Amazons Attack Atlantis

WONDER WEDNESDAY

On Wednesdays I look at various chapters in Wonder Woman’s history. Click here for previous installments.

This week we continue our look at The Twelve Labors, the series of mid-1970s adventures in which Wonder Woman insists on earning her way back into the Justice League of America by having fellow JLA heroes observe and judge her exploits.

But just as a side note, you may be interested to know that there’s a play about the creator and the lasting legacy of Wonder Woman, Lasso of Truth, opening next week at Marin Theatre Company. Check back tomorrow for a link to my advance feature in the Marin IJ. I’ll actually be taking part in a panel discussion on the legacy of Wonder Woman after the 2pm matinee of Lasso on Saturday, March 1, alongside comic creator and women-in-comics historian Trina Robbins and Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, director of the documentary Wonder Women: The Untold Story of American Superheroines. So that may be a good time to come check it out if you’re into that sort of thing. 

We’ll never know, because only one of them actually does anything.

Wonder Woman #215, DC Comics, January 1975.

Now it’s Aquaman’s turn to tell the story… Hey, where are you going? Come back! It’ll be worth sticking around for, I promise. The weird thing about this story by Cary Bates, “Amazon Attack Against Atlantis!,” is that it’s very much along the lines of the world-destroying event storyline of the 2011 Flashpoint crossover that led into the New 52 reboot: it’s a war between the Amazons and the Atlanteans. But in the 1975 version, Wonder Woman and Aquaman are trying to prevent the war, not leading their armies into battle.

Or rather, Wonder Woman is. Like all the other heroes in these stories, Aquaman’s role is to observe. Of course when he finds out what’s going on he tries to help, but Wonder Woman’s fixed almost everything before he can do anything. In the fine tradition of Mer-Man, Aquaman is pretty useless next to Wonder Woman.

This time the framing sequence is a little more elaborate than just one Leaguer giving his report. There’s a full-on trial going on in the Justice League Satellite, with the accused sitting with his back to us, wearing an ancient Roman helmet. Everyone’s just sitting around the JLA meeting table, with the League acting as judge and jury, and Wonder Woman and Aquaman testifying for the prosecution. (And yeah, that doesn’t exactly sound like the fairest system for a criminal trial.)

He’s not wrong. The whole trial is out of order!

Bates and artist John Rosenberger make a point of keeping the accused’s face hidden for most of the story, which might be an effective strategy if it weren’t for the fact that the cover pretty much spoils any potential surprise.

Anyway, Aquaman was just minding his own business, spying on Diana for the League, when he sees her knocked down by a waterspout and dragged under the surface of New York’s East River (ewwww). She gets out of it by spinning her lasso up over the surface and climbing up the rope, which sounds like a very special understanding of physics.

That’s…that’s not how anything works.

Aquaman gawks while Wonder Woman destroys the waterspout by reversing its spin with her lasso, then he puts on civilian landlubber clothes to go spy on her some more. He does something I always thought it would be cool if he did, which is that he spies on people from a distance by having their pet goldfish eavesdrop and tell him what they said telepathically. Considering that the people he’s listening to (Diana Prince and her boss Morgan Tracy) are in the UN’s high-security Crisis Bureau, that’s pretty significant.

I wonder if there are any pet fish in the Oval Office.

He watches more strange and seemingly random occurrences—three normal dogs being walked down the street turn into giant hell-hounds that attack Diana and Morgan, and Diana fights them off. She does it so capably that some random British chap notices that hey, she fights like Wonder Woman and actually kinda looks like her too. Aquaman manages to steer him off this train of thought by saying that if she were Wonder Woman, wouldn’t it be kind of stupid for her to show off her fighting skills in her secret identity.  Stupid indeed!

Nice save!

Now, all these attacks seem not exactly like any kind of master plan so much as mere annoyances, or distractions rather, and indeed there’s stuff going on in Atlantis and on Paradise Island that the mysterious accused doesn’t want their respective heroes to know about. Not that he’s making any great effort to distract Aquaman, who’s already pretty distracted by watching Wonder Woman. Still, Wondy starts to wonder about the fact that she can’t get through to the Amazons on her Omni-Viewer, and she hops in her invisible plane to check it out. Or rather she tries to—when she flies over a public fountain, the water turns to a geyser of oil that catches her plane and then solidifies into a pillar of coal.

Now, this also sucks for Aquaman because he hasn’t really been keeping track of time, and he can only survive for an hour without water. Just as he’s desperate for water and making his way toward that very fountain, it turns to oil. It sucks to be Aquaman. Like, as a rule.

Jeez, man, carry a canteen, wouldja?

Wondy manages to pry her plane unstuck because, well, she’s Wonder Woman. Aquaman, on the other hand, is having a much harder time just staying alive because he forgot to keep himself hydrated. Finally he manages to revive himself by kicking some kid’s soda pop all over him. Seriously.

Mmm, sticky.

Wonder Woman flies to Paradise Island only to find the whole island missing, and a minnow finally reaches Aquaman through the sewer to warn him that Atlantis is under attack. The Amazons have positioned their island directly over Atlantis and have declared war on the sunken city. When she finds her mother, Queen Hippolyta, Diana tries to get her to call off the attack, but even the magic lasso won’t make her listen. How can this be?  Well, because she’s under the spell of… Mars, god of war!

Shocked, aren’t you? Surprised, at least? Oh, I see, you read the cover so you already know that. Well, fine. Mars feeds off warfare, and the normal wars of mortals just aren’t doing it anymore. He wants to feast on bloodshed between the two most powerful warrior races on the planet.

So remember how all of this was being told in a trial? Well, Mars denies the whole thing, but it just so happens that Aquaman overheard Mars gloating to Wonder Woman about the whole thing—and not just him, but a very special finny friend of his, some exotic lung-fish that can perfectly remember and mimic human speech verbatim. Handy, that.

Of course we only have Aquaman’s word for it that he didn’t coach the fish himself.

It turns out that I was exaggerating a little when I said that Aquaman is no help. In fact, Wonder Woman tells him to block the two armies from fighting while she takes down Mars. And he does that, telepathically summoning a bunch of whales to get in the way. Wondy meanwhile defeats Mars in battle way more easily than should be possible, because the lack of the war he was expecting weakens him down to human size and strength—which isn’t exactly the way it normally works with the gods in these stories, but sure, why not? And I guess that sort of explains why Mars is just sitting through this trial in the JLA satellite, but I can’t say I’ve seen them do that kind of thing before at all.

Man, war just can’t catch a break.

The verdict? Guilty! So it’s off to space prison for Mars. Seriously, space prison. Apparently the Justice League has some gulag out there in space somewhere, because that’s just how they roll. It’s like Guantanamo but wayyyy less accountable. And in outer space.