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Wonder Woman Must Change!

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Denny O’Neil, Mike Sekowsky, others
Diana Prince: Wonder Woman vol. 1-4
DC Comics
$19.99 each

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Wonder Woman is virtually impossible to write well. The problem isn’t that the concept is dumb — on the contrary, the difficulty is that it’s not dumb enough. Most superheroes are artistic nonentities. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Wolverine — they’re defined by their powers and their backstory and maybe by one or two dabs of easily reproduced personality (Batman’s grim; Spider-Man’s down on his luck, Wolverine’s mean.) You can put them in different narratives because they aren’t integrated into any narrative. They aren’t the product of a coherent individual aesthetic in the first place, so imposing a different vision on them isn’t especially hard.

Wonder Woman’s different. Her creator, William Moulton Marston (with the help of his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and their lover, Olive Byrne) created the character to fulfill very specific political and sexual fantasies. Marston wanted to create a strong icon of femininity, so girls would be inspired to embrace feminine virtues, like love and… submissiveness. The result was Wonder Woman, a powerful heroine of justice who would preach about female empowerment in one panel, bash a bad guy in the second, and find herself trussed up like a turkey in the third. Harry G. Peter rendered Marston’s inspirational, fetishistic fantasies in one of the most distinctive styles of the golden age; his stiff figures, active lines, frilly imagery, and distinctive stylization gave Wonder Woman an outsider-art look somewhere between Fletcher Hanks and Henry Darger.

Together Moulton and Peter created a comic that had self-conscious ideological and aesthetic content. They set out, quite deliberately, to reconcile and explore binaries involving fetish and feminism, submission and strength, peace and violence, masculinity and femininity. Those contradictions, and the passion with which they were handled, give the early Wonder Woman stories an energetic, absurd sublimity like very little else in super-hero comics. But those same factors have made it extremely difficult for anyone else to use the character. Just as the most obvious example: how do you present Wonder Woman as an icon of strong womanhood when her costume is a ridiculous swim suit tricked out with fairly explicit bondage iconography (the rope, the metal bracelets)? Or, as another for instance, if Wonder Woman’s mission is supposed to be to bring peace and love to man’s world, how do you make that work with the fact that she spends most of her time hitting people? Moulton had specific answers to these questions because he was a crank and, I would contend, because he was a great artist. But if you’re not both a crank and a great artist, and you try to write Wonder Woman, you’re pretty much screwed. Which is why, while lots of people have written great Batman stories or Superman stories, I have yet to see a great Wonder Woman story written by anyone other than William Moulton Marston.

The one possible exception to that is “Wonder Woman’s Rival,” by Denny O’Neil and Mike Sekowsky. Initially published in Wonder Woman #178 way back in 1968, it’s the first story O’Neil and Sekowsky worked on, and thus the first entry in DC’s four volume “Diana Prince: Wonder Woman” reprint series.

Those four volumes are, by the by, utterly lacking in any contextual material; there’s no introduction, no commentary, no nothing. But, from what I’ve been able to determine from other sources, it seems that in the late ‘60s Wonder Woman was not selling especially well. DC was therefore open to letting Mike Sekowsky, the new editor and artist on the title, take some chances with the character. As a result, O’Neil and Sekowsky clearly feel liberated from any need to treat Wonder Woman with reverence or even respect, and the result is exhilarating. O’Neil turns in a script which is positively mean-spirited in its desecration of the Wonder Woman mythology. Steve Trevor, upright military man, is portrayed as a slimy, brutish, insecure Neanderthal. One particularly ludicrous scene shows him adopting hippie lingo to pick up some anonymous and much younger girl. Later, when he’s arrested on false murder charges, he behaves like a whiny baby-man, sneering at Wonder Woman when she, obviously heart-broken, is forced to testify against him. Meanwhile, Wonder Woman herself is depicted as deeply, weirdly insecure; “I’m not a woman, but a freak,” she cries after Steve has rejected her.

This is the last thing Moulton would have had the character say, obviously; for him, Wonder Woman was a paragon, not an aberration. But I think the outburst pretty clearly captures O’Neil and Sekowsky’s position; they want nothing to do with this nightmarishly outré heroine, nor with her ridiculous costume, nor with her unworkable mythos. Instead, they want to groove, baby. In an antithesis to Wonder Woman’s usual World War II honor-and-military associations, O’Neil sends the plot cavorting through hippie hang-outs, and sprinkles it with wannabe up-to-the-minute patois like “the fuzz frowns on chicks cruising in this pad solo” and “Yeah, man! We need some hens for a party!” Sekowsky, too, seems to be having the time of his life; the art is relentlessly modern retro-chic, with over-saturated psychedelic colors and bold, off-center constructivist layouts. The high-point is a full-page makeover sequence, where Diana Prince, preparing to infiltrate the burn-out underworld, goes on a shopping spree to get that happening look. Sekowsky uncorks everything he’s got: full-bore kaleidoscope effects, fabulous fonts, and dramatic patterned clothes. “Wow!” Diana declares when she’s done. “I…I’m gorgeous! I should have done this ages ago!” I guess, in O’Neil/Sekowsky’s world, Diana always secretly thought that the stars made her ass look big.

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The comic is a mess, continuity-wise; Wonder Woman seems to completely forget that she even has a magic lasso when she’s interrogating people, for example. But that’s part of the charm; O’Neil and Sekowsky seem, not only not to care about the character, but to actually be contemptuous of her and her milieu. “Wonder Woman must change…!” Wonder Woman herself mutters at the end, and you get the sense that O’Neil and Sekowsky really believe it. They. Want. To. Do. Something. Else! They’re going to be modern, they’re going to be hip, they’re going to be different, and no stupid canon left to them by some decade-dead crank is going to stand in their way.

Alas, while a barbaric yawp is certainly good fun, it’s hard to build on it for the long term. O’Neil and Sekowsky are great when they’re gleefully leaping about on Marston’s corpse. As soon as they try to create something of their own, though, things quickly go to hell.

In issue #179, O’Neil, in the space of about three pages, strips Diana of her powers and sends Paradise Island into another dimension. Shortly thereafter, he shoots Steve Trevor, putting him safely out of the way in a hospital bed, where he is quickly and summarily forgotten (you never even learn if he recovers or not.) So far, so good. Wonder Woman is now Diana, a non-super civilian, struggling to adjust to her new humanity.

But then O’Neil introduces I Ching (groan) a blind (groan) martial arts master (groan) who trains Diana in his techniques while spouting (you guessed it) wise parables that appear to have been lifted directly from fortune cookies. Diana and her attendant master/racial stereotype then head off to battle Dr. Cyber, a typical evil genius whose sole distinguishing characteristic appears to be that she is a woman. Along the way, Diana encounters and semi-falls for a disreputable private detective named Tim who is just about as familiar as I Ching, though less viscerally offensive.

Sekowsky took over the writing chores himself with #182, zapping Wonder Woman back to Paradise Island for a sword-and-sandal battle royale. As the title staggers on, there are a few other one-shot exercises — a fantasy adventure, a ghost story, a couple of street-level helping-the-colorful-neighbors-with-their inner-city problems stories — interspersed with further campaigns against the inevitable Dr. Cyber. The different genres allow for some playful stories: one comic has an entertaining battle with a witch summoned by some neighborhood kids; another, by the irrepressible Bob Haney and Jim Aparo, features the bizarre appearance of a pint-sized “Amazon guardian angel” with whom Diana communes in a Gotham alley.

For the most part though, there’s little effort to experiment, either for thrills or laughs. Instead the four collected volumes read suspiciously like hack-work, created by folks who aren’t paying too much attention for an audience that they distantly hope isn’t paying too much attention either. Nobody, for example, ever bothers to give Diana a personality. Sekowsky supposedly based her wardrobe on that of Diana Riggs in The Avengers…but it wasn’t the clothes that made Mrs. Peel, but the wit and sophistication. Diana has neither of these, nor, indeed, any consistent character at all. There is one interesting issue where she’s presented as advocating torture; a vicious Diana Prince might have been kind of fun. But the trope is dropped, and Diana drifts back to the blandly heroic default.

Not that it’s all bad. A Rober Kanigher-penned Superman/Wonder Woman team-up, where Wonder Woman and Lois Lane vie for Superman’s love, has the requisite Superman-is-such-a-dick Silver Age appeal — plus you get to watch Supes and WW dance together at a space-age hippie shindig (Supes sets the floor on fire — darn super powers.) Sekowsky’s Wonder Woman/Batman team-up seems to reignite his creative juices somewhat, with Bruce Wayne alternately leering over Diana and worrying about his male ego (“I can’t let a woman and a blind man rescue me!”) Throughout the run, too, Sekowsky’s art remains enjoyable; he has a gift for pretty female faces, and the fact that Diana stays in civies gives him a chance to design a plethora of outfits for her. But even he never really regains the dynamism of that first issue, with its hippie coloring and in-your-face modernism.

Sekowsky eventually got moved off the title; Denny O’Neil came back for a bit, and finally sci-fi master Samuel R. Delaney showed up for two issues. In the first of these, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser make a cameo because, apparently, Delaney wanted to prove that he could be boring with a whole range of other’s copyrighted properties. In the second story, Diana has her consciousness raised by a women’s lib group. I guess this last was somewhat controversial, and seeing Wonder Woman utter the words “for the most part, I don’t even like women!” is definitely jarring. But the whole thing’s so stupid anyway it’s hard to get too exercised about it. To say Delaney was phoning it in here is a disservice to telecommunications technology. The scripts read more like he leaned out the window and casually hawked them out between brushing his teeth and shaving.

The final story in volume 4 is the predictable reboot. Robert Kanigher, who’d written Wonder Woman stories through much of the fifties and sixties, came back to write another, while Don Heck supplied some strikingly awkward and ugly art. I Ching gets shot by a sniper, which is a lot less satisfying than you’d think it would be. Diana gets amnesia, Paradise Island is inexplicably back from its dimension- hopping, Wonder Woman regains her “special outfit.” It’s all so rote it’s hard to see why they even bothered; obviously continuity doesn’t really matter, so why even pretend to have a transition issue? Couldn’t you just put her back in the swimsuit without any explanation at all? Who would care?

I guess maybe somebody would have. Gloria Steinem cared that Wonder Woman had lost her powers, apparently; she’s supposed to have been the one responsible for getting DC to go back to the original, powered-up, scantily-clad version of the heroine. Soon thereafter WW was once more regularly appearing in tied-up bondage poses on her covers, something Sekowsky had kept to a minimum. A return to submissive cheesecake probably wasn’t exactly the outcome Steinem had hoped for, but you fool with Marston’s character at your own risk. O’Neil and Sekowsky had the right idea in trying to get as far from the original version as possible…even if, unfortunately, that was the only idea they had.
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This essay first appeared in the Comics Journal.

Update: This is the latest in a series on post-Marston takes on Wonder Woman. The rest of the series can be read at our old blogspot address here.

Can Wonder Woman Be a Superdick? (part 1)

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I’ve been doing a series of posts about superheroes and gender. In the most recent I talked about superdickery. Superdickery here refers to the way super-heroes tend to stand in for the uber-patriarch, both as benign law-giver and as evil ogre-father. In the post, I talked especially about how Marvel’s innovation was to shift more explicitly towards the idea of superhero as nightmare ogre-father (the Hulk! the Thing!) Ultimately, though, the ogre-father is still the father; Marvel comics are still about dreams of empowerment, rather than about denigrating or undermining those visions of absolute mastery.

Okay. So…if superheroing is all about superdickery, what happens when you have a female superhero? As the title up there says, can Wonder Woman be a superdick? And, if so, how, if at all, is that dickishness different when it’s attached to a woman?

There have been a couple of gestures at making Wonder Woman dickish. As I mentioned last post, Kate Beaton’s butch WW can be seen as dickish to some extent. And Greg Rucka’s WW in the Hiketeia might be considered superdickish in some sense too.

Overall, though, male writers have seemed distinctly uncomfortable with having Wonder Woman act as a superdick. I’m going to talk about some specific examples in a minute. First though, I want to discuss briefly why the superdickery meme is so hard (as it were) to apply to female characters.

In general, the whole point of the superdick is that you have some non-powered weakling (Bruce Banner, Clark Kent, whoever), and then the superhero acts as empowerment fantasy. Bruce Banner can’t lay down the law — but Hulk can smash. Peter Parker can’t replace Unlce Ben — but Spider-Man can! Bruce Wayne cant’ fight evil in his undies — but Batman will. Etc.

On the one hand, this is a pretty simple formulation. On the other hand, though, it is, I think, plugged into some fairly profound dynamics around male identity. As I discussed in this post, this post, and this post, male identity is built around a central incoherence. This incoherence can be seen as biologically Oedipal (with Freud), or as cultural (with Eve Sedgwick.) Either way, the point is that a male is both identified with patriarchal power (the father) and distanced from that power (the child.) To be identified with patriarchal power is to turn one’s back on femininity, and in some sense on humanity — so that the uberpatriarch is both a monster and, in some sense, unmasculine, since he rejects women (what gender is the Thing under those briefs, exactly?) But, on the other hand, to be a sniveling child outside of patriarchal power is to be feminized.

In short, the engine behind the super-hero split identity is the anxiety of maleness. Peter/Spider-Man is constantly vacillating between two people because neither one is stable. Peter is under pressure to take up the rod of superdickery and become a real man; Spider-Man is under pressure to cast aside the rod of superdickery and pay attention to the girls already so he can become a real man.

Women aren’t implicated in this psychodrama. Female identity isn’t incoherent — or at least, it’s not incoherent in the same way. A commenter on a recent article of mine at Reason put the point succinctly:

girls can think ninjas are cool without any blowback. Any man who likes sparkly emo vampires is probably sorting through some issues.

That’s exactly the point; a girl who likes ninjas doesn’t have her femininity called into question (on the contrary, butch women are often considered especially hot, as I argue here. Men who like romance, on the other hand, open themselves up (as it were) to the charge of not being sufficiently masculine.

So that means women have it easy compared to poor, conflicted men, right? Well, not exactly. It’s true that female identity is in some sense more stable…but there’s a certain amount of coercion which goes into enforcing that stability. Men are always defined by their lack of the phallus, always anxiously scurrying after the unattainable superdick…or dropping it like a hot potato and scurrying away when they get it. Women, on the other hand, aren’t supposed to have the superdick in the first place, so they’re just kind of supposed to sit there and be. Basically, for women, the ideal is more coherent, which means that individual slip ups (watching ninja movies) aren’t necessarily always as important. However, overall, a more coherent ideal can actually be more limiting. Always striving and failing is tiresome, but probably preferable overall to being stuck in prison.

Which brings us back to Wonder Woman.

That’s from Denny O’Neil and Mike Sekowsy’s first issue on WW from 1968. And, as you can see, the creators seem to be of the opinion that WW is a freak. And why is she a freak? Not because she’s actually a monster like the Thing, but simply because she’s got “muscles” and is a woman. And, not coincidentally, in the following issues of their run on the series, O’Neill and Sekowsky actually depowered WW, turning her into a civilian spy — still a crime fighter, but one who wouldn’t necessarily scare the (male) kiddies.

O’Neill and Sekowsky are more blatant than most, but they’re hardly alone in their discomfort with the super-powered WW. Throughout “The Greatest Wonder Woman Stories Ever Told,” there’s a constant, insistent effort to evade the image of Wonder Woman as superdick — to domesticate her, if you will. In Robert Kanigher’s “Top Secret,” Steve Trevor engages in an elaborate plot to get Wonder Woman to marry him. His scheme fails…but it forces WW to create her Diana Prince identity in which (of course) she serves under Steve in the military. In this story, then, Wonder Woman isn’t Diana’s empowerment fantasy; rather, Diana is *Steve’s* empowerment fantasy. WW does get the better of Steve, but only by doing what he wants. She bows to his superdickery and relinquishes her own.

Similarly, in Robert Kanigher’s revealingly titled “Be Wonder Woman…and Die!” the emotional focus of the story is on a terminally ill young actress who impersonates Wonder Woman and then expires beautifully. It’s pretty clearly a Mary Sue story in some sense — a WW fan appears, is lauded by her idol, and then shuffles off the mortal coil to great acclaim. But you do have to wonder — if this is a Mary Sue, whose Mary Sue is it? Who exactly is getting off on a depowered and dead WW clone? Could it be the male writer,by chance?

One final example; Wonder Woman #230, from 1977. (Todd Munson very kindly gave me this issue when I visited his class at Randolph-Macon a few weeks back. ) This issue is by Marty Pasko, and it’s set in the 1940s to tie in with the then-current TV series. It’s also obsessed with doubling. The villain is the Cheetah, who suffers from multiple-personality disorder; normally she’s an everyday socialite (Priscilla Rich), but when she sees Wonder Woman she has a psychotic episode and turns into a supervillain. In this sotry, Priscilla accidentally encounters WW and has her transformation triggered. As the Cheetah she then manages to discover WW’s secret identity, and makes plans to use the information to kill her. However, Cheetah turns back to Priscilla before she can take action. Priscilla then contacts Diana Prince…and hypnotizes her into forgetting she’s Wonder Woman, figuring that if Wonder Woman disappears, Priscilla herself will never change into the Cheetah again.

So along the way here there are several suggestive incidents.

— Early in the issue, Steve Trevor is gushing on and on about Wonder Woman. Diana Prince is clearly quite pissed about this; she’s jealous of her alter ego. Thus, there’s a definite implication that Diana *wants* to get rid of WW, just as Priscilla wants to get rid of the Cheetah.

— There’s an erotic tension between the female antagonists. Priscilla’s repressed emotions are released whenever she sees Wonder Woman; it’s not hard to read a lesbian subtext into that. Moreover, the hypnotic encounter between Priscilla and Diana is framed as seduction; Priscilla even comments (lasciviously?) on how “naive” Diana is.

In breaking the mirror here, Priscilla is banishing both Wonder Woman and the Cheetah. Where agonized male-male tensions tend to lead to heroes hitting villains and hyperbolic violence, the female-female encounter/seduction does the reverse. It doesn’t redouble anxieties around female identity; it eliminates them. Priscilla is ushering Diana back into femininity. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in the last panel Diana’s face seems definitely softer and less butch than it does towards the top of the page.)

Priscilla can be seen, in other words, as patrolling the boundaries of femininity. This is actually a fairly common dynamic, I think; women are often harsher on (small) infractions against femininity than men are. My wife pointed out that Patti Smith in the 70s once commented that there’s nothing more disgusting than seeing some woman’s breast hanging over a guitar. The quote is interesting too, because, like this encounter, there’s definitely some not quite dealt with eroticism there; Smith is perceiving female guitarists as sexual beings; there’s a same-sex frisson. I haven’t quite worked this through, but it seems like there’s a parallel here with Eve Sedgwick’s ideas about male homosociality. That is, men form homosocial bonds (and repress explicit homosexual ones) as a way of cementing patriarchal power. Women might be seen as forming homosocial bonds (and repressing explicit homosexual ones) as a way of policing or reaffirming femininity — which again essentially has the effect of cementing patriarchal power. That seems like a good description of what Priscilla is doing here, certainly — she seduces/explains the error of her ways to Diana in order to prevent Diana from becoming a superdick, and so leading Priscilla herself into superdickery.

On the one hand this ends up being a false consciousness argument (women reinforcing the patriarchal order out of a mistaken fear of their own power/acceptance of their natural role.) On the other hand, it might also be seen as a not unrational risk assessment. Priscilla is worried that Wonder Woman’s escape from femininity will bring reprisals against Priscilla herself (she’ll become the cheetah, get herself in trouble, and end up being punished.) Similarly, Patti Smith, as a female rockstar, could be seen as covering her own ass — too many female rockstars might cause trouble.

I don’t know; not sure that that’s all thought through as well as I might like. But I think there is definitely a sense in which bonds between women are used to patrol femininity just as bonds between men are used to patrol masculinity. And the obsessively doubled relationship between Priscilla/Cheetah and Diana/Wonder Woman seems to get at that.

Though at the same time, of course, there’s a tradition of feminist sisterhood which is about confronting or challenging patriarchy. It’s interesting in that regard how, even though this is set in the 40s when the Marston /Peter stories took place, there are just a lot less women here than in Marston’s writing. The only woman who’s around is Priscilla, which is obviously an antagonistic relationship….

— Because WW has disappeared, Steve has to take her spot in a video. (The director comments “I’d rather shoot a war hero than some broad in a silly get-up anyway!”) The Cheetah has booby-trapped the camera, though. Priscilla doesn’t want to kill anyone…so she figures she has to remind Diana of who she was. She leads Diana off to the side (which looks again very much like femme/butch seduction)

and this time the female/female encounter brings WW and the Cheetah both back.

Because we see this entirely from Priscilla’s perspective, though, this comes across more as sad necessity than triumphant victory. The return of female superpowers may be necessary, but it’s not ideal or normal. And, moreover, it really does result in bad news for Priscilla; she gets beaten up, captured, and sent off to Paradise Island for reeducation (where presumably she’ll be reintegrated back into femininity.)

—Soon after WW reappears we get this panel:

The reappearance of WW seems to humorously undermine Steve’s maleness. When a woman wields the superdick, men are less male. Not only can’t Steve take WW’s place, but even in wanting to he becomes ridiculous; less of a man.

— The comic ends with WW back in Diana Prince identity, talking to Steve. Steve is worrying about the possibility of WW disappearing again — and Diana suggests that if WW does disappear Steve should spend more time looking for her. There’s certainly a hint here that Diana would like WW to go away— she wants Steve to recognize, or respond, to Diana instead. Like Priscilla, Diana seems to in part want to lose her super-powers and her super-identity.

This isn’t that unusual a trope — as I mentioned in the last post, Spider-Man often wants to lost his powers, as does Bruce Banner, and so forth. The difference here is, perhaps, that when Diana is just Diana, there’s no indication that she wants to be anything else. She doesn’t wish she had her powers back, or think about WW. Instead, Priscilla has to remind her who she was. When Peter Parker, or whoever, is depowered, his identity remains incoherent; he still wants the superdick. But for Diana, the only tension is when she’s Wonder Woman. A feminized Diana, sans superdick, is perfectly happy — just as, presumably, a Priscilla without the Cheetah would be perfectly happy. There isn’t the attraction/repulsion for patriarchal authority that you tend to feel in male super-hero narratives. Instead, the energy of the story seems to push pretty firmly towards just turning superfemales into ordinary women and being done with it. Of course, it can’t end up there because, you know, Wonder Woman’s name is on the cover of the comic, and you need more stories with her. But that isn’t Marty Pasko’s fault. He didn’t create the character.

And next time we’ll talk about the guy who did create the character and how he felt about superdickery. Hopefully we’ll get to that next week.

In the meantime…this is actually part of a long series of posts on latter-day Wonder Woman iterations. You can read the whole series here.

Brave and Bold #140 — Batman and Wonder Woman

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I love Bob Haney and Jim Aparo’s run on Brave and the Bold; I have an unhealthy obsession with Wonder Woman. So Brave and Bold featuring Batman and Wonder Woman — that’s got to be good, right?

Well, not exactly. Haney and Aparo both seem more or less on autopilot here; it doesn’t suck, or anything, but neither is there any particular inspiration. Haney pulls out one of his usual plot gimmicks (some old geezer offers to give millions to Batman’s favorite charity if pointy-ears will rescue his daughter. It’s amazing how often this happens.) So Batman goes off, and there’s the usual Haney twists — malevolent, intelligent gorilla surgeons; Gotham City replicated on a floating barge; double-crossing heiresses, that sort of thing. Wonder Woman shows up, and Haney does his best to figure out why her presence doesn’t make Batman irrelevant. Maybe, I don’t know…she could not know her own strength until seeing Batman in danger causes her to free her inner Amazon? Sure, what the hell, that works. Meanwhile, Aparo entertains himself by drawing the protagonists from the boots down….

So good fun…but it never really fulfills the kinky promise of the bizarre splash page:

There’s some bondage/mind control for you in the best Marston tradition! Aparo seems to be especially having fun getting WW to twist around like a cat, curling up her fingers into claws. We get some more on the next page:

And…unfortunately that’s it for the super-heroes-as-mind-controlled-wild-animal subplot. It’s never actually even explained why Batman and WW are behaving like that; there’s one panel where Bats speculates vaguely about drugs or hypnosis, but it’s never followed up. Of course, the real reason is simply that Haney thought it would be cool/funny/sexy and make a good lead in. And then he just dropped it, because he got distracted. Haney doesn’t really write plots anyway; he just writes plot holes.

Still, I have to say; as far as versions of Wonder Woman go, this one has a certain aphasiac appeal. Haney doesn’t seem to have any great affinity or even enthusiasm for the character; he just sort of picks her up and drops her into one of his usual nutty plots, gratuitously noting each of her powers along the way (invisible plane! magic truth-telling lasso! amazon speed!) because that’s what you do in a comic. In that context, the scene at the beginning comes off in a similar, check the boxes kind of way — if you’ve got a Wonder Woman story, you throw in some bondage. And you might as well tie Batman up too, because, hey, he’s there, and why not?

And there’s something to that. Maybe it’s just the extent to which Haney so obviously doesn’t treat these characters as Mary Sues, or really as icons at all. He doesn’t want to honor them; he doesn’t want to desecrate them; he just wants to race through his story and have some laughs and come out the other end and get a paycheck. In that context, an Amazonian feminist avatar decked out in bondage gear isn’t any more or less ridiculous than a guy wearing a bat suit. Most latter-day Wonder Woman writers are tripped up because Marston’s WW is more coherent than your average super-hero, so when you try to put her into a storyline that functions differently than that propounded by her creator, things go awry. But Haney’s plots aren’t coherent; they don’t work anyway. Wonder Woman still looks like a nutty non-sequitor…but, in Haney’s world, that makes her fit right in.

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This is part of an occasional series of posts on latter-day iterations of Wonder Woman. You can read the whole series here.

And since arbitrary links are sort of in the Bob Haney spirit — I’ve been posting some downloadable music mixes over the last couple of weeks. The last one is titled Book Radio Mixer, the one before was called The Old Gospel Ship. Click through the links for tracklists and downloads, if that appeals.

Lose the Girdle, Get Empowered (OOCWVG)

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I doubt that Adam Warren was necessarily thinking specifically about Wonder Woman when he created his Empowered comic. Nonetheless, the two work off of many of the same touchstones: super-hero bondage fetishism; feminism, and an interest in presenting cheesecake for guys alongside girly stuff for everybody else.

To the extent that Empowered can be seen as a kind of Wonder Woman knock-off, it’s easily the best one out there, putting to shame even relatively successful efforts like Alan Moore’s Glory or Darwyn Cooke’s satirical take on the character. In large part this is because of how far away from the Wonder Woman concept Empowered strays. Though he uses a lot of the same ideas, Adam Warren comes at the material from a completely different place than Marston and Peter did.

The difference can maybe be summed up by saying that Marston was a system-builder — an actual honest to God academic crank who started from big-picture concepts about how feminism and bondage and gender fit together, and created a character and world to match his theories. Warren is not like that at all. He says he started Empowered as a bondage commission for fans with “special interests.” Similarly, the feminist title “Empowered” seems to be basically a goof. For Marston, feminism and fetish was his life work and his obsession; for Warren the confluence of the two is more a serendipitous passing fancy.

What Warren is really interested in, as it turns out, is the characters. Even in the first, throw-off three-pager, you can see this. A generic super-team (the “Super-Homeys”) stand around contemplating how to defeat the evil Death Monger. Various ideas are thrown out, until Empowered, very nervously, volunteers that maybe they should try cutting off his power source. This seems like a reasonable idea; but it is instantly dismissed when teammate Sistah Spooky points out that Empowered’s panty lines are clearly visible beneath her skin tight super suit! Everybody cracks up, Empowered scurries away weeping — and I guess they beat Death Monger somehow. Or, you know, not.

Empowered

The thing is, this isn’t just a gratuitous gag (as it would be in, say, Mini-Marvels) Empowered staggering off whimpering “stupid, I’m so stupid” is more Peanuts than Nancy; it’s actually painful. And it’s also feminist; the way Empowered is objectified and dismissed is, and is meant to be, textbook workplace harassment…at the same time as the character is obviously designed to be oggled by the reading fanboys. (And “designed” is the word — her skin tight costume won’t work if anything is worn over it. Also it rips easily. And when it rips, she is powerless, and gets tied up.)

Much like Marston, Warren is having it both ways. Where Marston pulled off that trick through constant and complicated theorizing, though, Warren manages it first of all by being genuinely funny. There’s plenty of the kind of witty sci-fi goofiness that made Warren’s Dirty Pair such a treat. He seems to have an endless supply of that sort of thing, from a gang of minions who make a living stealing from their super-villain bosses, to a support group for heroes who got their powers from exotic venereal diseases (watch out for the alien princesses and the anatomically correct robots, boys); to my absolute favorite, the evil Cthulhu like ancient evil which lives in a belt in Emp’s room watching DVD collections, listening to sports radio, and dispensing relationship advice to her Emp’s boyfriend. (“Bahh. Running out to the market of super to purchase feminine hygience products. Even among the eldritch ancient ones we had a word for such behavior. And that word was…P-whipped!”)

Even more important than the humor, though, is the fact that Warren seems to really care about his heroine. Empowered could easily have turned into a series of dumb blonde joke…but instead, Emp comes across as an incredibly likable character, way more competent and courageous than she or her teammates are willing to credit. As I said, Warren starts out by highlighting her unhappiness and humilitation, a la Charlie Brown — but he quickly heads for less depressing territory, giving her a yummy ex-evil minion as a boyfriend, and incidentally creating one of the best couples in super-hero comics. Thugalicious (does he have a name? He must, but I can’t find it. Oh well.) is incredibly sweet, setting up his villainous cohorts for defeat after defeat at Emp’s hands because “this stuff makes you happy, dinnit?” — and, less selflessly, because Emp “always gets completely sexed up and out of control after every super-hero outing.” In return, when thugalicious’ cohorts wise up and almost kill him, Emp, kicks the door over and with uncharacteristic competence blasts through a roomful of minions to get to her man (said man remarking, with heartfelt enthusiasm “Bad Ass!”)

Empowered

The end of this scene is pretty great as well. Generally when super-heroes save their loved ones, they’re pretty blase about it — along the lines of, “Aha, here I am again to rescue you just in time. You never doubted me, of course!” Emp, on the other hand, falls apart, weepingly cussing him out for being a macho asshole and getting himself in this pickle. It seems — and I think, is — such a natural reaction that it took me days to realize how unusual it was for the genre.

Warren’s decision to highlight Emp’s body-image issues also seems to me to be pitch perfect. Like all super-heroines, she is, of course, actually drop-dead gorgeous…but it’s the rare woman, drop-dead gorgeous or not, who wouldn’t have serious reservations about wearing a skin tight latex costume in public. Body issues are a real feminist concern, and treated as such (in the first strip for example). But they’re also a convenient way to make readers feel good about oggling the cheesecake. You’re not just enjoying the goodies on offer; you’re also sympathizing with the very likable heroine, and reassuring her that her ass is not, in fact, at all fat — or only fat in a good way.

In short, the book is both exploitation dreck and touching romantic sit-com — not to mention super-hero spoof — and the different genre modes all work to reinforce rather than undermine each other. it doesn’t hurt that Warrens’ artwork is excellent — and more than excellent for what he’s trying to do. His style is is very expressive in a manga vein — but it’s also got a scratchy, alternative 80s mainstream vibe that makes it look less slick and finished than most manga titles. It’s clear and stylish enough to deliver solid storytelling and very sexy cheesecake, but it also has a scrappy, smaller-than-life quality which sums up Emp herself.

In thinking about Emp and Wonder Woman, the “smaller than life” is I think the key. Wonder Woman is a paragon; that’s the point of the character. Emp is trying to be that, but it (usually) doesn’t quite work. Making that shift allows Warren to think about the issues Marston and Peter brought up in some new and interesting ways. Is it really ideal to have a feminist icon who is perfect at everything, for example? How courageous or heroic is Wonder Woman really when everything comes so easily to her? Is it really that important in a relationship to establish who is saving who, or, you know, can you save each other back and forth without keeping such merciless score? Can’t you just enjoy a little fetish porn without trying to make it part of some big right-minded philosophical system? The point isn’t necessarily that Empowered is better than Marston/Peter (I don’t think it is), but rather that to have a conversation with the original Wonder Woman that isn’t egregiously stupid, it seems like you maybe need to take a step back from it. Marston’s Wonder Woman was a very personal vision; so, in a lighter vein, is Warren’s Empowered. For my money, that makes Empowered a much more faithful daughter of WW than any of the “genuine” iterations of WW that have wandered zombielike across the DC universe for the last umpty ump years.

Update: More on Empowered as the savior of the DC universe.

Let Venus Wear Her Girdle, Damn It (OOCWVG)

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In my post about Greg Rucka’s Wonder Woman yesterday, I realized I forgot to sneer adequately at one of the things that most annoyed me in his scripting for WW 196-200. Namely, the gods.

I don’t mind that Rucka turns all his gods into irritating American suburbanites and/or hipsters (Aphrodite as bored housewife; Cupid as stoned California drop-out, etc.) That’s fine; whatever. Some of the dialogue is kind of funny, I guess. I sort of laughed when Ares told Cupid to stop hitting on his great aunt and Cupid says “like that ever stopped anyone in this family from getting game.” I don’t know. I don’t expect a ton from Rucka at this point; I guess I appreciate any indication that he’s trying at all to entertain me rather than educate me or encourage me to fawn over his Amazon paragon.

So, right; updated gods — not especially clever, but par for the course. What really irritates me, though, is the theology. At one point, Ares explains at length to WW that he (Ares) is now more powerful than Zeus, because nobody is scared of the sky but everybody loves war. Putting aside the question of whether Zeus couldn’t somehow piggyback on climate change fears, I just want to say — I am so, so, so sick of the whole “it isn’t the worshippers who get power from the Gods — it’s the Gods who get power from their worshippers” wheeze. It was tired when George Perez dragged it out for his WW series, and after Neil Gaiman picked it up, dusted it off, and then (in his elegantly canny British way) jumped up and down on it for years…well, there wasn’t a whole lot left.

And yet, here’s Rucka, trundling along years later, spouting this crap like it’s actually insightful or meaningful or anything but the tedious ploy of a nonbeliever who wants to have a deity for verisimilitude while pissing on him (or her) too. The logic is patently ridiculous…and as a result it makes the Amazons look like idiots. If they know that their prayers and belief give the Gods power, then, you know, why not think about something else for a while? Why worship a figment of your imagination? Doing so isn’t profound, and it’s certainly not an alternative to man’s world, where everybody is always already worshipping their own immaculate feces. (And, yes, Alan Moore’s worship of his own imagination also irritates me, though at least, unlike Rucka, he actually does have an imagination.)

It seems to me like if you’re going to use gods in a super-hero comic, you can do one of two things. First, you can just treat them as super-heroes, which is more or less what Lee/Kirby did with Thor (at least in all the Thor I’ve read; maybe somewhere they try to build a theology/philosophy to explain the gods, but I mercifully missed that.) Nothing wrong with gods as superheroes; it’s entertaining and goofy and involves people hitting each other with unusual weapons andl/or force blasts, which is what comics are all about.

Or, second, you can actually, you know, have some kind of concept of transcendence and use the gods to explore that. That’s what Marston did in the first WW series. His Aphrodite and Ares are archetypes connected to his ideas about femininity and masculinity and love and war. Aphrodite especially is definitively transcendent; she’s wiser and more powerful than any other character. It makes sense that the Amazons worship her, because she actually seems to know things they don’t.

Of course, the things she “knows” about submission and love and gender roles are things you could disagree with — but Marston believes in them. What’s most irritating about the “gods are there because we believe in them” meme is that it true to some extent — but the truth is vitiated by putting it so clumsily. Yes, fictions do have power, and the power has something to do with belief. But that belief is at least in large part the artist’s belief in his or her own work, and it is created not just through saying, “hey, I believe in that,” but through genius and craftsmanship. Marston’s Aphrodite means something because Marston took the time to make her mean something; she’s transcendent because Marston thought there was transcendence, and thought about how to express that in his work. Rucka’s Ares, on the other hand, just says, “conflict is important,” as if anybody couldn’t have figured that out for themselves. And then he says he’s powerful because people think conflict is important. Just give it up, already. Don’t lecture me on the meaning of existence when you can’t even figure out how to tell a decent comic book story.

Wonder McDonnell (OOCWVG)

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So; Wonder Woman #196-200, Greg Rucka’s first few issues on the title, I think, with art by Drew Johnson and Ray Snyder.

Wonder Woman publishes a book filled with wisdom. We don’t get to hear much of that wisdom in detail, but apparently she thinks peace is good, eating meat is bad for the environment, and you should support your local U.N. The comics, in other words, are kind of like listening to World View, except with all the actual information about world events replaced with platitudes and remarkably poorly rendered, unstylish art. It can also be distinguished from World View because it has less action. Wonder Woman wanders around to signings and readings while a shadowy, nefarious organization attempts to…ruin her reputation! Like in Legends! Remember Legends! Except, this time, instead of Darkseid, we’ve got some blandly blond executive type and Dr. Psycho. Not the Marston version with ectoplasm and kinky hypnotism. No, this is a tedious, latter-day version who does nothing for five issues and finally is unleashed at the end to…start a mild riot, which the police break up by themselves without even Wonder Woman’s help. That’s because Wonder Woman is engaged in a by-the-numbers slugfest with Silver Swan. Who apparently is the tortured, mind-twisted Vanessa Kapetelis, the teen Mary Sue from George Perez’s run on the title. I presume the obligatory desecration of Vanessa isn’t Rucka’s fault. Still, it does suck that every minor character, no matter how innocent, has to eventually show up as a super-villain. It sort of makes you think that the people writing this stuff don’t actually have more than two ideas to rub together.

Who the fuck wants to read this crap? Whose idea of a hero is a NPR commentator in a swimsuit? Rucka just seems endlessly fascinated by how busy WW is; how she’s racing from one do-gooding enterprise to another. The supporting characters are mostly her staff, because, damn it, social secretaries are fascinating. The series often feels like a journalistic puff piece from a fashion magazine or something; it’s like WW is Angelina Jolie. And I know that lots of folks like to read about Angelina Jolie and her doings, sure. But Jolie exists; why do you want to invent her? I can understand the appeal of Twilight; I can understand the appeal of Superman; I can understand the appeal of the Marston Wonder Woman, who was fun because she had amazing adventures and exciting powers. But Wonder Woman as ersatz, earnest celebrity? For God’s sake, why?

In fact, to see how wrong-minded this approach is, you don’t have to go any farther than the back-up features in WW #200, an annual sized volume. A short story by Robert Rodi with art by Rick Burchett called “Golden Age” essentially retells Rucka’s story in the style of Marston/Peter. And — despite the fact that artist Rick Burchett disgraces himself in trying to imitate Peter, and despite the fact that Rodi is unwilling to fully embrace Marston’s bondage fetish — the result is delightful. We ditch the leaden plot, and instead rush blithely from enjoyably ridiculous complication to enjoyably ridiculous action feat. WW refuses to endorse Veronica Callow’s perfume, so Callow builds a super-robot which imitates WW and performs numerous evil deeds (painting a moustache on the statue of liberty! kissing Steve Trevor!) WW despairs as her friends turn against her…but then, with the help of Etta Candy, she uncovers the dastardly deeds…and convinces the robot to turn to the good! And at the end the goddess Aphrodite appears and turns the robot into a real girl. WW sum up by noting that she defeated the robot with “my powers of persuasion! That’s all any girl needs to be a Wonder Woman!” By this point, anyone willing to satirize Rucka is okay in my book…and, as a bonus, we also get to see one of the Amazon kangaroos, lost for many years in the seas of continuity.

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This is one of the only bondage scenes in the story (the villain is tied up at the end. Artist Rick Burchett gets Peter’s stiff poses, more or less, but Peter’s fluid linework not so much. The motion lines for the spanking for example, are uniform weight, simple boring strokes, clumsily positioned. No way would Peter draw them that way.

Again, this doesn’t actually read like it’s by somebody who really understand, or likes, or even read the Marston/Peter run that closely. Having WW’s friends turn on her and the anxiety about kissing Steve — that’s way, way Silver Age. Marston’s WW would never cut and run back to Paradise Island…and no way would Marston’s Steve reject a kiss from WW. But that’s neither here nor there; the point is that this is silly, action-filled fun, with the central messages (persuade, don’t fight! women power, yay!) presented with tongue-in-cheek, perhaps, but still with less pomposity and greater clarity than in Rucka. If they published a WW comic like this now, I’d probably have to buy it, even if the art did suck this badly.

(There’s also a moderately entertaining silver age story called “Amazon Women on the Moon” which is about what is says (by Nunzio Defilippis and Chistina Weir with actually competent art by Ty Templeton). And then there’s an adequate retelling of the Perseus legend by Greg Rucka. And hopefully that’s the last Greg Rucka I’ll read for quite some time.)

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For those who want more Rucka-bashing, I made fun of the Hiketeia here.