In this post I talked about Alan Moore’s proposal for Glory and compared it to the original Marston run. In particular I quibbled with Moore’s comment that the original WW was “coy but suggestive.”
A couple folks in comments argued that the original WW was in fact coy. Eric B. says
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.
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!”
Both of these comments miss the point, I think. The books are explicit. Marston is a bondage fetishist and he’s serving up bondage. If you asked Marston whether he would rather get off by looking at pictures of people who are naked and not tied up, or people who are clothed and tied up, I am quite quite sure he would tell you clothed and tied up, every time. If you asked Marsten whether he would rather show look at pictures of people clothed and tied up or pictures of people naked and having sex, I’m willing to bet he would say he would rather look at pictures of people who are clothed and tied up. If you asked him whether he would rather look at people who are naked and tied up or read an elaborate narrative about bondage and dominence which narratively requires the characters to be clothed — well, narrative fantasy is really, really important to masochists. I think WW is Marston’s erotic fantasy…not something like his erotic fantasy, not pointing to or suggesting an erotic fantasy, but his erotic fantasy, period. There’s no feeling of something held back in the WW comics; no sense that the real sensual pleasures are being deferred to heighten tension or for censorship reasons. The obsessive reiteration of a fetish isn’t coy or disingenuous. It’s a really different mindset to say with Moore, in the one case, “I’m going to cutely suggest situations which I find sexually stimulating, but hold something back” and, in the other, with Marston, to say, “I’m going to fill a book by obsessively repeating the situations– the very ones — that I find sexually stimulating.”
I think my commenters and Moore, are somewhat thrown off by the fact that they don’t share the fetish. As it happens, I don’t share the fetish either — but Marston is clear both in his other statements and in the book itself about what his intentions are.
I guess you could say, well, *Marston* may not be coy, but the reader will perceive it as coy or suggestive. I still don’t see it, though. “Coy” is about being in control — which is certainly an important aspect of Moore’s art. Obsession is about not being in control; about submitting. Marston’s WW feels obsessive in its repetition, its outlandishness, its monomania, and its philosophical integration, it doesn’t feel like he’s placing this stuff out there to tantalize *you*. It feels like he’s caught up in it; like he can’t stop and doesn’t want to. In the way he blatantly, obsessively puts his fetishes out there, he’s much more like R. Crumb than he is like Moore’s Cobweb.
Update: In other-people-who-disagree-with-me news, Bluefall has an impassioned post about the coolness of truth and how I denigrated same when I said that WW’s lasso of truth was better when it was a lasso of control. I guess in response I’d say there are truths and truths, and that the psychotherapeutic new-agey self-actualizing that seems to carry the day in WW mythos doesn’t, to my mind, have the kind of power that Bluefall claims for it.
Also — and this was my point in the original post to a great extent — it seems like any self-knowledge worth its salt would be a self-knowledge that would allow you to figure out that, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m wearing a swimsuit and bondage gear…maybe I should put some clothes on.”
Relatedly, Bluefall seems outraged that people think that WW is a ridiculous character; she sneers at those who say “”this character fails” or “she shouldn’t be popular” like that’s actually going to make her fail or stop being popular,”
But…she can be a failure aesthetically even if some people like her…I mean, some people like anything, even Tom Petty. And moreover, she’s not especially popular. Sure, there’s a small fanbase, but it’s not big even by the standards of comic-book super-heroes. She’s got nowhere near the pop-culture cachet of Superman or Batman or Spiderman or Hulk or even the Flash.
To the vast majority of people, WW isn’t even on the radar. If she is on the radar, she’s a joke. And those people are right. The character is preposterous — gloriously so, I would argue, but still. I guess that may be an uncomfortable truth to face for some…but embrace it! It will set you free, or tie you up, or something.
I’ve begun printing up all of your WW posts and stuffing them between the covers of my DC Archive reprints. This way, when I die, my family will know why I had four (four?!) hardcover volumes of vintage WW.
Wait — on second thought, this’ll just make things worse, won’t it?
It’ll probably just make them think we were having an affair….
Noah, it looks like my post before didn’t take, so I’ll try again.
The 13 year old coy but suggestive thing in the Moore pitch was a bit of a red herring. Glory spun out of Moore’s Supreme and it noted he was working on Youngblood at the time. The coy but suggestive stuff really fit those two books better, as it reflected the silver age aesthetic Moore was imitating.
When Moore got down to writing Glory it seemed his views had changed. Issue 1 has a modern day sex scene in the end between Glory and the love interest.
Issue 2 has a flashback to an old adventure featuring the Danger Damsels where they are kidnapped, tied up and taken to the kingdom of “Slaveria” as part of a plot to force Glory to “submit” to the ruler.
Lilith disguises herself in the form form of a prostitute in issue 2 andis known as the whore of …..(some magical term i don’t remember)
As for the Danger Damsels, they are funny stereotypical characters, but its interesting that they would make a modern day appearance in issue 3, which was never released but here’s the solicitation:
“The demon Lilith has succeeded in transforming Glory from a regal demi-goddess into dreary waitress Gloria West! In her anguish over Glory’s
disappearance, Lady Demeter is blighting the Earth, resulting in mass destruction that can only be stopped by the combined might of the Allies and the
newly reformed… Danger Damsels?! “The World’s Lament” is the third chapter in the stunning revitalization of Glory by writer Alan Moore and
penciler/inker Art Thibert! Ships with TWO variant covers!
“
The Allies are the Awesome universe version of the JLA, so its a pretty funny idea to have them need to team up with the Danger Damsels.
Maybe this is just the anthropologist in me, but I really don’t understand how WW can be considered an “aesthetic failure” because her outfit shows a lot of skin.
I mean, if we are to believe she comes from a women-only culture (where there would probably be fewer taboos and shame attached to the female body), and one that has grown and developed without outside influence for a few thousand years, the way she dresses is really not all that unreasonable. (Also, her being fairly invulnerable doesn’t hurt, either.) (Ever see that Troy movie that came out in 2004? Brad Pitt wasn’t wearing much more than WW does, there.)
As for Wondy being a “preposterous” character, and completely irrelevant to society/pop culture in general, tell me why do tons of women (and men) still remember the crappy 70s Wonder Woman TV show so fondly, and why so many looked up to her as a hero because of it? Why did they stick her on the Justice League cartoon show? Why put her in DC’s new kids’ Superfriends comic? The fact of the matter is she is the most well-known female superhero, and she can be an inspiring, empowering hero the same way Batman and Superman can. And that’s not even counting the adult, comics-reading fanbase.
I think the trouble with Wonder Woman is that because her origin deals with a culture and a backstory that is not as simple as “my parents are dead” or “immigrant from the stars”. Telling stories about her background, or allowing her character to be informed by that background takes more effort, and probably forces the writer and reader to rethink elements of our culture, maybe even pushing it out of comfort zones.
As Bluefall says in her post, is Adam West the One True Batman? Certainly not. It’s silly and ridiculous, and contrast that with the Batman we’ve seen in comics for the past two or three decades and you’ve got an entirely different animal. It’s the same with Wonder Woman.
I really think you should have a look at Bluefall’s When Wondy Was Awesome series of posts (scroll to the bottom to find the first one and work your way up). They look at the evolution of Wonder Woman past the Marston and Silver Age days. That is where you’ll find the Wonder Woman of today.
Hey Pallas. Damn it, I would really like to read those. They’re not collected in a trade or anything are they.
Maddy, thanks for the link. I’ll try to check it out. I don’t think I’m likely to have my mind changed, though. I don’t think Bluefall and I have a whole lot of aesthetic common ground. As an example the Adam West Batman is probably my favorite iteration of the character (except for Bob Haney’s equally bumbling version.) And I find the mythologizing of Superman even more irritating than the mythologizing of WW (as I discuss in this post).
It’s true Wonder Woman has some level of pop culture appeal. Somewhat more than Aquaman, I’d say; somewhat less than Thomas the Tank Engine. I’m not sure what that proves, exactly, though.
I do agree with you that the background Marston gave to WW makes her extremely difficult to write coherently or successfully. So difficult, in fact, that I think the only way to deal with her is to say, forget this, I’m going to write something else.
If I get Maddy’s idea, she’s saying WW suffers from premise overload. The WW backstory doesn’t have the classic simplicity of “‘my parents are dead’ or ‘immigrant from the stars'”.If so, one factor might be this: a man back then had to talk himself into believing a woman could be heroic. The idea didn’t come naturally, therefore it got complicated.
I don’t want to get too far into Moulton’s philosophy, because I’m no expert, but it seems like he had done a lot of thinking about women by the time he invented WW. He had come up with very involved rationales as to why women were strong, heroic, etc. In the case of WW, his rationale included making a given woman the product of a different culture and species.
A woman creator might have been more straightfoward, like Kane/Finger and Siegel/Shuster. No emphasis on the character being an Amazon. She’s raised as a human who finds out she’s special.
The gods put her on earth with a mission and now she’s old enough to have it revealed to her. She’s going to guide and protect humanity using the special powers given her by Olympus.
Being an ordinary person born into a special mission seems like the same sort of big, bold myth found with Superman and Batman.
On the other hand, maybe a woman might say Paradise Island and Amazons were the whole point. So much of this stuff is subjective and individual.
Maddy wrote:
“Maybe this is just the anthropologist in me, but I really don’t understand how WW can be considered an “aesthetic failure” because her outfit shows a lot of skin.
I mean, if we are to believe she comes from a women-only culture (where there would probably be fewer taboos and shame attached to the female body), and one that has grown and developed without outside influence for a few thousand years, the way she dresses is really not all that unreasonable.”
Its not ridiculous given her culture, its ridiculous given the fact that she’s wearing an American flag.
Its also probably ridiculous in the sense that I bet most people who write her give her fairly unoffensive American values and do not simulate a foreign anthropological viewpoint. (For example, the lesbianism is implied but never shown)
Noah wrote:
“Hey Pallas. Damn it, I would really like to read those. They’re not collected in a trade or anything are they.”
No, but the two issue shouldn’t be hard to order online. I really dig the writing, (the art isn’t great, except for a sequence by melinda gebbie) but I also liked Moore’s Supreme.
If you liked Supreme (but it doesn’t sound like you did) you might want to pick up the Awesome Universe Judgement Day Trade: which is sort of, but not quite, Moore’s take on a Crisis on Infinite Earths type event.
Reality gets mucked with in the end, setting up Moore’s superhero universe for his Youngblood run (only 3 issues ever came out, with a 4th posted in script form on the internet) and Moore’s Glory run (2 issues released, presumably 2 more written since Avatar advertised it as a 4 issues miniseries)
Hey Pallas. I did like Supreme, actually. Not as good as the Marston WW run still leaves it room to be plenty good. I liked Judgement Day somewhat less, though I think it never crossed over into actually bad.
I’ll take a stab at finding those Glory issues….
Noah:
My pointing out Wonder Woman’s “pop culture appeal” was in response to your saying that WW is mostly unknown or a joke to most of the people who are aware of the character. I think the section of people view her as a joke is smaller than you believe.
As for writers being so befuddled by WW’s background that they don’t want to write her, I think Gail Simone and Greg Rucka would probably beg to differ.
Tom:
Yes, “premise overload” is what I was getting at and that’s a good way of putting it.
And it’s an interesting point that a man trying to create a heroic female character felt the need to make her background so complicated in order to justify her existence and heroism.
When it comes to characters as old as WW, Superman and Batman, and the nature of how their comics are created, with various writers and artists over time, we’re are a bit stuck with what we’ve got.
Wonder Woman is always going to come from Themyscira, but we can ditch the bondage fetishes and focus on the heroism and what makes her interesting as a hero, and maybe even what makes her interesting as a woman. After all, she’s from an all-woman island, and a place that’s a vestige of a culture that has long since past from the rest of the world.
To me, the fascinating part about Wonder Woman, in terms of sex and gender, is that she is coming from a place where she is loved and adored by all, where she has never been a second-class citizen, where she has never faced discrimination or bigotry. Then she enters the “real world”, where there are all those things, sometimes blatant, often subtle, and always complicated, and usually thoroughly embedded into the culture, exist in abundance.
Whereas it might take twenty or so years of life for me to become aware of things like sexism and misogyny, Wonder Woman would be able to recognize it instantly. So if we’re looking at her from a what-does-she-bring-to-feminism point of view, I think she’s very useful in that, and making people see uncomfortable truths about themselves or others would be a valuable component to that.
Maddy, the problem with WW aesthetics is that it doesn’t make any sense the same way the plane doesn’t. Why would an isolated island build a plane that don’t want to leave on? Why is WW the only person dressed in such skimpyness when everyone else on the island is stuck in Greek togas.I don’t ever remember Marston’s Amazons even wearing armor so the allsions to 300/Troy are modern rationalizations.
I also think the Lasso of Command is inherently more profound and dangerous than Truth. Why, bother getting people to admit their faults unless you want to better them? The truth becomes useless in the instance you come across Bluefall’s version of the Devil. He likes killing. That’s the truth. With the lasso of Command, you could dare to falsely make the Devil good.
I think there were 3 Glory issues released…#0, 1, and 2. I have them if you want to read them, Noah.
Hey Maddy. I really didn’t like the Greg Rucka WW I read. I still need to get to Gail Simone. I do have hopes for those; she sounded smart and funny in the interview with her I read recently.
And thanks for commenting. I can get a little snarky, obviously, but I do appreciate folks reading the posts and thinking about them. Take care.
Wow, this blog has gotten really popular ever since you started the Wonder Blogging.
Put me in the camp of lasso-of-control-is-better-than-lasso-of-truth. If you’re going to have kinky bondage in your adventure story, then why not go all out?
The Lasso of Truth embodies most of what I think is wrong with modern WW: writers have tried to de-emphasize Marston’s obsessions and water-down his craziness, but they can’t let go of the visual elements. I think there’s a huge incongruity between how WW looks and how she’s written today.
Then again, another approach might be the clean slate, but that gave us the White Jumpsuit Era, which was commercially and, in my opinion, aesthetically a failure.
Brigid at Mangablog,the new team at When Fangirls Attack and Chris Mautner over at Comic Book Resources have all very kindly started to link here with some regularity. So that’s probably the reason for the uptick in traffic.
I just wrote about the white jumpsuit era for TCJ. The one sentence version is that I think it did have its moments, but overall I agree that it didn’t really work.
“Outrage” is the wrong word. “Pity” is better. People who think Wondy is ridiculous or who think she has no relevance or think nobody likes her are, to me, as I said, the same as Creationists. They can be as fervent, frothy, and impassioned as they like, but what they believe is demonstrably wrong and shows an unwillingness to rationally engage with the world. Diana’s huge. Her comics don’t necessarily sell particularly well, sure, but no comics sell well, because the comics-buying segment of the population is a tiny, incestuous, intolerant little demographic that doesn’t like things that aren’t the precise set of straight white men in tights they grew up identifying with. What they like or don’t like couldn’t sell out a football stadium. (Literally. The #1 comic in March, Dark Avengers, sold 96,546 issues per ICv2, and Michigan Stadium seats 102,501.) That Diana doesn’t capture the attention or respect of a notoriously picky demographic smaller than a single college town is not much of a knock on her.
Wondy’s *iconography,* though, the number of people who recognize the name and symbol and think “hey yeah she’s awesome,” based purely on cultural osmosis and maybe half-remembered episodes of the Carter show or Superfriends or JLU, is vast and impressive, and could put millions of butts in movie seats with ease if DC ever got their act together to make a film. The Palinites even tried to cash in on it during a presidential election. Diana is very well loved on a cultural level. Pretending otherwise is just silly. Being offended by it and blogging a twenty-point screed about how ridiculous she is is even more so.
Creationists? As Tom would say, come on now.
You like Wonder Woman. That’s cool. I like her too, albeit in a somewhat different way. This really doesn’t need to be a life or death struggle.
I was just thinking that the outraged WW fans are way, way more friendly and tolerant than the outraged alt comics fans I have dealt with in the past. Yours is probably the most heated comment I’ve gotten, and it wouldn’t even make the list of the 50 nastiest things said to me when I made fun of Art Spiegelman.
In any case, thanks for commenting. Take care.
Noah, I love that this discussion is evolving past your initial response to me and Eric. But you’re makin’ quite an assumption about which fetishes I share.
More relevant, my point was that it doesn’t matter whether the bondage images Marston wrote into his comics were his exact and explicit turn-on. He didn’t (or the publisher didn’t) SELL them that way. If I buy a book called “Hot Women Hogtied” and it contains images of hot women hogtied, that’s pretty straightforward. If I buy a book called “Adventure Heroine Saves Democracy,” and in fact all her democracy-saving adventures involve hot women getting hogtied … I wouldn’t call it subtle, but I would say it’s something other than explicitly promised.
Marston and Co. were selling superheroic adventures, not even if in interviews or wherever he discussed his fetterphilia-filled philosophies.
(Your guess that Marston would prefer clothed, bound women to naked, untied ones seems silly. Dude might’ve preferred naked, bound women in explicitly sexual situations to coming up with reasons to have bad guys tie WW to a stake. But I don’t know what Marston would’ve preferred, so I can let that slide.)
Randomly: I’d like to go on record as saying that referring to Wonder Woman as “Wondy” always makes me absolutely cringe. This is probably some personal flaw I should work on.
On the lasso: While it’s (now) a Lasso of Truth, it contains still a small measure of command — you never see anyone simply take it off, or fight back, once they’re in it. In addition to “truth,” it still compels, dare I say it, submission. Only drawback to the modern Truth emphasis: when Byrne temporarily killed her, she would’ve become the Greek Goddess of Loving Submission, instead, and that might’ve been a hell of a read …
Hey Guy. My apologies for the assumptions about your kink. And for using “Wondy” if that was me; I agree that that’s egregious.
The thread has brought up some interesting stuff about masochism, bondage, and narrative which I’m still trying to think through. So I may try to reply to some of your other points in a later post, presuming I sort out what it is I want to say about all that….
Oh, and I just wanted to add to Inkwell — despite my somewhat frivolous first response. I’m really touched. Thanks.
Hm. I find my eyebrows raising a bit at your response to Maddy linking “When Wondy was Awesome”. To say “I’m not going to change my mind when I look at it” before you even SEE it…is…well, what? What’s the point of arguing with you then, or linking you on WFA if your perceptions are set in stone, can’t be changed and aren’t open to debate? Just because Bluefall has different opinions than you doesn’t make her posts any less likely to change your mind.
Also, your response to bluefall didn’t address any of her points. I didn’t find her comment heated at all (though maybe I just know bluefall too well. She’s generally very passionate about things, and I share that trait.)
Oh, and Pallas:
(For example, the lesbianism is implied but never shown)
is drastically wrong. It’s STATED, not implied, in Perez’s run, and we see Amazon couples sleeping together.
(Oh, right, I also meant to put that my “…what’s the point?” statement doesn’t mean I’m going to stop linking you at WFA, it was rhetorical)
Bookworm, I noted that bluefall’s post could have been a good bit more heated than it was. And I didn’t address her points because I addressed them in the post. She didn’t say anything new. I’m willing to repeat myself over and over with the best of them, but even I have limits.
I said I didn’t think I’d change my mind when I read the link because Maddy seemed to be suggesting that I would suddenly come to understand the beauty of the latter-day WW. The chances of bluefall causing me to believe such a thing are not high. I base that on the fact that I’ve read a fair bit of latter day Wonder Woman, and my opinion of it is diametrically opposed to Bluefall’s. (She seems to like League of One, for example, which I think is pretty irredeemably bad. Or, on another tack, she seems not to like Adam West’s Batman run, which I think is near perfect. She doesn’t seem especially interested in humor, which is pretty important to me aesthetically. And so on.)
There are lots of reasons to talk to people who you don’t agree with, even if you’re reasonably certain that they’re not going to convince you or change your opinion. You can sharpen your arguments, for example. You can learn things which don’t change your mind but are interesting in their own right (I didn’t know that Perez had explicit lesbianism in his run, for example.) You can gain new insights through the process of arguing (I get article or post ideas all the time form back and forth comments.) You can meet new people and have pleasant interactions with them (pleasant variously defined…I sometimes like a good troll slugfest, for example.)
As for why you should link to the blog…I can’t really answer that question for you, and, indeed, as you put it, “I find my eyebrows raising a bit” at the fact you brought it up. In any case, I really need to go to bed now. Take care.
Argh. Damn follow-up comment rhetoricals. Well I’ll just take my eyebrow down then. G’night.
She’s got nowhere near the pop-culture cachet of Superman or Batman or Spiderman or Hulk or even the Flash.Well really, how many comic characters have the ‘cachet’ of Superman, Batman, or Spider-Man? Not very many.
And the Flash?
Why don’t you hit the streets and ask every single person you pass ‘Do you know who Wonder Woman is? Do you know who the Flash is?’ and see which one gets the bigger response.
Batman has had a television series (and obviously a lot of movies). Spider-Man had a television series (and obviously movies). Superman had a television series (and obviously movies). The Hulk had a television series (and obviously movies). So purely by exposure, people will know of them. The Flash had a rather short lived TV series that likely most people are not even aware of. Wonder Woman had a TV series. No movie (yet).
If you were to hit the street again (after the Wonder Woman/Flash question) and ask people to name 10 superheroes, Wonder Woman is going to end up in that top 10 list. End of the day when you tally all the votes, she will be one of the top 10 characters named.
She is an icon. People recognize her.
So don’t try to dismiss her as not being popluar. People recognize her. She may not be one of the top selling comic books, but that is because of the main demographic of comic buyers. It is predominantly male. And there are a lot of males who just refuse to buy a comic strictly about a female character. That is the bottom line of it. So among comic buyers, her title isn’t going to be a top ten book. That doesn’t mean she isn’t a great character, that doesn’t mean she isn’t widely recognizable, it doesn’t mean her comic series is bad. It just means the main demographic that buys comics thinks Wonder Woman is a ‘girly’ comic and thus not ‘manly’ enough for them. They just don’t get it. And that is too bad because they are missing out on a high quality title. But you can’t tell them that because it falls on deaf ears. “Wonder Woman? That is a comic for girls.”
It isn’t. It is a comic for anyone who likes well written and well drawn superhero comics.
The Flash sells better than WW. I think he may be more popular overall. The difference isn’t really worth arguing about though.
In any case, just because people have heard of her doesn’t make her an icon or especially important. People have heard of Thomas the Tank Engine and Dora the Explorer. More people, probably.
Women buy comics in fairly large numbers these days. They even buy superhero comics. (Hint: they come in digest size and read from right to left.) They just don’t buy Wonder Woman in large numbers. There are various reasons for that…but it isn’t just because the comic is perceived as too girly.
I don’t get this thing where if you like something, you then have to insist that everybody else likes it, or that the thing you like is iconic or important. WW is a corporate-owned character with some moderate cultural name recognition because of a thirty year old television series and a 60 year old run of comic books. She hasn’t been all that popular in a long time.
But that’s no reason you shouldn’t like the comic or the character if she appeals.
I think the writer is used to arguing with people who really like the Flash.
I find a simple metric for cultural impact is performing a Google search and then looking at the result count.
Wonder Woman – 5,220,000
Dora the Explorer – 3,610,000
Thomas the Tank Engine – 2,370,000
What does this mean exactly? It probably means that 30 year olds with fond memories of Lynda Carter are a lot better at creating web pages than toddlers who are learning to read.
P.S.
The Flash – 1,340,000
Eat it, woman hating Flash fanboys!
The problem is that “Wonder Woman” is an intuitive name to search for, whereas “thomas the tank engine” is unwieldy enough that you may be cutting out some hits. Googling for Thomas and Engine gave me more than 7 million hits, for example…which may or may not be closer to an actual count.
Good on you for trying to introduce quantitative measures, though.
Hey, if we’re going to use metrics, number of web pages means a lot less than the data we can get from Google Trends. This will show how many people were searching for any given term.
Google Trends report on comparative search data for Wonder Woman, Dora the Explorer, Thomas the Tank Engine, John CalipariFlaws: I’m not using exact match.
We could also do an analysis for historical prices for advertising bidding on those terms with Google’s keyword tools in Adwords.
Hmm. Well, by that metric, Dora wins easily…but even she’s no match for Ashlee Simpson.
Calipari wins the “news reference volume” chart by a factor of 2, though.
What made Ashlee so huge in ’04? And why is Wonder Woman huge in Jakarta? These are probably rhetorical questions.
Paradise Island is just off the coast of Jakarta. The Amazons search for their own.
Ashlee’s first album, a huge hit, was in ’04, as was her reality series, according to Wikipedia.
What is news volume? I don’t even know what I’m looking at with those charts, I have to admit.
Now you’re just confusing me. Does this mean that John Calipari is more popular than the Flash?
News volume is the number of news reports indexed by Google News on any given day.
Brian, on the day he was announced as UK's coach, Calipari was so popular he tied with Dora the Explorer, the backup candidate. (Included for fun, & b/c someone in one of these threads mentioned college sports attendance).