Seeing Double

WONDER WEDNESDAY

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

That’s what Catwoman used to look like. But we’ll get to that later.

Diana Prince: Wonder Woman vol. 4, DC Comics, 2008.

All right, the swingin’ mod era of Wonder Woman is coming to a close—just one more reprint volume left! Then we’ll be back to Amazon superpowers and the star-spangled bathing suit just like Aphrodite intended.

Jeff Jones’s damsel-in-distress covers really don’t have much to do with the content of the story.

Wonder Woman #199, DC Comics, April 1972.

Now that writer-artist Mike Sekowsky was off the title, the mod era of Wonder Woman was winding down. Denny O’Neil, who’d written the first few issues of the run, came back to script the adventures of the now-non-superpowered karate-chopping heroine, and Don Heck and Dick Giordano stepped in on art, keeping the look and feel remarkably consistent.

One welcome and readily apparent change is that Diana Prince kicks way more ass right off the bat than she has for a while. For an erstwhile Amazon who knows all kinds of martial arts, she’s been way too willing to let any man who happens to be handy take the driver’s seat. That’s not what we want to see from Wonder Woman.

Mind you, the very first thing that happens in this issue is a new leading man appears. Much like Tim Trench at the start of the mod Wonder Woman era, he’s a wisecracking private eye. This one, however, is a preexisting character, not that you’d know it necessarily. He’s Jonny Double, a hard luck detective who premiered as the star of a single issue of Showcase in 1968, then went on the guest-star circuit (Challengers of the Unknown, Kobra, Adventure Comics starring Supergirl). He was revived as a star attraction in a miniseries under DC’s mature-readers Vertigo imprint, written by current Wonder Woman scribe Brian Azzarello.

Oh yeah, and there’s some seriously purple prose involved.

Not that there’s any indication here that he’s shown up before if you don’t happen to know that. He’s just a guy who surprises Diana with a gun and then hires her when she kicks his ass.

“Gentleman snoop.” Gotta love that snappy patter.

Their client is Fellows Dill, who’s… Hugh Hefner, essentially. Called “the King of Beautiful Women,” he owns a chain of nightclubs and is always surrounded by scantily-clad beauties. And if this weren’t already obvious, he’s also a total creep.

The man’s gotta swing!

Dill is getting death threats from some “fanatics,” and he needs a beautiful woman bodyguard who won’t be too conspicuous amid his usual surroundings. She refuses his proposal to “dress you like one of my usual girl servants—milkmaids, I call ’em!” (See, not bunnies—milkmaids! Totally different!) After all, it wouldn’t fit in with her strict dress code of wearing only a variety of all-white outfits. But she agrees to work for the guy because he says he’ll pay her enough to afford an operation to restore the eyesight of her blind mentor I Ching. Mind you, there’s never been any indication before now that there even was such an operation, but surely she can take this slimeball’s word for it.

But first a training montage, because who doesn’t love a training montage?

Sure enough, they’re soon attacked by a bunch of hooded cultists. Diana and Jonny fight them off for a while, but they’re overpowered by knockout gas while the actual target, Dill, runs off into the woods. The cultists are ready to behead them both, but Jonny talks his way into being allowed to go fetch Dill for them to save Diana’s life. If this was Tim Trench, he would have saved his own skin and that would have been the last we saw of him, but Jonny’s better than that. Meanwhile Diana gets chained up (because it’s not a Wonder Woman comic unless she gets chained up at least once), but she manages to free herself with her unusually dexterous feet.

She also knows the ancient art of footsie.

There’s a lot of Jonny trying to rescue Diana, then Diana rescuing Jonny instead, then some almost-smooching in the snow because Diana is apparently direly in need of a romantic interest. But wait! Someone’s shooting at them! It’s Fellows Dill, and he’s crazy! Mad, I tell you!

I wanna know what these Wonder Girl backups were.

Wonder Woman #200, DC Comics, June 1972.

Diana manages to subdue Dill, but he’s still too cuckoo to say what the heck is going on. Then they get attacked by a kamikaze St. Bernard with a neck-barrel full of nitroglycerine, because, you know, that’s something that happens.

And boom goes the dyno-dog.

They find what appears to be a small cabin, but (to coin a phrase) it’s bigger on the inside. And it’s full of paintings of beautiful women slashes and disfigured. Someone has a real problem with standards of beauty, apparently. And, oh yeah, this is the cult’s base, because how could it not be?

In my day, we just drew mustaches and goatees.

They manage to kayo the cultists and steal their plane, but uh-oh, that’s what someone wanted them to do! The plane is remote-controlled, and although Dill’s on it, the bad guys don’t seem to care about him anymore. Whatever mastermind is behind this is really after Diana Prince, which is funny because the cultists didn’t seem to give her a second thought before, aside from wanting to kill her because she was with Dill. Now whoever it is just wants revenge on Diana. Confusing!

Who could it be?

And whoever the bad guy is, she’s with Doctor Moon, a brain-transplanting scientist who debuted in a Batman story earlier a few months before.

Aw, who are we trying to kid? There’s only one real recurring villain in this particular era of Wonder Woman, and this baddie shows all the hallmarks. A tendency for female henchmen—check. At least some of the cultists are heard to be women under their robes, and Diana and Jonny are attacked by women guards tilting on “motorized gyro-bikes.” That’s another sign of this particular villain: unintentionally silly methods of attack.

Hey, can’tcha leave a tender moment alone?

And whoever it is has issues about beauty, almost as if she were a beautiful woman who was recently hideously scarred.  Hmmm.

Diana and Jonny get captured and chained up, because it’s obligatory and they haven’t done that yet in this issue. And they discover that the big bad is, unbelievably, exactly who you’d think it would be.

Who would have thought it was her only current nemesis all along?

Yes, Doctor Cyber, wearing a new metal mask because she’s all scarred and stuff. And she’s got that brain-transferring criminal scientist with her because, well, she wants to be beautiful again, and she aims to do that by putting her brain in Diana’s body. She was going to just use one of the many models she’s captured and hypnotized, but this is way better.

Foiled by yoga! Not again!

Diana manages to break free with the power of yoga (seriously) and defeats Doctor Cyber (again) who seemingly meets with her death (again). I’m sure that’s the last we’ll hear from her, because that trick always works.  In all seriousness, it’s a very Batman-style resolution—special training getting our hero out of a fix, mixed with some rather blunt social satire—which shows O’Neil playing to his strengths. Now let’s see if Fellows Dill ever manages to regain his sanity, pay Diana and fix I Ching up with that eyesight-restoring surgery. Personally I’m not holding my breath for us to ever see or hear of him again.