Adventures in Yellowface

WONDER WEDNESDAY

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

Whenever I get back to writing about the swingin’ mod era of 1960s Wonder Woman comics, it’s funny how I keep putting off the Doctor Cyber stories. When one of those is next in the queue, I’ll interrupt things to talk about a special from the 1970s or a loosely related current series instead. Cyber was the big recurring villain of writer/artist Mike Sekowsky’s run on Wonder Woman, which reinvented Diana Prince as a non-superpowered, karate-chopping detective and fashion boutique owner. But the trouble is, Doctor Cyber is just not a very good villain. Sure, her goons killed Diana’s longtime boyfriend Steve Trevor and her new mentor I Ching’s entire Chinese monastery, but Cyber’s master plan is always pretty vague and ill-thought-out (step one, steal lots of money; step two, take over the world!), and the threats she sends after Diana are less than fearsome: trained birds, cute women, armed skiiers.

But there was a whole lot of build-up for Cyber, with both Ching and Diana having deep personal reasons for wanting to bring her to justice, so the fact that they just seemed to forget about the criminal mastermind to toddle off to other adventures seemed a little odd. It’s not that I minded a break from the Cyber saga, and I understand the desire not to overload any new reader who might be picking up the series for the first time with a lot of back story that doesn’t have anything to do with that particular issue’s adventure. But the fact that Diana hasn’t even thought about Steve since an issue or so after he died is pretty messed up.

Anyway, now let’s take a look at the last three issues collected in the trade paperback Diana Prince: Wonder Woman vol. 2. For better or for worse, Doctor Cyber’s back! And now I’ve gone and spoiled the big reveal.  Ah well.

That nice Blues Brother-looking blind man? I don’t believe it for a minute.

Wonder Woman #187, DC Comics, April 1970.

I Ching gets a call from an old friend that necessitates a quick trip to Hong Kong. All the flights are full, so he calls in a favor from Patrick McGuire, a pilot whose life he saved back in “the war,” presumably World War II.

Man, good thing Amazons are oath-bound never to be dominated by men.

There’s another passenger on McGuire’s cargo plane, a young woman named Lu Shan. This name should be pretty important to Ching for reasons that will soon become clear, but he doesn’t react to the introduction at all.

Note that I Ching hears her name but doesn’t react at all.

But wait! There are stowaway criminals hidden in a crate, and they’re out to kill the mysterious Lu Shan! Diana and Ching make short work of them, killing them all by kicking them out the door into empty air. Damn, better not tell Superman. One dead body didn’t go overboard, however, and it has a tattoo marking the guy as part of the Tiger Tong, a ruthless Chinese gang of criminals. While comforting Lu Shan, Ching notices that she wears half of a coin as a ring, a coin that he wears the other half of on a chain around his neck. Lu Shan is his long-long daughter, Lu Shan! You’d think this might have occurred to him when he first heard her name, but eh, it’s been a while.

Some long search. You couldn’t even be bothered to wonder about her name.

In Hong Kong they continue to fend off Tiger Tong attacks while accompanying Lu Shan to meet her employer, whom she also calls her master.  Who could it be? Who do we know who employs primarily attractive young women as her hired goons? Why, Doctor Cyber, of course! And true to form, she has another cockamamie plan. This one makes a little more sense than last time, at least. She has devices scattered around that will create earthquakes, and she plans to destroy Hong Kong as a demonstration and then blackmail the world to do her bidding, lest she do the same again. And Lu Shan has tricked Diana and I Ching into delivering the devices right to Doctor Cyber themselves.

How much sharper than a serpent’s tooth!

Lu Shan, on the other hand, just wants to kill her dad, because she thinks I Ching killed her mom. Never mind that Doctor Cyber killed her whole village; even Ching doesn’t bother talking about that anymore. And oops, he can’t talk about much right now anyway, because she just shot him.

This will be important later.

The Tiger Tong’s leader shows up to horn in on the action, but Cyber quickly impales him and his goons with some kind of death trap so horrible that we don’t even see it, just its shadow. But one of them isn’t quite dead and shoots a nearby “blazier” (that is, a blazing brazier, I guess), sending red-hot coals flying into Doctor Cyber’s face. The poetic irony! It burns! Also the coals.

Diana is really bizarrely proportioned on that cover.

Wonder Woman #188, DC Comics, June 1970.

I Ching’s not dead, but he’s in a bad way. Cyber’s goons are out to kill Diana, and she’s on the run with Patrick McGuire too, who seems there just to be a big strong man for her to rely on. Worse still, the earthquakes have begun! Diana manages to capture one of Cyber’s women and tortures her into revealing where the Earthquakers are hidden and how to turn them off. Her methods are unorthodox!

The inspector’s creeping me out a little there.

Diana and Patrick make it through the collapsing streets to stumble right into Doctor Cyber’s lair. Unfortunately, “stumble” is the operative word here. They fall through a trap door and get knocked unconscious, leading to the scene we saw on the cover: Diana chained up and Doctor Cyber unwrapping her bandages to show how hideous she is now.  True to form, we don’t get to see her face, because it’s icky. But Diana does, and more to the point, she gets to kick it.

She was always good with chains.

Diana breaks her bonds and frees Patrick, but Cyber sets off a self-destruct in a final gesture of rage, blowing up her own lair and presumably herself with it.

That’s the last we’ll hear of her!

Finally, finally an end to Doctor Cyber. I mean, whoever heard of a villain escaping certain death? Granted, this would be a lot more satisfying if anyone remembered why they were mad at her in the first place. (Steve who?)

And what about I Ching? Well, he must be feeling better, because he’s disappeared! He slipped out of the hospital on the sly and ran off to Red China to find Lu Shan. Well, says Diana, they’ll just have to follow him!

What the…?

Wonder Woman #189, DC Comics, August 1970.

Mind you, China’s a big place, but Diana remembers offhand that Ching has friends in a village called Ashai. By the way, remember the friend that Ching went to Hong Kong to help in the first place? No? Neither does anyone else. That plot device was abandoned pretty much as soon as they got on that plane two issues ago.  Poor guy, whoever he was.

Nobody thinks Diana going to China is a good idea, but Patrick insists on helping her if she insists on going. And he has a plan! First, some yellowface makeup to make them look Chinese.  (Oy gevalt.) Then, they’ll just fly a plane into China in the wee hours of the morning, when everyone’s too sleepy to notice, and I guess their radar is too.

Yeah, that’s a terrible plan.

To be fair, even in Sekowsky’s reality this plan sucks, and a Chinese plane does come after them, but they evade it by crash-landing and hoping the pilot thinks they’re dead.

Sure enough, they find I Ching in Ashai, where his old friends are in trouble. The Chinese government wants to force the whole village of farmers and fisherman to go work in the mines. So he and the villagers plan to sneak the entire village off in a riverboat, and they conveniently discovered an old cache of Japanese weapons from WWII to fend the army off if necessary.

Ching really has a short attention span when it comes to quests.

Mind you, a riverboat isn’t terribly inconspicuous, and of course they’re spotted pretty quickly, so they’ll have to shoot it out. A boatful of villagers against the Chinese army isn’t much of a fight, and they’re getting slaughtered out there, but with good old manly Patrick’s instruction they take out a whole lot of soldiers in the process. Even Diana takes up a machine gun, firing away at enemy planes, which is just weird to see. And Patrick steps in to show that silly Wonder Woman how to fire the dang thing properly.

I guess she really is a whole new Wonder Woman!

Still, it looks like they’re pretty doomed. But wait! The Chinese pilot who’s about to kill them is felled by unknown fire. It’s the British! I guess that boat crossed over into Hong Kong territory while everyone was too concerned with the firefight to notice. Hong Kong Police Inspector McLean, who had expressly forbidden Diana to go to China, gives her a hard time about disobeying orders, but takes her out for dinner anyway, because, you know, she’s a babe. Suave smiles all around!

What’s next for the fierce fashionista? Is this in fact the last we’ll hear of Doctor Cyber? Why the hell was she called Cyber anyway? Will I Ching ever find Lu Shan? Will he even remember that he was looking for her? What about that guy in Hong Kong who needed his help? Will Diana ever remember Steve again? Will any of this be resolved? Well, we’ll just have to see in future installments of… Diana Prince: Wonder Woman!