Last year, creators Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette released the critically divisive Wonder Woman: Earth One volume 1, the first Wonder Woman installment of DC’s “Earth One” line of graphic novels which set out to explore out-of-continuity alternative takes on the earliest days and adventures of the DCU’s most iconic heroes.

Now, a year later, Morrison and Paquette are teaming up once more to pick up where they left off and continue work on their incarnation of Diana in Wonder Woman: Earth One volume 2, set to be released at an unspecified date presumably in 2018.

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CBR sat down with Morrison and Paquette to take a closer look at their plans for the character, and to discuss where this version of Diana will fit in the newly revitalized Wonder Woman mythology.

CBR: In your surprise appearance at New York Comic Con's Meet the Publishers panel, you spoke about how you’re planning on doing a lot of work with Diana’s costuming in Wonder Woman: Earth One Volume 2. Can you speak to the process of constantly redesigning the look of a character with such an iconic silhouette?

Yanick Paquette: I tend to rely on the iconography that we’ve already established. The stars especially, things like that. But also I’m trying to -- [Laughs] there’s a huge costume that I’m not going to go into detail about yet, but there’s a crazy costume in the book that really got my blood pressure up. It was like, “Oh, man, can I solve this?” So look out for that.

I do a lot of research, too. I think, really, that the iconography can be the thing that sells the fact that it is Wonder Woman, even though she’s wearing a military outfit or a baseball uniform. She’s also wearing, like, normal clothes too! Normal street clothes.

Grant Morrison: We also tried to think of it like -- each costume starts from its utility. So when she’s giving a lecture in Holiday College, she’s wearing something like a pencil skirt or a business suit. When she’s out in the desert with the military, she’s dressed more militaristically. Like Yanick said, there’s a particular costume that I think when people see they’re going to go, "Jesus!! What did you guys do?!” [Laughs] We’ve got a whole bunch of things in there -- whatever situation she finds herself in, we’ve given her an outfit. And as Yanick says, it’s still the Wonder Woman colors, it’s still the iconography you recognize, so I think it’s very consistent through that.

We’re in a zeitgeist right now in comics where Wonder Woman is in the forefront of everyone’s mind -- and for good reason, obviously. But it feels like this new spotlight has put a lot of pressure on her to be more kid-and-family friendly. Is that a pressure that you’ve started to feel as you continue work on Earth One?

Morrison: Not with what we’re doing, no. Because like we spoke about [at the panel], the idea of different versions of characters -- I’ve always loved that Batman, Superman -- they’re allowed to have all these different definitions. You can have a really dark Superman story, but you can also have a cartoon kids story, and it’s the same with Batman. We really felt like Wonder Woman hadn’t been given that spread of options, you know, the ability to show the different ways the character could be played or the different types of stories she could appear in.

So, we’re not really taking [that pressure] on board, no. I’d still like to think our character is the same character at the core, she stands for the same things, she means the same things, but we do want to put her through some things! [Laughs] Some things that we think might actually happen if a woman turned up from a technologically advanced society and terrified the world.

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Sure! That’s absolutely fair. I think that definitely came across in Volume 1 as well -- this idea that Diana is a threatening presence, not necessarily a warm presence for people who have never seen her before.

Morrison: Yes! And we particularly go back to Marston’s original, which is what we really based the whole concept on. We wanted to explore those ideas and to critique those ideas as well as simply reflect them. And the Amazons? You know, they’re technologically advanced, they have thought radio, they have invisible jets, they have purple rays -- and in the movie version, it’s easier for the world to deal with them because the culture didn’t advance in thousands of years.

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But we felt, honestly, that a society of immortal women from the Hellenic era would build some culture over thousands of years. [Laughs] They’d figure things out, they’d build...I don’t know, washing machines, you know? So we wanted to reflect that, and I think that makes them slightly scarier. They’ve got an agenda. In the movie -- as much as I loved the movie -- I think Diana’s encounters with “Man’s World” when she walks in on the generals, it’s a great scene, but it comes from naivetee. Our Wonder Woman has an alternative, which is even more scary. She comes in and says, “No, you’re getting it wrong because...” and not just “because I don’t understand your culture.” It’s, “You’re getting it wrong because I’ve got a better culture.”

[Laughs] And if there's one thing men love, it's being told by a woman they're doing something wrong.

Morrison: [Laughs] Right! And it's even worse for them, because maybe she's got weapons that are so far beyond we've got. She actually poses a genuine threat. So yeah, we're doing it in a such a way that the Amazons have that element of the Marston culture. His idea was that men should be submitting -- he was quite happy with the idea of mind control, and men kneeling to women and accepting loving authority, so we're playing with that. What would that actually feel like?

So, is that something you'd consider your take on the character to be saying that is lacking from the other stories that currently exist out there in the zeitgeist for Wonder Woman?

Morrison: Yeah, our book, our trilogy, is really like a "war of the sexes." It's a story about bringing down the patriarchy, we're not not candy coating it. Diana stands as a bridge between these two cultures, and that's what makes her important. She's trying to recognize that even in this patriarchal world, there are women doing stuff, there are activists, it's not just a man's world. So she comes to represent that, but at the same time she's struggling with the fact that she has to figure out how to make a world out of this when the Amazonian culture is thinking, "Well, really, these men should be on their knees."