The day the sea and shade both wanted to be sky

[arbre_rieur]

Four pages from WONDER WOMAN 6...

Now that Zeus has gone missing, both Poseidon and Hades want to take his place.







The proposal is that Poseidon and Hades, instead of beating the crap out of each other to decide who succeeds Zeus, like the two originally planned, share the throne by entering into a three-way bigamous marriage with Hera.

Hera, understandably, shows up to express her displeasure at the idea.





She teleports to Mt. Olympus, where she uses the candle to destroy Hera's scrying pool. Hera, being on Earth, can't return quickly enough to stop her. Which was the plan all along.

Hades is pretty pissed off at being played, but Poseidon just finds the whole thing amusing.

Comments

[mrstatham]

Pretty smart choice, frankly, and one I'm surprised hasn't been tapped into sooner.

[his_spiffynesss]

Yes, the Cloak of Peacock feathers makes sense seeing how the creatures had been long associated with her. It's her accessorizing it the classic and nothing else! which does make it stand out:)

[icon_uk]

Oddly, the only time I can remember peacocks being linked to Hera as a design element was in "Hercules, the Legendary Journeys" where in the early seasons she was only ever represented by a pair of eyes in the sky, and the eyes were the eyes from a peacocks tail (and when she did eventually appear as a physical entity rather than a voiced FX, she was played by Meg Foster, possessor of one of the most striking pairs of eyes I've ever seen.)

Hercules also introduced a faux member of the Greek pantheon, the goddess Celesta, who guided the newly dead to Hades with her eternally burning candle...

I wonder if the creators were fans?

[goattoucher]

"Argus was Hera's servant. His great service to the Olympian pantheon was to slay the chthonic serpent-legged monster Echidna as she slept in her cave. Hera's defining task for Argus was to guard the white heifer Io from Zeus, keeping her chained to the sacred olive tree at the Argive Heraion. She charged him to "Tether this cow safely to an olive-tree at Nemea". Hera knew that the heifer was in reality Io, one of the many nymphs Zeus was coupling with to establish a new order. To free Io, Zeus had Argus slain by Hermes. Hermes, disguised as a shepherd, first put all of Argus's eyes asleep with spoken charms, then slew him by hitting him with a stone, the first stain of bloodshed among the new generation of gods.

According to Ovid, to commemorate her faithful watchman, Hera had the hundred eyes of Argus preserved forever, in a peacock's tail."

[icon_uk]

Umm, yes, I know the mythology thanks, but the Argus story in no way suggests that Hera gave a crap about peacocks as a personal design statement or used them as a motif.

Putting the eyes there was just a punishment she inflicted on a servant who failed her, and Lord knows the Greek gods did plenty of that. You don't see Athena being associated with spiders, despite her punishment of Arachnae, or Artemis wearing deerskin because of what she did to Acteon.

[mrstatham]

The peacock's still one of her sacred symbols, and was a creature heavily associated with her, and as such, it's still a relatively smart design choice that I've not seen otherwise in comics.

[icon_uk]

And I'm agreeing with that point, I was citing the only other example I can think of in ANY media which links her to peacocks from a design ethos.

[his_spiffynesss]

In Hellenistic imagery, Hera's chariot was pulled by peacocks, birds not known to Greeks before the conquests of Alexander. Alexander's tutor, Aristotle, refers to it as "the Persian bird." The peacock motif was revived in the Renaissance iconography that unified Hera and Juno, and which European painters focused on. A bird that had been associated with Hera on an archaic level, where most of the Aegean goddesses were associated with "their" bird, was the cuckoo, which appears in mythic fragments concerning the first wooing of a virginal Hera by Zeus.-Wikipedia

[icon_uk]

Cool, thanks