Award-winning writer Tom King has made his mark on some of DC’s most illustrious characters, including Batman, Superman, Mister Miracle and Rorschach. Now, his attention has turned towards Wonder Woman, writing brand new adventures for Diana of Themyscira as she enters DC’s thrilling new All In era. Last month’s Wonder Woman #14 was a pivotal issue, revealing the surprising origin of Trinity, Wonder Woman’s rambunctious daughter that King first introduced in 2023. In this week’s Wonder Woman #15, we see Trinity in her earliest days as Diana assembles a team of allies that are both welcome and, in some cases, surprising.
We recently spoke with King on the book’s recent events and overall themes, as Wonder Woman kicks off a climactic new storyline that spells the beginning of the end for the villainous Sovereign.
With the origin of Trinity finally revealed, what idea came to you first: the character as Diana’s daughter, or the events leading up to her creation?
It began pretty simple, actually. Superman now has a son, and so does Batman, so I thought, “When are we going to see Wonder Woman getting a daughter?” That was just a story I wanted to tell, and mostly out of jealously of Morrison telling the epic origin of Damian Wayne. (laughs)
So, it started out that way and then we went back to her origin. We went back and forth, myself and writer Joshua Williamson, and Brittany Holzherr, my editor on the book. We had dozens and dozens of conversations on how best to do her origin story. Where did Trinity come from? Is it adoption? Is it natural birth? Who would the father be?
Where we settled on was this. I love the clay origin story. I love the absurdity of it. I love the feminist message behind it from its original intention. To go back to a core theme of Wonder Woman in carrying on her mother’s legacy felt right to me. It felt real to me. And the fact that Diana is always and forever the rebel who does things differently from her mother, having Steve be involved and be a part of her child resonated and became beautiful to me. It felt like the most natural thing in the world.
This Wonder Woman series is a great gateway for new fans who may be new to the Wonder Woman comics, encompassing all her iconic elements. Were you a longtime Wonder Woman fan, and did you bring that into your work on this book?
I was a Wonder Woman fan as a kid, but for this book, I went back and read a ton of stories that I’d missed. The classic runs I had under my belt: the Messner-Loeb stuff, the Gail Simone stuff, George Pérez, Greg Rucka. But going back, I also hit up the original H.G. Peter and William Moulton Marston comics and even the Robert Kanigher stuff.
For this series, however, I wanted to write a story that didn’t require having to read any of those old books. It’s akin to the Batman story Hush, which is an epic story that’s also wholly accessible for new readers. Every issue’s intention is to show why Wonder Woman is great, how she’s different from Batman and Superman, why she’s essential to the DC Universe, and why she’s essential to American culture and to world culture. All of that is meant to be encompassed in every issue of this run.
Speaking of the classic comics, one of the delights of your Wonder Woman is the presentation of the various Wonder Girls all together as supporting characters. What was your approach in writing them together in this series?
That’s actually a response to the audience. When I first started writing Wonder Woman, I put down these rules for my own sense of clarity. One of them was to not include any of the Wonder Girls. The reason for that is that they’re amazing characters and I wouldn’t want appearances from Donna Troy or Cassie Sandsmark to overshadow what I was doing with Diana in Diana’s own book. But as it happens, when the book first dropped, there were so many reactions crying out for the Wonder Girls, asking where they were as Diana was dealing with the whole U.S. government against her and pleading that they be in the book.
I’m not arrogant enough to think that I’m always right, and on this I was wrong. So, I brought them in and they’ve really paid off in adding a new dimension to this run. They’re fun to write. As soon as all three of them are in the same place, they start immediately bouncing off each other. Yara’s the tough one who’s the loudest in the room, Cassie’s the younger sister who is maybe secretly the strongest of all three of them, and Donna is the oldest, obviously, so she takes point as the leader who shows the most maturity, which usually means she’s the straight man when all three are together. It’s a fun dynamic to write.
Sticking with character relationships, you have a tendency to center your stories around major DC romantic couples. When it came to Steve Trevor’s inclusion in the book and the relationship between him and Diana, what was your thought process in depicting these two together?
Steve Trevor can be very generic and boring over the long history of Wonder Woman. He’s been around for eighty-plus years, and a lot of the time he exists to be a generic white dude to be saved by Diana, or sometimes even save her—which never made any sense. I wanted to emphasize how he sits at the very heart of who Wonder Woman is. He started her journey to Man’s World in Diana’s origin story when he crashed on Paradise Island. I wanted to bring out what made the relationship unique, what made him unique and what’s cool about Steve Trevor as a character. Any character can be great. My motto is if Kite Man can be cool, anyone can.
How did you approach the themes of this series? Diana’s enemies here are the Sovereign and Sarge Steel, who use the antipathy and creeping paranoia of the gender divide in America to attack Wonder Woman both publicly and psychically, specifically in issue #8 where Wonder Woman is hallucinating a fantasy where she’s a traditional 1950s housewife to an uncaring Steve. Was the oppression of patriarchy a pioneering theme in how you saw Wonder Woman’s opposition throughout her history?
I always feel that in looking at what makes a character special, look at their origin and where they came from. All of that is baked into Marston and Peter’s vision of what the character of Wonder Woman stood for. She was supposed to show other ways in going about a superhero adventure, which had at that time mainly been about violence being the answer to all things. I was trying to build off of what they had done, along with the eighty years of stories since. I don’t know if it would strictly be called the patriarchy, but it’s definitely an overtly macho way about using power to define someone. It involves a theme of power used throughout all of comics, from “Truth, Justice and the American Way” to Stan Lee’s “Great Power, Great Responsibility.” The idea that anyone puts someone down for who they are is what we fight against. That is what Wonder Woman has always gone up against, and her stories have been about how she overcomes that misuse of power.
Wonder Woman #15 by Tom King, Daniel Sampere, Khary Randolph, Tomeu Morey and Alex Guimarães is available in stores this week.
[[{“value”:”Award-winning writer Tom King has made his mark on some of DC’s most illustrious characters, including Batman, Superman, Mister Miracle and Rorschach. Now, his attention has turned towards Wonder Woman, writing brand new adventures for Diana of Themyscira as she enters DC’s thrilling new All In era. Last month’s Wonder Woman #14 was a pivotal issue, revealing the surprising origin of Trinity, Wonder Woman’s rambunctious daughter that King first introduced in 2023. In this week’s Wonder Woman #15, we see Trinity in her earliest days as Diana assembles a team of allies that are both welcome and, in some cases, surprising.
We recently spoke with King on the book’s recent events and overall themes, as Wonder Woman kicks off a climactic new storyline that spells the beginning of the end for the villainous Sovereign.
With the origin of Trinity finally revealed, what idea came to you first: the character as Diana’s daughter, or the events leading up to her creation?
It began pretty simple, actually. Superman now has a son, and so does Batman, so I thought, “When are we going to see Wonder Woman getting a daughter?” That was just a story I wanted to tell, and mostly out of jealously of Morrison telling the epic origin of Damian Wayne. (laughs)
So, it started out that way and then we went back to her origin. We went back and forth, myself and writer Joshua Williamson, and Brittany Holzherr, my editor on the book. We had dozens and dozens of conversations on how best to do her origin story. Where did Trinity come from? Is it adoption? Is it natural birth? Who would the father be?
Where we settled on was this. I love the clay origin story. I love the absurdity of it. I love the feminist message behind it from its original intention. To go back to a core theme of Wonder Woman in carrying on her mother’s legacy felt right to me. It felt real to me. And the fact that Diana is always and forever the rebel who does things differently from her mother, having Steve be involved and be a part of her child resonated and became beautiful to me. It felt like the most natural thing in the world.
This Wonder Woman series is a great gateway for new fans who may be new to the Wonder Woman comics, encompassing all her iconic elements. Were you a longtime Wonder Woman fan, and did you bring that into your work on this book?
I was a Wonder Woman fan as a kid, but for this book, I went back and read a ton of stories that I’d missed. The classic runs I had under my belt: the Messner-Loeb stuff, the Gail Simone stuff, George Pérez, Greg Rucka. But going back, I also hit up the original H.G. Peter and William Moulton Marston comics and even the Robert Kanigher stuff.
For this series, however, I wanted to write a story that didn’t require having to read any of those old books. It’s akin to the Batman story Hush, which is an epic story that’s also wholly accessible for new readers. Every issue’s intention is to show why Wonder Woman is great, how she’s different from Batman and Superman, why she’s essential to the DC Universe, and why she’s essential to American culture and to world culture. All of that is meant to be encompassed in every issue of this run.
Speaking of the classic comics, one of the delights of your Wonder Woman is the presentation of the various Wonder Girls all together as supporting characters. What was your approach in writing them together in this series?
That’s actually a response to the audience. When I first started writing Wonder Woman, I put down these rules for my own sense of clarity. One of them was to not include any of the Wonder Girls. The reason for that is that they’re amazing characters and I wouldn’t want appearances from Donna Troy or Cassie Sandsmark to overshadow what I was doing with Diana in Diana’s own book. But as it happens, when the book first dropped, there were so many reactions crying out for the Wonder Girls, asking where they were as Diana was dealing with the whole U.S. government against her and pleading that they be in the book.
I’m not arrogant enough to think that I’m always right, and on this I was wrong. So, I brought them in and they’ve really paid off in adding a new dimension to this run. They’re fun to write. As soon as all three of them are in the same place, they start immediately bouncing off each other. Yara’s the tough one who’s the loudest in the room, Cassie’s the younger sister who is maybe secretly the strongest of all three of them, and Donna is the oldest, obviously, so she takes point as the leader who shows the most maturity, which usually means she’s the straight man when all three are together. It’s a fun dynamic to write.
Sticking with character relationships, you have a tendency to center your stories around major DC romantic couples. When it came to Steve Trevor’s inclusion in the book and the relationship between him and Diana, what was your thought process in depicting these two together?
Steve Trevor can be very generic and boring over the long history of Wonder Woman. He’s been around for eighty-plus years, and a lot of the time he exists to be a generic white dude to be saved by Diana, or sometimes even save her—which never made any sense. I wanted to emphasize how he sits at the very heart of who Wonder Woman is. He started her journey to Man’s World in Diana’s origin story when he crashed on Paradise Island. I wanted to bring out what made the relationship unique, what made him unique and what’s cool about Steve Trevor as a character. Any character can be great. My motto is if Kite Man can be cool, anyone can.
How did you approach the themes of this series? Diana’s enemies here are the Sovereign and Sarge Steel, who use the antipathy and creeping paranoia of the gender divide in America to attack Wonder Woman both publicly and psychically, specifically in issue #8 where Wonder Woman is hallucinating a fantasy where she’s a traditional 1950s housewife to an uncaring Steve. Was the oppression of patriarchy a pioneering theme in how you saw Wonder Woman’s opposition throughout her history?
I always feel that in looking at what makes a character special, look at their origin and where they came from. All of that is baked into Marston and Peter’s vision of what the character of Wonder Woman stood for. She was supposed to show other ways in going about a superhero adventure, which had at that time mainly been about violence being the answer to all things. I was trying to build off of what they had done, along with the eighty years of stories since. I don’t know if it would strictly be called the patriarchy, but it’s definitely an overtly macho way about using power to define someone. It involves a theme of power used throughout all of comics, from “Truth, Justice and the American Way” to Stan Lee’s “Great Power, Great Responsibility.” The idea that anyone puts someone down for who they are is what we fight against. That is what Wonder Woman has always gone up against, and her stories have been about how she overcomes that misuse of power.
Wonder Woman #15 by Tom King, Daniel Sampere, Khary Randolph, Tomeu Morey and Alex Guimarães is available in stores this week.”}]]
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