WONDER WOMAN VOL.1 #6 (1943)
by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter
Wonder Woman was a quarterly series at this point, but this simply meant there were more pages.
All three stories feature Cheetah in her ridiculous Golden Age costume.
We begin with Wonder Woman being late for a charity show, upstaging who was supposed to be the star of the show: debutante Priscilla Rich.
Wonder Woman’s performance requires her to be chained and gagged, because of course.
Remember: there is no subtext, only text.
She’s supposed to perform and escapist trick, but Priscilla secretly tied her hands using the unbreakable Golden Lasso.
However Wonder Woman is able to chew through the leather mask (!!!) and contorts herself to untie herself with her mouth.
Sarcastic Wonder Woman is the best Wonder Woman.
Angry that Wonder Woman is upstaging her career, Priscilla finds out she has an alternate evil personality.
I don’t know what’s worse, that Cheetah’s original costume is a rug or that she’s running around in a desecrated corpse.
And so Discount Catwoman Cheetah begins her criminal career by stealing from a rich dude who dumped her to attend Wonder Woman’s charity event.
Steve, if she prefers to attend gay parties, maybe consider you’re not exactly her type.
Interesting to see that people don’t automatically assume Wonder Woman has a secret identity.
Cheetah has the chance to kill Wonder Woman right now (I think cutting her throat would’ve worked in the Golden Age, she wasn’t invulnerable yet), but prefers to disgrace her.
Also Wonder Woman sleeps with her tiara! That can’t be comfortable.
So of course:
“I’d love to wear handcuffs”… yeah, we figured that out.
Someone pays her bail, leading to Wonder Woman meeting Cheetah.
I thought the rich dude was the one who paid Wonder Woman’s bail… but no, Cheetah did that! Yes, she sent her to jail AND she had her released. Needless to say, her plan makes no sense.
ALL OF THAT so that Cheetah could shove Wonder Woman into a huge grain deposit (???) and let her suffocate there.
Which obviously doesn’t work.
And so we end the first story with Cheetah setting the building on fire and dying. Talk about anticlimactic!
Moving to the second story, we interrupt military intelligence related to WWII to have Wonder Woman visiting a beauty salon. Yes, really!
THAT IS NOT HOW GLASSES WORK!!!
Later she discovers that someone has been writing down her thoughts while she was getting her hair done. Unfortunately I can’t read this handwriting, so it might as well have been shorthand.
This girl working for Cheetah is a mind reader, and she tells Wonder Woman how she learned that Priscilla is Cheetah.
She and another girl are being blackmailed by Cheetah into working for her.
Please note that they are supposed to be in zebra costumes, so either the colorist wasn’t told or he’s never seen a zebra.
Cheetah kidnaps, ties up and whips girls? She really was destined to fight Wonder Woman.
While she’s not superhumanly fast at this point, she still manages to escape.
This leads to Wonder Woman needing to travel to Japan to stop them from attacking Americans.
We are in full WWII propaganda mode, so be warned: this is going to be INCREDIBLY racist.
I think I need a shower after reading those panels.
The Japanese are convinced the information received by Cheetah is false because Wonder Woman apparently has super-ventriloquism.
This convinces the Japanese, and Wonder Woman escapes in the most ridiculous way imaginable.
And this story ends with Cheeath warning Wonder Woman to stop stopping her plans, plus Steve Trevor being a little unhinged.
Moving to the third and final story, it begins with Wonder Woman arguing with a general about Amazon strength. Which apparently can be achieved by just putting your mind into it.
The general selects a team of sportswomen what will compete against Amazons, and Cheeath takes the opportunity to kidnap and impersonate the hurdles champion.
Because even random bystanders are not exempt from bondage shenanigans in Golden Age Wonder Woman.
The mind reader returns to tell Wonder Woman that Cheeath is impersonating someone on the trip.
How is it that Cheetah is able to stay hidden when Wonder Woman has her Lasso of Truth AND access to a telepath!?!?
There is no subtext, only text.
In 2021, the world record for clean and jerk weight lifting is 412 pounds (187 kg) for women and 584 pounds (265 kg) for men. That’s for the highest weight class, but apparently a “featherweight” Amazon gets to lift almost as much with one hand!
Even more impressively ridiculous: a 31 feet (9.4 meter) pole vault! The 2021 record is 16.4 feet (5 meter) for women and 20 feet (6.1 meters) for men, but with Amazon training the girl easily exceeds both with both hands and feet chained!
Cheetah then gets the idea to steal Queen Hippolyta’s magic girdle. Considering Wonder Woman sleeps with her tiara, I was pleasantly surprised to see Hippolyta doesn’t sleep with her girdle.
She succeeds in stealing the girdle, and Hippolyta joins the family tradition.
How does Cheetah STILL have a secret identity!?!?
This leads into the first ACTUAL fight between Wonder Woman and Cheetah. Since she has the girdle, she actually has a chance!
The fact that Cheetah loses immediately once she doesn’t have the girdle is a testament of how she doesn’t completely fit as a Wonder Woman villain.
And so we end with Wonder Woman FINALLY discovering Cheetah’s identity; she will stay on Paradise Island for a while to cure her evil personality.
Historical significance: 5/10
Cheetah is by far the most iconic of Wonder Woman’s villains, but this particular version doesn’t have much of a legacy… see more below.
Silver Age-ness: 10/10
I still can’t believe it took Wonder Woman that much time to figure out Cheetah’s identity.
Does it stand the test of time? 0/10
Yeah… this was pretty bad. Not as bad as the Ares story but we have a lame villain, a nonsensical plot, and let’s not forget the racism. Actually, better if we forget it.
How close is this to the modern character? 0/10
Cheetah has a surprisingly complicated history. The Priscilla Rich version has a couple dozen appearances in the Golden Age, and shows up in 3 issues during the Silver Age… supposedly, because the continuity placement of those stories is suspect.
Priscilla eventually gave up crime; her identity was inherited by her niece Deborah Domaine, who like the original Cheetah didn’t have any actual powers. She had less than a dozen appearances.
The post-Crisis Wonder Woman went for a completely different Cheetah. This one was archeologist Dr. Barbara Minerva, who by turning into a human-cheetah hybrid with actual superhuman powers (of magic origins) finally became a real threat to Wonder Woman.
That’s the version that is still around, although DC has experimented with a couple of alternate designs.
There’s also a male version of the Cheetah running around (pun intended), but we don’t talk about him.
Aside from the name, basically nothing from the original Cheetah remains in the following incarnations. Even the evil alternate personality has been dropped, as most version of Dr. Minerva were at the very least morally compromised before the transformation.
The only minor claim to fame of the Golden Age version is the Cheetah that appears in the Super Friends cartoons (since the Dr. Minerva version hadn’t been created yet).
Basically every single other adaptation prefers to use the Barbara Minerva version of the character.
Which I completely agree: “evil archeologist gets animal powers by a curse” is a FAR better enemy for Wonder Woman than “psychotic sociopath with no powers wearing a rug”.
And of course Cheetah also shows up in the movie Wonder Woman 1984.
She sucks.