Doctor Poison
DC Comics Villain
Doctor Poison is a fictional character appearing in DC Comics publications and related media, commonly as a recurring adversary of the superhero Wonder Woman. A sadistic bioterrorist with a ghoulish face, she first appeared in 1942’s Sensation Comics #2, written by Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston and illustrated by Harry G. Peter, and holds a distinction as Wonder Woman’s first costumed supervillain.
As the narrative continuity of Wonder Woman comics has been adjusted by different writers and artists throughout the years, various versions of Doctor Poison have been presented, usually as perversely cruel toxicologists of Japanese descent. There have been at least four different incarnations of the character since her debut: (1) the Golden Age Doctor Poison Princess Maru; (2) the unnamed Post-Crisis Doctor Poison and Maru’s granddaughter, first appearing in 1999’s Wonder Woman (vol. 2) #151; (3) the short-lived New 52 Doctor Poison, a Russian scientist known only as Dr. Maru, first appearing in 2016’s Wonder Woman (vol. 4) #48; and (4) Colonel Marina Maru, a Post-Rebirth reformulation of the character who heads an elite team of mercenaries known as "Poison", first appearing in 2017’s Wonder Woman (vol. 5) #13.
Elena Anaya portrayed the character in the 2017 DC Extended Universe film Wonder Woman.
Publication history
Golden Age publication
In her first appearance, Doctor Poison is presented as an ostensibly male figure in a hooded green surgical gown and black domino mask.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12963444. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1942, 1999, 2016 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Doctor Poison” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.