Give Peace a Pass

WONDER WEDNESDAY

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

The next several covers (by Bob Oskner) are all like this, with a JLAer watching from the sidelines.

Wonder Woman #213, DC Comics, September 1974.

Last issue, Wonder Woman decided to earn her way back into the Justice League of America after her non-superhero years by performing twelve labors like those of Hercules. These aren’t any preassigned labors; she’ll just have her usual adventures and JLA members will monitor them and report back on her worthiness. Mind you, nobody asked her to do this, and they would have been perfectly happy to welcome her back anyway, but it’s really important to her to do this, so they’re going along with it.

Superman took the first shift, and now it’s the Flash’s turn–the guy whose shtick is that he can run really fast. It’s also a completely different creative team’s turn to tell the story: writer Cary Bates and penciller Irv Novick from the Flash’s own series, with inks by Tex Blaisdell. It was Bates who set up a lot of Wondy’s new status quo after the mod era in Wonder Woman #206, but he only wrote a couple more issues of her series, both of which are collected in The Twelve Labors paperback.

You know how people are always wishing for world peace? Well, in this issue they get their wish. All of a sudden, everybody on earth loses the ability to fight. Well, almost everybody. The only three people who’ve retained their natural belligerence are an antiwar protester, a gangster, and Wonder Woman.

This will be important later.

All three of them just happened to be experiencing a flash of pain during a lightning storm at the moment that a robot from outer space was pacifying the world by emitting some kind of beams. This combination of circumstances happened to make them—and only them—immune to the rays’ effects. All this peace sounds great, right? Well, not when it makes people unable even to defend themselves against pests or predators, or even to hunt for their food. This is happening all over the world, Diana’s new boss Morgan Tracy explains, but the UN is keeping it hush-hush to avoid worldwide panic. There’s not even any crime going on anymore, although I don’t think any of DC’s other superhero comics got the memo that month.

Peace! Good god, y’all! What is it good for?

Bates doesn’t really point this out, but teaching the world to embrace peace was always a big part of Wonder Woman’s mission, and the irony here is that now she has to stop the whole world from staying peaceful.

Gangster Marty Tragg finds out the world’s gone topsy-turvy the hard way. There he is minding his own business, hijacking a plane, and the pilots almost crash the plane in their abject terror of the threat of violence. The only reason the plane doesn’t crash is that Wonder Woman spots it and pulls it to safety with her magic lasso and invisible plane, capturing Marty in the process.

On that plane is White House advisor Dr. Hans Krissen—an obvious stand-in for Henry Kissinger—whose newfound docility doesn’t prevent him from macking on Diana pretty hard. Krissen is there to consult with the UN Crisis Bureau to try to figure out what the heck is going on and what they can do about it. “How ironic that a world at peace is finding it harder to survive than a world at war!” Diana says. Well, I don’t know if there’s really that much evidence for that sweeping statement just yet, but sure, why not? Ironic indeed!

The ladies love Kissinger. No, seriously, they do.

Diana sneaks off to fly over to Paradise Island to see what she can find out there, only to find that the Amazons are no less affected by whatever the heck is going on. (Animals, on the other hand, are completely unaffected.) But Diana is there to consult the Magic Sphere, a device of advanced Amazon technology that we hadn’t seen in a while, a sort of television that can view anything going on anywhere—not just in the present, but at any time as well. The Magic Sphere goes wayyyy back to Wonder Woman’s very first appearance in 1941’s All-Star Comics #8, and Bates and Novick cleverly portray it as hidden away in a cobweb-strewn temple “where no Amazon had passed for years.”

Now, that’s what I call a callback!

The Magic Sphere revealed to WW the strange connection between her, Tragg and activist Angie Blake that made them all immune to world peace, and she gathers them all together as the only people still violent enough to save humanity. Angie’s no fighter and is in fact opposed to violence, and criminal Tragg doesn’t exactly have humanity’s bests interests at heart, but they’re all Wonder Woman has, so she uses the magic lasso to brainwash them into helping her defeat the giant cybernaut that pacified the human race. Whatever works, I guess.

No means no, Diana.

Wondy attacks the robot, which proceeds to fight back, so maybe she’s not so far off with her assumption that it’s up to no good. And when it looks like the cybernaut may be about to do her in, the Flash can’t even step in from observing to help, because he’s no more able to fight than anyone else is. But Wondy’s two unwilling allies suddenly step in to save WW and turn the tide against the invader. Teamwork saves the day from insidious peace!

She may be an abductor and brainwasher, but she’s OUR abductor and brainwasher!

Of course there’s a clever twist at the end. With an assist from the Flash, who’s been observing the whole thing while vibrating into invisibility through super-speed, Wonder Woman manages to reverse the robot’s wiring so that it reverses the effect of its peace rays and returns the world to normal. But they also find a message from the scientist who built the robot. This wasn’t intended to make the Earth helpless before an alien invasion; it was created by an alien scientist whose own world was ravaged by nuclear war, and he wanted to prevent that happening to other worlds. The moral of the story, as it were, is that this kind of shift toward peace has to be a homegrown movement, something gone into voluntarily, or it won’t work out well at all. Well, I guess we’ll see how that plan works out over time.

Interestingly enough, although the Flash files his report at the end of the story, recording it on a tape recorder, he doesn’t end with any kind of judgment about whether Wonder Woman passed the test or not—which, after all, is the whole point of all these do-nothing superhero guest-stars. Either he figures the results speak for themselves or he really isn’t very good at this whole adjudicator thing at all.

Green Lantern guest-stars in the next issue, but there’s a lot more than that going on. Issue 214 is another 100-page giant (for a whopping 60 cents) packed with backup stories reprinted from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. Check back next week to read all about it!