Bullets, Bracelets And 75 Years Of Wonder Woman

As Diana of Themyscira Enters a New Phase in Her Storied Career, David Barnett Raises a Toast to the Ever-amazing Amazon...

- David Barnett

Happy birthday to Wonder Woman! Diana of Themyscira, arguably the world’s premier female superhero, turns 75 at the end of this year.

But while she might be as old as your granny, she isn’t planning on swapping her Lasso of Truth and bulletproof bracelets for a bus pass and pension book just yet. Under the creative team of writer Greg Rucka and artists Nicola Scott and Liam Sharp, Wonder Woman has been given the Rebirth treatment by DC in her anniversary year – and it’s excellent.

Rebirth, of course, is aiming to tidy up DC continuity once again, and with 75 years to go at with Wonder Woman, that’s no mean feat. But with the title that debuted this summer, the new team are going all-out not only to reconcile the many variations of the character but also to make her more relevant for 2016 and beyond.

So what do we know about Wonder Woman? Well, she’s a member of the race of super powerful women from Greek myth, the Amazons, who have lived in splendid isolation since ancient times on what was initially named in the comics Paradise Island, but in recent iterations has been given the more classical sounding appellation Themyscira.

The long-standing origin of Diana was that she was fashioned out of clay by Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, who wanted a daughter of her own. Given that Themyscira was cut off from the “world of men,” the... uh, usual methods of achieving this were out of the question, which is why Hippolyta took the golem route and persuaded the gods of Olympus to breathe life into her clay-baby, who went on to enter the world of men as a sort of Amazonian ambassador, hiding in plain sight under the secret identity of Diana Prince.

DIVINE REBOOT