My pal Gary Sassaman is back with another installment on his "Tales From the Spinner Rack," discussing the comic books he (and I) grew up on. This time, he covers the history of Wonder Woman with special emphasis on the long, long run of writer-editor Robert Kanigher and artists Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. I collected and read those issues but I don't recall liking any of them and even in my pre-teen years, it felt to me like the writer was just making things up as he went along with no particular master plan. It turned out I was right. As I later learned, even from Kanigher himself, he considered it a badge of honor for a writer to never know where he was headed; to write Page 2 without a clue as to what he was going to put on Page 3.
One time, he was explaining to me that only inferior writers had to plan ahead. I pointed out to him that Truman Capote said he always wrote the end of a story before he wrote the middle and sometimes, the beginning. As I guess I expected, Kanigher then explained to me that was why Truman Capote was such a lousy writer…and so was just about everyone besides himself writing comic books.
Anyway, I kinda liked the character of Wonder Woman but I never liked her comics; not until the late-sixties when, as Gary describes, they turned her into a non-superpowered clone of Diana Rigg on the Avengers TV show. The issues drawn by Mike Sekowsky were, literally, the only ones I liked until some time in the eighties. But Gary will explain all that to you…