Wonder Woman's Island 
Wonder Woman



     From the very beginning Wonder Woman was very different from the other
heroines of the 1940s.  For more on that and some pictures take a look at the
Golden Age Wonder Woman Page.   
     Like all long running comics Wonder Woman had its ups and down.  By the  
early seventies it had become mired in mediocrity and readership was falling.
An attempt was made turn things around by replicating the Golden Age style
but that wasn't very successful.  So writer Dennis O'Neil took over and got 
radical; he stripped her superpowers, sent the other amazons to another
dimension, killed off Steve Trevor, gave her a mentor (I Ching) to teach her 
various martial arts and turned her into an Emma Peel-like character.  After 
a few years of that she was back to her old self which not only revived the 
character but made the seventies one of the most interesting eras for Wonder 
Woman.  Here's a few covers from back then, click on the thumbnail for a 
larger image.






So how does Wonder Woman wind up tied to a buoy at the
bottom of the ocean?  Well it's pretty lame actually.
The whole issue revolves around this eccentric
millionaire who's going to give a million to charity
if Wonder Woman can make up stories about an adventure
she had based on three pictures within this time limit.
So the cover is just one of these pictures and WW comes
up with this story about a missing diver, a giant clam
a sea spider (?) and a hungry sea monster.  Oh well, at
least the kids listening liked it and the millionaire
forked over the cash









In case the blurbs plastered all over the cover aren't
a big hint DC tried tio revive the Golden Age Wonder
Woman style.  Which meant bringing back Etta Candy and
the Halliday Girls and trying to replicate the H.G.
Peters artstyle.  The best I can say about is it's a
nice try.


















Another psuedo Golden Age story though I'm not clear
if Minister Blizzard was a real Forties villain or
just invented for the story.  Yes, it's Minister not
Mister, he holds a govenment position amongst the Ice
People.





















Here we're into Diana's Emma Peel Phase.  She's
abandoned the wimpy Diana Prince identity and while
she officially just runs a "With It" Boutique like
Mrs Peel she gets into all sorts of adventures.  The
cover's symbolic as Diana winds up working as a
bodyguard for a diplomat under threat of assassination.
So she's looking at maybe taking a bullet as she can't
deflect them anymore.













A very pulpish cover, exaggerated rather than invented
as she does get chained up by hooded types but she
doesn't kneel and wears the white jumpsuit that was
something of a trademark.

Once again Diana's working as a bodyguard, this time
to the publisher of a Playboy-like magazine targeted
by a group of purity crusaders who dressed a lot like
the Klan.  Naturally Diana doesn't like the publisher
but she believes even male chauvanist pigs are
entitled to protection.  This issue also introduced
Johnny Double, a PI they seemed to be setting up as a
new love interest.  Anyway it ended on a cliffhanger
with Double being wounded by the brainwashed
publisher.


The followup to the previous issue this cover is very
loosely based on the story.  The masked woman is Doctor
Cyber, the woman responsible for Steve Trevor's death.
While she appeared to perish when her undersea base
exploded she survived but was severely scarred.
Bitter (and not wound very tight in the first place)
over losing her looks Cyber has started a campaign to
punish everyone beautiful.  She was behind the Purity
Crusaders of the previous issue, one of several schemes
to gain her vengence.  The Publisher pushed feminine
beauty shich made him a target, Cyber has also been
kidnaping and brainwashing beautiful women to take
them out of circulation.

Initially intending to kill Diana, Cyber comes up with a better idea.  A face
graft!  Though it's a lot more high tech than you'd guess from the cover.
Anyway Diana's yoga trance keeps her from inhaling the anesthetic and she
breaks loose.  Cyber seems to die, impaled by one of her own scalpels.
Unfortunately nobody bothers to check her pulse.


This one's a bit of a cheat as that's Cathy, a friend
of Diana's, in trouble rather her but it's historically
interesting as this is the last Diana Prince, Wonder
Woman issue.  Next issue she regains her powers and
Paradise Island reappears.

The new kind of threat was a clothing store owner
trying to co-opt the local Women's Lib movement so
they'd stop going after him for exploiting women with
sexist fashions.  Things got a bit out of hand and
Cathy got kidnapped leading a rescue attempt and Grande
getting arrest and the store being closed down.  Which
threw a lot of low income, african-american employees
out of work so they started picketing Women's Lib.  I
suppose guest writer Samuel Delany was trying to make a
point but even for a socially conscious 70's comic it's a bit over the top.



In the previous issue Diana regained her superpowers
and wastes no time getting back into action.  She's
got a new job as a guide at the U.N. and (for reasons
I could never figure out) resumed her old wallflower
Diana Prince identity.  For some reason nobody notices
her radical personality change or even seems to
remember the once well known adventuress Diana Prince.

On with the story.  For accuracy I should note she's
chained to a nuclear missile rather than tied to a bomb
and dropped.  All thanks to a villain named Dr. Domino,
somebody should have told this guy a Domino mask
doesn't mean wearing a hood shaped like a domino.  Anyway
WW defuses the nuke but it crashes onto Domino's ship
which immediately explodes.  As he's too ludicrous to
bring back Domino really does die in the explosion.  Which just goes to show
that if you want to get ahead in the world a sensible name is a must.



For a couple of issues DC did Golden Age style stories
without any fanfare and did a much better job than
their previous effort.  The art was somewhat minimalist
but the stories with their emphasis on the amazon
virtues were a lot closer to the original Wonder Woman
stories than their previous attempt.

In this one a group of prisoners escape Transformation
Island before they can be reformed and take over
Paradise Island with knockout gas.  They put Wonder
Woman and Queen Hippolyte on trial for crimes against
evil.  As you can see they don't have much chance of
talking their way out of that.  Inventia, the leader of
the escapees, sentances Wonder Woman to the four dooms.
Four tasks she considers impossible with the understanding that as soon as
WW fails one the captive amazons will be executed.  In the following issue WW
completes all four but is doublecrossed by Inventia.  But she manages to free
herself and return Inventia and her gang to Transformation Island.



This one's set some years back when Wonder Woman was
Wonder Tot.  The men in question are masked aliens on
(wait for it) Space Kangas (those Kangaroo like things
the Amazons rid though Wonder Tot uses a large rabbit)
which leap from World to World.  Touching down on
Paradise Island they easily take over from the amazons
who figure with Aphrodite's law broken their powers
are gone.  The plucky Wonder Tot evades capture and
unmasks an alien to show they're female so contrary to
the cover men still haven't set foot on Paradise Island.
Realizing they still have their powers the Amazons
break free and the alien women are sent off to
Transfomation Island for rehabilitation.




With the brief Golden Age phase over it was back to
more action oriented fare.  These next few have various
members of the Justice League of America on the covers.
Why?  Well after she regained her powers the JLA
offered to restore her membership but she refused.
Diana was afraid that she was still too rusty after
her time as a mortal and might foul up when things got
intense.  So a bargain was struck, each of the JLA
members would individually monitor WW on a case and
assess how she did.  If they were all convinced she
did well then she'd accept the renewed membership.  So
began the 12 tasks of Diana which are easy to pick out
as the JLA monitor of that issue shows up on the cover.

In this issue WW investigates the mysterious
disappearance of a lot of famous feminists.  Incidentally she's jumped from
UN guide to a troubleshooter for the head of UN security which is how she
hears about this.  It turns out there's yet another parallel world where men
are men and women are property.  A few women from that world crossed over and
(despite an emotional reversal effect) got hooked on Women's Lib.  Returning
to their own world they started a revolution which the men in charge are
fighting by bringing in prominent Earth Women to denounce feminism.  Which
they are happy to do.  Huh?  Remember the emotional reversal effect?  Soon as
they cross worlds they suddenly decide men should be in charge.  WW follows
them over and manages to fight off the effect so she doesn't go quite as far
as the cover shows.  Naturally she brings the Earthwomen home and just as
naturally the bad guys dimensional abduction lab explodes.


Rather than controlling time Chronos has actually just
planted clock traps around New York,  While the Atom
watches Wonder Woman foils his scheme and captures him.























The mystery woman is a maskless Doctor Cyber up to her
old tricks again.  In this issue she learns her old
enemy Diana Prince is Wonder Woman and joins the Wonder
Woman rogues gallery.  As you might have guessed Cyber
makes another attempt at gaining Diana's face.  Of
course trying the operation at the top of a ski slope
while Wonder Woman is strapped to a sled (I'm serious)
wasn't such a hot idea.  Once again Cyber appears to
die, plunging to her death from a ski lift and once
again she returns later.  She became a regular
recurring villain until Wonder Woman wrapped up in
issue 300





A few issues after Wonder Woman got back into the
Justice League the comic switched to the adventures of
the World War II (Earth 2) Wonder Woman.  Probably
because of the TV series was on the air and doing the
same thing.  In the previous issue a time (and
dimension) travelling nazi showed up in the present and
dragged Wonder Woman back to the past.  Where she wound
up in a catfight with the original Wonder Woman who
figured she was a nazi imposter.  After they
straightened that out the two Wonder Women worked
together to return the Earth I WW home.  They managed
that but the original Wonder woman was knocked out when
the time machine automatically returned.


Anyway in this issue WW wakes up before the cybernetic nazi can do her in
but he gets away.  Queen Hippolyte erases her daughter's memory of the other
Wonder Woman and the eventual allied victory on the grounds she might not
give it her all if she knows victory is inevitable.  As for the cover WW does
wind up chained and with missiles being thrown at her but she's inside a maze
and free to move around rather than tethered and a sitting duck.  About two
years later the comic returned to the adventures of the contemporary Wonder
Woman.


In 1986 Crisis on Infinite Earths erased Wonder
Woman from history.  The original Wonder Woman and her
Steve Trevor are apparently living happily ever after
somewhere on Olympus but never existed in the new
continuity.  Their daughter Lyta aka Fury gained a new
mother when reality changed.  She's still around though
she's abandoned her superheroine identity, most recently
in Sandman.  Matter of fact she was crucial to the
plot of The Kindly Ones.  But I digress, back to
Wonder Woman.

Surprisingly there was one last pre-Crisis Wonder Woman
story after this but it was written as a Golden Age
Wonder Woman story.  The Legend of Wonder Woman by
Trina Robbins and Kurt Busiek was their homage to the 
original H.G. Peters illustrated, Charles Moulton written version they had 
loved in their own childhoods.  In this series Atomia, the Evil Queen of the 
Atom Galaxy from a seventies pseudo Golden Age Wonder Woman story in Wonder 
Woman 211 returned to menace Wonder Woman thinking her the main obstacle to 
Atomia's plans of global conquest.  She was right!

In her original appearance Atomia had attacked Paradise Island, gassing and
minaturizing Wonder Woman and several other amazons.  Her neutron robot 
slaves then bound and carried the captive Amazons into Atomia's subatomic 
world.  There Atomia revealed her plan to enslave them and use them as her
army to conquer Earth!  Wonder Woman used her own telepathy to take control
of the Neutrons and escape.  Her plans foiled Atomia vowed to return.  Which
brings us back to the Legend of Wonder Woman miniseries.  In this Atomia
again captures Wonder Woman and convinces Etta Candy's niece (who has been
tagging along with WW) that evil is fun and to switch sides.  Suzie shows a
definite flare for evil though Wonder Woman doesn't seem to take either Suzie
or Atomia very seriously.  However she is a bit worried that she hasn't done
a very good job as Suzie's guardian.  Anyway Wonder Woman escapes pretty 
easily as she wasn't shackled by a man so the chains are child's play to 
break.  She just played along hoping Suzie would reject Atomia's influence. 
We could speculate that knowing she could break free at any time so she might
as well enjoy it is why she doesn't actually break free until Steve Trevor 
arrives at her cell.  But maybe we're reading too much into it.  Then again ...
Anyway this series was the last hurrah for the original Wonder Woman.  It was
time for DC to unveil the new and improved (though this is very debateable)
Wonder Woman.



A year after "Crisis on Infinite Earths" Wonder  
Woman reappeared as a new heroine making her debut.  
Things had changed, the mythological aspects were 
emphasised, she saw no point in adopting a secret identity
so there was no Diana Prince anymore (in the revised 
continuity there never had been) and she no longer lost 
her powers when her bracelets were chained together.  So 
covers like this one are rare for the new Wonder Woman as 
villains lost their reasons to try and chain her.  Circe 
is an exception as supposedly if Diana dies, she dies too 
unless she kills Wonder Woman by a very specific ritual.  
But for the most part these days Wonder Woman's enemies 
are more likely to just try to kill her which isn't really 
an advantage IMHO



Thankfully there are occasions when capturing her is still 
in the villains best interests.  As witness the recent 
Body Doubles series.  Pity the interior didn't include
anything like the cover scene though the series did deliver
the best bound Black Canary scene in years 





















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