How many Amazon tribes have we seen?

[Lorendiac]

Here's my question: How many geographically separated "Amazon tribes" have existed in DC's regular continuity at one time or the other? I'm feeling the urge to compile a complete list.

Please note that I'm not interested in any "Indian tribes" who just happen to live in the Amazon Basin in South America. But if a comic book told us about a bunch of women, anywhere in the world, who explicitly called themselves "Amazons," then I'm very interested in hearing about them -- even if there was never any solid evidence that they were a long-lost offshoot of the Classic Amazons who were led by Queen Hippolyta for thousands of years.

For my purposes, I'm defining "in DC's regular continuity" as meaning an Amazon tribe meets at least one of the following criteria:

A) The tribe existed in the Earth-One universe of the Old Multiverse (Pre-COIE),
and/or
B) The tribe has been mentioned as existing within the "New Earth" timeline that became the DCU's mainstream setting after COIE.

(That means nobody needs to list every single time we've seen another "Elseworlds" or "Parallel Earth" variation of what I call the "Classic Amazon" culture; the one based on Paradise Island/Themyscira.)

To start the ball rolling, I'll mention three obvious ones (although I know there have been at least a few others). Then I'll sit back and let you, my fellow fans, mention anything else that you remember hearing about!

1. The Classic Amazons. Wonder Woman grew up among them. Pre-COIE, their home on Earth-One was called "Paradise Island." The Post-COIE version of the tribe usually refers to their home as "Themyscira." Either way, I believe they've been living there for over three thousand years, since the days when what we now call "Greek myths" qualified as "current events!"

2. The Bana-Mighdall Amazons. They lacked immortality, and moved around quite a bit over the last few thousand years, but managed to maintain a strong cultural identity as women warriors descended from a group of Amazons who had lost faith in Hippolyta's leadership way back when and struck out on their own.

3. The Underground Amazons. In an "Angel & The Ape" miniseries from the early 1990s, we learned that the Post-COIE version of Dumb Bunny of the Inferior Five is the daughter of a woman from a superstrong tribe of "Amazons" who live in a secret underground community. I don't think we ever got any further follow-up on the history, location, and other distinguishing characteristics of that tribe. (Probably because we've seen precious little of Dumb Bunny and the rest of the Inferior Five since that time.)

Note: Pre-COIE stories of the Inferior Five had stated that Dumb Bunny's mother was a former superheroine of the WWII era known as Princess Power, who was depicted as a blatant parody of Wonder Woman. But the Inferior Five and their relatives were eventually stated to exist on a different world in the Multiverse -- dubbed "Earth-Twelve." (Which made sense, since the Earth-One Wonder Woman wasn't constantly being asked by civilians: "Hey! Are you any relation to Princess Power, who served in the Freedom Brigade in the 1940s? Her costume looked a lot like yours!") I'm not sure if it was ever explicitly stated that the Earth-Twelve Princess Power had been born and raised in an Amazon community, just like Diana, but even if was stated, that still wouldn't belong on my list the way her "New Earth" Post-COIE tribe does.

Anyway, now that I've mentioned the Classic, Bana-Mighdall, and Underground Amazon tribes, I want to know what others you can remember! And as I said, if they claimed to be Amazons then I'll add them to my list to be on the safe side, even if you are very skeptical about whether they had any historical connection to the Classic Amazons.

 

[Tron Bonne]

2. The Bana-Mighdall Amazons. They lacked immortality, and moved around quite a bit over the last few thousand years, but managed to maintain a strong cultural identity as women warriors descended from a group of Amazons who had lost faith in Hippolyta's leadership way back when and struck out on their own.

Now, are these the Amazons that Artemis is generally associated with? Kind of like the evil version of the Amazons we all know and love?

 

[Lorendiac]

Now, are these the Amazons that Artemis is generally associated with? Kind of like the evil version of the Amazons we all know and love?

Those are the ones. The idea was that for about three thousand years, there was no contact whatsoever between the Classic Amazons, sitting on Themyscira ignoring the outside world, and the Bana-Mighdall, descended from Amazon "renegades" who'd lost faith in Hippolyta. The Bana were wandering around in Patriarch's World, lacking immortality, doing a lot of mercenary work, assassination-for-hire, etc. I think Diana (Wonder Woman) had never even heard of the Bana-Mighdall until she stumbled across their secret city in Egypt in the late 1980s.

But eventually a reconciliation was effected and the Bana-Mighdall were allowed to take up residence on Themyscira. Then, when Hippolyta insisted it was time for a whole new contest to see who would be Wonder Woman from now on, Artemis (the red-headed Bana-Mighdall with a huge chip on her shoulder) "won" -- except that Hippolyta had fixed the contest so the Wonder Woman who was destined to get herself killed several issues later wouldn't be Diana.

I hear that in Amazons Attack (which I haven't read), a Bana-Mighdall faction which might be called a "radical splinter group" of the original Bana-Mighdall were responsible for all sorts of nasty, violent stuff which made the U.S. government feel very, very threatened.