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Show 220 I began to absorb them, reading them instead of the scriptures at night. Comic books in general were not new to me, but I had never encountered anything like Wonder Woman. For one thing, Wonder Woman kicked ass, and I simply hadn't seen many comparable representations-comic book or otherwise. I had discovered and admired Kitty Pryde from X-Men, as well as Elektra; but they did not have the same effect on me as Wonder Woman. Kitty was too marginal, and Elektra endured an inordinate number of lectures about the dormant good inside of her. For whatever reason-and I had other concerns on my mind taking priority over trying to articulate why this might have been-I wanted something new in my life, and I found it in the form of the Wonder Woman comics released in the early 1940s. That part of the story is simple. As a character, Wonder Woman's origin story fluctuated as the series went on, but her timeline is basically this: she was bom Diana Yeoman on Paradise Island, an island undocumented because of its advanced invisibility technology, and its location in the Bermuda Triangle. The island is inhabited by the all-female Amazon race. The presentation of the mythical Amazons as a peace-loving and prosperous group is one of Marston's many surprising mythical appropriations. In every instance I've found of the Amazons in mythology or ancient stories, they are always presented as foolish, war-hungry types who are inevitably defeated. In Greek their name means "breastless," after a practice of removing their right breast to improve the process of shooting bows and arrows. |