History of Wonder Woman - Part 2
Friday, November 23, 2007 at 02:11PM This continues from Part 1 which covers Wonder Woman's history from the 1940's through to the late 60's.
This essay is part of my Wonder Woman Files covering Diana's full history.THE I-CHING ERA
By 1968, DC Comics was determined to reverse the flagging sales of Wonder Woman. Writer Dennis O'Neil and penciler Mike Sekowsky were appointed to overhaul the book and the character. They decided to change everything about Wonder Woman except her name, taking away her powers and costume and turning her into a martial artist crime-fighter, a new take on the modern woman.
It started with Wonder Woman #178, the cover of which showed our heroine in a very fashionable outfit and a new hairstyle as she stood next to the proclamation “Forget the Old! The New Wonder Woman is here!”
In the story, Steve Trevor was accused of the murder of Alex Block, a jerk who’d called Wonder Woman a freak once when she and Steve had been at a party together. Wonder Woman was asked to testify at Steve's trial. The prosecutor first attempted to diminish Steve’s rep as a hero by saying that Wonder Woman was the real hero of their little duo and hadn’t really needed the soldier's help during all their adventures together. He said that Steve had killed Block as a way of overcompensating for the fact that he knew he was pretty useless compared to Diana and thus felt he'd had to mete out vengeance when she was insulted. When asked, Diana was forced to admit that Steve had indeed referred to Block as “a rat who did not deserve to live” following the man's remarks about Diana.
This was pretty damning and Steve blamed Wonder Woman for his trial going badly, despite the fact that she would’ve beeng committing perjury otherwise. Wonder Woman went home, terribly upset. Her Diana Prince identity seemed pointless now. She said she'd created it for the sole purpose of being “near the man I love, to have him always at my side.” But now if he went to jail, what did it matter? Crying, she thought “Alex Block was right … I’m not a woman, but a freak who will send her own beloved to his death!”
That's what we want in a hero, readers. Self-pity.
Wonder Woman then decided that since it was as a super-hero that she'd condemned Steve, it would be as an ordinary woman that she would save him. As Diana Prince, she’d go undercover and clear her love's name. Not wishing to scare people off with her military outfit, she got her hair done and went on a shopping spree so that she would look like any other “trendy chick.”
Diana soon solved the case and Steve was released. Later, Wonder Woman and Steve were hanging out, snuggling happily on the couch. As Wonder Woman rested her head into the nape of Steve’s neck and asked “Then you do forgive me, Steve?”, soldier-boy then answered, “Of course, darling! But I can never forget what Diana Prince did for me!” He then he went on to say he never realized how surprising Prince could be and that perhaps he would ask her out soon (jackass!).
And for some inexplicable reason, rather than punching Steve in the mouth and asking why he would talk about dating other women when the lady who loved him was right there in his arms, what did our super-hero do? She panicked and figured that she’d better start doing stuff to keep Steve interested because if he could fall for a fake person like “Diana Prince”, then he was likely to fall in love with anyone!
This was our hero? Someone who couldn't say “screw you” to a guy for making a pretty jerk statement and not respecting her principles in the first place?
Wonder Woman #179 then gave us a pretty rushed explanation as to why the next change in Wonder Woman's life would occur. It turned out that Paradise Island had used up its magic energies (which I guess had to be checked every 3,000 miles). Queen Hyppolyta decided to move the whole damn island into another dimension so it could recharge itself. Until it was recharged though, they wouldn’t be able to return to Earth's dimension. On top of that, Paradise Island’s absence would sever Diana’s connection to the magic that empowered her. Wonder Woman could either leave with the Amazons or remain on Earth and become a normal woman. No enhanced strength, no cool reflexes, nothing.
As this was going on, Steve had allowed the world to think he was a traitor to the U.S. so he could infiltrate the organization of new villain named Dr. Cyber. Not realizing this was an undercover mission and concerned that her love was being hunted down as a spy (a crime she was sure he'd neem framed for), Wonder Woman said she couldn’t abandon Steve at such a dangerous time. She turned in her costume and lost her powers as Paradise Island left Earth’s plane of existence.
Rather than go find Steve immediately, Diana apparently felt the most important thing to do was find a new, affordable apartment to live in. While enjoying the view from her new digs, she saw an elderly blind Chinese man getting mugged and immediately went down to help him. But the old man was no pushover and took out the muggers with several martial arts moves. Diana then asked the guy if he was okay and was surprised to realize that he knew who she really was due to "certain powers" given to him. The stranger, named I-Ching, was also aware that Diana had lost her powers and was now wondering how to help out her love Steve Trevor. He explained that the lines of fate had brought him and Diana together because he was also after Dr. Cyber. Apparently, the cyborg villain had killed the secret sect of monks I-Ching had been a member of, leaving him the only survivor. Now, I-Ching hunted the killer out of his love for humanity, which needed to be protected from such people. Now that he'd met Diana, he would train her so that she would be prepared for the battles ahead.
Very well-informed, this randomly introduced new character. Like Mr. Miyagi and a psychic combined!
You’d think that with Steve already out there hunting Cyber and in possible danger, these two would rush into action. But
no, I-Ching figured it was okay to take a couple months to train Diana in martial arts so that she could compensate for her lost powers. Due to her years of experience in fighting and her Amazon training, Diana was able to master in a couple of months of training what normal people would take years to learn. That may sound flimsy to some of you, but I think the fact that it still took Diana a few months of training is a lot more realistic than some comics and movies where characters seem to pick up fighting techniques in just a few days. The story also made a point to mention that during these months, Diana trained during the days but would hunt down information at night to try and find any trace of Steve.
Seems they didn’t need to bother searching, because one day Steve stumbled into I-Ching's training gym, bleeding from a gunshot wound. As Steve was taken to the hospital, Diana wondered if she was destined to lose everyone she loved (forgetting apparently that it was her choice not to join her mother and sisters). But I-Ching scolded her for her self-pity (about damn time!) and they then began their hunt for Dr. Cyber. In the next issue, Steve ran out of the hospital to warn Diana about an oncoming attack, only to be brought down by machine gun fire from one of Dr. Cyber's assassins. Her love now dead, Diana was truly on her own, with only her new mentor I-Ching to act as comfort and support.
Thus began the entirely new Wonder Woman. No powers, no love life, no costumes. Diana was now an Emma Peel (from the TV show The Avengers) kind of character, using martial arts and dry wit to get herself out of danger. Although the comic was still called Wonder Woman, Diana didn't use that name anymore within the stories. She was just Diana Prince, here to help when you needed it. She didn’t have a specific uniform and would change clothes constantly, although she did have a fondness for all-white outfits that allowed her freedom of movement and were also fairly fashionable. And there at her side at all times was "the Incredible I-Ching", ever faithful and ever wise.
Whereas before readers were used to seeing her team-up with folks like Batman and Superman, now she was seen with DC’s sleuth and spy-type characters such as Tim Trench and Johnny Double. And in none of those team-ups did anyone say, “Man, didn’t you used to wear a costume and have powers and call yourself Wonder Woman? What happened with that?”
And how did Diana now support herself? Well, with Steve dead, she didn’t work for miitary intelligence anymore. Now she owned a fashion boutique! Cuz, you know, what other career could the world’s premiere woman super-hero possibly have?!
Wonder Woman #183 featured the “Return to Paradise Island.” It has possibly the worst intro to a Wonder Woman story ever, since we see Diana running through the streets of London and then stumbling, taking the next several moments to weep openly as she said that being human simply hurt too much. Seriously, why advertise that you're making Wonder Woman more of a modern independent woman when she still indulges in cry in self-pity just because she stumbled?!
At that moment, an Amazon in full armor showed up and told Diana that Paradise Island was being invaded and she
needed to help. Back when Paradise Island was being taken to another dimension, the writing and dialogue had basically said this was the “last farewell” of the Amazons and that Diana would potentially not see them again in her lifetime, because you couldn’t just hop back and forth between dimensions. But apparently that had changed now and we found out that there was a convenient portal the Amazons could use to go to Earth whenever they wanted (making the earlier story pretty meaningless). So, Diana was fetched home.
Seeing her home in ruins, Diana found out that apparently Mars, god of war, had tried to force Hyppolyta to tell him the secret of interdimensional travel. With the Queen now in a coma, Diana donned armor and led her sister into battle. Fights happened and did not go well. Along with all this, fans were given the seemingly random revelation that Mars was Hyppolyta’s father.
Diana wound up going back in time to ask King Arthur’s court for help, but they said no, they were tired of war. Aided by Valkyries, the Amazons finally gained the upper hand and Hyppolyta regained consciousness. Happy that her mother was well and the Paradise Island would be rebuilt, Diana went back to Earth to continue her life as a human crime-fighter, despite having been brought to tears one issue earlier over the fact that even stumbling caused too much pain. The next issue, we got to see Diana reach new heights of glory as she rescued a young girl named Cathy from three “strange-looking female hippies” that had made her their live-in house-keeper/slave, having her wear a dog collar as they
occasionally beat her. Diana took out the three hippies (known as Top Hat, Moose Momma and Mingo) and then made Cathy her secretary so she could run Diana’s shop whenever Diana had to leave to fight evil.
Diana spent the next several of issues fighting Morgan Le Fay, shop-lifters, Hong Kong assassins, and yet another return trip to Paradise Island. Although these were pretty mundane stories, they did have some dialogue that sounded hysterical out of context (such as Diana doing martial arts in a mini-skirt and saying, “One good thing about minis is they give you plenty of room for knee action!”). There was a brief flirtation between Diana and Inspector David McLean, but the latter didn't become a new love interest. There were scenes of Diana using a machine gun, which just seems wrong even if she was without powers. And team-ups with other super-heroes finally happened. She met up with Superman for an adventure, but neither one really mentioned her former career as a costumed super-powered warrior. It seemed strangely like business as usual between them.
DC began to think that perhaps the low sales were because some readers didn’t recognize their new Wonder Woman in her new ouftits. So with issue Wonder Woman #191, Diana began the story by saying that she would explain how she'd come to be this way and then the rest of the comic was just a reprint of issue #179, presented as a “flashback.” The issue also had an article called “Wonder Women Of History” that talked about Marie Elizabeth Zakrezewska, who was a major player in women’s rights. This was possibly to counter a growing criticism that Wonder Woman had been de-powered by men who did not appreciate powerful women.
The next few issues continued mundane stories. Diana encountered a prankster who accidentally poisoned some people, 
Diana was almost made a queen of another country, Diana visited a haunted inn, etc.
Discontent among fans wasn’t going away, so with issue #196 Wonder Woman began featuring two stories per issue under the title of “Then and Now”. One story would show the modern take on Diana while the other was a reprint of one of Marston’s classic tales. Issue #197 had no new material whatsoever and was a reprint of issues #181 and #182 for those who had missed the Dr. Cyber storyline and the death of Steve Trevor. Publishing these reprints was also a way of biding time as the creative staff figured out how to make Wonder Woman popular again. Likewise, Wonder Woman #198 was just a reprint of issue #183 and #184.
Staring with issue #199, Denny O’Neil also took over as editor and promised a dynamic new change for Wonder Woman. However, no such change seemed to occur. The only thing significant about the story at all was a scene between Catwoman and Diana in issue #201 where the feline thief mentioned that Diana had once been the super-powered adventurer called Wonder Woman (so at least someone remembered). It seemed like the upcoming change had just been a tease. It took people outside of comics to get Wonder Woman back in gear.
WE WANT THE POWERS BACK!
A lot of the return to the "classic Wonder Woman" had to do with Gloria Steinham, the woman behind Ms. Magazine, a new Women’s Lib publication. In the first edition of this mag, the original William Moulton Marston version of the Amazon Princess was proudly displayed on the cover. The cover story, entitled "Wonder Woman Revisited", involved Steinham
denouncing the recent changes in the comic as part of an "evil male plot" to water down the mighty Amazon Princess. The campaign to restore Wonder Woman as an icon of feminism continued in 1972 with the publication of a hardcover book called Wonder Woman containing a collection of reprints from the Amazon's earlier adventures.
The public's positive response to this article and the falling sales of the comic itself persuaded DC to bring back Robert Kanigher as editor of Wonder Woman (not necessarily the wisest move, considering he was from the era of Diana being hit on by Amoeba Man and becoming a romance editor, but at least he was enjoyed the classic version of the character). Kanigher quickly undid everything that had happened to Diana during Denny O’Neil’s run, taking her back to her roots. Kanigher described this comeback as "a sentimental return of the Amazing Amazon to the unique origins that made her so celebrated for decades."
So, Wonder Woman #203 featured O’Neil’s final tale, a very anti-male story. Sadly, O’Neil chose to end this issue with a cliffhanger ending, one which Kanigher either didn’t know about or had no care to resolve, so this final story of the de-powered Diana was never actually completed. D’oh! O’Neil would later work on Batman comics where he would have far more success in redefining the main character.
Wonder Woman #204 started with Diana and I-Ching hanging out on the street when a sniper opened fire on people below. I-Ching was hit and killed, dying in Diana’s arms. She bid farewell to the man who’d been like a father to her and afterwards she pursued and defeated the sniper. But during the fight, she got a head injury that slammed her with amnesia. Feeling a strange calling, she returned to Paradise Island (which was suddenly back in Earth's dimensional plane) and the Amazons took her in. Hyppolyta ordered that the "Amazon memory machine" be used to restore Diana’s mind, with the exception of three specific memory tapes so that she wouldn't learn of a special secret.
Diana regained her memories up to the point where she lost her powers. She picked up her old costume and with Paradise Island back on Earth, her powers were back as well. She was ready to return to Man’s World when a black woman named Nubia showed up. Yeah, you heard me. Black woman ... named Nubia. ((SIGH)) You can blame that on Kanigher, he wrote it. Grrrr ...
Anyway, when they met, Hyppolyta wondered why Nubia felt so familiar. It turned out the special secret she’d wanted to keep hidden from Diana was that long ago, when she'd asked the gods for a child, Hyppolyta had actually been told to create two children from clay, one light-skinned and one dark-skinned. The children were Diana and Nubia, respectively. But then Mars kidnapped Nubia and not even the gods could find her. Diana’s gifts from the gods (her powers) were meant as compensation for Hyppolyta losing her other child. Meanwhile, Mars had the other child raised on a floating land mass that he named Slaughter Island (making it the anti-Paradise Island). Mars also gave Nubia a mystic ring that made her loyal to him and she made Slaughter Island her base of operations, with Mars's followers as her army.
Nubia returned to Paradise Island later and brought an invasion force with her. But Diana learned the truth about her sister and smashed Mars' ring, freeing Nubia from his control. The day was saved again.
On the flipside of things, Diana Prince decided to get a new direction in life and started a job at the U.N. (no more fashion boutique for this woman!). She found herself crushing on a handsome diplomat named Morgan Tracy but was rebuked by his comments of how dowdy and plain she was.
Soon afterwards, the Wonder Woman series began reprinting old Marston stories, giving them new artwork but keeping the story itself the same. For new readers, it seemed that these were new stories. One problem though. Because these were just the same scripts that Marston had written during the Golden Age, Steve Trevor was there, alive and well! Evidently, the editors had forgotten that he was supposed to be dead. And you couldn't explain it away as being a flashback tale because the comics had specifically stated that these were "new" stories taking place in the present day.
THE LADY DONE GONE CRAZY!
Finally, editor Julius Schwartz (one of the major legends of DC) and writer Len Wein came on board and tried to explain away the continuity problems introduced by having had various different writers over the past few years (as well as Steve Trevor's unexplained resurrection). For the next twelve issues, the JLA was heavily featured. It began when Superman approached Wonder Woman and asked just how and when she'd regained her powers. Diana was confused, saying she’d never lost her powers nor had she ever heard of a man named “I-Ching.” But she soon became convinced otherwise and went to Paradise Island, demanding to know why she couldn’t remember these things or what had happened to Steve Trevor. Hyppolyta then explained that the Amazons had had no real records of her activities when she’d been without powers, except for secondhand information and her direct adventures with Paradise Island during that time. Since she thought it would be wrong to give her daughter only “half memories”, she decided Diana didn’t need that information at all.
Diana was furious, saying it wasn’t for someone else to decide what she should and shouldn’t remember (especially when you consider that her mom had manipulated her mind twice now). When Diana asked where Steve was, Hyppolyta then told her about Steve’s death some time ago. So how had Diana had a recent adventure with him (in the re-drawn Marston tale) just a few weeks back? Well, that was apparently a mental projection of Diana's subconscious to help her maintain psychological stability. Which is a very nice way of saying that Diana went crazy for a little while and had interacted and fought alongside with a DAMN HALLUCINATION!
Feeling betrayed (and probably reeling from the knowledge that she’d been hallucinating her dead love), Diana left Paradise Island and figured she had to prove she was still worthy of being a Leaguer by undertaking twelve grueling trials. Each issue of this storyline was narrated by a different member of the JLA (a nice attempt to boost interest in the book by having said guest-star on the cover of each issue). Superman scribe Elliot S! Maggin, Martin Pasko, David Michelinie and Cary Bates switched off on writing each trial. I find it interesting that right after they had an issue that displayed the problem of having multiple writers, DC let the next storyline of Wonder Woman be done by a group of different writers. Oh, well.
The trials weren’t bad stories, actually. One of them involved Paradise Island being moved to hover over Atlantis as part of a scheme by Mars to cause the Amazons and Atlanteans to go to war (it failed, of course). During another trial, Hyppolyta revealed the true reason no man was allowed to set foot onto Paradise Island. In this story, it was retconned that if a man came onto the Island, any Amazon who saw him would instantly fall in love with him, so much so that they would fight their sisters if they also showed interest.
Along with these trials of Diana, DC also tried to put Diana in the spotlight again by having her make regular appearances in the anthology title World's Finest, which had increased to an 80-page book starting with issue #244. But here’s the curious thing. These stories were all new but featured the Earth-2 Wonder Woman instead, the one who fought during the Golden Age, battling Nazis such as Paula von Gunther and the like. This was an intentional move based on the success of Lynda Carter, who was also making a career out of fighting Hitler's forces in front of television audiences at this time.
USURPERS AND SPACE MISSIONS
In 1979, a two-issue story by Jack C. Harris came out that would heavily influence another storyline written fifteen years later by William Messner-Loebs.
In Wonder Woman #250, Diana came home to chill out for a while when a red-haired Amazon we’d never seen before named Orana challenged her. Orana said that Diana had been Wonder Woman for a while now and hadn’t really changed Man’s World enough, so she was calling her out. By the laws of the gods, this challenge meant that another challenge had to happen to determine if Diana was still worthy to be the “Wonder Woman.”
Like before, all the young, athletic women of Paradise Island faced off in a series of challenges. Orana and Diana were among the top of the competition, but there was a noticeable difference in how the two approached the competitions. For instance, in an underwater contest, Orana won but only because she had focused on killing the electric eel creatures that inhabited the waters and pushing past them, whereas Diana took the time to avoid the creatures and to aid any sisters who'd been injured by them. And during a race in outer space, Orana leap-frogged over various meteors, not caring that they were being hurtled to Earth as a consequence. Meanwhile, Diana abandoned the race in order to make sure innocent people didn’t suffer from the falling meteors.
Hyppolyta said that although Orana had technically won, Diana had proven she had compassion as well as the physical abilities and therefore proved more worthy of the title. But then the gods showed up and said nope, the rules were very specific and technical. Orana had won the races and thus was the winner, didn’t matter why or whether or not she’d not cared about what happened to others. Good bureaucrats, them gods.
Diana conceded (!) and Orana was given the lasso, tiara and costume of Wonder Woman. But as she left Paradise Island, Diana promised to follow her into Man’s World. Technically, this was against the gods' law that said only the Wonder Woman was allowed to leave the island, but Diana didn’t care. She was more concerned about innocent people being endangered by Orana’s attitude, ego and inexperience.
In the next issue, Diana’s fears proved justified. During a high-speed police car chase, Orana attacked the police car, thinking they were the culprits because she hadn’t taken the time to learn what police vehicles looked like. She also tended to act not just ill-tempered, but physically violent towards anyone who pointed out that she was not the “real” Wonder Woman.
Taking some time to return to her civilian apartment and life, Diana was approached by Conrad Starfied from NASA (yes, that was actually his name) and told that she’d been accepted as a trainee astronaut. This would be the start of a new job for our heroine, as she joined the space program and got a new supporting cast, including General Robert Novack and her fellow trainees Stacy Macklin and Mike Bailey (who also became a love interest).
Reading about Diana’s new job in the newspaper, Orana was very pissed, correctly guessing that Diana had broken the law and left Paradise Island in order to spy on her. Calming down, Orana told Diana about a case she was working on involving a villain named Warhead. Remembering him from a Pentagon file, Diana said that Warhead was said to have possession of a short-rang neutron bomb, which she explained would kill possibly millions of people while leaving buildings intact. But Orana, not up with the weapons technology of Man’s World, figured this is a tall tale and basically told Diana to screw off for trying to mess with her.
Of course, Orana learned the hard way that Diana wasn’t lying. Together, the two teamed up to save the day but the adventure ended with Orana being killed. Diana took the woman’s body back to Paradise Island, taking no joy in the fact that she was now reclaiming her title as Wonder Woman. Although this story was only two-issues long, it would inspire the creation of a character named Artemis who would appear decades later. But we’ll get to that.
No sooner had Diana Prince joined NASA then Wonder Woman had to deal with a new enemy from space, a golden woman called The Empress. The Empress said she was the true Diana and believed that our hero Wonder Woman was an entity somehow passing herself off as the princess. The truth came out when Hyppolyta revealed that Astarte was in fact her own sister Diana, who had been killed by Hercules long ago. The Princess Diana we all knew and loved and who was born from clay had actually been sculpted to resemble the Queen's dead sister and had been named in her honor.
The Empress, learning that she was in fact dead and that this Diana was her niece, was then approached by the gods who welcomed her to rest. A strange tale but, just like the story with Orana, it would have an influence on later writer William Messner-Loebs.
Meanwhile, in her civilian identity, Diana Prince was having her own problems. She was enjoying NASA and came to enjoy the company of Mike Bailey, whose interest was in her and not Wonder Woman (shocking). Yet his manner at times reminded her sadly of Steve Trevor (he even called her “angel” as Steve used to) and she wondered if she was over her past love.
In 1978, DC Comics decided to shake up the format of their title Adventure Comics from issue #459 onwards. Now running at 68 pages, the title focused on different stories starring different heroes, Wonder Woman included. While her own title was focused on her new career at NASA, the stories in Adventure Comics made sure to focus on her mythical nature, with plot elements involving her background on Paradise Island and as a child of the gods.
Not long afterwards, Jack C. Harris left and Paul Levitz stepped in to take over the writing. Figuring that a mistake had 
been made, he immediately went to work in getting Diana back to more familiar territory. First, he did an issue where Diana fought a villain called Bushmaster. Sadly, having a guy called “Bushmaster” face off against the premiere female super-hero was not a wise decision, as it led to many male fans making many obscene jokes rather than taking the fight seriously (especially when the cover had Diana thinking "I must resist the telepathic commands of the evil Bushmaster!").
In Wonder Woman # 256, we were told on the cover that Wonder Woman would make “a shocking discovery … A SECRET THAT CHANGES HER LIFE!!” It turned out that just days after the fight with Bushmaster, Wonder Woman fought the card-theme team of criminals known as the Royal Flush Gang. Members of the Royal Flush Gang have been known to change now and then, particularly the member designated as “Ace." As she confronted the new recruit calling himself “Ace”, Wonder Woman ripped off the thief's mask only to discover that he was actually Mike Bailey. After the battle was finished, Diana decided she needed a change of scene to forget this shocking betrayal and left NASA to return to the U.N. After only four issues, Diana’s days with the space program was already a thing of the past and the new love interest was gone for good.
With the next issue, Wonder Woman was back on familiar New York ground, feeling that she’d returned home. Despite the fact that her dossier was filled with unexplained absences, contradictory statements and some dubious reports of her activities, it was decided that she wasn’t a security risk for the U.N. (which I guess is a really laid back organization). She was rehired by Under Secretary Wagner, despite the protests of Morgan Tracy who figured her for a potential spy and criminal.
WELCOME TO THE EIGHTIES
Wonder Woman went through several writers after that. Paul Kupperberg did an interestingly dark and bitter-sweet issue (and no, Paul, I didn’t just write that in hopes that you would read it and buy me lunch next time). Gerry Conway then stepped in for a few issues to remind us just why Wonder Woman’s bracelets were so important, as she lost them during a fight with Hercules and then went insane with rage in the middle of the street, endangering many.
Stories went on. Not much special happened. Steve Trevor was introduced back into continuity eventually after Aphrodite brought him back to life. She gave him brunette hair and the new name of Steve Howard (because goddesses are funny like that, I guess) and then about two years later he was killed off again! So that makes it once where Diana convinced herself he was alive again and once when he was reincarnated and died once more. And two years after that, he showed up AGAIN! Well … sort of.
Jerry Conway wrote a story where a version of Steve Trevor from a never-before-seen parallel universe wound up accidentally transported to Earth-1’s dimension and crashed on Paradise Island. Just before his arrival, Diana conveniently had her memory clouded by the “Mists of Nepenthe”, and so when she met this new Steve she was happy to make his acquaintance and didn't recall that the man had now seemingly been resurrected two or three times before. Diana then journeyed to Man’s World and started a career as "Diana Prince in Military Intelligence." Etta Candy and General Darnell also returned as her supporting cast for the first time in years. The classic take on Wonder Woman was thus restored and updated, after which Gerry Conway left. A shame, because Conway had done some quite interesting tales here and there.
In 1982, Roy Thomas and artist Gene Colan gave Wonder Woman a slight cosmetic change. The golden eagle that had been on her chest for years was now replaced with a stylized “WW” design that only resembled an eagle if you squinted. This was done because it was easier to copyright and market this symbol (much in the same way that Batman’s symbol was given a yellow circle around it so that Warner Bros. could trademark the image and put it on T-shirts).
After Thomas left, Dan Mishkin took over the writing of Wonder Woman and immediately gave readers a Diana who was more confident and leader-like than had been seen in years. Steve wasn’t the man she pined for, she was her partner and and friend who occasionally helped out. She carried her own weight and let you know who was in charge when she walked into the room. This was a woman who made it clear why she was a super-hero who’d been popular enough to hold her own title for decades of continuous publication. As the cover of one of Mishkin's issue's read: "Look out! She's her old self again ... and she means BUSINESS!"
Wonder Woman now fought huge battles against Aztec gods and magical foes like the witch Circe, who'd appeared in a few stories over the years but hadn't seemed like much of a threat before. Mishkin wasn’t against using humor at times either, such as his adventure when Etta Candy
(much slimmer now) became Wonder Woman for a night, leading to dangerous hilarity, or his story where Diana had to fight gremlins.
And then Mishkin left. Sadness. Writer Steve Gerber was going to do a revamp, but that never happened. Mindy Newell did a three-issue story that wasn’t bad. But the title wasn't as cool as it had been.
It should be noted that in the late 70's and early 80's, Diana’s rogues gallery started getting touched up again. There was the new Nazi villain Armageddon and the mystically empowered Silver Swan, who was really bitter dancer Helen Alexandros who had made a pact with the god of war to become beautiful and superhuman. The Cheetah, Priscilla Rich, was gone for a while and then succeeded by her niece Deborah Domaine, who was brainwashed by the terrorist Kobra to become Wonder Woman’s latest enemy. The second Cheetah also joined the Ultra-Humanite’s “Secret Society of Super-Villains” in a fight against the JLA and JSA. Oh, and there was the martial arts master Red Dragon from China. The Red Dragon story was fairly interesting because when he confronted Diana, he held Steve Trevor hostage and demanded that Diana help him overthrow the Chinese government or else Steve would die. Diana refused, saying that while she didn’t agree with China’s communist government, she wasn’t about to overthrow it herself and allow a tyrant to take power instead. Interesting twist, huh? You can thank Gerry Conway for that story.
Of course, along with these updated and fun new foes, there was also the occasionally not-quite-up-to-par baddies such
as Kung, “assassin of a thousand claws”, and the evil Video Commander. Ooh, scary. Mayhaps he will throw an Atari at my head. Or maybe he'll just challenge me to a live-action version of pong called "Death Pong" or something inanely derivative like that. Seriously, you know these guys just watched Tron and suddenly thought "Man, what if Jeff Bridges were a bad guy? That would be brilliant! Quick! Get to the drawing board now! And draw a giant 'V' on his chest so that people will remember his name!"
And another silly new foe was Captain Wonder! See, the telepathic Doctor Psycho found out that he could use ectoplasm to create stuff. Doctor Psycho then drew from Steve Trevor’s mind a power fantasy in which he'd imagined himself as “Captain Wonder”, Diana’s male equivalent. Using ectoplasm, Dr. Psycho created Captain Wonder for real and inhabited his body. As Captain Wonder, Psycho had “all of Wonder Woman’s powers, only more powerful”, which I guess was a strange way of proving that a male version of Diana was still better than the real thing and isn’t that a screwed up point to make?
Then came 1985. The year of The Crisis On Infinite Earths. If you don’t know about this story, you can read all the details in my Crisis Guide. In a nutshell, DC decided to revamp and streamline a lot of their continuity and characters. It was known that a lot of changes were going to happen for Diana so the series was wrapped up. In the final issue of Wonder Woman, Diana finally married Steve Trevor.
In the actual Crisis comic book series, Wonder Woman joined alongside Earth’s heroes against the Anti-Monitor, a creature who sought to destroy the multiverse and basically become God. The heroes of several Earths (Earth-1 and Earth-2 among them) all banded together to stop him and in the end a new universe was born from parts of the other universes (with Earth-1 as the dominant influence). Earth-2 Wonder Woman and her husband Earth-2 Steve Trevor were able to survive the destruction of their Earth by taking up residence on Olympus. But their universe was now gone and no one could remember now that they and their world had ever existed.
There was still one last battle with the Anti-Monitor before things were done and the mainstream DCU could be considered safe. During that fight, Diana was blasted with chronal energy and hurled backwards along her own lifeline, finally becoming clay and crumbling away into dust. As far as history was now concerned, Wonder Woman didn’t exist. She’d been retroactively erased from the universe. This was to set-up her new comic book series which would be relaunched from ground zero, reintroducing her and her history from scratch.
Of course, reintroducing Diana from the ground up meant there had to be some major changes in continuity. For instance, in the new universe, the JSA were the predecessors of the JLA. They lived on the same planet, it was just that one team had been in operation decades before the other one (and had actually inspired the later team). Since there was now only a modern-day Diana and no longer one who’d operated in World War II, it was now said that the first female member of the JSA had been the Golden Age hero called Miss America (Joan Dale).
The biggest problem with Post-Crisis continuity was that although Diana was being introduced to the DCU as if she’d never existed before, Donna Troy was still said to be a character who’d been around for years and had been the first female member of the Teen Titans. This meant that, as far as continuity was concerned, Wonder Girl's debut actually preceded that of Wonder Woman's. Eventually, they changed it back that Diana was around for a few years before Donna showed up. The whole fiasco is covered in my Donna Troy History essay.
We'll continue this in Part 3. For now, we simply say good-bye to the Pre-Crisis Wonder Woman. For all her faults and periods of silliness, she was fun and memorable.
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