The latest issue of Wonder Woman seems to have confirmed that her origin has been restored to its pre-2011 status quo. A seemingly throwaway line in a narration box has social media users convinced that a key part of Diana’s origin — that she was created from clay by her mother — has been restored. Over the years, Wonder Woman has had a variety of different tweaks to her origin, but none more dramatic, or controversial, than the one introduced in The New 52. During that line-wide DC reboot, writer Brian Azzarello and artist Cliff Chiang revealed that Diana was actually a demigod.
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For years, Diana’s origin had maintained that Hippolyta built a daughter from clay, and then had her blessed by Olympian gods, bestowing on her the powers of Wonder Woman. The 2011 reboot revealed that this was all a cover story, and that in fact, her powers had come from being the daughter of Zeus, a secret Hippolyta kept even from the other Amazons.
“It undoes a lot of vital threads,” longtime DC writer Gail Simone said of the changes in 2017. “It changes Hippolyta, it makes Wonder Woman’s origin about fatherhood, not motherhood, on and on.”
The changes were unpopular with many fans, although Azzarello and Chiang’s run on the comic was generally well-liked. It’s likely that the pre-New 52 origin would have reinstated before now, except that a lot of casual fans get their origin from the 2017 movie, which used the Zeus twist as well.
“She was neither a man nor born of woman,” Tom King writes in Wonder Woman #2. “She was Amazon. Forged first of clay. Then steel.”
In case that leaves any ambiguity for the reader, the narration continues and extrapolates on that the next page.
“We have heard the other story as well,” the issue’s narrators say. “The queen, the god, and the secret daughter they bore. Like any good fable, there’s certainly a hint of truth somewhere in it. And like any good fable, there’s most certainly a lie right at the center of it.”
The pages, scanned and uploaded to social media, prompted excited tweets from fans who were glad the more conventional version of Diana’s origin had been restored, and more than a few people arguing semantics and saying things like “until Zeus himself tells me it isn’t true, I won’t believe it.”
(Paraphrasing, there.)
In any case, it seems at face value that the clay origin has been restored as the primary, accepted lore, while the “daughter of Zeus” story still exists and floats around in the universe as apocryphal. That’s more or less a reversal of what happened in 2011, when the clay story was deemed mythology and Zeus’s involvement was introduced as fact. It leaves just enough wiggle room for online conversation, and for readers to choose their own backstory, but it certainly gives fans who were disappointed by Azzarello’s change something to feel good about.
