Reading Aaron Diaz's Wonder Woman

Abstract

AbstractThis paper seeks, first, to provide a review of Wonder Woman scholarship to date and, second, to document the (a)e(s)th(e)tic underpinnings and execution of one depiction of Wonder Woman, a version which exists only in a single image (discussed in two separate posts), created by one Aaron Diaz, proprietor of the webcomic Dresden Codak and blog Indistinguishable from Magic. To understand Diaz's Wonder Woman we do not simply need to consider the image which Diaz drew, but the versions of the character which he seeks to critique. I seek to demonstrate that Diaz's reinvention of Wonder Woman not only fails to address many of the issues which surround the representation of gender in superhero narratives, but actively removes the potentially positive work found in other incarnations of the character.