Diana (Rigg) Prince, Wonder Woman, Part 1:

Relatable Mod Role Model or Disempowered Shadow of Her Former Self?

By Margaret O'Connell
May 4, 2009

DC has been reprinting a lot of Wonder Woman material lately, probably at least partially in the hope of capitalizing on increased interest in the character generated by the prospect of the on-again, off-again live-action Wonder Woman movie. Unfortunately for whatever visions of tie-in cross-promotions DC's book-publishing division may have nourished, Joss Whedon's decision not to write the Wonder Woman film script after all was followed a few months later by Warner Bros executive Jeff Robinov's announcement that "We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead."

Apparently Robinov, who was unhappy with the unimpressive box-office performance of recent Warners releases such as Jodie Foster's The Brave One and Nicole Kidman's The Invasion, was referring specifically to action movies. Even so, this phallocentric attitude ignores the fact that within the last decade alone, female-lead action films such as Charlie's Angels (2000), Tomb Raider (2001), and Kill Bill Volumes I (2003) and II (2004) all earned $150 million or more worldwide for their respective studios.

Of course, the most recent of these films came out all of five years ago. By Hollywood standards, that might as well have been the Middle Ages.

In any case, the live-action Wonder Woman film has been put on hold indefinitely, although an animated WW movie by Bruce Timm was released on Blu-Ray and DVD in March. Nevertheless, DC's book division has been steadily continuing to produce volumes of Wonder Woman reprints, in accordance with its previously established publication schedule. Perhaps the most unexpected of these WW-related projects has been a series of trade paperbacks under the rubric Diana Prince: Wonder Woman.

These collections reprint stories from a 1968-1972 run during which, in the words of Les Daniels' 2000 volume Wonder Woman: The Complete History, "the Amazons and their home of Paradise Island were transported to another dimension, their magic 'exhausted' by their endless (if all but unnoticed) efforts to reform mankind." However, Diana/Wonder Woman refused to go with them, instead choosing to renounce her powers and remain behind in an effort to clear her longtime love interest, Steve Trevor, of treason charges. Although variations on this "left behind" scenario have since become a standard Wonder Woman cliche, this appears to have been the first time the DC Powers That Be resorted to packing Diana's mother and Amazon sisters off to some nebulous other realm, leaving their designated representative all by herself in "Patriarch's World."

Now bereft of super-powers, the ex-Amazon Princess falls back on her civilian identity of Diana Prince and decides to rent a modest storefront with built-in apartment on the Lower East Side of New York, in the hope of launching some sort of small business. Exactly how she manages to pull this off is a mystery, since initially the implication appears to be that with the Amazons and their resources gone, the erstwhile heir to the throne is not just physically powerless, but virtually penniless.

While inspecting her new premises, Diana spots an elderly blind Chinese man being mugged by a gang of youths. Before she can rush to his aid, the man uses martial arts to knock out all of his multiple assailants. He then greets Diana by name, despite being physically unable to see her.

The aging martial artist introduces himself as I Ching — a sobriquet that one fan commentator pointed out is as much of a bad joke as naming a Christian character King James Bible. Ching explains to the former Wonder Woman that he has come to New York seeking her help in defeating the nefarious Dr. Cyber, an evil cyborg mad scientist who has already slaughtered all the other members of the obscure Asian cult to which I Ching belonged while looting their monastery of its precious gems and other treasures.

With all Ching's former associates dead, apparently the no longer super-powered Diana is the best living candidate to be speed-taught the defunct cult's special brand of martial arts. This is necessary in order for her to assist the blind mystic in tracking down Dr. Cyber and foiling the would-be despot's scheme to transform the entire population of the world into living automatons. (Evidently Batman and all the other experienced DC Universe martial artists were unavailable.)

Diana agrees to I Ching's proposal, and embarks upon a whirlwind course of training under her newfound mentor's tutelage. Her previous Amazon conditioning enables her to master what would normally be years' worth of knowledge and techniques in mere months.

Then one day Steve Trevor abruptly shows up, gravely wounded as a result of an unsuccessful attempt to infiltrate the terrorist organization headed by — you guessed it — Dr. Cyber. When Steve dies in the hospital in the very next issue (Wonder Woman #180), Diana and Ching's anti-Cyber alliance is further solidified. They spend the next twenty-three issues attempting to bring justice to the elusive cyborg evil genius and any other malefactors they encounter along the way.

All of this is all very well in theory. At least, if you make allowances for the fact that the actual execution of these new concepts is apt to be rather unappealing to anyone without a high tolerance for campily atrocious attempts at "hip" 1960's dialogue, and for the mostly middle-aged DC comics creators' typically ham-handed handling of the social issues of the day.

But the real problem is that the creative personnel seem to have discarded most of Diana's established characterization and ideological underpinnings along with her powers and what they appear to have regarded as her fusty old mythological Amazon trappings. The formerly rather earnest, overconscientious Diana is now so instantly and insouciantly mod and with-it that she appears to have undergone a personality transplant along with a wardrobe and hairstyle makeover.

Even worse, the scripters seem to have at best an extremely tenuous grasp of even the basic "sisters can do it for themselves" elements of Golden Age Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston's relatively gender-egalitarian philosophy. And even the more ideologically sophisticated of the Diana Prince: Wonder Woman writers conspicuously fail on the rare occasions when they attempt to comprehensibly convey the ideas of 1960's and '70's second-wave feminism.

As a result, throughout the twenty-five issues of this revisionist era, the former Wonder Woman all too often comes across as just an exceptionally spunky, judo-proficient chick. Formerly the incarnation of female empowerment and independence, Diana still manages to beat the bad guys on her own occasionally. But usually she has to be rescued and/or bossed around by her prospective male love interest of the moment — and has so little feminist consciousness that she fails to even notice this, much less object to it.

It's possible that DC was genuinely grasping, however vaguely, at the rising tide of feminism in the zeitgeist at the time when they came up with the "Diana Prince, (non-super-powered) Wonder Woman" concept, more often referred to by longtime fans as Wonder Woman's "Diana Rigg period" or "jumpsuit period." However, crassly commercial considerations undoubtedly played a larger role than any resurgence of the 1940's "any woman can be a Wonder Woman" philosophy that they may conceivably have had in mind when substituting martial arts expertise for Diana's traditional Amazon powers.

(That "any woman can be a Wonder Woman" line annoyed the hell out of me when I read it in the 1972 collection of Golden Age Wonder Woman reprints produced by Ms. Magazine. This slogan makes about as much sense as saying "Since Batman has no metahuman powers, any man could be Batman." Sure, if he had unlimited time, money, a genius-level intellect, and Olympic-level physical prowess in virtually every form of combat or acrobatic activity ever invented. With Wonder Woman the "anyone can..." claim is even more implausible, since under normal circumstances, she actually does have gods-given quasi-Kryptonian-level super-powers.)

Denny O'Neil, who wrote a number of scripts for the so-called "New Wonder Woman," then went on to edit the title, explained in Les Daniels' book, "I saw [the revamped WW concept] as taking a woman and making her independent, and not dependent on super powers. I saw it as making her thoroughly human and then an achiever on top of that, which, according to my mind, was very much in keeping with the feminist agenda." However, according to Daniels, O'Neil "later saw the point in feminist complaints that DC had weakened an important symbol." In hindsight, O'Neil acknowledged, "I'm not ashamed of what we did, but I'm not sure I'd do it again."

Mike Sekowsky, who pencilled most of the Diana Prince: Wonder Woman issues, edited about half of them, and scripted seventeen of the stories, was far blunter about the motivation for the change in premise. In a Fanzing: The DC Comics Fan Site article called Truly, Modly, Deeply: The Diana Prince Era — Issues 179-204, longtime fan Carol Strickland quotes a letter column from the period in which Sekowsky proclaimed, "The old Wonder Woman was dropped because the sales on the old WW were so bad that the book was going to be dropped. The new Wonder Woman was given a chance — (a last chance for the book) and it worked!"

Actually, DC couldn't have canceled the book without legal repercussions, if there is any truth to the persistent rumor that DC's original agreement with WW creator William Moulton Marston contractually required them to publish some sort of Wonder Woman comic on a regular basis a certain number of times a year. The only semblance of written documentation I have been able to find for this is on a slightly outdated page of the How Stuff Works website, which says, "William Marston ... left behind a contract that gave DC Comics the right to exclusively publish Wonder Woman comics as long as they continued to keep the title going. If they ever stopped publishing it, the ownership would permanently revert to Marston's estate." In view of the book's routinely unsatisfactory sales, this is probably the main reason why, according to the Wonder Woman Pages, Wonder Woman is "the only comic book featuring a woman to have been published without fail for [over] fifty-five years."

Before the months-long delays between issues during Allan Heinberg's 2006 revamp, the only significant disruption in the Wonder Woman title's schedule was a temporary four-month suspension in preparation for George Perez's 1987 post-Crisis reboot of the character. Even this momentary interruption in the comic's monthly appearance was neatly filled by a very retro-looking four-issue miniseries drawn by Trina Robbins and scripted by Kurt Busiek, which was slotted into the schedule in its place.

Next week: Part 2: Feminism, Continuity, and Kryptonian/Amazonian Double Standards.

Truly, Modly, Deeply: The Diana Prince Era--Issues 179-204