Wonder Woman #20

[iamrman]

Wonder Woman's friend, publicist Myndi Mayer, has been murdered and Diana is out to find the one responsible.

After roughing up some gang members, Diana finds out where Mayer's sleazy assistant 'Skeeter' La Rue is hiding out.

Mayer's staff had suspicions about La Rue from the start, but when they confronted her about it, they got fired for their trouble.

The kicker is, Myndi Mayer had already died from an overdose when La Rue shot her.

Comments

[cygnia]

"Combat Zone" -- there's a flashback of growing up in Massachusetts...

[lego_joker]

I think George Perez called this his personal favorite issue - if not the favorite - in an interview, and I'd be hard-pressed to disagree...

Bits of this haven't aged that well (even besides everyone's 80s-tastic fashions), and maybe it's not very flattering to Diana's own mythos that this is basically her playing out a Batman story, but this thing just works like gangbusters otherwise. The pathos (Myndi was my single favorite aspect of Perez's run, bar none), the chronology-cutting, the absolutely gut-wrenching twist ending...

(Legit, "Until she ran out of sky" shouldn't unironically work in 2022, but somehow it does.)

Much kudos for keeping in the two-page "Frosty the Snowman" sequence, by the way. It's probably the most ripping-off-Batman part of this issue, but good God how can you say no to Perez laying that out?

[tcampbell1000]

I'd say the vibe here is not "Wonder Woman as Batman" so much as "Wonder Woman as noir." Batman is the noir-iest of the major superheroes, so it's a small distinction sometimes, but most of the tropes here are more familiar to me from really old movies than Batman comics. Inspector Indelicato especially feels like a direct descendant of Sam Spade.

The one possible exception to that is how Perez handles the action scenes, which feels a little like Batman but also, weirdly enough, like horror. After 19 issues of foregrounding Diana's humanity and humility, Perez suddenly makes her a terrifying other, and he does it without changing anything about her essential character ("I am sick of this violence," she says, but she's certainly used violence often enough before). The sequences rarely show her full face and focus on the mere mortals absolutely losing their shit as she defeats them.

Why does Skeeter fear her so? He must know by now that Diana generally leaves her enemies alive, especially when they're just humans, and she's way gentler than Batman is. Skeeter knows what'll happen to his life after she exposes him, so a lot of it's just long-view pragmatism.

But I think there's a spiritual side to his fear, too. Her purity is so alien to his whole being that he fears it more than death. He lived his life by corrupting the corruptible, sucking out vitality like the bloodsucker he's nicknamed after. But now the bill's come due: Diana is here. She cannot be bitten, she cannot be corrupted, and she cannot be stopped. That's the only way Diana works in this noirish sensibility, the recognition that she stands above it, whereas the end of Myndi's story was very much of it.

[janegray]

The story itself may be good, but I don't think it was worth losing Myndi. She was a fun and interesting character that should have been a permanent member of Diana's cast.

Seriously, one of the biggest criticisms of Wonder Woman is that she lacks a good cast. Etta, Steve and Hyppolita are great, but that's three people. It's so ridiculous a lot of modern stories retcon Barbara Minerva as Diana's friend pre-Cheeta just to give Diana SOMEONE to bounce off to.

Diana's writers keep introducing great characters (Myndi, the Kapatelis, Ferdinand) only to ditch them.

[iamrman]

Yeah, writers introduce interesting members of Diana's supporting cast, only for the next one to ignore/discard them entirely. Just look at what happened to poor old Vanessa Kapatelis in later years. :(

[jgraygaming]

I find it fascinating the Titans can't escape the Wolfman/Perez years but, somehow, modern Wonder Woman writers hardly ever call back to the Perez run at all. Or Simone's run. Or Phil Jimenez. All three, to me, really get Diana and I find it sad modern comics seems to demand "angry Amazon" and not "outsider paragon of peace and truth".

[bruinsfan]

Amen. Perez' run is iconic for a reason, and it's not JUST because of the beautiful art.

[lego_joker]

Ehh - for decades of his existence Bruce also had to make do with three (Dick, Alfred, and Gordon), and Clark arguably less than that (depending on whether you saw pre-Crisis Lois as more of an antagonist than a friend). Three might be the most (established) supporting cast most superhero writers are equipped to handle.

[janegray]

Antagonists (but not enemies) absolutely do count as cast members. JJJamesons and Flash (even back when Flash was still a bully) are some of Peter's most iconic cast members.

Batman pre-Nightwing stories also had him interact much more frequently with the Justice League.

[mazway_75]

It is fun to look back at early bits of Skeeter and realize "oh, of course he was putting on the act of some Southern guy when he was from Jersey."

That last bit of Diana reacting to how Mindi was already dead was striking, the classic bit of "how could someone who vibrant end like that?" and the cops closing the narration with "wish I knew."