Great Harah, it is time for me to say hello and welcome to Geek History Lesson.

I am Ashley Victoria Robinson.

Jason Inman is not allowed on the podcast today because, as you may obsessed out from the title of this episode, we are going to spend some important long term time on Themiscira.

This is our Wonder Woman Mega episode and if you don't know, you are in the right place.

We're gonna teach you everything you need to know about all of Wonder Woman's history.

Themiskira aka Paradise Island is where she's from and men are not allowed to be there or touch the ground.

And so Jason's not allowed on this episode, except he's going to be featured in every single other episode that you're gonna get a chance to hear.

Today.

We are as led by me taking a journey through all of Wonder Woman's history from the Golden Age through the Silver Age up to the Bronze Age, because frankly, Diana Prince deserves as much exposure as possible and I want you to learn as much as I did going back to her incredible publication history.

Oh, got out your lasso of truth, put on your cool headband, spend around a bunch of times and do your makeup as good as Linda Carter's.

Because it's time for Wonder Woman's mega episode.

Take it away, past Jason and past Ashley.

In your Satin Tides fighting folio rides and old red, white and blue wonder Woman, wonder Woman.

That's right, because you're weak.

History lesson On, wonder Woman.

The Golden Age is now in session.

Make a Haakah dev stop, whoa with love, Make Laijah del the truth of wonder Woman, Golden Age, wonder Woman.

Man go Age, Hello, and welcome to Geek History Lesson.

I'm Ashley Victoria Robinson, and I'm.

Jason Wonderful and men, welcome to your mind University, the place where we're going to tell you about classical figures in the Great Pantheon.

That sometimes may be a superhero that dresses up in the red, white and blue, and that is who Ashley.

That is the Wonderful, the iconic, the feminine wonder Woman.

Diana, Prince of Thymyskira.

That's right, yeah, Themyscira.

If you guys have been like living in a cave somewhere, maybe you don't know that there's a giant Wonder Woman movie coming out, and it's it's pretty awesome.

We can say at the time of this recording that we have seen it, Yes, but we're not going to talk about the movie in this episode.

Why not, Well, because next week.

We're going to be doing our wonderwe movie review after the movie's opened, so that you know, some of you can see the movie, some of you can see have your thoughts with our thoughts because it's gonna be full spoilers.

Oh yeah, and we'd like to respect your spoilers exactly.

And just like our past episodes on Superman and Batman, Wonder Woman has such a lengthy and huge history that we have to break her up, just like we did Superman and Batman.

That's right, This is only wonder Woman the Golden.

Age, Yes, and we will go into the exact timeline that that covers in a little.

Great We also want to tell you too, you really want to stick around all the way to the end because we.

Have one of our coolest guests.

One of the coolest guests we have ever gotten on this show, Ashley.

Do you want to introduce it that is?

Or should I introduce that is?

I will give her an intro and you can say her name.

How about we split it up, joke, You dinna make it even more difficult.

Okay, Sure she is for my generation, for children of the nineties, the definitive wonder Woman, still playing the role till this very day.

Susan Eisenberg, the wonderful voice over actress.

She yeah, she was the voice for wonder Woman in Justice League and Justice United, Superman, Batman Apocalypse, Justin Doom, Injustice and Justice two, and the DC Universe online.

So she's pretty wonderful.

She is a wonderful woman.

And she has played wonder Woman, so of course we had to have her on our first wonder Woman episode.

But enough of this jibba jabba.

Let's move on into the Hencent Origin, which is the first part of our podcast.

But before we get to the Tencent Origin, I'm wonderfully skipping ahead.

I believe we have some excellent listeners out in the Mind University that have suggested this lesson.

We have a minefield of tas for this week's lesson, including Shadows of Ash, Still, Brave Love, Gene s Sam Martinez as d F g h j K lp qw E R, Alexis N Bowen, and tree BRANCHI thank you so much for requesting Diana Prince Wonder Woman episode.

Thank you tree Branchy, because now you're going to send us into the dens End Origin, which I said before is the first part of our podcast where we give you the cliff notes version everything you need to know about Wonder Woman.

So when you want to impress your friends right before, right as you're walking into the Wonder Woman movie, you can be like, hey, guys, I know all these details and I got it from ge Guessory Lesson.

Yeah, it's true.

Okay, Ashley, take us away.

So she is, of course Princess Diana of Themiscira, a very famous d C Comics character.

Her first appearance was an All Star Comics number eight in October of nineteen forty one.

So she is a she's in an old lady.

She is a seventy six year old beautiful Amazon.

She's a member of the aarp is.

Yes, definitely.

She was created by William Moulton Marston with the inspiration from various women in his life that we will definitely be touching on, and artist Harry G.

Peter, which I cannot believe is his real name.

Her most famous alias is, of course Diana Prince, which she has adopted in her civilian identities, giving beginning in the Golden Age, she is an Amazon and a demigod, although we're not going to touch a lot on the demi god stuff slash touch on it at all, because that doesn't happen until the modern age of comics, got it.

We're going to focus on her as an Amazonian princess and as a secretary, and well, you know what all that means.

Her team affiliations and partnerships have included Steve Trevor, The Justice League, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Girl, and her abilities include superhuman strength, speed, durability and longevity, flight, skilled hand to hand combatant, a lasso of Truth, a shield, indestructible gauntlets, and an invisible jet as it was renamed during the Linda Carter TV series.

Is that when it became a jet from a plant.

That is we'll touch on that a little bit in our history lesson, And of course she has famously been played by Linda Carter, Susan Eisenberg, and Gal Gadot.

Yes, and that's your tensent origin on Wonder Woman.

Yes, and that we of course we jumped a little bit out of the Golden Age there, but it's okay, it's all right.

Wonderment's so big.

Yeah, good talk about her.

All right.

Let's move into the meet cute, which is our section that we stole a.

Term from romantic comedies, where we tell you where we first met wonder Woman in our lives.

Yes, so, Jason, I'm curious if this is gonna be one of your standard answers, where did you first meet wonder Woman?

What do you feel is my standard answers?

You are a wizard magazine man.

Listen, Batman the animated series showed me everything.

Hey man, No, we both we both have in our origin stories.

You know, wonder Woman's really tough because it's just like Superman and Batman.

Batman.

I kind of wonder, I don't know why I said it that way.

I love it.

I kind of wonder if I just kind of always knew who she was.

I feel like she's always been just such a huge part of ours.

Guys, Superman, Batman, and wonder Woman.

I really feel like I knew who she was before I read any comics of her.

Now I first became aware of who she was actually read one of her Adventures was a comic book.

Back in the day, Walmart, which was one of my my prime sources of comic books, would have these ten packs of comics for like five dollars.

And that was back in the day, of course, when comic books cost like a dollar to a dollar fifty.

You good all day.

You would see ninety nine cent comicooks all the time.

You usually they were the young reader comic books.

That doesn't matter.

Yeah, but anyways, so you could buy these packs and the packs were all it was usually DC.

Marvel didn't do this for some reason, which is I always thought was weird.

Because they were broken at the time.

Uh No, this is early nineties, so Marvel the Marvel was doing just fine.

Uh So it would be like random.

So that was like the first way I read Man of Steel by John Burne, like, but it'd be like issue three and then be like The Justice Society of America by Mike Paraback, which I've talked about in the series, Like that's where I discovered that was in these packs.

And then I remember some issues of wonder Woman was were sneaking in there, and some of them were the George Perez Wonderful an issue that's a good run and the first one I can remember.

I cannot tell you the issue, but Wonder Woman like Cheetah's on the cover or something like that, and like Cheetah's like going at Wonder Woman.

I don't know.

That could be like thousands of Wonder Woman comic books for as far as i'm but anyways, it was a Cheetah versus Wonder Woman issue.

Yeah, and it was in the it was at night, That's what I remember.

But from there, I've read a bunch of Wonder Woman.

I've read the New fifty two run.

I've read a bunch, I've read George Prez's run.

But Wonder Woman a lot of our adventures that I've read were she's with the Just League.

So there you go.

How about yourself?

So I first met her in the Justice League show.

I mean, yes, I knew who Wonder Woman was.

I'd seen her because you knew who she was exactly, But that was my first real encounter with her as a character was when that series came on, because I was mostly reading Batman stuff and she didn't appear in any of the issues that I picked up.

And it's not like it is today where there is a ton of kid friendly and then specifically female friendly stuff that was very accessible before this these series of cartoons came along.

So yeah, and I loved that.

Even though she's definitely a supporting player next to Batman and Superman, she can definitely stand her own like they're the leaders of that show, but she doesn't take any crap from them.

Nice.

So yeah, that's my meet cute.

Great, let's move right into the history one oh one of Wonder Woman in the Golden Age, where a teacher Ashley is going to hop into the way Way Back machine and travel back to nineteen forty one, and also she's going to tell us what time periodes is this lesson takes place in.

Yes, so this lesson is probably gonna have a little bit more of publication history than we normally touch on, because I think it is really important and important to understanding, particularly this Golden Age incarnation.

Sure, so, typically the Golden Age of comics is considered to be between nineteen thirty eight and nineteen fifty, so that's what we're working, and we're working in nineteen forty one to nineteen fifty, so only about ten years of comics is what we're going to cover.

It doesn't go all the way to the sixty one or sixty two.

Where are they first as a Barry Allen.

So see that depends because the thirty eight to fifty is what publishers, if you're making a grand generalization, would cover.

We're actually going to go up until about We're gonna mention an event in sixty two because that's sort of the end of this version of Wonder Woman.

But most of what we're covering is a lot of standalone adventures.

So what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna give you some publication history.

I'm going to recap her first five issues and then tell you some weird stuff that happened and the trend of this storytelling because overarching narrative didn't exist at this point.

And that's totally fine because I know also in the fifties, superhero coomboos kind of went out of fad and they didn't sell very well.

They did in Wonder Woman's series actually got canceled.

She wasn't published through a lot of the late fifties.

Wonder Woman.

Don't worry, she came back.

That's why they Yeah, well I'll tell you, I'll tell you what happens.

I'm excited about this.

Let's go okay, so publication history.

William Moulton Marston, great name was a famous psychologist at this time, already famous like world famous, Bill Knight, the science guy, famous, Neil de grasse tys and famous.

I mean I put him on a higher level than that, but sure, I'm just trying to.

Think of like who were two scientists, but who were two scientific figures?

You know, no, no, no, in popular culture, and he was famous for inventing the polygraph or the line of detector.

He struck up an idea for a new kind of superhero, one who would triumph not with fists or firepower, but with love.

So he's like kicking around this idea of like, I don't know, like maybe I'm all right a superhero.

And then he was telling this to his wife Elizabeth, and she said, quote, fine, but make her a woman?

Was he English?

Do we know?

I think he's American?

But I don't.

I don't.

I don't know, my dear Elizabeth.

William, here I have an idea for superhero.

Maybe maybe this person has long hair.

Where's the colors of the of the American flag?

Missing something?

Here?

I'm missing one important element, an hour glass figure.

Dear godzooks, that's it.

My superhero needs hips.

So I think that Elizabeth Marson doesn't get enough credit because Wonder Woman being a woman is a pretty important part of her car is.

Probably it is one of the most important.

Probably one of the most defining facts about her.

So I really wanted to mention that fun fact.

Steve Trevor, who is, of course the love interest of Wonder Woman during this time period, he holds a position in American Army intelligence, We'll get into that, and he often used a lie detector while he was interrogating bad guys.

This is this is a smart businessman.

Guys, sell me some detective tests.

Yes.

He later gave an interview with Family Circle magazine.

I have no idea what that is, stating that that there was an untapped potential in the comic book medium and that was why he felt compelled to create Wonder Woman.

So William Moulton Marson originally named her Suprema Suprema Suprema s U.

P R.

E.

M.

Anyway, but I did not know that before researching this in the original pitch, so he hands it in to the original editor and the Sheldon Mayor, and she is she is called Suprema the wonder Woman.

Yes, and then Sheldon Mayer was like, that's great, We'll just call her wonder.

Like, look, man, this casts us per letter Let's cut some of these offs.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, I mean lettering was a lot more difficult back then.

That's probably a legit because they're also Suprema is a stupid name.

It's okay.

I think wonder Woman is a better name.

Wonder Woman's a way better name.

Suprema is a very Golden Age of comics name.

Hey, I just want to put a call out there to all the writers.

I don't think it's copyrighted, but Suprema would be a great unless that's the daughter of Supreme that Alan Moore hero, but nevermind, I don't know.

Suprema is a great name, should be a superhero.

Yeah.

And if you look at Harry Peters's original sketches, but you can find they're on They're all over online search Wonder Woman original sketches.

If you look at any of the covers or any of the interior art for these Golden Age stories, she only wears a skirt when they're really feminizing her.

Most of the time, she's wearing shorts in order to keep her modest and covers.

And most of the time if i'm and correct me if I'm wrong, because you just read all these issues, doesn't she only wear a skirt on the covers?

Yes, she never wore or on particular splash pages, but it's always shorts.

And I'm like, dude, I wish they would make those.

I would wear them right now.

They're so cute, Like you call them georts?

What do you call them?

They're just shorts?

Okay, cool floey hair?

Ready?

Yeah, yeah, sort, No, that's gene shorts.

So Max Gaines, who is the publisher of National Periodicals and all American publications that would later merge to become V rebranded his DC hired Marston based on this pitch, and then he was basically given a first appearance right off the bat.

And fun fact, while Wonder Woman was highly influenced by Elizabeth, his wife who we just talked about, she wears these gauntlets that you know have become very iconic, and the gauntlets that she wears in the Golden Age are black and they're more like leather bracelets.

And we'll get into what they mean in the continuity, but this was an homage to a woman named Olive Burne who was a student of Marston's and in a polyamorous romantic relationship with William Marston and his wife.

Yea, yeah, yeah, if if you want to know more about that, or recommend a book that you can read at the end.

But the gauntlets are specifically an homage to her, and I think it's really kind of sweet that they existed this very day, although they've evolved a lot a lot since that, like all superhos exactly.

Marston then wrote an American scholar, when reflecting on his creation of Wonder Woman, that not even girls want to just be girls.

So long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength and power, not wanting to be girls.

They don't want to be tender, submissive, peace loving as good women are, women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness.

The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.

There's a good pitch.

Now, there are parts of that statement that you're like, well, that sure was the forties that like a good woman is submissive.

But I think that the whole idea of making a character like Superman but who is distinctly feminine is one of the most important parts of her and has lasted to this very day.

And it's pretty cool that in the nineteen forties there was a creator out there who wanted to do that for all of us.

Yeah, and fun fact, while Marston was originally writing these comics, in order to preserve his professional reputation, he wrote under the pen name of Charles Moulton.

So if you go and you look at a lot of these golden aged stuff, even in the omnibi that are being republished today, it still says created by Charles Moulton.

Harry Peter the artist is not credited anywhere except he'll sign the final panel of the issue or the bottom of the cover, which kind of which was a trend during the which was.

A trend of the day.

Especially if you go back and Bob Kane, Bill Finger didn't get a lot of credit for a lot of the early Batman stuff, even though bill Finger is responsible for like creating Robin and Joker, and also Bob Kane would also have artists got straw him and still say because they he was hiring them out, he was still just sign it.

It was all his Yeah.

Yeah, that's just my modern sensibility.

But I'm like, I can't believe that there's no little thing that says.

But it is a good thing.

Mind by now, even though they're not going to change the pages, because I understand that, like, it's a good thing that.

Like in the Wonder Woman movie, in the credits, it says wonder Woman created by William Moulton.

Marston, Yeah, and Harry Peter, Yes, it does.

I know.

It just says most Martin.

Oh he gets a special thing, so he gets a special things.

Sorry.

So Wonder Woman was so popular following her debut.

She is the first truly like pop culture sensation.

There have been female heroes that came before her, but she's the one who broke the mold so big that following her debut in All Star Comics Number eight, she was given her own solo series Sensation Comics, which was first published in nineteen forty two, less than a year, about eight to nine months after her first debut, and she got her own solo series quicker than any other comic book character up to that point.

In history.

Now, since then, there's obviously been characters that have rushed directly to series.

But I think that's pretty amazing.

It is for a female character.

I remember, right, I think it took Superman like fifteen to twenty issues before they gave him Superman, Yes.

And I know I think Batman it was three two or three years.

It was two or three years for Batman as well.

Yeah, yeah, before he got Batman.

Now, obviously this is because she came after those two characters, but the response is what drove that happening.

But we'll get back to Wonder Woman in just a minute.

Now, let's talk about this all right.

So now it is time to jump into the fictional history of Wonder Woman, which is what I know.

You all shut up to this Golden Age lesson for Like I said, I'm going to recap Wonder Woman's first five issues for you.

I'm so excited about this.

They're kind of amazing.

I'm gonna be honest with you.

I have never read Golden Age Wonder One beyond her first.

Appearance, so I had never read it before researching this ish this episode, and I was lucky enough to get the first volume of the omnibus.

I think the Golden Age oas.

Yes, we're going to talk on this a little bit later, but I think of the of the Golden Age, I think these ones are the best, okay personally, all right, so let's start with All Star Comics number eight.

This is, of course, your classic origin of Wonder Woman.

She is a baby gallam made out of clay by Hippolitza, whose name is given the French spelling, which is hy po lte.

But I'm assuming everyone still called her Hippolyta, because that's what Anglos call her, because Hippolota wanted a baby so bad.

But you know, the Amazons were made to woo men and to bring love to the world, and they lived on this amazing island and during that time.

This is the only time I've heard Diana's name ever explained, although I think it's fairly obvious if you know anything about Greek and Roman mythology.

It is an exact homage to the Roman goddess of the Moon and the hunt.

In Greek tradition, she's called Artemis, and Roman she's called Diane or Diana.

And I think this is yeah, because she's a powerful female.

I did not know Diana and Artemis were entered the Roman Greek names.

I did not know that they are.

Yeah, yeah, and Apollo just gets to be Apollo see Roman.

But see that that makes a lot of sense, especially being a child of the nineties comics, that when they replaced Wonder Roman the nineties call they've been in a new character called Artemis.

Yes, exactly, exactly.

I also thin it's ironic because of the New fifty two Azarello and Chang's she fights Artemis.

She fights Artemis a lot then I.

Need and like kicks her butt.

Artemis is a ginger.

Yes.

They also explained why they wear the bracelets.

So remember I said that Wonder Woman has the gauntlets, but they're like these weird black leather cuffs.

So the Amazons live on Themyscira because Hippolyta lost the battle to Hercules, and Hercules enslaved them, and then she led her revolt and they were free, and they moved basically away from the realm of men because Hercules led men and men suck.

So they wear these leather bracelets.

And when you turn eighteen, you go and do a ceremony in this temple, and they're like they light the candles and they burn the incense, and they put the cuffs on you as a reminder of their time in bondage and to never let a man bind them again, which is going to become a platform.

Let me ask you this at this point, and I don't know if this is in your lesson?

Do you know what wonder Woman's And they might not have explained this in the Golden Age.

Do you know what Wonder Woman's gauntlets are made of?

No?

The shield of Zeus.

Oh, I don't know.

If they don't say that in the in the fifty issues that I read, I might feel like that's a la.

Might be it might be a thing too, Yeah, probably, But it's a weapon.

It's a shield of Zeus that was broken and reforged by Hephestius.

Oh that's cool.

I like that.

Thank you for telling me that.

So, Heppaula says a pretty good mom as it turns out, and she has a magic sphere.

Now in the modern age you usually see this as like a window, or maybe like a magic mirror, and she uses the magic sphere to teach Diana all arts, sciences, and languages of the modern and ancient time.

Cool.

So Diana knows everything you could want her to know, except how the modern world works.

Diana is a walking Babelfish.

She's amazing.

So they use it to a spy on the world of men to make sure that they don't have to interfere.

And that's how.

And they're looking in their little glasswind they see Steve Trevor, who is quote the most valuable man in army intelligence and out and they see that he's being captured by these two Germans named von Storm and Fritz, which I think are the best names for German officers by Americans.

Ever, they just call them Fritz.

They don't even care.

And he's flying in his robot plane, which is a big deal because the robot plane is what is going to win the Americans the war.

Now, this was his WL war.

This is set in World War two as World War two is going on, so like it's definitely an American power fantasy.

But I think there's you should give a lot of leeway to it and understand that this was to help people cope.

Well a lot of it.

A lot of the comics, especially during the forties, were almost used as propaganda pieces.

Absolutely, and there are ads throughout here that by war bonds support your troop.

Yes, so they're all about like like the American spirit, and we can win the day, and we can do it.

We're just just you wait.

Okay.

So these two Germans von Sturman Fritz, they steal Steve Trevor's robot plane and they use the robot plane to dive bomb an American bass and they kill all these Americans and it's so tragic, and the Amazons are.

Like, well, that sucks, and they're just watching it.

They're just watching it.

They don't have TV.

It doesn't happen anywhere close to Themoscara.

No, okay, it happens on an an unspecified American bass.

They're zooming with the sphere, Yeah, zooming enhands Diana throughout those a whole issue.

I wrote this many times in my note.

They draw her like Betty Davis.

Eddie Davis was very famous for the shape of her eyes.

Diana's eyes are very heavily lidded.

I think it's an aesthetic of the time, along with the kind of buffont hair do that she has.

But I actually think the way they draw Hippolota is like much more beautiful, Okay, like Hyppolica is the most beautiful Amazon of the gold.

You're saying, you're saying that Diana is the ugly duckling of Thescary.

I'm just saying, Diana's mom is hotter than her, that's all.

Diana's mom is hotter than her.

So in the wake of seeing these poor American basses and poor Americans will just be destroyed, Hippolita appeals and praise to Aphrodite and Athena, of course, goddess of love and beauty, and then was in war, and they appear before her and they tell her to send her greatest wonder Woman, which is the title that they used to refer to their warriors, to send their greatest wonder Woman with Steve Trevor, who who was washed up on their shore by this time, to protect quote America, the last citadel of democracy and of equal rights for women unquote.

Death is a very generous today.

You're welcome, world.

But this is the thing that Jason was talking about, Like, this is, you know, the propaganda bleeding into pop culture and maybe if you were a little girl in nineteen forties, this was what you were looking for.

But it sticks out like a sort thumb for modern readers.

Well, let's just the interesting thing about and this is something that I think modern people, I would say, especially post nineteen ninety, we have.

I would even say maybe post nineteen eighty, although the Cold War not I dipped into this a little bit.

We have a hard time dealing or conceptualizing this world.

I think in a post Cold War world, yes.

Where it was like the end of the world was around the corner.

Well, and this is only a generation away from the war that was supposed to end.

At all wars, and so we're getting a repeat war.

Yeah, and so we're and this is a comma, but coming out knee deep in this war that's like the Nazis are going to come over and invade New York at any moment.

Yes, So about five panels into meeting Steve Trevor, Diana's in love with him and very sad that he's unconscious.

He has a quote brain injury concussion end quote.

So she begs to go with them to the Land of Men and hypologize like, nope, you're my daughter.

So they have a contest in order to see which wonder woman is going to accompany him.

She puts on a zoro esque domino mask that hides who she is in no way, shape or form, and she ties with another Amazon blonde terror named Mala.

Malla's kind of important, and she'll pop up again in Sensation Comics, but we'll talk about that when it happens.

And they come down to their final contest, which is Bullets and Bracelets, where they are given a gun, they shoot at each other and whoever can block the most bullets wins.

Diana wins.

She reveals herself.

Everyone's like, oh my god, Diana, I didn't know it was you.

And then Hippoulata was like, look, I made this super cute outfit to celebrate the Americas.

So here you go.

Put this on instead of your white dress now.

So Diana later on will return to Thymyscira Themiscira, Sorrysiramscira.

She will return to Themiscira and relive these events in I think it's issue eight, and we basically get a clip show issues later, we get a clip they literally live.

I don't know if it's because people because Sensation Comics was a new series, but they lift panels from this and they reprint it, but it ends with a new fight between her and Mala, and she beats Mala again because like, why wouldn't she.

I wonder if somebody was late, like an artist or William Martin Marson got sick.

It's possible, and they were like, we just got to fill in.

But it is, like like I said, because I read them all and like to be like, man, it's only we're like at the clip show.

Okay, so fun.

Fact, many of the Amazons that we still know by name are mentioned in this issue, Philippus and Tiape, and they remain a part of the mythology to this very day, although many of them will get new races assigned to them later on and more important, bigger roles in the future.

But they're here and that's cool.

And like Jason mentioned, Artemis is not introduced early in Wonder Woman's history because she's basically a replacement.

She might know.

No, here's the thing, she's not in this issue.

Okay, okay, I don't I look for her.

I don't exactly remember where Artemis is introduced.

I just remember the eighties of the nineties, like she's a modern content.

It might be George pres but again, like I just remember kind of like as Reeal, like she kind of just popped up out of nowhere, and again she might have appeared before that.

I don't know.

Well, I'm sure we'll cover that when we get we get to when I.

Get to wonder Woman in the modern age, we'll figure it out.

There are also definite hints of homosexuality that a modern age reader can find if you're looking for them in this issue, although you know that's something that remains controversial to this very day.

But I appreciate that that it was definitely there now, Jason, Like I said, I've I read a lot of the Golden Age Batman stories for our episode on that.

I haven't read a lot of the Superman stories.

Oh you're missing out.

I think the wonder Woman stuff holds up way better than the Batman stuff, and it has, as we'll get into a little bit, it has more over hints of overarching narrative.

Do you think in your experience the Superman hold up in a similar way?

Oh, hold up in a similar way.

How the Golden Age of Superman?

Do you think it feels more modern than some other Golden Age?

Because I think Batman stories are very like one off detective stories like the Superman have been overarching theme.

No, well, Superman's early adventures are all about one thing.

They're all about social justice.

Every single one of them about social justice.

It's about protecting the poor, protecting the weak from like corporations and businessmen and politicians.

It is about which makes sense, you know, because he's a farmer's son, so of course he would represent like his class.

Superman is more about class and class wars kind of almost.

It's more about him being like, hey, just because my people are poor doesn't mean we don't deserve fair and equal rights.

So in Wonder Woman, in the narrative of the story, every issue will get a callback to either Themyscira or Amazons.

The Superman refer back to Krypton.

In every issue, No, not at all.

Or does he refer back to his Kansas farm life.

Well, interesting, Kansas wasn't introduced into Superman until the seventies.

You're right, and I knew that.

Does it refer back to his parents or his origin here and there?

Okay, but not as much as see, that's an interesting thing I think about Wonder Woman is Wonder Woman really and that this might be cognizant of the one when you think about that, characters like Wonder Roman.

Compared to Superman and Batman.

There are certain characters you find in comic books that don't have a lot of great runs, and sadly, I think Wonder Woman is one of those characters.

Would I would say she has less than ten great runs.

And the problem I.

Think about Wonder Them, The biggest problem that I think of with Wonder Them is that a lot of writers, I think gets stymied by her origin and can't ever move past it.

Well, because she hasn't.

She is still an Amazon whereas she and she's not a survivor the way that Superman is a survivor.

And Orbaman exactly, yeah, a survivor of a tragedy.

She's just a girl that was like, I'm going to go do this thing for a while and sometimes I'll come home.

Yeah yeah, yeah, no Superman.

You know, it's interesting.

I think I think the Superman things are best to read to get an idea of how people felt at the end of the recession going into the war.

Interesting, I think it.

I think allows you a very street level look into what living in a major American city might have been like.

And I feel like Wonder Woman is a look at how we were all supposed to behave at the height of the war, or as it was ramping up and becoming more real.

I mean, it kind of sounds like from every little bit you've told me so far, that Wonder Woman is really about, like, hey, this is actually how we should treat everybody.

It is it is, but it's also this is you, you reader.

You should go and do something about this, because Diana would.

So let's talk about Sensation Comics number one.

If you have a copy of it, you should send it to me.

So this is the first introduction of Yes, please, I would love to own this.

It's expensive.

This is the first appearance in the introduction of the invisible jet.

Although at the time it was referred to as a transparent plane, it is not called an invisible jet until the Linda Carter television series.

Which is made of transparent allumin If you know that reference, that is correct.

It is transparent aluminum.

So there you go.

So she takes the transparent jet and she takes Steve Driver, who's still unconscious, and she flies them all the way from wherever it is that Themyscia is.

Because they never really tell you.

Yeah, in the Mediterranean Sea, somewhere.

She flies him to Walter Read Hospital.

Wow, which is interesting because I didn't really know what Walt.

I mean, I knew it was a hospital, but I remain until a couple of weeks before because Jason I were talking about it.

So she drops them off there and then she goes shopping because she doesn't look right.

So while she's out shopping, she's accosted by gangsters.

So she beats up some gangsters and throws their cars into buildings.

Then they shoot guns at her.

So she does her bullets and bracelets, but every time she does bullets and bracelets, she has a library's like, I don't want to play bullets and bracelets now, Guys like it's a game to her.

I guess.

She gets noticed by a producer of a traveling side show, so she becomes an actress in order to make money doing bullets and bracelets so that she can build a life for her and Steve when he wakes up, does.

She wear the Wonder Woman costume when she does the.

Bullet she does with the Zorro mask?

Yeah, with the masks well, because it's not quite a dominant like it's a piece of fabric wrapped on your head mask, So there's no indication for how long she's an actress.

It's probably eight panels.

Then she returns using her earnings to go and find Steve Trevor who's still unconscious.

This is a pretty serious injury Steve's They took it to Walter Reed.

He's in a bad way.

So as she's walking up the steps to Walter Read, she sees an army nurse with glasses who looks exactly like her, and she is sobbing on the steps of the hospital.

So she comes up to her and she's like, who are you, why do you look like me?

How can I help you?

And there's just like, my name is Diana Prince, and my fiance who I'm in love with, just got deployed to South America, and I don't have any money to go marry him and have a baby.

So Diana, Diana of Themyscira, gives Diana Prince all the money she just earned and said, I'm buying your identity, give me your clothes, go to South America.

So Diana Prince hops on a plane, goes to South America and then mails Wonder Woman a thank you letter.

At the end of the issue, look we're like halfway through.

I don't wanna, I don't, I don't.

I don't want to make this podcast uh topical.

But wonder woman is an illegal alien, Yes, she completely is, and she's living under a false identity ra.

And this this, this is not even the end of the two Dianas.

I think it's you ten or twelve.

Good lord.

She Diana Prince comes back with her husband from South America, who sees Diana of Themiscira in the nurse outfit on a date with Steve Trevor gets into a fist fight with Steve Trevor, and then Diana Prince comes to Diana Themiscira and demands her identity and her old job back.

Listen, lady, you gave it up.

Sorry for money, you gave it up.

It's crazy.

You don't get your name same important.

Steve wakes up and breaks out of waul to read hospital, even though they tell him not to go fight Nazis, and then Diana Prince, the nurse, is blamed for not watching Steve more closely, even though she wasn't there.

Steve Trevor crashes another jet out of the sky and Diana saves him by using the robot controls in her transparent plane and she lowers a rope ladder, puts her knees over it, and hangs upside down like in the Batman sixty six movies.

Cool catches him out of the sky on a ladder while doing bullets and bracelets at Nazis.

I'm watching it out for knowing, But guys, I don't want to do bullets and bracelets.

I don't want to play bullets and bracelets, right like that, Yeah, that's the voice that I imagine.

So she kills all the bad guys with bullets and bracelets.

But luckily, Diana had her mom look up the location of another secret bass, and she just calls her through the use of telepathy, and so they go there.

Steve, they go to a secret Nazi bass.

Steve poisons everybody in the Nazi bass that they land on with gas, including a guy in the foreground who looks suspiciously like Hitler a right, and breaks his leg while doing so.

Steve breaks his legs.

Steve breaks his leg the Nazis and I.

Was concerned about Hiler.

Well, you know, it's just equal opportunity.

Saving Wonder Woman and Diana Prince become romantic rivals in the final issue of the panel because as Diana Prince, she can't get Steve to go on a date with her because he loves Wonder Woman so much and she's just the plain Jane.

Oh so he doesn't know.

No, he's an idiot, but he doesn't figure glasses.

You don't know.

But the nurse followed him to the European Theater and he doesn't figure out.

No, Wonder Woman followed him to the European Theater.

But wouldn't Diana Prince also be in Europe dating training day?

Does he go back to America for dates?

Well, he's not supposed to be in Europe.

They go back to America, Okay.

Because he's he then held and then he sees Diana.

Yeah, they're globe trotter.

So that's it.

That's sensation comics number one.

That's a lot.

That's a lot of time.

This is like six months a year of time.

Like I said, they're very I mean the coloring and it's the product of the time never changes.

This could all be within an hour.

I know things moved, you know how that like your grandparents are like things were slower and shimpla back then.

No, they were not.

They were way faster.

Guy, We're lazy.

Yes, sometimes you take a whole comic issue for a fight.

Sometimes the whole comic issue just has yeah one conversation.

Yeah, good lord.

They didn't screw around.

No, not at all.

Comics better.

So here's sensation number two.

Diana Diana.

When I say Diana, she's the nurse, and I say wonder woman, she's the hero.

Great, that helps, all right, that does help.

Diana and Steve are kidnapped.

She is hog tied, which will happen every single issue from here on out in until the seventies, and he is hogtied and gagged by Gestapo agents.

They are together.

They are interrogated and tortured by Doctor Poison.

Now Doctor Poison is a Nazi bad guy with an ugly green costume in ugly green goggles who uses poison and gas to get their way.

Initially, I look at the art, this is a man, Okay, I was gonna ask you that.

However, at the end of the issue it is revealed to be a woman.

We'll talk about that, which leads to the character that you will see in They'll.

Wonder if because doctor Poison is in the wet.

Now, can I ask you a question real quick because you read this issue.

Do they ever explain or or is there an idea that, like the Doctor Maru or doctor Poison, the woman was wearing a disguise to make it pear like she yes.

Da, I'll tell you at the end of the I'm sorry, that's okay.

So she interrogates them.

Neither of them gives up anything because they have really strong will.

So they take Diana.

She's all hog tied, and they throw her into a room away from Steve Trevor because who knows, and then you know, luckily, like she had her handbag with her clothes in it, so she changes into a wonder woman.

Now, Diana Prince always has to carry her costume with her in case she has to charge into battle and become a wonder woman.

But she often has a hard time locating a place to change and has to like run off and find a room somewhere.

And she's because it's not the seventies, it's the forties.

Sorry, she's not as smart as Clark Kent, who can always seem to find him a phone booth when he needs it, I guess.

And you can see radio waves fun fact.

She once gets naked and changes into her Wonder Woman outfit inside a milk tank that's attached to the back of a truck while it is careening out of control downhill.

Well, see that just shows me her skill that she was able to jump into this thing.

She was thrown into it by gangsters as Diana and then changes into Wonder Woman inside of it because she's trying to uncover a sidebar.

She's trying to uncover a milk racket that is seeking to take the nutrition away from American children, an entire propaganda piece for the milk, and.

You could only buy milk at certain days.

Milk's disgusting.

Uh, you're an American, that's true.

So Doctor Poison meanwhile tells Steve Trevor her entire plan, which is to contaminate the American military's water supply using Reverso.

Well, what is reverso?

I'm so glad you asked.

Reverso is a drug that will cause all who ingest it to do the opposite of what they are ordered to do, and was specifically developed to undermine the efforts of American soldiers and their allies.

Sounds amazing, right, The greatest thing about Sensation number two is it introduces Eta Candy, and so Eda basically gets made fun of for being a fat girl by everyone.

But she is the leader of all the girls at Holiday College.

So Diana meets her and she's like, bring one hundred Holiday College girls to help me.

And they get in their jeloppies and they drive back to find Steve, Eda and all these like beautiful girls.

Because Edda, we're in America.

We're in America.

Because Eda was originally a patient of Diana the nurse, and she was really skinny, and after she got out, she ate all this chocolate and now she's like, butta, and she got more self confidence.

Ironically, you know.

What would have stopped her from eating all that chocolate?

Revers though, no milk.

There is milk in chocolate.

Milk not that's down the line.

And the Wonder Woman, so Eda and the one hundred Holiday College Girls beat the living snot out of every Nazi.

This is gonna happen in almost every issue from here on out too, all these college girls just beating up these army guys.

Cool and wonder Woman breaks into Steve Trevor's cell, she frees him.

The Holiday Girls handcuff all the Nazis, and Wonder Woman reveals that Doctor Poison is none other than Princess Maru Evil, analog of Princess Diana in every way, who hates the Americans.

I actually think it's cool that, like one of her chief bad guys of the Golden Age is another princess.

Yeah, that's kind of interesting because Doctor Poison has kind of been forgotten.

Yes, so I was going to ask you about that, Jason.

Doctor Poison is one of Wonder Woman's earliest rivals, and she's pretty important at this time.

But when you think of the pantheon of Wonder Woman villain, does she come to mind for you?

No?

Not really.

But I know that there have been some attempts to wret Connor and reboot her.

I know, and I don't know if any of them have been really successful.

But no, when I think of Wonder Woman, I do not think of Doctor Poison.

Then who do you think, off the top of your head?

Who's the joker to Wonder Woman's Batman aries aries more than Cheetah?

Yes, I don't like Cheetah at all.

To be honest with you, I am not.

I think a lot of people want to bring her up though, because she is a female foe.

Yeah, Like they did a thing where the granddaughter of Doctor Poison has shown up.

Yeah, I think that's a cool idea, Like if you had a Doctor Poison for every generation.

I can get behind that as an idea.

And they also did a thing in The New fifty two where Doctor Poison was like the daughter of a Russian scientist.

Yes, I believe so.

Whatever, But then then they and then also in now in Rebirth, they did a thing where Doctor Poison is like a Japanese soldier spy kind of girl.

So, you know, I don't know, and I'm kind of One of the things I'm kind of glad about the movie is that it seems like we're taking a lot of Golden Age reference and I like that.

I think that two has the potential to not interfere with anything they're going to try to maybe do in the Justice League movies or in the modern age.

Doctor Poison should be Diana's joker, I think.

So.

I think there's a lot of potential in just the idea of that character.

All right, So Sensation.

Comics number three, Oh lord.

So Diana learns that Steve is finally being formally discharged instead of just riding away from the hospital, and she breaks down in tears because she's so sad that he's gonna be leaving her and she's not gonna be able to nurse him every day to make her stop crying.

Because Steve is a man and can't handle feelings, he has his friend who is a colonel, hire her as his secretary.

But Diana is so beautiful that Steve's secretary, Lila, is jealous.

But somebody during this time is leaking secret information out of Steve's office.

Now there's lips, sinks, and there's a bunch of people other than Steve who work in this office, and all the girls, all the secretaries are suspected because a man can't betray the army.

And Diana is ordered because she's so good at her job that she's had for six hours to give all the girls health examinations because that's how you're going to find a spy.

And it gets like weirdly sexy, like she's in her nurse outfit.

They hire her because she's a nurse.

She'll be able to tell if someone is lying to her not because she has a last lot of truth and she's like, she's not feeling up, but she's like touching all these women who are kind of in their underwear, getting a sound.

I get it.

Lila, who is Steve's secretary, refuses to undergo her examinason, so she attacks Diana with a bottle and Diana punches her unconscious.

And does nobody react to like this?

There's no one else in the room at this, It's just it's just she brings one girl in at a time, has her way with them.

My cousin Hello, Well, Lilah's sleeping on the floor.

Diana goes through her clothes and discovers that she's the spy.

She finds the note.

Of course she has a no one.

She reports this to her superiors and uh, she is arrested instead of Lila being arrested, so she's hogtied, thrown into a room, changes into Wonder Woman and breaks out.

She kidnaps Lila, who's woken up by this time, and jumps out a window, and Lila is so scared that she confesses now.

Wonder Woman has a habit of jumping out windows a lot in the beginning, usually with someone else in her arms, and she seems to be a lot like Superman, and that she can only take these huge bounding leaps.

She can't fly the way she is in contemporary continuity.

Do you want me to confirm that for you?

Sure?

I know exactly she cannot fly in the Golden Nation.

Yeah, that's what I mean.

Ye.

Wonder Woman does not gain the ability to fly until nineteen eighty five.

Yes, I didn't know it was that late, but it was a.

Post crisis before that.

She can only like leap like great.

She she can jump role she can jump real far.

And it's the invisible jet.

Yes, the transparent plane.

I think you meet.

He's right, because if she could fly, she wouldn't have it exactly, would be seay.

So it turns out that Lila's not the spy, but Lyla has a little sister who looks exactly like her named Eve.

Twins in the storm and just go with it.

Eve is actually the spy because she fell in love with the Nazi agent and accidentally revealed all this classified information to him.

So Lila and Wonder Woman swim after Nazis who are trying to escape in a motor boat, and they find this Nazi who seduced Lilah.

Does sister Eve, and they waterboard him until he reveals his plan to her to take over America.

Wonder Woman then sends a mental radio call to Eda to intercept Steve so we can't be killed by Nazis.

A mental radio call is basically Wonder Woman built a cylinder that has a TV screen on it and a phone coil that connects to a headband that projects her image if Eda puts it on her head and she can receive the telepathic message.

Okay, how does that it?

Now?

To put it on?

She just checks in every once a while wearing it.

I guess it's not very practical.

Yeah, So she's like, come and bring the Holiday girls and like say the day so a wonder Woman rescues Steve from literally being crushed by Nazis.

Eve is accepted into Beta Lambda.

Beta Lambda is the sorority at Holiday College that Eda's in charge of, and she's hazed by her sisters in a hilarious final panel that involves her being tied up and spanked by girls in masks.

Okay, which which is gonna show up a lot in the next few comments.

There's some common themes here, howgdy yes, A lot of a lot of sensual situations.

This Holiday College seems like a school that you go to to go to vacation.

Yeah, because it's called the Holiday College.

They don't seem to be doing it.

It's not spelled the same way.

It's h O L l I.

D A Y still anyway.

Yeah, and Steve Trevor seems like a complete idiot.

Steve Trevor is an idiot, but he's the most valuable man in Armunes.

He's not an idiot.

He's just not as heroic as Wonder Woman.

That's solid.

It's because he's not because Wonder Woman who's saving the day every single time.

That's funny.

Put a pin in that.

Okay, So here's the last one I'm going to recap for you because this has been a long journey since als right, Yeah, this is Sensation Comics number four US fifth appearance.

So Diana decides that she's gonna make Steve jealous by talking to him about how great her boss, his best friend, this colonel guy is, because Steve won't date her because he loves wonder Romans.

Come on.

Steve tells Diana about a string of government girls who have been murdered and that she needs to be careful.

Wait a minute, all right, so here's here's okay.

So, so Diana's like, all right, I'm gonna make him jealous.

So Steve, this colonel guy is so great Steve, and he's like, Diana, all these girls are being murdered.

That's his response.

Yes, Steve has really, really bad social skills.

Diana.

I don't know if you know, but you work for the government, and how these other governmental secretaries have been murdered.

That's pretty much how it goes.

I'd watch your tone.

Steve's a little murdery in this issue.

I'm so Diana, of course, takes it upon herself to investigate the number one suspect, who is a German baroness.

Oh all right, and this Baroness is going to be camonn ongoing adversary for Wonder Woman throughout the Golden Age.

And you have a name, uh, the German Baroness.

Okay.

She's usually referred to as the Baroness, and she often gets a Scooby Doo level revealed toward the end of an issue where the bad guy is unmassing turns out to be her.

Yeah, it's pretty great.

So the Nazis want Eve remember the little sister from last issue, Oh Yeah, to come back to their side and attend their school.

But while they're trying to recruit her, she's held up from a meeting that she's supposed to go to at Beta Lambda for more hazing.

So she shows up late and the Beata Lambda girls punish her by forcing her to wear a collar and ordering her repeatedly to quote submit to us.

Interesting, So she takes.

A nail file and files her way out of this metal collar that they've tied her up with, like a prisoner, and she runs off to go to Nazi spy school.

Meanwhile, Steve Trevor's also been looking for these missing girls, and he beats up some Nazis in the woods.

Yeah, and then it is revealed that the Baroness did kidnap these government girls to go to her Secrets by school, and she kills them when they betray her, So Wonder Woman goes after her.

When the Baroness throws a costume ball and Diana goes dressed as wonder Woman because duh, and Steve thinks she's so beautiful as Wonderful, but Steve like has no idea.

Ste He's like, you're the secretary.

No, He's like, you're wonder Woman.

She shows up as a wonder Woman.

She thinks she's gonna pretend to be Diana and Steve's like, oh hey, wonder Woman, you look so great.

Okay, Steve's an idiot, allows herself to be captured, hogtied, oh my god, and agrees to go undercover and be the Baroness's slave because the Baroness doesn't want her to go to spy school.

She wants her to be her personal slave.

This establishes the Golden Age tradition of wonder Woman that if her bracelets are bound by man, she loses all of her Amazonian power.

So they take change and they bind her two bracelets together, and this happens pretty frequently until the seventies.

It's like her kryptonite.

It is, yeah, it is very much that.

So using Amazonian psychology, she is able to free many of the don't ask me what that is, many of the women who were also captured.

But her strength is gone and she could not break out.

So Steve, of course, is also captured by the Baroness and he's like walking around and he discovers wonder Woman alone in a room.

Oh woman, and Hey Steve, and then they are simultaneously discovered by Nazis then take them out onto the roof before a firing squad.

But luckily Eda and the Holiday Girls break into the facility and they beat this.

Not out of all the guards.

Wonder Woman does bullets and bracelets again.

They get to Europe.

Don't worry about it, okay, and she and Steve defeat the Nazis and then all of the Holiday Girls line up to kiss Steve.

Sounds like a great night for Steve.

Yeah.

So not long after this is the issue I talked about where Diana returns to Thimyscira at the time Themskira Sorry And this The cool thing about that issue, like, besides the fact that it's a weird clip show, is that this introduces keanga's for the first time.

So keangas are the giant kangaroos that Amazons in the Golden Age would ride around and they would fight each other on It was like jousting but more crazy, And we do meet jumper jumpa is specifically Wonder Woman's kanga jumpus still exists, usually in some of the more like Ya friendly adapts.

Just recently made a stuffed jump up.

It's so yeah, they're kingas, but this one is jump up.

Yeah, because it's the Golden Age, I guess I want to ask you it is.

So from here on out, I'm going to kind of summarize some important appearances and some trends that we see.

Guys, this is the Golden Age.

This is going to be a longer than normal episode and we still have a season.

But you know what, I'll tell you what I think going through these Golden Age issues were so fun.

I don't care that this is a long episode.

I thought about summarizing ten, but it seemed too long.

Don't cut anything else out.

Let's just keep rolling.

Okay, this is a fun time.

So in Wonder Woman number six, which was published in October of nineteen forty three, because Sensation Comics ends and then they rebrand it as Wonder Woman.

They renamed Sensation the one roun.

Basically they renumber it.

So in Wonder Woman number six, which a couple of years later, we meet a character called Priscilla Rich.

Jason, do you know why Priscilla Rich is important?

She would later go on to Mary Elvis Presley.

I wish that would have been so cool though she's actually the original Cheetah.

Oh, I did not know.

So the Cheetah first appeared in nineteen forty three.

I know you don't, but she's in a more than wonder Woman character very early in Wonder Woman's history.

Now, most people when you think of Cheetah, I know you're sitting there thinking that it's doctor Barbara and Minerva, because that's the one that is currently in continuity.

She's probably the best of the cheetahs.

I'm not gonna lie.

The original Cheetah is a lady in a costume, sure, but Barbara and Minerva is not introduced until the Bronze Age in Wonderment volume two, number seven from August of nineteen eighty seven.

And we'll get to that in the next.

Next two episodes or so.

Yeah.

But yes, so there are actually like five cheetahs, but the original Cheetah originated in the Golden Age.

Original Cheetah.

Yes, that was a great sentence.

I'm so sorry.

Most of Wonder Woman's Golden Age adventures have her thematically protecting women or saving women who can't save themselves from peril, and then giving them the social or physical skills in order to save themselves.

So it's very much, you know, like teach a girl to punch, and she'll punch your way out of danger from here on out.

And it's usually I was trying to do the teaching man a fish thing.

It's usually because none of the men want to help her.

Help help the women, Okay, whoever the her is, and the story, like Steve is usually like these government girls is getting murdered, but I'm not gonna do anything about it, but you should watch your back.

So then Diana goes off and tries to save the day.

She also does work as Steve Trevor's aid as Wonder Woman, So whenever Steve is going somewhere on a mission, Wonder Woman shows up to help, and she always does the heavy lifting, and it's always her who saves the day, and he always gets the credit, although to the great credit of William Moulton, Marson and whoever else was working on the scripts, editors, whatever.

There was always a panel to usually the second or third to last panel of the issue, where he's speaking to a crowd and they're saying, you're so amazing, Steve, how did you do this?

And he goes, no, it all belongs to my beautiful angel Wonder Woman.

He's always call her angel.

He does, he does.

That is something that is still being used in current continenty.

Greg Ruck is using it a lot in his run.

I use that in The Wonder rooman animated movie made by Bruce tim Like.

Steve Trevor calls her his angel.

Yes, he calls her his angel because I believe the first time he sees her, she kind of comes, she jumps down, and she's Halo.

They sort of do that a little bit in the new movie as well.

They definitely do, but so I appreciate that even though everyone is trying to give Steve the crowd like he knows he's a schmuck, and he's like, no, it wasn't meam so sorry.

She spends pretty much every issue until the seventies, like I said, being tied up by bad guys.

Sometimes she's tied up by vines and tentacles depending on where the story is set, which is weird in and of itself.

From time to time, she can use her ability to speak to animals.

That is something that is established in the Golden Age cool, and she's usually able to call a bunch of like familiars to her side in order to beat up nazis all right, although there is an issue where she's tricked into believing that she's a dog and she wears a dog costume.

Golden Age.

I want to assume it's supposed to be like an answer to Catwoman's popularity, but I don't know they were like dog Girl at that time.

Cat one was only called the cat.

Oh that's true.

She was a jewel thief.

But I don't know.

It's weird, Like there is even go find this panels really famous if you google it.

Like she's wearing like a dog costume, brown dog costume, it's in there.

I think it's the Baronessa's there and she's like, oh mark for me dog.

We all have things in our lives we regret, and that is what Wonderoman of rest.

Yes, there's also heavy commentary on gun violence and the current American political state during this time, because you know, it's a time of war.

They were pacifist creating the story.

Wonder Woman has been held up as both a pacifist and feminist icon for this reason, and I just thought that was interesting because the TV show Arrow has dealt a lot with gun violence recently, and Supergirl is obviously making political commentary.

So it's an interesting way that Wonder Woman has been doing these things from the beginning and now they're bleeding over into more pop culture.

And it's also very interesting especially since now Wonder Woman has become this character in the DC universe that kills that Batman and Superman don't have a problem with killing.

Yes, so it's very interesting that she's all about peace and violence, but now she's like, look, if I stab you with my sword of you're a bad guy, so.

What you deserve it?

Yeah, Yeah, it's a little bit of the modern sensibility.

Now during the Golden Age, Wonder Woman does not cross over with any other contemporary superhero neither do any of the rest of that until she joins the JSA, although this is specifically because William Moulton Marston did not believe that she would ever follow anyone else's lead beside Steve Trevor and that she was better in a solo capacity, although in All Star Comics when she returns to it, Wonder Woman joined the Justice Society of America and William Moulton Marson threw a giant fit in the DC offices because he did not believe that Wonder Woman would ever let a man lead her, or that she would alie with other superheroes.

And then the big thing that ends the Golden Age of Wonder Woman is the Flash number one twenty nine from June of nineteen sixty two, because that is when she is with a lot of other heroes shunted off to Earth two.

This is where some of the JSA stuff comes into Jerk Flash.

Yes, and this is the beginning of her quote Silver Age life.

Some people want to equate it with when Donna Troy first appears, but Donna Troy doesn't appear until nineteen sixty five, which I think is well into the Silver Age by that point because Donna Troy is held up as her protege, so most people would consider for Wonder Woman nineteen sixty two, even though in the grander scheme the Golden Age did end before that.

After that is when her mythology changes a little bit and her themes, the thethmatic themes of her story change because we get new writers on her for the first time ever.

So that is your history of Wonder Woman.

Yea age, so ut of bondage, a lot of bondage.

Yes.

It is funny because some of it has definitely remained.

Yeah, I'm to the modern age.

So shall we go into recommended reading.

Yes, let's go to recommended reading, the place where we're going to give you books that if you are so curious about wonder Woman the Golden Age, you can go read them.

You go get check them out geek insro lesson dot com slash recommended Reading.

We have a full list there and if you click on those books, we'll take you right to Amazon and you can pick up those books and a little bit of percentage of your sale comes right back to the main university.

Yes.

So if you liked the publication history part at the beginning of this lesson and you think that they sound like crazy amazing people who created this crazy amazing character, there's a great nonfiction book that you can pick up called The History of wonder Woman.

I bought it for Jason.

It's a straight up biography of Marston.

Yeah, it's it's great, but through I would say, mostly through the lens of what led to wonder Woman.

So pick that up and then DC is amazing.

They're publishing all this great Golden Age bound together in a lovely omnibi.

So you're gonna want to pick up wonder Woman the Golden Age Volume one and volume two.

They have some outstanding Darwin Cook art on the cover.

Yep, they're beautifully restored and like I said, I think they read really well.

So you want to go pick up all that stuff.

Great?

All right, now let's move into our discussion.

Yes, the part that we've been waiting for, Ashley, why don't you Why don't you introduce us in?

All right?

So we are going to talk to the wonderful, the beautiful, the incredibly talented Susan Eisenberg, who has played wonder Woman in Justice League, DC, Universe Online and the Injustice games that everybody knows and loves.

Thank you so much for joining us.

One kissed your lesson today, Susan.

My pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

So my first question starts at the beginning.

When you learned that you were going in to read for a wonder Woman for the first time.

Did you take any inspiration from Linda Carter, who was probably the most iconic wonder Woman of the time.

You know what, It wasn't in my consciousness to do that at that point.

I mean I hadn't really, I mean as much as I grew up with Linda Carter because she was the voice and the embodiment of the character.

When I was younger, I wasn't geeky about that stuff.

So it's not like I held her close and then went in with her sense the sense of her when I went to audition.

And the truth is, the first audition was just, you know, at my agent's office.

The second one, I had to go to Warner Brothers, and I meat Bruce tim and Andrea Romano, and.

Bruce gave me the picture of her.

So it's not like he handed me a picture of Linda Carter and said, Okay, do your thing, Oh that's cool.

It was it was the picture of what we know Diana to be from the Justice League, and they were very clear about how they wanted me to voice her.

And so you know, I didn't grab from Linda Carter's portrayal.

I mean not that she wasn't definitive, but I didn't borrow from her to do what we needed to do for Justice League.

Do you remember any more of the audition process, Like do they ever do something where they had you read with Kevin Conroy, Batman or Superman as well?

No, they didn't and in fact, you know, I think they would do that if it were a theatrical release, and then I think they would want to test the chemistry and if it's on screen and do they look good together and blah blah blah.

But with us, No, I mean, I think, honestly, I think we got so incredibly lucky that our vocal cast for Justice League blended as beautifully as they did, because it really felt like we'd known each other for a really long time.

And that stuff you can't, you know, you can't conjure it.

It's either there or it's not there.

But no, I remember going by myself to Warner Brothers and having to read for Bruce and Andrea, and you know, the stakes were really high because it was Wonder Woman and it was an animated series, and they were really clear on what they wanted.

Like I said, they gave me direction and wanted to see how I took the direction?

Can she take the direction?

Kind of thing?

And I guess what.

I did was okay, because you know, a couple of weeks later, I got the call.

Now, does anything come to mind as a favorite episode or a moment that you got to perform in Justice League?

You know there are too many because it was years, but I mean not to say that they aren't favorite episodes.

I mean, this little Piggy I always talk about because I got to, you know, do that banter thing with Batman and kind of have that fun little sizzle once in future thing, because I just think it's such a perfect episode with every thing in it, the music, the story.

I mean, I just I just loved it.

I mean.

The first episode because it's like that's there, you go, there, you get the introduction to the character.

I feel felt like when she was leaving Themyscira to you know, to go to a man's world.

I mean, all of that was.

Just you know, it's a joy to be able to have something that juicy to play.

Now, how has voicing wonder Woman changed over the years, Because you've been lucky enough to make a mark on wonder Woman in this amazing Justice League series, but also you've now been more recently voicing Wonder Woman as a villain basically in the Injustice series.

It's true, Jason, you do not lie.

Yeah, I know, and it's it's I'm telling you.

It was really weird to play her that way because that's just so not my tendency to want a voicer like that, but you know, that's the job, right and that's the vision.

So for the story.

You know, she's definitely badass in Injustice too, and there's not that sense of camaraderie obviously with the other cast members.

It's a it's a different ballgame altogether.

But it's also you know, like I said earlier, it's just a different vision of.

Her, and as an actor that that's my job.

You know, it's people paying me good money to to make their vision come off the page, if you will.

Is there anything that you like better about the kind of work that you get to do an Injustice hmm?

That's interesting, Well, I mean it is.

There is something fun about being that.

Haughty and don't f with me kind of character.

I mean, you know, Justice League on television was on Cartoon Network and this is like a far cry from that.

So there's something really freeing about doing that and having the fun to do that.

But you know, I got to do a little of that with Justice League, so you know, it's just you know what, you guys, it's just all fun.

Like you get to go to work and you get to be wonder woman, and I don't care what project it's in.

If you know it's it's a pretty good day.

I mean, that's that's the truth.

All right.

Now, we have some questions.

They're going to make you think a little bit about the character, a little bit more about the character of Wonder Woman.

And Michelle, one of our lovely patrons over at patreon dot com slash jaw and asks what do you think it would take to make Wonder Woman turn dark?

Like Superman losing Lois of course in the Adjustice series turned him from the side of light.

What event do you think or what type of event do you think could do the same for wonder Woman.

You know, I think her essence isn't dark, so it would have to take, you know, something that was done to her unwillingly, or if there was something done to humanity at large, if she were to see something like a nuclear holocaust or experience something so dreadful that she no longer believed that Wright could win.

I think that could turn her dark.

I don't think she has I mean, I do think she has so much faith, so I don't think that's likely.

But I think if that were to happen, I think that could be something that could.

Turn her dark.

John Devenny, another one of our patrons, wanted to ask you, what themes in Wonder Woman's stories or the cartoons, movies past or present do you think still relate to today's society.

You know what I get told all the time that she is a beacon for people and that she has such the character has such compassion, And what I really loved about playing the character initially was that she was an outsider and she had to go to this group and make a life for herself and it wasn't easy.

And I think that for so many people out there, life is not easy, and I think they need and we need beacons.

And I think that she has done that so bravely and so many of her creations, you know, whether it's in the magazines, the comic books, Justice League, and I think it'll be huge in this movie, in the Wonder Woman film that's about to be released.

But I think that that still resonates, that notion of being an outsider and being a woman in a man's world, being new to the group at the Justice League, all of that having to acclimate and finding your way, and she does it, and she does it heroically, So I feel and this is just me.

I feel like that that.

Resonates huge, hugely for people because I've been told by so many people how she has been their strength through really dark times.

Now for many people, myself included, you were my very first introduction to Wonder Woman.

So I wanted to know, how does it feel to have made such an indelible mark on the most iconic female character.

It's extraordinary, I mean it really, you know, there's nothing like it.

It was a job that I got very early on in my career, and I feel like I was given this tremendous it's a privilege to voice her, and I feel like I was given this extraordinary gift back in two thousand and one, and I still keep getting this gift known as wonder Woman.

You know I think that.

I mean, I'm just I got.

Lucky in a huge, huge way, and I never lose sight of that.

I ever don't have gratitude for her and for the job, because to know that you can have an impact or you have had an impact on people, that you've been a part of somebody's childhood that they associate with you, you know, associate you with this icon this beautiful, beautiful character Uh, you know, it's like it's an extraordinary stewardship that I've been entrusted with, and you know, it's it's just it's a great, great honor, it really is.

And I get told I didn't when you're recording the show, you know, you don't.

We were recording in a vacuum basically, I mean, you're at the studio.

And it really hasn't been until the comic cons and social media that I think I really understood the power of the Justice League and how much it impacted people.

That has been a huge eye opener because if you ask me, like, you know, ten years ago, did I know that the answer would have been absolutely not.

Now I have a question I'm very curious about.

Since you have returned and left the role of Wonder Room a couple of times, what do you use as an actor to drop yourself back into the mindset of Wonder Woman.

How do you get back into her head?

Well, she's never far from my head.

And you know, and it's funny that you said I left the role.

You know, I never left.

It's funny because you know, as an actor, you either get asked or you don't get asked.

And it's really.

People ask me all the time, well, why didn't you do it for that project or that project?

We have no control over that.

You know that they often go in different directions.

They want to try something else out, They want to try a celebrity out.

They like somebody else who's maybe younger, or you know, it's a Hipper wonder Woman whatever.

I mean they have there's no Hipper wonder Woman Susan.

But you know they have their recent they you know in quotation marks, they have their reasons.

And so it's it's sweet that you would say I left, but I never left.

But the truth is she she's never far.

From me because when I played her for five years, all I need to do is conjure that Diana up and she's right there.

I mean, all I need to say is great, Hara, and I'm right there.

Yes, you know, if I if I say, you know, if I in my head talking to Superman and tell him I'll meet him in the watch Tower, I'm there.

And you know, it's not like I don't have a script.

It's not like I don't have a director.

It's not like I'm just put in a room and somebody says, okay, go do it.

You know, I do have a script, I do have a director.

I often have an image and Injustice she looked very different than Diana from Justice League.

See you online game.

I mean that, you know, there's there's a whole other team there in place to tell you, to give you parameters and say okay, this is what we're looking for and now go ahead, and you know, to be perfectly frank, I mean, it's not a huge stretch for me to do this.

It's like I'd love to say, well, I you know, I have to I have to go away for weeks at a time and get into character.

It's like, no, she's she's you know, just crazy and lovely and wonderful, and she's right there.

You know.

Because of your answer, I'm now going to tell people that we've literally had.

Wonder Woman on our podcast.

Now.

Yes, Susan, this has been an amazing pleasure to talk to you.

Where can our listeners find you on the internet?

And do you have any future projects that they can check out?

I do have a Yeah, I do have a future project.

It's an animated movie, but they I can't talk about it yet, so that's kind of a drag.

But I think people will love it, and it's it's it's a great character.

It's not wonder Woman, but it's an amazing character.

The Justice League is having a reunion in Denver at Denver Comic Con, and that's the last week of June, first weekend of July, and hopefully they will film it so all the Justice League fans out there can see the League reunited on stage with Andrea Romano reading from some original scripts from the show.

So I think that'll be really special.

And people can find me if they'd like to follow me on Twitter, I'm at Susan Eisenberg one on Instagram Susan Eisenberg twenty one, and if they just want to chat or see what I'm up to, they can go to my website.

It's Susaneisenberg Voice dot com.

That's it.

Well, thank you so much for talking with us about Wonder Woman.

Thanks for inspiring us all to be wonderful women, and thanks for telling us where we can find you all over the internet.

Could we before we say goodbye?

Yeah, could we hear you say great Hara, just one last time?

Okay you ready?

Great Hara, amazing chill.

I used to want to save the world before I gave it all up to design clothes.

Your Geek History Lesson On Wonder Woman the Silver Age is now in session.

Hello and welcome to Geek History Lesson.

I'm Ashley Victoria Robinson and I'm Jason lasso Inman.

Welcome to Geek History Lesson because this is the podcast where we take one character from pop culture movies, television, comic books and tell you everything you need to know about it in a little bit less than an hour.

And today's episode is all about wonder Woman.

One.

I guess she wouldn't have a theme song.

We're still before her show, aren't.

No, We're not before a show.

We're going to cross over into her show.

Okay, all we will talk about the show very very briefly.

Well, what are we talking about?

What section of history are we talking about?

Wonder Woman the Silver ag Yeah?

Wow, right, we like the Silver Age?

It's fine, Well I didn't.

I don't know whether that question was like right for the airhorn learn or write for that?

We are talking about who knows why not more approval of the Silver Age?

Which one were you for knowing the answer?

Mostly because the Silver Age, I'll fully admit silverage is not my favorite Aero comic ex Well, actually, I want to say, do we want to define the ages now or wait till the main No, We're gonna do that in the main lesson.

Okay, cool, But we do have a couple of ta's.

We have a couple of sweet souls who requested this, and they include Shadows of Ash, Still, Brave Love, Gene s, Sam Martinez, A S, D F G h K JK LP QW e R.

You're a sweet person, I'm sure, but screw you for just slamming your hands on your keyboard and colinade a username, Alexis and Bowen and tree Branchie, thank you so much for requesting wonder Woman.

This silver age.

That's right now.

Before we get too deep in the weeds about what the silver Age actually means, I think Jason has something he wants to talk to us.

I want to talk about the Kickstarter age.

That's not a real thing.

But what is a real thing is that I am launching a forty eight page combook called Super Best Friend on Kickstarter on January nineteenth of this year.

Could be in the future, could be in the past, depending on what time period you're listening to it right now.

It is basically what if Maddie Moore, the best friend to the world's greatest superhero, accidentally leaks his best friend's secret identity to the entire world.

His best friend, of course, being Captain Terrific, the world's greatest superhero.

Who seems a lot like Superman.

So if you like Superman, if you like Booster Gold, if you like the Amazing Spider Man, then you're gonna like the hyghjinks of Maddie Moore the sidekick finally becoming the hero in my new comic book called Super Best Friend.

You can go to Super Best friendcomic dot com, or if that link doesn't work for you, you can just go to a Kickstarter and search for my profile, Jason Emmett and you can click that little notification button.

You can follow me on Kickstar.

You can follow the project and you'll get a notification when it goes lives.

There are a lot of really cool stuff that is going to be for only the people that donate in the first forty eight hours, so you're not gonna want to miss it.

And if you have missed that, you're listening to this in the far future.

Sorry.

All right, let's move into the first part of the podcast, which is the ten cent Origin, and that is where I'll give you all the basics about what you need to know about Wonder Woman.

So she is Princess Diana of Themiskira aka Diana Prince, a DC Comics character who first appeared in All Star Comics number eight from October of nineteen forty one.

She was created by William Moulton Marson and Harry Peter.

Because we are conveniently leaving off the fact that she was also co created by Elizabeth Marson and Olive Byrne, she is an Amazon and a Demi God, and her team afiliations and partnerships include Steve Trevor, The Justice League, The Justice League, Dark Batman, Superman, and Wonder Girl, and her abilities include superhuman strength, speed, durability and longevity, flight, skilled hand to hand combatant, a Lasso of Truth, a shield, and indestructible gauntlets.

Yes, and really quickly, before we move too far, I just want to mention that everybody that if you want to learn about Wonder Woman in the Golden Age, was there one of our previous episodes, that is episode one sixty four.

I was going to bring that up.

I'm so glad that you got I'm sorry, I was okay, I was trying to help you, Professor.

No, I I accept the help and I'm grateful for I was right.

Yeah.

You know, we these takes so much research that we have to do these it it's not been one hundred.

And fifty episodes.

Yeah, that's fine, let's move it to the meat cute.

Yes.

The meat cute is a section of the podcast where Ashley and I are going to tell you where we first meeted and cuted Wonder Woman.

Although I believe we did this in the previous episode, but we're gonna do it again.

We do all the time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, in case you ever go to a cocktail party and somebody's like.

Hey, it's like nineteen sixty and there's a lady over there with an invisible jet.

Who is she?

And that way you can answer yes, wait, no, that was a ten in a word.

Yeah.

Actually, I am lost in the multiverse of DC multi verses and ages, and I apologize.

The meat cute is basically where we talk about where we first met the character.

Yes, so I did not be Wonder Women in the Silver Age.

No, I met her on Justice Leaue The animated series.

How about you Death Superman, so I met her in the Dark Ege.

You can go to like if you go back to episode one six before you get a little longer full versions of those stories.

We gotta let's cover today, so let's hop right into the history one oh one.

Jason, what's that?

That's where you're going to tell us everything we know about Wonder Woman the Silver Age.

Yes, all the details.

So if you did listen to the Golden Age episode, I did reference some events that went up to nineteen seventy, but the Silver Age, and this is per Jason his Superman the Silver Age episode two o seven.

Silver Age lasts vaguely from nineteen fifty six to nineteen seventy.

For Wonder Woman, it does get extended into the seventies, just because that's how long.

It's different with each character.

This is a vague thing, so there's no single event that can be said to herald the beginning of the Bronze Age, which is the end of the Silver Age.

So it's a little bit more arbitrary.

Whereas we know that the Silver Age begins with Flash of Two Worlds.

No, it begins with the first parents of Barry Allen.

Sorry, my mistake, and so showcase something.

Let's should we go through the Let's go through the ages real quick and just explain him to everybody, just in case case you're coming to this brand.

New Okay, what's the Golden Age?

Well, the Golden.

Age is where the first parents a Superman.

It's passing comics and all these By the way, these are very loose.

These are constructs developed by comic book nerds.

Part of the reason why we're very being very wishy washy is because there is no herd.

There's no academic Yeah, there's no hard and stop like you know the Bronze Age.

Oh, by the way, Barry Allen debuted in Showcase number four.

Okay, I actually have that fact for something I'm gonna bring up later.

Oh cool, coo cool.

So it's the Golden Age is from nineteen thirty eight to nineteen sixty correct.

Uh when nineteen fifty six is the earliest, Yes, because the Silver Age is supposed to be nineteen fifty six to nineteen seventy.

Sorry, I'm just.

Trying to bring up my list of all the ages here.

So Golden Age is nineteen thirty eight to nineteen fifty six.

The Silver Ages, again said, begins with the official appearance of Barry Allen and the age from nineteen fifty six to ninety seven.

That's what you're going to cover with Wonder Woman.

Then it goes to the Bronze Age, which is nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty five.

Then there is the Dark Age, which I don't know if we've talked about it.

I don't know if you liked that title, but it's like, we're comics become very mature.

It's Watchmen and Dark Knight returns and YadA YadA, and then from two thousand and on it's considered the Modern Age.

Some people have called it the Digital Age.

They might actually call it the Kickstarter Age.

You made that joke earlier, but that might be what it gets known as when you look at the publishing trends.

You know.

A funny thing.

I actually think that far in the future mm hmm and far listeners of geek hischral lesson, I kind of think that a new age of comics will begin with twenty twenty, and I think that will be named the Kickstar.

Or maybe twenty ten, right when Kickstarter is sort of somewhere.

In there, I think it's gonna yeah, because I think, ah, whatever, we don't want anyway.

We're not comic book a story.

There's in case anybody is listening like they were a big fan of our cheat up yeah yeah last week and they're like, oh, this is cool Wonder Woman, there's a chance they may not know what the ages are, and I wanted to make sure we explain that.

Okay, all right, now, Ashley, let's get back to Wonder Woman the Silver Age.

What really matters in this lesson.

So one of the most important things which happens to Wonder Woman during the Silver Age is she gets a massive reboot penned by Robert Canneger.

Now, Jason, do you know why Robert Canneger is an important figure in comic book history Outside of his work on What the Woman The Name is Familiar?

I'm gonna say he's a writer in the Legion of Superhero.

He introduced Mary Allen in Showcase number four and kicked off the Silver Age.

Oh well there you go.

Yeah, yeah, which is the only reason why I had a note about when Mary Allen was launch.

Well, good for him.

While this may seem, yeah, this seems a little convenient, but It's true he did that and then he came over.

In fact, the only reason that a new creative team took over Wonder Woman from William Moulton Marston, Elizabeth Marsden, and Olive Burne is because William Moulton Marston died and so he didn't have the ace up a sleeve of being like, well, I created Diana Prince, I'm the only person who can write her.

Robert Canneger was a close personal friend of his, took over the book, made massive changes to the book because he also took over as editor, and so he basically got to operate with very little oversight or pushback in the same way as Stanley got to operate when he was creating the superhero universe over at Marvel Comics.

And that was common at the time, whereas people would be writing editing and they would edit their own scripts.

In fact, which we're not a big proponent of.

We are not.

In fact, when he was doing this, Elizabeth Marston publicly spoke about is Elizabeth Williams's wife.

His wife, yes, publicly spoke out against the changes that he made to the book and her disgust with it, and then he invited her out to dinner and she said nothing about it because she's a lady.

But there are several public statements where she's like, I don't like what he's doing to my little baby Amazon.

All right.

Marston was originally preceded by Sheldon Mayer, who only wrote like four issues of Wonder Woman before he took over, so basically he's like an interim place holder.

But Cannegher is like, this is like the guy since the creator to write this, to.

Write this for any amount of time, and he is going to write this book for twenty years, so hold on to your bet.

Well that's interesting though, because that does not exist for Batman or Superman, like the original creators kind of like got off those books in the forties.

So we had the original creator all the way through the most of the fifties.

Yes, wow, Yeah.

So the Silver Aids marks a shift in the popular comic book landscape away from war stories, you know, because we sort of left that era behind from a World War perspective at least, and romance stories really surged and were really really popular.

Diana Prince was starring in Sensation comics, and she did have a romantic relationship in the Golden Age with Steve Trevor.

So Robert Canneger takes that and puts it right front and center.

By the way, I'm sorry, I didn't mean you rupt you, and I apologize for because I wanted to make my point of I think that sensation comics that still exists, like action and detective comics.

I absolutely agree.

It's a great title.

It is a great title.

Now you'll remember from the Wonder Woman of the Golden Age episode that Steve Trevor is an og part of Wonder Woman's mythology.

But in those stories she is a take charge lady.

There is comics from the forties and the fifties of Diana carrying Steve around in her arms, and he calls her angel and proposes to her all the time, and she's like, no baby, I got stuff to do, and like leaves them alone.

Give me that again, No baby, I got stuff to do.

Throughout the cill Rage, you actually see a ton of covers and comic book stories that invert this.

We get the first cover where Steve is carrying Wonder Woman in his arms out.

I am going to reference a lot of covers throughout this episode, and it's because I want to show them to Jason to make my point.

I will be sharing all of these on our Twitter at GHL podcast.

So, Jason, I want to show you the first issue of Sensation Comics where Robert Cannegher takes over and just like describe it for the listeners and tell us what's going on here.

It's a blonde eyed stet Steve blonde eyed.

It is a It is a blondehaired man, Steve's Rogers.

It looks like Steve Rodgers, It's Steve Trevor.

It looks like Steve Rodgers in an army uniform carrying Wonder Woman, and Wonder Woman looks very like.

Oh Steve.

So this, this cover is what Elizabeth Moulston pushed against.

She did not like that Steve is carrying Wonder Woman in his arms in this way.

In the Golden Age, wonder Woman led at a Candy and her posse of the Candy Girls into battle against war villains and dictators, and in the Silver Age she is often captured by similar figures dictators, warlords, heads of government and sits around crying and fretting until Steve shows up to save her.

Already then, so this transition to damsel in distress marks the first thing in a long line of total retcons and reboots where Wonder Woman goes from being a feminist icon, forward thinking and powerful to a woman who needs a man to help her through the world.

So, Jason, I want to ask you a question, in an effort to be fair to Robert Knnigher, who I don't think went in here with bad intentions.

Nobody ever sets out to make a bad comic book.

Was there any chance that the first major run after the Marstons was going to be any good?

No?

So, I mean that's a short answer, but yeah, yeah, yeah, there's just no way.

I What they did was like, was revolutionary.

Wonder Woman was so progressive for the time.

Well, and you can see this to the modern day mm hmm.

Wonder Woman is a very difficult character to write, and I think the big reason why she's similar to Superman that they are such products of their time that they only seem to work when they are in adventures or stories that harken back to that Golden Age storytelling, and every time you try to knock them out of it and they don't work.

If I may as well, I think the reason that the Golden Age stories still to this day, stand up and if you go and listen to our Golden Age episode.

I had a blast reading about all of those.

It's because there were two women consulting and co writing it with their husband slash lover Like, I just think it's time for some women.

Y wonder Woman is what I'm saying in this Silver Rage lesson.

I think there's a woman writing wonder one right now.

Actually, oh there is.

Juilli Wilson has also been at it for a while.

But I think it's a wonder Woman's stories are mired with strictly male creative teams, and I am not saying that you have to be the thing to write about it, but considering Wonder Woman's long history, I think that may have helped along the way.

Sure.

Many comic book historians also credit this tonal shift to the Comics Code Authority.

Jason, what is the Comics Code Authority?

The Comics Code Authority is basically this organization that had a lot of power over comic books for I don't know this mid fifties to the nineties, and they would say yay or nay to things that could be in comic now's raided because a lot of people had a lot of problems, especially government officials, that Batman and Robin hung out a lot with no women around, and a lot of people thought they were gay.

Yeah, God forbid, they were just buddies or father and soide, God forget.

Yeah, that a father and son could just be alone in a house together.

Yeah, yea yeah.

So Wonder Woman.

A good thing that kind of comes out of these tone shifts is eventually she does become more embroiled in the Greek mythology and magic that I think has come to define her, and that you and I both like about her character.

It is just a long road getting from there to hear she is presented much more as a Helen of Troy character.

In the Silver Age, she's renowned for her beauty, sought after by men whose mother prayed over her crib for baby Diana to be quote as beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, as strong as Hercules, and swift as Hermes.

The shift begins in Wonder Woman number one oh five, which was published in nineteen fifty nine and is appropriately called the Seak Great Origin of Wonder Woman.

In this issue, Diana is born Hybolica gives up this prayer, and Aphrodite casually drops by Hebolodus home to bless Diana and bestow her power upon her in the traditional Greek sense.

If you've read the Iliad, you know Aris comes down from the sky during the battle and bestows his power on Hector.

So Athena, I'm sorry Aphrodite does that for Diana.

Part of this still sticks with wonder Woman mythology to this day because Aphrodite is traditionally her matron goddess, So that's kind of cool.

I will accept this.

Then, every other meaningful Greek god in the pantheon also comes by to pay tribute to sweet baby Diana, including Hercules, which is where I take issue because the Golden Age Amazons freaking hate Hercules.

Yeah, I thought the bracelets were the chains of Hercules.

Yes they were.

They do not like him.

They do battle against him for several years.

I believe at one point they rip one of his arms off.

So I'm like, Okay, you didn't even read the source material that your buddy wrote.

Okay, great.

Sometime later, when Diana is in her teens, or she appears to be in her teens, she's a young woman.

I'm not going to pretend like I understand how people age on Demuskira.

All of the men on Earth are wiped away.

They all die in a mysterious ancient event.

And hyppolgiz out time.

I mean, am I right?

And Hippolyta holds Diana in her arms, and they weep together, and they rend their clothes and they tear their hair because the most important thing to them are men.

And Hippolita literally says, quote, woe is us dot dot dot We are dot dot dot alone now end quote, because all the men have died.

They're so sad Amazon.

They are so sad that all the men died.

In the same issue, we also learned that teen Diana built a boat that she used to sail to Paradise Island on her own from Man's World, despite the fact that Robert Cannegher told us of her literal birth on Paradise Island in a story a couple issues earlier.

The Secret origin of Wonder Woman.

If you haven't got other is kind of a disaster.

It is all over the place.

It ignores the mythology of the character and the rules that he sat down in his own story as he penned this.

It's it's a little weird that he is sort of negating some of the Martians stuff as well.

I mean, at some point he's going to negate pretty much all of it.

Wow, Also as I wonder why the shift.

Look, I don't want to talk too much about misogyny, but I'm not going to pretend that that's not part of it.

Well, and I get and there will be plenty of that in this lesson, because that is just part of the world.

What was happening exactly, And you have to look at this through the lens of history.

But if you think about that, and then you think about it coupled with the Comics Code authorities, so suddenly there are all these rules breathing down your neck.

You know, we are also going to get to some events where Robert Kannenger does some very mean things to some real life women.

I just think he wasn't.

I just think he was the wrong choice for that good dude.

I don't think he's not a good dude.

I think it was the wrong choice for this book.

I think you might have stumbled upon it with the Commis Code authority.

I think Commas cod authority might have affected wonder One more than anybody would have thought.

I can't imagine what that would be like, because you know, you and I create comics and we have pretty much autonomy with what we want to do.

We we're pretty misogynistic, I know exactly.

We hold our yeah, the female let only just coming.

We hold ourselves to a certain level of standards because we are writing for all ages.

But like, can you imagine if somebody came down from the sky and was suddenly like, no, I do not think so.

It would have been the government.

Yeah, Like if the government it was a government agency.

Can you imagine if they said no, Jupiter, Jet and Chuck can't live in the same house because obviously they're having sex even though their children and siblings.

Like everything the Commas Code Authority did was insane yea true.

So Also, as the Greek mythology is ramping up and several of the Golden Age elements are winding down, we are losing the inclusion of actual goddess at a candy in Wonder Woman's story, what is she the patron got of candy?

Okay, of curvy gals, of confidence, of singing at the top, I've sugar, I'm saying woo woo, as our Golden Age readers will know, I love Etikanddi Wooooooo, she's a woo girl.

Wonder Woman joins Batman and Superman with having a serious sales dip during the Silver Age, part of which we all know is due to the rise of Marvel Comics.

My brain weirdly a corrected that sentence to Eda Candy joined Superman and Batman was and I was very confused at the beginning of that, But it continued, so sales plummeted on one.

Of the sales plummeted, and Sensation comics became populated with new characters that had no tie or story relationship to Wonder Woman at all.

Now, if you were a contemporary comics reader and you think that is strange, that is because up until a transition that comes at the end of the Silveryge to the beginning of the Bronze Age, all comic books were anthologies.

It was like picking up an archie's digest so you could get Sensation comics, not every story had Wonder Woman in them.

During the Golden Age, when she became really popular, it became all wonder Woman stories, And in the Silver Age, now we're losing some of that a little bit, and then Jason, let's the same happened for Action in Detection and every comic suffered from this.

Eda Candy and the Candy Girls were sidelined permanently because of seduction of the innocent.

Now, what is seduction of the innocent?

A seduction of innocent?

If I remember, right, that's the report that created the Comic Code Authority, or that's the report that was that led to that was talking about how comics were quote unquote perverting the youth of America.

Yes, and it was written by Frederick Wortham, and he called Eda Candy and the Candy Girls quote gay party girls end quote well they are very happy, you know what.

I hope there was a bunch of nice lesbians driving around beating up Nazis together.

What a dream.

But that is the reason that Eda Candy has been nothing but a supporting character ever since then.

In fact, I think if it wasn't, it was not until Lucy Davis played Eta in The wonder Woman, the first wonder Woman movie, that the character became a regular wonder Woman's staple once again.

Because now she's in pretty much every wonder Woman's story.

So that's how long it took this character to come back.

Throughout the Silver Age, Diana does what several many DC Comics characters did and join the Justice League as a founding member.

There's a really weird storyline during these early issues where wonder Tot comes to life thanks Gardner Fox, who's basically a baby and a diaper who only speaks some baby talk.

It's horrible, and so much of this happened in the Silver Age because DC was making a lot of choices from an editorial standpoint, based on what they saw as successful in the Superman title.

Now, I understand Superman and Wonder Woman are very similar, especially at first blush, but they are not the same.

You can't govern your Wonder Woman stories the way you govern your Superman stories.

You can't govern your Batman stories.

On and on an other for almost any character would of course, but what was working for Superman in the Silver Age was the Superman family.

And so we introdu crazy any stuff.

Yeah, and so we introduce wonder Tot to close out the wonder Woman family.

Now, Jason, can you name the members of the Wonder Woman family in the Silver Age.

I didn't know she had a family.

There are four.

Members, Okay, I'm gonna say, home boy, I know we have is Wonder Tot one of these.

Wonder Tod is one of those.

We have Wonder Tot, we have Wonder Girl.

Yes, do you know which version?

No, that's okay, not Donna Troy, basically the not Donatroit.

I'm going to say, we have Well, Keanga should be one of these.

No, Kenga is not around now, the Wonder Kangaroo.

She's not considered a member of the Silver Age Wonder Woman.

Well, that's wrong.

Diana is one of them.

So you got three each seed one or more.

Oh, Diana's considered part one of these people.

Yeah, well then I'm going to go fanciful and I'm going to say the Wonder Robot, the robot butler of Wonder Woman.

You did pretty good.

So have Paula Ta, who was referred to as a Laita at this time.

L y t A is the Wonder Queen.

What come on, Diana is the Wonder Woman.

That is stretching the definition of the Wonder family here.

Donna Troy Girl was Wonder Girl, and then Wonder Tot was the last one.

What is especially weird about Wonder Woman stories in the nineteen seventies is the bild to Diana surrendering her powers?

Do you mean the sixties?

Well, it's yes, it starts at the end of the sixties.

But Wonder Woman through the seventies has no powers whatsoever.

Okay, So when writer Mike Sikowski takes over, he has Diana give up her powers, stating that she would rather live in man's world without powers than follow her Amazonian sisters who get shunted off to their own dimension because of reasons.

Fans of Diana Prince may know that this leads to Wonder Woman adopting just the moniker Diana Prince and a more of full time capacity.

Wonder Woman kind of goes on the back burner and becomes an alias, whereas wonder Woman was just her name for a really long time.

Diana Prince was the alter ego that she adopted when she became an army nurse during a golden age.

When Mike Sikowski said what he said about this and why he made this a wonder Woman, he said, quote what they were doing in Wonder Woman.

I didn't see how a kid, male or female could relate to it.

It was so far removed from their world.

I felt girls might want to read something about a super female in the real world, something very current.

So I created a new book, new characters, everything.

I did up some sketches and wrote out some ideas.

End quote.

He is also joined on this run with Denny O'Neill and Dick Shordono, who are two legendary comic book creators.

We talked a lot about them.

Since she has no superpowers, Diana does what every young girl wants to do.

She becomes a fashion designer and opens a quote mod boutique.

End quote.

Readers only familiar with contemporary comics probably think this is wacky and absurd, and it is very much those things.

However, with romance comics being popular and fashion comics being popular, if you're not familiar with Millie the Model, you go ahead and google that right now.

They were so popular at the time.

I don't think this change for Diana is completely out of left field.

I don't think it was the right change, but I think the effort to contemporize her and bring her to a more street level of storytelling was a smart move.

Publishers do it continually.

It's why people claim they like Batman better than an a character and this is for anybody that doesn't know.

This is of course that classic cover or the images you've seen of Diana where she's like in an all solid white suit, in an all purple suit.

Yes.

Yeah.

DC Comics was obviously trying to corner this piece of the market with their most prominent female characters speaking to younger, more contemporary people.

So in Wonder Woman n.

Number one, seventy eight in nineteen sixty eight, Danny O'Neil, who was writing, became obsessed during this time with stripping characters of their superpowers, and so that's ultimately what led to Diana giving up her powers.

Like I said, throughout the seventies, Diana Prance explores spirituality, which was very trendy at the time, also very trending now, and even gets herself a mentor, a Verson of indetermined Asian origin named i Ching to instruct her in martial arts and ancient weapons, which I would pretty much have imagined being an Amazonian she would be a master of several martial arts.

But there you go.

Iiching kind of becomes like her Alfred, or perhaps more appropriately like her Wong, and appears in a bunch of covers throughout with very merry questionable coloring.

The quote unquote training allows Diana to fight people even without her preternatural powers, which is cool, but like not as fun as giving her superpowers in my opinion.

And once Diana is ready to kick butt again, her book adopts another popular genre of the time, spy dramas.

Now you'll know this from Pasky history lessons if you listen for the last year or so.

This is at the height of the power of James Bond movie.

So espionage was a natural evolution for the Princess of Themiscira.

Apparently.

I want people to check out.

I'm going to share this cover wonder Woman one eighty one.

It is straight up at James Bond homage.

I'm going to show it to Jason right now.

It's this one right here.

I've seen that cover before.

She's literally like skiing down a mountain.

It's a perspective shift and it's wonder Woman with yellow pants, questionable and green coat and the skis in the ski poles are like coming at her from all sides of the cover.

Yeah, and we know that James Bond has a whole bunch of ski chases.

She's standing over ching there.

I mean it's it's it's specifically inspired by there's a there's a Roger Moore movie that's in the snow, but on Her Majesty's Secret Service, which is the George Lasimi film like mostly takes place in the Alps.

Yes, and inspired that scene an inception as well.

Yep.

I would also argue that the Avengers television show really informed this, and I don't mean Avengers like Captain America and Thor I mean Avengers like Steed and Missus Peel that they directly affected Lady Spy Diana, not least because they have the same hairstyle in all of these covers.

Diana's main villain at this time becomes doctor Cyber in the Doctor Poison, Doctor Psycho proud naming tradition doctor Cyber, doctor Cyber who dabbles in ideas of technology and spirituality, which we're popularizing and emerging at the time.

I don't think we've seen doctor Cyber since the Silver Age.

I could be wrong.

I don't know.

Uh, these issues are actually kind of cool if you read them in the context of the time period when they're being published.

I it'sly hilarious by modern technological standpoints.

But wonder Woman is a character that I go to, like Jason was talking about a little earlier, for big action, for mythological epics, for her to fight a minute time.

I'm not interested in wonder Woman hacking personally.

Now, Jason, do you think Wonder Woman should be striving to be on the cutting edge of technology?

No?

Right?

Does this feel silly?

It feels really goofy?

Yeah, I mean doctor Cyber, I'm sorry, is a really dumb name.

Terrible name.

It's a really dumb name.

And I get it because like Cyborg is down the pike, Cyborg's not very down.

The Cyborg is like literally around the corner from this.

Yeah, so I get that, Like computers must have seem new fangled and amazing.

Jim Drake is also not super super far down the line wonderful like Batman.

It makes sense for bad Yes, it even makes sense for Superman because Superman's a science fiction character.

But for wonder Woman, Wonderman is fantasy.

It's sword and.

Sandals, sword and sandals, like, that's Wonderman.

I was gonna say, is more classical, Yes, classical in the literary.

I could see doing it if you wanted to like do a juxtaposition of modern verses that technological.

But like, I know that's not what they were doing.

Yeah, so yeah, I don't know.

I am sad to report though publishing sales of Sensation Comics and Wonder Woman went up, but criticism went up as well.

With the feminist icon Gloria Steinem, she founded a magazine called Miss MS, still being published, debuted in nineteen seventy two.

Jas based I know Glorious nine by the way, I've heard of that name.

Gloria Signing, by the way, is incredible and iconic and people should absolutely be reading her work.

It is still very relevant to Google.

Yes, Jason, based on this lesson, who do you think Glorious Steinem put on the very first cover of Miss in nineteen seventy two.

Well, I think it's obvious that it's Wonder taught, so it's wonder Woman and the cover states wonder Woman for President.

I will also share this and I'm showing it to Jason Roman.

That's it.

I love the idea of the Wonder Woman for President.

It's a weird what is she picking up with her lasso like a city block?

What is going on there?

Yeah, it's like a city because she's going to save your city.

She's taken you away from the war.

Peace injustice in seventy two.

Yeah, well this would have been the height of Vietnam.

Yes, which I think also may have been why they were like, we already did wonder Woman at war?

Are we going to do that again?

Miss?

Recently a few years ago, in twenty twelve had its fortieth anniversary issue.

They put wonder Woman back on the car.

Do you have that cover?

I have it and it's drawn by the alreads Mike and Laura.

Oh that's so maaze.

How beautiful?

Is it?

Right?

Stop the war on women this time?

Yeah?

Wow, that's amazing.

Well done, MISS magazine, Well done.

So I'm going to share both of those.

They're really nice, Loge incredible.

So I mentioned that MISS was first founded in nineteen seventy two.

In nineteen seventy three, a fabulous journalist named Joanna Edgar wrote a criticism titled wonder Woman Revisited, taking a look at the silly tonal turn in wonder Woman comics because she had grown up with Golden Age wonder Woman issues.

And she opens her articlead.

She opens this article talking about how she was the kid who would go out to the sidewalk and swap comics with other kids, and they were all boys and they didn't like Wonder Woman, so she would have to trade them three Wonder Womans for one Superman.

And then she talks about with this shift, is it going to be the same, is it going to be as good?

Because she doesn't like that Wonder Woman's becoming more trivialized and she wants to trade.

She wants a comic trade to be one for one like all of us exactly.

Come on.

And then she notes at the end of her article that next year, so in seventy four, the first female editor is coming on to Wonder Woman.

Her name is Dorothy Wolfock.

And so I know Dorothy yep iconic, very iconic.

And so the last question is will she still have to trade three for one against Superman?

Or is this going to ground wonder Woman.

It kind of does, because the Bronze age is a dope time for Wonder Woman.

Look, I.

Have a message for those boys on the street.

Who's the writer of this.

I'm sorry Joanna Edgar.

Listen, boys, I know you're listening, and I know you're still alive.

I mean they very well could be.

Oh yeah, they're listening.

How dare you did this to Joanna?

If I find you, you're going to get the biggest pounding of your life.

I haven't heard someone say pounding in a long time.

This book, I know the Zipzappan for the kids.

This article is.

It's quite short by modern standards.

I read it.

It's incredible.

It was good for nineteen seventy three.

It came up in the first Google search, so I'm sure it didn't quite well done.

Na, well done.

Not only do I think this is a wonderful piece of comic book journalism, I actually think this tone, in this kind of analysis is what we should be striving to move back toward.

It's also a great piece of feminist journalism.

You can find it for Frownline.

I'm going to share the link right because I can't recommend enough that people check this out.

So now we're going to enter the Robert Canagan is a bad guy section a little bit.

Oh, but I thought we'd moved past him.

Oh no, he's still the main writer.

Okay, yeah, we have a couple other people coming on to the team, but he is still the writer and the editor at this time.

Okay, so he still controls the fate of one right.

Yeah, so even when he steps back as a writer, he is still working on wonder Wolding.

Okay.

Following these sharp criticisms by editor Gloria Steine, she was actually tapped to curate thirteen original Marston Wonder Woman stories in a printed collection with an introduction that she wrote for DC in nineteen seventy four.

And I need people to understand the significance of this because trade paperback markets barely existed before two thousand.

So like the fact that they curated a collection of Wonder Woman and let Glorias Seinem picket and write the intro is like culturally so significant.

Yeah, trade paperbacks really weren't a thing until post nineteen eighty five because that was mainly a creation of the direct market director comic book say Yes, and then like the nineties of word trade paperbacks really explode and then two thousands where everything got a trade, everything got a trade.

So that's a big thing.

I will say.

I wish DC instead of just being like, hey, do you want to curate our collection, was like hey, Juanna, do you want to write Wonder Woman?

Yeah?

Well, I mean it's still only nineteen seventy a.

Little too progressive for nineteen seventy three.

I mean I wouldn't.

I mean, look, can you imagine I would have died?

You're lucky.

The Hot Loves hooligant Oh sorry sorry, Hot Lips Hulhan Hulahan.

There you go, who we love and we stay on.

Hooligan's her brother, the Hot Lives.

I can't say the name now.

It's a tongue twister.

But Hot Lips was a progressive as she was, and that's all you're gonna get.

She's not that progressive.

She's a biomodernis standard.

So in the yeah, I should have let her write it.

Johanna would have would have been great, would have done an amazing job.

Can we hire her now for it?

Uh?

Sure, let's find her.

You're still working, you let me know.

The seventies also sees a return of Diana to World War Two for a little bit, with her timeline converging with Man's world, and this was due to the popularity of The Wonder Woman television show starring actual Goddess Linda Carter, which was set during World War Two.

Throughout the first season, I would be remiss if we didn't talk about the wonder Woman television show.

We're not going to talk about it a lot.

But compared does not the other television shows at the time, like Star Trek or Mash which Jason just referenced, I don't think Wonder Woman holds up as well, but it remains iconic.

Linda Carter is amazing and did such an outstanding job as an actor and an advocate to this day, and it did succeed in elevating Diana to the same level in larger pop culture as Superman and Batman for the first time arguably in her publication history.

So we're very, very grateful for that.

The show does everything for wonder Woman that the nineteen sixty six Batman show did for Batman.

It for a lot of people for a long time, for about twenty years.

For people, Batman was Adam West, wonder Woman was Linda Carter.

My mom still thinks one of Room is lit.

And she yees, and Superman was Christopher Reid and all three they are the classic.

Yes, there are in sort of a film point of view, there the Golden Age.

They are the Golden Age film trilogy.

Yeah, or even though like I know, she was on TV.

Yeah, she is just as important as Adams Batman and Chrisopher Reeve Superman.

And it is because of this series that we have not won but two Wonder Woman live action movies.

Yep.

So I just wanted to say that really quickly.

He held the torch for a long time, Linda Carter and probably until Susan Eisenberg.

Yes, so good past podcast guests, isn't it good for her?

And well done?

And I've met ms Carter once?

Lovely, Oh really, it's very very lovely.

Oh good.

She's so beautiful.

She's just a great Instagram follow.

She is truly a wonder Woman.

Yes, so far, I'm so so far.

I will say that, like, I think it's one of those parts where, like I hope you realize if you're playing wonder Woman, like what that means to people.

And as far as I know, every person that's played wonder Woman, that's truly a wonderful woman.

It seems like it.

Yeah.

Following the goofy turn in the Weirdness of Diana Prince Superspy, Robert Canneger takes up Robert.

We haven't gotten to the scary stuff yet.

I'm sorry, no, no, no, takes up writing duties on Wonder Woman once again, and let me tell you, he paid very very close attention to the outcry and the demand to return to a more serious wonder Woman.

So the first thing he does when he gets back on Wonder Woman, as he introduces the quote, evil black wonder Woman named Nubia, pops up.

Yes, I would like to state that Nubia does evolve into a very cool, very powerful character by more aware creators.

Nubia is super cool.

I would love to see her in a movie.

I think she should be used way more effectively and way more often in current DC comics continuity.

I would love to do a GHL on her.

Yep, I did not realize that she was evil.

I didn't realize she was evil either.

No, she should be in she should be in modern Wonder Woman storylines.

I absolutely agree.

And I also think, and I think we've said this on most of our wonder Woman centric episodes.

I really think that the auxiliary Amazonians could be used more in the comics perspective, like Sensation comics should be the adventures of the Amazonians.

And that's the closest thing I think you can get to a Wonder Woman family because it doesn't make us much sense because one woman is not known to be married and have children and stuff like that.

By the way, I knew that this was a real deal.

But action figure Spotlight, hold on, we have we have music for this right now?

Oh, hold on, hold on, not perfect action figure Spotlight.

Migo.

Yes, all seventies toy company that a lot of people would call dolls.

They made a Nubia action figure that is tied into the Wonder Woman TV show.

I'm showing a picture to Ashley right now.

Oh, she's got a cool streak of white hair.

That's a great Migo, actual life.

I remembered they made an action figure of her, and so like, that's really cool.

So Nubia has action figures.

Well there you go.

Please make a note so that I can be sure to share that and I actually figures.

Nubia and Diana go head to head for several issues.

The covers are stunning.

If anyone is familiar with the film poster for a Faster Pussycat Killed Kill, it's a lot like that.

It's these two like tough ladies fighting each other on the covers.

But rather than explore a feminist dynamic between these two characters or having them come to an understanding.

We have a mass shooting.

So Robert Cannegher introduces a sniper who's hunting down characters and who is the very first person that he murdered as well, I'm so glad you asked.

It's a woman's magazine editor, like Gloria Steinem who sort of launched this all in the first place.

And I think that is so despicable and so deeply ugly.

So I'm I'm just gonna rewind you a little bit just to make this abundantly clear.

Please say that all that again, like WHOA is the exact.

So he introduces Nubia.

Yes, Nubia, Diana fi fight first person that knew so no, no, no, no, it's not Nubia.

So instead, so they fight a couple times for a few issues.

It's kind of interesting.

And then instead of exploring a relationship between them, maybe bringing Nubia on as a partner or doing like they could have done really cool things they had a great opportunity, instead they introduce a sniper character who's going around killing people, and they're Diana's trying to hunt the sniper down, and the first person who the Sniper Murders is a woman's magazine editor.

Miss is a women's magazine.

Gloria Steinem was the editor.

The criticism from Miss magazine is what launched this reboot in like it's it's so ugly.

It would be like a modern day I'll make.

I'll make the safest analogy I can I can do.

It would be like a modern day comics team doing a mass shooting and drawing you and I having been shot because we spoke critically about their work in the past, or because we didn't like the character that they were writing.

Yeah, we criticized them on an episode.

Yeah, like it is.

It's an ugly, ugly thing to have done.

It's kind of gross.

And and this is the point where I'm like Robert Cannegher, like, thank you, thank you so much for Barry Allen.

He has a lot of really important contributions to comics, But this is the thing where I'm like, this is why his name is not as lauded as some of his contemporaries from the Silver Age, right, Dick Giordana's why, Julia Schwartz, this is why, because like this is horrific.

This is like trull behavior to the Mac.

That's so crazy because I get not liking her, like that's fair.

He doesn't have to like her.

It's so funny because Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman all have these like weird dips and rises, and their dips and rises are almost all around the same time, are very close life.

And it's weird because Wonder Woman's dip is right now, and because at this exact same time, Batman and Superman stories were like getting really good.

Yes, yeah, and we we're not going to get that for like another five years with Wonder Wolman.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that it's probably the most despicable won Roman story of all time here, yes, and yeah that happened, so boy.

Like I said at the beginning, the Superage has never been super to my taste.

But doing this lesson through the lens of time and from our contemporary sensibilities, this was weirder and more difficult for me than doing the Golden Age episode, which is from an older, more backward that's not the right word, piece of history than modern day.

Like I thought this was upsetting.

It's just because the character was more pure, Yes, maybe that's it, And maybe it's because the female character who I care a lot about.

You can also argue that under Robert Cannegher's rule of the Wonder Woman franchise rain that he stunted her for several decades he was in charge of Sensation and wonder Woman because the titles kind of went back and forth for twenty years before.

And this is what's going to make it all okay, George Perez is on the horizon with a Wonder Woman reboot, be real badass again.

We're gonna go into the Bronze Age, and this is where we're gonna end our We gotta get through Bronze Age before we get to George Pere.

But yes, yes, but he's coming, He's coming.

He's right.

You can actually argue that his wonder Um run starts in the Bronze Age, but kind of depends.

But there is great stuff for Wonder Woman in the Bronze Age.

She gets the best hair she's ever had.

And that's where we're gonna wrap up our Silver Age lesson on Wonder.

Woman, cool, weird and upseting, so rich to bed for wonder Woman.

There you go.

We're able to survive the Silver Age.

Yeah, who I mean?

She made it out, But boy, boy, that reputation boy and really quick.

If you do want to hear more from Jason and I about the Silver Age and wonder Woman in the Silver Age, I highly recommend that you check out our Patreon.

Yeah, go over to patreon dot com slash jaw on the jawii in you can listen to the Patreon exclusive podcast Gee Cares.

Listen to Extra, where we're gonna be talking about the best Wonder Woman's Silver Age villains.

Nubia may or may not be on the list.

I can't promise anything, but if you go over there and support the podcast, you get that podcast, you get Jason n Ashley's excellent adventures where Ashley and I go a little bit more personal about our lives.

And then there's a Just League podcast coming very soon, so buckle up for that.

Go over sportspod Patreon dot com slash jowing, and we thank all our super friends who are already over there and being nice supporters.

Yes, that's the easiest way to sports podcast patron.

Alrighty, now we're going to talk about the recommended reading.

Yes, it's the recommended reading where if you are interested in more Wonder Woman Silver Age adventures and nonsense then you can go over to geeksh Lesson dot com slash recommended Reading.

Ashley will have some picks for what you should read over there.

You click on the widget takes you at Amazon and the book comes right to your door.

Wow.

The Mine University gets a small percentage of that purchase.

So the thing that I always am going to recommend on these Wonder Woman episodes, specifically, it's The Secret History of Wonder Woman.

It deals a little, it's it's mostly stuff.

That happens before the Silver Age, but nonfiction book we really clear.

It is Eisner nominated, Eisner winner, and I think it is the best deconstructing from a modern perspective of who Wonder Woman is and where she stands in comic book history.

It's really good.

It also recommends a lot of great supplementary material if that is your jam.

Cool, and then I'm also going to recommend Wonder Woman Diana Prince celebrating the Sixties omnibus.

For some reason, there is wonder Woman the Golden Age omnibus, and there's Wonder Woman the Bronze Age omnibus, but there's no wonder Woman the Silver Age omnibus.

So this is the collection that I recommend that you go check out if you are looking for stories from this time, and then lastly if you want a little bit of silver age and some other stuff too.

Wonder Woman a celebration of seventy five years.

We've recommended a couple of these in the past.

These are really wonderful collections.

Great collections like shout out to the collections team and whoever's curating each of these individually.

They do a really really good job at giving you a smattering of the best or most interesting or most surprising from all the ages across the history of these characters.

This is when I do these lessons always where I go to start on the wonder Woman collection is no different.

So is well designed.

The covers are always awesome, beautiful, like the even the inside, like the front cover dress is always gorgeous.

They're just nice and.

They're also full of a bunch of essays by various creators, like talking about the various ages.

They're great collections.

They're great coffee table or bookshelf books as well.

They make you look really smart.

And now we're gonna move into the teaching tweet.

Jason's favorite part of the podcast.

Ah Yes, the teaching tweet is where Ashley is going to tell you.

So you's gotta sum.

Up wonder Woman the Silver Age and a little bit less than one hundred and forty characters, maybe two hundred and eighty depending on how Twitter has changed its character spacing.

We're not quite certain.

That's why I'm not a huge fan of the section.

But I agree to do it because you students want it.

And you can find this tweet on our social media at GHL.

Podcast on Twitter.

Go follow us there if you're not Ashley.

Here is your wonder Woman Silver Age tweet.

Wonder Woman the Silver Age tried out a couple jobs, lost a couple friends, got a TV show, and is ready for her final form at silvery Do you believe that wonder Woman's final form comes in the Bronze Age?

I believe that all of the pieces are put in place and at the end of the Bronze Age.

And I say that because obviously I'm coming from the bias of who I think wonder Woman is and what I want to see in wonder Woman.

Absolutely, and if you love wonder Woman in the Silver Age, please tell me why.

I would just thought that was an interesting statement.

I do because for me, like I'm I'm so psyched to do the Bronze Age.

The only judgment I'm giving on this podcast is.

To those three boys who wouldn't trade those combooks out.

Dare you?

You're cruising for a bruising and then Robert Canneger.

Yeah, I have a fist sandwich for you, sir, I think you did.

I still have a fish sandwich for him.

I'll fight his ghost.

You're the ghosts of Robert Canneger.

Do you know where we live?

I'm ready, I took I have some shopman, Howard.

Wonder Woman is a pretty unique character in the d C Comics pantheon.

She is truly a god amongst the pantheons.

We got the word pantheon.

Depends on whose definition you're following there, But yes, for the sake of yes, I will say yes.

So Jason, I want to ask, I'm wanna drill down into this a little bit.

For your money you're in charge of, do you see comics?

How much money can I put on those fifty dollars or a DNAR.

I'm gonna say a nar.

Okay, I'm gonna put a DNR on this.

Just one, only one is wonder Woman in your view, more of a comic book care some more of a superhero character, or more of a mythological character.

Oh man, I can tell you which one I prefer.

Please do.

That's what we're here for your opinions and hot takes, because I don't.

Think there is an answer for that.

And I also think that depending on who is the writer or who is the creator director, that changes.

Because there are some really good Wonder Woman superhero runs and there are some really good wonder Woman.

How did you define it mythologically?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, mytholodic because.

There are some Wonder Woman stories where she is in ancient civilizations, She's in different parts of the world, she's fighting gods and goddess story.

Where she's just putting in Circe and Ka Cheetah in the face, yes, versus like Circe for it or a doctor psycho.

Who I just do not like the war.

We are going to talk a little bit abou Cheetah today, So good pool Chah.

You know, I know it's trite and I know it's kind of overdone.

Now.

I do like Wonder Woman being like a mythological character, I really do.

I think that's the stories that I want to read like because I I do like the run where they reveal that she's a Demi God.

I do like that run, and I do like the runs where she's fighting Hades, and it's something it's I know, it's a very quick, very easy shorthand kind of like what we have with Thor and Asgard, But to me, it's something that makes her stand out in the DC universe.

And without it, she's just super powerful lady in a swimsuit.

Yeah.

Yeah, And I kind of like her being godly, And it also makes her unique among the trinity of Batman and Superman.

It also makes her because otherwise she's just girl Superman.

It also makes her unique among the other big, strong ladies of the DC universe.

It makes her unique when she stands next to Mary Marvel or when she stands next to Big Part.

It makes her queenly.

Yes, it makes her feel like a leader amongst humans.

And I think I like that more than Yeah.

I don't know, because I will say this, I'll throw this out there, and I know you're gonna tell us a lot about these villains.

I think a lot of wonder Woman's superhero or super villain normis are lame, whereas I think her mythological villains are really interesting.

Oh well, with that in mind, because we're gonna talk a lot about the ones today, I think it's time that we say hello and welcome to Geek History Lesson.

I'm Ashley Victoria Robinson.

And I'm Jason Wonderful and men, welcome to your mind University, because this is the podcast that we call the Mind University Geek History Lesson, because you're here to learn, because I am a TV writer from Kansas and Ashley is a com book writer from Canada, and we're here to tell you everything about a certain character or pop culture construct in a little bit less than an hour.

It's a day we're talking about.

Let me see, let me hold me that my papers here, hold on a second likely oder the typewriter, wonder woman in.

Hold on, I got a wonder woman.

Say it properly, place put in the paper up.

In the Bronze Age, we're a very analog age.

That's where we typewriters.

Well, if it's truly the Bronze Age, just no typewriters.

There's no podcasting equipment.

You and I are fighting people off with very very heavy swords and shield and.

Actually, if this is the seventies, we'd actually be up there like a news pressure.

Oh well, I welcome listeners, will listen the nineteen seventies broad Nose Park.

Somebody's just got someone's furious with you.

Someone doing their job right now, and they really hate how I sound.

I just want to say that Jason pulled down his pop filter, which is a little thing that goes in front of the microphone.

So when you say your p's and b's and stuff, does something you're spinning And I was truly perplexed by what you were doing.

Yeah, you have to do that for the rest of the popecast.

NOD NORAD Command.

We have an invisible jet flying over Colorado.

Jet of Bogie flying over Colorado.

No it's not a drone.

No it's not a drone.

I said, NORAD, not Houston.

Houston is not.

I don't know where NORAD is the only thing we drove by NORAD.

You thought if we're the fake stargoot and Trian Mountain is that's how of Colorado Springs.

The only thing I know about NORRAD is the Athletic Radar and Aerial Display or something like that.

DEFEND is the Seinfeld joke.

That's a timely reference review.

I thought that's completely wrong.

I have no idea.

So if you realized welcome to the Bronze, if you're listening from Norad email us hears that, I know we have a listener.

One listener O, Nora.

It's got to be the security gig guy, right for sure, Dal or not binary power right sure, somebody in the security gated Nora.

It's got to be listening to this for sure.

For sure.

I do want to shout out our thas everyone who ever requested a wonder Woman episode gets shouted out in these ages episodes.

So thank you so much to Shadows of Ash, Still Brave Love, Gene S, Sam Martinez, A S, D F G H J K L p Q W E R.

I'm sorry you have the worst season names.

The cat smash the keyboard.

Someone definitely smashed their hands down.

Alexis n Bowen and Tree Branchy for requesting wonder Woman.

I think you're going to get requested a lot of our stuff.

Alexis is an og and I think she she might win for most requests of let's just say it right now, she does.

She does.

We love you You're You're the Queen of you are the winner.

You win the ghl No prize, which is nothing.

It's this hearty handshake.

Did you get it?

Jason?

Did mind it?

So I think you should feel it and energetically.

Just a quick refresher, let's run through a tense on origin in case you have decided to listen to this but you don't know who Wonder Woman is.

Princess Diana a Femis Skira aka Wonder Woman is a deep Wonderwoman Thanks so much, DC Comics character.

Her first appearance was an All Star Comics number eight in October of nineteen forty one.

She was created by William Moulton Marston and Harry Peters and William Moulton Marston's girlfriend Olive, who never gets official credit.

And I love her and that is why I shot her out every single time.

She is also known as a Diana Prince.

She is an Amazon and a Demi God, as Jason talked about in the intro.

Her team affiliations and partnerships include Steve Trevor, Justice Leek, Batman, Superman, a Wonder Girl, and her abilities include superhuman strength, speed, durability and longevity, flight, skilled hand to hand combat and alas So of Truth a shield an indestructible gauntlet.

Why did she have Steve Trevor a theme song?

I've never heard of favorite before.

I'll tease this a little bit.

I am not pro Steve Trevor in the Bronze.

Okay, so we're gonna we're gonna turn into a real ass ob We're gonna talk.

No, look, it's a whole thing.

It's a whole thing, including visual aids that we've got to get through some other business with the podcasts, very visual media.

Well, I do have two photos.

I'm going to ask you to react to its Steve Trevor in the Bronze.

You're gonna time everybody's gonna get a podcast react huh.

Yeah.

We love the reacti verse, Reactiverse reactors.

But if you want to hear us talk more about superheroes and our potential experiences as superheroes, I want to really encourage you, of course, to go check out Patreon dot com slash jawin that's jaw i i s.

Paton dot com.

Slash l is the perfect plus to get all your podcast tea needs, including out free podcast and exclusive discord earn uh.

If you like things.

This is about Greek mythology.

It's called Titans.

You get every news breath of the Titans.

Team Totans series on a podcast called Teen Titans called.

Talking Titans Talking hosted by myself and Diego Anthony Dunias.

We represented by you and Diego Anthony Niaz.

We recently had an episode where we had the voice cast of Teen Titans give us one answer to one question.

It's really fun.

You've got the radio performers of the Teen Titans.

Yes, Rodeo podcast experience.

Exactly, and we are answering on this week's Geekause Reels an extra podcast which superpowers we would like to have?

Yes, what's what superpowers of the most medical benefits for nineteen seventies colorstics Kalistonia exactly.

So check that out Patreon dot com, slash Jawa.

It's kind of weird that the nineteen seventies sound like a nineteen fourios radio presentation.

Yeah, but you've committed to this and I think the bit's just going to carry out.

It's pretty amazing what a fist over a microphone accomplished.

There are no literally there are no audio effects on this.

Jason is doing all this.

This is just my voice fist and you I'm not really close to the microphone.

All right, So let's get into the Bronze Age.

Now.

If you've been listening up to this point and you don't understand the Bronze Age, and you really just do only understand it as a historical period, I'm going to give you a really quick recap that comic book historians, which is a really fancy way of saying comic book readers.

And I'm sorry, and we should say too, we also have two or three other two other amazing wonder woman.

I'm going to get to that.

I have the numbers.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I got it.

I will go back to the Guard Show, go back to your old I'm Laura over over.

And these periods are meant to denote tonal shifts within the comic book universe.

They are all generally agreed upon, although, as we are going to figure out once I explain them to you, not exclusively followed.

So the Golden Age of comics was from nineteen thirty eight to nineteen fifty.

Six, broadly Houseian.

Era broadly, and it ends with the first appearance of Barry Allen in Showcase number four, which was published in October of nineteen fifty six.

That's the Flash of Two Worlds cover.

You've seen it or you've seen it homaged, and if not, google it, it's really neat.

The Silver Age of comics is generally considered to be from nineteen fifty six to nineteen seventy, which had restricted storytelling under the Comics Codes Authority.

Often led to silly stories, but we start to see more hints of depth towards the end of it.

It was preceded by the introduction of the Comics Code Authority.

It doesn't exist anymore, don't worry about it.

The Bronze Age, which is what we're going to talk about today, is generally considered to go from nineteen seventy to nineteen eighty five.

The precipitating event is Jack Kirby leaving Marvel and the death of Gwen Stacy and Spider Man won twenty one.

So that's the era that we are sitting in today.

If you haven't listened to our true prest episodes on Wonder Woman, as Jason alluded.

To, I was just so excited about them.

I'm sorry, that's okay.

I was like, we gotta explain this verse and then we can do all of them.

We gotta talk about wonder Woman.

Episode one sixty four is wonder Woman the Golden Age, and episode three point fifty is wonder Woman the Silver Age, and I will say a wonder Woman the Feminist Age.

I feel like I will say, you think the Silver Age was the Feminist Age definitely, because that was when she was on the cover of Miz magazine and she kind of began We're going to talk a lot about feminism in this episode as well, but that's when she was really became this pop culture feminist icon because this was, you know, the beginning of the sexual revolution was in the Silver Age and women's lib and all of that.

And I should say, like, yeah, if you never listened to our past episodes, we have a bunch of Superman.

We've Superman has made it all the way into the nineties, yeah, and we have Batman.

Batman's made it all the way in the eighties.

And I know there's been some requests for Robin the Golden Age.

We also did our first Team Tight and we did teen Tight tmes Silver Age Lost.

These episodes, I think are some of our best episodes.

Yeah, so go check them out.

Check them out.

So Wonder Woman's Wonder Woman adventures in the Silver Age don't have as clean a break as Batman and Superman's.

What is considered to be this tonal shift is the introduction of the character Nubia.

We talked about Nubia.

I decided to include it in our Silver Age episode that we've already listened to.

This is the expansion of the Amazonian cast of characters.

It brings more Amazonian canon characters to the real world of the DC universe.

Can you explain who Nubia is?

For a lot of people like myself?

Yes, I can be forgotten who Nubia is.

So the very lazy, utterly lackluster way to describe Nubia is, she's the black wonder Woman.

Okay, you've seen her.

She always has a magnificent hairdoo.

She wears the traditional Wonder Woman stars and stripes costume.

The Bronze Age of Wonder Woman is considered to start after Nubia's.

Introduction, which is around ye uh.

Nubia's introduced at the end of the seventies.

Okay, but Wonder Woman gets a complete revamp, retcon reintroduction by George Perez, a complete redo of her origin story, a complete wiping clean of these characters.

These Amazonian characters don't get referenced again for quite a while.

Okay, so if you're reading wonder Woman, Wonder Woman's bronzies is actually considered to start after Crisis on Infinite Earth with her reboot, so we're a little bit later in the Bronze Age than Batman.

In Superman tradition, will know, technically, by our definitions, like we've done in previous episodes, that would be the Dark Age.

So again, what I what I what I'm trying to have you understand is.

That I'm just clear, I'm bringing up questions that the listeners are.

Going to have too.

Yes, And and Wonder Woman's Bronze age is very very small because she goes right into the Dark Age, but it's considered to be in the nineties, So she's a little bit behind Superman and Batman.

Kind of because she because she got complete a complete reac complete reaboot.

And and I'm gonna tell you a little bit of the history of why this happens.

But ultimately I and I chose to do these episodes with this demarcation point, so that I didn't teach you all about Nubia, wipe that clean and what that did to her canon, and then introduce you to a brand new canon halfway through the episode.

So I chose to do that for the ease of these episodes.

But I also chose to do that because Wonder Woman, if you look at her publication history, it's not as clean as Batman and Superman.

And that is just, frankly, because the editors and the people in charge of DC Comics did not care about their female superhero as much as they did about their two male superheroes.

Well, wonder Woman has always been I hate to say it, that the if we're the second fiddle, the third fiddle.

If we're ranking look, if we're ranking the Trinity, it's Batman's, Superman, wonder Woman in that order.

Yeah.

So I acknowledge that it's messy.

I acknowledge that it's pushing the generally considered bronze age bounds.

But this is what Wonder Woman spent a lot of time in this on the This is what wonder Woman readers generally considered to be her bronze age arc is the George Perez run.

So that's what we're talking about today.

Cool.

So I'm gonna tell you how they developed this brand new origin for wonder Woman.

Greg Potter, who was a writer and the creator of jem Son of Saturn, Everybody's favorite story, collaborated with Janet Race, the Wonder Woman editor at DC Comics at the time, to rework wonder Woman.

They were struggling.

They did this for a while, and then they brought in George Perez.

George Prez incredible artists.

I always think of him, of course, as being the new Teen Titans artist, and he did a legendary Avengers run in the seventies, Yes, Crisis on Infinite Earths.

He also draws the best hair in all of comics bar nine.

Like you can tell if there's a woman on panel, you can tell it's a George Perez Big Beasts, Yes, absolutely amazing.

They stated that they were inspired by John Byrne and Frank Miller's work at the time, and they wanted to give a more serious tone to Wonder Woman because she'd kind of been a sillier character.

So she just came out of her spy age where she was depowered and she was kind of a sexy go go girl, for a lot of the seventeen and we should explain that that is.

Of course, John Burn's complete reboot of Superman and Man of Steel took him back with a brand new origin, and then it's not a complete reboot.

So soft, it's always a soft frame.

Van Miller did a soft reboot a Batman in Batman Year one.

Yes, so it's basically like all three.

All three these characters got it back to the basics around the same.

Time, yes, but as always, Batman only gets a mostly back to basics reboot.

Janet Race left DC Comics to return to traditional publishing before Is She One came out and editorial duties were taken over by Karen Berger.

I just want to mention that specifically, because the only woman who worked on Wonder Woman in this era was always in the editor position.

Just an interesting fact from me to you.

Perez was given the job of plotting and penciling.

Potter contributed to the first two issues, then he left.

He was briefly replaced by Len Ween.

Len Weed, of course, legendary creator who worked on and created every single character you love from the eighties until George Perez began taking the book on solo.

Plotting in issue eighteen, George Press also drew this entire run, so he did a lot a lot of things that you like or maybe don't like about this age.

You can lay at the feet of George Perez because he really took this on.

The fun thing about Wonder Woman, like I said, is she does not have the clearest definition in her eras like Batman and Superman.

So we're just going to have to deal with it.

But if you want a little bit more info on Crisis on Infinite Earths, we do have a series of episodes called Crisis Club.

You can get longer form video versions of them on the Patreon, but you can also listen to audio versions if you go back to episodes two eighty two to two eighty six.

Yeah, but the Patreon.

Just to give you a fun fact, I think the I think we put each podcast.

Each podcast episode was two episodes of Crisis, Yeah, smashed into one.

Yeah, so it's one and two.

You're missing like an hour of each episode.

It's a lot of info.

Yeah, So we've had we have them, but they are available Patreon.

They are available.

So let's explore the theme of rebirth.

Rebirth is a word that DC loves to throw around, and rebirth is very much everything that's in store for wonder Woman throughout the Bronze Age.

Wonder Woman, as rewritten by Len Ween and George Perez, not only Diana but the entire Amazonian race a completely new introduction to comic book readers.

I read the whole series for the first time in preparation for how many issues this episode?

Oh my god, it's five volumes.

It's it's massive.

I think it's sixty some issues.

So it's like it's a good long run, the type of which we don't get anymore.

So you don't.

I read it, so you don't have to, basically, thank God, and I'm here to tell you everything about this new origin.

I would like you to keep in mind that in the nineteen eighties you got a little more bang for your book than we get these days.

And what do you mean by that?

Thirty six pages of comic book story, not the thirty six pages of comic books?

Wow?

Exactly, wow.

No, actually, right now it's trying to signal for an ad but I'm still wow about these pages.

Thirty six pages of we don't get you, thirty six pages of podcast.

Thank you, Christopher walkin wal He said, wow, wow, yeah, yeah, the question for Walkuner is right here.

Wow yeah, got you.

So what I'm ready?

So this is thirty six pages.

It's not the mere twenty pages that we're supposed to be great and you'll receive.

Now, George Perez was writing I know he was getting an assist but Lynnlean, but he's writing Hansling.

Yeah, yeah, and I think he was inking this stuff too.

Yes, he was like, holy cash, just I want you to think about how tired George Perez was.

Well, I send you off look to pray.

And if you know, if you know anything about gege Prez, and you've seen any pictures of him, the like great George Prez, you know he just wore Hawaiian fashionista.

Yeah, this is probably why he probably was so tired that he was like, wife, I cannot be bothered to pick up shirt anymore.

And she was like Hawaiian shirts.

It is George.

She made a lot of his shirts, I know, and iconically yeah yeah yeah, So we're gonna get back to George Perez and his shirts and what this thirty six pages of Wonder Woman Origin nonsense is just the second Gee Kiss Tray Lawson we are back.

We have all put our Hawaiian shirts on, we have all hunkered down, we have all inked these origins.

And uh now I'm going to explain to you the thirty six pages of Wonder Woman number one.

Okay, hold on a second here.

Before we went to break, Ashley called this a bunch of nonsense.

So it's comic books.

It's all nonsense.

I know, I know, And it's all funny books, and it's all goofy and it's all stupid and silly, and you can love it still, but you specifically called it nonsense.

As a person who like consumed a lot of this Wonder Woman in a very tiny period, why what about this is not again, it's actually because laud it is one of the greatest Wonder.

Woman forst is it's actually I use the wrong It's not nonsense.

It's this is a very serious mythological retelling of Wonder Woman's origin.

I mean also itself very serious.

This is like and it's deeply tied to lore.

And this is also this is kind of the definitive Wonder Woman origin in a lot of ways.

Like look, if I can be honest, I think I was overwhelmed by the radio voice, Oh okay, and I was like, please, we just need a break.

You gotta go with it, you know, all right, let's go, let's go.

Okay, we open on a prehistoric man clubbing his pregnant prehistoric wife to death.

Well thanks everybody, So doesn't that feel feminist right off the bat, I'm going to sign off.

I'll see literally hits her in the head and cracks her skull open and she bleeds out on a rock.

So that's how that's how we meet.

Wonder when yeah, smash cut too, Artemis.

Smash cut, smash cut too, Artemis, Athena and the Greek pantheon, the goddesses are all pitching to Zeus that they want to create a new race of humans who share a more deep tie back to the gods of Olympus Areas, of course, is being a giant butthole, and he's the only god who stands up and opposes them.

It's quite a powerful gigantic butthole.

So Zeus followed, follow the butthole vibes and just raise but hoole and just rage quits the entire discussion because Aris is complaining about it the whole time.

So Artemis Athena Aphrodite Hestia nice deep cut by the way there, George, Demeter, and Persephone go behind the backs of all the buttholes and they go right to Hades.

Hades grants them access to the souls of the old world who had passed away when Guya, the goddess of Earth, was the only goddess.

They're preserved by her in a very special place in Hades Realm, and they are reborn into new, more powerful bodies than ever before.

These reincarnated souls become the classic Amazonians, Hippolyta, Philippus and Tiape and Monolope and Hipolota the proper Greek spelling.

Thank you so much for that.

They are placed on Earth to usher in a new, more beautiful age of humanity.

This takes up us up to page seventeenth.

Okay, so Heracles, yes, Heracles Greek name Heracles, and theseus into attacking the Amazonians because he hates them because all the goddess has created them.

So he's like, I'm gonna take my big strong man's and attack these big strong ladies.

In order to keep the amazon safe, Poseidon splits the sea for three months so that they can walk to Themyscara.

They walk across the the Themyscira.

It's like the Moses Party of the Red.

Yeah, it's actually really neat.

Themyscira is described as a paradise island where they can be protected from future threats so long as no man sets foot on their shorts was, of course the classic rule off Themyscira, paradise island, whatever we're calling it.

Hypaulita loves her life.

She's the queen of the Amazons.

She's getting kisses from her girlfriends on the cheek.

But I do want to say, for the nineteen eighties, pretty progressive.

There's a lot of cheek kissing by the Amazonians.

Okay, lady and lady, there's no man's is We believe all amazon Onians are lesbians in this household.

So it's nice to see the seeds of that planted in the Bronze age.

So she loves her life's having a wonderful time.

But she's got this like deep internal longing, and she talks about how she's missing something like physically inside of her body.

So she goes to talk to their oracle Monolope, and she's like, I'm so sad and I am missing something deep inside my body, what's wrong with me?

And Menalope lets her know that this is because she was the only reincarnated soul among them who was pregnant when she was killed.

Remember the prehistoric lady who was pregnant and club to death in the opening.

Yeah, this is This is the woman's soul who is reincarnated into Apolita.

So she needs to go to where the land meets the sea sculptor baby out of clay, and Athena will bring it to life.

So she does, and thus Diana, a Roman name, not a Greek name, is born.

I will always take umbradge with the fact that wonder woman is tied to Greek mythology.

But they called her a Roman name.

You gotta let it go.

I know they did it because Diana is a common name that you could have in the human world.

But like it just it sticks out to me like a sore thumb.

Her name should be Artemis.

So Diana and the Amazons live happily for thirty thousand years.

They're having a wonderful time, and then Monolope warns of a threat.

So Queen Hippolita holds a competition for a champion to be chosen you know, like very Greek Gucker Roman.

We're wrestling and we're shooting bows and arrows, and we're riding horses, and we're running and jumping in climbing trees.

But she forbids her daughter from competing.

So of course Diana does it anyway, and of course, because the book is called Wonder Woman, she wins.

So the trials conclude with the Flashing Thunder.

Have you ever heard of the flashing Thunder?

I don't know what it is.

So it's it's very strange because everything up to this point really mythological.

George Press's art is very stylized.

The coloring is very beautiful.

And Tiapee pulls out a gun, a handgun, and that's the flashing thunder, and she shoots three bullets at Diana, and Diana has to survive it in order to become the champion.

Oh so she does bullets and bracelets.

Oh yes, okay, So it's the idea of the ancient meeting the model.

Yes, so they've brought this incredible weapon from the human because like swords are an advancement on bow and arrows, the gun is an advancement on swords.

But it's such a tone shift in the comic because she whips it out from under her like green Greek style cloak, and it's like it's like a glock.

I don't know.

I think that's cool.

I think that's pretty cool.

So of course, Diana bullets and bracelets, no problem, nobody gets hurt.

She has gifted Hara's girdle because yes, you can be a superhero, but you have to be skinny.

I mean it's the eighties, the era of the supermodel, like come on, and her ceremonial costs, and we end on a splash page of the classic Wonder Woman with stunning George Perez hair.

That is the first issue of Wonder Woman's New Origin.

Any thoughts or initial reactions, Jason.

I mean not really.

It's very long.

Was this all the first issues?

This is thirty six pages?

This happens thirty six pages.

Oh, when you read this series, Issue one and two have a lot of words on the page.

Well, that's the youth because we used to like to read them back in the day, back in the day, my day, we read books.

But you can just watch them.

It's interesting because when you get into like later issues, it's it's a lot more modern but like there is, it's very much presented as if it's this tale out of history, you know what I mean.

I mean the gun thing is very interesting and it's something I wish we could have cut.

We would have seen in the movie that would have been cool.

I think it's a neat thing, and I'm surprise it wasn't co opted more because the bullets and bracelets seen like that theme precedes this and we do see it a lot of it.

And I will say that the really good piece of writing in this is that you can tell that George pres Was and len Ween were very much like we have to make you care about the Amazons, yeah, and we have to explain why they're special, because if we just keep being like it's a tribe of women, nobody's gonna care.

And they really do go out of their way to show you, like how who these characters are.

Like Antipee is very like she wants to fight all of their battles and they're like, no, that's what Aris would do.

And Menalope, who's an Amazonian who gets kind of lost in the shuffle.

She's their oracle.

What's her name again, Menalope?

Menlope?

She is very Sage and Austeer, like she really is removed from them, but she's very, very wise and hypologizes, really care like they do a better job at differentiating their individual personalities I think than a lot of modern Wonder Woman stories.

Unfortunately, the series is an immediate financial and critical success.

People loved it from issue one.

They were like, her hair is great, this origin is great, She's great.

I know.

These covers are beautiful.

Yeah, and they still hold up.

The wrap around cover that they now have on the hardback collections is just absolutely stunning.

It marries it goes on to marry Wonderwoman more closely to these mythological origins even in the modern world.

So Jason, knowing that, who do you think is the first villain?

It's actually three villains that Wonder Woman faces off against.

Okay, I think it's got to be Sircy the Witch because we're staying Greek.

I think it's got to be Aries because we're staying Greek.

And I'm just gonna go Cheetah because Cheata is the very like, we got to have somebody for her to actually punch.

You got one out of three, correctly, Okay, Then who shows up?

So the first villain that that she no, Poseidon helped them walk through the sea, but he could turn a villain, you could turn into a villain.

That's true.

But yeah, Posidon, this historically kind of this, kind of kind of bad.

So you're you're one for three.

So her original villains are Aries, Phobos, and Damos.

Do you know who Phobos and Demos are?

Fear?

Who's Demos?

I forget?

So it's the god of It's basically fear and panic.

Oh okay, they're the two sons of Aries and Aphrodite.

Okay, okay, so it's apology, but also all men on purpose.

I definitely think this was on purpose.

Other pantheon members who do show up in this arc include Charon, the guy who brings you across the river sticks Hepestus Harah Femus, who the writer's state is the Messenger of the Seas.

That's not true.

The Greek Messenger of the Seas is triton.

EMUs is actually the goddess of justice, natural and divine law, and she's the daughter of Gaia, so it makes sense to include her.

But they use this name and they attribute it to the wrong character.

But she so she does appear, but I just thought it was very strange because they get a lot right from mythological history, and they.

Get that very raw.

So we're back to adaptation right again.

It's the idea of like, you cannot be beholden to a previous thing if it's going to break your story, if you if and again you know, so they trusted their gut and they made a choice and they went for it.

Yeah yeah, but I just because no matter what they do, somebody is going to be like the Greek mythology did this, Well, that's I just did it.

I just did That's why you called it nonsense earlier.

That's why I called it nonsense.

So Bronze Wonder Woman was explicitly intended to be feminist, despite the fact that once again, the one woman who was a major part of the creative team was the editor.

The nineteen eighties sees the end of second wave feminine and the ramping up into the right girl feminist movement of the nineteen nineties.

If you are someone who has read any of these texts, you can definitely see them lifting direct phrases and philosophies and putting them into the mouths of characters like Diana and a couple of the women that'll introduce you to later a quick crash course in the values of second wave feminism.

It's built upon the idea of sexuality and family and domesticity and workplace and reproductive rights not being counterparts to each other, so they're not in opposition.

There's something that a woman should all have togethers.

And it fights the idea of inequality and official legal inequality, so the idea that like a woman would suffer professionally if she left to deliver a baby, whereas a man would still have the same career trajectory.

So it's a lot about marrying the values of a nineteen fifties housewife with women's lib and that's what we see see Diana try to do throughout this run.

And she's trying to be a great woman of Earth but also a great woman of the Amazon, so she's trying to be a superhero and a goddess at the same time.

I just want to throw out the signal right now to any men listening to be like good wish they just talk about comic books.

If you don't think Wonder Woman is inherently about feminism.

It has been about feminism since nineteen thirty nine, then you're a damn idiot and you haven't read wonder Woman comums.

I would also encourage you to go and read the interviews with George Perez and Lenuin and from this time where they're saying this.

So I just want to say, as as the other, the non female contingent of this podcast, understand what the hell you're reading.

And if you don't think wonder Woman is about women's rights and feminism, then I'm sorry You've never understood a single wonder Woman comic book you've ever read.

And I just wanted to bring that to light so you can understand, like why these types of stories are I'm not trying to let warn this run is.

I think if you would ask most people, this is the era that most people would be like, this is the best era of wonder One.

This era definitely deserves to be a contention.

Yeah, So there are two key Wonder Woman characters that we haven't met yet.

Jason, who are we missing from Diana's story so far?

That's been part of a wonderful mythology since the Golden Age.

Well, a guy you don't like, Steve Trevor, Yes, And then the other person.

I'm just going to make a guess at a Candy correct fact.

So yeah, Wonder Woman spends a few issues getting set up as Diana and bringing Diana to the forefront, and so then we finally get when we finally meet them.

Old Softy McGee, Steve Trevor.

Old Heart as Leather is Steve Trevor hard?

Oh yeah, so Eda Candy we're introduced to is the attache to Steve Trevor.

That makes sense.

Who is sent on an off the book's mission for General Kohler, a corrupt military man that Steve had previously testified against in court.

This version, yes, But I bring it up because this version of Steve Trevor is a Vietnam veteran, not a World War One or World War Two in the eighties, which is which is interesting because in the modern day we struggle now with where to place Steve Trevor.

It's the same as Tony Stark, being like, did Tony Stark blow up in Afghanistan?

Or did Tony Stark blow up in some South Korean war like he originally did in the sixties.

And I really respect the creators for being like, nope, We're We're doing contemporary to the time feminism with Diana.

We're going to do the story of a contemporary military man with Steve Trevor.

He does have a successful military career, but he also does question the military industrial club complex.

He does not blindly follow, which is new for Steve Trevor up to this point in Wonder Woman history.

This version of General Kohler is upon possessed by Aris, who's sent you know, who's trying to break through the protective outside of Themyscira.

So that's the mission that Steve gets sent off to in the middle of the night.

So Steve Tremor, we're talking about Steve Tremmer.

Does he still does he?

Is it still or do they change this?

I'm sorry if I'm getting ahead of you.

Is it still the classic he crashes on the island?

Yes?

Yeah, okay, okay.

So George Perez, the artist and a fighter je okay, cool, pretty much universally draws the most beautiful people in comic book history.

His version of Steve Trevor is not the most beautiful person in comic book history.

And I would like to show you a picture of him, and I would like for you to describe him to the audience, because podcasting is famously a visual medium.

This is Steve Trevor.

Well, here's the problem with this, uh one.

He looks like a sailor.

He's got like a blue knit cap, he's got cold he's got like a fur collar and his thing gloves.

But this is the thing of like I can tell he's young, bes to be young because he has blonde hair, But the way George Press has drawn him with so many lines in his face, he looks like he's in his sixties.

He looks ancient.

He's stopped by the sailor.

Ma.

This is that is something that like artists that sort of draw in George Prez's style.

It's one of those things that their style is so simple that the second they had too many lines to a face, it looks old.

It's very strange because obviously, like Diana is very beautiful, and she you know, never has any marks on her face, and he flows and and they juxtapose her with with a Steve Trevor who looks like he could be her grandfather, and you slowly watch their love story on school and it's it's a bit strange to me.

I don't like the way Steve Trevor looks distracting to me.

And it's my only real note with this whole series is like the way Steve Trevor looks like he looks.

That's why I said, like old is leather, Steve Trevor like he looks like he look he's a Vietnam Vet.

He seems some stuff looks terrible, and he's the romantic lead of the comic.

Like Jason asked about earlier, Steve's playing does go down in the water outside of Themyscira.

He also accidentally fires a bomb on the island while he's going down, but luckily herme's just kind of showed up out an nowhere.

I was like, Diana, you're the hero.

Now have a golden lesso of truth.

She lassoes it, and she sadly she does not ride it like slim pickens out of the atmosphere, but she is able to sort of wing it away.

You don't understand that reference, go figure it out.

Yeah, And then she brings Steve back to man's world where he can heal properly and she can learn how to better protect her people because before this she didn't really understand that there was this protective barrier around Themiscira and now that she's your champion, they were like, ah, this is clearly what she is to protect us from.

So they send her over to Earth, over to human's world, and she's like, Okay, I guess I'll go over there right now.

She takes up with Professor Julia Kappitellis, who's a professor at heart, who immediately decides that they can live together and introduces Diana to the monster of Boston traffic at rush hour.

That's a joke just for Jason Boston, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah, Because Diana has this amulet of ares that has a companion in man's world and she needs help translating it.

And Julia is this professor of ancient Greek everything that we need for the plot.

So so she's the one physician.

She's like, oh, you speak ancient Greek.

I also speak ancient Greek.

Have a sweater and come live in my house with my dad, h daughters.

Isn't that some sweaters?

Uh.

It's during this time that Phobos and Demos, the sons of Aris, are terrorizing not only Wonder Woman but her cracked team of Steve, Etta and Julia, playing such tricks as sending a Gorgon, but emphatically not Medusa, just a Gorgan to Earth to rapidly age Professor Julia's teenage daughter into an old woman, and then rapidly ate your house until the wooden beams collapse in upon themselves.

Jason, Yeah, why do writers always want to have Diana interact with teenagers and children?

Do they?

I feel like in every Wonder Woman Run, there's a scene where she has some meaningful interaction with a young girl.

I mean, I don't know if I agree with that sentiment at all, because I have not encountered it that often.

But my best thing would be to say that it's because you're trying to impart a moral lesson to a kid.

M hm.

You know you want a young girl to read this, and so, like, you know, you're trying to get her to be like, look, you can be like me.

M I don't know.

I don't know that this is a trope of Wonder Woman from what I've read of wonder Yeah, maybe it's a trope of the George Perez run.

Maybe I just feel like every Wonderman Run, the like I said that I've ever read, is like there's some young girl that Diana has to be like, don't worry, I'll save you and you can be a hero too.

Well, I mean that's in a lot of superhero stories.

I mean, Batman's got a Robin, Superman's got a Jimmy Olsen.

Sure Team Diana discovers that Ari's corruption has infiltrated the American military system unimaginably called Project Ares.

I think this is definitely a very again post Vietnam sentiment.

So not only is there the corruption of all these monsters are coming to Earth, but it's also in the systems of government that were in place to protect them.

Well, I mean to me, if Arry's supposed to be this god of war, you think, you know, a strategy is a part of war, and you would think he wouldn't name the project after himself to signal to all of his enemies that hey, comes.

Stop this.

Yeah exactly.

Diana is dubbed wonder Woman by the American media because they're afraid, I think, call their Princess Diana, they'll confuse her with the Princess of Wales.

I like you, I like that.

Okay, it's okay.

Very cute, but also very strong.

She doesn't have a secret identity, she's very much.

I'm Princess Diana, and they're like, well, we got a Princess Diana.

You know, I really liked that Diana Spencer exists in the DC.

You I like it.

That's cool.

They should be friends.

They should be you know what they should be, they should have met.

That's the crossover, uh, that we all wanted.

I'm going to tell you a little bit more about how Diana defeats a.

Yes, Princess Diana Wales takes down uh, not only Aries, the god of War, but Project Aries, the American military industrial complex.

Sure, right after this, we are back on geek history lesson.

We are talking about Princess Diana, Yes, that's right, the blonde one, and we are talking about how she tied into the bronze age of Wonder Woman in d C Comics history.

We just revealed that Aries is a big plan was to take over the military using Project Mary's very imaginatively named, and it's up to Team wonder Woman to take him down.

They are able to use the member the ambulet that they had before that they had to find the mirror of Yes, exactly that, the mirror of it, so they call it.

So they're looking for its mirror, which usually means there's two of one thing, right, Okay, Diana, when she holds it, it's it's almost like it's out of phase.

Sometimes you can see it and sometimes you can't, Like.

It vibrates with a different frequency of the universe.

It might be to a certain Star Trek movie that just came out.

So she stands in front of a mirror and does that a little bit.

Why in front of a mirror?

And then they fall through the mirror to where the mirrors on the Is it a full length mirror?

How do they fall from the mirror hanging on the wall?

What?

And they get sucked through the mirror to where Phobos and Damos have been hanging out with a bunch of snakes so that they can defeat the sons of Aries and also a bunch of snakes.

Now, to be fair, Phobos not Fomo.

Phobos mythologically does have like a beard of snakes and does command snakes.

But they basically use this as a chance to have Diana.

If you've ever seen the Class of George press cover where she's fighting a giant snake, it's this specific issue.

And once they defeat Phobos and Demos, they are able to return from the mythological world to the real world to overcome the same version of the conflict.

In the real world.

They basically fight a pit of actual snakes.

Then they go to a military base and enter another den of snakes where they have to take on all of these generals and all of these people that had worked with Eda and Steve in order to wipe Ari's influence out of the American military.

Okay, so Perez is doing this thing where he is I'm gonna use mirror again.

He's holding the mirror up to nature.

He's telling us by the extreme examples of what they're doing with these monsters in the mythological world.

And then they come back to the human world and they do the same thing and the human world and that happens again and again and again and again throughout the Bronze Age.

Okay, Diana defeats Aris, and her Bronze Age adventures have seemingly come full circle.

I mean, you know, once Wonder Woman has defeated Uncle Grandpa.

Where else is she gonna go if she's not going to immediately join the Justice League.

Her Bronze Age sort of Dark age.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay, well I went to the I have a question for you as you're fine.

Yeah, defeating Aries end I quote canceled oblivion.

So what else could there, you know, possibly be heard of?

She defeated Aries.

That's usually a wonder Woman's story ends when she defeats Aries.

Well, in this era of wonder Woman's storytelling, we started with a retcon and a rebirth.

Okay, I said, We're gonna have a big theme of rebirth throughout this, so why not end with another retcon and another rebirth?

Uh?

This rebirth is a bit more literal than you might be expecting.

Fighting Aries and taking him down and protecting both the human world and her family back on Themiscira almost destroys Diana.

She's on the brink of death, so they take her back to Themiscira to that special little island that they have just off the coast where they put everybody to convalesce.

Uh.

Sometimes there's a purple ray there in the Golden Age.

So she's there convalescing.

They're not sure if she is gonna make it, but she does, of course, because it's comics.

Nobody dies in comics, and when she recovers, she's given magical winged sandals from Athena weirdly, instead of from Hermi.

I was gonna say, what didn't be from her?

You would think no, but hermis gave her the last so earlier.

That's weird.

So now she gets wings sand from a feed.

Yeah, yeah, George, what's going on here?

Why did you call the messenger of the seas Hems instead of trying.

He was doing he was doing three things at once.

He didn't he was He was probably waiting on half a shirt from his wife.

He just had to make the book, just had to come out.

So he's just writing with only half a shirt the book.

The book had to come out.

Though his wife was sewing the other half of a sleeve, it wasn't there yet.

And what's important about the magical winged Sandals is that they will allow her to continue going back and forth from Themiscirra to the human world.

She can pass through the shield that's protecting it because she did such a good job saving both of them.

At the same time, she could continue to be the champion and guardian of both.

She doesn't have to be one or the other, which again sort of continues his feminist theme of like you can do both.

You can integrate both things into your life.

You don't have to choose.

I really really like this beat.

There there is again a funny little subplot toward the end where we get another Princess Diana mix up and.

The end and they were like, but this is the height she was at the height of her popularity.

Princess too.

This is right pre you know, it's right around the time of the divorce, the revenge dress.

Like everyone is really, everyone's really, she has mentioned several times throughout this series.

The end of this age includes the introduction of an archaeologist named Barbara Minerva Jason.

Who's Barbara Minerva?

Cheetah?

Where are we in the real timeline?

Here we are in nineteen ninety right now.

Okay, so we're well into the Dark Age?

Actually, okay, interesting.

All right, So again this is considered to be the end of this era, Barbara Minerva, and this is why the introduction of Cheetah.

So this is the first introduction of Barbara Minerva as Cheetah.

We've had two cheetahs previous.

Oh they had different names.

Yes, okay, So we do have an episode on this episode three forty nine all about Cheetah Barbara Minerva would go on to become the Cheetah, the most iconic Cheetah, but there were two different women called Cheetah.

We cover them both really briefly in our Cheetah episode.

It's her introduction and then what eventually would lead to her establishment as this foe for wonder What this is considered to be her demarcation.

Okay, she expressed, this is an archaeological interest in Wonder Woman's lasso.

She's like, Oh, that's interesting.

I would like to have that.

Yeah, I heard you got it from Hermes, even though it feels like it should come from Artemis.

Yeah, exactly.

It's pretty significant because it introduces yeah, like I said, this version of Cheetah into d C comics history, and from this point forward pretty much establishes her as a top tier Wonder Woman villain, because up to this point it had either been Aarris Yes, who we've spent a lot of this episode talking about, or Circe, who Jason mentioned earlier.

It gives Wonder Woman for the first time a human villain who's based on Earth who she basically can't just you know, lasso into oblivion and call a day, which is what happens when she comes face to face with every other human threat.

Sure, and that is your Bronze Age episode on wonder Woman.

Okay, if you want to read more about this, if you wait, we got to I need a final ask here.

Oh well the final ask is okay, yeah, go for come we doing?

You want to regret?

Okay?

Yeah, I haven't.

I have questions?

Sure, yeah.

So, and I'm assuming this is for the listeners as well, So I'm going to ask on the behalf of the listeners.

So, if you were to do another wonder Woman, is is it going to be wonder Woman.

It's going to be wonder Woman in the Dark Age.

But it just won't It'll start in like nineteen ninety one.

Yeah, so it'll yeah, so it will take up with basically this what happens once Barbara ba Nerve is introduced.

I know it's muddy, Yeah, I understand it.

And again it's because this era in the late seventies, when Nubia was introduced.

They basically like put Diana on the sidelines and we're like, it's all Nubia.

So there are two schools of thought about whether that story is more Silver Age or more Bronze Age because it straddles a lot of the political issues that were present in the nineteen seventies, and again because Wonder Woman doesn't have as clear demarcations.

The school of thought that I chose to go with was that Nubia belongs with the stories from the seventies, okay, And then if you follow that, it's that the George Peyres run is the Bronze Age, and then the Dark Age picks up with Cheetah going forward.

And again it's messy because I could have talked to you about Nubia, but that would have been half the episode, and then we would have rebooted halfway through, okay, And I thought this was clearer, sure, And I thought this encapsulates under the type of storytelling asks where the next Wonder Woman comes up.

I'm just like, where where are we going to be?

Like what?

What?

What of here?

You we're going to because like, yeah, it's only going to be It's it's basically the next one is going to be just Wonder Woman in the nineties.

Yes, but I will say from that point forward from a Wonder Woman point of view, and I look, I assume when we do teen Titans, we're going to get into a similar messy era because of the Wolfman Perez run.

Yeah, because it also doesn't follow as cleanly the demarcations at Batman and Superman does.

But once you get from the nineties forward, because of brand integrations and because of events and dare I say event fatigue.

Every time there's a demarcation between the Dark Ages and the Digital Age, everybody gets a reboot.

So it's much cleaner from this point forward.

And this is I think applying these formats to smaller characters, it gets messier.

It just is what it is.

So we all do the Dark Age.

But yes, as you say, it will basically be wonder Woman in the nineties, because I can't remember off the top of my head what the demarcation is of the Dark Age where we end it.

Recommend it's been so long since we did it.

Tell us some reading.

I think you have some reading for us, Yes, recommended reading where if you want to read more about Wonder Woman in the Bronze Age, you go to Geeki History lesson dot com slash recommended reading.

You pick up any of these volumes of your choice.

Luckily, DC Comics put together some really, really beautiful collections of the George Perez Wonder Woman.

There's five volumes.

They're all on there.

Start at the beginning, read it all the way through to the end.

It's one of our most straightforward recommended readings of all time.

Next, why don't we roll into the honor roll?

Jason, would you tell me what that is?

Let's if you go over to Apple podcast and give us a five star review on Apple Podcasts.

We'll shout out your review on the air no matter what.

You're right.

This review comes from Uko Matt, who says, amazing podcast.

The first episode of GHL I ever heard was the Digimon one, and as a huge Digimon lover, it was neat to see them go into detail of the history of it and since then I've been hooked on the podcast, Uko Matt, I also love Digimon.

So thank you so much for the digital love with your Apple podcast review.

Welcome into the Teacher's Lounge.

And if you want more from Geek History Lesson, you can find us, of course, all over social media at geek History Lesson.

Okay, I'm gonna write that down, I don't remember.

Thank you so much the name of the podcast super easy to find Jason, Where can we find you?

Uh.

You can find me on Blue Sky at Jason Inman for the first time ever.

And you can find me on threads and Instagram at Jollin.

Where are you about, I'm everywhere at Ashley V.

Robinson cool, And now it's time for what have we learned today?

I know we need a sound effect for that.

Uh, command to actually Robinson come on to a Robinson comment command or I mean sort guard booth the front?

Good to actually Robinson guard booth to the front.

Go to Robinson?

Hello, how can I help you over?

To know you were?

Don't the military?

So I don't have to follow that.

It's a non military radio code?

Over?

This is a podcast looks not a radio close enough over?

Nope, I believe it's time for or what have we learned?

What's that over?

It's why we have to reply it?

Or okay, great?

What have we learned today?

Today?

We have learned that the comic book ages are liquid and meaningless.

Today we have learned that Wonder Woman's mythological roots will always shine through and present her most interesting stories.

And today we have learned that Steve Trevor is an old man.

I think you know the thing that I am always constant reminded by comic books.

The thing that I learned from this podcast is that all comic books are kind of meaningless, and you just need to take what you love and what you find enjoyable from them, and that's all.

That's all that matters.

What makes you happy, makes you happy, and screw the rest.

I think we've also learned that even amongst the greatest runs in all of comic book history.

It always gets a little bit confused, some real dopies.

Thus it's okay, Yeah, that's okay, And we love them anyway, We love them through it, and we love you for listening.

Yeah, we love you.

So thanks for listening to Geaks the Lesson.

I'm Jason in then I'm Ashley Robinson and Bronze Age.

Ashley, will you please close out this podcast?

Last is now dismissed.