Wondabunga

By Mel Dyer What can you do, with Colonel Steve Trevor? Not to get sacrilegious - for some comic fans, he's Playgirl' s answer to Mary Magdalene - but, perhaps, it is time to replace Wonder Woman's official hot piece, since World War II, ..with another   love interest. Is it time to replace Col. Trevor's backstory, with something broader or more nuanced, revealing a tragic past, a dark family secret ..or an apocalyptic destiny?  Is it time for Steve to be retconned, as an entirely different character, with a wholly different personality and motivation - maybe, something more challenging to Wonder Woman? Like most of you, I can throw some things against a wall and imagine what might stick, but can't really picture him, as anything, but, what he has been, since the Golden Age: swaggy, All-American flyboy hero. There's really nothing else in the Steve-burrito, amigos. I've looked. He's not enough of an obsessive, entitled ego-monster to be a plainclothes B...

By Mel Dyer Wonder Woman is at her best - her most entertaining - under fire and rising to a challenge! Game-changing stakes and characters, who challenge her freedom-loving, Bohemian ideals, distinguish her as more than a female Man of Steel; they uniquely define her, ..as Wonder Woman. Certainly, one of the greatest challenges to her Amazonian mettle, ever created, ..has been classical literature's superman, Hercules. I don't think Wonder Woman’s creator, Dr. William Marston or most of the writers, who followed him, have ever fully  reformed Hercules, an alternately quarrelsome, thuggy companion and outright enemy of the Amazing Amazon’s, ..since her launch in World War II. Even 1950s writer/editor Robert Kanigher, after making him one of Diana's fairy godfathers, lending his magical strength to her own, ..typically wrote him, as an unrepentant jerk. Like so many other male supporting characters, who are not perennially neutered boyfriend, Steve Trevor, and don't beha...