At almost 500 large-format pages and 1,140 entries The Essential Wonder Woman Encyclopedia can probably answer just about any question you may have about the daughter of Paradise Island. And if you need to take a break from reading, you can always use the volume as a miniature barbell to improve your muscle tone.

 

Seriously though, this volume is a major expansion of Michael Fleischer’s The Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes Volume 2—The Wonder Woman by two guys who know their comics. Phil Jimenez teaches at the School of Visual Arts and served as a writer/artist for Wonder Woman while John Wells is a well-known comics historian. They do an excellent job assembling and organizing a complex body of information due to the multiple parallel worlds involved and even provide a helpful “How to Use This Book” to help you sort it all out.

 

So what’s included in this volume? The main attraction is entries on just about any character who ever appeared in any Wonder Woman comics, with multiple entries for the main characters due to the parallel worlds (Earth-1, Earth-2 and post-Crisis). There are also entries for mythological figures, tools (e.g. the magic lasso), locations, institutions and probably some other categories I haven’t thought of. There are loads of black and white illustrations from various eras and two color insert sections (32 pages total) of mostly recent art (with some inserts of older style art which provides a nice contrast).

 

What is not included are entries for “real” humans such as William Moulton Marston or Fredric Wertham or Lynda Carter. The latter omission is explained in the authors’ introduction: this volume is about Wonder Woman in the comics, not in television or other media. The former, I am guessing, is because it’s about characters and things within the comics universe, not those who created them (or tried to censor them in the case of Wertham). Fair enough, and you can find information about Marston elsewhere (and you should since he seems to have been quite a character: besides playing a role in developing the lie detector, he is said to have lived in a “polyamorous” relationship with two women).

 

The entries are cross-referenced, so once you start reading you may find yourself drawn from one entry to the next. Nothing wrong with that except that I started reading this afternoon and the next thing I knew it was dark outside—so consider yourself forewarned that it’s easy to lose yourself in this book for hours at a time.  There’s also a snappy preface by DC comics writer Gail Simone who also coined the term “Women in Refrigerators” and was one of several friends who began a list cataloging the number of women comic book characters who had been “killed, maimed or depowered.”

 

I do have one question, for anyone who would care to answer. I note that in this encyclopedia Washington, DC is said to be located in Virginia. Was that really where it is located in the comics, as opposed to being a federal district which shares borders with the states of Virginia and Maryland?

 

You can read an excerpt from The Essential Wonder Woman Encyclopedia on the Del Rey web site  here. | Sarah Boslaugh