Five Great Wonder Woman Villains No One Ever Talks About?

[Mel Dyer]

'The Five Most Promising' might have been a better title for this. There may be some super-villains that I missed, here, but, I did try...here is the article.

[Mel Dyer]

The five super-villains were:

Doctor Cyber
First Born
The Adjudicator
The Queen
Bushmaster

Meredith Finch tweeted me her appreciation for my commentary on the Queen, which I explained was originally 'Termite Queen', in the article. So, it's settled; Meredith's insectoid alien, ..as I suspected, a few months ago, ..is a revival of the Golden Age villainess, Termite Queen.

[Dr. Poison]

The five super-villains were:

Doctor Cyber
First Born
The Adjudicator
The Queen
Bushmaster

Meredith Finch tweeted me her appreciation for my commentary on the Queen, which I explained was originally 'Termite Queen', in the article. So, it's settled; Meredith's insectoid alien, ..as I suspected, a few months ago, ..is a revival of the Golden Age villainess, Termite Queen.

Thanks for confirming Mel.

[ducklord]

The five super-villains were:

Doctor Cyber
First Born
The Adjudicator
The Queen
Bushmaster

Meredith Finch tweeted me her appreciation for my commentary on the Queen, which I explained was originally 'Termite Queen', in the article. So, it's settled; Meredith's insectoid alien, ..as I suspected, a few months ago, ..is a revival of the Golden Age villainess, Termite Queen.

Maybe it's my inner 12-year-old speaking, but I'm not sure that Wonder Woman fighting the telepathic commands of someone calling himself "The Bushmaster" would fly outside of a Garth Ennis comic.

[Stanlos]

'The Five Most Promising' might have been a better title for this. There may be some super-villains that I missed, here, but, I did try...here is the article.

Adjudicator! I had to get rid of my comics a few years ago and am in the process of reacquiring volume 1 of Wonder Woman again. The first ones on my list are 288 (and the DC Presents prequel where she soundly demonstrates the veracity of her legend) and JUDGMENT IN INFINITY with that entity as the antagonist. EXTRAORDINARILY POWERFUL but its origins may be problematic as it doesn't really fit the GL color spectrum origin of the DCU.

[Mel Dyer]

Adjudicator! I had to get rid of my comics a few years ago and am in the process of reacquiring volume 1 of Wonder Woman again. The first ones on my list are 288 (and the DC Presents prequel where she soundly demonstrates the veracity of her legend) and JUDGMENT IN INFINITY with that entity as the antagonist. EXTRAORDINARILY POWERFUL but its origins may be problematic as it doesn't really fit the GL color spectrum origin of the DCU.

The Adjudicator might not be Galactus or Darkseid, but, he's hardly a lightweight on the cosmic scale. He's on a power and awareness scale, beyond the reach of almost any DCU character, but, the SPECTRE - in a comic with sales, as chronically low, as WW's, ..what is he doing in a file cabinet?! Does Adjudicator or Doctor Cyber even come up in a planning meeting? I'm guessing not, because Joss Whedon clearly didn't know about either one of them and dismissed WW's rogues gallery as virtually unusable and uninspiring.

And before anyone here tells me that the Adjudicator would be better suited to a Green Lantern or X-Men comic - that Wonder Woman should be hacking her way through an endless column of witches and fairies - let me remind you that, at the height of her popularity, Wonder Woman regularly traveled to alien planets and other dimensions, where she toppled empires and liberated entire civilizations of people, who had nothing to do with Greek mythology. Even the Greek gods were portrayed as cosmic beings, with elaborate citadels, lairs and armies on other planets, and Wonder Woman made nothing of piling up her Invisible Plane with immortal Amazons, cowgirls, hotshot Navy pilots and sorority chicks...and beating the hell out of every testy mythical personage, Bullfinch ever scribbled about.

I'll ask those same fans to show me a better super-villain, created for use in Wonder Woman comic, in the last thirty years - NOT Darkseid, the Joker, Doomsday, Sinestro, Neron, Poison Ivy or any antagonists from other comics - that comes close to approaching the scope and level of development on the Adjudicator. Show me TWO, created for use in WW. Why is this comic constantly borrowing villains from other comics, perpetuating the myth that Wonder Woman has no rogues gallery, worth writing about?

I'd pay money to be a termite on the wall in one of these infamous editorial meetings, we're always hearing about in interviews. I do not understand how this comic is put together - how the stories are conceived and what list of characters, supporting regulars and villains, that the creators are working from. For a character, like the Adjudicator - a first-class supervillain, if there ever was one - to go unused and left to obscurity seems entirely inexcusable...

And thank you, all of you, for keeping this discussion up front and fresh in our minds.

[Stanlos]

The Adjudicator might not be Galactus or Darkseid, but, he's hardly a lightweight on the cosmic scale. He's on a power and awareness scale, beyond the reach of almost any DCU character, but, the SPECTRE - in a comic with sales, as chronically low, as WW's, ..what is he doing in a file cabinet?! Does Adjudicator or Doctor Cyber even come up in a planning meeting? I'm guessing not, because Joss Whedon clearly didn't know about either one of them and dismissed WW's rogues gallery as virtually unusable!

And before anyone here tells me that the Adjudicator would be better suited to

That's an interesting position as he would from his origin be far beyond the both of those and yes even Spectre, at least as they have been previously characterized. The Adjudicator and the . . . was it Overseers? . . . whatever they were their operational levels were universal. I would liken him more to the Cronus from JL/Avengers. Given how the DCU's cosmology has pretty much been rewritten as Green Lantern Rainbows I don't know that the Adjudicator and the Whatever-they-were would translate. I am set to receive those issues shortly and will check the origin carefully to see if I am misremembering.

[Mel Dyer]

It would be so embarrassing to see the creative teams of Green Lantern or JLA borrow the Adjudicator or Cyber and do something interesting with him, ..while WW writers are boating about another upcoming Cheetah story. I Ching, Doctor Cyber, Steve Trevor...you name it. The Time Masters, who first appeared in a 1950s WW comic, are now in a CW TV show, called Legends Of Tomorrow, ..while Wonder Woman, it seems, is barely in a Batman v Superman flick. For a Wonder Woman fan, this is embarrassing.

Why are WW fans forced to watch this happen, over and over again?

And, for my money, Bushmaster doesn't look any sillier than Lex Luthor, Metallo, Magneto, Doctor Octopus, the Riddler, the Green Goblin, Black Manta or any OTHER major super-villain, when these characters started out - characters, who are presently celebrated in comic books, as classics. Classic villains don't create themselves, but are made by writers, artists and editors, who actually care about the comic, they're putting their names on. Please don't anybody tell me that Bushmaster, - basically Boba Fett, with zombie-creating technology - couldn't have been a Deathstroke, a Batroc or a Winter Soldier, with the right writer and competent editorial development.

How can Wonder Woman, barely holding its own shelf-space from year to year, have a badass, zombie-creating super-assassin - one created for use in WW - and justify NOT using him, with zombies and variations on zombies popping up in hit TV shows and blockbuster movies?

Classic villains start with writers and editors, who actually give a damn.

[Dr. Poison]

This habit of ignoring the majority of Wonder Woman's rogues gallery has been going on since the Post-Crisis reboot. Since then, it's been a revolving door of Cheetah, Circe, and the Olympians with a sprinkling of Dr. Psycho, Silver Swan, Giganta, Angle Man, and Dr. Poison from time to time. Queen Clea got a great revival under Jimenez and then was only seen in cameo form after that. Many of Diana's other rogues from before Crisis such as Baroness Paula Von Gunther, Minister Blizzard, Osira, Duke of Deception, Kung, Gudra, The Mask, Red Dragon, Sharkeeta, and Zara have been only seen in cameo form or not at all since Perez's reboot. Most of the writers who have written for Diana in the last few decades want to create new characters for her world instead of modernizing and building up the existing characters. Diana doesn't need public domain or constant new characters to help her carry her book. She needs a creative team who values her history and wants to work with it instead of against it.

[Frank]

The Adjudicator might not be Galactus or Darkseid, but, he's hardly a lightweight on the cosmic scale. He's on a power and awareness scale, beyond the reach of almost any DCU character, but, the SPECTRE - in a comic with sales, as chronically low, as WW's, ..what is he doing in a file cabinet?! Does Adjudicator or Doctor Cyber even come up in a planning meeting? I'm guessing not, because Joss Whedon clearly didn't know about either one of them and dismissed WW's rogues gallery as virtually unusable and uninspiring.

It's been quite awhile since I read those issues - I think I re-read them when PJ did his "all-heroines" issue - but I don't recall the Adjudicator having any character development, and didn't the story conclude with him being whisked away by his caretakers, who deemed him mentally unfit for anything? My only point is that there wasn't much in the one story arc he's been in to make much of a lasting impression, so I can see why he remains in the dustbin of obscurity. The thrill of those 3 comics had to do with the heroines, not the villain.

The absence of Dr. Cyber from WW, however, has always bewildered me. Post-crisis, she's only been around a wee bit, and it seems like she's been anywhere but in WW, from Kurt Busiek's peculiar re-imagining of her in Power Company to JLU cartoons to Joe Kelly's awesome Enginehead. I would have much preferred a re-vamped Cyber from Rucka than Veronica Cale.