IF ONLY STEVE TREVOR HAD UNLIMITLED, INVISIBLE JET FLYER MILES!

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 Batman or enough of an annoying, self-serving douche bag to be a male Lois Lane. He never has been. He is actually a terminally good, loyal, stand-up chap, ..and that's problematic for me, frankly.

It's problematic for me, because, this late in the game, some eighty years after Wonder Woman's debut, ..it isn't enough to drive a story. Not the way Lois Lane's bi-weekly alien abductions, crawling into unstable nuclear reactors and belittling Superman does! There's nothing happening, with Steve (decisions he makes, etc), that makes Wonder Woman do anything, we don't imagine she would already be doing, ..or anything that makes us think we can't live, without knowing what happens, next. Nothing's happening with Steve Trevor, anymore, that's half-way interesting; things happen to him, that leave him wet and shirtless...

And that simply isn't enough.

Colonel Steve and his Amazon getting all melodramatic. (Nicola Scott art)

Perhaps, Steve's role in Wonder Woman's world, the way he is used in a story, should change. I would prefer his thing, with Xena Boringer Princess, go back to something building in intensity, but unstable and playfully unfinished. What I find really boring is the present scenario, with Steve having landed the Diana-plane and claiming her, as his prize--vice versa. That has been firmly in place, since before writer/editor Robert Kanigher's run in tbe 1950s, ..and it is boring, as Hell. I think things, between Steve and Diana, should be hotter and more uncertain. If that means introducing a rival for Diana's affections, ..like Southern ladykiller, Major Keith Griggs, or a studly I Ching Jr. we haven't met, yet, I would welcome that...

Or ditching him, entirely. Is that sacrilege? Probably.

And what is the U.S. Military still doing at the center of things, in the Wonder Woman comic, ..this far out of World War II? Frankly, I don't know what you do with Steve, if he's not a career soldier. Is it time for the Military to be taken out of the WW origin story and Steve's backstory, specifically? While I love Steve's association, with the military - all my uncles, but one, are servicemen - I'm weary of  how immaterial it has become, since the Forties. If writers cannot use Steve's military experience, the way George Lucas uses Ben Kenobi's Jedi past, I would favor them treating it, as an interesting plot device - an enigmatic tool in Steve's belt...

And not the definitive summation of the character.

I guess I like Colonel Steve Trevor, just fine - might like him better, piloting his leading lady's Invisible Plane, into the cartoon sunset...invisibly, of course. [If only he had his own invisible jet, with unlimited, invisible flying miles!] He and Wonder Woman have been sputtering along, seemingly forever, like that famous, romantic-farewell-from-a-train scene, in Doctor Zhivago. That said, they are not an exciting or even interesting couple, anymore (if they ever were), and it's not her.

It's him. It's all him.

Note: This entry was previously titled "The Problem With Steve Trevor", "If Only Steve Trevor Had An Invisible Jet, All His Own" and something worse, before that, that I can't remember.

Mel Dyer, without his fine, coyote-hatin' Goldiweiller, Kirby (now moved on to that big, coyote-hatin' hate group in the Sky) continues a somewhat bleaker, dogless existence in the Capitol Hill area of Washington, DC. He has been an active member of the Latino Culture Council of the Capitol Area (El Consejo de Cultura Latina – La Zona del Capitolio) and the Kiwanis Club of Capitol Hill.