This is the week my book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is released. I’ve put together a week-long roundtable to celebrate.
Earlier in the week I asked folks to ask me Wonder Woman questions and I’d answer them here. A few people responded. So here’s my answers. If you have other questions, ask in comments and I’ll try to answer as best I can. (Questions about my book would be great too, if you are one of the few who have read it!)
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Andrew
Is there someone that you think could channel H.G. Peter?
I love Harry Peter too! His style is very different from current mainstream superhero art. He looks back to a Victorian illustration tradition in a lot of ways; stiff figures, fluid linework, just very different than the muscles-on-muscles pin-up style you get in Marvel and DC nowadays.
So, if you were going to have someone approximate that, I think you’d need to look to alternative and indie creators probably. I’d love to see Edie Fake do a Wonder Woman story. Edie’s fascinated with gender and sexuality in a way that’s reminiscent of Marston, and he’s really into fantasy landscape as well. It would be different than Harry Peter, of course, but I think he could get some of the same sense of overripe wrongness/rightness that Peter did.
Leah
How do you think Wonder Woman has informed the portrayals of other women superheros. And why do you think there there not more leading lady superheros. Most of the well known ones these days seem to be part of teams (ex. XMen, Fantastic Four) rather than stand alones.
That’s tricky; I don’t think the original Wonder Woman comics have had much influence at all on other female superheroes, as far as I can tell. Marston’s mix of bondage and feminism isn’t something that many other mainstream creators have been all that interested in. There have been a few direct lifts, like Alan Moore’s Promethea, or Winged Victory in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City, or Wonder Girl. But for example Storm, from the X-Men, whose one of the higher profile superheroes, doesn’t owe much to Wonder Woman. Buffy and Sailor Moon, two very popular female superheroes, don’t look back to her much either.
And I think that’s part of the answer to your second question. There are stand along female superheroes, like Buffy and Sailor Moon. They tend not to come from Marvel and DC (the big two superhero companies). And that’s just because Marvel and DC have historically featured male characters by male creators mostly packaged for me. That’s changing somewhat as the movies create a more diverse audience, and so maybe we’ll see more stand alone superhero films featuring female heroes from those companies in the future.
Matthew
It seems that people are clamoring for a Wonder Woman movie, but do you think an interesting film could actually be made with the character in her current state? Or are her bizarre origins, years of retcons, constantly fluctuating characterization, and general difficulty to handle by modern comics writers too much to overcome?
Anything’s possible I guess. Somebody could just go back to Marston and Peter and make a movie with gorilla bondage and space kangaroos, if they wanted. I suspect though that the movie will be boring not because anyone is confused by years of indifferent comics, but just because most superhero movies are boring and unimaginative, and there’s no reason to think this will be different. In other words, the Wonder Woman movie will be bad because the Avengers and Superman and so forth are bad, not because Wonder Woman comics are bad. They’ll write a script where she hits people and has angst and things blow up, would be my guess.
I suppose they might try to incorporate feminism in some way. That could be bad, as the animated feature showed. For an actual feature there’s too much money at stake to screw around with trying to be true to the character or the comics fanbase, though, would be my guess.
Eric
What did you think of the David Kelly pilot?
I didn’t see it!
Oh; missed this one: Mike asked:
“Who would win in a spirited debate about feminism and intersectionality: original Wonder Woman or New 52 Wonder Woman or Ms. Marvel?”
I presume this is somewhat tongue in cheek…but fwiw, Marston is really racist. I talk about how this causes real problems for his utopian vision here.
Elektra Assassin could be seen as one of those comics mixing bondage and feminism. Might even be influenced by WW in some way.
Huh…maybe. Empowered too, perhaps. Bondage imagery isn’t that uncommon in pulp comics of the Golden Age, is the thing, as Trina Robbins points out. I bet Frank Miller is just going to hard-boiled pulp for his fairly standard bondage tropes. I suspect that’s the case for Empowered as well. Neither of them feels particularly indebted to Marston’s particular vision of bondage as feminist liberation (to me.)
Right; the whole point about Elektra is that she’s more phallic than the guys. That’s not Marston, really; for him, bondage and submission are alternatives to phallicism, not an extension of it.
Noah, I am generally more interested in your writing on Wonder Woman than the character herself, but the most interesting thing about her to me is that she grew up in a society without a patriarchy — without even an opposite sex. The standard gendered culture codes and stereotypes and the associated normative judgments would be completely alien to her. She would be taken aback by assumptions I don’t even realize I’m making. I feel like that’s been touched on throughout her history, but never fully explored. It seems to me like her “mission” that so many after Marston have had difficulty defining would be to show the women of “Man’s World” that much of what they’ve been taught is a lie, and much of what they’ve learned to live with is unacceptable. What do you think? Am I wrongheaded with any of this? Would it be a viable tack to take with the character? It’s not as wacky-fun as liberation and love through bondage and submission, but I’m looking for a less fetishist handle to get a grasp on the character.
I’m not really aware of anyone fully exploring the implications of a single-gender utopia. George Perez’s run has a bit of the stranger in a strange land thing going on, but it doesn’t really explore how, or in which ways, Paradise Island would be really alien. Among other things, nobody is really willing to talk about sex or sexuality at any length. Gail Simone mentions in passing that the Amazons all have to be lesbian — but it’s never really explored. And of course, if Wonder Woman is heterosexual (or even bisexual), what would that mean to her contextually?
I would say that the person who maybe approaches this most directly is actually Marston himself. He doesn’t talk about it explicitly or directly, exactly, but in those early issues, Steve is injured pretty much all the time; he’s unmanned, and I think the implication is that Paradise Island is a place where everyone is unmanned. Invasion doesn’t transfrom or violate the island, it turns the invader also into a sister. So Paradise Island is not so much a separate society, as a separate way of existence, in which people of various genders can participate.
Does that make sense? I mean, in terms of the kind of thought experiment you seem to be looking for, I’d say Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is a much closer fit than anything that’s been done with Wonder Woman, or is likely to be done with her.
It does. Thanks. A thought experiment is exactly what I’m looking for, and I may have to check out Left Hand. The Trevor example is a good one — a reaction to intrusion that is not masculine, yet not weak. I just think that sociologically, the idea of femininity in isolation would give you a writer a lot to play with — and without maternity, until the introduction of Diana herself. I think Simone’s run addressed that aspect.
Yes…I think I read a little bit of Simone’s run in that respect. It ended up being about how the Amazons were lacking, though, right? They couldn’t be mothers so they weren’t fulfilled. That just seems like reinscribing normality to me in a lot of ways; there’s something wrong with the Amazons, rather than something right, or even just something different.
Marston had Amazon children. It wasn’t clear how they’d gotten there. (Though the mechanics of heterosexual sex were absent from most golden age comics of the period as well, obviously.)
Noah, you mention in the book a relative paucity of biographical information about Harry Peter, which I assume means we know less about his personal philosophies and motivations than Marston’s. Is there any indication to what extent the individual artistic choices you discuss were strictly specified by Marston, and how much came consciously (or not) from Peter? The strength of their working relationship suggests that Marston knew Peter would provide the right kind of phallic ectoplasm or busted male body when he asked for it, but is there any way to know if Peter brought some of the symbolic content himself? Or did Marston just go down the Alan Moore route and produce scripts that had to be delivered via truck?
I think Dash Shaw would be a really interesting artist and writer for Wonder Woman. He’s played a bit with gendered and sexual reversals, and his style is in some ways a grotesque exaggeration of Harry Peter’s and Fletcher Hank’s style of drawing.
Kailyn, that’s an interesting suggestion. I’m not superfamiliar with Shaw’s work, I have to admit.
Tim, that’s a good question. It’s complicated by the fact that Peter worked with many assistants, so it’s not always certain who was drawing the art at any given time (and no one knows who the colorist is — though color is hugely important to those comics.)
I haven’t seen Marston scripts myself, unfortunately, though some are available in archives. Ben Saunders in his Wonder Woman chapter in Do the Gods Wear Capes? talks about a script he saw in which Wonder Woman was described as being nude; in the finished comic, Harry Peter put clothes on her. So…I think that speaks to their working relationship in several interesting ways, though it maybe doesn’t answer your question directly.
as a child of the 50’s i created a place for myself on Paradise Island where i could contemplate decisions i needed to make without any testosterone littering the landscape. until this book came along i had forgotten where i learned of paradise. i had even come up with a ‘hack’ to explain it – the factoid that all humans start out female in the womb. so i was returning to a safe place to find courage to not be bound by other’s expectations of me. so little ole me, a petite china doll to the eye, has always been an Amazon.
Marston would definitely like the idea that all humans start off as female. He believes in sisterhood for all.
Noah, you might take a look back at the Lynda Carter series (available on Amazon Instant Video, etc.) It’s got more of the Marston WW in it than I would have thought. Plenty of bondage, same-sex eroticism, WWII, etc. Steve is definitely constantly being kidnapped/captured and rescued by WW. Admittedly, no space kangaroos, etc., but not terrible as an adaptation.
I watched a bit of it a while back; seemed pretty awful. But maybe I should check it out again, I suppose….