I never reviewed Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2 in any depth since I felt a bit burned out with superhero movies at the time. Also, the daddy issues of Chris Pratt's boorish character - played by an actor just shy of forty- were tiresome. I went into the cinema with low expectations but was charmed, to my surprise, by the film.
Wonder Woman is a character I have often found silly and dated. Perhaps that's because my earliest experiences of her adventures were the deliberately "period" stories of the mid-Sixties by Kanigher and Andru. I read the story below in a Double Double comic in the very early 70s: it revived Giganta, the ape-turned-statuesque jungle girl and the sneering, butch Nazi spy mistress, Paula Van Gunta.
Since in my child's eyes it was clearly a girl's comic, I completely missed out on the Sekowsky/O'Neil " Diana Rigg" period of Wonder Woman, although I've read some of the reprints. It's an appealing idea now but O'Neil's "hard-boiled" stylings turn me off. I haven't read Diana's brief foray into Sword and Sorcery either:
On holiday in Kirkcudbright in 1974, I resorted to a WW Super-Spectacular when there was absolutely nothing else to buy; the iconic cover of 210 is indicative of another Golden Age revival.
By the following autumn, I was in secondary school and WW was petitioning to rejoin the JLA. This issue caught my eye because it was narrated by two of the most obscure Bronze Age JLAers.
In initiation of the tv series, the comic turned to Earth-2 adventures of the Amazing Amazon. We didn't see the wartime WW episodes in Scotland- if I recall correctly, BBC1 screened the "new" WW series that was set in the present day from the late summer of '78. Lynda Carter's Diana has such innocence and honesty that, like Christopher Reeve, she grounds the campery with integrity and became an icon. The regular DC title subsequently abandoned its 1940s setting in turn.
However, despite picking up the odd issue in the late 70s, I wasn't impressed or engaged by the title. The stories and art were pedestrian and faddy. In fact, it took the presence of another E-2 heroine, the JSA's Huntress, to get me to buy the title on a monthly basis. The issue below came from the spinner rack in Lewis's department store in Glasgow, the summer before I started as a fresher at University.
With the Crisis on Infinite Earths eliminating E-2 and the JSA in the mid-80s, a series of reboots began, gaining critical acclaim. These included Miller's Dark Knight and Year One for Batman, Byrne's Man of Steel and Perez's vision for WW. He devised new versions of GA villains like the Cheetah and more recent adversaries, like the Thomas/Colan Silver Swan.
I drifted away from the Perez series after the first dozen issues or so and didn't return to it until John Byrne performed some of his "Everything You Know Is Wrong" stunts in the mid-90s. He folded in the New Gods mythos and revived characters like Etrigan the Demon and, incredibly, the astounding racist caricature, Egg Fu.
While his pointless deconstruction of Wolfman and Perez's Wonder Girl/ Donna Troy seemed like vandalism, Byrne's replacement of the 80s Fury character with Diana's mother in the JSA was neatly logical.
Alex Ross produced a beautiful and heartfelt tribute to Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman in the Treasury format graphic novel Spirit of Truth in 2001:
But in this decade, I still haven't been interested in following the adventures of Wonder Woman - with the exception of the 1977 version of the character in arch pastiches of the Disco Era, such as the recent team-up series with Batman '66.
Dispensing with camp, the purity of the 2017 film's approach was very engaging; Gal Gadot found the character traits of innocence and directness that Lynda Carter pioneered and while it was a mash-up of Thor and Captain America: the First Avenger, the film was thankfully superior to the execrable Man of Steel and Dawn of Justice. There was a flavour, too, of Saving Private Ryan in the WW1 scenes and while that time period bewildered me, I enjoyed the relationship with Pine's roguish Steve Trevor. I was also very pleased to see Etta Candy and Dr. Poison.
However, the trailer for Justice League doesn't fill me with anticipation. I've blogged before about my apathy toward Marv Wolfman's Cyborg- a dated Blaxploitation cliche and a Titan and not a Leaguer, to boot. As for Aquaman, it looks like some executive spotted an image of Jae Lee's Namor from the 90s and thought: gnarly.
In the next post, I'll take a look at the newest Spider-Man movie and then we'll finally revisit Virgin of the Secret Service, Batman in 1972 and meet the 13th Doctor Who!
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