My mission statement for Wonder Woman is best summarized like this:
Wonder Woman is not on a “peace-keeping mission” in Man’s World, she is on a mission to bring Peace to Man’s World.
The object of this article is to examine the third member of the DC trinity as it is advertised: Wonder Woman. Despite being the third member of the trinity, a very well known character with live action and animated appearances a-plenty, and hundreds if not thousands of issues of comics, the average enthusiast will struggle to come up with their favorite run of Wonder Woman- to exclude the recent and excellent Absolute Wonder Woman, who is for all intents and purposes an Elseworlds character with no bearing on the “main” Wonder Woman. What exactly do we even know about her? What do we know about any of her three(?) proteges? What is her actual mission and reason for being in Man’s World at this point?
Lets address a few basic things first.
- What was the original intent of Wonder Woman, and why does she come to Man’s World?
- What does Wonder Woman do or not do that sets her apart from the other members of the Trinity, and what is her role in the Trinity?
- How does Wonder Woman come to be, and why would a Wonder Girl come to be afterwards?
First, the author/creator of Wonder Woman was a sex pest, polygamist, and ardent misandrist, things that still carry some weight as ideas and practices in the circles most comic book authors run in. His idea was that Wonder Woman should be equipped with all the force, strength, and power of a character like Superman, with the allure and feminine character of a good and beautiful woman in order to bring into compliance the errant male forces of action in the world by submission to a higher state of love imposed by a superior female figure. - I am only slightly paraphrasing here.
From wikipedia:
The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound… only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society.
— William Moulton Marston
So, in essence, Wonder Woman was created to longhouse the world of Superman and Batman, to morally subjugate men of action by the calming lull of domesticity presented by the ultimate woman. That is the literal and direct truth. One wonders how proud Mr. Marston would be at the current state of these characters and their relationships, given the incessant millennial infantilization and crude asexuality that rules editorial in our modern era.
On to our second point, what does Wonder Woman actually do? What is her role?
Wonder Woman clearly does not, to any length, actually do anything to bring the mortal world into compliance with divinely informed gynocracy. In fact, she seems to do the same things every other hero does, beating the shit out of monster of the weeks, but seems to do them trapped in a box other characters do not exist in.
Wonder Woman was revised in the 1960s to more heavily reflect divine gifts given by the Gods of Olympus, and her duties in the world changed from smashing a massive Egg shaped Chinaman (look it up.) to battling the uncaring plots of the Gods. So Wonder Woman is responsible for curbing the ambitions of Olympus, which just seems odd, considering they presumably have been active for thousands of years without this sort of intervention. So Wonder Woman gains Ares as an adversary, and we are cursed with seeing that 100,000 times. But more to the point, what exactly are you supposed to do when you have retread the entire Homeric spectrum for things for her to do? Ah, now we have the children of Ares to fight, and Hercules’ sisters kid, and maybe Barbra Minerva is good actually or whatever bullshit they come up with to keep her in print.
The other thing Wonder Woman can be noted as actually doing in the modern day, is acting as an asset of the United States Department of Defense or its greater Intelligence Community under the guidance of her handler Steve Trevor. As much as you’d like to blame Tom King for this, and it would an understandable leap, it actually predates him as a practice, its the actual reason she first leaves Themyscira in the 1940s.
But I can’t stand Wonder Woman being a state department asset, one, because she already suffers the ritual abuse of being compared to Captain America enough (Not a dig at Cap), and two, because where does that leave her with the Justice League? With Batman? With Superman? With her villains?
“Ah yes Diana it is I, Circe, returned sorceress who has been troubling your people so long! I have long waited in this desert to-”
“Circe, as much as I would like to battle you, I’m actually here to interrupt Iranian command and control infrastructure with my boyfriend, the first man I ever met, who works for the CIA. I’ve been reliably informed that regime change here will benefit women around the world.”
If Wonder Woman is a Homeric adventurer, why don’t they embrace the main theme of Homeric myth, the entire genre of Greek Tragedy, and give her something to worry about that isn’t something as foreign to an immortal warrior from a mythical island who may or may not possess an invisible jet (she can fly without it) as 3rd wave feminism and problematic interpretations of ancient mythological monsters? Why not have her go on long journeys with terrible monsters and forces that would compromise her basic nature on a more narratively impactful level? Why does she live in Washington DC with a state department asset, and spend the other 70% of her time doing everything with the Justice League except for interfacing with them in a way that displays that in fact she is a supernaturally born leader of warriors with a practiced knowledge of historical evil and the power to compel people to the truth, but the virtue to compel them to such virtues without the use of force because of her literal physical appearance, and her divine grace? I am not the first person to make this argument, or the last, but we have Absolute Wonder Woman to thank for showing us a light in these dark times so it should be revisited.
The two halves of Wonder Woman thus explored, her as a state department asset and her as a greek warrior, we can begin to understand why it is she is written so weirdly over time. Some writers want to write a spy story, some writers want to shoot Blue Beetle in the head and then decapitate Maxwell Lord. I think these are really both nonsense. As with many things DC, I think the only positive steps in the Wonder Woman space have been taken in animation. Wonder Woman as an ambassador to the UN makes far more sense than her at Langley, her role in JL and JLU is far more concrete and interesting- she is both friends with Superman and Batman and also a moral paragon who position is that they have an obligation to organize because it allows them to do the most good, and that to accomplish that they need to interface with the “normal” powers of Man’s World in an acceptable way. She does not need to become queen of Themyscira or a god on Olympus or whatever the fuck to have a planetary impact, in fact any assertion that she would have to change her state in a material way is sort of refutation of the wisdom and blessing that brought her to life and into Man’s World in the first place.
What does Wonder Woman do? She helps people because she is essentially good, and has the circumstance of being involved in a world of terrible monsters and true evil and powers that are impossible to comprehend and are regarded as being literally fake, myths that ancient people told themselves to explain the rain. So Wonder Woman is a window into another world, where there is the same avarice and spite and lust and good and evil, but rather than acting as a lever of the mortal world’s powers-that-be against the powers of the other world for no other reason than she has a crush on the first guy shes ever met, in Absolute Wonder Woman she is working to recover a noble and lost heritage in order to restore something good to the world and to herself. This is also the goal of this article, because despite the fact I think Wonder Woman has nearly never had any written interpretation worth considering, there is a Wonder Woman out there who is actually interesting and has something to do in the wider DC universe.
That brings me to the third and final point, how does a Wonder Woman come to be, and what could possibly beget a Wonder Girl?
Wonder Woman is supposed to be hot. In many of the Wonder Woman stories, and in many Justice League stories, she is supposed to be the incarnation of feminine beauty, blessed by Aphrodite. This is the reason they hired a wooden israeli broad to play her, its the reason she gets so much shit from terminally online hags irl, and its why she has been paired with both Batman and Superman time and time again, because they represent separate but equal latitudes on the spectrum of male perfection. Were it I, and we will take this opportunity to do some actual headcanon prodding, I would say bravely that in fact material beauty standards have not changed since Helen of Troy, regardless of the agenda of online freaks, and she does not need the umpteenth costume redesign that adds a skirt or armor or a sword or a secret agent catsuit or some retarded shit, she does not need a “greek nose” that is in fact a levantine nose that is absent from all contemporary statue work which should inspire her looks more than anything, she wears the bodice and bracers and boots and tiara and it literally never occurs to her that it could look odd (it doesnt, Superman is the most popular man on Earth and he DOES wear his underwear on the outside of his pants) and design aside, it is worth saying that if anyone could pull off wearing what she does- its her. She is supposed to be attractive, alluring. It is literally a part of her superhuman abilities. If villains are a superstitious and cowardly lot, then they must also be lustful and vain, and you could in fact imagine she would use that to her advantage. God forbid she has aura. Comics were, and someday again will be, produced for a younger male audience who are interested most intensely when the women are good looking and dressed fantastically in outfits they will not see at the mall. All this to say that I favor the “Child made of clay” origin, because it most directly contributes to her imagined purpose in Man’s World, and gives a reason for her difference from the other Amazons.
Wonder Woman is of course not the lone victim of female looks-minimalizing in comics. I struggle to think of a single female character who has not been re-imagined at some interval to disguise the original artists work to make them pop in the eye of the demographic which continuously patrons independent artists pornography of these characters in various mediums. These people are Wonder Woman’s only true fans. Bruce Timm, PBUH, understood at a basic design level what made these characters pop, what was recognizable about them, and what made them interesting in serial storytelling. He is responsible for perhaps the single greatest 8 seconds of Black Canary ever depicted in any medium. Those who know.
Women in comic books are a completely downtrodden and beaten category of character, as unpopular and uninteresting as they have ever been because authors and artists have at every turn been incentivized to invent new reasons for these characters to be uninteresting and appeal to a totally mythical audience of women who desire to see these characters demolished in their entirety and replaced with placid nothings who give the heroes and villains around them stern lectures about things no one wants to read in your monster fight comic book.
Wonder Girl is in sort of a strange spot. Wonder Woman is an immortal, so are the rest of the Amazons, their island is hidden from powers that would harm it, so- is Wonder Girl forever Wonder Girl then? She just never gets to move up? or she has to be a Wonder Woman adjacent hero with the exact same powers and gimmicks? You would have to move Wonder Woman forward, to move Wonder Girl (whichever one) forward, something DC is incredibly hesitant to do. The ironclad rule of comics is that we must never grow up, never have endings to our stories, never experience consequences or consistency for your actions. If Wonder Woman decapitated a guy- we can just wipe it away and now look and she can whack her bracers together and it makes a weird energy pulse! Doesnt that excite you! But that too shall pass.
It to me seems impossible to have the entirety of the mythos of the bedrock of western civilization at your disposal, and you cannot write a decent story about a hot girl.
There is something to be said in the near future about the greater state of comic book women, and the displacement of teenage sidekicks.
attached here is the work of Ed Benes, who, criticisms aside, is not afraid to draw a hot girl.
