Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Ten things I previously did not know about Wonder Woman

All taken from The Essential Wonder Woman Encyclopedia.

1.  Abu-Gita, an ape queen from Gorilla City, once tried to invade Themyscira, home of the Amazons, but Wonder Woman's use of the Lasso of Truth on her revealed that her faith in her gods was based on lies.

2.  Etta Candy, Wonder Woman's chubby sidekick, has a father named Hard , a mother named Sugar, and a sister named Mint.

3.  Wonder Woman once fought a group of flying shark-women who attacked Paradise Island after being mutated by a scientist named Gerta Von Gunther, who later saved the day by dousing their leader, Queen Sharkeeta, with "humanizing solution" that made her submit to being imprisoned on Reform Island.

4.  A villain named the Sinister Seer of Saturn once attacked Wonder Woman by sending a doll-sized replica of the heroine to Earth which then grew to gigantic size.  When Wonder Woman tried to stop it, it attached her to itself magnetically and blasted off back to Saturn, where the villain put her through challenges that involved her regressing in age to become Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot.

5.  Wonder Woman once kidnapped a boy and took him on a time-travel trip because he was bored in history class.  They ended up getting trapped as ghosts in Nero's Rome.

6.  A villain known as American Adolph tried to form a criminal empire and take over the United States, but was foiled when Wonder Woman was given a copy of his book, My War Against Society.

7.  A Leprechaun named Moon O'Day, who, despite being male, was a student at the Holliday College for Women, created a typewriter that could make anything typed on it come to pass.  This typewriter was acquired by a criminal known only as "The Boss", who used it to tell Wonder Woman to fly a kite around the moon.

8.  Wonder Woman once fought an alien robot named Princess No. 1003, whose disappearance from her home planet prompted an invasion of Earth by its other 2,785 robot princesses.

9.  There have been at least eleven different versions of Wonder Woman in all the various timelines and continuities of the past 70 years, including two different versions of the original World War II-era character, two different versions of Wonder Woman's mother Queen Hippolyta, at least two former Wonder Girls, two different characters named Artemis, and one of several versions of the villainess Circe.

10.  Wonder Woman once fought an evil wizard named Strogo, who lived on the Planet of Thought, which was populated by fairy tale characters.  He captured Wonder Woman as part of his scheme to obtain an element called "xium", which would power his black magic wand.  When Wonder Woman shattered the xium gem, everybody on the planet turned into a toddler.

That's a tiny sampling of the bizarreness on display throughout this massive tome.  If you want to be overwhelmed by decade upon decade of confusing, often tedious inanity, give it a read.

8 comments:

  1. Good grief! I had no idea Wonder Woman was so awesome! Every single one of those sounds like a story I want to read (with the exception of #9, of course, which is just sad). I'm off to the library to get a reprint collection straight away!

    Thanks for the tip.

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  2. "...confusing, often tedious inanity..."?

    We've agreed on many things over the years, but sometimes I get the feeling you and I are two very different people!

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  3. Psst! Mint Candy was Etta's brother!

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  4. RAB: Thanks? Yeah, that was kind of harsh; a lot of these stories seem pretty bizarrely fun, but hundreds of pages of descriptions of them is kind of overwhelming, and a lot of the latter-day stuff does seem pretty inane, rather than enjoyably nuts. I was mostly trying to just describe this stuff without rendering any judgment, but I think spending enough time trying to cherry-pick gems from the midst of long, tiresome passages that made my eyes glaze over with their endless attempts to coherently make sense of a tangled, oft-rebooted continuity. From what I can tell, having actually read not a lot of WW, the Golden Age stuff by Marston and Peter is pretty great, and not much else after that can compare, but there's probably some entertainingly weird shit throughout. I don't know if I would want to try to track much of it down though...

    Mart: D'oh! See what I mean about my eyes glazing over?

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  5. See, if you put it that way, I can agree wholeheartedly. If we're talking about the Kanigher WW in particular, "often tedious inanity" is not an unfair description.

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  6. The early stuff is a lot more fun to read, than to read about, honest!

    I must follow you!

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  7. Since Noah hasn't chimed in to defend the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman, I will. The early stuff is great. One hundred percent crazy, but great. The Kanigher/Andru "silver age" stuff reprinted in the Showcase volumes is garbage.

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  8. I absolutely need to own this insanity. At least to see it try to pass of the sixth one seriously, if nothing else.

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