YOU ARE NOW LEAVING PARADISE ISLAND: BRIAN AZZARELLO & CLIFF CHIANG DISCUSS THEIR EPIC ‘WONDER WOMAN’ WORK [INTERVIEW]
Last month DC Comics released Wonder Woman #35, the culmination of Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang‘s three-year run on the series. The writer-artist team relaunched Wonder Woman in September 2011 as part of DC’s line-wide “New 52″ reboot, and proceeded to build it into one of the company’s most acclaimed titles.
Over the course of 36 issues (#1-35, and a special “Zero Issue”), Chiang, Azzarello, colorist Matt Wilson, letterer Jared K. Fletcher, editors Matt Idelson and Chris Conroy (and a number of guest artists) constructed an elaborate and controversial new status quo for the Amazonian princess: they gave Diana a new origin, reestablishing her as the daughter of Queen Hippolyta and Zeus, rather than a woman formed of clay; they rewrote the history of Themyscira and its Amazonian inhabitants to one of violence and drama, rather than the idyllic Paradise Island; they set up an extended supporting cast (including the human Zola, her son Zeke, Orion of the New Gods, and an entire pantheon of deities and monsters); and in issue #23, they killed off Ares and crowned Diana herself as the DC Universe’s new God Of War.
Azzarello and Chiang’s Wonder Woman has been praised for putting forth an epic, cohesive and narratively self-contained superhero drama with flourishes of the urban fantasy that once defined DC’s Vertigo imprint, but has also been criticized for the changes it made to Wonder Woman’s core myth. What’s not in dispute is that the pair have created the most memorable and talked about Wonder Woman story in years — maybe in decades — and to mark the conclusion of their work, we caught up with Chiang and Azzarello to look back at their run and talk about their novel take on the feminist icon.
ComicsAlliance: Your run on Wonder Woman managed to stay largely self-contained for three years, telling your own story without any real crossovers. Was it difficult to have that level of autonomy when dealing with a character that’s such a vital part of the larger DCU, or were you able to just tell the story you wanted without too much worrying?
Brian Azzarello: Well, we don’t play very well with others! [laughs] Before we got started, we talked to [DC Co-Publisher] Dan [DiDio] and editorial at DC and submitted an outline, and said “this is gonna take three years,” and they said “great, go for it!” We had autonomy because we submitted the idea before we even started.
CA: While this is generally known as “the Azzarello/Chiang run,” there were a number of other people who had a hand in the finished product: Tony Akins and Goran Sudzuka drew some issues, Matt Wilson handled the colors, Jared Fletcher was your letterer. Did you choose the rest of your team, were they brought on by editorial, or was it a mix of the two?
Cliff Chiang: Once we knew the book was going to happen, we were just looking to get the people we wanted to work with, that we knew would share the vision of the story we were telling. Brian has known Tony for a long time and he was a great fit, and then we brought in Matt on colors and Jared on letters, and then later on Goran came in – everybody was friends, and everybody knew each other’s work and it all jelled.