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Post by MDG on Aug 3, 2015 11:42:08 GMT -5
I'm hardly an expert on the Kanigher era. But from what I gather, it runs from workmanlike to terrible, as he apparently had little to no regard for the character or her fans. So I hear, anyhow. His second tenure is terrible other than the introduction of Nubia. I'm a pretty big fan of some of his war work, but from what I have seen and heard, have to give a big thumbs down on his Wonder Woman stuff. I've always had a hard time with Kanigher. Aside from Metal Men (which is really nothing to write home about), when i started re-reading a lot of 60s comics that I read as a kid, i was amazed that just about all the ones I remembered as not liking were written by Kanigher. I had a hard time reconciling this with his war work. Then I read an interview with (I think) George Evans where he said that whenever he got a Kanigher script, it was almost always heavily rewritten by the editor. His WW stuff can be a fun, goofy read, in small doses, but can come off like something a bored parent would make up to try to get the kid to sleep.
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Post by gothos on Aug 5, 2015 16:05:57 GMT -5
Maybe the Kanigher scripts that read so poorly are the ones where he edited his own work! I have sometimes enjoyed the more oddball qualities of Kanigher's WW scripts, but yeah, he was never really inspired; it was just a job with a character he neither created nor owned. He's a little more inventive with Metal Men because they were his babies, though even as a young reader I was annoyed with his tendency to make crap up and not justify it. Every damn MM story has Doc Magnus yammering about the robots' emotional "responsometers," and not one damn word about what mechanism made it possible for them to metamorphose into damn near any shape they wanted! I did a long write-up of a Kanigher WW story here. I started it off in fairly unflattering terms: In my essay on "Master of the Elements" I commented that even at the start of the so-called "Silver Age," one could still see a fair deal of "carry-over" from the practices of the Golden Age, and nothing shows that better than the work of Robert Kanigher. Kanigher's work, throughout the three "ages" he covered in his career, epitomizes what I called the "hit-or-miss approach of the Golden Age." Because of this, it remains a point of great irony that he scripted the first adventure of the hero most associated with the advent of the Silver Age. When reading the kind of work Kanigher turned out for WONDER WOMAN throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the mind boggles as to whether the Silver Age would even have got off the ground, had he, rather than John Broome, become the principal scripter for the FLASH title.
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Post by MDG on Aug 5, 2015 20:40:49 GMT -5
Even tough Kanigher wrote the first Flash stories, you gotta figure Schwartz worked very closely with him to get the character launched.
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Post by Jesse on Aug 6, 2015 6:09:07 GMT -5
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Post by Hoosier X on Aug 14, 2015 22:57:44 GMT -5
Wonder Tot wants some attention on this thread! NOW!
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shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,707
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Post by shaxper on Aug 14, 2015 23:06:53 GMT -5
Wonder Tot wants some attention on this thread! NOW! Someone explain to me the backstory on Wonder Tot and Wonder Girl again. I think I understand that neither were separate identities, but rather aspects of Diana herself? I know I read an interview with Marv Wolfman once where he explained that Wonder Girl's inclusion in the Teen Titans was an error because of this, and they later had to retroactively explain where Donna Troy came from.
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Crimebuster
CCF Podcast Guru
Making comics!
Posts: 3,942
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Post by Crimebuster on Aug 14, 2015 23:18:13 GMT -5
Wonder Tot wants some attention on this thread! NOW! First Superbaby and now this? What's next, the X-Babies? You must be some kind of sadist to keep posting this stuff.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 14, 2015 23:23:09 GMT -5
Wonder Tot wants some attention on this thread! NOW! First Superbaby and now this? What's next, the X-Babies? You must be some kind of sadist to keep posting this stuff. Not X-babies, but baby Magneto... sheesh! Maybe Hoosier is secretly Skottie Young creator of all the MArvel baby cover variants -M
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shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,707
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Post by shaxper on Aug 14, 2015 23:25:15 GMT -5
Not X-babies, but baby Magneto... sheesh! Y'know, that was actually a half decent story...
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Post by Jesse on Aug 14, 2015 23:54:55 GMT -5
Terry Dodson & Rachel Dodson Wonder Woman #46 Looney Tunes variant
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Golddragon71
Full Member
Immortal avatar of the Dragon Race The Golden Dragon
Posts: 343
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Post by Golddragon71 on Aug 14, 2015 23:58:27 GMT -5
Oh Bruddah!
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Post by Hoosier X on Aug 15, 2015 0:05:11 GMT -5
Wonder Tot wants some attention on this thread! NOW! Someone explain to me the backstory on Wonder Tot and Wonder Girl again. I think I understand that neither were separate identities, but rather aspects of Diana herself? I know I read an interview with Marv Wolfman once where he explained that Wonder Girl's inclusion in the Teen Titans was an error because of this, and they later had to retroactively explain where Donna Troy came from. Wonder Girl was just Diana as a teenager. There was a series of adventures in the wonder Woman comic book with Wonder Girl, Wonder Woman as a teenager. It was more of a fantasy series, with Wonder Girl facing strange creatures that lived in the sea or on islands that were close to Paradise Island. The main supporting character was Queen Hippolyta, but there was also Mer-Boy (who I hate) and Bird-Boy (who is so much worse!). Mer-Boy was from a race of sea-dwelling people, half human, half-fish. Bird-Boy was from a race of very unintelligently designed bird-people. They were both highly codependent and constantly pestered Wonder Girl to choose one of them to go steady.
I like it for the Ross Andru art and I think it could have been a very entertaining fantasy series if there hadn't been so much reliance on the romance comic aspect of Mer-Boy. He was in the series in almost every Wonder Girl story. Yuk.
Eventually they did a few Wonder Tot stories. The adventures of Wonder Woman as a baby. The first Wonder Tot stories are hilarious! In one of them, Wonder Tot's gone for hours and Hippolyta asks where she's been and she says "nowhere." And then Hippolyta asks what she's been doing and Wonder Tot says "nothing." And then Hippolyta and the other Amazons notice that she's bouncing up and down holding a whale's tooth! And finally Wonder Tot tells the story and it's a hilariously insane fantasy adventure.
I like the first few Wonder Tot stories. They're are really CRA-ZEE, with none of the annoying aspects of the Mer-Boy character. (Mer-Boy as a baby appears in one story as Mer-Mite, and he pesters Wonder Tot to be his girlfriend and Wonder Tot outright rejects him. "Me only a baby! Me too young to have steady boyfriend! You are stupid!" (Or something like that.)
Wonder Toy had the potential to be some ding-dongy Silver Age fun, but they didn't produce very many of those with Wonder Tot as a solo character. They started a series of "Impossible Tales," wherein Queen Hippolyta took the "moving pictures" (made with that crazy crazy Amazon technology) she had accumulated of her daughter over the years and edited the many images into a series of adventures where she got to star with all three versions of her daughter.
They did A LOT of these "Impossible Tales." And some of them are entertaining. They did it so much that they quit labeling them as "Impossible Tales" a lot of the time. It's easy to see how Bob Haney - when he wrote Wonder Girl into the Teen Titans - might have thought she was a separate character. He could have picked up a few issues of Wonder Woman where adult Diana was adventuring with her mother and two other characters called Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot and there might not have been any in-story explanation that the story was Hippolyta's fantasy.
I've read Showcase Presents: Wonder Woman, Volumes 1 through 3, and that's several years' worth of Kanigher-era Wonder Woman. The first appearances of Wonder Girl, Wonder Tot, Mer-Boy, Bird-Boy, Mr. Genie (Wonder Tot's buddy; he's a gigantic genie wearing a turban). Also, the first Mouse Man, in a Wonder Woman story!
Great Ross Andru/Mike Esposito art all the way through.
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shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,707
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Post by shaxper on Aug 15, 2015 0:07:56 GMT -5
Someone explain to me the backstory on Wonder Tot and Wonder Girl again. I think I understand that neither were separate identities, but rather aspects of Diana herself? I know I read an interview with Marv Wolfman once where he explained that Wonder Girl's inclusion in the Teen Titans was an error because of this, and they later had to retroactively explain where Donna Troy came from. Wonder Girl was just Diana as a teenager. There was a series of adventures in the wonder Woman comic book with Wonder Girl, Wonder Woman as a teenager. It was more of a fantasy series, with Wonder Girl facing strange creatures that lived in the sea or on islands that were close to Paradise Island. The main supporting character was Queen Hippolyta, but there was also Mer-Boy (who I hate) and Bird-Boy (who is so much worse!). Mer-Boy was from a race of sea-dwelling people, half human, half-fish. Bird-Boy was from a race of very unintelligently designed bird-people. They were both highly codependent and constantly pestered Wonder Girl to choose one of them to go steady.
I like it for the Ross Andru art and I think it could have been a very entertaining fantasy series if there hadn't been so much reliance on the romance comic aspect of Mer-Boy. He was in the series in almost every Wonder Girl story. Yuk.
Eventually they did a few Wonder Tot stories. The adventures of Wonder Woman as a baby. The first Wonder Tot stories are hilarious! In one of them, Wonder Tot's gone for hours and Hippolyta asks where she's been and she says "nowhere." And then Hippolyta asks what she's been doing and Wonder Tot says "nothing." And then Hippolyta and the other Amazons notice that she's bouncing up and down holding a whale's tooth! And finally Wonder Tot tells the story and it's a hilariously insane fantasy adventure.
I like the first few Wonder Tot stories. They're are really CRA-ZEE, with none of the annoying aspects of the Mer-Boy character. (Mer-Boy as a baby appears in one story as Mer-Mite, and he pesters Wonder Tot to be his girlfriend and Wonder Tot outright rejects him. "Me only a baby! Me too young to have steady boyfriend! You are stupid!" (Or something like that.)
Wonder Toy had the potential to be some ding-dongy Silver Age fun, but they didn't produce very many of those with Wonder Tot as a solo character. They started a series of "Impossible Tales," wherein Queen Hippolyta took the "moving pictures" (made with that crazy crazy Amazon technology) she had accumulated of her daughter over the years and edited the many images into a series of adventures where she got to star with all three versions of her daughter.
They did A LOT of these "Impossible Tales." And some of them are entertaining. They did it so much that they quit labeling them as "Impossible Tales" a lot of the time. It's easy to see how Bob Haney - when he wrote Wonder Girl into the Teen Titans - might have thought she was a separate character. He could have picked up a few issues of Wonder Woman where adult Diana was adventuring with her mother and two other characters called Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot and there might not have been any in-story explanation that the story was Hippolyta's fantasy.
I've read Showcase Presents: Wonder Woman, Volumes 1 through 3, and that's several years' worth of Kanigher-era Wonder Woman. The first appearances of Wonder Girl, Wonder Tot, Mer-Boy, Bird-Boy, Mr. Genie (Wonder Tot's buddy; he's a gigantic genie wearing a turban). Also, the first Mouse Man, in a Wonder Woman story!
Great Ross Andru/Mike Esposito art all the way through.
I definitely recall an issue in which Wonder Woman, Wonder Girl, and Wonder Tot exist side-by-side. Too lazy to figure out which issue it was. So apparently there was mass confusion.
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Post by Jesse on Aug 15, 2015 0:13:29 GMT -5
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Post by Hoosier X on Aug 15, 2015 0:24:39 GMT -5
Wonder Tot wants some attention on this thread! NOW! First Superbaby and now this? What's next, the X-Babies? You must be some kind of sadist to keep posting this stuff. I also love the Metal Men! Have you ever seen the sales figures on the Metal Men in the early years of the series? It was outsold by the Superman comics, but it was comparable with Batman and Flash. It's easy to see why DC gave Metal Men a regular series after the tryout in Showcase.
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