Last month, Grant Morrison discussed reworking Wonder Woman for his new Elseworlds graphic novel Wonder Woman: Earth One with the media. There he spoke about his annoyance with the character in the past, and how he was dipping back into the original William Moulton Marston stories for his inspiration.
Today, he spoke with USA Today, and has revealed a few more details about his approach to the book. Given the opportunity to rework the character, he told the source that his take was looking at the relationship Wonder Woman has with her mother:
She’s very different, and I’m really focusing a lot more on the mother and daughter story in it between Hippolyta and Diana. I want it to be that kind of book, a story about women. I grew up with my own mother and sister in the house, and it was watching that and the way women can tear each other apart and lift each other up at the same time. I wanted to do a little bit of my own experience with those characters. Diana’s a lot more defiant in it and she’s not sent to man’s world — she runs away to it so there’s a very different dynamic between her and Hippolyta, and the entire thing basically takes place around a trial.
Also addressing the recent discussions about why it has been so difficult to make a leading character out of Wonder Woman and how this filtered into his ultimate narrative:
I always felt one of the fundamentals of Wonder Woman in at least the last two decades is that she always seems to be on trial, and I don’t mean that in a story sense. Everyone’s always saying, “Why does nobody buy Wonder Woman? Why isn’t she any good?” (Laughs) it seems like she’s always on trial, so I thought if I literalized that and made the story basically the Amazons bringing her back home after her first adventure away and putting her on trial, it’d be different from anything else you might see. The Amazons have their own ways of doing things.
It’s kind of asking Wonder Woman to justify herself, which I feel has almost been what the character’s had to do for a long time.
Morrison also mentions that this is something that he has not done before structurally, and how the “entire history of feminism” has influenced his narrative.
Definitely. The story structure is very different, the way it’s written is a lot more poetic, but at the same time there’s a ton of action.
What it’s done for me is I’ve had to read the entire history of feminism, which I’m still working my way through. Reading that, you really do get angry. You get a little bit militant. It’s brought out my politics again a little bit, which has been buried for a long time. It’s getting me back into my alternative roots.
Of course, the other major attraction of the book will be the artwork from Yanick Paquette. Most recently seen in the pages of Scott Snyder’s Swamp Thing, he’s perhaps best known for his lengthy run on Ultimate X-Men. He’s previously worked with Morrison on Seven Soldiers: Bulleteer, along with individual issues of Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne and the first volume of Batman Incorporated. Some pages can be seen below.
