I’m going to change it up a bit this week and instead of choosing a new comic as my pick of the week, I’m going to go back to the year 1992 and choose a series of comics.
Thus, this week I’m choosing a storyline within the William Messner-Loebs run of Wonder Woman. Bill took over from George Perez, who had relaunched the series and had a very epic run. So as you can imagine those were some pretty big shoes to fill.
Whereas Perez focused on the mythological aspects of Wonder Woman, Messner-Loebs decided to make it more action focused, and quickly took her into outer space. And I have to say it was fantastisch, or as we Germans might say, funtastisch (yes us Germans can be clever from time to time.)
Wonder Woman #66-71 was a six-part storyline that finds our Wonder Woman launching to outer space to rescue a cosmonaut, who is then betrayed and teleported somewhere in deep space, and then her and the cosmonaut find themselves on a prison planet inhabited by slaves who are all female. This prison planet is run and guarded by a nasty alien species whose empire stretches throughout the galaxy and consist of only males. Wonder Woman leads an uprising and with her band of space pirates, sets on taking down the empire once and for all.
It was epic and I interpreted it as an interesting retelling of the Wonder Woman origin, with a focus on the Amazons. Basically Loebs took this tale out of Themyscira and made it galactic. And the whole thing was drawn by Paris Cullins, who depicted a very muscular Wonder Woman that was definitely a cry departure from how George Perez and Jill Thompson drew her previously.
Reading some of the letters pages in these issues, this was quite controversial. But it does hold up and you need to hunt down these issues. I love this storyline so much and really enjoyed the art. I even did a little cosplay of the change in uniform that Cullins designed.
Hunt them down if you can, and if not, well that’s your loss isn’t it?
Bis bald,
Franka
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