"Man's Underworld" from Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Tomorrow's Heroes

When I was putting together last fall's post on all of Plastic Man's team-ups, the Plastic Man/Wonder Woman team-up from the pages of Batman: The Brave and the Bold #19 and #20 had long since shipped, but it hadn't yet been collected into trade, so I decided to wait to address it in a later post, not wanting to spend...let's see...$16?!...just for a blog post.* 

Well, the trade is here now. So now I can post about it.

The Plastic Man/Wonder Woman team-up is the first story collected in Batman: The Brave and The Bold: Tomorrow's Heroes. Entitled "Man's Underworld", it is the work of writer Dave Wielgosz and artist Nikola Čižmešija. 

The pairing of the two characters struck me as a particularly interesting one, because not only have they never had a team-up like this before (unless you count those two pages from "The Great Super-Star Game!"), but I am having trouble recalling even a particular significant scene featuring the two characters during the seven years or so they were on the Justice League together between 1998 and 2005 (Although Wonder Woman was dead for part of it, and Plastic Man was on a sort of sabbatical for another). Certainly not in the main, Grant Morrison-written portion of the JLA title, although it's possible I am forgetting something from an anthology, spin-off or a JLA Classified story...please let me know if you can think of any!

This story is set, an asterisk and editorial box on its third page tells us, before Absolute Power, so presumably sometime during the 2018-2022 Justice League series, when the team was based in the Hall of Justice...and Wonder Woman was on the team and Plastic Man was not (Although, come to think of it, wasn't Wonder Woman dead for part of that series too...? At least, Hippolyta seemed to have temporarily replaced her on the team again for some reason during Brian Michael Bendis' run...).

An opening full-page splash has Wonder Woman seemingly addressing the reader directly: "My lasso of truth has been stolen...I have come here to request your assistance to help me find out where it is and who is responsible...Will help me?"

A turn of the page reveals who she is addressing, which, of course, the cover—for the single issue or the trade—has already spoiled. 

Sitting behind a desk with a "W. Winks" name plate is a smiling, bald and round-faced Woozy Winks, who answers that, "My partner and I do excellent P.I. work..." That partner, standing behind Woozy, shadow obscuring his face, is an uncharacteristically silent and grim-looking Plastic Man...who will snap back to his chattier self in the very next panel.

It's been a while—the last time I remember Plastic Man's day job coming up, he was running a security firm of some sort during Joe Kelley's JLA run—but Wielgosz remembers that Plastic Man and Woozy opened a detective agency in Phil Foglio and Hilary Barta's 1988 miniseries, which then played a role in the Superman team-ups that followed it.

Plas first questions why someone with Batman and Martian Manhunter in her contacts would turn to him for this, and he seems disappointed in her answer. That is, they (and the apparently not-dead male Question) recommended she go to Plas, telling her he would be "the most capable of getting in the mind of a thief."

Woozy and Plas have a somewhat pointed exchange regarding Plastic Man's need to prove himself, to which Plastic Man tells his old pal, "I didn't make a great impression back in our JLA days."

Again, I found myself struggling to think of any time the pair had really spent together in JLA. Plastic Man obviously acquitted himself well throughout his time on the team, helping save the world/the future/the universe/all reality alongside his teammates repeatedly. Still, he was generally portrayed as something of a jackass, constantly making annoying jokes. 

And he was often portrayed as particularly libidinous, asking Power Girl if she wanted to know why he was called "Eel" in the Mark Millar fill-in or, perhaps most famously, disguising himself as teammate Barda's dress in one of Mark Waid's fill-ins issues during Morrison's run.

I don't recall him sexually harassing Wonder Woman or coming on to her at any point, but, given his behavior in a lot of comics during that time, I guess I wouldn't be surprised if he did in a tie-in or spin-off and I'm just blanking on the instance. 

All I can think of at the moment is a passing comment about a peephole during his triumphant return to the team during Kelly, Tom Mahnke and company's JLA arc in which the team faces Fernus/The Burning Martian:

He could, of course, just be kidding here, but, uh, what a think to joke about.

Oh, and I suppose Plastic Man could be referring to something beyond a particular interaction with Wonder Woman in general, or a general feeling of insecurity about his status as a true hero given his criminal background. I mean, Kelly did write Plas as something of a bad person, a dick to his ex-lover and literal deadbeat dad, so...

So, the idea of Plastic Man being asked to "think like a criminal" in order to solve a case that Batman or Martian Manhunter couldn't knock off in a couple of pages is an intriguing premise, although it's worth noting that Wielgosz doesn't really come up with such a plot (In his defense, I guess this entire story is only 24 pages).

Like, solving the case basically just requires reviewing some security footage of a tour group at the then semi-public Hall of Justice, a working knowledge of DC supervillains that any Justice Leaguer (or reader!) should have, busting up a bar and then busting up an auction full of criimnals. I'm pretty sure Wonder Woman could have handled this case solo...or with the help of pretty much anyone else.

Seeing a shadow in Wonder Woman's room steal the lasso, Plas tells her it is Shadow Thief Carl Sands, who Plas apparently knows from his old days as gangster Eel O'Brian (The criminal underworld in the DC Universe, according to this story, was a very, very small world). 

I liked Sands' dig at Plas, in which he pointedly refers to him as "Elongated Man."

Next stop? Central City, for an auction of superhero memorabilia to a club full of criminals, all of whom are disguised by gas masks, making them relatively easy to infiltrate (In introducing the set-up, Wielgosz refers to both Final Crisis and Scott Snyder's "Black Mirror" story from pre-New 52 Detective Comics).

The pair do so, which requires Wonder Woman changing into a fancy black dress on a rooftop with Plas, who says, "I'll just...turn around and not look and you tell me when you're done gearing up." Which he does, without turning his eyeballs into periscopes or anything. 

Again, he talks to Wonder Woman about his insecurities, particularly during his tenure on the Justice League: 

Once inside, the two split up. 

Wonder Woman, being a statuesque beauty, even when wearing a gas mask, draws the attention of the old guy presumably running the operation (Not great at this undercover thing, the superheroine imbued with the gifts of the Greek gods introduces herself as "Cassandra Troy"...although given those are the names of two of her Wonder Girls, maybe she just panicked and grabbed two names out of her memory, like a disguised Bruce Wayne introducing himself as Tim Grayson...). 

Plastic Man, meanwhile, stretches and wriggles through the ventilation system until he spots the lasso, and is confronted by a flame-thrower wielding Roulette, the actual boss of the operation. As she explains, she wants to move on from superhero fight clubs and get into other criminal enterprises. 

As it turns out, Plastic Man also used to know Roulette, back before he was a superhero and she was a supervillain (I had completely forgotten this story when I read "Man's Underworld", but Neil posted about it on Bluesky between then and my writing this post, reminding me that Plas and Roulette have shared a story before, the Len Wein-written, Tom Derenick-drawn Justice League of America #35-37 from 2009; now I wonder if that Justice League story mentioned that the pair had a past...?)

There's a flashback, some "Join the dark side" talk and a brief fight. During all that, Roulette needles Plastic Man as "the superhero permanently on probation," adding, "I saw how Wonder Woman talked to you out there, with so little respect...You know that won't ever change."

Plas rushes out of the back with the lasso, Roulette on his heels, blowing Wondy's cover, and leading to our heroes back to back, the whole crowd circling them. 

Wielgosz takes a shortcut that doesn't really make much sense here, as, at one point, we're meant to believe that Plastic Man is somehow in danger of being torn apart by the crowd, as he's being stretched in different directions by each limb, but, well, the panel or so devoted to it isn't terribly convincing (see the middle one below), as Čižmešija doesn't draw Plas all that stretched, certainly not to anything that looks like a breaking point, and, besides, stretching is, like, his whole power's deal, right? 

The artist only has a single panel to work with, and Plas is in the background. A legitimate threat to Plas could have been posed by the flamethrower—indeed, Roulette temporarily melts him with it in one panel earlier—but the creators would have had to do something different to present a realistic threat to Plastic Man then what they do here. Maybe another draft of the story might have helped.

Anyway, Plas being in danger at all is simply an excuse to have Wonder Woman throw her lasso around him in order to pull him to safety...and give readers the opportunity to see its effects on Plastic Man, or what Wielgosz suggests those effects might be.

Here, he transforms back into Eel, seemingly losing his powers (and goggles) and completely freaking out, as if in pain or having a brief panic attack. In the last two pages of the story, Plastic Man reveals bits of his origin to Wonder Woman, who I was fairly certain knew that he used to be a criminal named Eel O'Brien from Mark Waid, Bryan Hitch and company's JLA #51-54, wherein the Leaguers with secret identities, including Plastic Man, are each split in two (It's been a while since I've read that story too, though; Waid's short, 18-issue run was a real mess, and, outside of "Tower of Babel", I haven't really ever reread any of the JLA arcs he wrote during that time).

During his brief talk with Wonder Woman, Plas tells her that "Plastic Man" is "a character I created" and, having played him so long, he sometimes loses track of that. He explains that, after getting his powers, he started fighting crime, "hoping one day I could do more good things than Eel O'Brian had done bad". And that "being the goofy, loud guy no one wants to deal with works in my favor."

Some of this psychology seems to echo what Marv Wolfman wrote of Plas in his not-very-good 2011 one-shot Green Lantern/Plastic Man: Weapons of Mass Deception, and it also perhaps helps explain the somewhat bifurcated nature of Plastic Man since Morrison folded him into JLA. Specifically, that he's at once a hyper-competent superhero and an irritating comedy relief character who often appears dumb, libidinous and borderline criminal or immoral...usually as part of an unfunny joke a writer might be setting up for him. 

At any rate, Wonder Woman stifles a laugh when he says, "I know more than I let on, except when I don't," and proposes the two keep working together as, while they've recovered the lasso, there's still Roulette, the auctioneer guy and a bunch of criminal types obsessed with superhero memorabilia to deal with. 

In the lower right corner of the last panel, there's a red "THE END", followed by a yellow "of our story, but the start of a lovely partnership."

So as Plastic Man stories go, this has the strength of being an unlikely, somehow never done before one, as well as exploration of what goes on in Plas' head, even though I'm not fond of the insecure take on the character, whether that insecurity comes from his criminal background, his concern that he's regarded as a clown or unserious superhero by his peers (Something explored in the Eclipso half of 2007-2008 Countdown to Mystery, collected in 2009 as Eclipso: Music of the Spheres**) or, here, how he behaved/was written during his JLA years. (Although I suppose that is kind of interesting in a meta way, and Wielgosz seems to be attempting a retcon of sorts, or least an explanation to square JLA Plas with "real" Plas.)

Of course, the idea of keeping score with himself, weighing Eel's bad against Plastic Man's good, and worrying about always being regarded by others as a criminal on some level, that seems like a better story for somewhere in Plastic Man's past, sometime before he was inducted into the line-up of the World's Greatest Heroes, got a seat at the Justice League meeting table on the moon and started saving the world from the likes of Solaris and Mageddon and company on a monthly basis.

Čižmešija's art is quite strong throughout. I don't know the name, and his Plastic Man, perhaps appropriate for this story, is toned down quite a degree, looking consistent from panel to panel, rather than flowing from one shape to another as is usual the case. He also looks like a straightforward superhero character, rather than having, say, big ears, or a cartoonish grin, or some of the other signifiers some artists have given him over the years to demonstrate that he's a "funny" character. I wouldn't mind seeing more of Čižmešija's Plastic Man...or other characters. 

*DC was really selling a comic book for $7.99? That is insane, even for a 68-page book. This 120-page trade paperback collection is only $17.99; why bother with single issues once they reach the cost of, like, half a trade...?

**I actually bought and read that trade paperback in December, when the omnibus collection of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake's Spectre series had me curious in revisiting various later takes on The Spectre and Eclipso. I ultimately decided not to write about it at all though because it wasn't very good, or interesting in any way, so it didn't really seem worth my time or that of the reader. It's a really bad Plastic Man story, though! And has a terrible, terrible take on Woozy Winks!

One bad thing and one good thing about picture book A True Wonder: The Comic Book Hero Who Changed Everything

I've read a handful of these non-fiction picture book biographies of certain comic book creators and/or their greatest creations before. Writer Kirsten W. Larson and artist Katy Wu's A True Wonder: The Comic Book Hero Who Changed Everything (Clarion Books; 2021) obviously focuses on Wonder Woman. I found two things of particular interest in it: one good, one bad.

I should note that this is more a biography of the character than it is her creators, starting by introducing Wonder Woman, then turning to comic books, then her famous 1972 Ms. magazine cover, then her 1975-1977 TV show and finally her 2017 feature film, with several pauses to focus on broad changes for women in American society and Wonder Woman's ability to inspire women in the real world.

It opens with a two-page spread with three comic book-like narration boxes, the first two featuring quotation marks (It won't be clear to most readers until the last page's source notes, but the words in quotations are taken from a story in 1942's Wonder Woman #1, which actually came along about half a year after Wonder Woman debuted in Sensation Comics #1):

"As lovely as Aphrodite—as wise as Athena—with the speed of Mercury and the strength of Hercules—

she is known only as Wonder Woman, but who she is, or whence she came, nobody knows!"

Until now!

Dominating the foreground Wu's version of Wonder Woman, rendered and costumed in a way that is quite visually (and, one imagines, legally) distinct from the DC Comics character, an athletic, black-haired beauty who seems to be made of pastel light and cartoon stars, only the vaguest suggestion of any kind of costume beyond a trailing red ribbon. (We'll talk more about Wu's Wonder Woman a bit further down.)

Behind her are the four Greek mythological figures mentioned.

From there we cut to "America, 1941" and what appears to be a comic book studio, in which we see a half-dozen handsome, even pretty young men in business attire all looking like drawings based on clip art search results for "business guy." They don't really look all that much like they came from the 1940s; indeed, no one's even smoking!

Two of them are busy at drawing tables, one leans over one of the artists, three gather around a drawing of a caped strongman labeled "He Boy." On the walls are colorful images of various Supermen, and an open box is full of a comic labeled "Zoom Man."

"The comic book industry is dominated by white men," the first narration box says. And, indeed, there are free-floating labels with arrows pointing out that all the characters on this page are "white men." (One says "Another white man" and another "Also white men.")

This is a) true, with so few exceptions so as to prove the rule and b) weird, because as you and I, comic book fans, are well aware, Wonder Woman is also the creation of white men: William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter...although you wouldn't know that Peter had anything to do with Wonder Woman, given that he's not mentioned at all in the story. This is the bad thing. 

As the story unfolds, important players behind-the-scenes of Wonder Woman's comic book career (and, later, TV and film careers) are highlighted with baseball card-like boxes depicting their images, names and some details about them.

The first of these come on pages seven and eight, and feature Marston and his wife, Elizabeth Marston. After a spread showing how much kids loved comic books and that grownups were worried about the violence in them, we cut to the Marstons' home, where Bill is deep in thought in an easy chair, while Elizabeth stands nearby, cajoling him, "Come on, let's have a Superwoman! There's too many men out there."

For that suggestion alone (that's all the role she plays in this book, anyway), she gets a baseball card, but Peter does not. In fact, he's left completely out of Wonder Woman's creation story, as the next spread features Marston with a briefcase and sketch of Wonder Woman. Of where she came from, Larson only says, "Inspired by the idea of a female superhero, Bill proposed a new comic book character, one who would be a good influence on children—Wonder Woman."

And then it's to the offices of All-American Comics, where M.C. Gaines okays the idea, and gets his baseball card. So, both Elizabeth Marston, who suggests a woman hero, and Gaines, who okays the hero, are pivotal parts of Wonder Woman's origin, but not the guy who drew here? There's a step missing here, obviously.

Peter's omission gets only more annoying as one reads on, given that other key figures named and "carded" include associate editor and "Wonder Women of History" writer Alice Marble, Marston's assistant-turned-ghostwriter Joye Hummel, Ms. cofounders Gloria Steinem and Joanne Edgar, television actress Lynda Carter and the Wonder Woman film's director Patty Jenkins. 

Now, certainly these folks all contributed to the evolution of Wonder Woman as an important character in American pop culture, and they all played roles of various degrees in helping maintain or increase her popularity, but none of them helped create Wonder Woman the way Peter did. Imagine, if you would, a book about Marvel's Incredible Hulk that includes the contributions of Stan Lee, Martin Goodman, Lou Ferrigno and Ang Lee, but never mentions Jack Kirby.

Because Peter didn't just come up with Wonder Woman's basic look and costume. He drew all of the Wonder Woman stories in both Sensation and Wonder Woman, covers included, as well as her newspaper comic strip (granted, with assistants helping on much of the background inking), from Wonder Woman's first appearance in 1942 until his own death in 1958. That's Wonder Woman's entire Golden Age career (outside of the Justice Society strips, I suppose, although I noticed when reading the earliest JSoA stories in DC Finest collections recently that Peter even drew some of her initial stories there). 

That means Peter designed and co-created not just Wonder Woman, but also Hippolyta and the Amazons, Steve Trevor, Etta Candy and the Holiday Girls and just about everyone Wonder Woman villain you can think of (Unless you want to be cheeky and say, I don't know, Veronica Cale).

And, as we now all know—we do all know this now, right?—drawing the art in comics stories isn't a simple act of illustration, but another form of writing, just writing with pictures rather than words. Marston is the creator who obviously gets talked about the most, given how colorful his personal life was, how interesting his psychological theories were, and how he used Wonder Woman to try to popularize those theories, but Peter is just as much Wonder Woman's father as Marston was. 

So that seems like a pretty big omission on Larson's part, and one that makes me question everything else in the book. 

After the 34-page story concludes, there are two pages devoted to short text features in the back. One is entitled "The Origin Story...Of This Book," and details how Larson was a Wonder Woman fan as a child (thanks to the TV show), and notes that seeing the 2017 film made her wonder where Wonder Woman came from, which is how this book came about. She notes that she wasn't a comic book reader, which will seem obvious after reading the book.

The other page is entitled "The Women of Wonder Woman". It's only five paragraphs long, but it lists seven women, their names all in bold. It is, interestingly, here that Peter gets his only mention:

Wonder Woman's looks, created by artist Harry G. Peter, may have been inspired by Olive Richard, who lived with Bill Marston's family, had dark hair, and wore signature cuff bracelets.

"Lived with Bill Marston's family," you say? Huh. I wonder if there's anything more to that story, maybe something less likely to make it into a children's picture book? Notably perhaps, this is Richard's only mention in the book, as well. 

Anyway, the decision to omit one of Wonder Woman's creators from a story about Wonder Woman's creation is the bad thing, and, perhaps, a fatal flaw in this book. 

Now, what is the good thing?

Well, I was kind of fascinated by how Katy Wu draws Wonder Woman throughout the book. I am, quite obviously, not versed in copyright or trademark law (If you know me at all, you'll know I'm not terribly well-versed in anything useful; pretty much just comic books, and, to a lesser extent, giant monster movies and cryptozoology). 

But I would have thought that, this being a work of non-fiction about Wonder Woman, it might have been free to use Wonder Woman's likeness throughout. Certainly, the previously discussed With Great Power and Along Came a Radioactive Spider by Annie Hunter Eriksen and Lee Gatlin were full of accurate images of Spider-Man and other Marvel superhero characters (as well as a few others, like Fawcett's Captain Marvel). 

I've never read it, but, working in a library, I've definitely seen and handled What Is the Story of Wonder Woman?, one of those Who HQ non-fiction books for kids in which the subjects have big heads on the covers, and that Wonder Woman is wearing her traditional costume on the cover. 

Regardless, Wu opts to draw a Wonder Woman who looks like Wonder Woman if you squint, or from far away...at least at a few points in the book (Her other take on the character is more interesting, I thought).

You see this almost-but-not-quite-Wonder Woman version of Wonder Woman on the cover. She looks a bit like a fully colored thumbnail version of herself. Yes, she's got the read bustier with a bit of gold at the top, the blue shorts, a tiara and bracelets, but the details are missing: There's no star on the tiara, no eagle or "WW" on the bustier, no white stars on her shorts (I would have thought that Wu could have gone ahead and used a version of the eagle on Wondy's chest, as I thought the reason DC changed it to the "WW" symbol in the first place was because they learned they couldn't trademark an eagle...?)

This version also appears on the faux covers of Wonder Woman comics kids happily hold aloft on one page, and striding like a giant in the background on a page labeled "Present day," where she is missing her tiara (and facial features) but does hold a glowing golden lariat.

More interesting, I thought, was the Wonder Woman Wu drew on the first page, one that seemed more idea than character, made of something insubstantial, a black-haired being of fluid, shimmering red and blue light. In that image, she is trailing a solid if sheer-looking red ribbon, a motif that appears throughout the book, as if a literal manifestation of the thread of her story. 

On two pages devoted to a readers' poll of who should "serve alongside Hawkman, Johnny Thunder, and the others" in the Justice Society, we see this Wonder Woman seeming to explode out of a ballot box,  a fist raised in victory. She's more solid here, with flesh-colored skin and silvery rather than golden bracelets, but her costume is part red and part blue, partially obscured by the ribbon, and stars abound.

The very next page has a panel of her in this costume, the bustier seemingly changing from blue to red and back before readers' eyes. And then later, on the page devoted to the debut of her TV show, Wu draws an image of Wonder Woman hanging from a helicopter's landing skids and she's outfitted similarly to the way she is on the cover, although here she seems to wear a golden belt and her shorts have a golden trim, and while her boots are comic book-accurate in design (at least circa 1977, with the point at top and the stripes), the colors are blue and gold rather than red and white. Again, the ribbon plays a big part, drawn entering the page from one side and exiting on the other, while it entwines Wonder Woman's not-quite-right costume, as if to artfully obscure it.

As much as I liked Wu's attempts to draw Wonder Woman in a way that was recognizable but off enough not to make any DC or Warner Bros. lawery's fingers twitch, I think there were also some funny attempts to draw generic superheroes.

There is, obviously, that scene in 1941 with all the white men, where the various heroes all look like the kind one might find in a child's birthday card, or a coloring book, or a clip art file that comes up when searching "superhero", all capes and generic chest symbols (I assume she could have used a faux Superman here, a caped, dark-haired strongman in red and blue, just leaving off the trademarked "S" symbol? She probably also could have used some public domain heroes, although maybe the creators didn't want to suggest a specific studio or publisher in that image.)

Where it gets positively ludicrous is a drawing the Justice Society:

You know, J-Man. And H-Man. And G-Man. And the other guy.

Surely there was a better way to draw the JSoA without violating any trademarks, perhaps drawing them all in silhouette...? I don't know. I just find it funny to see the words "Justice Society" (and then the names Hawkman and Johnny Thunder) juxtaposed with those images, as if the artist read the script and was like, "Justice Society, huh? So, just some random group of vaguely superheroic looking guys, then!"

Now that I think about it, maybe J-Man is supposed to be Johnny Thunder and H-Man Hawkman...? (And maybe G-Man could be Green Lantern? He's got a cape like Alan Scott and he is wearing green! Maybe this is the JSoA of an alternate Earth in the old DC multiverse, like Earth-W or something...)

Anyway, A True Wonder is interesting enough to look at, in part to see an artist wrestling with drawing one of the most iconic of superhero characters when they aren't permitted to use any of the specific iconography, but if you, like me, care at all about where comic book superheroes actually come from, its excision of H.G. Peter from the story of his own greatest, most lasting work is sure to irritate. 

For more of Katy Wu's art, visit here or here. 

A post about a fantasy Wonder Woman movie that I guess I planned to write a decade or so ago

I'll be moving soon. I've been in the same apartment in Mentor, Ohio, just down the street from the James A. Garfield National Historic site (where our 20th president once lived) and a little further down the street from the public library where I work, for 12 years now, but the time has come to head back to my hometown of Ashtabula, Ohio to take care of my ancestral home.

This, of course, means I've been doing a lot of digging through closets and corners, finding things I had forgotten about and wondering what to do with them (Do I, for example, really need this folded-up poster heralding the debut of Scott Snyder's 2018 Justice League run that the publisher must have sent along with some review copies back then? What about this cardboard box from a Kickstarter I kept, just because it had Jim Lawson's handwriting on it? How about that pile of mini-comics from a past Gehngis Con that I still haven't gotten around to reading yet?).

The other night I tackled one of the drawers in my desk. It was full of the expected junk drawer components of buttons, nails and tacks, paperclips, mysterious keys and pencils and pens (at least half of which didn't work), along with business cards gathered from artists at comic conventions or art shows, corners torn from the lefthand side of envelopes with friends' addresses written on them, phone numbers and email address from past co-workers, a slip of paper with a woman's name and phone number on it I was happy to get (The woman in question? Long since married) and scraps of paper containing the writing of my late grandfather.

There was also a little penguin finger puppet holding a sign that read "Keep Cool, Uncle Caleb," that my young niece had made and mailed to me when I was suffering from a particularly bad bout of anxiety. And a list of women's names—Clothilde Ellinboe, Pansy Hammer and so on—that I couldn't quite make sense of, until I remembered it was a list of all of the love interests that appeared in the original prose short stories of Max Shulman that were collected into his 1951 book The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. (As to why I decided to make and keep a list of them, I can't remember; they are some great names, though!).

The vast majority of the mess was made of little horizontal pastel scraps of paper, each with a few words hastily scribbled on them, that were clearly from sticky notes at work. While there are a few notes about sources or ideas for books I wanted to write someday, most of them were the titles of books or DVDs that I had come across at the library, was interested in reading or watching someday but not right that moment, and so I wrote them down for Future Me to get back to someday, then put them in my desk drawer upon returning home, and then forgot about for years. 

Reading them as I cleared out the drawer, I recognized the titles of only four or five that I actually ever got around to reading or watching; most I had no memory of, although Past Me helpfully usually wrote the word "book" or "DVD" next to the titles, so I at least know what form of media they were. 

Among all these scraps of paper was a square of thin paper—the blank side of a receipt that would be tucked into a book on hold to let staff know where it was going—with particularly small and scribbly writing on it. 

It took me a bit to figure out what it was, but it appears to be my fan cast for a Wonder Woman movie, something that has been in some form of development or other since I was in college, but really started to ramp up in the second decade of the 21st century. 

I'm assuming I jotted these notes down at work one day, planning to do a blog post about it that night or that weekend, this being back when I still did blog posts on a daily-ish basis, but, like all the other scraps of paper I brought home from work, I just stuck it in my desk drawer and then forgot about it.

According to the date on the other side of the receipt I was using for scrap paper, this would have been in October of 2014, so just about ten years ago now. I'm not sure what exactly prompted my thinking about it at all, but there must have been some renewed conversation online about the Wonder Woman movie (Director Patty Jenkins wouldn't be officially attached until 2015, and, of course, the movie eventually saw release in 2017, following Wondy's debut in the terrible 2016 Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice.)

Anyways, as I am stuck at home with Covid at the moment with little else to distract me from just lying around and feeling miserable, I figured I might as well get around to writing this post I planned all those years ago.

This, then, is how I would have cast a live-action Wonder Woman movie if I were in charge of casting a live-action Wonder Woman movie, a decade ago...

Wonder Woman/Diana: Jessica Lowndes. There's a pretty good chance you don't know who Jessica Lowndes is; she's probably the least famous actor or actress mentioned in this post. (Here, familiarize yourself!)

She played Adrianna Tate-Duncan in the 2008-2013 90210 series, which is where I first encountered her (I am tempted to say she was the most beautiful and charismatic actress on the show, but then, the 90210 reboot also featured Jessica Stroup, who played Erin Silver, so Lowndes had some serious competition). By 2014, Londes had also appeared in a couple of horror movies (2008's Autopsy and The Haunting of Molly Hartley and 2010's Altitude, which, fun fact, was directed by comics artist Kaare Andrews). 

Incredibly beautiful, with dark hair and big, blue eyes, she would have made a striking Diana. She is only 5'4, which many might think is too small to be Wonder Woman, but my vision of the character has always been aligned with that of the original William Moulton Marston/H.G. Peter version of the character, which was more girlish than the imposing warrior figure she would eventually evolve into. I think the dissonance between the more daintily designed Wonder Woman and her great strength and martial ability is more compelling than either the big and muscular warrior or Barbie doll like designs that have tended to dominate the character's post-Marston/Peter history.

Obviously, Lowndes did not get the gig, which went instead to Israeli model-turned-actress Gal Gadot, who I thought both looked the part and did a fine job of playing it in Batman V. Superman, Wonder Woman and Justice League (I never saw Wonder Woman 1984, though).

After 90210, Lowndes embarked on a music career (Confession: I've never heard a single song of hers) and has since made a career out of made-for-TV romcoms for Lifetime, the Hallmark Channel and other such venues, some of which also feature Lowndes' music. 

Of course, now that what used to be called the DC Extended Universe is being rebooted by James Gunn, I suppose they will need a new actress to play Wonder Woman on the big screen, so maybe Lowndes will get her chance yet...!

Steve Trevor: Channing Tatum. Very handsome, a convincing action hero and adept at playing somewhat dim characters, I think Tatum would have made a consummate Steve Trevor. 

The role went instead to Chris Pine, who I thought was quite good in the film. Tatum's career obviously didn't suffer from not being in Wonder Woman, though. 

It occurs to me now that another potentially good Steve Trevor would be Ryan Gosling, who is also handsome, a fine serious and comic actor, and pretty good at playing characters that aren't necessarily the brightest.

Etta Candy: Rebel Wilson. This was pretty lazy fan-casting on my part, to be honest. Trying to think of an actress to play a plus-sized comedic character, I landed on one of the few plus-sized comedic actresses I could think of, Wilson, from 2011's Bridesmaids and 2012's Pitch Perfect.

The eventual Wonder Woman movie would cast British actress Lucy Davis of the original, British version of The Office and 2004's Shaun of the Dead as Etta Candy.

Hippolyta: Claire Danes. On my little sheet of paper, I see I wrote "Liv Tyler" after the colon following Hippolyta, then crossed it out and wrote "Claire Danes." 

I am assuming I was thinking of Tyler based on the fact that she is also dark-haired and blue-eyed, and thus would resemble her daughter Diana. The post-Crisis Hippolyta does indeed look fairly similar to her daughter, as did the Golden Age version of the character, although there was a period where the character was depicted as blonde for a while.

I'm not sure why I changed my mind and wrote in Danes...I am assuming because I decided to cast Tyler elsewhere (as you'll see below). A fine actress in addition to a timeless beauty, Danes would have certainly made for a good Queen of the Amazons.

Connie Nielsen played the character in the actual film.

Aphrodite: Liv Tyler. Another instance where I apparently changed my mind, I at first wrote "Olivia Wilde" and then crossed it off, writing Tyler's name instead. 

This choice seems pretty self-explanatory. Aphrodite is the goddess of beauty, and Tyler is maybe the most beautiful woman in the world...? Or at least one of them. I was an avid follower of her film career in the '90s but haven't seen all that much of her much since The Lord of the Rings trilogy wrapped (just 2004's Jersey Girl and 2008's The Incredible Hulk I see, consulting her IMDb page.) The last film I would have seen her in before taking these notes would have been the quirky little 2014 comedy Space Station 76. 

I am sure I had originally written Wilde's name down because she always struck me as disconcertingly beautiful. I first noticed her in 2011's Cowboys & Aliens, where she seemed distractingly attractive; like, she was so pretty that she looked out of place in the movie and seemed miscast...like, she was clearly too beautiful to be playing that particular role, and every time she appeared on screen I would get bumped out of the necessary suspension of disbelief one needs to maintain to watch a film....even a film like Cowboys & Aliens.)

Tyler ultimately seemed a better choice, though, for the same reason I at first considered her for Hippolyta: She sort of resembles Diana (and/or Jessica Lowndes) a bit in terms of her basic features, and Diana is supposed to have the beauty of Aphrodite, so it makes sense to cast an actress who sort of resembles her a bit. (Giving it some more thought, I wonder if the character who plays Wonder Woman/Diana should also play Aphrodite, given that Diana's looks come from Aphrodite...?)

Athena: Keira Knightley. This one seems a bit obvious. Who should be cast to play a goddess? How about actual goddess Keira Knightley?

Neither Aphrodite nor Athena were used in the eventual film. In fact, if I'm remembering it correctly, it was quite light on Olympian deities, ultimately only featuring a single one, and a god at that, rather than a goddess.

The Cheetah: Kristen Bell. I have no idea what I thought the plot of this film I was pretending to cast would have been, other than that it would take place during World War II and be inspired by the Marston/Peter comics. Because I wrote down casting for like five villains and, in general, I've always been a proponent of having only one villain per comic book superhero movie, given how many of the superhero movies I've seen with two villains seem to go off the rails. 

Anyway, the first villain I wrote down was The Cheetah, and I was of course envisioning the Golden Age Priscilla Rich version, a woman in a cheetah costume, rather than the Barbara Ann Minerva were-cheetah version that was introduced during George Perez's post-Crisis run on Wonder Woman.  

I have no idea why I thought this would be a good role for Bell; perhaps I had just seen her in something (most likely 2013's The Lifeguard) and she was on my mind the day I was scribbling these notes? 

Anyway, The Cheetah would indeed make it into a Wonder Woman film, although not the first one; she appeared in the 2020 sequel Wonder Woman 1984, played by Kristen Wiig. Wiig played the Barbara Ann Minerva version, rather than the Priscilla Rich version.

Baroness Paula von Gunther: Carice van Houten. Although The Cheetah is probably Wondy's best-known recurring villain (the result, I'd guess, of appearing in the Super Friends series of cartoons), she's not the first. That honor goes to Paula von Gunther, a ruthless Nazi spy and saboteur who first appeared in 1942 and was another creation of Marston and Peter's.

Though somewhat generic for a villain of the time, what made her interesting to me was the fact that she eventually became a sympathetic character and, with Wonder Woman's help, ultimately reformed and joined the Amazons on Paradise Island. She was therefore a very early example of Wonder Woman not simply killing or locking up her foes, but actually striving to reform and redeem them into better people.

As to why I picked Carice van Houten, it was almost certainly on the strength of her role in the somewhat silly but all-around awesome 2001 film Miss Minoes, where she played a cat that gets turned into a human girl. (I think I also probably assumed she was German, although it turns out she's Dutch.)

Since then van Houten has appeared in plenty of films, although looking at her IMDb page now, I think the only one I actually saw was 2006's Black Book. I suppose she's now best known for playing a character on Game of Thrones...?

As for Von Gunther, she never made it into onto the Silver Screen but she did appear in an episode of Batman: The Brave and The Bold which, like all episodes of Batman: The Brave and The Bold, was awesome (Oh, and Wikipedia says she was on the original 1970s Wonder Woman TV show, which was obviously well before my time.)

Doctor Psycho: Peter Dinklage. Another rather lazy choice on my part. For the part of Wonder Woman's diminutive, woman-hating villain, a hypnotist and occultist with a hardly subtle name, I of course thought of Dinklage, the best-known actor of a certain size. Dinklage has obviously played a villain to great acclaim before, but, to my knowledge, not one as straight-up over-the-top as the wild-eyed, wild-haired Psycho. 

The character never made it into a film adaptation yet, although Dinklage has had roles in two superhero films, playing Dr. Trask in 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past and a giant of Norse mythology in 2018's Avengers: Infinity War. 

Marva Psycho: Lucy Collins or Haley Bennett. Doctor Psycho's fiancée-turned-wife plays heavily in the drama of his origin and becomes necessary to him when he starts exhibiting occult powers, Psycho having used her as a medium from which he pulled ectoplasm...which probably didn't seem as weird in the 1940s, so much closer to the age of spiritualism, than it does now.

I'm not entirely sure what my thinking on this casting was, aside from the fact that I had then just-recently seen both actresses for the first time (in 2012's Mirror Mirror and 2009's The Hole, respectively) and liked them both a lot. 

Both actresses seem to have been working pretty regularly since my first exposure to them, and on some fairly sizable project, especially Collins, who has gone on to success in television with Emily in Paris. 

Hercules: The Rock or John Cena. Ha ha, maybe my least imaginative choice yet! For the part of Hercules, I narrowed it down to two charismatic, extremely muscular professional wrestlers-turned-actors, one of whom I had just seen playing Hercules a few months prior...! (That would be The Rock, er, Dwayne Johnson, in the 2014 Hercules movie, based on the short-lived Radical Comics Hercules series by Steve Moore and Admira Wijaya...I remember liking the film quite a bit at the time, although now I haven't many specific memories of it.)

Both actors would of course go on to play DC super-people, with Cena playing Peacemaker in 2021's The Suicide Squad and a TV show that followed it to great acclaim, and Johnson playing starring in 2022's Black Adam to...less so. 

Ares/Mars: Ian McShane. That Hercules movie must have made an impression on me, as Ian McShane was also in that, and here it seems I cast him as the god of war, using either the Greek or Roman name (I remember reading about Mars in the Golden Age Wonder Woman comics, although obviously Ares would become one of her biggest recurring villains, especially during the Perez era.) 

There are then two lines of writing that I can't read at all; while it looks like there may be some names among them, I don't recognize those names, and they don't appear to be English...?

Anyway, thus ends the post I thought about writing ten years ago. 

Stop back on October 6th for the next installment of "A Month of Wednesdays".

Hey kids! Comics!

(Page from Justice League #38, written by Scott Snyder, drawn by Jorge Jimenez and colored by Alejandro Sanchez)

Is there a science teacher in the house?

Before I discuss one of this week's weirdest comic books, I'm afraid I just have to get this out of my system first, if you will all indulge me.

So the above image is a single panel of Dark Nights: Metal #1, written by Scott Snyder, penciled by Greg Capullo, inked by Jonathan Glapion and colored by "FCO" Plascencia. In this panel, we see the entire Justice League flying through outer space together. Green Lantern Hal Jordan is wearing a Green Lantern Corps ring, which encases him in a force field and allows him to travel through space. Presumably, it either traps enough oxygen in there with him to allow him to breather, or it generates oxygen. It's a pretty versatile piece of super-alien technology. The three other human members of the League--Batman, The Flash and Cyborg--are similarly allowed to travel through space thanks to the ring. As you can see, they are in a ring-conjured construct in the shape of a spaceship.

The remaining three members--Superman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman--are shown flying alongside of Jordan, outside of the ship. The only thing they have to protect them from the vacuum of space is a little see-through mouth guard like thing; these likely supply them with oxygen, as well as allowing them to speak to one another.

So here's my question: Are Superman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman able to travel through a vacuum like that without dying...? Please correct me if I'm wrong, and I likely am wrong, since all I know about what happens to organisms exposed to space comes from movies, comics and mostly-forgotten comments made by barely-remembered grade school science teachers, but I thought if one was in a vacuum, the lack of oxygen and the extreme cold were only some of the things that could kill you. I thought the vacuum would also suck out all of the air inside of you, and maybe all of the liquids inside of you and maybe the organs inside of you...? It was my understanding that you would basically explode if you were in a vacuum.

Superman seems cool. While I've seen him wearing full space-suits before, I've also seen him wearing a little mask like the one above and I've also seen him flying through space with no protective wear at all. I'm assuming he's simply so strong that his body can withstand the rigors of space travel and hold itself together. The cold wouldn't be cold enough to hurt him, since almost nothing can hurt Superman. And he doesn't really need to breathe oxygen, since his body is powered by solar energy, rather than the chemical processes that keep humans alive. Also, he can fly, so propulsion shouldn't be a problem for him.

Wonder Woman though, that seems like a stretch. Sure, she's plenty strong and has a high degree of stamina and invulnerability, but it's not comparable to Superman. Even if we imagine that her demi-god powers are such that they would allow her body to keep itself functional in one piece in space, and even if we imagine that she's strong enough that the cold of space wouldn't freeze her, she still needs oxygen to breathe. Even if the mouth piece is pumping oxygen into her mouth and nose, wouldn't it just get sucked right back out of her ears and pores and so on...? Like Superman, she too can fly, so there's no problem for her there (Unlike Superman, I'm having trouble thinking of a single instance of Wonder Woman flying through space without the benefit of a ship or a giant kangaroo).

And then there's Aquaman. I know he was massively powered-up by the New 52 reboot, to the point where he is basically as strong as Golden Age Superman, but no matter how tough and how strong they say he is these days, his body can't possibly be strong enough to survive a vacuum, can it? (The excuse for his super-strength and high degree of invulnerability is that Atlanteans basically hyper-evolved to survive in their environment, so that he must be super-strong and nigh-invulnerable to survive and even flourish at depths where the pressure of the ocean would crush just about anything.) Similarly, while he is fairly immune to heat and cold, space is, like, really cold; can Aquaman really withstand the cold of space? Aquaman also needs oxygen to breathe, whether he gets it from the air or from water. Again, the mask might be giving it to him, but how's he keeping it...? Finally, Aquaman can't fly; how is he moving through space...?

Now, all of this is easy enough to no-prize away. I imagine that Green Lantern is actually projecting a field around all of them, despite the fact that we can't see it...the Lantern rings can project and construct light constructs that a comic book reader's eye can't always see. In fact, they have to be all under the influence of the ring to a certain degree, as otherwise they couldn't travel through space in that manner very far (I think it was Geoff Johns who introduced the idea of the Lanterns' rings opening wormholes to allow them to travel through deep space in an efficient manner, but maybe someone had thought of that before). So maybe there's a giant field of oxygen all around all of the heroes, and Capullo and company just didn't render it visible (It's also possible that those face masks create super-thin, sheathe-like space-suits that can't be seen by the human eye, not unlike the ones in Guardians of the Galaxy 2).

So I'm not really arguing with the panel, I just want to know what the vacuum of space does to human beings. And Superman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman.

Thanks in advance for any help you might be able to offer in setting my troubled mind at ease.

Friends don't button the top half of their shirts around friends.

That's the second-to-last page of Wonder Woman: I Am Wonder Woman, a 2010 junior reader book written by Erin K. Stein and illustrated by Rick Farley. I am fascinated with the image. Actually, I'm fascinated with just about every image in the book, but this one is my favorite. I love that Wonder Woman is just having a casual dinner with her friends Superman and Batman, who are shown training with her and helping her fight a dragon earlier in the book, and her guests are both wearing suits...but with their dress shirts unbuttoned enough to reveal the icons on their superhero costumes.

That is fantastic.

I can't imagine the exact circumstances that lead them to be half-dressed in this particular way; they are obviously somewhere private (Wonder Woman's home in Washington D.C. is my guess, based on the context), where they can be free to air out their costumes a little, but the World's Finest still feel compelled to have their civilian clothes on over their costumes. Superman looks pretty disheveled, with his tie just hanging there, while Batman has his pocket hankerchief impeccably folded.

I kind of love the fact that these two egomaniacs who spend so much of their lives wearing logos for themselves just can't bear to cover up their logos when they don't have to, particularly in the company of Wonder Woman. This is like them saying visually, constantly, "I'm Superman" and "I'm Batman."

I suppose there's another reading, though. Maybe they do that so they can help Wonder Woman tell them apart better? Raised on an island where she never had occasion to lay eyes on a man, perhaps all men look alike to Wonder Woman? And thus the two fit, dark-haired dudes wear their logos like name tags?

I'm also finding myself wondering about how breathable spandex is, because good God it must be warm wearing a bodysuit under a suit all day, and if they always wear their costumes under their suits, as that would mean that they're always just a few broken buttons away from having their secret identities exposed.

I could go on--I have lots of thoughts about what they're eating!--but I'll shut up now. If you ever want to stare at weird pictures of Wonder Woman and ponder the world in which they are illustrating though, you probably can't go wrong with this book. (Ralph Cosentino's Wonder Woman: The Story of The Amazon Princess is still the best Wonder Woman book for children, though.)

Don't forget Batman '66 Meets Wonder Woman '77 #5...!

I forgot Batman '66 Meets Wonder Woman '77 #5 when I was at the comic shop this past Wednesday, and had to return to pick a copy of it up this weekend. That is why it is not mentioned in the previous installment of the Comic Shop Comics feature. This issue begins the final third of the decades-spanning series, and thus jumps to the third temporal setting, the year 1977 (when the second and third seasons of the Wonder Woman TV show were set). The first two issues were set in the 1940s (when the first season of the Wonder Woman TV show was set, and Bruce Wayne and Talia al Ghul were just little kids) and the next two were set in 1966 (when the Batman TV show was set).

Thus, with this issue we get to see the future of the Batman '66 timeline. Bruce Wayne has grayed at the temples, Mister Fantastic/Nick Fury style, and retired from crimefighting during an off-panel incident in which he killed The Joker (who attacked Wayne Manor, indirectly killing Alfred in the process). Barbara Gordon has turned from library science to police work, and has replaced her late father as the city's police commissioner (Chief O'Hara's daughter also inherited his title as Police Chief, as well as his brogue). And Dick Grayson has adopted the name Nightwing, and become Gotham City's primary costumed crimefighter (Amazing how '70s ready his Nightwing costume was; I'm pretty sure all that cover artist Mike Allred and interior pencil artist David Hahn did to make his original costume more '70s-ish is add a zipper and some bellbottoms).

This series is awesome and everyone should read it. If you missed this last issue, you can always go back to the shop and buy a copy. I did! And if you missed the first five issues, well, at this point I'd just wait for the trade, if I were you.

While I was there, I purchased Suicide Squad Vol. 6: The Phoenix Gambit and got a few pages into it before I realized that I had actually never purchased and read Suicide Squad Vol. 5: Apokolips Now. While I was disappointed that I would have to wait a while to read this one, I was also excited that DC is now putting out collections of the original, John Ostrander-written volume of Suicide Squad at a quick enough pace that I have now officially lost track of it. With the sixth volume, they've collected the first 49 issues of the 66-issue run. Another collection or two and will finally–finally!–all be available in collected, trade paperback form! Huzzah!

On Wonder Woman and Justice League America Vol. 1

This 280-page collection of issues from Justice League America from 1993-1994 comprise the beginning of writer (and Slave Labor Graphics founder) Dan Vado's run on the main title of the then multi-book Justice League franchise, following the conclusion of Dan Jurgens' run as writer/penciler.

The entirety of Jurgens' run was collected in two volumes rebranded Superman and Justice League America, and apparently DC is doing the same with Vado's run, giving Wonder Woman top-billing in an apparent attempt to goose interest in a collection of these issues, which, if not the absolute nadir of the franchise, is certainly well into a valley between the peaks of the Giffen/DeMatteis run and the Grant Morrison.

The new title is more or less meaningless, just as that of the previous two collections was (as I mentioned before, Superman is barely in Superman and Justice League America Vol. 2, that's just a better title than The Second Half of Dan Jurgens' Justice League America). In fact, Wonder Woman took over leadership of this Justice League in Superman and.. Vol. 2, and she doesn't exactly play a bigger-than-average role in these comics.

Not only are we wading pretty deep into the era where DC was trying to keep the Giffen/DeMatteis conception of the League going past its expiration date at this point, but this book makes for an interesting read in 2017, given the fact that Vado is so clearly writing in the "old", pre-trade market, soap-operatic model of superhero comics. That is, rather than writing story arcs as part of a bigger, overarching storyline, Vado picks up the cast right where it was, making few if any real changes, and gives each of those characters a conflict of their own to wrestle with from issue to issue, major conflicts moving from the background to the foreground and necessary.

At this point, the League is still operating out of the new New York headquarters from their Jurgens run, with Max Lord essentially their boss and Oberon his assistant. Wonder Woman is the field leader of a team that consists of mainstays Blue Beetle, Guy Gardner (still wearing Sinestro's yellow ring), Booster Gold, Fire and Ice, plus Jurgens additions Maxima, Bloodwynd and their newest recruit, The Ray.

Of the long-timers, they are still all somewhere between reeling and sidelined by their fight with Doomsday, the one that killed the recently-resurrected Superman (the destruction of Coast City comes up in conversation at one point, and when Hal Jordan of Justice League Europe--Or was it International at this point?--shows up for a few panels, he's wearing his arm in a sling). Booster Gold's costume is still shredded, so he is wearing a big, goofy suit of armor that looks like a futuristic football uniform to me; Ted Kord has hung up his Beetle costume and devoted himself to lab work, leery of jumping back into the sorts of superhero fights that had landed him in a coma; Fire is still powerless; and Ice has left the team, but not the book, as she returns to her hidden ice kingdom.*

The foregrounded plots involve one in which Wonder Woman leading the team to secure an airport in a fictional war-torn country with an assist from original Flash Jay Garrick (who sadly doesn't stick around too long), only to face off against Dreamslayer and the "new" Extremists. Then she extends an offer of sanctuary to a pair of wanted space criminals who crash land on Earth, leading to a tense stand-off with Captain Atom and his '90s-looking back-up, The Peacemakers, who are working on behalf of President Bill Clinton. Finally, the team heads to the hidden kingdom Ice hails from, where her similarly-powered brother has initiated a hostile take over, and plans to march on northern Europe with the help of mystical weapons and the patronage of a shadowy threat which, if I remember correctly, will end up being the driving threat of the upcoming multi-book crossover event, "Judgement Day."

This collection has a nice new cover by Tom Grummet...unless DC found a nice Grummet drawing of this team in a drawer somewhere and repurposed it here. The bulk of the interiors are drawn by Kevin West, who arrives with the third issue of the collection, originally inked by Rick Burchett. West's style is quite strong, and pretty much perfect for the book at this point in its existence, as he draws figures as well as Jurgens--and, in fact, some of his lay-outs look so Jurgens-like it looks as if Jurgens himself was doing breakdowns--but he also has a strong facility for facial expressions, and several close-ups reminded me of the work of Kevin Maguire, the Giffen/DeMatteis team's original artistic collaborator.

The influence of the era can be seen slowly creeping into the book, visually as well as in the scripting, as when Blue Beetle finally puts his costume back on it looks a lot like Todd MacFarlane's Spider-Man, Booster armors up and Fire and Ice both get new, much more-revealing costumes.

The rest of the art in the book comes from pencil artist Mike Collins (two issues), Chris Hunter (one issue of Guy Gardner scripted by Chuck Dixon, which is a direct tie-in to JLA) and the art team of penciler Greg LaRocque and a trio of inkers, who draw Justice League America Annual #7, which is placed at the end of the collection (That's from the "Bloodlines" event, and introduces New Blood Terrorsmith, who has a neat look and a neat power, but never really went anywhere after this, save a Showcase appearance...there are three even less interesting and less appealing New Bloods who show up as well to help the League fight him).

The overall quality of the book is rocky, and despite its title, it's definitely for fans of the Justice League, not of Wonder Woman. That is, if you were picking this up specifically because of it's title, chances are you're going to be sorely disappointed. The art and story actually age pretty okay, although Gardner's lewd come-ons seem incredibly weird today, and it's hard to understand why Wonder Woman or Maxima aren't constantly throwing him through walls or breaking his bones. This Wonder Woman is a lot more patient and less violent than more modern takes, I guess.

*********************

As I noted when writing a little preview of this for Comics Alliance, back when there still was a Comics Alliance (sniff), this particular volume contains 1.) The Ray on the Justice League, 2.) The Justice League fighting a version of The Extremists and 3.) Terrorsmith, so one can't help but imagine a young Steve Orlando read and internalized these issues, given that he just launched a new comic book series called Justice League of America featuring The Ray on the the team, their first foes are a version of The Extremists and future solicitations reveal that Terrorsmith will be making, like, his third appearance ever.

*********************

Amazon has an entry for an October volume of Wonder Woman and Justice League of America that collects the series through issues #91. That's only six more issues, and considering that those six include part 1, part 4 and an "aftermath" of "Judgement Day," I have to assume parts 2 and 3 of "Judgement Day" will be in there as well. (Vado also wrote Justice League America Annual #8, but given that it's an "Elseworlds" annual I imagine arguments could be made for and against collecting it; the best argument for being maybe that Evan Dorkin draws a back-up in it called "The O Squad," in which all of the many, many JLA villains whose names end in "O" team-up).

Then there's one chapter of the the Zero Hour tie-in that ran across the various League titles by Christopher Priest (The story introducing Triumph, which...well, I don't know if that would get collected with Triumph or Priest's (excellent) run on Justice League Task Force or...what. Priest wrote JLA Annual #9, part of the weird-ish "Legends of The Dead Earth", Elseworlds-esque themed annuals).

Then the Gerard Jones-written run begins, the last before DC cancels the whole Justice League franchise, clearing the decks for Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell's JLA. That lasts 23 issues, and if DC ends up collecting them--and at this point, they've come so far, why not?--I'm curious if they will keep the the Wonder Woman... and title for volumes 3 and 4 and maybe 5 or...what, exactly.

Say, is this temporary, one-arc line-up the closest a League comes to The Big Seven between the end of the Detroit Era and JLA...?

I'm also curious if at any point they will collect the other early '90s League titles, Justice League International (perhaps re-christened in trade as Green Lantern and Justice League Europe?), Justice League Task Force (originally conceived with rotating line-ups and writers, a first volume seems an easy sell, as the pre-Zero Hour conception would/could include scripts from Peter David, Jeph Loeb and Mark Waid) and the unfortunately titled, originally-rather-poorly-drawn Extreme Justice.

Extreeeeeme! I do like Amazing Man a lot, though, and was sorry to see that his death was treated as a real, permanent death. That guy should totally be on the Justice League right now. 

*Did DC miss a huge opportunity by not pushing Ice, a superhero who is also an ice-powered princess, a few years ago, in the wake of 2013's Frozen movie? Like, if they were reinventing, rebooting and relaunching all their characters anyway, it occurred to me while reading this volume that in many ways Ice is basically just Elsa, only a superhero.

Wait, that worked?

But Wonder Woman didn't even say "Clear!" first! Wonder Woman defibrillates Superman's heart with one of Zeus' thunderbolts in JLA #9 by Bryan Hitch and Daniel Henriques. He survives...but only to die for real in Superman #52, which came out...in May, three months prior to when this scene was published.

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.