You Come A Long Way, Bad-Ass!

August 6th, 2025

Wonder Woman can be difficult to love because like a lot of amazing things she's gotta be shared with people. Feminists and sex-starved wolves wrestle to control Princess Diana da First. Wild enough her builders were both. Billy Marston was our early century "Dr. Fill". Totally a vintage pop-psychologist, S+M horn-dog, polygraph innovator, plus creator of child's material aimed at little girls. Cramming bondage into as much panel-age as he and artist H.G. Peter within her titles their trademark storybook luster could concoct. Me, I get worn out on the gazing placed on his intimate life. To this day I don't know nor care about Jerry "Superman" Seigel or Bob "Batman" Kane's fetishes. One thing I hate is people taking the boss thing of sex then pushing it into boring or morose territory by obsession. Living with 600 sex criminals over a decade I've heard enough, Sister.

Multitudinous dudes and dykes wanna slobber over her, and honestly that's inherent to the creation. Prudery was something Marston and 1940's proto-feminist folk were against. Di's ensemble was shocking then for its times, almost a string bikini or g-string despite the target being wee women needing a superhuman to call theirs. Feminists the longest have decried Di's appearance being for "the male gaze". Au contraire, mon freur, 100% the beauty of Aphrodite she packed purposefully.

Problem is often, she's not cherished nor written as the top thing that makes her coolest because sex and other superficial issues get smeared all over her: being our first SCIENCE FICTION action Super Heroine! How bad-assed is that?

Early Di is a 20-esque scientific genius, medicinal wiz, flies an invisible robot plane, Zooms off a laptop with Greek columns on it in 19-forty-some-odd, has a TV in mom's boudoir to spy over the entire Earth, uses Amazonium bracelets for bouncing bullets, a lasso from links off the mythological girdle of Hyppolyte to extract info from baddies, earrings for underwater breathing and language interpretation, all while riding giant kangaroo-back in Amazonia - totally Woman-Kanda, not now's cinematic isle of pissy horseback sword-slingers. Fifties come, Dr. M. splits. Now she's a romance lead with none of those attributes. Silver Age all the pecker-bearers - Hawkman, Green Lantern, Flash, and the Atom get Sci-Fi facelifts. Di downgrades to an archaic maiden with superpowers who hangs out with her mom, and somehow herself as both a teen and toddler for one dumb decade before losing her costume to go kung-fu fashionista.

Personally I adore "Diana Prince Is Wonder Woman". Stripping her powers and such was unnecessary. Having her be an agent for the Amazons still owing her strength to the previously explained Amazonian discipline of channeling psychic to physical energy could've rocked. Point being, she's meant to be a female from a mysterious ancient island who beats people up for good reasons. That gets audiences excited elementally. Stuck with figures they thought nobody loved but had to be used, those dudes had no idea what to do with Wonder (or any other) Woman before Batman: The Animated Series. That Emmy-winning iconoclast proved such an audience existed with vast responses to Ivy, Catwoman, Renee Montoya, the return of Batgirl and birth of one mirthful maiden setting those clowns straight. Crowds love 3D ladies let to mix it up with the boys, not only be ciphers or sidekicks.

Political moves rarely wind up reaping real rewards. For all the hoopla, competent filmmaker Patti Jenkins' two films for me are flops. How am I measuring this? Glad you asked this Sociologist-in-training trained in objectivity.

Which pair of female-led action vehicles would anybody agree have the greater not only cultural impact but pan-demographic re-watchability? "Wonder Woman" and "...1984" OR "Kill Bill Volume 1" and "...Volume 2": no question. Nor excuses neither. Tarantino's vaster response financially isn't the hype machine and machismo be damned. This man built the better beast than the broad with the biggest pedigree in pop-culture. We should still be dissecting the epic battle between Wondy and the Cheetah. Instead it was a dark, muddy, and forgettable one with me checking clocks, wondering how long was left for her to vanquish Max Lord as this snoozer packed in its penultimate punch. So I won't get shanked, let me state fault isn't one bit gorgeous Gal Gadot's. This is everybody's. DC, maybe Diane Nelson, Patti, fans, pseudo-fans with worn keypads, all making the same mistake thinking she's too good to be a superhero. Like that's an insult. Problem is, they're so busy making her goddess, ambassador, princess, vestal virgin, and anything but that she blows at the thing she was constructed for often compared to exciting colleagues with popular universes like the Lanterns and Flash.

Pre-arrest constantly on social media I kvetched re: Diana's disconnect from her creator's cool concepts. Knowing if somebody gave love and kindness to the original recipe it'd be the most delicious Di in decades. Wish Grant-ed! WW Earth One was beyond my expectations, dreams, and capacity to explain the enormity of. Every note hit and then some with the genuine article back to life, back to reality like Soul II Soul sung, but a challenging narrative that embraced all audiences ideologically. Guru shit, Morrison.

Problem is it solved D. for me. Beverly Cloonan's impressive run, though better than most couldn't keep my focus. Like the antique Looney Tunes where Brooklyn mice Hubie and Bertie break and enter a cheese shop and glutton-ize unto repulsion, I'd had my utter fill. Earth One was the period on that sentence. Then I gambled on Absolute Wonder Woman. Winner, ding-ding! Hola back, Gurl!

Bringing my blog home to prison, a corrections officer giving me the lowdown in the pill line (gaw, for the day I can go in my kitchen, open a bottle and simply swallow a tablet without standing behind 30 convicts) hipped me to the popularity of the Absolutes. Particularly and unsurprisingly Batman. Joker sporting his fetus-jacket was the selling point. Frankly Kids, like this seriously dope Thee Marloes jam in my ear-buds secs ago sung "Cause my heart has had enough" regarding dark material. For Mercy's sake I'm in PRISON. Little rays of light don't hurt time and again. Regardless I ordered DC's Absolute Trinity: Bat, Super, and Wonder. Quickly I'll hand you a juicy incarceration side-dish to your comic review - my ex-Nazi gangster/ex-fiance got shipped with WW Vol I, and the molester of one entire daycare center he beat to pieces over those crimes ultimately leading to my man's expulsion from here got the other two took from me. There are several morals here but I'm bounding back to comics 'coz they help me escape all such things. That's why I reordered Volume One plus Two of Absolute Wonder Woman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLOl_rpk6Ec&list=RDJLOl_rpk6Ec&start_radio=1

K, I was trepidatious with the description saying Di here is raised in Hell by the evil witch Circe in a different, darker world. Inside three pages my pacing slowed to a savoring crawl reserved for a finest fare so rarely read. That dreamy storybook Peters quality of yore gets brought to the 21st century with unparalleled grace by Hayden Sherman. Tattooists take note. Mythological imagery rendered into elegant perfectionist panels throughout unfailing to the end. Also reflecting and augmenting Peters' seed (sounds sexier than that's supposed to) is this craftsperson's athletic, robust Diana still model-gorgeous. Volume Two's chores go at the climax to Matias Bergara, a fashionable stylist. Hopefully this was fill-in work, but being behind the Ultimate Firewall I'm unsure. Sherman's art fit Kelly Thompson's considerate heroic opus so well it's jarring shifting copilots. Even the remarkable picturesque style of Mattia DeLulis while phenomenal, taken from another source and married into the trade disjoints a masterclass marriage of mind and motor here.

What Kelly accomplishes is genius storytelling. Dodging politics but presenting a politically formidable character: showing up, not showing OUT. Remarkably written, and crafting her into a powerful super-heroine witch surrounded by technological nightmares is killer. Inverting origin formulas with the essence intact, the impetus of Absolutes, is wondrously accomplished.

That thoughtfulness in scenes like Wonder Tot defeating the golden serpent in her crib as lovestruck Circe watches impressed and impassioned glitter through the big-picture journey. Her use of archival characters well chosen from the almost-century inventory kills competitors coming before. Even given free reign with a blanker slate than those glued to Earth Zero this visionary quality transcends that excuse showing Ms. Thompson is a pack leader.

DC now for my money relies on legacies and dynasties. Material spanning a century taken and mined for literary gold. Myself a fan of the editing and revision stage above else, smart reboots and reinventions like this (though this is other level - Superman to me was a good Elseworld's event) reward the half-century fan ready to strap in and repeat.

As for Absolute Batman? Amazing too, but this ain't about him. I'm collecting the DC Compact Editions now, and hope they do a volume with that title. Having finished their version of Batman: White Knight it was beyond expectations 1000% especially its Harley twist.

You might garner I'm big on action ladies. Guilty. Babs Gordon's my fave. DC Compact's Batgirl Of Burnside ships to me next month. Excited to do pieces like this here, if you like these books too, recommend something and I'll see if the fine folks at The Hit Pointe can get it to me. PLEASE - if you dug this, share it some place! I'm out in under a year and want to build this baby before I bail. Work wonders out there, y'all! Fly back quick... xoxoxo Batmama

Devoted to the charming Alex Wright after learning last week he left us. This red-headed grizzly cherished comics considerably like myself, in secret clubs sharing our lives during dark days personally he and a group of digital Comic Nerds were sunbeams. Our fella posted a catalogue of Wonder Woman issues ignited with her All-Star debut. Total joy reading together, a big family of stirred-up kids. One thing I always wanted and envied was big families, and the one he and I shared was a warm up act for nowaday's beloved criminal community. Good night, Mr. Wright!