CSBG Archive
I Love Ya But You’re Strange – That Time Wonder Woman Wanted to Marry a Monster
Every day this August I’ll be spotlighting strange but ultimately endearing comic stories, one a day (basically, we’re talking lots and lots of Silver Age comic books). Here is the archive of past installments of this feature.
Today we look at a bizarre issue where Wonder Woman almost marries a monster – for serious! It was written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito.
The opening of the issue is great. First off, I love that this is an accurate summation of the status quo of the book at the time. Freakin’ Bird-Man and Merman. Boy, do I hate Bird-Man and Merman. On top of that, Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot are at the wedding with no explanation! And, of course, the absurdity of the whole page as a whole…
This leads to a three-page sequence that is just awesomely absurd…
She MISSED THE PLANE!!! How AWESOME is that?!?
Later in the issue, stupid Bird-Man distracts Wonder Woman and she crashes into the ocean. It’s all good, though, because WONDER WOMAN HAS GILLS, PEOPLE!!!
Then Merman gives her some crap, too, and Wonder Woman is in quite a mood when she comes across a fantastical flying island and in it, a monster. He is so hideous that he gets not one, not two but the whole trinity of Wonder Woman exclamations!!!
Now you know the best way to get to Diana’s heart, because she is now basically obsessed with the guy.
She comes after him again and they fight and he knocks the castle down…
Surprisingly, the best way to get Wonder Woman to marry you is for him to dare her to do it. She agrees.
At the wedding, though, the monster thinks she is doing it out of pity and runs away. And then, as often happens every day in the world, a Sphinx monster attacks (this has nothing to do with anything in the plot of the issue – it literally just shows up out of nowhere)
We learn that the guy becomes handsome when he acts nicely and becomes a monster when he acts like a jerk. Ultimately, he decides he prefers to be alone. As the issue ends with Wonder Woman in tears, she dreams of ways to come up with recipes that would win him over (as the key to a man’s heart is his stomach – angel in the kitchen and all that).
What did you find most disturbing of the panels I showed you?
16 Comments
The Crazed Spruce
August 28, 2011 at 5:00 am
Oh, sweet bajeezus!
Your icon of feminism, ladies and gentlemen….
chad
August 28, 2011 at 12:37 pm
omg can not believe this story for wonder woman was so blinded by love for the creature he even let her get nasty even pushing her off a cliff omg. not to mention wonder tot and wonder girl are suppose to be wonder woman at earlier ages.
Dominic
August 28, 2011 at 12:48 pm
If you totally suspend all disbelief, don’t question the illogicalities, coincidences or sheer crazy parts of this story it still makes utterly no sense. I declare this my favourite Wonder Woman forever.
Also, Birdman’s legs are freaking me out. You so know he’s ending up as dinner one day.
Jacob T. Levy
August 28, 2011 at 6:37 pm
Read this after reading the “Kanigher fires the supporting cast” post, and it makes me that much happier that Kanigher fired the supporting cast.
Dean
August 28, 2011 at 6:52 pm
What disturbs me is the sight of Merman balancing on his tail. How the hell does that work?
buttler
August 28, 2011 at 8:26 pm
I love everything about these pages. Holy crap. I’d say I love Steve’s speech the best, but I dunno… I mean, GILLS! It’s really hard to beat the gills.
IAM FeAR
September 4, 2011 at 7:47 pm
This is some weird crap….. but I love the Ross Andru art!
Jim Kosmicki
September 5, 2011 at 11:44 am
this is great. While in grad school, I did a paper on how the then current Perez WW reboot was finally trying to inject some proper feminism into the Wonder Woman concept, and this was the silver-age WW book that I used to show how bad the book got in the post-Marston era. I had to bring the actual comic into show the professor to prove that I hadn’t made it all up. Of course, in the pre-digital world, I mainly used this because it was the best silver age WW book in my collection!!
Logan
February 18, 2012 at 5:17 am
I know it’s bad that out of all that weirdness, the thing that bothered me was……
“If you’re wondering if the Amazon can breathe underwater… The answer is she can’t….. She has Gills”…..
So the answer is She CAN breathe underwater.
“She’s not able to breathe underwater, she just has gills that allow her to breathe underwater”
“If You’re wondering if he can fly…. The answer is he can’t….. He just has wings that make him able to fly”….?
Pete Woodhouse
February 18, 2012 at 5:41 am
Love the King Kong reference just shoehorned in for no apparent reason!
moonsault86
February 25, 2012 at 11:09 pm
Does anyone else think the monster turn into a young George W Bush with a bleach job?
blackphoenix
April 22, 2012 at 5:08 am
I didn’t find it disturbing–I thought it was hilarious!!!!
I love the look of horror on Diana’s face when Hippolyta asks if anyone has objections to the wedding! And was that King Kong DIana yanked away from that blonde on the Statue of Liberty? The Wonder Woman stories of that era were eccentric, funny, and charming–qualities lacking in the modern “Xena-fied” version of Diana’s adventures currently being put out, but that’s a topic for another thread.
Fraser
May 27, 2012 at 9:31 am
I notice this has Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot without any “impossible film” explanation.
SteveAsat
July 6, 2012 at 1:58 am
She’s having, like, the worst day ever. Later that evening Max Lord spills a glass of Pepsi down her back in the JLA cafeteria and the rest is history.
Is that Dumb Bunny fighting Kong?
SteveAsat
July 6, 2012 at 2:07 am
Kanigher gets a lot of flak for setting up loopy situations, but he also has a great sense of detail. “Hey, how come nobody ever notices that Diana’s voice and Wonder Woman’s are exactly the same? Or Clark’s and Superman’s, for that matter? Shouldn’t every superhero’s greatest enemy be blind people? Oh wait, I have Diana going underwater in this story, I’d better explain why she doesn’t drown. Uhhhhh…oh wait, fish don’t drown underwater, they just use gills. Problem solved!”
Okay, great sense of detail but kind of weak in the continuity department.
E. Martín
November 20, 2012 at 9:52 am
This Golden Age Diana can glide, can’t she? So why does the Beast have to grab her at the cliff?