Let Loose the Cheetah

WONDER WEDNESDAY

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

Regular readers of this space, if such there be, may recall that last week I noticed that Wonder Woman #196 contained a never-before-published Golden Age Wonder Woman story that was also never reprinted thereafter—and certainly not in the collection I was reviewing, Diana Prince: Wonder Woman vol. 3, which was only concerned with the mod Wonder Woman stories of the very early ’70s.

Well, clearly I had to track this story down. So in the last week I went and bought a copy of this single issue so I could read it.

That’s right, I’m reviewing the same issue two weeks running. Wanna make something of it?

Wonder Woman #196, DC Comics, October 1971.

The never-before-printed and never-thereafter-reprinted story was one of two backup features in this particular issue, the other being Wonder Woman’s origin from her very first appearance. But this story is an odd specimen, both drawn and written by Wonder Woman cocreator H.G. Peter, the artist (and longtime San Franciscan) who’s never credited that way because writer William Moulton Marston always gets sole credit as her creator (under the pen name Charles Moulton). But Peter drew Wonder Woman’s adventures from her first appearance in 1941 till his death in 1958. The folks at DC seemingly stumbled upon this unpublished story while searching through Peter’s collection of Wonder Woman art and decided to finally let it see the light of day.

“The Stormy Menace of Goblin Head Rock” features the original Cheetah, who was the first Wonder Woman villain I was aware of when I was a kid in the ’70s and who I always thought of as her archnemesis, which is funny because she didn’t appear all that often, but she was on the Super Friends TV show and its associated comic book. (Wondy’s always had a shortage of memorable villains.) Unlike the revamped Cheetah that emerged in the late 1980s, this one, Priscilla Rich, had no superpowers and was just a psychotic debutante in a cheetah costume.

Well, that was serendipitous!

Whenever this story was written, it features the Cheetah where she was left at the end of 1948’s Wonder Woman #28, in which she teamed up with a bunch of other female Wondy foes to form Villainy, Inc. She’d been sent to the Amazons’ Transformation Island to be reeducated, as often happed with Wonder Woman villains in the old days, but she cold-cocked her jailer, Diana’s friend Mala, and escaped.

But then Transformation Island (alias Reform Isle) was also where she’d been left in 1945’s Sensation Comics #22 and other appearances, so it’s hard to place exactly when this story falls relative to her other appearances. But 1948 was the last we heard of her until 1966, so this probably takes place sometime in that great void.

Mala could really be better at her job.

In any case, some professor has disappeared with his machine to control the weather, and you only get one guess who has it now. That takes care of the Stormy Menace of the title, but what about Goblin Head Rock? Well, Goblin’s Point happens to be a place with a cliff that looks exactly like a smiling face with a big pointy nose, and not even in a subtle way. That’s where the Cheetah’s wreaking havoc with the weather machine, and guess who gets caught up in her first storm? Diana’s spunky pal Etta Candy and her sorority marching band, of course, on a ship that just happens to be full of gold bullion, because of course it is.

Etta and the Holliday Girls are real cool jazz cats. Apparently.

The Cheetah doesn’t seem to be after the gold here, or working to sabotage the US military or anything like that. In fact, she doesn’t even seem to have a plan. She’s just fucking shit up for the hell of it—and for her revenge on Wonder Woman, somehow. Which makes it strange when she’s surprised that Wondy shows up to stop her. I mean, what did she think this was all about? What did she think was going to happen? But to be fair, the Cheetah’s a loon.

Dude, YOU HAVE NO PLAN!

Anyway, Wonder Woman rescues all the sailors and Holliday Girls from the sinking ship, and Steve dives down to rescue all that gold. But the Cheetah cuts his lifeline and the ship falls on top of him, so it looks like that’s it for ol’ Steve. Or rather it would be if he didn’t have a girlfriend who can not just hoist the entire ship off him but throw it into the air.

I love the way she shuts Steve down there.

From here things make even less sense. The Cheetah’s storm machine can apparently not just control the weather but exert some kind of magnetic pull on Wondy’s invisible plane, and also she now has a whole army of henchwomen dressed like her. Where’d they come from all of a sudden? I mean, okay, she had her own horde of slaves just like Paula von Gunther did, but have they just been waiting for her all this time?

She has the Holliday Girls and that missing professor tied up to a lighthouse just waiting for her to call down lightning to kill them, so Diana has no choice but to…what, rescue them from their nonpowered captors? Of course not. To get herself and Steve tied to the same death trap, so the Cheetah can kill all of them at once. Fortunately Cheetah relied on Wonder Woman’s magic lasso to tie them up, and more fortunately still, one of the things it can do now apparently is absorb lightning, so all Wondy has to do is break the lighthouse (since the lasso can’t be broken) and free them all. And somehow, because she’s so good at this, she manages to break only the stone lighthouse and not all the all-too-human people tied to it. Not that that’s at all plausible, but, you know, shut up. Because now we get to see Etta and the Holiday Girls beat up a lot of Cheetah Ladies, and that’s just inherently awesome.

Get ’em, gals!

As Golden Age Wonder Woman stories go it’s a bit of a mess, and it’s easy to see why Peter didn’t do a whole lot of writing. But it’s an awfully entertaining mess, so I’m glad he wrote this one, and that DC eventually dug it up.