The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 512: Wonder Woman v.1 #257, July 1979

Today is mine and my lovely wife's twentieth wedding anniversary. One of the great things that she brought to our joining together was a small, but very cool, collection of comics she'd had since she was a little girl. I thought that today I would read one, as a way of paying tribute to the most wonderful human being I know.

I was a bit flummoxed when I first got my hands on these comics. There were a lot of Disney and Archie comics, but sprinkled about for flavour were some cool superhero titles. Like this issue of Wonder Woman - published by Whitman? Now, many years ago, I figured out for myself that these comics were more than likely packaged together and distributed by Whitman, but, coincidentally, as I was reading the back matter of this issue, the question is actually posed to Bob Rozakis in his "Ask the Answer Man" column. He verifies that these comics were published as special value packs. I remember such things, but haven't seen any for many moons.

Pre-Crisis Wonder Woman is really pretty great. Unlike many of her incarnations, this one strides across the page like the Greek goddess that she is. Her thoughts and actions are epic. The comic begins with the invocation-like list of the deities that have gifted WW with her powers, echoing the beautiful opening captions of the earliest of her adventures, and calling to mind the incantations that Alan Moore takes up in his meditation on Wonder Woman in Promethea. This poetic aspect of the character is one that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves. More than most of the mythic superheroes, Wonder Woman is one that almost self-consciously has her origins in language. She is a created figure, going by her original origin (I'll be honest, I have no idea if she's still meant to have been molded from clay in the newer iterations of the character), and where narratively she is sculpted from clay, figuratively, she's sculpted from words. This is something Marston understood very well in his original scripts. I'd urge you to have a look, even at just those opening captions. They're really quite lovely.

In this issue, Wonder Woman is faced with the menace of Multi-Man, an old Challengers of the Unknown villain, who has one of the most ridiculous costumes I've ever seen.

You're welcome.

(Also, we have a variation on the Wonder Woman being restrained theme here, though it's glass spheres and sleeping gas, rather than shackles and chains.)

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 426: True Love #1, January 1986 ("Wuv, twue wuv" Week, Day 6)

As with yesterday's comic, this one is a reprint of old romance stories, though without the re-scripting. A collection of tales from Standard Comics in the 1950s, featuring some of the luminaries of the industry, these stories are a welcome break from the heart-wrenching, angst-filled stories of teenage heartache. These are stories of what comes next, of the "happily ever after," and how it can oftentimes be just as difficult as early romantic entanglements. Which is probably, as someone whose been married for 20 years, why this comic appealed to me more than most I've read this week. As someone who understands the kind of daily work involved in being in love, and loving, it's nice to see such subjects given a good treatment.

Even more, one of the stories in this issue features a woman who can fix a car, and doesn't take shit from a mopey man with whom she has a relationship. There's even a gentle-yet-heavy-handed exploration of PTSD in the wake of the Korean war, which offers an interesting perspective form which to start thinking about these sorts of romance comics. Industry creators have, for a long time, claimed that one can tell grown up stories using a medium that is far too often associated with children's literature, and these stories offer evidence. Instead of relegating the medium to one that is only useful for action stories, we see from this sampling that creators were trying to tell stories about the things that move us, and that we are moved by, in our daily lives - not unlike most serious, literary authors. True Love shows us that there are romance stories for grown-ups, even if the cultural mores of the 1950s leak through a little too prevalently sometimes.

Also as with yesterday's comic, I read the opening text feature, which revealed where these comics had originally appeared. It was nice to see acknowledgement of the fact that most of these stories were written by men for women, and that that opens up the stories to a slew of critical problems, but I found that, by and large, they treated women with far more respect and interest than the teen romances I've been reading this week. True Love was a 2-issue mini-series, and I think I'll be looking for the second issue for another sampling of these thoughtful stories.

One last thing - the cover does not have anything to do with the interior. It's beautiful, as is most of Dave Stevens' work, but it's actually the promotional blurb on the inside front cover that I find amusing. It calls this work "An unmistakable gem of a cover." Noting the pink hair of the lady on the poster, I can only imagine it's a shout-out to Jem and the Holograms, which was first airing around the time this comic came out. Eclipse always was a clever comics publisher.

Last day, tomorrow, and something a little different. See you then.