Volume 4 covers the end of one differing phase of the series and all of the rest, although the difference is purely superficial. Indeed, though I’ve never seen this officially confirmed, it’s long been common knowledge that Marston’s original deal with All-American comics included a clause by which ownership of Wonder Woman would revert to the Marston family if a Wonder Woman comic was not published for a certain length of time, and it was widely believed that the series continued because DC had too much income in licensing deals tied up in the character to afford to lose her, no matter how badly the series sold.Īssuming this to be true, it seems equally clear that as a consequence, nobody gave a damn what Kanigher did with the character. It’s not hard to imagine the comic being the perennially low seller it has always been rumoured to be. And there was the accidental creation of such characters as Wonder Tot and Wonder Girl, who were supposed to be Wonder Woman at different stages of her earlier life but who, instead, started appearing alongside her. His work on the series was already legendary, in the sense of notorious, for its slapdash, wing-it approach, in which incident would follow incident with a complete lack of logic, as if Kanigher did not know, when he typed one page, what the next would contain.

Kanigher had been writing Wonder Woman since the late Forties, succeeding creator William Moulton Marston after the latter’s death. The time has come to read it again – it is equally incredible-in-not-a-good-way – and bite the critical bullet. I first read this volume several months ago, in utter disbelief, but having just run two Wonder Woman blogposts very shortly before, I decided against doing a post on it at that time. To make them cheap enough to be attractive, the stories are reprinted in black and white, which is a drawback, but in this instance, nothing that has any bearing on the contents. 157 – 177, mostly written by Kanigher and drawn by regulars Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. The volumes provide you with a good long read: Wonder Woman Volume 4 reprints 21 issues from 1965 to 1968, nos. I’ve read all manner of stuff in comics over the fifty years that I’ve been involved with the things, weird, incomprehensible, brilliant, dull, inspired and just plain awful, but I don’t think I have ever read anything so head-scratchingly, bewilderingly bizarre as Robert Kanigher’s Wonder Woman.įor the last decade or so, DC’s Showcase series has been a cheap and easy way to read long runs of old series, mostly but not exclusively from the Sixties.

Trout Nation – Your One-Stop Procrastination Stop.

Valerian et Laureline: 26 – Where Stories are Born.Film 2023: Inspector Hornleigh Goes To It.The Infinite Jukebox: Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’.

Robert kanigher wonder woman