The Further Adventures of Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman

by Martin H. Greenberg

Raised on an idyllic island untouched by time, Wonder Woman must acclimate herself to Man's World--a dangerous, wonder-filled, grim world whose dark forces she must fight. Original.

Genres: Short Stories, Superheroes, Fantasy, Fiction, Anthologies, Dc Comics, Wonder Woman

344 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Martin Harry Greenberg was an American academic and speculative fiction anthologist. In all, he compiled 1,298 anthologies and commissioned over 8,200 original short stories. He founded Tekno Books, a packager of more than 2000 published books. In addition, he was a co-founder of the Sci-Fi Channel.

For the 1950s anthologist and publisher of Gnome Press, see Martin Greenberg.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gal Godot was eight years old when this book appeared so it obviously tends to feature the William Moulton Marston original vision and Lynda Carter than the current millennium's concept, but I thought it did a good job of presenting many different facets and faces of the character. Many modern readers won't recognize some of the tropes, but the stories are all pretty enjoyable nonetheless. The writers that Greenberg assembled are an interesting mix of mystery (Wellen and Slesar), comics (Cavalieri and Newell), and science fiction (Sargent and Scarborough) notables, and they did Diana and friends proud in this volume. (I can't lie to you, that lasso won't let me.)

[clumsyplankton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enjoyable

[Quentin Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was different. Some of the stories barely featured Wonder Woman, but I do give the collection credit for trying to tell Wonder Woman stories that differ from the norm. These aren't all comic book battles, but a variety of stories that really fit into different genres. I would have preferred a few more traditional type stories, but overall this was a good collection that at least tries to be different.

[David Leemon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of well-written and imaginative short stories featuring Wonder Woman

[Danica · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only thing that lost this book its 5th star was the lame story by Joey Cavalieri about a manic, pill-popping harridan of an editor for a periodical called "Wonder Woman Magazine" . This thinly veiled attempt to undermine the idea that women can survive in the business world (what is repeatedly said in the story as 'man's world') falls flat in so many ways. The main character is a whiny *itch of a female who can't get on with her staff, blames the men who work for/with her for her shortcomings, and apparently can't function without the aforementioned psychoactive medications. It was utterly boring and bereft of anything but the briefest mentioning of Wonder Woman as possible.

In an otherwise lovely compendium of entertaining and inspiring tales, that one big fail just left a bad taste in my mouth. I can only hope I never run into that author's works again, as I adore all the 'Further Adventures of..." books so far!

[Jeff Jellets · Rating 3 out of 5]

’… and she also realized the great good Wonder Woman was capable of doing in a world that had lost its way in the maze and mayhem of everyday life.’

The big two comic book publishers — Marvel and DC — have tried several times to bring their more iconic superheroes from comic panels to traditional print … without really any great success. One of DC’s better tries occurred in the early 1990s with Martin H. Greenberg’s anthologies of original fiction with this one — The Further Adventures of Wonder Woman — as part of six book effort that largely centered on the Batman franchise. It’s possible the bat-books were better, but the Wonder Woman collection is largely a flop.

The eight stories do benefit from being set during one of the best periods of Wonder Woman-lore: writer/artist George Perez’s wonderful post-Crisis reboot where he wisely jettisons Diana’s cliched relationship with the ‘first-man-she-meets’ Steve Trevor and grounds her firmly in the deep end of Greek mythology with a worthy adversary in the war god Ares. Readers who aren’t familiar with that period, though, will probably get lost trying to make heads-and-tails out of Diana’s Boston-based supporting cast — who largely faded away post-Perez — especially as most of the stories lean heavily into how her BFF Etta Candy, her foster family Julia Kapatelis and daughter Vanessa, and Beantown police detective Ed Indelicato perceive the near-perfect super-heroine.

As stories go, I guess Mindy Newell’s Somebody’s Baby was my favorite. Sure it’s a rather ‘on-the-nose’ social commentary, but it’s sensitively done and makes good use of Wonder Woman as an ingenue in Man’s world, exploiting her relative naïveté without making her look like a dunce or undermining her inherent nobility. Honorable mentions also go to Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s Candy’s Wonder Cure which leads with a rather uncomfortable, but insanely interesting, conversation about what its like to have to live in Wonder Woman’s shadow as her ‘fat’ friend before unravelling into a more pedestrian plot-line involving an ‘evil’ spa. Pamela Sergeant’s Diana and the Djinn also isn’t bad; it’s really the only time in the anthology that Diana even comes close to squaring off against a villain worth her mettle.

And that’s the real problem with this collection. It may be labeled The Further Adventures of Wonder Woman, but the titular heroine is largely missing from more than half its pages. The longest story Happy Hunting Ground eschews her entirely for more than half its length and when Wonder Woman does show up, it’s to simply see that trucks of toxic waste are diverted to pollute a rich guy’s pool (which seems as insanely irresponsible as dumping the sludge in the woods). Diana is similarly bedeviled by Ares in at least three of the stories, but hardly trades a punch with him. If anything, the anthology is almost proof-positive of the old writers’ chestnut about the difficulty in writing good Wonder Woman stories. While everyone seems to love the character, no one really seems to know what to do with her.

As a result, Diana spends most her time outside her own book, looking in.

P.S. Superheroes can indeed be done well in prose. Look no further than George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards anthologies for proof or if you prefer the long-form novel to short story collections, go to Peter Clines Ex Heroes for the good stuff!

[Travis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picked this out because I enjoyed the Superman anthology.
You expect most anthologies to be uneven, but this one was just bad.
Too much myth, too many writers that don't seem to know what to do with Wonder Woman or have forgotten she's a super hero and too much trying waaaay too hard to make sure every story ( since the main character is a she, in case you forgot) has lots of 'womens issues' being dealt with. Cuase, she's a woman

WW comes across very flat and either badly naive or just uninteresting. All the background characters tend to take over the story so that WW seems to be just a guest star.

Shame, as these 'Further of..." anthologies seem like a fun idea, but both the WW and Batman ones had the same problem of writers who come across as not sure how to do a prose comic book story.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a lot of sermonizing in this book. I love Wonder Woman (really I do), but her endless speeches about peace and love can kill a narrative dead. It's no surprise that my favorite story is about the embattled editorial staff at Wonder Woman magazine. Diana doesn't even pop up in the damn thing. The author (Joey Cavalieri, who is a friend and acquaintance to many of my friends and acquaintances), explores what it means to be a woman in a man's world. Good for him for giving us a view of Wonder Woman beyond the read, white, and blue.

Here's how one of the book's authors describes our hero. I think it's very nice: "Wonder Woman was all the lovely women in Rome and in Paris and in the movies he had seen and the novels he had read, who belonged to a world in which women acted in a way he could not quite understand."