"Losses"
Cover Date: April 1993
Writer: William Messner-Loebs
Artist: Les Mendes (Pencils), Ande Parks (Inks)
Previously....
Wonder Woman's home island of Themyscira was blown up. I don't know, I really just picked this issue because of the cover, I mean, aren't you curious about how Wonder Woman got a job at the local Taco Bell rip-off?
No? Not even a little bit?
Well, we're doing this anyway.
Plot
So, Diana is looking at the expanse of ocean where Themyscira used to be before it got blown up. She finds Steve Trevor just kind of floating in the water in scuba gear, and they chat for a bit, about how Themyscira will exist as long as people remember or it gets retconned out of existence during the next reboot of Wonder Woman's origin or something. Then, Wonder Woman, depressed about the destruction of her homeland, decides to go crash in her friend's basement for a while. But...uh...she does it heroically.
Anyway, eventually Diana decides to find a job, which proves difficult as she has no work experience or skills, so she finds the going tough. Eventually she starts bitterly complaining about how the economic realities of modern America make finding good work so difficult for the underclass. Man, I could just imagine a kid spending $1.25 on this issue to read about the heroic adventures of Wonder Woman and her epic struggle with chronic unemployment.
Diana eventually lands a job with Taco Whiz, the litigation-avoiding version of Taco Bell, and meets Hoppy, her new sassy African-American boss whose speech patterns seem to vary from sentence to sentence. She explains to Diana, "I seen on TV where Taco Whiz is the biggest employer in the country now, right behind the Japanese an' the Federal Government." Thrilling. Also, I can't help but note that by 1993, 'the Japanese' were in the middle of their 'Lost Decade' so I'm not sure- You know what, let's just finish this damn thing.
Right, so time for Wonder Woman to fight a villain, then? No! It's time for Diana to look for an apartment! Because if there's one thing more exciting that watching a super-hero get a minimum wage job, it's watching them look at apartments. It turns out that working a minimum wage job does not allow you to afford much of an apartment, so Diana ends up renting a room in a boarding house.
The next day, Diana is walking to work when a guy with sunglasses who had been stalking her finally puts his plan into action. The plan involves intentionally picking a fight with some sort of mob boss with robotic henchman...and the mob boss has some sort of helmet that allows him to turn into a demon. You know, that plot point seems pretty fucking stupid when you type it like that. I can't help but feel that there might have been more time to come up with a decent villain if I hadn't had to watch the montage of unsuccessful job interviews that took up most of the middle third of this issue.
Wonder Woman defeats the demon and her stalker offers her a job. Will Diana's new job interfere with her commitments to the Taco Whiz? To Be Continued!
Analysis
Man, there have been a lot of bad Wonder Woman comics over the years, haven't there?
William Messner-Loebs wrote Wonder Woman for over three years. It was not a good period for the character. I guess that Loebs was trying to humanize Wonder Woman a bit with this plot, and there's nothing more human than unemployment I guess.
I suppose it's really more a problem with the character in general. Wonder Woman is supposed to be a perfect child of the gods, but what the hell does that mean. Superman's already got the whole 'perfect man-god' thing covered, so where does that leave Diana? In general, there have been two main stands in trying to flesh out the character. First, there's the 'naive innocent living in world she does not really understand' interpretation, where they try to play up how this perfect being who was raised in a different world would not quite understand how the real world works, which is the model in play in this issue. The problem with that is that there's probably a time-limit for how long that type of character would work. You couldn't have Diana being confused by income inequality in a capitalist society after living in man's world for years, after all. (Unless, of course, you reboot the franchise, meaning that it will probably be making a comeback relatively soon.)
The other main way to portray Wonder Woman is as a great 'warrior', playing up her martial abilities, and I'll talk more about that if I ever do one of those issues of Wonder Woman.
Damage Stars: ****
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