Who the Hell is Wonder Woman? pt. 3

Wonder-foe Giganta destroying Times Square. Typical redhead. Astute readers might notice her bold use of Donna Troy as a necklace. Hi, Donna!

So. Having read my last entry, you might be thinking, “Hey, this story sounds pretty cool; I wonder what happened next.”

Probably not, but you might be.

At any rate, that’s where I and many other fans were in July of ’06

But I’ll get to that in a second. To really get the full impact of what the Wonder Woman relaunch was like, you’re going to need to know a little about the history of how comic books are made and published.

Okay.

So back in the 1930’s and 40’s…

Hey. Hey.

Don’t you dare click away. I promise this will be interesting. And brief. Sort of.

So originally, when comics consisted of a mixture of new material, reprinted newspaper strips, and short, text-only stories, they were larger in dimension and page-count than they are now. Various books were released on monthly, bi-monthly, and quarterly schedules, and featured a number of stories and features per issue.

The 1940's Wonder Woman, seen here in a rare appearance where she doesn't look as much like she wandered off the set of a weird bondage porn as usual.

Lest you be tempted to raise your fist and shout, “Damn you, Greatest Generation!” for one-upping us technologically-superior slackers once again, let me assure you that almost every single comic published in the “golden age” was total garbage and completely unreadable unless you’re a six-year-old in 1941 shouting “Wuxtry!” on a street corner or something. There were exceptions – Will Eisner’s Spirit, Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, and some Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Captain Marvel material – but in general stories were simple, formulaic, and boring, and artwork was extremely crude.
Many is the fan who has gone through DC’s Archives in search of what they think will be some cool, pulp noir adventure stories, and come up with a pile of crudely-drawn nonsense that’s more notable for being full of really embarrassing ethnic caricatures than anything.

Fast forward to the 1960’s. Comics are now smaller in both dimension and page-count.

The 1960's Mod Wonder Woman. Sock it to me? Daddy-O? I have no idea.

At this point, it’s rare that you’re getting multiple features per comic. Early in the “silver age,” you’re still getting multiple stories per comic, but that increasingly changes to stories that take up a whole issue. When Marvel arrives on the scene and comics like Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man become wildly popular, we begin to see *gasp* stories that span multiple issues in order to accommodate larger artwork by superstar artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, as well as Stan Lee’s ongoing, soap-opera style subplots.

This, incidentally, is when superhero comics really become readable en masse. 60’s comics like Superman, Amazing Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Daredevil, Flash, and others are still a blast to read now assuming you can get past really dated pop culture references, the fact that everybody in the world is white unless they're the monarch of some African or Asian nation, and everyone treating women with as much respect as they would have given their dog had it learned to talk and started nagging them.

Once we get to the 80’s and 90’s, multiple-issue stories are the norm, and comics have shrunk once again.

Wondy trying out a rarely-used superpower: the ability to look really fucking 80's.

And that brings us to where we are now.

At this point, following a comic series requires you being okay with the fact that, in general, you’re going to have to pick up five or six issues in a row in order to get one complete story. The reason for this is that longer stories are easier to collect into sizeable trade paperbacks that can then be sold at Barnes & Noble.

If the issues are released monthly, that means that it can take half a year to complete one story.

And that’s a fairly big “if.” See, another reason that it takes so many issues to tell a single story now is that the way comics are drawn has changed a lot. Less happens on a given page of a modern comic book than happened on a page drawn in the 1960's.

Top: Superman page from the 60's. Superman changes out of his disguise, flies to the fucking moon, and pulls it out of the sky to plug up a volcano.

Bottom: Astonishing X-Men page from 2008. Wolverine is in a tree for four panels.

Publishing schedules also aren't what they used to be. It was once the case that twelve issues of Amazing Spider-Man (or whatever) were published every year no matter what happened. If the regular writer or artist of the book had trouble getting material in under deadline, there were back-up scripts and fill-in artists ready to go.

That's not so much the case anymore. Both Marvel and DC have become extremely lax when it comes to giving popular creators the time they need to work on a book, even if that means that months go by without an issue seeing print.

One of the most egregious examples here would be All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder written by Frank Miller and drawn by Jim Lee. The latter is insanely talented, probably the single most popular comic book artist of the past twenty years, and also incredibly busy working on a number of projects at any given time while running his own publishing imprint, Wildstorm. The former wrote things like Sin City, Daredevil, and Dark Knight Returns.

Actual, unaltered panel from All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder.

All-Star Batman and Robin #1 was released in July of '05 and was advertised as a bi-monthly comic. Issue #2 was released in September of '05. So far, so good. Issue #3 was released in December of '05. Slipping a little, but whatever. Then you get to issue #4. Released in May 2006. And that was the only issue released that year. Issue #5 came out in May 2007, and the series has become somewhat more regular since then. However, to date there have only been nine issues of All-Star Batman released since July of '05. And keep in mind that this is one big story that we're buying in instalments that take about ten minutes to read.

While it's cool that comics have way higher standards for their art and higher production values than they had in the past, I tend to think that all of the time spent on getting these really elaborate comics to print negates one of the big advantages of the medium - that it's a visual medium that can be produced fairly rapidly. Having twelve issues of X-Men a year is, I think, a nice alternative to waiting a few years for a movie to be produced.

All this is just to show that following a monthly comic can really suck if you actually care about a storyline enought that you'd like to see it finish while you can still remember how it started.

Unfortunately, Wondy suffered from this problem.

As mentioned in a previous entry, Wondy #1 was released in June of '06 and sold a whopping 132,600 copies. Issue #2 was a few weeks late, arriving in August, and only moved 84,500 copies. Not as great as #1, but still excellent for a Wondy book. It was at this point that they announced that the book would be bi-monthly, so of course it immediately got even slower than that, and issue #3 didn't arrive 'til November of '06 and sold 77,000 copies. Wondy continued on its quarterly schedule with #4 in February of ' 07 at 69,847 copies. At this point the book has lost about half its readers.

We're then told that #5 is being pushed back. Then it's being rescheduled. Then it's being rescheduled indefinitely; when issue #5 is actually released in March of '07, a different creative team is behind the book, and the story that began in issue #1 is still totally unresolved. To finally read the ending of "Who is Wonder Woman?", we had to wait until Wonder Woman Annual #1 in September of '07.

In short, it was over a year before the 5-part storyline was completed. A story comprised of just over a hundred pages took over a year to be released.

The wonky release schedule caused sales to plummet, and fans were up in arms over the whole thing, accusing Heinberg of neglecting his Wondy-duties because of his recently-appointed position of executive producer of Grey's Anatomy.

The whole thing basically turned into a huge debacle, and that's even before we get into the quality of the story itself.

Next time I'll look at how the story actually progressed, and we'll see whether or not it was worth waiting a year to see Diana twirl her way back into our hearts.

Diana fights off her one weakness: bigness.