Tag: Diana as Wonder Woman

Dc Comics · Golden Age · Not important, or even that fun

1955 Feb, Wonder Woman 72

BwillaLeave a comment

“S.O. S. From the Past”

Wonder Woman is competing with some of her sister Amazons in a series of activities. Because she has won all of the previous games in this one she is bound before she jumps off a cliff into the sea to race to catch a bottle with a message in it. But this is a tiny handicap for the mighty Wonder Woman and she is still the first to the bottle. When she brings it in though they discover this isn’t the bottle Hippolyta tossed in the ocean, but an SOS from 1555.

For a normal person this would just be sad because there is nothing we could do; but for Wonder Woman and the Amazon time machine this is a walk in the park. She ends up on a deserted island the day the letter was written and soon finds the writer about to be sacrificed to some god by the natives of this island. Wonder Woman scares them, breaks their statue, and frees the man before telling the natives to be just, peaceful, merciful, and kind. Then she brings the man onto a passing ship.

The captain has never seen anyone like Wonder Woman before, and upon questioning she tells him how she came to find the man she had saved (omitting that she is from the future). He too had recently Roy d a cry for help in a bottle, but as it was dated 1056 there is nothing he could do about it. Wonder Woman can though; and she focuses her mind on the future and her mother obligingly changea the settings to send Wonder Woman to where she is needed.

This time the danger is not in being trapped on an island far from home; but a prince is being held within his own castle and is going to thrown into the moat to die. Wonder Woman easily gets past the guards and grabs the falling figure. But it isn’t the prince, just a statue that is made of magnetic metal that traps her wrists to it. She sinks to the bottom of the moat, unable to pull herself free until she tempts an electric eel to shock her and lessen the pull. She gets to the surface in time to catch the real prince, then she bursts in the castle, fights people and reinstates the prince. As a reward he gives he a bottle with a message in it, which is the one Hippolyta had thrown into the water; having slipped through a crack in time.

“The Golden Doom”

One day something strange begins happening. Roses turn to gold, as does the coal miners bring up, or the soil in a farmers field or the flower box on Diana’s windowsil. Knowing at once the danger this could cause she leaps out of the window onto her invisible plane to investigate. One her way she spots a house fire, tries to snuff it out with dirt but the dirt is gold and it melts so she brings down a water tower instead. After speaking to General Darnell and Steve she goes back to her plane and begins to drill into the Earth, which is the origin or gold.

Eventually she gets to a large cavern filled with golden mole men. They cover her with gold via their gold guns and explain to the captured woman that they want to be the prime race on Earth, and will achieve this by starving the humans when all the dirt is turned to gold. Wonder Woman whispers to her plane to dive and it begins to drill even further into the Earth and she goes with it. Soon they are deep enough that the moltan heat melts the golden casing around Wonder Woman and she turns the plane around, sucking the heat up with her and melting the mole men as she passes. It also melts the gold on the surface when she arrives and she says it fixes thw problem, but… Whatever.

“The Secret of Wonder Woman’s Sandles”

Ok, I get why we need a story about her lasso, or her tiara, or even her earrings which she uses to breathe underwater. But her sandles? They don’t do anything special. They are mostly normal shoes. In this story we learn they are another thing she earned before she could leave the island for Man’s world.

They are shown to her right off, but they are much too small for her for they grow with her deeds. The first thing she does to begin to be worthy of them is something that needs to be done at once. An undersea volcano begin bubbling, and threatens Paradise Isle. So Wonder Woman lifts the entire island, moves it, and re settles it far enough away from the volcano to be safe. But even this amazing feat only makes one of the sandles grow.

The second thing she does is much smaller in comparison, but a ship had gotten stuck on the back of a passing whale? She lassos the whale to make it stop so the ship goes forward with inertia and then she catches it before it smakes into the sea. This makes the other sandle grow and she puts them on.

Dc Comics · Golden Age · Not important, or even that fun

1955 Jan, Wonder Woman 71

BwillaLeave a comment

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“One Woman Circus”

Wonder Woman is traveling in her jet when she passes over a circus where the main tent is about to fall upon the crowd within. Lassoing one of the flags on top she lifts it into the air and sets it down away from the people before landing to investigate what had caused this almost accident. She goes to the owner’s trailer to find a woman and a man arguing. The woman is the owner of the circus, and the man thinks that she cannot run it on her own due to her gender. He has wanted her to merge her circus with his and says that if he was in charge that this accident wouldn’t have happened.

The woman knows that she can run her business just as well as any man could, and she plans to prove it. The man walks away after telling her that he won’t marry her until she gives up this foolish idea. Miss Norton turns to Wonder Woman, and sadly tells her that she can’t give up the circus as she had promised her father she would keep it going. But everything has been going wrong. Wonder Woman says they should start by looking into what made the tent collapse.

As Wonder Woman examines the tent poles one of the men tells Norton how glad he is that she isn’t giving her circus to Bill. Wonder Woman finds the problem, the center pole of the tent had been weakened by acid and the assistant (the man talking to her earlier) points out that the only person with motive is Bill. Norton doesn’t think that the man she loves would do such a thing and Wonder Woman reminds him that a person is innocent until proven guilty and that they cannot accuse without evidence. Still, the man is planning on keeping an eye out for any more potential ‘accidents’.

That night another accident occurs, the large cats are released and they begin to chase the circus members. Wonder Woman solves the problem with ease by lassoing them and bringing them back to their cages. The assistant once again accuses Bill, and while it seems likely, Wonder Woman reminds him that they still need proof and Norton is shaking her head, refusing to even think about the possibility. (I know it won’t be Bill due to the way the story is told, but if I was in this guys place I would definitely suspect him.)

Norton wakes the next morning to find that only her, Wonder Woman, and the assistant remain, everyone else has left in the night. The place will have to be closed, the show can’t go on with this few people!. But Wonder Woman has a plan and the night of the show Norton is the ringmaster while Wonder Woman crosses the tightrope on her fingernail. Just one. She spins rapidly to move across the wire before it snaps when she is halfway across. The speed of her spins makes enough of an updraft to keep the wire aloft and she makes it across to the other side. When her feet hit solid ground again the assistant tells her that wasn’t an accident and that she should stop before she gets hurt.

Wonder Woman won’t do that as the show is for charity and she gets ready for her next act where she balances an elephant on each foot. As she lifts them into the air, back flat against the floor someone shoots one of the elephants which while it doesn’t harm the mighty animal it does make him begin to lose balance. So Wonder Woman tosses them into the air with her feet, and they somersault in the air. Once again the man tries to convince Wonder Woman to quit but she tells Norton to announce the final act. Which is Wonder Woman juggling twelve bowling balls, and as they get close to her feet she jumps on them and continues around the circle, getting higher and higher.

A slight ticking comes from one of the balls and Wonder Woman grabs it, letting all the balls crash to the ground as she lands. The assistant comes into the ring then, Bill held at gunpoint. He had found him skulking outside, and he was obviously guilty. Wonder Woman thinks for a minute and then offers the bowling ball to the assistant, while she questions Bill saying something is wrong with it and it needs to be examined. The man recoils, knowing it is the ball within which he had placed a bomb. She destroys the bomb and lassos the man who confesses that he had done the sabotage, out of revenge for the fact the circus hadn’t been left to him. He goes to jail and Bill and Miss Norton tell Wonder Woman they are going to marry and combine their circuses, hopefully with Norton having as much power as Bill, but not likely as it’s the fifties….

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The day seems normal to a random pilot, his plane is flying well, and it seems a typical day until his plane begins to dissolve in mid-air. Nor is it the only one to do so, as Wonder Woman must save a falling Steve from another such incident and she discovers that reports of this have been coming in from around the world. Only Wonder Woman’s plane seems unaffected, but everyone is hesitant for her to head into the air again in case this has changed. So she and Steve climb a mountain to the point where the metal is vanishing but are unable to get any readings.

As they return to the city they find the top floors of skyscrapers are vanishing now, the height that is being affected is growing lower. Thinking of the inevitable doom of all the life on Earth Wonder Woman sprints to her plane and breaks through the limit where other planes could go and finds an alien race that is vulnerable to metal and so is removing the danger. Seeing Wonder Woman they follow her to the ground where she breaks out of the dive but they don’t, smashing into the Earth and dying. Wonder Woman destroys their device and all returns to normal.

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“Dream Invasion”

One morning Diana wakes from an uneasy sleep disturbed by nightmares. She pushes it to the back of her mind as we all have those sometimes and besides she can’t even remember it. Her day went I presume normally for we then cut to the next night when she is tired from her lack of sleep and figures she will sleep very well. She doesn’t though, having the same nightmare again. When she wakes this time she thinks there might be something to it and forces herself back to sleep and lucid dreaming. Her dream is of an alien invasion, and her running around the city to save as many people as she can. While flying in her jet she gets a vision of her enemies, who tell her she has somehow intercepted their thought waves and all of this is what they were planning. So they need to kill her to keep her quiet. They chase her in her jet, but she is faster and leads them to the site of an atomic test going on that day and they explode. Steve then knocks on Diana’s door, wondering why she had been late to the test.

Dc Comics · Golden Age

1954 Feb

BwillaLeave a comment

Wonder Woman 64

“The 3-D Terror”

Okay so we’re at the movies, and the young couple we are focusing on are praising the special effects (1954. I can’t even imagine how bad they were) when the monster on screen really  jumps out of the screen. Wonder Woman is going by the theater, and she tries to calm the fleeing crowd, thinking it was only an effect that frightened them. The owner of the movie house explains everything to Wonder Woman, and plays the film from the first for her. As the film is projected the monster comes out again, and WW leaps up and fights the beast.

Riding the creature she ends up in the air where she finds another, and saves a plane from it’s grasp. In anger it rushes toward her and she has the two monsters crash into each other, and fall down dead. When she also has to fight a seas monster she is convinced we are being invaded, and asks for military help. Because of her great influence she is able to avoid the question of how this invasion is occurring.

Wonder Woman had all the 3-D film spliced together, and began to play it, where the alien invader briefly explained through really fake science, how they had managed this. But before they could leave the tape, the strip of film WW had added of a powerful hydrogen bomb went off and killed all the creatures on the film.

“The Doom Dolls”

It is an exceptionally windy day. So windy that Wonder Woman must halt her normal activities to catch a falling water tower. Then it skips to the next day, when Wonder Woman is at her newspaper job. Two men come in, saying they are the president, and secretary of one of the many Wonder Woman fanclubs. They tell the woman they are putting on a parade in her honor. She says she has only done as much as any other person in her position would do, but she wouldn’t want to disappoint anyone, so the parade is a go. As the men walk away they reveal they are actually from a Wonder Woman hate club- made of criminals.

A think we get a hint of their evil plan as we see people shutting down shops so they can attend the parade. Almost all of the city has turned out! Wonder Woman herself is there, sitting next to the men who made the parade as giant Macey day balloons move past. As they do so the crowds drift into slumber, except for the gangmen who have small air filters in their noses. Wonder Woman is placed inside of one of the balloons (which must have a smaller container inside so it doesn’t let all the air out) and then they let it loose. Gang members start looting the town, and we have a panel where we see them carelessly stepping upon the unconscious figures on the ground. Then they fly away by letting remote controlled balloons lift them into the air.

We cut to our hero, who has woken. She calls her jet, and it zooms through the balloon, but it is made of auto sealing rubber, and closes back up. Instead WW starts vibrating, until the balloon pops. She jumps onto her plane, and gets hunting. She ropes the flying balloons, and brings them to earth with her. We close upon the crowd, awake once more, and marching for their hero.

“Wonder Woman’s Last Hour”

Wonder Woman is facing down a group of criminals, bouncing back bullets, and as they try to run her over she lies flat and the vehicle goes over her. Then, returning to her feet Wonder Woman lassos her prey from behind. Handing them over to the cops Wonder Woman calls her plane and makes a miraculous leap from the ground to it. Once seated in the cockpit Wonder Woman takes stock of her  surroundings and with her powerful vision (is this a new power or has she had it before? I’m gonna tag it because I don’t remember it.) she sees a jet plane on fire. The pilot has bailed out, but their chute got caught in the engine; and the pilot is Steve!

Once she is near enough she neatly jumps out of her plane, plucks him out of the air and gently lands on an invisible wing. The she spots an office building that has a hold up going on in a lower floor and she runs down the side of the building to get to it. (never seen her do that before either.) She dodges the bullets of the crooks and smacks them all over head with a large painting.

The next day gangland has called their brainiest member to solve the Wonder Woman problem, and from the headlines about the day before gave him an idea. We cut to WW as she walks down the street, and she sees the same gang she had captured on the first page. For some reason the bullets didn’t bounce off her bracelets (though she was still unharmed) so she went to lie under the car as it went for her. She lassos it like the day before, but her lasso doesn’t hold. She calls her plane to follow the gang, but mixes up her commands and leaves her face first in the road.

Steve lands safely before her and after she explains what has been going on he tells her she must be in a world of illusion. To get out she must seize the one real thing in it. (How would he know that?) But before she can figure out anything more she hears the hold up in the skyscraper, and starts to run up the side of the building only to find she can’t. Her greatest tools not functioning, and Steve having run into the building to face the gang Wonder Woman knows she must fight bare handed to save him.

She runs into the room, picks up two men, who promptly vanish. Feeling as though she can’t do anything right today she sits down and buries her face in her hands. Steve tells her something must be real, she just has to find it. She grabs Steve and he begins to change shape, becoming her true foe- the Thought-Master (she says she’s faced him before, but I don’t recall him.). She says she started to suspect him when Steve skipped the danger he had been in yesterday. With the capture of the Thought-Master the illusions end, and leaving the building Wonder Woman lassos the real Steve and pulls him to her, just to make sure.

Dc Comics · Golden Age

1954, Jan

BwillaLeave a comment

Wonder Woman 63

We begin in a police station where some egotistical ass has called to alert the police to his impending crime. But unlike a cool phantom thief the dude just walks out of the bank he just robbed and happily laughs as the bullets bounce off him. He drops a gas grenade and walks away from the stunned officers of the law. Days later Steve thinks that such a thing is impossible and is conversing with Diana when suddenly the man- who calls himself the human tank- runs out before him with his new illegal gains. Steve of course tries to shoot him. Diana dashes to an alley and changes clothing, but she is unable to stop the Human Tank as she is to busy making sure the ricocheting bullets don’t hit the civilians.

He takes a car and drives off, Wonder Woman chasing him. But her lasso does as much good as the bullets had, bouncing off of him. (That’s not how lassos work…) Instead she ends up leaping on the car and lifting the man over her head with one hand and taking him to jail.

He’s not there for long however. That night he literally punches his way through the prison walls with the help of his toughened skin. She knows she must somehow weaken him before she can capture him for good. When she sees some sand blasters at work she gets an idea. The next time she is notified of his whereabouts she is ready for him. She steals back his loot with her lasso, and so the man chases her. She runs into a carnival, and then it’s fun house, still being chased by the criminal. The tunnel he follows her into shoots jets of pressurized air at them, and though they quickly fell the Amazon, the Tank seems unaffected. Gritting her teeth Wonder Woman holds on, waiting until the Tank cries out as the chemicals on his skin wear away.

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Diana wakes one day, and looking out the window is shocked to find herself in San Fran, not New York. She went to be in her own apartment the night before and now she is at the other end of the country. She changes into Wonder Woman and calls her plane, noting by how quickly it arrives that it was also in San Francisco. She decides to fly back to NY and follow her footsteps to find out she had ended up in California. But as she flys back she finds that 3000 miles later she’s in San Fran again. Intrigued she returns to the apartment where she woke, and there was a man there, who asked her how her trip had been and told her he was the one who made her come out this way.

He shows her how he had projected images into her mind, and changed what she saw so when she woke she thought she was in San Fran, when really she was in NY. He explains that he has this ability due to the alien race that was using him to spy on Earth before invading, and he called her to help prevent it. Once she leaves to stop the invasion the man reveals he is really the Duke of Deception.

Wonder Woman finds and destroys fake space ships, and uses her radar to hopefully hide the real ones. She is directed into a cloud, but she finds none. The friction of her flight causes the cloud to rain, and it was radioactive. Flying in front of the drops she causes a draft to sweep the deadly water with her, she then goes higher so it freezes and turns into a ball of snow. When she finally sees the real invaders (the duke and his men) she lassos the snowball and throws it at them, therefore removing the threat with their own weapon.

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There is a picture of Wonder Woman in a history book, not too abnormal, except for this painting was done more than four hundred years ago. She says she is going to clear up the mystery by going to the past, which I think clears it up pretty well, but I guess she wants the full story. So she goes to see Paula and is sent back to when the portrait was done, Steve jumping in right after. Though it was a very small amount of time in 1954 Paula worries the time machine will have sent him to vastly different era.

Wonder Woman appears near a castle and decides to ask the people there for answers, only for them to try to kill her as she approaches, mistaking her for another. She is moments from taking them all down when an unseen enemy hits her from behind. She manages to remain standing, though her vision goes black. When she recovers she finds herself alone, though not for long as another group of knights come up to her. They call her Queen Niada and say how worried they had been.

They explain that they must hurry as her uncle is about to crowned, so she turns and runs back to the castle planning to continue the ruse until she could find the real queen. She shows up in the throne room, and is all like ‘uncle you look as though you’ve seen a ghost’ a picture is painted of her return and a feast is held. During the feast the amazon faints and her ‘uncle’ takes her to her room and calls a physician. Then the two throw her out a window.

She manages to wake during the fall and punch a way into the castle via the moat where she landed. She happens to come through in a dungeon where the real queen, and Steve were being held. WW breaks down the door and takes them both with her. The Prince’s men try to stop them, but she easily defeats them and then the two time travelers go home.

Dc Comics · Golden Age

1953 Nov

BwillaLeave a comment

Wonder Woman 62

*edit: the leader of the gang in this story is “Angles” Andrew a character who only just makes my tagging requirements and is also the first Angle Man

Silly Crooks! In order to discover Wonder Woman’s secret identity they place shoes that very like hers in a window, proclaiming they had been found and WW could turn up any time to get them.What they didn’t take into account was that many people would give their eyeteeth for something their hero owned. As each girl entered the shop her picture was taken, and the flash scared them off before they could grab the shoes. First they went after a young actress, who wanted the shoes to help launch her career. They wiped her off the list when the real Wonder Woman saved the girl from their gunmen. The second girl was a reporter, who was lured to an airport by the promise of a story. As she was almost pulled into a jet Wonder Woman lassoed it and flipped the plane, while sealing the jet.

Well finally they went after Di. But, as she has done many times in the past she runs fast enough the are shooting at her after image, and she is able to save herself and prove to them that Diana Prince is not Wonder Woman. Then she explained she was able to follow and help the girls as the trap had been obvious. I thought so too, I mean wouldn’t she notice she hadn’t lost any shoes?

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For once Diana is having a peaceful morning, when suddenly she gets a mental radio call. She finds it is her dear friends the leprechauns calling and swiftly soars to their side. When she arrives she finds most of the people sleeping. Only the king remained to explain. Their magic lamp had gone out, and should she fail to relight it the leprechauns would be helpless before their enemies.

As is wasn’t a normal lamp, it couldn’t be lit by normal means. She needed to catch the dust of Halley’s Comet, and have that burned with the heat of the sun. She goes first to Sol, and passes as close as she dares, swinging the lamp from her lasso into a solar flare. She then goes for the further object of her search. The Comet was out near Neptune, and she sent her plane after it faster than the speed of light. By the time she arrived though, the lamp as barely filled with the sun’s flame and so she needed to go into the comet’s tail herself. It was only the speed of her plane that kept her from being harmed as she stepped onto it’s wing to gather the dust.

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Okay two things real quick Diana works for the military, but Wonder Woman also writes an advice column in a paper called the Daily Globe. Second, I think we are about to get our first retcon. In case you don’t know what that is, it is when the writers retroactively change something in a story, in this case the origin of Wonder Woman’s earrings. It used to be they were a gift from the Queen of Venus that would allow them to communicate. I guess we will be either not be seeing any more of that version of that species, or they will communicate via mental radio. She is written a letter asking to explain their origins and this is what she tells him.

During a tournament on Paradise Isle. To make sure that people will not assume favoritism WW makes each task almost impossible to do. Being bound from hand to foot for the high jump, for example. But the games are put to a halt due to the appearance of the Martians. (Yes they are from Mars, the planet, but they are the workers of Mars the God and are not the race we get to know later. Also I always laugh at the planes of the Amazons. Besides WW’s they are shaped like rubber ducks.) The god’s men shoot down the planes with their polar rays, there for freezing the pilots. Frozen though  she was Wonder Woman used her breath to steer her plane. She sped it fast enough to defrost herself via friction, but while she was gone her mother was captured.

She allows herself to be tied with the lasso, only to find the Duke of Deception (who was leading the attack) had not caught Hippolyta after all. They place her in a tube and begin to pump the air from it, as they know she can’t survive that. Then they send the pod into space. She took gold from her tiara and made earrings, and then pushed them against her bracelet to pressure the ferric oxide into them. This somehow let her breath while she wears them??? Does she breath through her ears? She frees herself and stops the Duke but really?????