Kay_Challis
Scott Free
The big thing is that Wonder Woman's back story is completely unrelatable compared to Batman and Superman. Superman is an immigrant made good. Batman is a man who has taken a tragedy to become the pinnacle of humanity. What's Wonder Woman? Someone made from clay who came to a Man's world?
The origin actually provides a nifty way to make the Trinity make sense. Though again the gender politics are an obstacle, as going this way with Feminist Icon Wonder Woman would be a horrible thing to do.
But... You've got Superman, the god. You've got Batman, the human who's made himself into a god. Then you've got Wonder Woman, the
thing that's made itself into a human.
The 'trinity' depicts the ladder by which base matter ascends to the divine!
You know after I typed that, I started realizing that as bizarre as her origin was to me there was something really, really fascinating about it to me. Of anyone in this thread, you've made the most sense out of it.
Kay_Challis
Virgil Hawkins
I preface this by admitting I am really ******** drunk.
Give her a city. Get rid of Themiscrya. Get rid of ALL the Greek Gods stuff, Make her street level for a year, helping kids and rape victims and kittens in trees.
Although not drunk, I still managed to misread that as "helping kids rape victims and kittens in trees."
I wonder if giving her a city and making her street level might be more fun if we
didn't get rid of Themiscrya, but just made it a bit more interesting and messy. Then made
it the city.
Let's turn it into somewhere that feels like people
live there. And conspire, and study, and buy and sell, and take holidays. It's a place that's been devastated and rebuilt - or taken out of the material plane and returned - dozens of times; it must be layered with the strata of civilisation and dusted with traces of heaven. It should be less like island-of-the-boring-people-who-stand-around-looking-statuesque, and more a complex island-based city state...
Some alleyways haven't been completely restored to materiality and those who walk those streets risk turning into ideas. The ghosts of desecrated temples drift through the night air, settling in open spaces or possesing mundane buildings, filling grocery stalls and kanga stables with a sudden and inexplicable sense of the ineffable.
Sinister forces work to reactivate the sleeper units of metahumans who've lain dormant since the secret Rome/Carthage superhero arms race in the first century BC. BDSM tourists in scintillating fetishware flock to the island's now welcoming shores, where they brush shoulders with the staff of the Tartarus Embassy and the teams of archeologists who're struggling to make sense of finds that carbon date as older than the universe.
I'm thinking of a tone somewhere between the Verinas/Pullo segments of
Rome,
World of New Krypton, Pretsky's later
V. I. Warshawski novels and
Prospero's Books.
Wonder Woman: BLOOD ON THE STREETS OF PARADISE!
You know I think this is the best way that Wonder Woman could go. How better to be an ambassador for a country than have that country an actual active part of the world? I completely agree with you on this Richard and your stance on Themiscrya. Sure it's an offshoot of Greek and Hellenistic culture but it's also an offshoot of Greek culture that hasn't been culturally contaminated by the fall of that civilization and it's incorporation into Roman/Christian/Renaissance etc. ideas. How would those ideas have developed in the interim free of that contamination? I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have stagnated in such a way as everyone since from Perez forward has portrayed this society as behaving. It would could a lot towards explaining why they have things like an invisible jet or a purple ray.
So the question now becomes if Themiscrya and Paradise Island are present active in today's world then what role does Wonder Woman play in society and as part of the Trinity?
The answer? Wonder Woman becomes the Themiscryan archaeologist discovering "Man's World" and seeing how and why it differed from where Themiscrya developed. Wonder Woman from I can tell in her early years was more so than Batman and Superman really rooted in the pulps with the blatant sexuality and surreal settings and villains that she constantly faced. Have Wonder Woman go on jungle adventures with an archaeology team (thus providing her with a unique supporting cast) fighting forgotten elder gods intent on subjugating mankind to their alien pre-universe ideas or mad. ancient cultures that are twisted reflections of the peace and prosperity of Themiscrya.
Diana though is a warrior though. She's the gray area between Superman's upholding of the law and Batman's quest for justice (and there is a difference between law and justice). In between her archaeological expeditions pit her against mad scientists, Nazi baronesses, and psychic dwarves (I swear these are all actual Wonder Woman villains). Have the ideas of the Greek Gods be present but hold off on fully showing them unless it matters. She's someone who has to make those decisions about gray areas.
What needs to be done is make Wonder Woman an interesting character in her own right instead of being Superman who is female and is really, really into Greek mythology.
If anything above all else, Wonder Woman needs to be an adventuress fighting the strange, mad things lying between the gods and aliens that Superman fights and the madness of men that Batman faces.
Jonah Hex
They were gonna do this with "All-Star Wonder Woman." Unfortunately, the writer/artist, Adam Hughes, suffered a broken hand and it seems to have indefinitely delayed the project. Whether it will ever see the light of day, whether as originally intended or repackaged somewhere else, is up to speculation.
With Bob Schreck, the editor of the All-Star line no longer at DC, there has been a lot of wild speculation that this project may never see the light of day since the All-Star line is pretty much kaput.
100
100
100
