Ares
577 BCE - Ares has a passionate affair with Hippolyta. When she refuses to lead the Amazons into war, he swears that he will overcome the Goddesses favor and claim her people.
576 BCE - Ares manipulates Hercules to attack the Amazons, leading Antiope and many other Amazons to break their vow to not seek vengeance against their captors.
571 BCE - Ares betrays Antiope and her Amazons, using them to start a war between Greece & Carthage before punishing them for breaking their vow, turning them to stone.
1939 - Ares influence in WWII attracts Hippolyta, to remain in mans world with Steve Trevor, joining the war effort.
12 years ago - Ares influences man's armies to allign against Circe. Wonder Woman becomes the amazon's champion, halting his influence and sending him back into exhile.
8 years ago - Ares approaches a heartbroken Valerie Beaudry, granting her physical beauty to become his champion and battle Wonder Woman.
7 years ago - Ares former champion Valerie Beaudry reclaims her briefly to aid Diana Prince during the Godwar before he reclaims it.
6 years ago - Ares corrupts the lost tribe of Amazons and uses to attack Themyscera. He is stopped only when Wonder Woman overcomes her exile and frees them from his control. He takes refuge with Circe, and they have a daughter, Lyta, together.
5 years ago - Ares defeats Artemis, freeing her only when Diana Prince sacrifices herself, only to escape the underworld with the sacrifice of Hippolyta and usurp the mantle of Goddess of Love to finally defeat him, casting him from the material plane.
3 years ago - Ares gives Cassie Sandsmark her own enchanted lasso, attempting to corrupt her.
The more you look at the classic Wonder Woman stories, the more you start to become aware of a startling fact: this character had an intensely complex internal mythology that it really had to give up in order to be accepted as a part of the larger shared DC world. The scope of her narrative was huge and mythic, a grand tapestry of gods and their influence of Earth. There are elements of this still at play, but it's weirdly vestigial; it plays as a background narrative. While Ares is still Wonder Woman's main antagonist, he operates almost entirely behind the scenes. This creates a unique opportunity for us to find a new balance for the role of the this particular villain in the world of one of the best characters in DC.
Ares's Comic HistoryAres appeared for the very first time in the same issue as Wonder Woman, in Wiliam Moulton Marston's Wonder Woman #1 in 1942. These early stories featured a more deliberate conflict between Ares and the goddess of love Aphrodite. She created the Amazons as a direct answer to his followers. He only went by the name Ares briefly before he began going by his Roman name Mars. he also took over the planet Mars as his headquarters and enslaved it's alien population. He was continually testing his followers and giving them bodies and sending them to earth to wreak havoc on Earth, eventually playing a major part in World War 2. This was the structure of the classic Golden Age Wonder Woman stories that have served as the foundation for the character ever since.
Wonder Woman returned to prominence in the resurgence of comics in the late fifties. Her new stories featured Mars, but it wasn't until George Perez' rebooted the whole series in 1987 that we first started to see a return to the omnipresent, incredibly powerful character from the Golden Age. This is where the body-encompassing blue armor that has since been his trademark was introduced. While he is almost always operating behind the scenes, subtly manipulating events to foster his domain of chaos and war, he does occasionally come down an actually become physically involved, always to devastating effect. The guy is a god, after all. |
Our Ares StoryIt's a little touch and go for us to include an immortal god in our timeline... The character's existence basically confirms the existence of ALL gods of ALL pantheons in the world of DC. We actually deliberately included George Perez's War of the Gods story arc as a way to acknowledge their existence. Ares is a unique case of course, because he's played such a huge part of Diana's story that we wanted to ensure that we used him regularly. His constant efforts to sew discord and violence into the world serves as a very clean and easy to adapt tool to explain the conflict in Wonder Woman's story, whether it's the division of ancient Amazons as Antiope is corrupted and leads them against Greece, or the modern conflict that leads Diana to first become Wonder Woman. Ares is a continual threat, even though he almost never actually involves himself in his own plans.
Of course... the major exception is in our interpretation of one of the big moments in Diana's history; when she lost the role of Wonder Woman to her Amazonian sister Artemis. There are a number of stories that involve Diana achieving godhood, and for us to adapt this idea the only real way for it to play out would for it to be what amounts to a final battle with Ares. This is intended to be the climax of their conflict, and that's a pretty cool idea. It actually thoroughly explains his roll starting to subtly corrupt Wonder Girl. |