woman in the popularity department, at least based on the number of trade pages devoted to their adventures).

And within the context of the fictional shared-setting of their books, the DC Universe, Wonder Woman’s status quo is constantly being shifted as she experiences relaunches and new directions, changing cities, jobs, love interests and supporting casts on a fairly regular basis. When Crisis on Infinite Earths recreated the DCU as a brand new universe through a complicated cosmic event, Batman and Superman were given new origin stories (Batman: Year One and Man of Steel), but they were set in the past, as it was assumed that there couldn’t really be a DC Universe without them in it. Wonder Woman similarly had a rebooted origin, but rather than being set in the past, her story simply restarted in the early ‘80s. In other words, in DC’s fictional timeline, as of the late ‘90s, Superman and Batman were said to have been active for about ten years, whereas Wonder Woman was a newcomer, only active for about half that time.

Infinite Crisis changed that, so that she appeared for the very first time back when Superman and Batman did, but this only served to make things more confusing, as it solved the problem of giving her equal standing with the World’s Finest within the ficitonal history, but it did so by unsolving the problems of her origin.

Regardless, post-(First)Crisis Wonder Woman was not only a superhero struggling against mythological villains like Circe and Ares, but a political and social ambassador of the Amazon nation of Themyscira. The ambassador aspect was given greater and greater emphasis right up until Infinite Crisis, with writers Phil Jimenez and Greg Rucka focusing on her work with the United Nations, social causes and charities and political machinations.

Golden Age Wonder Woman, at least in these first Wonder Woman stories? She was more of a fairy tale heroine living out her life in a work of concentrated war propaganda (and I know the P-word has taken on negative connotations over the years, but I mean that in a good way).

How this Wonder Woman became our Wonder Woman is hard to figure, particularly if we ignore everything in between and just look at, say, her first few adventures and her last few.

The Golden Age Wonder Woman certainly came across as a younger woman, if not a girl. She was continually referred to as a “maiden,” she had a schoolgirl crush on the first man she ever met, she lived with her mother right up until she moved out for the first time (only to go fight Nazis, not go to college) and her best friends were a bunch of co-eds whose hobbies included man-hunting, dancing and hazing rushes with paddles.

The modern Wonder Woman seems older and more mature, I think in large part simply because of her roles as an ambassador, long-time superhero and mother figure to Wonder Girls Donna Troy and Cassie Sandsmark, just as the married Superman and boy-raising Batman seem fatherly (DC reps will often say their “Trinity” is all in their late 20’s, which always causes me a bit of cognitive dissonance…that would mean Batman started his career at 19, and that Dick Grayson is now as old as him).

The early Wonder Woman also had a very distinct mission—to defend freedom and democracy (The Allies) from the armies of evil (The Axis). It made sense of her star-spangled costume, her reason for being in the U.S., her continued association with Steve Trevor and it automatically generated enemies for her. Rereading these original Wonder Woman stories, it’s pretty remarkable how big a role World War II played. It's actually hard to imagine Wonder Woman without World War II, which might be why DC has traditionally had more difficulty finding a direction for her than theu have the other points of the Trinity (It’s worth noting that Batman and Superman have kept the same home bases, supporting casts and antagonists for pretty much their entire fictional careers).

With World War II over it wasn’t too difficult to make Communists the new Nazis, and Wondy’s adventures with Steve Trevor against the enemies of freedom continued relatively unabated. But despite the fact that America’s leaders have never had a problem finding new enemies to fill in for the vanquished Axis, this obviously wouldn’t work for Wonder Woman, particularly as her readership matured and grayed over the years, and post-Vietnam, post-Watergate Americans were less likely to embrace the U.S. government’s enemies as unequivocally evil in the same way that kids in the early ‘40s could eagerly cheer for a superhero sticking it to Hitler.

Wonder Woman could easily have continued fighting Communists through Vietnam and right up until the fall of the Soviet Union. And today, she could conceivably be fighting the global war on terror, but it’s actually hard to imagine DC publishing stories like that. Ironically, in a lot of ways DC’s readers have become more politically savvy and aware over the last 60 years, but the stories have become less overtly political (Today, Wonder Woman is more likely to take up arms against fictional Qurac than Iraq, for example).

So when Allen Heinberg tried to capture some of this Golden Age magic with his soft reboot of Wonder Woman, he had her working for the fictional Department of Metahuman Affairs instead of, say, the CIA or U.S. Army. But this tied her so thoroughly to the made-up world of the DCU that it sort of defeats the purpose of referencing her Golden Age association with the United States at all (Particularly without doing away with the baggage of 20 years worth of being a member of the royal family of a sovereign nation—in these Golden Age stories, Paradise Island wasn’t played as it’s own country so much as an otherworldly fantasy land, but Post-Crisis it's more like an all-female Cuba with Greek architecture and sense of fashion).

Interaction with the rest of the DCU has caused an awful lot of problems for Wonder Woman in general, as each reboot required other reboots across the universe. When Wonder Woman was reintroduced as a latecomer to the DCU, for example, there was already a Wonder Girl active before Wonder Woman, which began a whole slew of retcons and reboots for Donna Troy/Wonder Girl/Troia, and John Byrne would later send Wonder Woman’s mother back in time to World War II, making her a Wonder Woman before Wonder Woman, and thus retroactively making Wonder Woman a legacy character (Again, Superman and Batman never had these sorts of problems).

In addition to working for DOMA tracking superhumans, Wonder Woman’s current status quo has her partnered with old DC character Nemesis (from John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad run), working under Sarge Steel (Suicide Squad, Titans), using credentials created for her by Batman and a disguise suggested by Superman. Rather than standing on her own, the current Wonder Woman is, at best, a spider scurrying along the webs of DCU continuity. Batman and Superman are, of course, members of the Justice League and prone to guest-stars from other books at any time, but for the most part their adventures can be enjoyed all alone, without any real familiarity with the workings of the DCU.

So it was certainly refreshing to read Wonder Woman stories where all the information you needed was right there in the story itself. Rather than wondering how these stories fit in with the last Wonder Woman story I read, I could simply enjoy the flat, two-dimensional art of H.G. Peter and his quirky vintage sci-fi-meets-mythology designs and William Moulton Marston’s almost stream-of-consciousness storytelling, including the amazing feats of blocking bullets with bracelets, the pre-feminist feminism, the humor of Wondy’s sidekick Etta and her cartoonish sorority sisters and family members.

The other remarkable differences between yesterday’s Wonder Woman and today’s were in the powers and the cheesecake factor. The original Wonder Woman was super-strong and super-fast, but didn’t seem to be completely invulnerable (she did block bullets with her bracelets) and she couldn’t fly, which meant she had to resort to riding horses, running and swimming super-fast and flying her robot plane. I don’t know why exactly, but I found this a lot more intersting. I guess because I've grown so used to her just being a sort of female Superman, so it was neat to not see her flying around Superman-style, but distinguishing herself from him (even if, in this case, that distinguishing factor turns out to be relative weakness).

And it goes without saying it was refreshing to see her not exploding out of her costume. In her first few stories, Wonder Woman is wearing a billowing skirt, but it quickly turns into a pair of shorts. Not a pair of panties, and not a g-string, but a pair of shorts.

Her top didn’t lift and separate, it wasn’t a corset or boob armor or just something to cover her nipples because a completely topless superheroine would be silly. It looked like something a ballerina might wear.

Likewise, her bracelets were actual bracelets, not forearm-long pieces of armor.

Taken together and read on this side of the manga revolution, it was downright surprising to see that Wonder Woman was actually something of a magical girl-style heroine decades before “magical girl” would even become a comics genre.

Reading Wonder Woman at any point form the last 30 years or so, it’s quite clear that she’s designed to sexually titillate male readers more than, you know, just look kinda cool. It’s not just the likes of notoriously-bad-at-female-anatomy Michael Turner, the unfortunate choice for JLoA cover artist, or the notoriously smexed-up JLoA interior artist Ed Benes. It’s everyone who draws Wonder Woman these day, because that barely-there costume has become inherent to the character design. Check it out:











John Byrne, J.G. Jones, Adam Hughes, Brian Bolland…these are great artists who all understand how to render human anatomy and how clothing falls across a human body in the real world. And these are all nice images, but what strikes you first about them, that it must be cool to have Wonder Woman powers? That Wonder Woman looks like a fun character to read about? Or that you can almost see her breasts?

Certainly a certain amount of sexiness is expected in any superhero comic book, chronicling the lives of perfect specimens of the human physique as they do, and even when Wonder Woman’s interiors were at their strongest visually (under the pencils of Perez and Jimenez), she was half-naked (Hell, in the Archives, Peters’ Wonder Woman is often shown in cheesecake-y costume-changing scenes, and on her first appearance in Man’s World passersby remark on how little clothing she’s wearing). Over the years though, it seems like we’ve seen fewer and fewer images like these,





accentuating the joy or menace of Wonder Woman’s superpowers, and more and more images simply reveling in the skimpiness of the costume.

Which is why I think Tintin Pantoja’s Wonder Woman pitch caused such a stir when it made the rounds in the blogsophere a few months back—it looked like the Wonder Woman a lot of people wanted to read, rather than the Wonder Woman they had to read about. While it’s hard to judge a couple of pages of art posted on the Internet, it did seem like Pantoja had managed to capture some elements of the original Wonder Woman story, including the princess/magical girl themes and the fact that the character seemed more or less like a real person, not a scantily clad statue come to life.

So yeah, Golden Age Wonder Woman’s adventures are totally insane, what with their never-acknowledged yet hard-to-miss perverse sexual undertones and symbolism (Suffering Sappho indeed), bizarre fantasy technology and bastardized mythology mash-ups, pulled-out-thin-air plot points and all-around aura of silliness, but those aren’t the only reasons they seem so weird to readers today.