Wondabunga

By Mel Dyer If you were a well-known comic book, with a  Galactus-like  bad guy at your disposal – a comic that’s rarely a hair’s breadth from  total cancellation  – what would you do with him?  What if such a comic had another super-villain, who was like a  female Doctor Doom  or  Darth Vader  ..and another, like a cross between the  Borg Queen  and the  Xenomorphs  from the  Aliens  films?  What if such a comic had still another fantastic character, who was like a cross between the Batman comic’s  Bane  and  the Kurgan  from the  Highlander  films? Well, ..if your title is  Wonder Woman,  the answer is easy… Absolutely  nothing. When it comes to knowing what to do with a potentially GREAT super-villain, no comic book has historically been more infuriatingly clueless or outright wasteful, than  Wonder Woman.   Who know...

By Mel Dyer I think it's a shame that Geoff Johns didn't give an Orion/Diana partnership, a chance.   Conceptually, this worked for me, better than the stale Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor sandwich that we fans have been choking on, since comic's Golden Age... Sty-ana? In  Brian Azzarello's  hands (for fans, certainly not the most trusted hands, at the time he was writing  Wonder Woman ), Orion was Willie Garvin to Diana's Modesty Blaise, who (btw) is also a Greek princess...nothing overtly sexual, between them. We don't really know, if they're boinking. Like Diana and Orion, they're companions - does it matter, if they're messing around?   Let people use their bloody imaginations... If we still  have  those. Wonder Woman meets Orion, in DC Comics' New 52 experiment! (Cliff Chiang art) The friendship between the Amazing Amazon and Jack 'King' Kirby's New Gods  hero, Orion, started with a guardrail orientation of how to treat each othe...

By Mel Dyer Mala is Wonder Woman’s first, bestest Amazon girlfriend. Having been with the Amazing Amazon, since the World War II era comics, Mala understands things about the leading lady and where she comes from, that almost no one else could. Think of Mala, as a totable Paradise Island...Themyscira-in-a-bag. Including her in the regular cast and moving her to Man's World is a way of keeping Paradise Island in the foreground, without having to constantly write the Island or visits to the Island, into a story. Keeping Diana's Amazon past, out front, subtly keeps her superheroics, in context...making sense. That's a useful thing. It’s not just about girl-power. Girlfriends for Wonder Woman have a role to play in moving a story forward, in the smoothest, least clunky fashion, possible. While I’ve found Wonder Woman’s frequent visits with Queen Hippolyta, on Paradise Island, great escapist entertainment, I also realize that's not always easy to do, in the middle of a story...

By Mel Dyer After the rather tepid debut - more of a meow, than a roar - of her most enduring comic book foil, the Cheetah, in Patty Jenkins'  Wonder Woman 1984 (now, streaming and in theatres), ..the Amazing Amazon's arch-nemesis is an empty chair, right now. That said, her perennial sorceress enemy, Circe, is slowly developing into something interesting, outside of the WW comic -  "The Witching War" arc in the hot-trending  Justice League Dark. In James Tynion IV's origin tale, the mythical princess of ancient Greek Colchis, celebrated for her radiance and healing arts,  .. finds herself   the young (maybe, teenaged) hostage in an arranged marriage to the cruel king of a  wealthier nation . Upon killing the abusive pig - a rich friend of her father Aeetes, perhaps - and hanging him in a meat locker, her once worshipful people chase her into the Underworld, where the Greek goddess of witchcraft,  Hekate,  grants her great sorcerous power!...