Yeah, I’m sure Wonder Tot will be a huge help – Wonder Woman #133

I’m back for more punishment.

Not too long after I started this blog I reviewed the very first of the “Wonder Woman Family” adventures, Wonder Woman #124.  Check it out at you own risk.  I don’t want to get too deep into summing that issue up – the last time I tried to make sense of that story I almost had a stroke, so I’m giving it a wide berth.

But, lest anyone accuse me of shirking my duties, I’ve decided to brave another iteration of the antics of Wonder Woman and the teenage and infant versions of herself.  How bad could it be?

Pretty bad.

“The Amazing Amazon Race,” written by Robert Kanigher with pencils by Ross Andru, doesn’t have the same mind-blowingly stupid plot hook that that first foray did.  So we can be thankful for that.  No, this one is just dull.  Dull, dull, dull.

Wonder Woman is reading her fan mail, and she selects an imaginary fan to share an imaginary adventure with her.  There are about twelve too many layers of “imaginary” here, but I guess we’ll just roll with the punches.  She whisks the fan, Alice, away to Paradise Island.  There, Wonder Woman competes with her fellow Amazons in a competition to be Wonder Queen for a day, and apparently the prize for that is wearing a crown for a 24 hour period.  It’s the Amazon equivalent of the Miss America Pageant, I guess.  Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot show up to compete (Maybe what I hate the most about these stories is that no one seems to find it odd that younger versions of Wonder Woman just show up out of nowhere) in a variety of boring races and feats of daring-do.  Alice watches them and Wonder Woman drags her along on a water race where Alice’s life is promptly placed in danger (as seen on the cover).  In the end Wonder Tot wins the competition.  That about sums it all up.

Dull.

The backup story, again by Kanigher and Andru, is entitled “Wonder Woman’s Invincible Rival – Herself!”  While no potboiler, it’s at least a bit less lame.  Don’t let that not-so-ringing endorsement fool you, though – it’s still not very good.  It’s your typical Wonder Woman romantic fare, with Wonder Woman taking the role of her double, “Miss X,” in a movie, alongside her beau, Steve Trevor.  She does this so that she can find out if Steve really loves her, and the big lummox falls for this thinnest of ruses.  For a time, as I was reading this story, I thought that he really knew that Wonder Woman and Miss X were one and the same, and that he was just toying with Diana by falling head over heels for this “new” woman.  But no.  The ending, which has Wonder Woman throwing off her Miss X costume to save Steve and others from a collapsing roof, reveals that he really was fooled, which I guess makes him one of the dumbest men in the history of comicdom.  But his love for Wonder Woman is confirmed at the end, so I guess all is right in their little world.

As much as Silver Age silliness may grate at times, it’s very often endearing.  But with the Wonder Woman stories, there seems to be a disconnect, something that prevents them from crossing the boundary from junk into charming.  It could be that it stems from old men trying to make stories relate to young girls.  I don’t know for sure.  But stories like these don’t cut the mustard.  They just don’t.  Silliness is one thing – brain dead is another.

Maybe I’m being too harsh.  Maybe I still have some lingering frustration from that first “impossible” story.  Maybe I hold Wonder Woman up to a too-high standard.  But these stories are just so drab.  She deserves – or deserved, I should say – better.

And I like Wonder Woman.  I really do.