Nicola Scott – Celebrating Wonder Woman and Making Historia
There are guests who leave you feeling like you understood a story you thought you already knew — and then there are guests who make you feel like you were never really paying attention at all. Nicola Scott is the second kind. As the first Australian artist to become a genuine staple of mainstream American comics, she has drawn Superman, Batman, and more pages of Wonder Woman than she can probably count. But it was our conversation about what Wonder Woman actually means — as a symbol, as a piece of living mythology, as a feminist icon who predates the word “feminist” being in common use — that stopped me mid-sentence more than once.
Nicola’s passion for Wonder Woman is the kind that doesn’t perform itself. It’s quiet and deep and rooted, and it comes through in every creative decision she described, from her landmark Wonder Woman: Year One arc to the staggering artistic achievement of Wonder Woman: Historia: The Amazons. I think you’re going to love this one.
How George Pérez’s Mythology-Rich Reinvention Shaped a Generation of Wonder Woman Fans
Nicola traces her deep love of Wonder Woman back to George Pérez’s defining run in the late 1980s — a reimagining that leaned hard into Greek mythology and treated the Amazons as a fully realized civilization rather than a convenient backstory detail. For Nicola, that run was formative in the most literal sense: it shaped how she understood what superhero comics could do when they trusted readers with real mythological weight. Pérez didn’t just borrow the names of gods and monsters; he built a theologically and culturally coherent world around Diana, and Nicola described how that approach gave Wonder Woman a gravity that set her apart from nearly every other superhero on the stands. When she eventually got the opportunity to work on Wonder Woman herself, she came to the table with decades of that accumulated love — and a clear sense of the standard she wanted to meet.
The Female Gaze and the Creative Philosophy Behind Wonder Woman: Year One
One of the most fascinating stretches of our conversation was Nicola walking me through the deliberate choices she and writer Greg Rucka made on Wonder Woman: Year One — particularly around what Nicola calls the female gaze. She talked about how mainstream comics have historically depicted the human body, especially women’s bodies, through a lens calibrated almost entirely for a presumed male audience, and how she made a conscious decision to flip that. That meant drawing male and female characters with the same care, the same sensuality, the same physical presence and dignity. The result is artwork that feels genuinely different — not just aesthetically, but ethically.
Wonder Woman Historia, Transgender Amazons, and the Living Tradition of Mythology
If Year One was Nicola finding her voice on Wonder Woman, then Historia: The Amazons was her full-throated declaration. The three-issue series, written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, tells the origin of the Amazons in an oversized, painterly style that Nicola described as among the most demanding and rewarding work she has ever done. We talked about the decision to include transgender Amazons and nonbinary characters within the mythology — a choice that Nicola explained not as a modern imposition on ancient source material but as a natural extension of it. Mythology has always contained gender-fluid figures, divine transformations, and identities that don’t map neatly onto the binary. Making the Amazons reflect that felt, to her, more mythologically honest than leaving it out.
Wonder Woman as a Feminist Symbol and the UN Honorary Ambassador Controversy
We also spent time on Wonder Woman’s complicated life as a cultural symbol — from her origins with psychologist William Moulton Marston to her brief and controversial appointment as a UN Honorary Ambassador in 2016. Nicola engaged with all of this thoughtfully, neither dismissing the criticism nor abandoning her love for the character. Her view is that Wonder Woman is most powerful not as a perfect representation but as an aspirational one — a figure who keeps getting reinterpreted because the conversation about what women can be, and what the world owes them, is never finished.
Guest Links and Episode Resources
You can find Nicola Scott’s work at @nicolascottart on Instagram. Wonder Woman: Historia: The Amazons is available wherever comics are sold. Full episode page at bostonblake.com.
If this conversation moved you the way it moved me, I hope you’ll subscribe to the Mythic Podcast wherever you listen — and share it with someone who still believes comics are just for kids. They need this one.
