Through Dirk I found this link to Alan Moore’s proposal for Glory, Rob Liefield’s Wonder Woman knock off. Since I’ve been doing an on again off again series on latter day interpretations of Wonder Woman, I was curious to read Moore’s ideas and see how he stacked up against Marston’s original stories.
There’s no doubt that Moore’s a smart guy, and he certainly keys into some of the things about Marston’s work that I like. For instance, Moore describes Steve Trevor as “one of the most truly pathetic love interests in comics” — and argues that this is a strength, not a weakness. Has anybody played Steve for mascochistic laughs after Marston? I don’t think I’ve seen it (certainly not the most recent animated movie where Steve’s an action hero and teaches WW to love (blech.)
Some of Moore’s other readings of the material don’t strike me quite, quite right though. In general, he does tend to pick out things about the original work that are fun or weird or entertaining — and then he suggests updated analogues that are almost but not quite as fun, weird, or entertaining.
–He mentions Etta Candy and the Holiday Girls as “sickening Nancy Drews” and points out that they could be used for humorous effect or (suitably aged) for a poignant touch. And it’s true — the Holiday Girls are completely bizarre. (Though they started in the 40s with Marston, not in the 60s as Moore suggests.) But the *most* bizarre thing about the Holiday girls was that Marston played them straight. Etta wasn’t there for laughs (or not only for laughs); she was actually frequently the hero, often tougher and more competent than WW, and always tougher and more competent than Steve. I don’t see any indication that Moore noticed that.
–Moore talks about the Invisible Plane, calling it “exactly the sort of lovely, pointless idea that I think we should encourage.” But then he goes on to suggest it be updated to create something which “fits more” with Glory’s mythological background. He decides on a Diamond Chariot, an intelligent crystal growth which can “reform itself according to any configurations that Glory programs into it.” Which is fine… but probably the most entertaining thing about the plane in the first place was its utter incongruity and awkwardness. Why do the Greek mythos Amazons have an invisible WW II plane lying around? Why is it invisible, anyway? Where on earth (literally) is she keeping it? Moore rationalizes the trope — but rationalizing isn’t necessarily making it better.
–Moore has got some fun villain ideas (the bondagey Venus Fly Trap, for example) but nothing nearly as weird as Marston’s female-gorilla-turned-into-a-woman, or the cross-dressing transgendered wizard character. (Though perhaps Moore would have come up with something nuttier if he’d gotten to actually write the thing.)
As far as the bigger picture stuff goes, the same thing applies: Moore does understand where Marston is coming from…but only up to a point. He says that “Dr. Charles Moulton was a barely suppressed psycho-sexual lunatic who [wrote] Wonder Woman with one hand in his pocket…” and points out how bizarre it was to have all this bondage stuff in a comic that was supposedly “designed by experts especially for the young and impressionable female reader.”
However, what Moore doesn’t seem to quite grok is that Marston knew this as well as anyone. Better than anyone, probably. You can go online and find quote after quote with Marston talking about how much he likes seeing strong women bound, how much he likes to submit…and how all of this relates to his feminism. (The top of this recent post includes a few examples of Marston holding forth.) In other words, Marston isn’t some weird idiot savant who didn’t know what he was doing. He put the bondage in there because it tied in (as it were) in very specific ways with what he thought about gender relations and with his (perverted, but real) vision of feminism.
So Moore goes on to say that this weird supposedly-for-young-girls-but-actually-stroke-material vibe is “one of the only really interesting and unique things about the [Wonder Woman] comic book…we’d do well to create a similar coy but suggestive edifice for the new Glory”
I think there are a number of problems with that comment. First, to say that the bondage/feminism is “one of the only” interesting things about Marston’s run is really confused — that’s the only thing in Marston’s run, practically speaking! That’s what it’s about! That’s the whole kit and kaboodle! Marston examines it obsessively, from every level, and very self-consciously.
The point here is in that second bit, where Moore says that “we’d do well to create a similar coy but suggestive edifice for the new Glory.” Okay…but Marston wasn’t about being “coy but suggestive.” He was about expounding a feminist/utopian philosophy which he was invested in for erotic as well as philosophical reasons. Moore gets the exploitation, but misses the rest of it — and so what he comes up with is “coy but suggestive”, with some bondage elements and eroticism and a semi-closeted lesbian admirer/companion for Glory. In other words, he wants to do somewhat subtle PG-13 exploitation — which is fine, and could be very entertaining…but I’d argue (and have argued recently) that Marston was doing something different. Among other things that “something” involved his compromised, bizarre, but genuine commitment to a female readership — somthing that Moore’s proposal explicitly doesn’t have (Moore says he wants to “prime the story with plenty of open spaces for the readers’ filthy, disgusting thirteen year-old mind to inhabit” — and I don’t think the mind he’s thinking of belongs to a girl.)
None of which is to say that Glory wouldn’t have been fun to read. There are even a couple of points where Moore’s series might have improved on the original: Moore, for example, actually seems interested in Glory’s secret identity, and was eager to write stories about it, whereas Marston (at least as far as I’ve seen) seems to have included Diana Prince because, well, super-heroes have secret identities, and it’s not too much trouble to put her in a couple of panels per story.
Overall, though I seriously doubt that Glory would have been as loopy, as funny, or anywhere near as good as those old Marston comics. It’s not too hard to be more self-aware than Siegel and Shuster and Mort Weisinger, and craft a series of Supreme stories that are able to encompass the joy of the originals and add some more thoughtful reflections as well. Trying to do the same thing with Wonder Woman, though…well, it’s not at all clear to me that Moore is more self-aware than Marston, and it’s entirely clear to me that his grasp of the material is less thoughtful and less original. Moore has done some things I like probably as much as the old WW comics…but Supreme wasn’t one of those things, and reading this proposal, it’s very hard for me to see how Glory could have been either. (It might have been the best take on WW short of Marston, I suppose…but I’ve been arguing at some length that second best Wonder Woman is not an especially high bar.)
And you know what? Even if Moore did somehow manage to write as well as Marston, Harry Peter’s art would kick ass on any lame-ass nineties super-hero hack who Liefield dragged in. (There’s a faint suggestion in the proposal that Moore was thinking of bringing in Melinda Gebbie to do some work on the title; I suspect [Update: on the basis of no actual evidence, I should add] that she’s the “Peters stylist” he alludes to. And she would be better than a standard super-hero artist…but she’s nowhere near as good as Peter himself.)
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I was hoping to talk about Promethea here as well, but this post is long enough already, so I’ll probably save that for tomorrow…or possibly next week, depending on how things go….
Update: A follow up post is here
Skimming the Moore pitch, it doesn’t seem to discuss the main modern era Glory story at all, which is much more of a love story than the pitch indicates. Maybe he hadn’t thought of it yet.
Here’s a desciption from mania.com:
“Gloria West is a waitress in a diner in New York who also happens to be a registered schizophrenic and who believes herself to be a superhero named Glory. Problem is, Gloria West really is the superhero named Glory. She’s also the daughter of the goddess Demeter, who allowed her daughter to share the body of a mortal and explore what it means to be human. However, neither Demeter nor her daughter is aware of he danger posed by Lilith, who has decided to destroy Glory using the only weapon she can against someone so pure of heart: love itself.”
http://www.mania.com/glory-1_article_32357.html
“I think there are a number of problems with that comment. First, to say that the bondage/feminism is “one of the only” interesting things about Marston’s run is really confused — that’s the only thing in Marston’s run, practically speaking!”
Well, I’m not really that familiar with Marston’s original run, but I thought something which Moore doesn’t address in the proposal and Moore only slightly touches on and doesn’t follow through on in the two issues he wrote is that the Glory/ Wonder Woman setup uses Messianic imagery.
Superman is now recognized, especially after the 1978 picture, as a messianic figure, sent from a technological Utopia to save us all. The man of tomorrow, representing, dare I say, the “male” attribute of reason.
Wonder woman/ Glory can be seen as an alternative version of a Messiah, a sort of new age figure sent to us from a mythological utopia to save us, embracing “female” characteristics of love and emotional harmony.
While Superman relates to ideals of American innovation, reason, and progress, Wonder Woman represents a return to spirituality, and perhaps, the rescuing of WWII era man’s world through society getting in touch with its feminine side.
This isn’t a big part of Moore’s Glory, but in her origin story her Goddess mother sends her to WWII era America to specifically help the allies defeat Hitler.
Glory’s mother says something along the lines of “The Gods have not interfered in the affairs of mortals since the Trojan war, but I have a mind to teach Hitler a lesson.”
A failing of what I’ve read of the Ruka run in my mind was that Wonder Woman was trying to preach new age values of peace and love to man’s world, but her mythology was filled with insane, inbred lunatics causing catastrophes.
Humanity should run like heck from Wonder Woman, who might be a nice person individually, but who brings this awful baggage alongside her.
To some extent, Moore symbolically avoids this problem, by having Lilith represent the sins of the material world, and associating the villain with hell rather than heaven. The Wonder Woman version of heaven is amoral. The Glory one can represent heavenly enlightenment and all of that stuff Moore touch on in Promethea.
"coy but suggestive"–Moore says the tone of the piece should be coy but suggestive…as early WW stories are. Noah, you say they aren't, but surely they are. That is, while they ARE certainly about bondage and the sexual thrill of S & M, they never explicitly give us that, but rather come up with a number of ways to show "sexual bondage" without actually showing them. How is that not being "coy and suggestive." True, it's by necessity for Marston and by design by Moore, but nevertheless Moore does identify the tone of the series accurately. What seems less compelling for you is that Marston "really believes" in bondage as feminism while Moore is merely pastiching them because they were there in Marston. While the tone of this proposal does seem to indicate that (Moore's knowing ironic tone and mockery of Marston), I'm not sure this is actually true. Given Moore's own consistent preoccupation with S & M, power and sexuality, and feminism (in nearly everything he's written), I find it hard to think that Moore's Glory wouldn't have been "honestly" engaged with these issues (not merely coy, not merely pastiche)…and quite conceivably much better than Promethea. In Glory, he seemed to want to adhere to a Silver Age model of coherent single issue stories that explore these issues while still being "fun." Promethea dumped the "fun" in favor of preaching mystical ideas and suffered because of it.
Hey Pallas. That sounds promising; as I said, focusing on the secret identity might really have been the way to go.
The messianic tinge to Wonder Woman is wrapped up (I keep doing that) in the bondage and gender politics. She’s supposed to teach men to be true men by teaching them to submit (and bring them to love by defeating the axis — it’s cool that Moore caught that bit.)
WW’s mission has never really made sense after Marston, because of the loss of the WW II setting and because nobody else had Marston’s cranky gender politics.
Eric, it’s just weird for me to think of the WW stories as coy. They are obsessive about their kink, and quite explicit — lots and lots and lots of spanking, for example. It’s not actually porn — no naughty bits — but it’s not really teasing either, in the sense that it delivers the thrill Marston was into over and over and over again.
It’s possible Moore’s version would have been better than his proposal…but the proposal’s all we’ve got to go on (except for the couple of issues which I would certainly like to read, but haven’t.)
There’s spanking and then there’s spanking. Giving one is precisely being coyly suggestive about the other.
Long Moore interview today at CBR about the new installment of LoEG, coming out end of month. I’m optimistic that it’s more comics/less endless summarizing than Black Dossier…but perhaps that’s just my own inner optimism speaking.
Eric, the point is that for Marston, the spanking or the bondage isn’t pointing coyly or suggestively somewhere else — it’s the point. The images of women tied up and being spanked? He’s made it quite clear that those are what he wants to see. He’s not substituting them for other, more erotic images. Seeing women tied up is the erotic climax for him (as it were.) I guess you could say it’s coy as far as a reader who wanted to see nudity is concerned…but it doesn’t read or play out as coy or subtle. It reads and plays out like someone obsessively reiterating their fetish. There isn’t any smirk, or any subtle “oh, we know we can’t quite go there.” There’s just the compulsion, over and over.
Moore wants to use innuendo and subtlety to suggest erotic activities he doesn’t feel able to show. Marston shows exactly what he’s interested in. I think that’s a huge difference.
Right…to some degree…because even winking and saying “oh we can’t go there” would be too much for 1940’s DC comics. Instead you substitute clothed playful suggestively sexual spanking for unclothed playful explicitly sexual spanking. It’s still suggestive…and let’s say you were a grown man reading this thing (oh wait, you are)…then it’s coy in that you and the author know what’s “really” going on, but the target audience (pre-teens) doesn’t. So…no ironic wink, but still more suggestive than explicit…and given the situation, I would say still “coy.” Probably not worth arguing this out anymore though, I admit.
I’m with Eric. In recalling my limited exposure to the material (my barely-sublimated-bondage-fetish-comics were all by Chris Claremont. Hi Chris! Thanks!) I recall that, you know, WW gets tied up by the bad guy who wants to rule the world,or whatever. It’s hero-jeopardy in an action adventure. That’s coy compared to, “I want to tie you up, Wonder Woman, because it’s a hot, yummy turn-on for you, me and the old weirdo who writes us! Grrrrowl!”
I think Moore’s proposal is a great reading of early Wonder Woman in terms of mining it for ideas he wants to bring to Glory. I think your work, Noah, is more purely academic — let’s engage with this wacky stuff for the sake of understanding and appreciating it. Moore isn’t doing that. He’s looking for what strikes him as useful and fun for his Glory retread. And those differing goals, I think, may be the reason you find much of his take to be a little disappointing.
Hey Guy. The proposal is entertaining reading, and it is fun to see Moore figure out what he wants to use and how and why. As an artist, he clearly doesn’t need to be bound (ahem) by Marston’s original intentions. My point is that what Marston is doing is more interesting than what Moore turns it into. I’ll elaborate on that if I ever manage to write that post about Promethea.
I did a new post about the coy question; it’s here