Taking Your Time

WONDER WEDNESDAY

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

Clock tentacles!

Wonder Woman #220, DC Comics, November 1975.

OK, so the members of the Justice League of America are monitoring Wonder Woman’s adventures at her request, to judge her worthiness to rejoin the JLA. Pretty much everybody’s taken their turn already in The Twelve Labors, and Batman’s out of town, so it’s down to Hawkman and the Atom, two unlikely pals who used to share a comic. Unable to decide, they flip a coin, which lands on its edge, so they decide to make a competition of it; they’ll both go watch her and see who gets to her next exploit first.

Hawksy is enjoying this a little too much.

First to report back turns out to be the Atom, in a little tale called “The Man Who Wiped Out Time!” by writer Martin Pasko and artist Dick Giordano. As fiendish plots go, it’s actually pretty lame. Somebody has made all the clocks in New York City suddenly disappear. Now nobody knows what time it is!

OK, so everybody’s freaking out a little, because they don’t know if they’re late or what. But who would do such a thing? And more importantly, why? What’s the point of doing something like this? How could this situation possibly prove advantageous to anybody?

Well, the answer to why is wrapped up in the answer to who. The guy who did it, a small-time supervillain named Chronos, is obsessed with time. Thus the name. He just really, really likes time, and likes to do vaguely villainous things themed around time. Chronos is the Atom’s arch-enemy, which mostly goes to show what a small-timer the Atom is. (And wow, that turned out to be a double unintended pun.)

Wonder Woman works at the UN in her secret identity of Diana Prince, and apparently people are panicking all over the damn building over the lack of clocks. So she does something with her lasso I’ve never seen her do before. In addition to compelling people to do whatever she tells them to, and in addition to being unbreakable, the lasso is infinitely elastic. So she lassoes the entire UN building from the outside and commands everyone in it to simmer down. But she can’t lasso the entire city—or can she? Actually, she thinks about it, but decides nahhh, too risky.

Giordano really seems to focus on the lashes and lips.

It happened to be mentioned earlier in the story that Wonder Woman always has a perfectly regular heartbeat, regardless of stress or strain, and she uses that to her advantage, focusing on the rhythm to restore her sense of time. And sense is really the key to the whole problem, because all the clocks are still there; it’s just that nobody can perceive them anymore. Nobody except Wondy, that is, who suddenly sees them again—and sees Chronos as well.

She probably doesn’t remember you because you’re not that memorable.

So now Chronos attacks WW with a variety of cockamamie time-themed weapon—like a giant jet-powered boomerang made of the gnomon of his flying sundial, which is just about as exciting as it sounds. Atom still doesn’t see his old foe, so it just looks to him like Wondy’s fighting nothing, which might as well be true. Chronos taunts Wondy that she’ll never find where he’s hidden his “time-perception banisher” that he’s using to keep time all to himself. Seriously, that’s what he gets out of it. This isn’t leading him to riches or conquering the world or anything; it’s all about making sure that “No one can tell time but me! Ha ha!”

All over the city, people are being mildly inconvenienced! The horror!

The hiding place is supposedly a “time landmark,” so WW goes around to all the big clocks that only she can see, and like the cover indicated one of them grabs her with its tentacle hands and binds her to its dial, which them goes rolling amok through the city, even though nobody can see it.

That dude is awesome.

In fact, all the big clocks are death traps of one kind of another, but of course this is no big deal to Diana, who fights her way through all of it and finds the widget, crushing it to return everything to normal. No surprise there.

But there’s a twist! Hawkman returns to report on a Wonder Woman adventure he observed—at the same time the Atom was watching Wondy have a completely different adventure elsewhere! But how can this be? I guess we’ll find out next week!

Weirdly enough, it doesn’t occur to anyone that Chronos might be behind two such things happening at the same time—because frankly, it’s hard to imagine him doing anything nearly that effective.