I will always have a love-hate relationship with DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths.
On one hand, it ended up destroying my beloved Earth-Two and messing up so many characters I loved from there (and that continuity).
On the other hand, many of the very long-running mainstream Earth-One characters were allowed to be rebooted, their histories wiped clean and started fresh.
And in my opinion, Wonder Woman benefited 100% from that.
It was a pleasure to watch Greg Potter and George Pérez revamp Diana, and once Potter left Pérez took it upon himself to provide her a clean modern origin and especially with an excellent new supporting cast.
While DC has always had characters tied to the religion/myths of ancient Hellas (Greece), they often were a pretty hodge-podge mess of both Hellas and then Roman reinterpretations. Anthropologist that I am, and fan of ancient and classical Hellas, even as a kid the bastarization of all that pissed me off.
That changed in this issue.
Not only did we get a beautiful new origin for the Amazons and Diana, we also got a cleaned up and far more accurate take on the Greek Patheon, removing all of the Roman variations from Wonder Woman. And I was all for that.
Pérez was fully on his A-Game by this time and he brought 100% to this title.
Things I so very much loved:
- Pérez giving us such an amazing visual Diana, so very different from how he drew any take on her before.
- A concept of the former Paradise Island being far more grounded as Themyscira.
- Hippolyte being called that and not Hippolyta (though she doesn’t have her true myth origins).
- Hippolyte being dark-haired and not blond as her Earth-One version was.
- A truly amazing cast of Amazons that were more than card-board cut-outs (Philippus, Menalippe, etc.).
- An Ares to be feared (with his own children Phobos, Deimos, Eris, etc. as his supporting cast).
- Diana finally getting armor/weapons beyond the usual lasso and bracelets.
- An unpopular one, but Steve Trevor being much older than Diana, and their entire new dynamic.
- A great Etta Candy!
- Heracles and NOT Hercules!
Things I so very much did not love:
- The impact of this total reboot on Donna Troy.
- The overall loss of Lyta Trevor‘s (Fury) being Diana and Steve’s daughter and her being a true legacy character.
- Diana not having been around in WW2 and in the JSA. (But I understood this.)
It started strong and I felt Diana, at least as she appeared in her own book, was great. Her appearances elsewhere in the DCU had mileage that varied.
DC shitting on Pérez’s War Of The Gods plan pretty much cemented his leaving the book. (Hell, the damn shoving that Millennium cross-over bullshit into the Wonder Woman stories would have been reason for me to quite too!
Of course, comics ultimately being soap-opera melodrama, others would take this reboot and go in different directions that to me, ultimately felt flat and empty.
I retain that John Byrne’s run did some irreparable harm, putting Hippolyte in the role of Wonder Woman and then pushing her into the past to return a Wonder Woman to World War 2 (and the JSA). That always just felt wrong to me. (And what he did to poor Donna was not needed at all.)
Yeah. I loved Diana being in the JSA. But once it was decided to make her a modern character, trying to return all that to some form of continuity was not needed and only convoluted things even more. (Though I can’t lie, I do love the relationship that Ted Grant (Wildcat) had with Hippolyte!)
I left comics years before the whole New 52 version reboot occurred. I read bits and pieces of that lore on the interwebs and don’t really jive with it. (Having to tie Zeus into Diana’s origins just pissed me off. Utterly not needed in any way and detracts from her uniqueness to me.)
But for the most part, this iteration of Diana (and her supporting cast) worked for me for many years. I did love what Marv Wolfman and Pérez came up for a new reason for Donna Troy’s powers and history, but I very much would have loved for them to have found some connection between the two in coming up with their new canon ideas. (All pointless now of course.)
But this series, along with some of this era’s Superman, did give me more great Pérez work to love!