The Amazon Incident

WONDER WEDNESDAY

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

Yes, those are butts on their helmets. You never heard of the Golden Ass?

Wonder Woman#224, DC Comics, July 1976.

The title of this one is “Wonder Woman vs. the United States!,” and the last two words are all star-spangled on the splash page, much like Diana’s shorts. I should maybe point out that 1976 was America’s bicentennial year, and playing it up with patriotic-themed publications was de rigueur.

Man, I didn’t know the Tea Party was around in 1976.

And why’s Wondy suddenly an enemy of the people? Because Amazons Attack! Specifically the Amazons downed an American fighter jet that flew into Paradise Island’s airspace, which raises all kinds of questions about sovereignty and who exactly is the aggressor in that situation. Or rather it would except for three things. One, the jet didn’t know it was in Amazon airspace because it didn’t know where Paradise Island was, which apparently is in the Bermuda Triangle. Two, it wasn’t an officially sanctioned Amazon attack but the proverbial few bad apples. And three, writer Martin Pasko doesn’t care about any of that crap.

Regardless of whose fault it is, we start with Wonder Woman in a cage, having voluntarily put herself in federal custody as a gesture of goodwill, and to embody the peaceful nature of the Amazons that should make it clear that they couldn’t possibly have been the aggressors in this situation. She tells us all about it while being interviewed by Lois Lane, whom regular Superman artist Curt Swan draws as distractingly identical to Wonder Woman.

It would be one thing if their resemblance were a plot point, but it’s not.

Wondy was minding her own business, doing her patriotic duty by christening a ship called the Independence (remember what I said about bicentennial stuff?) when she stumbles into a demonstration demanding the bombing of Paradise Island and the deportation of Wonder Woman. It turns out this is the American Patriots League, a right wing fringe group that I guess must be the Tea Party of its day, and Wonder Woman was only arrested because she insisted on it to keep the loons from further rioting. Oh loons, the things we do to appease your craziness.

Of course, no sooner does she demonstrate her goodwill by having herself locked up than she breaks out to clear all this nonsense up. She uses her lasso in yet another seemingly unprecedented way, using its vibrating coils to create a dummy of herself, with a conveniently red-and-blue prison blanket to add the illusion of her costume. The yellow ghost of her eagle pattern on the dummy goes unexplained.

On her flight to Paradise Island in her invisible robot plane, she has time to reminisce about what’s happened since last issue, when Steve Trevor was brought back to life almost as an afterthought. Steve has to keep his return on the down-low because the world thinks he’s dead, but neither he nor Diana has really figured out what he’s supposed to do now.

When she gets to the island, her mother, Queen Hippolyte, professes to know nothing about the downed plane or all this Bermuda Triangle hype, but there’s no mystery who the real culprit is. Another Amazon named Panthea (whom we’ve never met before) is leading a rogue group of Amazons who attack Diana as a traitor and a coward nearly as soon as she arrives.

She already has her own throne!

In Wondy’s battle with one of the rebels, Ismene, the other Amazon’s bracelet shatters. That should be impossible unless the bracelet is a fake, which is a big problem because when the Amazons remove their bracelets, they go mad. This has been a plot point in some past Wonder Woman stories, and she’s even gone berserk that way once or twice, but it doesn’t come up too often. As soon as her madness is disovered, Ismene takes poison and dies, which doesn’t exactly make her seem any less crazy.

Foiled by cheap costume jewelry!

The rogue Amazons go into full-scale civil war, but Diana nips it in the bud with some more unconventional use of her powers: uprooting trees with her super-breath (say what?) and chopping the trunks into prison bars that conveniently fall into place all around the rebels. She captures Panthea just in time to stop her from poisoning herself too, and hears her story.

She just loved science too much! Is that so wrong?

Panthea was an Amazon astronomer frustrated by the way the island’s invisibility shield interfered with her telescopes. So she tried to monkey with the shield, accidentally destroying her bracelets in a lab accident. This of course made her go crazy, and she started to lure planes in by making the island visible, only to destroy them with the invisibility shield that she’d altered into a force field. This was all part of her slightly incoherent plan to discredit Hippolyte and Diana and seize power for herself.

It’s always weird when your lover has nothing going on in life except you.

Diana defeats Panthea easily, of course, and delivers her to the US to be tried for her crimes. No less than President Ford comes on the TV to address the American people, saying any question of retribution against the Amazons is unthinkable, because America already owes them a debt it can never repay…for giving us Wonder Woman. Amen to that.