CHAPTER FIVE: THE ICON

"My main goal was to purify the concept," said writer/artist George Perez, which for one thing meant a decision to "stick to Greek mythology" and eliminate the Roman references that had been cropping up since the 1940s. William Moulton Marston had no doubt mixed up the two cultures deliberately, using the more familiar Roman names for figures he wanted readers to recognize immediately (the Roman Mars), and the less familiar Greek names for figures he may have wanted to disguise (the Greek Aphrodite instead of the Roman Venus). In any case, Perez rejected the thought that the love goddess Aphrodite could have been the leading patron of the Amazons, and doubtless would have rejected Marston's notion that women would tame men through erotic enslavement, if it had been more explicit. Still, theological purity is hard to maintain, and the first issue of the new series introduced the decidedly non-Greek idea of reincarnation, presenting Amazons as the reborn souls of women who had "their lives cut short by man's fear and ignorance."

Perez was also determined to avoid "the bondage/slave motif that was so prevalent in the original series. If Wonder Woman was supposed to represent an ideal, I had to get away from that." His solution was to face the issue directly in Wonder Woman #19 (August 1988). "I actually did do a bondage cover where she was chained, to establish the fact that in the story she broke out of the chains. The thing about her losing her powers because she was shackled I did not want, so I removed it in that story by confronting it head on." This removal of Wonder Woman's most notable weakness was perhaps comparable to the idea of dropping kryptonite from the Superman series, and was part of a continuing campaign on the part of various creators to make Wonder Woman virtually invulnerable.

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