This question pertains to Wonder Woman as she appears in DC’s Elseworld story Superman: Red Son. I’m not sure if/how the answer applies to mainstream DC continuity but I’m still curious as I don’t think that this question was suitably addressed. I don’t know as much about Wonder Woman as I do about many of DC’s heroes so I appeal to those with (hopefully) greater knowledge. Hopefully, this is enough text to prevent mouse-over spoilers so here goes.
In the second book of Red Son, Batman lures Superman to a compound in Siberia. There, he finds that Batman has bound Wonder Woman with her own lasso. Batman traps Superman in a small room lit only by red sunlamps, thus disabling his powers. To save Superman, Wonder Woman breaks her lasso and destroys the generator that powered the red lights. The process of breaking the magical lasso leaves Wonder Woman visibly aged and mentally destabilized. (Quote: It was like, I don’t know, something just kind of switched off in my head or something.) She is forced to retire from heroics.
Isn’t Wonder Woman’s lasso supposedly unbreakable? Is it unbreakable by anyone but her or is there some other clause I don’t know?
Why did the lasso breaking have such an effect on Wonder Woman? (The aging and the mental breakdown.)
Haven’t read the series, but unless they’ve changed something again, Diana’s lasso is unbreakable, including by her, and her physical well-being is not linked to the lasso in any way.
There was a JLA storyline (“Golden Perfect”, apparently), wherein the lasso was broken, causing all sorts of problems because it meant that “truth” was also broken. WW had to go get it fixed, but it didn’t cause her to age or anything.
Isn’t RED SON an “Elseworlds” book? It’s the D.C. version of Marvel’s “What If…” series. That is, if they wanted to write something not hindered by continuity they just slap on the Elsewords label on the cover. I think that’s why her lasso broke. It’s an alternate DC universe with different rules from the one in the “main” DC universe.
First, as mentioned, Red Son is an Elseworlds story so the writer can feel free to set it how they want without fanboys going crazy trying to figure out how it fits in. There isn’t anything in normal continuity that I’m aware of that ties Wonder Woman and the lasso that closely together. It worked in the story and that was what counts in this case.
The lasso comes from the girdle of Gaia and is typically described as “unbreakable”, but I can think of a few options to break it (if they couldn’t break it then making the lasso would have been difficult). The obvious one would be if a god did it. Olympians from the DC universe could potentially do something (though they may find it tough) and I would be surprised if the lasso could resist Darkseid’s omega effect.
In current continuity, while the lasso is unbreakable, it does not actually cause people to speak the truth. It is a conduit from Diana and one of her powers is to cause them to speak truth. At one point she was made the goddess of truth when she died. Supposedly she is still a goddess, despite being forced to leave Olympus for interfering on earth.
With the mess that has been happening in her current series, it is actually hard to tell exactly what her status is.
A seperate question about the same series. At one point in the book, they said that Superman had taken over every country on Earth except for the United States and Chile. The United States was being “protected” by Lex Luthor. But what was the point being made about Chile? Was this an Allende/Pinochet reference?
Wonder Woman started out as trained Amazon warrior with almost no knowledge of men and a direct connection to Greek mythology. She also had a huge sexual bondage and dominance thing going, sending criminals to Reformation Island where they were put in chains and subjected to “loving domination” by women dressed like drum majorettes. The Amazons themselves always wore bracelets as a remembrance of their enslavement by Hercules, and you could render Wonder Woman or any amazon helpless by linking the bracelets together.
The real key to understanding Wonder Woman is this: the creator of Wonder Woman, William Marston, retained copyright to Wonder Woman until he sold it to DC, but when he did so he put a clause in the deal that said the rights reverted to his heirs should DC ever cease to publish Wonder Woman.
After Marston died DC dumped all the bondage stuff in short order and over time dumped every other part of the mythology, until by the early 70s, she had been reduced to Diana Prince, a woman with no super powers and no connection to Greek mythology: she was a disco clothing store owner who did spying on the side. She was good at judo, and that was about it.
The feminists of the 70s took up Wonder Woman as an icon of female strength and power, and were very cheesed at the Diana Prince powerless version of Wonder Woman. So DC gave Wonder Woman back her powers and with that cheesy desire to please that comic book publishers can have when they smell a buck, made her an actual Greek goddess at one point.
Because the feminists were key to Wonder Woman’s success at this point – no they weren’t buying the mags at all, the readership there has always been 90 percent male. But they were buying lots of Wonder Woman underoos and T shirts and whatnot for their duaghters to make them feel all empowered and all. In fact, I’ll bet that sales of Wonder Woman clothing and such probably makes more money for DC than sales of the mag itself ever did.
Thus you see what Wonder Woman’s nature is to DC: it is a franchise for selling clothing and other merchandise. The mythos itself means diddly-squat to them. Anyone who pays any attention at all to the mythos under DC is kidding themselves. There is no mythos any more. There is only ancillary sales.
That was true initially but hasn’t been for sometime. At this point Warner Brothers (and by extension DC) own Wonder Woman lock, stock, and barrel. Details can be found here.
In some versions of the mythos, Amazons are immortal, and already several thousand years old by the time Steve Trevor lands on the island in World War II.
In some versions, the immortality only lasts while they are on Paradise Island. In this version, Wonder Woman ages normally whenever she leaves the island. Presumably, she gets rejuvenated whenever she visits home.
In other versions, the immortality is linked to her status as an Amazon. When she is stripped of her powers (as happened during the mid 1970s) that probably includes the immortality as well.
If the author of Red Son decided that her powers were derived from an external source (Greek gods) then he might have decided that the unbreakability of the lasso and her youth were part of the package, and both could be taken away.
Lord Il Palazzo, let me be the first on this thread besides you to explicitly admit he’s read Mark Millar’s RED SON.
Isn’t Wonder Woman’s lasso supposedly unbreakable? Is it unbreakable by anyone but her or is there some other clause I don’t know? It is nominally unbreakable but it has been severed and repaired several times before. This happens occassionally in different Elsewhere continuity: I Magog snapped at her lasso at the end of THE KINGDOM, and I vaguely recall Doomsday having done so in some story.
**Why did the lasso breaking have such an effect on Wonder Woman? (The aging and the mental breakdown.) ** No reason, except on the rare occassions it has been broken before it had NO consequence, so it was an interesting deviation. It would have been more poignant had there been an actual reason, eh? In the story, Superman put it down to “strain.” Wonder Woman recovered enough to lead that Amazonian assault against Superman by book three. All in all, pretty much just a whim of Mark Millar’s.
That’s a John Byrne innovation from the 1990’s. I’m not sure it’s still in force.
:Ahem: Mod clothing store, or properly boutique. Just saying. (And really, the bondage fans were a sort of skeevy minority, & whether or not they misinterpreted what Marston & Peter were trying to do, playing primarily to them could have been commercially counterproductive, even if it weren’t for Dr. Wertham & the Code trying to get implied rape out of kid’s comics.)
Yeah, more or less.
The big problem is that while comics fans & comics writers can be expected to have a lot of primary familiarity with Superman, & even (despite the lack of fidelity to the source material in screen versions) Batman, when it comes to other heroes, they often only really know the character from Super Friends/Justice League/JLA. So when they try to use a character like Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Booster Gold, Manhunter, whomever, they often get it really really wrong.
So: No, the lasso is unbreakable, & unbreakable means unbreakable, full stop. But some writers like to “break the unbreakable” 'cos they think they’re being clever or bold somehow.
Which makes it exactly like every other comic book franchise owned by either of the big two. You think Marvel gives a shit about the comic book Spiderman, when the cinematic Spiderman just pulled in over half a billion dollars pure profit on what is almost universally regarded as the worst Spiderman movie to ever hit the theaters? Comics are at best a sideline in the superhero buisness these days, and has been ever since the market collapse of the '90s.
It was probably for the best. Superheroes have been insanely restricted by comics code morality guidelines for decades now. Comics were just the first mass medium to have superheroes fefore they spread to other media: pulps, radio, movies, books, television, video games and the internet webcasts, animation and webcomics. Superheroes have dominated the comics medium for years. Advances in computerized special effects have made them popular in television, movies and the gaming industry. But comics as an industry are increasingly better off when other genres have a chance to shine.
I dunno exactly what the explanation for it is, but it certainly felt “right”: by breaking the lasso, she somehow broke something deep inside her. It may or may not have any tie in with the non-elseworlds continuity, but it definitely fit this story well, and was a great dramatic element. I don’t think its explained further anywhere in the story, and this is not an elseworlds anyone has revisited, so I don’t we can do more than speculate.
And yet I think almost everyone would agree that comics are superior in their storytelling than almost any other medium. Despite being able to be more graphic, movies and Tv are sort of the “bubblegum” versions of these characters and stories.
Comics are superior in some aspects of superhero storytelling. It’s cheaper to do serial storytelling in comics than in just about every other mass medium medium except webcomics and maybe some gaming programs.
Comics fanboys don’t like damsel in distress scenes? Really? You’re honestly saying this? Maybe some idealized Boy Scout Fanboys in your fantasies don’t like bondage scenes, but if you look at all the comic book covers that featured bondage over the years, you might find yourself changing your tune. Here’s an archive of such covers to help you get your head straight with reality:
The link itself is safe, but some of those comic cover are crazily not safe for work – particularly Airlock No.2 and Last of the Viking Heroes No. 5. For something contemporaneous with Wonder Woman’s early years, try Rangers’ No. 14. Any of the Fight Comics and Wings are major goodness in this respect.
