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 inspired those great adventure heroes.
That leaves comic writers constantly trying to turn Wonder Woman into something more familiar to us. Typically, that's a female Superman or Aragorn of Lord Of The Rings - now, in film, it's probably the Highlander, an immortal adventurer, whose life in the modern world is constantly trashed, by antagonists from the Dark Ages ..and before even that! Narratively speaking, she wasn't created to be any of those things, and that leaves writers, even the craftiest, most imaginative ones, forcing Wonder Woman into story models that typically don't fit her, so well, ..and ultimately leaving her fans disappointed, with the results.
Want to KNOW WONDER WOMAN, the way I know Wonder Woman? You've got to get ALL THE WAY down to the... STAR-SPANGLED PANTIES!
Since our first time, watching Xena: Warrior Princess on UPN, in the Nineties, most Wonder Woman think of the Amazon, as a heroic fantasy heroine, like Conan or Perseus in 1981's Clash Of The Titans. One look at what that show did with the Greek mythology elements, who needed travel to the modern world or subatomic universes, anymore? Most of us re-envisioned Diana, as a stiff Xena or a female Perseus. It was go Greek or bust! Unfortunately, that expectation limited and continues to limit what writers are encouraged to do, with Wondy stories.
Brian Azzarello - and he caught a pile of crap, for this, from unappreciative fans - did a phenomenal job of expanding our ideas about what role the Greek gods could play in the on-going narrative, ..beyond the brainless, spastic clashes of the Titans, we've been buggered with, since George Perez left the comic, in the early Nineties.
Wonder Woman isn't stuck, riding a pegacorn, through one moldy sky of toga-clad, Greek fairies, after another. She's a traveler. Her creator, Marston, spun her through myriad magical realms, time-lost empires and Martian landscapes! Truthfully, if we look very closely, the Wonder Woman comic has been firmly in the adventure genre - sci-fi adventure, specifically - since the very beginning.
As with Flash Gordon's journey to Mongo, Wonder Woman's origin story gives us Steve Trevor crashing near Paradise Island, where he encounters a bizarre, classically exotic, futuristic civilization and falls in love with a beautiful, foreign princess, ..but, that's where Dr. Marston flips the genre! From there, instead of Steve winding up fighting for his life in a colosseum, as so many adventurer heroes (of that time) typically have, ..it's his princess-lover, Diana, who leaps into the typically male, gladiator role, fights for the right to be with him and wins, saving his life!
Upon her returning with him to Man's World, we find Dr. Marston has flipped the genre upside down, ..again. In Man's World, the exotic princess-lover, Diana, fully equipped with the bizarre weapons and accessories of her secret civilization, but disguised as a common mortal woman, evades capture and, worse, marriage, by assuming the (then) typically male adventurer role. The Amazon sheds her mortal guise and charges into battle, as Flash Gordon did on Mongo, ..against the colorfully bizarre evildoers of a strange, new world - our world…
Finally, ..as Wonder Woman!
Adventurers must travel to someplace peculiar or challenging. That is the genre. The comic has been squarely there and true to the genre, since the beginning. After watering her kangas, clubbing with Etta in Ocean City and high-fiving her giant, octo-walrus kaiju, uncle, Poseidon, Wonder Woman is an adventurer heroine, ..genre-dating Buck Rogers and Indiana Jones, before Superman ever gets a call-back.
I feel Chiang and Azzarello came very close - maybe, closer than any writer, since Phil Jimenez's Skartaris story - to returning the Wonder Woman comic to its adventurer-hero roots, and I was really looking forward to seeing, if they or the writer, who followed them, ..could still make that work, going forward. Diana's (and her Army's) adventures take her, firstly, ..BACK to her native Paradise Island - then, to Hephaestus's mountain workshop, ..and down into Hell, ..to a fictional, Middle Eastern country, over to Mount Olympus, to New Genesis ..and back around to some of those locales, again! It really convinced me that this kind of story, previously attempted by comic book writers Kurt Busiek, Bill Loebs, John Byrne and Phil Jimenez, ..was a classically GREAT fit for Wonder Woman! For me, that was the definitive, classic Wonder Woman story, and when Cliff and Brian left the title...
And I was very sorry to see it all go.
Considering the closest thing modern fiction has to Wonder Woman's narrative ancestors are the world-roving heroes of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Tom Strong and the Indiana Jones flms - all successful enterprises, in the modern - I think Azzarello's vision has definite possibilities. I think the idea that Wonder Woman is living in a perpetual adventure, beside her strange Greek god cousins, Amazon sisters and assorted, bizarre characters, ..deserves a better chance, than even he, himself, was permitted to give it. Perhaps, one of Wonder Woman's writers or editors will follow through and build on what the Chazzarello run started.
Maybe, that is happening, with James Tynion, Becky Cloonan and Michael Conrad, in the pages of Justice League Dark and of Wonder Woman. As with the Golden Age, there's nothing wrong, with this comic, that bold, daring imaginations ..can't make right.
[Second Edition]
Edgar Miraculous (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.
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