Posted in: Comics | Tagged: dc, frank cho, greg rucka, wonder woman

Frank Cho's "Genderless" Wonder Woman Pre-Canceled By DC?

On Friday, Bleeding Cool told you that controversial artist Frank Cho, whose antics are responsible for 30% of Bleeding Cool's total monthly web traffic, was "in negotiation" and "almost there" with DC on a new Wonder Woman comic, to start as soon as Greg Rucka stops writing his Wonder Woman comic. As you may also recall, if you follow Bleeding Cool's daily reports on Frank Cho (and if not text "CHO 'NUFF" to Bleeding Cool to subscribe to up-to-the-minute Cho updates on your mobile phone), Cho quit his job as the cover artist on Wonder Woman after an ongoing conflict with Rucka, and it doesn't sound like the two will be working together any time soon.

As to how the falling out occured, for some inexplicable reason that nobody could ever possibly guess, Rucka wanted to exercise precise editorial control over the covers drawn by the guy who has spent the past two years constantly in the headlines (on Bleeding Cool) for provoking outrage with his drawings of female superheroes. Cho disagreed. Rucka, as it turns out, must have had the better written contract, while Cho's verbal contract promising complete creative control and no interference from Rucka was less rock solid. And by that we mean that for all we know it was scrawled on the back of a cocktail napkin and actually if we're being completely honest it was probably just a drawing of a penis wearing a wool cap and glasses with an arrow pointing at it and connecting to the words "Greg Rucka," but – credit where credit is due – it was a very nice looking drawing of a penis wearing a wool cap and glasses. Bottom line: Rucka won the battle for creative control, and Cho walked off the title.

Soon after, as part of Bleeding Cool's special edition Bleeding Cool Presents: Frank Cho European Outrage Tour 2016 coverage, we learned that Cho told an Italian newspaper that DC was basically hanging out outside his bedroom window holding a boom box over its head and begging him to come back and take over Wonder Woman:

They want me back to Wonder Woman as soon as possible, as soon as the writer is gone. So that's why I've already written a Wonder Woman story to go so that as soon as the writer is gone and I'm pretty sure DC and Marvel want me to draw and it makes sense. It really all the projects kind of play to my strengths as an artist, but at this point of my life I want to write and draw my own stuff. So that's why I pitch the Wonder Woman story to DC and they really liked it and they said "All right it's not an origin story, it's actually a fun action story" so that's why they picked it up right away. Or they will.

And that comic, Cho promised, would be "genderless."

And all these female political agenda I'm not even addressing that. She's Wonder Woman, where there's a bad guy she's gonna fight the bad guy and beat him. That's all it is. That's what comic books should be.

You know. Like Watchmen.

Anyway, a monkey wrench seems to have been thrown into these plans, because a new report from CBR says DC is denying the story, claiming that they have not in fact been conspiring with Frank Cho.

Despite a report stating otherwise, a DC Comics spokesperson tells CBR there are "no current plans" for a Wonder Woman project by Frank Cho.

So what's going on here? Is somebody lying? Is DC playing semantics with the "no current plans" statement, avoiding addressing future plans? Are they actually courting Cho behind Rucka's back, and trying to keep it a secret? Was Cho talking to the same guy at DC who promised him he wouldn't have to do what Rucka tells him if he signed on for Wonder Woman covers? Because that guy is clearly not reliable about this sort of thing. Does Cho hallucinate Dan Didio every time he goes to the bathroom, like Christian Slater talks to Elvis in True Romance, and are all of Cho's DC contract negotiations therefore taking place with a phantom Didio who is unable to make legally binding agreements because he is just a manifestation of Cho's own psyche, and he just keeps saying things like, "Frank, I gotta hand it to you, you were cooler than cool?" When is Frank Cho going to put out another sketch cover so that Bleeding Cool can meet our Q4 click goals?

We don't know the answer to these questions right now, but we feel confident that we can probably get to the bottom of it with twenty, maybe twenty five more articles published over the next couple of weeks, utilizing top notch journalistic techniques such checking out Frank Cho's Facebook page and then waiting a little while and hitting refresh if he hasn't done anything particularly juicy yet, because eventually he will get around to it. Stay tuned to Bleeding Cool, your number one outlet for all things Frank Cho, for updates on this story, updates on those updates, and updates about the updates about the updates.

Until then, here's something outrageous Frank Cho posted on Facebook this weekend. Enjoy, and please share this article lots of times on social media because if Bleeding Cool doesn't get a certain amount of web traffic from Frank Cho stuff this month they may kill one of the writers to make an example for the rest, and I don't want that to be me. I'm too young to die, and I can write Frank Cho articles with the best of them! See?

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