The 12 Labors of Wonder Woman - Part 9

[jkcarrier]

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

TL;DR version: Amnesia and bad continuity have left Wonder Woman unsure of her abilities, so she asks the JLA to monitor her next 12 missions to make sure she's still fit for duty.

This issue, Elongated Man takes his turn playing peeping tom. Warning: Exceedingly cracktastic attempt at "feminist themes" below the cut...

(Wonder Woman #219, 1975. Selected panels from an 18-page story)

Ralph (Elongated Man) Dibny and his wife Sue arrive in New York just in time to see Wonder Woman save a pedestrian from an oncoming truck:




As you might expect, the crazy woman will be important later.
Ralph decides to use a portable video camera (cutting-edge technology back in the '70s) to surreptitiously record WW's next case. At the United Nations, Diana Prince's boss tells her about the "World Conference of Feminist Women" taking place next week. But there's a problem... two of the women scheduled to appear have up and vanished:



("Minna Golden" is a roman à clef of Golda Meir. I assume "Bonita Doolin" is likewise based on a real figure, but I'm not sure who. EDITED TO ADD: banjomike informs me that she is based on Bernadette Devlin.)

Diana is assigned to watch over the other attendees, and make sure nothing happens to them. First up is tennis pro Betty Jo Kane, playing a match against Willy Wrigley:




Betty Jo vanishes in thin air. Her fans take it well:



Those darn feminists...they're worse than soccer hooligans!
After calming the crowd with her lasso, Wonder Woman checks out Betty Jo's locker and finds a suspicious receipt:



As we all know, feminists never get their hair done. Diana learns that the next woman on her list, Margaret Matthews, is scheduled to appear at the opening of another "Consciousness III" branch, and decides she'd better check it out. Ralph follows along, bringing Sue along as cover. All seems normal, until...



During the fight, Diana gets conked on the head with a shampoo bottle:



Ralph is dismayed to have lost sight of Diana. But then he "VOOP"s away as well.



Wonder Woman ends up in the throne room of Mchsm, ruler of the dimension of Xro. He's got the other missing Earthwomen locked up nearby.



Mchsm explains that men are the ones in charge on Xro:



Frdn and Stnm decide to visit Earth and see what this "equality" jazz is all about. But there's a hitch:



Frdn returns to Xro, and is inspired to start a feminist slave rebellion. Mchsm decides that the best way to defuse the protests is to bring over a bunch of Earth-feminists...since the emotion-reversal effect works both ways, they'll start preaching submissiveness instead of liberation, and convince the Xro women to go back to the kitchen where they belong.



But now that Wonder Woman is here, Mchsm decides that her lasso will be an even better tool for domination. But WW is able to resist the urge to just hand it over:



One of the thugs manages to sneak around behind and grab the lasso. For all the good it does him:



When Diana got lassoed, she deliberately stopped resisting the emotion-reversing dimensional mojo, so she would do the opposite of what she was told. Got all that? Anyway...




Oh no! Not the "Destroy Palace" button! Wonder Woman frees the prisoners, but of course, they don't want to leave. So she has to drag them over to the teleporter (with Elongated Man slipping in right behind them):




Wonder Woman gets everyone cleared out just in time:



(I had to include that panel of Ralph and Sue being all woobie. Aww.)
So Ralph concludes his report, and votes to have Wonder Woman re-admitted to the JLA. And in case you were wondering why he wasn't affected by the Xro emotion-whammy:



Well, all righty then. The issue ends with Hawkman and the Atom flipping a coin to decide which of them will monitor Wonder Woman next. Can you stand the suspense...?

Comments

[tsunamiwombat]

Thats a rather...come hither look she's wearing on the above cut/cover image O.o

[perletwo]

For srs. I'm wondering what her other hand is up to down there below the crop....

[kamino_neko]

Roger this...

I'd say we're bad people, but...

[funbox]

To be honest, I'm more interested in WHO she's talking to...

[kenn_el]

Too bad Betty Jo Kane, professional tennis player, was a play on Billie Jean King, rather than DC's own Betty Kane, professional tennis player and Bat-Girl/Flamebird!

[jkcarrier]

Maybe that's the real reason Betty went to the hair salon...she decided to go brunette for a while!

[perletwo]

Because ILU ppl & am too darn generous for my own good, and because I have great faith in you ppl's creativity, I have made you an icon base from the preview image, with the text scrubbed out of the word balloons.



Go to town, peoples!

ETA: The base is in .jpg format. When you make your additions you'll probably want to save it as a .gif to keep the file size small enough.

[icon_uk]

How about?

Histerical

[aaron_bourque]

My sisters ... imprisoned in cages!? That's wonderful!

Bwuh?-face.

Re: Histerical

[liara_shadowsong]

Um... I dunno. But if they're imprisoned in cages, they aren't dead. That's something, right? *blinkblink*

[sadoeuphemist]

So, what were all those feminists doing in beauty parlors in the first place?

Also, Ralph looks way too happy at the thought of a sexist dimension.

[aaron_bourque]

So, what were all those feminists doing in beauty parlors in the first place?

Just because you don't want to be objectified doesn't mean you can't take care of yourself and gossip.

[sadoeuphemist]

Hey, Wonder Woman says liberated women wouldn't be at a beauty parlor, and who am I to question Wonder Woman on feminism.

[aaron_bourque]

Wonder Woman is more beautiful than any of the women at the parlor are. She's just protecting her good looks.

[jkcarrier]

There's a couple of panels I left out that talk about how the salon caters specifically to "liberated women", encouraging them to "make up to please themselves" rather than worrying about what men like. The very idea --!

[cainofdreaming]

Too much Adventure!, I reckon, but I can't shake the feeling that this could have been even crackier if the salon in question would have been part of Salon des Femmes Nouveaux. But then we wouldn't have Diana bondage.

Though with Ralph in there... hmm... I think we're going to need diagrams here. And some higher math.

[banjomike]

Bonita Doolin would be Bernadette Devlin

http://www.thenewartexchange.org.uk/images/DuncanCampbell-BERNADETTE4.jpg

[jkcarrier]

Awesome, thanks! That's been bugging me for years! :D