Wonder Woman
Main article: Publication history of Wonder Woman
Initially, Wonder Woman was an Amazon champion who wins the right to return Steve Trevor – a United States intelligence officer whose plane had crashed on the Amazons’ isolated island homeland – to “Man’s World” and to fight crime and the evil of the Nazis.
During the Silver Age, Wonder Woman’s origin was revamped,along with other characters’. The new origin story increased the character’s Hellenic and mythological roots: receiving the blessing of each deity in her crib, Diana is destined to become “beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, stronger than Hercules, and swifter than Mercury.”
At the end of the 1960s, under the guidance of Mike Sekowsky, Wonder Woman surrendered her powers in order to remain in Man’s World rather than accompany her fellow Amazons to another dimension. Becoming a mod boutique owner, the powerless Diana Prince acquired a Chinese mentor named I Ching. Under I Ching’s guidance, Diana learned martial arts and weapons skills and engaged in adventures that encompassed a variety of genres, from espionage to mythology.
Because of the popularity of the Wonder Woman TV series, the character later returned to her superpowered roots in Justice League of America and to the World War II era in her own title.
Following the 1985 Crisis on Infinite Earths series, George Pérez, Len Wein, and Greg Potter relaunched the character, writing Wonder Woman as an emissary and ambassador from Themyscira to Patriarch’s World, charged with the mission of bringing peace to the outside world.
In July 2010 (Issue #600) DC Comics replaced the character’s iconic stars-and-stripes singlet with a blue jacket, red and gold top and dark pants, retaining only her tiara and lasso.
Originally, Wonder Woman owed her abilities to the goddess Aphrodite creating Amazons superior to men, with Diana being the best of their kind.
The Golden Age Wonder Woman was later updated by Marston to be able to will a tremendous amount of brain energy into her muscles and limbs because of her Amazon training, endowing her with extraordinary strength and speed. According to her first appearance, she is stronger and more agile than a hundred of the best human athletes. In Sensation #6, she is able to tear a steel door off its hinges. In one of her earliest appearances, she is shown running easily at 80 mph. In the same comic, she jumps from a building and lands on the balls of her feet. She can even type at a rate of over 160 words a minute during a test given to her. It was implied, and ultimately confirmed, that any woman who underwent Amazon training would gain superhuman strength. The TV series took up this notion,[14] and in the first episode of Super Friends, Diana states to Aquaman “… the only thing that can surpass super strength is the power of the brain”. In early Wonder Woman stories, Amazon training involves strengthening this ability using pure mental energy.
Her powers would be removed in accordance with “Aphrodite’s Law” if she allowed herself to be bound or chained by a male. In the television series, her magic belt allowed her to retain her powers when she was not on Paradise Island; removing it weakened her.
With the inclusion of Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot in Diana’s back-story, writers provided new explanations of her powers; the character became capable of feats which her sister Amazons could not equal. Wonder Woman Volume One #105 reveals that Diana was formed from clay by the Queen of the Amazons and was imbued with the attributes of the Greek and Roman gods by Athena – “beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, swifter than Mercury, and stronger than Hercules.”[18] Wonder Woman’s Amazon training also gave her limited telepathy, profound scientific knowledge, and the ability to speak every language known to man and beyond. She was even fluent in caveman and Martian.
Although Wonder Woman’s mythos was returned to its original interpretation between 1966 and 1967, new abilities were added: super breath, the ability to blow jet streams or transform water into snow, which apparently came from Hercules; ventriloquism; imperviousness to extremes of heat and cold; the ability to ride the air currents as if flying, even sensing air updrafts with her fingers; telepathy, including the ability to project images; microscopic vision; the ability to vibrate into another dimension; the ability to bestow wisdom to other beings; the ability to throw her tiara with such skill it could stop bullets; and others, according to the Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes, Volume Two (1976).
Depending on the writer, Diana’s invulnerability and power varied greatly according to the needs of the story. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, Robert Kanigher, for example, portrayed Wonder Woman as being so strong that she, after standing atop her hovering plane and lassoing it with her magic lasso, was able to effortlessly lift Themyscira out of the way of an approaching tsunami using just one hand. She was even able to make a coin into a bridge with her strength, or drill through a mountain within seconds, as well as hurl spaceships with enough accuracy she could bowl over a whole fleet. Kanigher showed Wonder Woman as a preteen able to lift whales, push a ship away from a whirlpool, and also as a toddler able to blow so hard on her birthday cake that she sent it into orbit.
In the Silver and Bronze ages of comics, Wonder Woman was able to further increase her strength. She was unable to remove her bracelets without going insane. In times of great need, however, she would do just that, in order to temporarily augment her power tenfold. Since she would become a threat to friend and foe alike, she would use Amazonian berserker rage only as a weapon of last resort.
Before Crisis On Infinite Earths there were two Wonder Women: the first one lived on Earth-Two; the second, on Earth-One. The first canonical appearance of the Earth-One Wonder Woman is Wonder Woman vol. 1 #80. Their first published meeting is Justice League of America vol. 1 #100; however, their earliest meeting within the DC continuity is Wonder Woman vol. 1 #228, which takes place in 1943, prior to the events of the Justice League of America story.
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