Wonder Woman, Delineated
This is a difficult one, because in terms of the Big Three she’s the character I know the least about. That said, I think there’s enough about her that’s commonly known, thanks to the TV series, to make a useful analysis without being a hardcore fan. In fact, I’d say one of the reasons that the character’s been so mishandled over time is that too much time is spend exploring elements that are unfamiliar to anyone but hardcore comics fans (like her secret identity, or lack of) rather than the elements that made her popular in the first place.
Core Genre: Fantasy. And with that in mind, can someone tell me why Fantasy outsells SF as a genre by a significant amount, yet the most obviously fantastical character DC has can’t get any traction? Something’s going wrong somewhere, and I suspect it comes down to gender disparity within the marketplace. As I understand it, and as I observed back when I worked as a bookseller, Fantasy novels sell incredibly well to female readers. Why on earth can’t DC try and angle a WW title towards them? Of course, last time they got a big name female author to write for them, they screwed the pooch with the Amazons Attack nonsense. You look at that and you can’t help but feel that someone deliberately spoked that storyline.
The Bad: I don’t tend to like mythological-origin characters, Thor excepted (because Norse mythology through a Kirby lens is senses shattering). Mostly, this is because magical characters tend to be associated in some way with Camelot, and by now you should all have guessed I have a real problem with cultural appropriation of Arthurian myth.
Greco-Roman mythology, while interesting, I find to be somewhat played out. I think it’s because so many of the building blocks of what we in Europe consider to be story or story-telling (drama, tragedy, comedy, the theatre itself) owe so much to this tradition, that any modern adaptation is already fighting against the weight of history, in danger of appearing dull, dusty and quaint. To expect anyone to freshen this kind of thing up is asking an awful lot.
On the other hand, that’s probably just me.
The Good: So, what makes her work?
A) Truth. Truth truth truth truth truth.
B) The hunt.
C) Magical gadgets
D) Super-strong, super-fast.
Factor A is more subtext than explicit, but I think it’s fair to say that any Wonder Woman story has to have a theme of honesty or a counter-theme of dishonesty to it. I say this is because a lot of her stories can be a bit unfocused; she needs something to define her. It’s unfortunately easier with the others in the ‘Trinity’ thanks to their admirably efficient origins (baby in a rocket, super-rich orphan). I’d argue that B is absolutely essential, although we don’t seem to see much of it in Wonder Woman stories. Yet it’s right there in her name: the goddess of the hunt. It’s what superheroes do, and Wonder Woman should embody it. Hunting crooks- uncovering the truth of their deeds- make A and B her method of putting her antagonists into context. C and D become her method of interacting with them.
A sub-factor, I believe, is her ambassadorial mission, her way of teaching or rehabilitating the world beyond Themyscira (do we really still refer to it as “man’s world”?) Some may say this element is essential to every Wonder Woman story. I’m not sure of this myself, but I do think it’s a reoccuring theme that should crop up now and then, in the same was that while not every Batman story needs Alfred, he should be seen more often than not.
Whether or not she can fly is another interesting consideration. I think it’s an important development for the character in that it gives her parity with Superman, but at the same time it takes away from the whole “invisible plane” thing, which is far more of an essential factor, as much a part of the character as spinning around while transforming, getting the truth out of people with the magic lasso, and deflecting bullets with her bracelets.
That argument aside, what she absolutely has to be is strong. Stronger than Superman, in fact. Certainly more ruthless, in that she’s born to a warrior culture that would have given her far more training that a Kansa farmboy would ever have received. Also, if you’ve written a Wonder Woman story where she’s been saved by someone else, you have FAILED, completely and irrevocably.
Other factors: Unfortunately, her rogue’s gallery is lacklustre to say the least, and her supporting cast needs to be beefed up. But that’s a practical consideration for the writers and editors. Characters need to be consistant across multiple writing teams to become established, which doesn’t tend to happen with the revolving door of creators on certain titles.
Conclusion: From a practical point of view, there’s got to be a market for the character that’s just waiting to be tapped. In terms of the character herself, in actual fact there’s nothing there that needs to be fixed. Maybe what she needs is a change of context. A year-long Conan-style story? No, I know- a year long Mercedes Lackey story.
on October 15th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Many things could be done. I feel strongly that there is not a writer anywhere in the Big Two’s stable who can make anyone care too much about the “mission” aspect — it just doesn’t connect, “standing for something” seems to be all she stands for, and as far as I can see she doesn’t stand for much outside of that. You can write good political stories that way, sure, but it comes back to a message of…what? “Believe in yourself”? “By the way, the Greco-Roman gods are all real”? “Leave Themiscyra alone”? “Girls rock”? What, exactly, can a Wonder Woman of 2008 have come here for?
Couple of things. Truth, and danger. Truth: Wonder Woman’s rogue’s gallery is all about people who embody kinky shit, but can’t accept it, therefore sublimate it, make it dirty, hence become crazy or criminal and hate her. Truth is having a healthy outlook on sex. This goes right back to the basic draft of the character — well, can any of us doubt it’s in there?
But you can’t do that. So, sublimate it into some other kind of truth: it’s a Promethea universe, but we treat it like Jack B. Quick. Screw with stuff we shouldn’t, heh heh. Here comes the danger: it’s WW vs. anything from the world of fantasy. WW vs. Cthulu. WW vs. interdimensional minotaurs, it doesn’t matter. WW vs. experiments in lonely cottages, like Steed and Mrs. Peel. Nazis fit this pattern too: social experiments gone wrong, kinky stuff sublimated thereby creating monstrous perversions of ordinarily healthy urges — it’s right in there, along with Cthulu and crazy women who dress like cheetahs or grow to enormous size. Think WW as Hellboy, or more accurately the anti-Hellboy. Truth: she knows where all this stuff comes from and what it represents, even if she never says it out loud. We think “oooh, monster from the earth’s core!”, but she thinks “yikes, more repression! Do they ever run out of this stuff?” Easy to do: just let her at the stuff they’ve been filling Spider-Man comics with for the last forty-odd years. Explain nothing, just go with it. This last bit is where WW scripters have usually dropped the ball, they think they have to rationalize Wonder Woman, but how’s that going to work? Superhero comics are all about externalizations, and this superhero more than most…which I’m sure you’ll agree is saying something. Man, and would you believe I don’t even care about Wonder Woman at all? But as long as she’s there, somebody should use her for something half-decent. You hit the nail on the head with calling it “fantasy”, that’s just what it should be. Keep Brad Meltzer and Geoff Johns the hell away from it.
See, when you said “the hunt”, I thought you were nuts…but that fits too, doesn’t it?
That whole “Amazons Attack” thing…my own feeling is, somebody needed to employ a little imagination. Instead they applied the opposite. Musta been Johns.
on October 15th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Perhaps “the hunt” should be better characterised as “the quest“. Oh yes, I like the weight of that. That’s what I’m trying to get at, and that is exactly the problem with “the mission”. A mission is all too readily interpreted as political. Special forces units go on missions. The Fellowship of the Ring goes on a quest (although, the Fellowship as a covert operations team: ooh, there’s a post in that, not to mention hideous fanfic).
But that aside, I think you’ve got absolutely the correct formula for this character. Wonder Woman is the anti-Hellboy. I would buy the fuck out of that title.
These posts are going to need extensive follow-ups in the wake of further thought and consultation.
on October 15th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
I like “hunt”, myself…just like the idea of WW coming from a land of utopian Greco-Roman magic “science”, and appalled to discover the world outside practices something you could characterize as “Mars-based” science, sorry Ares but Mars is better for adjectival constructions, blame the Romans not me…
So a Lovecraftian story with her in it would not be impossible, from that perspective. One things comics used to do was to link magic and science a lot more strongly than we, for some reason, would consider “legitimate” today…a mgic airplane? Um, okay…Kirby gave the Norse gods, qua gods, ray-guns and robots, so I guess I’m okay with that sort of thing. “Science breaching the walls” could be a nice way of bringing that stuff back in…happens all the time at STAR Labs. But wouldn’t it be refreshing, to have weird transdimensional nature-of-reality shit happening that had nothing to fucking do with whatever Geoff Johns is doing in Green Lantern? The notion that this stuff is all hierarchized is stultifying — let WW’s Greek Gods mean something, I say. “Oh no, it’s Cthulhu!” “Actually, it’s Typhon…what do you want here, Typhon?” Doesn’t have to be that way…but all the multiversal ordering or roles and powers is so tiring, if you’ve got a mythological connection there you should just use it, and not worry about Zeus really being an alien or related to the Guardians or from a pocket universe or friends with Shazam or whatever. Also, I’d be very happy if people could leave aside the business of gods needing to be believed in, for just a little while…no matter how well it’s managed, I would call it a crutch, at this point. Maybe gods don’t need to be believed in, you know? I mean how do we know what they get up to when we’re not looking?
Ha! Throw the Phantom Stranger in there too, right? Let him be Diana’s “Commissioner Gordon”.
on October 15th, 2008 at 11:33 pm
Couple of typos in there. Low on coffee.
on October 16th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
But high on life.
Once again, we see the interconnectedness of the DCU causing as many negatives as positives. Like anything, sometimes we get too little, sometimes we get too much, but the urge to have to make sense of various titles’ continuities into a cohesive, uncontradictory whole? We’re on the damn mountain, and this time we just know the rock’s going to stay there, Sisyphus, we just know it.
Let Wonder Woman be Wonder Woman, I say. The lady doesn’t need a young whippersnapper like Darkseid telling her what her mythology does and doesn’t allow. And as for the belief thing, I think Pratchett had the last word on that in Small Gods, and that was, what, fifteen years ago?
on October 17th, 2008 at 1:06 am
And I forget who had the first word…A.E. Van Vogt, possibly? Anyway this has become a crutch, I think: “man is the measure of things”. It’s the stuff of Buffy plots — not saying anything against Buffy, but though undeniably skilled, Whedon’s basically a latter-day consolidator: his specialty is the nostalgic riff, his specialty is going to the well again and trying to bring up water in different kinds of vessels you wouldn’t ordinarily use for that. Nothing wrong with it. And certainly there’s no reason to wholly repudiate the “gods need worship” thing. But I don’t need to hear anybody explain it to me again, and especially if they’re using it to scientize fantasy I think it shuts down more possibilities than it opens up.
Wonder Woman should be a Vertigo title: DC’s as much as proven that they can’t make her relevant in their tightly-continuitized universal context. I say “anti-Hellboy” because I can’t help thinking what Mignola could do, given WW to play with as he would…I had the same thought some time ago about Mignola on Captain America, what I maintain has always been Marvel’s most “cosmic” title. Just think, a year-long Cap/Dr. Strange team-up! I think it’d be an amazing fit: for heaven’s sake, Cap’s costume is practically Masonic. You could go with that.
And obviously, so’s WW’s costume, and you could go with that too: she only looks like a superhero, but she’s really something else.
If it weren’t for the Big Two’s determination to try turning every B-lister into an A-lister (and outside of her universal recognizability, WW’s definitely a B-lister), we could have some Two-Steves-like (or Morrison-like?) scribe taking her off into uncharted territory and making new story features in the DCU. Throwing shit at the walls, seeing what sticks. But unfortunately, it seems things’ll never happen that way again.
on October 17th, 2008 at 11:40 am
We miss the third inevitable step with “man is the measure of all things”. We conceive of an independent superior god who creates us, then we decide this god is our creation, making us superior. We’re very bad at making the final leap of “…however, this doesn’t mean that the physical universe gives a shit and won’t toss an asteroid or two just to reaffirm our place in the grand scheme of things.” We’re not good at humility. Or rather, we’re not good at humility in the absence of something sentient to defer to. Even SF Grandmasters had trouble with that. There’s always got to be a more advanced civilisation, or a set of mathematics that predicts group behaviour, and if we can discuss these things in pseudo-religious terms, then all the better. There’s the contextualisation again. When we don’t have deities, we run out of words.
Oh, that’s an interesting thought. Wonder Woman’s pseudo-religious fantasy setting is to Earth-Prime religion what Flash’s Silver Age science is to actual science.
And you know what would be good? Grant Morrison’s take on masonic symbology and Captain America. That’s a can of worms that would guarantee they’d never let him do it (and all the more reason to put him on. Sometimes I miss the early-Jemas Nu-Marvel era). Alan Moore probably knows more, and has a better skill-set for it, but you’d need a writer who understands America, and American heroes. I think Moore’s had his fill of that, while Morrison’s still working his way through it.
on October 19th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Thought about it for a while…
And no: not Morrison.
Gene Colan art.
And Jim Woodring script.
You scoff: but Jim can buckle down and do work, when he’s asked to.
As to WW’s costume…stars on her ass and a bird on her chest? Red White and Blue was never so deceptive…
Been drinking, so can’t make a more cogent comment. Tomorrow will be better.
on October 19th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Gene Colan would be brilliant. No-one better for art where the real meets the fantastic, which is exactly the vibe we’ve been talking about. Woodring would certainly be different, although you know what’s just occurred to me? A Woodring/Colan revival of Tomb of Dracula. Suddenly, I need that in my life.
on October 20th, 2008 at 3:01 am
Oh my God, brilliant!
See, it’s not always a mistake to blog-comment while blind drunk…