Gad, Sir! Comics!

It’s quite unsettling to consider that Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is only 10 years older than Star Wars. Those 10 years seem to cover so much more time than the next 30. Memory has a parallax effect all of its own.

It’s not the best Beatles album, but it was the most pregnant with possibilities, marking that moment when vivid primary colours burst out of the constraining Mondrian grid of mod, but before they all mixed and faded and turned into the dung-brown of the 1970s.

Of course that metaphor is excessively visual. This is a blog about comics, so what else can you expect?



Pictures and panels

The Beatles: Yellow Submarine Playing Cards, Carta Mundi, 2004

Batman issue 222, cover by Neal Adams, DC Comics, June 1970, scan pinched from Mile High Comics

“The Pepperguard” by Alex Ross, from Kingdom Come: Revelations, DC Comics/Graphitti Designs, 1997

Wisdom issue 6 “The Rudiments of Wisdom”, part 6 “Look Out, Here Comes Tomorrow” by Paul Cornell (writer), Manuel Garcia (penciller), Mark Farmer (inker), Guru-eFX (colours), Joseph Caramanga (letterer) and Nick Lowe (editor) Marvel Comics/Max, July 2007

So 52 week 52 brought back the DC Comics multiverse, or “megaverse” as Rip Hunter wants to call it (though, really, something called the megaverse should be full of multiple versions of Judge Dredd, not of Superman). And with it came Earth-2.



Before the Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986, I much preferred Earth-2 to Earth-1, the home of most of DC’s comics at the time. Partly, that was because DC allowed things to change there – Clark Kent had married Lois Lane, Batman had died – but a lot of the appeal was that events there had passed in real time. Superman first appeared in 1938; the Justice Society disbanded in 1951; Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle married in 1955; Power Girl met the reconstituted JSA in 1976 …

… so if Earth-2 is back, she’s aged about 50 now. I’m sure that Dan Didio will soon be issuing a memo to all DC artists reminding them to draw her accordingly.



No, that’s not going to happen, is it? Although Crisis on Infinite Earths remains the worst idea ever perpetrated in superhero comics, for its destruction of the niche ecologies in which different types and styles of story could be told, the truth is that “real-time” Earth-2 was already becoming untenable by 1986. The first generation heroes were hitting their seventies, and after 10 years of continuous Earth-2 stories, DC would soon have had to make choices about whether and how to age the second generation. And since the two most prominent of those, Power Girl and the Huntress, were good-looking women, it’s unlikely that DC would have wanted to let time have its effects.

It’ll be interesting to see how DC handles its new Earth-2. It would be nice if, contrary to its one panel to date, the new Earth-2 turned out to dominated by third-generation heroes, with the youthful Power Girl explained by some sort of time warp. But I’m betting that, instead, the 1976-1986 stories will turn out to have happened in some recent, nebulous comic-book time.

Because you can’t go home again – no matter what the speed at which your home vibrates.


Panels and pictures
52 issue 52, written by Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka and mark Waid, art breakdowns by Keith Giffen, finished art for this panel by one or more of a large crew of artists whose work I don’t know well enough to identify, letters by Ken Lopez, edited by Michael Siglain, DC Comics, May 2, 2007

Power Woman drawn by Alex Ross, from Kingdom Come: Revelations, DC Comics, 1997


Addendum (20 minutes later)
I've now seen Grant Morrison's Newsarama interview, in which he says, "And the parallel Earths you see in issue #52 are not the familiar pre-Crisis versions. If you think you recognize and know any of these worlds from before, you'd be wrong." So my post may be even more off-beam than usual.

On the other hand, Morrison also says, "Each parallel world now has its own huge new backstory and characters," whereas Geoff Johns, when asked, "Do they fit the descriptions of former earths? Or are they kind of open-ended now?", replied, "Right now, they're just out there. 52 earths. That's all. And you'll start to see them here or there, but the goal really is, like the end of the issue said, 'It's a world full of possibilities.' We don't want any rules on our stories. So let's be able to tell stories of all sorts of different things."

Morrison also demands, "And no crossovers! Each of the parallel universes should exist in its own separate stream with no contact from the others - not until we have a story worthy of bringing them together." Countdown seems to have contradicted that within a week.

So who knows?

Wonder Woman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told, 187 pages of strip, DC Comics, 2007, US$19.99
Features: “The Origin of Wonder Woman” by Paul Dini (writer) and Alex Ross (artist)
“Wonder Woman Comes to America” by William Moulton Marston (writer) and Harry G Peter (artist)
“Villainy Incorporated” by William Moulton Marston (writer) and Harry G Peter (artist)
“Top Secret” by Robert Kanigher (writer), Ross Andru (penciller) and Mike Esposito (inker)
“Wanted – Wonder Woman” by Robert Kanigher (writer), Ross Andru (penciller) and Mike Esposito (inker)
“Giganta the Gorilla Girl” by Robert Kanigher (writer), Ross Andru (penciller) and Mike Esposito (inker)
“Wonder Woman’s Rival” by Denny O’Neil (writer), Mike Sekowsky (penciller) and Dick Giordano (inker)
“Wish Upon a Star” by Elliot Maggin (writer), Curt Swan (penciller) and Phil Zupa (inker)
“Be Wonder Woman … and Die!” by Robert Kanigher (writer), Jose Delbo (penciller) and Dave Hunt (inker)
“Who Killed Myndi Mayer?” by George Pérez (writer and penciller) and Bob McLeod (inker)
“She’s a Wonder!” by Phil Jimenez (writer and penciller) and Andy Lanning (inker)
Cover by Alex Ross


DC’s post-Infinite Crisis relaunch of Wonder Woman has been faltering badly. In such circumstances, creators often try to reconnect with some earlier, definitive version of the character in question. Want to get the Fantastic Four right? Go and read some Stan and Jack. For Batman, the basic vision created by Bob Kane, Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson can be filtered through lenses provided by O’Neil and Adams, Englehart and Rogers or Miller and Mazzuchelli, but it remains consistent. For Superman, the version of choice at present is the one overseen by Mort Weisinger, rather than Siegel and Shuster’s original, but the principle is much the same.

So what do past versions of Wonder Woman have to offer the present? The latest volume in DC’s presumptuously titled Greatest Stories Ever Told series might hold some clues.

Under the deeply boring cover by Alex Ross (a particular disappointment after two decades of fine and often iconic covers by the likes of Brian Bolland and Adam Hughes) lies a rather erratic selection of stories. We get almost 50 pages by the character’s creators, William Moulton Marston and Harry G Peter, but there is way too much Robert Kanigher. True, he was a very long-serving writer, but the inclusion of four of his stories means that there is no room for anything by, for example, Roy Thomas and Gene Colan, who provided the last remotely successful version of Wonder Woman before the 1980s reboot. The O’Neil/Sekowsky story features a conventionally super-powered version of the character, rather than the depowered Emmapeeled Diana Prince who followed shortly after. There are only two stories from the last twenty years, with nothing by Greg Rucka, who seems to be the best-regarded writer the series has had in recent times.

The eccentricity goes beyond the choice of creators to the choice of specific stories. For example, we get two versions of how Wonder Woman came to adopt her Diana Prince identity, but the rest of her origin is treated only in a few panels by Dini and Ross culled from a much longer story.



The earliest stories, by Marston and Peter, are, of course, quite batty, with a fairy tale logic and Marston’s strange belief in improving society through bondage and “loving submission” to authority. It is hard to see how they could be used as the basis of a mainstream DC superhero comic book nowadays. But they are more purely entertaining than anything else in this book, and, stripped of their BDSM elements, might form the basis of an all-ages read of similar tone to Jeff Smith’s Shazam!, or alternatively something akin to “magical princess” manga.

Kanigher and Andru’s stories are at the dull end of typical silver age superhero fodder. They are also marked by an increased sexism. Marston had written Wonder Woman in the days when Katherine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell were playing witty independent women on screen and Rosie the Riveter was heading to the factories. Kanigher was working in the age of Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe and happy homemakers. Little wonder that he assumes that, if Diana were to marry Steve Trevor, she’d have to give up her super-hero career. After all, she’d be too busy cooking his meals and ironing his shirts.



Mind you, it is almost tempting to envisage Wonder Woman in a comics version of Bewitched, trying to keep Steve and the neighbours from learning that she has been using her powers surreptitiously to defeat those pesky super-villains. With Agnes Moorhead as Queen Hippolyta.

The O’Neil/Sekowsky story is worse. Steve Trevor is tried for murder. Here’s what happens in court.



From here on, Steve’s conviction for the crime is blamed on Wonder Woman: it’s her fault because she’s so emasculating and had the presumption to tell the truth under oath. This isn’t just the view of the prosecutor, it’s the view given throughout by Steve Trevor and even by Wonder Woman herself, so it was presumably Denny O’Neil’s opinion at the time too. Wonder Woman makes no criticism of Steve’s neanderthal behaviour, or even of the reason his alibi is so flimsy – at the time of the killing, with Wonder Woman off fighting criminals, he was busy chatting up the first available blonde, whose name he didn’t bother to get. Perhaps O’Neil thought that was Wonder Woman’s fault, too, for not being on 24-hour call for sex. Vile stuff, and definitely an approach to be avoided by modern creators.

The Maggin/Swan story is so forgettable that, even though I looked it up before starting this sentence, I can remember nothing about it now that I reach the end.

Wonder Woman was completely restarted after Crisis on Infinite Earths. The two post-reboot stories here are decent enough, and “Who Killed Myndi Mayer?” is quite a good little single-issue mystery story. But both Pérez and Jimenez make the mistake of trying to convince us that Wonder Woman is a paragon by having their narrators – Detective Indelicato and Lois Lane respectively – tell us so. The result is that their lead character is remote and uninvolving. Virtue need not be boring, but we need to understand and internalise the difficult decisions and choices that a virtuous character has to take. That is missing here. But, to be fair, with modern soap-operatic superhero comics it is hard to find stand-alone stories, so these two might not be representative.



All in all, this book suggests the rather bleak conclusion that there are no prior versions of Wonder Woman that could provide a solid grounding for a new one. Alternatively, before Gail Simone takes over Wonder Woman and Adam Hughes launches All-Star Wonder Woman, they might need to take inspiration from a completely different set of stories from those presented here.


Panels
Wonder Woman “Villainy Incorporated” by William Moulton Marston (writer) and Harry G Peter (artist), Wonder Woman issue 28, March/April 1948
Wonder Woman “Top Secret” by Robert Kanigher (writer), Ross Andru (penciller) and Mike Esposito (inker), Wonder Woman issue 99, July 1958
Wonder Woman “Wonder Woman’s Rival” by Denny O’Neil (writer), Mike Sekowsky (penciller) and Dick Giordano (inker), Wonder Woman issue 178, September/October 1968
Wonder Woman “She’s a Wonder!” by Phil Jimenez (writer and penciller) and Andy Lanning (inker), Wonder Woman (second series) issue 170, July 2001


All reprinted in the volume under review

Alex Ross’s cover for an upcoming issue of Justice Society of America has caused a bit of a kerfuffle because of the bulge in Citizen Steel’s pants. As Dick Hyacinth says, there have been “several arguments that Ross painted [Citizen] Steel with a bulge only because his model had one.”

Piffle. Let’s start with another Ross painting, done for the animator JJ Sedelmaier, and reproduced in Comic Book Artist.



I trust that no-one doubts that that composition was designed to draw attention to the foreground figure’s package. Ross has placed us, as we look at the picture, below groin level, looking up, so that bulge is almost literally “in your face”. Now let’s look at the Citizen Steel painting.



The whole composition seems designed to draw the eye down to Steel’s dick. The raised arms make his torso a triangle pointing down to it. This is reinforced by the way the musculature has been painted, emphasising diagonals converging on the groin, by the folds in Steel’s strained pants, and by the “Y”-shaped design on the costume, which acts as a pointer. None of that is accidental, surely.

So what is Ross up to? Perhaps he’s just having a joke. Perhaps it’s a plot point, and the Citizen’s steely erection will save the day from Star Sapphire’s radioactive vagina. Perhaps it’s tit-for-tat (as it were) for all those cheesecake covers of DC superheroines – so common that DC has just put out a 200-page hardcover book of them. Perhaps, after 70 years of homoerotic superhero comics featuring scantily dressed musclemen wrestling with each other, Ross feels that it is time to move one stage closer to the money shot.

I wonder how it will sell?


Digression
I assume that, for American readers, the name Citizen Steel brings to mind Citizen Kane or Citizen Robespierre or some such.

But I’m a middle-aged Englishman, so I just think of Citizen Smith. Freedom for Tooting! (Or wherever Steel hails from.)


Pictures
Ambiguously Gay Duo Comics, cover by Alex Ross, JJ Sedelmaier Productions, 2003, reprinted in Comic Book Artist volume 2 issue 2, October 2003

Justice Society of America issue 7, solicitation image by Alex Ross, DC Comics, 2007