During the Justice League’s most trying times, Wonder Woman often serves as a conduit for parallels in Greek history and myth, at least when Geoff Johns writes her. The year-long Darkseid War(2015-2016) was one such event where the superheroes and villains of earth watched helplessly as two gods—the Anti-Monitor and Darkseid—battled it out. The effects rocked the DC Comics universe.
Wonder Woman acted as the reader’s narrator for the conflict and she remarkably didn’t describe any of the events in the panels, but instead evoked Homer. ((The comic book spells it as “straight,” but I corrected it for this post.))
There were once two sea monsters that guarded the Strait of Messina.
Charybdis hid in the darkness of the sea, its mouth formed a whirlpool on the surface, lined with rows of razor-sharp teeth that would tear a man to shreds.
On the other side of the strait there was Scylla. A six-headed monster whose heads would fight over the men it caught.
Odysseus had to pass through the Strait of Messina between the two monsters.
But they were too close to avoid both of them.
So he had to make a choice.
What was the lesser evil?
Which monster did Odysseus choose?
Odysseus and the Strait of Messina
Wonder Woman’s story comes directly from book 12 of Homer’s Odyssey where the protagonist—Odysseus—recounts how 10 years after the Trojan War, he was still trying to make his way back home to Greece. After blinding a cyclops, surviving Hades, bedding a goddess, and withstanding sirens, his men still had to sail through the Strait of Messina.
Before he arrived at the impasse, the goddess Circe gave him intelligence on the two monsters awaiting him. Homer tells us that Charybdis resided under fig trees with thick foliage and
sucks down the black water.
For three times a day she flows it up, and three times she suck it
terribly down; may you not be there when she sucks down the water,
for not even the Earthshaker could rescue you out of that evil. (Homer, Odyssey 12.104-107)
On the other side was Scylla who
has twelve feet, and all of them wave in the air. She has six
necks upon her, grown to great length, and upon each neck
there is a horrible head, with teeth in it, set in three rows
close together and stiff, full of black death. Her body
from the waist down is holed up inside the hollow cavern,
but she holds her heads poked out and away from the terrible hollow,
and there she fishes, peering all over the cliffside, looking
for dolphins or dogfish to catch or anything bigger,
some sea monster, of whom Amphitrite keeps so many;
never can sailors boast aloud that their ship has passed her
without any loss of men, for with each of her heads she snatches (12.89-99)
Although Wonder Woman presented Odysseus’s situation as a choice between two evils, Circe warned there was no choice—face Scylla, because “it is far better to mourn six friends lost out of your ship than the whole company” (12.109-110). Odysseus questioned whether he could fight Scylla, but Circe mocked him, “Will you not give way to even the immortals?”—emphasizing that men in his crew would all die.
The sight of Charybdis and Scylla was much more horrifying than Circe warned, as Charybdis
made her terrible ebb and flow of the sea’s water.
When she vomited it up, like a caldron over a strong fire,
the whole sea would boil up in turbulence, and the foam flying
spattered the pinnacles of the rocks in either direction;
but when in turn again she sucked down the sea’s salt water,
the turbulence showed all the inner sea, and the rock around it
groaned terribly, and the ground showed at the sea’s bottom,
black with sand; and green fear seized upon my companions. (12.236-243)
Heading instead toward Scylla, who predictably snatched up six men from the crew, Odysseus watched helplessly, as he
saw their feet and hands from below, already lifted
high above me, and they cried out to me and called me
by name, the last time they ever did it, in heart’s sorrow.
And as a fisherman with a very long rod, on a jutting
rock, will cast his treacherous bait for the little fishes,
and sinks the horn of a field-ranging ox into the water,
then hauls them up and throws them on the dry land, gasping
and struggling, so they gasped and struggled as they were hoisted
up the cliff. Right in her doorway she ate them up. They were screaming
and reaching out their hands to me in this horrid encounter. (12.248-257)
Odysseus confessed that it “was the most pitiful scene that the eyes have looked on in my sufferings” (12.258-9)
Wonder Woman and Odysseus’s “Decision”
Back in the Darkseid War, Wonder Woman’s narration leaves Odysseus’s decision nebulous. Neither option was good and she is just as hopeless as the Greek hero.
What Odysseus decided doesn’t matter. Six of his men died getting through that strait.
Sometimes there is no escape.
Sometimes whatever you choose, you lose.
Those are the lessons of the gods.
They are far from perfect. They’re anything but.
They will turn on you.
They will turn on their own family.
On themselves.
The gods are at war.
And not all of us will survive.
The Darkseid War was a story-arc that DC Comics spent years building up to and a year telling. Sometimes when you need to emphasize the epic nature of your tale, evoking Homer can do the trick. Geoff Johns utilizes Wonder Woman’s mythic background to weave in the ancient poet’s words naturally, as if it were just a bedtime story on Paradise Island. The payoff is refreshing for the reader who doesn’t need meme text splayed across the page to know that the battle is an epic event which will be remembered in comic book history.
Reading The Odyssey and The Darkseid War
There are countless translations of the Odyssey. I used Richard Lattimore’s translation for the quotes above. There are newer translations, but I’ve always enjoyed Lattimore for Homer and Thucydides.
As for the Darkseid War, the full story spans a year across numerous titles and multiple spin-offs. However, at the heart of it was the Justice League. As such, the laymen can get the best parts of the story by starting with the two Justice League collected volumes (part one and two, soon available in a single Omnibus edition).