Wonder Woman: Earth-Two

There's one last 1970s Earth-Two comic set retroactively during World War II that I didn't discover until reading All-Star Squadron, following Steel and Superman vs. Wonder Woman. In November 1975, the tv movie The New Original Wonder Woman aired on ABC, adapting the Golden Age comic book by setting Wonder Woman's adventures in World War II; this lead to a tv show from April 1976 to February 1977, similarly set during World War II.* These days, comics readers often complain when comics contort to be more like their television or film counterparts, but it's nothing unique to this moment: the Wonder Woman comic switched to a World War II setting to tie in to the tv show.

I don't know how they might have handled it without the multiple Earths set-up, but DC already had a method of depicting WWII-set adventures of Wonder Woman. In Wonder Woman vol. 1 #228 (cover-dated Feb. 1977, but actually released Nov. 1976), the Earth-One Wonder Woman encounters a villain who has traveled across time and dimensions from Earth-Two in 1943. She fights him, and ends up pulled back to his home dimension and time, and teams up with her Earth-Two counterpart to defeat him. Wonder Woman returns to 1970s Earth-One at the end of the issue-- but from that point onwards, Wonder Woman vol. 1 continues to follow the 1940s adventures of the Earth-Two Wonder Woman, not following its star back home.

The Earth-Two Wonder Woman would star in Wonder Woman for the next year in a series of adventures by a variety of writers and artists, and often guest-starring various members of the Justice Society; many were written by the ubiquitous Gerry Conway. My understanding is that these stories often owed more to the tv show than to the Golden Age comics they were supposedly set between; I think in the original Golden Age comics, Diana Prince was a nurse, but in these stories, she's in Army Intelligence, for example. Roy Thomas would of course pick up some details of these comics for All-Star Squadron, pitting some of the original Axis villains devised by Conway against the Squadron.

During this time, the Earth-Two Wonder Woman also had a feature in World's Finest vol. 1 that ran from issue #244 (Apr./May 1977) to #249 (Feb./Mar. 1978), and she played a role in "The Reality War!", a celebratory story in issue #250 (Apr./May 1978) that featured a whole mess of DC characters; she also had an epic 64-page story in DC Special vol. 2 #9 (1978).

But as you can tell if you pay attention to the dates, DC's tie-in had been a bit belated, and thus it didn't last long. In issue #243 of Wonder Woman vol. 1 (May 1978), released over six months after the tv Wonder Woman had switched to a contemporary setting, the Earth-One Wonder Woman was again pulled through time by a villain to Earth-Two (this time to 1945). The two Wonder Women teamed up again, and before returning to the future, the Earth-One Wonder Woman erased the Earth-Two Wonder Woman's memory of her, thus neatly explaining why the Earth-Two Wonder Woman hadn't known of Earth-One in any of the set-later-but-published-earlier JLA/JSA team-ups! Then, from #244 onwards, Wonder Woman vol. 1 again focused on the adventures of the Earth-One Wonder Woman.

So, are they any good? I don't know. I had intended to read all of these stories and review them... but I couldn't! Most go for silly money on the secondary market, if they're available at all, and few have even been digitized, so you can't read them on comiXology or DC Universe Infinite. My write-up here is just based on what I've read about these comics, not actually reading them myself. 

DC has done some good collections of older Wonder Woman comics the past few years, including collecting the "Diana Prince, Secret Agent" era (1968-73), and the "Twelve Labors" storyline (1974-76). It would be nice to see those continue into a reprint of this material; Wonder Woman #228-43, DC Special #9, and the Wonder Woman stories from World's Finest #244-50 would make a great, if a little chunky, collected edition. Maybe DC could toss in Superman vs. Wonder Woman and/or Wonder Woman vol. 1 #300 if they were feeling generous. The former I've already covered; the latter is a 1983 story where the Earth-One Wonder Woman visits her Earth-Two counterpart in the present, and establishes that Diana Prince married Steve Trevor and has a daughter, Lyta (later, of course, Fury of Infinity, Inc. fame). I would buy it! Below I'll list what chronologically such a collection would include, and what its credits would be. (Thanks to the Grand Comics database for the covers used in this essay and for credits information.)

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Wonder Woman: Earth-Two

Writers: Gerry Conway, Martin Pasko, Jack C. Harris, Alan Brennert, Denny O'Neil, Roy & Dann Thomas
Pencillers: Jose Delbo, Don Heck, Mike Vosburg, Bob Brown, Jim Sherman, Mike Nasser, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Russ Heath, Steve Ditko, Dick Ayres, Joe Staton, George Tuska, Ross Andru

Inkers: Vince Colletta, Joe Giella, Dick Giordano, Bob Wiacek, Bob Smith, Dan Adkins, Steve Ditko, Frank Chiaramonte

Colorists: Liz Berube, Jerry Serpe, Adrienne Roy, Carl Gafford, D. R. Martin
Letterers: Milt Snapinn, Joe Letterese, John Workman, Ben Oda, Bill Morse, Gaspar Saladino, Clem Robins, John Constanza

• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #228-29
• World's Finest vol. 1 #244
• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #230-31
• World's Finest vol. 1 #245
• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #232-33
• World's Finest vol. 1 #246
• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #234-35
• World's Finest vol. 1 #247
• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #236-37
• World's Finest vol. 1 #248
• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #238-39
• World's Finest vol. 1 #249
• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #240
• All-New Collectors' Edition #C-54
• DC Special vol. 2 #9
• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #241
• World's Finest vol. 1 #250
• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #242-43, 300
  

* The show continued after that, but switched to a contemporary setting for seasons 2 through 4.

This post is a supplement in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Secret Origins of the Golden Age. Previous installments are listed below:

1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)
8. Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)
9. Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)
10. Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]
11. Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)
12. All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)
13. Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)
14. Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two (1977)
    

Review: Steel, the Indestructible Man by Gerry Conway, Don Heck, et al.

The nature of shared universe comics is that when reading them, they lead you to discover more comics that you also want to read. This is their curse and their blessing all at once. Hence, it was while reading All-Star Squadron that I discovered the existence of Steel, the Indestructible Man, a comic set on Earth-Two during World War II, and so I decided to catch up on it before wrapping up my WWII-set comics with The Young All-Stars.

 

Steel was created by Gerry Conway, a mainstay of DC in the 1970s and 1980s; around the time he wrote this, he was also working on Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, All Star Comics, and Justice League of America, among many others. I haven't found Conway's work on team books to be very interesting most of the time,* but Steel reads differently than the others. I don't want to falsely attribute motives to him, but Steel reads like something he wrote because he was in love with the idea, rather than because he'd been assigned to and was capable of putting out serviceable work at great volume. The lettercol of issue #2 indicates that he was inspired by the research he did while writing the WWII-era adventures of the Earth-Two Wonder Woman to come up with his own WWII hero.

 

Steel is set about a year before America entered the war, when many Americans believed we shouldn't be involved at all. Steel is Hank Heywood, a promising medical student who gave up his career after a trip to Poland where he saw Nazi brutality firsthand, and enlisted in the Marines. Injured while taking down a saboteur, he survived only because of an experimental surgery by his old mentor, who use "bio-retardant" to heal his wound and enable his body to accept steel beams and motors in place of damaged bones and muscle. But after his surgery, he realizes he can use his newfound strength and durability to fight for the cause in a more direct way.

 

from Steel, the Indestructible Man #1 (art by Don Heck & Joe Giella)

The actual superhero plots are often pretty banal; Steel fights mediocre enemies like the Mineral Master and the Gadgeteer. Like Roy Thomas's later All-Star Squadron, though, what elevates the material is a sense of history, the way it weaves Steel into the real social concerns of the 1940s. Every mediocre supervillain here is somehow tied to the concerns of the war; Heywood himself is torn between using his abilities to push America into war and the dreams of his peace of his fiancée; on a practical basis, he has to work his superheroing in and around his responsibilities as a Marine private. Like the best superhero premises, it feels like a strong "storytelling engine," one that could have generated ideas and conflicts for years to come.

 

Additionally, Conway does some of his finest scripting here; much of the series is narrated in the first person by excerpts from Heywood's journal, which gives the whole series a strong sense of personality. Don Heck is an artist I can't claim to have thought much about (my notes tell me I have reviewed seven  previous comics he's worked on, but in none of those reviews did I ever mention his work aside from All-Star Squadron), but here he does great work. Like the best superhero comics artists, he draws cleanly and clearly, and is also good at communicating character. Steel's costume might be over-the-top, but it's also entirely appropriate, and presents a strong image. And some of the stories have some good zip to them, like the one where Steel confronts a newspaper mogul over his complicity in a friend's betrayal.

from Steel, the Indestructible Man #5 (art by Don Heck & Frank Chiaramonte)

The only thing I didn't like was issue #5, which for some reason takes a swerve into the Gothic, with a tale of twin brothers and deformed creatures in a spooky house in the middle of a dark forest. It's no coincidence this story is totally detached from the concerns of World War II!

Interestingly, nothing in the first five issues definitively places it on Earth-Two; though Superman, the Sandman, the Flash, and Hawkman would have been active by this point (among others), no one ever mentions them or calls Steel a superhero. If #6 had been published, however, it would have featured the origin of Baron Blitzkrieg, a character Conway and Heck created for the Earth-Two Wonder Woman comics... but there never was an issue #6. Steel was a victim of the so-called "DC Implosion," one of seventeen comics cancelled overnight. Issue #5 previews a #6 that never appeared, and Conway and Heck had even written and pencilled the issue.

That wasn't the end of Steel, though; Roy Thomas brought the character into the All-Star Squadron, a natural fit if there ever was one, given the common vibe of both series. Thomas even took the completed issue #6 and worked it into All-Star Squadron, using it as flashbacks in A-SS #8-9 to explain how Steel came to be involved in that adventure of the Squadron. I reread #8-9 to cap off Steel, and found them more interesting with the context of knowing who Steel was and wanting to see his adventures continue. Steel would continue as an A-SS member up through the Crisis, and his grandson would also star in Justice League in the 1980s, which I look forward to reading someday.

Steel, the Indestructible Man was originally published in five issues (Mar.-Nov. 1978). The series was created and written by Gerry Conway; designed by Don Heck; pencilled by Don Heck (#1-5) and Juan Ortiz (#3-4); inked by Joe Giella (#1, 3-4), Vince Colletta (#2), Bruce Patterson (#3-4), and Frank Chiaramonte (#5); lettered by Ben Oda (#1-3), Todd Klein (#3), Clem Robins (#4), and Karin (#5); colored by A. Tollin (#1), Adrienne Roy (#2), Bob LeRose (#3-4), and Jerry Serpe (#5); and edited by Allen Milgrom.

 

* Lest it sound like I hate all Gerry Conway work, I actually really enjoyed some of his Crisis crossovers, especially the "Crisis on New Genesis" one. Plus I liked Sun Devils, but that came later.

 

This post is the thirteenth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two. Previous installments are listed below:

1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)
8. Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)
9. Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)
10. Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]
11. Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)
12. All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)