Nottingham, England. From the depths of a river of fog emerges the blood moon... It's some kind of omen, obviously, betokening a quite horrifying example of what American comics think England is like!
It's Wonder Woman #28, cover-dated March 1989. It's the post-Crisis re-imagining of DC's superheroes. Fans were variously excited or disgusted by it at the time, but I was entirely oblivious. As I documented a few blog posts ago, I wasn't into superheroes at all just yet; that would take a couple of years to happen. But that time was definitely approaching, and this one might have put me off them completely if I'd seen it! It's not really that great, I'm afraid.
George Pérez, who was one of the world's very greatest superhero comic artists, is the writer of this comic. Chris Marrinan, a pretty good artist recently recruited by DC, drew the pictures. I really wanted to claim he was a greater writer than an artist, but I can't really do that. He definitely wrote some of the Nova comics in my collection that I was looking at just recently! But no, he's an artist, and a good one too. Point is, though, he's not George Pérez, and some of the writing on this comic is kind of embarrassing.
We open with several pages of suspense on the fog-shrouded moors. Because England has fog-shrouded moors all over the place, you know. Nottingham is full of them.
You get the idea. Meanwhile, Wonder Woman is living in Boston at this point (the fake Boston in America, not the real one in Lincolnshire, England) and hanging out with a large supporting cast including Hermes the god while she tries to find her stolen magical lasso. It had also been decided to add Wonder Woman to the cast of DC's new "Justice League Europe" comic as a part-time member who would take part in their adventures when the ongoing plot of her own comic permitted. What this meant in practice is that she appears in the first issue of Justice League Europe, it's mentioned in this issue of her own comic, and then someone must have changed their mind about the whole idea, because her membership in the Justice League is never even mentioned again.
But it comes in handy here as a pretext for her to go to Europe (the Justice League were based in Paris, but it's all "Europe", right?) and investigate the mysterious Dr Minerva in her sinister castle in Nottingham, England. She disguises it as a general celebrity royal visit, and of course the "London Star" newspaper is all over it...
The London Star gets sold in Nottingham, apparently. Or maybe they have it specially delivered to the building that's interchangeably referred to as a 'mansion' or a 'castle'. Since it's the only building we see in Nottingham in this comic - one solitary mansion surrounded by foggy moors - the postman probably doesn't have much trouble finding it. Even when bringing a letter addressed to Prof Minerva, [indecipherable squiggle], Nottingham, England.
And of course Wonder Woman finds her way there too. This first panel is the real doozy:
She's come by taxi. From Paris? Well, presumably from the airport. The taxi driver seems to be Dick Van Dyke. The taxi is very American-looking, but the artist and writer have made an effort here - the driver's on the right hand side.The colourist has made everything green, so it's hard to tell if they're meant to be on a road, or what side of it they're on, but Diana doesn't seem to be standing in the middle of a busy street to talk to him, so it's okay.
And of course, that clever writer has used the one and only thing that Americans know (entirely incorrectly) about Britain - that we measure distance in kilometers. "The mansion's close to four kilometers past those moors there," says the cockney chimney-sweep who drives a New York cab.
See, here's the thing, George Pérez (the late, great artist whom I admire enormously) - Nottingham is a CITY. It isn't a castle surrounded by four kilometers of moors. If, like me, you grow up in the Boston area (real Boston, not fake American Boston), then Nottingham is the coolest big city you could ever dream of seeing! Sixty or seventy miles away, so too far for a regular shopping visit (it helped that Grandma lived close by) but a whole lot cooler than the likes of Lincoln or Peterborough. The biggest and coolest city I was familiar with at the time this comic was coming out, by far! (London was remote enough that it didn't really count - the world was a bigger place back then).
I would have been really annoyed by this comic if I'd seen it in 1989. No acknowledgement that the Boston in America isn't the one I'm familiar with? Well, that's just rude. But getting Nottingham so totally wrong? Unforgivable!
Okay, let's be fair. There are, even to this day, people in Britain to whom Nottingham is just the place where Robin Hood lived. And where Forest play. But they probably assume there's a castle like the one we see here (Nottingham Castle doesn't look much like that, really) and wouldn't be so certain it's without a foggy moor or two. And to be honest, when I was young, I assumed they used kilometres in America. Miles seemed like a strictly British kind of thing, and kilometres would be what a modern, flashy country like America used, right? It still feels kind of wrong when I see Americans talking about miles. But, see, I make sure to keep it a secret, and laugh at them if they try to do me a favour and translate it into kilometers!
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