This post is inspired by the latest feud thread, and occurred to me yesterday, but I didn’t want to skew results, so I waited until it was closed before posting…
OK, Wonder Woman…we all know the name, right? And the existence of her lasso of truth, and her look and all, yeah?
But, do we all know where she’s from?
The question that brought this to mind is to name a superhero who’s not from the US.
That Wondie is scoring so low has me wondering, just how well known is it that she’s not a yank?
For the record, she is Princess Diana of Themyscira (FKA Paradise Island). She, depending on the continuity in question, either borrowed, or created, the identity of Diana Prince as a secret identity.
For the movies, I’d love to see Greek heptathletes offered screen tests, myself, somebody like Argyro Strataki. I’m kind of indifferent to Wonder Woman being a supermodel - I’d much rather see her as a Mediterranean demigoddess warrior/athlete who could casually pick up a javelin and kill a man 200 yards away.
Or Melina Kanakaredes, if she was 12 years younger and four inches taller.
I answered yes, but I don’t feel the question is very well phrased. I’ve heard that Wonder Woman was born and raised on some mysterious island somewhere, and I think she’s the daughter of the Queen of the Amazons or something. But I would assume that she is in fact an American citizen. I have no idea whether that’s canon or not, but it would be my first guess. You don’t need to be born in the US to be an American, after all.
It’s not, really - Golden Age Diana Prince was an American citizen, and when Diana started using that name, briefly, a couple years ago, she faked up documents that allowed her to work for the US government, but Wonder Woman remains the Princess of Themyscira/Paradise Island in all continuities, and ambassador from Themyscira until the whole situation with Themyscira went all to hell in current continuity (making her Diana Prince identity legally problematic - the documents were, in the GA version, for another woman, and in the recent version are straight up forged…and in the Silver Age, I’m not sure she even bothered with that).
Of the two TV versions, I’m 99% sure the Linda Carter series used the GA version, and 100% that the DCAU used the modern pre-Diana Prince version. The recent aborted TV series seems to have been in the Silver Age mold, only adding in a second false identity.
Thank you for introducing me to the concept of women heptathletes. Taking the term “women’s heptahlon” to Google Images, and running with a theme, I discovered and have been thoroughly enjoying Lucimara Silva.
I read a few comic series, but I haven’t read superhero comics since I was a preteen. I’ve read Sandman and Preacher and Y: The Last Man and Fables. I knew that WW wasn’t a US citizen because of a short story I read a few years back.
Pssst, Superman’s not from the US as well. He was one of those illegal babies sent to the US by his foragna parents, just so that he could leech on the Social Security program (and save the world as well, if you want to nitpick).
I called myself a non-comic book reader, but I am very much acquainted with superheroes.
That said, even before all that, I knew Wonder Woman’s backstory was that she was an Amazon. But I didn’t choose her when I was going to post in the Feud (I wound up deleting it because I couldn’t finish) because I’d already picked her for magic powered superhero and television show.
I was prepared to say that “women heptathlete” was a redundancy, since as far as I knew the heptathlon, as the term is used in Olympic and other world-class competition, is a woman’s-only competition, but I’m surprised to learn there’s a men’s version as well.
Anyway, find a contender who can speak passable (if exotically accented) English, put her in a raven-black wig and screen test her, already! I don’t want Wonder Woman to be some flimsy starlet. I want her to be able to pick up a manhole cover and spin it like a discus. I’d like to see this generation’s Anya Major, who got the job in Apple’s “1984” ad because she could swing a sledgehammer like she meant business.
I knew that Wonder Woman was from the island of the Amazons (though I couldn’t remember the island’s name), but I didn’t answer the poll because, despite not reading comics, I pick up enough via nerd osmosis that I might as well be a comic-reader.
Yes, but Wonder Woman, even though being born a citizen of Amazon Island, has been regularly depicted as holding an American citizenship as well (it has varied according to the writers, I’m not a huge DC fan, and even less a Wonder Woman fan, so I assume other posters can develop on that more adequately than me). So, the wole “born outside of the US but still American Super Hero” would qualify Superman as well as Wonder Woman (or the Martian Manhunter).
Assuming I’m not being whooshed, the original Amazons were female warriors in Greek myth. The Amazon River was got its name when early Spanish explorers claimed to have seen female Indian warriors there.
As I said above, Princess Diana of Paradise Island/Themyscira is not an American citizen. That she remained princess of her homeland should make that fairly obvious, since one of the parts of becoming an American citizen is to renounce foreign allegiances.
The Golden Age/Earth-2 Diana Prince was, but Princess Diana was not Diana Prince, she was just using her identity as a cover. The modern Diana Prince identity had forged papers, but fraudulent papers for a person who doesn’t really exist do not earn the person using them citizenship.
J’onn J’onzz is not an American citizen either - he, likewise, simply created a false identity which supposedly held citizenship, but, again, a false identity does not confer citizenship.
Superman, on the other hand, is, quite legitimately, an American citizen, due to his adoption by the Kents.
It’s kind of sad that we’re so hyperaware these days about what technically makes someone an American. I don’t think kids in the '40s had any doubt that Wonder Woman was as American as it gets despite being born elsewhere and not having been naturalized.
I’ll point out that the actual wording was “Name a superhero who came from a country other than the United States.”
A lot of people (including myself) would probably be thinking of a real country rather than someplace like Paradise Island (aka Themyscira) or Krypton. Or even Qurac or Wakanda.
For reasons that should be obvious, I didn’t vote in the poll.
A good point, that (though I’m not sure if more people thinking of fictional countries would have helped Diana’s score much - I suspect Wolverine still would have been the #1).
