George Perez, the zenith of Wonder Woman's career.

[mosellegreen.insanejournal.com]

I originally made this post during Wonder Woman Week, hence the pile of links, which I hope y'all won't mind my sharing again.

The Links:

teh_no answered my challenge of a one-line Wonder Woman/Black Canary fic.

joasakura wrote a delightful fic about Amazon Spanking Therapy.

Wonder Woman: Enemy Of Freedom by Nicolas Juzda.
I'm not here to judge or condemn. That's the job of each and every one of you. My aim is simply to lay out the facts in a clear and unbiased manner, until you can make an informed decision about the depths to which this hellspawned harpy has sunk all on your own.

If you want more Golden Age WW, scans of her daily newspaper strip from the 40's can be found here. Also there's an article and several scans here.

There are WW cartoons here and here.

hradzka wrote Escape Artistry, which is about, um, Batman and Wonder Woman tying each other up.

The Curse of Bast
Author: mosellegreen
Fandom: Golden Age Wonder Woman & Black Canary
Pairing: Wonder Woman/Black Canary
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The romance of Dinah and Diana is interrupted when they must rescue Larry Lance from a crazed cult led by a high priestess with a pack of slavegirls.
Notes: Thank you to grey_bard, ink_n_imp, and carlanime for beta. Written for the alien_altars challenge.
Illustration by ink_n_imp!

So, now to George Perez. There are now four volumes of trades of his issues, and high time. He was the one who got me into comic books as an adult. I was always a Wonder Woman fan, at first chiefly because she was "the girl" and I needed someone to pretend to be when I was running around the backyard. But I stopped reading her comics before I entered adolescence.

Then when I was 17, I impulsively picked up the latest issue of Wonder Woman from the newsstand, just for old times' sake.

That's Zeus propositioning her. I chose this image in particular because it shows off her very Grecian off-duty costume to such good effect. WW aficionados will remember that in the Golden Age Wonder Woman had a golden eagle on her chest which was changed to a stylized WW in the Bronze Age. With this off-duty version of her costume, Perez was able to give us both.

Incidentally, at a con in '88, George Perez related that he intended for Zeus to be a redhead, since gods are, you know, immortal and don't age, but the colorists gave him white hair in the first issue and after that we were stuck with it.

Wonder Woman politely declines the god's offer, which you can expect didn't go over too well. As a penalty, she must go down into the caverns beneath Paradise Island, which it turns out is where all the monsters from Greek mythology have been kept for the past 3000 years, and kill them all. In short, they made her into the hero of a Greek epic in the tradition of Jason or Perseus. How could someone who watched The Clash of the Titans in her childhood resist? Especially given her full armor below. She still has the star spangled leotard, of course, but it's armor, not just an outfit, and it's just the minimum part of the full array which she wears here:



So what do I love so much about Perez's Wonder Woman? Well, this page from the first issue is a good example of one reason:


Notice that although all of the Amazons are beautiful women, they are not in the least provocative. How many comic book artists have the guts to draw well-built women in a non-exploitative way? These Amazons don't stand around in skimpy armor with their chests stuck out, they carry themselves like athletes, quite rightly.

Also, George Perez was the first person since Marston died to be true to the character. Most of the other writers who've handled her didn't really know what to do with her and settled for making her a Superman in drag. Perez went back to Marston's original work and used the elements there. Not all of them; he thankfully left out the bondage and the astral projection and the utopian psychology, which I enjoy tremendously but only as Golden Age crack, but kept the two essential things that made Wonder Woman different from every other superhero: Greek mythology and feminism. He made those the chief point of her character and her stories. He also thought about what she would be like, having been raised on an island that is practically paradise by warriors who have been at peace for millenia, and so her personality is simultaneously innocent and valorous.

Here is the very last page of the first Perez issue, when Diana first dons her new armor after having won the tournament to choose the Amazon champion:

http://pics.livejournal.com/mosellegreen/pic/000ey6kf
http://pics.livejournal.com/mosellegreen/pic/000ezb7g
http://pics.livejournal.com/mosellegreen/pic/000f0sy7
http://pics.livejournal.com/mosellegreen/pic/000f1af3

Comments

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

Or a supporting cast, or much of anything, really. The only constants in Diana's long career have been her mother, Themyscira, and occasionally Steve Trevor - and even those can't always be counted on. Say what you will about the Marston era, but it had continuity and a set cast of characters and plot devices - Etta and the Holliday Girls, the mental radio, Steve and Colonel Darnell, Mars and his minions, the goddess Aphrodite - which were a regular part of the series and tied everything together. Subsequent writers dumped most of that, added their own ideas, then dumped THOSE, too! I mean, wasn't it Robert Kanigher (I think it was him, anyway) who added a whole bunch of things to the mythos - Merboy and Bird-Boy, the Glob, Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot - only to literally lock them all away in a drawer when they got too complicated? (One wonders what would happen if somebody did a Grant Morrison and OPENED the drawer again...) The only consistent thing we got from that was Wonder Girl, and hasn't SHE been a treat for continuity over the years. Ever since then, almost every writer who's handled the character has erased or ignored most of the plot elements added by the previous writer while adding their own - and the next guy does the same thing.
Basically, both Batman and Superman have evolved in a more-or-less natural manner from the original creations of Bob Kane and Jerry Seigel. Wonder Woman has not, and this is to her detriment.

[mosellegreen.insanejournal.com]

That's true. I think after Marston died, a lot of her writers didn't know what to do with her, and a lot of them coped by making her a female Superman. Worse, in the animated shows being made these days, a lot of the writers think she's Xena.

When Perez did his reboot, he focused on the two things that made her unique: feminism and Greek mythology, and the result was great. (Bondage was another, but wouldn't have suited his serious approach.)

I'm a huge WW fan, but I haven't done more than peek at her book in the last 15 years because I disliked so much of what they did with her. I basically consider Marston and Perez the only official (to me) WW writers.

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

I'm a pretty casual WW fan, but I have the same basic opinion. I think if you combined the characteristics of the two, you'd really have something worth reading on a regular basis.