“fuckety fuck fuck, what the fuck” hahaha. <3 Sue

I wouldn’t say that everyone is overreacting to the idiotic “new origin” of Wonder Woman, because it is, as you point out, idiotic, but on the other hand, you’re all purchasing it. I have to wonder about your (Kelly’s, that is) boycott of a comic you have actually started enjoying – Batgirl – but yet you keep buying Wonder Woman. You can “vote with your dollar” as much as anyone – I started boycotting Mark Millar not because he’s a shitty writer but for whole other reasons – but if you’re going to boycott all the Bat-books because of DC’s treatment of Cass Cain even though you like some of them (and you don’t include Batwoman in that, I notice), why on earth are you buying Wonder Woman? I get that you want to support a book with a prominent woman in it, but if it’s absolutely awful and you keep buying it, DC will think you enjoy it, confound it! Don’t let them think people actually support what they’re doing!

Yeah, I’m a WW fan from way back (way back to the ’70s, anyway), but post-Simone WW has become a “wait till the trade hits the public library” thing for me.

I confess I’m not reading Wonder Woman, but this nonetheless sounds to me like something that’ll soon enough be quietly tossed into the dustbin of history. Rather like Spider-Man: Chapter One.

Hell, odds are all of these changes will be reverted by the end of the storyline anyway.

I listened to the past 10 episodes over a week and you guys are getting better each week. I’m looking forward to the mauling the David E Kelly Wonder Woman script is bound to get soon

@ross I could have easily thrown in a few more in XD
@annoyed grunt Thanks, I actually mauled it a few weeks ago on Bleeding Cool

My wife listened to this with me on the way to work this morning. After hearing that a leg has been knocked out of the Trinity, and Wonder Woman has been an independent feminist icon for 70 years and a lot of the other stuff, she said “What’s the big deal? It’s just a story.”

I think, as much as it’s right to get pissed off about this kind of stuff, Wonder Woman’s legacy is strong enough that when her origin returns, few people will remember this episode.

I do like your suggestions for the dream sequence retcon and other humorous reactions to the issue. Tragedy plus time equals comedy, indeed!

@ross: I’m shocked that quote isn’t from me…but Sue really brought it this week! XD

@Greg: Hmm. I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. Is the question, if I’m taking a stand on voting with my dollars by not buying some Bat books that I DO actually like, then why not vote with my dollars on a Wonder Woman run I don’t like? If so then the answer is two…maybe three-fold.

1) Though I was not excited about JMS’ reboot, I was going to at least give it a try before writing it off, and I figured I owed it a couple/few issues before saying no to it – especially as WW is a favorite character and book of mine.
2) by the time we got a few issues in all hell had broken loose and JMS was leaving and Hester was coming on…so I figured I owed it a couple issues more to see if Hester could fix it. So that about brings us up to speed the current issue.
3) Is just the same issue I have as a reviewer with dropping books in general – its hard to do because I feel compelled to read and know what’s going on – especially in big books. This is particularly true of a book like Wonder Woman, that is really the only long running headlining female book. That makes it particularly hard for me not to read it – whether I’m going to love it and enjoy it and rave about it, or going to hate it and be critical of it.

I didn’t want to get into it in the cast and have it overtake our other topics…but here’s an expansion on my reasoning (and rationalization) about what books to drop and why: http://1979semifinalist.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/panel-of-the-week-2911/

I’m sure it’s flawed and emotional reasoning – as I feel emotional about the whole damn thing, but it might explain a little bit.

@buttler: You’re not wrong.

@Michael P: It’s possible. There are a lot of rumblings though – perhaps just to keep people buying this arc so that it doesn’t feel like a COMPLETE waste of time? – that what emerges from this will be a “new modified origin blah blah blah”. We’ll see.

@Annoyed Grunt: Thanks so much! You can see Sue’s analysis of the Wonder Woman tv pilot already on Bleeding Cool: http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/02/02/dc-women-kicking-ass-on-wonder-woman-tv-pilot-script/

@joshschr: Hmm. Does your wife read comics? Or Wonder Woman comics? I’m not trying to be jerky because “it’s just a story” is a fine reaction to this kind of thing and a reaction I certainly expect of people who don’t read comics especially…but as fans of comics, who review them and podcast about them and write comments on boards…wouldn’t “It’s just a story” apply to all of this and mean we should all just go about more important non-comics related business? It’s an argument I have to admit that doesn’t appeal to me. It’s ALL “just a story”…right?

Kelly: Those make sense, and I certainly understand the first two reasons. I would think that as it was clear Hester was coming in on JMS’s plots, you might be a bit less forgiving, but I understand your reasoning.

I often feel the pull to “know what’s going on,” but it seems like the Big Two really count on that to keep readers hooked. From your point of view, I certainly get that you want to support Wonder Woman, but do you have a line? Will you read Wonder Woman no matter what? It’s not as personal to me as it is to you given your stand about comics in general, but when comics were cheaper, I read a lot more of the comics that told me what was going on in the general universe. I honestly can’t afford that anymore. Every once in a while I get curious about it (like when I was reading every DC book in January, because they do reference other ongoing events, however obliquely), but man! that’s a good chunk of change!

My wife has read all of Y:The Last Man and Identity Crisis and maybe a couple random issues of other books I thought she’d enjoy. Her only other major investment in the area is probably sitting through a lot of Batman: TAS, Superman: TAS and JLA and JLU. So she’s probably gotten as much exposure to Wonder Woman from seeing her on the covers to comics I have lying around as she has actually seeing Wonder Woman in action inside comics.

However, I thought she’d been around comics enough (my brother and I gab on endlessly when we meet) and heard enough of your arguments to understand where you were coming from. It was an odd reaction after listening to you and Sue and Maddy so passionately lay out the problem. I had to boot her out at her office or I might have asked her more what she meant or what she thought of Wonder Woman. Maybe tonight.

This is the first time I listened to your podcast, mostly because of the line ross quoted. We both laughed when we heard that. Not that it was meant to be funny at the time, but after everything that came before it, it was unexpected.

As far as it being “just a story”, I don’t know if she meant it’s just ONE story, or it is just “an imaginary story… aren’t they all?” kind of thing. I haven’t read the whole issue, just the four panels or so that are causing the discussion, so I don’t know if it’s a poor story or just poor characterization. My take on what my wife said is that this is just one story and Wonder Woman will show up in dozens of others places being written differently.

Again, you’re right to be up-in-arms over the panels. It is a dumb turn for the character in continuity to have her heroic spark to be ignited by Superman. It’s not who she has ever been. What I’m saying is that even if Hester and JMS went full bore on this trajectory with Diana donning a cape and calling herself Super Woman, that’s not who anyone outside of comics is going to think Wonder Woman is.

Which is probably getting tangential to the discussion on your podcast, but I’m in a sharing mood today.

“I feel compelled to read and know what’s going on – especially in big books.”

Wikipedia is great for this.

To which I’ll add, that’s exactly the way DC (and Marvel) wants you to feel. Their entire marketing strategy is based around cultivating this attitude in the hardcore audience, so that they know they’ll have people buying their comics no matter what they do with them. And as long as that’s true, they’ll feel free to tell all the shitty, self-indulgent stories they like, secure in the knowledge that readers like you will eat it right up regardless, because brand loyalty is more important to you than quality.

So, if it were me (and several years ago, it was), I’d tell them, “Fuck you, I’ll decide what is and isn’t essential reading for me,” and exercise a bit more of my god-given free will. Because the only person making you buy comics you hate is you.

@joshschr It’s rare than my proficiency at swearing turns into anything good but it sounds like it brought you as a listener? I understand your wife’s attitude about Wonder Woman, actually. I’ve had the same reaction to things on TV (I am a soap guru so I live and breathe by the “it’s just a story” concept). What your wife is probably not aware of it is the endless shit that has flowed for Wonder Woman over the past half decade (and even the past few months). The three of us are channeling some of the anger through that as well.

MichaelP, I figured out the game a while ago, but I’m more likely to drop an offending title completely than pick up the few gems in the run. I’m trying to change that attitude, but my lcs was out of batgirl 17 & 18 so that was a setback.

Sue (right?) I was really just curious if that was your whole review or if you first picked off all the low-hanging fruit to support your position and then settled on a series of f-bombs to close your argument. I was happy to see how things turned out.