Hobbes: “Is Amazon Girl’s super power the ability to squeeze that figure into that suit?”
Calvin: “Nah. They can all do that.”
First of all, this is probably the most embarassing post I’ll ever make here.
I have exactly one “Wonder Woman” comic in my collection. How it got there I don’t know. It’s No. 131, July 1962 “The Proving of Wonder Woman” cover story. It has a lot of origin related stuff in it. The basic plot is that once a year Wonder Woman has to prove herself worthy of being the island’s do-gooder in the outside world. The whole test is run by her mother, Wonder Queen. (Insert J. Edgar Hoover jokes here.) The various tests show off various abilities of WW and her gear. The tests are:
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Walking a golden lasso tightrope across a “giddy” chasm. So she’s a tightrope walker. (What’s the danger of falling if you can fly?) Jove/Zeus throws lightning bolts at her which she repels off her tiara while spinning rapidly. So add spinning on a tightrope and the tiara repels lightning.
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Retrieving a golden apple dropped into a pit (which leads to Hades). She digs her way thru a metal door using her tiara, which is made of “Amazonium, the hardest metal known.” She sucks the apple away from Pluto’s feet with an amazing suction breath. (Insert you-know-what jokes here.)
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She is sent underwater to raise up by herself the ship that had brought them to the island. She swims underwater “at rocket speed”. She gets into a fight with Neptune and climbs onto the back of a giant swordfish to best him. So she apparently has some sort of magic power over animals. She then raises the ship to the surface. (Putting her strength into a Superman like class.)
The only novel powers revealed in the 2nd story are “extra-perceptive vision” and breaking up a meteor with a single fisted blow. Again, getting into something nearing Superman.
I have a lot of JLAs from that era, which presumably show even more powers, but it’s late. 'Night all.
Are the Perez stories available in trade paperback?
But surely not worse than Martian Manhunter. 
And…are we sure that the “thread a needle underwater” bit wasn’t a double entandre or a veiled reference, or something? You know, to sneak something past the censors? (Like when Claremont had a character refer to Destiny as being Mystique’s “leman”? )
I recall another bit of Wonder Woman Weirdness from a 1960s comic – Wonder Woman, Wonder Girl, and Wonder Tot (I kid you not – sometimes DC heros had absurd extended families) were in a competition. At one point they had to literally fly through hoops. The problem was, the hoops got smaller and smaller in diameter as you got near the end of the course, until at the very end you had something it would be tough to fit a pencil through. All three of the Wonder Women managed to somehow thin themselves out and reduce their overall diameters temporarily to fit through the hoops. Take that, Superman!
What would you ever call that power? Where else would it come in useful? (“Oh, no, Rudolph, Santa’s got the flu! Who else could possibly fit down those chimneys?” This month, a Very Special issue of Wonder Woman.)
A bit of trivia: Marston, who invented the “lie detector”, also devised Wonder Woman as a powerful role model for girls. This explains the truth-enforcing lasso (which I’ll bet Marston wished he had).
Waitwaitwaitwait…
Wonder Tot was a seperate entity from Wonder Woman?
I always though she was more like Superbaby?
It’s been a while, so I’m not sure of the theology, but in this competition they were all side-by-side. Maybe time travel was involved.
Just a thought:
It seems to me that they wanted Wonder Woman to have non-threatening powers. Hera forbid she should be faster or smarter or more agile or, worst of all, stronger than Superman (or any of the other DC stable of heros). So she gets stuck with the “running up a glass wall” or “threading a needle underwater” (doesn’t that seem like a labored attempt to make her abilities seem gender-determined?) or stretching herself to ridiculous thinness (You can never be too thin – it’s the ultimate wasp waist! She could even thread an underwater needle with herself!) and other weird but non-male-superhero-threatening powers.
I’ve become aware of this issue, now that I have a seven year old daughter who keeps asking me why boy heros get all the good roles. She likes the “pro-active” Disney heroines like Mulan rather than Snow White.
Lastly, I’ve been trying to avoid the WW sexual jokes – they’re too damned easy to make, for one thing. And I notice that she gets much more than her share of them. Sergio Aragones in MAD is not a super-macho, female-oppressing cartoonist, but I note thast in a feature on superheros the jokes involving her all have a sexual basis (Wonder Woman changes in an alley, to the delight of a drunk sprawled there) that the other heros don’t get (You never see a woman ogling Superman changing in a phone booth).
I bet Marston had his own version of the truth enforcing lasso. See this Wonder Woman entry from the word iQ encyclopedia.
As to the history of Wonder Girl and Tot
from the same article.
Interesting take on Wonder Woman’s powers in the current JLA Cartoon, as reported on www.jabootu.com :
From the JLA cartoon series, it seems pretty clear that at least some part of WW’s powers come directly from Hera. Which would explain why those powers seem inconsistent. When she has to perform some particularly taxing chore (in one egregious case, stopping a nuclear missile by essentially catching it), she usually does the “Hera give me strength” thing.
Hera must be on duty 24/7.
At some point she died and came back as full fledged goddess.
Hence, powers galore.
She spars with Supes, so why wouldn’t she be able to survive sex with him?
And since WW can fly now…
When she wants to go airborne, does she have to recite some silly incantation like
Zephyr winds which blow on high/
lift me now so I can fly
or does she just take off?
She can blame Jon for that. You’re Green Lantern, you bloody twit, contain the missile!
Talk about inconsistant powers, she has nothing on GL. Theoretically unstoppable cosmic power… In practice, you could mug them with a banana with most writers.
Oh, come on. She dresses like a floozie, has super-hero oral suction, and ties men up for a living. To pick up on sexual innuendo is not the fault of the reader.
She just takes off. The incantation you quoted is, of course, recited by TV’s Mighty Isis.
Otto, since the show was so short lived, I was wondering if anyone would actually catch the reference.
I thought of it because when Wonder Woman is in flight, her arms and body posture are the same as Isis when being borne by the zephyr winds on high.
Regarding WW’s ability to deflect bullets with bracelets:
In order to do this, wouldn’t some sort of precog or seeing in “bullet time” be a requisite?
I always found it amusing that, on the TV show, she had reflexes fast enough to deflect bullets, but evidently could be taken by surprise by someone clamping a chloroform-soaked rag over her face! You would think she would just remember (after the first time, anyway!) to hold her breath and then rip the guy’s arm off!