Originally Posted by
Doctor Bifrost
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.