Gotta Get Back in Time

WONDER WEDNESDAY

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

The explanation for this is more straightforward than most.

Wonder Woman#228, DC Comics, February 1977.

What’s this on the cover? Wonder Woman fighting Wonder Woman? Why, it’s been almost a year since that happened! I’m sure there must be some logical explanation, right? Well, actually, yes.

But first I want to point out the cover date, just a month after last issue. With this issue the Wonder Woman series started to go monthly for the first time since the series started in 1942. It started as a quarterly but had been a bimonthly series for most of its existence.

So what’s up with the two Wonder Women? Well, the Nazi supervillain being introduced on the cover, the Red Panzer, should be a tip-off. Who’s the real Wonder Woman? They both are! One’s the Wonder Woman of the 1970s we’ve been following for years now, and the other one is the Wonder Woman of the 1940s, whose adventures took place on Earth-2. (This was DC Comics’ explanation for why the 1960s Green Lantern and Flash were so different from the 1940s versions, and why the relatively unchanged Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman weren’t getting old if they were around in World War II.)

The real reason we have the two Wonder Women on the cover is that the Wonder Woman series made an abrupt shift to a World War II setting starting with this issue, because the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman TV show had just begun, set in the 1940s, and DC didn’t want fans of the TV show to be confused when they read the comic. The letters page explains all this at length, along with a charming introduction to Lynda Carter.

It also explains that writer Martin Pasko had originally planned a completely different story for this issue, that (among other things) would explain how Wonder Woman’s unbreakable lasso could be broken by King Samson when Wondy appeared in Freedom Fighters a couple months before. Now, just like Diana Prince’s abrupt shift of job description at the United Nations, the explanation had to be relegated to the letters page. The reasoning was that WW’s lasso is unbreakable as long as it’s made of the gold of Hippolyta’s Magic Girdle, but because Samson had changed it to silver, it could be broken. Once it was turned back to gold, it became unbreakable again.

Now, for previously existing readers, the shift to Earth-2 in the 1940s might be a little confusing. So the editor explains that the contemporary Earth-1 Wonder Woman will still be appearing regularly in Justice League of America and Super Friends (the latter was a non-canon series based on the TV cartoon, but never mind that), while the Earth-2 Wonder Woman would be appearing monthly in Wonder Woman and bimonthly in World’s Finest, which would be newly expanded from just a Batman/Superman team-up series to an 80-page giant series including backup solo stories of WW, Green Arrow, Black Canary and the Vigilante.

So how does Pasko (and artists Jose Delbo and Vince Colletta) make the shift in eras? Well, this Nazi villain, the Red Panzer, has developed time-travel technology. Glimpsing into the future to find out that the Nazis will lose the war, he resolves to go change the future. But he overshoots considerably, jumping not just way too far in time, to 1976, but to a parallel earth, where he unexpectedly encounters Wonder Woman. He’s convinced she must be an imposter, because even if she did exist in this time “his” Wonder Woman should be older.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we travel through time.

Retreating back to Earth-2’s 1943, he accidentally brings Earth-1’s Wonder Woman with him. Now, the Wonder Women of the two earths have met several times before in the yearly team-ups between the Justice League and Justice Society of America, but that’s usually only involved dimensional travel, not time travel. It’s always been an older JSA that’s met the young JLA in the present.

Got it? Good.

After Wonder Woman takes some time to go shopping at 1940s prices and freak out the locals with references to things that haven’t been invented yet, she inevitably encounters her Earth-2 counterpart, who in this era has never met her yet. From the WWII WW’s perspective, this new WW is obviously an imposter, so clearly they must fight. The doubling effect is even more confusing because at the time there were no slight differences of costume to help distinguish one Wonder Woman from the other; they looked exactly alike.

Go ahead, get that out of your system.

After they duke it out for a little while, the native Diana uses her magic lasso to force the other WW to tell the truth about who she is, and learns that it was all a big misunderstanding. She helps the Earth-1 Wonder Woman make her way back to her own time and dimension in the Red Panzer’s ship, and that’s we’ll see of our familiar present-day Wondy for a while.

It’s like tag-team protagonists!

Mind you, they could have waited until the Red Panzer was defeated, but for whatever reason they decided getting WW back home was a higher priority. The 1940s Wondy continues to fight the Panzer alone, which works out pretty well for a while. But no sooner has she subdued him with her lasso than his ship—the one the other WW went home in—abruptly returns to its own time in exactly the right spot to knock Wonder Woman out. That’s some bad luck right there!

Ah, back to those woman-in-peril covers the gents love so much.

Wonder Woman#229, DC Comics, March 1977.

So the tables have turned! Where the Red Panzer was once all tied up, he’s now tying Wonder Woman up with her own lasso. (A tactic that’s not particularly notable, because it happens all the time.)

And as ever, it comes off as pretty fetishy.

He doesn’t get very far with it before she fights back, leading to an air battle. (His armor can fly, and she’s in that same aircraft of his.) But when he blasts her with a howitzer he happened to have up his metal sleeve (actually it is his sleeve), she blocks it with her bracelets, accidentally fusing them together. Faithful Wonder Woman readers may recall that Amazons lose all their powers when their bracelets are bound together by a man, and that’s just what happens here.

This isn’t getting any less kinky.

We get reintroduced to Wonder Woman’s 1940s supporting cast, Steve Trevor and Etta Candy, with the new addition of General Blankenship, a character from the TV show. Etta, sadly, is a far cry from the fun-loving sorority girl of the actual 1940s comics; here she’s an inept military secretary and compulsive eater. Steve seems to have made an abrupt shift to a brunette, like the actor who played him, Lyle Waggoner.

Oh, Etta. How the mighty have fallen.

Steve manages to help Wondy get her bracelets unstuck, but she’s soon captured by the Red Panzer and gets her bracelets stuck together again. He tosses her into a maze and she manages to get them unstuck by getting her chains blown up by a guided missile that miraculously doesn’t take both her arms off in the process.

This really doesn’t seem like a good idea.

Deducing that the Panzer’s missiles much be homing in on her bracelets, she takes them off to lure the bombs away from her. But this leads to yet another little bit of Amazon lore. Any Amazon who takes her bracelets off goes berserk, and Wondy consequently flies into a kill-crazy rage.

Yeah, Steve, I think that’s the general idea.

Luckily, Steve manages to clamp one of her bracelets back onto her wrist, making her “her docile self again” (I beg your pardon!)—never mind that she left them in a completely different room. The Red Panzer gets blown up good by one of his own missiles, but Diana assures both Steve and us that she’s sure he’s fine, what with the armor and all.