There’s a very interesting interview with Greg Rucka over at Newsarama. Rucka addresses some of the criticisms of his run on Wonder Woman so far and shares his thinking on the character.
I’ve never viewed the pace of the book as a problem. Plenty happens in the average issue, and there’s a fair amount of variety to it all. I do think that Rucka’s central antagonist, Veronica Cale, is dull, and her beef with Diana amounts to jealousy. Rucka disagrees:
“Veronica Cale looks at Diana and sees her as a fraud. Diana is a liar. She thinks that Diana is selling the world a bill of goods. She looks at Wonder Woman and sees a six foot-tow, drop dead gorgeous woman – who flies and bounces bullets off of her bracelets – and her answer is that everyone should just be nice to each other.
“For Veronica, that’s total bullshit. It all comes easy for Diana, but what about the people who have to scratch and tear and bleed and fight and work for everything that they get? What about the people who weren’t molded out of clay and blessed by gods? What about the people who have to work sucky, nine-to-five jobs, workout twice a day, and still can’t get rid of fifteen pounds? People can be just like Diana if they just want to be? For Veronica, that’s just bullshit.”
I don’t recall Veronica articulating it quite that way in the comics, aside from her assertion that Diana is a fraud. And that reference came in context of Veronica remembering her first encounter with Diana — showing up at a party where Diana was the center of attention.
Beyond that, it doesn’t seem like Veronica is paying much attention to what Diana’s message is. It’s never been her suggestion that people can be like her; she just thinks everyone is capable of elevating their own circumstances and improving the lives of people around them. (Veronica, having resorted to blackmail to fund her education, can certainly understand the concept of aggressively upgrading circumstances.)
So, I guess I’m still not buying Veronica as principled opposition, in part because she seems to base her view on a fairly juvenile misunderstanding of what Diana’s about. She seems to have created this image in her mind of Diana as the pretty princess who had it too damned easy, and if that’s not jealousy, I’m not sure what is.
I do like Rucka’s take on mythology, and his great way of summarizing mythical stories:
“The reasoning behind why Athena did what she did was that Poseidon and Medousa were meeting for their liaisons in Athena’s temple, after all of Athena’s clergy had taken vows of celibacy. So Athena’s a little pissed off, because Poseidon is thumbing his nose at her and her clergy while he uses her temple as his personal love shack.”
An interesting read, and another entry in the “writers defend their work” sweepstakes.