The Essential Wonder Woman EncyclopediaPublisher: Del Rey
Release Date: April 27, 2010
Price: $30.00
Creators: Phil Jimenez, John Wells
Format: 496 pgs.; Trade Paperback
ISBN: 978-0345501073
Age Rating: Unrated
ICv2 Rating: 4.5 Stars out of 5
Created by the eccentric psychologist William Moulton Marston in 1941, Wonder Woman is one of the most interesting characters in the DC Universe. Marston, who invented the polygraph, believed women were more honest than men and gave his Amazonian heroine a golden lasso that forces anyone within its confines to tell the truth. The story of the creation of this singular superhero is chronicled in The Essential Wonder Woman Encyclopedia, a massively updated version of the original Wonder Woman Encyclopedia, which was published in 1976 (pre-Crisis).
Jimenez and Wells have created an impressive work of scholarship detailing the biographies of every important character that has appeared in nearly 70 years of Wonder Woman comic book publishing. In addition to biographical information, the authors also supply the date of the characters' first appearance in the Wonder Woman comics. Of course the devices Wonder Woman uses such as the "electronic evolutionizer," her indestructible bracelets, and invisible airplane are all discussed in depth as are the key geographical sites in the Wonder Woman canon, but it is the mind-numbing number of characters involved in her many sagas that make up the bulk of the book. For the Wonder Woman mythos not only includes the heavily-populated Greek Pantheon of gods, titans, demi-gods, heroes and heroines-it also includes a large number of heroes and villains from the DC Universe from Apokolips to the Joker.
Those who want to become expert on all things Wonder Woman or who just want to explore a portion of the incredibly complex DC Universe with its multiple Earths and pre-Crisis and post-Crisis iterations will find this volume extremely useful. Those who are unfamiliar with the world of DC Comics will find it mind-numbingly complicated as characters such as Angleman, Antiope, or even Neptune exist in two or more forms (each form gets a separate entry).
Although it's not a great cover-to-cover read, The Essential Wonder Woman Encyclopedia is tremendous fun to browse and a superb reference work. Profusely illustrated with black-and-white comic art throughout (and 32 pages of color), a reader can open this volume to almost any page and find something interesting to read and look at.
--Tom Flinn: ICv2 VP-Content.