To understand how well known my love for Wonder Woman is you need to realize that nearly every person I know texted me about five minutes after seeing Batman vs Superman just to tell me that Gal Gadot pulled her off well (I agreed when I finally saw it but that’s another post). I’ve been waiting for Wonder Woman’s Earth One title to see how they would revamp her origin yet again, but I must admit I was concerned because as much as I love much of Grant Morrison’s writing, he does not have a style that would serve the Amazon well.

Turns out I had reason to be concerned.

It started with the interviews. Morrison made it clear he wanted to pay homage to Wonder Woman’s original creator William Moulton Marston, which in this day and age is problematic at best. We like to only think about WW’s female empowerment message, which has been there from the beginning but Marston’s tales were always about “loving submission” and while that included men submitting to women it most often featured women submitting, and being chained and bound. Now I love those old books because they were oddly progressive for their day but that does not mean they need revisiting. Which is exactly what Morrison has done.

Having read those issues I’m not as angry as this woman is because I get where most of the imagery comes from (I’m sorry, Anne, the kangaroos were genuinely a thing) — directly from the source material — but her review shows how poorly this stuff plays in the modern era. If this was written as parody of those original issues I’d almost forgive it but it obviously is not. Morrison’s claim to modernization is recognizing that the Amazons were lesbians, who seem to have spent much of their time as female porn stars do in adolescent male fantasies, rather than having true relationships and meaningful conversation. The other thing I liked that he managed to not do so well is make Steve Trevor Black. This makes sense as a quarter of our armed forces are African American but I feel like he was just put in as an excuse to have a speech about slavery later in the story. Representation rocks but I’m not sure this was done in the right spirit. I was deeply offended when the Amazons fat shame poor Etta Candy and while she stands up for herself I have to call bullshit on the idea that there would be no overweight Amazons. Nature makes us in all shapes and sizes, not society. I also have to say, after seeing such a modern take on Diana in BvS, I don’t love the fish out of water story as much anymore. George Perez did it to great effect as did William Messner Loeb but it feels dated and unfair to the character now. If she is 5000 years old why must we assume she knows nothing about our world. She doesn’t have to be naive to want to show us a better way.

As for the new origin, I know I’m in something of a minority, but I enjoyed Azzarello’s take on WW with her origin as a demigod. While this story is also about secrets the idea that she is genetically engineered and uses male DNA felt weird and wrong.

In the end, that’s the bottom line, this whole book just felt weird and wrong. Wonder Woman threw off her chains a long damn time ago for good reason.

via GIPHY

There was really no need to try to bring back so much of this imagery as she has long grown past it. Wonder Woman hasn’t been about loving submission for a very long time and her message about peace comes from a warrior’s heart. Watching Gal Gadot stand with that grin on her face when Doomsday knocks her down in BvS is far more true to her than any panel in this book and that’s a damn shame. Morrison plans on two more books in the arc but frankly I’d really just prefer to let this stand alone…unopened…on a sale table.

Here’s a peek inside: