Taken in isolation - not evaluating other characters - when do you think Wonder Woman shifted from golden age to silver in flavor? And is this the same point at the Earth-1/Earth-2 split for you?
When WW II ended and she wasn't fighting Nazis? When Marston died? When Etta stopped appearing? Logo change with WW #60? When Hippolyta went blonde? Just curious as to what people think.
With most classic DC heroes, there's this transition period between the late '40s and late '50s, which is like their lost decade--some stuff from the original concept holds over but new ideas start to develop. With Wonder Woman the moment when there's a definite change is WONDER WOMAN 98 (May 1958). People tend to overlook that soft, squishy part in the middle when the characters were neither one thing nor the other.
[QUOTE=Jim Kelly;4615575]With most classic DC heroes, there's this transition period between the late '40s and late '50s, which is like their lost decade--some stuff from the original concept holds over but new ideas start to develop. With Wonder Woman the moment when there's a definite change is WONDER WOMAN 98 (May 1958). People tend to overlook that soft, squishy part in the middle when the characters were neither one thing nor the other.[/QUOTE]I don't know that we overlook it, so much as you have to draw a line somewhere when sorting eras. Same thing happens with real historians. Explaining the squishiness is great, but the layperson still likes categorizing.
Well, we get reprints of the "Golden Age" and we get reprints of the "Silver Age" but the in-between age stories don't get reprinted as much--so nobody remembers them, because they aren't available. It would be one thing if this soft section was only a few years, but it's about ten years for Wonder Woman and Superman (likewise for Green Arrow and Aquaman). Just where one Batman ends and another begins is even harder to determine--because Bill Finger and Bob Kane were involved with the character for all that time.
I think "officially", it is the E1/E2 split.
But I think all of the other things you mentioned (except for Marston death) also marked that change.
Issue #98 (1958) when Robert Kanigher paired up with penciler Ross Andru and inker Mike Esposito and together these three would work on the definitive Silver Age Wonder Woman. Issue #98 also marked a new origin story for the character and thetone of the stories changed as well, as a few issues later Kanigher introduced Wondergirl (#105).
The most significant change for me was when Hypolitta went blond and they made a completely new origin for the Amazons and Diana where she got her powers from the gods that include Hercules and the Amazons became only women when they lost their husbands in a war.