A Drunk of Ice and Fire

In Justice League Doom, Batman’s contingency plans for checking the power of every other super in the Justice League are revealed. (The following are not spoilers, go watch JL Doom it’s really good)

Superman, meet Kryptonite

Flash must maintain his tremendous and mighty speed lest he harm himself and those around him.

Green Lantern is tortured by a morbid alternate future he cannot tear himself away from.

Martian Manhunter’s physicality is threatened, both his treasured and necessary ability to hold human form and his actual flesh by an elemental enemy.

Batman, tricked by the League of Doom, his plans stolen from him, falls prey to a spectre from his past.

Wonder Woman fights a bunch of cat women she hallucinates. 

No, not Catwoman in plural, Wonder Woman fights a bunch of women covered in fur with sharp claws and teeth. While the other members of the JL face existential threats, Wonder Woman fights overgrown fucking cats.

And not just any cats, copies of one in particular: her archnemesis Cheetah.

I hereby posit that Cheetah is a lame supervillain archnemesis, potentially one of if not the lamest of the Justice League.

From the outset to a casual observer, Cheetah seems to have been created so that fanboys could watch a literal catfight between two well-toned heteronormative females. She has “womanly” curves, long, flowing hair and feline features in the human sense: sharp and beautiful. The shading of her fur slopes back and forth, sculpting a visually pleasing shape, and her physique is taut and muscular.

Barbara Minerva (Cheetah’s alter ego) in the comics employs a blood curse to take the form of a cheetah lady, aided by a kinda racist attendant who reveres her and serves her in all her physical forms. She is brilliant, incisive and driven, but also exploits a developing culture to help her gain her own ends, usually ending in theft and brutal murder. Minerva doesn’t give a shit about the sanctity of human life. She is personified greed; even if her quest is only for knowledge, she will use blood and force to achieve it. You could say that she loses her humanity in Cheetah, but she never really had it to begin with.

So yeah, she is a foil for Diana, who is all things moral and empathetic. But Diana deserves better. In Perez’s first major arc of the comics, she has the God of War Ares, who spars with her mentally and physically as he threatens Man’s World. In War of the Gods, she has the nefarious sorceress Circe. Wonder Woman faces the pantheon of the Greek gods, Medusa and the brilliant, rich yet bitter Veronica Cale in Greg Rucka’s run (in some way Wonder Woman’s Lex Luthor, though I do not pretend to be a major scholar of Superman). In the sublime Hiketeia, Wonder Woman squares off against Batman himself and trust that it is a MUST READ.

And yet we are told that it is an overgrown cat who is her archnemesis. Does that say something about Cheetah? About Wonder Woman? About us? About George Perez, artists and writers who followed him in comics and animation and now feature film?

So why did I begin by talking about the other supers of the Justice League? Because they get cool ass archnemeses. Not all of them are cool, obviously, but the Joker? The Gotham rogues gallery in general? Lex Luthor? Vandal Savage? Sinestro? Maxwell Lord? Big Bad Darkseid? I like to make fun of Oceanmaster but he wields incredible power and has designs of domination. Barbara Minerva is a small woman, a mortal, who may have an intellectual capacity rivaling Lex Luthor but basically does petty crime that enriches her secret, secluded life. Where is the grandiosity? Where is the imagination? Not here, not with Cheetah.

I could sit here and refute my own points with some deeper thought and contemplation but I want everyone who is only marginally interested in or familiar with Wonder Woman to know that Cheetah is not the evil answer to Wonder Woman’s goodness. She should not be elevated to or be considered as Diana’s equal. She is a Big Bad and a boss, sure, but she is not Diana’s evil OTP. I really hope the movie makes them friends so that Wonder Woman witnesses her downfall and has to HELP her, not just defeat her. That would draw out Diana’s empathy which I believe is one of her greatest assets as a super and is something that Gal Gadot was able to convey in the first film.