Pre Crisis Golden/Silver Age cheese affected everyone at DC at some point, but Wonder Woman felt the full blast. In my opinion, she wasn't worth a damn until Perez got a hold of her, and many of the sillier(i.e. ALMOST ALL) elements of the years before should be forgotten and never revived. Sadly, I always hear these Pre-Crisis fans complaining "THAT'S NOT WHAT MARSTON WROTE!!!! THAT'S NOT WEIRD ENOUGH!!! NOT ENOUGH BONDAGE"!!! Folks, Marston was a CRACKPOT, and it showed in his work. And trust me, that crap from the 40s were FAR MORE sexist than any of the stuff Azzarello has written.

I have to admit that I haven't read everything Wonder Woman but I think that you have to look at the era in which the Golden and Silver Age books were created and understand that it was a very different era of comic book making back then. Creators were ashamed of admitting that they worked professionally on comics and the genre as a whole was largely thought to be material for children and not to be taken seriously. For the large part it was not taken seriously by the publishers or adults of the era and thus you have stigma that the industry as a whole still struggle with today. I feel, as most comic book fans feel, that the genre is on par with popular entertainment like film and TV with compelling stories that evoke emotion, drama, compassion and serve as a particular social commentary on different topics and themes. I also feel that a large part of the bias and stigma still hindering the expanse of comics today was built in the Golden and Silver Age of comics because a lot if it was over the top ridiculous.

With that said, I think that you have to respect those eras as the foundation for what we have today, And to respect that you have to delve into what compelled the imagination then and apply it to modern comics. There will still be that cheese factor but you can't have the present or the future without everything that came in the past.

I would love to know where you're hearing about fans calling for Marston era writing or the return of his intentions for the character? I find it fascinating in the day and age that anyone would really want that.

@Press Oblivion: Look up ANY forum concerning what Azzarello did to this amazons.

And that's the Marston take? Writing them as insidious brutes that wont rear males? I thought Marston's main deal was bondage?

You are painting forty years of publishing with the same brush. In comparison to Marvel if you said the stuff printed in 2010 was the same stuff as 1970, then you would have captured almost the entire publication of the majority of its characters. Having read most of the Wonder Woman stories in one form or another, I can say that what Marston mostly did was a bunch of silly stories about space (traveling to Venus, traveling to Mars, traveling to Saturn) that was representative of the era in terms of content. There was actually not that much of the stuff that he is accused of (bondage) and from what I have seen that is mostly revisionist from the present. If you want to look at a horrible run on Wonder Woman, it is Kanigher which produced the worst stuff in the golden age, but no one even knows him (and probably for the best for all of the extremely weak characters he created - the Crimson Centipede). The period after Kanigher was lots of fun - the mod girl years and then after that the title just became a superhero comic, not much different from any other except the main character was a female.

@RazzaTazz: But the book got rid of "fun" (i.e. cheesy old concepts) in 1986. Why bring them back?

@jointron33: At the end of the first volume they were not that cheesy, in fact other than the publication history that the character had, it would seem no different than post-Crisis WW.