Etta Candy Is Wonder Woman's Invaluable BFF

There's a lot of focus on Wonder Woman the character right now and it might be easy to forget that she is not the only woman who appears in the film Wonder Woman. In fact, in one of the earlier trailer for Wonder Woman, Etta Candy is introduced. As it happens, Etta Candy is in the Wonder Woman comics, and she's so much more than a sidekick to our favorite Themysciran warrior. Don't write off Etta just because she's introduced as Steve Trevor's secretary in Wonder Woman; a long comics history proves that she is an indispensable hero in her own right.

In the long history of Wonder Woman as she exists in the DC Comics, there have been many versions of her character. The same goes for Etta Candy, who has existed in many different forms and had various similar but different origin stories over the preceding decades. During the Golden Age of DC Comics, Etta was actually a college girl who helped Wonder Woman on missions. According to the Golden Age Etta Candy DC comics wiki, she was part of a girl squad known as the Holliday Girls. Led by Etta, these co-eds were actually a group of sorority ladies who served as backup for Wonder Woman after meeting her (presumably when Diana arrived on U.S. soil). What becomes clear in the Golden Age is that Etta has always been a necessary friend and sidekick to Wonder Woman, as she provides some insight into the intricacies of modern American life and she's constantly ready and willing to help the hero fight off her enemies.

In the Silver Age Etta Candy comic book storyline, the focus is more on her time spent working in the U.S. Army during World War II. In this version of Etta Candy's life, she met Wonder Woman while an undergrad at Holliday College and the two women went on to work in the Air Force, but Etta didn't know Wonder Woman's true identity.

What's very interesting and true to the feminist underpinnings of the Wonder Woman comics is that Etta Candy has always had an active and vibrant love life. While it has never been Etta's function to merely exist for the pleasure of men or as a one-track female character, we do see that she gets to be the focus of her own romances, much in the way Wonder Woman gets to indulge in romance at various points. As the Golden Age DC Comics wiki states, Etta Candy dated a Hungarian Prince, a fella named Oscar Sweetgulper, and was even in a relationship with her brother's friend. Better still, it's acknowledged in the comics that Etta Candy is a full-figured spitfire of a woman with her own agency and yet she still gets to fall in love. Hell yes.

It looks like Wonder Woman will be incorporating a bit of Etta Candy's established modern characterization, including the fact that she is Steve's secretary and she is a female companion and aide for Wonder Woman. However, fans will have to imagine what could have been since we most likely won't see Etta and Steve hook up, which is definitely what happens in the comics.

Luckily, it looks like the Wonder Woman film is also preserving Etta's readiness to fight (in one trailer, she tells Wonder Woman she loves to engage "in a bit of fisticuffs") and is just as excited to establish her independence, like her new Themysciran BFF. All things considered, count me all the way in for Etta Candy.