Phil Jimenez – Greek Gods in Wonder Woman: Historia
Some conversations stay with you long after the recording ends. My talk with Phil Jimenez — artist, educator, and one of the most thoughtful voices in comics — was one of those. We sat down to celebrate Wonder Woman’s 80th anniversary and ended up going somewhere much deeper: into the ancient roots of mythology, the spiritual weight that superhero stories carry, and why a warrior princess from an island of immortal women might be exactly the icon our moment needs. Phil has spent decades pouring himself into these characters, and the passion he brings to the page is matched only by the generosity he brings to conversations like this one.
Phil’s collaboration with writer Kelly Sue DeConnick on Wonder Woman: Historia for DC Comics Black Label is nothing short of stunning — a book that treats Greek mythology not as dusty backstory but as living, breathing elemental truth. If you’ve ever wondered why these ancient stories keep coming back, keep reshaping themselves into capes and crowns and divine rage, this episode is for you.
Dionysus, Gender Fluidity, and the Art of Designing a God
One of the most electric parts of our conversation was Phil walking me through his approach to designing Dionysus for Historia. Dionysus has always been a shape-shifter in the mythological tradition — a god of transformation, ecstasy, dissolution of boundaries — and Phil leaned all the way into that. His Dionysus deliberately blurs and plays with gender presentation, drawing on both the ancient sources and a very contemporary understanding of identity. Phil talked about how the Greeks themselves understood these gods as forces that exceeded human categories, and how important it felt to honor that strangeness rather than sand it smooth. The result is a figure that feels genuinely otherworldly, genuinely divine, and — in the best possible way — genuinely queer.
Wonder Woman as a Mythic Response to Toxic Masculinity
Phil spoke beautifully about why Wonder Woman endures, and it comes down to this: she was conceived as a direct counter-mythology to the culture of domination and violence that has always surrounded her. Paradise Island — Themyscira — isn’t just a cool setting. It’s a deliberate utopian vision, a world imagined outside the logic of conquest and control. The Amazons don’t simply fight; they embody an alternative way of organizing power, love, and community. In a cultural moment where so many people are exhausted by the weight of toxic masculinity, Phil sees Wonder Woman not as escapism but as resistance — a reminder that different worlds are imaginable, that they have been imagined, that we can draw on them for strength right now.
Comics as Repositories of Spiritual and Mythological Memory
This is the thread that runs underneath everything Phil does, and he articulated it in a way I haven’t heard before: comics, at their best, are repositories of spiritual information. They’re not lesser versions of literature or film; they’re a unique medium that has inherited the function myths once served — holding a culture’s deepest fears and hopes in story form, passing them hand to hand across generations. Phil talked about how the Greek gods, when you strip away the soap opera drama, are really elemental forces: Hera isn’t just a jealous wife, she’s the burden and complexity of civilization itself; Aphrodite isn’t just romance, she’s the irresistible pull of connection and creation. When he and Kelly Sue approached Historia, they were asking: what does it mean to restore these forces to their full, terrifying, luminous power?
Joy, Community, and the Personal Stakes of the Work
Phil shared what Wonder Woman has meant to him across his life — as a gay man, as an artist, as someone who has navigated the beautiful and sometimes brutal terrain of identity in America. He talked about Provincetown and the LGBTQ+ community there as a kind of real-world Themyscira: a place of chosen family, of joy fiercely protected, of culture built on the margins and made magnificent. And he was honest about the tension between joy and struggle — how you hold both at once, how art helps you do that, how finding delight in the work of representation is itself an act of defiance. By the end of our conversation I felt genuinely moved, and genuinely hopeful.
Links and Resources
You can find Phil’s work at philjimeneznyc.com. Full episode page at bostonblake.com/mythic-podcast.
If this conversation sparked something in you, subscribe to the Mythic Podcast wherever you listen — and share it with someone who needs a little divine inspiration today.
