4/12 Wonder Woman Earth One Annotations Part 2

VOLUME 1

‘Today the Spirit of War rules supreme over the entire earth. Whence does it come? Why do human beings every generation or so, since the beginning of history, feel an uncontrollable urge to fight and kill one another?

‘The ancient Greeks believed there was a God behind it all – a mighty, invisible God of War who urged human beings on to conquer their fellows and destroy every man and woman who resists. The Greeks were right about a lot of things. They made great discoveries in mathematics and astronomy; they founded modern science and modern medicine.

‘Scientists may yet prove that the Greek God of War exists – ‘

William Moulton Marston Wonder Woman #2 1942

Announcing our themes up front, we chose to show Wonder Woman our heroine, in chains on the cover. But we gave her a challenging, even superior, expression and the physical poise to suggest she can handle this.

In fact, she’s arranged this…

With the notion of bondage as philosophy in our minds we chose, as the principal motif in the first book, the rope, twine, thread, or lasso, which winds through the story and binds its narrative.

It is Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth and the Fates’ Thread of Life. It was Yanick’s idea to makes this thread a visual element that could take the place of traditional panel borders (flowing curved shapes replacing the lined, ruled borders of a typical comics page layout – which then try to reassert themselves in the ‘Man’s World’ scenes). Yanick also added touches like the Greek pottery shards that frame panels in the opening scene and tell their own version of the story, as well as numerous other visual motifs that played as musical theme accompaniment to certain characters and settings.

In terms of story, we were eager to break away from the conventions of boys’ adventure fiction that drove most superhero comics – the quest, the revenge, the Joseph Campbell Hero tale of the Young Orphan who becomes King and gets the Girl. The Messiah! The One!

Those were the narrative structures of the Aeons of Osiris and of rock star Horus, it seemed to me. Tales of climbing the Pyramid.

This story would focus instead on a young woman having to prove herself to her society, and the wider world. The web of relationships she creates become supporters, defenders, opponents, and the story is resolved when Truth is revealed, changing the frame, and allowing for new growth. Violence would be kept at a bare minimum, with the conflicts trending emotional or existential.

Oh, the excitement, some may cry! But within this structure, there would still be room for spectacle and feats of strength, super-combat and monsters! Life and death decisions would be made! Family secrets would emerge! The world would never be the same again!

The story opens on a crude representation of the male/female power struggle, which some readers found upsetting, others laughable – a contemptuous, leering Hercules looming over the cringing Amazon Queen Hippolyta, whom he has on a chain leash in a pig sty during a thunderstorm. Ever the gentleman!

Hercules, often cast as the hero by popular culture is depicted by Marston and Peter as a deceitful boor who woos and charms Hippolyta before stealing her magic girdle and enslaving the Amazons, so we simply amplified that.

Our opening scene here is a mostly faithful contemporary reimagining of the first scene from 1942’s Wonder Woman #1.

While it’s true that we wanted the image to be powerful and challenging, to sum up the themes of the book and yet tame enough to make it to the page without censorship. This was still a superhero comic book.

In truth, our glossy Hollywood rendering of the extremes of male/female experience barely comes close to the type of sadistic online pornography young people of the 21^st century grow up with, which, for me at least, made any pearl-clutching horreur seem disingenuous and performative.

With his beast helmet, and hairy flesh, his domineering physicality, Hercules embodies Man’s undeniable desire to subjugate and despoil what seems natural and free. The need to tame and control, the sadistic delight in oppressing the vulnerable and terrorising the weak is here expressed in Hercules. He is the virile, unconquerable dreamself of cruel and ageing ‘strongmen’ the world over.

(Before the accusations of misandry fly again like doves, Hercules does not represent all the well-mannered, ethical, Apollonian men who find the oppression of women revolting. That’s Steve Trevor. For the purposes of this book, this story, the Amazons see men as the enemy and we generally take their side, while showing exceptions to the rule).

My friend Lyle felt that Hercules was too articulate here. His dialogue should have consisted of two words, ‘OH, YEAHHHH!’ Looking back, I think he’s right.

Our Hercules, based on his appearance in Wonder Woman #1, is a brute. The snorting, sweating, battle-loving progenitor of the Patriarchy. Of course, he prefers to pretend that it’s all a post-ironic roleplay! It’s just bants with the lads and the girls are up for it really…

There is no myth or comic book story in which the Amazon Queen kills Hercules, but this was the first scene that came to mind, and I couldn’t resist having Hippolyta strangle the bastard with the very chains he put her in.

He shows up again, as a miserable wraith in Hades in Book 3.

The daub on the shrine of Aphrodite is Greek and reads ‘PORNE’ or ‘WHORE’. The statue has been defaced with splattered urine, spunk, and alcohol, if you must know...

The jump cut three thousand years to the present day supplied an immediate contrast between the mythic, violent and storm laden origins of the Amazons and the sunlit pacifist wonders they had created in a world without men. It also worked to suggest the compression of vast time that typifies the lives of immortals. 3 thousand years pass in the blink of an eye. Here we are.

Some critics complained that we’d misrepresented Marston’s Amazons as misandrist harridans in a deliberate affront to Marston’s original conception of an all-loving, all-forgiving, and sweet-natured utopia (perish the thought these victims of rape and slavery at the hands of mythical heroes might harbour any misandrist tendencies after their treatment! Given the behaviour of men in general, misandry can be seen as a perfectly reasonable response to their conduct that at least deserves some airtime as far as I’m concerned).

Many readers prefer the Amazons to be paragons of femininity, ‘love leaders’ in the Marston sense, or, in more recent portrayals, uncompromising warriors. These are all valid approaches but our intention here was to dial up the potential for a bit of Shakespearean intrigue, by exploring the contradictions and unanswered questions in Marston’s original thesis.

It was Marston, after all, who had the Amazons retreat from the world of men, developing in secret for three thousand years on their hidden island. Meanwhile, Hippolyta has access to a magic mirror/TV surveillance set-up which allows her to watch the development of civilization and the Inquisitions and witch burnings, the centuries of rape, slavery and oppression, the fights of the Suffragettes, and the Women’s Liberation movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, for Women’s Rights.

Yet she does nothing. That seemed worth investigating. The Amazons had Invisible Jets, mental radios and orgone ray technology. If they were arch feminists who supported the struggles of all women everywhere, wouldn’t we expect them to have used their superior tech centuries ago to change the course of history in favour of women?

As women died in childbirth, many barely reaching their teens, or were burned to ash on stakes or sold and raped, the immortal ‘aloof’ beauties of Paradise Island made art and forged beautiful machines and looked the other way.

That they did nothing suggests a kind of superior indifference developed over immortal lifetimes or, more interesting creatively, a deep-seated refusal to face a final reckoning they know must come, unfinished business, that awful binary War of the Sexes. I decided the Amazons still harboured a subconscious fear and horror of men and what they’re capable of, and a kind of disdain for the women of Man’s World who have allowed themselves to be subjugated. Diana is the first to overcome this fear and scorn and by doing so she ends the stasis and changes the world.

(Marston implies that because Amazons become mortal when they leave the island - and presumably immortal again upon their return - subsequent Wonder Woman authors have provided their own explanations for why the Amazons were confined to Paradise Island, but we chose to take a more psychological approach to Hippolyta’s isolationist policy)

We went back to Marston’s original names for places and technology, so that ‘Themiscyra’ the more recent name for the Amazon island becomes ‘Amazonia’ once more, (after the name of their city in the origin story) and ‘Paradise Island’ (with its sister cities New Athena and New Sparta and smaller satellites like the ominously named Reformation Island).

We were eager to steer clear of retro-Greek culture portrayals of the Amazons. We took our cue from Harry Peter’s combination of Greek architecture and Astounding Stories sci-fi Deco.

From that base, we designed Amazon cultural artefacts to reflect an aesthetic that has tried its best to reject phallic symbolism, instead basing the architecture and design on flowing fern-like natural forms, (warping Deco into Nouveau) domes, shells, and vulvic shapes (we were relentlessly mocked for the vaginal stylings of Wonder Woman’s Invisible Jet but it was simply more fun to come up with a new and consistent aesthetic than to copy designs we’d seen before).

The rainbow runway that the Invisible Plane uses to guide its landing was a lovely visual detail from the original stories we were keen to reintroduce. We also kept Marston’s old-timey names for Amazon tech like the ‘Robot Plane’, Mala’s ‘Swan Plane’, ‘Mental Radio’ and ‘Magic Sphere’ because they felt more like the cranky nomenclature of a divergent scientific culture. The skycycles were our own creation.

Here we meet the Queen HIPPOLYTA and NUBIA her personal bodyguard/lover/advisor etc. Wonder Woman’s mother is different from the Amazon Queen of Greek myth, but they share a few traits and a bit of backstory.

Nubia was introduced in a 1973 story from Wonder Woman #204, where she was revealed to be Diana’s long-lost twin. She’s depicted here as Hippolyta’s bodyguard, lover, second-in-command, and the power behind the throne (a role taken by the later character Phillipus – but I prefer Nubia).

THE FATES are CLOTHO, LACHESIS, and ATROPOS –and represent Past, Present and Future, as well as the phases of the Moon and the three faces of the Triple Goddess as Maiden, Mother and Crone – Youth, Maturity, and Age. Lachesis was based on the actor Angelina Jolie but only Yanick could tell you who inspired the others. They are all the same woman at different times in her life so probably ALL Angelina Jolie!

Our Fates speak in rough Sapphic Meter. I don’t feel too bad about saying I lack the skill and grace of Sappho (she was a genius whose work has persisted in print for two and a half thousand years, after all, while my great efforts from a few years back are destined to decay in the dime bins) but I did try a little nod in her direction!

The Fates always speak of their specific domains, so the Maiden’s words revolve around beginnings, dawns, origins.

The Mother tends to speak of ripening, fullness, afternoon.

The Crone‘s focus is on endings, death, and night.

I imagined Amazon society at its imperial height as a kind of Elizabeth the 1st Gloriana ‘Faerie Queene’ period of high art, drama, and creativity under the aegis of a nigh-mythical Queen. A society of courtly, brilliant, immortal women!

When we pick up the story the Amazons have lived for 3000 years on their island. I figured all the big innovations had happened long ago. The culture, as I saw it, would have relaxed, and loosened over centuries with the remnants of the High Style still present albeit smoothed out into irony, sentimentality, pastiche, and the ritualised routines that make immortality on a small island, with the same people for millennia, endurable.   

Therefore, I wanted the Amazons to converse in the echoes of a courtly Elizabethan style, which shows up when they’re speaking to the queen or at formal occasions but made a point of deliberately breaking the rhythm to indicate the relaxing of formality over centuries.

The metre is reasserted more forcefully in Book two when Amazon culture is reaffirming itself in the face of Man’s World’s intrusive gaze.

Notice how quickly Diana learns English – when she first encounters Steve Trevor, her attempts to converse with him are halting - ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane…’. Within 20 pages she’s discoursing conversationally. Later, we see how she’s mastered the language sufficiently to deploy more poetic English when she faces the Army and goes all haughty Amazon Princess on them.

(Interestingly enough, this detail was borrowed from my Tarzan movie pitch, which remains for me the best revamp of a franchise character that I ever did. Tarzan, who’d been put in a position where he had to communicate fluently with numerous jungle animals, was, I decided, an expert communicator and could master human language in days. Typically, they made some other Tarzan that wasn’t as good…).

We’ve shown Diana to be a mistress of the healing Purple Ray. Here, she realises it has no effect on men. This detail will play into her rescue of Steve from Medusa at the end.

Doctor Althea is the physician from the original stories, here as Diana’s teacher and, as the body language reveals, her lover. Speaking of body language, there’s a cloying, almost claustrophobic element to the intimacy here. In thousands of years, these women have had sex with one another in a thousand extravagant ways.

But there’s also a sense in which Diana, born in her mother’s laboratory and being the youngest, is different and might wish to escape from this steamy, lovely world.

Diana’s first act is as a healer, and this was deliberate. That it’s a deer she’s reviving points us directly to the Disney princess influence (she resurrects Bambi’s mom!)

Dindra the Deer, who injures herself every 100 years, tells us that even the animals on Paradise Island are immortal (I remember being amused by a cynical reader’s suggestions that Dindra was throwing herself to her death on a regular basis as a demonstration of how boring life on the island of the forever young could be!).

Blonde Mala was champion of the Amazons and Diana’s close friend from the very beginning, appearing first in All-Star Comics #8 from 1942, apparently.

Mala is ‘The Wonder Woman’ on an island of wonder women, chosen to be the exemplar of their creed. All the Amazons in one champion.

The relationship between Diana and her mother Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons is a little frostier and more tense here than in other depictions. When this started life as a movie pitch, the idea was to ratchet up the potential for ‘Shakespearean’ royal family drama and conflict by giving Diana and her mother a more fractious relationship.

The original stories are not about escape in the way this contemporary revisioning is. In the original stories, the Amazons learn about the Nazis and elect to send a champion to aid the war effort. Against the wishes of her mother, Diana resorts to subterfuge to defeat Mala in the ensuing contest to select a representative. She becomes the ‘Wonder Women’ and goes off to join the Allied war effort.

We had no World War Two as a clean-cut moral battleground, so the whole emphasis of the story was shifted. Our Diana is a fairytale Princess grown weary of her lovely tower and its distractions.

With that altered focus, we had to give her something to escape from. No-one wants to escape from Paradise but if you feel stifled, if your mother won’t let you do anything in case you hurt yourself…

Our Amazonia is truly an all-female utopia, but we chose to hint at the hidden stresses such a utopia might breed – women are not immune to jealousy, anger, sadness, or fury. The Amazons have ritualised their emotions, but the wrong inciting incidents can reawaken old routines as we see.

Hippolyta uses the phrase ‘Man’s World’ to describe everywhere that’s not her Amazonia. Some critics have questioned the phrase on the basis that half of the population of our world, which is what she’s referring to, is comprised of women. As a result, it’s been replaced by ‘Patriarch’s World’ in some more recent Wonder Woman stories but once more, we preferred Marston’s original designation with its recognition that ‘Man’s World’, our world, has been set up and established largely for the benefit of one half of the population.

‘Man’s World’ is also more contemptuous, and seemed like a phrase our man-hating version of Hippolyta would use to dismiss the rest of the world!

Think about this. Hippolyta has been through hell. Her PTSD and that of her sisters who suffered alongside her has been encoded in their culture. They deal with it in their own distinctive ways, but it haunts them. We’re seeing the eternal Queen face her worst nightmare as time crashes into her idyll. Can we blame her for reacting defensively, then aggressively, blindly? Her imagined endless reign now faces the moment she’s feared, her starlit invented world has been interrupted, her immortal afternoon ruined…

I saw Hippolyta as someone bound in her turn by duty, responsibility, and an accountability she can’t confront. She’s never really got over her aversion to men and doomscrolling on the Magic Sphere has scarcely mellowed her opinions. She made plans to fight a final war against men, even made the weapon and the weapons… but she lost the heart for conflict long, long ago.

And from there flow all her troubles…

The Amazons’ isolationism, their elitism, their rejection of action - all stem from Hippolyta’s desperate desire to protect her daughter from the Monster in Man. That much is true. But there are further layers of deeper, more revealing truth to come.

So in this Volume we see Hippolyta at her worst – imperious, over-protective, anxious and defensive. To judge her too harshly for that is to misunderstand the Queen.

The Magic Sphere is controlled by Hippolyta’s hand gestures. It also appears to have a child lock so that Diana can’t use it – although we suspect she’s found a workaround!

The wild Bacchanal depicted here is a much tamer version of the scenes from Marston and Peter’s Wonder Woman #3’s Diana’s Day celebrations, depicting the Dionysian revels of the Amazons on Diana’s Day. We didn’t have to invent any of it. I wish I’d gone deeper into an exploration of this interruption of Dionysian chaos into Hippolyta’s Apollonian/Athenian world.

Diana’s Day is equivalent to our Christmas, swapping out the male grandfather figure in favour of masks, moon nymphs and sturdy ‘spankers’.

Girls dressed as deer to be hunted, ‘skinned’ and ‘eaten’ are from the 1942 original!

We reframed it as another ritualised way for the Amazons to blow off steam. Over centuries, Diana’s Day has followed the same pattern. A re-enactment by the Amazon Champion, wearing Hercules’ lion-helmet, of the Amazon defeat of Hercules. An example of how they have folded and codified their history and thereby taken control of it.

Here, the contest from the original stories is an annually recurring ritual day. The Amazons battle New Athena against New Sparta, a ‘Wonder Woman’ is named and it’s always Mala.

This time Diana disrupts proceedings, masked as Hercules, playing the role of an unknown wild girl of Sparta.

She does this because the champion may demand a gift from the Queen and Diana needs Mala’s Swan Plane to return Steve Trevor to the USA.

Having outsmarted her pursuit as usual, Diana wanders along the shore at dawn, bored on another perfect day, perhaps wishing in that moment for a miracle from the Gods, a way out of her gilded prison…

I asked Yanick to draw Steve Trevor so that his posture, framed by billowing parachute silks, resembled Botticelli’s famous Venus Rising From the Waves. His collapse is designed to echo a detumescing erection.

The traditionally blonde and blue-eyed Steve Trevor functioned as Wonder Woman’s inciting incident in the original story. A USAF pilot, crashed on Paradise Island during World War 2, Steve is saved by Wonder Woman and the Amazons. When she learns of the War beyond the shores of Paradise, she decides to join the fight.

As a character, Trevor was designed to play the Lois Lane role in the original stories. Lois Lane, however, was a unique creation whereas Trevor was a generic action hero type created as a male foil for the lead character.

Steve is often rescued by Wonder Woman, and we are assured she finds him attractive although he’s rarely convincing. At his best, Trevor can be played a kind of Han Solo, Indiana Jones figure. A swaggering, male adventurer, the equal of the world’s most Wondrous Woman. In practice, it’s clear Marston’s interest in Steve was limited and the character’s lack of charisma seemed baked in.

(The only time I’ve ever believed in the Wonder Woman/Steve Trevor romance was with Gal Gadot and Chris Pine in Wonder Woman)

So, sticking to the formula, Steve’s Trevor’s role in the story is essentially feminine (these divisions into what is feminine, or masculine are not necessarily my own but reflect the binary world in which the Amazons operate. I trust most people know what I’m talking about…) – he gets in trouble and motivates the lead character. He takes a back seat in stories while helping to move the plot along and set things up for the lead etc.

Notable also was our decision to make Earth One Steve Trevor a black air force pilot, unlike his Aryan counterparts in the canonical DC universe. The intent again was to generate some interesting friction with ideas Marston and his Amazons simply take for granted – as seen in the later ‘dog collar’ scene and again in Steve’s speech to the Amazons at the trial, where he explains why he’s decided to take their side.

Steve’s dramatic arc continues through the background of the entire trilogy and tells its own distinct story.

We never play him as Wonder Woman’s ‘boyfriend’. He himself considers this immortal Princess ‘out of my league’, and she has no context for romance with a mortal man. They appear to be good friends. 

The subtle feminizing of this version of Steve Trevor can be regarded as ‘problematic’ or ‘progressive’ depending on how you feel that day…

We almost showed Steve’s ordinary human fiancee in Volume 2 but preferred to leave his sexuality undisclosed. He’s Diana’s tough, dependable pal and that’s all he needs to be.  

Basically, Steve Trevor is Ken!

(when I imagined how to continue the Earth One books – I had no serious intention of doing so but I realised they opened up a fascinating and unique playground in which to investigate gender roles and the twists and turns of an immortal romance among other things – I planned to explore Diana and Steve’s relationship as it evolved through a number of strange modes over many centuries during the founding of the future state of Harmonia…)

In this version, Diana’s rescue and treatment of Steve is made clandestine rather than overt as in the original. I chose to use later canonical lore that declared no man was permitted to set foot on the soil of Paradise Island! Here, I also allude to the controversial Wonder Woman run by Brian Azzarello and Clifford Chiang where the Amazons are portrayed as bloodthirsty female warriors who capture men, fuck them, kill them, then keep only the girl children!

The ’touch our soil and die’ injunction to men is revealed to be a smokescreen in Volume 2. There, we’ll see what the Amazons actually do to trespassers on their shores. Death might be preferable.

The Wonder Women of New Sparta are the wild girl punks of Amazon culture. Among them we see the familiar red and gold spangled outfit of Wonder Girl, Donna Troy, here known Troia (one of her many variant identities). Donna Troy is a character with a famously convoluted and relentlessly rewritten history, so in Volume 3 we address that by providing a very simple and logical origin story for her Earth One counterpart…

The tattooed woman with the red ponytail, leader of the ‘Spartiate’ is ARTEMIS. Artemis was created in 1994 by William Messner-Loebs and Mike Deodato and briefly replaced Diana as Wonder Woman, in the monthly comic. She was introduced as a representative of the Bana-Mighdall, an offshoot Middle Eastern tribe of Amazons (although the name sounds Celtic, oddly enough). Here, we’ve condensed various concepts into the idea of New Sparta.

I feel I made a big error in this story by having Diana and Mala in the Kanga joust use lances instead of lassos. Lances feel like phallic weapons of ‘Man’s World’ and I wish I’d asked Yanick to depict lasso combat instead which would have been more appropriate. Having said that, Marston and Peter have them fighting with outsized swords.

We did, however, bring the kangas back, including Diana’s favourite and mine, Jumpa! I love animals in comics, I love super animals, and I always felt the kangas in the early Wonder Woman stories were an inspired element – they even had space kangas capable of leaping between worlds!

Another contentious moment arrived when Diana verifies Steve’s sex by reaching between his legs.

Described by some as ‘sexual harassment’, for me it was a storytelling moment; Diana acts like a scientist for whom men are just an object of study. There is no erotic intent in her appraisal of Steve’s genital apparatus. She’s like a vet sexing a puppy.

As mentioned before, the violent intrusion of time and drama into their endless utopian dream causes irrational eruptions of jealousy, anger, and other negative, turbulent emotions long held in check or diverted into ceremony.  

Medusa’s island tomb is based on the emblematic Gothic painting, Arnold Bocklin’s Isle of the Dead. The territory of the Underworld is vast, half-real, where the subconscious mind becomes territory.

Elizabeth Candy and The Holliday Girls appear, sorority sisters of Holliday College Beeta Lambda chapter. The Holliday Girls with their exuberant leader ‘Etta Candy’ (these punning names were common to Marston, comics and specifically bondage comics, unsurprisingly) were Wonder Woman’s allies in all the early stories.

The Holliday Girls are singing ‘Girls (Who Run the World)’ by Beyonce (this is repeated and takes on a new resonance with the Holliday Girls’ final scene in Book 3) before their bus goes off the road and is caught by Wonder Woman, effortlessly.

Marston and Peter’s ‘Etta Candy’ was one of their greatest creations; an unapologetically big girl with a huge personality and charisma who soon became Diana’s best friend in ‘Man’s World’. Plus-sized, proud, brave, funny and defiant, Etta Candy was the perfect representative of ‘Man’s World’ to change Diana’s mind about the world beyond Paradise (Marston’s successor as the book’s writer, the distinctly non-feminist Robert Kanigher cast Etta as an insecure, weight-conscious girl lacking in any vim or verve).

We dropped the dated pun, went back to ‘Elizabeth’ or ‘Beth’ Candy, then based her look on the wonderful Beth Ditto, singer in the Gossip and made her unapologetically queer. The Holliday Girls, as our first glimpse at the women of Men’s World, come in various sizes, shapes and ethnicities.

The Amazons’ shock upon seeing Beth Candy was described as ‘fat phobic’, making them misogynist as well as misandrist. It’s true Doctor Althea is particularly scathing about Beth’s physique, but we were making the point that these Amazons DO have a somewhat low opinion of ordinary mortal women that is, I figured, rooted in their guilt for having done nothing to improve the lives of women for centuries. Our Amazons have convinced themselves that the women of Man’s World are weak, subjugated, and sick. Too far gone to save.

To have the most exuberant, clever, and self-assured representative of ‘Man’s World’ face the sneers of these immortal supermodels, then change their minds by sheer force of charisma was deliberate!

Diana herself is shocked by her first sight of the Holliday Girls – not just Etta but the tall, short, thin, geeky girls of Beeta Lambda in what to Diana seem strange variations on a theme, like different breeds of dog!

Diana’s first experience of the mortal world – the hospital where she’s brought ailing Steve Trevor is a whirlwind of horror. Everyone’s different shapes! Men control everything and they’re everywhere! Women get old and die! It’s a horror show which only gets worse when the Army shows up.

Diana’s initial contact with the forces of Ares, the War God who becomes her primary adversary in Volume 3 is here. She is unimpressed. Unlike the warriors and heroes of myth, these are small, vulnerable young men with machines as their weapons, or old men barking orders from a safe position.

Her Amazon self-assurance and aristocratic exceptionalism shades into arrogance as she mocks the beardless young soldiers of Man’s World for resembling ‘girls’. It’s an easy victory. And everything she’s seen only proves Hippolyta right. Diana is her mother’s daughter here – ‘Men! Euurr!’ – and is almost bounced right back on the apron strings…

I’ll admit I’ve always struggled with the idea that Diana began life as a clay statue of a child given life. It made her feel like a golem, a Pinocchio, rather than a living character. I overlooked the ‘given life’ bit to focus on the pottery aspect.

My first impulse, then, was to ditch the clay origin. Here, recalling this story’s origins in a film pitch, I wanted Hollywood style inner conflict where it’s revealed that Diana is in some sense the daughter of the hated Hercules…

Somewhere in the middle of writing Volume 1, I realised I preferred the feminist myth of parthenogenetic female reproduction where Hippolyta models an ideal daughter in clay, which is then animated by the gods. It’s feminist Adam and Eve! Wonder Woman should be no man’s daughter!

I had to reconcile these impulses in this new iteration. The truth is revealed that Hippolyta combined her eggs with the seed of Hercules in her genetic weaving laboratory, sculpting Diana into life on a science fiction ‘potter’s wheel’.

(this referred back to organic chemist Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith at the University of Glasgow and his theory which proposed that  clay could have provided a convenient structure on which the first molecules of life organised themselves – I referred to the idea in The Filth but it was a perfect fit here and gave me a way to refresh the clay statue notion without resorting to the supernatural).

We decided to show the origin of the Wonder Woman ‘swimsuit’ costume as a majorette outfit (we’ll go into Diana’s various looks in this series when we annotate Volume 2).

Diana ends the conflict by submitting, surrendering. In doing so, she achieves all her goals without lifting a hand in anger.

Diana proves her genius as a healer by re-calibrating the healing Purple Ray to work on men, thus freeing Steve from the ossifying effect of the Medusa’s gaze.

Finally, Hippolyta must face trial by Lasso of Truth. Her secret is finally revealed that she created Diana to be an unbeatable super weapon, designed to destroy Man’s World. Diana, too much of her own person to be a living weapon, mellowed Hippolyta and caused her to change her mind (as we’ll learn in subsequent volumes, however, you don’t get to change your mind when the Fates have been set in motion…)

We also learn that it was Hippolyta’s Magic Sphere, emitting its curious radar, that exposed Amazonia’s location – her original sin of lurking on the Sphere has set the whole play in motion.

The pointing finger pose of the three Fates quotes the 1783 painting The Weird Sisters or the Three Witches by Fuseli, depicting the trio of prophesying hags from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

The book was intended to stand alone, if need be, ending on Wonder Woman offering dialogue to Man’s World and setting up the potential for future stories.

The trilogy had already been planned so I was pleased when Volume 1 was enough of a success that we were given the go ahead to continue.

I gnawed away at this story for a long time. Almost 3/4s of the dialogue was revised from the first draft. I tried to push it away from the traditional Boy Hero’s Journey template and make it about relationships, perspectives, truth and lies. I still can’t apologise enough to the amazing Todd Klein for making him re-letter the whole book pretty much from scratch before I was happy with the result!

As I said before, this turned out to be one of my most divisive pieces of work, attacked from both sides as ‘misogynistic’ and ‘misandrist’. Some of the criticisms were thoughtful and considered, others missed the point. Many critics blamed Yanick and I for foundational elements of the Wonder Woman stories that we did not create, others were convinced we were either too faithful to Marston’s idiosyncrasies, or not faithful enough. If the Amazons were fat-phobic, that meant the creative team was also… and so on…

Thank god for Yanick Paquette! Even if I’d dropped the ball, his lush detailed, photo-real and inspired work – with colours by the brilliant Nathan Fairbairn - was worth the entrance fee and more! Although Yanick’s drawings of idealized model-like Amazons (derived entirely from Harry G. Peter’s Hollywood film star depictions) were sometimes condemned as the ‘cheesecake’ they were intended to mimic, these criticisms tended to overlook the incredible, and in comics quite rare , diversity of body shapes in Yanick’s real world scenes where there are women of all sizes, ages, and ethnicities – immediately and deliberately as a contrast to Paradise Island’s narrowly designed utopia!

I was a little disappointed by the response, but I was completely energised and excited by the work I was doing, and having too much fun with Wonder Woman to stop! There was no shortage of other versions of the Wonder Woman story to suit some readers’ tastes if they didn’t like this one!

Next would be The Empire Strikes Back of the trilogy and the downfall of Diana!

This was the last of my comics that my mum read before she died in 2015. Her own personal version of dementia meant that she could enjoy things and comment on them lucidly within a five-minute window, before she would abruptly reset, and it was as if she was seeing the same thing for the first time.

She loved Yanick’s art on Wonder Woman, several times...

to be continued