I wanted to address these tags specifically for two reasons: one, you bring up a really great point! Two, you're also giving me an opportunity to write a portion of the rant I mentioned in my og post! I totally agree that generally, the exclusion of non-white writers and particularly women of color is an especially acute problem in the comic industry! It's absolutely something that needs to be discussed more often and actively fixed.
However, I will note that when I made this post, I'm speaking in the specific context of Diana having a grand total of four (4) female writers on her book from her creation in 1941 to 2018: Mindy Newell, in the 80s. Jodi Picoult, following the One Year Later event in 2006. Gail Simone's run in 2008. And Meredith Finch, who co-wrote the final portion of the New 52 Wonder Woman run with her husband David Finch in 2015. And since 2018 (and there's a reason I'm splitting it there, which I'll come back to in a second), there have been only four others: Shea Fontana, G. Willow Wilson, Mariko Tamaki, and Becky Cloonan.
Eight women. Wonder Woman has been around for 82 years and has starred in her titular ongoing for nearly as long and that book (whether titled Sensation Comics or Wonder Woman) has only been helmed by eight women across its 800 issues. And none of those runs lasted particularly long: Picoult lasted for 5 issues on the title and Tamaki's run was only 10 issues, for example.
Yes. Women of color in particular face unique access and opportunity issues that white women do not, and seeing another WOC on Wonder Woman after Tamaki's run would be fabulous (honestly I'd be perfectly happy if they brought her back). But this is a particular case where putting any female writer, regardless of color, on the book would be a massive step forward because of the particular and unique context of how Wonder Woman as a creative property has been treated by DC since her inception.
Diana has a very long history of being minimized and sidelined as a heroine until the 80s under George Perez's pen, but even then she and her history were still largely treated badly in comparison to Superman and Batman. Additionally, Wonder Woman books are not under their own editorial branch. They're folded under the Superman Office. Which, for a long time, had Eddie Berganza as its head editor. A man whose sexual harassment of any woman placed in his radius was so horrible and well-known that DC's upper management literally had a blanket ban on hiring any women to work under him. Because it was simply easier to not hire women at all than it was to fire the man who assaulted them, you see. And then, when he was promoted to be DC's Executive Editor (over the objections of multiple women), he managed to get himself into trouble by publicly sexually assaulting a woman at a con. Did Dan Didio and Geoff Johns fire him? No. They demoted him back into Head Editor of the Superman office.
I say all of this because this is an incredibly important historical background to understand where we are with the Wonder Woman books right now: every single one has been helmed by a woman or non-binary writer for the past two years, among them Stephanie Williams, Vita Ayala, Joelle Jones, Jordie Bellaire, Becky Cloonan, and Kelly Sue DeConnick. And that corner of DC has, in general, flourished under their pens. I may dislike some of the writing quality or the creative direction some of the characters/plots have taken, but I cannot deny that the Wonderfam and their lore have collectively been given an amount of distinct, explicit attention and care by these writers that hasn't been seen in nearly 20 years since Phil Jimenez left the main Wonder Woman book.
And now DC has hired Tom King, who self-admittedly does not care about Wonder Woman and did not want the job, to write her main title. He was hired over Kelly Sue DeConnick, who wrote the astonishingly good and very financially successful Wonder Woman: Historia. He was chosen over Stephanie Williams and Vita Ayala, who have revitalized Nubia and made her a financially successful and narratively viable character over the past two years. He was chosen over Mariko Tamaki, who has not only written Wonder Woman before but has written several incredibly critically and commerically successful books for DC across multiple character families. He was chosen over Marguerite Bennett, who likely got screwed out of her own run on Wonder Woman after pissing off Geoff Johns back in 2016. And he was chosen over cultivating new talent, doing a breakout hire from any of the indie companies, or hiring an established, respected writer from outside the comic industry.
Even beyond the fact that we shouldn't be putting an all-white male creative team on a Wonder Woman book in 2023 given the historical context I just described, Tom King is profoundly the wrong hiring decision for a wide variety of reasons and DC choosing him over any of the women and nb people I just named shows a fundamental lack of respect for what should be one of DC's major creative properties.
DC should be doing heavy recruiting work to expand and diversify their talent pool outside of the big names who always get books to write. Period, the end. That includes a specific focus on writers of color, particularly women. But even disregarding that aspirational goal, they should be picking writers who clearly care about the characters they're writing. That's not King, not on this book. And the fact that they chose him anyway is a tragedy regardless of whether or not they picked him over a white woman or a woman of color.
Because there are thousands of other talented creatives, many of them women and POC, who would've happily taken the job. There are creatives who would fight for the chance to headline a Wonder Woman book. So the fact that King and Sampere were hired to helm the book instead signals DC's obvious lack of interest in a) expanding their creative talent pool, b) hiring more female creatives, something they should care about in general but also should be paying special attention to given the historical exclusion of female voices in that particular corner of the DCU, and c) making Wonder Woman a genuine company priority. And that's enraging to me.
