Wonder Woman is queer: Writer
THEGUARDIAN: Wonder Woman is queer, her writer has confirmed: “I don’t know how much clearer I can make it.”
Greg Rucka, who worked on Wonder Woman for DC Comics throughout the 2000s, returned to DC Comics this year for the new Rebirth series commemorating her 75th year in print.
He told the comic news site Comicosity the character had “obviously” been in love and relationships with other women, as has long been speculated by fans.
Wonder Woman is known as the warrior princess Diana in her homeland of Themyscira, an island populated only by Amazonian women.
The confirmation was met with celebration on social media.
But Rucka cautioned against prioritising “the desire to see representation on the page” at the expense of good writing and character development.
While he acknowledged the demand from audiences to have characters from marginalised groups leading books and series, he said it was a “thorny question” when his job was to “serve the characters as best I can”.
Rucka was critical of writers that shoehorned their characters’ sexualities into their narratives for the sake of doing so.
“The character has to stand up and say, “I’M GAY!” in all bold caps for it to be evident,” he said. “For my purposes, that’s bad writing. That’s a character stating something that’s not impacting the story.”
But in the case of Wonder Woman, he said, her queer identity was important to the narrative because Themyscira was represented as paradise, and with that came diversity.
“It has to be an inclusive and accepting society, for a number of reasons — paradise being one of them.”