The *original* Wonder Girl was actually a teenaged Diana. Unfortunately, Bob Haney had not realized that the “Wonder Girl” who’d appeared in many of the late 1950s Wonder Woman comics written by Robert Kanigher was Diana. Queen Hippolyta seemed to have a penchant for viewing things through a magic viewing screen, usually things that had happened in the past. In some of these stories, she would recall things that Diana had done as a young girl/teenager, things that seemed to “prepare” Diana for her eventual role as Wonder Woman. (Diana also had some adventures as a “Wonder Tot”. These tales reflected the Superman history with Superboy’s adventures being “stories of Superman when he was a boy” as well as the wilder tales of him as a “Supertot.”)

There were a couple of these Hipployta viewscreen stories that might have influenced Haney’s idea of Wonder Girl being a separate character. In them, Hippolyta, using some of that ol’ Amazon magic, would “summon” Wonder Woman’s earlier selves into existence. Typically, the reason would be rather benign (IMS, one story revolved around whether Hippolyta loved one particular Diana more than the others) but something would happen to create a life-and-death fight that could only be achieved with Hippolyta and the Wonder Daughters joining their forces to fight off the bad guy. (To a degree, John Byrne played with this concept during his run on “Wonder Woman.”)

Of course, DC’s continuity was pretty lackluster during Silver Age period. Each of the major characters’ titles (Superman/Action, Batman/Detective, Wonder Woman) tended to ignore things that happened in the team-up books (Brave and the Bold, World’s Finest, Justice League of America) and vice-versa until the very late 1960s. The Wonder Girl of the Teen Titans didn’t even get an origin (or a name) until several years after her first appearance with the Titans and all because Bob Haney was only interested in telling stories that he thought would be entertaining, and to hell with how it fit into anything else.

Of course, this played havoc with the Wolfman/Perez era of the Titans. The team had finished creating a clean and sensible (and final) origin for Donna only to see it undone in the post-Crisis era. Wolfman, at the end of Crisis, had devolved Diana back to the clay from which she’d been formed which set up the Potter/Perez Wonder Woman to start fresh; unfortunately, the reboot didn’t start in the post-Crisis DCU past while keeping the character firmly a part of the present (the way that Miller did with Batman putting the Year One events into a short story arc in the regular Batman title). Potter and Perez opted for the Byrne-style by starting the character fresh without completely taking into account how the reboot would affect other titles (Byrne’s decision that there’d never been a Superboy meant the Legion’s history had to be altered and by making Superman the only surviving Kryptonian created a continuity gaffe–Kara had sacrificed herself to prevent Kal’s death but Kal was supposed to have been one of those who remembered the events of the Crisis but no non-Kryptonian was offered up to serve in Kara’s stead to save Kal). With the Wonder Woman reboot, there’d been no thought how this would affect Donna Troy. She couldn’t have been “inspired” by the new Diana–she’d already had a career as Wonder Girl BEFORE the new Diana made her official debut in the post-Crisis DCU; so she now got her powers as a result of having been brought up by the Titans of myth.

And even with this new origin, it wouldn’t resolve the problems that had been caused by Haney’s desire to tell some stories of the Justice League’s “sidekicks” but felt there needed to be a female presence and chose a character who had been little more than an image in Hippolyta’s magic viewscreen.

Lets see, we gave powergirl a secret ID (with red hair), we are having Red Robin get raped by a little girl, we’ve killed of Donna Troy, We brought back Constantine, We broke the moon & made the Phantom Strange a useless patsy character? An thats just in the last 30 days.

Wait till next month when you discover Wonder Womans dark secret (its very, crying games), find out that Star Man is not really gay, that DC purchased the rights to the Punisher & that Lex Luthor is secretly in love with Ambush Bug.

Just FYI, one of those factoids is real.

But that being said, why does everyone here keep saying “they keep killing Donna” as if its an annual event or comparing her to Jean Grey? She’s died ONCE before now. Jean Grey has died a total of 18 times (if you include all the times Wolverine stabbed and killed her in Phoenix: Endsong, to which she immediately resurrected herself). Donna only died during “Graduation Day” and never before or after that until now. Wonder Woman has died more times than Donna. Calling her the Jean Grey of DC is completely false.

I do like the idea of Eclipso killing off lame superheroes though. Remember that Eclipso series from the early nineties? It was pretty bad except for the fact that tons of really lame superheroes just seemed to get in line to be killed by Eclipso in that series. Tons of characters nobody cared about getting masacred… it was practically a Rob Liefeld book.

Judd Winick and Grant Morrison. Two guys who have returned Batman to the stupid days of The Silver Age.

And none of that is getting re-booted.

But, we get seams, knee-pads and codpieces.

Oh, and turtlenecks.

It’s NU.

Or maybe the new Batman. Is she the last DC character who hasn’t worn Bruce Wayne’s work clothes?

I’ve got a question…who came up with this “DCnu” name? NU. NEW. Really? Is it a Twitter thing? One letter?

Better question…why are we all going along with it?

Whoever voted up there to “jason todd” Damien…I wish YOU had Dan Didio’s job.

Except that, according to several people, JMS included, this is an editorially driven reboot, overseen by Dan DiDio, the man most responsible for dragging these characters away from their iconic status quos in the first place. How many times does Lucy have to pull away the football before you stop saying to yourself, “Okay, all the other line-wide stories this guy spearheaded were crap, but THIS one will be good”? Past a certain point, it’s actually a defect in character to put any of your faith into such a proven failure.

On the DCnU thing, I really wish that instead of Cyborg they had gone with a couple Milestone characters on the JLA (I’m pretty sure you’re allowed to have more than one non-white character on the team). I harp on this, but am I the only one that would rather see Icon on the JLA? Hell, keep Cyborg. I don’t care. But Icon would have been a better replacement for Martian Manhunter. Just sayin’

he could chop off the heads of all the bad guys.