In case you hadn’t noticed, lately I’ve been on a classic-heroines kick. While stuck in bed with a bad cold a couple of weekends ago, I was hunting down a few images for something I wanted to write about Spider-Woman, and then one thing led to another and I eventually bought a huge pile of old comics off eBay. Since I was following a train of thought, they all fell into a similar category: ass-kicking women I loved as a kid. (Plus some crazy, gorgeous Jack Kirby stuff, but I’ll save that for another time.)
Luckily, there is much to love in all those old issues. For all my nostalgia about the comics I grew up with, I’m the first to admit that re-reading them often makes me want to scratch my eyes out. The writing and the artwork and the production of modern comics is usually so sophisticated compared to last century that it can be tough to put yourself back in ther mind-set of what made those older stories so magical. It turns out, though, that those early Dazzler issues had great art by John Romita, Jr., and John Byrne hadn’t spiralled into total megalomania yet and Wonder Woman still had a fun contrast of 70s feminism and the timeless objectfication of hot chicks.
I’ve really been most surprised by the pre-Crisis Wonder Woman stuff. There’s plenty of the goofiness that came with decades of accumulated plot developments: the Amazons with their advanced spacecrafts and magic bracelets, the invisible robot plane controlled by WW’s tiara, the Greek gods dressing pretty much like golden-age superheroes. I expected (and looked forward to) all that, but I guess all the traces of feminism and radical politics and anger-at-man’s-world stuff mostly flew past me when I was young. Check out this sequence from Wonder Woman #263 (January, 1980):
 |
 |
 |
 |
All this, of course, is forgotten once Wonder Woman has to battle “The Gaucho, A Real Man!” from the Argentinian pampas who looks like an escapee from Epcot Center and rides a horse with rocket hooves.