WTTM
In the latest comic book questions, find out if Wonder Woman speaks with an accent.
Today we are looking to see if Wonder Woman speaks with an accent.
In Comic Book Questions Answered, I answer any questions you might have about comics (feel free to email me questions at brianc@cbr.com).
Reader Laulu W. REALLY wanted to know (as he emailed me the same question multiple times): “Does Wonder Woman have an accent in the comics? If so, what is the dialect like? ? ” So let’s take a look!
Something that’s always a little confusing is how to think about the Golden Age attitude towards things like this. I think it’s hard for people to fully understand how the Golden Age comics worked, in the sense that they A. didn’t care at all about that stuff and B. didn’t care. sometimes cared too much. In other words, you were really in the whims of whether the writer in question was interested in a topic, while the default state in a narrative approach was “Nobody cares?” Show, don’t say â€.
It was the fascinating conflict of William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, that he cared A LOT about certain topics, but then glided over other things like crazy. It was Marston who, along with artist HG Peter, featured Wonder Woman in All Star Comics # 8, where he established that Wonder Woman and the other Amazons on Paradise Island were from ancient Greece …
However, the interesting twist that Marston introduced here that sort of glossed over everything is the magical sphere that the Amazons had used to not only watch over all of the history of the world, but even the future! As a result, Amazonian technology is more advanced than the modern world, but at the same time, their monitoring suggests that they can speak every other language in the world …
They are “Wonder Women” after all.
So when Wonder Woman arrives in Man’s World in Sensation Comics # 1 (from Marston and Peter), she then meets a woman named Diana Prince, a nurse who wants to go with her fiancee. Wonder Woman effectively buys her identity and assumes it perfectly, and so the presumption is that she doesn’t have an accent, because she is able to just embrace the life of this American nurse without anyone noticing. …
It also speaks to that dichotomy I mentioned, where Marston cared enough about the topic to bring it up (creating a secret identity for Wonder Woman) but also didn’t care to put a lot of effort into the secret identity. (she just takes on the identity of another lady, who looks exactly like her and has the same first name and last name is Prince while Wonder Woman is Princess Diana).
In the post-Crisis version of Wonder Woman, George Perez, Greg Potter, Len Wein, and Bruce Patterson established that Wonder Woman spoke Ancient Greek in Wonder Woman # 3 when she met Julia Kapatelis …
And so, even when she learned to speak English, the implication was that she maintained that Greek accent, and Phil Jimenez confirmed that in Wonder Woman # 170 (by Jimenez, screenwriter Joe Kelly and inker Andy Lanning), where Lois Lane describes Wonder Woman’s accent is JUST Greek enough to make her seem a little exotic …
The Rebirth version of Wonder Woman has essentially stayed true to this approach, in terms of the language she spoke when she arrived in “Man’s World,” with Barbara Minerva taking the place Julia Kapatelis had in the comic books. post-crisis …
So I imagine Perez’s focus on Wonder Woman’s accent remains the same today. Just Greek enough for it to sound a little different.
Thanks for the question, Laulu! If anyone else has a question about the comic, please email me at brianc@cbr.com.
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