Did George Perez help or hinder the WW mythos?..

[SiegePerilous02]

What I would keep:
- the Amazon cast, with some additions of older characters like Mala, Althea and Nubia. Just put them through more of a Marston filter: technological advancements, worship Aphrodite and Athena, a lot of weird pagan rituals with some sexual undercurrents, etc.
- the Kapatelis women, Myndi, Indelicato, etc. can all stay. but they would live in D.C. Julia would teach at Holliday College, which is how Etta and the Holliday Girls would come in.
- Nessie and her supporting cast of kids her age would interact heavily with Donna, who would be Wonder Girl.
- No Diana Prince
- Full blown flight, no gliding on air currents. But it would come later after a few years of using the plane.
- I would keep the basic idea of Cheetah being a God-cursed monster, but Rucka's execution is stronger, so I'd go with his.

[AmiMizuno]

I don't mind the blessing of power but not when Diana was a baby after she won the contest. I love the Amazons can get stronger when they train. I do love the lasso origin. One thing I wonder if Holiday Girls were to be more of a Holliday Girls be supporting cast how would they be written in? I don't mind if Diana trained them the Amazon training. I do think Diana should go or at least live with the Holliday Girls

[SiegePerilous02]

Amazon training would definitely be something I'd add back in. As well as the lasso's original origin and power set.

[Jim Kelly]

Many of the character suffer because of how aged . . . they are.

It is weird how they seemed to have so many older characters. I guess they wanted Steve to be a Vietnam vet, so he had to be a lot older--but then his relationship with young Etta comes off as weird. And Julia Kapatelis looks like she's pushing sixty (as if Olimpia Dukakis could have played her in a movie at the time)--yet Julia has a teen-age daughter. Why?

I found a lot of this kind of boring. I understand they were trying to be serious and have some scholarship behind the story--but it was like watching paint dry.

[Powerboy]

I don't remember all the details. But I was never really interested in WW as a character before Perez. I loved that he made her mission explicit, even having her speaking before the U.N.

[AmiMizuno]

Amazon training would definitely be something I'd add back in. As well as the lasso's original origin and power set.

I love the training. So sometimes I wonder how can Diana fly with that training? I don't mind if she is blessed by the goddesses or maybe some special Amazon training that they give her. I would love if Nessie and her go on adventures. To be honest I would't mind that both Diana Trevor and Steve have a relationship with the Amazons. I wonder what kind of emotion should Hippoltya feel when Steve is Diana's Trevor son? I think that would be a interesting connection. Nothing too long but just a flashback when Hippoltya talks to Steve or Diana

[Doctor Bifrost]

I don't mind the blessing of power but not when Diana was a baby after she won the contest.

My non-canonical version: Diana is granted powers by her patron goddesses when she is baby (although naturally they develop over time). I happen to like teenage Diana training with her superpowers (beyond the average Amazon) while on the island.

But: before she enters the contest, in disguise, she first goes to Magala (or some other Amazon mystic) and finds a way to set aside her powers (in an elaborate, ornamental jar would be a nice touch) so that she is competing on a fair basis. In fact, it's even a little harder for her, because she has never trained without her powers. But of course she wins.

Afterwards her powers are returned to her.

[Agent Z]

Unfortunately, it came at the cost of drastically stunting her love, romantic, and sex life.

Not really. He just decided that wasn’t as important to the story he was telling. And later writers gave her relationships anyway.

and in some ways the start of avoiding most of her villains who were not mythologically based. (Not letting the Amazons be technologically advanced, scientists, etc., limited the genres she could operate in until much later in her Post-Crisis run too. It was way too narrow.)

I personally don’t see why this itself is an issue. Limiting stories in and of itself is not a bad thing and being able to tell more stories in different genres and being able to tell good stories are not the same thing.

The other issue is the rogues gallery. Its one thing to not use a certain chunk of the rogues gallery. Which is something alot of writers do, as people have their favorites. I certainly don't mind Perez doing this. (And I can hardly blame other writers for not picking up the slack) What gets me is his weird need to make new versions of so many of Dianas rogues. A third Cheetah? A second Silver Swan? A complete reinvention of Doctor Psychos into a telepath?

He was only doing what others would during post crisis. Poison Ivy went from a misandrist who was just immune to toxins to an ecoterrorist with plant powers. Mr Freeze started out as just a guy who just liked freezing things to a man desperately trying to save his wife. Brainiac went from a green guy from outer space to a sentient AI and so on. Huntress went from being Batman and Catwoman’s daughter to a mob princess turned superhero.

[SiegePerilous02]

I personally don’t see why this itself is an issue. Limiting stories in and of itself is not a bad thing and being able to tell more stories in different genres and being able to tell good stories are not the same thing.

Being able to tell good stories within the limits is not a guarantee either. You're just preventing authors from telling potentially good stories along with some potentially bad ones. The trade off isn't really worth it, IMO.

If the Wonder Woman's world is fully open to all of its corners, you increase the odds of authors telling good stories with them. If you don't have something that grabs their interest or prevent them from exploring, you're shooting yourself in the foot.

[kjn]

Not really. He just decided that wasn’t as important to the story he was telling. And later writers gave her relationships anyway.

If you aren't interested in telling a romantic storyline, the simple answer is to simply not tell a romantic storyline. What Pérez did was instead to write out the established (for some values of established) love interest for Diana by fundamentally changing the relation between Steve Trevor and Diana.

I personally don’t see why this itself is an issue. Limiting stories in and of itself is not a bad thing and being able to tell more stories in different genres and being able to tell good stories are not the same thing.

You are correct in that good storytelling always require limitations, or perhaps better put, constraints. But there are different types of constraints, and one should not needlessly pull up constraints that block future avenues of storytelling. If you need a constraint for the specific story being told, that is one thing, but one should leave few constraints for the next writer outside of the actual personality of the characters.

In any case, I don't think Pérez did leave that many constraints for the next writers to deal with. Messner-Loebs could send Diana off into space the first thing he did. Instead, I think the next few runs of crappy writing led to the new generation of Wonder Woman writers to only have one great run to fall back on, and that one was mythologically based. The problem with Pérez run wasn't that it was constraining, but that it became too influential on later writers.

I'd argue that both Azzarello's run and Rucka's Rebirth run left more and more damaging constraints on future writers than Pérez's run did.

[Agent Z]

Being able to tell good stories within the limits is not a guarantee either. You're just preventing authors from telling potentially good stories along with some potentially bad ones. The trade off isn't really worth it, IMO.

If the Wonder Woman's world is fully open to all of its corners, you increase the odds of authors telling good stories with them. If you don't have something that grabs their interest or prevent them from exploring, you're shooting yourself in the foot.

If a Wonder Woman writer can't get good stories out of the one genre they're dealing with, I find it unlikely that increasing the genres they can use will yield better results. It is the job of the writers to do something that will provide interest to the WW fanbase while using the established status quo. Most writers use the myth stuff anyway and when they do use sci fi stuff, it's mostly average at best, outright terrible and incompatible with Diana at worst. I mean, how many of her most well regarded stories are sci fi?

[WonderScott]

In my opinion he did the best version of the Wonder Woman mythos - overall. He really put a lot of thought into the Amazons and why they were there. He understood the value of the intrinsically female-centric nature of Diana''s narrative - the origin, the relationships, everything else that stood out in contrast to the mainly male-centric focus of most mainstream superhero comics - and he incorporated it well, but without the overly pedantic "women are superior to men!" attitude of Marston in the original.

(There's a difference between saying "this story is going to be primarily about women because we have so few examples of such stories" and "this story is going to be about women because we want to show that women are better than men." He went with the former and did it well.)

As I've mentioned, I am not a power-monger when it comes to finding favorite characters, so it didn't bother me that the Amazons were not technologically advanced, and that the average Amazon wasn't near-Diana-level in power. I felt they were advanced over Man's World in some other areas, such as having access to some magic, and having a focus on both self-improvement and community that, over centuries, created a strong, thoughtful, supportive culture for themselves. (I like it when "hidden societies" are better in some ways and not better in others.) And I liked the relationship between the Amazons and their patron deities.

I also thought it was all very well-written and very well-drawn.

But I did say "overall." Things I did not like:

- Wonder Woman coming to Man's World and starting her career as a superhero years after Superman, Batman, the JLA, and the Teen Titans had been around. (Personally, I do not think this was Perez's decision, but I don't know the actual details.) It made her seem younger and less experienced than them, which I do not think serves her character and her place in the world. It meant she wasn't a founding member of the JLA; I like Black Canary quite a bit, but I thought the switch read like "hey, any two female characters are interchangeable."

And, of course, it completely blew Donna Troy's origin (such as it was), and her relationship with Diana, Hippolyta, and the Amazons, out of the water. This didn't happen to any of the other (male) Original Five Teen Titans. Donna was, in some ways, already running behind the other four, because she didn't have a decades-long publication history as a teenage hero in Man's World (or an actual on-page history with her mentor, Wonder Woman) that the others did. Instead of taking the opportunity of Crisis on Infinite Earths to solidify Donna's history, the completely changed it in a way that moved her further from the Wonder Woman mythos, and she has never recovered. I don't think this has been good for anyone.

- He aged Steve Trevor and Etta Candy and married them to each other. This completely changed the nature of her supporting cast. This opened up the way for new ideas, of course, but nothing has ever really stuck. When was the last time we saw Julia Kapatellis or Trevor Barnes? I think keeping Steve and Etta more the way that they had been, and then building on that with some new ideas, would have been a better way to go.

But in general? My favorite version of the Wonder Woman mythos, and one that could have been built on in much better ways than it was.

But that's just me.

Excellent assessment and definitely reflects my thoughts as well.

[SiegePerilous02]

If a Wonder Woman writer can't get good stories out of the one genre they're dealing with, I find it unlikely that increasing the genres they can use will yield better results. It is the job of the writers to do something that will provide interest to the WW fanbase while using the established status quo. Most writers use the myth stuff anyway and when they do use sci fi stuff, it's mostly average at best, outright terrible and incompatible with Diana at worst. I mean, how many of her most well regarded stories are sci fi?

How many well regarded stories does she have period? She's got plenty of average or terrible stories related to myth as well. I mean, Amazons Attack! uses the Amazons obviously. Space stories are not incompatible with Diana because she does it when she's with the JLA and her creator wrote her into outer space adventures.

It's the writer's job to tell a good story within an established status quo. How does that mean that the status quo and editorial edicts in place are automatically good? If they wanted to shift focus away from all the other locations and characters she used to interact with that weren't related to myth...then they simply had to ignore them for the time being. Making it so they never existed is short sighted and kind of rude to all the writers who are going to come after you, because maybe the want to use them? Same with the romance with Steve, it'd be easier to just not write the romance if he wasn't interested, but leave it on the table if later writers were interested. He made it impossible.

[AmiMizuno]

What do you mean she was doing space stories since the beginning, Anything can be possible. Diana so far Rebirth has not been rebooting itself.

[Joao]

If we had to take the best of Prez’s run what should be kept and what should go? I would say kept cheetah’s origin, I did like how Diana got her name. The idea of Myndi. I did like the Nessie and her family. However, I do think Many of the character suffer because of how aged if they are. Most runs Diana is young enough to be a fish out of water. What would be wrong if Nessie and Diana were around the same age?

His Cheetah, the amazons' origin and Vanessa/Julia. That's pretty much it.

Oh, his Diana had a great personality too.

Well, half of those listed before are things that Rucka kept some way or another. His doesn't deny Pérez's Barbara Ann Minerva, it builds on her. The same for the amazons. Maybe that's why I adore Rucka's WW, cause he balanced a lot of the Pérez stuff with things that needed to go back to basics - Steve and Etta and Ares/Aphrodite, for example.

I personally think the more complex stuff can go. Like Diana's name based on Steve's mother. It's too much information that kind of has no use. I would prefer investing time developing the core cast and their personal relations, something her comics could desperately use.