2010 "Ladies of DC - Artemis" art by Taylor Cordingley
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They're fun, they're sassy and they all seem to have a mean right hook. For years, DC Comics has consistently created amazing female superheroes. I'd like to pay tribute to these amazing women of the DC Universe with one of my patented pin-up series -- Ladies of DC! Eighteenth in this series is the aggressive Artemis!
ARTEMIS
Real Name: Artemis of Bana-Mighdall
Notable Aliases: Wonder Woman, Javelin, Requiem, Shim'Tar, Polemarch
First Appearance: Wonder Woman #90
Abilities: Highly trained in various forms of hand-to-hand combat, expertise in a wide-array of weapons (specializes in swords and archery), limited knowledge of sorcery, fluent in demon languages, immortality.
Towards the mid-'90s, DC felt the need to shake up the Wonder Woman title as it had lost some of its magic after George Perez had left the title. This shake up included the introduction of the Amazon Artemis who became Wonder Woman for a brief period. She was fiery, aggressive, mouthy and brutally violent -- in other words, she was everything Princess Diana was not. In fact, it could easily be said that Artemis is the Faith to Diana's Buffy (except Artemis and Wonder Woman came first). She's also the Huntress-type of Wonder Woman's world. Only without that whole "has major problems sleeping with guys and then pretending like they never existed" thing. I really love Artemis and she has one of the greatest character designs. I've always felt Wonder Woman had superior supporting characters to Superman and Batman and Artemis is no exception. If you don't believe me when I say she's one bad motherf*cker, I suggest you read her appearance in Secret Six where she makes a rather bloody escape from a slave camp. Although Artemis made a crappy Wonder Woman, she's an awesome character in her own right who's amazing in battle and often tries to do what is right. But I will say this one last thing -- as a kid when I first saw her (it was the issue in which she returns from the dead in Wonder Woman) I remember thinking "God! Look at that hair! How the hell is she not going to get grabbed and whipped around thanks to that twenty-foot train?" Yes, the hair's impractical but hey would you want to tell that to her? I rather like having all my body parts where they're supposed to be.
Ladies of DC
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