Welcome to Pleistocene Park: The Inside Secrets of Colossal Biosciences

This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. In a remote corner of a laboratory in Dallas, scientists stare intensely at a tinamou egg resting on the counter. The tinamou, for the record, is a plump and endangered bird found in Central and South America […]

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Who is Wonder Man? If you’re not a fan of Marvel Comics, you may have been asking that question ever since you heard about the upcoming MCU miniseries. Well, now that Marvel’s released the first teaser for the show, that question has several new layers of meaning.

The teaser sets up the world of Wonder Man, in which the titular hero is the star of a cult sci-fi series from the ’60s or ’70s, something in the vein of Star Trek: The Original Series. When a reclusive European filmmaker called Von Kovacs (Zlatko Burić, recently seen playing a political allegory in Superman) decides to revive the character for a new movie, out-of-work actor Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) sees a chance at stardom.

Just based on this teaser, Wonder Man is swerving pretty hard from the character’s comic book origins. Created by Stan Lee, Don Heck, and Jack Kirby, Wonder Man first appeared as a musclebound member of Masters of Evil in 1964’s Avengers #9. Wonder Man dies in the battle, but not before he realizes that he’s been duped by Baron Zemo to fight against the Avengers and helps Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. He stays dead for a long time, even if Ultron later uses his brain patterns to help create Vision.

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Eventually, Wonder Man comes back as an ionic being and properly joins the Avengers, where he becomes best friends with the X-Man Beast, and later the West Coast Avengers. Along the way, Wonder Man has a stint as a Hollywood stunt man, a strange storyline that clearly inspired the Wonder Man TV series.

Outside of the Hollywood setting, very little of that comic book origin shows up in the teaser. However, footage of the original Wonder Man movie does see the hero wearing a variation of the red and green duds that Williams dons in his first appearance.

Thin on comic book references though it may be, the Wonder Man trailer is chock full of references–references to Marvel itself. The teaser presents a world in which everyone is tired of superhero movies, perhaps the purest example of the “world outside your window” that Stan Lee wanted the Marvel Universe to be. When a director of Van Kovac’s stature decides to take on the Wonder Man property, the public is baffled. Why would a true artist want to work with superheroes?

We get a little bit of Van Kovac talking about the modern mythology of superheroes, an argument common to many a comic book shop, and we also see young Simon Williams watching old Wonder Man movies, suggesting that the hero taps into something primal in all humans.

Will Wonder Man be able to make a convincing argument that Marvel is high art today? Or will its constant in-jokes make Wonder Man a true sequel to its last comedic outing, the divisive She-Hulk: Attorney at Law? We’ll find out soon.

Wonder Man releases to Disney+ on January 2026.

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