Queen Hippolyta And The Amazons Guest Star In Demon Knights

I haven’t been following Demon Knights closely, but my Twitter pal Randy Homier alerted me that the team visited Themyscira in the latest issue.  In Demon Knights #19, an army of vampires invaded the island, leading to a super cool night battle with the Amazons.  Here’s a shot of Hippolyta battling Fara, an Amazon-turned-vampire:

Demon Knights is set in the past, 1043 AD to be exact, so there was no Diana, but it was cool to see Bernard Chang take on the Amazons again.  I’ve been a fan of Chang since he filled in for Aaron Lopresti on a few issues during Gail Simone’s run on Wonder Woman, and I enjoyed his version of the New 52 Amazons.

Demon Knights #20 is set after the battle, with the team consulting the Amazon’s library for information on their quest to find the Holy Grail.  Lately we’ve been seeing a lot of elements from Azzarello and Chiang’s self-contained Wonder Woman run showing up elsewhere in the New 52, with Orion in Superman and the recent reveal in Teen Titans that Lennox is Wonder Girl’s father.  In Demon Knights, we got references to some of the more unsavory aspects of the New 52 Wonder Woman.

The exiled Amazon, and current Demon Knight, Exoristos explained to her team how the Amazons got news of the world:

This is a reference to the Amazons’ thrice a century raping and murdering of male sailors, which we learned about in Wonder Woman #7 and which I wasn’t at all pleased about.  I even wrote two posts about it pointing out the mythological inaccuracy of the new story.  Exoristos confirmed the brutal nature of the Amazons’ interactions with the sailors, stopping her Amazon sister, Khronika, from telling the rest of the Demon Knights what happens to the men:

I quite enjoyed the Amazons’ guest appearance generally, and Robert Venditti and the whole team are putting out a very cool book.  There’s lots of excitement, the characters are interesting, and the art is strong.  It brings me down that the Amazon’s tri-centennial raping and murdering  is bleeding into other books, though.  I was hoping it would sort of fade away and not get mentioned again.

Still, Demon Knights is a fun book.  Or was; DC just announced yesterday that its last issue ships in August, which is sad to hear.  It’s very different from the rest of the DC titles I follow, and it’s nice to have a change from the same cookie cutter superhero stories.  Plus, Hippolyta fighting vampires!  That’s just good stuff.  You’re not geting that anywhere else.

Wonder Woman #0 Review OR Kind Of Cute On The Surface, But Troubling Below

I’m not entirely sure why this issue didn’t work for me, so this review might be a bit of a jumble.  The Silver Age throwback should’ve been right up my alley!!  They were clearly going for a Robert Kanigher, 1960s Wonder Girl vibe, and man oh man do I know that stuff like the back of my hand.  It’s classic, and sort of terrible, but also fun in its own weird way.  And doing the issue in a throwback style is SUCH a cool idea that really takes advantage of this whole zero issue mandate.  I guess it just didn’t go anywhere interesting for me.  I expected more, maybe.  We’ll dig into it, but first:

SPOILERS!!!!!

If you haven’t read the issue yet, GO AWAY!!

You know that spoilers are the worst… just spare yourself the shame of spoiling yourself.

Okay, so back to the book.  As a throwback, it was cute.  The whole thing with Ares was a nice little story where young Diana learns to be a great warrior but finds out that at the end of the day her compassion comes first AND she awakens some compassion in the god of war too.  Things end badly between her and Ares, but she has a better sense of who she is.  Lovely.

However, that’s all it is.  It was a straight forward, simple tale, generally unconnected from the past twelve issues.  I’m sure it’ll have ramifications in the future, but for right now, as a single issue, it didn’t really do a lot.  I expected more from it, and in a few different ways.

First, in a practical sort of way, I expected a better pastiche of a Silver Age Wonder Woman comic.  Maybe it’s because I’m all over early Wonder Woman stuff, but this issue was off the mark.  It was both overdone and underdone.  The dialogue was comicly extravagant, even by Silver Age standards.  Check out this introduction of Ares:

Kanigher could throw down some overblown dialogue, but he was never this Shakespearean with it.  At the same time, the story itself was way too simple.  There’s a Wonder Girl birthday story in Wonder Woman #113 where there’s an earthquake, a tornado, a roc, a sea monster, and a birthday cake that gets blown into space and orbits the Earth.  It had hilariously random panels like this:

Plus it was only NINE pages long.  Wonder Woman #0 is 20 pages, and she trains some and fights a minotaur.  That’s like a page and a half in a Silver Age book.  This issue just didn’t capture the Silver Age vibe properly.

Second, I expected it to be darker.  We’ve gotten twelve issues of horror stories, really, and when I saw the preview I thought it would be fascinating to see how that translated into the innocuous, fantastical world of the Silver Age where no one ever really got hurt and everything was always swell.  What we got instead was a watered down Ares, compared to his deadly and explosive previous appearances, and a book that’s wasn’t at all creepy or gruesome or dark.  I thought they’d try to subvert the Silver Age style, but instead they just played it straight.

Third, I expected some sort or intrigue or connection to the complex machinations of the Olympian gods that we’ve seen so far.  The book has had all sorts of twists and turns and betrayals, and you never know who you can trust, especially after the last issue.  I thought we might see seeds of where we are now and hints of where we could be going, but it was just a straight-forward, simple story with no real connection to the bigger plot.

Now, I probably expected too much.  Azzarello and Chiang are two of the best in the business, and I was looking for something really clever and involved and they gave me simple and cute instead.  There’s nothing wrong with cute, I just thought there would be more.

The only way I could see why they went for this comicly overdone yet simplistic storytelling is if this issue is a ruse, a cheerier, pleasant take on what was actually a horrific relationship between Ares and Wonder Woman and we’ll find out what actually happened down the road.  I don’t think that’s what’s happening, and I hope that’s not what’s going on because lord knows we don’t need Wonder Woman to have even more complicated and messed up father figure issues.  I’m just saying, that’s the only reason I can imagine they’d do a story this way after what we’ve come to expect from the twelve issues previous.

Aside from my many expectation problems, the whole Ares training Diana thing is kind of irksome.  She already has crazy powers because Zeus, a man, is her father, and now she’s got fighting skills because Ares, a man, trained her?  This is a lot of men for an Amazon.  Being an Amazon should be more than enough to make Wonder Woman awesome and bad ass.  They are fierce, epic warriors.  And if you’re thinking that maybe Diana needed the extra grit and brutality that only the god of war could provide, in current continuity the Amazons are straight up murderers.  They don’t play around.

By having Ares train Wonder Woman, the implication is that Amazon training isn’t enough, that Diana needs more than her Amazon background to be a real hero.  And it’s a double whammy with the new Zeus angle too.  You could argue that in this new continuity, the Amazons are almost useless.  They’re rapists who all seem to hate Diana, apart from her mom.  She gets cool superpowers from Zeus and awesome fighting skills from Ares.  All the Amazons are good for is Hippolyta providing a uterus and the rest of them teasing Diana enough that she’s got something to rebel against so she can be a cool bad ass.  Wonder Woman used to be great BECAUSE she was an Amazon, but now it seems that she’s great IN SPITE of being an Amazon.  That makes me sad.

I know the whole Amazon story is xenophobic and problematic, but the fact is that in such a ridiculously patriarchal genre, a female superhero being the product of a race of warrior women is kind of epic.  Strong men are EVERYWHERE in comics while strong women are few and far between, but Wonder Woman came from a whole island of them!!  It’s awesome, and that’s why she was created in the first place.  William Moulton Marston was sick of male superheroes being dicks and punching everybody, so he created Wonder Woman who was a more loving, happy superhero but at the same time just as strong as everyone else.  And she was all of these things because that’s how the Amazons raised her.  The Amazons were powerful, wise, and kind, and taught legions of women to be the same way.  Now, everything comes from men, and the Amazons just sort of suck.

Now, I doubt that this undermining of the Amazons and the new, male-based powers of Wonder Woman are some sort of scheme on Azzarello’s part to make Wonder Woman wholly dependent on men.  Instead, I think he’s just all wrapped up in trying to tell his story and not actively taking into account the character’s history and the significance of her Amazon heritage and the strength and power of women that it suggests.  I don’t think any sort of feminist, much less matriarchal, angle is on his mind, and because of that this history is being eroded and replaced.  It’s not malevolent.  Just careless.

Well know I dislike this issue a lot more.  That took a weird turn for me with the Ares thing at the end here.  I thought I had a handle on what I thought about that, but it seems that I’m more upset about it than I anticipated.  Oh well.  Again, I don’t think it’s an intentional thing.  I just don’t think they’re paying attention to Wonder Woman’s feminist history and taking into account what these new changes mean in that regard.

Overall, it’s a cute little issue, which is nice, but I expected a lot more out of it.  It also tweaks Wonder Woman’s origins in an even more male-based way, which is very annoying.  If you start reading between the lines, you end up in a dark place like I just did there.  It really sneaks up on you.

Anyway, I expected more in a great many ways, from an accurate throwback to feminist origins, and got none of it.  So it goes.  The art was pretty, and it was a nice story.  It’s the first issue in a while I could let my nieces read, though then we’d have to have a long talk about Ares and why the Amazons seem to be such bitches.  Maybe they don’t read this one, then.  But yeah, it was cute on the surface, and troubling below.

The Amazons And Their Murdering Ways OR The Evolution Of Brutality, Part Two

Yesterday, we looked at some ancient Greek sources that talked about the Amazon’s sex and child rearing practices.  While there was a bit of enslaving and some child mutilation, surprisingly no one got killed.  The Amazons didn’t cavalierly kill their sex partners or throw their male babies to the wolves.  Women were in charge, and often weren’t too nice about it, but men played an important, more domestic role in their society.  And again, nobody was killed.

So now we jump ahead several hundred years to the Roman Empire and their historians.  For some reason, as more time passed the Amazons became more brutal.  But the earlier Roman accounts of Amazon sex and child rearing weren’t too bad.

Just before the era of the Roman Empire began, though, there was one last Greek historian who wrote about the Amazons.  In his Historical Library, dating to roughly 50 BC, Diodorus Siculus had this to say about the rise of the Amazon’s first queen:

To the men she assigned the spinning of wool and such other domestic duties as belong to women.  Laws also were established by here, by virtue of which she led forth the women to the contests of war, but upon the men she fastened humiliation and slavery.

And as for their children, they mutilated both the legs and the arms of the males, incapacitating them in this way for the demands of war.

So basically, Diodorus read some Xenophon and pretty much copied him.  That’s not so cool of him.  Nonetheless, it brought Xenophon’s old account of the Amazons from hundreds of years before back to the minds of Roman era historians.

However, it seems that no one really cared because our next historian, Strabo, came up with a whole new story for the Amazons.  Strabo was born in Turkey, but he spent a lot of time in Rome and toured the nascent Roman Empire extensively.  His major work, Geography, dates to about 10-20 AD, and he told this story of the Amazons:

[The Amazons] have two special months in the spring in which they go up into the neighboring mountain which separates them and the Gargarians. The Gargarians also, in accordance with an ancient custom, go up thither to offer sacrifice with the Amazons and also to have intercourse with them for the sake of begetting children, doing this in secrecy and darkness, any Gargarian at random with any Amazon; and after making them pregnant they send them away; and the females that are born are retained by the Amazons themselves, but the males are taken to the Gargarians to be brought up; and each Gargarian to whom a child is brought adopts the child as his own, regarding the child as his son because of his uncertainty.

No killing OR enslaving OR mutilating.  This is the most upbeat story since Herodotus.  Once a year, the Amazons get it on in the dark with random Gargarians, go home and have babies, keep the girls, and give the boys back to the Gargarians.  Everybody lives, no one gets their legs broken, and Amazon society can carry on.

So we’ve reached the Common Era, and no one’s mentioned the Amazons killing their sexual partners or their male babies.  That’s about to change, but it’s sort of fascinating that the Amazons haven’t killed anybody yet.  Most of the stories aren’t terribly cheery, but no one’s died.

But then Justin came along.  No one’s exactly sure when his Philippic History was written, but most scholars date it around the 3rd century AD, a couple hundred years after Strabo.  Justin was very to the point in his description of the Amazons’ baby making:

Having thus secured peace by means of their arms, they proceeded, in order that their race might not fail, to form connexions with the men of the adjacent nations. If any male children were born, they put them to death.

While “connexions” sounds a lot more consensual than slavery, the Amazons were now killing their male children.  Roughly six hundred years after Herodotus first discussed Amazon procreation, finally someone was killed.

Around 500 AD, we have another copycat in Paulus Orosius.  In his Seven Books of Histories Against the Pagans, he basically echoes Justin’s account of the Amazons:

Then, after obtaining peace by force of arms, the entered marital relations with foreigners; they killed male children as soon as they were born.

I guess plagiarism was less of a big deal back then, or maybe everyone just stopped caring after the original author died.  Regardless, there’s another account of the Amazons hooking up with some of the dudes around them and killing their male children.

Soon after that, it appears that the historian Jordanes, based in the empire’s new capitol of Constantinople, was confused about whether to go with Strabo or Justin.  So, being a thorough sort of fellow, he mentioned both stories in Getica from 550 AD:

Fearing their race would fail, the Amazons sought marriage with neighbouring tribes.  They appointed a day for meeting once in every year, so that when they should return to the same place on that day in the following years each mother might give over to the father whatever male child she had borne, but should herself keep and train for warfare whatever children of the female sex were born.  Or else, as some writers maintain, they exposed the males, destroying the life of the ill-fated child with a hate like that of a stepmother.

It’s kind of interesting to see that the evil stepmother thing dates so far back.  Anyway, Jordanes included both the annual hook up of Strabo and the succinct male baby killing of Justin and Paulus Orosius. 

There were, of course, many more references to the Amazons in writings from the time of the Roman Empire, but these are the only ones I could find that mentioned sex and children.  Same with the Greek sources from yesterday.  There may well be more… this is a blog post, not a scholarly journal.  However, from these several noteworthy sources there seems to be a definite pattern.  Generally speaking, the legend of the Amazons gets much darker over time.  While there’s some slavery and child mutilation in a few Greek and early Roman sources, no one, sexual partner or baby, gets killed in any of these accounts until the 3rd century AD, and sexual partners were never killed.

With myths and legends, people tend to conflate ancient accounts, ignoring the order in which they appeared and creating a more streamlined meta-narrative that incorporates some aspects from each.  This meta-narrative is usually prefaced by a very general “in the myths…” that views mythology as monolithic and fails to acknowledge that the stories evolved.  Because the Amazons were fierce warriors, their simplified history often focuses on the darker, violent aspects and ignores the more peaceful stories. 

As a result, discussions of the Amazons can sometimes lack nuance.  It’s easy to conflate the stories and describe the mythical Amazons as “violent”, a society known for killing people, particularly men.  However, this fails to acknowledge the difference between their warrior skills on the battlefield, which were a constant theme in everything written about the Amazons, and cold-blooded murder, which was a much later addition to their legend.  Killing other soldiers in war and murdering newborn babies are two VERY different things.

In the earliest and thus most “accurate” accounts, ie. the ones that were the least removed from the original oral legends at the genesis of all of Greco/Roman mythology, the Amazons didn’t kill their kids, and enslaved men were mentioned only twice.  And in the very earliest, they had husbands and families!!  For some reason, the stories got more violent as time progressed, and Wonder Woman #7 continues this tradition.

In none of the ancient accounts did the Amazons kill their sexual partners and kill their male babies.  The story got stepped up a notch in Wonder Woman #7, except that Hephaestus saved the male children from certain death.  While this change to the Wonder Woman mythos has no real basis in actual mythology, it definitely continues its trends.  The Amazon story gets more violent and brutal as time progresses.

Well, now I’m sort of worried about the inevitable next revamp.

NOTE: If you want to learn more about the Amazons, I suggest Lisa Smedman’s history of the Amazons, presented here in PDF form.  You’ll want the “Scythian Amazons” chapter.  The site is super old and Smedman is far too keen on the historical reality of the Amazons, but the chapters consist of MASSIVE chunks of text from all kinds of ancient sources, all about the Amazons.  She’s compiled some great stuff.

The Amazons And Their Murdering Ways OR The Evolution Of Brutality, Part One

Since Wonder Woman #7 came out last week and revealed that the Amazons seduced and murdered sailors and then traded their male children for weapons, I’ve been thinking about the ancient stories of the Amazons.  Not only did the Amazons kill the men, but one of Hephaestus’ spared Amazon sons says that the Amazons would have just killed them if Hephaestus hadn’t taken them in, which is pretty brutal.  There have been a lot of interesting reactions to Wonder Woman #7 that mention the ancient stories about them killing the men they had sex with and their male children, and I thought it might be fun to look at some of those stories directly.

There are all sorts of ancient references to the Amazons, but I’ve compiled all of the sources I could find that mentioned their mating and child-rearing practices.  What’s fascinating about these ancient sources is that the stories of the Amazons get worse and worse as they go along.  It seems that the legends grew, and the tales of the warrior women became fiercer and more bloodthirsty as the years passed.

NOTE: Of course none of this is actual history.  It’s all myths and legends with a constant misogynistic bias on account of that’s just how the ancient world rolled.  But it’s all we’ve got to go on, Amazonwise.

We’ll start in fifth century Athens, the height of ancient Greek civilization.  Athens was the political and culture center of ancient Greece, so it’s no wonder our first three sources come from there.  Also, the Athenians HATED Amazons.

Around this time, the Athenians built the famous Parthenon, a temple to their patron goddess, Athena.  Each side of the Parthenon had a series of metopes, or carved marble panels, that showed an important victory over a major enemy.  The East side showed the Olympian gods defeating the evil giants and beginning their reign over the world.  On the South, the ancient Athenian king Theseus slaughtered vicious centaurs.  The North had scenes of the Trojan War, the Greeks’ epic triumph over the thieving Trojans, their ultimate enemies.  And the West?  The West was the ancient Athenians fighting Amazons.

To be in the company of giants who opposed their gods, brutal centaurs, and the epic villainy of the Trojans shows you how poorly the Athenians thought of the Amazons.  They didn’t just dislike the Amazons because of the rampant misogyny in their culture… they saw the Amazons as one of the chief villains in the history of their city.

So it’s sort of surprising that Herodotus wrote a relatively cheery portrait of them.  Dating to around 440 BC, Herodotus’ The Histories detailed how the Amazons merged with the Scythians.  The Scythians wanted to marry the Amazons, but the Amazons replied:

“We could not live with your women- our customs are quite different from theirs. To draw the bow, to hurl the javelin, to bestride the horse, these are our arts of womanly employments we know nothing. Your women, on the contrary, do none of these things; but stay at home in their wagons, engaged in womanish tasks, and never go out to hunt, or to do anything. We should never agree together. But if you truly wish to keep us as your wives, and would conduct yourselves with strict justice towards us, go you home to your parents, bid them give you your inheritance, and then come back to us, and let us and you live together by ourselves.”

And that’s just what the Scythians did.  They intermarried, moved far away, and became the Sauromatae (aka. the Sarmatians).  Herodotus continued:

The women of the Sauromatae have continued from that day to the present to observe their ancient customs, frequently hunting on horseback with their husbands, sometimes even unaccompanied; in war taking the field; and wearing the very same dress as the men.

So we’ve got no killing of men, no killing of babies, and a generally harmonious society where the Amazons have husbands but can still hunt and go to war like they love to do.  Herodotus has been called the “Father of History” so we should give this account a lot of weight, but no one ever does.  This version of the Amazons doesn’t come up all that much (though in terms of comics, it’s very reminiscent of Kanigher’s Silver Age Wonder Woman).

Soon after Herodotus came this account from Hippocrates, from around 400 BC.  You probably know Hippocrates from the Hippocratic Oath.  He was actually a physician and not a historian, but his medical work led him to a story about the Amazons:

Some tell a tale how the Amazons dislocate the joints of their male offspring in early infancy – some at the knees and some at the hips – that they may, so it is said, become lame and the males be incapable of plotting against the females.  They are supposed to use them as artisans in all kind of leather or copper work, or some other sedentary occupation.

This is getting a little darker.  Now the Amazons are busting up the limbs of their male children so they can’t rise up against them later in life.  However, no one’s getting killed.  The poor fellows may have been a little mangled, but they were nonetheless raised by the Amazons and served an important role in the society.  Plus, the account is qualified with “some tell a tale”.  Hippocrates adds: “For my part, I am ignorant of whether this is true.”

But it seems that the story was fairly well known.  Writing around 400-375 BC, the historian Xenophon told a similar tale.  This is part of his account of the rise of the Amazon’s first queen and their society:

Growing in bravery and fame, she campaigned ceaselessly against nearby peoples.  Her fortunes prospered, and she took on lofty aspirations.  She called herself the daughter of Ares and assigned to the men the spinning of wool and the domestic work of women.  She established laws according to which the women went to the contests of war, and humility and slavery were fastened on the men.

The Amazons mutilated the legs and arms of the males who were born, rendering them useless for war.

Now we’ve got mutilation AND enslaved men.  But again, no killing.  The men couldn’t fight, but they were alive at least, and just like with Hippocrates they played an important part in Amazon society.  I’m certainly not trying to suggest that slavery was good, but it sounds like a much better time then being dead.  After the initial crippling, anyway.  That probably sucked. 

So with our ancient Greek sources, the ones who would be most antagonistic towards the Amazons AND the ones who date the furthest back so they’d have the best grasp on the tales of the Amazons that had been passed down for generations, the Amazons didn’t kill their sexual partners or their children.  In two of the three, they weren’t very nice to them, but they raised them and the men were part of their society.  No partner/baby killing from the Greek sources is pretty significant.  They regularly described the Amazons as vicious, violent warriors, but they only killed in battle, not in cold blood.

Tomorrow, in Part Two, we’ll look at Roman historians.  Sometime after the rise of the Roman Empire, the legends of the Amazons got a lot more brutal.

Wonder Woman #7 Review OR That Was An Odd Choice

So I was RIDICULOUSLY jazzed for this issue.  Cliff Chiang is back and Hephaestus and Eros were going to be in it and they were going to plan a trip to Hades and it all sounded terribly exciting.  Then it took a very bizarre left turn that’s been perplexing me all night.  I’m still not sure how I feel about it, but I don’t think I like it. 

But I can’t tell you about it without first saying SPOILER.

As always, I’m going to wreck everything that happens in this comic, so if you haven’t read it yet, go away!!

Seriously, it’s only three bucks… go get a copy.

Okay, onto the reviewing…

Cliff Chiang was back and killed it as always.  I loved barefoot hipster Eros and burnt arms, ogre-like Hephaestus.  That was all very fun and good.  But I’m pretty much only going to talk about one thing in this review.

In this issue, we learn that Hephaestus’ minions are the male children of Amazons, who they trade to Hephaestus in return for weapons.  Hephaestus takes them in and raises them as is own, and they’re one big happy family, working at the forge.  You see, thrice a century the Amazons go out looking for dudes to have sex with, seduce them with their feminine wiles, kill the dudes after they have sex with them, keep the female babies to be Amazons, and ditch the boys.  Apparently it’s been going on for a while.

I have a huge problem with this.

Let me preface this by saying that I love EVERYTHING Azzarello and Chiang have done with the series so far.  The new take on the gods is fantastic, I adore the new characters, and I think that Zeus as Wonder Woman’s father was a really interesting tweak to the mythos that’s been handled well so far.  I know a lot of Wonder Woman fans are up in arms about this new direction for the book, but I’m not one of them.  I’ve loved it all, and I think it’s the best book on the stands right now.

But this bothers me.  For a lot of reasons, some of them dully logistical even.  I mean, how does Wonder Woman not know about this?  Was she literally JUST born?  Or did she just not notice all the babies, and everyone ducking out every 33 years?  It’s not a big island.  Anyway, let’s get back on track.  The main reason this doesn’t sit well with me is because the Amazons have ALWAYS been better than us.

That’s their schtick.  Paradise Island is a feminist utopia and the Amazons are more advanced than everyone else on the planet in every possible way on account of they don’t spend all their time killing each other and taking other people’s stuff like we do.  And it’s been like that for seventy years, most blatantly in the Golden Age with William Moulton Marston but in every incarnation afterwards as well.  The Amazons can be warriors when they need to be, but left to their own devices they are a peaceful and prosperous people we could all learn something from.  That’s what makes them awesome.

And that’s what makes them important.  Wonder Woman and the Amazons have been representatives of feminism for decades, way before feminism was cool (though really, feminism still isn’t cool is vast swathes of the United States).  Yeah, there are lots of great other female characters in comics now, but no one’s been around for as long or been as spectacular as Wonder Woman.  Wonder Woman is who she is because she’s an Amazon, and Amazons have always represented the best that humanity can achieve.  They’re noble and brave and strong and heroic, which can’t be said about most other female characters without having to add “she’s also this headlining hero’s girlfriend” or “she’s a derivative of this more well known male hero” or “she’s got a big hole in her costume right over her cleavage”.  And they’re ladies!!  They’re better AND they’re ladies.  The Amazons are strong and independent women who have been a remarkably progressive and feminist presence in the DC universe since it began.

And now they’re jerks.  No, jerks is WAY too soft.  They’re killers.  Murderers.  You could actually call them feminazis is you wanted to… they’re certainly exterminating large numbers of a particular group of people they don’t like.  There’s no way to justify seducing and then killing random, innocent men.  I mean, you could get into a whole “no man is innocent in a patriarchal society” thing but that’s just a slippery slope and you’ll end up sounding like Valerie Solanas.

Plus, if it wasn’t for Hephaestus, they’d kill all the male babies too!!  Wonder Woman sees the whole set up as forced slavery for her brothers and she tries to set them free, but they all tell her thanks but no thanks.  Their Amazon mothers were cruel women who would have left them to die if it wasn’t for Hephaestus, and they were glad to stay with him.  This scene would actually be sweet if I wasn’t perplexed by everything that came before while I read it:

Hephaestus, the male, is caring and compassionate.  The Amazons, the females, are cold-hearted killers.  This is not how things are supposed to go.

And here’s the thing… if this had been the Amazons pre-Paradise Island, I’d be cool with it.  I could understand it.  An all female society is going to die out pretty quick if you don’t figure out some ways to make babies.  If they were plundering a Greek trireme or some such and killing all the dudes, I could see that.  It was a different time, and you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.  But at a certain point, they go off to Paradise Island, become immortal, and build a utopia.  There’s no need to do that anymore, because a) they’re immortal so they won’t die out, b) they don’t want to have anything to go with men anymore… that’s sort of the ENTIRE goddamn point of the island, and c) having left the world of men because men are murderous, treacherous fiends, their main aim as a society was NOT TO BE LIKE THAT.

Also, why?  I know Azzarello has mad skills and I’m sure he has a plan, but I have NO idea why this was done.  It serves no purpose in the story, other than to make Wonder Woman look dumb repeatedly.  It feels like a twist just for the sake of being shocking and different.  Maybe it will play out into something interesting and, I sincerely hope, good and restorative for the Amazons, but so far there’s no discernible reason for it.

In earlier issues, I sort of enjoyed the man-hating bits with the Amazons because it felt like a joke, like they were teasing Diana for being out in the world with stupid dudes all the time.  But in actuality, they REALLY hate men.  It wasn’t a joke.  Thrice a century they’re going out to kill them and toss them off boats:

That is beyond screwed up.  If that is a sanctioned practice in Amazon society, what does that say about Amazon society?  Nothing good.  The Amazons were unimpeachable.  The Amazons were the ideal.  But now, they’re no better than the rest of us.

Now, this doesn’t ruin Wonder Woman or anything like that.  Much as Wonder Woman being the product of a feminist utopia is a fantastic story, Wonder Woman being a kind and noble hero despite what is now a pretty twisted history is still a positive message.  Wonder Woman herself remains awesome.  But something really great from DC’s history is now gone, and that’s kind of sad.  What the Amazons represented was so cool and so unique, especially in what has historically been a male-dominated and often sexist industry.  After seventy years, that’s now been done away with.

With this shift, Wonder Woman seems to be just like everyone else, a hero with a messed up past who’s trying to overcome the ever-present darkness that surrounds her.  She’ll overcome it, of course, and be a stronger hero for it, but Wonder Woman was never dark or tortured or trying to deal with a screwed up history.  That’s what made her different.  She wasn’t a hero to excise her demons or because of a psychological break cause by serious parental issues, she was a hero because she’s an Amazon and that’s just what they do.  But now she’s a hero despite being an Amazon, and that’s bumming me out some.

So yeah, this was not my favourite issue of the series.  And of course, it’s just a comic and the world hasn’t ended or anything.  I’m frustrated and perplexed by a change to the backstory of a fictional character I enjoy… there are people dying in Uganda.  Also, I feel a little bad about not liking this, because I’ve loved the book so far.  I know I just said it’s not a huge deal, but I’ve been thinking about it ALL night and yeah, it just doesn’t sit right with me.  Of course, I totally reserve the right to take this all back if the story restores all of the Amazon’s feminist awesomeness at some point, but for right now I’m confused and a little bit disappointed.