Hippolyta
701 BCE - Hippolyta is born in ancient Greece.
682 BCE - 19-year-old Hippolyta marries an elite hunter.
678 BCE - 23-year-old Hippolyta's husband is injured & becomes abusive.
675 BCE - 26-year-old Hippolyta is pregnant when her husband kills her and her sister Antiope. Her soul, along with the souls of her unborn daughters, are kept safe within the Well of Souls.
580 BCE - Hippolyta is given life by the Goddesses as an Amazon, her new body arising from the Aegean Sea. She becomes their queen, while her sister Antiope becomes a high priestess.
577 BCE - Hippolyta falls in love with Ares. When she refuses to lead the Amazons into war, he swears that he will overcome the Goddesses favor and claim her people.
576 BCE - Hippolyta opens the Amazons city to Hercules and his men to prevent war between them. They are betrayed and imprisoned as Hercules steals her magical girdle. The goddesses free them in exchange for their pledge to not seek vengeance, but Antiope leads them to decimate Hercules men, and leads a contingent of Amazons to leave their kingdom and to make war on Athens, ignoring their vow. Hippolyta's remaining Amazons are granted a new island home, but are tasked with protecting Doom's Doorway.
1939 - Hippolyta rescues Steve Trevor when he crashed on Themyscira while escaping from Cylvia Cyber's organization the Tribunal She leaves the island to bring him home, falling in love with him during the journey, and assisting him on his missions against the Tribunal, battling Ares influence in man's world. Away from Themyscira, she begins to age.
1940 - 28-year-old Hippolyta & Steve Trevor investigate an attacked american submarine, and discover Queen Clea's ongoing coup for the Atlantean throne. Hippolyta frees the imprisoned Princess Eeras and helps her retake the Atlantean Throne. She is placed under house arrest as an imprisoned royal.
1941 - 29-year-old Hippolyta joins the newly formed Justice Society at the suggestion of Steve Tevor. She stops Cylvia Cyber from selling computer technology to the Axis powers, and believes Cyber killed in the ensuing explosion.
1942 - 30-year-old Hippolyta battles Isabella Maru when her chemicals allow her to take control of an entire allied battalion, and to capture Steve Trevor. She is captured by the Tribunal, who are led by a a still-alive Cylvia Cyber who is now encased in golden technological armor and obsessed with wreaking revenge on Hippolyta, attacking her and attempting to capture her so she can have and stealing her strength and beauty. She & Steve help rescue the soldiers held prisoner by by Gerald Shugel. Their lives are saved by Will Everett who sacrifices himself to save them, absorbing the radiation of an experimental reactor. and who she invites to join the Justice Society as Amazing Man.
1943 - 31-year-old Hippolyta & the Justice Society fight Queen Clea, who has stolen the Trident of Posiedon & built an army of enslaved sailors to assault Atlantis. Clea dies, & the entire Atlantean nation of Venturia is lost, along with the Trident of Posiedon.
1945 - 33-year-old Hippolyta & Steve Trevor discover that, with the war coming to an end, Cylvia Cyber has launched a satellite to find Themyscira and steal Hippolyta's power. They pursue her onto the satellite to try to stop her. Cyber is finally killed in the ensuing battle. With the war over, Hippolyta returns to Themyscira.
32 years ago - When Hippolyta beseeches the goddesses for a daughter, they instruct her to form a daughter from the clay, and they grant her life and power, giving her the lost soul of Hippolyta's unborn child. She names her Diana.
26 years ago - Hippolyta grants Diana an enchanted mirror that gives her a playmate named Donna, not knowing that the girl in the mirror would be granted the soul of her unknown second daughter.
22 years ago - Hippolyta summons the Amazons to defend Themyscira when Dooms Doorway is opened. Diana tries to close the door herself but is not strong enough until she is assisted by her mirror-sister Donna. Donna is welcomed by the Amazons, and Hippolyta takes her in as a daughter.
12 years ago - When Circe is freed from her island, Ares leverages the armies of man against her. To stop the impending war, Hippolyta chooses to send out a champion, but forbids Diana from competing. When she wins in disguise, she ventures forth, becoming Wonder Woman, defeating Ares but choosing to stay in man's world.
11 years ago - Hippolyta, not approving of Donna's journey of discovery but understanding, grants Donna Troy her own magically enhanced Lasso.
10 years ago - Hippolyta is forced to exile Diana Prince when she leads Barry Allen and Hal Jordan to Themyscira to stop Felix Faust from siphoning the magic from the island.
6 years ago - Themescera is attacked and claimed by the Lost Amazons, when they are awakened by Ares after they are found by Diana Prince and Helena Sandsmark. Diana undertakes the labors of the gods so that she can breech the barriers of Themyscira and help Antiope to overcome Ares hold on her and free their sisters, allowing the lost Amazons to finally rejoin their the Amazons of Themyscira. Hippolyta is reunited with both her sister and daughter.
5 years ago - Plagued by visions of Diana Prince's death, Hippolyta stages a new tournament to select a new champion, and sabotages Diana so that Artemis wins the mantle of Champion. This inadvertently brings about Diana Prince's death at the hands of Ares, and Hippolyta ventures into the Underworld with Nubia as her guide to trade her life for her daughters.
Even if she wasn't a part of Wonder Woman's story, Hippolyta would be a pretty fascinating character all on her own. She's meant to be a character out of antiquity that has survived to this day, which by itself is interesting, but then you also add on the whole idea that she's the matriarch of a civilization made up entirely of women, which is an idea that's managed to be pretty narratively controversial over the years. Of course, there's also her role as the mother of Wonder Woman, which has changed so drastically over the years as this story has evolved, devolved, and then evolved again.
Hipolyta's Comic HistoryHippolyta is a core part of the story of Wonder Woman. She appeared for the first time in the same story as Diana; in All-Star Comics #8 in 1941. Hippolyta's role as the matriarch of the Amazons and the mother of Diana is probably one of the only elements of that origin story that's never actually been altered. The dynamic pseudo sci-fi world of Willaim Moulton Marston's original Wonder Woman stories is so it's own thing. It's very hard to explain Hippolyta's role as the figurehead of that society without seeing his particular blend of sword & sandals meets Flash Gordon meets Betty Page worldbuilding (to say nothing of Marston's particular ideas about the inherent goodness of expressing love through acts of submission). The image of a powerful woman holding court over groups of women who were submissive to her was a regular occurance... not just Hippolyta and the Amazons, but also Etta Candy and her Holiday Girls sorority... it was just how those worlds were built. Hippolyta herself was constantly being depicted as performing feats of vast athleticism as the Amazons filled their days with sport and competition, and she was consistently being depicted as both the best and most idealized of them.
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Marston stopped writing regularly for Wonder Woman around 1950, with editor Robert Kanigher taking over principal writing, which he'd keep doing for several decades. The tone of Wonder Woman's world didn't change overnight, but ideas of more traditional 1950's womanhood started to infuse the characters, depicting them as weaker, more prone to being obsessed with romance, changing their whole personality to suit a guy they just met... basically exactly what you might expect when written by 50's era male comic writers that aren't controversial femminist psychology professors.
There is a moment in that transition however, when a very particular switch gets flipped that indicates a change has happened. Right around issue #98 of Wonder Woman in 1955. The original artist Harry G Peter, who had been with Marston from the beginning, finally left the book. His signature style vanishing is immediately noticeable, but the big change is that the very next time Hippolyta appears, she's blonde. Absent any context, that wouldn't be worth noting, but given that it happened right in the middle of the larger shifts in Wonder Woman's story, it's hard not to associate the changes with each other. Just WHY the change happened is debatable; It could arguably be simply to better differentiate her from Diana, but this is also right around when the book started to focus more on her stories when she was a teenager (which would later be confused by Teen Titans creator Bob Haney as a unique character, leading to the invention of Donna Troy). |
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Hippolyta's role in the stories of this era largely became as a quest-giver, contacting Diana to let her know what her next task in Man's World would be... or else she was essentially the damsel that Diana would regularly have to rescue, since comics of this era didn't really seem keen to depict her rescuing her love interest. The Amazons disappeared entirely from Wonder Woman's story in the seventies as she was re-imagined as a powerless Emma Peel-style character, but upon their return their main characteristic was the near constant retconning of Diana's origins as writers tried over and over to find a version of her story that empowered Diana without also accidentally empowering women as a whole.
This changed in the 1987 Post-Crisis Wonder Woman series by George Perez, as he launched into a completely new take on the character. Hippolyta (Hippolyte?) is again brunette, and the world of the Amazons is again richly, sumptuously detailed, and unapologetically female. Diana is magically born of clay sculpted by her mother. Hippolyta is not exactly the radically athletc, sexual champion of Marston's stories, however, she's in fact more tragic. Her history a litany of tales of abuse and violence at the hands of man, infusing the Amazons with a sense of righteous anger. Still, at her core, Hippolyta's main role is as a strong, loving mother. |
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By the late 90s many of the continuity incongruencies surrounding the Golden Age Earth-2 characters being added to the main continuity were being ironed out in various standalone series. The fact that Wonder Woman was technically part of the original Justice Society wasn't really an issue; she, Batman and Superman were all around back then, but it was just accepted that this was no longer canon. Still, an interesting story was introduced that allowed *A* Wonder Woman to join the wartime Justice Society. In a storyline where Diana had ascended to godhood, Hippolyta took her daughter's place as Wonder Woman as an act of penance, and during that story she was actually sent back in time. Upon her return to our time she was briefly a member of both Grant Morrison's modern JLA and James Robinson & Geoff John's modern JSA before Diana's return.
2011s New 52 saw a big retcon of Wonder Woman's backstory, suggesting that she was actually the daughter of Zeus, and that Hippolyta had lied to her about her origins (which is actually used in the otherwise excellent Wonder Woman movie). The series also introduces some retcons to the Amazons that I won't go into, but that are so damaging they border on character assassination. In 2016 we got a NEW retcon by Greg Rucka, suddenly treating the world of Themyscira and the Amazons with incredibly delicate consideration in such a huge departure from the previous series it's almost whiplash inducing. Rucka brought the core of Hippolyta and Diana's relationship back to center, making it clear that whatever else was going on, these characters loved each other. |
Our Hippolyta StoryWith so many versions of Wonder Woman's origin story out there that vary from subtle changes to entire continuity rewrites, we're left with a weird blank slate as to just who Hippolyta is, and how the events of her life play out. We're partial to the story as depicted in George Perez's run, but skewing closer to Greg Rucka's Rebirth era characterization for the Amazons. This means that the Amazons were all women murdered by men across history, saved in the well of souls, and given life and purpose by the Greek Goddesses. While we did keep Hippolyta's betrayal at the hands of her lover as a reason for the Amazon's retreat to their magical island, we used Ares for that role instead of Hercules.
The idea that Hippolyta is the one who saves a plane-crashed Steve Trevor, who leaves the island for Man's World, and winds up fighting alongside both Trevor as he works as a spy during World War II, and also alongside the JSA... I absolutely understand that it feels awkward to some folks, but honestly once you allow it to happen it fits everything together SO well. She doesn't need to wear the costume or even use the title Wonder Woman, and it allows so many of the tropes of Diana's story that don't really fit her modern timeline to work again; all of a sudden the invisible plane actually makes a weird sort of sense. |
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After the war she returns to Themyscira of course... and then we get into the question of how she becomes a mother to a daughter empowered by the gods. There is this constant need to make Diana be a demigoddess and daughter of Zeus... but every time they do that, whether they mean to or not, they're making Diana's existence and powers a boon handed to her by a man, and that undermines the whole concept. Hippolyta asked the goddesses for a child, and they instructed her to sculpt a child of clay, and then imbued it with life. The child is then given gifts of power from all the goddess patrons of Themyscira. I understand that this version of the story is esoteric, but it feels right at home in the world of Greek mythology, and also allows Wonder Woman to be born of, and entirely empowered by, womanhood. Which again... is the point.
This is actually where we finally arrive at Hippolyta's ORIGINAL role in Diana's story, as she presides over a tournament to choose a champion to go out into Man's World... and her hesitance to allow Diana to go makes even more sense, given that she once made the journey herself. She continues to be the voice of her people... forced at one point to banish Diana, but then overjoyed when she is able to overcome those rules and rejoin her mother and sisters. |
Hipolyta's SacrificeWe were always going to use the story where Hippolyta has visions of Diana's death and selects Artemis as a new Wonder Woman, only for Diana to sacrifice herself to save her, inadvertently making the original vision come true. Not only is the idea of a new tournament hugely comic-accurate (at certain points in the classic comics it was literally happening every issue), but it's also such a classic trope of these myths for a person to inadvertantly bring about the tragic events they foresaw by trying to prevent them. It's also great how this whole story elevates Diana so much, while also allowing Hippolyta to be the focus of the story for a bit. It's just a great chapter in the lore of these characters.
However, this did leave us in a real jam. There is a moment there when, if we want to bring back Diana... which of course we do.... then the most natural story to follow would be for Hippolyta to sacrifice herself to return Diana's mortality. It felt like such a pure and truthful moment, but this meant that Diana would lose her beloved mother, and that shouldn't be treated lightly. What we all ultimately agreed on is that Hippolyta is a far, far more important character than just the hero's parent. She's a classic mentor character, someone the hero strives to emulate, and continues to do so through their whole life. It's understood that, as the hero grows, there's a narrative need for the hero to ultimately surpass their mentor, which is why the death of that mentor is a fundamental part of the classic hero's journey, especially in relationships where the hero and mentor's love of each other is unwavering. In this way, Hippolya's heroic sacrifice for her daughter's life is a poignant capstone to a story fit for a character of Grecian legend. |
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