Wonder Woman

valiance

Bloods End wrote:

Grant Morrison is going to be doing something with Diana soon. He said he's been reading all sortsa feminist literature and has "finally got it"

Awesome.

Lux wrote:

This...is the most diligent OP I've ever seen.

I like how you don't even mention the JMS run. I stopped reading a little ways in out of boredom and money. Does anyone know how that mess resolved itself?

Yes, great OP.

Also, I came back here after forever of not posting in GV because I think WW#1 is the best of the new 52. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

The writing reminds me of Rucka, which was my favorite run of WW, but thus far I think I like Az's modernization of the gods better than Rucka's.

Chiang's art looks a little weird to me sometimes, but most of the time it's excellent. Like he nails the centaurs and the whole scene with Hera creating them. His paneling is great, he makes complex action sequences clear and easy to follow, I'm definitely a fan.

Siegfried

Cade wrote:

I only wish she had the pants, damn the shorts look so out of place. It needs to be something else.

I know! I liked the pants redesign!

Burden of Proof

Loved the design of Hermes and the Centaurs.

CJG

Gotta say, I didn't like the pants. That's not WW to me. I just hope the shorts stay decent and don't turn into a bikini bottom.

I wonder if the greek gods will be something like the New Gods in the reboot. Those are some very different appearances than I expected. Hermes looked like a cross between an ostrich and a WW1 soldier.

The books are thin on content, however. Maybe I have a sense of nostalgia and books were always like this, but 20 pages of art with 12 pages of ads seems excessive. I'd rather have 24 pages of art if they're going to put in that much advertising.

Solar

Apollo looked cool

That was a good bit

smokmnky

something that kind of bothered me about the first issue. How does everyone know that is Apollo? Does his name get mentioned or is it just that people know greek mythologies better than me and just figured it out?

Jaythreef

I'm guessing it's because he said he was the "sun of a king." Apollo's the sun god, right?

I had read that it was Apollo before even getting the issue, but I probably wouldn't have made the connection myself, either.

Keith

Yeah, he said he's the "sun of the king" and then bursts into bright flames as the Sun rises

Arivia

Hmm, seems I need to read up on my Grecian myth, since I missed that entirely.

Delduwath

Also, remember: the most famous and important oracle of Ancient Greece is the Oracle of Delphi, a priestess of Apollo; her visions were supposed to be inspired by Apollo himself. In the first issue of Wonder Woman, we see that the character in question needs some answers about the future, grabs three young girls, and basically turns them into oracles.

Delduwath

I will say, though, that I totally didn't realize the woman in the peacock feather cloak was supposed to be Hera until I read about it here. I totally forgot that the peacock feather is associated with Hera. Also, I didn't even know that the rooster was associated with Hermes until someone mentioned it here.

Tairu

Apollo I felt was really obvious, I mean, he made like two sun-related puns on the first page. Of course, with him and Hera I feel like for people unfamiliar with Grecian myth there is a bit of mystery to them that will make it cool when they're revealed in later issues.

Matev

I missed the Hera reference, I thought it was Circe or something, but I picked up on Apollo. I was pleasantly surprised by this comic and look forward to more.

Arivia

Delduwath wrote:

Also, remember: the most famous and important oracle of Ancient Greece is the Oracle of Delphi, a priestess of Apollo; her visions were supposed to be inspired by Apollo himself. In the first issue of Wonder Woman, we see that the character in question needs some answers about the future, grabs three young girls, and basically turns them into oracles.

Diana herself calls out to the Oracle of Delphi. Remember the smoke joke?

Burden of Proof

I was guessing Helios, though I'm not certain there's even a difference

Keith

Helios is a Titan, Apollo is a god

and since they kept referring to Zeus as his father, it's Apollo

Mysst

I like the the costume because it's iconic, but I really wish they would give her a costume that was more Greco-Roman, you know?

Macro9

Wonder Woman's new origin after the reboot. Spoilers obviously.

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/wonder-woman-new-origin-111010.html

Wildcat

I wonder how that will impact on her attitude to Patriarch's World.

Solar

Wildcat wrote:

I wonder how that will impact on her attitude to Patriarch's World.

Bastards, all of them

LordSolarMacharius

I think the change is disappointing; just in that it takes away a unique thing about her and replaces it with something that can seemingly be said about half of classical heroes.

Also, it's kind of dumb on DC's part to release a spoiler for issue 3 before issue 2 has been released.

Tairu

I actually like this change, because honestly it seemed like they never actually did anything with her origin. Also this creates some easy drama, and I don't mean that in a bad way.

Witch_Hunter_84

So basically . . .

Spoiler:

they gave her Wondergirl's origin? Kay.

Lux

I am totally cool with the change. I think clay babies are weird.

LordSolarMacharius

Here's a link to a recent Grant Morrison interview. The whole thing is interesting if you want to give it a read, but pertaining to this thread, here's the bit about Wonder Woman.

On Grant's Wonder Woman as a sexualised/fetishised character and how he'd handle her portrayal:

Grant: Ooh I'm sweating the minute you said fetish! [laughs] Well yeah, interestingly the thing about Wonder Woman, I don't know if people know this, you probably all know this, but I'm gonna tell you it again just to bore you, but Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston, who was a pop-psychologist and a little bit more than that in the 30s and 40s, and basically he was a kind of proponent of free love and that kind of you know, 1950s post-Kinsey stuff. So him and his wife had a lover called Olive Byrne, a younger, an 18 year old, and they were both sort of professors, and Olive was the original physical model for Wonder Woman. And Elizabeth Marston and Charles [William's pen name] basically created this character, because they felt that Superman represented a kind of blood-curdling masculinity as they said, so they wanted to introduce somebody who was a bit more feminine, but now at the same time Marston also had all these amazing kinks, because he had this idea that basically the world would be better if men would just submit to women's complete instruction. And I'm sure many of you may agree! [laughs] But he took it all the way, not just submit to instruction but get collars on, and get down on all fours, and just admit that's where you belong guys!

So a lot of the Wonder Woman stories had this thread through them, this idea of bondage but it was "loving submission" Marston called it. And it was this notion that, as I said in the book, there's a story where Wonder Woman rescues the slave girls of an evil Nazi villain, and the slave girls don't know what to do, even though they've been rescued they're kind of, they like being slaves. So Wonder Woman just says "Oh, don't worry, you can be slaves on Paradise Island and one of our girls will take over but she'll be really nice to you unlike the Nazi!", and that was seen as, that was the resolution to the story! You've got a nice mistress instead of a crop-cracking Paula Von Gunther.

So Marston had all these ideas and it was very deep, there was a book by him which was hidden in the DC Comics vaults because they didn't really want anyone to see it, and a friend of mine at DC sneaked it out for me one time. And it's this thing, and honestly you can't read it, it's deranged, it's like the guys just done mescaline or something, talking about his sexual theories. And it reads like William Burroughs, it's all this stuff about the luminous women from Venus and how they'll tie something round you and you'll be sorted out! So there was that, the Wonder Woman strip had this weird libidinous kind of element and obviously on Paradise Island, it was this amazing Second Wave, separatist, feminist idea of an entire island where women had ruled for 3000 years and what they did for fun was chase one another! So the girls would dress up like stags and run through the forest and another girl would chase them and then they'd capture the girl, tie her up and put her on a table and pretend to eat her at a mock banquet. This is a typical Wonder Woman adventure! [laughs] In 1941.

But then Marston died, and that energy left the strip, it just disappeared. They were really worried about what he was doing, the bondage elements were becoming more and more overt, but the sales were good! [laughs] This was working! Unlike Superman, as you say, I started looking at trying to do a Wonder Woman that brought back some of these elements but without it being prurient or exploitative.

Superman when he began was, he could throw people out of windows, you used to see him drop kicking guys into the ocean, and obviously that would kill you. You know Batman had a gun and sometimes he would shoot people. But those things weren't intrinsic to the strips, you know, you could take out those elements, you could take out the murder element of Superman and Batman and the strips still worked. But when you took the sex out of Wonder Woman, the thing went flat. And the sales died immediately after Marston himself died and never ever recovered.

So it seemed that there was something about those libidinous elements that were actually fundamental to the concept of Wonder Woman, and trying to find a way to put those back without being William Moulton Marston and not being into what he was into, was quite a difficult thing. But yeah, I think I've found a way, but I'm not gonna tell you what I've done because hopefully the Wonder Woman series will be out next year sometime or thereabouts. But I think I've found a way to get all that back in again but it took a lot of reading. This has been the hardest project I've ever done. I had to read feminist theory all the way through, from Simone De Beauvoir to Andrea Dworkin and apply it to this character. And to try and do something that incorporated those ideas but completely took them in a different direction. So I mean beyond that I'll say, Wonder Woman needs sex definitely because you know, again as I said in the book, they kind of transformed her into a cross between the Virgin Mary and Mary Tyler Moore. This girl scout who had no sexuality at all and the character's never quite worked since then.

In the way that Superman's supposed to stand for men but at least he's allowed to have some kind of element of sexuality, Wonder Woman is expected to stand for women without any element of sexuality, and that seems wrong. I don't know if that answers the question but it shows I've been thinking about it! [laughs]

Wildcat

Sounds very interesting; I knew most of what he said about Marston but had never heard of the book before!

LordSolarMacharius

WW #2 preview.
-Amazons seem to be man-hatin' [boo].
-Diana has a sense of humour [yay].
-Hippolyta's a blonde again [ehh].
-Amazons are low tech barbarians [sad].

Spoiler:

Also, the solits for WW #5 notes that Tony Akins (FABLES) will be doing fill-in art duties for this issue (or as DC has put it, "Featuring guest art by...").

Antimatter

LordSolarMacharius wrote:

WW #2 preview.
-Amazons seem to be man-hatin' [yay].
-Diana has a sense of humour [yay].
-Hippolyta's a blonde again [ehh].
-Amazons are low tech barbarians [sad].

Bagginses

They're a theological monarchy who depend on supernatural elements for their resources and care. How culturally developed can you really expect them to be?

nightmarenny

What about that preview says amazons are man-hating?

Bagginses

nightmarenny wrote:

What about that preview says amazons are man-hating?

The narration could be interpreted as the thoughts of an average Amazonian, which would make them at least manhood hating.

LordSolarMacharius

Bagginses wrote:

They're a theological monarchy who depend on supernatural elements for their resources and care. How culturally developed can you really expect them to be?

A lot?

They are [used to be] a small, close-knit society of women, all of whom chose to give up the warring way of man's world and follow Hippolyta to the happy-ever-after paradise of Themiscyra. Here, as you said, they are loosely ruled by a theological monarchy and the island bears enough resources to live happily.

And they've been there for a couple of thousand years. No armies coming to destroy their libraries, no mystery cults forcing on them that knowledge is bad and ignorance bliss, no hateful antagonism but sisterly competition. Do you expect that they've spent all those years lazing around?

Maybe we're just too different people. If I were to recieve a huge sum of money tomorrow, to the point where I could depend on it for my resources and care, I'd... still work a bit because I like what I do to an extent. But I'd free up time and use those resources to take classes at colleges and universities in a variety of subjects. I'd try to learn and create - I try to now a bit, but I mainly focus on working for money. So to me, it seems natural that there'd be a fair few Amazons who would do likewise.

This is [was] a culture of curiosity - not of the outside world, they'd seen that and grown tired of it. But they hadn't grown tired of life, of creating. Their city would be a testament to that. The most beautiful place in the world, because they had the time and desire to make it so. (And no cost/time constraints.) They'd have members who had spent lifetimes becoming the most fantastic of artists, and had many lifetimes left over to be athletes and healers, scientists, playwrights, comedians, chefs, debaters.

And it's into this society that Diana is born. One of utopian majesty. But unlike all the other Amazons, she hasn't experienced our world. She hasn't grown tired of it. And when she comes to explore and help it, she finds that with its faults it is also full of many wonders, that it's worth fighting for its improvement, worth fighting for all the people in it.

That's "my Wonder Woman". And I'm excited for and interested in seeing where Azzarello and Chiang are going to take the book. But when I see that one of the ways they're taking it is to make the Amazons low tech barbarians, it makes me sad. Because it's losing one of the concepts that I most of love about the character. I hope I'll love this too, but... I mourn a passing idea.

***

I think I can understand why they've done it, by the way. An idealic Amazon society doesn't make for overly interesting stories. But to me, that's a good thing. It seems every god-damn story in recent memory in the book has focused on the Amazons in some way. That's background. They inform where the Diana comes from, what makes her who she is. But she's supposed to be doing stuff in our world. Fighting threats in our world. And I really wish writers would just stop going back to the island for conflicts.

***

Also, it's a little funny that Hermes' junk apparently smells enough to alert the Amazons of the presence of people on the island. It also seems funny that they'd then start threatening the people with castration - and be close enough for these spoken threats to be heard - without visually identifying the fact that it's Diana, their princess, and Hermes, a god.

WiseManTobes

If you can smell naughty bits across an entire forest, you may need some bow chikka wow wow,

just saying.

Solar

If the Amazons are man hating but Diana has a slightly antagonistic relation with them over it then that could work.

As it is I don't like it. Feminists are already incorrectly portrayed as man-haters, actually portraying DC's most recognized feminists in that way seems to be reinforcing a hurtful stereotype.

Also fuck Man haters.

Wildcat

An unfortunate turn of phrase, Solar

Solar

Get your mind out of the gutter Wildcat!

Wildcat

My mind's out of the gutter, but my hooves keep on getting dirty

Antimatter

Wildcat wrote:

My mind's out of the gutter, but my hooves keep on getting dirty

That's it. Taking you behind the shed and then what's left of you to the glue factory.

LordSolarMacharius

I guess I should mention that I'm far more excited about Diana showing a sense of humour and uhm... vivacious behaviour, then I am annoyed by stereotypical rather than Marston Amazons.

I just write less words.

Wildcat

Antimatter wrote:

Wildcat wrote:

My mind's out of the gutter, but my hooves keep on getting dirty

That's it. Taking you behind the shed and then what's left of you to the glue factory.

They see me prancin'
They hatin'