See, it’s not always a mistake to blog-comment while blind drunk…

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.

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.

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.

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?

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”.

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.

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.