Wonder Woman #1 (and #0)

This review was commissioned by @Gun Jam


Wonder Woman got a slightly later start than the other members of what would eventually become DC's "big three." Her first introduction happened in a short section of a late 1941 issue of All Star Comics. This try-out was well received enough that Wonder Woman became the flagship character of the new Sensation Comics line that kicked off the following year, after the studio merged with a couple of others to become DC.

The first Wonder Woman episode in Sensational Comics is basically an expanded remake of the initial All Star short. Some details get significantly changed as well as expanded on, though, so creator William Marston and his little cowriter-polycule seem to have still been ironing out the concept throughout that year. I'm not sure if all of them were good changes, personally, but I'll get to that.

Before going in, I'll also say that early Wonder Woman is a fundamentally weird comic, for at least three reasons. First, Marston saw comics as an ideal indoctrination vector for young minds, and his progressive-for-their-time-but-still-kinda-what-the-fuck ideas about gender and politics were his *primary* motivation for creating Wonder Woman. Second, Marston had no ability to distinguish between his ideology and his penis, and therefore fell under the impression that his fetishes were an important part of the message that the youth of his day desperately needed to hear. Third, unlike Superman and Batman who had their starts in the 1930's, Wonder Woman debuted just as America was entering into the second world war, so the nationalism was baked in right from the very outset.

So, yeah. It's weird.


Both versions of Wonder Woman's beginnings have the same inciting incident. A biplane flown by American army intelligence officer Steve Trevor runs out of fuel and crashes at the hidden island-paradise of the immortal Amazons. He is discovered and nursed back to health by Diana, the princess of the Amazons. Diana's queen mother then receives a vision from patron goddess Aphrodite telling her to send an Amazon champion to escort Trevor back to his homeland and then render assistance in the conflict she finds there; the future of "men's world," as they call the rest of the planet, hangs in the balance. They hold a tournament to find the most qualified champion, and naturally the winner is Diana. Her motivation being the fact that she fell in love with Captain Trevor. While he was unconscious.

That's certainly in keeping with the spirit of Greek mythology, but it's not in keeping with the specific Greek myths that make their protagonists look good.

Queen Hippolyte isn't keen on the idea of her daughter wanting to go running off from home for this particular reason. However, I'm not sure at all if the comic ever ends up recognizing this as a folly of Diana's, which...well, it seems to be part of the author's whole thing about the feminine power of love being a guiding force that humanity needs to follow more, and him not seeming to distinguish between compassion and lust in this case.

The All Star version ends with Diana winning the tournament and being given the honor of championing the cause of love in men's world. I think I must have mentally tacked a version of the 2017 movie onto the post-ending, because I walked away from it with the idea that Trevor regained consciousness and mobility before Diana brings him home and that the two of them developed a rapport during the trip. The 1941 expanded version, unfortunately, rid me of that misconception regarding the original author's intent. He's not really fully conscious again until they're back in the USA and his rescuer has taken on her secret identity as military nurse Diana Prince.

On one hand, amusingly direct mirroring of Clark Kent and Lois Lane's dynamic. On the other...Clark didn't decide he was in love with Lois by watching her sleep.

It's not helped by the fact that during the one brief return to semi-lucidity of his on the island that we're shown, Trevor does nothing but be sexist to Diana.

I do like her little humblebrag here, if nothing else.​

Also, where the All Star version's final panel ends on Diana being granted her super-powered wonder woman outfit and looking silently awesome in it, the remake builds upon the image and elevates it further with the revolutionary feminist concept of women be shopping.

Why.

Honestly, apart from the detail of the plane crashing in the water rather than on the beach and thus making the pilot's survival a lot less improbable, the Sensation Comics #1 version makes a lot of stuff dumber than it was before. Like, instead of Diana bringing Trevor to an Amazon hospital where the presence of a man is seen as a strange, unexpected curiosity, she has to get around the militant "no men allowed on the island" laws by bringing him to her personal laboratory. Where she saves his life with these unique medical contraptions that she invented herself. Because she's also a scientist apparently.

Likewise, the initial short has her going to the tournament in a mask so that people wouldn't know the princess had entered the competition. Which was kinda silly, because this is a seemingly small, centralized population, and it's just a little domino mask that barely hides a quarter of her face, but whatever. In the Sensation version, she's wearing the shitty little mask so that *her own mother* won't recognize her and forbid her participation.

There are a whole bunch of little things like that.

One thing that the longer second draft does better, on the other hand, is expand on the semi-mythic origins of the Amazon civilization. It takes the version of the Labors of Heracles story where he straight up steals the Girdle of Aphrodite from Queen Hippolyta, and ramps up the severity to turn Heracles into an out-and-out villain. In this version of the story, he steals the belt from them purely via perfidy and betrayal rather than strength or strategy. And he didn't just take the quest item; he and his army razed the entire Amazon civilization and enslaved its populace. Eventually, Aphrodite gave her favored people the power to escape captivity and flee by ship, and they were guided to the island where they've lived in secret ever since.

I found this backstory interesting. I think the decision to villainize a figure like Heracles (hypermasculine warrior-hero whose misdeeds in the myths - especially his violence toward mortal women, including his killing of the Amazons themselves in at least some versions - are mostly blamed on petty bitch Hera) was a clever one, and writing an Amazon version of the ninth labor that casts themselves as heroes and the Greeks as villains makes more sense than most of the "feminist reimaginings" that Greek myths have been getting in more recent decades. The fact that it keeps the events mostly the same, but simply changes the motivations and also adds some extra atrocities that might have simply been omitted from the Greek version, makes it seem like it could have actually been a competing version of the story told by some historic enemy of the Greeks we know.

Much stranger is the story getting contextualized as part of a Manichaean battle for the collective soul of humanity being fought by Ares and Aphrodite (of any two Greek gods to make mortal enemies...really?). And also, Aphrodite being the patron goddess of not only the Amazons, but also the United States of America. Global bastion of love and women's rights.

On one hand...I think I can see what the author might have been trying to do here, given the year of publication and his professed ethos when it comes to ideological outreach. Trying to encourage his child readers to WANT America to be the antithesis of everything the Axis represents and aspire to make it so. To start behaving in a manner that would please this version of Aphrodite and make the country worthy of her. But, on the other hand, taking this at face value there is just SO much wrong with it that I can't even.

I suspect that this aspect of the comic would have been much better had it come out in the late 1930's alongside Supes and Bats. The Axis is freely available to villainize, but America not being in a shooting war with them just yet means there's less flag-humping and more room for ruthless inward critique.


On the whole, I'd say Wonder Woman's debut was a lot weaker than Superman's. On pretty much all fronts. More ambitious, but less competent, and it hasn't aged nearly as well.

Next
Next

The Owl House S1E15-16: "Understanding Willow" and "Enchanting Grom Fright"