The Four Color Media Monitor

Time Out Chicago interviewed Brian Azzarello, and he predictably takes a path that won't be honest about why his detractors don't like what he's done to Wonder Woman. First, he says in reply to the following query:

How did this gig come about?

I was out to dinner with Dan DiDio. This was actually prior to the New 52 becoming the New 52. We were actually in talks about me doing a different character. We’ve gone out to dinner and I told him what my feelings were about taking this character in a certain direction. He was happy with it, so we were finalizing that. I asked, “Are you doing this [heading in new directions] with some of the other ones?” He said Batman is staying Batman, and he told me what editorial wanted to do for Wonder Woman. I was appalled. I came up with something different right there at dinner. I thought the direction was going to be a mistake for that character, right at her core. And I knew nothing about her!

Which doesn't matter one bit to someone like DiDio. He's actually being rather slippery on the issues surrounding what editorial wanted to do, since if his visions suited their disrespectful positions on the material they're in charge of, why should they have any problem with his ideas? Clearly, they didn't.

Now, his reply to the query about why the disapproving crowd doesn't like his take on WW, he gives a peculiar response that could even end up turning off liberals:

You know there are comic-book purists who hate the idea of Wonder Woman having a father.

Some people thought it was an insult to the ideal of feminism. Giving her a father was an assault to that. Though I have never met a feminist who didn’t have a father. ... With Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, any really famous character, you can break their origins down into a sentence or two, and Wonder Woman didn’t have that. And the sentence or two is not for people who read comics; it’s for people outside of comics, in general popular culture. But now she is Zeus's daughter, and now it works. In a general pop-culture sense, it works. That’s something that everybody can get their head around.

Even if there were detractors who said that, I doubt they were that many, and I don't think even the most hardcore feminists have ever denied having a father. In any case, he's obscuring the real problem WW fans have with this, that it makes the whole origin less imaginative - instead of being an entity created by magic, she's now just like anyone else, and worse, the Greek pagan deities are being depicted like a mafia, and the Amazons as a bunch of vile, murderous monsters. Unfortunately, this has become pretty predictable how many of today's press and comics contributors won't lead an in depth discussion of what they're doing or show the courage to answer and defend their visions.

The irony is that Azzarello, undoubtably a liberal, is willing to say something that his own fellow leftists could find irksome, as he does whatever he can to avoid the deeper issues and avoid addressing the real problems the audience has with his reprehensible rendering of WW and the Amazons.

Labels: bad editors, dc comics, dreadful writers, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, violence, Wonder Woman