Topping this thread for two relevant reasons. First of all we've been discussing George Perez' legendary and revered revival run of Wonder Woman from the 80s. Well, there's a new tpb out that I broke down and bought for $25 which collects Wonder Woman 1-14 plus the 80s Who's Who entries and a couple of art covers from the 2004 tpb (Gods and Mortals). Front cover's got the peril. Issue with Cheetah's origin is included. If you don't have the Perez stuff, pick it up.
Also, people have praised Wonder Woman '77. That praise is merited. Original stories which are in the spirit of the TV show. Diana Prince is drawn to look like Lynda Carter, Steve Trevor is drawn to look like Lyle Waggoner. The covers, however, don't really feature action shots from the plot within, but rather they all seem to be pinup art of Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. Not necessarily a bad thing if you'd rather have lots of those. By the way, this seems to be a "digital-only" series? Correct me if I'm wrong, though.
But back to the stories: they're great. And original villains are introduced! Not only do we get a brand new take on Silver Swan (which is the first time she's been returned to action for a while). Because it would be politically incorrect nowadays to turn an "ugly" person into a beautiful one ("looksism", and all) we don't see her origin, just that she's a Dazzler-esque disco singer with a killer instinct. Other new villainesses include Mother Russia (hot roller derby girls) and Celsia (kind of like if you combined Firehawk and Killer Frost in one mean bod).
And finally we get a really good interpretation of the Cheetah: in this case, it's kind of a combination of the motives of the jealousy of Priscilla Rich with the origin of Barbara Minerva: Barbara becomes insanely jealous of Wonder Woman's usurping of publicity attention at the museum where she works, and one of the exhibits just happens to be Priscilla Rich's uniform. She pricks herself with the ritual knife by accident (so this is very different than the politically incorrect Perez version with the deliberate ingestion of plant-god potion, Minerva's crippled leg, her African servant who speaks in Br'er Rabbit Ebonics, and her inability to utter anything but a growl) and voila, the finest depicted Cheetah transformation since the original Perez one! She is quite articulate about her jealous rage, too. See it to believe it. There needs to be a way to capture this on film, using reasonable CGI, in a Wonder Woman movie.
Minus points, though, for the tanktop underneath her shirt and the jeans which conveniently become Hulk-like ripped jean-shorts. I'm not into this fear-of-Islam/fear-of-third-wave-objectification modesty thing..if Cheetah is bare in the Rebirth series (and she is), she should be bare here as well.
But I guess they wanted to recreate the spirit of the 70s TV show as a "family show", which it was (except for the peril stuff all of us were gleaning from it in our precocious fetishy youth).
I originally read only the first 20 issues because comicbookdb had only catalogued 20 so far (by issue 20, we get to see Diana change into the sexy Wonder Woman wetsuit!) but then I saw there are 4 more, for total of 24. 21-22 is Gault's Brain as mentioned above. 23-24 captures a bit of blaxploitation flavor with a Parliament-Funkadelic band called Superfunk..but it makes a grevious error by introducing a Walkman into the story. The Walkmans (Walkmen?) weren't even introduced onto the market until 1979! So if this is really 1977 it's incongruous. Luckily they mitigate that somewhat by also introducing a trucker on a CB radio, which *was* the big thing back then (basically, the 1970s internet). Convoy!
Recommending this series highly with its true-to-source and lighthearted but still sexy flavor.
There is also now a tpb which collects the first 13..I'm definitely ordering that in the near future. (I have some other female-character tpbs which are coming in this week, that I'm going to write about first).
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