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Wonder Woman's Strangest Villainsby Wyatt GwyonExcerpted from The Amazing World of DC Comics #15 August, 1977In the service of Aphrodite, goddess of love, Wonder Woman has fought some of the strangest foes ever to appear in comics. Gods, aliens, criminals, spies, saboteurs, and heroes have felt her might.
She has even fought herself. This article will cover some of the outstanding
foes of the amazing Amazon's 35- year career.Originally the race of Amazons lived in ancient Greece, a world torn by the opposition between Aphrodite, goddess of love, and Mars, god of war. It was Aphrodite who created the race of Amazons, women of superior strength, to oppose the warlike breed of Mars (also called Ares). In Wonder Woman #1 Mars inspired the legendary Hercules to war against the Amazons. Only through Aphrodite's intervention did the Amazons escape enslavement, and they were compelled to live in exile on Paradise Island, forever separated from the worId of men. Here Wonder Woman was born, and was named Diana by her mother Queen Hippolyte. Since Mars' avowed intention is to plunge the Earth into endless war, he was a frequent foe of Princess Diana's. Collector of dead men's souls, grim ruler of the planet Mars, he first crossed her path in Wonder Woman #2, when he captured Steve Trevor. Though she freed Trevor, Mars was so enraged that he sent his three military commanders, The Earl of Greed, The Duke of Deception, and Lord Conquest to Earth to capture Wonder Woman. She dealt him a crushing, humiliating defeat, and he never directly opposed her again, although he continued to send his agents against her. The Duke of Deception (who was himself ruler of the planet Mars for a short time) has battled the Amazon at least a dozen times, usually with the vast forces of the Martian army behind him. True to his name, this master of illusion has impersonated Wonder Woman's friends, scrambled her brain waves so that she couldn't distinguish between reality and imagination, invaded Paradise Island, stolen Holiday College, and shrunk skyscrapers to toy size. In WW #169 Mars created a strange green-skinned villain called, oddly enough, The Crimson Centipede. With sixteen pairs of arms and legs, he attempted to destroy Wonder Woman and carry out Mars' design of chaos and destruction. Most recently (in WW 226-7) Mare sent the god Hephaestus against the Amazing Amazon. Hephaestus had the strange power to transform any strong human emotion into fire. From Norse mythology, Wonder Woman has confronted Odin (COMIC CAVALCADE #17), who was very similar to Mars, with his Valkyries who collected dead men's souls from Earth's battlefields. Diana defeated him and destroyed his kingdom of the dead, Valhalla, but in WW #23 he had reconstructed it again, and they clashed once more. His second defeat was so decisive that in despair Odin committed suicide! Odin's brother Loki had little to do with Valhalla. Wonder Woman faced him in SENSATION #83. Drawn into the future by Loki she was forced to compete in a rigged Olympiad for the freedom of the women of the future world. (The Duke of Deception has also compelled Wonder Woman to compete in Olympiads.) Menaces have come out of the past as well as the future to plague Wonder Woman. From ancient Egypt, Aknaten (WW #23) threatened the Earth with a flaming death by magic until the Amazon Princess defeated him. Another Egyptian, Osira, appeared in WW #231-2. Actually an alien who crash-landed on Lartt, 9000 years ago and constructed a peaceful society in ancient Egypt, Osira was overthrown and imprisoned in a pyramid until 1943. Released during a battle in North Africa, she causes World War II to stop, and Wonder Woman is in the curious position of having to restart the war-because, she reasons, man must learn by his own mistakes. To solve the mystery of an ancient Chinese sarcophagus which has turned up bearing Amazon paraphernalia, Wonder Woman goes back in time and battles Chang, a warlord of ancient China, in WW 37. She defeats Chang, and we learn the origin of the Great Wall of China. Wonder Woman constructed it to guard against future invasions" Besides Martians, the Amazing Amazon has faced an awesome series of invasions from Pluto, Saturn, Jupiter, and even the sun. In W.W. #99, The Silicons threatened the earth with destruction by artifical comets. The Ultraviolet Invaders (WW #54) were actually absorbed into the Earth's ozone layer, after being routed by Wonder Woman. The King and Knight of Chequerana were the only survivors of a cosmic chess game that claimed the lives of all their race. When their game (in WW #52) sends the Earth hurtling toward the sun, Wonder Woman intervenes by turning their powers against them, and it is Chequerana that is destroyed instead. One of the weirdest threats to Earth was posed by the Mole Goldings in WW #72, a race of sub- terraneans who attempted to change the whole planet to solid gold. Naturally Wonder Woman fought her share of Germans and Japanese agents during World War II, and some of the war tales have peculiar twists. In WW #2 The Duke of Deception got the blame for the bombing of Pearl Harbor; and Odin was allegedly "given psychic life by the mass desires of the German people during World War II." Most interesting of Wonder Woman's Axis villains was Baroness Paula von Gunther, a Gestapo agent first seen in SENSATION #6, who later became Princess Diana's closest friend. Though a scientific genius, The Baroness occassionally seemed short on common sense, as when (in SENSATION #7) she spent seven million dollars to inflate the price of milk in America; so that the poor would not be able to afford it, and they would grow up weakened and dwarfed. The next generation of Americans would be easy prey for Germany. No doubt there are more direct ways of winning a war. Paula was captured and taken to Transformation Island in WW #3, and reformed. However, her daughter Gerta von Gunther was responsible for another weird menace. Enlarging viruses for study with a special ray, Gerta unleashed a strange new form of germ called Bughumans (SENSATION #55). The Bughumans reversed Gerta's ray to shrink Wonder Woman and, so they planned, all mankind. With some help from Steve Trevor, our heroine thwarted their plans and reduced them to a harmless size. In recent issues, the Earth-Two Wonder Woman has again been fighting the Axis powers. The Red Panzer appeared in WW #228-9, and served as the pivotal point between the chronicling of the Earth-One and Earth-Two Wonder Women. On Earth-Two, The Red Panzer is a Nazi scientist who has developed a time scanner; with this, he sees that Germany is going to lose the war. He plans to go into the future to thwart the Normandy invasion which was the beginning of the end for Germany-but something goes wrong with his time ship, and he lands in 1976, on Earth-One. After battling Wonder Woman, the automatic grapple beam drags both him and Wonder Woman to Earth- Two, 1943. There Wonder Woman-One teams up with Wonder Woman-Two to defeat The Red Panzer. When Wonder Woman returns to Earth-One, the narration remains behind, to chronicle the adventures of Wonder Woman-Two. Villainy, Incorporated (WW 28) brought together seven of the Amazon's greatest foes. Escapees from Transformation Island, this group included: Eviless, of the Saturnian invasion force (WW #10 & 22); Queen Clea of Atlantis (appeared solo in COMIC CAVALCADE #18 and WW #8); Doctor Poison, a Japanese princess and spy whose specialty was chemical warfare (appeared solo in SENSATION #2 & 24); Giganta, an artificially evolved female gorilla (appeared solo in WW #9); Byrna Brilyant (appeared solo as The Snow Man in SENSATION #59); Hypnota the Great (appeared solo in WW #11), an Earthborn hypnotist who used her powers to subjugate slaves for Prince Mephisto and Eviless of Saturn; Zara (appeared solo in COMIC CAVALCADE #5), high priestess of the cult of The Crimson Flame; and The Cheetah. Interesting is that Doctor Poison, The Snow Man, and Hypnota, though all were female, used male aliases in their criminal identities. The Cheetah deserves a section to herself. A classic villain of comics, she is really Priscilla Rich, a debutante with an inferiority complex. Like Jekyll and Hyde, at odd times her repressed savagery wells up and takes control of her personality. Though she has tried to reform, Priscilla Rich has no control over The Cheetah part of her mind. She appeared in WW #6 & #28, and Comic Cavalcade #11. The early stories were enlivened by a variety of odd characters. One offbeat villain in Comic Cavalcade #10 was called The Great Blue Father. Really Dr. Protus Plasm, he administered a "moron hormone" to government officials and bureaucrats in the guise of a youth serum, to make them feebleminded. Since the story was written in 1945, the intent was probably not quite as satirical as it sounds now. Bedwin Footh, a frustrated actor, collected six thespian criminals to impersonate six of Wonder Woman's greatest foes in SENSATION #36. The Duke of Deception, The Cheetah, Giganta, Queen Clea, Blakfu (king of the Mold Men-WW #4), and Dr. Psycho were present in appearance, if not in reality. Wonder Woman unmasked this crew of rank imposters without much difficulty. Dr. Psycho was originally portrayed as a tool of The Duke of Deception, (in WW #5) but he was obviously bound for greater things. In his first solo appearances (WW #18, 160, 165, 170), he continued his womanhating, psychopathic ways, bound for revenge against all women for his romantic rejections. With the power to materialize ectoplasmic bodies, he could impersonate anyone. In WW #165, he created two duplicates of Wonder Woman, one vain, one tyrannical. Diana defeated them by turning them against one another, but Dr. Psycho managed, eel-like, to escape. The Angle Man was a crook with "a million angles," who faced Wonder Woman frequently from WW #70 on. With no special powers, he nonetheless set up a number of elaborate plots to kill the Amazon. He used altered tapes of her voice to misdirect her robot plane, he constructed an android duplicate of her, he discovered her secret identity-and once ( WW #81) he planned the greatest crime wave of all . . . by stopping all crime! He hoped that Wonder Woman would honor her promise to marry Steve Trevor and retire, during the criminal moratorium. The Fireworks Man, also known as The Human Fireworks, teamed, along with Angle Man and The Mouse Man, to murder Wonder Woman in WW #141. One of the most spectacular villains the Amazon princess ever fought, The Fireworks Man was able to turn himself into "a giant whirling exploding pinwheel," and attempted to drag our heroine into outer space. He was destroyed by a falling meteor. The Mouse Man, in the same issue, and subse- quently in WW #143 and 171, used his diminuative stature and control over rodents to beleaguer Diana, feeling, I suppose, that even Wonder Woman would weaken with the typical antipathy between rodents and the female sex. The Paper Man (WW #165) was surely one of Wonder Woman's most bizarre foes. An improbable villain, whose only power was that he had acquired some of the properties of paper, he nonetheless gave Wonder Woman a hard time. He met his end when, trying to escape as a kite, a puff of Wonder Woman's breath carried him into a newspaper plant, where he was presumably pulped into the Late City Edition. Egg Fu the First, an enormous Humpty-Dumpty- like creation of the Chinese Communists, menaced Wonder Woman and Col. Steve Trevor in WW #157-8. When he imprisoned Trevor on his island hideaway of Oolong, the villain impregnated him with strange ex- plosive beams, which turned Trevor into a human bomb. He then launched the Colonel and a "doomsday rocket" at the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Although the Amazon Princess intercepted him in the upper atmosphere, the ensuing explosion destroyed them both. They were miraculously reassembled by Queen Hippolyte's atomic reconstructor, but their bodies then glowed with a volcanic destructive force. When they returned to Oolong to defeat Egg Fu, he inadvertantly neutralized this destructive force by hurling them into outer space, where they were struck by antimatter. Wonder Woman returned and lassoed Egg Fu, but the Oriental, in trying to eggScape, shattered. Egg Fu the Fifth returned in WW #166, identical to his forebear. The lady from Paradise Island defeated him by slamming her bracelets together to create shattering vibrations. The other three Egg Fus apparently never hatched their plots, and were lost somewhere in between. A villain who actually never existed at all was Multiple Man. In WW #124, our heroine responds to fan letters requesting the simultaneous appearance of Wonder Woman, Wonder Girl, and Wonder Tot (clearly impossible since they are all the same person at different ages). She splices together snippets of Amazon home movies. The result is a film in which the three seem to battle the nuclear menace of Multiple Man who can assume nearly any form. Wonder Woman's skills as a screenwriter were great enough to warrant "The Return of Multiple Man" in WW #129. One type of villain whom Wonder Woman has often fought is the nature-villain-villains who can control some aspect of nature, or who embody some violent facet of nature. Besides The Snow Man of Villainy, Inc., Wonder Woman has faced The Termite Queen (WW #58); Prime Minister Blizzard (WW #29) of the North Pole; Mrs. Tigra Tropica (WW #26), mistress of a pack of trained tigers; Sharkeeta (COMIC CAVALCADE #21), a bizarre creature with the head of a woman and the body of a shark who menaced Paradise Island; and the fraudulent Volcano Prophet (WW #70), a common criminal who got rich by claiming to predict the eruption of volcanoes, until Wonder Woman discovered that he actually caused the eruptions with explosives. The Amazon Maiden has faced equivalents of herself on numerous occasions. She battled Angle Man's android and Dr. Psycho's duplicates and she once entered a parallel world (in WW #175) to battle an evil counterpart. Lya, daughter of The Duke of Deception, modeled a "phantasm" (COMIC CAVALCADE #26) of Wonder Woman out of her father's ectoplasmic clay, in order to impersonate her. Duke Dazam (WW #59) was the foe of yet another alternate-Earth Wonder Woman, named Tara Terrune. Accidentally hurled across the barrier between worlds, Princess Diana helped Tara Terrune defeat Dazam. In WW #48, a scientific thug named Elektro created Robot Woman, who possessed most of Wonder Woman's powers. Nubia was shown, in WW #206, to be the second daughter of Queen Hippolyte, kidnapped as a baby by Mars. She returned to challenge Princess Diana for the title of Wonder Woman. In WW #222, Wonder Woman follows a duplicate of herself (this duplicate was actually responsible for defeating Chronos; Wonder Woman herself was fighting Dr. Cyber-WW #221-at the time) to an amusement park called Dazzleland, based on the funny-animal creations of Wade Dazzle, cartoonist. Investigating mysterious disappearances from the rides, Wonder Woman discovered that Dazzle himself is frozen in cryogenic suspension, and the life energy from kidnapped park patrons is used to keep the machinery running. The Amazon had been lured to Dazzleland because she is immortal; her life energy could keep the machine running forever. Now that Wonder Woman is on television, and back in World War II, her original arena, the villains will doubtless grow stronger and stranger. Their strangeness will, as before, reflect the strangeness of Nazism, an evil so intense that it is almost surreal . . . though it was very real. To reach an understanding of evil ones, and bend them to "loving submission" is Wonder Woman's task. And fighting that evil even means fighting herself; for, as Dr. Psycho showed in WW #165, there is vanity and tyranny even in Princess Diana. Every villain she fights, even herself, represents the eternal conflict of Mars and Aphrodite. This continuously imaginative battle with evil is why Wonder Woman has held readers' interest for 35 years and will doubtless continue to do so. |