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Wonder Woman (1942)

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This is the YMMV page for instances relating to Wonder Woman Volume 1. For the YMMV page for the Wonder Woman franchise at large see YMMV/Wonder Woman.


  • Allegedly Optimistic Ending: Issue #20 ends with the Air-Pirates all captured, brought back when and wear they belong with Paula's space transformer, and of their two leaders swearing off crime, the monster that had her under its Mind Manipulation fleeing. Still, the time beast, which is capable of flight, intangibility, invisibility to seemingly anyone with inferior vision to Wonder Woman, Emotion Control, inducing Fake Memories, three forms of Time Travel, size shiftin, acts of Super-Strength surpassing that of Wonder Woman once it has fed enough, and is Immune to Bullets even when it hasn't fed much and in tangible, visible state, is allowed to escape.There's not much evidence Wonder Woman could stop it from getting away even if she wanted to. Most likely, the time beast simply learned to avoid direct encounters with Wonder Woman, and resumed wreaking havoc on people's lives across the planet and time stream with no further setbacks until Crisis on Infinite Earths!
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: During the Charles Moulton run, Steve Trevor not being able to tell Di and Wondy apart does not seem possible considering he spends a lot of time with both of them and she doesn't wear a mask, and has recognized her by voice alone and waits until he has enough context to call out the proper name. Some readers tend to think he may have been putting on a front to preserve her identity, or being willfully obtuse out of respect for her attempts to keep her identities separate, or just suffered from facial blindness. Steve seemed to quickly lose grey matter under subsequent writers, and it became quite obvious he really had no clue.
  • Audience-Alienating Era:
    • The all-but In Name Only early-1970s period where she lost her powers and became a Badass Normal kung-fu superspy in a white trouser suit, with a male Chinese mentor called I Ching, because DC was trying to emulate the success of The Avengers (1960s).
    • Some fans go further and treat everything between William Moulton Marson's Golden Age stories and the George Pérez Post-Crisis reboot (around 40 years of material!) as one. It's certainly difficult to name an "iconic" Wonder Woman story from that period, even for sheer goofiness. To say nothing of the fact that when they initially returned Diana to Paradise Island and restored her outfit and status (issue 204), they spent a number of issues rerunning older stories like "Wonder Woman and the Coming of the Kangas" (redone as "Attack of the Sky Demons") and "The Four Dooms", originally from #32 in 1949, with art by Ric Estrada and Vince Colletta.
  • Complete Monster: Cylvia Cyber, also known as Doctor Cyber, is the leader of an unnamed Nebulous Evil Organization who was defeated by Wonder Woman after slaughtering a monastery full of monks just to get the valuables inside and staging a jewel heist in London. Returning to destroy Hong Kong and blackmail the world with Earthquake machines, Cyber was disfigured by a member of Tiger Tong after she had the group killed for no longer being of use to her. Irrationally blaming Diana for this, she ordered the Earthquake Machine she placed across the world to be activated and tried to kill Diana herself, but was thought dead when one of the machines she was near exploded. Surviving and desiring to regain her beauty, Cyber returned multiple times to abduct women to transplant her brain into them, trying this on both Diana and Donna Troy, and fatally extracted information from a famous cosmetician in an attempt to graft Diana's face onto her own. Escaping custody and disguising herself as Diana, Cyber broke into the Pentagon and stole America's nuclear launch codes, planning to start a nuclear war and frame Diana for the deed.
  • Easily Forgiven: Paula von Gunther murdered many, tortured many, brainwashed many kidnapped people 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, and shows her burned face, 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.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse
    • When DC held a poll for which "Golden Age" villain fans wanted to see the Earth One counterpart of, the winner was Countess Draska Nishki, who had only appeared in two issues and really only gave Wonder Woman trouble due to circumstance rather than any traits inherent to her. Still, if one excuses the relatively small threat she poses to the protagonist she was one of the more intelligent villains, and that apparently left an impression on readers.
    • Fausta Grables was a one shot antagonist in the Golden Age Wonder Woman comics that DC never bothered to use again in any of its various reboots or else worlds. However, she's been featured in three adaptations, two of which greatly expanded and developed her character, one of which was set two decades before the comic character would have any reason to meet Wonder Woman. While she wasn't as intelligent as Nishki overall, Grables was one of the most successful when it came to deceiving Wonder Woman, which again left an impression. The fact she actually had a full name that wasn't painfully punny made her more memorable than the likes of "Olga".
  • Epileptic Trees
    • One of the first for Wonder Woman was that the character was a "secret lesbian". Marston mocked this in Wonder Women Of History by detailing the actual Island of Lesbos and its most famous resident, Sappho.
    • Many fans insist that the behavior of Steve Trevor and Phillip Darnell makes no sense unless they know Wonder Woman is impersonating Diana Prince but are keeping up the act of not realizing out of respect for her methods and the fact the real Diana Prince clearly approves of it. This particular line of thinking only applies to the issues written by Marston and Hummel, however, as Robert Kanigher makes it obvious that the two men are just clueless.
    • In Sensation Comics #10, one of the Holliday Girls gets knocked out underwater and doesn't die, leading fans to assume she was really some kind of Sea Monster in disguise. Wonder Woman #10 gives this Holliday Girl a name, Virginia True, and establishes that she is very much a human being when she is once again knocked out, underwater, and only survives thanks to Wonder Woman applying an artificial respiration technique to save Virginia. True is being targeted by aliens who have infiltrated USA, however.
    • Fans have long believed something supernatural was going on with Priscilla Rich/Cheetah, between her being able to survive fire a factory fire with nothing by a stuffed cheetah rug for protection, being able to run at seventy miles an hour, even if that proves slower than the slowest of Amazons, and the hairs of her stuffed rug costume standing on end when she gets angry. Marston and Hummel insist Priscilla Rich is nothing more than a mentally ill woman with a Split Personality, however. Most of the fans reading around the same time Marston and Hummel were writing would recognize Priscilla Rich/Cheetah as a Take That! aimed at Darla Drake/Miss Fury of Bell Syndicate, who was a very popular and influential comic strip character, a commercial rival to Wonder Woman published by a commercial rival of DC's former parent company National. Given comic books outpaced strips, and DC buried Bell, the allusions became increasingly lost to newer readers over the years. Miss Fury had clear super natural powers coming from the panther rug she wore, while Cheetah only things her rug is letting her do what she does, and that what she does is far inferior to the Amazons. This would eventually be lost even on most of DC's writers and editors themselves.
    • Most of the cross dressing villains are speculated to be varying degrees of gender queer, none more than Hypnota. There's not concrete evidence for any of them, even Hypnota's debut issue ends with Hypnota being referred to as a female after trying and failing to frame her sister for being Hypnota and assume her sister's place, but the fact Hypnota is referred to with nothing but male pronouns up until the last two pages is more than enough for people to argue the character is a "coded" trans man, if possibly not actually one in the the story. However, in future Wonder Woman volumes, Doctor Poison becomes the greater focus, as future writers tend to ignore that Maru openly flaunted her femininity just as often as she covered it, and Blue Snowman becomes the primary subject of jokes about "gender issues" or Aesops about hiding who one really is.
  • Fair for Its Day: While the depiction of the original Doctor Poison leaned into Yellow Peril stereotypes, she lacked the caricatured appearance and speech patterns that most Asian villains of the era had. The fact that she actually had an individual personality was another point in her favor, since most Japanese villains in World War II comics were one-note evildoers who would've been lucky to get even the bare minimum of characterization beyond "evil and Asian".
  • Fanon Discontinuity: Even fans who enjoyed the 1986 Legend Of Wonder Woman don't necessarily consider it a valid conclusion to the "Golden Age" stories due to some minor continuity errors (blonde Hippolyta instead of black haired Hippolyte, Etta Candy is blonde instead of redheaded, the Atomic Universe is instead a "pocket galaxy"; this could maybe be excused by "Earth One" if the fan girl who wrote it didn't explicitly reference the golden age books as her inspiration) and or the non explanations for the villains' returns to despotism (Leila's is because of Atomia, and Atomia's is just because).
  • Fridge Brilliance: It doesn't make much since for the Silver Age Diana's sister, Nubia, to look so different from her when they're both supposed to have "The Beauty Of Aphrodite" until one realizes that on Earth one the Greek gods are being treated less like Higher-Tech Species aliens that they were in The Golden Age and much more like the Physical Gods of recorded myths. According to the Greeks, their own gods preferred Ethiopian parties to Greek ones, and one imagines the goddess of love would be partying more than most. The Greeks also believed the gods could alter their appearance, which means even though Aphrodite was mostly worshiped by the central Europeans of the Mediterranean she probably spent a good deal of time as a darker skinned African too. The Athenians in particular thought the women of Kemet ("land of the blacks") and Aethiopia ("as scorched by the sun") were just as attractive as their own, in their own way, so it makes sense someone from another Athena venerating culture would be interested in a "Nubian" baby as well.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • Nazis trying to kill Steve Trevor and Diana Prince by pumping car exhaust into a room became a lot more uncomfortable when news broke to the general public that was an actual Nazi execution method.
    • 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." 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.
    • Doctor Psycho's backstory in #5 bares a distressing resemblance to many members of what would later be known as the "incel" movement, being a "manlet" that was unsuccessful with women and blamed it on them and believed that they needed to be subjugated.
    • Issue #215 has Mars attempt to start a war between Atlantis and the Amazons to regain his strength from two of the world's most powerful armies attacking one another, with Wonder Woman and Aquaman working together to stop him and call off the war. In Flashpoint (DC Comics), Wonder Woman and Aquaman are leading the sides of an Amazon/Atlantean war, and both sides are so powerful it ends up nearly destroying the world.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight
    • In issue #4, Paula Von Gunther creates a machine that uses "kappa rays" to see into the fifth dimension and observe a person's subconscious. She uses this on the "Rubber Barons", Skelly in particular seeing himself as a combination of Mister Monopoly and Superman. A year later Superman's own book would have it's own take on the fifth dimension, in this case a being from it coming to annoy him.
    • The "Bzz, bzz" of an incoming mental radio call bring to mind a cell phone set to vibrate.
  • It Was His Sled: The people of Atlantis being amphibious was supposed to be a surprise. People who learned about Wonder Woman post Crisis on Infinite Earths are more surprised by the possibility the people of this Atlantis can't survive underwater.
  • Mis-blamed: Feminists seem to get a lot of blame for Wonder Woman's depowering in the Bronze Age; however, the complete opposite is true. While the decision to depower her was made to make the comic more appealing to feminists and women in general, DC came up with the idea all on their own — in fact it was partly backlash from the feminists that resulted in her getting repowered.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Every single one of Queen Atomia's slave "subjects" was presumably human at one point, before she hit them with her Shrink Ray and shoved them in her horrific Mook Maker, permanently altering them physically and mentally into the forms of her robotic looking "Neutron" and "Protron" slaves for the rest of their lives.
  • Older Than They Think: Issue #4's story "The Rubber Barons" features the first appearance of DC's Fifth Dimension, about a year before Mr. Mxyzptlk first appeared in the pages of Superman (1939) in 1944. It wasn't quite what it became later, rather it was used as Techno Babble to explain how an Amazonian mind-reading machine works, but that ties in nicely with Grant Morrison's explanation of the Fifth Dimension as being the embodiment of imagination.
  • Seasonal Rot: Robert Kanigher wrote Wonder Woman longer than anyone, and it was generally agreed he did a good to decent job as long as one of William Maston's Production Posse, be it Marston himself, Harry Peter, Joy Hummel, Alice Marble, M.C. Gaines or Sheldon Mayer was working with Kanigher. Once they were all dead or gone, however, the quality of the Wonder Woman comic book decreased dramatically, not helped by the fact DC was overworking Kanigher and Wonder Woman was among the least favorite of the many projects he was serving as both writer and editor of while occasionally having to draw it as well. Kanigher eventually felt the need to address fan complaints and promise a return to form, but the stories still weren't clicking and Kanigher was finally relieved from writing. However, this lead to the reviled "Modernist" period of Wonder Woman, which brought in new fans caught up in the "mod" craze as it made its way to USA, but who only stuck around as long as the fad was in fashion, leaving DC with an even smaller audience of still angry fans as the fad faded out. This lead to Kanigher's return, but his stories still were still only slightly better received than the mod stuff.
  • Values Dissonance:
    • Many of the modern printed Wonder Woman collections remove the painfully racist caricatures of black people, replacing them with more natural-looking black characters. By 1945, Harry Peter himself started drawing most of the black characters with plausibly human faces, Alfonso Greene even more so, and Alice Marble made Sojourner Truth the subject of Wonder Women of History.
    • Wonder Woman from the Golden Age had a particular problem because her creator, William Marston, believed that dominance, submission, and a very bondage-oriented culture were all things needed in what was then "today's world". Wonder Woman at one point extols the virtues of being a (consensual) slave. Needless to say, this sexuality-based cultural paradigm was not in sync with what people believed then, and hasn't really caught on now either. And while Marston had very progressive ideas about women's empowerment for his day, he also seemed to think that women were "naturally" prone to things like vanity and emotional outbursts.
    • Issue #15 seems to be in favor of USA expanding its territory in order to civilize savages, with the Aesop being that USA must be careful about how it takes people so that it doesn't become a victim of this savagery. While Manifest Destiny is an old idea in the US, it concerns expanding from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with any expansion beyond this having always been controversial, since before the Civil War, when an earlier civil war was almost fought over the issue of keeping Cuba out of the unionnote . Turn of the century and the idea of USA adding more protectorates to "civilize" still isn't a very popular one.
  • Values Resonance: While Wonder Woman is said to have "perfect" beauty measurements, with specific attention drawn to her strength in contrast to lacking much muscle, Wonder Woman herself, and her mother Hippolyte, are of the opinion that the muscular women of "Man's World" who compete in shot put and weight lifting are quite beautiful in their own way. The Amazons themselves tend to look down on fatness, but it's shown even chubby women can find partners who will appreciate them. Etta's diet is by no means protrayed as healthy, and many jokes are made about it, but she's not just there to be Fat Comic Relief, and she does still lead an active life style.

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