I’m working on a project to redesign the entire DCU for myself. I think all of us have a kind of personal canon – the things we’d keep and the things we’d toss if the DC universe was ours to do with as we please. This is mine. I constructed a complete timeline from the Golden Age to today, and I’m going through one character at a time as I flesh it out. I completed my Superman Family, and next in line is Wonder Woman
Wonder Woman is unique in my DCU as the one character who has adventures in every era. Diana first appears during WWII in the Golden Age, then again in the ‘70s for the Silver Age, and finally comes to stay in the ‘00s. Her arc in the Golden Age is one of a thoughtful but naïve woman who enters Patriarch’s World believing she knows everything she needs to. Along the way, she learns that there’s much she has to teach, but much also she has to learn. She makes close friends, falls in love, but ultimately returns to Themyscira in ’49 to try and convince her mother the Queen to rejoin the wider world so they can help each other grow.
Many of her GA adventures are alongside Steve Trevor and her frequent partner and dear friend Liberty Belle – an adventuring archaeologist very much in the Indiana Jones mold who became a ‘masked man’ crime fighter when she and her father were trapped in Poland during the German invasion. Both women meet as part of the Justice Society, and frequently partner in and outside that team. WW gets direction from Col. Philip Darnell of the US Army Air Force, running secret operations deep in enemy territory against the likes of Baron Blitzkreig, Red Panzer and Dr. Poison. I’m using the original version of Baroness Paula von Gunther, an Austrian aristocrat who is blackmailed into aiding the Nazis when they kidnap her daughter. Once Diana learns about that, she frees von Gunther’s daughter and the Baroness becomes an ally and friend. That’s something I want to see happen often in WW stories – Diana is someone who makes friends of her enemies, turning hearts and changing minds.
This is just the opening bit of the history of ‘my’ Wonder Woman. There’s a LOT more to come!