Entertainment Weekly broke the news today that Wonder Woman and Superman are going to get together in Justice League #12, and apparently they’re going to be an item for a while. This is, obviously, a very stupid idea. I have a few thoughts:
1) Nobody is surprised by this.
Once DC announced that Superman and Lois wouldn’t be married in the New 52, we all knew this was coming. There were numerous articles written about it. Bleeding Cool had it on good authority it was going to happen. No one is bowled over by this “big news”. It’s like Before Watchmen all over again: The only thing people are surprised about is that DC is actually stupid enough to do it.
2) Come on, Jim Lee.
The Entertainment Weekly article talks about Jim Lee’s process in creating the cover, and says:
For the smooch featured on the comic’s cover, artist Jim Lee took inspiration from Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss and Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day in Times Square photograph.
Well that all sounds very fancy, right? Let’s take a look at both images:
Yeah, I can sort of see it. Way to be a true artiste, Jim Lee. Blending the traditional art world with iconic Americana is just terribly classy. Hey, comic books aren’t just for kids anymore!! Jim Lee’s working on a whole other level here with his varied influences and blending of styles.
Except for that his biggest influence seems to be a splash page he did of Superman and Lois Lane (remember her?) in Superman #212 in 2005. If I may:
So yeah, Klimt? Really? It sort of looks like he traced a piece he did seven years ago and then tweaked it some.
3) Why do they hate Lois?
Lois has been sidelined like crazy in the New 52, which is ridiculous since she’s the longest running regular female character in the history of the company. Plus she’s AWESOME. And the Superman/Lois/Clark love triangle is one of the most famous love triangles of all time. There’s SO much you can do with that. Seeing as a lot of the folks at DC are only capable of using female characters as love interests lately, this Wonder Woman hook-up could be bad news for having more Lois any time soon. Speaking of which:
4) Wonder Woman’s the ONLY girl in the Justice League, so OF COURSE she’s got to hook up with somebody.
Duh. That’s what female characters are for. She can’t just be a kick ass superhero who busts up the bad guys like, you know, the rest of the Justice League. Nope, she’s a girl and she has feelings. First it was her complicated relationship with Steve Trevor. Will they? Won’t they? Did they? So intriguing. And now, she’s onto another guy with Superman. Maybe after this she can move onto Batman. Or the Flash!! Think of the hilarious jokes they could make about the Flash being quick on the draw, if you know what I mean. It would be comedy gold. But yeah, the only girl just HAS to have a romance on the go. It’s the rules.
5) They really don’t make sense as a couple.
Again from the EW article, here’s what it says about how Wonder Woman and Superman will be a good couple:
The creative team believes the heroes are right for each other. She’s a mythic Amazonian warrior; he’s a veritable demigod. Both have huge hearts for mankind, yet also feel estranged from humanity. Relationships with civilians are tricky for caped crusaders, even liabilities. Usually, they choose to mask their full, true identities and hide their secret, high-risk do-gooding from their lovers to protect them. At least together, Superman and Wonder Woman can be themselves.
Now, we all love the Superman speech in Kill Bill 2, but the fact of the matter is it’s not right. Superman is arguably the most human member of the Justice League. Yeah, he’s got epic powers and such, but he was raised as Clark Kent, has down home, mid-western values, and is generally a pretty together guy. He likes being Clark too… I don’t think he’s “estranged from humanity” at all. So yeah, I completely disagree with how two of DC’s top executives think of Superman.
Also, this reminds me of that South Park episode where a black girl moves to town and Cartman automatically tries to set her up with Token, the only black kid in the school. Just because they have some surface level things in common (skin colour, super powers) doesn’t mean they should pair up. In fact, pairing up Wonder Woman and Superman is REALLY lazy. It’s so obvious and boring.
6) Do Johns and Lee even read Wonder Woman?
You know, that comic book that’s WAY better than theirs? Do you really think punk rock loving, rebel against the gods Wonder Woman is going to go out with a square like Superman?
7) Once you do it, it’s there forever.
They’re going to break up at some point, obviously. Maybe that’s what’ll start the Trinity War even. But yeah, this relationship will now ALWAYS be part of their history, making comics awkward and annoying FOREVER. It’s going to be post-breakup Ross and Rachel for ALL of time, or until they get mindwiped in one of those moronic ways we all find so irksome.
To sum up, this is stupid. There’s really no need for it, I can’t fathom any interesting stories that could come of it, and it’s basically a disservice to everyone involved, characterwise. It’s just lame storytelling and, even worse, gimmick storytelling. Though maybe Wonder Woman can get a sweet spin-off series now… Superman’s Girl Friend, Wonder Woman perhaps? If you ever wanted to know who Wonder Woman would have to screw to get a second series like EVERY other major DC hero, we may have found the answer.
Anyway, STUPID. Get it together, DC. You have the BEST characters in the world. Do something interesting with them for a change.
TIM HANLEY 
If I could give you all the high fives I want to give you over this post my hand would fall off. I don’t want to be anti romance/sex as that’s fun and part of life and thus makes sense to be part of comics… but in trying so hard to be new they actually fail to see that it’s just more of the same old.
Let’s just go for one big high five then and save your hand 🙂 I totally agree… romance and sex are lots of fun and can make for great comics, but there’s nothing worse than when it’s down lamely, pointlessly, and with a press release.
I think there are just too many sexist pigs at DC — Jim Lee being one of the more obvious ones (not that that makes him a bad person in other ways, but my God he has a record of sexism) — for them to be willing to give Wonder Woman a decent chance.
Gail Simone was doing a very respectable run and beginning to really find her footing on the book (after tying up a whole lot of junk left over by previous writers), when Jim Lee pulled her off Wonder Woman in order to assign JMS to write a totally inappropriate storyline — which JMS walked out of after two issues, leaving another writer to clean up the mess. Obviously ridership tanked. It always does when you pull shit like that. I have the Gail Simone run next to my 1940s run and my 1980s post-Crisis run… both of which benefitted from *long* runs with a single writer who “got it”.
Wonder Woman is *really easy to get right* — she’s the mythological goddess Artemis, basically, though somewhat friendlier, and she’s come to show “man’s world” a better way to live — but sexist pigs simply will not write her right. So this sort of editorial interference, removing any writer who’s writing it right, isn’t going to stop until someone more enlightened is running DC. It was in some ways more excusable during the generally-more-sexist 1950s/1960s/1970s; it’s embarassing now.
It’s even more impressively sad that Lee and Johns can’t get Superman right. Superman is an American farm boy who happens to have superpowers, and uses them to beat up rich, powerful criminals who think they’re entitled to stomp on other people. It’s pretty simple justice-fantasy-for-the-99%, it’s obvious, it’s easy to write, the public mood is *demanding* it right now, but the comics fanboys running DC just can’t see it.
If the original Siegel & Shuster punching-out-crooked-businessmen Superman plots were published as “brand new” stories right now, during the Second Great Depression — even without the Superman branding they’d probably be a big hit.
I think part of the source of the inability to write Superman and Wonder Woman correctly (well, heck, inability to write golden-age-style Green Lantern, Flash, Captain Marvel too, really) is the “Marvel envy problem” — too many writers want their heroes to be angsty and conflicted, which is fine for Marvel’s 1960s characters, but all wrong for the larger-than-life archetypical characters of DC’s 1930s/1940s fantasies.
Superman and Wonder Woman are supposed to be *role models*, more perfect than reality. Wonder Woman is a very subversive role model, which is probably why the conservatives running DC keep being unwilling to write her correctly.
As you can see, I’ve been ticked off about this for a while myself. Hope you appreciated the rant. 🙂
You make an excellent point about Marvel envy. Angsty and conflicted doesn’t work well in the DC universe, especially with the big heroes. In Teen Titans and books like that I suppose it might fit, but with Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman it just feels very out of place. They don’t need to create drama and tension and such by having Wonder Woman and Superman hooking up… saving the world and fighting bad guys is more than enough dramatic fodder I’d think.
There’s actually another difficulty writing Wonder Woman which I think people have been unwilling to say out loud. During the 40s, Wonder Woman could accurately claim that the United States was on the side of good — pushing the world more in the direction of her ideal world, becoming less sexist, more democratic, more peaceful, etc. So she could take up a costume of the US and come to help us.
Nowadays the US is a rogue state which engages in wars of aggression. Iraq comes to mind. If Wonder Woman left Themiscyra in 2012, she might be supporting the government of Bolivia or Sweden, but certainly not joining the army in the US. Unfortunately, writing an honest script which admits this openly would cause too much political trouble (due to know-nothing US boosterism) for DC to be willing to do it.
My first response was, “If DC is so desperate for storylines, I have some fanfiction over here to sell them.”
Second response was, WHY IS SHE TYING HIM UP OK WHO READ 50 SHADES OF GREY OVER THERE STOP THAT.
My third response was a sigh of relief that DC has canceled every book I care about in the last year so I don’t give them money any more.
Wonder Woman was into tying people up WAY before 50 Shades of Grey made it cool… that’s the one, small thing about the cover that I actually like. But yeah, it sort of does feel like fanfiction, eh? It’s bizarre.
Amen. I hope you don’t mind that I’m tweeting this post. @megabraincomics
With all the negative, I thought it only fair to way in on the other side. I personally never did like Lois Lane, and always felt Superman was wasting his time. The unavoidable reason would be that he is obviously going to out live her.
Conversely, I believe Wonder Woman would be a good match for superman. A good writer will make the relationship work, and provide for decent story lines.
I always found it interesting that they didn’t write Lois in a realistic manner.
Sometimes if you want to succeed you have to set aside your old fans, and strive for new ones. Keeping the minority happy is nice, but doesn’t always provide for financial gain.
The fact that Clark and Lois are together despite all their differences and all the obstacles in their way is one of the reasons their romance in so heartfelt and memorable. It’s quite striking that the biggest reason people give for wanting the Clark/Diana pairing is the idea that it “makes sense”. But that’s the problem. Love does not make sense. Love is not rational, logical, practical, or convenient. There are no great romances that can be described in those terms. This pairing will fall apart soon enough. But in the meantime, it will do considerable harm to Clark, Lois, and especially Diana.
Greg rucka, king of great heroes relationship must want to quit his job at DC.
Thanks a ton for spending some time to compose “Wonder Woman
And Superman Are A Couple Now OR Well, This Is Stupid STRAITENED CIRCUMSTANCES: Tim Hanley on Wonder Woman and
Women in Comics”. Thanks once more ,Mari
Sorry-but totally disagree -Wonder Woman and superman deserve to be together-and it’s more stupid to restart a whole series again with Rebirth just to sell more comics for people like you who can’t accept thinking outside the box. Sad.