WILD WORLD OF WONDER WOMAN : THE REVERSAL OF EVOLUTION

Are we not men?

One of Wonder Woman’s longest running foes, Giganta, has been depicted as a size-changing criminal since the days of the Super Friends. Her origins – and the origin of that attractive leopardskin leotard she’s been wearing since the good ol’ days -  however, date all the way back to Wonder Woman vol. 1 No. 9 (Summer 1944) when she was a baddie of an entirely different stripe.

Not in those heels, honey.

The story begins – as stories from this era often do – with love interest Steve Trevor producing a niece out of thin air solely for the purpose of getting the troublesome tyke into the maws of danger. While Uncle Steve and “Dotsie” visit the gorilla enclosure at the zoo, Dotsie wanders through a gaping wide steel rail which otherwise separated the crowd from the powerful, brooding ape inside. May as well have strung yarn across the enclosure door, in my opinion.

Whatever the case, Dotsie is snatched up by the lady ape, who was herself recently bereft of her own baby, which precipitates a jailbreak. The gorilla busts the bars of her cage like they were licorice, so all around we’re gonna give the Washington DC zoo a failing grade for “keeping the gorillas from murdering children.”

Luckily Diana Prince is nearby to effect a change into her star-spangled alter-ego and chase the grieving, deadly simian all-ll-ll the way to Holliday College, home of Etta Candy, her spank-happy Holliday Girls and the evolution-machine of Professor Zool.

After a struggle wherein the ape is finally subdued, the professor suggests an alternative to destroying the powerful beast – he’ll use his evolution ray to turn her into a totally stacked broad! Weirdly, no one has any objections or, for that matter, questions, so the experiment is underway and in moments Giganta the gorilla becomes Giganta the Russ Meyer pinup.

...yow.

Buck-nakers, flame-tressed and built like a brick privy, Giganta still has the hateful mind of an angry gorilla, which seems like at least a minor setback but then again Tyra Banks was evolved from a monitor lizard, according to her Wikipedia entry, so maybe she has a fashion career ahead of her.

And yet, this is only where the story BEGINS! Once again choosing to battle Wonder Woman, the now-human Giganta smashes the evolution machine, subjecting Steve, Dr.Zool, the Holliday Girls, Dotsie and Wonder Woman to rays which threaten to turn them into apes! I thought it worked the other way around. Anyway, the amazing Amazon hucks the malfunctioning machine out a window, thankfully stalling their devolution at the caveman stage.

UNfortunately, now that the machine’s outside, it starts devolving all KINDSA shit! Pretty soon, the world has been jetted back to the prehistoric age of man, with the local zoo animals turning into mastodons and dinosaurs just for the hell of it! I didn’t realize it was a straight line like that, but there you go.

More than that, all of humanity is reduced to stone age tribes comprised of ape-like humans, and all technology and modern advancement vanish, Whoops. Thanks for coming to Man’s World, Wonder Woman, we were hoping someone would Planet of the Apes us in reverse.

Naturally, the Evolution Machine seems the way to wriggle out of this little problem, so rigging a Ben Franklin kite-to-USB adapter, the Amazon and her pals fire up the recently repaired gizmo. Which is when – and I realize what I’m saying here –things get weird.

"I've mostly done this to screw with Kirk Cameron."

It turns out that the world wasn’t merely devolved, it was launched back into prehistory, and turning the Evolution Machine on “blend” launches all of reality forward to a mythical golden age “when the world was perfect!” Not only do the monsters from the age of dinosaurs disappear, replaced with birds and butterflies, but a whole benevolent monarchy develops instantly! Steve even meets them somehow, introducing King Aros and Queen Darla to his tribe of survivors.

"Up yours, Steve!"

Giganta meanwhile has soured everything by finding the only evil people in the golden age of mankind and turning them into an army. While Aros’ and Darla’s kingdom thrives on equally shared labors and rewards, the greedy peasant Jon and his followers are led to war by Giganta. It ends in good triumphing over evil, but as Darla explains it The Golden Age is over – people know, now, that they can be wicked if they choose!” That’s why we don’t teach abstinence in school, folks.

Darla leads the good-hearted survivors of the battle to a distant island, where their prisoner Giganta manages to uncover a heretofore unknown electrical property of the golden lasso, activating the evolution machine again. Pzow, we jump ahead a few “hundreds of thousands of years” and we’re on Paradise Island at the peak of Amazon civilization! Wonder Woman’s mom Hippolyta is there and everything. What the hell? Did she evolve from something? This is all very confusing.

Wonder Woman and her friends help the early Amazons rout a Greek invasion before launching back to the modern day, by which point clearly the evolution machine is proven to be a time machine, right? I don’t know. All I can say for sure is that IF the machine merely evolved and devolved the world without changing the passage of time in anyway, then they basically just destroyed pretty much every kind of science we have relating to the age of the Earth. Congratulations Wonder Woman, you’ve ended up proving the Creationism Museum factually correct! Now go put your woman-monkey away before everyone wants one.

"Have you seen my Instagram?"