THE I CHING DYNASTY

This post at CRIVENS COMICS AND STUFF led me to ruminate a bit on the character of "the Incredible I Ching" as portrayed in his sole venue, as the teacher of "the Mod Wonder Woman" of the late sixties and early seventies. I won't discuss that phase of the Amazing Amazon's history overall, except with respect to what it means psychologically for DC's character of Wonder Woman/Diana Prince to have a father.

First off, it's necessary to state that the basic schtick behind the character's name-- where he would introduce himself by saying "I Ching"-- wasn't particularly racist or chauvinist. However, it was so lame that even the primary creators of this arc, Denny O'Neil and Mike Sekowsky, dropped it quickly.

Second, although Wonder Woman's creator William Marston was himself a father in real life, it was apparently important to him that his heroine should be fatherless; molded out of clay by her figurative mother, the Amazon Hippolyta, and then brought to life by a Greek goddess. Wonder Woman, raised in an all-female society, never evinced any sign under Marston that she felt the lack of a paternal figure in her life. After Marston's passing, Robert Kanigher was for the most part the person most in control of the WONDER WOMAN franchise for the next twenty years, and for all the divergences Kanigher took from Marston's template, I'd say that on balance his heroine too was just fine without ever having had paternity in her life.

The character's first appearance, like his last, is defined by "comic book coincidence." At the start of the "Mod" arc, the superheroine Wonder Woman has to give up her powers for contrived reasons. Almost immediately, an old blind Chinese man with peerless martial arts skills accosts Diana Prince and talks her into training with him, so that she can fight evil with her purely mortal abilities.

Though I don't believe the arc ever uses the term "sensei," the initial relationship between Diana and I Ching is purely that of student and sensei. The two of them also become a crimefighting team, particularly against a mastermind named Doctor Cyber, but it was initially a very formal relationship, not showing the parental warmth seen, say, in the Golden Age Batman/Robin interactions.

Then, toward the end of his first run on the Mod Arc, Denny O'Neil scripted a big, teary emotional outburst for Diana in WW #182. Diana has been romanced by a handsome swain, only to find out that he's an agent of Cyber. She loses control and slams him around with forceful karate punches. When Ching stops her, she rejects his fortune-cookie homilies, telling him to shut up as she runs away.

Now, I should point out that although this was meant to be a more "realistic" reaction than what passed for drama in any of the earlier Kanigher WONDER WOMAN stories, Mike Sekowsky, taking over both writing and artistic duties in the next issue, never comes back to this moment of drama, as contemporary Marvel writers like Roy Thomas or Archie Goodwin might have. This would prove to be a repeating pattern in Mod Wonder Woman.

Issues 183 and 184 take the now mortal Diana back into Amazon territory, and Ching goes along for the ride. The Amazons are now being menaced by Ares, God of War, whom Sekowsky capriciously imagines to be Hippolyta's father and thus Diana's figurative grandfather. While the Amazons are besieged, Diana voyages to a dimension where many of the Earth's heroes dwell apart from humankind, all in a quasi-Arthurian setting, despite the presence of non-Arthurian types like Siegfried, Roland, and (possibly as a sop to feminism) Brunhild, leader of the Valkyries. The heroes make a show of indifference but end up helping to defeat Ares, after which Diana and Ching go back to Earth.

The next emotional moment, from #186, shows a bit more of Sekowsky's humor about the interactions of Diana and Ching. Diana spends most of the story trying to rein in the rampage of a psychologically unstable witch named Morgana-- a "yo yo," as Ching calls her. Sekowsky's big joke is that Diana keeps trying to fight the witch with her mortal skills, and won't listen when Ching tries to tell her he just happens to know magic and can overpower the witch in that manner. And on top of that, Diana and Morgana go toe-to-toe on a purely physical plane, and Diana loses, much to her chagrin.

Issue #187 and 188 introduce a new parental wrinkle. Through a set of seeming coincidences, Ching is reunited with Lu Shan, his long lost daughter. But "seeming" is the operative word, for Lu Shan is an agent of Cyber, and she shoots Ching in the belief that he's responsible for killing her mother.

Now, one would think that even a rather erratic writer like Sekowsky would want to follow through on this big revelation, even if it was just to invalidate Lu Shan's claim as false. But nope, we don't get it from Sekowsky, and we don't get it from O'Neil in his last few scripts for the Mod Arc. But for some reason, even before the decision had been made to end the Mod Phase, in issue #188 Sekowsky delivered a two-page in-joke in which Diana clobbers two petty thieves in a department store. The in-joke is that one of the thugs is named "Creepy Caniguh," which presumably expresses Sekowsky's opinion of the former WONDER WOMAN scribe.

In the ensuing issues Ching presumably has lots of opportunities to hold forth on what caused his natural daughter's grudge, but if he expounds anything to Diana, there's no evidence on any of the pages. Then Lu Shan, last seen escaping Cyber's HQ after shooting her dad in #187, makes her bid to become a super-villain. In this O'Neil script, she kidnaps Jonny Double, potential boyfriend material for Diana, as part of a scheme to get hold of a magical jewel to power a big dimension-crossing machine for purposes of pillage. 

Diana and Ching learn about these plans, promoting what I believe is the first time Ching expresses parental affection for Diana. But of explanations about the death of Ching's wife-- nada.

The next issue, #203, is essentially the last adventure for Mod Wonder Woman. scripted by Samuel Delany as one part of a projected new story-line that never came to pass-- one in which Ching is not even mentioned. But DC Editorial had already decided to bring back the Amazon Princess, and Robert Kanigher, as if summoned from the vasty deep by Sekowsky's jibe, was tapped to return Diana to her roots.

I'm not sure I could survive revisiting the extreme stupidity of Kanigher's hackwork in this period, and in any case the only relevant part of #204 consists of seven pages in which Kanigher kills off Ching and has Diana forget her whole "mod phase" before transitioning back to her Amazon status, and to whatever plotlines mattered to Kanigher.

Now, one might view this summary execution as "tit for tat." When O'Neil and Sekowsky took over the title, they certainly didn't make a smooth transition from whatever Kanigher's last scripts had been. In fact, they showed extreme disinterest in the old WONDER WOMAN mythos by killing off Steve Trevor, just so he wouldn't get in the way of whatever romances they wanted to give Diana. Compared to Trevor's unceremonious demise, Ching's is not that bad, if one grants that, in that era, no one but hardcore fans expected seamless continuity from comic books. 

Also, it's not impossible that someone above Kanigher-- hypothetically, Dick Giordano-- might have advised Kanigher to give Ching a decent send-off, not unlike a much later incident in which Giordano *allegedly * warned Keith Giffen not to kill off Aquaman's wife. In the absence of any testimony about outside influences, though, I have to say that I like the line Kanigher writes for Diana, calling Ching the father she never had. I'm sure Kanigher cared absolutely nothing about anything that had happened during Mod Wonder Woman, just as it would be hard to argue that the author even cared about his own WW stories, beyond putting money in his wallet. But a good line is a good line, whether its author cared about the story or not.

Much later, Brian Azzarello undid the whole "virgin birth" of Princess Diana by claiming that she was the daughter of Zeus. I've read none of these. But even with all the narrative problems of the Mod phase, I Ching still holds the honor of "first father."

SIDE-NOTE: Because #204 introduces Diana's Black Amazon sister Nubia, I did force myself to revisit Kanigher's "Origin of Nubia" story in #206. It's like a lot of Kanigher's WW stories from the pre-Mod era, where events often unfold with only the thinnest justifications. Here, instead of Hippolyta praying to have a child who's like her, Aphrodite rather randomly instructs the Amazon queen to make two clay kids, one light skinned and one dark skinned-- apparently for no reason but so that Evil Ares will have the chance to steal the dark one and try to mold her into his perfect warrior. This scenario did have some mythopoeic potential, but Kanigher pretty much blows it from start to finish. But again, I have to admit that Kanigher's basic concept had some validity, since a lot of later creators took pleasure in doing their versions of "Black Wonder Woman."