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Oldschool WW comics are truly marvelous, even when they're totally suspect in their sexual, social, and global politics. There's an energy, much mirrored in the Diana of the era, who far less den-mothery or pinup than she often is today, and much more likely to just plow into danger, get tied up, and hit things. With a moral tagged in somewhere.
I mean, the first thing she did with that lasso of truth was to make a doctor stand on her head! Competitors getting hit by the bullets in that Bullets and Bracelets game! Very little effort to make Steve Trevor anything more than a good-looking plot device. And, even as Batman and Superman are returned occasionally to their earlier stylized atmospheres and personalities, it's hard to do that with WW because it's a woman, you see, and she should be [fill in the blank, 'cause I'm too lazy and the list is too long], which is the sort of thing the early comics left to back-of-the-issue essays or the letters page but didn't really show up in the stories. Diana was the perfect woman, meek and demure and respectful, we may be told in a response to a letter from a fan, but we don't really ever see that in any story, aside from some swoony bondage moments, which pass quickly back into excitement and enthusiasm.
Marc Andreyko did a good job with her in Manhunter, recently. I found her annoyingly entertaining in All-Star Batman, and I Can't Believe it's Not the Justice League which both appear to be satires or intense parodies of two ways to take her character, with the latter being the most frequent, because little girls are supposed to prefer it or somesuch. Why you can't combine the two and have a proper Wonder Woman, who's all impetus and innate sense of justice and competition, intensity and BDSM and unity, learning to walk in an alien world, who knows? That's one thing that sets her apart from both Superman and Batman, is that she didn't learn her morals, her mores or habits, in our societies. Superman, for all his birthright, was raised in the States, raised human and American and whatnot. Diana was a chunk of stone on a xenophobic island of superbadass women who shoot at each other for fun and whose gods walk amongst and so on. She's on assignment. She had to win being Wonder Woman, as opposed to announcing herself such or winning it in the lottery of a dying alien being relatively close to you.
Do it in the style of, oh, Hellsing and sit back and watch the book fly off the shelves. Which, hopefully, Simone's version will do anyway. |
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