Wonder Woman Overload...
Will all of these WW posts, you may begin to wonder if I'm Josh Whedon or Greg Rucka or someone who may have some asociation with DC. No I am not, nor an I taking some Woman's Studies course in community college. I'm just someone who has taken an unnatural interest in the character (No! Not like that). Frankly, it's starting to take the scope of a research project, so this may be a good a time as any to start laying out the books and sources I might think would help me figure out Wonder Woman. I believe she is one of the more complex characters (if not the most complex) of the DC universe. She seems like a neat puzzle to solve (well, there's the mathematician in me coming out again -- everything is a puzzle to be solved). I've nowhere near started gathering all the books and articles I think I will need, but I can start.
Movie Poop Shoot: Comics 101: Enter Diana by Scott Tipton.
Excerpts from Phil Jimenez's interview with Gay League -- He discusses a bit of WW. The original website is no longer available. More bits of that interview, particularly
concerning Donna Troy (Wonder Girl I) can be found at OPIEblue.
An alternate history to Wonder Woman
From what I have been studying, Wonder Woman is a difficult character to write for, probably the most difficult in the DC stable. DC, especially the characters from the Golden Age are more archetypes than people. While that sorta puts the characters at arms-length from the reader, they're easier to understand and to adapt. They're more timeless. Wonder Woman however is much more rooted to the time in when she was created (World War II) and the mindset and philosophy of the creator, William Marston. Marston, to put it at most simply, was a staunch feminist. Yeah, it's more complicated than that, but this is a blog post, not a research paper. So he was a feminist. A feminist in the 40s. Thus this character is very much mired up in the society of the 40s, where it's only slowly dawning that women were no more inferior to men than believed, but still unsure as to what that means; plus there was a war going on as this Grecian inspired character became the patriotic personification of the U. S. of A.
Thus
the discussion here that Wonder Woman is Detective Comics' Captain America. Unmoored from her time of conception, her stories are lost. This wouldn't have been so terrible had it not been for Marston's death from cancer in 1947. Had he lived on, he could have possibly smoothly evolved the characters and the stories and carried them forward. Unfortunately, it was left up to others to try to decipher this character, and as complex as the often-times competing ideas that forged this Amazon, it's no wonder so many people failed to figure out the character.
This probably explains why so often fans (as well as the profession writers tasked to write WW) try to reinvent her.
Thus in the discussion linked above, one poster gives Wonder Woman a new origin story, but like the woman I linked to below.
The Secret History of Wonder Woman...
The previous post linked to a summary of Wonder Woman as laid out by a fan. If the word on the street was correct, that backstory --which is the post- "Crisis on Infinite Earth" reboot story for her, starting with the strips done by George Perez -- was inspired by a script of Wonder Woman written by a fan back in the day of the TV series (which at the time took place in WWII). She didn't know that DC at the time was going to align the comic book to WWII as well, so it was written to get Diana to the then present day America. She wrote it as faithfully to the William Marston idea of the woman as I believe is possible.
That story, and her story of Wonder Woman can be found in the following link.
Carol A. Strickland's Wonder Woman.
