Joan Rivers, eat your mechanical heart out. A woman's never looked so good at 600.
DC Comics released Wonder Woman #600 this week, but it wasn't the landmark issue that took fanboys and the 'net by storm. It was her new look, seen below.
Since her first appearance in 1941, Wonder Woman's look has been relatively unchanged. The tiara. The American flag hotpants. The boots. The, er, breast plate. It's a look which defined the character — as well as actress Lynda Carter, who incidentally has a foreword in the 600th issue, crediting Wonder Woman as "the goddess within us all."
Well, even goddesses need makeovers.
"There's nothing more daunting than re-designing an icon, but what was refreshing and novel in [new Wonder Woman writer] Joe Straczynski's directive to be bold in our choices was that we were starting with no preconceptions," DC's c0-publisher and redesign artist Jim Lee released. "This was no mere tweaking, no change of half-measures like haircuts or alterations of color schemes. We decided to go for broke, take no prisoners, and let me tell you — it was difficult.
"Wonder Woman's costume is so infused with our understanding of the identity of the character," Lee continued, "that it took … numerous back and forths 'til we broke down what existed, got back metaphorically to the clay from which Wonder Woman started and something new started to form."
The new outfit, not quite as jaw-dropping or arguably as likely to turn boys into men, matches the bold new direction Babylon 5 creator Straczynski will be taking the character in. "Suppose you woke up one morning, or turned a corner, and suddenly the life you had been leading up to that moment…was not the life you were leading," Straczynski discussed the series with DC's Vice President of Publicity David Hyde. "Suppose someone went back in time and changed one thing, and it changed your life to the point that you had little or no memory of what life had been like before the change happened. What would you do to get it back? Should you get it back? Who did it? And maybe more important… why did they do it?"
"That," the writer continued, "is the question faced by Diana starting in issue 600."
This article appears in Jul 1-7, 2010.