IDW To Publish First Ever Collection Of Golden Age Wonder Woman Newspaper Comic Strips

In the Golden Age of Comic Books, newspaper strips were still considered to be the dominant and far more respectable form of sequential art. They had, after all, been around for a while before Action Comics #1 rolled around and introduced the superhero, producing enduring and beloved characters like Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant, and even helping to popularize Mickey Mouse. As a result, the creators of these upstart superhero comics were pretty keen to get in on the deal, resulting in newspaper strips based on Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, often produced by the creators of the original comic books.

The Batman and Superman strips have been reprinted over the  years, but the Wonder Woman newspaper strip, which ran from 1943 to1944, never has, until now. IDW Publishing has announced that it's collecting the strip's entire two-year run into a single hardcover, set to be released later this year.

Originally produced by King Features Syndicate -- the same publishers that would later bring us Funky Winkerbean -- the Wonder Woman strip was written and drawn by William Moulton Marston and Harry G. Peters, the same team that collaborated on her classic comic book adventures. Given the prestige of the newspaper strips and their wide circulation among adults (compared to the comic books, which even back then were already starting to be seen as fare for the kids) this was a pretty big deal for Marston and Peters, and gave them the the opportunity to reintroduce their character to a much wider audience -- even though, as King Features touted in an ad for the series, Wonder Woman had already racked up ten million fans through her appearances in the comics.

The strip's relatively short two-year run retold Princess Diana's origin on Paradise Island and her journey to America to become a patriotic crime-fighter and her romance with pilot Steve Trevor. IDW's hardcover will collect the entire strip in 196 pages.