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In the latest Comic Book Questions Answered, learn whether Wonder Woman speaks with an accent.
Today, we look into whether Wonder Woman speaks with an accent.
In Comic Book Questions Answered, I answer whatever questions you folks might have about comic books (feel free to e-mail questions to me at brianc@cbr.com).
Reader Laulu W. has REALLY wanted to know (as he’s been e-mailing me the same question a few times), “Does Wonder Woman have an accent in the comics? If so, what is the dialect like?” So let’s take a look!
Something that is always a bit confusing is just how to think about the Golden Age attitude towards stuff like this. I think it is difficult for people to quite grasp how Golden Age comic books worked, in the sense that they both A. didn’t care about this stuff at all and B. sometimes cared way too much about this stuff. In other words, you were really at the whims of whether the writer in question happened to have an interest in a topic, while the default state in a narrative approach as “No one cares? Show don’t tell.”
That was the fascinating conflict of William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, that he cared a LOT about certain topics but then would gloss over other stuff like crazy. It was Marston who, along with artist H.G. Peter, introduced Wonder Woman in All Star Comics #8, where he established that Wonder Woman and the other Amazons of Paradise Island come from Ancient Greece…
However, the interesting twist that Marston introduced here that sort of glossed over everything is the Magic Sphere that the Amazons had used to not only monitor all of the world’s history but even the future! As a result, Amazonian technology is more advanced than the modern world, but at the same time, their monitoring suggests that they know how to speak all of the other languages of the world…
They ARE “Wonder Women,” after all.
Thus, when Wonder Woman comes to Man’s World in Sensation Comics #1 (by Marston and Peter), she then meets a woman named Diana Prince, a nurse who wants to go be with her fiancee. Wonder Woman effectively buys her identity and assumed is perfectly, and thus the presumption is that she does not have an accent, as she is able to just adopt the life of this American nurse without anyone noticing….
That also speaks to that dichotomy I mentioned, where Marston both cared about the topic enough to address it (creating a secret identity for Wonder Woman) but also didn’t care enough to really put much effort into the secret identity (she just takes some other lady’s identity, who just happened to look exactly like her and has the same first name and her last name is Prince while Wonder Woman is Princess Diana).
In the Post-Crisis version of Wonder Woman, George Perez, Greg Potter, Len Wein and Bruce Patterson established that Wonder Woman spoke ancient Greek in Wonder Woman #3 when she meets Julia Kapatelis…
And thus, even when she learned how to speak English, the implication was that she maintained that Greek accent, and Phil Jimenez confirmed as much in Wonder Woman #170 (by Jimenez, scripter Joe Kelly and inker Andy Lanning), where Lois Lane describes Wonder Woman’s accent as JUST Greek enough to make her sound a bit exotic…
The Rebirth version of Wonder Woman basically stuck with that approach, regarding the language she spoke when she came to “Man’s World,” with Barbara Minerva stepping in to the place that Julia Kapatelis had in the Post-Crisis comics…
So I imagine that Perez’s take on Wonder Woman’s accent remains the same today. Just Greek enough for her to sound a bit different.
Thanks for the question, Laulu! If anyone else has a comic book question, feel free to drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com.
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