Wonder Woman: Earth One
I thought that Morrison was more or less the last person who should tackle Wonder Woman’s roots in bondage and early feminism. Ambitious loudmouth white guys who think of themselves as progressives tend to have some tone-deaf approaches made all the more irritating by their savior complex. Add to that the fact that not only is his collaborator also a male, but that there wasn’t a single woman credited as working on the book, this OGN was filling me with dread. So I was taken by surprise when the first wave of reactions towards it were extremely favorable. Indeed, while it isn’t revelatory the authors acquitted themselves amiably enough, displaying only a slight portion of the impulses I was afraid to find and producing a satisfying, albeit not completely without problems, Wonder Woman comic.
Morrison makes the smart decision to frame Wonder Woman’s origin as a trial, avoiding the languorous pacing plaguing the other Earth One books by allowing him to cut to the chase and select only the relevant aspects of Wonder Woman’s start as a superhero, decoupling the origin itself from the story’s conflict. No need to tie her first adventure into a tired hero’s journey tale, with a boring villain to defeat at the end. Her story begins with a decision.
The drama develops not from some big bad who doesn’t get enough time on page to become interesting, but from the different points of view embraced by the characters and how they clash. This way, the comic is less of a straight three-act story, but rather a dialectic on femininity, power, consent, oppression and responsibility with each fragment of the story, each testimony bringing a new take on the issues, a new version of truth.
Since there is so much telling, this approach would have failed horribly if there wasn’t such strong a sense of each character. Morrison works with Paquette to make them be felt just from their body language and from a few lines of dialog. If the way they spoke wasn’t so purposeful and distinctive, if their expressions and reactions would have been bland or discordant, the whole thing would have been chaotic, not diverse, yet structured.
And through this kaleidoscopic approach Morrison and Paquette try to arrive at the truth of Wonder Woman herself. Recovering much from Marston and Peter’s original comics, but also taking bits and pieces from Kanigher’s, Perez’s, even Azzarello and Chiang’s then filling the gaps with their own ideas they presents a Wonder Woman that is strong, compassionate and cunning, a powerful warrior much more interested in healing. She’s a character that acts and she’s inspiring through her attitude and her decisions, not because other characters are telling the readers about how impressive she is, like it happens in Jimenez and Rucka’s runs.
At first it seems that she only wants to heal the crashlanded Steve Trevor, for which Paradise Island holds no cure, but it becomes clear that she saw great suffering in the world outside Amazonia and she wants to get at the source of that illness, to avail it if she can. For this her homeland needs to change its isolationist stance and to step back into human history. Thus there can be conflict in the Amazon Utopia without it being invaded like in so many other takes and without turning the amazons into rapists and killers, like Azzarello did.
Iterating through so many runs and approaches, I actually think that this is one of my favorite Wonder Woman stories. Then again, this probably comes down to there not being that much takes on Wonder Woman that I like. Since, even if I think many of the narrative and design solutions Morrison and Paquette brought to the table are smart, their execution falters.
Small gripes would be the moments where Morrison goes overboard with the exposition. After the prologue, for the first few pages we are repeatedly told that Wonder Woman decided to be taken captive by her sisters (then again towards the end).
This is meant to reinforce the importance of consent in bondage and relationships, but for how brisk the pacing is, it feels like a stopgap. All the more frustrating when there are other scenes that would have benefited from more elaboration.
Then there are Paquette’s faces.
A lot of the time they reminded me of Greg Land’s faces. Especially on the women. They don’t look as wrong, they are more or less in appropriate proportion to the body and the heads look connected to the neck, and there a lot more instances of lovely appropriate expressions filled with nuance and emotion. But I think that Land really spoiled for me a certain kind of illustration and whenever it pop up it is just unpleasant leaving a taint that is hard to wipe.
More than these, though, the comic has broader, deeper issues. The easiest to spot problems are still in Paquette’s otherwise just beautiful art (it show how much he grew as an artist since his run on WW in the 90s).
Even if Morrison holds his share of the blame, there are panels where the artist makes a point of presenting Diana as large, imposing, with a strong build, but as soon as those moments are over he reverts her body to that of a swimsuit model.
The statement is made, but it isn’t sustained. There is a shallowness in all of it. Only lip-service being paid to the idea of Diana as a physically imposing figure, without it being carried over into other scenes. We encounter a similar problem near the beginning of the story, when Wonder Woman is put in bondange on Paradise Island, dressed in a swimsuit and wearing makeup. But while the amazons do make a big case of her appearance, they all already look like wearing makeup. Maybe not as much, or with less garish colors, but Paquette ends up looking like those boys who don’t actually know how “natural” people look. Paquette and Morrison know they want to say something through how the characters look, but at the same time they want to maintain the classical superhero/genre comic look.
And Morrison’s writing mirrors these flaws. The whole trial and fractured perspective thing should have been stronger. The flashback scenes don’t feel as if they’re told from a character’s point of view, but still from that of the omniscient narrator. And this omniscient narrator leaves explicit references to systems of thought, instead of letting them appear organically from the character’s experiences. It is a shallow engagement with the concepts it addresses. This weakens the dialectical quality of the comic, risking to turn it into just a polemic where a straw-Valerie Solanas, without the irony and humor, is dressed down by a diverse set of third wave intersectional feminists.
The comic still functions and is still enjoyable, because its quality as a beginning affords it the luxury of just making statements, without developing on them. It needs to set up many things, to introduce many characters and as noted it does so very well. Still, there are shortcuts the authors needn’t have taken. They offered a vision for Wonder Woman which I really like, probably one of my favorites, but at the same time they demonstrated that indeed, they aren’t the people who would do the most with it.