Today isn’t actually Mother’s Day yet, but it is May 1st, and that means a monthly theme image. This month’s image is of Queen Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons and arguably the greatest mother in comics. As the mother of Earth-1’s Wonder Woman (Princess Diana), Queen Hippolyta was responsible for many, if not most, of the major events of Wonder Woman’s life.
Queen Hippolyta took both the Amazons and their magic away with her to another dimension in the mid-1960s, leaving Wonder Woman without super-powers — just after the death of her love Steve Trevor, WW simply called herself Diana Prince at this time, ditching the glasses and donning a series of fashionable outfits while having adventures where she used her formidable martial arts prowess taught to her by an old man named I-Ching.
The good queen of the Amazons later resurrected Steve Trevor, who now had brown hair and was called Steve Howard. Unfortunately, Steve was killed again and was later revealed to be the god Eros in Trevor’s mortal form. Bummer. So Hippolyta, saddened at how grief-stricken her daughter was over having the love of her life taken away from her twice, did what any mother would do: She erased Diana’s memories of Steve.
Then yet another Steve Trevor — this one from a parallel universe (revealed to be Earth-S in Mary Marvel: Times Past, 1980: Prelude to Odyssey) — arrived on Earth-1 and fell in love with Diana. So Queen Hippolyta got the goddess Aphrodite to alter the memories of the entire world just so that this Steve Trevor could continue the life of the previous Steve Trevor(s) without being hung up on that whole died twice thing. This Steve Trevor managed to do what the other two Steves never could — marry Wonder Woman. Unfortunately, Wonder Woman died only a few days after the wedding at the hands of the Anti-Monitor during the Crisis on Infinite Earths (she was devolved into the clay from which she was born).
Finally, as revealed here on the Five Earths Project in Wonder Woman: Paradise Lost, Queen Hippolyta re-formed her daughter Diana as an infant baby from clay with the help of the goddess Aphrodite. Without telling her adopted daughter, Donna Troy (Wonder Girl of the Teen Titans), about it, she designated her other daughter Nubia (Diana’s black twin sister who was raised by the god Mars) to be the new Wonder Woman. This led to a confrontation between Donna and Hippolyta in which Donna learned that Diana was not dead but was now a baby girl once more, then a confrontation between Donna and Nubia, in which the two Amazon sisters made peace.
What is Queen Hippolyta up to these days on Earth-1? She’s still raising little Princess Diana, while Nubia continues as Wonder Woman and Donna has ditched her old Wonder Girl name to take up her own WW-inspired career as Artemis. As revealed in a new story by Libbylawrence at the Earth-1 After the Crisis group, the Cassandra Sandsmark of Earth-1 has now become a new Wonder Girl. We hope to have that story published here soon.
Oh, and as for what happened to the third Steve Trevor? He disappeared at the beginning of Paradise Lost, only to reappear in an Earth-2 Wonder Woman story called Wonder Woman: It’s a Wonderful Life, where it is revealed that he is happily remarried to the Wonder Woman of Dimension X. It’s only fitting that one duplicate married another duplicate.