Tag: Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman Origins: Where to Start?

I’ve fallen into a deep dark hole of DC comics today and I can’t seem to find my way out. Yesterday I released the abstracts for LGBTQIA+ Fantastika Graphics digital symposium, including my own which I posted here. Although merely days ago I cautioned against writing a conference abstract without knowing some details of your plan/structure, I rarely follow my own advice. 🤷🏽‍♀️ So here I am, trying to figure out where to start my research with Wonder Woman’s origin story.

There are two general versions and they are in oppositions to each other. One is extremely feminist, centering on a parthenogenetic birth (a birth without requiring male interaction) and a matriarchal society spreading the message of peace and enlightenment. The other not only requires male interaction for Wonder Woman to be created but also changes the Amazonian society to make them more aggressive, and more often than not, a group of man-haters. This view is the opposite side of the feminist spectrum, a view presented by male authors who completely misunderstand feminism itself. LGBTQIA+ phobias also get mixed in here (with the idea that a woman would only want to be with another woman because they both hate men). It’s a disturbing and complicated history as each reboot clearly reveals the author’s own views on feminism.

That being said, I still have no idea where to start. Which comic runs should I focus on? The 1940s’ golden age? The 1950s’ silver age? The 1960s’ bronze age? The 1980s’ Crisis on Infinite Earth series which plays with parallel universes? The 1987 reboot which follows it? The 2005/6 reboots? The 2011 one? 2016? The 2017/2020 film adaptations?

I suddenly remember why I’ve avoided looking at Marvel or DC characters for so long. But the longer I put it off, the more “catching up” I’ll have to do. And I thought being an epic fantasy scholar resulted in too heavy a reading list.

But where do the babies come from?

It’s Friday, I’m burnt out, and I’m doing the mom thing today (chasing the kid around nearly an hour past his naptime as he hasn’t eaten his lunch yet). So today I’m going to post a preview of my LGBTQIA+ Fantastika symposium paper – in abstract form. You can find full details of the event here:

But Where Do The Babies Come From?: Evaluating the Effect of Mothers as Matriarchs in Monstress, Wonder Woman, and Y: The Last Man


What happens in a world where there are no men or patriarchs?How are political alliances arranged? How are relations formed? And where do the babies come from? These are some of the questions posed in the works of Monstress, Wonder Woman, and Y: The Last Man. Although men still exist in the world of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s Monstress, it is striking that the political alliance between the Dawn Court and the Dusk court are made via the marriage of two females. While patriarchal marriage alliances are generally made in order to combine bloodlines, Monstress blatantly ignores this objective. In contrast, while in the original Wonder Woman comics, Hippolyta creates her daughter Diana from clay, in the 2011 retcon DC changed this parthenogenetic birth so that Diana is created from the union of Zeus and Hippolyta, reaffirming the role of heterosexual parentage. Meanwhile, Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man undermines this heterosexual/binary parentage completely. At the beginning of the series, Yorick Brown and his pet monkey Ampersand are the only two living males left on the entire planet, as a mysterious illness kills anyone with a Y chromosome. One of the explanations offered for this illness is, due to viable cloning, males were no longer necessary, and Mother Nature destroyed them. All three graphic narratives offer interesting perspectives of the place and space of men within a queered world. While these texts are still fairly conservative (as they do not engage in sustained conversation about either intersexuality or pansexuality), each narrative still reveals insights into the binary nature of power structures and family dynamics. This paper will begin this dialogue as the first steps of a larger project examining power and gender roles in fantasy fiction.