come closer. tell me more.

revsoncorp:

I normally don’t write text pieces for this tumblr, but hey, it’s 2:45 am and I have nowhere to be.

I gave up the Azzarello/Chiang Wonder Woman with issue #3, so I can’t speak in an informed way about the revelation that has been so controversial on Tumblr this week. I have heard enough to get the gist.

In interviews before the launch and in the first months of it, Azzarello made a big deal about not taking previous incarnations of the character or her world as his model. He talked about not having read the Perez run or the Silver Age material. Though he has endorsed the Golden Age stories in interviews, he refered to it as the “bondage stuff,” which—while accurate to a point—didn’t give me hope that he took from it the same joys that actual fans of the character do.

I like continuity. I like history. Without it, none of our most prized characters would be worth a damn. If the present runs of Superman, Action Comics,and Justice League were all that “counted,” no one would care about Superman. We read these new stories in light of the old ones. (Azzarello does too, as anyone who has read his fabulous Dr. Thirteen series can attest.)

So while I applaud Azzarello for his intention to bring fresh ideas to Wonder Woman’s world, his lack of interest in her past set the alarms off in my head.

Especially since, different from Superman or Batman, Wonder Woman is one of the few characters who was originally created with a very specific ideological core. William Moulton Marston was a neo-Freudian who used his comic books to promote his idiosyncratic beliefs about “love leadership”—basically, that women were naturally more loving than men and therefore if they achieved dominance over them, they would be able to educate men in the ways of love, and therefore bring progress to the world.

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i almost reblogged this post, which is full of straw-feminist garbage, but then i saw this one which is much better and does not make me want to throw things.