원더우먼 출판물의 역사 (9) : 2006년 re-런칭 [파이널 크라이시스, 블랙키스트 나잇]

출처: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_history_of_Wonder_Woman

.......... as of March 3, 2010

9. 2006 Relaunch 2006년 리런칭 <2>

The relaunch was beset by scheduling problems, described by Grady Hendrix in his article, "Out for Justice," in the New York Sun.

새 시리즈의 출범은 스케줄 문제로 난항에 부딪히게 되었는데, 이에 대해서는 그레이디 헨드릭스가 New York Sun에 기고한 "Out for Justice"에 잘 나타나 있다.

"By 2007 [Heinberg had] only delivered four issues. ... Ms. Picoult's five issues hemorrhaged readers ... and Amazons Attack!, a miniseries commissioned to fill a hole in the book's publishing schedule caused by Mr. Heinberg's delays, was reviled by fans who decried it as an abomination."

"2007년까지 (하인버그는) 단 네 권만을 창작하였다. ... 피코가 만든 다섯 권은 독자를 잃었고 ... 하인버그가 늑장을 부리는 바람에 출판 공백을 메꾸기 위해 출간된 미니 시리즈 Amazons Attack!은 극단적인 혐오감을 표출하는 팬들의 욕을 먹었다."

Grady Hendrix, New York Sun, criticizes ...

그레이디 헨드릭스의 비평원문 바로가기

Out for Justice

Popular Culture

By GRADY HENDRIX

Wonder Woman has had her bottom spanked by glassy-eyed adult babies from Grown-Down Land. She has been rendered helpless by the prehensile moustache of Egg Fu, a 30-foot-tall, communist egg. She has been turned into a gorilla against her will, battled villains as depressing as the Paper Man (who has all the powers of paper) and the Mouse Man (who controls mice with his mind), and her own mother has tried to kill her on more than one occasion. But never before has Wonder Woman faced an enemy as demoralizing as the ones she's found in 2007 — the 66th year, this month, of her super life.

Two years ago, Joss Whedon, the creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," was hired to write and direct a Wonder Woman feature film for Warner Bros., but in February of this year, Mr. Whedon abruptly walked off the project, saying in an interview, "I would go back in a heartbeat if I believed that anybody believed in what I was doing. The lack of enthusiasm was overwhelming." Ten months later, producer Joel Silver shelved the movie indefinitely.

Over in her own comic book, the news hasn't been much better. In 2006, Wonder Woman publisher DC Comics had one of those "can't miss" big ideas that somehow always seem to miss. A companywide revamp of its titles (which also include Superman and Batman) was under way, and at its conclusion, Wonder Woman, then being written by the crime novelist Greg Rucka, would be canceled and relaunched with a new first issue. "Grey's Anatomy" scripter Alan Heinberg committed to a five-issue opening run, to be followed by five issues by New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult.

But the Heinberg relaunch rapidly went off the scheduling rails, and by 2007 he'd only delivered four issues. Ms. Picoult's five issues hemorrhaged readers faster than "Jonah Hex," DC's lone cowboy title, and "Amazons Attack," a miniseries commissioned to fill a hole in the book's publishing schedule caused by Mr. Heinberg's delays, was reviled by fans who decried it as an abomination. No movie. Declining readership. Angry fans. Was everything lost for the Maid of Steel?

Surprisingly, no. In November, fan-favorite and ex-hairdresser Gail Simone took over the writing of the relaunched comic book on an ongoing basis, providing safe haven, at least for now, for the universe's greatest female superhero. "These characters are not made of porcelain," Dan Didio, the executive editor of DC Comics, said. "They're made of diamond. They can weather a bad story."

Wonder Woman, Superman, and Batman are the only characters to be continuously published by DC Comics since the company's inception in 1944, and all have achieved a pop culture recognition that transcends their creator and stretches far beyond the nerd-o-sphere. "I tell people I work for DC Comics and they scratch their heads," Mr. Didio said. "I tell them I work for the company that publishes Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman and they get excited."

DC Comics is, more than anything, the caretaker of these three characters, each of which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But while Batman and Superman each have several monthly titles and have spawned any number of movies and TV shows, Wonder Woman still has just one title on the stands, she's never starred in a movie, and there has only been one Wonder Woman TV show, the Lynda Carter series that went off the air in 1979.

"It's probably more difficult because she's female," Mr. Didio acknowledged. "But it's hard to say that the character has a weakness when she's outlasted so many other characters."

Even people with a tenuous grasp of pop culture know that Superman is from the planet Krypton and works at the Daily Planet. They know that millionaire Bruce Wayne saw his parents murdered in Gotham City and became Batman. But they're a little foggier on Wonder Woman. She's an Amazon from ... Amazon Island? No one's even quite sure what she does. Ambassador? Warrior? Gym teacher? Few people know that she's really Princess Diana and that she has two mothers. Formed from clay by the Queen of the Amazons, she was imbued with the attributes of the Greek gods by Athena — "beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, swifter than Hermes, and stronger than Hercules."

"I think that's because of the lack of exposure," Ms. Simone, the series' ongoing writer, said, acknowledging the catch-22 facing Wonder Woman. "She hasn't had a major motion picture. She's only had the one TV series, not several of them like Superman has."

Mr. Rucka offered another explanation. "All along, there's been a feeling that they have to bring in more readers, they have to increase sales," he said. "What they haven't done is portray her consistently. They relaunch the series, they bring back her secret identity, they take it away, they bring it back, they make two Wonder Women, then three, then none, then one. At the end of the day, it's that inconsistency that hurts her the most."

But back in 1941, when superheroes could protect us from Nazis as much as from the Speed Maniacs from Mercury, Wonder Woman's creator knew exactly how she was to be portrayed.

"Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world," wrote William Marston, a psychologist, inventor, and happy polyamorist who lived in a cozy, lifelong ménage à trois with his wife and the couple's lover, both of whom served as inspiration for Wonder Woman. Marston, who invented the systolic blood-pressure test used to detect deception, which became a component of the modern polygraph (and inspired Wonder Woman's famous golden lasso), felt that women were more honest and unfailing than men, and he championed their ascent in society. There had been female superheroes before her debut in December 1941, but none of them had served an agenda as ambitious as the one Marston gave his Wonder Woman: to change the world.

While Batman and Superman were fighting saboteurs and war profiteers on the home front, Wonder Woman was leading Marines into battle in the Pacific. Women were entering the workplace in massive numbers, and Wonder Woman was a four-color embodiment of Rosie the Riveter. But her approach to fighting crime was as unorthodox as her creator's approach to marriage. In an early edition, when debutante-turned-arch-enemy, the Cheetah, attacked, Wonder Woman tricked her into performing a dance number. As the audience applauds, Wonder Woman turns to the Cheetah and raves, "You're a born dancer — your dancing could attract millions of admirers! Oh, Cheetah, why don't you dance and make people love you?" Outsmarted, the Cheetah agrees and begs to be sent to "Transformation Island" where strict, slightly kinky Amazonian discipline was used to reform hardened super-villains.

Despite Gloria Steinem putting Wonder Woman on the first cover of Ms. Magazine in 1971, Marston never intended Wonder Woman to be a feminist. Feminism preaches that women are equal to men and should be treated as such, an argument that falls apart when your avatar of femininity is a 6-foot-tall Amazon who flies an invisible jet and handles a golden lasso that forces adversaries to tell the truth. To Marston, it was always very clear: Women weren't simply as good as men — they were better than men.

The Amazing Amazon owes her longevity and popularity in large part to the politically incorrect idea that Marston etched into her DNA: Maybe women really are superior to men. Ms. Simone downplays any larger agenda in her run on Wonder Woman. "I just want to give the reader as good of a story as I can write," she said.

But in the first issue of her relaunch, Wonder Woman fights a gang of super-gorillas before realizing that they're not evil, merely misguided. Bringing the fight to a halt, she lets them move into her apartment, but only after their leader kneels and kisses her lasso. Not many superheroes turn their enemies into roommates, especially when their enemies are talking gorillas. But while the new Wonder Woman series portrays its heroine as strong and compassionate, it also carries a whiff of slightly sexualized dominance. In other words, as she enters 2008, Wonder Woman is finally back on track, just the way her creator wanted her.

Correction from December 13, 2007:

Super Girl is the comicbook hero known as "Maid of Steel." The title was bestowed upon an incorrect female superhero in an article on page 13 of the December 11 Sun.

Many attribute these flaws to the constraints that DC placed on the authors; Picoult's interpretation in particular has received acclaim from critics, who would have liked to have seen the novelist given more time to work.

이런 문제들 중 상당수는 DC가 작가진에게 내건 창작의 제한조건 때문이라는 견해가 많았다. 특히 캐릭터에 대한 피코의 재해석은 평론가의 호평을 받았는데 평자들 입장에서는 스토리 작가가 더 많은 시간을 투자하는 것이 낫다고 보았을 터이다.

Says Min Jin Lee of the UK Times, "By furnishing a 21st-century emotional characterisation for a 20th-century creation, Picoult reveals the novelist's dextrous hand."

UK Times 이 민진의 분석에 따르면, "20세기에 나온 캐릭터를 21세기 버젼으로 세밀하게 재창작하는 데 있어서 피코만큼 솜씨좋은 작가도 없다"는 것이다.

Indeed, others blame DC's inconsistent portrayals of the Wonder Woman universe, brought about by employing so many writers in such a short span of time, for the failures in the relaunch; "I feel sorry for Picoult, she was going in a good, clear direction but is soon side-tracked by DC Comic’s external needs."

다른 비판에서도 최소한 원더우먼의 세계에서는 일관성이 결여된 DC의 운영정책을 힐난하는 시선이 역시 존재하며, 결국 이런 일관성의 결여로 인해 지극히 짧은 창작기간 동안에도 너무 많은 작가진이 중구난방으로 참여하여 시리즈의 출범에 심각한 차질을 빚었다는 것이다. - "피코에 대해서는 정말 유감이다. 명확하고 올바른 창작의 노선을 제시했음에도 불구하고 DC 코믹스의 외부적인 여건 때문에 샛길로 빠지게 된 셈이다."고 한 한탄이 참으로 타당하게 들린다.

Min Jin Lee, the UK Times, criticizes ...

이 민진의 비평원문 바로가기

Wonder Woman:

Love and Murder by Jodi Picoult

Reviewed by Min Jin Lee

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP in Elmhurst, New York, it was a special day when I had enough coins for an Annabelle's Rocky Road bar and a Wonder Woman comic book.

In real life, I was a shy, short-sighted Korean immigrant girl wearing cousin Grace's hand-me-down sweaters and corduroys. But in the privacy of a rusty fire-escape of a Queens apartment building, I was an Amazon warrior princess clad in a sassy American flag uniform, forearms ringed with bulletproof cuffs forged from bits of Zeus's Aegis shield, and I defended my new country with superhuman reflexes and the Lasso of Truth, made from Aunt Antiope's Golden Girdle of Gaea.

Wonder Woman: Love and Murder, written by the bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult and drawn by the talented artists Drew Johnson, Terry Dodson, and Paco Diaz, is a hardback collection of five magazines. Picoult, the second woman to script the six-decade old series (the first was Mindy Newell) gives Wonder Woman and her alter-ego Diana Prince an identity crisis worthy of an immigrant's.

Picoult makes the case for the displaced alien: Wonder Woman, daughter of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, is, after all, Princess Diana, an emissary from Paradise Island (Themyscira) - her first language being native Themysciran (she also has Ancient and Modern Greek).

In the here and now, Diana Prince must conceal her Amazonian identity while wearing a poorly tailored trouser suit and lacking the cash for a tank of gas. Our heroine is friendless in her new world.

After snapping off Maxwell Lord's head to save Superman in the previous series, Wonder Woman is remorseful over the murder, and has taken a year off superhero work. As Diana Prince, she works as special agent for the Department of Metahuman Affairs with her partner, the blond, soul-patched Nemesis. In Love and Murder, Wonder Woman battles the tricksy Circe, manages her reincarnated mother Hippolyta who stages an Amazon attack on the US capital, and protects the immature and libidinous Nemesis.

In these inevitable crises, our heroine must choose among many conflicting identities - loyal Amazon princess, civil servant, good daughter to a virtuous, controlling mother - and defender of the flawed but lovable human race.

In the trials of this ancient, gifted female, we witness her modern existential tears, self-doubts and moral dilemmas. Her worthy rival, the villain Circe, analyses her enemy astutely: “She's so eager to be perfect that she's forgotten the simplest truth... something perfect is bound to get... broken.”

In her introduction, Picoult asks pointedly: "How could I put my fingerprint on Wonder Woman?” By furnishing a 21st-century emotional characterisation for a 20th-century creation, Picoult reveals the novelist's dextrous hand.

Wonder Woman's creator, Dr William Moulton Marston, a Harvard-educated psychologist, might have appreciated this new self-awareness of an ambivalent superhero. Marston invented the first functional polygraph machine (forerunner of the Lasso of Truth) and maintained a polyamorous household with his wife Elizabeth and lover Olive, who each bore him two children.

An eccentric intellectual who believed in the moral superiority of women, Marston wagered that comics could serve as “psychological propaganda”. In 1943, he wrote in The American Scholar that “the picture-story fantasy cuts loose the hampering debris of art and artifice and touches the tender spots of universal human desires and aspirations, hidden customarily beneath long accumulated protective coverings of indirection and disguise. Comics speak, without qualm or sophistication, to the innermost ears of the wishful self”.

The Wonder Woman historian Les Daniels shares the “open secret” that her readers have been overwhelmingly male - “estimates run as high as 90 per cent”. Marston sought to change patriarchy through the populist medium of the comic book by getting to the boys before they became men.

Picoult, who engages with timely and critical issues in her popular novels, is a worthy legatee of his subversive and high-minded ideals. Love and Murder delivers a Wonder Woman who doesn't just make man wonder over her strength, she wonders about herself.

Beyond Marston's intended audience, Wonder Woman reached girls all over the world and socialised them. Diane Middlebrook, the biographer of the poets Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Ovid, who died in December, aged 68, regarded Wonder Woman as her first hero: “I used to have this fantasy that I was actually a goddess. Wonder Woman came about as close as they got. I used to buy those thick Wonder Woman comic books.”

In his unflagging devotion to Wonder Woman, Nemesis argues: “You stop believing in heroes, the hero inside you dies.” From the girl who would be biographer to boys and girls around the globe, the imprint continues to live - sustaining our inner heroes.

Recently in the Final Crisis storyline, Diana was attacked by Mary Marvel who infected her with the Morticoccus virus.

최근 Final Crisis의 스토리 라인에서 다이애나는 메리 마블의 공격을 받아 모티코커스 바이러스에 감염된다.

This seriously deformed Diana and brainwashed her into becoming one of Darkseid's Female Furies.

이 일로 다이애나는 완전히 세뇌당하여 결국 다크사이드의 피메일 퓨리 중 하나로 변신해 버린다.

She aided him in conquering Earth along with other female superheroes/villains like Catwoman, Giganta and Batwoman.

다이애나는 캣우먼, 자이갠타, 배트우먼 등과 함께 다크사이드의 지구 정복을 돕는다.

Blackest Night: Wonder Woman #1-3, February ~ April 2010

During the Blackest Night event, Diana is lured to Arlington National Cemetary by Maxwell Lord, who was reanimated as a Black Lantern.

Blackest Night 이벤트 중에 다이애나는 블랙 랜턴으로 소생한 맥스웰 로드의 유인을 받아 알링턴 국립묘지로 향한다.

When Wonder Woman arrived, he sprang a trap, using black rings to revive the bodies of fallen soldiers.

로드는 반지의 힘으로 시체를 부활시켜 원더우먼이 도착했을 때 덫을 놓는다.

Wonder Woman uses her Lasso to reduce Max and the soldiers to dust; However, as she leaves, the dust begins to regenerate.

원더우먼은 로드를 물리치기 위해 올가미를 쓰지만, 그가 묘지를 뜨자 재로 변한 존재들이 다시 소생하게 된다.

Later Nekron, lord of the dead, and the one responsible for the creation of the Black Lantern Corps, reveals that he allowed for Diana's earlier resurrection, in order for him to have an "inside agent" among the living.

이후 네크론 - 망자의 신이면서 동시에 블랙 랜턴 군단의 리더 - 은 다이애나의 부활을 앞당기게 되는데, 산 자들 사이에서 살아있는 스파이가 필요했기 때문이다.

Briefly reanimating Bruce Wayne as a Black Lantern, Nekron creates an emotional tether in Diana, allowing him to place a black power ring on her and transforming her into a Black Lantern.

브루스 웨인을 블랙 랜턴으로 소생시키면서 네크론은 다이애나에게 감정의 재갈을 물리는데, 이로써 반지의 힘으로 다이애나를 블랙 랜턴으로 변신시키는 데에 성공하게 된다.

Soon after, a duplicate of Carol Ferris' violet power ring attaches itself to Diana, using her unrequited romantic love for Batman as well as the love she feels for the whole of Earth to destroy the black ring, at the same time turning her into a Star Sapphire.

나중에 캐롤 페리스의 파워 링과 복사판이 다이애나에게 붙었는데, 다이애나가 배트맨에 품은 연정과 지구에 대한 박애로 인해 블랙 링을 파괴하고 다이애나가 스타 사파이어로 변하는 결과를 낳았다.

Diana was also given spiritual aid from Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love in accepting the ring.

다이애나는 반지를 받아들이는 과정에서 사랑의 여신인 아프로디테에게서 영적인 도움을 얻었다.

Some time later, Max attacked on Wonder Woman in Coast City.

시간이 흘러 맥스는 코스트 시티에서 원더우먼을 공격한다.

Wonder Woman encases Max's body in a violet crystal, then shatters it to pieces.

원더우먼은 (맥스를 물리치고) 맥스의 시신을 보라색 크리스털에 넣은 채로 산산조각내 버린다.

She then encounters Mera who had transformed into a Red Lantern, and during the fight, their two rings interface with each other, Wonder Woman constructs the violet light giving Mera some measure of control over her new-found savagery.

다이애나는 레드 랜턴으로 변한 메라와 마주쳤는데 격투 중에 두 개의 반지가 서로 작용하여 보라색 광선이 생성되고 다이애나가 메라를 조종할 수 있게 된다.

Wonder Woman was also seen in Justice League encouraging Donna Troy to help make a new Justice League.

이 외에도 원더우먼은 저스티그 리그에 출연하며 도나 트로이의 뉴 저스티스 리그 결성을 돕는 모습도 나온다.