Saturday, January 13, 2007

The Comic Cover that started it for me

In my early teens I saw this cover at a used book store and it stirred something inside me.

Up until then, Wonder Woman had never been a part of my fantasy- it was all Supergirl. I don't even know if I had ever heard about her until then, but I certainly had never read any of her comics. I was HOOKED!

And thus began a love affair that has been going on for over 30 years(!).

I immediately set about getting my hands on every single WW comic book I could. I was living overseas at the time and wound up subscribing to the comic and having it sent to my NYC address. Every now and then, someone would gather a whole bunch together and send then to me. This may seem odd today, but please note that we're talking 1975 or so.

This is called the Silver Age of Wonder Woman, but I'm not entirely sure. All I can tell you is that this run suited me very well. It had a bunch of peril. Wonder Woman would get knocked out and about and find herself in all these different situation that really got my imagination going.


I tuned in at the time of the 12 trials (I think) that Wonder Woman had to go through in order to be accepted back in the JLA. Each episode would have one JLAer observing her performance.
As you can see by the collage here, there was lots of good stuff. The ones with her hanging on the electrified anchor are among my all time favorites.
Looking back at some of these images for the first time in many years, their influence on stories and scripts of mine can be easily observed.
This era represents a happy medium for me. Much of the golden age storylines are right up my alley, however the way in which the she was drawn didn't measure up to the silver age and beyond. A lot of the new artwork is simply incredible, but the stories lack the simple peril elements as can be seen in the collage. Future blog posts will also discuss the many amazing artists that have drawn Wonder Woman independently. In those there is the obvious potential to combine the killer artwork with the amazing peril. Nevertheless, often some of the peril depictions go beyond the realms of what I find to be erotic. Kind of like Goldilocks and the three bears, this particular era seems to be "just right."

There's this great site called The Wonder Woman files that has a tremendous amount of awesome material spanning all ages and incarnations of Wonder Woman. It's a real treat and the owner deserves a lot of credit.

To this day, Wonder Woman remains one of the sexiest characters ever. Granted, I have written many more Supergirl stories, but that's mainly because of the Kryptonite element. It would be fair for me to say that Wonder Woman is my favorite.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I share your love for WW.. although gold and silver age art doesn't really do it for me. I much prefer the extremely sexy modern art of Deodato, Benes etc :) I haven't followed WW since Deodato left.

Has there been any good art on WW recently?

Thanks for the link!

Ralev

Jonnie R said...

ralev,
I agree with you about the sexy modern art of Deodato and others. In tru Murphy's law fashion, however, the storylines with the sexier artwork are not as sexy as the storylines with the less sexier artwork.
Thanks for the comment!