Scans_Daily

Look, a kanga!



When Wondy was Awesome part 21 is up, finishing off the Rucka chapters and volume 2. Subsequent posts can be here again, yay!

And, because runespoor7 and I were talking about it a few posts back,

When Wondy was Awesome nineteen is up, again at my journal as per usual with the Rucka chapters.

And for legality and curiosity, one page from the most recent SUPER FRIENDS:

Look, pretty Diana!



For those who're interested, Chapter 17 of When Wondy was Awesome (in which Veronica Cale is Not A Nice Person and Diana writes a book) is now up at my journal. I can't put it here, because while each individual chapter is actually not so bad, the Rucka set as a whole is in flagrant violation of the 1/3 rule, and there was no way I could trim it down from the 1/2 issue format of our old LJ incarnation without shredding it. But it's good stuff, so go over there anyway. ^_^

Back to the main Wondy title this time, where we've moved on from the Luke era into the Jimenez era. Generally, I'm not a big fan of Jimenez. He had the particular talent of being both spectacular and spectacularly bad within the space of a single panel, he was a slut for continuity porn to a point often detrimental to storytelling, and he expected his readers to be familiar with pre-Crisis Wondy and random Power Company bad guys and the Super Friends show and all kinds of random crap in order to make sense of half his secondary & tertiary characters. Also, he did a hack job on Polly and saddled us with the travesty that is Trevor Barnes.

However, he gave us some important storylines with some interesting ideas behind them, even when the execution wasn't totally on, and he does a reasonably good Cassie (although again, I don't really know how much of that is that he does a good Cassie and how much is that my standards for "good Cassie" have dropped significantly since YJ ended). So onward we go, with the sad tale of Circe, Diana, and Vanessa Kapatelis: Silver Swan II.





Next time: The JLA indulges in petty bickering, a funny-looking alien calls Diana a whore, Major Disaster takes his life in his hands, and Manitou coins my favorite Wondy nickname of all time.

A few posts back, it came up in the comments that meaningful guest arcs by Diana in other titles are relatively rare compared to, say, Bruce or Clark, her theoretical equals in DCU importance. By that same token, Wonder Woman one-shots - the minis and hardcovers and self-contained trade-only specials that stand alone outside any given series - are even rarer. In fact, if you want to find them, you've got to be willing to look in places you wouldn't expect.

For example, today's chapter. See, about eight years ago, DC published what was ostensibly a Justice League book; a hundred-odd page special written and painted by Christopher Moeller called JLA: A League of One. It's not really a Justice League story, though. It's a Wonder Woman story, and one of her best.





Next time: An actual Wondy one-shot. Or I should say, rather, the Wondy One-Shot, and the eternal paladin conundrum of Ethics vs Morals, the Law versus the Right, and whether or not to punch your friends in the face for great justice.

Back in the summer of 2001, DC kicked off one of their many epic, universe-spanning Crossover Events with an issue of SUPERMAN in which Pluto goes missing. Yes, Pluto, the planet astral body. This Crossover Event was "Our Worlds at War," and it was not particularly well-received by fandom. Which makes sense; the plot was needlessly byzantine and, as ever, there was a lot of c-list fodder happening, particularly with women, surprise surprise. I find it fairly mediocre standard crossover fare myself, but '01 was quite a while before ICk and Shamazons, so I don't know if that's just a calibration issue and maybe it was pretty bad for the time.

But I will say this for it: despite being, ostensibly, Superman's crossover (his badguys, mostly his book, his long-term plot threads), the impact on and contribution from Diana and her corner of the DCU was significant, which is something you don't usually see - major impact on Diana's obviously not unheard of, but contribution in proportion to that impact is much rarer and worthy of note and approbation - and it had one of the greater Wondy moments on record, which is what we'll be looking at today.









Next time: The League is imperialist and Diana pretty much singlehandedly justifies every statement Clark or Bruce have ever made about hating magic.

After Byrne, Wondy passed into the hands of Eric Luke. For the most part Luke's run was mediocre and unremarkable, a result of him overusing his big new villain and seeming a bit more interested in the trappings of the character than Diana herself - this is the Wonderdome era, where her invisible plane becomes her floating sky castle and ends up as significant to many of her victories as her own abilities are. But one thing he did do right was the truly awesome GodWar arc, in which (intermittently) spectacular art, fascinating mythology, and the only canon romance for Diana that has actually *worked* combined into one of my favorite Wondy stories ever.



( High page count on this one, guys. You have been warned. )

Next time: Diana takes on the Justice League, does battle with a dragon, and looks really, really pretty.

Diana's no Batman, with five different books devoted to her adventures at any one time. She's not even a franchise like Green Lantern, despite how awesome a regular title devoted to Artemis or Nu'bia could be*. But she is and has been an occasional guest in setting books like Action and a staple of team books like Justice League in many incarnations, and many of her better stories are from those titles rather than her own.

* Well, if it wasn't written by WML. Now let's never speak of Requiem again.

This one's from 1995, during the Era of Three Hundred Justice Leagues. Diana was head of the JLA and had been for some time - a position she is supremely suited to by nature, but was only intermittently suited to by portrayal, given that writer turnover was worse than League membership turnover at the time, and many of her authors simply didn't get Diana. And by that I mean either her personality or the fact that she could beat her entire League at once with one hand tied behind her back (well, maybe she'd need both hands for Flash), and how that needed to be reflected in group combat.

Unfortunately Gerard Jones was among them, and he was on JLA duty during this arc. But this story is a crossover event, and the other two writers involved - Beau Smith on Warrior and Messner-Loebs on Hawkman - had a better idea what they were doing. Overall I wasn't sure whether to include it, because it's not really a Wondy story, but there are a couple of moments here that I truly love, so here we go, once again, into outer space.



( 90s Image-influenced art warning. Prepare your goggles now. )

Next time: Artemis finally becomes a likeable character, and we get to see Cassie when she still was. Plus Etrigan rhyming, Neron gloating, and Byrne killing Diana off. (Spoiler: It doesn't stick.)

So, after Perez's tenure wrapped with the War of the Gods crossover event, the title was given to one William Messner-Loebs, aka WML for brevity's sake (she said, as though she were ever anything remotely approaching succinct). And WML's run on Wonder Woman was... let's just say a departure. It was wildly popular sales-wise, but I have a lot of problems with it personally. He had no real respect for anything that Perez had done; he discarded her entire supporting cast as soon as possible, did a complete, arbitrary retcon of the Amazons' history and Diana's parentage (which thankfully was ignored by subsequent writers), buried Themyscira in an inaccessible pocket dimension for three years (for most of which time the readers were led to believe it had been destroyed, and in fact the whole "it's not really gone" was probably a panicked retcon), and mangled Polly so badly when she finally did show up that the letter columns spent months convinced she was Circe in disguise. We're talking "War Crimes" levels of butchery, here, or worse, and an unfortunate foundation for all the crap that's come her way since. But let's not speak of that, as to this day it still fills me with rage.

And Diana herself? He made her a klingon.


I mock, but this is still one of my favorite panels of all time.

( A klingon IN SPACE!!! )

Next time: See Diana deal with rent, taxes and deadbeat dads, and meet the other Donna in her life. It's more interesting than it sounds, I promise.

From as far back as Marston, Wonder Woman's defining short phrase, her version of "Caped Crusader" or "Man of Steel" or "Scarlet Speedster," has been "Amazon Princess." Which is fair, because that's what she is in the most literal sense - the daughter of the amazon queen (well at least until they dissolved the monarchy, but at this point I think I'm going to have to admit I've lost that one) - but for most of her pre-Crisis history, was nevertheless a relatively empty phrase. Diana was a princess because girls like princesses, as any Disney exec can tell you, and that was it. Occasionally the authority was useful, but basically it was a purely meta thing that was merely convenient shorthand for her specialness.

Part of Perez' genius was to actually consider what being a princess means for Diana, especially from the mythical perspective of this very mythical character. Mythic royalty isn't about tiaras and castles, after all. It's about stewardship, struggle, king sacrifice; about servitude and symbiosis and taking your people's burdens for your own. Diana, as Athena's champion and essentially a demigod, is an avatar of the Olympians, yes - but as heir to the throne, she's also the avatar of the amazons, and that responsibility is as integral to her character as her duty to her gods. She bleeds when her people bleed, they win when she wins, their story is hers and hers theirs. And Perez' run was saturated with that understanding, in a constant intertwining of Diana's mission and the activities of the Amazon Nation as a whole. She's not just one of them, she's not even just the best of them; she is them, full stop. That concept underpins the particular awesomeness I've got on offer today - this is the story of Themyscira and how the Amazon Nation reconnected with Man's World. Because Diana did, and so that Diana could. And because it's a damn good story.

Also, Diana v. Lois action. You know you want to see that.



( Man do I love that cover. )

Next time: Perez attempts to pre-empt strawfeminist portrayals of the Themyscirans with some strawfeminists of his own for Diana to oppose. And because he is Perez, they end up completely fascinating anyway.