Wonder Woman’s TV Sidekick Got the Perfect Tribute in DC Lore

Through its short-lived Wonder Girl miniseries, DC Comics found a way to honor Wonder Woman’s first live-action sidekick. In DC’s comics, the Wonder Girl moniker has been used by three superheroes: Donna Troy, Cassie Sandsmark, and Yara Flor. However, the classic Wonder Woman TV series notably created an original character to fill the Wonder Girl role, which DC’s post-Crisis continuity found a clever way to reference.

Cassie Sandsmark and Yara Flor have fairly straightforward origin stories, but Donna Troy is notorious for having an extremely convoluted background, with various conflicting stories explaining her powers and relation to Wonder Woman. In many cases, Donna Troy is established as Diana Prince’s younger sister, having been created by the same or similar magic as her older sibling. The iconic 1970s Wonder Woman TV series avoided adapting the increasingly-confusing origin of Donna Troy by creating Drusilla, a new version of Diana’s younger sister and the show’s version of Wonder Girl.

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The six-part Wonder Girl comic series by J. Torres and Sanford Greene references the TV show’s original character through Cassie Sandsmark, who adopts the name “Drusilla Priam” as an alias. Cassie previously operated publicly, despite being the second heroine to use the Wonder Girl title, but her assumed name granted her anonymity for a time while, in a sense, canonizing a version of Wonder Girl named Drusilla. Fascinatingly, Cassie Sandsmark and the TV version of Wonder Girl were not the first Wonder Woman supporting characters named Drusilla.

The first Wonder Woman character named Drusilla was an Amazon who debuted in a 1969 Wonder Woman issue in the pre-Crisis continuity (Earth-One). The original Drusilla was not only a warrior but also a messenger with unique teleportation abilities, using them to bring Diana back to Themyscira when the island was besieged by Ares in a storyline. It is unclear if the Wonder Woman showrunners knew that they named their Donna Troy-analogous character after an existing Amazon, but the two have little in common other than their given name.

There is no counterpart for Drusilla in the post-Crisis DC continuity and the TV version of Wonder Girl is quite similar to Donna Troy, making the notion of bringing her into the comics redundant. Cassie Sandsmark, while a fundamentally different character from the original two versions of Drusilla, honors them both in the post-Crisis universe by bringing their name back into the Wonder Woman mythos. The Wonder Woman TV series is one of the most iconic adaptations of the Amazon heroine, so it is a pleasant bit of fan service for Wonder Girl to reference its lore.