The object of all slot games for players is to arrive at the bonus round. In Superman, the player gets a chance to save the world when they are in the bonus round, much like the title character does in the comics and in the movies.

Part of saving the world in the bonus round will revolve around destroying missiles and players working their way around meteor fields. In the end, the ultimate goal is to go as far through the bonus round, picking up extra cash along the way.

The popular superheroes have made their rounds in movie theatres and competed for entertainment dollars on the big screen. Now, they will be competing for online players' money. Superman joins the Silver Surfer and the Incredible Hulk as comic icons who now have their own online slot game.

I can see the Hulk being a good icon for Internet gambling, what with the poor impulse control. According to another gambling industry site, besides Superman, the other new characters who've just joined the world of online gambling include Forrest Gump, Braveheart, Batman... and Wonder Woman. Great Hera!

Says a press release:

"Big brands drive player popularity, and that is why CryptoLogic is excited to launch a game based on Superman, one of the most iconic brands of the entertainment world," said Brian Hadfield, CryptoLogic's President and CEO. "By also adding Forrest Gump and Braveheart, CryptoLogic continues its industry leadership in launching branded games that resonate with both the casual and serious player. We aim for these games to be both popular and profitable."

We won't even comment on the fact that we can't get a Superman movie, but we can get Superman slots.

Caleb Paullus' Super Not Super is a series of brief photo comics exploring the not-so-superheroic trials and tribulations of caped crusaders. Batman finds even he is not immune to the economic meltdown, the Flash fails at physical intimacy, and Catwoman unwinds with a little *ahem* catnip. Sadly, Wonder Woman and Supergirl couldn't be given anything more interesting to do than household chores.

You can read the full comics at Super Not Super.

[via Geekologie]

These Empire Strikes Backglasses are via Ultimate Coupons. These actually look quite nice, and the Darth Vader/Boba Fett one is sort of epic and widescreen.

For decades, fast-food chains have been putting out collectible glasses (which usually break at the slightest provocation) tying in with generations of Star Trek, Star Wars and other great series. Here are some of our favorites, which you'll be lucky to find on ebay nowadays.

Here's a complete list of all the methods we found for jogging your memory from science fiction tales, from the least fantastical to the most. (The end of the list, sadly, includes some items that you're unlikely to be able to find at your local office supply store.)

Use an acronym.

Suppose you've got a beautiful blue time machine that goes by the ungainly name of Time And Relative Dimensions In Space — you can always shorten it down to TARDIS, which is much easier to remember. That's what the Doctor (and his granddaughter Susan) did in Doctor Who.

The same goes for Marvel Comics' super-secret spy organization, the Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division (S.H.I.E.L.D.) The only problem with acronyms is, people will change what they stand for when you're not looking — S.H.I.E.L.D. now stands for Strategic Hazard Intervention, Espionage Logistics Directorate in the comics, or Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division in the movies.

There's also the General Unilateral Neuro-link Dispersive Autonomic Maneuver (GUNDAM), and lots of other examples, here.

Write yourself a post-it note.

This may be the most foolproof method out there. In Star Trek: Voyager, Chakotay falls in love with a member of a species that erases itself from your memory after a while — and also somehow deletes all computer records. To guard his memories of their torrid, torrid love affair, Chakotay writes himself a paper note explaining everything that went on.

Similarly, in Scott Westerfeld's novel Uglies, Tally Youngblood undergoes the surgery to become a Pretty — but first she writes herself a note explaining all the plans she made to reverse the surgery. Because she won't remember them after she's become a Pretty.

In the movie Push, Nick gets someone to erase his memories and the memories of all his friends, so the mind-readers can't follow their plans. But he writes letters for himself and everybody else, to help them remember at the crucial moment — and there are instructions on how long to wait before reopening the letters.

And this technique is also used by Gwen Cooper in Torchwood (with so-so results), Noah Bennet on Heroes and Kurt on Odyssey Five. There's a great list over at TVTropes.

Keep a diary:

This is one step further than just writing a little note to yourself. In Gene Wolfe's novels Soldier in the Mist/Soldier of Arete, the protagonist loses his memory every single day. And he doesn't realize that his ability to converse with gods, ghosts and other mythic figures is unusual. He writes himself a detailed diary, and the first line of it is, "READ THIS EACH MORNING."

Lost's Daniel Faraday keeps a diary too, and seems to use it to remind himself of a lot of stuff he's forgotten as a result of some time-travel experiments that went wrong. Among other things, he doesn't remember writing the stuff about Desmond Hume being his constant.

Make up a song:

That's what Draycos does in Timothy Zahn's novel Dragon And Thief: A Dragonback Adventure. Draycos sees Jack being taken away on a spaceship, and needs to remember the words written on the ship's side — but they're in English, a language Draycos doesn't know. Says Draycos, "Alien symbols are difficult for one unfamiliar with them to memorize. But I am a poet-warrior of the K'da, and so as you were taken aboard the ship, I composed a song." For example, to describe the letter A, his lyric goes, "Two soldiers lean to, with joined hands." Or to describe the letter O, he sings, "Squeezed ring of fire, and what is more/A fire burns within its core." If you have an easier time remembering goofy song lyrics than unfamiliar symbols, this could work for you.

Leave yourself some objects to trigger a memory:

In Paycheck, Ben Affleck sees his own future, but then has his memory erased. So he leaves himself an envelope full of tiny objects, including a nail and an old penny, and a lottery ticket. They mean nothing to him — until he realizes that they're each incredibly useful at just the right moment. And they do help jog his memory, sort of. The Doctor on Doctor Who is constantly tying a knot in his hanky to remind him of things — but then he has to leave another knot in his hanky to help him remember why he made the previous knot.

Make yourself a video:

That's what Arnold Schwarzenegger does in Total Recall — he's forgotten his true identity as an agent of Mars intelligence (or maybe there was never anything to forget?) And now he leaves himself a video to explain everything — except maybe his past sellf isn't quite telling the exact truth.

Rodney McKay also leaves himself a video message in Stargate Atlantis after everybody loses their memories in the episode "Tabula Rasa." He tells himself to find Teyla quickly, or hundreds of people are going to die.

Create a memory key or "memory palace":

This one is a bit more involved. In John Crowley's modern fantasy novels, the Aegypt tetralogy, we meet the real-life philosopher Giordano Bruno, who had created a complex occult memory system, based on assigning graphical images to different pieces of information, allowing you to access them easily later. One such scheme involved concentric circles, and could allow you to set aside tons and tons of information. The Aegypt novels include the adventures of Bruno, who becomes the librarian of the Secret Library of San Domenico, keeping track of the huge collection of heretical texts using his amazing memory powers:

He knew and remembered every book, where it lay in Fra' Benedetto's cases, who had asked for it, and what was in it. In his vast and growing memory palace, the whole heavens in small, all that took up next to no room at all.

Also, in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, Tzu creates a "toy cupboard" in his mind, among other techniques for creating an order for random facts:

He learned to memorize longer and longer lists of things by putting them inside a toy cupboard the tutor told him to create in his mind, or by mentally stacking them on top of each other, or putting them inside each other. This was fun for a while, though pretty soon he got sick of having all kinds of meaningless lists memorized. It wasn't funny after a while to have the ball come out of the fish which came out of the tree which came out of the car which came out of the briefcase, but he couldn't get it out of his memory.

The Mentats, or human computers, in Frank Herbert's Dune seem to use a variety of techniques, including memory keys (and sapho juice) to remember tons of information with perfect clarity. There's a Yahoo group where would-be Mentats have posted advice on how to train your mind to be as clear as that of a Mentat — or a Vulcan.

Tattoo yourself:

It works for the guy in Memento.

Take smart drugs:

It's pretty amazing what you can do with smart drugs, but in Woody Allen's story "Think Hard, It'll Come Back To You," a smart drug called Cranial Pops can help you recall any weird bit of information that may have gotten away from anyone, allowing you to be the hit of a party — until they wear off and you crash.

Use hypnosis:

Lots of science-fiction heroes use hypnosis as a memory aid. In Robert Heinlein's Citizen Of The Galaxy, Baslim hypnotizes his foster son Thorby, so he can memorize a coded message to the Space Police, as well as a letter to a space captain to help Thorby get off the planet. When Claire forgets her assault by Ethan on Lost, the castaways use hypnosis to help her remember, and Fox Mulder on X-Files uses hypnosis to remember his sister's abduction by aliens.

More complex spins on the idea of jogging your memory using hypnosis include the hypnotic trigger that sets off River Tam and activates her killing-machine programming in Serenity:

And the images that make Chuck Bartowski suddenly recall bits of spy information stuck in his brain, in Chuck:

Wear video goggles or use image-recognition capability:

In David Brin's Earth, people wear True-Vu lenses that record everything they see, so they can recall stuff later. And in Amitav Ghosh's novel The Calcutta Chromosome, an object recognition computer can wring out all the details about objects you've seen. Science-fiction author Charles Stross suggests soon it'll be cheap and easy to store visual data on everything you've seen all day for a year, raising all sorts of questions about the boundaries between private memory and public records. Already, researchers have developed smart video goggles that will track what you see.

More way out solutions:

You could get a storage system in your head containing all the information you need to safeguard, as in Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson (and the movie of the same name.) You could burn your own initials into your brain to remind you that you erased your own memory, like Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. You could use Wonder Woman's magic lasso to restore your memories, if you know where to track her down. You could transfer your memories into someone else, like Data in Star Trek: Nemesis or Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. You could record your memories, like the people in Strange Days, or the dolls in Dollhouse. You could use a de-neuralizer to restore your memory, like Agent J in Men In Black II.

Top image: Citizen Of The Galaxy by Phil Golyshko. Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder and Cyriaque Lamar.

L'Hospice [Gilles Barbier via Nerdcore]

If you're not familiar with Kate Beaton and her hysterical (and often historical) comics, go go go to Hark! A Vagrant! or Beaton's LiveJournal for more comic goodness. She even has more Wonder Women for you to ogle.

Be a Hero [Kate Beaton's Livejournal]

Let's get the Mythical stuff out of the way first, shall we? Marvel's (Incredible) Hercules begins his latest and greatest storyline in this week's special one-shot, Assault On New Olympus, which guest-stars Spider-Man and leads into the regular series with plenty of other guest stars in issues ahead.

Not to be outdone, DC collects the recent Wonder Woman storyline Rise Of The Olympian in both hardcover and softcover, and it's well worth a look - I admit to being thrown by it when it was being published in single issues, but the destination is worth sticking around for; it's also the largest scale adventure for the character in years, as well. DC also has the first issue of Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love, a spin-off from Bill Willingham's Fables that sees fairytales' most deadly secret spy go globetrotting on her latest dangerous mission with wit, panache and some great art from Shawn McManus, for those who like characters who've been around before there were comics.

Talking of long-lasting characters, Ricardo Delgado's dinosaur epic Age of Reptiles returns this week with a new series, The Journey, which shows why dinosaur migration isn't as simple as it sounds. If you go in expecting an unusual, challenging but surprisingly beautiful read, you shouldn't be disappointed.

Much less beautiful (by design), Anthrax's Scott Ian writes Lobo: Highway To Hell, the first issue of which is out tomorrow and sure to be, uh, "heavy." Or something.

For those looking for more superheroic thrills, DC spins out The Great Ten from 52 (A plan only slightly flawed in that 52 finished over two years ago, and few people remember who The Great Ten were; they were the government-sponsored Chinese superteam). Marvel launches Paul Cornell's new Black Widow: Deadly Origin series, as well as a new Deathlok series (Deathlok: Pretty much, "What if Captain America was a cyborg with a bad attitude in the future?" It's as good/bad as that idea may sound to you).

And I guide you away from those in the tights and bright colors to my current hometown of Portland, where Greg Rucka's new series Strumptown is set. Yes, Stumptown (Rucka's new detective series, which he talks about right here, but comes from love of The Rockford Files and Magnum PI) may lack any sign of supernatural, sci-fi or urban fantasy hallmarks that would make it io9 material, but nonetheless, it's likely to be the best thing you could spend your money on at the comic store this week. Consider it recommended.

Just like last week, the week before that and every single one of these posts, you can meet all of the comics released to comic stores tomorrow on this here Diamond Distributors shipping list, and then find your closest comic store to purchase all the goodies mentioned here. You know it makes sense.

Today is the fourth annual Wonder Woman Day, officially recognized by the city of Portland - Here's the official Mayorial proclamation for doubters - and citizens of Portland have the chance to celebrate by hanging out with current Wonder Woman creators Gail Simone and Aaron Lopresti, as well as creators Ron Randall, Anne Timmons, Paul Gulacy and Love & Rockets creators Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez at Excalibur Comics (2444 SE Hawthorne Blvd) starting at 12pm today. The New Jersey event happens at Comic Fusion (42 Main St., Flemington, NJ), with guests including classic comic artist Joe Sinnott.

Both events will feature silent art auctions, giving you a chance to help out domestic abuse charities and get some amazing art in the process. Here're some of the pieces you can bid on:

Portland

Flemington

You can learn more about the history of the event here.

I'm not terribly optimistic that comic books will ever regain the kind of popular readership, particularly among young people, that the medium enjoyed in decades past, but Wednesday Comics seems like the sort of thing that has the best shot of reaching new readers. With so many different characters and creative teams to choose from, even the most skeptical readers will likely find at least a few stories that pique their interests, and the (mostly) continuity-free stories provide an ideal entry point for those just discovering the DC universe.

That said, Wednesday Comics is more than just a clever gimmick. DC has put together some great writers and artists for the stories, including Neil Gaiman and Michael Allred on "Metamorpho", Kurt Busiek and Joe Quinones on "Green Lantern", and the current Power Girl team of Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner on "Supergirl". Throughout, there is a palpable sense that these stories are labors of love for the writers and artists; even the stories that don't work seem to be made with more care than some perfunctory fill-in book, and I'm more likely to revisit these stories to see if I missed something than some gratuitous, pointless event tie-in. (Countdown: Arena, I am, as always, looking at you.)

The best stories in this anthology are those that make the best of their unique format. Gaiman and Allred's "Metamorpho" makes great use of the 14" X 20" dimensions the broadsheet pages give them, crafting entire days as a single panel that its characters then wander through. Such a trick might be jarring on a smaller page, but it works brilliantly here. "Metamorpho" also features a support feature where three children answer what they claim to be reader questions about the Element Man. The fact that these children seem to come from a strange alternate universe where Metamorpho is absurdly popular only adds to the charm.

Similar structural trickery can be seen in "The Flash." Under the banner of "Flash Comics", we see multiple small comics in the various issues, including "The Flash", "Iris West", and "Gorilla Grodd". Karl Kerschl and Brenden Fletcher have put together an entire world within a world here; there's a real sense that "Flash Comics" has run in the Sunday newspapers for years, largely unchanged since the 1960's, and this is simply the first time we've noticed. It's a fun device, particularly when much of its story relies on some of the wackiest comic book science this side of the Silver Age.

There are a bunch of other stories in Wednesday Comics that I would recommend without hesitation. John Arcudi and Lee Bermejo's "Superman" is both gorgeous to look at and manages to tell its story in the grandest, most iconic brushstrokes possible. It's a story that feels huge, even if the story only moves forward at a pace of three or four panels per week. My personal favorite, however, might just be "Supergirl", if only because there's something so gloriously, deliriously awesome about devoting most of the story to Kara chasing after her misbehaving pets. The fact that Streaky and Krypto are absolutely adorable probably helps, too.

Not every story is a triumph, though. Ben Caldwell's "Wonder Woman" is probably guilty of overreaching, trying to cram a cryptic, lyrical take on the Amazonian princess into such a small amount of space. The fact that each week features twenty to thirty panels on just one broadsheet page is probably the most obvious indication that he is trying to do too much in not enough space. I didn't really care for Paul Pope's take on "Strange Adventures", but part of the point of something like Wednesday Comics is to try out a wide variety of creative styles; I suppose it would be unlikely that I would be a fan of all of them.

Wednesday Comics is a breath of fresh air in an industry where superhero stories are increasingly stuck inside some fairly well-defined strictures. Its anthology approach and innovative format make sure that Wednesday Comics is quite unlike anything we've seen in quite some time, which should be more than enough to earn it a recommendation. The fact that the stories inside are actually quite good feels almost like a bonus.

According to Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke, the creation of DC Entertainment involved the end of any involvement in a WW movie from producer Joel Silver - AKA, the man who told Joss Whedon that he wasn't right for the character:

[WB Pictures President, and boss of DC Entertainment president Diane Nelson, Jeff] Robinov for months has quietly gone to producers like Chuck Roven and Joel Silver and Akiva Goldman and "called back" all their high profile DC titles in development like The Flash and Wonder Woman. Not only was that shocking to the producers, but even more so when they found out this was part of Robinov's strategy to severely limit the number of gross participants on the projects. Because the producers were told that they may get the titles back to develop, but with far less rich deals. "Jeff always wanted some kind of oversight of DC, and now he wants Warner's to hold onto ownership," my insider explains. (My understanding is that Joel Silver, who is buddies with Robinov, was allowed to continue bringing low profile [DC property] The Losers to the big screen under his Dark Castle banner. But Silver's 10 years of developing Wonder Woman is history now.)

Robinov is, of course, the man who allegedly claimed that Warners wouldn't consider movies with female leads after their last three female-led movies bombed at the box office, which may impact any possible Wonder Woman project. According to current WW comic writer Gail Simone, however, DC Entertainment's creation puts the Amazon warrior princess in a very good place, cinematically:

I have received THREE letters today from big-time Hollywood insiders, and they ALL feel that this change at DC actually increases the odds of a WW film being made tenfold.

These people know what they're talking about. It's speculation, but it's INFORMED speculation. So it could be really GOOD news for WW fans. I'm just passing this along.

"Informed speculation," indeed - but with Joel Silver out of the picture and a new division eager to (in the words of new DC Entertainment prez Nelson) "incubate" DC Comics' IP, is it too much to hope that the character will get the attention she deserves... and maybe a callback for Joss Whedon's near-mythical take?

Simone spoke during today's DC panel here at San Diego Comic-Con about where she's planning to take Diana following the conclusion of the controversial Rise Of The Olympian storyline: She's teaming up with former Bird Of Prey Black Canary to go undercover as cagefighters for two issues, starting with this Wednesday's Wonder Woman #34. Following that, there'll be an even more extreme change in the new storyline Warkiller:

Wonder Woman is going to renounce the gods and declare that she is no longer an Amazon. We're going to see her as more of a superhero than she's been in quite some time.

Don't think this means that the series will lose its Amazonian edge with this change, however; Simone also teased that Themyscira, the home island of the Amazons, is about to find itself with a new ruler: Ares, the god of war. Not that everything will go to plan:

They're not too happy about that. They're not going to make everything easy for him.

Cagefights, out and proud superheroics and warrior women making gods' lives misery - How can you resist? Warkiller begins in September's #36.

During his LA appearance with Clive Barker earlier this week, Morrison admitted that Wonder Woman had disappeared from Final Crisis midway through the series, although he had a good reason why:

[The ideas] went into a different project with Wonder Woman... The basics of Wonder Woman come from William Moulton Marston, a psychologist who created the lie detector, of all things. His idea was that a utopia would be achieved if men were placed in subjugation to women. So, Wonder Woman is a character where you imagine this very strange mélange of girl power, bondage, and a slightly disturbed sexuality. There is this bondage element; these extremely weird dark elements of Wonder Woman haven't been adequately dealt with. Wonder Woman remains a really bizarre, untouchable character. She should represent women in the same way Superman represents men.

The project - all detail of which, including release date, format, artist and (most importantly) whether or not DC have greenlit it - has a simple mission statement, according to the author:

To make it work, to give [Wonder Woman] a sexuality that isn't exploitive, because that's too easy; but also to give her a [narrative] power.

Well, it's definitely better than her calling men "sperm bank," I guess.

Grant Morrison & Clive Barker Meltdown Hollywood [Comic Book Resources]

Marvel Comics may have thought they were being original with a month of Wolverine covers "inspired" by classic artists to commemorate the launch of the X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie earlier this year - and we have to admit that all of the above all-original works are well done and kind of awesome - but Worth1000.com beat them to that idea punch more than three years earlier with their Superhero ModRen Photoshop contest. Here are some of the entries.

Many more at the link.

Pigs In Space

The Muppet Show had a built-in showcase for their sci-fi parodies, in "Pigs In Space." Their ship was called the Swine Trek, and they had the eccentric science officer, the heartthrob captain, and Miss Piggy as a snarky officer. The segment featured pirates (John Cleese), a character called Darth Nadir (Gonzo), an alien made of chopped liver, and many more strange sci-fi themed adventures. In this clip, as usual, Captain Link Hogthrob does something stupid.

Invincibility Made Easy

During Wonder Woman star Lynda Carter's visit to the show, the whole cast is inspired to try out the super hero gig themselves. Backstage during the show, each Muppet cast member is seen using the "Invincibility Made Easy" guide to try to become heroes. Even Miss Piggy, as Wonder Pig, tries to defeat a giant chicken. This segment features Lynda Carter singing "Orange Colored Sky" as the various Muppet heroes fall slightly short of "hero" status.

The Star Wars Episode

In season 4 of the Muppet Show, Mark Hamill was billed as the guest star, but the show also gets his "cousin," Luke Skywalker. Luke invades all of the sketches of the latter half of the show. In this final sketch, R2-D2, C-3PO and Chewbacca show up for a medley of songs about stars. C-3PO even does a little tap dancing!

Muppet Labs

Those famous Muppet inventors, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker, had their own segment for demonstrating their newest inventions. The inventions ranged from small things like magnetic carrots or very strong glue, to very large and strange things, like a teleporter, a luggage compressor, or a copy machine. That last one produces countless copies of Beaker, which slowly invade the show.

The Jekyll and Hyde Potion

When Alan Arkin visited the show, he was the center of one of the classic sci-fi premises: a Jekyll and Hyde story. Throughout the show, he and other various Muppets are all unfortunately transformed by the Honeydew-invented potion. Here, Alan, in monster form, invades an overly-cutesy rendition of "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah."

Koozebane

Koozebane is a planet that stands in for any strange new world on the show. It's home to such odd creatures as the Phoob, the Merdildops, and the Spooble, a sentient liquid. In this clip, during his visit to the Muppet Show, Dom DeLuise also visited the surface of the planet Koozebane, interacting with one of the planet's more annoying residents.

Shields & Yarnell Robot Sketch

In addition to its more regular sci-fi segments, the Muppet Show also used sci-fi premises as a jumping off point for much more absurd sketches. The show invited mime duo Shields & Yarnell to perform, and the result was one of their stranger sketches. In this wordless clip, the duo performs as two robots apparently having breakfast together.

This list doesn't even include Jim Henson Productions' involvement in other sci-fi projects like Farscape, and the various Muppet moments in The Middleman and Angel. As is evident from some of these clips, the whole Muppet crew had some sci-fi connections.

Fox made her lazy diss in an interview with the London Times last week, addressing rumors that she could take the lead in a potential WW movie:

Wonder Woman is a lame superhero... She flies around in her invisible jet and her weaponry is a lasso that makes you tell the truth. I just don't get it. Somebody has a big challenge on their hands whoever takes that role but I don't want to do it.

Commenting on the upset about her comment, Marvel Comics' Brian Michael Bendis - writer of New Avengers, Dark Avengers and the upcoming Spider-Woman, amongst many others - twittered a couple of additional jabs:

Spider-Woman is cooler than Wonder Woman in every way possible. Wonder Woman's got a pipply ass! she's the pipply ass of comics!! Spider-Woman has better hair, better costume, frank cho implants and a fucked up origin. Wonder Woman is a walking std farm!!

So, you know, let's put aside the whole "implants make a character better" thing, and even the "walking STD farm" thing, for a second (No, really; I know that's asking for a lot) and wonder out loud, just what is it that's so wrong with Wonder Woman? As Robot 6's Tom Bondurant, who's been writing about DC Comics characters for years, explains, the character's longevity alone should afford her some respect:

Brief breaks notwithstanding, Wonder Woman is one of the few Golden Age characters whose adventures have been published continuously ever since her introduction. Superman and Batman are the only others, so this alone puts them all in the same class.

However, if such minds as Bendis and Fox agree that she's lame and don't get what makes her an appealing character, then what is she doing wrong?

Maybe Bendis is right, in part; maybe it's the costume. That's something that even her writers have had trouble with in the past; here's what novelist Jodi Picoult - who wrote the character for a brief time in 2007 - told USA Today:

[R]ight off the bat, I tried to get her out of her bustier, 'cause let's face it, no woman would ever fight crime in one. But that was a no-no. (Laughs)

Greg Rucka, who wrote the Wonder Woman title for three years, fought a similar battle with no success:

I tried to get the costume changed from the start. Even had a story built around it. Despite repeated attempts, the response was a resounding no, and the arguments made were always commercial and economic ones, rather than those of story or content... the fact is, she's been hyper-sexualized from the moment of inception, and there's no likelihood that portrayal will ever change, no matter who's writing the book, nor who's drawing it. It's not unique to that character, though she is, I think, by far, the most visible example of it.

Is the problem, perhaps, that DC Comics are unsure about her audience? Picoult again:

It was very hard to gauge her readership. She obviously is drawn for the adolescent male. She has a lot of adult male fans reading her because of that and who are very tied to her and want to make sure she's not ruined by anybody. She has a huge gay following for both men and women. I think that DC has always hoped she would be a superhero for young women as well, but many of them at this point are reading Japanese comics.

Rucka has been less optimistic at times:

I honestly think DC/WB has no idea who her target audience is. I suspect, more often than not, they think she has none.

But why is that the case? Weirdly enough, I think that what makes Wonder Woman such an interesting character to those who love her is also her biggest weakness when it comes to explaining why she's not lame to everyone else: She's too complex a character to really match up with contemporaries Superman and Batman. Both Clark and Bruce can be summed up in one high concept sentence ("Last member of an alien race rocketed to Earth who personifies the best parts of humanity as he defends his adopted home planet" and "A man who's dedicated his life to fighting crime so that no-one ever has to suffer the same kind of tragedy that he has", respectively), and it's something that most successful DC superheroes have (Green Lantern: "Space cop with a magic wishing ring"; Flash: "The fastest man alive"; Aquaman: "King of the seas"). Wonder Woman, though...? Not so much. Here's Greg Rucka again, talking about what makes him love the character in a 2004 interview:

She's an Amazon. Amazons are a warriors, they're a martial culture. They can promote belief in peace in part because they've been living in absolute seclusion and isolation for so long, and also because if you mess with them, they'll kill you. It's easy to dictate peace when you're the baddest motherfucker on the block. Diana comes from this culture where she's bred for war, but is able to reap the rewards of 3000 years of peace - the art, the science, the philosophy. Add to that these divine elements, like the wisdom of Athena and so on, and you've got this person who has all these ingredients and they are in many ways pulling her in different directions, but she somehow manages to unify them all for a single direction. She's not going crazy, she's not neurotic - you look at every other superhero ever and they are all malfunctioning in some way [laughs]. In some way, they are internally malfunctioning - Diana really isn't, even with all the paradoxes and conflicts, she may be the most well-adjusted superhero out there. At least when I look at her, that's what I see. She's somebody who knows what she's about and has absolute conviction in what she believes and is willing to fight for those things she believes, be it with words or swords. I love the character and the more I work with her, the more I love her.

That mix of warrior and peacemaker is just one of things that makes her attractive to current Wonder Woman writer Gail Simone:

I have a scene in one of my early issues where Wonder Woman lets an opponent kick the crap out of her, without fighting back, just her extending an open hand to him, no matter what his rage makes him do. I think that's a big part of it - she COULD tear someone's head off, she COULD destroy a country if she chose. But she would consider that a failure as a warrior for peace. The death of an enemy is not victory to her. I love that stuff. I think it's a far better blueprint for the future than most of the action hero stuff out there right now.

The problem with Wonder Woman may be that the conflicts within her character - even if, as Rucka points out, the character herself has come to terms with them - make it harder for people to come up with an idea of who Wonder Woman is (Not for nothing was her series relaunched in 2007 with a storyline called "Who Is Wonder Woman," after all), and they end up looking at all the... well, the unimportant things, instead. It's understandable, in one sense, for people to focus on the way the character looks; comics are a visual medium, and she's not alone in that sense of objectification (Captain America, Batman and Superman are three male characters who have become similarly misunderstood because of their iconic, somewhat dated, looks), and just as easy for people to base misconceptions of the character on the little bits of her pop culture identity that they can remember: the invisible plane, the lasso of truth, and so on. But none of those things are who Wonder Woman is. It's as if Batman was reduced to half-remembered snippets from the Adam West television show from the 1960s.

It's a catch-22, of course; most people think Wonder Woman is lame because they don't know who Wonder Woman is, but they're unlikely to get to know Wonder Woman because they think Wonder Woman is lame. What she lacks is a Dark Knight Returns (or, for that matter, a The Dark Knight); a high-profile project that pushes people to re-evaluate the preconceptions and redefines the character in the mainstream consciousness, and not in the "Out of my way, sperm bank" direction... Something made by people with enough name recognition that could overcome concerns or apathy about the character enough to convince the masses to at least give it a try, and enough understanding of what makes the character interesting, unlike her peers and... well, wonderful.

Anyone want to see if we can convince Joss Whedon to come back to the idea of a Wonder Woman movie after all?

More images can be found at Pool's website.

Super [Ian Pool]

The series explores the roles Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman play in the DC universe by examining what happens when they are removed. Trinity delves into unapologetically mystical territory as it posits the three heroes as representatives of essential cosmic principles that underpin the Earth (and, by extension, the entire multiverse). The concepts they represent can be articulated in a number of ways - truth/justice/the American way and day/night/earth are just two combinations suggested - but they stand for something that is fundamentally good about the world.

Their magical removal from reality at the hands of the villainous trio of Morgaine Le Fey, Despero, and Enigma (who is, well, enigmatic) radically reshapes the world into one barely held together by the older heroes Carter Hall (Hawkman), Jay Garrick (the Flash), and Alan Scott (Green Lantern), who have marshaled the world's superheroes into the Justice Society International, sworn to keeping the peace and maintaining security at any cost. It's a world where the idealism of Superman has had to give way to mere pragmatism, and one that is vulnerable to the further machinations of Morgaine Le Fey, who seeks to attain godhood and rule the world.

There's plenty more going on, only some of which can be summarized easily. Krona, the renegade Oan immortal obsessed with learning the secrets of the universe, wishes to communicate with planetary intelligences. Green Lantern John Stewart has become infected with a super-intelligent alien parasite from the antimatter universe. The Crime Syndicate enlists the begrudging aid of the Justice League to save their Earth and its oppressed citizenry. An alien convict is desperate to regain his honor after accidentally killing a civilian. A Tarot card reader discovers she is connected to the soul of the world itself, making her a prime target for the upstart trinity.

On the altered Earth, Sir Alfred Pennyworth, late of MI5, recruits five others, from thuggish gangster Richie Grayson to sensationalist TV pundit Lois Lane, who share vague memories of the lost heroes to go on a quest to another universe, where the heroes have become an actual divine trinity. Heroes like Triumph and Tomorrow Woman must face the possibility that, should the true reality be restored, they would go back to being dead, while Hawkman wonders whether there is anywhere in the entire cosmos where he is truly meant to be.

There's a ton of stuff to unpack here, as befits a story that runs well over 1000 pages, and it's all interesting material. The epic length gives creator Kurt Busiek and cowriter Fabian Nicieza the necessary space to take a tricky metaphysical concept and make it concrete, which they do with aplomb. In a sense, the threat they're dealing with - a fundamental change to the nature of reality - is very similar to that which Grant Morrison explored in Final Crisis, but they have over seven times as much time to properly unfold their narrative, which makes for far more readily comprehensible reading.

This is a story that's equal parts personal and cosmic, and hundreds of characters get their own little moments, from Ragman to Black Adam to the self-declared alien tyrant Kanjar Ro. The minor hero Gangbuster, who protects Tarot as she becomes aware of her cosmic abilities and comes to her aid time and again, provides an everyman's perspective that keeps the potentially abstract stakes relevant and relatable. It's a sign of great writing when Busiek and Nicieza handle gang warfare in inner city Los Angeles just as nimbly as they do a godlike being searching for ultimate knowledge.

Busiek also makes some great choices to fill out the supporting cast - fans of James Robinson's run on Starman (which I am, since I'm a fan of things that are awesome) will get a kick out of seeing Opal City's own Charity O'Dare, who becomes the heroes' leading mystic once Tarot is captured. Kurt Busiek is well-known as one of the half dozen or so walking comics encyclopedias that DC keeps on staff, and it shows as he crafts a story steeped in the rich history of the DCU without ever drowning in gratuitous continuity references.

What the story arguably lacks is, of all things, enough Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. This is by design, as Trinity is less interested in exploring their relationships with each other as it is pondering their mythology and considering what they really mean to the DC universe. The best way to do that is to see what happens once they're gone, but it's worth acknowledging that they don't necessarily feel like the main characters in their own story (if I had to choose one person, I'd argue this is really Hawkman's story, but that's certainly up for debate).

The story isn't quite perfect, but most of my problems are quibbles. Krona is a tricky character to write, as his unimaginable power makes it difficult to really set up a fair fight against him. The climactic showdown between Krona and the godly versions of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman veers a bit between an epic clash and a minor nuisance for Krona. Much like with Superboy-Prime in other recent DC stories, there were times when fighting Krona seemed to take Trinity into Prince of Space territory. (For those who don't remember that particular MST3K entry, most of the fight scenes in Prince of Space entail the title hero patiently reminding his enemies that their weapons have no effect on him.) Ultimately, it's almost impossible to deliver a completely satisfying final battle after forty-five issues of setup, but Busiek and Nicieza just about pull it off.

And then there's the art. Trinity marks Mark Bagley's debut with DC Comics, and from the first issue he feels right at home. His drawing style is crisp, clear, and a joy to look at, but more to the point he simply nails the personalities of the characters he draws. I found his interpretations of Lois Lane and Alfred Pennyworth particularly memorable, but there's really not a single character he fails to capture. The rotating backup team of Scott McDaniel, Tom Derenick, and Mike Norton offers styles that contrast well with Bagley's. The various art styles ably hit the sweet spot between being too blandly interchangeable and being too jarringly different, and Trinity is well-served by the artistic variety.

When I started getting back into comics about two years ago, it was massive, universe-spanning stories, from Crisis on Infinite Earths to 52, that really showed me the unique ability of comics to craft stories on a scale that arguably surpasses any other medium, and I found the more mythical undertones of DC made it the better-suited of the two publishers for these sorts of tales. Trinity is probably the biggest and most epic superhero story I've ever read, and it's certainly one of the best. After all the problems of Countdown and Final Crisis, Trinity shows DC can still pull off both weekly series and metaphysical epics, particularly when they're done simultaneously.

Click through to check out our interview with Kurt Busiek, who is his usual illuminating self as he delves into the behind the scenes story of this massive undertaking.

How much of the story did you have in mind when you started, and how much came into place as you went along? What were some of the biggest changes to the story from original conception to finished product?

Once we actually worked out the story, what we had was a fairly loose outline that covered the high points, and then I'd outline the first act more tightly, and we'd work from that until it was nearly done, then I'd outline the second act more tightly, we'd work from that, and then of course the third. So we had the advantage of knowing where we were going, but the freedom of having a fairly sketchy roadmap, one that could accommodate new discoveries and opportunities that came up as we went along. So I don't think there were any flat-out "major changes" from the original conception — we delivered on that original outline pretty well — but there was a lot that came up while we were under way that we were able to incorporate.

The whole Tomorrow Woman arc, for example, wasn't in the original outline, it just came up along the way, and it worked, so we went with it.

This was the third DC weekly series, following 52 and Countdown, both of which had featured fairly large writing and drawing teams. Trinity, on the other hand, had a much smaller crew, with only you and Fabian Nicieza as your cowriter on the backup stories on the writing front and pretty much only Mark Bagley and the team of Tom Derenick, Scott McDaniel, and Mike Norton handling the art. How did it prove possible to pull off a weekly series for an entire year without delays with such a relatively small creative team?

In some ways it was easier than with a larger group, I imagine — because our creative team was small and focused, it wasn't as much of a headache to juggle different visions and schedules and such. I think the 52 crew had weekly conference calls, across I don't know how many time zones between Grant and the west coast guys. Fabian and I probably talked more often, but there were only two of us. All we had to do was get on the phone, and bang, writer-team conference call. It's a lot easier. And Fabian was always ready to talk stuff over, to make suggestions, to get me past logjams.

The other half was focus — Mark, Geoff, Grant and Greg were all juggling a pretty full plate along with 52, as were the guys who wrote COUNTDOWN, but I was working on TRINITY and ASTRO CITY and a very few other things. Fabian had more to juggle, between TRINITY, a few other comics assignments and his not-inconsiderable outside-comics work, but it was still kept lean enough that he had the time to focus on TRINITY.

Same for the artists — if you look at how much other work they were doing outside TRINITY, it adds up to an impressive but manageable workload for all of them. Everyone was pretty focused. The miracle was Mark Bagley, of course. He was the only one who wasn't doing anything but TRINITY, and he had a hellacious workload — 12 pages a week — but not only is he fast, he had the other quality that kept us on track: The ability to put ass in chair for long hours and do the work. Regardless of the distractions, the whole TRINITY team focused on the work and got it done when it needed to be done. And there were plenty of distractions — from buying and moving into a new house to deaths in the family and other emergencies — but everyone had committed to this schedule, and they did the work. So credit Mike Carlin, as well, for knowing how to pick a team of guys who'd all do that without fail. And for keeping us moving, getting us answers, support, encouragement, every time we needed it and without delays. I've worked on books where I'd turn in a plot and it wouldn't get approved by the editor and sent off to the artist for two weeks or more. In Mike's case, it was rare that something came in and didn't get turned around within two _hours_. A plot comes in, it was read immediately. An outline that needed approval would get it that day, or get requests for changes. We could work steadily because there weren't delays on the DC end.

And on that score, I'll add that it was a miracle that we didn't have to tie in to the other big events of the year — so we were able to keep moving, and not have to wait to find out what was going to happen in BATMAN or JUSTICE LEAGUE or FINAL CRISIS or whatever. We kept it largely to the immediate creative team. There were two moments where Dan Didio asked us to do something differently, and neither was anything major.

But in the end it comes back to focus. Tom Derenick did more pages that year than any other year of his career, and they looked great. Scott McDaniel handled anything we asked of him, from street-level adventure to space wars to trippy cosmic encounters, and made it all stylish and attractive. Mike Norton got a lot of character-drama chapters about a dizzying array of characters, and made them all individuals. And Mark Bagley drew the entire DC Universe and a brand-new mythology on top of it. And it's not like no one ever slowed down. But no one ever gave up, no one ever said, "No, I can't do that."

Plus, we all knew that once the year was over, it was done, so while that final sprint might have been exhausting, it would end. That makes it easier to keep pushing.

One of the big themes of Trinity is that Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman fulfill special roles in the DC universe that no one else can quite fulfill. Was it somewhat strange to develop this idea at a time when two of these characters were undergoing major upheaval in their main books, with Superman leaving Earth for New Krypton and Batman apparently dying in the aftermath of R.I.P and Final Crisis?

Not really. After all, I knew — even if the readers didn't — that my story happened before all those other events. And I didn't really know what was going on with the other books — the readers saw it play out week-to-week, month-to-month, but that doesn't mean I was writing TRINITY while hearing about each new development in BATMAN RIP. I was seeing those books when they came out, and we outlined TRINITY long before they started to play out that way, so we just did our thing without the other events needing to intrude. Fabian knew a lot more about RIP, since he was writing ROBIN and other Bat-related stuff, but I felt like I was working on a big standalone novel, so I didn't have to think about the other upheavals.

Structurally, the story deals a great deal with arcane topics from tarot cards to the fundamental metaphysical structure of the universe. When dealing with such heady mystical material, how do you make these elements cohere into something relatively comprehensible and consistent? Is that even necessarily a priority? What are the challenges in taking these rather abstract concepts and grounding them as something real and immediate to the characters involved?

The one time I talked with Jack Kirby, he told me that it didn't matter how weird or cosmic or far out anything got, as long as your characters reacted to it the way real people would. Give the audience a vantage point they can comprehend, a place to stand that feels real, and they'll comprehend the bigger stuff. Ideas like the Worldsoul and the metaphysical structure of things would be arcane and dry if you just explain them in a vacuum, but if it's Tarot learning about them, or Krona trying to comprehend and failing, there's a character involved, a human emotional reaction, and that goes a long way.

For such a massive story - by my count, it runs to about 1144 pages - how do you go about settling on which supporting characters to feature? What leads you to such obscure characters as Gangbuster, Charity O'Dare, or Tomorrow Woman? Even with more major players, like Hawkman or Firestorm, how do you go about deciding they'll play supporting roles as opposed to any of the other secondary heroes in the DCU?

1155 pages, I think, with the additional pages in #1 and #52.

And the supporting characters came in for a number of reasons — usually to do the job of supporting characters, which is to support the plot and the themes. Sometimes that happens by design, sometimes it just kind of happens. To rattle through your examples — Hawkman we used because we were told that nothing was going on with him so we were free to use him, and we earmarked him to play a major role. After which, of course, plans for the HAWKMAN SPECIAL happened, and the character suddenly became off-limits, but since we were operating outside of the other events (and before the special, in any case), we didn't have to worry about that. Gangbuster was another deliberate choice — we were looking for characters to use that people hadn't seen much of recently, and Gangbuster is a character I've always liked, and who fit into Tarot's world well, so we roped him in.

Charity O'Dare we used because we were going to use Madame Xanadu, only she got her own Vertigo series and became at least temporarily off-limits, so we have her major role to Charity (and a few minor bits to Madame Zodiac). That storyline played out differently, in some ways, because Charity's a different character, but it made for some nice moments.

Tomorrow Woman was a complete fluke — we needed characters to put on a set of covers showing "replacement" icons, and I wanted to get a little weird with it. Green Arrow was kind of an obvious choice for a replacement Batman, and Black Adam fit Wonder Woman's myth-based warrior concept, and that meant we needed someone for Superman, and we didn't want the replacements to be all male (but we'd picked Black Adam in part to break up the gender pattern), so we needed someone for Superman who was female, science-fiction-y and in some way futurist. Who better to replace the Man of Tomorrow than a Tomorrow Woman? So we put her on the cover, thinking it was a nice bit, that we could use a dead character because we'd revised history and all — and then the fans went nuts. There was an outpouring of excitement even just from the cover appearing online, and we're not stupid enough not to notice — so we gave her more to do, and it just grew from there. Fairly early on, once we started using her, we proposed bringing her back at the end, restoring her to life, and got the okay, so we were off to the races.

Firestorm wasn't a character we'd planned to use as much as we did, but his role grew organically. As one of the youngest JLAers, he was a good choice to have John Stewart explain Krona to, so he started out purely as a mechanical choice — he's the one who doesn't know, so we can build an infodump around him needing to learn — but then some chemistry happens, and all of a sudden it wasn't just that he was the new guy asking the Green Lantern about GL history, he was the young black guy who didn't want to feel stupid in front of the team so he went to the older black guy to ask privately, knowing that John would understand why he didn't want to look like a dope. And from that little spark, a friendship came out on the page that we hadn't been expecting, and the Firestorm-John Stewart bond became important, so Firestorm got a bigger role to play.

That's the way it happens — some characters you set out to use, some are happy accidents. As long as it works, it doesn't really matter how you got them.

Beyond the Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman trinity, there are a number of other trios you developed over the course of the books. Obviously, there's the Despero/Enigma/Morgaine Le Fey trio that serves as the primary antagonists, but there's also a brief point around issue 40 where the vague trio of Lex Luthor/Joker/Cheetah, which is arguably a more natural set of antagonists for the heroes, seems to gain some significance. What was your thinking in using a more unlikely assortment of characters as the main villains, and what was the function of spotlighting the more traditional adversaries at roughly the same point in the story?

We didn't want to use Lex, the Joker and Cheetah (or Circe or Ares, the two other natural WW-archfoe choices) in part because we had this big weird plan, and it's not really a Luthor-y plans and it's not a Joker-y plan, so we needed characters who'd come together in that kind of plan. Also, we didn't want to just make the most obvious choice. And we wanted to get at some core ideas about the Trinity. Lex, the Joker and Cheetah aren't the same concepts as the Trinity, but the Dark Trinity we used — a woman of mystic power, a technological schemer and a powerful alien — fit a Trinity-pattern we could use in the story.

You could do that with Lex-as-Batman and Cheetah/Circe as Wonder Woman, but even then, the Joker doesn't step into the Superman mythic role well at all. And we see those guys all the time anyway, so let's have them play secondary roles and do something new with the main villains. That was the basic thinking.

The other big trinity appeared to be Alan Scott/Carter Hall/Jay Garrick, as they openly wonder whether they could have fulfilled the roles of the trinity, seemingly coming to the conclusion that they are lacking. How do you go about demonstrating the importance of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman without implicitly devaluing the contributions of other heroes, such as these three Golden Age crimefighers, to the DC mythos?

Keep in mind that Alan, Carter and Jay weren't simply presented as "not up to the task." They were a force in a revised history in which the very core concepts that make Superman, WW and Batman what they are had been removed, blunted, faded, all the way back through history, as seen by the fact that even the Egyptian gods in Prince Khufu's time were weakened. So it wasn't as if DC's normal Golden Age heroes aren't all that, it's that when you take away the mythic underpinnings that fuel even them, they have to soldier on in a less idealistic way, becoming more pragmatic than inspirational, becoming tougher and darker, making hard choices without the magic. So that's not a reflection on them as they were in the Golden Age, but on what they needed to be to keep the world together in a reality without that truth/justice/"American way" at the heart of it.

I think they did about as well as they could, all things considered.

It's probably a fool's errand to even ask this question, but how does Trinity fit into the larger DC continuity, if at all? In particular, The resurrection of Tomorrow Woman is probably the biggest change, although there also new characters like the Dreambound who seem to have more story worth telling. Will any of these changes carry over into other titles?

I think it's pretty easy to see where TRINITY fits into DC continuity — just look at the JLA. When we first see them in the series, Red Tornado is damaged and his brain is occupying the JLA computers. Shortly thereafter, he's been rebuilt and is back in action. So it takes place around the time that stuff was going on in the JUSTICE LEAGUE book.

As for repercussions — well, those last couple of pages will make for some very big ones, coming up. And yeah, Tomorrow Woman and the Dreambound and Xor and Tarot are out there, ready to do more stuff, have new adventures. Where and when those'll happen, I can't say for sure, but all that stuff happened, it's part of the DCU now.

Heck, I'd like to see Tatters, the Ragged Wonder, turn up in Ragman's life. And Supergirl meet Interceptor. And Tomorrow Woman figure that if she survived, maybe there's a way for her to save Triumph...

Ultimately, what are you hoping readers take away from Trinity? The obvious message seemed to be that Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman have irreplaceable roles in the DC universe, but the ending of the story appeared to complicate that considerably, as the trinity acknowledged all the "normal" humans who had shaped them into who they are.

I think what we said is that Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman belong at the heart of the DCU, but it's not a one-way street. They represent things that we can see resonating in the other heroes, in all of us, in the whole world. They're the face of it, the symbols of it, but it's not unique to them. They get it from their lives and experiences and the nature of the universe.

But the reader doesn't need to think about any of that; this is a big sprawling adventure thriller, not a college class. If all they take away from it is "Wow, that was fun! The Joker turned into a whole city! The anti-Deathstroke is an idealistic hero! I wanna see more Tarot, and it was cool to see that annoying frog-guy blow up!" then I'm just fine with that. Theme is great, for people who like to approach stories that way, but it's an organizing principle that helps us write a story that has some weight, it's not something that all readers have to care about.

The stuff happening on the surface can be the take-away just as much.

In case you haven't already, click here to read our review of the entire 52-part series as a whole.