Comic Book / Wonder Woman (Charles Moulton)

Di facing Villainy Inc.

The first 29 issues of Wonder Woman (1942), Wonder Woman's first self titled series, running from 1942 to 1948 and ending with the death of Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston.

Charles Moulton was a pen name used by Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston and his assistant Joye Murchison, who was the second writer for Wonder Woman and first woman writer but was not credited separately from Marston even on issues where he did none of the writing. Their writing paired with Harry G. Peter's art marks the book's unmistakable Golden Age era. Issue 29 was Peter on his own after Marston's death.

Each issue in this era contains three densely packed Wonder Woman stories, which are either three separate unrelated tales or three chapters telling one full tale, which may have large swaths of time between them. These stories are divided by a "Wonder Women of History" short story simplifying the life of a historically important woman into a short comic and a short two page written word story building around a central mystery. The stories in the early issues are almost entirely self contained save for Paula von Gunther's character development, and while all the stories remain easy to read as stand alone entities the final few issues start pulling together an overarching plot concerning the disgruntled slavers of Saturn, who are now out of a job.

---

Overall

• 13 Is Unlucky: Played for Laughs. General Darnell says he won't order Steve on a mission because, if he vanishes without a trace trying to accomplish it, he'll be the twelfth operative to do so.
  Steve: You scared me for a second, Gen. Darnell! I thought I'd be the thirteenth!
• Academy of Adventure: Holliday College, where a portion of the students seem to be spies in training, Paula von Gunther has a secret laboratory under the mess hall, and regular odd villains try to sneak in or attack.
• Adam and/or Eve: Steve's first secretary Eve Brown's name acts as an amusing bit of symbolism. After she gets fired since Axis spies had enough on her to make her nearly take classified documents to them Steve's subsequent secretaries are also ladies with the last name Brown.
• Ace Pilot: Steve Trevor and Diana are both excellent pilots, and get to show off their skills on numerous occasions.
• Acoustic License: Di and Steve regularly talk to people while they're dangling from airplanes and no one ever so much as asks them to repeat themselves.
• Action Girl: Etta Candy and her "Holliday Girls" sorority were pretty tough cookies in their own right. While they sometimes got the enemy through various feminine wiles, usually they'd just straight-up slug it out with Nazis or Mercurians twice their size. And win.
• Africa Is a Country: Wondy once tracked a group of Nazis hiding in Africa, and then told Steve to fly her plane to her, in "Africa" as though this was a useful descriptor of her location. He found her very shortly after arriving, though he did seem to think it was a bit ridiculous for her to think he'd just run into her. The natives are also depicted very poorly, in an unfortunate reflection of what was socially acceptable at the time it was published.
• The Alcatraz: Reformation Island was almost entirely inescapable, and under warden Mala quite successful at reforming villains. Even when Eviless faked death while being brought in and was therefore never actually processed as a prisoner, then she got up from where her body was lain and formed Villainy, Inc. out of prisoners Villainy, Inc. ended up recaptured and imprisoned.
• Alien Arts Are Appreciated: Etta is fascinated by extraterrestrial culinary arts, and no matter how vile the aliens she encounters are she always takes time to check out their food and find some she likes.
• Alien Kudzu: Rykorn is a rather problematic quickly growing giant alien plant, it is not only difficult to kill its sap can knock drug people into near unconsciousness, it can grow fast enough to fill the entire Bar-L ranch overnight and within twenty-four hours each stalk's husk births a fully grown Rykornian warrior. Luckily Rykornians themselves are rather small.
• The Alleged Car: The one of the Holliday Girls has and old jalopy with the roof missing and no paint save the slogans the girls have painted all over it which they all pile into to go places.
• Alliterative Name: Tigra Tropica, a tiger taming villain.
• All Planets Are Earth-Like: Diana visits just about every planet in the solar system, all of which prove earth like with a breathable atmosphere. As does the moon, which even has a forest on it.
• All Women Are Lustful: Di becomes interested in Steve Trevor after helping treat his injuries while he was unconscious and getting a good eyeful, the Holliday Girls are notorious for being boy crazy, and pretty much every female villain encountered pulls some variation of I Have You Now, My Pretty or Bathe Her and Bring Her to Me on Steve and other men. Then there's Marya, the eight-foot-tall mountain woman, who considers American men to be a "tease" since when she returns an admirer's interest they are not quite ready for what she wants them to do—which is implied but not outright stated to involve multiple men at once—and seems to be interested in women as well given her starry eyed interactions with Di.
• Always Second Best: The Amazon Mala was designed to always be second best to Diana, but despite her strong competitive spirit she's never upset at losing and has only kind things to say to and about her princess despite being determined to beat her one day. They grew up together as friends on Paradise Island, and have been competitive with each other since childhood.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: The Green Geni are alien men who look entirely human save for their green skin.
• Amazon Brigade: While the Amazons themselves (mostly) stay on Paradise Island the Holliday Girls are more than happy to take up the slack as a bunch of ladies just itching to get into a fight with the Nazis, and doing quite well for themselves when they do.
• Amazonian Beauty: Marya is eight feet tall, muscled, works as a lifeguard and attracts a lot of male (and female) attention for her looks. While people will often refer to her as the Mexican giant to make sure people know who they're talking about, she is flirted with nearly constantly and it's clear pretty much everyone agrees she's beautiful.
• Ambiguously Gay: While Marya does find some of the men who hit on her while she's lifeguarding cute she spends far more time going on about how beautiful Diana is, how she wants to protect her, and will throw herself into situations with the Princess with little to no provocation. (She had found and rescued Diana after her plane crashed, at first thinking of her as a child.)
• Amusing Injuries: Gen. Darnell once ended up with broken bones in both hands due to furniture falling on him. While the initial injury was not treated as funny the inconvenience of having both hands in casts certainly was.
• Ancient Grome: Several gods use their Roman names, especially Mars and Minerva, while the rest use their Greek ones.
• Arcadia: Paradise Island is unquestionably a lush peaceful green island with a tight knit community of women, dedicated as much to art and science as to athletics. Going by the original story, the initial community was formed of the Amazons of Pontos after escaping the conquest of Hercules (doing his 9th labor by taking Queen Hyppolita's girdle; in the comics, she got it back). More women arrived there over the centuries, generally as refugees who loved it so much they chose to take the oaths and undergo the training to become Amazons. It especially helped that there was a separate island dedicated to their many RND and science experiments ("Science Island") and that their prison was also on a separate nearby island ("Reformation Island"), with some reformed female criminals deciding to stay on Paradise as well.
• Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?: When Etta Candy ends up stranded in their kingdom right as King Tassel and Lord Cob are discussing how they need to figure out how to transport Rykorn seeds to Earth for their plot to conquer it Cob turns to his king and asks. "are you thinking the same as I, your majesty?"
• Arranged Marriage: Prince Gaston of Barania promises King Ersatz of Skizofrenia that he will get his nephew Philippe, heir to the Baranian throne, engaged to Ersatz's daughter. Philippe is completely uninterested and has already proposed to the woman he loves, which Gaston uses as his "proof" Philippe is losing his mind (as Philippe's fiancé is not royalty — horrors!) in order for Gaston to imprison Philippe and take over Barania.
• Attention Whore: Even before she becomes the first Cheetah Priscilla Rich cannot stand for other people getting more attention than her. She even attempts to murder Wonder Woman over being the center of attention during a fundraising performance they're both part of because Diana is top billed. She ruins her own disguise and infiltration of Paradise Island at one point because she can't stand that someone else is going to win a footrace if she doesn't.
• Author Appeal: The constant bondage situations. Marston's domestic partner was noted for always wearing metal bracelets when outside the house, since a ring like his wife wore would be a bit outrageous at the time. Marston legitimately believed in female superiority in part as a result of his experiments with polygraphs; due to his experiments he came to the conclusion that women were inherently more ethical and honest than men. Wonder Woman's main weapon is a lasso that can compel people to tell the truth, and some later writers would call Diana the "Goddess of Truth".
• Author Tract: One of the reasons William Moulton Marston created Wonder Woman was to convince everyone to come under "submission to loving authority" and how a "loving matriarchy" would be a superior, peaceful world government. Oh, and bondage is highly enjoyable.^note "The next one hundred years will see the beginning of an American matriarchy – a nation of Amazons in the psychological rather than physical sense. Women have twice the emotional development, the ability for love than man has. Today, realizing their love motive has no sustained force, nothing to feed on, women are diverting their energies into other channels. And as they develop as much ability for worldly success as they already have for love, they will clearly come to rule business and the nation."
• Badass Normal: Etta Candy and the Holiday Girls are normal humans that can usually keep up with Di or keep the villains occupied while waiting for Wonder Woman's arrival. Etta in particular is an incredibly good Boisterous Bruiser who can keep up a steady stream of snark while taking on multiple opponents.
• Bait-and-Switch Lesbians: Holliday Girls are often introduced saying and acting like they've got crushes on Wonder Woman, before they're revealed to like men. As having actual confirmed lesbians in the comic would not have been acceptable at the time it seems like this is all they could get away with, though Marya acts completely besotted with Wonder Woman without ever being given a male love interest (it's not for her want of trying, though — in fact she implies she'd like more than one fellow. At once.).
• Barehanded Bar Bending: Diana very regularly bends, twists and tears bars meant to imprison her or her friends, and flashbacks show that she and Mala have been capable of doing this since they were Amazonian children.
• Benevolent Boss: Gen. Phillip Darnell cares deeply for his subordinates and frequently gives his secretary Diana Prince and top operative Steve time off at the drop of a hat, asks after their health and worries that their interactions with Wonder Woman and other superheroes are going to get them injured or worse.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Etta Candy is a short fat girl band geek, who is always carting around a box of candy and cracking jokes. (Her "woo woo!" exclamation is likely based on comic character actor Hugh Herbert.) She also has a long record of fighting Nazis and evil aliens while unarmed and winning, spying for the US Government, is a decent pilot, good shot, and is nearly as good with a lasso as Diana (she's from Texas, where her brother Mint and her dad Hard Candy are ranchers). People underestimate her constantly, which she uses gleefully to her advantage.
• Big Eater: Etta is almost always snacking on treats, though she often loses her box of treats in fights before she eats more than one.
• Big Fun: Etta Candy, who is a cheerful prankster, Boisterous Bruiser and unapologetic candy loving Big Eater.
• Birdcaged: In a flashback to Diana's childhood the Sky Riders shoved her in a large birdcage to hold her captive and make her mother obey them during their invasion of Paradise Island. She got the thing swinging and knocked into their leader, retrieving Hippolyte's magic girdle, then tore right through the bars and returned the girdle to her mother.
• Big Electric Switch: Once everything has been calculated and calibrated one activates the teleporter Paula invented, called a Space-Transformer using a large knife switch.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Rykornians are a One-Gender Race with leaf-like hands and feet, pyramidal heads and rhomboid bodies. They are born fully grown from husks on corn-like stalks and can subsequently control the leaves of their birth stalk as Combat Tentacles.
• Bizarre Alien Limbs: While the Rykornians are Plant Aliens and the females are large stationery stalks with long leaf-like tentacles the ambulatory males are small rhombus-shaped beings whose only notably plantlike parts are their four thin leaf-like limbs.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: The Rykornians are Plant Aliens that are born fully-grown from husks from giant stalks resembling corn which grow from little seeds, which they also use as a food source.
• Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: The Rykornian females are towering stationery stalks with long tentacles, "sap" that drugs people into near unconsciousness, husks from which their smaller kin are born and in which they subsequently live, and do not speak nor have faces but have some degree of sentience. The ambulatory Rykornian males are small rhombus-shaped beings with pyramid-shaped heads, four thin leaf-like limbs and cornsilk-like hair on their faces.
• Blasting It Out of Their Hands: Steve shoots ray guns, a pistol and a few less ranged weapons out of villains' hands.
• The Brigadier: General Darnell, Steve Trevor's superior officer and the man Diana Prince serves under in the USAAF and later USAF where he has to deal with Amazons, magical enemies and superpowered allies and foes.
• Blocking Stops All Damage: Diana's bracelets are divinely created to block anything.
• Boisterous Bruiser: Etta Candy is a stout plucky good natured gal who loves a good fight.
• Born as an Adult: Rykornians are born fully grown and with a functional vocabulary and knowledge of their king's current plots, which he uses to create invasion armies overnight.
• Born from Plants: Rykornians are born from giant corn-like stalks, and then use the husks they crawled out of as their homes.
• Born of Magic: Issue one of Wonder Woman (June, 1942) introduces Diana's famous "birth" from clay her mother had carefully sculpted into a baby.
• Bouncer: A rather large bouncer tries to keep Wonder Woman from entering a man's only club where she, correctly, thinks someone is about to attempt a murder. She throws the bulky doorman aside with ease.
• Bound and Gagged: Diana and/or Steve Trevor end up trussed up by the villains at least once an issue. On the rare occasion neither of them are tied up someone else, usually the villain, will be.
  • The villain the Mask gets her name from the poisoned S&M style mask/gag combinations she locks her victims in.
  • In "Prisoners of Cops and Robbers" Di gets tied to a piece of old pier that will end up entirely underwater at high tide.
• Brains and Bondage: Golden Age Wonder Woman was not shy about her BDSM interests, and was also the equivalent of a doctor on Paradise Island and improved the Amazon's Purple Healing Ray so it could safely be used on regular humans.
• Brainwashing for the Greater Good: The Amazons put the villains who are their prisoners in Venus Girdles which force them to be nice, but this is meant to be a temporary arrangement. Atomia ends up welded into hers.
  • Marston either didn't care or didn't realize that having Diana bring back her female villains to reformation island and then essentially brainwashing them into regretting their actions—in at least one case welding a woman permanently into a device that alters her mind and desires—to turn them into good guys might not be terribly heroic since she and the Amazons do so constantly.
  • The original story featuring Villainy Inc. showed it was possible for people to openly want the girdles off. When Eviless looks to recruit the prisoners of Transformation Island, several of Wonder Woman's old enemies are shown capable of exclaiming they want revenge too even with the girdles locked onto their bodies.
• Building Swing: Wonder Woman occasionally uses her lasso to swing between buildings in the rare cases when she can't just jump the distance safely. She also swings from her plane to buildings frequently.
• Busman's Holiday: All three times Diana and Etta try to take a vacation they end up fighting bad guys, once one of Paula's agents who snuck aboard their plane, then a group of cattle rustlers, and finally then some alien invaders.
• By the Hair: Priscilla Rich tries to have Diana Prince's mind read by Gail Young by having Diana's hair pinned down by someone posing as a hair stylist who then left the room. Since Diana is Wonder Woman she just got up and broke the thing pinning her down by her hair.
• Captain Colorbeard: In #20 Di fights a pirate known as Captain Redbeard, whose pirate crew is actually commanded secretly by his wife Nifta.
• Captured on Purpose: Diana's go to plan for finding kidnapped victims or locating a criminal's conspirators is to let herself be captured by them.
• Carpet-Rolled Corpse: While they're obviously alive Diana uses the roll 'em up in a carpet method to restrain and transport a villain.
• Carry a Big Stick: After Giganta ends the golden age of humanity, Domo tries to assert his authority with a club. Giganta herself ends up preferring a large club as her weapon of choice.
• Casual Interplanetary Travel
  • The Amazons have a (small) space worthy fleet, Diana's "robot plane" is capable of space travel.
  • Paula von Gunther ends up creating a teleportation device, and Diana uses it to travel to Venus and beyond at a snap.
  • By issue 27 Di has visited most of the planets in the solar system, there is a Saturnian embassy in DC and the Saturnians explicitly have faster than light travel.
• Casual Interstellar Travel: Quickly traveling between star systems is in the job description for The Golden Women Space Police.
• Casual Kink: Under the pen of her creator Diana quite frequently makes comments and insinuations about liking being tied up in consensual situations. Steve gets in on it too, though both of them get bound by villains far more often than in situations where they'd actually enjoy it.
• Catapult Nightmare: In "In Pluto's Kingdom", Lorrie, one of the Holliday Girls apparently does this, but it turns out to have not been a nightmare after all.
• Catchphrase:
  • Di has "Merciful Minerva!", "Great Aphrodite!", "Holy Hera!" and "Suffering Sappho!"
  • Etta Candy has her "Woo-woo!"
• Centipede's Dilemma: Gail Young can use her telepathy innately, but it's a jumbled unclear mess of thoughts. Once she tries to concentrate and think about what she's doing her other senses become too much of a distraction so she has to blindfold herself in order to get a clear read.
• The Champion: Diana had to win the contest and become champion of her people to become the Amazon who represented them in the wider world.
• Changed My Jumper: Wonder Woman wearing her spangled bike shorts and strapless bustier in ancient Rome doesn't seem to faze any of the locals.
• Charles Atlas Super Power: Long training in Amazonian disciplines allowed any woman to channel mental energy, giving them super strength, super speed and very mild telepathic abilities. It is a learned skill any human could theoretically accomplish given enough time, the Amazons just have a lot of time as they are immortal while on Paradise Island. In one early issue, it's even taught to some girls from the outside world — one adolescent is seen lifting five tons without strain, and the recurring Holliday Girls all have rudimentary training in the technique.
• Cheaters Never Prosper: Outright stated to be the moral of "Tutine, the Tutor of Destruction," to quote the opening blurb: "when you see the terrible trouble that one boy brought [...]on himself[...]when his cheating placed him in the clutches of an avaricious gangster, you will agree that such dishonesty always invites disaster."
• Childhood Friends: Diana and Mala grew up together on Paradise Island and their bond of friendship, trust and friendly rivalry has remained unshakable into adulthood.
• Chronoscope: Hippolyta's "Magic Sphere" is a disk shaped mirror that can show different points in time and space, though it is normally limited to showing earth-based locales.
• Clark Kenting: Wonder Woman with her hair in a bun wearing civilian or military clothes is perfectly disguised as Diana Prince.
• Clockwork Creature: Wonder Woman faced off against a partially clockwork giant Clock Roach which ensured time loops occurred. It was a monster with a clockface for its forehead and which emitted steam from its nose-spout.
• Clothing Damage: Steve Trevor's tops end up virtually destroyed rather often, and on one occasion his pants were put in the same boat.
• Colonel Badass:
  • Phillip Darnel (the USAAF colonel Diana Prince was secretary to) started out as a colonel with nerves of steel before getting promoted to general
  • Captain Steve Trevor, an Ace Pilot with Improbable Aiming Skills was eventually promoted to colonel.
• Color Character: Sinestra the Purple Priestess
• Combat Tentacles: Adult Rykornians can use the thin long leaves of their birthing stalks to attack and bind intruders.
• Complexity Addiction: When the Nazi spy Rudolph Hessenpfeffer has Steve Trevor at his mercy at gunpoint he aims the gun at the unstable roof above Trevor's head instead of shooting him to bury him alive instead. Wonder Woman is able to dig Steve out and rescue him almost immediately thereafter, though the commotion does allow Hessenpfeffer to escape.
• Conditional Powers: Golden Age Amazons have three such restrictions:
  • So long as no man sets foot inside the capitol of Paradise Island and the Amazons do not submit and offer obeisance to a man they are immortal and do not age (as adults) while on Paradise Island.
  • So long as the queen wears her Golden Girdle the Amazons (as a group) cannot be defeated, by any foe. As they're superpowered fighters with centuries of experience on the few occasions a foe has caught them out on this they notice quickly that they don't have that extra bit of invulnerability and adjust quickly.
  • Should an Amazon's bracelets be welded together by a man they lose their super-strength until the weld is unmade. This one is tricky, as they're still stronger than the average human and Diana has been able to break chains holding her bracelets together that were welded by men, just with far more effort than normal.
• Confidence Sabotage: Dr. Lana Kurree (No Celebrities Were Harmed, she's an Expy of Marie Curie) creates an effective cancer treatment called Plasmin, and is thourougly disheartened when it apears to kill a patient. It turns out her boyfriend, Carl Ambishun, created a deadly fake Plasmin, killed the patient with it, framed her for it and intended to steal her formula to sell under a different name.
• Contagious Powers: The Golden Age/Earth-Two Amazons were humans whose powers (save immortality while on Paradise Island) were all Enlightenment Superpowers any human could attain with enough training. This meant that Diana was able to train Steve Trevor and Etta Candy to resist telepathic attacks and Etta, Paula and a handful of Holliday Girls like Bobby and Glamora were able to achieve low-level Super Strength through Amazonian training. In the end, after being together for decades, she and Steve even found a way to make him stop aging.
• Conveniently Common Kink: Under the pen of their creator Diana and Steve are both inordinately pleased about getting tied up consensually and are into "loving submission". As the book was being published in the 1940s and was aimed at children the sexual connotations are never directly addressed, and given Marston's personal preferences pretty much every heroic character given any characterization is fond of "loving submission to women". Darnell seems to be the only exception among the main cast.
• Cool Garage: Diana has a secret hanger for her space worthy stealth plane, complete with a chemistry lab set up and adjoining space for her usually conspicuously absent horse Serge.
• Cool Horse: Serge, the horse Diana keeps as Diana Prince, has a sixth sense about danger that helps Diana save a child from a villain without revealing her second identity as Wonder Woman. Serge never seems to get tired (though Diana can run much faster than a horse anyway) and is really good with children.
• Cool Old Lady: Dean Strikt whose students generally call her Dean Sourpuss, right to her face. She's old, set in her ways, tough and faster than she looks and is violently protective of her students, even the biggest troublemakers, and will unflinchingly badmouth and boss around superheroes, soldiers and US Government officials to their faces while supporting her students following whatever wild dreams they possess.
• Cool Plane: Diana's invisible Robot Plane, which she can pilot remotely using a mental radio, does not have a traditional engine and so is almost silent, and can travel in space. According to issue 23 it can go 3,000 mph.
• Cool Starship: The "Robot Plane" does double duty as a speedy stealthy little spacecraft.
• Cool Versus Awesome: The conflict in "Siege of the Rykornians" is aliens vs. cowboys, and the cowboys get a helping hand from an Amazon Princess when the aliens prove to be rather damage resistant and in possession of drugs that weaken humans on skin contact.
• Costumer: Two separate storylines saw Diana, Steve and the Holliday Girls tossed into multiple historical periods with their outfits changing into elaborate ones to match the era.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Wonder Woman and the Holliday Girls end up fighting, and disarming the Space Police force the Golden Women because of a misunderstanding that was perpetuated by one of the policewomen interrupting with accusations every time the earth women tried to explain themselves, and saying things which implied they were the evil oppressors of the Geni, rather than holding the Geni because they were murders on a planetwide scale. Once an understanding has been reached the leader of the police group is rather embarrassed by the misunderstanding and how easily it could have been avoided.
• Country Cousin: Etta Candy's family lives on a ranch in Texas and Etta, Diana and on at least one occasion Steve have traveled there for a handful of story arcs in the country.
• Cover-Blowing Superpower: Priscilla Rich's disguise when she infiltrates Paradise Island is given away when she's not willing to lose a race against Mala, the only Amazon other than the Queen herself capable of keeping up with Diana. Di picks up on who she is straight away with the combination of petty competitiveness and Super-Speed.
• Covers Always Lie: The cover of issue #25 shows Diana looking at Wanted Posters of King Tassel, Sinestra the Purple Priestess, and Nina Close the Mask while the three villains sneak up together behind her. Nina does not appear in the issue, Tassel and Sinestra's stories are not connected in any way, and no villains in the tale get away long enough for there to be a bounty or wanted poster issued for them as they're all caught in the act. For the record the villain in the third tale not represented on the cover is Tirza.
• Covert Distress Code: Diana and Steve have developed a series of handy codes and phrases to clue each other in when they've got to give a message saying one thing but the real danger is another. At one point Steve is quite annoyed when Darnell reads a message to Steve from Diana and takes the danger written about within at face value, despite him knowing his agents have such a code, and not only misses the message that Di is captured but also that she was forced to write the letter and the danger is elsewhere. This nearly causes an interplanetary war when the attempted assassination of the Ambassador of Saturn is not prevented until very nearly after the last minute.
• Covert Emergency Call: While Diana is the master of covert Mental Radio calls for aid since her mild telepathy allows her to make such calls without a physical mental radio on hand Steve Trevor and Etta Candy are able to do so with the bulky things on at least three separate occasions, which is helped by the fact that they don't need to make any noise to make the calls and the devices are almost entirely unknown outside of Paradise Island so the villains have no clue what they are.
• Create Your Own Villain: From Priscilla Rich's very self serving perspective Wonder Woman is responsible for her becoming the costumed supervillian the Cheetah, because she got all the attention at a charity benefit they were performing at without the audience seeming to care at all about Pris and then survived Pris' ensuing attempt to murder her.
• Crippling the Competition: Priscilla Rich enters a race held on Paradise Island in disguise, when she realizes Mala is catching up to her she messes with an obstacle to make it dangerous as she passes by.
• Crystal Landscape: The moon has glass volcanoes which are covered with sparkly glass sheets and have valleys full of clear crystalline structures between them.
• Cult: Wonder Woman had two unrelated villains who started a cult in order to scam people out of money, though Zara is the more villainous of the two they're both murderers.
• Cure for Cancer: In #17 Dr. Lana Kurree creates a "cancer cure" called Plasmin. It is not treated as a cure all, just a very effective treatment that her boyfriend is trying to steal the patent for.
• Damsel in Distress: Myrna Dearfield gets kidnapped by the Yellow Mask Gang while they're looking to steal her husband's research. She has to be rescued from the gang's Queenpin Tirza by Wonder Woman herself after they get the research from her husband's duplicitous assistant, and is saved from death at the amoral gangsters' hands just in the nick of time.
• Damsel out of Distress: Etta, the most "normal" of the main cast, was once taken hostage by mobsters. She's knocked them all out and delivered them to the cops before anyone even knew she'd been in danger.
• Dance Battler: Priscilla was a skilled dancer, and this translated into remarkable agility in combat as Cheetah.
• Dark Mistress: Gender reversed with "Captain Redbeard" who secretly serves as the public face of his wife Nifta's criminal organization, with him being knowingly set up to take the fall for her plans and actions while she—until they find themselves facing Wonder Woman—manages to seem like an innocent civilian unaware of her husband's activities despite being the mastermind and actively involved in carrying out her plots.
• Darkest Africa: In one tale the African natives Wonder Woman runs into are enslaving members of another tribe, and while the victim tribesmen are very friendly they're also extremely superstitious and practice Hollywood Voodoo. The apparent villainous natives are being forced to capture slaves by a Nazi general who will murder them and their families if they do not and are slightly more technologically savvy than the others, but this is not revealed right away.
• Dastardly Whiplash: Minister Blizzard had a handlebar mustache, cliche villain outfit including a helmet with jagged edges and acts like the archetypal Evil Chancellor.
• Deader than Dead: During the Golden Age Paula developed tech to allow herself to be revived after being executed by electrocution, which after her Heel–Face Turn was combined with the Amazonian Purple Healing Ray and could revive most people after death so long as the damage wasn't too extensive and they were brought in soon enough, with only memory loss as a side effect. This meant that people who died around Wonder Woman could usually be quickly brought to Paradise Island and revived, however when Lila Brown was partially disintegrated by a villain it was rather clear she wasn't coming back even though Diana was standing right there.
• A Deadly Affair: Nina Close discovers her husband is having an affair with another woman, whom he likes for having all the traits he literally beat out of Nina. This is the last straw, so Nina creates the identity of the Mask, kills her husband, and very nearly successfully frames the mistress for the Mask's crimes.
• Deadly Doctor: While Dr. Poison prefers her victims strapped down, she's perfectly willing and able to kill with her medical and chemistry knowledge no matter what state she encounters her victims in.
• Deadly Gas:
  • The villain Nina Close is known as The Mask before her identity is revealed due to her signature move of trapping her victims in masks designed to release deadly hydro-cyano gas into their mouths if a ransom isn't paid or someone attempts to remove them.
  • Aeropyramic gas, which burns oxygen out of the air and makes it unbreathable, makes an appearance in issue 23.
• Death Is Cheap: Paula modified the Amazon's Purple Healing Ray to the point where any time someone was killed without being disintegrated or having their brain damaged Diana just chucked them in her plane and flew them the Paradise Island to be revived.
• Deception Non-Compliance:
  • When taken captive by a WWIII conspirator and forced to lie to Steve Trevor that she's going with the woman willingly Diana Prince taps her foot, in Morse code letting Steve know what's really happening so that he can follow the women to the conspiracy group's headquarters and mount a rescue.
  • When Diana is taken captive and forced at gunpoint to write a letter that will send the USAAF on a wild goose chase she sends it to Steve and includes in it their secret code letting him know who the real threat is and their real target.
• Decoy Leader: Captain Redbeard is a known criminal and the leader of a bunch of plane-flying sky pirates, but in actuality the leader is his wife, who was never implicated in anything criminal until they tried to steal from Paula von Gunther, got in a fight with the Holliday Girls and drew Wonder Woman's attention.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Di befriends several of her villains after defeating them, most notably Paula.
• Descriptively-Named Species: Rykornians are born from what looks like giant corn stalks, and the mobile males have corn-silk like fibers on their heads.
• Desk Jockey: General Darnell, to whom Diana Prince acts as secretary and Steve Trevor answers, works from his desk and is only ever seen in the "field" once, where he was talking to other officers not participating in combat.
• Devolution Device: Prof. Zool, the one responsible for Giganta's creation, makes a devolution device into which he and the Holliday Girls are shoved by Giganta. They get devolved into "gorillas", but maintain their human heads.
• Diabolus ex Machina: After Giganta ends the Golden Age Of Humanity, Wonder Woman traps her with no established means of escape. So Giganta's bonds are revealed to have stored enough electric charge to power a device she can use to escape, and Wonder Woman, who had both been looking for such a power source and responsible for binding Giganta, somehow didn't notice.
• Differently Powered Individual: Humans with odd powers like Hypnota, Gail Young and Lana Kurree are called new humans. It's not made explicit if Pricilla Rich is one, but given her multiple displays of Super-Speed it's likely.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Using her lasso in a brute-force fight. It's a favorite candidate for the Worf Barrage, because if her target turns out to be stronger than her, she's usually yanked through the air into his fist. But if Diana's stronger—or she gets the villain off-balance first—she can whip the villain around at the end of a giant Epic Flail that inflicts leverage-enhanced Grievous Harm with a Body on him and any other villain underneath.
• Disproportionate Retribution: In "Ectoplasmic Death" Etta decks Oscar because she thinks he's going to try to take her candy, that he just gifted to her. Though their dialog makes it clear he usually tries to eat as much as possible of the sweets he buys her, her violent reaction is pretty extreme.
• Distressed Dude: Steve (under Marston) actually doesn't need rescuing any more often than Diana due to his ability to get himself out of trouble, but he ends up captured by the villains or otherwise at their mercy rather often.
• Do-Anything Soldier: Steve Trevor's job with the USAAF seemed to be a mishmash of spy, commando and ace pilot.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Along with all the much-discussed sexual innuendo there is a rare and serious religious example. "The Icebound Maidens" (issue 13, June 1945), which has some of Peter's most beautiful art, explains that the Garden of Eden was preserved in clear ice far below the South Pole. Aphrodite takes some Venusian women, including young Princess Eve, to be Eden's caretakers. The goddess' visitation on Venus, standing in a cloud of light, surrounded by enraptured witnesses, looks exactly like a Roman Catholic holy card for Our Lady of Fatima. Peter was French-American, and he or his parents may have been Catholic. Here's a mythic/archetypal analysis of "Icebound Maidens" exploring what Marston was doing, having a pre-Christian goddess taking charge of a place created by the God of Israel.
• Dressed Like a Dominatrix: "Ectoplasmic Death " While the long black shorts Bobby's wearing are quite modest the collar around her neck with a strip attached that runs down between her breasts is a rather interesting outfit to wear for laying around on a couch reading.
• Dressed to Heal: The Amazon physician Althea does not wear a lab coat, but does wear a head mirror, stethoscope and glasses along with a white dress.
• Dressing as the Enemy: Spy Queen Furiosa and her spies successfully infiltrate a US military facility. Unfortunately for them Wonder Woman happens to be in the area and tell by their behavior that something is off.
• Dropped After the Pilot: Mint Candy, the brother of one of the three main characters who works in military intelligence like the other two, is introduced in the first issue and never seen nor mentioned (at least by name) again.
• Duel of Seduction: Steve and Draska try to get each other to lower their guard with flirtations, the problem being that Steve is there on orders even though Draska knows exactly what he's doing and who he works for. This means the flirtations are entirely a smokescreen of courtesy and she holds all the cards, which Steve realizes but can't do anything about.
• Earthy Barefoot Character: Marya was living a solitary life in the wilderness (her mom is shown living in the nearby village) when she first encountered Diana, and even during her stint as a student at Holliday College refuses to wear shoes. This rather limits what jobs she can take to support herself living in a city so she ends up being a lifeguard.
• Elaborate Underground Base: Paula von Gunther has a multi-room labyrinth base beneath Holliday College, where she keeps the Space Transformer and works on scientific breakthroughs for the Allies and Wonder Woman. She also lives down there to keep hidden from the Nazis.
• Electric Slide: Wonder Woman has, on a couple of occasions, run along short stretches of the power lines outside the window of WAC officer Diana Prince's office, once even directing her Radio Plane to drop its ladder above them for pick up.
• Electronic Telepathy: Diana had a "mental radio" that allowed her to communicate telepathically with the Amazons on Paradise Island. Di could make "calls" without a radio due to her own mild telepathy, but with the radio even normal humans like Etta Candy and Steve Trevor could use telepathic communications, so long as whoever they were contacting picked up on their own mental radio.
• Enslaved Tongue: Those stuck in the magic lasso have to obey whomever is holding the other end. At one point a villain got hold of it and ordered Di to tell Steve certain things, and while she had to obey the commands she also tapped her foot in Morse to communicate what was really going on to him.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: The Axis powers, specifically Nazis and Imperial Japanese, who employ women in senior positions (e.g., Paula Gunther, Princess Maru) and are much less sexist against them than the US Army authorities are against Diana Prince. Though the US is happy to accept the aid of Wonder Woman and the Holliday Girls, none of those women are on the payroll.
• Escaped Animal Rampage: A large female gorilla is extremely distressed having just lost her baby, and snatches a child from a zoo visitor. In the ensuing chaos she escapes and starts attacking people and property. She is eventually subdued by Wonder Woman, and when most are pushing for her destruction due to just how dangerous she is Prof. Zool asks permission to use her in an experiment, which ends up turning her into the human villain Giganta.
• Evil Chancellor: Minister Blizzard is an archetypal one.
• Evil Is Petty: Cheetah (Priscilla Rich) is so annoyed at other women getting attention when she's not that she'll murder them over it. This includes times when she specifically and intentionally created the situation that brought attention to the woman in question.
• The Evil Prince:
  • Dr. Poison is an evil princess. She is a member of the Japanese royal family who experiments on soldiers and civilians alike with toxins and diseases. These days she's often used as a stand in/ Distaff Counterpart for Real Life Japanese war criminal Ishii Shiro, who experimented on Chinese civilians with biological and chemical agents.
  • When King Francois of Barania dies his brother Prince Gaston has Francois' son and heir Philippe locked away, telling the people that Philippe's mind is cracking due to the grief and stress, with the end goal of murdering Philippe in captivity and Gaston taking the crown.
• Evil Redhead:
  • Mars is a redhead hellbent on entangling humans in a forever war.
  • Queen Atomia is such an evil redhead she ends up welded into a mind control device to facilitate her reformation.
  • The more human Giganta becomes the more evil she becomes, and red hair is among her first human traits.
  • Countess Draska Nishki, who will gladly plunge the world into war if she's not getting paid, and sends a formation of bombers to the general location of Paradise Island in the hopes they will hit something, is a red head.
  • The Red head of the Third World War Promoters, Velma Boswell, is the one most resistant to the loving affect of the Venus Girdles, and shocks the people of Venus with her depravity.
• Evil Uncle: The recently crowned King Philippe of Barania is imprisoned and declared to be losing his mind from grief and stress by his uncle Gaston, with Gaston's end goal being to kill Philippe and frame it as a natural death or suicide and take the crown for himself.
• Family Theme Naming: Etta Candy's family, excluding her niece Suzie, all have names that play on the family name. Her mother is named Sugar Candy, her father is named Hard Candy, and her brother is named Mint Candy, though in her parent's case they might be nicknames they're also the only names for them the readers are given.
• Fate Worse than Death: Several of Wondy's villains consider getting locked into a Venus Girdle worse than dying, including Eviless who is furious that the things can subvert people's personalities so completely that they'll eventually love their captors. Given that her own profession of choice is slave driver some of her anger seems to stem from the hero treating her like a villain while she herself forces people into Happiness in Slavery.
• Faux Affably Evil: Tirza, The Queenpin of the Yellow Mask Gang, comes in and shoos away her men from torturing Myrna Dearfield, has the woman unmasked and acts as though the gang's brutality is excessive and tries to get Myrna to tell her where Dr. Dearfield's atomic weapon notes are hidden supposedly to prevent the men from doing more harm to Myrna, while at the same time drugging her. She also intends to kill Myrna for having seen her face and to track down Myrna's young son to use as leverage against her and to kill since he witnessed his mother's abduction.
• Female Fighter, Male Handler: This is the main relationship between Diana and her Love Interest Steve Trevor. Even when he's already a skilled fighter and a military man, he has nothing to do against supernatural powers Diana has, being usually her handler and supporter.
• Feminist Fantasy: The reason William Marston created Wonder Woman, as he explains:
  "Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman."
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: The trio of superpowered martial artist Wonder Woman (fighter), Omnidisciplinary Scientist who can teleport allies into and out of just about anywhere Paula von Gunther (mage), and super spy Steve Trevor (thief) work together frequently.
• Fire Is Red
  • Red flame is actually a hint that it is not naturally occurring and is the result of the chemicals Zara uses to fool her cultists into thinking she has power over fire. When Diana sees weapons and other things burning with red flame she knows Zara is about.
  • Professor Zoo's inventions also produce red fire, but it is decidedly less than lethal.
• First Contact Farmer: By happenstance Etta Candy is the first human to come across the Rykornians and their invasion attempt starts on her family's Bar-L Ranch.
• Fishbowl Helmet: The red Hazmat Suit that Wonder Woman wears to protect herself from dangerous levels of radiation has a clear fishbowl helmet.
• Flashy Teleportation: Paula's Space Transformer makes a blinding flash and a muted explosive sound when teleporting someone. When a couple of Holliday College students who were not in the know about the teleportation device happened across it and messed around the girl who accidentally sent her friend to Venus was found inconsolably sobbing as she thought she'd blown her friend up.
• Friend to All Children: Diana has a soft spot for children, and kids get along with and trust her wonderfully. At one point a boy lost control of his sled and almost slid right under Serge's hooves while Diana was out riding. As she made sure he was okay the kid learned she'd never sledded before and offered to let her try it out. She then spent hours sledding with him and his friends, who were all playing unsupervised on a hill, using Serge and a bit of rope to pull the kids back up the hill in a makeshift drag lift.
• Gadgeteer Genius: While the Amazons who spend most of their time on Science Island all have traits of incredibly clever inventors (they're responsible for the purple healing ray, mental radio and the invisible stealth plane that can be remotely controlled through Diana's mild telepathy and travel in space) Paula von Gunther blows them all out of the water. Among other things she invents a device to bring the dead back to life with only a bit of memory loss (so long as their body is not badly damaged and decay is prevented), a teleporter and a time machine.
• Gender-Restricted Ability: As they were originally envisioned the Amazons all had lives prior to becoming immortal Amazons, in a ceremony implied to involve the magical spring on Paradise Island, however only women could become Amazons and men were unable to.
• Get Back to the Future:
  • After Diana, Etta, Steve, and the air pirates they were fighting get tossed back in time by a combination of Clock Roach and Paula's Space Transformer they work to fight their way back to the present, with those that arrived via Paula's machine having gone back specifically to try and help Diana make her way back to her own time.
  • Lana Kurree's mind is so powerful that when she is exceedingly upset she stirs up the "winds of time" and sends herself and anyone nearby back in time. Her powers are activated by her panic when she is framed for murder and semi-convinced it's her fault. Etta and the Holliday Girls who were brought along for the ride backwards on the winds of time have to try to calm her in order for her out-of-control powers to bring them back to their own time, instead of further into the past.
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: In the Golden Age the Amazons lock their prisoners into Venus Girdles which force them to obey every order and be happy about it. The only heroic character who ever even seems uncomfortable about mind raping their prisoners is Mala, and the only prisoner to manage to hold onto her own fury at the injustice of her imprisonment and do anything to subvert the girdles while locked in one outside of eagerly asking for its removal when given a chance is Byrna Brilyant, who manages to secretly build a new and improved set of Powered Armor while imprisoned on Reformation Island.
• Girl in the Tower: In #14 the princess of "Shamrock Land" gets trapped in a tower that's set to blow up by the evil Gentleman Killer and Diana has to rescue her.
• Girls Behind Bars: Visits to Mala while she's overseeing her prisoners on Reformation Island have the all female inmates wearing skimpy clothes, restraints that very intentionally bring bondage to gear, sing the praises of said bondage themed restraints and participate in training fights and ambiguously gay adoration of Mala and each other.
• Gorgeous Period Dress: "The Rage of Redbeard" takes place in 1750 with all the Holliday Girls in pretty wide gowns, some with panniers. They find that these restrict their movement and make it much harder to fight than normal.
• Go Seduce My Archnemesis: Steve had been acting as a Honey Trap to gain intelligence for the US Army before he ever met Wonder Woman, and on at least two occasions pulled out that skillset to help distract and get information from a villain for her.
• Goshdang It To Heck: Etta uses "goldurned" (as a substitute for god dammed) on occasion, though Bobby's "Cataleptic Cats!" exclamation takes the cake.
• Happily Adopted: In "Who'll Adopt Teasy?" the titular trouble making orphan ends up very happy with the ridiculously easy going family that adopts him. Wonder Woman pointed him out to his soon to be mother as she, correctly, felt that they'd be a good fit.
• Happiness in Slavery: All over the damn place in Golden Age Wonder Woman comics, where the Amazons had some... interesting ideas about criminal reform. Wonder Woman brought a great number of her (female) villains to an islet called Reformation Island, where other Amazons would subject them to "Venus girdles" (which magically dissipated any evil/violent thoughts) and some thinly-veiled BDSM play to "cure" them of criminal tendencies. Several Amazons note that their "prisoners" often grow to like being chained and spanked for minor infractions.
• Healing Potion: When Marya finds Wonder Woman with a head injury after her Robot Plane was sabotaged she brews some herbal tea to help her heal and recover her memories. The drink is quite effective, but Marya prefers to defer to actual medical professionals.
• Healing Spring: In the Golden Age Paradise Island was home to a fountain of youth the Amazons used water from for healing, though they usually preferred their more controllable magi tech the Purple Ray. They also used the fountain to maintain their eternal youth, though the undiluted waters were dangerous to baseline humans.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: The Amazons have helmets, but even when Diana, Mala or other named Amazons are donning more armor and protective gear they never grab a helmet. When we see the Amazons in ancient times, before they moved to Paradise Island, they are seen wearing their helmets.
• Hidden Elf Village: Paradise Island, though it is accessible to the outside world in certain arcs.
• Hive Mind: Rykorn males are born/hatched fully grown and already tied into and subservient to the hive mind lead by their king. The females are so alien it's unclear how they think, but they have enough sentience to work to protect themselves and their offspring.
• Hollywood Magnetism: In a possible future Diana views through the "Magic Sphere" Paula von Gunther creates very round electric planes substitutes which are somehow kept aloft and propelled by magnetism, and are easily brought down by electric disturbances.
• Hollywood Natives: The portrayals of those living in Africa are…unfortunate to say the least. Depicting them as superstitious fools, or slave trading cowards.
• Homosexual Reproduction: Wonder Woman is an interesting case. She was brought to life by through Hippolyte's longing and craftsmanship, Aphrodite's compassion and both of their love and both women call her daughter, though in practice when Diana talks of her mother she means Hippolyte.
• Hood Hopping: In the Golden Age Wonder Woman very frequently crossed busy streets by hopping across the rooftops of the cars on them.
• Horse of a Different Color:
  • Amazonain children have ridden giant rabbits since even before Kangas arrived on Paradise Island. Mala and Diana are shown racing on them in a story about Wondy's childhood.
  • Tigra Tropicana tries riding one of her large "tamed" tigers to escape from Diana and Steve, but Diana realizes she's slipped away and catches her before she gets too far.
• Hospital Hottie: The Royal physician of Paradise Island is Althea who, while older in appearance than many Amazons, has an hourglass figure and wears a rather revealing white dress with suggestive holes cut out of the fabric.
• The Hyena: Princess Hyeenia of Skizofrenia seems to laugh at everything, to the point that even her own father, who is otherwise very supportive of her, will yell at her to stop laughing or get out.
• Ice Palace: Princess Snowina's palace and throne is constructed of ice.
• Idiosyncrazy: Evidently hounded by her own name Tigra Tropica finds a way to use tigers in all of her crimes, no matter how much they make her schemes far more complicated and convoluted.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty: The Valkyrie Gundra kidnapped Steve away to Valhalla which led to Wonder Woman leading an contingent of Amazons against the Valkyries and defeating one of the Axis's most powerful comics only allies. (Given the Nazi's attempts to co-opt Norse Mythology in Real Life their Golden Age DC counterparts had the Valkyries' support).
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Both Lana Kurree and Gail Young find their status as New-Humans undesirable due to their lack of control. Lana Kurree is essentially doing her best to live out a normal life and never use her time travel powers while Gail Young cannot turn her telepathy off and is constantly haunted by the indistinct and often violent murmurs she gets from other people's thoughts, especially since it takes a lot of concentration for her to match thoughts to their owners and she usually cannot.
• Immortality: The Amazons are immortal only while they're on Paradise Island. Their training in Amazonian disciplines means that their aging is slowed while in the wider world, but they are mortal humans.
• Immortality Field: Paradise Island keeps the Amazons immortal. Amazons lose their immortality when they leave for the "Patriarch's World".
• Immune to Mind Control: Through her low level telepathy Diana is aware of attacks on her mind but not susceptible to them, which permits her to do such things as pretend Hypnota has gained control over her in order to get close to the villain or find their hideout and plans.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Steve Trevor is a crack shot with his service weapon, and has shot chains off of imprisoned allies and similar feats.
• Inappropriately Close Comrades: Col Darnell quietly seemed to encourage the budding romance between his secretary WAC 2nd Lt Diana "Prince" and his top operative USAAF Lt Steve Trevor. He didn't seem to be aware they were actually dating once Wonder Woman and Steve became an item as he was supposedly unaware that Diana and WW were one and the same.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Priscilla Rich needed to feel superior to everyone else, because deep down she hated herself. Wonder Woman upstaging her at a party was what prompted her to develop her alternate personality and become the supervillain Cheetah.
• In It for Life: In the Golden Age of Comics those who became an Amazon dedicated the rest of their lives to the Amazons' causes, and also had those lives extended far beyond the normal human timespan. To leave the cause is not allowed and the one time an Amazon attempted it Aphrodite ordered her hunted down and imprisoned indefinitely.
• In Space, Everyone Can See Your Face: When Diana and the Holliday Girls go to confront the Golden Policewomen in space they wear a transparent green barrier Paula invented to protect them and allow them to breath.
• Instant Waking Skills: The ability to be fully alert upon waking is a part of Amazonian training and Diana bemoans that the time she's spent in "Mans World" is making this more difficult for her as she has become prone to sleeping in by Amazon standards.
• Institutional Apparel: Reformation Island has it's own version of institutional apparel. The inmates there are given sporty dresses and then locked into magic girdles and bracelets of submission which they wear at all times until they are deemed reformed and released.
• I Surrender, Suckers: The honorable version of this trope was perhaps The Golden Age Wonder Woman's favorite stratagem. Typically, she would intentionally allow herself to be captured by foes she could easily defeat, in order to learn the villains' plans and/or be led to their hideout. After being Bound and Gagged and taken to the appropriate location, she would get free and kick everyone's ass. (Unless she messed up and let herself get tied up with her own lasso, or have her bracelets welded together by a man, in which case complications would ensue.)
• Incapable of Disobeying:
  • The Amazons and Winged Women of Venus both use Venus Girdles on captives, unruly subjects and in the Amazons' case Amazons in training. Venus Girdles are meant to make the wearer "enjoy loving submission" and those wearing the things not only have to obey every order they're given their emotions are also warped to make them feel like enjoying it.
  • Wondy's first magic lasso wasn't the Lasso of Truth, but the Lasso of Submission and anyone wrapped in it had to obey the orders of whomever was holding the end.
• Instant Expert: Diana learns languages incredibly quick, picking up Saturnian enough to eavesdrop on her opponents within hours of first hearing it.
• In the Past, Everyone Will Be Famous: There was a Golden Age time travel story in which almost everyone Wonder Woman, Steve Trevor, and the Holliday Girls interacted with was either another time traveler or Julius Caesar.
• Introduced Species Calamity: The Rykorn manages to overlap with Alien Kudzu as their rapidly growing birthing stalks are of questionable sentience and the Rykorn themselves are Plant Aliens with a Hive Mind and connected to their stalks. In the course of a single night they overtake acres of land and require military and superpowered intervention in order to destroy the stalks before they overtake Texas and beyond.
• Invisible to Normals: Diana can see things on the ethereal plane, like the servants of Mars, and can train others to sort of see them, though Di's telepathic abilities make it innate for her and others first need to be aware there's something to see and then concentrate quite hard to get a glimpse.
• Island of Mystery: Paradise Island, but less so than it would become in later iterations.
• It's All About Me: Priscilla Rich became the first Cheetah because she couldn't get over it when Diana got more attention than her at a party.
• The Jailer: At the start of the Golden Age Diana left her villains to the cops and the legal system to deal with, but after Paula von Gunther's attack on Paradise Island she and the Amazons build a prison and start dumping all of Diana's female foes there indefinitely without trial regardless of what their alleged crimes or where they took place. This includes locking them into mind altering devices that force them to obey all orders and act happy about it. While most are brainwashed into Happiness in Slavery the rest desperately want the girdles off but cannot remove them themselves. The only character to ever try to point out how unlawful this is is Byrna Brilyant, who is also the only known character to hold onto their own mind enough to subvert orders while locked in a Venus Girdle since she built herself a new and improved set of Powered Armor. No "good" character ever acknowledges that there might be anything wrong with this set-up.
• Jedi Mind Trick: Wonder Woman can use "telepathic waves" to order the weak minded to do her bidding. It generally only works on those who are considered "mindless", animals or those who are already in an altered mental state like Queen Atomia's "Neutron" slaves.
• Jerkass Gods: Even in the Golden Age, where the Greek/Roman pantheon come across more as aliens who are semi empowered by the abstract concepts they're "gods" of and Artemis and Aphrodite are the only two that aren't outright villains none of them seem particularly friendly. Artemis keeps a bunch of trigger happy guards, who see nothing odd in her ordering the capture of one of her few worshipers to turn over to Mars and Aphrodite has a short temper and a habit of trapping people in And I Must Scream situations for the rest of their existences.
• Jumping Out of a Cake: The princess goes home for "Diana's Day" at the winter equinox, with crazy pranks, dressing up, a big feast and lots of gift-giving. Some of the Amazon maidens dress in deer costumes while others, playing huntresses, capture and (of course) tie them up. At the grand finale the captured doe-girls are put in a huge pie shell and "baked" along with another girl who plays a roasted "dancing chicken".
• Jungle Drums: The African tribesmen who are being forced to work for the Nazis (who are holding their women and children hostage) use drums to summon their neighbors in before attacking them.
• Just in Time: "The Return From the Dead": When Diana nearly outs herself as Wonder Woman to her boss General Darnell his phone rings at just the right time to distract him from the pertinent part of what she'd said. She even murmurs that she was "saved by the bell".
• Just Keep Driving: Wonder Woman frequently runs across the roofs of cars, and while plenty of pedestrians acknowledge that it's happening those in the cars just keep driving along like it's an everyday occurrence.
• Kinky Spanking: When Diana brought tennis rackets back to Paradise Island some of the Amazons tried them out for fetishist spanking.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Domo tries to take leadership away from his queen after the end of Humanity's Golden age, boasting that no woman can defeat him. When Wonder Woman confronts him he quickly specifies no woman besides her.
• Kryptonite Factor: In keeping with the bondage undercurrent, she loses her powers whenever her bracelets are welded together by a man (she is tied up "incorrectly" on several occasions. Hilarity ensues.) She (like all other people, supposedly), could also be knocked out by hitting them on the right spot in the back of the head. In addition, removal of an Amazon's bracelets would send her into Unstoppable Rage.
• The Lad-ette: Etta Candy's Beta Kappa sorority were a bunch of feminine female Frat Bros who liked beating up Nazis and singing Bawdy Songs about their sexual desire for men.
• Lady Land: Paradise Island is an island populated entirely by women, though men can visit they need to be accompanied by an Amazon in order to find it.
• Land of Faerie: In "In Shamrock Land" Diana, Steve Trevor and Etta find themselves in a land populated by European fey who'd followed and accompanied their associated humans to the Americas after Etta falls down the hole at the base of a tree chasing a leprechaun. They're mostly benevolent tricksters, but do not think like humans.
• Last-Second Word Swap: In "Terrors of the Air" Diana almost says "Great Hera" while in her Diana Prince identity, but stops herself and changes to Heavens.
• Lava Pit: When Diana and the Holliday Girls are abducted by Hades to Pluto they're almost killed by first freezing and then a lava pit.
• Leprechaun: #14 Diana winds up in "Shamrock Land" while chasing the Gentleman Killer and ends up having to contend with leprechauns too.
• Let's You and Him Fight: The Green Geni manage to manipulate Wonder Woman and the Holliday Girls into fighting the Golden Policewomen by framing themselves as victims and the Golden gals as opressors. The misunderstanding is helped along by one of the Golden Police's own accusations, but the two groups team up to prevent the Geni from escaping to do more harm once the Geni show their true colors.
• Lie Detector: Steve uses a lie detector to question his new secretary when Diana says there's something suspicious about her. The subsequent questioning reveals that the woman is spying on them.
• Lightning Bruiser: Diana has super speed and super strength.
• Limited Wardrobe: Even when the other Holliday Girls change outfits Etta Candy wears her Holliday College tank top and red shorts. Even in space. The only exception to the rule is if she's on vacation at her family ranch in Texas, in which case she wears her cowgirl outfit, or in the two issues which are costumers (and in one of those issues she wore her cowgirl outfit).
• Living Lie Detector: While Marston's Wonder Woman was not considered an avatar of the truth nor was the magic lasso yet the "Lasso of Truth" through her low level telepathy Diana was still usually aware of it when she was being lied to, if a villain was hiding their true nature and making benevolent claims she could generally tell if their actual intent was nefarious.
• Living Polyhedron: The (male) Rykornians are living rhombuses with four thin leaf-like limbs for locomotion.
• A Lizard Named "Liz": Diana has a Riding Kanga (giant kangaroo) named Jumpa.
• Locked in the Dungeon: Annette Dubois was locked in a dungeon by her beau Philippe's Evil Uncle. He had Philippe imprisoned in a tower, with the end goal of killing them both once he could get away with it and take Philippe's inheritance as King.
• Lost Food Grievance: Taking candy or other sweets from Etta is a good way to ensure you'll be pummeled, which for some reason does not stop Oscar from regularly buying her a box of chocolates and then trying to see how many he can steal for himself. He ends up getting decked just for sliding an arm around her on a date because she figures he's just trying to sneak some of the candy.
• Lunarians: The moon is inhabited by nymphs who worship their ruler Artemis as a goddess. The moon also has forests and glass volcanoes.
• Mad Doctor: Dr. Poison, with her focus in poisons and disease as a biological weapon, serves as a reminder that the Nazis were not the only Axis power performing experiments on human victims during WWII.
• Made of Iron: Wondy's skin is not as tough against damage as a Kryptonian's, but she's still far more durable than normal humans. While pointy objects and bullets seem to annoy her a lot, blunt stuff and lava or other such things don't bother her any more than they do Superman.
• Magic from Technology: Paradise Island had advanced technology that was a mixture of science and magic, such as their "Purple Ray".
• Magic Wand: The faerie Queen Moonbeam uses a magic wand to compel people to obey her, help out her friends and paralyze opponents with magic.
• Manipulative Bastard: Lana Kurree's boyfriend wants to be the one to patent her cancer cure and to this end he murders a young man and frames Lana, nearly convinces her it really was her fault, tries to keep her away from her friends and is generally slimy. Fortunately on one of her inadvertent time travel adventures she discovers his true nature and vows never again to unquestioningly trust a man.
• Master Poisoner: Doctor Poison.
• Meaningful Name: Dr. Cerebrum is an eccentric but clever inventor who creates a non-lethal weapon he calls the War-Prevento Machine.
• Media Scrum: In #18 a bunch of reporters force their way into General Darnell's office and swarm him with questions about a rumored secret weapon while taking a bunch of pictures before they're escorted out.
• Men Are Generic, Women Are Special: The reversal of this concept is toyed with during Marston's run. Diana assumes characters are female until their gender identity is revealed, and goes with female pronouns for the gender-ambiguous Hypnota, most characters are female with only two somewhat regularly recurring male characters (Steve Trevor & Phillip Darnell) and there are multiple societies made up entirely of women.
• The Mentally Disturbed: In addition to being a pretty obvious narcissist, Priscilla Rich—the Cheetah—suffered from dissociative episodes, psychotic breakdowns, and a split personality. Not a mentally well woman.
• Mental Picture Projector: One of Paula von Gunther's one-shot inventions was a device that showed the thoughts of the person strapped into it on a screen like a film.
• Missing Floor: The basement of the sciences building at Holliday College is not on the regular floor plan nor meant to be accessed by regular faculty and students and houses lots of maintenance things. Paula von Gunther's post-Heel–Face Turn laboratory is also hidden there behind a panel in the wall.
• Mission Briefing: In the early issues Colonel (later General) Darnell would give mission briefings to his intelligence officer Steve Trevor with his secretary Dina Prince taking down notes or relating further information about every other issue.
• The Mole: U.S. Army Intelligence often seems to be the service from which CTU inherited its vetting procedures. Steve Trevor goes through a number of secretaries, almost all of whom turn out to be moles working for the bad guys. (Diana Prince didn't work for Trevor, but for his boss, Colonel Darnell. Though come to think of it, Diana herself was a mole, albeit for America's friendly ally, Paradise Island.)
• Mole Men: In "The Adventure of the Mole Men" Diana and the Holliday Girls deal with a group of Mole Men who have taken to abducting people using sink holes. The Mole Men have odd noses, stooped backs and eyes adjusted to dark but are not wholly different from humans.
• Monster of the Week: Seemingly played straight at first, with villains other than Paula only showing up for a single issue. Later these presumed one-shot villains and their related characters started reappearing with ties to the current plot or looking for revenge.
• Mountain Man: Marya is a rugged solitary young woman who lives in the mountains and is straight up called a giant—she's eight feet tall—mountain woman. She comes from farther south than most examples as she's from Mexico, and she did, mostly, clean up for her stint as a student at Holliday College, but even then she pretty much refuses to wear shoes if the terrain doesn't require it and mostly keeps her own council and doesn't interact with the other students if she can help it.
• Mugged for Disguise:
  • In issue #3 Paula von Gunther's final escape from US custody occurred when she managed to surprise a female guard and steal her uniform.
  • In issue #6, the first appearance of the Cheetah, the villainess ties up and impersonates an Olympic athlete named Kay Carlton so that she can attend an athletic tournament being held on Paradise Island.
  • In issue #32 Etta, Bobby and Glamora jump and tie up a pilot, and then Etta takes his uniform in order for the three of them to get away with taking his plane.
• Muggle Best Friend: Etta Candy is Amazon Princess Wonder Woman's regular ol human best pal.
• Murderous Mask: Nina Close, the Mask, is so known because she locks her victims in masks rigged to fatally poison them if they tamper with them or she remotely activates them.
• Museum of the Strange and Unusual: Lotsa Dough's museum collection is almost entirely made up of a jaw dropping number of taxidermied reptiles, though she's also got a suit of armor, and life sized mannequins of a Neanderthal couple and T-Rex.
• Mutants: So called "New Humans" are people with genetic abnormalities that give them superpowers, but these powers are difficult to control and are more of a hassle and trauma for those New Humans depicted, like Dr. Kurree and Gail Young, than useful for fighting crime with them doing their best to suppress them and live normal lives.
• Mysterious Veil: Sinestra hides her identity while acting as the Purple Priestess by wearing an elaborate headdress with a semi-transparent veil over the lower half of her face.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Several of the villains have rather telling names; Sinestra the Purple Priestess (Issue 25, "The Judgment of Goddess Vultura"), Eviless who joins Villainy, Inc.,
• Nazi Nobleman: Villain Rudolph Hessenpfeffer (the Gentleman Killer) was a Nazi spy and nobleman who wore a monocle.
• Never Give the Captain a Straight Answer: For whatever reason the police communications officer felt the need to call Suprema and every other officer out of the room to hear the broadcast that explained why their earth prisoners were really there and how the Green Geni had broadcast a lying call to help to earth that painted the space police as the villains. By the time they return to the room Diana and the Holliday Girls had escaped and gone to the Geni.
• Never Mess with Granny: The Holliday College Dean (called Picklepuss and Sourpuss by the girls) is very protective of her girls, and not only does she know when to flee and ask for help, something the Holliday Girls are terrible at, she is also a capable enough fighter to surprise and get the better of superpowered foes.
• No Name Given: It's entirely unclear what the Holliday College Dean's name is. Her desk is shown in a single panel with the name "Dean Strikt" on it but she's always called Dean Sourpuss, or other unflattering variants, even when her students are speaking with her.
• Non-Indicative Name: The Magic Sphere is neither a sphere nor entirely magical, with a large array of mechanisms set behind the mirrored disk which are visible when Odin breaks it. At least two of the mechanical components are visible when it is intact, as a partially mercury filled glass tube and the turning frame are on the exterior of the wall right by the seeing disk.
• Not Helping Your Case: When the Golden Police capture the Holliday Girls, thinking they're Green Geni due to the coating they're wearing, the earth gals already have reason to suspect the Golden gals are villains due to a plea for help they intercepted. Then one of the Golden women keep cutting off Etta's explanations and saying things which make them seem to be unmistakably overbearing conquering dictators, instead of police leading to a much deeper misunderstanding than was already in place.
• Nuclear Mutant: Atomia uses nuclear radiation as part of her process of creating super-strong but essentially mindless mooks out of kidnapped humans.
• Nuke 'em: The Green Geni are not as negativity effected by nuclear radiation as humans, and are a group of xenophobic homicidal interstellar criminals who like to find worlds bearing life and nuke them from orbit as entertainment.
• Ocean of Adventure: Diana and the Holliday Girls can't even get near the ocean without running into Atlantean royalty, invading aliens using submarines, Nazi naval saboteurs, modern gangster pirates, fighting merfolk factions, pirate ghosts or a stateless civilization living on a flotilla of long lost ships. The Holliday Girls also once rescued a princess floating in a glass bottle while at the beach before freeing her hidden kingdom from tyranny.
• Old-Timey Bathing Suit: The Holliday Girls are rather curious to see what their middle aged dean looks like in a swimsuit, only for her swimsuit to be an old fashioned not form fitting striped thing with capri-length pants with silk stockings underneath.
• One-Gender Race: The Neptunians are an all male extraterrestrial race.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: In #20 it's made clear that "Nifta" and "Redbeard" are nicknames, but the couple's real names are never given.
• "Open!" Says Me: In "The Return From the Dead" Steve and Wonder Woman realize the Holliday Girls are being kept prisoner behind a very impressive locked metal security door. Di takes the easy route and just smashes through the wall next to the door.
• Orbital Bombardment: The Green Geni get a kick out of finding planets that support life, and then bombarding them with nuclear weapons from orbit. They then have the temerity to act like the victims when the Golden Women Space Police force turns their own vessel into a prison ship for them.
• Or Was It a Dream?: After Wondy, Steve and Etta fall down a hole in a large tree and end up having adventures in "Shamrock Land" while chasing the Nazi Rudolph Hessenpfeffer at the end of the issue, when they're back in the human world with a captured Hessenpfeffer they seem to think they dreamed it all when they hit their heads, especially since they don't remember it all clearly. As some of the leprechauns and the fairy queen show up again later in Sensation Comics it evidently really did happen.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: Gerta von Gunther created a number of winged shark mermaids, they were led by one of their number named Sharkeeta and turned against her to get retribution for being kept in tanks like pets.
• Outside Ride: Diana and Steve spend an awful lot of time hanging out on the Amazonian stealth plane's wings or dangling from its ladder while it's in flight, usually to try to catch, give a hand to or lasso someone.
• Overt Operative: Steve Trevor is an intelligence agent who is often sent to gather intel in the field, even straight from enemy agents. For some reason he almost always does this in his full USAAF uniform, even the hat, which helps explain why he is captured so often but not how incredibly effective he is at his job of gathering sensitive secret information.
• Panthera Awesome: Tigra Tropica is a villain who has tamed herself a bunch of tigers, and even rides one.
• Paper Destruction of Anger: As she sees how little attention she's getting as presenter while Priscilla Rich is introducing Wonder Woman's act at a charity performance she crushes her notes in her hand. Her next act is to secretly sabotage Wonder Woman's act in a murder attempt.
• Perspective Flip
  • Wonder Woman's origin is one of Hercules' Ninth Labor specifically and Classical Mythology in general. The Amazons were the good guys, it was Hercules who betrayed their trust, they worshiped female gods (and Hermes) rather than the generally disliked Ares, etc. Justified during Marston's run as we are never shown these events directly, only told them by Hippolyta or from an "ancient Amazonian scroll". (Although it is heavily implied that Amazon version is the "true" one in Wonder Woman's universe.) Marston also gave their mythology Divine Ranks that would make more sense for a group of female warriors often fighting male-dominated people than that of the Greeks; having a good goddess (Aphrodite) fighting over dominance with an evil male anti-god (Ares/Mars) rather than there being a patriarchal Top God. Most later authors have tried to "fix" this to various extents however.
  • In ancient times the Amazons are seen aiding Troy in it's doomed to lose war with Greece and hunting men for husbands, showing that although they are more benevolent than they're mythological counterparts, "Moulton's" Amazons were not always Perfect Pacifist People. That only came after moving to Paradise Island.
• Pirate: Wonder Woman, Steve Trevor and the Holliday Girls once battled some Sky Pirates and their fight managed to attract the attention of a Clock Roach who found the whole thing so absurd it knocked the lot of them back to the Golden Age of Pirates with modified costumes, gear and memories to have a proper pirate fight, though the memory alteration did not work on Diana due to her ties to the truth and telepathic abilities.
• Plagiarism in Fiction: Lana Kurree's boyfriend steals her formula and research into a cancer treatment, and then frames her for murder so that he can try and pass it off as his own. Given who her friends are this does not work out for him.
• Plant Aliens: Rykornians are small rhombus bodied male aliens with leaf-like limbs and long silky fibers growing on their faces that are born from husks on large stalks which seem to be the sedentary females of the species and which have long thin leaves they can use as tentacles and "knock out sap".
• Plant Hair: The Rykornian Plant Aliens "hair" is very clearly based on corn-silk.
• Plant Mooks: While older Rykornians definitely have their own sense of self newly hatched/grown ones are fully functional and only follow the will of their king, which they know as soon as their about. This allows the king to quickly grow himself an army.
• Power Incontinence: Dr. Lana Kurree can travel backwards in time, however she cannot control where she ends up and the "winds of time" sweep up her and those in close proximity when she gets sufficiently upset, though she can return everyone to the correct time period once she has calmed completely. Luckily she's very level headed; unfortunately her boyfriend frames her for murder and tries to steal her work.
• The Prankster: Etta, whenever the opportunity arrises. For example, when she and a couple other Holliday Girls have Wonder Woman's boots in the same room as them her reaction is that they need to slather the insoles with glue.
• Prank Gone Too Far: Di occasionally tells Etta off for some of her pranks, but makes her swear to tone her pranks down after she scares two of the Heyday triplets into running off where they were swiftly kidnapped by men working for their murderous uncle.
• Prefers Going Barefoot: Marya pretty much refuses to wear shoes, which is why during her stint trying living within civilization in DC the job she got to help support herself in college was as a lifeguard. Giganta wears shoes at first, but after going through several outfits settles on going barefoot.
• Princesses Rule: Princess Snowina is the ruler of the North Pole.
• Proud Scholar Race: The Amazons of Paradise Island often came off this way. They had developed a range of impressive tech including having their own space worthy fleet before any other nation on earth had made it into orbit, invisible aircraft and medical advances which combined magic with lasers but generally didn't share any of these advances with their supposed allied nations like the United States.
• A Pirate 400 Years Too Late: Wonder Woman once faced a husband and wife team that lead a group of (mostly women) air pirates who operated out of a small fleet of aircraft. While most of the group was well adapted to "modern" (1940s) times the husband styled himself after an old timey pirate and went by Captain Redbeard. Amusingly their fight attracted the attention of a Clock Roach that then put the pirates, Diana, Steve Trevor, Etta Candy and the Holliday Girls back in the more appropriate time period for a swashbuckling confrontation on the high seas.
• Pirate Girl: In #20 The vengeful lady "Nifta" runs a large group of Sky Pirates all of whom besides her husband are women, and they like to dress the part.
• Planet Looters: The Green Geni have not actually run out of radioactive material, but that doesn't stop them from strip mining every planet they can for the stuff and killing all life therein just for their own amusement.
• Play-Along Prisoner:
  • Diana does this almost Once an Episode, often for increasingly flimsy reasons (the real one being that creator William Moulton Marston was ridiculously obsessed with BDSM). Contrary to popular perception, the "lose my powers if I get chained by a man" Kryptonite Factor rarely came into play; Marston had no shortage of loopholes he could exploit (did the villains chain her wrists together? Did they make sure to weld the chains?) to have her break her chains at a moment's notice.
  • Diana talks Mala into tricking Paula into binding her as part of a gambit to help break the conditioning on the women Paula brainwashed. As soon as the women start fighting Paula the blonde Amazon easily breaks her bonds.
• Plucky Comic Relief: Etta Candy was a prankster and Boisterous Bruiser whose quips and violence was most always played for laughs, though not the character herself which was rather impressive for a short overweight comic relief character in the 1940s.
• Poor Communication Kills: The Golden Women grab Wonder Woman and the Holliday Girls and, due to where they found the ladies and the green membranes which are allowing the humans to live in the non-earth environment, believe them to be more of the evil Green Geni. While both Diana and Supreema start to realize that both groups are missing some information, one of the lower level space policewomen keeps angrily cutting off each and every attempt by the humans to explain themselves with accusations that paint the Golden as the villainous oppressors in the fight against the Geni. The ensuing fight nearly results in the deaths of the entire space police force and the destruction of life of earth.
• Prehensile Hair: King Crystallar of the Green Geni has a prehensile mustache, its movements help emphasize his reactions and emotions.
• Prison Changes People: Reformation Island changes (most) of its prisoners for the better, as seen when most of the prisoners risk their lives to save their warden Mala and queen Hippolyte from seven villains who had staged an escape. Hippolyte and Mala actually award those prisoners their freedom in return, as they've demonstrated that they really have reformed from their old ways.
• Psychic Block Defense: Di had low grade telepathic abilities that allowed her to shrug off or completely ignore attempts at mind control and other telepathic intrusions. It also allowed her to make Mental Radio "calls" without having a mental radio with her, which meant she could remotely control her plane as it had a Mental Radio receiver.
• Punny Name: Lotsa Dough is the name of an incredibly wealthy woman.
• The Queenpin: The rather brutal Yellow Mask Gang, which conducts its business internationally, is run by the Faux Affably Evil Tirza.
• Rapid Aging: In the possible future in which Diana and Etta Candy find a way to derive the "L-3 Vitamin" from the spring water of the Amazon's Fountain of Youth which allows everyone who drinks it to regain and retain their physical youth, thus eliminating death from old age, Etta also develops an anti-L-3 formula which causes the effects of L-3 to rapidly reverse until the imbiber is their actual age.
• Raygun Gothic: The Casual Interplanetary Travel of the Golden Age WW stories is rife with colorful retro rockets, marvelous space travel capable submarines with extra little scalloped fins and so very many types of ray gun.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Mala is the warden on Reformation Island and is more than reasonable with her wards, a large group of whom chose to dedicate themselves to her due to how well she cared for them and helped their rehabilitation.
• Rebellious Princess: After Steve Trevor crashed on Paradise Island, a contest was held to determine which Amazon would return him to the outside world. Princess Diana wanted to enter the contest but her mother Queen Hippolyte forbade her to do so. Diana entered the contest in disguise and bested all of the other contestants, winning the right to leave.
• Recognizable by Sound: Steve Trevor can recognize Diana by voice alone, but will not call out an identifying name until he's got enough context to know what identity he should be using.
• Reinventing the Telephone: Amazons use "Mental Radio" instead of phones and Di has one in her plane, and has given Etta one to get in touch with her. She's not opposed to using an actual phone but she can't put one in her plane, they don't allow for images, cell phones weren't around yet, and she wouldn't be able to call home with one.
• Reluctant Warrior: Diana constantly advocates diplomacy over violence, but she'll not hesitate to fight to protect a life.
• Retcon: Diana had already been in her own books and had an Origin but issue 1 is where her origin as a statue modeled out of clay by her mother first appears.
• Retro Rocket: While the Amazons have space planes there are plenty of nice aesthetically pleasing rockets used for space travel, like the Venus Rocket built at Holliday College.
• Revenge Against Men: Villain Zara led a fire cult that sought to tear down men of power after being sold into slavery as a child by her own father.
• Robe and Wizard Hat: Shaggy is actually a leprechaun but he's got powerful magic, wears the requisite pointy hat and matching robe and even has a Wizard Beard.
• Robot Me: Diana had Paula build a lifelike robotic Diana when Gen. Darnell scheduled Diana to give Wonder Woman an award at a ceremony. The robot had no AI and was instead controlled through a mental radio receiver, much like, but far more sophisticated than the one in Diana's robot plane. This made it more drone than robot, moreso than the robot plane, which could act autonomously.
• Rocketless Reentry: Paula invents a type of coating/exoskeleton type thing that allows Wonder Woman and the Holliday Girls to drop though an atmosphere from space without burning or being harmed.
• Roguish Romani: In # 29, some "Irish Gypsies" (presumably Irish Travelers) visit and the Holliday Girls go to watch them put on performances and get their palms read. One of the men stabs another and leaves him for dead and then his lackeys kidnap the Holliday Girls. The woman who read their palms helps Wonder Woman rescue the girls, and the man who was left for dead helps take down the murderous traveler and his lackeys after Diana and Paula heal him.
• Roofhopping: Wonder Woman would get through the city by leaping between rooftops and swinging from buildings using her magic lasso.
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: The Geni just look like human men with green skin and mustaches.
• Sadly Mythtaken: It was quite blatant in the original Golden Age comics; aside from Aphrodite as the Amazons' Big Good, Marston rarely bothered bringing in any of the other Gods... but when he did, it would always be mixed in with Casual Interplanetary Travel sci-fi, with Ares literally ruling a kingdom on Mars, Hades literally ruling Pluto, etc.
• Scam Religion: Zara of the Crimson Flame is a con artist villain who uses charlatan tricks to dupe people into joining her made up cult and then takes their money and uses threats and more stage magic to make them scared enough to do her bidding.
• Scars Are Forever: Imperial Japan is trying to enforce this on poor Mae Wu, a Chinese girl who was tortured by them and escaped to America where she's trying to raise money for her people and hoping to have surgery to reduce her scarring. She ends up killed when she goes to see a surgeon.
• Schizo Tech: Paradise Island had both magic and advanced technology. For instance, they built the Robot Plane (later known as the Invisible Jet). Since they had a magic scrying device that let them observe developments on the outside world at will, and they were a scholarly culture with nothing but time on their hands to invent things, this actually makes perfect sense.
• Science Hero: Wonder Woman started out as a scientist with her own laboratory in which she and an Amazonian physician nursed Steve back to health, Diana aiding by inventing the Purple Healing Ray. She also flew an experimental stealth Space Plane. Later writers moved her further and further from the role, instead focusing on the ties her mother and birth via Aphrodite's aid gives her to Classical Mythology, despite the original comics usually treating those Olympians that showed up more as aliens than gods.
• Scrapbook Story: The entirety of "Siege of the Savage War Maidens" is told using Amazonian home videos with some voice over by Hippolyte with the framing device being that she is telling the Holliday Girls a story from Diana and Mala's childhood on Paradise Island.
• Secondary Color Nemesis: Mars/Ares wears orange, Paula, Dr. Poison, Queen Atomia and Mask (Nina Close) wear green.
• Secret Identity: Diana Prince is Wonder Woman's.
• Secret Room: Following her Heel–Face Turn Paula von Gunther has a secret laboratory under Holliday College.
• Selective Obliviousness: Under Marston's pen Steve acting like he doesn't know "Di" and his "Angel" are one and the same is highly suspect, given he can recognize her by voice, can recognize her with her hair up, can recognize her with glasses on, regularly teases her about the similarities between the two and seems to love catching "Di" wearing part of WW's outfit and so on. He maintains plausible deniability by never actually confronting her or confirming his "suspicions". Under later writers Steve seems to be legitimately clueless.
• Sensor Suspense: During the Golden Age Paradise Island had a proximity alarm set up to alert the Amazons if anything was approaching the island from the sea. One one occasion despite the alarm being triggered their foes remained unseen while they scrambled to figure out what was coming since the villain had co-opted the tech that makes Diana's Space Plane invisible for a ship.
• Shipper on Deck: Etta Candy is a bit annoyed that Wonder Woman refused to even consider Steve's proposals, given her pals are already in a relationship and it's no secret they love each other. She didn't try to push them, but given Di's abilities and Steve's spy status they both end up overhearing her complaints about their stalled relationship anyway.
• Shipshape Shipwreck: In "The Curse of Montezuma" Diana recovers a sunken Conquistador's ship, the only damage to the long sunken ship, which she was recovering in 1947, was the hole in the side that sunk it and while the sails were missing the rigging was all still intact.
• Shooting Superman: Maybe a sniper would have a chance, but most goons like to stand directly in front of Wondy before shooting at her.
• Shout-Out:
  • The chemist Dr. Lana Kurree's name is a shout out to real life Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie. (She's depicted as a black-haired version of the real scientist, who was ash blonde.)
  • Contains a darkly amusing reference to the witch's death via falling house in The Wizard of Oz when Steve's third secretary is killed, all that's shown is her two legs sticking up out of the tipped over desk and rubble.
• Sidekick: Etta Candy and the Holiday Girls, young women from Holiday women's college who assisted WW, did investigative work, got caught and tied up and rescued a lot. Many of them were from Etta's "Beeta Lamda" sorority, where a common pledge prank was that you had to walk around campus in baby outfits with diapers and a bottle.
• Sky Pirate: The husband and wife team of Nifta and "Redbeard" operate a crew of pirates out of planes which makes them fitting foes for the two Ace Pilots Di and Steve.
• Slain in Their Sleep: Cheetah intends to kill Diana Prince this way, and comes within inches of plunging a knife into her heart while she sleeps but stops at the last minute because the one she's really pissed at is Wonder Woman and she realizes she has everything she needs to frame Wondy for stealing from a charity for war orphans by sticking the funds she herself stole under Di's bed.
• Slave Galley: When Diana and her sky pirate foes led by Nifta are tossed back in time by an odd Clock Roach to maintain the Time Loop that has Nifta feeling like she's fought Diana before Diana ends up shackled on a slave galley, and she breaks her oar for a weapon and convinces the others slaves to revolt as well.
• Slave Liberation: Given the high number of her villains who forced others into slavery the book is full of stories of her freeing their slaves, and those under More than Mind Control could be brought back to themselves by having a wrist wrapped in her lasso or through her own very mild telepathic abilities.
• Slipped the Ropes: While Diana prefers to just break whatever bonds are holding her any time a villain manages to tie her up with her indestructible lasso she has to subtly slip out instead.
• The Smart Guy: Paula von Gunther acts as the smartest member of Diana's crime fighting group, which in this era consists of Diana, Steve, Etta, the Holliday Girls, and Paula.
• Smooth-Talking Talent Agent: The first (named) villain Diana runs across in Man's World is a sleazy Vaudeville agent named Al Kale, who talks her into doing bullets-and-bracelets as a sideshow gimmick. It proves to be a smash-hit, but when Diana (who was mostly doing it to kill time while Steve Trevor recovered in hospital) calls it quits, he tries to run off with a 100% cut of the receipts.
• Snake Pit: Tigra Tropica drops an unconscious Steve into a tiger pit to try and escape from Wonder Woman while Diana rescues him. The rescue takes far less time than Tigra was hoping for, though the reader is treated to the amusing view of her being lassoed off of a running tiger's back right as she reaches her front gate.
• The Sneaky Guy: Steve Trevor is quite good a scouting out an enemy fortification or hideout and then returning with the information without being noticed. As it's not his book though he usually finds that Diana's tactic of allowing herself to be captured and brought along by the bad guys has gotten her there first and on the rare occasions the villain has stumbled across a way of restraining her that is tricky for her to escape from he helps her out.
• Space Cossacks: The Green Geni extraterrestrial group present themselves as freedom seekers fleeing oppressive governments who have been imprisoned within their own vessel by the Golden Women who are imposing the laws of those they'd fled on them. They're not exactly lying, but they did leave out the bit were their favorite pastime is bombarding inhabited planets with nukes from orbit, which is why the Space Police aren't just letting them roam as they please.
• Space Police: In #26 Wonder Woman and the Holliday Girls had a run in with the Golden Policewomen, who were part of a coalition to stop any universal oppressors. After a bit of miscommunication where the policewomen thought Wondy was allied with a group of green skinned fellows who were going around murdering the populations of other planets the two groups worked together to defeat the atomic weapon using villains and Diana gave them a formula for a green tinged spray that would work as a defense against such dangerous radiation.
• A Spy at the Spa: The possible Ur-Example might be "The Adventure of the Beauty Club" from #6, where Cheetah ran the titular beauty club for Army officer's wives. The treatments are meant to distract the clients, and in some cases immobilize and terrorize or torture them, to allow a blackmailed telepath to gather intel without the wives ever knowing they'd betrayed the military secrets they were privy to.
• Spy School: Holliday College is not explicitly a spy school, and most of its students just seem to be there to attend college, but there is a whole slew of students, Etta Candy most prominently, who get to brush off classes for espionage missions for the US Army, this group of students gets to go on armed learning expeditions with their professors, and there's an underground base in which Paula von Gunther designs things for the Army and Wonder Woman hidden on campus.
• Spy Speak: Diana Prince and Steve Trevor have enough pre-arranged words and phrases that she's able to tell him the truth about the villain's real target in a letter the villain is forcing her to write to send the army on a wild goose chase, and which they read before sending it to him.
• Statuesque Stunner: Marya is frequently outright called and occasionally mistaken for a giant and is eight feet tall. She's also very beautiful and is admired for her beauty both in her home country of Mexico and when she comes to DC to attend Holliday College, where she also acts as a lifeguard.
• Stealth in Space: In its earliest appearances Wonder Woman's invisible "plane" was a fully functional stealth spacecraft which ran almost entirely silently and was not visible to the naked eye.
• Stepping-Stone Sword: In #14 Diana breaks off the tips of some spears and climbs up a tower to rescue the princess trapped inside by wedging them into the space between the stones on her way up.
• Steven Ulysses Perhero:
  • Byrna Brilyant is a Mad Scientist usually capable of challenging Wonder Woman herself with her tech.
  • Tigra Tropica is apparently the actual name of a tiger taming villain.
• Strapped to a Bomb: Wondy was strapped to a torpedo alongside another woman by some men trying to find treasure in a sunken ship.
• Sudden Name Change: The name of the Holliday College Dean is usually given as Sourpuss, but is in an issue where her desk is shown it's written as Strikt.
• Sufficiently Advanced Bamboo Technology: Paradise Island had advanced technology, magic and magitek far outpacing the outside world but stuck to an Ancient Greek aesthetic. The Amazons developed an invisible plane, mental radio, and purple rays and used casual scrying devices to keep up to date on developments in the outside world but wore togas, used archery as a pastime and built their buildings in the ancient Greek style.
• Suicidal "Gotcha!": Diana Prince has fallen out of airplanes and at least once been trapped in a fire and presumed dead only for Wonder Woman to show up at the scene, and claim she saved Diana and got her to safety. On at least one occasion her timing was off, as she needed to get the plane she'd jumped to from Steve's plane back to Paradise Island before revealing herself, and she got to interrupt Gen. Darnell and Steve planning her own funeral. Darnell was shocked to see his secretary come back, but Steve seemed more amused.
• Superhero Origin: She's the chosen champion of the Amazons as covered, once again, in issue 1, tasked with spreading the message of love, peace, and justice.
• Supernatural Martial Arts: Most of Wonder Woman's abilities (outside of immortality) are the result of being a master of Amazonian martial arts, which include training in mild telepathic abilities and are implied to be something any human could learn with enough patience and time.
• Supernatural Phone: The mental radios allow the user to use a form of telepathy to connect with the person being contacted, though the things are pretty much never used to do more than, essentially, FaceTime.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: Amazons, including Wonder Woman herself, were depicted as avoiding contact with outsiders by swimming underneath their boats and ships and then pushing them away from their island from beneath without ever having to come up for air.
• Super-Senses: Diana can sense magic!
• Super-Speed:
  • Di is the "mile a minute maiden" and has "the speed of Mercury", and is capable of moving so fast she can appear as Wonder Woman and Diana Prince in the same photograph.
  • While her super speed not made explicit in the text Cheetah (Priscilla Rich) is able to run as fast Mala, the only Amazon capable of giving Diana a decent race. Priscilla's speed at running even gives away her identity while she's in disguise once.
• Super-Strength: As touted in her first outing Di is "stronger than Hercules".
• Super-Toughness: She has to block bullets with her bracelets instead of her skin, but she's much tougher than a baseline human.
• The Symbiote: Ambulatory Rykornian males live in the husks they were born from on their stationery birthing stalks, and both types of Rykornian works to protect the other.
• Take Over the World: The Neptunians intend to take over the world and enslave the populace.
• Tap on the Head:
  • "Ordeal of Fire": One of the Nazi agents strikes Ann Maxwell across the back of the head and knocks her out after he hears her telling Steve that she recognizes Paula's picture as someone whose been poking around the munitions plant where she works.
  • "The Return From the Dead": Shockingly subverted, given how common it is for the heroes to get hit in the back of the head and wake up later. The male Neanderthal mannequin becomes animated right behind Steve and starts to swing its club at the back of his head only for Wonder Woman to intervene.
  • "The Drugged WAC": Played straight when Psycho breaks a pitcher on the back of the prison matron's head.
• Technicolor Toxin: L-3 is technically beneficial, given its Fountain of Youth applications, however drinking enough of the odd magenta water diffused "vitamin" will kill by reversing one's age until they're a zygote.
• Telepathy:
  • Under the writing of her creator Diana was a mild telepath, but she couldn't read minds — only perceive and fight back when another telepath was trying to trick her or mess with her mind, and she can send messages to anyone who has a mental radio.
  • Gail Young can read minds but not block any other telepathy, and can only really concentrate enough to get a clear read when she's blindfolded or keeps her eyes closed.
• The Theme Park Version: Of Classical Mythology. The gods and the tales are streamlined down into the bits that are useful, and are often hinted to actually not be proper "gods" and rather something magical and extraterrestrial/dimensional.
• There Was a Door: In "The Return From the Dead" Diana realizes the Holliday Girls are unconscious behind the steel door Steve is trying to pick the lock to and steps through the wall next to the door to rescue them from the room behind it which is quickly filling with toxic gas.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill:
  • To be an Amazon in the Golden Age one had to take an oath no never take a human life, and breaking this oath not only ensured one was no longer an Amazon and their limited immortality was revoked but also invited Aphrodite's wrath which generally meant the oath breaker was stuck in a mind controlling Venus Girdle indefinitely. Given how many non humans run about in comics there was a rather large loophole, one Diana was not eager to exploit. Paradise Island was a "paradise" with lessons to teach us because unlike man's world, it was peaceful. There's a reason they were aided by the goddess of love and the arch-enemy of Amazon society was the god of war.
  • Diana was one of the most devout Technical Pacifist types in the DCU. That was part of the point of having a lasso (aside from Moulton's interests) — it was a non-lethal weapon.
• Til Murder Do Us Part: The villain the Mask, who has targeted and killed the seemingly distraught Nina Close's husband turns out to be Nina Close, who was pissed at her husband for, among other things, showing another woman with affection while ignoring and dismissing her.
• Token Minority: There were at least thirty named Holliday Girls in the Golden Age, and only one, Selina Ritio, was unquestionably a woman of color.
• Too Dumb to Live: Steve's secretary is annoyed at the accolades Diana Prince gets and that Diana is the secretary for the general. Due to this when Diana bursts into Steves office to pull him away from the desk and yells for Ms. Brown not to pick up the pen on the desk she obstinately grabs it. As the thing was actually an experimental disintegration bomb there's not much left of her but her lower legs.
• Torches and Pitchforks: Giganta rallies the "peasant"s to rise up and attack Queen Darla and King Aros' palace while Wonder Woman, Steve Trevor and the Holliday Girls are visiting. When the rebels tie up the Queen to kill her Giganta has them include Wonder Woman with the intent that they're both assassinated.
• Trap Door: Tigra Tropica places an incapacitated Steve Trevor on a trap door above a cage full of tigers and sets things up so that if Wonder Woman attacks her Steve will be dropped as tiger food. Diana manages to lasso her and save Steve from the tiger pit, though as the fall woke him he was unsettled by the experience.
• Trick Arrow: Nymphs use lasso arrows to try and capture Diana and Paula in issue 5.
• Trickster Girlfriend: Diana's relationship with Steve has tones of trickery, with her liking to cover his eyes from behind to make him guess who she is, which he always gets right away since he knows her voice, and generally doing things to make him frazzled before leaning on him and saying things about what a useful boyfriend he is.
• Two Girls and a Guy: Wonder Woman, Etta Candy and Steve Trevor team up consistently and are all friends.
• Unholy Matrimony: Villains "Captain Redbeard" and Nifta are a married couple, with Nifta being the actual mastermind and leader of their pirating and Red set up to take the fall in order for her to remain innocent in the public eye. They do not take it well when Diana unmasks their organization's true leader.
• Unscaled Merfolk: Gerta von Gunther did some experiments on a handful of sharks which turned them into mermaid like individuals with human level intelligence. She then kept them in fish tanks like pets which infuriated them and they attempted to get revenge on Gera and the Amazons under the leadership of one of their number named Sharkeeta.
• Unstoppable Rage: For Wonder Woman and other Amazons in their pre-Crisis incarnations, the Bracelets of Submission acted as a check against the use of unrestrained power. If Wonder Woman's bracelets were removed, she became intoxicated with power, violent and nearly unstoppable. Like some readers, villains could be confused about the "rules" of Wonder Woman's bracelets, thinking that their removal would also remove her strength (cue Oh, Crap! moment for the bad guys).
• Utopia: Paradise Island lives up to its name, as a refuge for women where they can study many different disciplines without any men deriding their efforts or interfering with their accomplishments.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: While it does not seem to have been the authorial intent the original Paradise Island maintains it status as a "Paradise" by having dissenters forcibly locked into Venus Girdles, which force them to submit to every order with a smile and find happiness in it, until their minds have been reshaped to Aphrodite's liking. The only Amazon to seriously question this—without breaking enough rules to end up locked in one of the things—is Mala, though Diana inconsistently agrees with her on the use of the girdles.
• Ventriloquism: Diana would occasionally throw her voice so it appeared that Diana Prince was talking to an out of sight Wonder Woman just around the corner or on the other side of an open doorway.
• Vicious Vac: The Golden Women use a giant vacuum-like weapon called an Inhilerator which is incredibly intimidating and helps along the misunderstanding that they are the aggressors in the confrontation betwixt them and the Green Geni.
• Video Phone: While the way the Amazons' Mental Radio worked was inconsistent, the lunchbox-sized, phone-like device always included a small screen and was fairly transportable.
• Villainous Badland, Heroic Arcadia: Venus is a lush planet inhabited by winged maidens who follow Aphrodite's law, like the Amazons of Paradise Island which is likewise a very nice place. Mars, ruled by Mars, is a cruel place which upholds such virtues as deception and violence and is a barren wasteland.
• Villains Want Mercy: The Sky Riders immediately say that they're just like the Amazons and beg for forgiveness and to live on Paradise Island with them after their defeat, despite having been planning very vocally what way was best to murder every woman and child on the island just seconds before. Hippolyte responds that of corse she'll forgive them, and even let them become Amazons, once they've actually proven their remorse and been judged reformed as she's having the lot of them imprisoned on Reformation Island.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Diana does not like it when people mess with Steve, and villains whose first appearance has them threatening, poisoning or attempting to brainwash him are tracked down and beaten by her with a bit more vigor than normal, especially those that mess with his mind.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: Paula von Gunther acts as a sort of prototype voice with an internet connection, as the internet was not yet invented. Diana, Steve and the Holliday Girls would call Paula up on their Mental Radios while in the field to ask for her help and advice as she was an Omnidisciplinary Scientist. Sometimes this resulted in them needing to bring something, or someone, back to her lab. She was also Mission Control for extraterrestrial adventures since the mode of transportation was usually her teleporter.
• Water Source Tampering: A possible future shows the hero doing this when the inmates of a fortified prison manage to take the president hostage. As everyone in this future has taken/is on the age regressing immortality drug L-3 she dumps an anti-L-3 agent into the water supply for the prison, causing all of the troublemakers to rapidly age up physically to their actual geriatric ages.
• Weather-Control Machine
  • The iconic device of villain Byrna Brilyant, aka "Blue Snowman", creates snowstorms and blizzards.
  • Prof Chemico invents a "Climate Changer" which can alter the temperature and weather in large areas. Minister Blizzard decides to steal it in his first appearance.
• "Wanted!" Poster: The cover of Issue 25 shows Diana with the wanted posters for three villains including the Mask spread out on her desk while she listens to the trio attempt to sneak up behind her.
• Weaponized Headgear: A Nazi general has an experimental Death Ray attached to a hat which he uses to kill a number of US military officers. The death ray doesn't survive Diana's attack in response.
• Weapons That Suck: The Golden Policewomen use a suction based non-lethal weapon called the Inhilerator to capture foes.
• Wearing a Flag on Your Head: Diana is of course wearing star spangled shorts and a red top.
• Weird Moon: Diana and Etta jump to the moon from earth on the back of a Kanga, and once they get there the place is a lush forest with glass volcanoes. It also goes dark when Artemis is poisoned.
• Whole Episode Flashback: "Wonder Woman and the Coming of the Kangas" is a flashback to Diana and Mala's time as children on Paradise Island, with the framing device being that Hippolyte is showing the Holliday Girls family photos and videos and talking about the adventure in question.
• Winter Royal Lady: Princess Snowina is the ruler of the North Pole.
• With My Hands Tied: Wondy (and/or Steve Trevor) end up bound in some way Once an Episode, and occasionally the baddies even unintentionally stumble upon her odd Kryptonite Factor by having a man weld together her bracelets of submission, depowering her. Generally this does nothing to prevent her from defeating them given her training and she merely had to do so with her wrists bound at near normal human strength and speed. She can still usually pull apart and break the welded chains regaining her full powers it just takes time and a lot of effort.
• Wizard Beard: While Shaggy is actually a leprechaun he wears what is essentially a Robe and Wizard Hat, has powerful magic and has a long white beard that has gotten stuck in things when he doesn't remember to tuck it into his belt.
• World's Most Beautiful Woman: Diana is described as being "as lovely as Aphrodite" in her first outing.
• Wolf Whistle: Marya is rather amused by the men trying out pick up lines on her while she's acting as a lifeguard, one of whom is shown giving a wolf whistle as he spots her. She doesn't actually respond to any of them as she's on the clock, but does check them out to pick out the cute ones, mentally commenting that American men are a tease, implying that her attempts to follow up on their flirting have led to dead ends.
• The X of Y: "The God of War" (issue #2)
  "The Treachery of Mavis" (issue #4)
  "The Return of Dr. Psycho" (issue #5)
  "The Winds of Time" (issue #17)
  "The Mystery of the Atom World" (issue #21)
  "The Island of Evil" (issue #22)

Issue One

• See "Wonder Woman #1"

Mars of Mars

Issues: Wonder Woman (1942) 1, 2, 5, & 18, Sensation Comics 92

---

• Animated Armor: In "The Return From the Dead" Etta and Bobby are poking at a suit of armor in Lotsa Dough's manor museum when it moves and orders them to follow. While it is only an illusionary moving suit of armor created by Dr. Psycho the Holliday Girls do not realize this until too late.
• Animate Inanimate Object: "The Return From the Dead": Dr. Psycho uses several of the objects in the Dough Museum to form semi-illusionary puppets to attack the Holliday Girls and later Steve Trevor and Diana.
• Booby Trap: Dr. Psycho tries to kill Steve Trevor by leaving an explosive pen on his desk. It turns out to be a rather powerful experimental explosive called an Electo-Atomizer and when Steve's secretary arrogantly reacts to Di telling her not to touch it by petulantly grabbing it since she doesn't like Di telling her what to do it atomizes most of her and the desk.
• Buried Alive: In #5 Dr. Psycho tries to get rid of Wonder Woman by burying her in the grave that was meant to be his in the prison yard. She digs herself out almost instantly.
• Cardboard Prison: Dr. Psycho rather easily escapes prison twice in in issue 18 ("The Return From the Dead", "The Case of the Drugged WAC", & "Ectoplasmic Death") alone.
• The Case of...: the Drugged WAC
• Circling Birdies: When Diana knocks out Mars in issue 5 he's shown on his back with a dove circling over his head.
• Clear My Name: By taking on her appearance when he steals the thing Dr. Psycho frames Wonder Woman for the theft of the War-Prevento Machine. She and Steve then have to figure out who was disguised as her and track them down to clear her name and prevent them from using the weapon to cause any harm.
• Coincidental Broadcast: In "Ectoplasmic Death" Oscar just happens to be holding a newspaper with a nice big picture of Dr. Psycho and an article about the explosion at the prison when he walks in on Psycho accidentally, ensuring that he recognizes the criminal despite never having met him before.
• Confronting Your Imposter: In #14 while Psycho is using an ectoplasmic disguise of Steve Trevor he runs into the man himself, though Steve fails to catch him.
• Criminal Mind Games: Right before his execution Doctor Psycho sends a note to Steve Trevor that taunts that he's going to kill Trevor after his execution and gives clues as to when and how. Even with this note he nearly succeeds in killing Steve, with Diana's speed being the only thing that saves him from the disguised explosive device when it goes off right on his desk.
• Cut-and-Paste Note: After Dr. Psycho's supposed death in custody a sinister note threatening Steve Trevor's life is found "written" using cut out words that claims to be from Psycho.
• Death Row: Dr. Psycho manages to fake his own execution and escape from death row by gaining access to his powers when his captors thought them blocked and sending an ectoplasmic copy of himself to the chair to be executed.
• Death Trap: In "The Drugged WAC" Dr. Psycho manages to knock out Diana with a knock out gas, but instead of killing her forces her to call her allies to a certain buoy by mental radio by wrapping her in her own lasso and then rigs the buoy with explosives and ties her to it, again using her own lasso. She escapes and no one dies since she lassos the entire boat her friends are in and pulls it up by hand while dangling from her mentally controlled plane.
• Dead Serious: Di's early villains were considerably less threatening than they would later become due to the fact that any time anyone actually died they'd just get tossed on a slab in Paula's laboratory and brought right back to life. Then Dr. Psycho escaped from prison and blew up Lila Brown, one of the very few recurring characters, and basically obliterated everything above the knees making it clear that even Di's friends and allies could be killed off for real and establishing Dr. Psycho as a legitimate threat.
• Destroy the Evidence: In "Ectoplasmic Death", Psycho blows up the medical ward of the female prison to hide evidence of his second escape (in this two parter), especially that he absconded with his reluctant medium Joan White.
• Dirty Coward: The Duke of Deception tries to get others punished and killed for his mistakes and does his best to disguise himself when he knows he'll be in trouble with his boss. When he's punished and enslaved he betrays the other prisoners to try and get his position back after they help him.
• Faking the Dead: In #18 Dr. Psycho makes one of his semi-illusionary puppets of himself, which he then controls through his own execution while he escapes. As this is not the first time he's faked his own death to escape from the prison where it happened Diana and Steve are quite unimpressed with the warden.
• Fisher King: Artemis is the ruler of the moon, and when Mars drugs and kidnaps her the moon goes dark.
• Gallows Humor: When Steve's secretary Lila Brown ends up mostly disintegrated Diana makes a short quip about the woman not having to follow directions from her anymore, something Lila resented and died over when Diana told her not to pick up a pen that was actually an experimental explosive left by Dr. Psycho.
• Gladiator Games: The Martians force their captives to fight to the death in an arena. Diana is forced into the games once and they have their male fighters and female fighters combat to find the strongest of each and then set them against each other. Diana manages to defeat all the other women and the male champion, a Saturnian, without killing them which get her chained to a post to be whipped, but she manages to turn the situation against her captors.
• Hard Light: The original Dr. Psycho's ability was to create things out of "psychoplasmic energy", which were hard light constructs which faded out once he wasn't concentrating on them, using a medium who was knocked out once under his sway so he'd have enough psychic power on hand to create his constructs without draining himself.
• Hate Plague: Mars' lieutenants are sent to earth specifically to spread hate, mistrust and an inclination towards violence among men in their spectral forms.
• Kangaroo Court: Ghorkos, Dread Master of Phobos, inner moon of Mars, is holding a trial for Steve Trevor where Steve "will be shot if he tells the truth, hanged if he lies, but can name his own execution if he pleads guilty". When Steve chooses Wonder Woman to be his lawyer since no one in Phobos will defend him, the prosecutor, unable to outright prohibit her from doing so, sets an Impossible Task to "prove her fitness to practice law on Phobos" and says she'll be killed if she accepts the challenge and fails. Upon Wonder Woman's advice, Steve says "You're going to hang me!". Hanging is the punishment for lying and it cannot be done without turning Steve's statement into the truth. Shooting is the penalty for telling the truth and it cannot be done without turning Steve's statement into a lie. Because the statement won't be considered a guilty plea either way, he's acquitted.
• Killed Off for Real: During the Golden Age even one-shot characters that hadn't been named before being killed were almost always quickly brought back via Paula's modified Purple Healing Ray. When Lila Brown, one of a handful of named recurring characters who even had family members who showed up more than once, was murdered by Dr. Psycho her body above the knees was disintegrated ensuring that she never came back.
• Latex Perfection: The Duke of Deception creates masks and full body disguises out of ectoplasm that he can wear to appear to be anyone.
• Once-Green Mars: It is implied there was some form of devestation on mars in the past, and all the current residents are ghosts and spirts with a limited ability to manifest physically.
• Our Nymphs Are Different: In the Marston stories Nymphs are the all female residents of the lunar forest who are ruled by Artemis and worship her.
• Press Hat: In "The Return From the Dead" Dr. Psycho included a fedora with a press pass shoved into the band in his disguise as the reporter Tinhorn.
• The Starscream: The Duke of Deception is Ares/Mars' right hand man and he's repeatedly attempted to betray the war god who granted him his powers.
• Take Me Out at the Ball Game: In #2, the Earl of Greed attempts to kill Wonder Woman during a baseball game by having one of his agents pitch and an exploding ball at her.
• Tentacle Rope: In "Ectoplasmic Death " at the Holliday College dance Dr. Psycho manages to ensnare all of his enemies in tentacle like strips of pink ectoplasm.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: In "The Return From the Dead" Dr. Psycho flees when Di lassos the War-Prevento Machine, being gone in the seconds it takes her and Steve to confirm it really is the machine.

Venusian Allies

Issues: All-Star Comics 13, Wonder Woman (1942) 12, 13, 22 & 26, Sensation Comics 11

---

• Aliens Steal Cable: The women of Mercury have listened to Earth radio broadcasts, and gotten some rather twisted ideas from them which lead to their enslaving of their men.
• Animal-Eared Headband: The Holldiay Girls have Gel Osey wear a sexy cat outfit including a cat eared headband as punishment if she wants to stay in their sorority after she nearly sabotages a project to create a rocket to fly to Venus in her jealously and ignorance. The lesson doesn't stick and she goes out that night and messes up the project thinking that those who worked on it are no better than her.
• Bedsheet Ladder: Gell Osey climbs out of the room she's being kept in as part of her initiation into the Holliday Girl's sorority, which is harsher than most because she acts like a spoiled brat and talks down to those already in.
• Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: Venusian women are about the same size as humans with large brightly colored wings, while the men are much smaller, submissive and do not have wings.
• Building Is Welding: A group of girls are shown welding on a large rocket to show that the scientifically and engineering inclined Holliday College students were responsible for building the rocket to Venus, which later crashes due to Gell Osey's interference.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Gel Osey is so furious that other Holliday College students are getting publicity for working on a rocket that is intended to go to Venus and bring back information about the planet that she tries to join the project at the last minute despite having zero of the requirements or skills and then attacks those working on the project when they won't let her. She later sneaks aboard the vessel to try to show them up and become more famous than them by going to Venus, on the designed to be unmanned craft, which ensures the rocket crashes due to the weight difference.
• Magical Accessory: Desira gifts Diana a pair of earrings which allow them to telepathically communicate dimensions away and which protect Di's head from the vacuum of space if she winds up there.
• Mercury's Wings: The giant women of Mercury (the planet) wear winged sandals and helmets, with their queen wearing a winged crown, which allow them to fly.
• Planetary Nation: The entirety of Venus is ruled by Queen Desira.
• Prevent the War: Diana Prince gets kidnapped by a woman who is part of a conspiracy to ensure WWIII starts within two years of the end of WWII to be pumped for military secrets. Fortunately Diana Prince is Wonder Woman, so bringing her to the conspiracies' headquarters ensures the lot of them are rounded up and imprisoned in short order with Di transporting the men to Venus for imprisonment and the women to Reformation Island.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: In "Jealousy Visits the Winged Women of Venus" a Retro Rocket, which is not mentioned to have any kind of faster than or light speed capabilities when being described by those who designed and built it, makes it from Washington D.C. to Venus in a matter of hours.
• Sexy Whatever Outfit: Gell Osey tries to attack a professor, and all of her classmates, while jealously demeaning their work and claiming herself to be just as good at the subject of science as those who have gained recognition for it despite never even paying attention to the subject. In response the Holliday Girls force her to wear a sexy cat outfit, complete with fist mitts, during dinner as punishment in order to continue as a sorority pledge or they'll kick her out.
• Slave Collar: The women of Mercury have enslaved their men and force them to wear collars that they can use to inflict pain if the men don't obey them.
• Venus Is Wet: Venus is a lush planet full of plant life and lakes inhabited by winged women who worship Venus and are allied with the Amazons whose culture is very similar to their own.
• Winged Humanoid: Diana was close friends with Queen Desira of Venus. Desira and her people were humanoid women who had butterfly wings.

Paula's Redemption

Issues Wonder Woman (1942) 3 & 4Stories: "A Spy on Paradise Island", "The Devilish Devices of Baroness Von Gunther", "The Secret of Baroness Von Gunther", "Ordeal of Fire", "Man-Hating Madness" & "The Treachery of Mavis"

---

• The Atoner: Paula didn't really want to work for the Nazis in the first place, but to save her daughter threw herself into the work and committed many horrific acts and ruined and ended many lives. Once her daughter was safe she dedicated the rest of her life to doing everything she could to take down the Nazis and their allies and help people whenever she became aware of an opportunity to do so.
• Bandaged Face: After Paula's face is horribly burnt following her Heel–Face Turn it is only seen covered in bandages until Aphrodite restores her skin months later. Even after the restoration her face is noticeably missing features it once had which were burnt, like her beauty mark.
• Becoming the Mask: Paula von Gunther was blackmailed into working with the Nazis, but by the time Diana caught her she was obviously reveling in it as being forced into such a position had turned her bitter and nihilistic to the point that she stopped caring about anyone who wasn't her daughter, whose life the Nazis held in their hands. She does redeem herself and change her ways after her daughter is saved and she's spent some time on Reformation Island, after which she pours her creative science into helping the allies.
• Blowing Smoke Rings: Paula von Gunther would blow smoke rings, but she gave up smoking after her Heel–Face Turn. When she later pretended to have returned to villainy to infiltrate a villain organization she casually blew smoke rings and twirled her signature cigarette holder while telling the conspirators that her friendship with Wonder Woman was all a ruse to find weaknesses in the hero.
• Brainwashed: Before her Heel–Face Turn Paula enslaved people to aid her in providing information to the Nazis via brainwashing that included hypnotism, drugging, and torture.
• Clear Their Name: When the Holliday College students Eve Brown and Dorothy "Dot" Lord are accused of being Nazi spies and arrested Diana quickly realizes they and eighteen others have been set up to take a fall by Paula. In order to decrease the security on her she's been pretending to give the US the names of other Nazi saboteurs, and for some reason the FBI is taking her at her word. Di spends the issue trying to prove the girls are innocent, which the FBI doesn't want to hear of even after Paula takes the opportunity to escape.
• Crusading Widow: Paula von Gunther at first appeared to be a loyal Nazi spy, but after the reveal that the Nazis had murdered her husband and kidnapped her daughter to force her to comply and Diana saved her daughter Paula quickly switched to dedicating herself to aiding the Allies and Wonder Woman against the Nazis.
• Dressing as the Enemy Paula has one of her minions infiltrate Paradise Island by dressing like an Amazon. It doesn't work out well since it is an island of immortal women, so it is quickly realized that there is a woman on the island no one recognizes.
• Easily Forgiven: Paula von Gunther murdered many, tortured many and gave allied secrets to the Nazis. While her motivation for doing so, to save her daughter's life, is sympathetic, it does not make the lives of those she killed, injured and compromised worth any less. Once she's told her tale everyone forgives her and she doesn't even need to go back to prison, which she escaped from, to finish out her time for the crimes she'd already been convicted of.
• Facial Horror: After Paula's Heel–Face Turn her face was horribly burnt in a fire when she entered a munitions factory that had already been set alight by Nazi spies she'd previously been collaborating with (under duress—they had her daughter) in order to find and disable the explosive device in the factory that would have made everything so much worse. This scarring is never shown as she is bandaged or wears a veil over it, but other character's reactions make it clear it has thoroughly disfigured her.
• Failed Execution, No Sentence: Prior to her Heel–Face Turn Wonder Woman's Arch-Enemy Baroness von Gunther is executed for murder but then pseudo-scientifically resurrected by her minions, who bribe the prison doctor to give them the corpse. It's then stated that she can't legally be executed again.
• Fake Defector: Paula, on at least two separate occasions, uses her old Nazi contacts to the Allies' benefit by pretending to have "escaped" the Allies to return to her old allegiances (a group she worked for under duress in the first place) and just slip right back in as an Nazi agent. This didn't work too well the second time as the officer suspected something was up and she needed to be rescued, but she was able to lead the good guys to the local Nazi headquarters.
• Forced to Watch: Paula von Gunther was forced to watch as Nazis murdered her husband for her refusal to cooperate with them. They then took her toddler aged daughter Gerta and informed her Gerta was next if she didn't fall in line.
• Free-Range Children: In #3 Diana comes across some kids sledding when one loses control and goes across a road, nearly getting killed. They learn she's never sledded before and offer to teach her so she spends quite a while with them playing in the snow and trying to keep them off the road and there is zero indication of any adult supervision outside of Diana. When they're done playing for the day the kid who nearly got killed earlier goes to his mother's place of work to wait for her to get off so they can go home together.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Prior to her Heel–Face Turn Paula von Gunther's smoking habit was so constant that her dragon cigarette holder was her Iconic Item, but after her daughter was returned to her and she swiftly dedicated the rest of her life to wrecking Nazis and helping Wonder Woman she almost entirely stopped smoking which indicates her need for nicotine was inspired by stress, anger and spite.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In #3 when Diana goes to track down and rescue Paula's daughter Gerta she discovers an entire barracks full of hungry children in torn clothes in a Nazi prison camp and declares that she'll rescue the children from "the horrors of Nazi cruelty," she never went back and freed anyone else from Nazi imprisonment after getting this group of kids out. The extent of this cruelty in the real world would only really become known the year after the story was published when the first major concentration camp came into the hands of the allies and the full horror of The Holocaust was revealed to the world at large.
• Heel–Face Turn: Paula von Gunther started out as Diana's first recurring villain that wasn't Mars, but it was revealed she was only working for the Nazis because her daughter was being held hostage by them and her desperation, hopelessness and grief and turned her cruel. Determined to reform her most brilliant adversary, Wonder Woman braved enemy lines to rescue Gerta, winning Paula's gratitude and friendship. Almost immediately after, Paula returned to the United States and risked her own life to stop a gang of Nazi arsonists, saving countless lives but suffering severe burns in the process. She retired to Themyscira, where she became an honorary Amazon and one of Diana's most stalwart allies.
• Herr Doktor: Paula von Gunther was an Austrian scientist who worked for the Nazis when they held her daughter Gerta captive after killing her husband for her initial refusal, but switched sides as soon as Gerta was safe. She helped improve the Amazon's purple healing ray and invented a teleporter among other things once she was working against the Nazis.
• Hidden Depths: In her first few appearances Paula seemed to be a cruel unrepentant loyal Nazi collaborator and supporter who practiced slavery, it was then revealed she was only working for the Nazis because they had her daughter prisoner and had already murdered her husband and she turned on them and became Diana's loyal friend and ally in a heartbeat after Diana rescued her daughter.
• Hollywood Law: When Paula goes to trial after her Heel–Face Turn it's somewhat unclear what she's even on trial for. The prosecutor brings up the murders she's been convicted of, and Diana somehow gets that thrown out due to Double Jeopardy, but Paula should be in trouble for plotting to blow up a munitions factory (which she then did everything she could to prevent after her daughter was returned to her and the Nazis couldn't use her against Paula) and her escape from prison. While the jury is obviously sympathetic to her being forced to work for the Nazis under duress the woman still killed at least one guard and escaped from prison without serving her full term. This is never brought up.
• Hypnotize the Captive: Paula von Gunther developed a series of mental altering devices and a routine to turn scores of prisoners into her loyal slaves, most of whom she then sent out into the world as Nazi spies but some of whom were to act as spies and saboteurs after being "rescued".
• I Control My Minions Through...: Paula von Gunther controlled her minions through a combination of Fear and Brainwashing, which Mala and Diana used to turn them against her while working to rehabilitate them, showing that Love is more powerful than Fear.
• I Have Your Wife: Paula von Gunther initially refused to work for the Nazis, and in retaliation they murdered her husband right in front of her, nabbed her daughter Gerta and informed her that if she didn't fall in line they'd kill Gerta painfully. Paula then became their most valuable agent in the Americas, until her daughter was rescued. She dedicated the rest of her life to ruining Nazis and their allies.
• Learned from the News: Etta learns about Eve Brown and Dorothy Lord's arrest as Nazi spies when the Daily Blade explicitly names them in an article about twenty-one people arrested for espionage. They all turn out to have been very lazily framed by Paula von Gunther as she pretends to cooperate with the FBI, in order for her to draw them into a false sense of security so she'll be able to escape.
• Love Makes You Evil: Paula von Gunther refused to work for the Nazis so they made her watch as they murdered her husband and then took her daughter Gerta hostage. In response Paula decided that even if she'd probably never see her daughter again that Gerta was worth more to her than the rest of the world and came to enjoy her sadistic torture and experimentation on people for the Nazis, even if she never did stop hating the Nazis themselves.
• Love Redeems: Paula's love for her daughter Gerta both damns and redeems her, as while the Nazis were forcing her to aid them by keeping Gerta prisoner Paula was rather nihilistic and had thrown herself into the work. Once reunited with her daughter the cruelty she's allowed to shape her actions since her husband's murder fades away.
• The Ludovico Technique: As a Nazi agent Paula would drug her restrained victims, then use a rig to hold their eyes open to force them to continuously watch images in order to break their minds and modify their behavior.
• Luxury Prison Suite: Paula von Gunther's prison cell seems rather sparse, but does include a rather conspicuously nice armchair and more inconspicuously a hatch to an elaborate basement lair.
• Machiavelli Was Wrong: Diana uses this against Paula in order to help start unconditioning the poor women Paula tortured and brainwashed into being her slave agents. As the women have already spent months on Reformation Island under the care of the warden Mala the plan is to have Mala intentionally allow Paula to take her captive and try to escape. When Paula does so her slaves turn on her, as their fear of her is outweighed by their love for Mala.
• Magic Plastic Surgery: Baroness Paula von Gunther cements her Heel–Face Turn by deactivating a bomb in an already-burning building and suffering severe facial burns in the process. A magical Amazon healing ointment is then used to give her a new face that looks totally different from her former one, symbolizing her moral rebirth. This is the possible Ur-Example.
• Misplaced Retribution: Mavis, one of the victims Paula tortured into being her agent, decides to take revenge on the former Nazi when she's saved following Paula's Heel–Face Turn...by abducting Paula's toddler Gerta to give to the Axis powers to kill.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: When Paula von Gunther first refused to work for the Nazis they tortured her husband to death, then they took her toddler aged daughter hostage and requested they work for them again with the implicit threat that they'd do the same to Gerta as they had to Gottfried. She throws herself into the work and decides that the only person left she is willing to care about in the world is Gerta.
• Out-of-Character Alert: Diana notes Steve being dotting and flirtatious with her while she's at work, in her Diana Prince guise and realizes something is off. It turns out Steve was nabbed and brainwashed by Paula von Gunther (pre-Heel–Face Turn) and is just trying to get her away from her desk so he can steal important documents to bring back to Paula.
• Posthumous Character: Paula von Gunther's husband Gottfried von Gunther was killed in front of her by the Nazis when she refused to work for them, with the threat that her little daughter Gerta would be next if she didn't cave. By the time she and Diana met she'd been working for the Nazis so long she'd gone from numb to enjoying inflicting pain.
• Redemption Equals Affliction: Paula von Gunther nearly dies of burns and smoke inhalation right after her Heel–Face Turn when she runs into a burning munitions factory to disable the explosive device her former co-conspirators placed there. Her face is left horribly burned by the fire.
• Reformed Criminal: One time enemy Paula von Gunther becomes her stalwart ally. It probably helps that Paula was really only helping the Nazis due to their threatening her daughter and she is incredibly grateful to Diana for bringing her to Paradise Island.
• Strapped to an Operating Table: Paula von Gunther straps her victims into chairs and onto tables both in preparation for torturing information out of them and to condition people into her agents via The Ludovico Technique.
• Targeted to Hurt the Hero: Paula von Gunther's husband was brutally murdered in front of her by the Nazis for the couple's refusal to cooperate, right before they kidnapped her daughter Gerta in order to force Paula to work for them lest they do the same to Gerta.
• The Unreveal: In "Ordeal of Fire" Paula von Gunther's face is burned horribly when she goes to stop the last stateside Nazi plot she'd been involved in after her Heel–Face Turn. Her face is bandaged or covered by a veil thereafter, and when it's shown to the courtroom during a trial she's only shown from the back. Her face is not depicted again until it's been magically restored by Aphrodite.
• Would Hurt a Child: Paula von Gunther seems to be made furious just by seeing children playing, and at one point turns her car towards a child and runs over his sled. The fact that she didn't actually run him over, just brushed him, clues Diana into there being something more behind this and her subsequent questioning of the villain with her lasso reveals that Paula's own daughter is held captive by the Nazis. She hates seeing happy kids because it reminds her of what her love for her own has twisted her into and that she has given up hope of seeing her again.

Atlantean Principalities

Issues Wonder Woman (1942) 8, Sensation Comics 35 & 36, Comic Cavalcade 18, Justice League of America 135Stories: "Queen Clea's Tournament of Death", "The Girl with the Iron Mask", "The Captive Queen", "Girls Under the Sea", "The Menace of the Rebel Manlings", "Battle Against Revenge" & "Crisis in Eternity"

Clea would eventually go on to ally with the Saturnian Eviless and join Villiany Inc.

---

• Arrow Catch: When Queen Clea's original plan for Steve's execution falls through (because Steve is a better fighter than she expected), she has her archers loose their arrows on him instead. He lifts the last of the beasts he killed to shield his front and Diana jumps in and deflects and catches those aimed at his back until their other ally deals with Clea and Clea's fighters with knockout gas.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: When Queen Clea orders Steve Trevor killed for entertainment by giving him a sword to fight three giant boars and then having her archers perched around the edge of the arena should he manage to survive Di jumps in and blocks the arrows aimed at his back while he lifts the boar he'd managed to kill to block the first volley aimed at his front before they fight the Atlanteans themselves.
• Bald of Evil: Manlius, the cruel dictator who rises to power in the political chaos left in Aurania after Clea's attacks and enslaves the local women, is bald.
• Bathe Her and Bring Her to Me: Queen Clea has Steve Trevor stripped, cleaned up, dressed in a loincloth and brought before her...to face some of her monsters in the arena for her entertainment. Despite the heavy BDSM overtones this series was aimed at children and thus is still age appropriate.
• Beastly Bloodsports: Queen Clea tries to have Steve executed by having him stripped, given a loincloth and sword and tossed in her arena with a bunch of giant boars. When Steve manages to kill her boars she has the archers lining the arena loose a couple of volleys at him, only for him to use the corpse of the last boar as a shield.
• Bread and Circuses: Queen Clea keeps her people entertained with bloodsports and violent executions in her arena. Meals are served to the audience as they watch as well.
• Bulletproof Human Shield: When Queen Clea's plan to have Steve killed fighting giant beasts in her arena fails she has her archers loose a volley of arrows on him from all sides. Steve grabs the corpse of the last beast he killed to shield his front while Diana jumps in and protects his back.
• Buried Alive: King Manlius, who overthrew the weak new democracy in Aurania after it was freed from Queen Clea, tries to burry Wonder Woman, the old queen and the president in the base of his throne. Di smashes her way out.
• Captive Audience: Queen Clea likes to force captives to watch the bloody executions of their fellows in her arena before their own. This works out poorly when she tries to force Diana to watch Steve Trevor's death by giant beasts, since not only does Steve kill all of them but when she has her archers loose a volley on him to kill him anyway Diana leaps in and keeps any arrows from reaching their target.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Queen Clea loves doling these out, though her attempt to creatively kill Diana and Steve doesn't work out. She has Diana encased in molten metal while Steve is forced into the arena with nothing but a small sword to be killed by monsters so that Di will have to hear Steve die as she suffocates. Things go sideways due to Diana being entirely unaffected by the heat and then breaking out of her restraints and Steve being far more competent with a blade than anyone expected.
• Dismantled MacGuffin: The notes detailing how to make the Devitamizer formula were split into three and given to three people the creator trusted before their murder. Only one of the three pieces is still with the person it was given to by the time Eeras and Steve started tracking it down.
• Drowning Pit: Queen Clea decides to have a bunch of Navy men who refused to submit to her put in a cage and lowered into a deep column of water for entertainment while she eats dinner. Wonder Woman saves them.
• Full-Boar Action: Queen Clea tries to have Steve killed by putting him in the arena with a group of large boars with unnaturally long tusks armed with only a sword. Luckily for Steve the beasts prove exceptionally unintelligent and he's able to kill all of them with nary a scratch.
• Giant Flyer: Queen Clea's forces ride giant pterodactyl-like mounts with sharp teeth.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: The outpost city of Venturia essentially fell apart during Queen Clea's reign, prompting her attack on nearby Aurania. Later exiled from Venturia, she tried to become Queen of Skartaris, nearly destroying that country in the process.
• Go-Go Enslavement: When Queen Clea captures Steve Trevor she has him dressed in a loincloth before sending him out into her arena to entertain her as a gladiator until he fails and dies. He does quite well, but when Clea decides he's not going to fall and lines up her archers to shoot him Diana jumps in and protects his back and he grabs the body of one of the beasts Clea had intended to have kill him to use as a shield for his front.
• Hollow World: Queen Clea's Venturia and Queen Eeras' Aurania are both said to be Atlantean outposts but rather than underwater in their first appearances they are underneath the ocean in a dry enormous cavern.
• Loincloth: Queen Clea has Steve dressed in a fur trimmed loincloth, and nothing else, for his public execution. She hands him a sword and intends to watch him fight her giant monsters to death in the arena over dinner, but to her disappointment he kills all of her monsters and survives.
• Now That's Using Your Teeth!: Diana bit the top of a cage filled with US Navy men who'd been captured by Queen Clea and held it so it didn't fall into the water Clea intended to drown them in while using the rest of her limbs to defend against Clea's attacks and keep hold of the chain that had been holding the cage.
• Rigged Spectacle Fight: Queen Clea's gladiatorial arena is a place to watch captives struggle as they are torn apart. She gives them weapons which are not meant to be of any use against her beasts, has them stripped and redressed in only a loincloth and sets archers around the arena walls just in case they manage to surprise her and survive. Steve manages to survive his fight anyway, by using the bodies of the beasts he'd managed to kill with the knife he was given as a shield against the archers and then being rescued by Wondy.
• Shirtless Captives: Queen Clea seems to really hate that Steve Trevor wears shirts, and removes them from him both times she captures him, the first time having him dressed in a loincloth and sent to die in an arena fighting monsters for her amusement.
• The Snack Is More Interesting: Queen Clea has a particularity cruel iteration where when she sets up an execution or torture to watch while eating a meal she's gloat at her captives and then ignore them and give her food all of her attention until things get interesting by her standards, which generally means her victims are panicking and in pain and which she'll watch with rapt attention while finishing her meal.
• Take Over the World: Queen Clea aims to conquer Atlantis and then the surface world.
• A Truce While We Gawk: Part of the reason Steve gets to kill all of the giant beasts Queen Clea set to kill him on his own is that Diana and Clea are too busy gawking at how efficient he is at it to continue their own fight or interfere with his. Once he's killed the last of them Clea gets her act together and orders her archers to just shoot him, at which point Diana jumps down to help Steve.

The Masters of Neptunia

Issue Wonder Woman (1942) 15 & 31

---

• This Banana is Armed: The Masters of Neptune crash to earth in what they claim to be an uncontrollable chunk of their home planet, but the many "rocks" that fall from it into the sea are actually terraforming devices and bombs disguised as rocks.
• Colony Drop: A chunk of what's claimed to be Neptune falls into the Atlantic ocean, causing earthquakes, tidal waves and massive property damage and resulting in a temporary island called "Neptunia".
• Combat Tentacles: The "flying fish" the Neptunians ride use their tentacles to aide their riders in combat.
• Flying Seafood Special: The Neptunians ride giant flying tentacled fish.
• Forced Transformation: They transform humans that try to investigate them into tigeapes, then use the tigeapes to attack world leaders while acting like they're trying to protect said leaders from the tigeapes.
• He-Man Woman Hater: The Neptunian Masters are all men and see women as subserviant and below them. They are infuriated when a women is placed as their new leader after their defeat.
• Horse of a Different Color: Neptunians ride flying fish instead of horses.
• Hostile Terraforming: The Masters plan to move the earth out of its orbit to orbit around Neptune and change it for Neptunian use rather than human. They're also planning to enslave any survivors.
• The Master: The Masters of Neptune are plotting to enslave a large part of humanity and jettison the earth from orbit.
• Planet Spaceship: The Masters intend to modify earth to drive its remains into orbit around Neptune.
• Shattered World: Neptunia is supposedly a chunk of Neptune that was broken off the planet.
• Villain with Good Publicity: The Masters present themselves as benevolent to humans, while despising them and forcing those humans who question them to be secretly turned into tigeapes.

Mystery of the Atom World

Issue Wonder Woman (1942) 21Stories: "Mystery of the Atom World", "Ruler of the Atom World"

---

• Airborne Mook: Atomia's Protron mooks have built-in jet packs, which makes them more annoying than the usual mook as this was long before later writers gave Diana the ability to fly on her own.
• And I Must Scream: The Amazons put prisoners on Reformation Island in Aphrodite Girdles, which are essentially a downplayed version of Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul which ensure that they do not attack the guards or try to revolt. These are very much meant to be temporary measures, but Atomia proves such a remorseless, murderous and horrific individual who removes hers and tries to kill the Amazons that Aphrodite herself welds her into one which will force her to act benevolent and never harm another soul without removing her ability to think.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: In "Mystery of the Atom World" Queen Atomia was meant to represent the dangers and the benefits of the newly honed nuclear power following the creation of the atom bomb. This was dropped in her later appearances where she's a simple bad guy.
• Bad Boss: Atomia treats her slaves like complete garbage, killing them when they fail to follow her orders or when they mindlessly embellish them. She even casually tells two of them to go immolate themselves and they do it without any hesitation. The fact that she has slaves who'll blindly follow her every whim and it only makes her bored shows what a horrible person she is.
• Body Horror: Queen Atomia's two mook makers horrifically and permanently alter her human victims in two distinct and horrifying ways. Her Nutron Converter is Unwilling Roboticisation turned up to eleven, with the resulting mooks all identical, with only enough grey matter left to be susceptible to a Jedi Mind Trick so they are functionally dead. Her Protons started out as human individuals before going through her Proton Machine and becoming identical young women in appearance, with a mind-control device attached to their heads to make them obey her every whim and question nothing.
• Body Sled: In #21 Atomia, Steve and Diana all end up sitting or standing on "Nutrons" while said Nutrons are flying using their built-in jet packs.
• Clone by Conversion: Queen Atomia's "Proton Chamber" turns those of her victims that are forced into it and put through the chamber's process all into identical clones which are near mindlessly loyal to her and extra susceptible to her mental commands.
• Conspicuous Consumption: When she's first seen the self-professed Queen Atomia's Protons are piling precious gems in front of her and the drum-like arms of her throne are hollow and filled with diamonds and emeralds.
• Death of Personality: Queen Atomia has two different ways of inflicting this on her victims to turn them into her loyal "servants", and not even Amazonian medical science can restore them once the process is complete. She can put them through her Proton Chamber which at least leaves them with a human appearance and semi-intact (though severely altered) mind, or force them through her Nutron Machine which leaves them far less intact and almost mindless outside of obeying her commands.
• Emotionless Girl: Atomia's Protons all look like (identical) human women, but they have no ability to express emotion without being specifically ordered to by their queen and seem to have none. In the (1980s)"The Legend Of Wonder Woman" they can get angry, but even then only mildly given the circumstances.
• Emperor Scientist: Atomia is Queen scientist, and every single one of her "subjects" has been unwillingly subjected to her experimentation and forced to become mindlessly loyal to her.
• Empty Shell: Queen Atomia's victims were once human and have been reforged into her mindless minions which loyally follow her every order. Whomever they once were is functionally dead and while they have enough grey matter left to be susceptible to a Jedi Mind Trick not even Amazonian medical technology or magic can do anything to help them or give them true emotions, motivations or personal volition.
• Faceless Goons: While Queen Atomia's "Protons" have all been modified to have identical faces her "Nutrons" are never seen outside of their identical helmets. While the poor "Nutrons" were once human their helmets are now part of their…biology…as former humans she's forced through her Nutron Machine.
• Falsely Reformed Villain: Queen Atomia seemed like she was genuinely trying to reform, and then started a riot and tried to kill a bunch of people which led to her getting permanently welded into a mind altering device to force her to behave.
• Femme Fatalons: Queen Atomia has sharp fingernails/claws about as long as her fingers themselves.
• Frozen Face: Queen Atomia's victims faces are unchanging, as their mental capacity and physical appearance is permanently altered to her liking. They're entirely unaware and uncaring of this eerie outward sign of what's been done to them.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Queen Atomia is of the horrifically evil variety rather than incompetent as it's implied she created her own country and she rules over it with an iron fist, forcing all of her unwilling subjects through horrific experiments.
• Gratuitous Laboratory Flasks: Paula von Gunther's laboratory under Holliday College has several tables covered in glassware, despite the fact that she's never seen working with any of it and her projects are all run on electricity. They are used against her though, by the evil Science "Queen" Atomia who shrinks Paula and her visitors by tossing a concoction into a beaker that vaporizes it into mist in the lab.
• Hazmat Suit: In Queen Atomia's introductory issue Diana wears a red hazmat suit with a fishbowl helmet while investigating the source of dangerous levels of radiation that Paula's sensors picked up.
• Hellish Pupils: Queen Atomia's poison green eyes are each split by a thin vertical slit pupil.
• I Kiss Your Foot: When Queen Atomia's court is first seen one of her "subjects" is just rising from kneeling at her feet to do kiss her feet.
• Incredible Shrinking Man: Queen Atomia's "hydroxo gas" can shrink people to microscopic size.
• It's All About Me:* Queen Atomia makes her self centered mindset pretty clear:
  Queen Atomia: I take what I like, Wonder Woman, and I keep it forever!
• A Taste of Their Own Medicine: When Atomia escapes from Reformation Island and tries attacking Paradise Island Queen Hippolyta calls on Aphrodite for help with the unrepentant cruel woman, who had forced people through machines which altered them physically and mentally to become her near mindless slaves. Aphrodite then makes it clear that just because she's friends with and supportive of a Perfect Pacifist People she's still an Olympian through and through when she permanently welds Atomia into a personality altering device that will force her to be kind for the rest of her life.
• Jedi Mind Trick: Wonder Woman can use "telepathic waves" to order the weak minded to do her bidding. It generally only works on those who are considered "mindless" or animals. Due to this ability she is able to control Queen Atomia's "Neutron" slaves.
• Jet Pack: Queen Atomia's Neutrons, humans she has forcibly converted into mostly mechanical near brainless slaves, have jet packs built into their backs.
• Lilliputians: It's never clearly addressed if Atomia is meant to have always been microscopic, but given her extensive laboratory takes up almost her entire "kingdom" and her ability to shrink down normal humans it's likely she and her "subjects" started out as human before she decided to create a minuscule world to hide her work in. Though her wild eyebrows, claws and often fully green colored eyes make it seem she was possibly something other than human.
• Lobotomy: Both types of Queen Atomia's "subjects" the Protons and Neutrons have had their brains altered so that she can control them better. The Neutrons have been reduced to essentially robots with just enough grey matter left to be subject to Jedi Mind Tricks and telepathic control while the Protons are only missing enough to never question their master.
• Mad Scientist: Queen Atomia has a laboratory in which she has two self invented machines which turn people into her permanent Slave Mooks, a Shrinking Fluid and is trying to steal uranium in order to take over the world.
• Magic Pants: Queen Atomia creates a gas which shrinks people down to microscopic size when breathed in and which has no effect on non-living items, unless the items happen to be the clothes said shrunk people were wearing; those shrink down right along with their owners with no explanation beyond it being a Golden Age superhero tale where everyone needed to remain properly clothed.
• The Minion Master: Queen Atomia sits back on her throne and orders her many Proton and Netron slave mooks to deal with her foes, fetch her food and even carry her about. Once she's deprived of them she proves to be an unexpectedly competent fighter with super strength on her own.
• Monochromatic Eyes: The somewhat inconstant coloring of Golden Age comics results in Queen Atomia being depicted with solid green eyes which give her an even more inhuman appearance—mostly in smaller panels—though it's clear she's meant to have a thin slit pupil splitting the poisonous green.
• Mook Maker: Queen Atomia has two sets of machines for turning humans into her near robotic slaves. There is one for her "Neutron Slaves" and one for her "Protons" and both work disturbingly quickly to permanently alter people mentally and physically.
• Reforged into a Minion: Queen Atomia has created a machine and chamber that can turn people into her mindless "Nutron" and "Proton" slaves, altering their physical body and greatly reducing their mental capacity. When she tries to use the Proton Chamber on Diana and her friends Diana destroys the chamber.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Atomia's atomic world makes no sense whatsoever, and doesn't really try to. Paula claims that the Neutron and Proton slaves, which are humanoid complex living organisms which in the Protons' case have a lot of steel worked into their formerly human bodies, are the size of actual nucleons and there is no hand wave given about the shrinking process somehow maintaining/protecting their forms.
• Shoulders of Doom: Queen Atomia wears curved decorative green shoulder pads over her dress, giving her incredibly tall pointed shoulders in silhouette.
• Shrink Ray: Queen Atomia uses a kind of gas to shrink down and then enslave humans.
• Slave Mooks: Queen Atomia's slave "subjects" are all individuals she's put through her Proton or Neutron slave machines which permanently alters them into near identical robotic drones subservient to her will with a certain set of powers for each. As she nearly does the same to Diana and the Holliday Girls presumably all of her slaves were once humans before being hit with her Shrink Ray and forced into the machine.
• The Sociopath: Queen Atomia is a remorseless, manipulative, power hungry tyrant who demands to be ruler of everything no matter how big or small and whose "subjects" are people she's forcibly transformed into mindless slaves.
• Take Over the World: Queen Atomia wants more power, and uranium, in order to expand her little self created empire to include the earth rather than only things of a microscopic scale.
• Technicolor Eyes: Queen Atomia has green eyes with brighter green scleras, though in some panels it looks more like she has black eyes with bright green scleras and inconsistent printing gives her some panels of eerie solid green eyes. Later artists will make her eyes clearly one shade of poison green split by a thin vertical pupil.
• Unusual Eyebrows: Queen Atomia's eyebrows are drawn at least twice as long as those of human characters, which in addition to her long red hair, claw-like nails and—in early prints—often fully green colored eyes makes her seem like a prototype Tamaranian .
• Unwilling Roboticisation: Queen Atomia shrinks down humans and forcibly converts them into her mindless slaves by putting them through a machine that converts them into the almost entirely robotic Neutron forms of her "subjects". They retain enough of their gray matter that they're susceptible to Wonder Woman using a Jedi Mind Trick on them, but their transformation appears to be permanent and they are considered dead.
• Was Once a Man: Queen Atomia's identical adoring subjects and mindless robotic seeming slaves are revealed to be created by forcing humans through transformation chambers. Not even Amazonian medical science can do anything to help them.
• Weak-Willed: This is intentionally one of the side effects of being forced through Queen Atomia's Nutron chamber, in addition to being left as a Blank Slate the chamber makes its victims more susceptible to mind control and Jedi Mind Tricks so that Atomia can dominate the remnants of her new Slave Mooks' minds.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The Amazons have a strict no-killing code, but made exceptions for gods, monsters and the undead. They were also fine with brainwashing villains into being better people, though not executing them. For instance Diana has no issue tearing through Atomia's Neutrons, since the humans that were used to make them are by her figuring already dead.
• You ALL Look Familiar: While Queen Atomia's "Nutron" machine creates a rougher physical result on those forced through it and they all wear identical helmets her "Proton" machine makes every woman to go through it identical, and while they retain more of their minds than people rebuilt into her "Nutrons" they are also left her devoted servants by the procedure.

Etta Candy and her Holliday Girls

Issues Wonder Woman (1942), Comic CavalcadeKey Stories: Etta Candy and her Holliday Girls: The Toothache", Etta Candy and her Holliday Girls: "Hard Candy's Ranch"
Many stories focus on the Holliday Girls with Wonder Woman an incedantal character, or not present at all. These tend to be one-shot stories, though characters who join the Holliday Girls or are introduced during them usually reappear in other tales.

---

• Absent-Minded Professor: Despite being a rather ingenious chemist with an interest in archeology Prof. Chemico is not a terribly good planner, and is really good at missing signs that things are about to get dangerous for him requiring his students to rescue him from the mishaps he occasionally gets himself into.
• Adults Dressed as Children: One of the ritual hazing experiences for pledges the "Beeta Lamda" sorority at Holliday College involved spending an entire day on campus dressed as a baby and carrying a baby bottle. The young women weren't looking to pass as infants and it was intended to be embarrassing but harmless.
• Adventurer Archaeologist: Prof. Ainchent is an Egyptologist in a world where this means encountering immortal Pharaohs, vengeful mummies and tombs full of fully functional traps.
• Adventurer Outfit: Bobby and Glamora give the concept a nod with the way they don a pith helmet every time they get to go on an adventure, but other than putting on boots they just wear the Holliday Girls outfits they always wear.
• Ancient Tomb: In issue 23 Diana, Etta, Bobby, Glamora and two Holliday College professors go to a recently discovered ancient Egyptian tomb where they run afoul of the Curse of the Pharaoh who is there entombed.
• Anticipatory Lipstick: Holliday Girls and known playgirls Glamora and Bobby are shown putting on lipstick prior to events and missions which will include men around their age. Other women are often uncomfortable when the two of them are going to be around men who are in committed relationships even though they've proven time and again that while they might eye a committed man they won't mess with guys their friends are dating.
• April Fools' Plot: Etta Candy is a prankster who celebrates her birthday annually on April 1st, and insists every year that she's turning 16. One year she ended up beating and capturing some criminals while looking for the dentist prior to the party and it seems the Holliday Girls thinks she's just telling a story.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: After their encounter with an Ancient Egyptian who claimed himself immortal and faded away following his defeat Steve is rather dumbfounded that the two Holliday College professors along are happy to denounce the entire thing as something they hallucinated or dreamed up, considering they're standing right next to the magical immortal Amazon Princess Diana whose youthful looking mother has been around since the now fabled siege of Troy.
• Berserk Button: In "Etta Candy and Her Holliday Girls: The Toothache" the mobsters manage to find a temporary one of Etta's by hitting her in the jaw. Despite them having threatened her and pointed a gun at her face she was just going to ignore them since she really needed to get to the dentist. Once they hit her in the jaw aggravating her already hurting tooth she disarms and beats the lot of them unconscious and angrily waits for the cops to show before getting to her appointment.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: The Holliday Girl trio of Bobby (blonde), Glamora (brunette) and Etta (redhead) is the group most likely to assist or go on their own espionage missions and expeditions.
• Blood Knight: While most of the Holliday Girls like fighting Bobby Strong takes it farther than the rest of the gals, and will taunt enemies who are reconsidering so that she gets to pummel them and attack foes that might have been talked down by her allies if not for her presence. She will also stow away on a plane if she can't get permission to come along to what promises to be a good fight.
• Birthday Episode: Etta is trying to get a sore tooth dealt with by a dentist so she can get to her own birthday celebration in "Etta Candy and Her Holliday Girls: The Toothache". She is quite annoyed that she has to deal with some mobsters trying to pull a con on her way, and sprints off as soon as the police arrive to pick up the criminals she's thoroughly beaten.
• Cake Toppers: The Keating Mansion's eerie atmosphere is aided by a dusty cobweb strewn cake with a young bride and groom topper, of Abigail and John in their youth before John became a career criminal and Abigail a recluse.
• Camping Episode: In "The Legend of Rainbow and Stardust!" Diana and the Heyday triplets visit Etta Candy on her family's Texas ranch and have a camp out, during which they roast marshmallows and tell stories over the campfire before their trip is interrupted by rustlers.
• Caught by Arrogance: John Hunter, a thief famous for bragging under the false name Lon Logix, decides to go mess with and steal from his former fiancee after learning the police have uncovered his identity after speaking to her. He knows she's in contact with authorities including Wonder Woman and still shows up at her house expecting to get away scott free.
• Cool Teacher: Unlike some of the other Holliday College professors Prof. Chemico is happy to share his findings with his students, and any time he's set to go on anything resembling an expedition will bring along those students who ask to instead of trying to coddle them and keep them at the school to be proper demure ladies.
• Cowboy Episode: In "The Legend of Rainbow and Stardust!" where Diana, Etta, the Heyday triplets, and the Candy family and ranchhands sit around a fire telling stories while dressed in plaid, cowboy boots, hats and handkerchiefs and then fight some rustlers.
• Crime After Crime: The mobsters Etta runs into while trying to get to the dentist compound their insurance fraud with kidnapping and then attempted murder trying to keep their plans from getting out.
• Curse of the Pharaoh: In issue 23 Diana, Etta, Bobby and Glamora along with two Holliday College professors run afoul of a curse in an Egyptian tomb, which is relayed to them by the spirit of the mummy there entombed. Once the ancient Egyptian is defeated his mummy, which had been missing before, materializes in his tomb calling into question if the entire adventure was some kind of mass hallucination.
• A Day in the Limelight: While Etta Candy is a part of most Golden Age tales she's the main character of "Etta Candy and Her Holliday Girls: The Toothache" in which Diana only makes an appearance for a couple of panels and the story is focused on Etta.
• Defensive Feint Trap: At one point Etta leads her Holliday Girls into an outnumbered fight with some Nazis then has her girls flee past a waiting ambush let by Steve and turn and rejoin the fight once the USAAF has the Nazis cut off from escape.
• Demolitions Expert: Arda Prosperous, one of the Holliday Girls, is quite handy at spotting and defusing bombs. She doesn't always have enough time to defuse them which once allows a criminal to blow up the building they're in the basement of.
• The Dentist Episode: "Etta Candy and Her Holliday Girls: The Toothache" revolves around Etta trying to get to the Dentist to deal with a sore tooth, that once she finally arrives needs pulling. She just happens to run into some mobsters running a con along her way and has to deal with that before she can carry on.
• Didn't Want an Adventure: While most of the Holliday College professors seem perfectly fine with how often their expeditions and such turn into fist fights with Nazis, aliens or superpowered mummies Prof. Ainchent wants no part in it. Unfortunately for him he's also a decent pilot and crack shot so Dean Strikt sends him after his hapless colleagues when they go missing, usually when he's got much more relaxing plans in mind.
• Dirty Coward: Prof. Ainchent does fairly well with all the spookiness in King Aknaten's tomb, until Wonder Woman, Etta Candy, Bobby Strong and Glamora Treat all fall down a trap door, at which point he essentially declares, "whelp they're dead", runs all the way back to his plane and flies back to America before even bothering to make a report. Steve Trevor is not impressed and forces the professor to show him exactly where the cursed tomb is.
• Disappeared Dad: It is all but outright said that Ursula Keating's "aunt" Abigail that raised her is actually her mother, making her father Abigail's long since runaway fiance John Hunter.
• Durable Deathtrap: Bobby Strong, Glamora Treat and Etta Candy accompany a professor to a recently opened ancient Egyptian tomb and discover that it is full of still functioning traps, though as the "mummy" meant to be entombed there is some variety of immortal and living there with a whole bunch of minions these traps have been maintained through the ages.
• Evil Uncle: The Heyday triplet's uncle tries to murder them when he hears his mother might have written him out of her will, because he's a violent career criminal who has no plans to reform.
• Fading Away: King Aknaten declares that so long as he wishes it he remains immortal. Shortly thereafter Steve shows up and helps WW and the Holliday Girls escape, resulting in Aknaten and his men being thoroughly beaten by a bunch of young women, in response he looks away and just fades right out of life, taking his not-so-ready-to-die soldiers with him.
• Family Relationship Switcheroo: Ursula Keating was raised by her Aunt Abigail, except her "aunt" has no siblings and was abandoned by her fiancee shortly before Ursula was born indicating that Ursula is actually Abigail's daughter. Ursula never confronts her on this as Abigail is a recluse who does not do well with mental stress.
• Flashback: "The Legend of Rainbow and Stardust!" starts with the framing device of sitting around a campfire with Hard Candy telling how Rainbow went from circus performer to local Texan legend, with Rainbow's final performance and escape with Stardust shown in flashback. The last half of the story involves Rainbow and Stardust helping Wondy, the Heyday triplets and the Candy family and ranch hands fight off some hustlers in the present.
• Gender-Blender Name: One of the Holliday Girls goes by Bobby Strong, using Bobby as a diminutive of Roberta.
• Girly Bruiser: Glamora Treat, one of the Holliday Girls, is demure, fashion conscious and highly aware of any attractive males near her to the point that Diana feels uncomfortable having Glamora go on a mission with Steve. She also gleefully and eagerly joins on dangerous expeditions, is a crack shot with a rifle, can do a lot of damage with a club, has trained in Amazonian martial arts and loves beating up Nazis. For bonus points she is the girly girl in a Tomboy and Girly Girl pairing with fellow Holliday Girl "Bobby" Strong.
• Grave Robbing: A mummy whose tomb Etta, Bobby, and Glamora are exploring alongside one of their professors accuses them of being grave robbers before attacking them, and doesn't see how the distinction between robber and archeologist is anything more than pedantic.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Bobby Strong and Glamora Treat spend most of their free time together, and know each other well enough that during times of crisis, like being ambushed, they don't even need to talk to each other to work seamlessly as a team.
• I Have Brothers: Roberta "Bobby" Strong will resort to this explanation for why she's a viable candidate for adventurous outings if her own abilities and explanation of her skills isn't enough to convince those in charge.
• In-Series Nickname: Holliday Girls "Bobby" and "Ginny" have the full names Roberta Strong and Virginia True.
• Insurance Fraud: While trying to get to the dentist Etta ran into a woman directing two men to mug her and steal her jewelry at gunpoint in order for her to collect on the insurance on said jewelry. The three mobsters then threatened Etta at gunpoint for overhearing their plot, at which point Etta, who was in a hurry and was just going to leave them alone, beat them all unconscious and called the cops on them.
• Intergenerational Friendship: A couple of the Holliday Girls, are a paramilitary group made up of young adults, are friends with a bunch of children who like to play on the streets of Washington D.C. which means that the kids will come tell them when there's suspicous activity or one of their friends has gone missing.
• Leave No Witnesses: A trio of gangsters decide to kill someone who just happened to overhear their insurance fraud plans, as the timing led them to believe the witness knew even more. Unfortunately for them the witness was Etta Candy, and she'd been in a hurry an willing to just ignore them and instead ends up beating them all unconscious and handing them over to the cops.
• Lured into a Trap: Etta talks to Steve and some other army men outside a cave they know some Nazis are in for about two minutes, before telling him and the rest of the men that she's bringing the Nazis to them so they ought to hide. She then runs into the cave, screams, and runs out with the Nazis following her right into an ambush.
• Mugging the Monster: The fact that Etta Candy regularly fights supervillains, invading aliens and Nazi spies is not publicized so when a trio of gangsters think she's overheard them plotting Insurance Fraud in "Etta Candy and Her Holliday Girls: The Toothache" they decide to attempt to kidnap and off her. This does not work out well for them and when she hands them over to the police they've all been beaten unconscious.
• Mummy: In issue 23 Wonder Woman, Etta Candy, Bobby Strong and Glamora Treat fight an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh who claims to be immortal after entering his tomb, but after they defeat him he and his mooks all disappear, and his once empty sarcophagus suddenly has his ancient mummy inside.
• Only the Chosen May Ride: Rainbow and Stardust are a pair of horses with intelligence that gets them compared to humans and they run as wild horses and refuse to be captured or ridden most of the time, but allow Diana and Etta to ride them after the women save Rainbow after the stallion was shot by criminals.
• Prank Punishment: As Etta is leader of the Holliday Girls she gets to come up with punishments for them being late to meetings or lying, which tends to involve forcing them to try to get places blindfolded or turning out the lights on them as they try to complete a task bound in some way.
• Ragnarök Proofing: In issue 23 Wonder Woman, Etta Candy, Bobby Strong and Glamora Treat enter an ancient Egyptian tomb in remarkably good condition, including still functioning traps.
• Runaway Fiancé: Abigail Keating's fiance John Hunter ran away the night before their wedding to live a life of crime as the master thief Lon Logix. She lived the rest of her life pining after him, and it is very heavily implied her "niece" Ursula is actually her daughter with John.
• The Rustler: "The Legend of Rainbow and Stardust!". At his daughter's urging Hard Candy tells Diana and the Heyday sisters the tale of some rustlers who tried to steal livestock from the Bar-L only for the eponymous oddly intelligent wild horses to alert the Candy family in time for them to prevent the theft.
• Same-Sex Triplets: Lillie, Tillie, and Millie Heyday. Three of the Holliday Girls.
• Self-Disposing Villain: The Evil Pharoh who gives up on life when he's defeated and takes his unfortunate men along with him.
• Those Two Guys: The tomboyish rebel Bobby Strong and fashion conscious Glamora Treat are best friends and two of the most commonly recurring Holliday Girls. In all but one appearance their only real function is to act as set dressing and make snarky commentary on the bizarre situations and powers they keep running into.
• Thrill Seeker: Bobby Strong and Glamora Treat love a good adventure with a spot of fighting thrown in, and on at least one occasion where they weren't able to talk those in charge of such an expedition into letting them come along they stowed away to join in anyway.
• Time Master: Dr. Lana Kurree, Holliday College graduate and chemist, is normally rather level-headed which is good since when she gets into a true panic the winds of time sweep her and those right by her into the past, generally by decades but sometimes thousands of years, and she has no control over it beyond controlling her emotions. This becomes a problem when her boyfriend frames her for murder.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: During WWII the Holliday Girls contained a pair of close friends who fit, the very feminine and boy crazy Glamora Treat and the rough and tumble tomboy Bobby Strong.
• Wacky Fratboy Hijinx: The Holliday Girls spend far more time participating in wacky sorority girl hijinx, and beating up Nazis, than they do going to class. This gets them in real trouble on occasion such as the time two of the Heyday triplets were kidnapped from the Girls' Haunted House mostly because the place was incredibly unsecured and no one knew where they were since the older girls grabbed them and tossed them in a truck to bring them there on a whim.
• Walking Swimsuit Scene: Marya does actually put on pants whenever they're available, but she's not going to change out of her lifeguard swimsuit if something comes up at, or she's kidnapped from, work.
• A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Etta runs into a high level mobster who has kept from being implicated in her group's criminal activity by playing helpless victim. She is quite annoyed when Etta overhears her ordering her men to carry out insurance fraud.

Saturnian Invasion & Villainy Inc Arc

Issues Wonder Woman (1942) 10, 11, 22 & 28, Sensation Comics 59, Comic Cavalcade 22

---

• Achilles' Power Cord: Saturnian ray guns have a cord in the handle which is attached to a pack worn by the wielder. Steve grabs the cord to prevent a guard he's attacking from killing him and is next seen using the gun himself.
• Alien Abductees Fight Back: Steve, Diana and the Holliday Girls ends up as the latest human victims abducted to Saturn and made into slaves. This works about as well as can be expected for the slavers, with Steve and Diana leading a Slave Revolt and using the Saturnians own weapons to destroy what had been built of the earth invasion infrastructure the slaves were set to work on. The end result is the end of legal slavery on Saturn and a treaty between the Emperor and the USA.
• Alien Abduction: Saturnian slavers have been abducting humans for some years to sell to the Empire as slave labor, though some people were taken by humans like Hypnota and sold to the slavers. When the emperor outlaws slavery and calls an end to the endless pointless project they were being used for (they were supposed to build a road from Saturn to Earth, when the Saturnians could already travel to earth casually) the abducted humans are returned to their countries of origin.
• Alien Invasion: The Saturnians have been plotting an invasion of earth for some time, and abducting humans to force them to help build the infrastructure to do so. They make a mistake when one of their agents nabs Wonder Woman and the Holliday Girls, leading to the derailment of their plans.
• Alien Sky: The rings of Saturn dominate the sky of the Saturnian moon the Saturnian Empire slavers take Diana, Etta, Ginny and Steve to.
• All Crimes Are Equal: After Paula von Gunther and Dr. Psycho proved adept at escaping from custody, Wondy had a bad habit of taking any female criminal she captured to Reformation Island to be indefinitely locked in brainwashing Venus Girdles without trial regardless of their crime. This meant that Byrna Brilyant, whose crime was holding people for ransom in a way that was specifically designed not to cause physical harm or remove them from their families, ended up locked up under the same conditions as mass murdering, human trafficking war criminals.
• All Women Love Shoes: The stereotype of women loving shoes is a large part of why Steve can't stop laughing when Diana's only voiced concern while they're starting a Saturnian slave revolt and stealing a ship to get back home is that the slavers stole her boots and she's now stuck barefoot. (There are plenty of other stories where Diana goes without shoes and is fine. She's concerned about her boots in "In the Enemy's Hands" though, and removes them herself to walk across hot coals.)
• Always Identical Twins: The villain Hypnota has an identical twin sister named Serva, and the two pull off twin switches as part of their magic show.
• Ambiguous Gender Identity: Hypnota is physically female but they and their sister usually use male pronouns to refer to Hypnota, they spends most of their time disguised as a male, and when they're not hiding their femininity wearing a mustache and goatee anyway. Hypnota was like this long before surviving a gunshot to the head changed their personality and turned them villainous.
• Artificial Gravity: The Saturnians have reverse gravity rays, which cause gravity to work in reverse on those who've been struck by it making them fly up to the ceiling of whatever room they're in.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Advancement in the Saturnian Empire's court is based on defeating foes through single combat and battle, and disastrous enough defeats result in the loser being stripped of their titles and enslaved.
• Asteroid Miners: The Saturnians (who do not actually live on the planet they're named for but instead on the bodies which orbit it) mine the rings of Saturn using abducted slaves from other planets.
• Asteroid Thicket: The Saturnians are building a road through the solar system using tightly packed asteroids, which Diana points out is impossible and makes no sense. Once she arrives at Saturn she discovers they're doing so anyway and she and Steve Trevor destroy the space road which was being built using conscripted slave labor and was intended to be part of Saturn's invasion of earth.
• Barefoot Captives: The slaves on Saturn are not allowed shoes, and those that arrive with shoes have them taken from them in short order.
• Beach Episode: In "Spies From Saturn" Diana and the Holliday Girls take a trip to Virginia True's family beach house. While there they go swimming, attend a party, and discover a spy from the planet Saturn has a submarine there from which he is helping his Emperor plan an invasion of Earth.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: When Diana and Steve manage to capture the Saturnians' submarine-spaceship by tying the magic lasso to its nose and then to Diana's Cool Plane most of the Saturnians choose to leap to their deaths rather than be captured.
• Billions of Buttons: Etta Candy once activated a space ship, which then took off with her still aboard, on accident due to messing with two of the many buttons covering a wall and then trying to fix whatever that had activated when things started lighting up.
• Bits of Me Keep Passing Out: The first sign Steve Trevor is fighting off Hypnota's mind control is that when she orders him and some other mind control victims to shoot he grabs his gun and then his arm just fails to lift. He looks down at it in a daze before he actually starts to regain control.
• Bound and Gagged: In "Villainy, Incorporated" Giganta and Queen Clea bind Steve to a stake, strip him of all but tattered bits of his pants and gag him.
• Brainwashed: Hypnota has brainwashed the humans they abducted and sold to Saturnian slavers, to ensure they think there is nothing for them but to be Saturnain slaves and do not attempt to rebel or escape. This makes it very difficult to get them back to their homes, learn their names and return them to human society in general after the Saturnian Emperor signs a treaty with the United States.
• Bring the Anchor Along: One of Paula's minions tied Diana to a tree with her own unbreakable lasso. Diana responded by tearing up the tree by the roots and knocking her out with it.
• Captured on Purpose: Eviless' capture by Wonder Woman turns out to just be a step in her plan. By having herself and her followers imprisoned on Reformation Island she'll be able to strike at Paradise Island directly and she's already thought up a way around the Amazons' Heel–Face Brainwashing Venus Girdles.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Eviless has no tragic backstory or other sympathy garnering details, she just likes control, murder and corrupting people.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: Diana and Steve have a rather relaxed conversation while staging a slave revolt on Saturn, destroying all the infrastructure that had been built for an invasion of earth and stealing a ship. Though even Steve thinks it's a bit ridiculous that Diana's first concern when they're on said ship is that her shoes are missing, and he can't quite stop laughing.
• Catch a Falling Star: When WW uses the effects of the Saturninans anti-gravity ray to try to float from the villain's craft up to her invisible plane Steve climbs down her plane's hanging lander to try to catch her, which turns out to be a good thing as the ray's power fades out and she starts falling with him catching her at just the end of his reach.
• Cement Shoes: Hypnota tried to kill Wonder Woman by having her feet and wrists chained to heavy weights and then dropping her in a pit of water. It was not effective.
• Chameleon Camouflage: The Saturnians' invisibility cloaks are more like camouflage suits, which is why they supplement them with telepathy to ensure they're not seen and why Di, who can No-Sell telepathic control and suggestions, still doesn't notice them at first when she has no reason to think there's anyone else around.
• Chance Activation: Etta and Steve are discussing how impossible it's going to be to get a spacecraft they're in to do anything and Etta manages to launch them both into space by plugging in two wires and pulling a lever. Neither are pleased since it was accidental, the government is probably going to charge them with theft and they still have no clue how to actually control it.
• Chekhov's Gun: While they're escaping the slavers of Saturn on a stolen ship Diana bemoans her lost Wonder Woman boots, which Steve finds hilarious due to how stereotypical it is. The Saturnians later replace her replacement boots with the missing originals, which they had coated in a strong poison, in their quest for revenge.
• Choke Holds: When Diana Prince tried to question Mephisto Saturno the man started choking her, which caused Diana to quickly slip out of his grip and surrender to try to avoid having him realize that squeezing both hands around her throat wasn't actually having an effect on her and blowing her secret identity.
• Coat Cape: When Holliday Girl Virginia True is out on the town she wears her jacket just over her shoulders, the easier to shrug out of if she gets in a fight.
• Contrived Clumsiness: Diana "accidentally" trips on a chain while pretending to be under Hypnota's mind control in order to drop the sword Hypnota intends to force Diana to use to kill captives right in front of Etta Candy, whom Diana had just secretly unbound.
• Contrived Coincidence: In William Moulton Marston's final issue Diana calls appraisers asking if any have encountered gems resembling those that have just been stolen from her mother, as soon as one gives her the first name and a vague description of someone trying to sell a gem that fits Diana walks out of her office and the girl is sitting right there in the US Army intelligence office for some reason. Which Diana finds improbable. It also turns out she was indeed trying to sell some of the pilfered content of the Royal vault and following her leads Diana right to Zara and Hypnota.
• Conveniently Coherent Thoughts: Played with and averted:
  • Despite Diana's low level telepathy she cannot read minds unless the person in question is using a Mental Radio, she can only tell there are people nearby, make Mental Radio calls without one physically present on her end and occasionally tell when someone has nefarious intentions especially if they're lying about said intentions.
  • Gail Young is a proper telepath but cannot read thoughts clearly unless she's in close proximity to the target and blocks out other distractions. She usually has to close her eyes or blindfold herself.
  • The Saturnians are able to talk mind to mind to help keep themselves hidden while they're using invisibility tech, and these projected thoughts Diana can clearly intercept.
• Danger — Thin Ice: Hypnota tries and fails to use thin ice to murder Wonder Woman and make it look like an accident. While Diana does trip over the tripwire Hypnota had set up and falls through the ice the experience doesn't phase her and she punches through the ice to escape.
• Decadent Court: The smarter and more favored members of the Saturnian Empire's court realize that they can advance through the ranks through backstabbing, betrayal, and framing others for their failures. It's a court where the elite are waited on hand and foot by slaves, and are in danger of failing in the eyes of their emperor and being executed or enslaved themselves at any moment.
• Death Ray: The Saturnians have death rays, but they seem to much prefer to use their two flavors of Gravity Screw rays instead, which can also prove fatal but in a more delayed fashion when the effect wears off and gravity reasserts itself.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Despite the fact that he looks like Satan the Emperor of Saturn admits defeat once Diana and Steve Trevor outmaneuver him in his own throne room (after their initial escape), he outlaws slavery and becomes a good ally to Di and the United States, with an ambassador sent to Washington DC straight away. This does not endear him to the slavers of Saturn, though in truth this is mostly a ruse as he is trying to get the "rebelling" slavers to get the US to publicly break the treaty first.
• Disappearing Box: Hypnota and Serva's signature act involves Serva seeming to disappear from such a cabinet and then in a quick puff of smoke Hypnota appearing to turn into Serva, who quickly closes the cabinet and opens it again with Hypnota walking out.
• Diplomatic Impunity: Hypnota and the Saturnain slavers who refused to give up their trade when it became illegal try to frame Count Dendum, the Saturnian ambassador to the United States, as using his position to abduct and enslave humans. Their plot fails due to Diana and Steve being aware that something else is going on.
• Drop Pod: Saturnic Traveling Torpedoes are single person drop pods used by the Saturnain Empire. They are dropped into water and can then be piloted to a landmass at high speeds but cannot fly to return to the ship.
• Duality Motif: Clarice Mystik has a downplayed duality motif displayed by her heterochromia and slightly asymmetric clothing which reflects that she's a sweet girl who is nonetheless a minion of the evil Zara.
• Dynamic Entry: Right as the Emperor of Saturn is about to have Steve arrested Wonder Woman smashes through the window to the throne room and forces peace talks to happen that result in the Emperor agreeing to make owning, selling or trading human slaves illegal and a treaty between the Empire and the United States.
• The Enemy Weapons Are Better: While Steve's service weapon was taken by the Saturnians when they abducted, stripped and enslaved him it still wasn't nearly as impressive as the Saturnain Ray Gun—capable of emitting a death ray or Gravity Screw ray dependent on a knob—that he steals as he's escaping and leading a minor slave revolt.
• False Flag Operation: Eviless and Hypnota tried to start a war between the Empire of Saturn and the United States of America by making it look like the American military attacked the Saturnian ambassador and that the Saturnian ambassador was abducting US citizens, both actions the two villains were actually behind.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: While Diana generally uses the teleportation device Paula invented the Saturnians explicitly have ships capable of faster than light travel, as Diana and Steve steal one to get back home after being abducted.
• Flaming Sword: Zara's weapon of choice is a flaming scimitar, which she sets alight through the same chemical method she uses for all the fire in her staged bits intended to trick people into joining her cult.
• Giving Them the Strip: In Wonder Woman #11, Wonder Woman jumps onto a fleeing getaway car and grabs hold of Hypnota's servant Serva. Serva dives out of the car, leaving Wonder Woman holding her cloak.
• Graceful Loser: Outwardly when the Emperor of Saturn realizes he's been outmaneuvered in his own throne room he has the guards that had just surrounded Steve stand down and asks Diana what her terms for him are. He then keeps to these terms despite them being very unpopular with the powerful slavers of his empire and forges an alliance with the USA. He doesn't even act mad, though he's actually plotting with the slavers secretly.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: In #28 Diana wrapped both hands around Cheetah's neck and then lifted and spun her to knock down Cheetah's fellow Villainy, Inc. members.
• Harmless Freezing: Blue Snow was developed to allow for the freezing of living things without causing damage. It can stress out those hit with it because the freezing process is quite slow and implied to be somewhat painful, but it doesn't physically harm them.
• Horned Humanoid: While the rest of the Saturnians look human for some reason their emperor has devil horns. The others are occasionaly drawn with smaller horns, but that is inconsistant.
• Human Aliens: Most of the aliens Diana met in the Golden Age were rather humanoid with little tweaks like those from Venus having butterfly wings, but the Saturnians were pretty much visibly indistinguishable from humans save a handful of their number with green or blue hair or noticable horns.
• Human Cannonball: In issue 10 Diana has herself shot out a cannon straight into the Saturn Emperor's throne room.
• Human Traffickers: Hypnota uses her mental control powers to make the people she abducts placid and ensure they won't fight back before selling them, and has been selling large quantities of people to Saturnian slavers.
• Hypnotic Eyes: Villain Hypnota's "Blue Hypnotic Ray" can be projected from her eyes and hands.
• Identical Stranger: While Diana and the Holliday Girls are briefly enslaved on Saturn the Saturnian slaver Eviless takes note of how remarkably similar she looks to the Holliday Girl Virginia True and later uses this knowledge to kidnap and impersonate Virginia in order to get revenge on Wonder Woman.
• If It Swims, It Flies: Wonder Woman and the Holliday Girls try to ambush the Saturnians aboard the submarine Saturnia, only to discover that Saturnia doubles as a spaceship.
• Impossible Task: The Saturnian slaves are supposed to build a road from Saturn to Earth. This is a task they've been at for years and without any real progress. Supposedly the road will enable their planned invasion, but they already have Faster-Than-Light Travel and make frequent casual stops at earth to abduct more slaves. In practice the whole set up seems to be designed to make the slavers of Saturn rich and keep them from rebelling against the Emperor, who does not seem all that interested in actually invading earth.
• Incredibly Conspicuous Drag: Hypnota wore a mustache and turban to disguise that not only was she a woman, but also the identical twin sister of her Lovely Assistant in order to pull off some of their tricks as stage magicians. She did not bind her chest, seemed to be wearing mascara, and otherwise just looked like a girl wearing a mustache, which seemed to fool audiences just fine. She keeps this same costume as her supervillain outfit, but does even less to hide the fact that she's got a woman's body and doesn't actually seem to be trying to pass as a man.
• Intrinsic Vow: When Hypnota brainwashes Steve the first time he seems like the perfect mark, but the second time the villain makes a miscalculation and orders him to shoot Diana. He raises the gun, then freezes and lowers it, dizzily coming back to himself. Diana trusted this would happen, saying that Steve will never harm her.
• Invisibility: Saturnians can use their telepathy to hide their presence visibly and audibly, and usually use their variation on an Invisibility Cloak to improve the effects. This doesn't work very well on Diana given her own low level telepathic abilities.
• Invisibility Cloak: The Saturnians have full body costumes which allow them to remain invisible on the light spectrum so long as they are in range of their "Invisibility Ray Generator".
• Invisible Writing: Zara uses invisible ink to write on her victims without their knowledge which is then activated later in dramatic fashion to better convince them that her cult is legitimate.
• Jailed One After Another: In the only successful escape from Reformation Island—though only half the conspirators actually made it out before being recaptured—the four who made it off the island to the US were recaptured and sent back one after another within a day of their escape. First Zara and Hypnota then Queen Clea, and lastly Giganta.
• Jeweler's Eye Loupe: The appraiser who lets Diana know that someone is trying to sell gems that fit the description of the stolen Paradise Island Royal family jewels has an eye loupe sitting on his desk.
• Killer Outfit: It doesn't actually kill her, but after she and Steve lead a successful Saturnian slave revolt the Saturnian slavers managed to poison Wonder Woman's boots while looking for revenge, which knocked her out and left her unconscious for at least a day.
• Knockout Gas: The Saturnian Count Mephisto Saturno floods Washington DC with Lassitude Gas, which is colorless and odorless and makes people feel listless and then fall asleep.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: The victims of Hypnota's quickest and most frequent form of telepathically induced brainwashing do not remember any part of their own history, including names, unless it's necessary to complete Hypnota's orders, and find that they cannot remember anything from while they were under it afterwards.
• Legion of Doom: Marston's final issue has Cheetah, Giganta, Blue Snowman, Dr. Poison, Queen Clea, Hypnota, Eviless and Zara teaming up to form Villainy Inc. in order to escape Reformation Island and kill Wonder Woman.
• Lovely Assistant: Before Hypnota turned villain Hypnota and Serva disguised the fact that they were identical sisters (as they used it for some of their tricks) by Hypnota crossdressing and Serva acting as her pretty assistant.
• Luck-Based Search Technique: When Hypnota takes Wonder Woman hostage and Steve brings Etta and the Holliday Girls to search for her Etta decides to climb a tree to get a better view, and the first branch she grabs is the disguised lever that opens the hidden door to Hypnota's secret lair.
• Made a Slave: It turns out (after Hypnota had been imprisoned and slavery outlawed on Saturn) that on the side Hypnota had been using her powers to brainwash people into being obedient slaves and then selling them to Saturnian slavers like Eviless, who are furious at the loss of revenue caused by their trade being made illegal.
• Manchurian Agent: Hypnota snuck in to where Serva was being kept and brainwashed Serva right after her (first) rescue from Hypnota to report back to her former master without raising suspicion as soon as she can after hearing anything about Wonder Woman's plans or location. Hypnota is unaware of this trigger until it's been activated and can do nothing to fight it or alert the others to it.
• Mass Hypnosis: After developing powers and turning evil in the aftermath of surviving being shot in the head Hypnota starts hypnotizing large swaths of audience during their stage act and using them to commit crimes.
• Master of Unlocking: Serva actually laments how good she is at picking locks, since Hypnota placed a trigger in her mind that she has to obey so even though she'd been sent to a safe location she picks the lock and escapes back to her tormentor Hypnota when she hears the trigger.
• Mental Fusion: The Saturnians create large group mental links while using their invisibility cloaks in order to communicate without being overheard. These links seem to have one dominant member who directs the others, and overall individuality is not fully sacrificed.
• Mind-Control Eyes: Hypnota's victims have a Thousand-Yard Stare and sometimes the blue of her "blue hypnotic ray" is visible in their eyes while under her control.
• Not Himself: To their sister Serva the switch from being a considering, careful person in private to a sadistic villain after surviving a gunshot to the head is a huge change for Hypnota, and unfortunately one that seems permanent. The public don't notice as Hypnota and Serva have always presented a different persona to the public as a part of maintaining their stage magic act.
• Now That's Using Your Teeth!: Diana uses her teeth in a lot of odd ways, though one of the most memorable was biting the top of a cage filled with US Navy men who'd been captured by Queen Clea and holding it so it didn't fall into the water Clea intended to drown them in while using the rest of her limbs to defend against Clea's attacks and keep hold of the chain that had been holding the cage.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Queen Clea thought she could trick Steve by wearing a trench coat and holding the sleeve up over her mouth. Without removing her very distinctive headgear. Steve was not fooled, but pretended to be in order to get her to drop her guard so he could arrest her.
• Peace Conference: Diana manages to force peace talks between the Saturnian Empire, Paradise Island and the United States before the Empire launches its full scale attack. While this does result in a treaty the Empire only intends to follow it to the letter and is poised to take advantage of any perceived breech by the other signers.
• Pointy Ears: Older Saturnians have pointed ears, and little horns, while young adult Saturnians are indistinguishable from humans.
• Powered Armor: Byrna Brilyant's "Blue Snowman" armor has some powered elements, but is mostly designed to protect her from harm and the cold. It is also surprisingly buoyant.
• Pretend to Be Brainwashed: As part of a play along prisoner gambit in order to find captive friends Diana pretends Hypnota's blue mind control rays have worked on her on two separate occasions, and that the Saturnians use of telepathy to hide themselves and their conversations is effective on her on another.
• Psychic Radar: Diana's telepathy allows her to "see" the Saturnians even when they're using invisibility tech.
• Prison Riot: Eviless tries to start a riot on Reformation Island, for only seven of the villainous prisoners to be interested. After her little group forms Villainy Inc. and captures Mala, Hippolyte and some other Amazons the rest of the prisoners finally riot, so that they can save the Amazons and recapture their fellow prisoners since most of the inmates had truly reformed.
• Ray Gun: The Saturnians have Reverse Gravity Ray guns.
• Remote Body: Byrna Brilyant, the Snowman, can remotely pilot her "Blue Snowman" Powered Armor and the several dozen identical robots/extra suits she's created.
• Secret Underground Passage: Hypnota's villain lair is hidden in a series of interconnected underground passages with the entrance disguised as an old tree stump.
• Self-Restraint: When Eviless tries to start a prison break on Reformation Island only seven prisoners join her with the rest electing to remain. When Eviless' newly formed Villainy Inc. starts captures Mala and the other Amazon guards the rest of the prisoners break out specifically to save them, and are more than willing to return to their sentences once the villains are defeated, but Hippolyte says they have poven themselves reformed and frees them.
• Seven Deadly Sins: Each of the original seven members of Villainy Inc. have motivations tied to the sins that got them into villainy in the first place. Byrna Brilyant perfected "Blue Snow", which was intended to have medical uses, which she instead uses to blackmail and threaten communities out of their money due to Greed. Queen Clea's Lust for men and power threw two Atlantean principalities into war and caused her to abduct entire shiploads of men, strip them, keep the submissive ones as slaves and devise scantly clad executions for the others for her own entertainment. Cheetah's Envy whenever others received more attention than her drove her to murder before she ever donned a costume and villain name. Dr. Poison's Pride in her horrific work is such that she can't understand when someone insults it or tries to call her out for how horrific it is. Eviless became a slave driver as it was a simple job that allowed her to order others to do all the work while she got to hurt them for disobeying and make money off selling them, she then becomes a full fledged villain to get revenge when parts of her job becomes illegal as she doesn't want to have to go through the work of adapting to the new guidelines due to her Sloth. Giganta is furious with the world at large and Wonder Woman in particular for her creation, legal status, appearance and pretty much everything else in her life tying her to Wrath. Zara's Gluttony for the finer things in life causes her downfall when she has no patience about spending and reveling in her ill gotten gains. An argument could be made for Hypnota representing the eighth, Despair, as they turned to villainy due to paranoia and feelings of betrayal after the one person they trusted most in the world shot them in the head.
• Sexy Silhouette: In "The Sky Road" Di's morning shower and is depicted through her shadow on the shower curtain.
• Shipped in Shackles: When Diana and the Holliday Girls recapture the four villains who managed to escape from Reformation Island they send the first two back bound hand and foot. The later two are bound in Diana's magic lasso and escorted by the princess herself.
• Shower Scene: In "The Sky Road" Di takes a cold shower to try to help herself wake up when she feels listless and weak in the morning, unbeknownst to her due to the Lassitude Gas she's being drugged with. While her nudity is mostly shown in silhouette against the shower curtain she is for some odd reason showering tiptoe like she's wearing invisible heels.
• Slave Liberation: Di and Steve Trevor lead a Slave Revolt on Saturn and in later diplomatic talks have the Emperor abolish slavery on Saturn and return the abducted slaves to their places of origin in order to enter a treaty with the US.
• Slave Revolt: Diana and Steve lead some slaves in a revolt after being enslaved by the Saturnians, and after causing a lot of damage steal a ship and return to earth.
• Smoke Out: Hypnota's signature act involves Serva seeming to disappear from a Disappearing Box, then with a quick puff of smoke seeming to turn into Serva, who quickly closes and then opens the box and finds either herself or Hypnota inside. They then "switch/teleport" a couple more times.
• Space Sailing: Wonder Woman and the Holliday Girls end up captured aboard a Saturnian spy submarine which they soon afterwards discover is both submarine and spaceship.
• Stage Magician: Hypnota is a stage magician and hypnotist whose identical twin sister acts as their Lovely Assistant. They use the fact that they're identical and that Hypnota dresses as a man so this fact is unknown to the audience to pull off some of their tricks.
• The Starscream: The position of the Emperor of Saturn's most trusted slaver advisor appears to be equally Evilesse's and Mephisto's. Unsurprisingly, when the Emperor outlaws slavery, they appear betray him and try to start an interplanetary war in response. In actuallity Eviless and Saturnette both betray Mephisto in order to take over his operation, with the Emperor himself consiging Mephisto to a life of slavery for his failures.
• Super Drowning Skills: Diana actually has to stop her fight with Villainy, Inc. to save Eviless when she realizes the villain isn't coming back up after going into the ocean. Eviless does have the excuse of coming from a planet without large bodies of water, but she picked a fight on an island
• Sweet Polly Oliver:
  • Byrna Brilyant's Blue Snowman suit makes her look like an older overweight gentleman and thus acts as a very thorough disguise.
  • Maru binds her chest, wears baggy clothes and a masculine mask in her Dr. Poison disguise.
  • Hypnota disguises themself as a man for their stage shows, but has an Ambiguous Gender Identity as their identical twin sister usually refers to them with male pronouns, they themselves switch between male and female pronouns and after their sex is revealed they wear their mustache and goatee but do nothing to hide their female figure.
• Take Me to Your Leader: When the Saturnians poison and kidnap Wonder Woman (again) Steve takes the Saturnian ship he'd stolen earlier along with a contingent of Holliday Girls and flies to Saturn where he demands to be taken to their Emperor.
• Tap on the Head: "Villainy, Incorporated": Giganta knocks Steve out with a hit to the back of his head while he's trying to arrest Queen Clea and is unaware that Giganta is around.
• A Taste of the Lash: Eviless, the founder and leader of Villainy Incorporated, is a cruel galactic slaver who uses a whip as her primary weapon.
• Telepathic Spacemen: Saturnians are telepathic.
• 'Tis Only a Bullet in the Brain: Hypnota was accidentally shot in the head by their sister Serva while practicing for their stage show. While they survived their personality was drastically altered and they became a villain.
• Treasure Room: While the other four members of Villainy, Inc. are trying to overthrow the Amazons and find themselves fighting not only the Amazons but all the other prisoners of Reformation Island, Queen Clea, Giganta, Zara and Hypnota run for the royal treasure vault, take everything they can pick up and steal a jet plane and take off. All four, and all the loot, have been recaptured and returned by the end of the next day.
• Tricked-Out Shoes:
  • The Saturnians have "metal boots" which allow those currently under the effect of an reverse-gravity ray to walk on the surface actual gravity is pulling towards, instead of being repelled by it and possibly floating away until gravity fatally reasserts itself for them.
  • The giant women of Mercury have winged sandals which allow them to fly, but they are slower and less maneuverable than the winged ladies of Venus.
• Trigger Phrase: Hypnota places the trigger circumstance of Wonder Woman's schedule being spoken about in poor Serva's head, which causes Serva to pick the lock of the safe-house and return to her tormenter to give intel about Wonder Woman's location to Hypnota.
• Trip Trap: Hypnota sets of a trip wire on an iced over lake as a death trap, and when Diana trips over it she's sent through the thin ice.
• Tunnel Network: Hypnota's villain lair is a whole series of interconnected Secret Underground Passages, which makes it so that even if someone does find her lair they're likely to get lost once they get in.
• Underestimating Badassery: The Emperor of Saturn thought the chains Mephisto Saturno had placed Wonder Woman in were overkill for such a "delicate" feminine prisoner, and ordered her put into more appropriate bindings. When Diana tore through the new chains like they were wet paper and started tearing through his slavers the Emperor revised his opinion.
• Undressing the Unconscious: After getting knocked out by Giganta while trying to arrest Queen Clea Steve Trevor wakes to find the villainesses have stripped him and bound him to a wooden stake.
• The Unfought: After a great deal of build up, fighting many of his underlings, and developing the Saturnian Emperor as someone whose court values one's ability to fight in order for advancement Diana crashes through the window of his throne room ready to fight him as he is about to have a defiant Steve Trevor and Etta Candy executed before him. The Emperor immediately proposes a truce without even getting out of his chair and Di doesn't get to lay a finger on him. His agents then continue to be a menace using loopholes in the text of the truce while making sure their actions cannot be conclusively traced back to him.
• Villain Team-Up: The second ever villain team in superhero comics made its appearance in issue 28 as Villainy Inc.. The team was started by Eviless and included Cheetah, Blue Snowman, Dr. Poison, Giganta, Hypnota, Queen Clea and Zara.
• Visible Invisibility: When Saturnians are using their Invisibility Cloaks and telepathy to makes themselves invisible and inaudible to human senses they are completely invisible until Wonder Woman's own telepathy clues her into their presence, following which point the level of detail seen on them is indicative of how much Wonder Woman is concentration on "seeing" them. The most detailed "invisible" Saturnains are rendered in monochrome blue, and at the least as a vague humanoid dotted outline.
• With My Hands Tied: Diana ends up bound to a pole with her unbreakable lasso. As she can't break the lasso she just tears the pole out from where it's bolted and uses said pole to free Etta Candy and the Holliday Girls by smashing the wall of the prison they're in.
• You Have Failed Me: Zara and Hypnota berate and then try to behead Clarice Mystik when the frightened young woman fails successfully sell the highly conspicuous and reported stolen Amazonian Royal Gems they'd ordered her to liquidate. Diana and Etta save her.

---

Wonder Women of History

• Historical Domain Character: The entire point of the Golden Age's "Wonder Women of History" feature is to have a short interlude in the fantastical superhero story to have a quick comic about a famous woman from history and get across a bit of her early life and then what makes her historically important. There are some creative liberties taken (Amelia Earhart is implied to have ended up on Paradise Island), but usually these are very minor and due to the limited space and format. Ladies covered included: Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, Edith Cavell, Lillian D. Wald, Susan B. Anthony, Soong Mei-ling, Joan of Arc, Elizabeth Kenny, Jane Addams, Juliette Gordon Low, Julia Ward Howe, Helen Keller, Sojourner Truth, Abigail Adams, Evangeline Booth, Marie Curie, Emma Willard, Hannah Adams, Elizabeth Blackwell, Lucretia Mott, Annie Oakley, Sarah Bernhardt, Amelia Earhart, Maria Mitchell, Dolley Madison, Carrie Chapman Catt, Sacagawea, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dorothea Lynde Dix, Nellie Bly, Jenny Lind and many others.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Annie Oakley's incredible marksmanship is the star of her tale, helping her family out as a kid after her father died and earning her fame and money as an adult.

---