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This essay contains spoilers for Wonder Woman #1-19.
“Be careful in the world of men, Diana. They do not deserve you.”
— Queen Hippolyta, Wonder Woman (2017)
As of 2025, I have been collecting comic books for 50 years. It’s wild to write that sentence because it makes me come face to face with the fact that I’m over 50 years old. I’m not at all ashamed of my age (I’ll be a fly 54 in April; don’t play with me). It’s just that I never thought I would make it to 50. I am, after all, a Black man in America. The odds aren’t in my favor and never have been. According to the data, I have the highest probability of dying from some disease, some violence, some dehumanization, some labor, or some despair before I could even reach this or any earlier milestones. I’m legit shocked that I made it past 30.
Is it strange for a grown-ass man to still be collecting comic books (not to mention dressing up like superheroes for Halloween and such)? If I’m being honest: Yeah, it might be a little strange. Hehe. Legendary comic book writer and novelist Alan Moore sure thinks so. I admit that part of my continued interest in it is how it serves as a cure for a certain kind of loneliness, as reading always does. But it also connects me to the whimsy and relative happiness of my childhood. You see, my father bought me my first comic book when I was just four years old. He and I weren’t as close as I wish we could have been. Holding on to this hobby is, I think, a way to hang on to my relationship with my father, who passed away decades ago, just after reaching an age I never thought I would.
The first comic book he ever bought me was a Wonder Woman comic book. It was, in fact, Wonder Woman #211 (volume 1) from May 1974. He didn’t give it to me until the following year, but I can remember it still; how I was wowed by the colors on the cover and the superhero at its center: an Amazon princess named Diana from a land of only women who leaves her home to make the larger world a better place using her powers and her jewelry (indestructible bracelets, boomerang tiara, magic lasso, and earrings that allow her to breathe in any environment and translate any language) to help her do it.
For the record, Wonder Woman wasn’t my first fictional love. That distinction goes to intellectual genius and tambourine player extraordinaire Valerie Brown of Josie and the Pussycats, who I’ve loved since I was two years old. Nevertheless, Wonder Woman’s book had such an enormous impact on me that I remain, to this day, a huge fan of the character. Her comic not only drove my ability to become literate at age 4, but it also ignited my purpose to become a writer. The first story I ever wrote, at age 6, was about me being Wonder Woman’s sidekick. That dream came true decades later when my friend, and amazing artist and writer, Phil Jimenez drew me into Wonder Woman #188 (volume 2) as Bobby Barnes, the Wonder Boy.
I often wonder why my father decided to give me a Wonder Woman comic book and not, say, Spider-Man or The Hulk. Very few men are iconoclastic enough to give their sons things society deems more appropriate for their daughters. I wonder if he saw something in me even back then—something, I don’t know, queer—and saw that same thing in Wonder Woman and was, therefore, trying to say, in a language he hoped I could understand then or maybe would understand one day, that he saw me and loved, unconditionally, what he saw. Because yes, even back then, at that young age, while I didn’t have the words for what I was and what I was feeling, I was already a year into knowing that I was somehow different from other little boys.
So, whenever I think of Wonder Woman, I think of my father. And I think of love.
If my continued reading of comic books is tethered to my childhood, it’s not because I’m using it as some sort of escapism. On the contrary, I’m interested in the idea of what fiction, speculative fiction, and science fiction reveal about humankind—what we’re thrilled or revolted by; what we decide is heroic or villainous—and how it affects my own personhood: Is it calling on me to resist my worst impulses and be a better human being or is it giving me permission to debase myself by debasing others? That might explain why I’m committed to a particular political vision of Wonder Woman.
The Wonder Woman I grew up with—which also included Lynda Carter’s television version, which served severely—embraces a radically progressive understanding of existence where the goal isn’t harm reduction, but harm elimination. Hers is the promise of a world where all marginalized people are safe and are, in fact, no longer marginalized. Where there’s enough food, resources, and shelter for everybody. Where harmony with nature is preferable to the thrashing of it. Where reason comes before force. Where warfare is replaced by cooperation, decency overrides rape culture, art makes more sense than guns, and bigotry is made obsolete by mutual respect. And she uses her gifts to fight for these things not because it makes her “angelic,” “perfect,” a white savior, or a “Mary Sue,” but because it’s the right fucking thing to do for the survival of the species and the ecosystem. My Wonder Woman is a pipe dream no doubt, but one I’m willing to strive toward because the alternative is a homicidal nightmare.
My commitment to the ideals of this character often puts me on the defensive and places me in isolation. To state it plainly, these ideals aren’t desirable or lucrative in a world of folks who, whether they admit it (to themselves or to us) or not, actually enjoy hoarding, violence, destruction, rape, and bigotry—which they make sanctified by gods. For decades, corporate entities have been trying to figure out ways to take the world’s most well-known female fictional superhero, strip her of her “perfection,” by which they mean her revolutionary characteristics, and, for all intents and purposes, “bring her down to Earth,” by which they mean revise her so that she appeals to the savage…I mean average American.
This brings me to the current iteration of the character in volume 6 of the series. I had first written about Tom King and Daniel Sampere’s Wonder Woman right after the first issue hit the shelves back in September of 2023. I was excited that DC Comics, the publisher of Wonder Woman comic books, had put an A-list creative team on the series. I imagined that might help the character, who is both popular and unpopular (if you know what I mean), get the recognition and respect I thought she deserved in a hobby industry obsessed with revenge-fantasy characters like Batman and Wolverine.
I liked that first issue a lot, even though I found it to be flawed; even though I find Tom King’s work, in general, to be flawed—problematically so. In that previous essay, I promised to follow up on how I thought King and Sampere (pronounced SOM-PAIR-RAY) were handling the series as it progressed. Given that they have just completed their first, and extended, story arc with this month’s issue #19, I thought this would be the best time to return to the scene, given that I can assess something that has, for the most part, a beginning, middle, and end. Although, there can really be no end in capitalism. Every dead horse must be beat. Every turnip must be squeezed for blood. Every piece of art must have sequel upon sequel. All stories must be endless for as long as they’re profitable—and often beyond that.
So, what do I think about this latest volume of Wonder Woman after having read 19 issues and some assorted specials? Regrettably, I find that under King’s pen, this legendary literary character reads as neither wonder nor woman. What I mean by that is that she seems more like a generic cipher for what particular kinds of men might imagine their “ideal woman” to be. Think The Stepford Wives. Here, Wonder Woman seems constructed specifically to appeal to “traditional” readers, appease “traditional” tastes, and assuage “traditional” fears—probably because the last (and likely final) U.S. presidential election revealed that most Americans are, and I mean this in the most disrespectful way possible, “traditional.”
Capitalism compels us to direct all of our efforts toward the largest paying audience, no matter what cowardice is involved in doing so; no matter the artistic, ethical, legal, or spiritual catastrophe associated with it. Corporations will, then, command those in their employ to fashion their talents for the tastes of “Middle America.” “Middle America” is nothing but euphemism for middle-of-the-road white people. And this middle road is both the birthplace of and breeding ground for mediocrity, which inhabits every part of the majority, whether in regard to their emotional, intellectual, political, or spiritual (and I use this next word as lightly as I possibly can) aspirations.
One of the hallmarks of a system like white supremacy is how persuasive it is in getting its adherents to believe that their ordinariness is excellence, and, therefore, makes them exceptional. It does a tremendous job of convincing them that the terror they experience when they’re confronted by notions like equity doesn’t come from where it actually comes from (the fact that giving the oppressed an actual rather than imagined fair chance would demolish their delusions of superiority and expose their wretched fantasy for the pure bunk that it is). It tells them that equality is, instead, some bleeding-heart gobbledygook that seeks to lower standards so that inferior people are allowed to enter into spaces where they don’t belong; and, therefore, they’re right to despise and circumvent any attempts at equal opportunity.
This is an easy scheme to sell no matter how expensive it is in actuality; lies are much gentler on the skin (and the psyche) than the truth. And for human beings, there’s no greater lie—and no greater delight—than to believe that we’re somehow, some way, better than somebody else; maybe even inherently so. This deception is the foundation for why, for instance, white people are permitted to fail, at whatever, endlessly without it reflecting poorly on them or the white race as a whole; while Black people get one chance and failure isn’t an option. Because if one of us fails, it’s made to seem as though we all have. (Black men could tell you about this best of all; for us, it’s been given a name: “Black men ain’t shit.”)
The greatest sin of white supremacy, or any oppressive construction, though, is how it successfully gaslights the marginalized peoples who are demonstrably exemplary into a state of imposter syndrome. This is really why the world has always been in a decrepit state and why it always will be: Those who have power lead; and the powerful who lead are the least qualified to do so. But because they have power, they have been told—and they believe—that on the basis of that power (which they gained not through talent or brilliance, but via depravity or inheritance), they’re the most qualified. See Donald Trump. Or George W. Bush. Or Elon Musk. Or so many others. There are more examples than we can count.
A subject-related example for me would be the messy history of the DC film universe. Filmmakers Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon, and writer Geoff Johns, were allowed to turn in bad script after bad script, and produce horrible film after horrible film until behind-the-scenes controversies that became public made it more difficult, at least from a public relations perspective, for WarnerMedia to justify the continued creative bankruptcies and monetary losses in the name of silent, but sinister white solidarity. Despite that, Warner merely replaced one conventional decision with another. James Gunn and Tom King are the new holders of the keys to the kingdom, with King now being their go-to expert for how best to convert their literary properties into lucrative film franchises and Gunn overseeing the actual filmmaking.
I mention this because I believe King’s vision for Wonder Woman in the comic books will likely have tremendous influence on the new cinematic version. The dreadfully redundant, reductive, and sexist animated series Creature Commandos—which is basically an adolescent, trivial, dollar-store mash-up of Guardians of the Galaxy, Suicide Squad, and Invincible—has given us a glimpse of the frat-boy approach the powers-that-be are taking toward the Wonder Woman mythos. Not that the previous filmic version, brought to life by anti-Palestinian actor Gal Gadot, was any better. The nerve of them casting someone who is pro-genocide—because let’s keep it a buck, that’s what the fuck it is—to play a character like Wonder Woman, who would find those positions abhorrent. Hollywood has the shadiest, ongoing, and purposeful habit of presenting the villain as the hero that goes all the way back to The Birth of a Nation.
And why King’s influence bothers me is because I find that he writes Wonder Woman as mollifying and singular. She’s the only “good” Amazon: meaning that she’s essentially the Amazon who’s most sympathetic toward even the warlike men; the only one who loves the United States; the only one who really wants to be an American; the only one who doesn’t really have a problem with patriarchy as such, and thinks that it can be somehow redeemed, reformed, and rearranged so that it has room for some women, too.
I contrast that with writer Kelly Sue DeConnick’s understanding of Wonder Woman. In her interviews about her limited series Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons, DeConnick states that she doesn’t trust the idea that Diana is “The One.” When a person from a marginalized group is placed in that position it reifies the perspective of the ruling class that: a. insists that the majority of the out-group individuals are unworthy, which: b. justifies the continued oppression of said out-group, and: c. allows the oppressors to escape accountability for their actions because they can hold up the token representative as proof of their “righteousness.” In return, the token individual: d. volunteers their complicity and actively works against the best interests of their group in order to continue to receive whatever benefits proximity to the power-brokers affords them (see: Caitlyn Jenner, Candace Owens, and Clarence Thomas). They do this because it’s expedient and satiates their self-loathing, but they’re unaware that: e. there’s a steep price attached to the betrayal that will eventually come due. King’s Wonder Woman gives me classic token teas.
Speaking of being the only one, in his early interviews, King stated that he initially had no intention to include Wonder Woman’s family in his stories. He wanted to segregate her from these women, focus solely on her without any familial connection because he saw the Wonder Girls as distracting and detracting from Wonder Woman’s individual greatness. This was his position even as all the other major heroes in the DC stable—Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Flash, Green Arrow, the Justice Society, etc.—were all having their families explored and expanded. Instead, he preferred to have Superman and Batman stand in as her family. In-story, this is to solidify her place among them in DC’s holy trinity. Metatextually, it’s to get men who are normally not interested in Wonder Woman to buy her book. It’s kind of like how it was (is?) necessary in literature for a white person to vouch for a Black person’s work in order for it to be considered legitimate. King was eventually convinced by Wonder Woman fans he met in person at comic book conventions to include her real family. That was nice.
As someone who has been reading Wonder Woman comics for 50 years, I was excited to see the Wonder Girls (Donna Troy, Yara Flor, and Cassie Sandsmark) included in the stories. They normally don’t show up in the Wonder Woman book often or consistently. We never really got to see Wonder Woman establish multidimensional relationships with them the way Superman and Batman have with their sidekicks and protegees. For Wonder Woman, it’s been superficial at best. However, I wish someone who was more skilled at writing women was overseeing this long overdue plot point.
When King writes Wonder Woman’s relationships with other women, whether these women are Wonder Woman’s friends or her foes, there’s always an air of competition or there’s outright hostility, but there’s never any regular-ass homegirlness; none at all. In Trinity Special #1, for instance, in a short story called “Mothers and Daughters,” during the famed tournament of wonder to determine which Amazon would return crash-landed Steve Trevor to Patriarch’s World from Themyscira (known colloquially as “Paradise Island”), Diana punches her mother Queen Hippolyta so hard that she falls to the ground. In a mirrored event, Wonder Woman’s daughter Lizzie (more about her later) punches now-Queen Diana to the ground during a similar tournament. What’s puzzling about these scenes is how absolutely unnecessary they are; how they establish nothing noble, endearing, cool, or insightful—other than showing that Wonder Woman and her daughter are violent and volatile individuals who are prone to unprovoked attacks when they don’t get their way. Very Karen behavior. And the story seems to suggest that this is the Amazon way. To me, it reads as a sexist trope about women’s emotional instability.
These adversarial encounters continue. In Wonder Woman #2, during another recap of the aforementioned tournament of wonder, Diana is brutally stabbed by Emelie, the Amazon she’s opposing. In Wonder Woman #4, as her Amazon sisters are being rounded up and slaughtered by the Amazon Extradition Entity (A.X.E.), Wonder Woman can’t really be bothered with that (in issue #1, she visits the burial site of one of the men allegedly killed by Emilie, but she hasn’t said boo about the hundreds of Amazons murdered by the American government). Instead, she visits a young, queer-coded boy with a terminal illness named Jack, whose Make-A-Wish-like desire is to meet and hang out with her.
She decides to take him to Themyscira after he expresses a secret desire to go. When they arrive, they are greeted by a group of super-sexy Amazon warriors. Unlike past iterations depicting a more diverse Amazon population in terms of age, body type, etc., all of King and Sampere’s Amazons are nubile Victoria’s Secret supermodels. These Amazons, led by a Black Amazon with a crisscross scar over her left eye, inform Wonder Woman that despite the boy’s sickness, and her good intentions, he cannot remain on the island. This nameless Amazon threatens violence against her and Jack.
At this gesture, this willingness to do harm to or in front of a child, I couldn’t help but think about the thousands upon thousands of Palestinian children who are murdered in Gaza when Israel drops bombs, that my own tax dollars help pay for, on Palestinian schools, hospitals, playgrounds, neighborhoods, and the children themselves—and the irrefutably demonic justifications that both Israel and the U.S. have for it all. There’s something about utopias, ain’t there, where the utopians feel that paradise just can’t be paradise until they can sacrifice those they’ve excluded? Toni Morrison and Ursula K. LeGuin put us on game about that. And James Baldwin scolded us about the ways we consistently fail children, which is to say, the ways we consistently fail the future.
“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
― James Baldwin, “Notes on the House of Bondage,” The Nation, November 1, 1980
Wonder Woman, of course, threatens the nameless Black Amazon right back, reminding her that she whupped all their Amazon asses back in the day and that’s why she’s Wonder Woman. Even the Amazon queen, Nubia, and Wonder Woman’s other mother, Philippus, are low-key scared to confront her. It’s in that moment that Wonder Woman is established as “not like them other b*tches”—even as, and here’s the conundrum and the complication, the blood of the sisters she’s known for centuries is being spilled in the streets of the same America she is pledging her allegiance to (contrary to King’s assertion that his Wonder Woman is actually critical of America). As her plan to stop The Sovereign’s genocide slowly unfolds (and that’s one of the biggest problems with this story: it moves at a snail’s pace and seems to unnecessarily linger instead of moving plot points forward) and Amazons continue to die, I find it strange that her ire, at this moment, is directed toward The Sovereign’s victims—and, in a sense, in defense of the nation behind the violence. But then I realized that this is a categorically American logic that attempts, in every scenario, to twist reality so that even when America is the marauder, it comes off as the knight in shining armor. It doesn’t make any sense, but neither does America.
Wonder Woman wins this encounter with her people, of course. And proceeds to play with Jack on the beaches and in the gardens of Themyscira, letting him throw her tiara, shoot arrows at her, sit on her back as she does pushups—some of the things a baby Robert would have loved to do. I, in fact, tried to recall my childhood splendor and see myself in Jack while reading this. But I couldn’t. Because my invitation to Themyscira would’ve had to have been under wholly different circumstances. And I wouldn’t have wanted to shoot arrows at Wonder Woman, that’s for sure. Most of all, I would have wanted to feel welcomed not just by Wonder Woman, but by her people as well. And if I couldn’t have that, then I wouldn’t have wanted to go. Little Jack, however, is as happy as a pig in shit despite the inhospitable, bikini-clad, sword-carrying soldiers of Paradise Island. I suppose all colonizers have learned to expect some hostility from the natives, whose lands they’ve colonized/gentrified/invaded, and have built up an armor against it.
And Wonder Woman herself? Well, she’s just as pleased as punch to be the Pick-Me Princess.
In Wonder Woman #5, the Wonder Girls show up to help Wonder Woman in her fight against The Sovereign, but she’s too proud and doesn’t want these sisters to be harmed by American forces. So, she harms them herself instead. She arm-wrestles Cassie, shoots Yara in the abdomen with an arrow, beats Donna at a video game. And it’s not lost on me that Yara, in particular, the only woman of color in this particular Amazon sisterhood (she’s indigenous Brazilian), gets the most violent beating. In issue #6, the only physical fights Wonder Woman has are with her female foes—Giganta, Silver Swan, and Grail. Meanwhile, her male adversaries—The Sovereign, Doctor Psycho, and Angle Man—are all safely hidden away elsewhere, striking at her from a distance. It could be said that this was an allegory for how patriarchy pits women against each other as it sits back and pulls the strings. But it’s soaked in such a sexist milieu that it seems foolish to give King the benefit of the doubt.
In issue #10, Wonder Woman is brutally beaten by The Cheetah before having a male-gazey, gay-baiting, semi-lesbian, will-they-or-won’t-they encounter with her. Her interaction with The Cheetah is portrayed as the kind of same-sex situation many cisgender heterosexual dudes dream of, where the women are beautiful (by European standards only), outrageously feminine, and are interested in sex with each other only to the extent that it’s a titillating exhibition for the men masturbating or participating. The basis of this is a faux, performative queerness that functions as a layered antiqueerness because of how it attempts to diminish lesbian identity and, at the same time, make it appealing (to straight men) by eliminating gay men from the very idea of homosexuality. It says that sex between women is the right kind of homosexuality (if it’s in service to the patriarchal libido) and sex between men the wrong kind (because it’s gross to “real men”).
And as Wonder Woman readers, we’re supposed to see all of these interactions as edgy and remarkable. Exciting, even.
But nah, bruh. This shit is weird. And not in a good way.
Having been in the comic book community for five decades, my observation has been that the majority and most vocal of men I’ve encountered—whether creatives or collectors—don’t like Wonder Woman. It’s as though they find the very thought of her, the very purpose of her, terrifying (though they, themselves, would never characterize it in this way because they would deem such an admission unmanly). And they can only force themselves to tolerate her if they can interpret her in ways that are non-threatening; and this is usually, though not always, pornographic in nature.
For one, they behave as though Wonder Woman has an inverse relationship to their favorite male heroes (which is to say, they believe they have an inverse relationship to women in the real world). Therefore, if Wonder Woman is too strong, it makes Superman too weak. If she’s too smart, it makes Batman too dumb. If she’s too fast, it makes Flash too slow. And so on down the line. In their logic, if Wonder Woman is the representation of women’s power, then she’s also a representation of men’s lack thereof. Thus, she has to be downplayed (“nerfed” as we nerds call it). Made lesser. Marked as inferior. Weakened. Put in her place. Shown as requiring the assistance of the men in her life to solve her own cases (rarely, if ever, do they call on her for help). Her tagline, “stronger than Heracles, swifter than Hermes, and wise as Athena,” is assessed as hyperbole at best and bullshit at its core. However, for obvious reasons, exceptions are made for the “beautiful as Aphrodite” part of the equation.
I believe the basis of this stems from how patriarchy dictates that no woman can ever be more powerful than a man, biologically or otherwise. That egomania extends into the imaginary. This essentialism—which cherry-picks or outright ignores scientific evidence, or exaggerates gender/sexual differences, and relies mainly upon a primitive “what my eyes can see” approach to whittle down the wide range of life into opposing binary pieces—is the source of so many obvious hatreds (misogyny, misandry, antiqueerness, antitransness), but also some unexpected ones (like classism, racism, and ableism). Justice League Unlimited writer Mark Waid revealed one aspect of this unspoken but omnipresent pathology in a recent interview with AIPT:
But, I would look to Superman and Wonder Woman as a good team. Superman as the heavy hitter, but, in the field, Wonder Woman is the general. Wonder Woman is the one calling the shots. Not that Superman is under her in any sense, you know, on a power level or on a stature level, but she’s just the military mind you need in the field.
I can only guess at the reasons why he felt he needed to clarify that. But he even had Justice League membership cards drawn up to drive the point home. Where Superman’s power is measured on the chart as 100, Wonder Woman’s is 95. This despite the fact that her creators William Moulton Marston, Elizabeth Martson, and Olive Byrne created her to be Superman’s equal (and perhaps even his superior), which William accurately predicted would strike fear in the modern patriarchal heart.
It should come as no surprise then that King’s Wonder Woman is only truly friendly in the presence of men and boys: Superman, Batman, Steve Trevor, Jack, random guy #13. The only time she’s visibly happy is when she’s the only woman in the room. King has said that he was writing this book so that his daughter and niece had a hero to look up to. But to me, it’s as though he’s writing it to make Wonder Woman “safe” for his son and nephew. In all honesty, he’s not the only writer who doesn’t know how to write women or the friendships between them. He’s merely in lockstep with a populace that doesn’t seem to be interested in the dimensional portrayals of these relationships.
What’s wild is that the senior editor of this book is a woman, Brittany Holzherr. I wonder: Does she detect any latent and blatant misogyny and sexism in these stories? I know better than to assume that identity has any trustworthy connection to political awareness, though; because I know that it doesn’t. Still, King’s inability to write genuine female beingness explains why we’re in an age where we believe that only women should write about women, Black people about Black people, queer people about queer people, etc. There’s an attitude in people from dominant classes that makes them believe that the little they know about marginalized people is a lot; that their own (mis)understandings couldn’t possibly be limited, faulty, or wrong. Often, they don’t even consider asking deeper questions, doing better research, or speaking to subject matter experts to broaden their perspectives. They think that their own observations and thoughts, no matter how convenient or provincial, are golden from the start.
Another thing: Tom King’s Wonder Woman feels eerie in its patriotism because I don’t believe Wonder Woman should be an American patriot. She’s not Captain America. Or is she? To be fair to King, Wonder Woman has been a patriotic character since her inception. Aside from her Marstonian/Byrne proto-feminist aspects (and I want to say that for King, Amazon feminism is akin to mainstream, exclusionary, bourgeois, categorical, hierarchical feminism—as the Black revolutionary Angela Davis put it—presenting, mainly, as women’s success measured in patriarchal terms and, conversely, a cartoonish misandry, especially if the men are deemed unattractive in some way; but if they’re dashing and strong, well, then, they’re rewarded with sex from beautiful Amazons), she was World War II propaganda meant to galvanize the American public against the threat of both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan; and her stories contained all of the racism required to emphasize that purpose; while ignoring, entirely, the United States’ own racial segregationist and genocidal system known as Jim Crow.
There are also all of these allusions to the alleged sanctity of the American flag and American monuments in King’s Wonder Woman stories, as well as an intentional omission of the blood that soaks them. This becomes apparent in issue #6. Giganta uses the Washington Monument—perhaps the most famous, if not the biggest, phallic symbol in the country—to crush Wonder Woman. She fails, of course (and the gag in the book is that Giganta is defined by her failures). Wonder Woman pushes back and uses the monument to knock Giganta to the ground. It’s kind of creepy (and revealing) to see these two women battling each other using a symbol so penile. What adds insult to injury is learning that the monument is rebuilt under the auspices of Superman, who we are told, in issue #18, said, “…that this symbol of strength would not lie in ruin under his watch.” Oh word?
I wonder if Superman had considered that the man for whom this monument is named, George Washington, gladly enslaved Black people. One of those Black people, Ona Judge, escaped his clutches and he literally spent the rest of his life attempting to track her down and re-enslave her—even as his wife, Martha, spent just as long trying to sell Judge off or otherwise remove her from their household. People who study history recognize this narrative for what it is. Whenever a white male slave owner is willing to risk life and limb to reclaim a Black woman he enslaved, and the white female slave owner is trying her best to be rid of the enslaved Black woman, anyone with a lick of sense knows that the white man was raping the Black woman and that the white woman wasn’t trying to stop the rape per se, as much as she was just trying to be rid of her husband’s “mistress.”
Possessed by an ignorance too thick to educate, it’s virtually impossible for bigots to introspect. Their insides are so repulsive that they somehow know that to gaze upon them is to risk turning themselves to stone. Their heartlessness proves that they’re stone already, but that doesn’t seem to matter. This refusal to look inside, their inability to see their behavior for what it is, is how they can so casually engage in ghastly acts, large and small, and present them as victory. Theirs is a bizarro world of opposites where abuse is love, rape is sex, money is god, corporations are people, and children are food.
Further, Americans are forever trying to make rape romantic. Like when they talk about the “love affair” between Founding Father Thomas Jefferson and the Black woman he enslaved, Sarah “Sally” Hemings; or more recently, between elementary school teacher Mary Kay LeTourneau and her 12-year-old student Vili Fualaau. This also extends into how they admired, cheered, and elected an adjudicated sexual abuser to the most powerful position in the land. But I peep game. Simply: Rape is a war waged body to body. And America honors its rapists, both veteran and active duty, with medals, crowns, myths, and legends. In this tradition, issue #18 tries to paint Washington as some sort of truth teller whose morality was so incorruptible that he was even able to resist The Sovereign’s Lasso of Lies (an opposing force to Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth). But Black folk know better. We know that the supposed “strength” that Superman is defending is, and has always been, tyrannical and unjust.
After Steve Trevor dies in issue #14, Wonder Woman steals the American flag that was draped over his coffin (and later given to a distant relative of his) and retreats to the caves of Themyscira to mourn her loss. She embraces the flag like a security blanket and weeps into it. In issue #18, before she snatches the American flag away from a government agent named General Glory, she says: “When you fall, I will not see that great symbol fall with you.” I suppose we’re meant to forgive her for her woefully poor grasp of the crimes committed by that flag—and they are legion. Still, these images of a jingoistic Wonder Woman aren’t just repulsive; they’re also jarring because they recall an ancient kind of disinformation, one that contemporary minds might imagine had gone the way of the dinosaur; one that most readily recalls juvenile understandings of America involving Betsy Ross, apple pie, chopped-down cherry trees, and remembering the Alamo for all the wrong reasons.
In some ways, with Trevor’s death, King subverts a trope called “Women in Refrigerators” by putting a man in the proverbial refrigerator instead (that is, by making a male character a plot device in a female character’s hero’s journey). But he immediately shell-game swaps it back with subsequent actions. In issue #1, Wonder Woman said people who used girl as a pejorative were foolish. “You call me girl because you think I am a fool. But I am thinking, those who think girls are fools are fools themselves.” Yet, while mourning Trevor’s death in #14, she uses it to insult herself. “You sad, pathetic little girl.” Really? Well, then, who’s the fool, Wonder Woman? Them or you?
Then, using pieces of her soul and Trevor’s, Wonder Woman creates a baby from the clay of Paradise Island in almost the same way Wonder Woman’s own mother created infant Diana who would go on to become Wonder Woman. The baby’s name is Elizabeth “Lizzie” Marston Prince aka Trinity. She’s named after Trevor’s grandmother (contrast this with previous stories of Wonder Woman as mother, where her daughter is named Lyta after her own mother). Wonder Woman has this child not because she really wants one. She literally says to Jack in issue #4 that it would be irresponsible for her to bring a child into the world given its tumultuous state, as well as the dangerous nature of the life she lives. She has Lizzie because her dead boyfriend kinda/sorta wants his legacy to continue. As a “favor” to Trevor, who made the request as he was literally shipping off to Hades, Wonder Woman makes what Reddit user The5Virtues termed “a trauma baby” because it’s a decision she makes primarily from her state of grief and loss. And given the evidence on the page, the choice is more coerced than consensual.
(In regard to Hades, in a back-up story in Wonder Woman #15 called “Elysium,” we learn that for Trevor, heaven just isn’t heaven without Wonder Woman. And not even all the great food, sunsets at the beach, reuniting with deceased family, chugging beers with fallen soldiers, or potential sex with exotic women can change that. This is endearing and quite moving. But that last bit, the exotic woman offering herself up for pleasure with him, which he declines, was some of the most shameless Orientalism I’ve seen since Hollywood’s rash of Vietnam War movies in the 1980s.)
And what a disservice this is to their daughter. It’s as though Wonder Woman is saying to her: You’re only here because your father wanted you here. I only love you because I loved your father. You were created to ease the pain of my missing him. You are only here so that when I look at your face, I see his face. This is a terrible reason to have a baby, an awful burden to place upon a child, and an enormously irresponsible thing for a parent to do. This might explain why Lizzie is, in essence, being raised outside of Wonder Woman’s purview and why her relationship to her mother is so hostile. We learn these things in the Trinity back-up stories, where we see Lizzie virtually abandoned by Wonder Woman, raised not by her Amazon sisters, her actual family—not Grandma Philippus, Aunt Artemis, Aunt Cassie, Aunt Donna, Aunt Grace, Aunt Nubia, or Aunt Yara—but by Superman’s son, Jon Kent (aka Super Son), and Batman’s sociopathic son, Damian Wayne (aka Robin). The only meaningful moments we get to see Wonder Woman with Lizzie so far is while she’s plotting The Sovereign’s downfall (issue #15) and building a monument to Steve Trevor on Themyscira of all places (issue #17)—which reminded me so much of how, in America, Confederate statues go up as obscenities in places they don’t belong.
And one mustn’t forget: The story of these 19 issues is being conveyed to Trinity by The Sovereign, taking his time to tell her all the excruciating details of his defeat at the hands of her mother as her bisexual “big brother” Jon is quite literally being electrocuted to death by an Amazon booby trap. It’s not at all hard to understand how flippant King is being with this fictional torture given his C.I.A. background—the entirety of issue #8 is about The Sovereign torturing Wonder Woman, of her having to eat a male rat while in captivity and apologize to his mate for the indiscretion (Wonder Woman can communicate with animals).
But isn’t this always the case? Whether it’s the lesbian Amazon lying face down in a pool of her own blood in issue #1, the Latine man compelled by The Sovereign to shoot himself in the head in issue #3, the indeterminate man of color who gets his face smashed in by Trevor in issue #4, or Yara Flor being scolded, spoken over, and whitesplained by Donna Troy (and given an assignment to rob a bank with The Sovereign’s money in it because, you know, crime and Black/Brown people are merged in the American mind—is this a Wonder Woman comic or a police procedural?) in issues #5 and 18, aren’t people from marginalized communities always the ones made to suffer most publicly and spectacularly in the war games of white people? This is why of all the feelings I have while reading King’s version of Wonder Woman, what I feel most overwhelmingly is distrust.
I know that my assessment of this book has been harsh. Sometimes honesty is. There are some things in the book that I found interesting. Like King’s critique of Christianity’s biblical misogyny in issue #8. Or the moments of levity, like in issue #3, where Wonder Woman knocks out an entire squadron of soldiers with just a flick of her tiara. Or in issue #10 when the Wonder Girls are bumbling as they try to find Wonder Woman’s Invisible Jet. Or issue #16 when Detective Chimp makes a monkey out of The Sovereign. Or in the hijinks-laden, Calvin and Hobbes-esque Trinity back-up stories drawn joyously by Belen Ortega (and featuring too much Jon and Damian, leaving Lizzie as the sole girl/woman in the tales; you see the pattern?*). But for me, those things are overshadowed by the egregiousness of everything else.
(*It was recently announced that Trinity will be getting her own miniseries. It’s about her quest to find her father. We go from one “the only one” to another, confirming that men have to play a prominent role in order for Wonder Woman’s world to be considered valid.)
What’s quite noticeable to me is that there’s so little magic in these stories. Wonder Woman doesn’t soar here; she’s doesn’t fly, either (even though she can). Her Invisible Jet, which was once some miraculous thing the Amazons created with their super-scientific minds, is now just some random Air Force bomber armed with missiles, making Wonder Woman an extension of the American military industrial complex in Themysciran drag (her costume is a remixed American flag). And I’m sure some grown up who hasn’t quite grown up yet thinks that this is “badass.” Well, I find it cynical in its colonial implications.
I have the same issue with King’s Wonder Woman that I had with the character in the Wonder Woman feature film. She watches stoically, almost indifferent, as her Amazon sisters are mowed down by the dozens by hostile patriarchal forces. But when Steve Trevor dies, a man she’s known for 11 minutes by comparison, she full-on loses it. Pining over him like some overly dramatic, spoiled, 18th-century dilettante in petticoats from a romance novel. As artist Nicola Scott said in a 2023 interview, Wonder Woman shouldn’t “be smitten with the first dick that arrive[s].” But in both the film and in King’s rendition, that’s the implication. She’s a woman eager to be in the company of men. To be confirmed by them. To be accepted by them. To be loved by them. To give her love to them. Just one of the guys until one of the guys is attracted to her. And then she becomes their conquest. This is Wonder Woman as Metahuman Tradwife.
In issue #8, King suggests that the Leave It to Beaver variety of womanhood is Wonder Woman’s worst nightmare. Yet, his own rendition of the character is really just a stone’s throw away from the underlying misogyny of that portrait. I’m thinking particularly about issue #5, where Wonder Woman’s protegee, the Wonder Girl Cassie—who, in her earlier iterations, was more masculine in her expression, performance, and presentation—explains that it was Wonder Woman who influenced her move out of the pesky butch realness and into the strangling arms of gender conformity: “And I became a princess girl.” And this is presented as inspiring.
Unfortunately, there’s a huge audience for this failure of imagination; and stories like this tap right into the majority’s opposition to the idea of human multitudes. This is especially true in the U.S., and especially now, with “woke” being considered a crime, and anti-trans violence being considered a virtue by which we prove both our humanity and our loyalty to the country. We’re in a new era (which is really just an old era returned to glory) of allowing bigots to believe that their corruption is heavenly and their master plans are biblical. I oppose all of that with everything that I am.
In issue #19, the anticlimactic finale that isn’t really final, we’re told of a future where the Amazons, including all of the Wonders, meet their end, in something called the Wonder War, not at the hands of The Sovereign, but at the hands of Lyssa aka The Matriarch. She’s the daughter of Emelie, the Amazon accused of murdering men in a pool hall in issue #1. Emelie was pregnant under circumstances that haven’t been made clear, but I assume had something to do with The Sovereign. The Matriarch has been set up to be Trinity’s arch-nemesis. This is an echo of Wonder Woman and Grail’s relationship as Grail is the daughter of an Amazon and the evil god Darkseid. I think either Emelie has been under the control of The Sovereign and his Lasso of Lies and is a survivor of rape and forced pregnancy, or her actions are a direct result of her envy of Wonder Woman, having lost the tournament to her all those years ago. Ick either way.
But that’s speculation. What’s on the page is Emelie giving birth to Lyssa with the help of Etta Candy. Back in the day, Candy was Wonder Woman’s obese white sidekick and comic relief. She has since been race-swapped to Wonder Woman’s thick Black friendgirl, who we’re told is a highly competent military mind as well as a boss-ass lesbian biker chick. But how she’s usually depicted in the book is as the Black-woman stereotypes we see in films like Gone with the Wind or The Help. The clean-up woman. The single Black woman who has no real life of her own and no real purpose other than to cheer on the wondrous white woman. The Mammy-Sage there to give the wondrous white woman sound and sometimes stern advice, and offer up her bosom as pillow. In issue #19, it’s no different. Candy is only here to play nursemaid and doula/midwife to an in-labor Emelie (who’s blaming herself for her predicament and calling the child she’s about to give birth to a curse and a punishment). I guess they consider it “progress” if the image has gone from “I don’t know nothing about birthing no babies” to “I do know something about birthing babies”? Sigh.
King is correct about one thing, though. Sometimes, the people who take us down aren’t the enemies we were always expecting. Sometimes, it be our own people. Shirley Chisholm, Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others schooled us on that. Everybody has a price, unfortunately; and the one percent have deep pockets and can buy anybody—often for cheap. But still, as I look upon broken and bloody bodies in this book, most of which are women and people of color (and when they’re women, their vapid death poses and death stares are indistinguishable from sex dolls), I can’t help but believe that the vantage point of these stories comes more from carelessness (if not malice) than honesty.
I find that I’m wary of King’s political orientation and, ultimately, his motives. I can’t in good conscience recommend this book. And that’s a damn shame because the art in it is so damn exquisite. Daniel Sampere is a master. Every panel of his work is a masterpiece and that’s not hyperbole. Every stroke of his pencil is dancing and graceful. I spent hours, days even, pouring over the choices he made, the flow of his efforts, how lusciously he renders the characters. Though I would have liked to see more of the exciting fight choreography he drew in the first issue, and more diversity among the body types and faces, he’s the reason I endured 19 arrows to the chest to tell you what I witnessed. But in the context of King’s writing, Sampere’s work becomes little more than a seduction, bait designed to lure us in. And before we know it, the hooks are in us and the mallet strike is imminent. The titillation factor of the dead bodies is evidence.
Enduring the obvious capitalist/editorial edict that demands that the allegedly feminist character after whom this book is named is domesticated in ways that make her less intimidating to fragile, but comic-book-buying personalities is a drain on my patience and offends all of my senses—especially my sense of justice. Nah, I can’t recommend this book. Not to you. Not to your daughters. And not to your sons. What I can do, however, is recommend other Wonder Woman and related books for you to read:
Absolute Wonder Woman by Kelly Thompson and Hayden Sherman
Wonder Woman as Wonder Witch is not something that I would’ve immediately thought could work, but the creative team nails it, and the essence of the character, in ways that make it seem like they were born to write her.
Diana and Nubia: Princesses of the Amazons by Dean Hale and Shannon Hale
The cutest all-ages exploration of young Diana and young Nubia as twin sisters, and the children of lesbian parents, Hippolyta and Philippus.
Justice League Dark by James Tynion IV and Alvaro Martinez
This often overlooked and underrated series, where the creative team was pulled for inexplicable reasons, does an amazing job of not only taking us on a journey with Wonder Woman as she familiarizes herself with the mystical end of the DC Universe, but it builds a fantastic friendship between her and magician extraordinaire, Zatanna, giving readers a super-rare opportunity to see Wonder Woman in nuanced relationship to other women.
Nubia and the Amazons by Stephanie Williams, Vita Ayala, and Alitha Martinez
This brilliant series delves deeply into Amazon culture to explore the underlying Amazonian philosophies and complexities. Here, we discover that Themyscira is a haven for all women, irrespective of age, disability, nationality, race, sexuality, or, and this is very important, gender identity.
Olympus: Rebirth #1 by Michael Conrad, Becky Cloonan, and Caitlin Yarsky
Wonder Woman’s mother, Queen Hippolyta is killed and becomes Goddess of the Amazons in this incredible one shot that follows her as she figures out how to navigate her newfound power among a group of flawed and warring gods.
Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons by , Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, and Nicola Scott
This is the history of the Amazons as told by the Amazons. It might be the greatest comic book series I’ve ever read in my life. I explain why here.
In the end, Tom King’s Wonder Woman forces me to confront one of two realities: Either Wonder Woman was always, at base, meant to be some sort of feminine twist on the white supremacist capitalist patriarchal formulation and I’ve just been in denial all of my life. Or it’s King (and Brian Azzarello, Daniel Warren Johnson, Mark Waid, and other patriarchs before them) who transformed the character—consciously or subconsciously—from an emblem of a disruptive, progressive, and healing inspiration to a dazzling Trojan Horse carrying inside of it the worst possibilities we have to offer.
It also confirms for me that it’s rare for anything (real or fictional) with the potential to change things for the better to survive long enough to take root here. Why? Because Americans are a cowardly lot who are afraid of everything: intelligence, kindness, our neighbors, our own shadows. But there’s nothing we’re more afraid of than change. That’s precisely why MAGA and their billionaire boys club are in the process of dragging us back 300 years to a misery that they find precious.
Whatever the case may be, this book of pretty-pretty pictures and dangerously indoctrinating politics does little more than raise my suspicions. And with the entire world collapsing right before our very eyes (thanks to the stunning patience of right-wing forces and the breathtaking asininity of the American electorate), is it any wonder that the toppling of these symbols of an ever-naïve hope and a never-achieved peace precede the crash?
It won’t be Wonder Woman alone, though. There will be an endless number of these situations, where bending the knee to fascist doctrine and bowing to Wanna-Be-King Trump’s incubus agenda disguise themselves as art. There will be so many that it will eventually seem “normal.” That’s how it was at the peak of the American age of castration and lynching; and that wasn’t as long ago as you think.
Right this very moment, they’re re-testing the boundaries for how far right they can go, as they eliminate all efforts at including anyone other than white people in any global dream. They will go as far we allow them to; and to be clear, they’re willing to go as far as falling off the edge of the Earth that they swear is flat. These endeavors will no longer be surreptitious, and they will no longer occur slowly. If we pay attention, we can see the shifts even now—not just in newspapers, not just in books, but in all art; and in commerce; and in people.
The temporarily silent, but always deadly, degrading stereotypes that used to be shamed away, banished to the hollow recesses of the mindless people who created them, are now re-released, Pandora style, for new-millennium minstrel projects—from Real Housewives to any gangster nonsense 50 Cent produces to Disney/Marvel’s military recruitment films. And whether spiritual or secular, this is the very purpose of chaos agents like Trump (and whomever else): They give us permission to be reckless for personal gain, to relinquish our humanity in the name of sadism. Resistance, though, insists that we, the artists among us especially, cannot kneel where horseshit abounds. We are left no choice, then, but to gather ourselves and, against our better natures, pick up the swords and shields that we once believed prudent to lay down. I know we’re tired; I know. But the Amazon fighting stance is now required, Fam. We must be ready for the attack.
For here be dragons.
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