KILLBILLEUS 2: WHY TYNION'S CIRCE IS STILL THE TORMENTED, IMPLACABLE DRACULA OF WONDER WOMAN'S ROGUES

By Edgar Miraculous Dyer

With DC Comics' Rebirth publishing event in 2021, Greg Rucka's award-winning Wonder Woman reboot re-introduced us to the Immortal Amazon's enduring witch foe, Circe, ..re-imagined as a quirky, Doctor Who'ish creature, trolling the space-time continuum from her mystical and inter-dimensional palace, Aeaea! 

I have and have had, since the 80s, a real problem accepting a generic sorceress as Wonder Woman's archnemesis, if only because I don't see 'fighting magic [?]' ..as a rationale for Wonder Woman's presence in the world of mortal men - that's NOT why she left her Paradise Island! Besides that, I just don't like sorceress antagonists much and never have.

What does a world, conquered by Circe or any other sorceress, look like, anyway?

Why should Wonder Woman or anyone fear it? Is it wild boar falling from the sky? Global chocolate shortage? All of humanity lost in a violent nightmare, she'll never let us awake from? The best comic book villain is only as powerful, as the value of what they threaten to take away from us, and the need to clarify exactly what that is, where Circe is concerned, ..is long overdue!

To my surprise, James Tynion IV's story, "Witching War" in his critically acclaimed run on Justice League Dark, introduced us to a new Circe - a deliciously complex monstress, that has turned me from the most vocal Circe-hater in online fan forums ..to an instant fan!

It's not the Wonder Woman fandom's fault that the slinky Dan Mishkin and George 'the Titan' Perez versions were tired, Hollywood cliches, when finally they reached us in the early-mid 80s, ..but they were. I think what Greg Rucka did with her was absolute genius, leaving the door open for James Tynion's Justice League Dark: Witching War to razor-define her motivation. Making Circe a heroic sorceress-princess, betrayed by the mortals she had devoted her life to protecting, as with the antihero of Francis Ford Coppola's masterful horror film, Bram Stoker's Dracula, ..was a great platform for future Circe stories.

In what (then) was likely the most studied Wonder Woman run, since Perez's, ..writer-artist Phil Jimenez made a valiant attempt to pull together that mess of a backstory, Circe already had, ..in some way that made her a natural enemy of the Amazons. As I see it, he just couldn't make that work in a compelling way, that made any sense to us, ..leaving Circe even more of a layered mess.

The SUPERMAN-WONDER WOMAN comic added something about Amazons buying weapons from Circe, some ensuing betrayal, by them...a consequent conflict - a clear, but lukewarm fix, at best.

The betrayal she endured in Tynion's Justice League Dark story stretches beyond the borders of Circe's mythical island homeland, Colchis. Prior to that, classical lit tells us Circe was renowned throughout the world for her healing abilities, with people coming from all over the world to be healed by her! When she killed the wealthy, warrior-king in Tynion's story, her impoverished country married her off to - a man, who abused her - her (their) subjects turned on Circe ..and literally chased her into Hell!

We do not learn what happens afterwards, ..before classical literature has its say, with her exile on the isle, Aeaea - the love affairs with Picus, Hermes, Odysseus, Daedalus and possibly Telemachus. Did she roam the Netherworld's darkest realms, learning hell-spawned magicks, ..before the Olympians imprisoned her on Aeaea? Her betrayal by the Colchistines might be a footnote in a larger, much darker narrative, ..as with Coppola's Dracula, one that would consume her in contempt for all mankind...

Forever!

An obsession with our torment, subjugation and eventual destruction - Circe's determination to subdue mankind, like beasts under her rule, crosses paths with Wonder Woman's Amazon creed, ..to preserve the liberty of all living things! So many of Wonder Woman's enemies don't have motivations, which make much sense. Comparatively, I think Circe's new origin brings a plausible inevitability to their conflict, ..while being easier to follow, than any, since the Golden Age.

So, what drove her to slaughter her husband, like a pig, you ask?  Did the loss of an unborn baby by her husband's abuse turn her healing magic to malevolence? Tynion left the details of Circe's transformation open to interpretation, but, I've always hoped some writer would pick up that thread and set it ablaze with some dramatic turning point!

Circe is the daughter of Helios, ..a Titan! Was it moley, a shrub said to nullify her fabled powers, which her husband used to prevent her using sorcery to protect herself, from his abuse? Did he bind this demigoddess with moley, somehow, ..ending her celebrated life - the only life young Circe'd ever known or loved - as a healer? If so, was Circe's need to end its control over her...to save her own life, ..the thing that sealed her husband's doom?

Something else we might have missed in Tynion's story - I certainly missed it!

A dark, feminist twist, entirely fitting for a Wonder Woman super-villainess! While the Colchistines, high and low, celebrated Circe for her brilliance and care for them, her divine mother qualities, it seems their adulation for a Greek king - a man - was greater. Theirs was worship, the classical Greek world reserved for male heroes, that left them more than happy to marry her off to him, ..with no regard for how he abused her. I think this new wrinkle honors the feminist struggle in Circe's classical story...

And surpasses it, even.

It is regrettable, I think, that Justice League Dark neglected to differentiate Circe's whiteface look, from that of the Joker, Harley Quinn and the Queen of Fables. I might welcome seeing her given a golden, Greek burial mask to mock her grotesque immortality - a mask that moves like flesh and is basically...part of her body? Imagine a golden mask, which cries BLOOD...forever! I think Circe needs some story elements and visual characteristics to set her apart from the other villains, I mentioned.

There's long-awaited, narrative MEAT on these bones, now.  I posted James Tynion's revision of Circe's backstory, because not everyone has been reading the comic, since 1986, ..or long enough to have read Tynion's Circe story in Justice League Dark or anything before DC Comics' Zero Hour multi-comic event in the 1990s. Even with this new, marvelously coherent origin, I think Wonder-fans need a limited series, exploiting Circe's new, layered background and past adventures, yet to be written - Young Circe, Circe: The Early Years, Circe: Year One, Circe vs Gozer! What seemingly unlimited potential she has, now...

And please, please...with-OUT all that business about Hecate added to her story, after DC Comics' Crisis On Infinite Earths! What does it add to the impact of her story...really? Most people don't know who or what Hecate is ..or why her presence in the story should impress them. If we're honest, it's an unnecessary complication of an otherwise simple story, a contextually meaningless layer to the reader. As I see it, the case has never been made for Hecate's non-role in this story. It certainly hasn't here, in "Witching War", ..and the strength of Tynion's origin tale simply doesn't need it.

Let it go, fanboy. We're kangaliers. We'll get through this. Just take a deep breath and let the Hecate thing go.

With Rebirth, Greg Rucka's Doctor Who inspired, wander-weary Circe is perfect prologue to Tynion's. They make sense. The idea of her cooled, psychopathic contempt for man's inhumanity to man, starting with herself, ..growing out of her obsession with punishing mortals for our betrayal of her ..and why that should be especially problematic for Wonder Woman, ..makes sense. We still don't know exactly what a Circe-conquered planet looks like - whether Wonder Woman's failure to dispatch her will have it raining men or pigs, from the sky - but, her stories make sense in a way, they never did, ..before Rebirth.

So, Circe isn't a foppish, pee-oed party girl, anymore, ..a cliched temptress slinking around a fabled isle ..or a purple-haired, female Joker, with sorcerous ability! In James Tynion IV's hands, she's something much more sophisticated, now, ..while at once, also being a much more clearly articulated character - a refreshingly simpler and darker Circe. More than cartoonish hatred or jealousy or resentment or whatever War Of The Gods was about ..informs her enmity with Wonder Woman, ..because someone figured out how to make that enmity make sense to us.

With Rebirth, Greg Rucka and James Tynion IV have given the Wonder Woman comic a Circe worthy of our respect ..and a future.

Look alive, Kangaliers!

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.