Diana Prince: Wonder Woman

DC just wrapped up its 4 volume Diana Prince: Wonder Woman reprints. The books chronicle a period during the late 60's, early 1970s in which WW lost her powers, hooked up with a mysterious koan-spouting, blind martial arts expert named I Ching (!), traded her iconic uniform for a white jumpsuit, and bounced around the world seeking adventure. 

These aren't the greatest comics stories ever, but they do represent DC's attempt to catch up with Marvel, to make their characters more relevant to the times. So over in the Batman books, Dick Grayson was suddenly shot forward in age and heading off to college. The famous Green Arrow/Green Lantern series dates from this period, as does the Superman sequence, just republished by DC, in which Clark Kent moves from the Daily Planet to Morgan Edge's WGBS and Superman's powers are cut by a third. The writer Denny O'Neil had his hand in all of this stuff. If you think about it, he was the Geoff Johns of his day. DC really gave him the keys to the kingdom. 

Anyway, they tried with Wonder Woman. The stories are all over the place, a combo of romance comics with Diana falling in love with just about every man she meets, Avengers-type kung fu action with Diana as Ms. Peel and I Ching as her John Steed. Interestingly, in the final volume two stories pop up written by Samuel R. Delany. One, The Grandee Caper, has WW and Catwoman traveling to another dimension where they meet up with--wait for it---Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. How? Wha? Delany isn't able to run on all of his usual cylinders in a mainstream comic, but any tale featuring a "dimensional energy transfer matrix machine" is pretty good stuff.