TITLE: Superman Vs. Wonder Woman (Tabloid Edition)
AUTHOR: Gerry Conway, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, Dan Adkins, Gaspar Saladino, Jerry Serpe, Joe Orlando
73 pages, DC Comics, ISBN 9781779507204 (hardcover)
DESCRIPTION: Originally published as All-New Collectors’ Edition C-54 by DC Comics in 1977 as a part of their Tabloid-sized run of comics, Superman Vs. Wonder Woman is an “untold epic of World War Two,” pitting these two powerful friends and members of the Justice Society of America not only against each other in an ideological battle over the impending creation of the atomic bomb, but also against Axis super-humans Baron Blitzkrieg and Sumo the Samurai for possession of a prototype.
MY RATING: 4 stars out of 5.
MY THOUGHTS: I still own the original tabloid size comic edition of this (as well as Roy Thomas's 90s Young All-Stars retcon of how the story played out in a continuity in which there was no Superman or Wonder Woman during World War II, but that’s a topic for a different post entirely), but it had been over a decade since I'd last read it, and I'm a sucker for nice hardcover re-issues.
The brighter colors and more pristine paper of this re-issue makes the art really pop. Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez is one of those artists who pretty much defined my early love of DC Comics (along with Dick Dillin on Justice League of America, Kurt Schaffenberger on various Superman Family books and Shazam!, Jim Aparo on The Brave and the Bold, and Neal Adams on Green Lantern/Green Arrow and Batman among many others, but I digress), and this is one of my favorite stories drawn by him.
The story holds up well enough. The requirement that Supes and Wonder Woman had to fight first felt a bit forced to 11-year-old me and still does ... but it gives us a great set piece on the Moon that introduced a "lost city" I'm not sure anyone ever followed up on. The physical fight is thrilling, but there’s also the ideological battle between the adopted American who think the country that raised him can’t be in the wrong and the “princess of peace” who recognizes the full danger of atomic energy. That was heady stuff for an eleven-year-old to wrap his head around. Now fifty-four, I recognize that while the dialogue expressing the heroes’ viewpoints falls into the grandiose style of pronouncements that Conway, Roy Thomas, and others were known for in the 70s, the questions they struggle with (Superman’s almost-unquestioning faith in national leadership, Wonder Woman’s frustration at those same leaders ignoring the devastating uses to which scientific discoveries can be put, and when national pride supersedes common sense) are still with us today.
Baron Blitzkrieg has been one of my favorite villains since his first appearance. This was his second and was quite a few years before Roy Thomas further developed his origin and his history in All-Star Squadron. He personified the ego of the Nazi movement for me for a long time (as odds as he was with the completely ineffectual Nazis of Hogan’s Heroes, one of my favorite television shows as a kid) Sumo the Samurai debuted here and his sense of honor (misguided as it was being tied to his national pride) intrigued me. The fights between Superman, Wonder Woman, Baron Blitzkrieg and Sumo are the artistic highlight of the book for me, Garcia-Lopez’s layouts of large action shots and emotional close-ups keeping the action moving. And I always wished the fight between Blitzkrieg and Sumo had been given a little more room to breathe.
I had forgotten just how little Lois Lane and Steve Trevor are given to do in this one. Given this was 1977, with the Wonder Woman show on TV and the Superman movie about to come out, it feels odd that Lois and Steve are sidelined the way they are. Lois gets a few scenes, but they’re mostly for yelling at or about Clark, and Steve has only one, in which he essentially gaslights Diana over what she did/didn’t see. I also admit I’ve always been disappointed that despite the background art on the front cover, DC’s version of Uncle Sam never appears in the book.
There’s a small continuity mistake that probably didn’t bother eleven-year-old me, but which stands out now. The Earth-2 Clark and Lois would have been working at the Daily Star (not the Daily Planet) in 1941, under editor George Taylor (not Perry White). Not a huge deal, obviously, but one of those things someone at DC at the time (if not editor Orlando, then in-house continuity guru E. Nelson Bridwell at least) should have caught.
This really was a fun trip down nostalgia lane, and makes me want to re-read some of the other tabloid editions from the era (Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali was re-released in hardcover a few years ago, and Superman Vs. Shazam has been reprinted several times (but not in hardcover tabloid format as far as I know). I still own my original copies of Superman Vs. Shazam, Superman and Spider-Man, and Batman Vs. The Hulk. I should dig those out.
Here’s my actual original copy, discoloration and all:
