The Great Wonder Woman Readathon

[The Darknight Detective]

The cover doesn't do anything for me. We get another cover with no background, just a monotone color. It's like Rob Liefeld designed these covers. I'm surprised she has feet.

It isn't a great cover, but Wondy looks lovely and appears to be less Golden Age-like than she did on the previous covers.

In the lettercolumn, someone writes in and complains about them ditching the I-Ching era. The writer then gives them props for at least trying to restore Diana to her powered roots. Assistant editor Allan Asherman is back and he goes off on a pretty biting tirade, ripping this person up one side and down the other for logic flaws and for daring to challenge the magnificence of Kanigher's vision. It's really unnecessary. I don't mind it in theory when editors get into it with fans in the lettercolumn, but what I don't like is when they get defensive. Sekowsky went overboard in trashing the previous version of Wonder Woman and Asherman and Kanigher do the same thing in retribution. They all end up looking like petty jerks. Sekwosky at least leavened his by including real criticisms from fans, but Asherman just uses this letter as a straw man to rant at. It's not cool at all.

I find this to be the case with many of the early '70s letter columns from DC, for whatever reason. They might have been trying to imitate Stan Lee's Soapbox jive, but they came off badly and not very hip in the process. By the time I started buying comics actively during the mid-'70s, however, that attitude disappeared from the letter columns

Also, this fan asks about the Amazons suddenly returning from the other dimension with no explanation after they supposedly went there because thy had to recharge their magic. I have been wondering about this myself. Asherman says that since they have mastered time travel, they might have just stayed there for any amount of time before coming back to the present; who knows?! This is another major cop-out. It's ridiculous.

No defense of this, either. The Amazons return should have been an obvious area to clear up. That it wasn't was really negligence on DC's part.

[Scott Harris]

Wonder Woman #211
by Robert Kanigher and... company



My Notes: There are two "new" stories in this issue, but according to the GCD, they are both "rehashes" of earlier issues, specifically #21 and #26. One story is about more invading aliens, while the other involves Diana getting shrunk down, so.. exactly the same as last issue, actually.

In addition, since this is a giant-size issue, we get treated to a number of reprints, including stories about Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot. Of course, by this point there was an actual Wonder Girl character, but since Teen Titans was on hiatus, Kanigher apparently felt free to bring back the Diana-as-Wonder-Girl stuff, which I'm sure confused just about everyone.

As I've said before, I don't really mind Ric Estrada's art on these repurposed stories, but in this issue they are juxtaposed with stories featuring the original H.G. Peters art, and I have to say that Peters blows Estrada away. I would definitely rather read the originals than these remakes.

The issue ends with a blurb teasing that Julie Schwartz would be taking over as editor next issue and that it would involve the long-simmering question of Diana's involvement in the Justice League. In the lettercolumn, Asherman starts off by saying that they continue to get letters both pro and con about the Great leap Backwards, but he then posts a bunch of fawning letters praising the "new" direction. He finishes by promising exciting developments in the next issue.

The cover is by the great Nick Cardy, whose talents are completely wasted, as he is asked to just copy panels from the stories being reprinted inside. Superman gets added to one for the main image; he appears exactly as much inside as well, randomly showing up for all of one panel. I would feel ripped off if I were a reader at the time. In fact, considering what I had to pay to land this issue, I still feel ripped off 40 years later.

My Grade: F. Any interest I might have had in the pre-new look Wonder Woman has been completely destroyed at this point.

[Scott Harris]

And that's where I originally came in.

Back when I started with #212, there were comments that I was being too harsh on the 12 labors considering what a breath of fresh air it was compared to the Kanigher era (and the I-Ching era depending on tastes). I very much see exactly what was meant, though my grades for the 12 labors weren't that harsh. Though they are vastly superior to this claptrap, they're also mostly fairly standard and uninspired superheroics. That just happens to be much better than what came before.

This pretty much wraps up my reviews of Wonder Woman. I've not reviewed #177-329, which comprises most of my Wonder Woman collection. I do have a few of her other Earth-2 issues in Adventure as well as Kurt Busiek's 4-issue retro series from the 80's, but I likely won't be reviewing them. And I likely won't be buying any more Wonder Woman back issues for my collection, unless they are pre-code and hopefully pre-Kanigher issues.

Though tastes may vary, for me, the new look I-Ching era is pretty much the high point of the whole series. The samples I have had of Kanigher's era before the I-Ching stuff begins have universally been disappointing at best and total crap at worst. It's just Z-grade sci-fi with self-imposed cliches, like Diana making a "bullets and braclets" crack every other page and shouting Suffering Sappho! all the time. It's bad, particularly compared to the much more interesting stuff being done in the Superman books at the same time.

And as we've seen, nobody that picks up after Kanigher leaves seems very interested in the character either. There's just a lot of flailing around for years on end. The Conway soft reboot around #269 was decent, mainly because it tried to return things to the original Marston status quo. And after that, only the Mishkin issues came close to equaling the energy and craftsmanship of the I-Ching era. It's not hard to see why: Sekowsky and Mishkin are the only two creators on the book that semed to both get the character and care about the character. Everyone else was just marking time.

Considering how iconic Wonder Woman is, it's hard to understand why more creators weren't found that could write good material for her. And it's hard to understand why DC didn't make finding such people more of a priority.

Surely the character and her fans deserved better than what they got. At least the post-Crisis version got George Perez, I guess.

[Polar Bear]

Better late than never...

Here's that link I'd promised--Comic Book Sales Figures for many years. http://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html

It seems to have the 1960s and 1985-->, with an unfortunate 15-year gap in the middle. Hope it helps, though.

[yvahed]

HI Scott

Just a thank you for the Readathon. Over the past weeks have read all 33 pages. I only started collecting around #300 and have many back issues all the way back to the #180's - still have never really read them in order and your reviews help make sense or rather nonsense of it all. Disappointed that you are not journeying next into Perez post-Crisis territory but your interests obviously lie elsewhere. She really reached her highs later under Perez and also with Jiminez and Rucka and now Azzarello IMHO.
Still am a major Wonder Woman fan and for me no other superhero comes close.

[Scott Harris]

Thanks for the kind words, I appreciate it.

Unfortunately, I'm just not interested in post-Crisis DC in general. I have a lot of respect for George Perez, he's a great artist. But the few issues I have read of his Wonder Woman are a little too mythology heavy for me; it's an interesting part of Diana's character, but it's not my favorite thing. So given my disinterest in post-Crisis DC, it's not enough to get me to read through them all.

I'm also still a fan of the character, though, which is kind of amazing given how poorly she was handled over the course of the 150 issues I read.

[Reptisaurus!]

Honestly, I'm not sure the character ever worked after Marston left. Or, I agree with this guy.