Wonderless Woman

So, I launched into Wonder Woman: A Celebration of 75 Years with great anticipation. 

Sigh.

The short version: If this selection of comic books from the last 75 years represents the Best of Wonder Woman, you have missed absolutely nothing by not reading Wonder Woman comic books. 

There are 19 comics in this book.  It starts with a two part origin story. That leaves 17 more selections.  Of those, another half-dozen or so are more or less revamps of the origin story.  So, a third of the time, we get a “Who is this Wonder Woman?” storyline. 

What about the other stories?  What does she do in them?  Whom does she fight and what is accomplished?

Well, that leads to the Big Question: what are Wonder Woman’s Powers?  Well… she is kinda strong.  She can punch and kick really, really well.  She sorta can fly…maybe. A quick glance at her Wikipedia page reveals a whole bunch of other powers which seem to come and go—none of which are on display in the selection of comic books collected here.

OK it’s not all about her shifting set of superpowers. She does have a magic lasso!  It makes you tell the truth!  She has these bracelets and she is really fast so she can move her hands to cause all the bullets to hit her bracelets.  And she has an invisible jet—in which oddly, you can still see the pilot, so it isn’t clear what good an invisible jet is.

So, with all those powers and cool toys, she must have a mission, right?  Yep.  Stop war. Which apparently you do by running around breaking things. 

OK.  You think I am being harsh.  Well, you are wrong.  I am being kind.

What is the real point of a Wonder Woman comic book?  You just have to look at them to know.  The creator of the comic book has four issues collected here.  And there is a remarkable visual feature in those.  There are sure a whole lot of women in bondage.  One might think the whole point of Wonder Woman was to be able to draw pictures of women who are tied up.

One would be right, by the way.  That was exactly what the creator of the character, William Moulton Marston, was keenly interested in doing. 

(Side note: Every now and then, someone at Mount Holyoke likes to brag about the connection between Mount Holyoke and Wonder Woman.  As it turns out Marston’s wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, was a Mount Holyoke alum.  She helped Marston dream up this superhero, patterned after Mary Olive Byrne, who was (cough, cough) the third member in their little ménage a trois involving lots of not-so-magic ropes.  Yeah, people at Mount Holyoke brag about this sometimes.)

OK, what about later on?  Well, in the later issues, there are not nearly as many people being tied up. Insert sigh of relief.

However…

…there is a much larger number of ridiculously scantily clad women running around beating people up.  When I say scantily clad, by the way, that means that the clothing all these female superheroes are wearing seems designed to make sure that the clothing doesn’t actually you know, clothe anyone.  The skin to clothing ratio throughout is somewhere in the vicinity of 25:1.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I understand that comic books are often being marketed to adolescent boys.  Before reading this book, I would have thought someone making this complaint was just exaggerating for effect.  But is there any reason at all that the creators of these comic books, spanning 75 years, could not have included a plot in any of these stories?  I mean other superheroes have comic books, also often marketed to adolescent boys, but they often manage to have something in them that is fun or interesting. Why don’t any of these?

It’s not like Wonder Woman can’t potentially be interesting.  But, again maybe it is just the selection here.  Maybe there is a wealth of Wonder Woman stories which have an interesting villain worthy of Wonder Woman.  But here, there are no clever plot twists or ingenious plans which are foiled.  There are a couple of times which someone comes along to compete with Wonder Woman to be the new Great Scantily Clad Superhero, but in every case, this doesn’t actually generate all that much of a story line. 

The oddity is that the rebooted origin stories are above average selections in this volume.  Which tells you a lot about the volume.

And so, Dear Reader, while I really would like to draw some larger lesson here, some moral tale or fascinating or witty observation to make this all worthwhile, I am at a total loss.  The best I can do: Don’t bother reading this book—just go rewatch the recent movie instead.  It is vastly better than anything in this book.