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Michael May's Robot 6 post Wonder Woman: What Makes Her Tick.

I'm still complaining about this one.

Even today, I can't get over the number of people who want to see Wonder Woman end up with Superman or Batman. I mean, I can handle a little flirting, a story with a date now and then, but I think that pushing either one as the major romance in her life minimizes Wonder Woman as an independent character. It reduces her to a prize for one of the DCU's great Alpha Males, and hurts her standing as a franchise. She becomes an accessory to one of them.

So it really irks me, not just to see so many fans who love this, but to see how often it seeps into the comics and their media tie-ins. In particular, it pisses me off when it becomes a focus in her own book, as her crush on Superman in the Perez run or even Rucka pulling that shit with Batman in Blackest Night: Wonder Woman. She is her own character, she deserves her own love interest but writers can't seem to get them to stick.

And this is DC's fault, because they aged and married off the guy who was meant to be her Lois Lane. Rather than rehabilitate him like they did Lois, and modernize him for the new era it seems they decided just not to use him anymore. The logic was that it was sexist for her to fall for the first man she ever saw. So they made the first man she ever saw into a fatherly mentor, and decided it would be better if her first romantic interest in a man was to be attracted to Superman. Because being attracted to a man that DC will never allow her to outshine is somehow less sexist than the original dynamic of her being attracted to a normal man who is equally turned on by her saving his ass all the time.



It's the dumbest thing they did when they rebooted Wonder Woman, and potentially the dumbest thing they've done in her history. (Even when they killed him off it was better because he had still existed, and they could always bring him back.) They simply haven't been able to recover. Every love interest they've introduced (Micah, Michael, Rama, Trevor, Io, Nemesis) that survives the writer who introduced them gets ignored by the next writer. None of them seem to take. In the meantime, tons of fans argue over whether Batman or Superman suit her better because so few people have seen that she was originally created with a love interest as part of her supporting cast.

Honestly, if they can get anything out of this Flashpoint and JMS reboot shit, it should be that they can bring back Steve Trevor revamped to suit her modern trappings, as a viable love interest. He lasted 45 years, after all. No one else can seem to stick around beyond the next writer.

What's in a Name When Your Characterization Sucks?

Everytime I go off about Perez's Wonder Woman run, I get somebody who asks me if at least I like that he tied Wonder Woman so closely to Greek Mythology. The problem with that is I'm not sure he did. Wonder Woman's story was ALWAYS that she was a princess of the Amazons. She was always patronized by the gods, it was just that Marston mixed up the names. Still, I remember the first Pre-Crisis Wonder Woman story I ever read. I borrowed a reprint of her Silver Age origin from my sister, who had been rolling her eyes at it. "Oh, it's terrible," she said, "the Amazons are all 'oh, the men have died in the wars, what'll we do?'" but I still read it. I really liked some parts of it. (Yeah, there's some 60s sexism, but I'll address that some other time.)

Most vividly, I remember the scene where Diana gets her powers. It's very like the start of Sleeping Beauty. The goddesses appear and bestow their gifts, and then the gods come in. There's a spirit of playful competition (with a little sexism from Hercules). Mercury/Hermes in particular stuck out at me, because I remember him being identified by Hipployta and then grinning at the baby. While he's looking at the little princess, his hat slips off. The newborn catches it.



Mercury/Hermes/Argeiophantes/Thoth/Eriounios/Whatever-you-call-him, who knew what he was giving her all along, feigns surprise and smiles with that soft expression you get when talking in front of a baby. "Why, look at that, she's faster than me! That'll be my gift to her." Even the crude still image in this panel gave me the impression of winking when I first read it. There's a life to this character, even though he's only there for a panel or two. I forgot which name the Queen called him by until I tracked this down, but I clearly remembered the smiling man and the playful way he announced his gift to the princess.



Even if she was calling him Mercury in the script, this was definitely Hermes from the Greek stories and you could tell right away. That story about Apollo's cattle? You could see it having happened with this guy. The sheer cheekiness of boring the Spirit of Watchfulness death, and then defending himself in court on the premise that a dull story isn't a murder weapon? You could see it with this guy. Finding joy in a child with such a startling appearance that the kid's own mother ran off? Yeah, this is that guy. He's playing with the baby. That quality with Hermes that made him a popular god, this overconfident (but not insultingly arrogant) and easygoing sense of humor, was in that little panel long before Perez took over the reboot duties.

The names weren't all right, but the Greek gods were sure as hell in the Silver Age stories.

(Side-note, I can't help but notice on the reread that Aphrodite and Athena give her powers vaguely equal to their own, but Mercury and Hercules give her powers specifically GREATER than theirs.)

Hermes has been a favorite since childhood, so naturally I tracked down the Perez issues where he was active. For a long time, I thought I was just annoyed they offed him for so long. But gods die and come back all the time. There's an argument that Persephone does it every year (you think you just fall into the Underworld and become the Queen of Death? No, there's some major mystical transformation going on there.) I'm not sure I'm even mad he was tricked. This happens to Trickster. No, it's all in the way the plot went down.

His storyline is as follows: Hermes is the only male present at Diana's birth. During the early issues he's shown being moody and sullen on Olympus. He directly intervenes in Diana's first encounter with Circe because he thinks it's unfair she wasn't warned about her. (This is weird, because no one had a problem with him tipping off Odysseus.) So far, so good right? The god who was closest to mortals is depressed that the Pantheon is drifting away from the mortal world. The helper of heroes is unhappy he didn't get to perform that role for the current Champion of Athena. The god of messengers is irritated he wasn't allowed to deliver a vital message. So far, he's lost his sense of humor but he's still Hermes. Possibly the solemn underworld aspect of Hermes--who spent his time back and forth between the worlds, was present at the moment of death for mortals, was tied to the Eleusinian Mysteries by bloodline and by carting his sister to hell and back every year, lost a mortal wife to suicide, had a summer house by a river in the underworld, and dated Gothic Lolita Hekate (rumor has it they had a tryst on a lakeside in Thessaly under the night sky where the moon and even the Pleiades could see)--but still arguably Hermes.

That goes away right after this. When we next meet this character, he manifests on Earth and directly announces himself as a god in order to rekindle his dead cult. He throws power around, healing and creating stuff, until he follows a cry for help and finds himself tricked by Phobos and Deimos (Yes. Phobos and Deimos. The DCU version of Phobos and Deimos), who steal the wand and a good portion of his power. Yes, that's right. He was actually tricked by the squabbling children of Ares. Hermes. The Wily One, the Watchful One, the Protector of Property, the Trickster, the Traveler... This guy who's job it was to go to new territories on diplomatic missions, and travel the mortal world incognito to check on their hospitality and pick up the dead... approaches an unfamiliar people in the stupidest way possible, puts himself in a vulnerable position, and gets punked by two members of Ares brood that even in the DC Universe are characterized by more malice and bloodthirst than sense.

I don't know who this guy Perez wrote was, but he wouldn't have lasted a day in Ancient Greece doing the Herald of the Gods job. I mean, seriously? Does anyone think the world of Greek Myth was less formidable than the DC Universe? When Hermes was born, the Gigantes were roaming around (so were a lot of Titans), Echidna's brood was active, and no small number of spirits and nature creatures were attacking even gods. Hermes was an Olympian, but the title alone and his father's reputation didn't protect him from that stuff. Not only that, ancient greeks weren't a bunch of fucking morons just because they were polytheists. They had skeptics, philosophers, and zealots who might just see magic as evidence of evil rather than evidence of the divine. And Hermes of all the Olympians was the one who spent most of his time wandering the earthly plane, dealing with skeptical humans and fending off any enemies of Zeus that might want to prey on one of the younger Olympians. Hermes got his fame for being clever enough to deal with this crap without an outright show of brute force when it came to monsters, and he spent most of his time among mortals being invisible or incognito. Yes, he tried to brazen his way in somewhere as a god among mortals once or twice such as when he was wooing Herse, but notice in those cases ended up with more trouble than he wanted to deal with ("Where'd that statue of my sister come from?"). That's why when you read Aesop he's always sneaking around pretending to be a mortal. That's why he never announced himself to Odysseus or Aeneas and just let them draw conclusions about who was helping them. He was smart enough to expect a little resistance to the "I'm a god" announcement, and had enough of a sense of humor not to have to announce it. At the very least, in an unfamiliar city, he'd do a little scouting around as a mortal first.

Hell, he's the god of communication and persuasion. Surely he'd have come up with a better plan to spread worship than announcing to a hostile world that the son of Zeus is standing Right There, and being extra careless. Surely he'd have done something a little more crafty than just telling everyone who he is and expecting them to believe him, when even in ancient times he'd have gotten more responses along the lines of "....Riiiiight."

The guy can't be this stupid and not have been a cautionary tale by now.

I know exactly the point of the story, that the gods have lost touch with the modern world and are expecting humans not to have changed. The whole point of using Hermes is that he's the only god close enough to humanity to try and reach out and keep the connection open. He's the communication god, the messenger, the herald and the peacekeeper. He'd want to keep the connection alive. And I see that the point was that the Greek Gods were filled with Hubris and didn't know as much as they thought they still. Still, this was totally the wrong god for this moral. For fuck's sake, the most consistent trait of Hermes among all the stories is that he's not a fucking moron. He's a social god, and even at best a con artist. His experience is in dealing with different peoples and carrying messages in the most effective way. He's a suave character, a smooth operator. He's not a naive, blunt buffoon. He'd do a little reconnaissance, and come up with a clever way to approach a strange culture. Then if he fails, at least he failed on the terms that suit the god's realm and was respectibly outmatched. But this guy in the Perez run was deservedly beaten for ridiculous amounts of pride and stupidity.

After this, he spends some time as barely more powerful than a mortal, and ends up dead when Circe eats all his power. Because Circe is in league with Hekate, who just has to be evil even though in her actual mythological appearances she's a good guy who helps against the Titans, helps Demeter look for Persephone, and supports the Olympian Order in the Underworld. She's the goddess of witches, she skeered mortals (except they ALL scared mortals, didn't Socrates get executed because someone was worried about pissing off Hermes?), she had a dark moon aspect so she's a bad guy who gave Circe a shit ton of power to cause a lot of trouble. And kill one of the few deities that Hekate's romantically linked to in the source material. It's as simplistic as making Hades evil, and even less supported. But why I hate War of the Gods could fill a book, and the poor writer was rushed by editorial doesn't make the first five chapters.

I know my Trickster stories, mind you. And I know from Coyote and Loki that the Trickster gets tricked when he's full of himself, and that often it looks stupid. (I can't think of a point where Hermes was tricked, but Hermes was constrained by his official role as the Agent of Zeus, a keeper of the status quo, so maybe he just never had to get cut down to size in his stories. This was a smart move on his father's part, because it kept their resident Trickster figure from running wild all over the epic landscape.) But here's the thing with that. They bounce back and continue to be clever in their other dealings. Getting tricked is a minor setback, and they learn a lesson and keep causing trouble. Perez's version of Hermes was devoid of his Trickster aspect. He never told jokes, he never outsmarted an enemy, I can't even remember a single instance where Perez's Hermes acted in an indirect manner without chafing about it. He confronted all of his problems head on, which is a respectable character trait but not one that applies to the Herald of Olympus. The charm of Hermes is his lateral thinking, his creative way of dealing with people and monsters, his Trickster side, and we never once saw that charm in Wonder Woman, Volume 2.

"Hey baby, ever make it with a fish?"

-- Kalinara's Zeus impression

Of course, when your main character is the spirit of Truth I imagine it's tough to have a patron be a Trickster. Then again, Zeus in his worst behavior has a major Trickster aspect. An aspect that Perez chucked out the window when using Zeus as an antagonist in his "Challenge of the Gods" storyline. Zeus makes no attempt to hide his intentions from the other gods or the Amazons (only Diana, in her naivete doesn't realize he's out to screw her) when in the source material he tends to move as secretly as possible. He's never this blatant. And he doesn't just go "Sleep with me or fight a bunch of monsters." He, as Kalinara pointed out in chat, will just raise his eyebrows at "No", go away, and then come back as a fish. But no, he's blatant. He announces he's going to visit Diana personally, and everyone but poor naive Diana knows that means he wants to screw her over. Everyone knows what he's up to, including Hera (who is apparently made more sympathetic by putting up with this shit), and he doesn't try to hide or cover it up. And when refused, he decrees some stupid punishment (that could easily have been brought about by Hera being pissed off, as it would have been in the source material) rather than come up with some complicated scheme enlisting that son of his that's a friend of Diana. This storyline totally and unnecessarily bypassed the built-in conflict made possible by the identities of these three gods in favor of a totally different character dynamic than seen in any of the Hellenic stories.

But yeah, I guess I can see where making Hera a bad guy would be bad. It's not like women with husbands who cheat on them and abuse them in real life blame people other than their husbands, after all. And it's not like a writer can have compassion for misplaced rage, especially when someone is wronged repeatedly throughout her life and can't do a thing about it. No, that's not something that happens to modern women. Empathizing with a woman who lashes out incorrectly at other women and helping her redirect her rage and power at something constructive isn't suitable for a Wonder Woman story, and having Hera act like Hera isn't close enough to Greek Mythology. The gods have to be called by authentic Greek names, and act completely different than they ever have order to be close to Greek Mythology.

So no, I don't credit Perez's reboot with closely tying Wonder Woman to Greek Mythology. If anything, it lost the spirit of the gods in this zeal to get all the names and places (which is fucking absurd, these deities could use a different name each mention in all 600 issues and not run out of their Ancient World names) to align correctly. Oh, and he put them all in Hellenic costumes. Because that sure helped.

Caring For Your Wonder Woman Garden

I'm going to say flat out, this isn't a bad costume. It's not an exceptional costume, but it's not bad. I really do wish they'd at least kept with red and blue as the color scheme. There's no reason to do anything but give her blue, starless pants and the same top. Still, I'm not adverse to leather jackets like many fans seem to be, and I like that the bracelets match the crown, belt and lasso now. I don't like color mismatch. I'll be pretending those pants are dark blue from now on, though. I don't think this is staying, the whole matter has a Superman Blue vibe to it, but as a variant costume Jim Lee did a decent job here. Much better than Deodato did back during the 90s. And the New York Times article promises a movie in return for some messing with the costume, so I think it's a small price to pay. But then, I took the white suit era as a way to prove she was as badass as Batman, so what do I know?

(Disclaimer: I won't be able to read Wonder Woman #600 for a week or two due to shipping, so it may turn out to be the most awesome thing on the face of awesome. If such is the case, these complaints still apply (because it won't make Superman #700 good) but I retract my trepidation.)

I'm still leery of this new writer. I have fond memories of Rising Stars and Midnight Nation. I met a boy in the day room the month after I left basic who had the whole run of both up until that point and spent a pleasant evening reading comics. I kept with both until they ended. I liked his Thor okay, too. I was a bit irked that Sif was sidelined, but he had some decent intrigue and some good exchanges on in there. But his Spider-man was more full of bad ideas than good ("One More Day", for example, was a fucking horrible idea, but not as horrible an idea as the Spider-Totem), and the preview of Superman #700?

The preview for Superman #700 and the stated story idea for the next 13 issues is utterly horrifying. Superman's confronted by a woman for not saving her husband, so he responds by shutting down and moping and therefore not having anyone get saved? How many people died while Superman leaned his ass against that fucking tree waiting for the Flash? Who the fuck is this useless asshole? Where is Superman? Where is the guy who responds to failure by going into Samaritan mode and overworking himself? Where's the guy who fixes this by getting a fucking time machine, going back to help the man, and accidentally screwing up the space time continuum so he can save a life? I mean, we could be dealing with the fallout from using a fucking time machine for the next 13 issues rather than walking across country. All right, that's a little Silver Age (but aren't we in a period of Silver Age Nostalgia, DC, huh? Can you tell us some Silver Age STORIES rather than just killing off all the Asian people for it?), but my point is Superman doesn't react to feeling helpless by doing less, he reacts by doing more. The lessen he has to be reminded of time and time again is that he can't do everything. Superman's danger is supposed to be doing too much, not too little, you dumbasses. Get off your asses and get us a time machine story, you lazy fucks.

If JMS can't get the idea down that Superman is an active character, I don't know how I can expect him to make Wonder Woman an active character, and there are some items in his plan that worry me.

1) Hippolyta is dead, and that is never good.

2) The plot doesn't sound terribly innovative.

She doesn't really remember any of it, because in this timeline, it never happened, so there's nothing to remember. However, she does keep getting brief flashes of images that we will recognize as being from the Wonder Woman timeline that we know.

In a way, the person she's become is searching for the person she was ... and maybe she'll find that person, maybe she won't, and maybe they'll meet somewhere in-between.

As it stands now, Diana was taken from Paradise Island 18 years ago, when she was a child. The island was under a massive assault, and Hippolyta wanted to be sure that her daughter survived. The queen led the final defense of Paradise Island, but in the end was defeated. She and most of the other Amazons were killed, with some taken prisoner while the rest escaped to the four winds.

So Diana's task now is to a) find out where, how and why the timeline was changed, b) who did it, c) if it can be undone, and d) stay ahead of the forces trying to kill her while e) helping as many of the surviving Amazons stay alive as possible, since they too are still being hunted.

Later...

She knows her background, having been told about it over the years, but remembers very little of it herself. She knows that they're all relying on her to put it all back the way it was, that one day the Princess will return to restore Paradise Island to its former greatness, and that's a huge responsibility for her. Sometimes she chafes against it.

Also, by virtue of being raised off the Island, and other factors involving the timeline shift, she doesn't have her full range of powers. She's nearly but not entirely invulnerable, can't fly (yet), and the lasso was taken from her mother after her death defending Paradise Island. So one by one, she has to pick up these skills or powers, allowing us to examine them more closely, and give them proper weight, rather than taking them for granted.

The basic story of Diana not knowing who she is, and saving the Pantheon and her world and rediscovering herself along the way so that she can be perceived as more relatable to readers sounds an awful lot like Walt Simonson's story (Wonder Woman Vol 2 #189-194). Walt Simonson is best know for writing a much better run of Thor than JMS did, and actually making use of the kickass warrior woman love interest Sif rather than trapping her in a dying body for most of his run. The difference being that Simonson's story was temporary, and was not a complete reboot of the character which brings me to the last problem:

3. That fucking weed-whacker.

Finally, there's the problem of her being overwhelmed by her mythology and her supporting characters. When writers don't know what to do with a character, they build up the supporting cast and universe to kind of hide that fact. After a while, you can no longer see the character for the underbrush. When that happens, you need to bring out the weed-whacker to clear some of that away so you can focus on the main character.

Yeah, this would be a great point... were it not applied to Wonder Woman.

Because after Crisis on Infinite Earths Wonder Woman was the only one of the major characters who had her pre-crisis mythos leveled by her writer. Her secret identity was thrown away, her weakness was thrown away, her powers were changed, her WWII ties were incinerated. The peaceful, loving, shy Amazons who trained to physical perfection and followed Aphrodite's path of love were done away with and replaced with the reincarnated victims of male violence, who followed five goddesses but primarily the virgin goddess Artemis (later emphasis has moved to the virgin goddess Athena), and left the world of men for Themiscyra are being traumatized by the mass rape of the entire nation by Hercules and his men. Diana was born a mere 19 years before she left for Man's World, and is thus the only one who was never hurt by a man. (Yes, that's right, every Amazon except for Diana herself has rape in her backstory, and is a reincarnated murder victim. Now THAT'S the background we all want for a Symbol of a Female Power.) Diana's love interest, the original reason for her coming to man's world, was aged and turned into a father figure. (Her real father figure Hermes, the only male deity who granted her powers at birth now that Hercules has been turned into a rapist villian, propositioned her later in this run because that's precisely what we want in a story about Men Accepting Women as More Than Just Sex Objects.) He got married off to the comic relief while Diana developed a crush on the unattainable Superman, because he's the Football Captain to her Head Cheerleader status. Rather than leaving the homeland because she fell in love, she put in for Hippolyta's diplomatic mission on Athena's orders--defying her mother's wishes at the time. The love story at the core of her origin was replaced with a muddled mixture of rebellion and obediance to maternal figures. Oh, and her bright and energetic deities (Aphrodite/Venus pre-Crisis had a wickedly naughty sense of humor that came out in Diana's weaknesses, that were of course wiped away because a curse where you can't allow yourself to be bound by a man or to view a man in your super-secret island clubhouse is more harmfully sexist than raping all the Amazons) are replaced by the stiffest, most wooden creations in all of DC Comics. The script just sucked the life out of them, figuratively and literally in the case of poor Hermes (a deity who was allowed to remain dead until Rucka's run, which is fucking irritating because he's supposed to be the most fun and closest to humans of the Big Twelve/Thirteen If You Count Hestia At The Fire Which I Do). By the time they were finished with the machete and the plow, Wonder Woman had traded in the childish, subtle misogynistic themes in favor of new, improved, violent, Not For Kids Anymore misogynistic themes!

Needless to say, I have a lot of problems with the Perez run. But it was a run, it had an origin story, and it sure as hell cleared a lot of brush away and built a new world around Diana.

Which William Messner-Loeb decided to take a weed-whacker to in the 90s, by introducing a new supporting cast and retconing some of what I told you into worse shit (Hippolyta was domestically abused by Hercules and betrayed the rest of the Amazon Nation to him. Oh, and she stripped Diana of her WW title so that she could set some other girl up to die in her place because THAT is how we like our Symbols of Motherly Love).

And then John Byrne decided to take weed-whacker and a FUCKING CHAINSAW to THAT by moving her to a new city, with an all-new supporting cast...

...that was quickly discarded when Eric Luke choose to take a weed-whacker to Wonder Woman again.

Phil Jiminez built on what was there before and tried to reconcile the supporting casts, as did Greg Rucka, but by the time Rucka's really gotten going wouldn't you know it's time to trim the hedges again with Infinite Crisis and Heinberg's Lawnmaster 5000Pro weed-whacker Plus! Next door, Superman has a flourishing patch of grass and Batman's vegetable garden is winning prizes but Wonder Woman's property is a dirt lot with a few patches of green but still... they took the weed-whacker to it. And when Heinberg, who actually planted a few flowers, ran out gas they brought in the Amazons Attack Landscaping Team to get that last patch of green.

And now, after Gail Simone's leaving the garden with more green than she found in it, we hear CHUCHU-CHAAAAAUUUG-CHUGCHUGCHUGCHUG as J Michael Straczynski makes his way to the poor, beleaguered lawn. (Meanwhile, the poisonous tree of Amazon violence and victimhood twists upward in the center of the yard, without having lost so much as a pine needle.)

I appreciate the need for proper lawn care, and there is a lot about Wonder Woman's origin that I would dearly love to see retconned away (the rape backstory to each and every single Amazon, the loss of her central love interest, anything WML did to Hippolyta), but dammit DC, Wonder Woman has seen enough of the fucking weed-whacker already.

I give every Wonder Woman writer a chance and again, there are some things I dearly wish would be retconned out. I'll give JMS a chance here, and I may even like it. But his attitude doesn't really give me hope here. Still, if he brings back Steve or gets rid of the Hercules rape or the reincarnated victims of violence idea, it will be worth another destructive run.

I won't even come CLOSE to everything that's wrong with this picture...

Edit 8 JAN 10 1720 CET: I've promised to tell everyone know that Chris wrote his very astute Blackest Night: Wonder Woman review before I wrote this, and note that he is very handsome. At least one of these statements is objectively true.

Blackest Night spoilers ahead, but you can't really be much further behind that I am.

I'm sure I've written about it before, but I absolutely despise the Wonder Woman bondage origin claims. Whatever creepy personal ideas Marston had that were leaking (or being leaked) into his creative life (and probably not coincidentally, the creative lives of just about everyone writing and drawing comics back then because it sure as hell wasn't just Diana getting tied up in that period), it is a documented fact that he pitched the character as a comic for girls. That he wanted to bring female readers to the superhero genre. He wanted to give girls a story they could read and enjoy.

So Wonder Woman counts among one of the very few superhero genre characters that are legitimately a gift to young women. She is not a character to be marketed to young men. Marston assured the company the boys would read as well, but she's custom designed for young women. For god's sake, she's a princess who talks to animals. Her entire supporting cast, with the exception of one blockheaded love interest, was women. She is a character made with little girls in mind.

The bondage urban legend always struck me as a mean-spirited attempt to rob us of that. To strip her of all innocent and generous beginnings in favor of something uber-sexualized. To say that we weren't worth our own superhero princess, she had to be secretly aimed at young men. That she was really meant for boys. It's a way to steal Wonder Woman, and claim she wasn't ever stolen.

To be honest, that's why I've always felt they had trouble with her. She is a female-oriented character that they keep marketing to a widely male audience. They fill her with T&A and hire writers who figure she should either be a complete bore or the "woman you wish you could date" in the hopes that men are biting. Then they further ward off women by spreading the story of bondage in her origins and skimp up the outfit even more than possible (No one's seen her in shorts in how many decades?), and wonder why no one is buying the world's preeminent superheroine.

In the past five years, though, I'd gotten the feeling that maybe this had changed, that maybe letters and postcards about other female characters had suggested to them that there was an opportunity to market characters made for female readers to female readers. They started hiring female positive writers and female positive artists for the character, treating her as an equal to Batman and Superman, propelling her to a more prominent place in-story, and just pushing her more greatly than they had been for decades. She even got an animated movie! There were stumbles, but I figured maybe they were giving it a shot.

Then I clicked a link on Twitter and saw this monstrosity.



Wonder Woman in a fucking Star Sapphire outfit.

Let me make this clear, as I have complained about her lack of romance as relative to having Aphrodite as a patron extensively. In the Golden Age, this would work. She followed Steve off the island for love. But Steve's not the love interest in the modern age. They made him too old, wrote him out and married him off. He's been replaced by Superman--No... Hermes--No... Guy Gardner--No... Trevor Barnes--No... Io--No... Batman--No... Nemesis... Oh wait, we can't decide on a major love interest because every writer has to make their own or pair her off with their favorite! (Funny, this never happens to Superman who still has his Golden-Age Love Interest.) And since she has been decreed by DC to be an eternal virgin, none of these relationships ever deepen to the point that she would be especially attached to this person over anyone else. They tend to be flirtations and infatuations. So Aphrodite is shuffled to the background in favor of virgin goddesses Artemis and Athena (both greener than a pine tree in the middle of December) as her primary patroness.

So even though with the character's current chastity (brought specifically about by them aging her boyfriend and marrying him off to the comic relief in the CoIE reboot) Love no longer suits her nearly as well as Compassion (or Hope, or Willpower), they stuck her in the all-girl Corps (WHY THE FUCK IS IT ALL WOMEN IN SLUTTY OUTFITS YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES?! ARE MEN UNABLE TO FALL IN LOVE AND ACT IRRATIONAL OR WEAR SKIMPY CLOTHES?!!) because hey, that's just a bunch of Space-Amazons, right?

They see nothing wrong with tying Wonder Woman to some smartass writer's abysmal joke about how women go CRAZY in relationships.

They see nothing wrong with taking a character who's concept is the person girls should all aspire to be and placing her with the group of women who are DEFINED BY THEIR ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS!!!!!

!!

!!!!!

!!!

Motherfuckers.

You can't just ignore Aphrodite's influence since the 80s and then suddenly decide her realm is the primary motivator in the character's life just because the character is the girl. Not without laying years of groundwork suggesting she's been fighting her need for love, which just hasn't been laid. She's been fulfilled the whole time without a man.

And you know what? She should be, as she's WONDER WOMAN. I'm all for bringing Steve back in some form--retcon, reboot, long-lost nephew... Something to give her the equivalent of Lois Lane again. But there's a reason they don't and never should (even with Steve in the equation) portray her as feeling like only half a person and desiring a soulmate above all else. Because she's WONDER WOMAN and that would send a really fucking bad message.

And that fucking costume. That godawful costume. Like someone vomited pink all over one of Solomon's concubines. They took one of the aspects of the character that is CONSTANTLY picked on--her skimpy costume (which is considerably skimpier than the skirt she debuted in and the shorts she wore after or even the tasteful bathing suit of the Silver Age)--and went and made it even skimpier, and even MORE sexualized, and then SHOVED her into a group full of women who thus far have been characterized as ALL ABOUT SEX.

It's the Ultimate Reminder that Wonder Woman is no longer for girls. She's been re-purposed for the lowest common denominator or men who refuse to grow up and deal with women on equal terms. She's not going to be given back to us, even though she was conceived as a gift for us. Too many people have managed to convince themselves she was always for boys to begin with, and if they can just hit the right shade of sexualization and male fantasy--the magic balance that Marston had somehow--they can make her popular again.

And it never seems to occur to them that she is not and never was meant to be a male fantasy. She's meant to be everything a girl would fantasize about being. I know, you're saying she's beautiful and sexy but guess what? That's not the kind of beautiful and sexy meant for the boys. It's not the sort of sexy that's there to be desired by the reader, it's the sort of sexy that's there because the person reading her wants to be desirable and POWERFUL in that way, as well as strong and intelligent and POWERFUL in those ways too. The reader is supposed to want to BE her, not just want her.

I haven't bashed the Perez Reboot in a while...

You know, I don't always agree with Scipio when it comes to women in comics. (I actually tend to rub my hands together wickedly in anticipation when I see him post specifically about feminism because I am a bad bad person who likes to watch people fight.)

This time he hit the nail on the head:

But writers seems intent on using Hercules as a bad guy. Maybe that's because, as much as she needs friends, WW needs enemies even more. Personally, I blame George Perez, who needed a cheap and easy Overbearing Male Bad Guy from myth to use in the version of the Amazons' origin he wanted to tell. Instead of using the traditional version of Amazons (the one used by both the Ancients and Marston) -- buttkicking women warriors who founded a society that didn't need men -- Perez chose to make them victims.

Why? Because in Perez's mind and time, the only people with virtue are victims, and all villains are victimizers. If you remember, Perez's Amazons were formed from the souls of women who'd been the victims of male aggression and violence. Because, you know, gods forbid women should decide to do anything except as a reaction to or consequence of men!

So he made Hercules an Evil Male, who deceived Hippolyta (et al.) with promises of love, then drugged, enslaved, and raped her. So that the gods could criticize the Amazons for being soft-hearted, trusting, and open to love; women's weaknesses! So the gods could punish them for being equally open to both war and love; so the gods could punish them for being well-rounded people instead of axe-wielding mankillers (so blame Perez the Scythian for that, not Pfeiffer). Once again, Perez paints the Amazons not as exemplars, but as victims.

Putting rape into the backstory of the entire population of Themiscyra is just one of a long list of WW reboot sins. (That list also includes sucking the life out of the Gods, making Wonder Woman a newbie after Crisis when the other franchise leaders were kept as experienced heroes, and removing the love interest.)

To be fair, I believe it was Greg Potter and Len Wein who plotted and scripted the first storyarc of the reboot, the retrofitted origin story, while Perez did art. Perez took over writing chores with issue 5 or 6. Still, the Bana-Mighdall nightmare parody of feminism is Perez's fault.

He makes my Steve Trevor argument for me.

This link was mailed to me:

"In the comics, the easiest way to bring real life into the life of the hero is to give him a spouse," said Avi Arad, another producer on the "Spider-Man" franchise.

"Lois Lane and the other women, in the comic books, the woman is the other world that represents all of us, and she is there to support, she is there to demand, she is there to observe and to make you think of her as an ambassador of the rest of us," said Arad, who also headed Marvel Studios, the comic-book empire's Hollywood branch, until last year. "Otherwise, there is never a personal story to bring all of us into the room."

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Steve Trevor can not be replaced in this aspect and we lost so much when they threw him to the background after Crisis.

Edit: I commented on Tom's reaction post, and though I'd share what I said with you:

Steve's not there to complete Diana, he's there to complete culture Basically, if you look at the original Avi Arad quote, he says women. Not a general character type, but general female character type.

Steve was the male character who served that role for the iconic female superhero. He's gone now.

The iconic male superheroes have specific dramatic setup in their casts. Oour iconic female superheros (Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Batgirl -- Hell, even Storm over at Marvel) do not have the same dramatic setup. There is no dude-in-distress to balance the damsel-in-distress.

Diana doesn't need Steve Trevor. We do.

That's the point I thought was self-evident that actually isn't.

From Greek Gods to Guy Gardner and G'nort

I was planning to post on the flaws of George Perez's Wonder Woman reboot, but instead I'm just going to touch on one flaw and how it relates to Green Lantern. Well, more specifically, Guy Gardner: Collateral Damage #1 which could have been called Green Lantern: Collateral Damage (Just like Ion is really only Green Lantern: Now With Less Angst!). In it, Howard Chaykin's Guy Gardner really reminded me of George Perez's Greek Pantheon.

With Perez, it was painful to read his Olympus and Hermes scenes because it seemed like he'd never read up on the gods. I got the distinct impression that he got a fact sheet and a few pages summarizing the notable stories and he went from there because while the structure and framework of the Pantheon was there, the life and the spirit was nowhere to be found.

I'm convinced that's what happened with Howard Chaykin and Beau Smith's Warrior run. Someone must have given Chaykin a list of plot elements and summaries, because the framework of Warrior is there but the spirit sure as hell isn't. I'm willing to accept the narrative condemnation of Guy because its first-person narrative from G'Nort's POV (I mean, since when is G'nort considered "perceptive"?) but even taking that into account doesn't improve on the overall mood of the book. I'm largely unimpressed with this comic and that is really saying something because I had very low expectations to begin with.

Also, that new Rannian Lantern puts the series out of continuity with GLC, which grates on my nerves because GLC has managed to keep with the spirit of Warrior even though it threw the trappings of the series to curb.

On the bright side, there was a G'nort butt-shot.



(Annoyingly, that was the only full tailview of G'nort and every other Lantern was turned to the side or the front every panel. Even the female character. The man knows nothing about Green Lantern. Butts, not breasts, dammit!)

Also on the bright side, I spent twenty minutes laughing at the first two pages in which we see "Dark G'nort." That was golden unintentional comedy, funnier than any other G'nort appearance I've ever seen. The scrunched up little face, the badass attitude, the known history, and the fact that this is Dark fucking G'nort combined to save the entire issue for me. I think he should stay this way, it is hilarious.

Those two pages aside, don't waste the six bucks. Buy a few Warrior back issues instead.

On Harsh Criticism

(Note: Please excuse the following really pretentious post. Using long words in a self-important tone is a defense mechanism common to the net-dwelling fannis comicus. It serves to discourage disagreement by maximizing the risk of humiliation and minimizing the gains of friendship. And a post explaining the fannish need to nitpick and complain would not be the same without using the proper "fanboy voice" in the writing.)

It may surprise recent readers to learn this, but I have been in a beautiful, blissful mood since November 30th. I had been running ragged for several months at that point. Spreading myself a little too thin had caused me, for the most part, to burn out on blogging. I was very close to just stopping abruptly and disappearing from fandom. I've done this once or twice before, it's not hard to pick up again. Instead, I signed up to do even more writing, and immersed myself up to the bridge of my nose in the venture.

It worked beautifully! Sure, it has probably affected my writing in the most negative way possible (I'm sure in a few weeks this annoying tendency to milk my writing for the highest possible wordcount to the detriment of theme, mood, grammatical accuracy, and actual communication, will fade away) Once the month was over, I suddenly found myself well-rested and brimming with ideas. I am attempting to write fiction. I am writing more on my blog. I am completely caught up with my blog-reading. I am smiling and laughing as I walk through the hallways at work. I am accepting of myself and unashamed of my origins. My heart is filled with good will for everyone I meet. I love comics, comics fandom, the blogosphere, and the internet again. I love everything, almost.

All of this good will seems to be stopping short at the feet of the people who work and slave to deliver quality entertainment to an ungrateful fandom. It seems that my sensibilities are set to hypersensitive. While I harbor no personal resentment towards the individual creators, the very small little details that grate on my exposed nerves, the ones which, prior to NaNoWriMo, I had tried so very hard to forgive and keep reading past, are suddenly to such an extent that I can not ignore them, even for the sake of a story which is ninety-five percent pure awesome. I must complain, in detail, and in harsh language, about these little problems.

In short, ladies and gentlemen of the internet, I am in full "Fanboy" mode, and have been rampaging accordingly since the month began. I'm sure when its over I will awaken from my fannish stupor, still hugging my three-quarter drunken bottle of liquid rage, dazed, confused, and completely unaware of what happened in the preceding posts. I will then collect my things, look back on the negativity contained on this blog with great embarrassment, take a shower and attempt to return to polite society. Most of fandom should understand, we are comic book fans after all and this is normal behavior. Most of you will give me a wide berth until you're certain I won't bite anymore. Everyone will politely ignore my previous comments, and new fans will have no clue as to my prior rampages with the exception of a slight blush whenever there is cause to praise the comics work of Tamora Pierce.

I very much doubt the creators themselves will remember or even care to remember my rantings. In comics, creators are a part of fandom, they get this from every quarter, I am just another nutbag fan, and I am hardly the harshest critic on the block. There is absolutely no point in pretending to be perfectly happy when perfect happiness is hardly my natural response, especially when feigning niceness might lead to stress, exhaustion, and the need to write another thirty-day novel to relax. Besides, having plopped down my three dollars to cover their royalties I am entitled to get whatever enjoyment is possible out of the comic book and as many of you know, ranting and raving on the internet is immensely enjoyable.

Complaining about comics is a joy in itself, and a form of socialization on the internet. It is one of three possible compensations for a disappointing read, the other two being mockery and potential increase in value. It allows a fan to show off their own verbal and analytical skills to the detriment of the creator, and even display a greater imagination by offering alternative stories. Complaining in a witty and entertaining manner, commonly referred to as "“snarking", is beneficial to the health and self-esteem of your common fan, and it serves to blow off the frustration that builds from watching a character that you grew up with take a direction that is deeply distressing for personal reasons.

Now, while most of my readers are members of the superhero fandom, and are already positive acquainted with the positive benefits of griping, there are still some people reading who find quite a bit of harm in these complaints. Most notably among this minority is She For Whom the Calender Trembles, Maker of the Tuna Casserole, Roaster of the Roast Beast, Scourge of the Parent-Teacher Association, Infamous for the "My Daughter Does Not Need to be in That Program" Altercation Which Resulted in the Transformation of Three Board Members from Flesh to Stone. Her full name has been known to cause spontaneous combustion in the faint of heart, so you may refer to her as "Mama" the Foul. To avoid being turned into a lovely statuette, offerings must be made on three seperate annual occasions, a pilgrimage must be undertaken each winter, regular verbal correspondence must occur and the request that I "be nicer to the other kids" must be periodically honored.

For the benefit of "Mama" the Foul, I will admit the obvious, that there is little point in throwing personal insults at a creator, criticizing the wrong creator, or criticizing a creator for the wrong things aside from venting pent-up frustrations. But, consider this -- in my normal job, I work in lower middle management. As a blogger, I can't get a writer like Geoff Johns fired (I don'’t think ANYONE could get Geoff Johns fired at this point, his name is etched in stone on the DC writing assignments list only the other titles he writes on change), but as the immediate supervisor of Poor Hapless Bystander I can certainly hurt his chances of surviving the next round of staff cuts if I'm not careful to explain precisely how he is responsible for the continuing daily sunrise in as glowing terms that equal or surpass the glowing terms his rival'’s supervisor uses when she explains how her subordinate is responsible for the continuing daily sunrise (performance reviews suck). This is hard to do when I sit down at my desk and obsess over the one fluorescent yellow thread in an otherwise perfect earth-tone tapestry.

I'’m not the only one who obsesses over the little things, thank heaven for fandom. I'm also not the only person out there in lower middle management who relaxes by obsessing over these things, and then complaining about them.

I am one of very few who gets told by her own mother she should feel guilty about it, and then writes an entire post explaining that she is not sorry, not wrong, but may have been just a tad bit oversensitive and that's okay but there's absolutely nothing personal. (Though if JSA sets me off this week, I may be moving on to personal insults -- in which case I'll need someone to distract Mama the Foul.)

Now, while complaining about everything is a guilty pleasure, it is still an enormous pleasure and a traditional comic book fan pastime. It is, in particular, a traditional superhero comics fan pastime.

So with Mama the Foul placated I was planning to, in the spirit of tradition, saturate this blog in the dubious pleasure of being completely unfair to some poor schmuck who was just trying to bring some joy into the collective heart of fandom and educate the comics blogging community about all of the numerous flaws in George Perez's Wonder Woman reboot. However, I'’ve rambled on long enough for one post, and there really isn'’t enough memory on Blogger to accommodate a detailed explanation of everything that was wrong with George Perez's reboot of Wonder Woman. Still, if tomorrow I find myself in a foul mood towards comic book creators again, this would be a safe rant to expect.

Writing Wrongs

After my initial Fantern gushing has died down, I've realized that I liked Infinite Crisis #7 for another reason. Not because of a non-ending, but because of a restored beginning. I'm a modern-age reader, and I'm not an enemy of dark and gritty storytelling -- but I started DC Comics with Grant Morrison's JLA, the Return of Barry Allen, and Kingdom Come. Written well into the 1990s, but all nostalgic books somehow. Unlike Marvel, where I started with shiny new stuff and lost interest when the old continuity came barreling down on me, I started DC with books that explored and revered a complicated and fluid past. DC's past wasn't set in stone, through Retroactive Continuity it changed as often as it's future did. I love this about the company, as it allows for flashback stories to be as fresh and interesting and still as surprising as your typical tales that run forward in an unceasing monthy marathon. No story ever really ends in comics, and you can't be entirely certain of the way it began. Some fans dislike this, but personally it's part of why I like comics. It's why I like the writers I do, the ones that weave strange tapestries with leftover threads from twenty years ago and who place at the annual Continuity Gymnastics Meet.

Sometimes, though, a Retcon needs to be retconned back to way it was, or at least, closer to the way it was. Infinite Crisis #7, for all its flaws, has left us with one very, very, very important thing.

Which is...

Wonder Woman helped found the Justice League.

After the first Crisis wiped her part of this out and shoved a substitute female in to hold fragile continuity, this latest Crisis has undone that damage and restored Diana to her rightful status in League History.

New Earth is a good thing.

A very good thing.

Oh, I'm sure there are those of you our there, those of you who started in the Modern Age as I did, who don't think this is a big deal. You may even dislike it, as it retcons away Mark Waid's JLA: Year One story and potentially removes Black Canary from her role as a replacement founder. I don't see the problem, myself. I liked Year One, I read my sister's copies when it came out, I even own the trade now. It doesn't need to be current continuity to be a good story. And yes, I adore Black Canary. I love her in Birds of Prey, I love her in the revisionist retconned JLA stories, but the bottom line is she was replacing Diana. Black Canary isn't a big name like Superman, Wonder Woman, or Batman. She's a secondary character put in to replace a primary seller.

And I can see the argument now -- Buuuut Raaagnuuuuulll, Superman and Batman are the big names and they're not founders. Why does Wonder Woman have to be?


And you're right, it's not an issue of membership. It's more one of timing. My problem with Diana not being a JLA founder is the reason she was not a JLA founder. It's because after Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985 when they rebooted the Big Three, Wonder Woman got the shaft.

Oh yes, she did.

Superman was retconned, and his origin was retold. He was taken out of the 1940s Justice Society, but still remained the very first of the "Second Wave Heroes" who showed up at the beginning of the DC Ten-Year Elastic Timeline they wrote after the Zero Hour Crossover. It was important that he still be an inspiration, and while he wasn't a JLA Founder he was still around when it was formed. He got a power down, but was still the biggest when it came to raw power and DC towed that line for a long time.

Batman was retconned, and his origin was retold. He was taken out of the 1940s Justice Society, but still remained one of the first of the "Second Wave Heroes" who showed up at the beginning of the DC Ten-Year Elastic Timeline they wrote after the Zero Hour Crossover. It was important that he still be a veteran hero, and while he wasn't a JLA Founder he was still around when it was formed. He got a little grimmer, and became more of a fighter than a gadgeteer but he still held the office of "World's Greatest Detective" after his reboot.

Wonder Woman was retconned, and her origin was retold. She was taken out of the 1940s Justice Society, and placed as a New Arrival directly after the Crisis. This put her at the Four Years Ago point in the DC Ten-Year Elastic Timeline they wrote after the Zero Hour Crossover. She was no longer a JLA Founder because she was not even around then. She was not a veteran hero, but a naive novice who was just learning about Patriarch's World. She did get a power-up, but she lost her seniority for it.

As a result, Wonder Woman was younger, less experienced, and less wordly than her former contemporaries. Again, this may not seem like a big deal to you, but it sure as hell does to me. Seniority is a huge deal where I work. These men were her colleagues before, and now, when she had been an equal when it came to age, experience and wisdom, she was now behind the curve. She went from looking to them as friends and co-workers to looking at them as examples and possible mentors. When they were veteran heroes she was a rookie. She was originally meant as an inspiration specifically to women, but now, when she came on the scene, it was littered with female heroes anyway. Her own sidekick, Donna Troy, had been recast at the beginning of the timeline and was, as Wonder Girl, more experienced than Wonder Woman when she first arrived.

And why? So that Diana, originally conceived as a teacher could be recast as an innocent setting her first feet on Man's Shores and learning the harsh lessons of life. They couldn't do it like Batman: Year One or Man of Steel and write her origin in a miniseries set at the beginning of the timeline. No, they put her at the beginning of Crisis so that we would watch her new life unfold in real-time. They rewrote her supporting cast to fit. Where she'd been a mentor and friend of a group of young girls, she was now surrounded by older women (Julia Kapetalis, the new Etta Candy, Myndi Mayner) who were there to guide and mentor her. She'd previously had a love interest, an adorable Navy pilot with a cute butt she followed all the way from Themiscyra, a man with old-fashioned ideas about womanhood who found Wonder woman strangely intriguing. She used to roll her eyes at him, try to subtly teach him lessons, and save him from danger when he got in over his head. Now, he was aged over twenty years ahead of her, and instead of a cute guy she wanted to come around to her way of thinking she had an older man to act as a father figure and guide her in this new world because she was now so fucking young and naive.

In fact, all romance was drained from her life as he was married off to a lady who used to serve as the comic relief. It was like Lois marrying Jimmy Olsen, dammit! She's never had another love interest even close to viable. But of course, they had to cut out romance because if she's not a virgin she's a whore, right? Or is it just to make her less experienced?

Her backstory family, her mother's Amazons, went from a goofy Golden Age take on Greek Mythology to a freaking Modern Age Greek Tragedy. They didn't just up and choose to leave Man's World of their own volition. Oh no, first they all needed to be recast as the reborn souls of women who died because of violence. Then, they needed to be punished for withdrawing from Men (which y'know, may have had something to do with having past-life trauma of violent deaths at the hands of men combined with immortality and no need to procreate) by being drugged, chained up and raped by Herakles and his army (in a retelling of an ancient story that, when I first read it had ended in Herakles running for his skin because of a misunderstanding when Hippolyta voluntarily gave him her girdle after talking so he could settle a debt), then forcibly exiled to an island in the middle of the freaking Bermuda Triangle by their own patron goddesses!!!

They powered her up, gave her flight, yes. The also removed the dumbest and most obviously sexist of the arbritary weaknesses -- when chained by a man, she loses her powers. The insanely outdated reason for no men on Paradise Island -- that Aphrodite had cursed the Amazons to a lust-frenzy if a man set foot there (which still gives me a chuckle, because its such an Aphrodite thing to do) -- also gone. That was all gone. But what good is it to make her physically more powerful and then scale back her personality so she's less threatening. What good is it to drop the silly Golden-Age bondage joke just to replace it with some seriously disturbing backstory that involves bondage and rape? They made Wonder Woman from a slightly worrysome children's story (which, let's face it, all children's stories are somewhat worrisome) into a book I'd never feel right about giving a little girl. I had to stop in the middle of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a grade-schooler, I'd never have made it through Wonder Woman (Volume 2) #1.

Meanwhile, Batman and Superman get by relatively unscathed, in some ways improved by the modernizing. Oh yes, they got darker elements in the reboot too. But somehow "Because Krypton's been recast as a no-huggin society that creates test tube babies in incubation chambers, I, DC's First Superhero, was now actually conceived without sin" and "In this timeline my parents are still dead, I'm turning paranoid, and my on-again off-again quasivillainous girlfriend used to be a prostitute (who still kicked ass because she punched out her pimp, rescued a younger prostitute and gave up the business for the more lucrative career of robbing mobsters) but I was still considered Character of the Century when all was said and done" don't hold a candle to "I, who once represented female autonomy and came from a society of female supremacy to preach about the value of femininity to an unappreciative culture, am now from a society of paranoid isolationists who have all been deeply wounded by men. My bright, funny backstory has been replaced by a tale of humiliation and death. Rather than make our own decisions, I and my sisters are now completely and utterly at the mercy of the fickle whims of the gods, because even Amazons can't make their own decisions."

And they keep their seniority, their experience, and their in-story status.

It just seems like there's something unbalanced there.

Then there were the little continuity holes like "Wonder Woman is no longer in the 40s" and "Wonder Woman is no longer in the JLA" when they wanted to reference old stories. How to fix those? Why, for them it was easy! Just take a female character who's around during that time, and stuff her in there. It doesn't matter who! They're female, they're interchangeable!

I am not overreacting.

Case in point: Black Canary and JLA Foundership.

Once again, I've nothing against Black Canary, she's a kickass character.

But I'm sorry, she could not replace Wonder Woman in the JLA. There is nothing, powerwise or personality-wise, that the two have in common aside from their gender and having been members in the past.

"Hmm, okay for this story Pre-Crisis we had Green Lantern, Aquaman, the Flash, the Martian Manhunter, and Wonder Woman."

"Can't use Wonder Woman in the flashback. New continuity."

"Crap! Well, we need to replace her, I need this flashback to explain the villain."

"Okay, well, let's think. She's got superstrength, superspeed, invulnerability, a magic rope that forces you to tell the truth, and can deflect bullets with her bracelets."

"Hmmm... Can't we stuff in Superman?"

"Nah, we need a chick. We'll use Black Canary. Martial Arts and Supersonic Scream."

!!

Allow me to repeat that...

!!

Y'know, in Today's world of questionable character mis-handling and suspiciously symbolic death that can usually be chalked up to cultural factors rather than malice, it's nice to have that one clear, shining example of direct misgyny.

Can you imagine that logic at work in real life?

"Sir, we have everyone we need in the ground support crew for this experimental exhibition flight except for a hydraulics expert in case of brake problems."

"Hmm... There's no women on the crew, better put MacKenzie in."

"Sir, MacKenzie's unavailable because of her vacation."

"Oh, shoot, then use Kaleikini."

"Ummm... Sir, Kaleikini is an wonderful technician, but she specializes in an onboard navigation system that isn't featured on this model of aircraft."

"So, what's the problem? We have a crew chief, a propulsions expert, a comm-nav guy, a GAC guy, and a chick. That's all we need, right?"

"..."

You know, I've heard John Stewart's role in the JLA derided as tokenism, and yes, he was there in JLU for racial diversity. But think about it, JLU is the animated version of the Justice League/JLA comics. In the story, he wasn't replacing Steel or Black Lightning as the resident Black Guy. He was replacing Kyle or Hal as the resident Green Lantern. His ultimate role in the franchise was based on his powers, not his color. But Dinah Lance, Dinah's another story entirely. She had no overlapping powers or skills with Diana, but was considered a suitable substitute anyway simply because she was another woman. There's your tokenism, right there. That's where inclusion attempts become sexist or racist in itself, when the character's status as an "Other" -- a woman, a black person, or a gay person -- overrides the character's abilities. Now, I love the old nineties teambooks where the demographics were carefully and deliberately plotted out when putting together the team, but for it to work the characters personalities and skills had to be more important when it came to the actual story. And therein lies the problem of revisioning and retellings. You can't carefully choose the demographics, you have to work with what was used before. Terry Berg will not suffice when a story calls for Damon Matthews. You wouldn't take out Kimiyo Hoshi and put in Cassandra Cain -- the abilities are too different and there's no justification for that replacement. By the same logic they should never have taken out Diana Prince to replace her with Dinah Lance.

Thankfully, someone at DC figured out that all of this was that stupid and put Diana back to when she belongs -- contemporary to the boys. I don't think this necessarily means that Canary's role in the beginning is ruled out (but in all likelihood, it does), and two female founders would be interesting, but I wouldn't be angry if it was just Diana and the four guys, the way it was originally written. I'm sorry, if you're the sort of fan who think Black Canary loses her worth as a character because the retcon that made her a founder is simply retconned away, then you must have no appreciation for the character. And if you're the sort of person who thinks that WW's role in early Justice League is simply that of "The Girl" and that Black Canary really was a suitable substitute in retelling the old stories then I honestly don't know why you read this blog.

But anyway, I like New Earth. New Earth is a good thing. A very good thing. It restored Diana's seniority and her role in the JLA, in one sentence. And now, we'll get to see the revisionist tales with Wonder Woman. And who knows what else they fixed in the relaunch? Greg Rucka was adamant a few months ago when this was announced that it was not a reboot, but a relaunch, so I don't expect all of my problems with Wonder Woman, Volume 2 to magically go away when Volume 3 hits the shelves (June Seventh!). But there's extra years to play in now, and the Kubert varient cover shows Diana, Hippolyta in the Golden Age outfit, Donna Troy and Cassie Sandsmark, so I expect some interesting backstory.

And I do love DC's fluid and flowing backstory. Comic books get to rewrite their history to fit the present.

Wonder Woman and Religion

Most of us blame the difficulty some writers have understanding Wonder Woman on gender. "She's a complex woman," I've heard. "They're each writing their ideal woman," I've read.

Read On

Most of these writers, of course, have no trouble with characters like Lois Lane, Barbara Gordon, or Dinah Lance. Those who do, they don't have problems to the extent they have with Diana. Lois, Babs, and Dinah seem to have much more clearly defined personalities than Diana. Diana seems almost schizophrenic, as every writer explores a different aspect, every writer makes their own personal stamp on her. For Perez, she was a total innocent, a full optimist. Loebs wrote a rebellious daughter who ran off to see the world and tried to become part of it. Byrne wrote a stiff, formal princess. Waid played up the warrior side. Morrison played up the disciplined competitor. Luke's Diana seemed lost to me. Jimenez wrote a highly emotional woman. Simonson introduced a rational, thinking woman. Rucka took to the rational, thinking side, too, but he added regality and spirituality. But the other three mentioned tend to be the same. Even lackluster writers have a basic handle on those characters, but it takes a really good writer to make Diana work.

Diana's problem isn't her gender, it's that she's from an alien and ancient culture. Not simply in attitude and philosophy, but in the religion. I think that's where it breaks down.

Most of the writers and editors (though not all, I'm sure) can be presumed to be from a monotheistic religious background. Supreme Deity, pitch perfect in all ways, representing the good and only the good in the universe, that's the measure of divinity. Most of their readers are from this background too. From this background, Diana's Pantheon seems like a kindergarten class with cosmic power. Hardly respectable or acceptable in their view of divinity (even though it's supremely unfair to judge a foreign religion in terms of your own). Divinity is good, and anything that's bad is not divine, after all. And if anyone finds the behavior of the Greek Pantheon acceptable in polite society, they need serious counseling. It's bad sometimes, therefore it can't really be divine.

Here's the thing, though. To the Modern Pagan Mind (I can't speak for the Ancients), this isn't the way to view divinity. Divinity is not good or bad, Divinity is good and bad. The Gods Just Are. Their behavior can be truly awful and truly wonderful. Their nature encompasses the extreme best and extreme worst of their spheres of influence. They aren't "people," they are "ideas." Aphrodite isn't a woman, she's the Love/Lust -- The Need to Continue/Protect the Species. Her arena includes lofty, self-sacrificial love and wild, self-(and other-) destructive lust. Ares' realm is protection and defense in addition to excessive force and violence. Athena's gentle compassionate wisdom exists alongside coldblooded scheming.

Some people who've read the Greek stories ask "How could they worship this?" (which is fascinating because I have a pagan friend who's read the Old Testament and constantly asks that about the Judeo-Christian religions). They have trouble reading in the abstract, I guess. They don't realize Athena and Aphrodite aren't women, they're concepts. Where it says "Athena does this" you should read "Wisdom does this," or "Knowledge does this." Apollo would be Reason or Light. Aphrodite is Love and Lust. Ares is War...etc..

Zeus alternately behaves as a loving father and an utter dick. I've seen it analyzed that Zeus represents Men in Power Positions (Kings, CEOs.etc..), or just Power itself. Power blesses, sets rules, rewards, creates and destroys, exploits, brutalizes, tyrannizes also. Worship of Zeus isn't necessarily embracing the worst indulgence of power, but it's representing Power as it is and accepting that it can harm and help. Aphrodite is the full scale of love and lust -- from the lowest urge to the highest regard. Her worship is respecting and accepting the nature of relationships/bonds between people, at the best and worst of it.

But people don't think this way. So, in order to write a character who worships these gods, and still use them, the writers need to find a way to make it acceptable to the majority.

They usually use one of three approaches: 1) Suck all of the life and personality out of these vibrant, energetic deities, 2) Write down the gods, making them subordinate/lesser than the supreme deity, or 3) both of the above.
Then Greek Gods are just background characters, and supporting cast in Wonder Woman. This would be fine, if they were used to support the story and move along the plot without being without being degraded in the above ways. Since the Post-Crisis Reboot, Diana's gods have been arbitrarily put in danger (Hermes, the entire Pantheon a few times), depowered (Hermes), made evil (Hecate), made ineffective (Persephone), rescued by her (Poor Hermes!) and even killed off (Hermes, Hades) in order to make Diana look stronger, and to make their existence more palatable to the majority of readers.

The trendsetter here was Perez. Sure, he told a fine story about a god being made flesh and suffering humiliation and depowerment as a human when he used Hermes. But in doing so, he drained Hermes of all of the personality that made Hermes so likeable. It could have been an acceptable result of this ordeal, but he did the same to the rest of the Pantheon. He turned Olympus into a funeral home. Even when Zeus acted like Zeus, he was so stiff and formal that it was unbelievable. Every god was the walking dead. A cipher. This is what he expected to represent the most vital pieces of life? Even Hades, the god of the dead represents a primal, energetic force in the universe that every human being knows in the deepest part of their soul. Perez's Olympus just didn't convey that. He couldn't even get their appearances right! (Artemis is Not A Blonde!) I groaned every time I saw the gods (with the exception of Hermes, whom I was excusing for his being weakened) when I read Wonder Woman for a long long time. And the death of Hermes was a continual sore spot which was only healed recently.

As I see it, Rucka seemed to have the best approach. The stories were heavy and plodding, like a Greek Tragedy, because he was playing up the cultural aspect. Ultimately, though, he has had my favorite Wonder Woman run to date. He'll always have a special place in my heart for returning Hermes to the living (conversely, he'll always be a sore spot for killing Hades). He wrote the gods as their personalities, introduced a mildly metaphysical (Cotton Candy Symbolism) explanation for their fluctuating power levels called "Indirect Worship" which reinforced the idea of the gods as Concepts with Consciousness as opposed to Normal Characters.

If you follow the maneuvers of Athena throughout Rucka's run, actually, you'll notice a parallel with what's going on inside Diana's head, which is truly an effective way to use the gods (if he did it on purpose -- and I have trouble believing the Hermes part at least wasn't on purpose). During his run I noticed:
-- Artemis -- the joy of the hunt, isolationist feminism (Themiscyra itself, which Athena and Hermes encouraged Diana to leave), seems to have been cut out of the picture (I know it was a name thing, but it still makes a great subconscious pattern especially considering that during Perez's run she was the one equated with Diana's personality the most) as Diana finally takes serious steps to spread her message to the world at large and tries to get away from chasing supervillains in favor of her professional life. Sure, it doesn't work, but notice the heavy themes of the run -- Supervillains scheme in the background while Diana focuses on the embassy, then they seek her out at work -- unlike the other runs, where the scheming took place during a lot of onscreen fighting and maybe a little side lecturing that is referred to but not shown.
-- Athena moves to take the throne as Wisdom, Strategy, and furthering her Ideological Goals moves to the forefront of Diana's thinking.
-- Diana is practically a cipher, seen through other's eyes for much of the run. She's not communicating herself to the reader, her supporting cast is. First person narrative, which is the standard of modern superhero comics, allows us a glimpse into her thoughts only once before Hermes, the God of Communication, Thought, and Learning is returned from the Dead. (Interesting how the single time we saw this method of narration is the crossover with the Flash -- a representative of Hermes if there is one in the DCU)
Rucka disappointed me, though, in Wonder Woman #225. Athena's narration is reverent of Diana, and hints at self-hatred. As though even the gods themselves cannot accept themselves as they are.
Diana's religion, once again, is undermined by the writer, even as he tries to build the character up. In a way, this cancels itself out. Diana is such a spiritual character, brought to life and empowered by the gods, given a mission by the gods, that anytime you undermine her religion you undermine the basis for her personality, and you start to lose what little ground you had.

I'm still really impressed, mind you (Despite my massive annoyance at Hades' treatment, and my irritation with Athena's attitude last issue) with Rucka's handling of the gods. I love using the events on Olympus as an allegory and a catalyst for the Earthly plot. I even more like the gods with their Homerian personalities, the sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent, always interesting Greek Gods that I've read about since Elementary school.

The clerk at my LCS knows this, and so he asked if I was angry by the implication in Infinite Crisis #4 and Wonder Woman #225 that they won't be an active part of Diana's life again. I don't think that's true, but on reflection, I don't think I'd mind if they are shuffled to the origin story and never used aside from retelling that. Too few writers can handle them correctly, and it gets downright insulting after a while.

(And yes, that was another Image stolen off of Poison Ivy)