Hey there, this is Nathan filling in for Comic Drake.
Today, we’re going to be discussing my all time favorite hero in comics, Wonder Woman,
specifically her antagonists.
Wonder Woman’s villains are among some of the more interesting in all of comics, but
they’re often one of the least known.
So today, we’re going to be celebrating in no particular order some of my favorite
antagonists to ever swear vengeance on the Amazon Avenger.
Let’s start this party off with something big.
How big you ask?
Big enough to be called GIGANTA!
She is considered one of Wonder Womans most iconic foes, and is armed with the ability
to grow hundreds of feet in a matter of seconds.
She was originally created in the 40’s as a gorilla transmogrified into a strong woman
because comics, but Giganta actually owes most of her character and notoriety to the
Challenge of the Superfriends cartoon of the late 70’s, as she was a fairly obscure character
prior to the shows success.
Following the first major, DC reboot of the 80’s, Giganta was adjusted to better fit
her cartoon persona.
A move DC would pull again with the Mr Freeze of of the Batman Animated series.
The new Giganta was Doris Zool who in order to escape death by vague blood disease, attempted
to swap minds with Wonder Woman, but that failed so she swapped with a Gorilla named
Giganta instead, and then the gorilla swapped minds again with a strong woman named Olga
who secretly had the mutant ability to enlarge herself.
Since becoming a villain, Giganta has spent most of her career as a mook with little ambition
of her own.
Her intelligence wavers from writer to writer though.
Sometimes she’s little more than a gurgling monster crushing buildings under her heel.
Other times she’s smart enough to muse over her nature as a criminal and even date The
Atom.
Despite never having a definitive story there is a certain magic that keeps drawing writer
after writer back to her.
To me Giganta is the perfect example of a Wonder Woman villain: she’s under utilized,
totally unique, and more fun than comics have let themselves be for ages
No one but me cares about The Silver Swan.
See there are three Silver Swans.
There's this chick Vanessa who is a friend of Wonder Woman’s that got turned into a
brainwashed cyborg, but she is lame.
There's also this girl Valerie who is like a mutant with a jerk husband that experiments
on her so she becomes Black Canary with wings, but Valerie’s lame too.
So instead, I’m going to talk about my favorite Silver Swan, Helen Alexandros.
See Helen is a ballerina who can't find work because she looks like a makeup free Mila
Kunis.
That's not even a joke.
I legitimately think she is drawn to look like Mila Kunis before Mila Kunis existed.
Either way, the ballet studios doesn't think she's hot enough to dance for them so she
does the most extra thing imaginable and goes to a temple in Greece to scream at the Greek
gods over her butterface.
Meanwhile Ares, the God of War, hears this and realizes someone this extra has to be
related to the me.
Turns out she is!
She’s Ares’ great great something-or-other granddaughter meaning she gets her own nepotism
based miracle.
The God of War appears before her and gifts her with beauty beyond compare, supersonic
powers, flight, and a showgirls costume!
There's a catch though.
Turns out great grandpa war god is a chungus muncher and her perfection is just a one hour
daily trial until she brings him the head of Wonder Woman.
I love the idea of SIlver Swan.
Wonder Woman more than any other hero in all of comics is built around saving her villains
from themselves.
The idea being that each of them is a victim or symptom of how sick man's world is.
It’s not that Helen wishes to be evil or hurt Wonder Woman.
It’s that we as a society value beauty enough that she feels she has to kill for it.
SIlver Swan, She’s a tragic tale of beauty, self loathing, and sequin unitards who (much
like Silver Swan) need to make a return.
What time is it, friendly friends?
It’s time for Circe, the demigod Animorph witch of the Odyssey.
Steeped in ancient myth, Circe is a figure of legend with one of those complicated Greek
back stories involving nine billion people, a retired god of moon witches, and a prophesy
that makes her think Wonder Woman is going to eat her soul for some inexplicable reason,
but for the most part, none of that matters because what carries Circe as an antagonist
is her unparalleled deviousness.
She just floats around finding things to ruin.
Are the gods having a good time?
Circe will trick them into a civil war and steal their powers as they die.
Is Wonder Woman experiencing general happiness?
Circe turns into a whole other person for years in order to befriend Diana and then
stab her in the back because screw happiness!
Did the Amazons just experience a tragedy and lose their homeland?
Time for Faustian pacts with an animal witch leading to an Amazon Civil War over what little
they still own.
I swear this woman is at the heart of more civil wars than Tony Stark.
And the best thing about it is that she loves it!
She almost never gets anything out of these endeavors, but it makes her so happy!
It's like she lives off bitter petty cruelty.
Circe, she's cunning, she's cool, she's the ancient Regina George of evil.
How could you not love her?
Real talk.
Once upon a time, America used to be slightly more racist than we are today, leading to
some really uncomfortable bits of comic book history.
One of the most popular forms of racism in comics was a phenomenon known as the Yellow
Peril, where we genuinely thought the Chinese were going to swoop in and use their magical
powers... of being Chinese to eradicate our western white people values.
It’s a disgusting bit of xenophobia that we have to acknowledge, not just because it
is an ugly reality of our culture with a longstanding effect that we still feel to this day, but
also because our next villain takes the idea of Yellow Peril and asks "You know what else
is yellow?
EGGS!"
Enter Egg Fu, the single most Because Comics character to ever exist.
Egg Fu is a titanic evil egg version of Fu Manchu that hatches new versions of himself
in case of scrambling.
When he was first created, Egg Fu no origin.
He was just a giant egg that was evil... because he was Chinese.
That was enough justification.
It is worth noting that DC has made a visible effort to retool Egg Fu in recent history,
pulling him away from his yellow peril origins by making him the stuff of my nightmares,
jeepers creepers, and renaming him Chang Tzu.
Despite the racism, Egg Fu is one of my favorite things in comics.
The idea of a titanic evil egg committing crimes is so quintessentially comics that
I can't help but love him.
It will never matter how gritty Batman gets because Egg Fu exists in the same world and
your tone is now silly.
Egg Fu.
What can I say other than YOU need to thank me for not spending this entire character
making egg puns.
You know Drake would’ve!
And now for the villain you've all be waiting for.
The crem dela crem of crime.
The mistress of misgiving.
IT'S TIME FOR THE CHEETAH!
Oh my God, there's a lot of them.
In the history of Wonder Woman, there have been a handful of Cheetahs.
The least interesting of these are 1980's Debbie Domaine who was a straw man eco-terrorist
and the 2001's Sebastian Ballesteros, who was a straw man businessman.
These two genuinely don't matter, but it's occasionally cool to see their existence referenced.
The real Cheetahs are Priscilla Rich and Barbara Ann Minerva.
Now Priscilla is the original and holds a special place in my heart.
See, she was a dancer who got so salty about Wonder Woman upstaging her that she develops
a Two Face like personality disorder that has general cheetah powers for unexplained
reasons.
It was an interesting dynamic where Priscilla genuinely wanted treatment and control over
her life, but the Cheetah only wanted Wonder Woman's destruction.
She was vicious and tragic and fans loved her.
It was a cool setup for a villain and back in 1943, there hadn't really been anything
like her.
She quickly earned the title of Wonder Woman's arch enemy and to this day remains one of
my favorite villains in all of comics.
However, Cheetah is weird example of a successful legacy villain.
While it's not uncommon for villainous identities to be passed on to new criminals, it almost
always returns to the original owner before too long, but in 1987 DC Comics would introduce
Barbara Ann Minerva as the new permanent Cheetah.
She was a spoiled archeology obsessed heiress who performed a dark ritual with human sacrifice
in exchange for cheetah based super powers.
Normally the plant god, Urzkartaga, would hand these powers out no problem to the virgin
offerings he took as brides, but Minerva having been deflowered didn’t meet his usual criteria,
so he made her powers a curse.
Minerva would forever suffer from crippling pain in her human form, but so long as she
remained in the Cheetah form, her savagery would grow and grow until she lost all control.
As I said before, Minerva remains The Cheetah to this day, and most comic fans would identify
her as the definitive version of the character.
I personally never thought she held a candle to the tragedy of Priscilla Rich, but Minerva
is rooted in what made the original Cheetah work so well.
It has always been my personal belief that in comics, the difference between an enemy
and an arch enemy is that an arch enemy encaptures something better than anyone else.
For Joker it’s nihilism, for Luthor it’s pride, for Captain Cold it’s his code, and
for Cheetah, it’s always been ferocity.
Priscilla always had that, but you could never see her eating the flesh of Wonder Woman's
friends or slaughtering children to get to under Diana's skin.
I truly think there’s a perfect Cheetah somewhere in between Priscilla’s tragedy
and Minerva's savagery, but until that perfect Cheetah is born you’ll always spot me cheering
on the two I love.
Are there any villains today that we covered that were your favorites?
Are there any Wonder Woman villains that we missed that you would wish he had talked about?
Leave a comment below.
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I hope you have a wonderful day!