Wonder Woman Musings:

Over on comicbloc, there's a casual debate about Hippolyta as the Golden Age Wonder Woman.

Of course I chime in.

Anyway, my thing about the Earthiness of the Golden Age versus the Silver Age in the last post really plays into why I'm very much in support of Hippolyta as the Golden Age Wonder Woman.

Basically, as much as I love Diana, I think Marston would be very disappointed with the direction his character has taken. He designed a character full of casual strength and earthy sexuality. But our Diana really doesn't fit that. She's justice on high, pure and lofty. She's the embodiment of high ideal.

But that's not the Wonder Woman I see in the old Golden Age comics. Golden Age Wonder Woman looks like a GI Pin-Up to me. Betty Grable posing for the soldiers. She's curvy and sultry and empowered in her casual sensuality. Sure she left Paradise Island to go kick the crap out of Nazis, but that cute bit in uniform that crash landed on her little Paradise played a good part of it too. She wanted a piece of that hot little number.

Diana doesn't have this anymore. She's a bit too much like her Earth-1 counterpart, I think. They really didn't know what to do with Steve by then. I think Steve probably was partly Marston playing with a bit of wishfulfillment, being this cool suave dashing fellow that's not afraid to chat up this hot chick who could bench press his ass. Marston could write it well though because he understood the appeal, I don't think later writers did. So Steve kept getting written out while Diana evolved through her white-suited Avenger-esque incarnation and so on.

But by divorcing her from Steve Trevor and then post-Crisis removing him as an interest at all took away an important part of the original character. The new Diana is a crusader and a paladin. A holy warrior.

But the Wonder Woman that beat up Nazis...she was no lofty warrior. She was a rough and tumble, salt of the earth brawler, unafraid to get down and dirty with the boys. She was fun.

Hippolyta, at her best, embodies those qualities a lot more than Diana does. She's got that fierce, rough, hard-edged battle fury. She's sexual. Her relationship with Wildcat had the same casual power and warmth as E-2 Diana seemed to have with Steve. She's not pure like Diana, who's biggest crime, killing Max Lord was completely righteous and justifiable at the time. She made some ghastly mistakes. She's got blood on her hands and split knuckles in spirit.

In that link, there's the argument that having Hippolyta come first cheapens Diana and makes her into a copycat. I disagree. First, inheriting the role from her mother doesn't cheapen any of the fantastic things Diana's done, any of her sacrifices. Second, I seriously believe having Diana as the first Wonder Woman, ignoring the Marston original, or *worse* supplanting her with the idea that this pure, lofty ideal was fighting those nazis instead is a cheapening of the original Wonder Woman.

Hippolyta feels like Marston's design, I'm perfectly happy letting her be Marston's design. What's in a name?

Though I'd like to replace the time travel with "left the island to go fight nazis (and possibly get laid) and came back to be Queen again". It's much simpler really.

And really...who's to say that Diana is actually the counterpart of the E-2 Wonder Woman. I mean, when I saw Diana Prince giving the wise words of advice to our Diana, telling her to embrace her humanity. I didn't see Diana getting advice from herself, I saw Diana getting advice from her mother. E-2 Diana was Hippolyta in that scene more than she'd ever be our Diana.

Really...it's not like names stayed completely constant across the multiverse. If E-2 Kal-L's counterpart is named Kal-EL, why can't E-2's Diana's counterpart be named Hippolyta.

There's a deeper symmetry too...on Earth-2, you have Diana and her daughter Hippolyta. On post COIE Earth, you have Hippolyta and her daughter Diana. I've described the similarities between E-2 Diana and Hippolyta...if you think about it both Lyta/Fury and our Diana have some interesting similarities as well. They're both unusual in their births (Lyta as daughter of Diana and Steve, Diana in her clay origin), they're both very young compared to the other Amazons, they're both more academically/scholarly inclined than their mothers...

Maybe that's why Lyta ended up killed off in JSA. It's not that her backstory was too confusing...it's that, basically, she's a redundant parallel, when Diana is as much a counter of the original Fury as she is, in a way.