I recently finished Les Daniels’ Wonder Woman: The Complete History, designed by Chip Kidd. I did enjoy it. The book is definitely tilted towards the earliest WW stories, with lots of info about William Moulton Marston and (to a lesser extent) Harry Peter — which is fine with me. Overall, I could have done with significantly less pictures of WW toys and ephemera, but that sort of thing isn’t nearly as irritating in this context as it was in Kidd’s Charles Schulz book. Schulz retained control over his creation till the end and beyond, and was always careful to keep the licensing schlock separate from the strip. In that context, Kidd’s insistence on mashing the two together came off as deliberate sacrilege. Whereas, like it or not, WW long ago left Marston’s control and became just another piece of corporate detritus. That’s not Kidd’s fault, and while I don’t necessarily need to see the process reverently documented, at this point I can’t work up a lot of bile about it either.
Anyway, as I said, Daniels includes a lot of interesting information about Marston. One of the most entertaining revelations is that Marston was a big, fat, duplicitous, self-promoting snake-oil salesman. I sort of knew this was the case already, but I hadn’t quite grasped the extent of his shillishness.
For example, in an earlier post I discussed Marston’s essay in The American Scholar. In that essay, he argues that WW was more popular than male heroes because boys want to be dominated by a strong woman. In support of his contention, he wrote as follows:
After five months the publishers ran a popularity contest between Wonder Woman and seven rival men heroes with startling results. Wonder Woman proved a forty to one favorite over her nearest male competitor, capturing more than 80 per cent of all the votes cast by thousands of juvenile comics fans….They were saying by their votes, “We love a girl who is stronger than men, who uses her strength to help others and who allures us with the love appeal of a true woman!
This all sounded fairly dubious to me for various reasons (couldn’t it have been female readers who swung the vote?) I somehow hadn’t considered the possibility, though, that the vote had just been rigged. Les Daniels sets me straight by reprinting what appears to be the poll that Marston was referring to.
First, of course, it’s only WW against 5 other heroes, not 7…which could have been an honest enough mistake. The point though, is that this is a survey page which was printed in Sensation Comics…where WW was the star feature. The other heroes featured were the back up stories in the book, I believe. WW is even shown bigger than all the other characters — and she’s drawn twice. Moreover, anyone taking this survey is likely to be a Wonder Woman fan already. Plus, the heroes she’s going up against are all second stringer, or fourth stringers (the Gay Ghost indeed.) Thus, the survey shows us that people who buy Sensation Comics liked WW, which doesn’t seem like much of a news flash.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that WW wasn’t popular with boys; her books sold a lot of copies, and Daniels thinks the majority of that audience was male. But using the survey to suggest that she was categorically more popular than major male heroes is, it seems to me, deliberately deceitful. Moulton’s building his pseudo-scientific theories on premeditated blarney.
Furthermore, from Daniels account at least, this balderdash appears to have been extremely effective. Marston’s professional standing as a psychiatrist, and his sheer willingness to deploy that standing in all sorts of ridiculous way, gave him leverage that it seems like virtually no other comic writer of his day had. Moulton’s editors treated him with kid gloves. He had final say on scripts. He had final say on artistic choices — in fact, he hired Harry Peter himself and paid Peter himself, a situation which I imagine was virtually unprecedented. Marston apparently was very involved in the artwork as well; his scripts supposedly included detailed directions for panel content and layout. I doubt he was quite Alan Moore, but it sounds like he was closer to that model than he was to Stan Lee.
Marston did have various tussles with censors and with editorial. I was first inspired to start blogging about WW when I heard about one of those tussles: Marston’s editors wanted to tone down the series by having him tie WW up with things other than chains. What the account I read didn’t quite say, though, is that Marston won that fight. The editor suggested less chains, Marston said no way, and so the chains stayed.
And this seems to have been repeated whenever there was a battle over content. For instance, Josette Frank of the Child Study Association was employed to make sure that the comics weren’t too…well, just too. She pointed out, quite logically, that Wonder Woman “does lay you open to considerable criticism…partly on the basis of the woman’s costumes (or lack of it) and partly on the basis of sadistic bits showing women chained, tortured, etc.” Marston responded by calling Frank “an avowed enemy of the Wonder Woman strip” and by claiming that the strip was not sadistic because “binding and chaining are the one harmless, painless way of subjecting the heroine to menace and making drama of it.” He went on:
confinement to WW and the Amazons is just a sporting game, an actual enjoyment of being subdued. This, my dear friend, is the one truly great contribution of my Wonder Woman strip to moral education of the young. The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound….Women are exciting for this one reason — it is the secret of women’s allure — women enjoy submission, being bound…because all this is a universal truth, a fundamentla subconscious feeling of normal humans, the children love it….I have devoted my entire life to working out psychological principles…[and should have] free rein on fundamentals.
And free rein is what he got. The combination of professional credentials, high sales, and a very friendly relationship with his editor meant that Frank (in a decidedly unfeminist outcome) was essentially dismissed as a repressed harridan who was seeing evil where there was none.
I’ve compared Marston to artists like Henry Darger and R. Crumb in the past; creators who elaborated their fetishes into individual visions. Reading Daniels, it becomes clear that, in many ways, Marston was a lot closer to artists like Darger and Crumb than he was to the hired hands who surrounded him in the comics industry. Not because he had more genius (though I think in most cases he did), but rather because he was really in control of his creation in a way that most of his peers probably didn’t even bother to dream about. Marston did get script ideas and input from others (especially family members), but he — not an editor, not a censor board — had the last word on what went into his comics. In fact, when (I think) Gardner Fox wrote a solo WW story for Justic Society, Marston rejected it and rewrote it himself.
As this suggests, Marston was devoted to his character. In 1945, he contracted polio and was confined to a wheelchair. He did take an assistant, Joyce Murchison, who became a co-writer on the title…but Marston continued to write, to plot, to approve art, and to maintain control of the series. in 1947 he was diagnosed with lung cancer. But he just kept on. According to his wife he “wrote a script the week before he died. Two days before the end he was editing pencils, in writing so faint we could scarcely read it, but catching errors we had passed up.”
In short, Marston had a level of control over Wonder Woman, and a level of devotion to her, that none of his successors on the title could hope to match. Robert Kannigher, as editor and writer on the title for years, certainly had great control over the character — but he didn’t hire the artists out of his own pocket, and he couldn’t prevent her from being used by other creators on other titles, the way Marston could. George Perez obviously had a lot of affection for the character, but he certainly wasn’t going to work on her on his death bed; on the contrary he quit of his own volition to work on more popular titles elsewhere.
Marston was impassioned. He wasn’t a corporate drone doing a 9 to 5; this was his dream, which he controlled, and to which he was willing to devote the last days of his life. Everybody else who has worked on Wonder Woman, on the other hand, has been doing work-for-hire, subject to a string of corporate whims, in the full knowledge that at some point they’ll get a better offer (more money, more creative freedom) and they’ll jump ship.
Work-for-hire isn’t necessarily everywhere and always worse than creator-controlled work, of course. Still, looking at Marston’s WW and comparing him to others’ work , it’s hard not to agree with Marston’s editor, Sheldon Mayer. When it came to writing Wonder Woman, Mayer said, “there was just one right guy, and he had the nerve to die. And he shouldn’t have done it. “
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This post is part of a series discussing Wonder Woman, Marston, and other WW creative teams. You can read the rest of the series here.
Noah,
The more I read your posts, the more I dislike the good doctor. In a previous post, you called his writing concerning the attempted domestication of the child who threw pianos "vile". I have to agree, but you also quote his own words "confinement to WW and the Amazons is just a sporting game, an actual enjoyment of being subdued. This, my dear friend, is the one truly great contribution of my Wonder Woman strip to moral education of the young. The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound….Women are exciting for this one reason — it is the secret of women's allure — "
Simply put, breaking that child like it was a horse is not a blip on the screen, it's his philosophy. You point he kept control of the strip, well that's consistent with being a control freak. His Wonder Women isn't a call to girls to stand up, it's a call to boys to learn how to break the spirited philly.
Or I could be wrong, but I think he wrote strong women because it thrilled him to see them chained up, not because of equality. It served his needs, not women's. It was all about him and that's not good in my book.
I think there's more to it than that; he likes having men tied up too, and he ultimately wants women to rule the world.
But I can certainly see why he might not be to many people's tastes….
The more i read about Chip Kidd, the less i like him. Coincidence?
Now there I'm with you….
In retrospect, it's a shame the Gay Ghost didn't win.
You may note that in that ad Wonder Woman's head is double the size of anyone else's, plus she appears elsewhere on the page. Even if she weren't the acknowledged star of Sensation Comics, the ad leaves little doubt who the publisher wants the reader to vote for.
This is all presuming, of course, that it was ever a legit poll and not just a publicity stunt. I suspect the latter.
Hey Steven! I thought I'd mentioned the head size…? Maybe I dropped it in a revision or something. In any case, …yes, obviously it's a publicity stunt. Using it as scientific data was thoroughly shameless.
Though, admittedly, given the fact that he was living semi-openly as a bigamist in the 1940s, we already had a fair bit of evidence to suggest that shame was not a strong part of Marston's make up.
Hey, even is the poll was legit, so what. It's five guys against one girl. The guy vote was split up. For all we know she won by three votes.
I've been following your Wonder Woman columns with fascination. Always hated the character, but you raise many interesting points. You really don't have to look past the lie detector – itself rather a severe looking bondage device in its original configuration – to realize Marston was a self-shilling crank.
As for Marston's proclivities, I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, but it's hard not to suspect he liked being tied up and restrained, probably responded initially with shame, and egotistically concocted a bondage worldview that obviated any need for shame. So bondage – and the "freedom" that comes with it – becomes not his secret shame but everyone's secret desire, and the path to emotional liberation. (As with the jargon of most cults, we can assume he believed anyone who didn't like being restrained was simply repressed, and even more in need of "therapy." His creation of the lie detector suggests that he had at least some fixation on the notion of secret shame, inventing a (specious. if well-promoted) device that would bring secret shame to light and, from his perspective, begin "correction" of it.
Sheer speculation, of course.
But how about all them bondage covers on WONDER WOMAN comics, well into the '60s? Good stuff, huh?
Carry on.
Hey Steven. Those are interesting points. I think you're right that he was interested in shame…though I don't know that I'd draw quite the conclusions you do. He was adamently *not* a Puritan, in any sense — I think he wanted to bring secret shame to light because he thought it was exciting and that repression was bad. He would want people to act on their repressed desires, not cure them. (Foucault would have some things to say about that, of course.)
Marston's personal proclivities are of course not a matter of record — but I don't think there can be much doubt that he was into bondage. I don't necessarily see why the proclivity has to come before the philosophy, rather than vice versa, or all at once. And even if it does, I'm not sure that that necessarily invalidates the philosophy.
I guess I think Marston's a crank, and that crankishness is obviously tied (as it were) to his sexual proclivities, as well as his desire to make a quick buck — but despite that (or because of it, perhaps) I think he overall had a lot of interesting things to say about gender and sexuality and politics and feminism. I don't agree with all of them, but I'm not willing to dismiss them out of hand either (though I can see why others might.)
In any case, thanks for stopping by to comment! Glad you're enjoying the series, in any case.
"I think you're right that he was interested in shame…though I don't know that I'd draw quite the conclusions you do. He was adamently *not* a Puritan, in any sense — I think he wanted to bring secret shame to light because he thought it was exciting and that repression was bad. He would want people to act on their repressed desires, not cure them."
I dunno. I agree that nothing necessarily invalidates anything else, but I wouldn't mind knowing more about Marston's upbringing, since most things including personal beliefs generally don't spontaneously arise from nothing; I doubt anyone suddenly wakes up one morning and decides the world would be a better place is everyone adopted a philosophy predicated on bondage and the power structures that produces. I don't doubt that Marston wasn't Puritanical, and that's not exactly what I meant, but there's something about him that suggests rebellion against some control structure previously imposed on him, like a fallen away Catholic turning vehemently anti-Papist. Which isn't to suggest he was crazy brooding or anything like that, but I'm less interested in his philosophy (which plays rather quaint and silly today, like the militant "naturalism" (nudist) movement of the '40s-'50s or the Wilhelm Reich cult of the '50s-'70s) than in what led him to concoct it, esp. in '20s-'40s America.
Bear in mind my viewpoint is colored by viewing bondage & s&m as pathetically laughable, though matters of personal taste and really none of my business. (Meaning: if someone gets off being tied up or beaten, that's their business. If they try selling me on its value, esp. its spiritual or emotional value, I'll laugh at them.)
I have to say, though, I'm still a bit confused about how being tied up and dominated allows women to realize their true inner power and natural superiority to men. But I suspect everyone is…
Yeah, I don't see that stuff as especially pathetic (though it is funny, of course.) I think sadism and masochism are pretty thoroughly incorporated into mainstream culture in various ways, and for good or ill.
Have you seen Bob Flanagan's "Sick"? I'm curious what you'd think of it. Flanagan was an extreme masochist with a debilitating and very painful illness, and he connects those two facts in pretty interesting ways. He's also very funny, for what that's worth.
By the by, as long as you're following the thread…could you email me? My address is noahberlatsky at gmail.
Wayne, I think you're feminist history is a little confused. Marston wasn't writing in the 1400s. There was a self-conscious feminist movement in the United States starting in at least the beginning of the 19th century (growing out of the abolitionist movement in part) and led by folks like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The woman's suffrage movement, which you mentioned, was a big deal in the twentieth century, and actually had succeeded in getting women the vote by Marston's day. I have absolutely no doubt that Marston thought of himself in that context (the cover with "Wonder Woman for President!" was not an accident) and considered himself an advocate of women's rights. You can argue that he wasn't really a feminist for various reasons if you want, but suggesting that the argument itself is invalid or historically inappropriate makes little if any sense.
In WW #1, Marston has the Amazon army defeat the Greek army. And in the one with the Atlanteans and Cleo there are female armies fighting each other. He tends to associate men with militarism…but women get to be in the military too with at least some frequency.
I'll be happy to bump our conversation to email, Noah, but I feel compelled to mention that feminism in the USA dates back to post-colonial times and was originally tied into the temperance movement, since legally many wives and families in those days were legally helpless to do anything when the men in the family squandered all the food & rent money on alcohol, which was a pretty popular male pasttime, as was wife/child beating. Basically women were legally the property of their husbands. This was the origin of the temperance movement in America, not a moral crusade to bring the country nearer to God (though phrasing it that way became popular) but simply to save a great many women from avoidable lives of misery, degradation and crushing poverty. Demanding certain rights for wives, particularly legal recourse if they needed to take control of family finances, and the right to stem physical abuse by drunken spouses if necessary, launched nascent feminism here, though obviously they didn't call it feminism at the time.
Steven, I'm happy to continue the conversation here. I wanted to ask you about something else via email.
Hey Wayne. Many in the early feminist movement tended to argue that women were purer and more spiritually advanced than men, just as Marston does. That was a big part of where the suffragette movement in England was coming from, for example; they believed that giving women the vote would improve morals and bring in the millenium, more or less. (That dovetailed with temperance; the idea being that if you gave women the vote, they, as more morally advanced, would abolish drinking.)
Marston is very much in a feminist tradition that argues for gender difference and radical social change based on that gender difference. It is worth recognizing historical changes in the movement, certainly, but feminism existed in a recognizable form when Marston was alive, and he identified himself with it fairly explicitly.
Similarly, Twain was a racist, or at least held many racist ideas. He also held anti-racist ideas. He struggled with the issues of race, in ways that we still struggle with them. Same for Abraham Lincoln. Pointing out that Lincoln was a racist (which he was) and that he sometimes transcended his racism (which he did) isn't unfair or ahistorical. It's simply recognizing that in a lot of ways he's not that far away from us, and that there's a lot of stuff in his life that remains relevant today.
I think the same thing is true of Marston. The past may be another country, but it's not another planet. Marston just isn't that far away from us, and his concerns about gender and feminism and power remain relevant.
And, by the by, a quick google search shows that feminism, in the sense of advocating women's rights, dates from 1895. So had you asked Marston if he was a feminist, he would have known exactly what you meant, and I have no doubt he would have said, "yes."
Hey, no problem. You gave me a chance to propound and bluster. I live for that. Thus the blogging….
Sorry I deleted my post on accident. You aren't talking to yourself.lol
I was saying thanks because it allowed me to see my own bias was clouding my perception.
I'm maybe a little hard on nuances in history trying to seperate things. I would never confuse a Teddy Roosevelt Republican for the modern day Republican. I hate when politicians try and invoke his name.
Yeah; the Republican party (and the Democrats for that matter) have had a lot of drift.