Wondabunga

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 presently an empty chair. That said, her perennial sorceress enemy,  Circe,  has slowly developed into something interesting, outside of the  Wonder Woman  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,...

By Mel Dyer I think one of the reasons that it's so hard for modern writers to get Wonder Woman  right, today, is because the genre of fiction that Wonder Woman  creator, William Moulton Marston, crafted her from - adventure fiction or pulp fiction - is not, as common, in popular literature and film, as it used to be. I also think Cliff Chiang and Brian Azzarello, during DC Comics' 'New 52' publishing event, came very close to rebooting the  Wonder Woman  comic to its roots, ..and I'll try to articulate why I do. Conceptually, Wonder Woman seems a much closer cousin to the heroes of  John Carter Of Mars, Buck Rogers, Doc Savage, Flash Gordon, Scorchy Smith, The Phantom, Jungle Jim, Hawkman, Doc Strange  and Mandrake the Magician,  than she'll ever be to Superman and Batman ..or even to television's  Xena. The problem with writing Wonder Woman is that most modern writers and readers really don't know anything about the pulp fiction genre that...

  By Mel Dyer It's a shame  Gateway City,  Wonder Woman's fictional, West Coast metropolis, from the now infamous, John Byrne run on her comic, ..wasn't in the book, long enough to become one of DC Comics' most iconic, superhero locales. Does Wonder Woman deserve her own slightly quirky, comically menacing, instantly iconic  X-files Capital of the DC Universe  – a narrative playset, from which to launch her greatest, strangest adventures? Could her having someplace to slam back caramel macchiatos, with Etta, Steve and I Ching, surrounded by uniformed, military personnel and beings from other planets, magical realms, alien dimensions and lost civilizations, ..give us the next Gotham or Metropolis? Afternoons in Gateway could find you smacking around Talos, giant robot from Jason And The Argonauts! (John Byrne art) Truthfully, while I'm done with seeing her poking around big, American Northeast cities, like  Washington  or  Boston,  I still thi...

A magic boy, born from a meteor and with  "the strength of a hundred full grown men", falls from the heavens, into World War II, ..to battle Nazis and racketeers, as WONDER BOY!