question of the day: What do you think of Wonder Woman’s new look?

It was time for the old look to go, IMO
Welcome to the new Wonder Woman.

I don’t like the look but more importantly I don’t like the new storyline if the decide to make it stick.

Basically they are just creating a totally new character and slapping the name wonder woman on her.

I am not sure I agree the outfit needed such a drastic revamp. I mean Batman, Superman and wonder woman have but for the most part pretty consistent in their look. Just minor changes here and there. Her new look is a bit more fighter but I don’t think that is such a good thing.

Basically I am all for her wearing something that looks a bit less like underwear/bathing suit but I am just not feeling the new look.

Wonder Woman: the next contestant on “Dancing with the Stars.”

What’s really dumb is that they already did the jacket back in the 1990’s. For several characters (Wonder Woman, Superboy, etc.) The only one who ever kept it was Animal Man and that was because he needed a place to hold his keys since his costume didn’t have pockets.

I don’t know why so many people are making this newsworthy. They’ll put her back in her original costume within 2 years, just like they did when they put her in her spy costume.

I like how even a fierce warrior for the 21st century has painted fingernails. Very progressive!

They could invent a better costume for her – a bellydance costume perhaps?

I have a test involving four rules when it comes to the physical appearance/costume of female characters in games, comics, or movies who are fighters or consistently involved in action scenes:

1) Comfortable Shoes
2) Athletic Bra
3) Pants
4) Practical Hairstyle

Now, if a character only has three out of four of these, it’s not a big deal. And of course, there are exceptions based on personality and in rare cases on the context of the universe. However, if a character fails on all four counts as so many women in geek culture seem to, I usually don’t enjoy the series.

If you can’t even get the basic stuff right (appearance), then there’s very little chance that you’ll be able to succeed when it comes to the much more difficult, important, and subtle aspects of character design (thoughts, speech, emotions, agency, personality).

With all that out of the way, this costume is around a 3.5 out of 4.0, which is excellent for a comic book. The boobs are a bit too over exaggerated and the hair could get in the way, but all in all, it’s well above average. Now that the easy stuff is out of the way, let’s see if they can get the important stuff right, i.e. the actual writing.

The thing that really pisses me off is when all the male characters in a geeky universe are running around with full suits of body armor and cool gear, and the female characters, who supposedly are performing the exact same jobs, are stuck in a tin foil bikini and heels with ass length hair. Any suspension of disbelief I was willing to offer is instantly squandered by stupidity like that. That reminds me…

P.S. Dear Team Ninja, Please don’t pull your usual shit with Samus. Sincerely, a feminist Metroid fan.

CrapCrapCrap… I wrote a long Comics Geek take on all this that got eaten by Internet Explorer when I stupidly clicked on a link.

Dammit. Well, two main gists were:
The new costume and storyline are part of a “villain messing with the timestream” plot, and likely to be undone in whole or in part fairly shortly, as an organic part of the story.

Wonder Woman’s actually had a bunch of costume changes. Though many are minor variations, a few were pretty major and in place for a relatively long time – the ’90s version mentioned by JoshDM, and the circa-1970 “mod” look. Exhaustive look at all the variants here:

http://carolastrickland.com/comics/wwcentral/costume_indices/wwcost1.html

Personally, I mostly like the new costume and storyline, though both are “not what I would’ve done,” which would’ve been “Keep Gail Simone on the book for a decade or three.” She’s done the best Wonder Woman stuff since her creator, IMO. I highly recommend her “The Circle” for anyone who’s never quite “gotten” the Wonder Woman character:

http://www.amazon.com/Wonder-Woman-Circle-Gail-Simone/dp/1401220118/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278002154&sr=8-1

Overall I think it’s great. I wish the top looked a little less painted on, and I prefer her traditional bracelets to the fingerless gloves. Also, the boots could really be more differentiated from the leggings, but I love the jacket and the overall look. It never made sense for a Greek to be dressed up in an American flag.

Amanohoyo, you might like the version of Wonder Woman in “New Frontier” (both the comic and the animated adaptation are great.)

There’s a good pic of her here:
http://joeshusterawards.com/2009/05/01/wizard-names-absolute-dc-the-new-frontier-top-graphic-novel/

Why an Amazonian princess from an ancient world would wear an American flag has always been a bit of a mystery to me

A classic reboot storyline from the 1980s found a way to explain this:

The American theme of Diana’s costume was explained by [George] Pérez in the Challenge of the Gods storyline in which Diana engaged in a series of trials arranged by Zeus as punishment for refusing his advances. Diana met the spirit of Steve Trevor’s mother, Diana Trevor, who was clad in armor identical to her own. Trevor revealed that during World War II she had crashed on Themyscira while on duty as an US Army pilot. She blundered into an Amazon battle against Cottus, a multi-armed demon, at the portal to the underworld. Trevor was drawn into the battle, although she was armed only with her side arm. She wounded the beast before suffering a mortal blow, allowing the Amazons to reseal the portal.

The Amazons, impressed by this unknown woman’s self-sacrifice, entombed her with honors and clothed her in armor displaying the American flag pattern on her uniform (which they assumed were her heraldic colors). Consequently, Princess Diana’s costume honors Diana Trevor and, by clothing her in its own heraldry, was intended to ease the heroine’s acceptance in Man’s world.

Needs more thigh holster ;-)

Clearly this is just a publicity stunt (a la death of Superman, Killing of Bruce Waybe et al) and it’s working – just look at the amount of posts generated on what I believe to be the thinking persons movie site.

Love it or loathe it, WW’s stars and stripes are a very iconic part of the DC pantheon and they (much like Coke Classic) will return very soon with a “The fans demanded it” tagline.

I can forgive any mis-proportional artwork, as it’s a Jim Lee drawing and that dude can’t draw proportionally.

The only actual issue I take with the costume are the bracelets. WW traditionally has 4 items going for her:
1 – Her lasso, which is there.
2 – Her invisible transportation, which isn’t present.
3 – Her tiara, which has been used as a weapon; it’s smaller, but there
4 – Her bracelets, which she uses to deflect bullets, and which (at one point) represent Amazonian enslavement by Hercules/Heracles. The ones she is wearing in the new costume are, in my opinion, inferior to the original silver ones.

Other than that, and even including that, this isn’t a noteworthy costume change. It is very much like her 90’s costume and I just do not understand the hoopla.

Some fun links

What happened to WW’s old costume

Jim Lee’s Other WW Design

Other Classy WW Redesigns

I love that site.

I know there’s a place for practical shoes, but there’s something to be said for tradition…

This actually isn’t the first major revamp of her uniform: back in the 1970s she went with an all-white business wear with blazer look that didn’t last too long (it coincided with her losing her Amazon powers and going to a kung-fu mantra). And during the 1990s when the comics were messing with continuity, Wonder Woman lost her job title to Artemis and Diana went with an all-brown spandex midriff-exposed look (later Artemis “died” and Diana got her job back).

Also wik: her pre-Crisis World War II era outfit was with a short skirt. Her mid-70s/Post-Crisis outfit was the swimsuit hip-hugger version popularized by Lynda Carter.

Can I just say that Wonder Woman has marvelous thighs? There, got it out of my system…

As for this outfit… at least it’s an upgrade from the more sexist elements of her primary costume. But losing the metal breastplate with eagle symbol? Fingerless gloves? Consider me underwhelmed.

There wouldn’t have been anything wrong if they had gone with a pleated leather knee-length skirt. There’s a Greek/Roman skirt design that looks like layered strips of leather armor, but I’m not a fashion expert so I don’t know what you call that style. I think Xena wore it.

“Seriously?” How can anyone talk of taking this “seriously” after looking at the history of bizarre, ridiculous, and gravitationally impossible getups this character has been stuck with 99% of the time?

Fanboy ranting aside: while far from perfect from a feminist or even a humanist point of view, at least this newest costume has the inescapable logical advantage of being physically plausible.

@David
Actually, the inviso-plane was ret-conned (retroactive continuity) for the modern age into being morphable invisible alien technology that she acquired during her adventures; non-Amazonian in nature.

In the recent Justice League cartoon movie where they fight the Crime Syndicate, there is an alternate origin for her invisible jet that also does not include Amazons.

That all having been said, the finger things between the index and middle fingers look uncomfortable.

I see lots of talk about the costume, but hardly any about it being J. Michael Straczynski who is writing it. This is the guy behind the awesome Babylon 5 series. With that in mind, I think we should give him a chance to see he plans to do with the character. Seems like most people are ready to condemn the new direction, off a single picture, before even seeing the first new issue.

Ultimately, it will live or die based on whether the new comic books sell. I will be interested to see what some sort of reviews the new issue gets, though I’ve never been a big comic book person myself.

I really like the new costume, honestly. Maybe I just have thing for leather jackets :p But seriously, the old one was absurd. This looks much better.

Give her a white mohawk and you got Storm from the 1980’s Uncanny X-men.

It must be annoying to constantly push up the sleeves on that jacket.

For what it’s worth, I just asked my 9-yr-old daughter “What do you think?” and her snap reaction was: “They. Are. Crazy.”

“Why?”

“I like the old costume better–it was more superhero-y. This one looks like what a normal person would wear, just with more gold and jewelry.”

Maybe she has a point. I understand the need to make WW’s outfit less sexualized, but maybe there could have been a way to do this without making the outfit so pedestrian; the armor that I and others have mentioned would have been one solution. (I also like some of the Spartan-warrior-type costumes in JoshDM’s link about other WW redesigns.)

The best superhero costumes are sui generis, a little (or a lot) outrageous, and nothing that could be mistaken for ordinary garb: Superman’s cape and tights, Batman’s pointy ears, Spider-Man’s entire outfit. Lasso and accessories aside, Wonder Woman’s new costume isn’t beyond the pale of what a merely mortal fashionista might wear. It’s eye-catching, but not larger-than-life, not mythic. And Wonder Woman, I think, needs to be mythic.

This bit, of course, was supposed to be in blockquotes:

Also wik: her pre-Crisis World War II era outfit was with a short skirt. Her mid-70s/Post-Crisis outfit was the swimsuit hip-hugger version popularized by Lynda Carter.

Bad proofreaders. Bad, bad proofreaders…

I’m no fan at all- the minuscule stars and stripes thing was always a huge turn off, but I really, really like that.

My body type has been thoroughly out of style for a long time- doesn’t exist in Hollywood, definitely doesn’t exist in fashion, and clothes that fit are almost impossible to find. The only place it ever seems to show up nowadays is poured into insultingly tiny metal bikinis in geeky stuff. So to see a superhero and go wow, she may be a drawing, but she has the same body type as me, she’s wearing a costumed up version of something I would actually wear if I was in better shape, and if I got into much better (but realistic) shape it would probably fit perfectly- wow. I’m not used to that. It’s really cool.

My only objection is that you don’t get boobs that size naturally without a fluffy stomach to match, no matter how much muscle you have under the fluff. But that’s minor. She’s not bulky, but women who are really into martial arts (at least in my family) don’t get big muscles, they get really lean, strong muscles.

The Babylon 5 guy is writing it, the plot sounds interesting, and the costume isn’t insulting for once. I may have to check it out… Also, I wish I had a jacket like that.

Aside from the fact that her legs are horrendously out of proportion with the rest of her body in this picture, I can dig it

They actually aren’t. I measured them proportionally and they’re the same as mine at least. But then there’s a reason I never tuck my shirt in…
Perhaps you’ve seen to many runway models with no hips wearing low riders? Because that’s about how leaner women with hips are actually proportioned. We just hide them under long tops because it looks weird by modern standards otherwise.

4) Practical Hairstyle
The thing that really pisses me off is when all the male characters in a geeky universe are running around with full suits of body armor and cool gear, and the female characters, who supposedly are performing the exact same jobs, are stuck in a tin foil bikini and heels with ass length hair.

Totally agreed on all points there except for the hair. My hair was long enough to sit on all through highschool and it was actually far more practical for athletic things than you would think, even when it wasn’t pulled back. It’s a lot easier to take care of than shorter hair, and the weight and length actually keep it out of the way. The only big danger for a superhero is that in a nasty sort of fight it’s something easy to grab.

I’m actually one of the few people who’s advocated a more belivable outfit for Wonder Woman, so I don’t mind it. What I find inexplicable is changing the background. Oh, look! Let’s combine Superman and Batman’s stories, as opposed to letting the premiere female superhero keep her own unique history! Oogh.

Any long-time reader of the Comics Curmudgeon has been terrorized a sketch of Mary Worth in the “old” Wonder Woman costume. I wonder if she’d borrowed it from Diana and refused to give it back…

I like the new outfit (I’m the only one who liked the 90s outfits), but hate the storyline. Even if it’s eventually “fixed,” it’s still overdone. And as my ex said (to paraphrase), “They had to recon her entire history just to give her PANTS?”

I think there’s too much look there. I always wanted her in street clothes, to tell the truth.

This outfit makes her look like a Goth kid dressing up as a superhero for Halloween. Or not even that: she could just be hanging out at the mall. There’s nothing about it to make her stand out even in a crowd, for heaven’s sake. Nothing suggests Amazon. Nothing suggests power. Nothing suggest royalty (remember she’s a princess). That thing on her head looks like a headband, not a tiara. And the colors! Tweaking an image is one thing, but this is what you do when you don’t like a character and decide to make it into something else altogether, and just stick the name on it. Maybe this guy’s been wanting to promote this character, whatever it is, and jumped at his chance. This ain’t Wonder Woman.

I love the costume Ming Doyle created (first small picture in the last link provided by JoshDM, a larger version is third from the bottom). They should go with that instead, methinks!

Lee certainly loves jackets and that sort of hair. For him they are a bit like Lefield’s pouches and hair gel coifures (although Jimbo is about a millionbillion times the draughtsman Lefield is)