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  1. #76
    Chad Jar Jar Pinsir's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by kjn View Post
    One could also turn it around, and say that Pérez took one of the richest and most important set of real-world mythology and its literature, and made it all into Wonder Woman's turf. He took some of the elements that Marston had, and elaborated on and treated them dead seriously and respectfully.
    Marston's pantheon was more transformative though, his pantheon ruled over their namesake planets, had their cooler Latin names, used spaceships, and really were different characters all together (Mars had 'dukes' and slave armies, Venus and her butterfly girls). Perez's were a lot more generic, really indistinguishable from how the Greek pantheon is depicted in Disney's Hercules or even how they were shown in the Bronze Age.

    Now, this mythology gave rise to issues later on because other writers fell into the rabbit hole of myth retellings, but it was not Pérez's fault: he just added a marvelous shiny toolbox to be used with Wonder Woman. It's not his fault that later writers went "shiny!".
    But its still an aspect of his legacy. There is a direct line of thought between Perez's more mythological Wonder Woman and her becoming the daughter of Zeus.
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  2. #77
    Extraordinary Member kjn's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Pinsir View Post
    Marston's pantheon was more transformative though, his pantheon ruled over their namesake planets, had their cooler Latin names, used spaceships, and really were different characters all together (Mars had 'dukes' and slave armies, Venus and her butterfly girls). Perez's were a lot more generic, really indistinguishable from how the Greek pantheon is depicted in Disney's Hercules or even how they were shown in the Bronze Age.

    But its still an aspect of his legacy. There is a direct line of thought between Perez's more mythological Wonder Woman and her becoming the daughter of Zeus.
    I haven't read Marston that closely, so can't say much about how he used them.

    But what made Pérez really interesting was that he examined Greek mythology closely and looked into how it would apply to Wonder Woman in a serious and respectful way. He really dug into the clay birth aspect with his Pandora story—that story had mythic resonances that surpass anything done earlier or before.

    You are also claiming that just because one writer included an element, and used it in interesting ways, it was bad because later writers took that element and overused it? Sorry, not buying that.

    And Diana's daddy issues as evidence for that Pérez's mythology-based ideas were bad? That's just dumb. For one, you have over 20 years distance between the two changes. For another, you have Morrison's take, where the gods are even less important than in Marston's take, but Diana still ended up with Heracles as her daddy.

  3. #78

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    Quote Originally Posted by SeanT View Post
    ...that normally the gods are all petty and jesus and generally awful...
    This may be one of my favorite typos ever!

    (Please do not take that personally.)

    As ever,
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  4. #79
    Chad Jar Jar Pinsir's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by kjn View Post
    I haven't read Marston that closely, so can't say much about how he used them.

    But what made Pérez really interesting was that he examined Greek mythology closely and looked into how it would apply to Wonder Woman in a serious and respectful way. He really dug into the clay birth aspect with his Pandora story—that story had mythic resonances that surpass anything done earlier or before.

    You are also claiming that just because one writer included an element, and used it in interesting ways, it was bad because later writers took that element and overused it? Sorry, not buying that.

    And Diana's daddy issues as evidence for that Pérez's mythology-based ideas were bad? That's just dumb. For one, you have over 20 years distance between the two changes. For another, you have Morrison's take, where the gods are even less important than in Marston's take, but Diana still ended up with Heracles as her daddy.
    Keep in mind, I'm not saying Perez's work is bad because later author's 'ruined' the idea, just that we should consider how his run would negatively influence Wonder Woman in the decades that followed. Same way as some people say Alan Moore ruined comics.
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  5. #80

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    Quote Originally Posted by Pinsir View Post
    ...cooler Latin names...
    Well, that's one opinion.

    There is a direct line of thought between Perez's more mythological Wonder Woman and her becoming the daughter of Zeus.
    I disagree wholeheartedly. Perez made use of the Greek myths in a way that fully supported and respected the essentially female-centric nature of Wonder Woman's mythos. Nothing could be more unalike than Perez's take on all this and Azzarello's: "We’ve cleaned her up. You can describe who she is now. She’s got the specific description now just like Batman or Superman. She’s the daughter of a god.” [And we don't even have to mention her mother, or any goddesses.] Perez described her perfectly, within his take on the Greek myths, without giving her a father and demoting the importance of her mother and of the goddesses.

    Really, it's like saying "Since Pygmalion and Galatea is a Greek myth that involves a Greek goddess, there's a direct line of thought that leads to someone writing a later story about her in which she turns out to be Hermes' biological daughter." That's only true if the writer is the kind of person who looks at a Greek myth that is (or has been modified to be) female-centric and has, as his first reaction, "But what about the men??!?!" I don't see how you can blame Perez for that.
    Last edited by Doctor Bifrost; 01-08-2019 at 05:29 PM.
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  6. #81
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    Quote Originally Posted by Doctor Bifrost View Post
    This may be one of my favorite typos ever!

    (Please do not take that personally.)

    As ever,
    Doctor Bfirost
    Haha. thanks. I can't even remember what I was trying to say!

  7. #82

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    Quote Originally Posted by SeanT View Post
    Haha. thanks. I can't even remember what I was trying to say!
    "Jealous" is my guess.
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  8. #83
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    Quote Originally Posted by SeanT View Post
    My point is that beautiful women in relationships get exploited. Whatever the perpetrator gets out of it, the women end up getting used. Powerful women get taken down by men (and then ultimately, themselves).
    And most of the powerful women in Perez's run ended up pulling themselves back up. Or in Diana's case not taken down at all.


    Less attractive women like Etta and Julia attract less attractive males, and everything's fine- except that Etta put off her wedding to Steve because of her jealousy, and you could even say her own relationship with Diana- in every other her best friend- was poisoned by that jealousy. Sex, or even sexual interest, is dangerous.
    Etta still married Steve. And less attractive? By what margin?

    Diana didn't have to get into a relationship with Steve right away.
    She didn't have to get into one with Steve at all.

    I mean, that's crazy. But you can be infatuated or interested and have that develop into a relationship, or even a flirtation. The movie and the Rebirth series handled that fine. That Perez felt even this couldn't be broached without exploitation just underlines every other relationship in the book. I think it's really infantilizing for a creator to think that Diana wouldn't be able to take care of herself even if she is unaware of the ways of man's world, and again emphasizes his conceit, that beautiful women are prone to getting exploited.
    Again, it wasn't beauty itself that was getting exploited in Perez's run it was women in general. Very rarely did beauty ever play a role in it and when Diana was being exploited it wasn't because of her beauty.


    Quote Originally Posted by SeanT View Post
    Even a blond bimbo has some power- as Rucka and Azzarello showed- where she was so stunning it could interrupt your train of thought.
    That's not power, that's called being objectified.

    Which highlights another issue I had with his run- that normally the gods are all petty and jesus and generally awful, whereas in Perez, the goddesses were all noble and selfless, while the males gods he focused on- Zeus, Pan, and Hermes- had bad intentions.
    Pan and Hermes did not have bad intentions. Hermes was somewhat arrogant but ultimately a good guy and Pan was impersonated.

    People talk about Perez removing the "battle of the sexes" element of Marston's run, but hew brought i back in a much more clichéd way- Beautiful women could either be sexless or exploited, and handsome or powerful men were mostly out to get them. Instead of beautiful women being powerful, they were vulnerable. He took Marston and threw it on its head.
    Whoever said that about Perez never read the books. And while women in Perez's run could be hurt by men, it was to discuss sexism and misogyny in the world and he ultimately showed the women overcoming this. Being powerful doesn't make you invulnerable. It's basically Marston without the sexual objectification of women.
    Last edited by Agent Z; 01-08-2019 at 09:23 PM.

  9. #84
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    Quote Originally Posted by Pinsir View Post
    Marston's pantheon was more transformative though, his pantheon ruled over their namesake planets, had their cooler Latin names, used spaceships, and really were different characters all together (Mars had 'dukes' and slave armies, Venus and her butterfly girls). Perez's were a lot more generic, really indistinguishable from how the Greek pantheon is depicted in Disney's Hercules or even how they were shown in the Bronze Age.



    But its still an aspect of his legacy. There is a direct line of thought between Perez's more mythological Wonder Woman and her becoming the daughter of Zeus.
    I must have missed the part in Disney's Hercules where Zeus tried to destroy an island because a woman rejected him like in Perez's run.

  10. #85
    Extraordinary Member kjn's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Pinsir View Post
    Keep in mind, I'm not saying Perez's work is bad because later author's 'ruined' the idea, just that we should consider how his run would negatively influence Wonder Woman in the decades that followed. Same way as some people say Alan Moore ruined comics.
    See, I don't really have any truck with the idea that telling good stories hurts a genre or a character in and of itself. It doesn't fly for Moore (or even Miller), and it doesn't fly with Pérez.

    The idea that post-Pérez writers focused too much on mythical stories is correct. But that's only one side of the coin. The real trouble is not really the amount of mythical stories, but that we got too many poor stories.

  11. #86
    Extraordinary Member kjn's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by SeanT View Post
    Which highlights another issue I had with his run- that normally the gods are all petty and jesus and generally awful, whereas in Perez, the goddesses were all noble and selfless, while the males gods he focused on- Zeus, Pan, and Hermes- had bad intentions.

    People talk about Perez removing the "battle of the sexes" element of Marston's run, but hew brought i back in a much more clichéd way- Beautiful women could either be sexless or exploited, and handsome or powerful men were mostly out to get them. Instead of beautiful women being powerful, they were vulnerable. He took Marston and threw it on its head.
    I both disagree and agree with you here.

    First, I don't think anyone post-Marston could bring up Marston's ideas of female supremacy and make it work today, and I don't think anyone here wants to go there. So in that way, everyone afterwards can be viewed as throwing an important Marston element out.

    Second, there is some truth in your description on how Pérez handled the Greek gods and goddesses along gender lines. The gods were much more likely to actively do stuff themselves, while the goddesses were much more focused on getting things in motion, and then passively wait until things were resolved. It was an aspect that troubled me as well with his run, together with that he largely made the goddesses noble and selfless and the gods mostly into jackasses. That's an pattern that I myself struggles with in my "Revisiting Olympos" series: how to reimagine Greek mythology in a way that is usable for Wonder Woman, removing the misogynistic elements and using some feminist lines of thought, without making all the goddesses into nice beings and all the gods into nasty beings.

    For Marston this wouldn't a problem: for him it would be a feature. But for me it would feel like too much of a simplification.

    Quote Originally Posted by SeanT View Post
    Diana didn't have to get into a relationship with Steve right away. I mean, that's crazy. But you can be infatuated or interested and have that develop into a relationship, or even a flirtation. The movie and the Rebirth series handled that fine. That Perez felt even this couldn't be broached without exploitation just underlines every other relationship in the book. I think it's really infantilizing for a creator to think that Diana wouldn't be able to take care of herself even if she is unaware of the ways of man's world, and again emphasizes his conceit, that beautiful women are prone to getting exploited.
    I think this is a much better expression of how Pérez hurt Diana's character than how I tried to convey it, when I described it as a streak of sexual puritanism.

    Pérez set out to address a huge problem with Marston's run: the forced romance between Steve and Diana. But he did that by eliding romance from Diana's life, and by making it impossible for any later writer to use Steve as her romantic interest until the next reboot. That's throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

  12. #87
    Incredible Member Geraldofrivia's Avatar
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    Can we move on to Perez taking away the scientific achievements and inquisitive scientific minds of Diana and Amazons? Making them completely dependent on the mercy of Gods.

  13. #88
    Ultimate Member SiegePerilous02's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Geraldofrivia View Post
    Can we move on to Perez taking away the scientific achievements and inquisitive scientific minds of Diana and Amazons? Making them completely dependent on the mercy of Gods.
    I think this is one of the worst changes. I theorize that Perez wanted to keep a consistent aesthetic for the "sword and sandal" thing he was going for by adhering more closely to the Greek myths, but it's not a decision that benefited the mythos in the long term and wasn't worth the trade off.

    You can have faithful representations of the Greek god characters and still have Sci fi Amazons. The Feat of Five arc is pretty great, but the Amazons don't have much to offer the world in a cultural exchange.

  14. #89
    Extraordinary Member AmiMizuno's Avatar
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    I would love to see Dc being back advance tech for Diana and the Amazons. I mean Earth One did it. We can have bullets and bracelets. I mean Diana being the only child I go back and forth. I would love to See Mala being Diana's childhood friend again and her running Transformation Island. I mean one thing that kept them up with us was the magically sphere. A few other things could be Azz's Amazons going outside of the Island then come back. No sex pirates just the Amazons leaving to see what's going on

  15. #90
    My Face Is Up Here Powerboy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Geraldofrivia View Post
    Can we move on to Perez taking away the scientific achievements and inquisitive scientific minds of Diana and Amazons? Making them completely dependent on the mercy of Gods.
    I always thought that had more to do with the television show having been only about 8 years in the past when his version started and things like the invisible plane was something people joked about and the science and technology was something people considered inconsistent with the setting. Granted, the science and tech have been explained nicely since then but, at the time, I'm not sure explanations were going to make any difference because a lot of people already had it set in their minds that the advanced science made no sense.
    Power with Girl is better.

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