The Four Color Media Monitor

The Brooklyn Daily's written a puff piece about Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang's drastic changes to Wonder Woman, with Chiang the one interviewed here:

Her unlikely origin story began with polygraph pioneer William Moulton Marston, a feminist theorist and psychologist with an apparent bondage fetish, who invented the Amazon warrior princess with the blue eyes and ample — ahem — ringlets of hair. And for eight decades since her creation, she has been wrestled into submission and tied up by one-too-many alterations, leaving her with a dearth of fans, despite the way she turns fanboys’ heads when she snaps a villain’s neck.

Is that supposed to be a reference to the 2005 story where she broke Max Lord's neck prior to Countdown, one of the most offensive things they ever published? What really made it horrible was how, as out-of-character and forced Lord's turn to a villain was (including his repellant slaying of Blue Beetle Ted Kord), the mind-control job he did on Superman to force him into acts of destruction could've been a lot worse if WW hadn't done something about it, yet Supes and Batman both disapproved of saving not just the former from disaster but a whole lot of the public too. For trying to stop a villain from controlling a hero into committing violence, she's villifed by the World's Finest and the public. Where the logic in that? Greg Rucka, who penned that embarrassment, should be ashamed of himself.

In this past Wednesday’s release of the “0” issue, Diana of Themyscira finally gets an origin story that is cogent and concise, has a bold 1960s Marvel art style, and presents a clear theme: when a coming-of-age hero is taken under the wing of Ares, she must decide if death is necessary for justice.

“It’s not a standard origin story where we show how she left Paradise Island, but it is about her character and a specific moment of how she grows into a hero,” Chiang said. “The ‘0’ issue deals with Wonder Woman’s childhood. We hint at it not being as rosy as one might think. She’s a princess in a culture that prizes skill and achievement, so she’s always had to prove herself worthy of the title.”

She becomes a disciple of Ares, who was usually a warmonger just for sport and other wrong reasons in past renditions? No chance this'll be rosy at all, I'm sure.

“Our job for ‘The New 52’ was explicitly to reinterpret the classic Wonder Woman story in a way that would be accessible for new readers and exciting for long-time fans,” Chiang said. “We’ve made some people angry, but we’ve also gained a different audience that had never picked up a Wonder Woman comic before, and I think that speaks to the strength of what we’re doing.”

Well it's been nearly a year and with examples of retconning like turning the Olympians into a mafia and changing the Amazons into lurid savages, I don't think they've made it accessible or exciting, and whatever new audience they have isn't reflected well by sales. All they've done is as they say - make everybody angry and discouraged.

And in reintroducing the woman warrior to new audiences, Chiang didn’t feel as though he was tasked with redeeming the character — just doing what it took to get her right.

“We’ve been given a fair amount of artistic license in interpreting the designs, and for me, it was about simplifying and streamlining, and making her feel distinct and believable as an Amazon warrior. Her height and build, her big Mediterranean hair, the cut of her shorts, those were all things I had to consider carefully. She couldn’t look like a runway model, or a swimsuit model. You have to believe this woman can take down a monster,” he said.

“Love it or hate it, people are talking about Wonder Woman, and that hasn’t happened for a while.”

And then he falls back on the now classic insult, implying that even negative buzz is a wonderful thing, when real, dedicated writers (and artists, as in Chiang's case) hope for positive responses, not negative ones. All they did with that license was blacken the image of the Amazons and Olympians, and they certainly aren't redeeming WW or her community and background with those kind of retcons.

Labels: dc comics, dreadful artists, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, violence, Wonder Woman