ow/white pages 1st appearance of Ares; Wonder Woman origin retold; 1st solo comic for female superhero; Marston story, H.G. Peter cover/art
Wonder Woman followed her auspicious debut in All Star Comics #8 with her first cover appearance for the newly launched Sensation Comics #1. That book's breakout success would lead to DC creating the first solo comic for a female superhero — with the company following the lead of the Superman and Batman titles with a quarterly Wonder Woman book in the summer of 1942.
In addition to another classic cover from artist H.G. Peter, Wonder Woman #1 contains four new tales of groundbreaking heroism. Those include a revisiting of Wonder Woman’s origin that reveals how the Amazons were sculpted from clay to fight war-mongering men who follow the malevolent god Ares. (In another groundbreaking move, DC acknowledged the heroine’s diverse appeal with Florence Nightingale starting a “Wonder Women of History” series.)
Wonder Woman, of course, was a vital addition to the Golden Age's superhero pantheon, with the style and format of William Moulton Marston's complex comics vision set from the start. This would result in a nearly unbroken run of quality throughout the WWII-era. Early Wonder Woman comics are often still heavily undervalued. There's good reason to expect these books to shoot up in value — especially with Wonder Woman ready to emerge as part of James Gunn's big-screen DC Universe, with a prequel series set on Paradise Island already in the works.
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