The Great Wonder Woman Readathon

[An Ear In The Fireplace]

Maybe they got angry letters after issues 231-232 complaining that Sandman should be in his S&K outfit according to his Golden Age timeline. Although why they would bother to correct this bit of continuity, when so much was out of whack, is beyond me.

[An Ear In The Fireplace]

My Grade: D-. The only thing that keeps this from an F is the fantastic cover by Jose Garcia Lopez and Dick Giordano. One of the best covers of the run on one of the worst issues of the whole series.

It is a beautiful cover. Would love to have this issue just for that.

[The Darknight Detective]

I never have read WW much, but looking at the covers in this tread, I have to agree: Lopez's really stand out from all the others. I don't know the DC artists well - is that Jose Gacia-Lopez, or are they two different artists

Yes, it's Garcia Lopez. I should have included Garcia.

Also agree about real-world scenarios: even as a kid I never liked it when WWII elements were brought into superhero comics, like the Red Skull and so on; or Thor fighting the Viet Cong. It always felt wrong to me, even though I was much too young to have any idea why it was making that impression.

It's okay if both sides have super-powered allies to keep things balanced, but, for example, would 9-11 have happened in the DCU? I doubt it, at least not the way it happened in reality.

[Scott Harris]

It is a beautiful cover. Would love to have this issue just for that.

Just don't open it and you'll be golden. Now there's a real use for CGC: Protecting us from bad comics.

[MDG]

Seems like you're finding he Conway issues a tad..... uneven.

[Scott Harris]

Wonder Woman #241
Gerry Conway, Joe Staton and Dick Giordano



Synopsis: Apropos of nothing, The Spectre is narrating this issue. He's not actually in it, mind you, he just acts as narrator for no reason. Hey, why not.

Anyway, We get a glimpse at something happening in Japan. There's a guy who has become irradiated, and now he can kill anything with radiation blasts. So the Emperor sends him to kill Wonder Woman. Meanwhile, Wonder Woman is at a state function when suddenly a totally ridiculous villain called The Bouncer jumps in and tries to rob the joint. Wonder Woman attacks him and he uses his amazing ability to jump really well to... jump to safety. he gets away.

Diana then gets a call from Etta Candy, who announces that her French beau, who has been creeping around for a few issues now, has just proposed and they are getting married. Diana is worried that he is up to no good and vows to investigate "tomorrow."

Then we get the Bouncer's origin, because the Spectre says it's the most important thing in the issue. That's just sad. Anyway, turns out he's a loser who blames his mother and all other women for the fact that he's a loser with mutant leg muscles. So he has vowed to get even with high society women by robbing them blind. However, his next gig is actually robbing donations to a local orphanage, because that's just how big a douche he is.

Unfortunately, Wonder Woman is at the charity event raising money for the orphanage, even though she almost skipped it because the orphanage discriminates against Jews, as we saw a few issues ago. Huh, that's apparently some kind of subplot Conway is working on. Anyway, when he sees Wonder Woman is yet again in his way, Bouncer grabs a little girl to use as a human shield and jumps away. Diana chases him, but he's gone off the deep end and decides to just kill the little girl, which is pretty hardcore. Killing orphans, that's just not right. And unfortunately, Wonder Woman is too far away to stop him!

Just then, though, the Japanese assassin steps out of the shadows and uses his radiation power to kill Bouncer. That's the last of his power, though, and he himself drops dead moments later. Once again, the Japanese assassin has proven to be truly honorable. Diana thinks about this for a second and then the story ends.

Notes: The Japanese assassin with the nuclear powers is none other than Sumo the Super Samurai, who Wonder Woman fought in the Superman-Wonder Woman giant size team-up comic. So this is in a way a direct sequel to that special. Turns out that at the end of that issue, he got bathed in radiation. That story is therefore apparently in continuity for this version of the Earth-2 Wonder Woman.

This story really isn't bad at all, the only problem with it is how ridiculously stupid The Bouncer is. Really, if you take the exact same plot and instead feature a more serious/tragic villain, you could have a really good story. But the design of The Bouncer is just soooo lame that it undermines what otherwise is a pretty good issue.

This subplot with Etta Candy has been going for several issues now and despite promises at the end of the last issue, the secret of her French lover has not yet actually been revealed. On a similar note, it was also nice to have a callback to the Jewish orphans plot thread. I wonder where Conway is going with these two things? <--foreshadowing

Conway slips in yet another JSA member, even though Spectre has literally nothing to do with this story. Also, Vince Coletta is finally gone from the book. And a thousand pencillers let out a shout of joy.

My Grade: Another B-. It's really a solid comic book, but honestly, The Bouncer? A guy with mutant legs who can jump really well? REALLY?!

[Scott Harris]

Seems like you're finding he Conway issues a tad..... uneven.

Uneven is what Conway does best. Usually though, in my experience, he's either good on a title or bad on it; fluctuating randomly from one issue to the next like this is uneven even for Conway.

[Cei-U!]

Something else from my Fanatic's Guide that may help make a little more sense out of this particular run:

The Bronze Age “Wonder Woman” stories indexed here are not published in chronological order, jumping forward and backward in time without any apparent rhyme or reason. The timeline, derived from direct statements and other internal evidence in the source material, is:

Spring 1942 - World's Finest Comics #245
April 1942 - World's Finest Comics #246-47
June 1942 - All-New Collectors' Edition #C-54, Wonder Woman #233-41
August 1942 - World's Finest Comics #248-50
Winter 1942 - Wonder Woman #230
Sometime in 1943 - Wonder Woman #228-29, 231-32
Sometime during or after 1943 - Wonder Woman Spectacular 1978, World's Finest Comics #244
August 1945 - Wonder Woman #242-43

Cei-U!
I summon the chronological crazy quilt!

[Scott Harris]

You know, I wasn't paying close attention to the timing, but I did notice the off date in #230. The previous issues had said it was 1943, and then this one starts by saying it's "Winter, 1942" and I was confused. Apparently that is a feature, not a bug, of this era of Wonder Woman.

[Scott Harris]

Wonder Woman #242
Jack C. Harris, Jose Delbo and Joe Giella



Synopsis: All of a sudden, the war is over! It's 1945 and Wonder Woman is marching in a victory parade! We win, I guess?

Just then, though, a giant flying saucer appears and abducts Steve Trevor in broad daylight with hundreds of thousands of people watching. Wonder Woman is not pleased, so she rushes off to Paradise Island to get her UFO tracker. She discovers that Steve has been taken by "benevolent" aliens who only wish to bring peace and harmony to Earth. By, naturally, turning everyone into hive-mind clone drones. For some reason, Diana's mother is totally fine with this; hey, their mission is peace, so peace at any cost, apparently.

Wonder Woman is having none of it, so she goes and confronts alien-drone-Steve. he is busy turning other people into copies of himself, so soon she finds herself outnumbered. Meanwhile, back on Paradise island, Dr. Fate and The Spectre decide to visit Wonder Woman's mother via psychic telephone and they tell her that alien domination is bad. She reluctantly agrees. It should be noted that this conversation has no affect whatsoever on the rest of the story, I guess they just wanted to slip in some JSA members and show that Wonder Woman's mom isn't a complete fool.

Anyway, Wonder Woman is in big trouble, so she resorts to her greatest power: Speechifying. She gives a heartfelt monologue about how they just fought a war for freedom and therefore the aliens should leave them alone and let them screw themselves up. The aliens apparently agree, because everyone reverts to normal and the aliens leave.

Epilogue: Angle Man appears out of mid air. Whoopdedoo.

Notes: What a complete cluster this is. You'll note that Gerry Conway is gone, replaced by Jack C. Harris. Likewise, editor Denny O'Neill is also gone, replaced by Larry Hama. And, oh yeah, everything that had been happening in this series is abruptly dumped in favor of a random time-shift to the end of the war.

So what apparently happened is that the Wonder Woman TV show decided to move from WWII to the present, so the comic decided to do the same thing. That transition takes place next issue, so first, they had Jack C. Harris write an epilogue to the WWII version -- an epilogue that makes no mention whatsoever of anything that happened in the previous issues. Instead, he goes with this utterly dopey alien plotline which thematically is identical to Conway's story about the alien mummy lady from just a few issues earlier.

I guess the thought was that by setting this at the end of the war there would be some sort of closure, but the opposite is true, particularly since everything Conway had been working towards was so unceremoniously dumped. What exactly was the payoff going to be for the long-running subplot about Etta Candy's sinister French fiance? Well, who knows, because Etta is in this issue, still single years later, and no mention is made of this at all.

Why they didn't just bring the series back to Earth-1 is beyond me. If they're going to ignore everything that was happening, then why bother with this story? Why not just leave things off in WWII where they were? It's not like this is satisfying in any way, shape or form.

Another epic editorial fail from DC.

My Grade: F. A terrible story grafted on top of a terrible idea, all driven by a knee-jerk need to ape everything happening in the TV show. When the tail wags the dog, you end up with terrible comic books.

[Scott Harris]

Wonder Woman #243
Jack C. Harris, Jose Delbo and Frank Chiaramonte



Synopsis: Angle Man shows up in the middle of 1945, and boy, is he confused. He had used his super angle (which apparently was given to him by Darkseid) to escape prison, but unbeknownst to him, it accidentally sent him to Earth-2, which seemed to happen to people an awful lot back in the day.

Meanwhile, Wonder Woman is at a JSA meeting, meaning this time they can actually show the entire team instead of just having one or two members make random cameos. She gets word that some fool (Angle Man, of course) is messing up Washington, DC, so she rushes off to confront him, telling the rest of the JSA to stay back as this is her fight. I can't stand that kind of pointless superhero bravado. Stop trying to prove yourself and start putting the safety of civilians first, how about that, Diana?

Anyway, Wonder Woman fights Angle Man. He blasts her with an angle beam and it goes haywire, teleporting the Earth-1 Wonder Woman to Earth-2. Now he's really confused, and so is Earth-2 Diana, because she had had all knowledge of Earth-1 mind-wiped earlier to prevent her from knowing that America would win the war. Earth-1 WW undoes this with her lasso and they team up to take down Angle Man.

They do this because Angle Man's super angle is running out of juice, so each time he teleports, he goes a shorter distance. They calculate where he s going to next appear and box him in, then clobber him. Earth-1 Wonder Woman than causes all the Earth-2 cast to forget about her again; then she grabs Angle Man and uses the last juice in the super angle to beam them back to Earth-1. She then uses the JLA teleporter to send Angle Man back to prison.

The End!

My Notes: Okay, so we're back on Earth-1 now. I'm still not sure why the story in #242 had to exist at all. They could have just done this crossover and been done with it. But whatever.

Angle Man is goofy, but kind of weirdly memorable, which I guess is why some people consider him to be one of Diana's best villains. That says more about how terrible her rogue's gallery is, really. The actual plot of this issue is, of course, random, with random chance pretty much determining everything. But that's more or less par for the course with mediocre superhero comics (see: Every issue of Marvel Team-Up that has Spider-Man randomly patrolling the city when something crazy happens).

This marks the end of the WWII stories in Wonder Woman. Next issues begins a new, modern era with a new status quo. it will be interesting to see if they bring back anything from the short-lived Marty Pasko status quo from before the WWII issues, but I doubt it. Here's an updated scorecard of random Wonder Woman status quo changes (otherwise known as seemingly directionless editorial interference):

#178-203 - I-Ching
#204-211 - random, aimless interlude period
#212-222 - The 12 Labors
#223-227 - Marty Pasko's brief new modern status quo
#228-243 - WWII Earth-2 Wonder Woman
#244- New status quo.

So how long will this last? Well, I know there was another soft reboot around #269 or so, but we'll see if this version even makes it that long before editorial decides to change everything again. Has there ever been a long-running series as directionless as this?

My Grade: C. Better than last issue, anyway. I am not hopeful for the Jack C. Harris era, though.

[JeffreyWKramer]

I gotta admire your tenacity, Scott. I consider WONDER WOMAN essentially unreadable during that era - indeed, I think the book has mostly been poor-to-awful for most of its existence after Moulton - and would have given up on this project well before this point. I bought some of those books back in the day, hoping for a JSA appearance that didn't suck and mostly having those hopes crushed.

[Scott Harris]

Wonder Woman #244
Jack C. Harris, Jose Delbo and Joe Giella



Synopsis: Wonder Woman returns from her trip to Earth-2 last issue and begins ruminating on how nothing whatsoever has happened in her personal life since her last trip to Earth-2 in #228. Even though she's been appearing in JLA and other titles in the meantime, everything is exactly how Marty Pasko left it: Steve Trevor is now going by Steve Howard, with a different hair color, and Diana is conflicted over his return from the dead following her brief spell of memory loss.

She doesn't have much time to think about things, though, because there's a hostage situation at the U.N. A scientist or something has been kidnapped by terrorists who then set off a series of bombs all over Manhattan. Diana spends her time chasing these bombs down and saving people, but the terrorists (code name: S.C.Y.T.H.E.) get away with their hostage and demand an exchange for their leader. Otherwise they will carpet bomb America from space.

How? Well, because the guy they kidnapped was working on the Space Shuttle program. So Diana rushes to Cape Canaveral only to see the Space Shuttle take off under remote control by SCYTHE. She manages to get aboard, but it still drops its payload of two giant bombs, one heading for the Washington Monument and the other heading for the White House. She manages to grab one bomb and throw it into the other, blowing them both up in mid-air. Hurray!

Anyway, Steve Trevor has a cunning plan: They will exchange the hostages as demanded, only he'll bring Diana along in her secret identity to kick their ass. They do this. Naturally, SCYTHE decides to renege on their end of the deal and tries to kill them, but Wonder Woman has her invisible plan whip up an instant tornado by flying around in circles really fast (no, seriously, I guess she learned this from the Flash). In the ensuing chaos, she and Steve take out some SCYTHE agents, but the others get away with both their hostage and their leader.

Also, subplot: Dudes at the Pentagon are investigating Wonder Woman and need to find Steve Trevor's body for some reason. To be continued?

Notes: I'm a little unclear why Jack C. Harris and company decided to stick with the status quo that Marty Pasko set up a year and a half earlier. This is actually the perfect chance to create your own new status quo, as you can just say "well, in the intervening months since we last checked in with the Earth-1 Wonder Woman, x, y and z have happened." Instead, they stick to Pasko's stuff and just pretend no time at all has passed. Missed chance.

It does mean that if you skip #229-242 entirely, you literally wouldn't have missed a single thing, as this basically picks up right where the series left off when it went to Earth-2. I guess JLoA wasn't really big on character development at the time, since Diana apparently went through none whatsoever during this period. Then again, I've read over 30 issues of her own series now and she's had basically no development in this title either, so that's not a big surprise.

Harris and company do seem to have some kind of plan for Trevor, on the other hand, which is a nice change of pace considering how pointless and superfluous he is. It should be noted that at some point he became a special agent for the U.N. instead of a member of the spy group that only spies on other spy groups that he joined at the end of the brief Pasko run. So him working with Diana makes a little more sense as they are both UN employees.

My main problem with the story is that the government decided to deal with terrorists and cave into their demands. That would never happen, especially in such a high profile situation. Plus, it's the DCU; if every supervillain around knew the government would cave to their demands, the entire world would be thrown into instant chaos. I just don't buy this move and it made the rest of the story a bit hard to swallow for me.

Also, one small note, some people in the crowd scene around the Washington Monument are clearly wearing New York Cosmos t-shirts. I guess someone at DC was a fan of professional soccer.

My Grades: B-. Solid if unspectacular and unmemorable superhero stuff. Very nice cover from Buckler elevates this from a C+. The fact that the story is not a complete disaster is actually a step in the right direction.

[Scott Harris]

Wonder Woman #245
Jack C. Harris, Jose Delbo and Vince Colletta



Synopsis: Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor get right the heck out of the snowstorm they were stuck in at the end of the last issue when SCYTHE double crossed them. They grab some SCYTHE agents and interrogate them with the lasso, but get nothing., so they just go back to New York.

Once there, Diana is approached by some Army types who want to ask her questions about the disappearance of Steve Trevor. Before things get too awkward, though, a giant tornado shows up. Wonder Woman uses her Flash spinning trick from last issue to dispel it, actually crediting Flash with the maneuver in her thought bubble. Then, when the tornado turns into a snow storm, she assumes it must be Flash villain The Weather Wizard behind everything.

But no. It's SCYTHE. Steve takes Diana on a secret submarine ride to s secret UN base under the city, where they are tracking a weather control satellite the kidnapped scientist from last issue built. SCYTHE now controls it, so Steve and Wonder Woman head into space to fight them. Naturally, Diana wins, but in the process the SCYTHE ship crashes and the kidnapped scientist dies. We discover that he went along with his kidnapper's plans willingly, because the head of SCYTHE was... HIS OWN SON!!!!!

The end!

My Notes: Oh, c'mon, dude. Seriously.

Anyway, there were some interesting minor notes in this issue. The subplot with the Pentagon searching for the truth behind the death of Steve Trevor makes a brief appearance, and is kind of interesting, at least as interesting as anything can be when Steve Trevor is involved. Also, besides the Flash stuff, Wonder Woman makes a reference to meteorologist Oscar Asherman, who was a very minor character in Action Comics at the time, working at the same TV station as Clark Kent. I guess. I googled it.

Most interesting is the fact that when they go into space, Steve suits up in a big bulky space suit, but Diana has a much more advanced, almost skin-tight see-through thin space suit she wears instead. And she says that Amazon spacesuits are more advanced than regular spacesuits. I never quite realized Amazons had a space program, so this was a revelation to me. I do know, on the other hand, that there have been previous Wonder Woman issues where she went into space, so I'm wondering if this was a reference to some previous issue? Either way, it was weird!

Steve is wondering in this issue if Diana might use her lasso on him to make him forget his secret identity. A reasonable worry, I'd say, given how cavalier she seems to be about mucking around with people's memories.

Also: The triumphant return of Vince Colletta! Hurray!

My Grade: C+. Terrible, cliched ending to a tediously boring story. I do like the little touches that tie Diana into the DC universe more, something necessary after switching to Earth-2 for so long.

[Scott Harris]

Also, one note on #243 that I forgot to mention. In this issue, she's in the middle of a JSA meeting when Angle Man attacks. In a editor's footnote, it directs readers to see All-Star #27 for the details of the mission they are discussing.

Now, really. I mean, I guess it's nice that they pinpointed this exact tale to obliquely reference, but how many readers actually had a copy of All-Star #27 lying around to check? I'm all for editor's notes explaining previous issues to help readers follow along, but this basically seemed like editorial fan-wanking. The events of All-Star #27 aren't actually discussed by the characters, nor do they have anything to do with this issue, so it's like... I dunno. Did Roy Thomas stick his head in the office that day and say "hey, you could put this at the same time as All-Star #27!" or something?

Bizarre and pointlessly obscure footnote.