Wonder Woman Book 1: The Last True Hero

Wonder Woman (1987) (Collected Editions) #7

by William Messner-Loebs, Jill Thompson (Illustrator), Paris Cullins (Illustrator)

William Messner-Loebs is an award-winning writer and artist known for his work on Wonder Woman , The Flash , Green Arrow and more.

Wonder Woman by William Messner-Loebs Book One showcases the most memorable moments of William Messner-Loebs work on Wonder Woman and features classic tales that have shaped the Amazon Warrior we know today. Collects Wonder Woman Special #1 (1992), Wonder Woman #63, #64, #67, Wonder Woman Annual #3 (1992) and Wonder Woman #68-75 (1992).
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Genres: Comics, Dc Comics, Wonder Woman, Graphic Novels, Fantasy

400 pages, Paperback

First published August 4, 2020

About the author

William Francis Messner-Loebs (born William Francis Loebs, Jr.) is an American comics artist and writer from Michigan, also known as Bill Loebs and Bill Messner-Loebs. His hyphenated surname is a combination of his and his wife Nadine's unmarried surnames.

In the 1980s and 1990s he wrote runs of series published by DC Comics, Image Comics, Comico, and other comics publishers, including DC's superhero series Flash and Wonder Woman among others. Additionally he has both written and drawn original creator-owned works, such as Journey: The Adventures of Wolverine MacAlistaire.

Reviews

[Chad · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a bit of an odd run. After meeting the White Magician, a man who portrays himself as a hero while really being a villain, he conspires to jettison Wonder Woman out into space with a Russian cosmonaut. They are then enslaved by an all male race and they eventually become space pirates. When Wonder Woman returns months later, everyone thought she was dead. She has no money and nowhere to live and Themyscira has gone missing. She actually ends up working at a Taco Bell knockoff. It's all a big departure from the exposition heavy George Perez run that mainly revolved around Greek mythology.

[Stephanie Baylouny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of fun! Stories were full of strong women and I loved the story arc including Diana and the female astronaut because, well, simply female astronauts are awesome. Didn't enjoy the main second artist as much as the first which docked a star for me. As soon as it switched from a female to a male penner the art definitely began to emphasize certain female body parts more than necessary...

[James DeSantis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wonder Woman's next writer after Perez! NOW I didn't finish Perez cause those prices of the Omnibus volume 2 and 3 are insane, but this was fun to jump into anyway.

This offers an interesting, if sometimes uneven, start to William Messner-Loebs's run. What I really loved was the overall feel of Diana here. She's so loving and caring, and it's great to see her protect people as much as she can, no matter what's thrown her way. This shines through brilliantly in the later issues, which I enjoyed a lot. I wasn't sure how I'd feel about Diana working at basically Taco Bell, but the idea of her compassion shining through even at a dead-end fast food job was awesome.

Now, for some of the things that didn't quite hit for me. The opening stuff with Cheetah and especially the whole space and planet Wonder Woman enslaved stuff, felt a bit out there. It's good, but it feels weak in comparison to the more grounded stories that come later. I've never been a huge fan of Planet Hulk and this feels like the blueprint to that. Also, the supporting cast is a bit weaker here; I really wanted Julia and Vanessa to be a bigger presence.

But sticking with what I liked, the stuff with the White Magician was good too. I especially liked Brian Elliott as a villain, even if it's one issue. That whole arc, and Diana's desperate quest to find the vanished Themyscira, felt much more engaging and really got me hooked. It feels like Messner-Loebs really hit his stride in that latter half. Overall, it's a bit of a mix-match in quality, but still worth reading if you like Wonder Woman. I'd give it a 3 out of 5.

[IncredibleOctopi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually enjoyed this more than I expected.

Everything--the plot, pacing, dialogue, and characters--felt right.
The art was crisp and colorful. This era's style isn't my favorite, but what it does, it does well.

I liked seeing Wonder Woman as a happy and really joyful character, but also mature. It's refreshing to have a character who I genuinely look up to.

But my favorite part of this was the story itself. Usually, I'm more focused on the characters, as the plot is usually either the big-bad-of-the-week, or the 30th world-wide alien invasion, or timeline re-write, or shocking-character-reveal-but-not-really. But not this time! (Mostly, at least.)
The story arcs were interesting and original and had me excited for the resolution.

My only critic would be that at times, the regular references to "women's mercy" "strength without violence" and such got a little old, but then again, this is kinda Wonder Woman's trademark, so I dunno. Not really a bad thing, just not my favorite part.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Messner-Loebs isn't bad, but I had a hard time getting into this the way I did when George Pérez was writing. When The ComicbookDatabase existed, these issues had really low ratings around 3 and 4 (out of 10). A lot of this probably has to do with the art. I wasn't crazy about Paris Cullins's work here, and Lee Moder makes everyone look ugly and androgynous. Moder's style would be more at home in humor comics, and he seems to have a strong penchant for drawing bare feet and hirsute bodies.

I didn't reread the first part, which I read in single-issue form in 2019, but it involves a team-up with Slade Wilson, aka Deathstroke, the Terminator and the end of the Barbara Minerva Cheetah, and the company-wide crossover with Eclipso: The Darkness Within, in which Diana becomes one of many hosts of Eclipso. The Phantom Stranger's old foes Tannarak and Tala, Queen of Evil are partly involved and continue to operate under pseudonyms (Tannarak calling himself Randolph Asquith and the White Wizard) throughout the volume, mostly behind the scenes. #65 is omitted because it's a fill-in by Joey Cavalieri. The focus is on Dr. Psycho trying to take advantage of Vanessa Kapatelis's jealousy of Diana, who has been like a big sister to her living in the same house. Diana doesn't even make a quantifiable appearance in the issue. The only illustrations of her are scenes in which others' think about her. The omission is kind of silly beause where else are people going to find it? Wonder Woman back issues from this period aren't particularly expensive, but dealers tell me that they can't keep them in the bins. It actually took me a long time to find #63 for a reasonable price--this collection did not come out until August 4, 2020, over a year after I acquired and read the back issue.

The second part of the book is a five-parter in which Diana is hired to rescue cosmomaut Natasha Terranova (rather corny name for a cosmonaut), who forunately taught herself to speak Greek as part of her interest in stage magic because she doesn't speak English and Diana doesn't speak Russian. They end up being sent into deep space and enslaved by an alien race that is normally all one gender for a millennia until it's time to reproduce, and are massively sexist in their enslavement. Diana leads a revolt that takes over six months, and despite Natasha having a little girl at home, to whom she writes letters that she expects she will never see. When she finally leaves, it's with the confidence that her followers will continue the slave rebellion without her.

When Diana gets back we finally see her unofficial adoptive mother, Julia Kapatelis, also writing letters to her. As she concludes the last letter, now certain she is dead, Diana comes to the door. Unfortunately, Julia has rented out Diana's room to a woman named Quinn Thomas whom I mistook for a man. She is either very butch or trans, but like I said, the artwork is not very good.

Diana is now using the Prince surname that she brushed off when Mindi Mayer suggested it early in the series, although everyone knows who she is. Quinn even makes mention of the mental radio that she used in the Golden Age comic books by William Moulton Marston, so apparently such things are public knowledge in the DC universe, at least to fans. Diana makes reference to receiving a living stipemd from the Justice League. There hasn't been a mention of her even being in the Justice League post-Crisis that I can recall, and she in fact joined in Justice League America #78 (August 1993) (collected in Wonder Woman and the Justice League America Vol. 1 ). The final issue collected here is cover dated July 1993, although the chronology of the stories can't be evaluated strictly by the cover date.

As a new writer to the series, Messner-Loebs is doing a major upheaval to the supporting cast. Having difficulty sleeping in the Kapatelis basement, Diana gets a job at TacoWhiz, which she takes seriously enough that her boss, Hoppy, teases her for reading a book called The Romance of Hispanic Cooking. There's plenty of room for Diana to make cultural criticism here, finding feeding people a noble form of work as she realizes the sort of clinetele she is serving, including college students, homeless, and retirees. Diana goes to a temp agency so that she can afford to rent an apartment, but no one seemes to be hirigng, something I didn't know was an issue in 1993. In the Golden Age, Diana literally bought the identity of Nurse Diana Prince because the latter needed money to marry her fiance, and Princess Diana had just gotten money from a Bullets and Bracelets performance, but in our age of credentialism (which wasn't dishonest because Amazons all received nursing training as part of their basic education), that's not going to work the way that it did during World War II. And certainly, she doesn't have a college degree although Themysciran education would probably help her pass a lot of Advanced Placement tests. She rents a room with no bed from a retired movie star named Camille Sly and teams up with a private investigator named Micah Rains (whose "eat the rich" T-Shirt makes him feel relevant today), whom Ed Indelicato despises.

The final issue in the volume seems to leave Diana rather glib on the death of all the Amazons at the hands of Circe--duty calls at the TacoWhiz, but a quick glance at volume 2 shows that this is the setup for the next volume. It's really nice to see the return of Doctor Fate. Messner-Loebs wrote Doctor Fate's series, which was cancelled with #41 (cover date June 1992). So Kent and Inza come back from their Mexican vacation for Inza to help and Inza gets rescued by Wonder Woman.

The title for the volume does not refer Wonder Woman. It refers to small-time crook named Dickie Loder whose sacrifice wins a fascistic cop, Isabella Modini, over to Diana's side. Modini suffered serious injuries hanging from Diana's lasso, keeping her away from Moder while she was trying to reason with him. When Loder saves Modini's life, Diana now has a friend who used to hate her because the force is talking about early retirement when all she ever wanted was to be a cop. The politics here and throughout, as I think I've implied are a bit heavy heavy-handed in comparison to Pérez, but Messner-Loebs's heart is in the right place. (I should add that Messner is his wife's surname--they agreed to both hyphenate their names when they got married.) I am going to read the next volume, Wonder Woman Book 2: Ares Rising , but I certainly don't blame anyone who got fed up and dropped the book during this run. The third volume of Messner-Loebs's run, which lasted to issue #100, was published in 2016 as Wonder Woman by Mike Deodato (named for its illustrator--who, based on what I've seen, is an extraordinary improvement over what Moder, who would go on to create Stargirl, was doing at the time) and is already an out of print collectible, so it may be reissued soon. It includes issue #85, but otherwise picks up with #90, the issue immediately following Book 2, which ends with issue #89.

[Marsha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This compilation of Wonder Woman’s exploits follows a more or less linear timeline, making it easier to see who and what the Themyscirean princess is to herself and to the world at large. She doesn’t care for violence; in fact, she emphatically states how she hates it, even when she’s dealing with unapologetically murderous vigilantes like Deathstroke.

But Diana is an Amazonian warrior. While she may prefer to talk down criminals, the mentally unstable or power-hungry demagogues (as we witness her doing time and again in this volume), she doesn’t hesitate to bring the pain and near-lethal force if she has to do so.

This volume features material from the early 1990s so it’s a bit behind the political correctness we’ve come to associate with contemporary 21st-century media. Beings of color are almost conspicuously absent (save for victims, aliens or demons). However, we do see powerful women amassing around Diana, such as the Russian cosmonaut Natasha Teranova, a female Dr. Fate and a whole planet of slaves who rebel against a tyrannical race composed almost entirely of men. Whew, talk about smashing the patriarchy!

This book also has Diana joining the everyday workforce of feeding fast food to the masses. With her usual joie de vivre, cheer and optimism, she sees nothing wrong in working for minimum wage, slinging cheap tacos or engaging in menial chores. She has no money and no other jobs are available so what else can she do? How else can she behave but as a ray of sunshine?

Wonder Woman’s attitude continues to baffle and irritate the more cynical humans around her. Yet we see how her indomitable spirit, her belief in common human decency and her unwavering desire to do good, bring justice and help the oppressed sway others to her side. Wonder Woman is simply an icon of wisdom, decency and benevolence. In this volume, she proves once again to be the best thing to come out of DC comics.

[T.J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

When William Messner-Loebs took over Wonder Woman in the late80s/early90s, DC's mandate was to push the character into more straightforward adventures, more team-ups with her fellow superheroes, and pull back from the tapestry of Greek mythology that was so closely woven through George Perez's legendary post-Crisis relaunch of the character.

So what did Messner-Loebs do? He launched Wonder Woman into outer space and into a slave revolt saga a billion light years away from any corner of the DC Universe!

Ok, so first he plays around with the Diana Prince superspy alter ego, teaming her with Deathstroke on a mission to rescue the Cheetah - and gives her a new frenemy/adversary named the White Magician, whose dubious ethics differ from Diana's. Straightforward superhero stuff.

But the story really takes off when Wonder Woman and an astronaut sidekick have to lead a prison planet of women in an uprising against gender-enslaving aliens (who were once women themselves a thousand years ago). It may not make much sense, but it's fun and shows Wonder Woman to be a leader and a hero even without her usual Amazon trappings. Coincidentally, back on Earth, the Amazons have gone missing and Diana's celebrity darling status has seemingly faded... leaving Diana with no choice but to find a job and a place to live. Who knew being a wonder woman could be so hard?

It's too bad Jill Thompson doesn't stick around on artwork throughout it all, as Diana goes from graceful to grunge with replacement artists.

[Rocco Ricca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun 90s comic-ness. Loebs very obviously wants to be saying something and be progressive in this book and while I appreciate the effort, he’s probably not the man for the job. Overall I did like the book, I think that the 6 issue space arc is a very big low for the book but the second half, after Diana comes back to Earth and (I can’t believe I’m writing this) gets a job at Taco Bell, it really finds its groove. Not a bad book at all!

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Messner-Loebs is one of my favorite comic writers, and I am thrilled that his early 90s run on Wonder Woman is being collected.

[Dan Foy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vintage, like a junkyard.

[dmerey · Rating 4 out of 5]

1980’s Diana slays (especially her hair. dc why do you make her hair straight nowadays 😕😕). and she’s very gay.

[cc · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5