World Without a Wonder Woman
WONDER WEDNESDAY
On Wednesdays I look at various chapters in Wonder Woman’s history. Click here for previous installments.
Both DC and Marvel have a tendency to bounce from one earth-shattering giant crossover event to another and another, with scarcely a month or two between them, giving any given series hardly any time to develop a story of its own before it’s siderailed by whatever shattering the earth is doing at the moment. A few weeks ago, I wrote about DC’s most recent one, Future’s End, about some horrible dystopian future not long from now. Well, the giant crossover event before that, Forever Evil, is about a horrible dystopian present.
The Crime Syndicate, an evil version of the Justice League from a mirror universe where all the heroes are villains and no one can stand against them, have invaded the main DC universe and seemingly killed the real Justice League. (Actually they trapped the heroes inside the body of Firestorm.) The Syndicate has called together all of this earth’s villains to run rampant as its army, its Secret Society, and any remaining heroes are on the run.
I’ll have to write more in depth about the Crime Syndicate at some future date, because they’re sort of fascinating. They were introduced way back in 1964, and they’ve been reintroduced after every reboot—even after the Crisis on Infinite Earths that was supposed to do away with parallel universes altogether. There have been occasional others in the mix, but the constants have always been Ultraman (Superman), Owlman (Batman), Power Ring (Green Lantern), Johnny Quick (Flash) and—here’s the relevant part—Superwoman (Wonder Woman). One thing that’s interesting to me about Superwoman is that she’s clearly a Wonder Woman villain—she’s her evil mirror image, after all—and yet she’s never actually encountered WW outside of a Justice League setting. If all you knew of Wonder Woman was her own series, you’d never even know Superwoman existed.
Bring on the bad guys.
Forever Evil,
As usual with these mega-crossovers, Forever Evil included a main miniseries, several spin-off miniseries (Forever Evil: A.R.G.U.S., focusing on our old pal Steve Trevor, plus Forever Evil: Arkham War and Forever Evil: Rogue’s Rebellion). It also completely dominated several other series, including Justice League, Justice League of America, Justice League Dark, Constantine, Trinity of Sin: Pandora, Trinity of Sin: The Phantom Stranger and Suicide Squad, and if you try to read the trade collection of any one of those titles from this period, it’s impossible to follow the story unless you read all the rest too, because one issue of any one series doesn’t follow the previous one—it jumps around from series to series to series, and you have to know what happened in all those series to understand how you got from the end of one issue to the beginning of the next. This is the case with all of DC’s big crossover events, and it makes for a horrible reading experience.
Meanwhile, each of DC’s titles was taken over by one-shot stories of one villain or another. If the previous issue was number seven, for instance, these villain-centered issues were 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, et cetera, depending on how many villain issues of that series they felt like creating. Some popular series had as many as four of them, one for each week in November, while others such as Wonder Woman had two—adding up to 52 of these “Villains Month” one-shots in all. Oh, and all of them had 3D covers as well. But we’ll get to that in a moment.
The main Forever Evil series was written by Justice League writer Geoff Johns (DC’s chief creative officer and one of the primary architects of the New 52) and drawn by David Finch, who’s going to be taking over the Wonder Woman series soon. Wonder Woman’s not in this story, which focuses on a rag-tag resistance to the Crime Syndicate led by Lex Luthor and other criminals who don’t want to put up with their crap (Black Adam, Black Manta, Captain Cold, Sinestro, Bizarro), but Finch’s Superwoman might be considered a sneak preview of Finch’s Wonder Woman.
I hate to say this, but I think maybe she’s not very nice.
And it’s not an encouraging preview. Blank express, dead eyes, a sort of Barbie-doll glamour—there’s something really lifeless about his Superwoman, though the barbed-wire lasso is a nice touch.
And truth to tell, it doesn’t seem like Johns has much of an idea of what to do with Superwoman either. She’s not really a player in the story, except as a vehicle of a mysterious pregnancy. Is the child Ultraman’s? Owlman’s? Someone else’s? And why should we care?
Having his(?) baby. What a lovely way to show how much you love power.
There’s also some weird suggestion, seemingly out of nowhere, that Batman may love Wonder Woman. Through some bizarre logic, the only way the Justice League can be freed from inside Firestorm is by someone with a strong “emotional tie” to Wonder Woman using her lasso of truth. The Martian Manhunter gets in Batman’s head and says, “You know why you can do this as well as I do.” I guess this is some kind of future plot point—or maybe not. Here too, it would be nice for the Wonder Woman plotline not to be about who loves whom.
Eh, Steve!
Forever Evil: A.R.G.U.S.,
As I mentioned, A.R.G.U.S. focuses on Wonder Woman’s ex, Steve Trevor, who’s in charge of yet another secret government agency, the Advanced Research Group Uniting Superhumans. For the first time since the New 52 reboot, we actually get a flashback to Steve Trevor crash-landing on Paradise Island, “six years ago,” which looks like it happened pretty much the way it always did.
And he may even have been her boyfriend in more than a nominal sense.
Etta Candy shows up again as his faithful assistant, and she’s still a slim black woman rather than an overweight redhead. (In the post-Crisis, pre-New 52 continuity Steve and Etta were married, but that was a completely different Steve and Etta.) There’s a little bit of weird stuff with some kind of extradimensional “Wonder Room” where he keeps magical mementos of his ex. At some point he gets captured by the Cheetah, and they reminisce about old times when she was part of A.R.G.U.S. All this stuff about the Cheetah being a former friend of Wonder Woman is entirely original to the New 52; that was definitely never true before the reboot.
Blah blah blah blah.
Oh, and we’re told—or rather, it’s demonstrated—that if two people fight over the lasso of truth, the purest of heart will be the one to control it. That’s a handy thing to know if it actually remains true past this particular miniseries.
Ewwww.
Wonder Woman #23.1, DC Comics, November 2013.
The first Wonder Woman villain one-shot focuses on the Cheetah, which is interesting mainly because she hasn’t appeared in the Wonder Woman series at all since the reboot, only occasionally popping up in Justice League. In this story by writer John Ostrander and artist Victor Ibanez, we find out that this Barbara Minerva really has nothing in common with the Barbara Minerva we knew before the New 52. She looks pretty much the same, and she’s still a former archeologist, but otherwise her whole story has changed.
Have a heart, lady.
This one was transformed into the Cheetah by a magical god-slayer knife. Rather than serving some obscure African plant god called Urtzkartaga (which never made a whole lot of sense for a Cheetah-themed character), she’s a devotee of Artemis, goddess of the hunt.
Way to break it to her gently there, WW. Good thing this is a dream.
Whereas the original Barbara Minerva was British, this one was raised by her Aunt Lyta, head of some kind of religious compound of wannabe Amazons in Idaho, who has young Barbara and her brother hunt each other to death. Guess who won. Aunt Lyta was also the one who had Barbara steal the god-slayer knife and plunge it into her own heart to become the Cheetah.
Somehow I’m not sure she’s the best influence.
In this story the Cheetah’s being hunted by Mark Shaw, which was the name of one of the many characters called the Manhunter in the old DC continuity. Here all we know about this Mark Shaw is that he’s a US Marshal and almost gets killed by Aunt Lyta, but the Cheetah kills Lyta first. Not out of any hard feelings, apparently—it’s just that she’s over being Barbara Minerva and doesn’t want any remaining reminders of her old life. All she wants now is the hunt, just like her dear old auntie.
That guy’s got issues.
Wonder Woman #23.2, DC Comics, November 2013.
In the First Born one-shot, we finally, finally find out what that guy’s deal is, courtesy of Apollo and a trio of L.A. teenagers whom he transforms into oracles. He’s done this a couple of times in this particular Wonder Woman series, and they never survive the experience. The First Born’s still wounded and unconscious from his battle with Wondy, and because he’s wayyyy before Apollo’s time, the younger god enlists the teens to finally tell his much-elder brother’s story to him (and to us).
Like I said.
This one’s reprinted in Wonder Woman vol. 5: Flesh,
Well, first of all, that army of hyena people I was wondering about in the last issue? It seems that they’re actually the First Born’s children, from his early years—how can I put this delicately?—fucking hyenas. Not, like, in the form of a hyena himself or anything like that. It’s just that he was raised by hyenas, so they’re kind of his type.
A lot of the story we’d already gathered: This guy’s the nameless first born son of Zeus and Hera, whom Zeus tried to have killed because of a prophecy that the child would rule Olympus someday. Like Romulus and Remus, the abandoned child is fed and raised by wildlife—in the First Born’s case, hyenas, so he’d grow up to be some kind of super-predator (or super-scavenger, but sure, let’s go with predator, which seems more the intent).
Mowgli? Is that you?
Growing up to be a hater who’s just got to kill everything, the First Born winds up conquering “it all” (the world, I guess—hard to tell, really) and then going on the challenge the gods when he feels they’ve ignored him.
Conan? Is that you?
Anyway, that gets shut down pretty damn quick. Zeus easily eliminates the treat, confiscates all the First Born’s weapons and other gear and splits them with Hades and Poseidon, and traps the First Born in the center of the earth, from which he spends the next 7,000 years clawing his way out. That pretty much brings us to the present. But Zeus apparently did say the First Born could claim the throne if Zeus himself abandoned heaven, and that has indeed happened, and Apollo won’t like that much because he’s taken over since then. Oh, and there are some prophecies of a war to come over the throne, but we pretty much knew that was coming.
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