10/1 Wonder Woman Earth One Annotations

VOLUME 2

The cover strikes the first ominous note; Diana’s fame has clearly spread – and crossed the threshold that separates hero from villain (as Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight reminds us, all it takes is the passage of time).

And a little time has passed from the end of Volume 1.

The tone changed here. If Volume 1 showed the Amazons under pressure, this second volume would lead with a scene of them at their finest - Hippolyta and her sisters being cool and kicking Nazi ass!

The cinematic cold open flashback was written at the same time as the introductory Hercules scene in Book 1 and was derived from a flashback scene I’d included in my initial movie pitch. The scene seemed to compose itself, with the clipped combative dialogue between Hippolyta and the Nazi superwoman Paula Von Gunther driving and escalating the conflict until suddenly the boastful, indomitable Nazis are overwhelmed by weapons of love and Paula is broken by Amazon psychology and mind control tech!

Instead of a typical action scene where swords and shields overcome the invasion, we show how the superior ‘love tech’ of the Amazons renders the conflict quickly one-sided. The Nazi invasion of Paradise Island is defeated by weapons that cause the Wehrmacht soldiers to orgasm uncontrollably!

Funnily enough, some readers seemed to feel that the Amazon love guns were much more offensive than guns that fire bullets and kill people, or swords that maim! Is experiencing a non-consenting orgasm mid-battle truly a worse prospect for some than experiencing a non-consenting bullet through the face?

Calling Wilhelm Reich!

The Nazis are rounded up and hustled via the ‘electro-chemical Space Transformer’ (which appeared first in 1945) to Desira’s alternate Earth where ‘BUTTERFLY-WINGED VENUS GIRLS WAIT TO PURGE THEM OF THEIR NEED FOR CONFLICT.’

(Desira is Queen of the planet Aphrodite where weak and wingless men are completely dependent on the winged mistresses of the world!  Marston and Peter’s stories featured an inordinate number of female-led societies, usually based on different planets of our solar system. That approach wasn’t possible with our more realistic slant, so we recast most of these worlds as parallel Earths of the Multiverse, as discovered by Amazon science. Desira’s Venus becomes an alternate Earth where the Amazons did take over ‘Man’s World’ long ago and renamed their world Aphrodite)

One of the reasons I shied away from the basic clay origin of Diana was because I wanted this version of Wonder Woman to be more ‘grounded’ in the Hollywood sense, which is to say it takes place in a more ‘realistic’ setting where these events might conceivably occur with massive consequences. The fairytale idea of Aphrodite or any other gods showing up to bestow magic on a clay statuette didn’t work in this context, hence my resort to weird genetic engineering or weaving as Hippolyta might call it at her loom. I wanted the familiar gods of Wonder Woman to behave more like gods do in the real world and we deliberately played down or reframed some of the fantasy elements of the original stories.

The gods in Wonder Woman express themselves through human vessels and through technology. When any person is overwhelmed with a desire to fight, that person is possessed by Ares (just as those in love are ‘possessed’ by Aphrodite). Ares is the sum total of all those possessions over millennia, much bigger than any one individual experience, therefore a God, millennia old and ever present. A distributed, networked consciousness that has existed in the human world since the dawn of violence. Real enough to inspire a man to kill you with a brick!

With the Purple Ray technology from those original stories in mind, it wasn’t much of a leap to link the ray with Wilhelm Reich’s postulated ‘Orgone Energy’ (Reich’s philosophy and Marston’s overlapped in many areas). The two concepts blended seamlessly.

I won’t go deeply into Reich’s fascinating theories here. Go read up on the man and his work. A brilliant, tragic, maverick figure who was considered such a threat to America in the 1950s that his books were burned on bonfires by the FDA for daring to question orthodox psychiatry and the roots of fascism in sexual repression.

I found his ideas to be immensely useful and underwent a course of Reichian bodywork therapy in the 1990s which was one of the most profound and transformative experiences of my life.

(Cloudbusting, my favourite Kate Bush song, was written from the point of view of Reich’s son Peter and has a great video with the magnificent Donald Sutherland as the scientist)

The Baroness Paula Von Gunther appeared in Sensation Comics #4, 1942. She kept a harem of slave girls, but it was revealed that everything she did was to protect her daughter who was held by the Nazis. The Amazons subject Paula to their mind control…err…’reform’ techniques, and she switches from enthusiastic Nazi to equally enthusiastic supporter of the Amazon creed (the ‘Venus Girdle’ which pacifies its wearer is from the original stories).

We recreated her as a prototype Nazi superhuman – Germany’s Uberfraulein - so that she could go toe to toe with the Wonder Women.

Paula’s resolve simply crumbles here in the face of Hippolyta’s unshakeable loving authority. Her epic dedication to fascism revealed as the folly of a weak, unformed personality clinging to simple solutions and charismatic leader figures.  

Paula’s psychological collapse is very much in the vein of that old bondage comics standby, the Mistress comeuppance story.

The Marston/Peter originals showed the Amazons as eager proponents of mind control, so I had to accept that as a fundamental of their culture. For some readers, this made the Amazons fascists and somehow it was our fault! It seems hard to believe some Wonder Woman fans overlooked the negative implications of Submission to Loving Authority, Transformation Island and Venus Girdles until now!

Practised under the auspices of Loving Authority, mind control in Marston’s worldview was a valid tool for deprogramming sociopaths, fascists, and misogynists.

Again, I chose to take the side of the Amazons and to present their philosophies and technology without too much editorialising or commentary. For that, read ‘A Clockwork Orange’.

The difference here from dystopian mind control tales is, I suppose the Marston philosophy that ‘love leaders’ exist. It’s what separates these technologies as applied by the Patriarchal state apparatus and big business, or by Amazonian wonder machines at the behest of a Loving Female Authority. In Marston’s utopia, we can totally trust the Queen and Wonder Woman to have our very best interests at heart! Rather than sneer at this lovely fantasy, I decided to accept these as the rules of this game.

All I know is we currently live lives defined by mass mind control via technology that’s used by Russia, China, and our own leaders to manipulate data, distort facts, sway public opinion, rewire personalities, and generally transform us into the willing drones of sadistic dark powers with a global anti-life agenda.

The theme has never been more topical!

The AR helmets date the book immediately! I spent several years working on Mixed and Augmented Reality applications at Magic Leap and witnessed miracles every time I visited with Rony Abovitz and his team in Miami.

The company’s original pioneering spirit was swiftly corporatized, and the radical ‘light chip’ technology diverted away from the mad ‘experiences’ we were developing, and that was the end for Magic Leap me sadly. The design of the glasses/viewer was very appealing and King Mob-ish, it must be said. Much better than the Meta-style viewers the shadowy cabal is wearing here.

I love Yanick’s opening spread of Diana playing baseball, knocking it out of the park! There’s so much energy and movement in the drawing, which contrasts with the montage shot of magazine covers on the following page. Each featuring a completely new variation on the familiar Wonder Woman outfit.

The catcher in the scene where Diana hits the ball right across Washington DC from Nationals Park stadium (here named Senator’s Park) to (due for demolition) RFK, a distance of 4.5 miles!  Catching the ball is Veronica Alvarez, who played for the women’s National Team and had recently retired from the game in favour of coaching at the time of writing.

Here we see the Holliday Girls in their marching band majorette outfits resembling Wonder Woman’s traditional outfit.

Yanick designs multiple new looks for Wonder Woman, from formal evening wear and a pants suit to sportswear and haute couture. One of the first ideas we had was to give Wonder Woman a range of extensive wardrobe of outfits. I used to love the costume design contests they had in the back of the early ‘70s Adventure Comics with new looks for Supergirl and I thought an ongoing Wonder Woman comic should have a page for readers to send in costume designs, with the best ones showing up in stories!

We decided to use her colours and iconography across a range of designs to show what was possible. No matter what the look, she’s always recognisable as Wonder Woman.

We see Diana looping her Lasso of Truth around Reince Priebus, the man named after a Scrabble accident and White House spokesman at the start of the Trump presidency when I was writing the book. The Lasso of Truth took on a new significance in the age of Fake News and ‘alternative facts’.

Etta Candy, a huge presence in the first book, is deliberately backgrounded here. Steve Trevor shows up but even he seems otherwise engaged much of the time. The effect is to isolate Diana. There’s a feeling that her friends are beginning to take her for granted, looking in the wrong direction.

Diana seems dispirited by the scale of her mission to bring peace and harmony to Man’s World, and we learn that she – indeed, all the Amazons - surrender their immortality when they step off their island. This apprehension of time and death prowling around her is what gives rise to her anxiety.

Diana’s wonder hijab was created to show her respect for the rules of different cultures. When she travels to the Middle East, she ditches the swimsuit for a beautiful design by artist Sanya Anwar. While she may not find herself in agreement with the dictates of monotheistic religions, she chooses to dress in a manner that resonates with the women she hopes to inspire.

The second of our villain revamps arrives in the form of Dr. Psycho, here introduced as Leon Zeiko, a gifted negotiator. The original Psycho was a misogynistic dwarf with mesmeric powers and a leftfield ability to manifest ectoplasmic twins.

The ugly dwarf thing seemed a bit dated (Peter Dinklage, with his magnificent speaking voice, was portraying the little guy as the hero on Game of Thrones at the time) and the ectoplasmic duplicates angle was too fantastical for our grounded approach. Instead, we decided to re-orient Psycho within the misogynistic PUA (‘pickup artist’) community as described in Neil Strauss’ book ‘The Game’ and its sequel ‘Rules of the Game’ (I found myself gagging while I tried to read ‘Rules of the Game’ and couldn’t finish it). The basis of the PUA method was/is to provide weedy, nerdy losers with a set of tried and tested hypnotic coercive routines they could use to charm hot women into their beds. Call it prosthetic charisma!

I asked Yanick to draw Zeiko as ‘ugly handsome’ – citing Matt Smith and Nick Cave as examples of what I was looking for (Nick Cave won out clearly!). The luxuriant hairstyle of the original dwarf Psycho was retained because I liked its resemblance to a leonine mane, recalling the iconography of Hercules. The lion motif shows up with Zeiko’s distinctive cane, and in his given name Leon also – and reminding us that the distorted power exchange depicted on the first page of Volume 1 is still in play. We kept the ‘evil hypnotist’ angle but shifted in the more contemporary direction of Ericksonian techniques and NLP.

Yanick and I paced the drinking scene very carefully to show Zeiko working his way through a classic PUA script, laid out here in its most simplistic form.

Girls! Boys! Others! If you ever sense this routine is being used on you, it’s here in these scenes in brief outline!  

Psycho presents as a feminist ally. Then he says, ‘ALLOW ME TO TAKE CHARGE.’ He’s set up a situation where a soldier shows up with exactly the right bottle of whisky. He insists that Diana drink shots with him, placing her in his frame. He praises her then withdraws the praise to criticize her and her culture (‘Negging’ as it’s known).

When Diana puts her elbows on the table and clasps her hands, he closely mimics her gestures without obviously copying them. This is a tactic known as ‘mirroring’. By matching the target’s posture and breathing, even using similar vocabulary, emotional congruence can be swiftly established.

Psycho has a ‘casting away’ gesture that he makes by flicking his fingers over his shoulder. He uses this gesture every time he speaks about something he wants to disparage. The Amazons ‘authority’, any plan to end war…

A classic PUA tactic is to talk about a spouse or lover who ‘doesn’t understand’ the PUA (in this case it was Psycho’s wife, Marva, from the Marston stories). This is called ‘triangulation’ where the target is made a perhaps unwilling confidante in a personal domestic situation, and implied to be someone who understands the PUA ‘better’.

Psycho saves his best for last when he trots out Sappho in the original Greek (we used her poem ‘Jealousy’ here). Obviously, he’s just memorised it.

Psycho’s online postings reflected language typical of PUA and ‘Red Pill’ communities.

Which brings us again to the admission that most of the artists and writers on Wonder Woman stories, including her creators, have been men. Many more women have contributed to the character and her adventures recently, but the names in the credits boxes have tended to be dudes not dames!

Understandable then that one of the big criticisms that often comes up in relation to Wonder Woman stories is that the mostly male creative teams can’t possibly have anything useful to say about the experience of women!

(I count myself among those who would rejoice to see even more women writing Wonder Woman stories, and superhero comics in general, but it’s worth pointing out that very few of us, male, female, or other orientation, can relate to the ‘lived experience’ of an immortal superpowered princess from an all-female utopia!)

This observation relies on a curious misapprehension that the male creators of comics don’t have wives, girlfriends, partners, daughters, sisters or mothers they interact with and learn from every day of their lives!

We know that Marston’s wife Elizabeth contributed much to Wonder Woman’s genesis, as did Olive Byrne the Marston throuple’s third member! The writer Joye Hummel took over writing Wonder Woman stories when Marston grew ill and she continued until his death, only leaving the book when the incoming editorial team decided to jettison many of the feminist/queer aspects of the stories.

In the case of the Earth One books, my wife Kristan was a major source of input throughout and provided a great deal of perspective and material. My mum and my sister are here too. Volumes 2 and 3 had the writer/musician Arden Leigh, a former professional dominatrix and ‘female pick-up artist’, who studied with the PUAs and Neil Strauss, as a consultant.

Aside from keeping me on point with the Amazonian bondage and domination aspects of Wonder Woman, Arden shared her expert knowledge of PUA scripts and NLP tactics described above.

Women helped made this book! How could it be otherwise?

Some readers felt sure that Wonder Woman would be immune to Zeiko’s crude wiles but some of the smartest, most principled women I know have been completely blindsided and undermined by unscrupulous men using these techniques. I wanted to raise that warning flag.

I’ve seen it happen, powerless to stop it, and I’ll admit I took some fictional revenge here.

It was my idea to use Maxwell Lord as the villain in a Wonder Woman movie and that’s why he’s ended up being swallowed into her rogue’s gallery! It’s all my fault, sorry! When I was consulting at Warners, one of Diana’s biggest comic book moments had recently occurred when she snapped Max Lord’s neck in the pages of Countdown to Infinite Crisis. I thought it would be interesting to revisit this pivotal moment in the movie story, even though Lord was never a traditional WW villain (and not even necessarily a villain in the comics). So, he went in the movie pitch, then ported over to Earth One and now he’s everywhere!

I chose him to be the incarnation of Ares, God of War. The middle part of our trilogy offering three villains in the manner of Tim Burton’s Batman Returns!

Previous comic book depictions of Ares showed an imposing figure in black armor with red eyes glaring from a plumed black spartan helmet, but Yanick and I wanted a modern god of war – mechanized, mass produced, wielding disinformation and terror. Our Ares would be present all around us, in every weapon of war, every soldier, every global conflict, a true god, vast and distributed, expressing its will through the material world. We had the idea to show more of the gods in modern guise, with Poseidon in the form of a nuclear submarine but in the end only Aphrodite, Ares and Hades make it into the narrative.

The ARES suits came from the movie pitch; as I say, I was trying to think of fresh and contemporary ways to portray the gods, and while I’d planned to have Maxwell Lord as the human avatar of the God of War, I also liked the idea that the distributed Ares consciousness would be able to control multiple soldiers. This led to the idea of armoured warsuits that, as someone who loves a good spy-fi Cold War acronym, I could call A(rmed) R(esponse) E (Environment) S(uit). Superhero movies love armies of disposable baddies and these murderous drones fit the bill!

Hippolyta anticipates her death at Paula’s hands. The Fates have prophesied as much, and she accepts the outcome.

That’s feminist theorist and writer, Gloria Steinem welcoming Diana to the stage, then looking on horrified as Wonder Woman suggests exterminating men!

Diana is broken here. Her mother is dead. She’s been exploited by Zeiko. Under his direction, she’s declared war on mankind and imperilled her sisters…

Still, Diana forgives Paula, Hippolyta’s murderer. Diana knows, at this moment, she must not falter and succumb to the anger of ‘Man’s World’. Her real revenge on Paula, cold, logical, and unstoppable when it comes, is to turn the staunch Nazi into an Amazon convert.

Zeiko’s punishment is more extreme – as he’s handed over to the Butterfly Venus Girls of Aphrodite – to be turned into one of their male slaves! It’s harsh but, honestly, it’s the least of what I’ve wished on the men who hurt women close to me.

Diana then earns the crown and becomes Queen of the Amazons.

In a boy’s adventure story, ascending to the throne and marrying the Princess would be the end of the journey (the story stops there because, for instance, Aragorn, ‘Strider’, is never more boring than at the end of The Lord of the Rings when he marries Arwen and assumes the role of King. Although kudos to Tolkien for providing the history of Middle Earth in the appendices, where we learn of Aragorn’s death many years later).

We were feeling a little more ambitious.

VOLUME THREE

I loved writing this part of the story. It felt like one of the most beautifully composed and written superhero comics I’d ever done. It was one of those rare pieces of work that accomplished everything I wanted it to, with no errors or glitches. Nothing was rushed or overlooked. It was a heartfelt Shakespearean ‘art d’amour’ which played as a massive special effects blockbuster superhero movie! This one’s full of action and spectacle, twists and turns and escalating jeopardy.

The first page asks a simple question ‘where is Arda Moore’ – the story unfolds then unfolds to answer it simply.

Volume 3 was released at a time when my work was generating less and less interest and enthusiasm, to the point where it seemed like an appropriate time to exit the world of periodical comic books!

Some readers felt the story was anticlimactic since we knew from Page 1 that the goodies were going to win! The Amazons are never really threatened by their enemies and the end is a foregone conclusion.

It’s true; when Wonder Woman shows up, Man’s World is fate to perish and be replaced in its turn and nothing can stop it!

The future world of Harmonia is based directly on the story ‘Wonder Woman for President’ which appeared in Wonder Woman issue #7 in 1943. Here Marston and Peter pushed the narrative 1000 years into the future when Diana’s influence has resulted in a feminist utopia!

Yanick updated and redesigned where necessary but kept the basic Harry Peter look with swift cable cars and domed building, plazas, fountains, and greenery.

I always knew this landmark story would form the faming device for the finale of our WW trilogy.

Arda Moore seemed like an odd name for the President of Earth. As previously noted, Marston’s character names often employ puns or word play but I couldn’t figure this one out. When I identified, at least to my own satisfaction, ‘Arda Moore’ as French ‘art d’amour’ it gave me the perfect question and answer narrative bookends! Whether or not that’s what Marston really intended with the name – maybe it’s a real person – it lined up perfectly.

Mourners at the funeral of Hippolyta scene include:

Astra, Queen of Infanta, (the child queen) and her retinue.

Princess Althea of the Sargasso Sea Kingdom.

Queen Desira of Aphrodite and her daughter Eve, ruler of Eveland.

Queen Atomia, monarch of Atomic Kingdom U-235, with her ‘proton girls’ and ‘Neutron Robots’.

The giant women are Queen Celerita and one of her Mercury Girls. Or maybe it’s Marya, the Mountain Girl.

Mala’s grief breaks her out of the formal rhythms into what an Amazon would regard as incoherent gabbling.

‘Weep for Hippolyta…’ - is pure Tolkien!

For Desira’s world of Aphrodite, we imagined immensely tall, seemingly fragile towers of spun sugar fairy Gothic, designed for women with wings and no need for stairs.   

Marston had Desira say ‘…our men love us dearly. They obey us because if they did not, we would fly away from them, and they have no wings to follow.’!!!

Our Aphrodite is a fairy Barbieland where the Magic Mike boys insist on their leashes when they go out!

We imagined wingless men useful for sex and odd jobs, freed from the need to compete for women, or fight or make war. With their needs taken care of, with cool shit to watch on TV, and best mates to hang out with, we figured they’d all have engrossing hobbies and be well groomed, well mannered, and ultimately happy to live in such luxury!

A horror for independent minded guys, sure, but if a Space Transformer bound for Aphrodite was set up in Times Square tomorrow, I feel certain there would still be a line down Broadway.

The Amazon council in New Sparta allowed us to use ideas and designs we hadn’t been able to fit into previous books. Here we get a glimpse of the sylvan, back to nature, culture of the Spartiate.

We liked the idea that Paradise Island, Amazonia was big enough to include the super-city New Athena and this forest ‘state’ of New Sparta where Artemis holds court.

The original Marston/Peter stories featured a character unfortunately named ‘Fatsis’ by Marston in the inconsiderate style of the day. This character was notable in being the first depiction of an Amazon with a non-standard physicality. Her name aside, Fatsis was shown to be a strong, capable, and courageous representative of the Amazon way.

Here we recreated the character as Dione, the Smith of the Amazons, the Fabricator, and we chose to give her the physique of a bodybuilder.

At the start of the project, I famously announced that I planned to read through the entire history of feminism.

I didn’t. I read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Gloria Steinem. Germaine Greer Female Eunuch. belle hooks, Susie Orbach, Andrea Dworkin, and lots of others but it’s a vast field and an ongoing project.

A number of specific feminist positions are advanced in basic form in the New Sparta scenes.

Diana presents her agenda, and Artemis counters with her own version of Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto (which I love – not as a set of literal injunctions to be carried out in the real world but for its confrontational punk fury and satirical poetry) while Dione brings a taste of Dworkin. Nubia speaks up in a broad simplistic alignment with belle hooks.

Artemis reduces it all to comic books when she suggests a fight to settle the issues! Diana sighs and complies, knowing full well the outcome.

Diana uses the same move to defeat an ARES suit during her rescue of Artemis later and to flag the moment, Artemis’ repeats Diana’s dialogue here.

Believe it or not, we had to fight for the Artemis/Diana kiss. I wrote a huge mock scholarly piece about how the kiss functioned in the context of ancient Amazonian power relationships and how it was neither prurient nor titillating. Reason prevailed.

We see some of the mythical creatures who also share Paradise Island with the Amazons, including some female centaurs and a lady cyclops who uses a giant rolling pin as her weapon of choice!

The Minotaur (strictly ‘kithotaur’ as he’s not from Minos but Kithira apparently) is Ferdinand, introduced by Greg Rucka and Drew Johnson in 2017. The character was named Ferdinand the bull, the pacifist cartoon bull from Munro Leaf’s Story of Ferdinand and the Disney short Ferdinand the Bull, who preferred to smell flowers than fight in the bullring.

I decided Etta’s brother Mint Candy should be a high-profile lawyer who fancies himself as Truman Capote. You can just hear his affectedly enervated Southern drawl.

The three men represent Ares’ helpers in the original stories.

Lord Conquest. The Duke of Deception. The Earl of Greed.

War’s helpers are rape and murder, disinformation, and the personified insatiable desire to have what others have that drives war.

These three demons are still with us and still a problem today, sadly.

Yanick and I had fun with Garrett Manly and his masculinist Manly Party. We were castigated for presenting such egregious stereotypes of men, but these characters come directly from the Wonder Woman for President story in Wonder Woman #7 – where Manly led his Purple Shirts in a revolt against female rule.

It's worth remembering that the cosmology in Wonder Woman depicts a world pulled between two gods, two forces – Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Ares God of War. Female and Male. For Marston, there was no doubt that the spirit of conquest, violence and cruelty was male, while the spirit of forgiveness, compassion and beauty was female. We had to pick sides in the War of the Sexes and it was fun to have a laugh at male pretensions!

Another inspiration for the Manly Party came from the comedy serial The Worm That Turned which unfolded in weekly chapters in The Two Ronnies comedy sketch shows with Ronnies Barker and Corbett. Diana Dors appeared as the Commander of State Police in a female-ruled ‘dystopian’ future Britain where men were given female names and aprons and weren’t allowed to watch anything ‘chauvinistic’ on TV!

Diana knows she must fulfil her fated destiny. She was made to destroy Man’s World. So she figures out how to do that without bloodshed. She chooses not to fight Ares in the old ways he knows so well. No battles here with swords and shields. Instead, she will demonstrate the unstoppable power of Amazon technology, then remake the world using philosophy and Venus Girdles!

Living in a post-feminist utopia with long-embedded Amazon fashions and traditions, Manly has no idea his little mental radio tiara is anything other than extremely butch, for instance. Or that his royal purple seems more accurately lavender or mauve…

Furthermore, he is literally talking balls.

Manly’s symbol, the swastika of the Manly Party, is inspired by Aleister Crowley’s personal sigil, and represents a stylized erect penis seen top-down, shaft to balls. We created it for this story.

There’s a lot of powerful and emphatic phallic imagery here but it all rebounds on Manly. He makes thrusting gestures, but his performance is subtly undercut by the way the arrangement of the microphone and Manly’s saliva is designed to echo a porno cumshot! The second panel in the sequence has the poor man practically mime a blowjob!

The rebels against Harmonia’s woke utopia are style warriors who have chosen to slob out or to cultivate weedy physiques in direct physical protest against the prevailing health and efficiency culture!

The guy in the pink shirt and Y-fronts reminds me of Randy Marsh, Stan’s dad from South Park! I don’t if that was intentional on Yanick’s part. He draws a lot of real people into his work so maybe he just happens to know Randy in real life! Or should I say… Lorde?

I love how effectively and fluidly the big battle scene works. A lot of artists would fumble the ball across so many pages of sequential action with a large number of characters. Yanick keeps every actor in play so that we can follow multiple dramas enacted in background. The battlefield setting is clear. The action is frenetic and eye-popping. The choreography flows like silk.

Even Paula gets her moment. Finally, her servitude is over! The Venus Girdle is no longer needed to shape her impulses! She is purged of her fascist tendencies, but her eagerness to believe in a cause and to follow a leader seems unshakeable.

Diana rails against the bars of the traditional hero narrative – she doesn’t want to take the crown and sit astride the throne like some prince in the Patriarchal Hero’s Journey. She’s tried that and it’s not for her.

The clay. The heart preserved when Hippolyta’s body was cremated. With this physical base, all Diana needs is a trace element of her mother’s ‘soul’.

Now, Diana dares to do things HER way. She takes full control of the story.

Diana presents the world with her terms.

Lysistrata by Aristophanes is a famous satirical comedy from 411 BC. It tells the story of the Athenian Lysistrata who persuades the women of the various ancient Greek city-states to withhold sex from their men until the Peloponnesian War is decisively concluded!

Hercules and Orpheus both went to the Underworld, and we felt it was important for Diana to take her own trip beyond the veil of death.

Charon, Boatman of the Dead ferries a proud and fearless Diana on the river Styx, deeper into the depths of the Underworld than we’ve seen before. Medusa’s island, seen in Book One, is only a milestone on the way to the Dead Land where Diana sets foot on the far shore.

The little glowing white dove that leads Diana is a psychopompos – a guide of souls and representative also of Diana’s own essence.

I was pleased with this take on Cerberus, Hound of Hell. He’s a lovely, licky doggie-woggie on your way IN but on the way out… a monstrous snarling horror blocks your way forever!

The details of Diana’s descent are drawn from classical descriptions – the asphodel flowers, the specific quarters, and districts of the Land of the Dead.

The three Judges of the Underworld are Aeacus (according to Plato, he was specifically directed to deal with European entrants to Hades hence his mention of the Greek Diana as ‘one of mine’), Rhadamanthus, Aeacus half-brother and full brother of Minos, King of Crete and the third Judge. Minos combines bull horn motifs and ears with a Blakean serpent tail.

Here we introduce the idea of the afterlife having limited bandwidth – all that remains is a condensed summation of your life – and Hades and Persephone are seen as curators of this library where everyone who ever died is stored as a brief loop that sums up their whole life in a single sentence. Hades eats Diana’s dove-soul and begins to shape her back to inert clay.

We then see that Diana is enduring a dose of fatal poison to facilitate her trip to the Underworld.

But Hades has reckoned without Diana’s strength of spirit – the immortal dove erupts from his mouth – at the same moment Steve Trevor tears off her confining mummy wrap in the world above. His urgent cries of ‘Snap out of it!’ distil Diana’s creed and mission into a single sentence!

Here we see Diana freed from restraint, casting off chains. From night into light.

Rules of Greek drama take over as we learn that Steve has paid for Diana’s life with his own. We reaffirm his centrality to Diana’s story while acknowledging his eternal ‘supporting character’ role.

Diana’s rules now apply, and she demands the Amazona take Steve to the Fountain of Youth! The first man to be immersed in its life-giving waters!

Diana brings new ways of thinking and of fighting wars.

A blockbuster ending demanded an Act 3 GIANT ARES. The conceit here was for Diana to recreate her controversial Maxwell Lord neck-breaking scene from Countdown to Infinite Crisis (2005) - by snapping the giant robot’s neck in the same manner.

That’s an easily recognisable Trump at the Oval Office window – he was still President at the time of writing, and we feared that only an Amazon invasion might convince him to leave the White House!

Diana’s tactics here are based on conversations with Arden Leigh. It’s well known that it’s often powerful men, like judges, politicians, CEOs, who visit dommes. Often, these strongmen enjoy relinquishing control – or at least pretending to – for the duration of a session.

Musing on Marston’s Loving Authority ideas, I wondered if the Patriarchy could be conceived as one consciousness, one ‘Man’ and if so, could the collective Patriarchy be brought to its figurative knees using variations on one of several dom/sub scripts! I wondered if the domme/client relationship could be triggered on a cultural basis…

So Diana plays dominatrix, cracks her whip and all the world’s ‘strongmen’ fall to their knees to kiss her boot because they’re programmed that way! This seemed to me one way to demonstrate the ultimate triumph of the Loving Authority method… but it needed superior firepower, a pacifist agenda and a terrifying, completely coherent societal paradigm to sweep away its predecessor.

Some readers chose to interpret this as a fascist feminist takeover of the Earth, with Diana telling everyone what to do.

It could also be argued that she’s stepping like a good mother to save us from the rampage of the rapacious suicidal monsters who currently run the the world! She’s giving our planet a chance to recover from their brutal exploitation. She’s giving us all a respite from the sociopathic gangsters we’ve allowed to rule our lives.

No-one is suggesting that a world run by women on ‘female’ principles (in this case, Truth, Beauty and Harmony) would not have interesting problems of its own but as for me, I can think of a lot of worse places to find myself than Harmonia!

Anyway, it’s Marston’s world!

As a final word on the advantages of female led societies over male, New Scientist 25^th November has this to say about the difference between aggressive, violent, and territorial chimpanzees and our other closest relatives the more laid-back, horny, co-operative bonobos - ‘The reason chimpanzees and bonobos differ so much in their behaviour is still uncertain. It might be related to chimps having social structures based on male dominance whereas in bonobos, females have more status…’

While the myanimals.com website has this:

‘Bonobo societies are matriarchal, which means females lead the groups. In these communities, there’s a fairly egalitarian society where strength and domination are put to one side in favor of other ways of relating.’

(sadly, the few bonobos left in the wild in Africa, are regularly forced into confrontations with that other unpleasantly competitive and violent primate, homo sapiens, with the results being exactly what you’d expect when a bunch of hairy hippy apes get in the way of armed and hungry humans).

I saw huge potential for a spin-off series where Diana has rewired the balance of power on Earth and now must face the consequences! I figured she would immediately have to deal with challenges from a dozen countries or factions.

I imagined a contemporary series where she’s defending her new world and we’re meeting foes like the Blue Snowman and the Cheetah for the first time in a whole new context. Wonder Woman facing increasingly weird threats from the displaced Patriarchy, as she strives to steer the world towards Harmonia, with more of the early Marston/Peter whimsy in a modern idiom. There could be stories set on Desira’s world or Atomia’s! All taking place against a backdrop of Aeon-changing worldbuilding.

How do they create that idyllic future we see? What would be the challenges? What would Wonder Woman and the Amazons be like raising a super-child, the newly reborn Hippolyta? Flashforwards to Harmonia and the Wonder Woman of the 22^nd century for future tales!

The Earth One set-up could have been an interesting alternative take on a freer, more fantastic, yet still grounded in the real-world, version of Wonder Woman.

As the Holliday Girls make big plans for a new world, Beyonce’s Girls (Who Run the World) plays them out as it played them in. Made suddenly literal!

The future world story is wrapped up as the Manly Party’s efforts are thwarted by Wonder Woman and the ‘Love Police’. As in Wonder Woman for President, we see that Steve Trevor is still alive and working alongside Diana. Indeed, many of the supporting cast have survived in major roles, which suggests some favouritism (we see a reformed Leon Zeiko, with his wife Marva, on the Council of Presidents).

‘Love Police’ and Reformation Island may ring warning bells. The Amazon utopia sketched out by Marston and revisited here has room for a wide range of expression but clearly there are limits. There are ideas and actions that are forbidden, and punishable by invasive love therapy!

Finally, take a look at Steve’s US shirt – I think I’m probably the first person ever to have noticed this but if you put those two letters together, right? ‘U’ and ‘S’. and it spells ‘US’…

Who’d believe it?

Another powerful reason to vote for me in the forthcoming World Presidential Election!