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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
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Posted: 11 April 2011 at 4:42am | IP Logged | 1  

If we examine the powers given to Wonder Woman by her creator, William Moulton Marsden, we notice what seems a conscious effort to make them "passive" and "feminine". She is not merely a scaled down version of Superman, she actually lacks several of his more dynamic powers. She cannot fly. She is not invulnerable. She has none of his vision powers.

The plane is a reflection of this.

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Josh Goldberg
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Posted: 11 April 2011 at 7:48am | IP Logged | 2  

I'm 99% sure that in the Cathy Lee Crosby version, Wonder Woman was invisible when inside the invisible plane.
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Brian Miller
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Posted: 11 April 2011 at 7:59am | IP Logged | 3  

I thought it was invisible so no man could follow her back to Paradise Island.

***********

That makes no sense. As evidenced by the 1st post, all they'd have to do is just watch where she's going to find Paradise Island.

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Michael Todd
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Posted: 11 April 2011 at 8:11am | IP Logged | 4  

It's funny when you think about it, in the early days when folks looked up and saw Wonder Woman (one of the few Super-Heroines at that time) flying in a sitting position rather than the traditional laying position of her male counterparts they must have thought that it was the lady-like flying equivalent of riding side-saddle.
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Kip Lewis
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Posted: 11 April 2011 at 8:12am | IP Logged | 5  

As a kid, I don't think I saw any difference between her "gliding on the winds" and Superman flying.  True, I never followed her comics as a kids, until after watching Super-friends and then Wonder Woman TV series.  (I thought the power was in her belt was a comic book convention too and didn't find out that it wasn't until my first WW comic where Diana had been replaced as Wonder Woman by red head or was it a blond?  No, not Artemus; this was either in the late 70s or early 80s.)

But in the Super-friends cartoon and in the JL comics (where I did follow Wonder Woman, ) I can't remember them drawing a difference between true flight and gliding.

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Kip Lewis
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Posted: 11 April 2011 at 8:35am | IP Logged | 6  

Hmmm, you know how some people thought the dashed line to indicate an invisible Sue Richards was actually visible to people within the comics; I wonder if they thought the outline of the invisible jet was visible too?

I think part of me wondered if WW was actually invisible in the plane, but we saw her because that's the way the artist decided to indicate she was in the plane.  I don't think the stories upheld that, but I did wonder.

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Juan Jose Colin Arciniega
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Posted: 11 April 2011 at 8:56am | IP Logged | 7  

Was it not invisible in order to be "invisible" to Nazi radars in WWII?
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Marcus Hiltz
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Posted: 11 April 2011 at 9:00am | IP Logged | 8  

Can I assume that the invisible jet no longer exists? It's not "realistic"!
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Rob Ocelot
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Posted: 11 April 2011 at 10:14am | IP Logged | 9  

I take it to be a shorthand showing that WW is actually flying the plane.  Otherwise a panel just showing the plane outline would be visually uninteresting, IMO.

As mentioned above it's of a similar nature to the depictions of the Invisible Woman as a dotted outline instead of a blank panel with other characters reacting to her or a dialogue balloon emanating from an empty area of the panel.  If you did this for every appearance of her power it would get a little samey.  I've seen it done both ways but more often than not it's the dotted outline that's the chosen convention.

Back to the plane, isn't it essentially a literary prediction of future technology (some of which has come to pass, some of which hasn't -- yet) like the LASER in science fiction?  Certainly what we describe as 'radar ablating' or 'radar invisible' stealth planes exist now.  The technology to bend light around objects to make them appear invisible (aka 'cloaking') is in it's early infancy and mostly theoretical.


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Phil Kreisel
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Posted: 11 April 2011 at 10:37am | IP Logged | 10  

I remember seeing (in this topic, that seems to be an odd term) issues in the Silver Age Wonder Woman where she's sitting in the plane, and there is sort of a silver pen outline of the plane - no details of dials, etc.

This brings up another point.  While it's invisible, it's not intangible.  So, when it's parked, if it's not in a hanger, there's a possibility that some innocent person could walk into it (and hurt themselves).   I just saw this when watching a James Bond film (Die Another Day) last weekend.  Q had given the car an "invisibility" feature, which worked until some henchman ran his snowmobile into it.

At Marvel, Nick Fury's SHIELD sports car had this invisibility feature at some point during Steranko's run in the 60's.

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Martin Redmond
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Posted: 11 April 2011 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | 11  

I don't care if it's passive, I still love it. I love all of the kitsch elements around WW. It makes her distinctive. She's like a non violent violent super female who still gets her way through non violent violence.

Edited by Martin Redmond on 11 April 2011 at 3:14pm
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Thom Price
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Posted: 11 April 2011 at 3:50pm | IP Logged | 12  

Funny, I was just pondering the Invisible Jet the other day.

I have a magnet on my work desk cabinet of Wonder Woman in a flying pose; at least once every few week, someone walks by and says some variation of "Wonder Woman doesn't fly, she has that invisible plane!"

It's always a stark reminder of just how insignificant comic books are to the general public;  Wonder Woman has been flying on her own for 25 years (longer if you count the "gliding on air currents".)  But most people seem to only associate her with the Invisible Jet, thanks to the Lynda Carter series and Superfriends.

From the time I was old enough to ponder such things, I was not a fan of the Jet and was glad to see it eliminated in the post-Crisis era.  Only very recently have I developed a retro-fondness for it, but it still never quite works for me. 

The only time the Jet has really made sense to me was in the JLU cartoons and the semi-related CRISIS ON TWO EARTHS movie.  There, the Jet is completely visible on the inside for the passengers, but completely invisible on the outside -- ultra-stealth mode.  Of course, that renders it far less fantastical -- almost mundane, as technology in real life isn't that far off.

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