Wonder Woman #600

Well, they're messing with Wonder Woman again. I shouldn't be surprised, really. Messing with Wonder Woman is what people do. It all stems from the history behind the title: for a while there, D.C. had to publish a Wonder Woman comic or they'd lose the rights to the character. So D.C. has been in a position where it must produce Wonder Woman comics even if it didn't particularly want to. It seems as though a rolling succession of writers and editors have tried to take a character they weren't interested in and turn it into something that would interest them. And yet, for some reason, WW still sells badly.

Stable mates Batman and Superman manage to keep multiple titles running quite smoothly, with a fan base that will happily follow them wherever they go. Wonder Woman? Well, readers come and go and rarely stick around for long, and D.C. struggles to keep one title running. It's an absolute miracle they made it to #600, and I half suspect that's more due to stubbornness than anything else.

What have Batman and Superman got that Wonder Woman hasn't? I'd say people who "get" them. The folks who write for Batman and Superman know they can't mess with them too much. When they need to make the characters more interesting - when they go through one of their interminable re-boots and retcons - they go back to the original story, grab the heart of it and try to tell that story in the most interesting way they can.

They know that Superman is Clark Kent - that he is the last survivor of a doomed world who was raised by humans and can fit into human society, but is not human and can't avoid that fact. They know that his character is essentially that of a boy scout - he wants to do what's right and be helpful. Sure he fights crime and smashes alien space fleets to pieces, but it's essentially his way of helping an old lady across the street.

They know that Batman is Bruce Wayne - that as a boy saw his parents murdered in the street and has always wanted to do something to fix that. They know that he is disciplined and determined and is capable of pushing himself past limits that would impede most men. They know that he is essentially the noble vigilante - trying to save his city the way he couldn't save his parents.

No body messes with that. Nobody changes it. Everyone gets the essence of Superman and Batman and no matter how often the characters are updated for "modern readers", they are still essentially the same. The worst that ever happens to them is they become a bit more human.

Wonder Woman? Well no one seems to know who she is. That's why every time they try to make her "more interesting" they decide to lose some of the "baggage" of her past. No one tries to lose Lois Lane, saying she's "baggage". No one tries to save Bruce Wayne's parents, saying their death is "baggage", but everyone keeps trying to take stuff out of Wonder Woman and put something else in to replace it.

Through the magic of Trade Paperbacks I've been reading Wonder Woman since the Forties, and I can tell you how much she's suffered over the years. In the Forties, she had a bright future ahead of her. In the Fifites, they treated her like she was some boring kid sister they had to babysit. In the sixties, they got tired of babysitting her and wanted to scrap her, but found they couldn't (legal reasons), so they killed off everyone in her back story and turned her into Emma Peel. In the Seventies she got her backstory resurrected (but badly), and promptly bounced between not-too-bad and oh-for-crying-out-loud. In the Eighties she started looking up... right up until they decided to scrap the universe and start again.

When Superman and Batman started again, the essentials were all in place. But Wonder Woman? Well, George Perez, in his infinite wisdom, decided to scrap half her story and lose half her personality. He came up with a corker of a story line, that was worth reading, but was essentially broken. Perez broke Wonder Woman by losing Diana Prince and palming off Steve Trevor. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Diana Prince is as much a part of Wonder Woman as Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne are parts of Superman and Batman. To lose her is to lose the core of the character. Steve Trevor is to Diana Prince what Lois Lane is to Clark Kent. You can't rend him irrelevant.

Since then I've been waiting for someone to fix it. I knew it was possible. I knew they would be able to have some time-flux-thingy or act-of-the-gods that could put the right pieces back into place... But no one ever did. Everyone kept trying to build on the broken version - and whenever they decided the broken version wasn't doing it for them, they'd just break it a little bit more.

It seems to be the universal solution to the "Wonder Woman Problem" - get rid of her supporting cast, put her entire history in the too-hard basket and try to make an interesting character, which we can then dress in something resembling a star-spangled swim-suit and call "Wonder Woman". Thanks to her writers, the character has rarely been the same person for more than a few years at a time. No wonder readers don't stick with her. You can't treat a character like a third-tier nobody and expect it to sell like a first-tier best-seller.

When they restarted her again in 2006/2007 with Allan Heinberg's Who is Wonder Woman story arc, someone finally started figuring out what had been going wrong all this time. They were finally starting to fix her. Heinberg put Diana Prince back into the picture (Huzzah!) and provided a Steve Trevor substitute in the form of Nemesis (bit odd, but I'll take it). He wasn't abandoning the broken version (bold) but trying to fix it, rather than break it even further (finally!).

In the introduction to the TPB for Who is Wonder Woman, Brian K. Vaugn mentioned how appropriate the title was - how no one seems to be able to get a handle on who Wonder Woman is. Well, duh! That's because Wonder Woman is Diana Prince, and everyone's been trying to ignore that for the last 30 years.

Oh, and then Jodi Picoult took over for the Love and Murder story. Jody Picoult gets Wonder Woman. She understands exactly who Diana Prince is, and how that makes Wonder Woman tick. If Picoult ever decides to write the story for the movie, I will be a happy girl.

I haven't read the next couple of stories yet, but I hear things went from brilliant to "eh" as soon as Picoult handed over the reigns. And now, of course, Strasinski's playing in the sandbox and wants to re-envision her for the 21st century.

How is he doing this? Why by scrapping he support cast and backstory, of course, and trying to create a character he finds interesting, who he can dress up in star-spangled togs and call "Wonder Woman". For one bright and shining moment things were better. But now the rollercoaster is dipping again, and the ride continues. Sigh.

Oh, and the "star-spangled togs"? Well, I don't hate the new costume. Quite frankly, I'm all for tweaking the suit to make it more practical. I don't mind the boddice (see, you can give the poor girl some straps), and I love the belt, but I don't like the boots-merging-into-tights thing they've got going, and I'd prefer if they lost the jacket and whent for something like the shoulder armour Donna Troy was wearing a few years back.

But, then, who am I to talk? What's my opinion worth? I don't write for D.C. and can't make a skerrick of difference - I just care about the character.