Ms. Marvel’s G. Willow Wilson reflects on the political side of Wonder Woman (2024)

One of the biggest characters in the world of comics is getting a brand new creative team this week, as writer G. Willow Wilson and artist Cary Nord take the reins on Wonder Woman.

Nord and Wilson make a good pedigree for the Amazon warrior. Nord won an Eisner for his work on Conan the Barbarian in 2004, and Wilson is the writer and co-creator of Kamala Khan, the breakout lead character of Marvel’s best-selling Ms. Marvel series. From what DC Comics has teased about their upcoming storyline, it involves a rebirth of the Greek gods, an influx of mythological refugees and, of course, a kidnapped Steve Trevor.

Wonder Woman #58 hits shelves on Nov. 14, and the series is published twice monthly. Polygon’s comics editor, Susana Polo, sat down with Wilson this week to talk about love, war, and how global political context of Wonder Woman is more complicated than we often assume.

Polygon: How did you get on Wonder Woman? What was the process?

G. Willow Wilson: I got a call out of blue from [senior editor] Chris Conroy at DC. It was very funny because it was like fate intervening. I had literally, just a couple of days before, decided, “OK, I’m coming to the end of a five-year cycle, I just handed in a novel that had been giving me no end of trouble.” A book without pictures. And I said, “OK, I’m for the first time in a long time able to take on another project.”

And I had planned to just sit there and marinate for a while and decide what I wanted to do next and put out feelers and do it the slow old-fashioned way. But as luck would have it, literally a couple of days after I cleared my desk, I got this call from Chris Conroy saying, ‘Hey, are you free to write Wonder Woman? And I was like, “Wow! Yes! Actually. As it happens, as of this week, I am, indeed, free to write Wonder Woman.” So it really did seem like the right place, the right time. And even if it hadn’t been, when you get a call saying, “Hey, can you write Wonder Woman?” You don’t say no. You find a way, you find the time. I was very honored to be asked.

Do you have a history with the character?

Yes and no. I find her to be the most complicated of the Big Three, or the holy Trinity, at DC. I think the backstory of both Superman and Batman — even though they’re quite unique — are more relatable than the backstory of Wonder Woman. Because Superman is the classic ... farm boy everyman from middle of nowhere discovers that he is the heir to an alien legacy. That’s the underpinning of Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker and it’s a very classic story. And Batman comes at that from another perspective, he’s the rich kid who seems to have everything, and a loving family and all the [...] money that money can buy [laughs] and he loses it all tragically, and becomes a dark anti-hero, so he’s sort of the inverse.

Those are very human storylines. We can really relate to them on a lot of levels. Whereas with Wonder Woman, not only is she this invulnerable warrior goddess-type figure who was raised in a completely different world, a utopia, literally called Paradise Island in some story arcs, she’s made from clay or she’s the daughter of gods, depending on which timeline you go with. It’s really hard for us to relate to that. Lots of us come from Kansas. None of us come from Themyscira.

It’s tougher to get into her as a character. And to me, she’s often the most frustrating of those three characters to read, because I think our instincts as writers is just to pile on gravitas. “We’ll just make it very serious because that’s what you would do if you were a goddess.” The challenge and the creatively compelling part of writing her story for me is to try to get to her human side, get into her flaws and what makes her relatable and what of her experience meshes with ours, us mere mortal schmucks here in the real world. And that is a really, really cool challenge for me as a writer.

When you thought, OK, I’m doing Wonder Woman, what was the first thing that you thought, “Oh! I could do this!”

For me it was, “Oh, I actually get to do Wonder Woman!’ And then “Oh my God, I have to do Wonder Woman.” So the first thing I thought of was the challenge of staying true to and paying homage to the 75 years of history that this character has, while at the same time trying to frame a new story arc that would be accessible to readers for whom this might be their very first Wonder Woman comic, to people who maybe don’t read comics at all but loved the Wonder Woman movie. [And] being cognizant of the fact that the audience that I’ve been writing for for the past five years with Ms. Marvel might be somewhat different from the audience that reads Wonder Woman on a month-to-month basis and trying to marry those two audiences and those types of expectations. So, no big deal, that sounds easy, right?

I knew that I wanted to start with a classic Wonder Woman story, using characters that are beloved to long-time readers, but also would be easy to glom onto for people reading the series for the first time. But instead of setting them up in the usual way, [I wanted] to turn them over, shake them and see what falls out of their pockets. So we’re seeing Ares but in a very different way than we’ve seen him previously, a way that challenges how Wonder Woman perceives herself and her mission, complicating everything.

Bringing back a number of the Greek gods and putting them through, based on previews, a transformative resurrection seems like it touches on a lot of the stuff you were just talking about — incorporating Wonder Woman’s history along with very recognizable aspects of her character to people who maybe have not read her stories. Was that how you came across that idea?

To me it was really a desire to smash the two Wonder Woman genres together. There are really two parallel Wonder Woman storylines. There’s Wonder Woman in our world where she is very much an anomaly, she’s dealing with real-world problems and political intrigue. She’s got a roster of anti-heroes and villains who she deals with who are very much from our world as well. And then, on the flip side of that, you have the very high fantasy stuff where you’re in the realms of the gods and you’re dealing with the underworld and with Greek mythology, and you’re in a completely different high fantasy world where anything is possible. Often those two run in parallel, I really wanted to smash them together. I think the Sandman influence will be pretty obvious pretty quickly.

In fact, when I sat down to write this I was like, “Do not write ‘superhero Sandman.’” And then I read over the first arc and I was like, “Welp! Here we go: superhero Sandman.” I find that very compelling, the marriage of the gritty, the modern, the high concept, with the mythological, fantastical, the darker elements. And I really wanted a chance to do a story that had both of those things running together in a single storyline, instead of running in parallel.

For you, what is the role of Steve Trevor in a Wonder Woman story? I think it might come as a surprise, for example, to a lot of people who saw the movie, that Steve Trevor wasn’t romantically linked with Wonder Woman for about 20 years starting in the mid-’80s.

He kind of comes and goes in very different ways. Sometimes he dies and is resurrected, sometimes he’s kind of flashed forward. He’s had a very interesting history, and he gets knocked about quite a bit in the name of being a Wonder Woman sidekick. I wanted to start out with a solid foundation that would make readers feel as comfortable with that relationship as Wonder Woman and Steve seem to be in it.

I figured by this point Steve has come to accept his role in Wonder Woman’s life. He’s comfortable with it in a lot of ways. He’s not a classic damsel in distress, he’s a career soldier, he’s military intelligence, he’s got a lot of stuff going on in his own right. But at the same time — he’s in love with Wonder Woman, who’s an icon and who is semi-invulnerable and whose sole job in life is to run around saving us from ourselves, as flawed human beings. So, I’ve gotta to figure if he’s hung on for this long, they’re at a point in the relationship where they’re very comfortable with that dynamic.

And I try to bring that through in the first couple of issues. That level of comfort, that laid back-ness — that’s not a word, oh my God — so that down the line we can pick it apart. [laughs] Throw some more things and people into the mix. I figure it’s not a terrible foundation to start from. It’s fun to portray that phase of a relationship. They’re not newly in love, and by that same token, they’re not fighting and about to break up. They’re in that spot where they can really rely on each other, and sparks may not be flying like at the beginning, but at the same time it’s very comfortable. And you don’t get that a lot. Usually superheroes are either breaking up or getting together, you don’t get a lot of that middle section.

What did you have planned for the Amazons? Are we going find out those plans later?

They’re a fascinating group of people to tell stories about because they allow us to mentally reboot humanity and say, “Well, what would the world look like if it was run by women? In this kind of fantastical utopia?” Would it be utopian, or would the same kinds of things happen that have happened in our own timeline. So they’re a really fascinating thought experiment. And yes, I’m really excited to do Amazon storylines and to ask those bigger questions. I think if you read the first issue, I don’t want to spoil anything but it’s obvious that the status quo gets turned upside down when [spoiler omitted] and it affects the rest of that Olympian universe as well. And so the status of the Amazons becomes very uncertain. But yeah, they’re really, really interesting.

And, I have to say, when the movie was coming out and there was all of this conjecture about what was going to be in it, I was very interested to see how those concepts would translate on the big screen, with actual flesh-and-blood actresses for a global audience. So it’s clear that these are questions that are interesting, not just to comic book geeks but to the world at large.

What do you mean by how it was going to translate?

Because I think it’s one thing to portray this matriarchal warrior society in the pages of comics, where we really suspend disbelief in a major way. It’s another thing to see actual human being actresses, real people, portraying these characters. I think in the books you can get away with losing a lot of nuance, you can make them very archetypal and I think it doesn’t work as well in film. But I was curious to see how real actresses — flawed, live, flesh-and-blood human beings — were going to portray these women. It very, very interesting to me.

Also, that’s for all high fantasy. I think that was what was interesting to me about Game of Thrones, because I think anytime you’ve got a fantasy world that exists only on paper, there’s a tendency to elide a lot of nuance. You can’t get away with it when it’s real people speaking real lines [laughs] that may have sounded great when you read them in your head, but then when it comes from an actual person, you’re like, “Oh my God, that is so unfortunate.”

So that was what was really interesting to me. Amazons are such an archetypal fantasy concept, that it’s easy to lose nuance and very hard to add it back in again. And so they’re an interesting challenge.

Wonder Woman is unavoidably this icon of feminism and of diversity and, to an extent, any Wonder Woman story can’t escape the broader context of her as a fictional element in the wider world. You just look at her becoming a figurehead for the UN, and the backlash to that, and the weight that we place on her as a fictional character. And certainly there’s a lot of conversation about issues of feminism and diversity just in the comics world right now. Do you feel that the presence of that context when you’re writing her?

Yes, absolutely. I think those of us, especially in the United States, who grew up with these characters, tend to assume a kind of universality to them. We assume that the ideals that they represent are universal across time and space and culture; that everybody can relate to them the same way that we do; that the things that they say and they think, their costumes, all of this stuff — is a universal human expression of justice.

And it’s not always the case. That’s not always the case. And I think now that we are really interconnected across the globe, and in social media, to the press, through the globalization of pop culture, we’re asking much bigger questions about these characters then we might have before, when they were a uniquely American phenomenon. And so it’s something that I’m always conscious of.

And it does, I think, make one’s job as a storyteller more interesting, because we’re now dealing with these characters who have a much broader reach than they might have 60 years ago. Yet by that same token, they’re no longer as universal and that’s a very interesting paradox.

[That’s] part of why I wanted to start out my run on the series in the way that I do: asking, “What is justice in this very different context?” Is there such a thing as a just war in a time when war is no longer about two armies facing each other across the battlefield, and it’s more about proxy wars and asymmetrical warfare and civilian casualties? And all of these different warring perspectives where there is no clear, black-and-white good guy and bad guy? And not shy away from that stuff. It’s a tall order, but I think it’s never been more necessary to ask those questions.

It’s interesting to look at the Trinity — Batman’s obviously a very local guy and Superman has a global reach, but [...] There’s that Gail Simone quote about how Batman solves mysteries, and Superman stops asteroids, and Wonder Woman stops wars.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. There’s an implicit political aspect to that character and an assumption that she’s always on the right side. But ... Is she? [laughs] Is anybody, ever, always on the right side? I think it’s really interesting, and uniquely challenging in this political context.