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Friday, September 25, 2009

Great Hera! Comics!


I have finally gotten my act together and written up a new Comic Spotlight! I apologize for the lag between spotlight posts, I haven't been able to find much time to read comics lately. Even my weekly books are piling up!

Ok, enough excuses. This week I'm sharing a new DC book with you. This particular book is another from the Aunt Collection. I present to you:

Wonder Woman #88 (1957)

I was pretty excited when going over these old comics again to see that I actually had a Wonder Woman issue below 100! That struck me as a fairly big deal considering she's been around since 1942.
This book is pretty beaten up, it almost fell apart when I was reading it and I didn't even notice the pink stain until I scanned the book. But it's still a pretty nice cover and it was a fun read.

The first story, which the cover is based off of, is about WW finding this mysterious box in her bedroom upon waking. There is a warning not to open it, yet she decides to anyway, assuming someone is playing a trick on her. Just as she's about to open the box, she hears gunshots and quickly heads outside to stop a car full of bank robbers. When she gets back inside she finds the box missing. She goes about her business and later finds the box again sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, but just as she's about to open it, she notices a baby falling from a window of a tall building! What are the odds?! After saving the happy baby and giving it back to it's bad mom, she finds the box missing again. When she next comes across the box she has to stop a madman with a grenade then box disappears again. Frustrated, she decides to take her invisible jet back to Paradise Island when she sees a parachute with that danged box! Stepping out onto the wing (of the jet plane!) she finally gets to open the box which unleashes the X-Bomb and a message from some Martians that she has sealed the fate of the earth! Acting quickly she lasso's the bomb and quickly works out where the Martians are hidden and directs the bomb at them, destroying the whole fleet and saving earth!

The second story was told from the perspective of WW's lasso. It was a tale of WW lending the lasso out to some folks in a carnival who needed some self confidence, they believed the new tricks they could do were because of the magic lasso, but really they just needed some courage to perform the tricks themselves. Awww.

The last story was about some nut job who put out an ad offering $1,000,000 to anyone that could provide Wonder Woman's secret identity. After spending an entire day fighting off the public trying to get her to tell them her secret, she goes to bed. When she wakes up she finds that someone figured out she was Lt. Diana Price and had plastered it everywhere. She then spends the day trying to convince everyone she ISN'T Diana Prince and continually fails. At one point she decides it's a good idea to made a Diana out of sea weed, dress it up in her clothes and parade it around and "save" it. There-by being in two places at once! No one is fooled. At the end of the day she gives up and goes to bed only to find that when she wakes up, it was all a dream! The nut job has also given up and taken back his bounty. Her secret identity is still safe! Whew!

There were also a bunch of funny tips for young ladies between the stories. One two-page spread talked about the uses of a broach. Fancy!
A couple of other's talked about superstitions around the worlds about how girls divine their future husbands and the like. They were pretty entertaining.

I think I might actually make up a separate blog topic to spotlight old ad's and funny items like this. They are too much fun to not share!

Now to actually remember to DO it!

Well, that's it! I hope you enjoyed the review, see you next time!

3 comments:

  1. Great review Dan! I love me some Golden Age comics. You always got so much more bang for your buck...or dime in this case. But that's not nearly as alliterative.
    Anyway I have a question about the first story. Was the baby happy because it fell from the window?

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  2. Would you call this a Golden Age? I thought Golden age ended at 1950 or so.

    I guess the baby was happy to have been saved by Wonder Woman. Or just to be in the presence of her, it looked pretty damn happy just to be held!

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  3. Goog my friend, you have a great knack for describing these various plots in a very entertaining way. Issue 88 was actually the 4th Silver Age WW book. Would love to hear more on your take about the old ad's and such. Nicely done!

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