For 80 years, Wonder Woman has inspired fans across the world, and Diana's stories have evolved in many ways. Whether she is fighting alongside the Justice League or on her own, whether it is in the main DC canon or in one of her several out-of-continuity series, whether she is on the page or screen, Diana is ready for anything thrown at her, and that includes her newest comic series, Wonder Woman Evolution, which is set for release this November.
Created by writer Stephanie Phillips and artist Mike Hawthorne, Wonder Woman Evolution finds Diana swept away from Earth by a cosmic force, one that plans to put Wonder Woman through a series of trials to determine whether or not Earth and humanity are worthy. In anticipation for this massive series, Phillips sat with CBR for an interview about Wonder Woman Evolution and provided an exclusive look for some of the interiors of this new comic.
CBR: I would love to know what about Wonder Woman appeals to you the most as a writer and as a fan?
Stephanie Phillips: Wonder Woman is this character that I grew up with as this larger-than-life, amazing female action hero, and I know a lot of other kids I think my age, I feel like there was a group of female action heroes that everybody gravitated toward. Xena was a really cool one, but something about Wonder Woman always drew me in. Maybe it's because I really loved comics, but it was just so cool to see the Trinity, and there's this amazing kick-butt woman standing up there next to Superman and Batman holding her own, saving them at times, which is really awesome.
Kind of adding to it, the more I sort of read about her background and about the mythology behind her, I've always been a huge fan of myth, so that was something that was wow. This is a character that has all of my favorite things. She's got a sword and a lasso. She's got this really cool costume and saving the day and this really cool backstory and mythology and just seemed so cool to get a hero like that, who was a woman that I could look up to. It became this icon for me, like beyond just knowing who she is as a person.
I grew up playing sports, and I fought for a long time doing MMA and Muay Thai. It was this touchstone for me of Wonder Woman. I've talked about this before, it's the cheesiest thing, but before I would get in the ring, I would watch animated footage of Wonder Woman kicking people's butts as a hype thing. This is the thing I need to channel right now is Diana just being amazing. It was this symbol for me that I always kept coming back to. She's actually, I think, the reason I wrote comics. When I had this idea this might be something I wanted to pursue as a career, it was Wonder Woman that I was really thinking of. This would be a moment that I would love to achieve in my life. It's here, and that's amazing.
Speaking about the mythology with Wonder Woman's backstory and origin, can we expect you to explore any of that with this upcoming series? If so, what sorts of mythology might you be dipping your toe into?
I would say it's twofold. We were going to be exploring her mythology, like looking at Themyscira and her background, kind of using it as a springboard to say we know a lot about Wonder Woman's past. How can these things influence who she is, as a modern day hero today with a lot of the problems that we are facing on planet Earth in 2021? Looking at how those things can influence it.
I also wanted to use a lot of mythology to build the actual structure of the story that we're telling. There's a lot of platonic dialogue embedded in it, hero's journey, a lot of epic elements from a lot of mythology, like Herculean tasks. Even though the setting is really cosmic, one of the things that Mike and I really wanted to do when building it was to take those elements that were familiar seeing in mythology, but apply them to a setting that we don't always see them, like giving her a space sci-fi suit. She's still doing these really big challenges and Herculean tasks, just in space, which Mike's drawing is absolutely stunning and fantastic.
Speaking about Mike, what was it like to work with him on his first major DC project?
It's amazing. I've always loved Mike's work. When our editor was like, "How would you feel working with Mike Hawthorne?" I was like, "Does Mike Hawthorne want to work with me? Have we asked him, because let's make sure he's cool with that!" [He] read the pitch and the script, and I was so excited by his excitement. I think we've been feeding off of each other's energy a lot, which is really nice. We talk quite a bit and go through scripts together. The cool thing I think about the eight issues is from start to finish, in my mind, I knew where the story was going, but I wanted to really talk to Mike and make sure everything tracked with him.
The really cool thing about that is starting Issue #1, Mike is seeding things that are going to start leading toward this ending that we're building to. It's stuff that's so smart. Once you get to the ending, I think it will create this kind of engagement for readers to get to go back and then see all these places where Mike was hiding bits of the truth, which I loved his idea for this because Diana is so about truth and justice. Mike's idea was what if we play with the concept of truth and hide bits of what the truth actually is all along for readers, but it won't add up until you reach that ending. And you're like, "Oh, they've been telling us the truth, all along." So working with Mike is amazing. He's an incredible storyteller, an artist.
As you're talking about Diana entering an intergalactic world, there's a little bit of that in the beginning of Issue #1, so can you give us any other teasers for what you're most excited about when it comes to the celestial conflict that Wonder Woman is now having to take on?
I think my favorite part has been the guest appearances. Even though we have a story that seems larger than life cosmic, Mike and I also wanted to make sure there were elements that are really grounded, so getting to have these guest appearances. We've got Silver Swan in there, Steve Trevor, which I don't think is too much of a surprise because he's on the cover of a book, so Steve Trevor. Themyscira does make an appearance, along with some of the other Amazons, and I don't want to give away too many of the other guest appearances.
We did want a lot of these appearances to have a real push in the story for moving Diana through the trial that she's facing. It's been a lot of fun to bring in elements that I love of Diana's past and have this kind of influencing where we're pushing her for the future.
Speaking up about Silver Swan, what are you most excited to play with this character, and what makes her such a good Wonder Woman villain?
I think she's a good villain because I feel like she highlights kind of a failure for Diana. That's really difficult for Diana to reconcile is being this mentor and someone that Vanessa always looked up to, and Vanessa in her mind became Silver Swan as a reaction to Diana not being there when she was needed, saying you can't be everywhere at once, and I understand you picked somebody else's crisis over mine. Then Silver Swan is kind of born from this feeling of being discarded by somebody that she really cared about.
I always thought she was a really interesting villain for kind of putting that in Diana's face. You can't be everywhere at once. You're not this omnipotent God. That's a sore spot for Diana, that she didn't save somebody. She's a hero, that has to hurt. To have somebody putting it in her face as a justification for being a villain hurts even more. That's kind of why I was drawn to Swan.
The other reason I'm really interested in the nanite technology. In a book that's talking about humans overstepping evolutionary boundaries, I'm interested in Swan as kind of this recurring villain in the book, as someone that kind of helps show us -- Swan's point of view in Issue #1 -- "I'm ready to evolve, as needed for the circumstances, but you choose to remain in the past as this kind of mythical historical figure." I think there are really good juxtaposition to each other.
Speaking of Vanessa's talk about evolution, as well as the title of this series, there is a lot here about evolution and survival of the fittest. Why explore these themes with Wonder Woman, and what are you excited to explore with these themes?
We kind of pick the themes as a way of thinking about how maybe heroes impact the way that civilizations evolve and progress, like as someone like Wonder Woman or Superman, stepping in to always save the day or saving entire continents or something like that. Is that interfering with natural progression? If left to their own devices, I think the natural progression can be really dangerous at times -- the way that weapons and technology have advanced beyond anything we were probably thinking it could or should. That's really dangerous.
Have humans become kind of their own greatest enemy through just being so obsessed with progress, that there's no stopping point? When is it too much or even enough? That's something we wanted to explore, but given those kind of things that we're talking about in the book, we want to know where heroes fit in. We're progressing to the point where we are just destroying our own planet, maybe another planet after that. What do heroes do about that? Do our heroes have to evolve in the wake of climate change and horrific natural disasters? Where do they kind of fit in? Does heroism need to change in some way? That's kind of what we're looking at as we go through the eight issues in the series.
Based on the description of the series itself, Wonder Woman is championing humanity's worthiness, so out of all the DC heroes, why is Diana perfect for this role?
I think that's a great question. For me, it's where she fits in between human and not human. I think that's something we want to explore as well. Superman is more human than most of us, but he's still an alien. Batman is very human, but he doesn't have the abilities that someone like Diana does. So Diana is like the perfect mix between those two. I think that's why she would get chosen. She's not literally from another planet. She is of Earth, but also has these abilities that are very much -- as Swan points out in the book -- god-like, but she's not a god. I think that makes her somebody that's a prime target for this kind of group of cosmic beings that are putting Earth on trial.
Speaking a little bit about Superman, we got a little bit of Clark and Diana's friendship in this comic, so what about their dynamic appeals to you the most?
I love their dynamic. I love the way those two interact. I think they're very different characters. That's something I wanted to showcase to answer your last question, why Diana over Clark or Bruce or somebody. I think this is this moment where Clark is making jokes, saying like last one to the top of the mountain is a rotten egg. There's something so charming and quaint about this small town boy that has grown up to be Superman.
Diana has an intensity about her, and it's something that Mike and I were really intent on. We want to see this. There's a part about her that can be really uncompromising. I think that's interesting. She can literally unleash hell and sometimes get lost in that. That's something I really wanted to see in this book. When you push her far enough, are we going to hit that moment? Is she going to be able to restrain herself and hold back. That was something Mike actually said when we first started working on the book. One of his favorite elements is that Diana has a ruthlessness that some of these other characters don't. We find that really fascinating about her. It's something we're really interested to see kind of come out.
Looking at some of the other work you've done with DC, specifically Harley Quinn, what's it been like to shift from telling Harley Quinn's story to a Wonder Woman story? What are some of the similarities?
That is an interesting kind of back and forth between those two characters. At the core, I think Harley is very interested in failure, so is the story that I'm doing about Diana, but it's two characters looking at failure in two very different ways. I feel like at the core of what I'm writing for both there's kind of this element of you can do everything absolutely right. Harley can come back to Gotham, make apologies, bake cakes for Killer Croc in her own very Harley way, do everything that she thinks is right, and it still might not turn out the way she wants it to. She's going to have to accept that and live with it.
On the flip side of the same coin, we're looking at Diana dealing with the same thing. She's going to be faced with past failures. She's going to be forced to fail at times in this story. We're really interested in how she deals with that. She's a unique character in that ruthlessness and uncompromising manner. She's going to take failure pretty hard, and I think react to it very differently than Harley does. I love both characters so much, and getting to work on both of them simultaneously, is pretty amazing because I think they're probably my two favorite female characters in the DCU. That's been a lot of fun.
Wonder Woman has been around for several decades, so how does the Wonder Woman you're tackling differ from the first Wonder Woman you were introduced to, and how are they similar?
I think we're paying homage to a lot of the great Wonder Woman stories that have come before us. I remember growing up on a lot of Gail Simone writing Wonder Woman. Terry Dodson. A current run with Becky Cloonan and Michael Conrad is really good. One thing we want to be sure of was that we were including a lot of elements from all these stories that came before. As we're kind of analyzing the past of this character, I think a lot of those elements come into play, while kind of adding our own voice and maybe even literal style with like our own sci-fi Wonder Woman space suit that we designed. Kind of putting our own thumbprint on the character in a way.
I think one of my favorites -- it was pretty definitive for me -- the New 52 run was just something that I remember the first time being like, "This character is incredible and expansive." That's something we wanted to play with too. There are some mythology elements and nods to the New 52 run. I think a lot of that is in there. We wanted to do a blend for people that love Wonder Woman, that can get excited to see those things in there, as well as new readers who maybe after they read our series will be prompted to go read some of those other things as well, because we -- the whole team -- are really big Wonder Woman fans.
I think there's a lot of that in there. Something I was talking about with somebody yesterday was one of the hardest elements of this is standing next to names that are gigantic at DC and so integral to this character's history, and still using my own voice and using his own style with her too. It's something that we want to strike a balance with.
What do you hope readers take away from this series?
I hope they see how much we love Diana. That is something I really want to come through, how much heart this whole team is putting into this. It's become a really personal story for me, kind of looking at elements of Diana's past, where she's at currently, where she might be headed. Maybe even thinking about elements of motherhood or have these things passed her by. Has she made all the right choices? I think there are a lot of people during a pandemic, or just in general, that maybe are thinking about these questions, and in some ways, it humanizes Diana, that she's thinking about them.
Not to give away who like our guide on the series is because I did mention that this is based in part on Platonic dialogues, so there's somebody that she does talk to while she's on these different quests and missions. That person at some point does just ask her, "Are you happy?" and Diana has a hard time answering this. I think it's something that was almost difficult to write because it's analyzing all of these things at once and having to answer one simple yes or no question and being stumped.
You get to be a part of the Justice League and save the Earth, but who's taking care of you? Who has your back in such a personal way? Are you lonely? As much a there's some really cool butt-kicking action and a lot of punching -- and Mike draws that very well -- I think we're asking some heavy questions that are really personal to all of us on the creative team. Hopefully, they'll kind of resonate with readers as well.
Wonder Woman Evolution by writer Stephanie Phillips and artist Mike Hawthorne goes on sale Nov. 16.