Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Wonder Woman #211

I'm dragging out one of these 1970's 100-pg giants from DC, big four-color tomes which are eternal sources of joy in my life. Seriously, just looking at the cover on one of these babies cheers me up, whether it's the beloved chock-full-of-reprints Shazams or even the I've-never-even-read-it Unexpected (What's in that book, anyway? 'I picked up the fishbowl and – WHOA, there was a hundred dollar bill under it!'). I don't know if it's the hard-to-find reprints or the delightfully jumbled cover design or the striking, gate-like letterhead or just how much better a hundred-page book feels than a 22-page pamphlet (or whatever the current cynical appellation for regular old comic books happens to be), BUT I LOVE 'EM!

The gay jokes are getting pretty played out
on my end, folks, so I'll let you run with this
one yourselves.

That being said, though, I'm reviewing Wonder Woman #211 here and it makes me want to switch to the hard drugs.

I suppose I should get this out of the way first: I hate Wonder Woman and I'm sorry she has the vote! I've sort of documented my reasons in other forae, but chief among what I think of as Wonder Woman's many faults as a character is that she just seems sort of sloppily applied.

She's a mythical amazon, but she ends up fighting giant communist eggs and amorous space gorillas, or something called Mouse Man which was apparently a dude in a yellow mouse costume complete with fuzzy ears and nose. She's a character from Greek legend who wears an American ensemble. And, you know, whenever they ran out of story ideas, they just swiped whatever just happened in Superman last month.

Worst of all is continuity. I understand that Robert Khaniger's era as editor was the worst for this particular fetish for the past, but it kind of doesn't get any better anywhere else. In fact, the storylines are slapped on here so sloppily that I'm taking it upon myself to rate each stories' inconsistencies via a powerful, text-based Continuity-Meter. The internet is a wonderful thing.

"I came to WIN!

Even as we tear into this, I don't want to sell her short, because Wonder Woman is actually a very complex character. I say this because her shoes have an origin. In fact, everything she owns has a freaking origin, as revealed in this 100-pg Spectacular documenting How Amazons Shop.

I also like to think of this issue as the Volcano versus Iceberg 100-pg Spectacular! I have never SEEN so much hot (or cold) Volcano-on-Iceberg action in my short life! I'm going to try and keep track of that, too. Not like I did with the Contest of Champions scores and all ...

Story by story, let's go:

Sur-r-r-re you will!

Maniacs of Mercury – If you read enough Wonder Woman, you'll notice that some themes start to develop. For instance, there's the eternal 'Men from a world once fairly balanced between the genders suddenly get a wild hair and oppress all their women, and also Wonder Woman if they can.' The rider to this is usually 'Then Wonder Woman beats them and gives women ALL the power on the planet, and the women say 'Oh boy, we'll TOTALLY be fair in ruling over the men' which you know is total bullshit.'

Which is what the first story in this book is about, as I'm sure you figured. The fun all starts with Wonder Woman and her superhuman sorority sisters collecting cosmic matter from inside the safety of the invisible jet, via BASKETS ON STICKS! If it's any more logical, the sticks are VERY LONG. Oh, but from their coloring, I believe the baskets are also invisible. I imagine that must help.

Anyway, some classic nonsense occurs which draws the invisible jet into a collision course with the sun, which freaks out the Amazons because apparently they don't have a problem floating through the freezing, airless void with the windows open and their diaphanous togas on, but god forbid it gets HOT.

Rather than sizzle alive, the ladies end up on the planet Mercury, ruled by the cruel King Celerito (trans: 'Little Celery') who – along with his doughty, carrot-topped male cohorts – have conquered and enslaved their once-equal female cohorts. They did this by tricking them into doffing their super-powered sandals and going barefoot. I think that might be a metaphor.

After trying to kill Wonder Woman with a forklift (Olé! Actually, I'm lying, it was a steam-shovel), Celerito is handily overthrown by the Amazing Amazon and stomped to death by his planet's women like in the ending to the Stepford Wives.

Continuity Meter: According to the dial, we're only hovering at 'stupid'
Volcanos vs Icebergs: 0-0

This is ... This is ... Someone spent a LONG time
working out the perspective for this shot. I SIDE
WITH QUEEN ATOMIA!

Mystery of the Atom World – Wonder Woman sure swears a lot.

Here's the Wonder Woman drinking game: Every time she exclaims 'Suffering Sappho,' 'Merciful Minerva' or 'Great Hera,' you take a shot. By page 5, you'll be on your ass. Heck, on the third page of this story, she busts out all three in three consecutive panels! Language, Wonder Woman, language!

Anyway, I'd probably be swearing too if I were caught in this boner of a story. Wonder Woman discovers a sub-atomic world ruled by the evil Queen Atomia, who would have been here sooner except it took SO LONG to think up a name for her!

Inside the magenta-skinned tyrant's realm, we discover that protons are actually tiny, cruel women and neutrons are equally tiny (but not cruel) blue robots. Electrons are apes I think, and the strong and magnetic forces of the universe are actually midgets and lobsters. Beyond that, it gets a little theological for me, and all I can really say for sure is that Amazons are in serious need of a physics lesson.

Wonder Woman, your ... your foot is swearing
vengenace. Does this happen a lot?

So Queen Atomia somehow shrinks our gaily-garbed golem into pint-size, along with a handful of her Amazon amigas, and transports them to her miniature kingdom with the plan of turning Wonder Woman into a 'super-powered proton' which will be sent back into our world and wreck stuff. Rather than a life of subatomic servitude, Wonder Woman THINKS REALLY HARD and it makes the blue neutron robots go nertz and smash up the evil kingdom. Adults wrote this story, try to keep that in mind.

Continuity Meter: In the early coupla captions for the story, we're told that Wonder Woman is investigating the site of an atomic bomb test in the middle of the Pacific. However, Wonder Woman is (a) wearing a spacesuit, (b) is crawling down a barren crater and (c) is doing all this against a backdrop of stars. On the following page, an upward-rocketing Wonder Woman flies up into a clear-blue sky.

I'm no scientist, but either two different stories collided violently, someone changed the script after the first pages were drawn, or that brief bump almost broke the needle on the Continuity Meter ...

Volcanos vs Icebergs: 0-0, but the Volcano threatened to eat the Iceberg's children at a press conference.

How can you tell? IT'S INVISIBLE!

The Origin of the Amazon Plane –This one starts with the notorious Waterfront Gang making a 'fortress' out of a carnival Ferris Wheel. Which is to say that they were sitting in the cars and shooting wildly. I'm not really sure what their plan was, or who put it together, BUT GIVE THAT GUY A RAISE!

As a point of order, a Ferris Wheel makes for a lousy fortress. For one thing, it's pretty much wide-open, no matter how much you hunker down in the seat. Secondly, no matter how fast you're traveling, anyone chasing you can just draw a bead from the cotton candy machine and plug you between verses of 'Let Me Call You Sweetheart' on the mechanical pipe organ. This being said, this Waterfront Gang pretty much has everything to lose and nothing to gain.

No small surprise then that Wonder Woman up-ends the wheel-bound owlhoots and drops them off – criminal carnival attraction and all – in the local penitentiary. My mental image of this is hundreds of hardened convicts getting really excited that they now have rides! I bet they have to trade cigarettes for tickets, though.

All this mildly retarded hullabaloo leads Diana to reminisce about the origins of her invisible robot plane, because you don't think she pushed the thing to jail, do you? (Also, Invisible Robot Plane is only one adjective short of being the next big internet fetish. Farm, that's the adjective it needs, Invisible Robot FARM planes' ... HOT TEENAGE Invisible Robot Farm Planes ...)

The mood ... is about ... to change!

Anyway. Wonder Woman is sent by her mom, the reigning MILF of Fantasy File Island, on a series of Byzantine quests to recover the three pieces of her amazing invisible robot plane. Invisible TELEPATHIC robot plane! She finds the cockpit (for the first time in her life) tangled in the carnivorous leaves of an man-eating, undersea plant, which raises the question of how exactly a plant develops a taste for human beings when it's at the bottom of the freaking sea (Answer: Amazon dopes and their never-ending pearl diving for invisible telepathic robot farm hot teenage virgin planes etc etc).

Directed by engraved instructions upon the body of the plane segment (Was ... was the lettering invisible? How did she read it?), Wonder Woman then retrieves another segment from the bowers of an electric tree - I guess trees can do that - and then the bowels of an active volcano, which brings us to the first round of VOLCANO VERSUS ICEBERG – in which Diana uses the iceberg as a toboggan to retrieve the tail section. And maybe the black box, explaining exactly how the hell the thing got into this situation in the first place. Oh, I'm sorry, I mean invisible black box ...

Anyway, It's a good thing she won her invisible plane, because otherwise she would have had to settle for an odorless go-cart.

Continuity Meter: Compared to the other stories, this one reads like the World Almanac.

Volcanos vs Icebergs: 1-0, Iceberg just didn't have the stamina.

Athena makes exceptions for total tools.

Wonder Girl Amazon Teenager –I've read this one a few times, and I still can't tell if it's about Wonder Woman as a teenager or Wonder Woman's teenage sidekick Wonder Girl. I mean, I know it SAYS it's about Wonder Woman about a teenager, but if that's true then the story is FIVE HUNDRED TIMES MORE RETARDED THAN IF IT WASN'T ... and it was already pretty retarded.

Teenage Diana and Hippolyta – Wonder Woman's slender Nordic mother from the Greek Myths - are watching the GROWN-UP Diana performing super-deeds as Wonder Woman via some big-ass HDTV which sees into the future. You follow that so far? If not, you'll want to start diagramming the rest of this.

Teenage Diana grows envious of her grown-up self's awesome costume, and so begs her mother to let her have one of her own. Because you don't get nothing for free on Amazon Island, it's decided that (surprise) Diana has to perform THREE DANGEROUS FEATS to earn the right to wear a costume of her own.

Accompanied by useless tool Ronno the merboy, Wonder Girl has to tangle with, among other things, a 'cannibal clam.' Technically speaking, a cannibal clam is just a clam which eats other clams. Frankly, it doesn't sound that menacing. Worse for Diana are the mythological Roc, a big swordfish and – oh, hey, VOLCANO!

In the end, Diana has a star-spangled skirt, an eagle-emblazoned blouse and a magic lasso apparently similar- but not indentical-to her modern day lariat. Oh, and unfortunately, Ronno the merboy found out where she lives and he watches her from the shrubs sometimes when she undresses to shower.

Mostly what I learned from this story is
that Amazons have a Suggestion Box,
for crying out loud.

As an aside, and being a Superman fan myself, I like to pretend that Ronno is actually the awkward, emotionally immature younger version of Ronal, the sonofabitch merman doctor who stole Lori Lemaris from Superman. I know he ain't, mind you, but I just feel for those big, blocky Wayne Boring Supermans who used to pine along the bay.

Continuity Meter: After this story, the Continuity Meter began crying and told me it's never known love.

Even disregarding the is-she-or-isn't-she dilemma with the dual Wonder Girls (and my thanks go out to this hearty fellow who's taken it upon himself to take a stab at explaning Wonder Woman's berserk-ass teenage incarnation-slash-sidekick paradox), I'm surprised this story didn't set the Meter on fire.

One of the integral elements of Wonder Woman's origin is that she competed in an immense tournament for the right to be the Amazons' ambassador to Man's World, and furthermore that she did so ANONYMOUSLY and AGAINST HER MOTHER'S WISHES. And yet, here's Diana and Momma Hipp cheerfully gazing into the star-spangled, invisible jet-setting future of our little lady tyro.

So, basically, Hippolyta is really good at faking surprise, this is what I've learned.

Volcanos vs Icebergs: Still 1-0, this was sort of a team-up between Wonder Woman and Volcano. Volcano was better written.

Dunh-dunh-dunnnnh!

Winning of Wonder Woman's Tiara – Does every single article of her clothing have an origin (For the answer to that, skip ahead to the next-to-last entry)?

Here's the skinny – Wonder Woman's tiara, which she explains is the symbol of her status as princess among the Amazons, goes up for grabs! See, apparently, she also must compete against all the other Amazons for the right to wear the tiara. Which symbolizes her status as princess. And she's a princess cause her mom's the queen. And the tiara is symbol of that. But ... she ... could not have ... princess.

Anyway. Heaven forfend this should turn into yet another story where Wonder Woman undergoes three tremendous trials in order to pad out her wardrobe, oh no. No, in THIS story, Wonder Woman undergoes three tremendous trials AFTER also participating in a bunch on athletic competitions with the other Amazons. And she has to do this EVER DAMN YEAR! You think taxes are bad ...

In addition to the suggestion box, Amazons also have competing newspapers.

In the end, against all odds AND after dousing a volcano with an iceberg, Wonder Woman gets her tiara back. This seems to me like a lot of work to get back something you had when the whole mess started.

Continuity Meter: I swear, I don't even know anymore.

Volcanos vs Icebergs: 1-1, it's sudden death!

Wonder Tot and Mister Genie – I've said it before and I'll say it again, I can hardly express how much I hate Wonder Tot and Mister Genie. This is a hatred for the ages, and it burns so bright that I would frankly make a better villain for Wonder Woman than, say, I dunno ... Angle Man. The guy who was really into angles. I don't even know anymore.

Oh good, now he's dancing. This just gets better and better.

Anyway, this is one of those horrible Wonder Tot stories starring the apple-cheeked Amazonette committing acts of marauding mischief on an unsuspecting world. This time around, it actually leads up to the origin of Mister Genie, which is as good a reason as any to declare DC Comics a part of the Axis of Evil.

Wonder Tot gets 'banged' out of bed ... I'm not kidding ... by a strong gale, and then surfs the currents for awhile, ending up on an island of golden apple trees (Golden Apples on trees, that is to say...) protected by a serious-ass dragon who is not there to play around with your ass. GO DRAGON! I'm with you!

Unfortunately for my sense of good taste, the mighty sprite flings the dragon to kingdom come (Seriously, look for him in book three, page seventeen*) and then floats off to find a strange desert island, where a treasure chest captures her attention. Opening it, she frees the poor, belabored Mister Genie from millennia of imprisonment, only to find the genie to be a wrathful entity who intends to imprison his liberator for an equal amount of time.

Besides being an apt metaphor for our current troubles in the Middle East, Mister Genie's strict 'Imprison Wonder Tot Forever' policy really appeals to me.

Gosh, she sure is adorable ... DIE! DIE! DIE A
THOUSAND DEATHS! DIE!

Sadly, he's a dope, and falls for a little ventriloquism. Wonder Tot lives, and she and Genie become best pals, chasing down a distant star to use as a clasp Wonder Tot's beret. I hope it collapses her noggin. Or, alternatively, I hope anonymous space aliens come out of nowhere and shoot at them, WHICH DOES HAPPEN. I additionally hope they enter some time anomaly which causes Wonder Tot to grow up into Wonder Woman, though I don't know why, and also that actually doesn't happen, and then she goes back to normal.

Hopefully, you now see why I hate this stuff.

Lastly, Wonder Tots sound delicious.

*Dumbest joke I have ever made.

Continuity Meter: Remember during the confusing Wonder Girl story, I mentioned that one of Wonder Woman's integral origin elements was that her mother didn't know her own daughter was competing in the trials to become the Amazon's ambassador to Man's World?

Okay, well, in THIS story, someone needs to explain to me what the hell's going on when even her OWN MOTHER calls baby Wonder Woman 'Wonder Tot.' WONDER TOT. That strangely seems to imply some knowledge of her daughter's future career, which she really shouldn't know. Meh.

Also fucking up my Christmas is the fact that baby Wonder Tot has a golden lasso already. Once again referring to the above Wonder Girl story, the lasso is one of the objects for which teenage Diana must quest. Maybe she lost her old one. Maybe Wonder Tot's was the Fisher-Price 'My First Lasso' or something. I dunno. Anyway. Retarded.

Volcanos vs Icebergs: 1-1. Still. I'm running out of jokes for this.

Secrets of Wonder Woman's Sandals – Boy, just like a woman to have an origin for her shoes, am I right fellas? C'mon, back me up here, this guy knows what I'm talking about, this guy here. Hey, nice tie fella, someone guess your weight?

Seriously though, it's starting to get ridiculous. You think there's a secret origin of Wonder Woman's magical Amazon underwear coming down the pike? Did she have to endure three mythological challenges in order to get her Ortho-Tricyclene refilled? WHAT MANNER OF BEAST DID YOU DEFEAT IN ORDER TO GET THAT HILARIOUS REFRIGERATOR MAGNET, WONDER WOMAN?

Or maybe I could just wear my New Balances, mother.

So Diana is brought barefoot to stand before her mother, the Queen, who sets her daughter out on a challenge to get some damn shoes on. Good thinking, Hippolyta, she's gonna catch a cold running around like that.

High on my list of personally hilarious moments is when Diana – again, I mention that she's barefoot – ponders aloud as to what accroutement exactly her mother implies is missing from her ensemble. Just a thought, honey: Shoes. You're not Doc Manhattan, you know.

Hippolyta takes Diana to an Amazonian telephone wire, over which a pair of diminutive sandals has been flung. I'm not kidding about the diminutive part, they're teeny-tiny, for rilla. The Queen then explains that these sandals are magic sandals which reflect upon the courageous deeds of their owners, and grow appropriately. This is called 'the hard sell.'

I guess I'm not following this. Apparently, the shoes grow in size every time the wearer (assuming she can wear them, I suppose. You need ti-i-i-i-iny feets indeed) performs some marvelous deed. Wonder Woman's been around for, like, sixty years or something, and I'm thinking a week's worth of battering Egg-Fu senseless with his own handlebar mustache would be sufficient to get those things to proper size. By now, they ought to look like clown shoes, and require a passel of smaller amazons to carry.

Maybe it's a comment on how freaking lame Wonder Woman's villains are, how it's gonna take years for those sandals to grow. In any case, she wears boots now, I think that explains everything.

So-o-o-o anyway, immediately upon hearing the caveat associated with her crime-fighting bunny slippers, Wonder Woman – I say this with all due respect – promptly begins bitching loudly about how long it's going to take for some catastrophe to come along and require her delicate touch of justice. At which point a volcano explodes under Amazon Island. Happy Birthday, Diana.

So Wonder Woman saves the island, resulting in one shoe getting all big and the other staying tiny. Please keep in mind that this is the emotional crux of the story, whether or not the shoes get big. It's very dramatic.

In the end, Wonder Woman whups ass on some other menace, I specifically forget what it was, and then her sandals are normal size. This one had me on the edge of my seat, worrying that her footwear might be uncomfortably small. It was the thrill of a generation, these freaking sandals.

What sticks with me in this story is the possible moral dilemma inherent in deed-relative morphing shoe sizes, that being a situation where you'd avoid doing good deeds just because your shoes are finally broken in. I mean, if you had to protect an island from an undersea volcano just to make your shoes fit, don't you think you'd let a kid get run down by a bus in order to keep 'em there?

Continuity Meter: Okay, not precisely continuity, but rather a large contradiction in the premise of the story. Wonder Woman's told that she can't go be the Amazon Champion of Man's World until she has her magic shoes, but how else is she supposed to go perform courageous deeds? Ah, to hell with it, let's bring in volcano.

Volcanos vs Icebergs: Iceberg on a technicality, the volcano's mistake was fighting a war on two fronts, just like Hitler.

The Mirage-Mirrors - This one ends with an ALL-NEW story, which makes it EXTRA ALL-STUPID, which I suppose is fine. Fine for Wonder Woman, fine for the era, fine for comic books, how smart do we really want these things to be in the first place?

Sorry baby, NO FAT CHICKS!

Remembering that Wonder Woman is a mythological Greek champion imbued with the might and power of a half-dozen gods of legend and who has entered the modern world in order to fight for the rights and freedoms of all people under glorious equality, you won't be surprised to find out that she spends most of this story chasing men and looking like a fat balloon.

The brief of it is that Diana, man-crazy and predatory, is dying for some attention from otherwise-lovestruck Col. Steve Trevor, who won't stop blabbing about Wonder Woman's pulchitrudinous patriotic package. Abashed by her alter-ego attracting more affection than her dowdy done-under day disguise, our Amazon princess does what any ditzy dame from a sixties sitcom would do and goes blubbering off to momma for some adroit advice.

Man, how does Stan Lee DO that?

Anyway, Hippolyta - leader of a nation of self-sufficient Amazon warriors whose legendary escapades predate the birth of Christ - fills her daughter in on a sneaky, passive-aggressive little manipulation of her own making. BE PROUD, WARRIOR WOMAN! Seriously, I'll spare you the stupidity – particularly since Comicon Pulse covered it straight - but suffice it to say that Hercules was better off.

On Momma's advice, Wonder Woman turns up the flirt on Col.Steve, accompanying him to a seaside carnival. Okay. Little does Steve know, though, that Diana has rigged up a series of magic funhouse mirrors around the joint. Trust me, this is all an important part of the plan.

Judging from Superman's mighty creepy leer, I'm guessing he has other plans too...

The magic mirrors transform Wonder Woman first into an elongated, giraffe-necked freako, and then into an ovoid mass of feminine blubber. STILL PART OF THE PLAN!

After foiling an overcomplicated carnival-robbing scheme of the Angle Man – again, that's the guy who really likes angles, and in this case, obtuse and overwrought angles which make everything really difficult when all you really needed was to approach the ticket counter with a gun, ahem – Wonder Woman returns to normal, only to find Steve REPULSED BY HER FLESH! STILL! PART! OF! THE! PLAN!

Apparently hungry for woman, ANY woman, Steve rounds a corner at full tilt and almost mows down Wonder Woman in her civilian identity of Diana Prince. Practically tripping over his own engorged rod, he begs for a date, only to have Diana reveal that she's already got a date with Superman. Who's right there. Meaning Trevor not only lost his erection, he lost it so fast that it sucked his testicles up his spinal column. Lesson learned. I guess.

And there it is. At the end of these eight million stories, each one weighing in at forty-five thousand pages, I can honestly say that my opinion of Wonder Woman has changed completely. I thoroughly hate her now. I'm standing over the burning ruins of the Continuity Meter and canceling my order for the Volcano vs Iceberg PPV, and just weeping softly while remembering how I had to endure three terrific trials to buy these steel-toe boots of mine down at Target.