Scans_Daily

Ah, Messner-Loebs. I have some serious problems with his run, which are only exacerbated by the repellent atrocity that is the later Deodato pencilling. But one thing I've got to credit him with, he did some good work with Diana's rogues.



The thing about Diana is that she's too practical and effective for the Joker Problem. She kills monsters and she saves victims, and she's really good at both. Run into her two or three times, and she either cuts your puppet strings, converts you, or decides you're too dangerous to live and sends you the way of Drakul and the khunds. You can't really sustain "can't be reformed" around Diana.

So there's only three real ways to do a lasting Wondy rogue. One, you make the villain flat-out more powerful than her. Circe's a good example. She's a freaking god, and not the chump kind like Phobos and Deimos either (moly weakness notwithstanding). No matter how much of a danger she is, Diana's not killing her unless Circe lets her. But that's incredibly hard to write - how do you defeat a more powerful foe without diminishing that foe or looking stupid or pulling a deus ex? Perez and Jimenez were awesome at it, but not everyone can be.

The second way is to make rogues who aren't actually malicious or even necessarily dangerous. A genial, swashbuckling gentleman thief, for example, who would never dream of actually hurting anyone. Then you have the problem of explaining why someone on Diana's field of play should *care* - Angle Man seems like a shot at this, but it's hard to justify Diana giving a crap about some petty theft when she's routinely embroiled in actual wars and armageddon events. At her power level, it's actually harder to write a believable amiable rogue story than a well-done conflict with a Circe or Darkseid. (A Mxy-like magical prankster who doesn't ever quite understand the consequences of his "harmless" jokes could actually work quite well, though, adding humor and giving her a regular opportunity to showcase her wisdom and diplomacy; really, why doesn't she have one of those already?)

The third way, somewhat tricky to establish but relatively easy to maintain, is to complicate the fuck out of Diana's relationships with them. Make them her friends, make her owe them or need them or feel responsible for them, make sure that "can't be reformed" is close enough to true that the enmity never ends, but is also a conclusion that Diana's constitutionally incapable of coming to. This was WML's go-to method, and he was actually pretty good at it (...at least, on the conceptual level).

( As usual, I apologize in advance for the 90s Imagesque art. )

Next up: Deals with demons and yet another indistinguishable Generic White Cop with a Crush on Wondy, as we move onto Cheetah as perceived by ye olde John Byrne.