Today is the 75th anniversary of Wonder Woman,
THE premiere female character in the biggest genre on the planet right
now. That’s a pretty big milestone
and an aptly timed one at that.
After decades trying to reclaim the place in the public eye she enjoyed
during her hit ‘70s TV show’s run, Wonder Woman is finally returning to the
public eye thanks to the premiere of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman in this year’s Batman v. Superman.
Now Dawn
of Justice was a travesty but Wonder Woman was actually a good part of it
and Gadot’s upcoming Wonder Woman solo film is shaping up to be a major blast,
so to celebrate this milestone I thought we’d get the full spectrum on the
various Amazonian heroes and characters’ that’ve peppered DC’s history.
I’d like to reiterate here that the red slot of Comics
Rainbow isn’t meant to be a character that’s actually bad just the one that’s
least cared for by the most people and in the case of Amazons that kind of has
to be Donna Troy. Donna Troy is
such a weird character I’m not sure I even have the space to explain why she’s
so looked down on. She was a
character created by accident and it shows. At her best she works well as a teen/young adult version of
Wonder Woman, powerful while also caring and decidedly kick-ass. However, Donna’s best is in short
supply as somewhere around 70% of her stories are devoted solely to explaining
her origin.
That’s the big reason Donna has never found traction as a
character, no one can decide where she came from. The original character of Wonder Girl popped up when Bob
Haney mistook a younger version of Wonder Woman for a different character and
so dropped her into his Teen Titans comic. Since then Donna’s origin has ranged from space homunculus,
to long lost sister, to alternate dimension, to who knows what else and none of
it has stuck because none of it is interesting.
Donna Troy is a textbook example of how superhero obsession
with origin stories can strangle a character’s potential. As I said, when Donna is allowed to
just exist and do her superhero thing she can be really great and is one of the
cooler members of the Teen Titans but those moments are so brief it’s downright
tragic. Maybe somewhere down the
line someone will come up with a Donna Troy origin that’s actual satisfactory
but really it doesn’t matter where she came from, she’s here now and that’s the
thing authors should focus on.
There are a lot of reasons Grace is my favorite Amazon, not
the least of which is how diverse a character she is. I’ve stated previously that I’m thoroughly in favor of
diverse representation in media for a lot of reasons but the biggest one has
always been that recycling the same characters over and over again is ungodly
dull. Giving us characters that
break the white straight male monolith is a great way to force a work into a
more creative place and Grace is a pretty good example of that. She’s an Asian American lesbian Amazon
ass-kicker and one of the coolest superheroes there is. She first popped up in the mid-2000s as
part of the revamped Outsiders, back
when the team became a sort of Teen Titans 2.0 type group. At the time she was just a super
strong, super durable bad ass who acted the team’s muscle as no one really knew
her origins.
Unlike Donna Troy, however, there was an origin story
already worked out for Grace. It
turned out she was descendant from a lost tribe of Amazons known as the
Bana-Mighdall. The Bana-Mighdall Amazons were fierce warriors but unlike the
Amazons of Paradise Island they were more inclined to deal with man’s world and
had complex technology augmented with magic. It was a neat idea and the Amazon edition only served to
make Grace a more interesting character as she now was a daughter of 3
competing heritages.
The big reason Grace is my favorite Amazon though is how
graceless she actually is. Unlike
all the other Amazons in comics Grace has always been loud and angry and
destructive, she’s basically DC’s She-Hulk. Women heroes who are super strong is rare but ones who are
aggressive and destructive with their strength is even rare so I always tend to
gravitate towards those characters.
Admittedly, the school of thinking is that Grace is adopting a
traditionally male role to increase her power but no less subversive to that
tradition. Also the fact that
Grace could beat up Superman and laugh about it is pretty cool.
Oh boy, I’m not going to win any friends with this
choice. So, might as well get this
out of the way at the upfront: I don’t really like the Teen Titans, the comics,
or Young Justice the TV show. I know that it’s the trendy thing to
jump on Young Justice because it was
a hit animated superhero show with girls and that’s amazing but I just never
cared for and a lot of that is the characters. Some of them are okay individually but some of them I just
can’t stand and Wonder Girl is the epitome of that dislike. But hey, this wouldn’t be the “everyone
likes them but me” category if this was a popular opinion.
`It’s a little hard to describe my dislike for Wonder Girl
but a lot of it has to do with just how poorly DC was dealing with teen girls
at the time she emerged as a character.
Her history is a weird cluster in its own right but I was most exposed
to her character during the mid-2000s when she was one of the main heroes of
the Teen Titans. This was the same
time DC was running Supergirl right into the ground with a terrible combination
of confusing continuity twists, character indecision, and tiring romantic
entanglements. The Wonder Girl
writers took one look at this and decided they could do the same thing only
much worse.
Seriously, so much of Wonder Girl’s prime years is marred by
her being a background player on her own team, lacking any personality beyond
being really mad all the time, and constantly being dragged down through her
romance to Super Boy. It could
just be that I’ve always been reflexively allergic to Super Boy and Wonder Girl
is now tainted by association but whatever the reason I just can’t get past
that era for the character, maybe it’s just me.
Obviously it Wonder Woman is the objective best Amazon, how
could she not be? Wonder Woman is
the most recognizable woman superhero of all time, she stands tall alongside
Batman and Superman as the core 3 fundamental superheroes, the American myth
made reality. She’s been a Goddess
of Truth and a Taco Bell employee and found the honor and nobility in
both. She turns enemies into
allies and allies into friends and wields the great weapons of truth and
kindness with incredible skill.
I’m hard pressed to think of a character that greater embodies the idea
of God-like perfection and power wielded in such a personal and intimate
nature.
What’s impressive about Wonder Woman, and a big reason why I
did this Comics Rainbow about Amazons as a whole rather than just her, is that
despite passing through various incarnations she’s always remained very true to
her core identity. Through her
initial Golden Age weirdness, her time without powers in the Bronze age, the
John Byrne era in which she lost the mantel of Wonder Woman, or Gail Simone’s
dynamite run on the character the core of Wonder Woman has always
persisted.
Unlike so many other
characters who morph and bend through multiple adaptations Wonder Woman remains
the same. Her sense of self and
core characterization is so strong that no amount of reworking can rip away her
basic identity. More than Batman,
more than Captain America, Wonder Woman IS.
So, remember how I mentioned just a paragraph ago that
Wonder Woman briefly lost her mantel of Wonder Woman? Well, during that time the mantel of Wonder Woman passed to
another Amazonian, the runner up that Diana beat in the initial trials to see
who would take the role named Artemis.
From there, Artemis became a pretty major part of the Wonder Woman
mythos, popping up whenever someone wanted to portray Paradise Island and
needed an Amazonian to hold down the fort who wasn’t Wonder Woman’s mom. Despite that prevalence most folks now
have turned their backs on Artemis and I really don’t see why.
The big take away I get from most folks is that Artemis is a
second string Amazon, which strikes me as utterly unfair. I don’t blame people for not loving the
Wonder Woman books where Artemis first came up and Wonder Woman adopted her
bizarre combination of hot pants and jean jacket but Artemis herself was badass
in those comics. She didn’t
represent the same values as Wonder Woman but she also wasn’t meant to.
Like many hero replacement stories the
entire point of her taking over the role was to show us a different take on Wonder
Woman, one that was meant as an exploration of a Wonder Woman who was every bit
as blood thirsty as a lot of folks seem to wish Wonder Woman was. Artemis was a powerful warrior with no
mercy and deadly accuracy, none of which really screams Wonder Woman because
that’s not who Artemis is.
So this is a pretty weird one but bear with me. It’s fairly well established that
Wonder Woman really doesn’t have a rogues gallery but rather a handful of
reoccurring bad guys. Most folks
could probably name Cheetah as her primary antagonist or Ares if they were
being pressed. Cersi is the
closest thing Wonder Woman has to a third archenemy after those two.
She’s was originally introduced in the
background of some Justice League adventure as the Cersi of myth that stranded
Odysseus before morphing into a reoccurring Wonder Woman baddy. She’s not particularly well liked or
prevalent but she’s been around long enough to be considered among the premiere
Wonder Woman foes over folks like Dr. Poison or Giganta.
That audience ambivalence is what’s left Cersi stranded in
this part of the list despite how cool she could be as an antagonist. The problem with Cersi is that creators
always seem to be reticent to actually make her the kind of big, all-powerful,
ego-maniacal bad guy that a hero of Wonder Woman’s stature really demands.
This is one of the weird things about
woman super villains, they tend to be relegated to villainous femme fatales or
anti-villains, very rarely are they allowed to just be big powerful foes
obsessed with world domination. If
Cersi was more in that particular vein she may not be as big as folks like
Luthor or Ras Al Ghul but she’d certainly stand out more as a Wonder Woman
villain and could be a serious force to consider rather than a reoccurring
footnote.
If you’ve never heard of her before, Hippolyta is Wonder
Woman’s mom and queen of the Amazons.
What’s more, she was also Wonder Woman herself for two separate eras of
the character’s history. When
Hippolyta was first introduced, part of the idea of her character was that she
was the version of Wonder Woman who fought the Nazis in the 1940s. That idea has stuck around till modern
times pretty much, with Hippolyta filling the role of the original Wonder Woman
and often taking the place of Wonder Woman on the Justice Society. Later, she filled in for her daughter
as Wonder Woman on the JLA while Diana was occupied being the goddess of
truth. She’s one of the coolest
and most proactive moms in comics and a rare example of a superhero parent.
Honestly I think Hippolyta’s role as a parent is key to why
she’s as popular as she is. Comics
tend to run off of very isolated relationships, without much in the way of
literal family. There are families
to be sure but they’re usually surrogate in nature, the way Batman or the Flash
surround themselves with a surrogate family to replace the one they lost. Actual family relationships between
superheroes are very rare and aside from Superman and Supergirl, Hippolyta and
Wonder Woman is the most high profile example of this.
The added lens of royalty and mythic weight that informs
their relationship creates infinitely more unique dimensions to build off
of. The way Wonder Woman picks up
her mother’s mantel, even defying her mother’s wishes in some iterations, is
the stuff of legends and the whole thing lends Wonder Woman an emphasis on
mother/daughter relationships that’s often missing in male dominated superhero
media.
Ah N’ubia, the really cool black Amazon that everyone likes
to forget exists. In fairness,
N’ubia is a pretty obscure character, appearing in only a handful of actual
comics and sporadically at that.
Her most popular appearance recently has been in Grant Morrison’s
multiverse work as a resident of Earth-23, where she is Wonder Woman. Still, every time she shows up she
manages to be awesome and every time audiences remember she exists people get
really exited about her. It’s easy
to see why too.
N’ubia is a lot like Artemis or Grace Choi in that she’s an
embodiment of a lot of the warlike elements of the Amazons that people really
respond to. A lot of that comes
with the subgenre of fantasy the Amazons inhabit. So many people are used to sword and sandal fantasy, fantasy
inspired by Greco-roman myth, to reflect blood and gore and crazy fighting that
characters like Wonder Woman or Hippolyta, who embody compassion, throw them
off. So, when people get a hold of
bad ass warrior women like N’ubia people really gravitate towards them.
What’s more, N’ubia’s place as a woman of color in the
Wonder Woman mythos is a pretty big deal.
Wonder Woman is the standard barer of female power and equality within
the ranks of comics so the fact her own collection of characters has always
lacked for racial diversity is a big black mark on that claim. Someone like N’ubia who’s every bit as
cool and powerful and competent as Wonder Woman while also black is a pretty
major deal.
Okay, this is a bit of a cheat but I don’t care, it’s my
list and I’m going to include who I like.
Generally I try not to use Comics Rainbow to dive into non-continuity
characters or folks from parallel universes because this is a series meant to
introduce people to characters and their mythos rather than confuse them about
it. However, when it comes to
Amazon I’m willing to suspend that rule because she’s just so damn cool. Amazon, a gestalt combination of Storm,
of the X-Men, and Wonder Woman was created during one of the greatest events of
all time: Amalgam Comics.
I’ll probably devote more time to Amalgam Comics down the
line but for now here’s what you need to know. Amalgam Comics was
a weird collection of one-shot comics that featured mashed-up DC and Marvel
heroes. Captain America combined
with Superman to become Super Soldier, Batman combined with Wolverine to become
Dark Claw, and Wonder Woman combined with Storm to become Amazon. I cannot think of a better combination
than Storm and Wonder Woman. I’ve
already discussed all the amazing reasons Wonder Woman is at the forefront of
women in comics but Storm stands equally tall as the first word on women of
color in comics.
She’s a powerful
Goddess in her own right that speaks to strength and beauty for women of color,
a true titan of the medium.
What’s more, both characters manage to transcend their own
incredible powers through the depths of their compassion. The love and connection these two
women have to their friends and comrade as well as the natural world is
staggering and truly defines them as unique heroes, symbols of both power and
the strength to use that power with compassion.
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