Well, obviously, I’ve gotten completely obsessed with Wonder Woman. If you’re just checking in, you can find the rest of my posts on this subject here: One Two Three Four Five.

So far the basic thesis I’ve been arguing is that the original Moulton/Peter Wonder Woman was a very odd and original creation, and that nobody else has ever really figured out a way to use the character that isn’t ridiculous or offensive or boring or all three.
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I’m going to take a slight turn here. I want to talk a little about Wonder Woman’s status as a feminist icon, and how that does or doesn’t really seem to make sense.

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I was aware that WW is generally thought of as a kind of feminist hero; an embodiment of strong, independent, heroic womanhood. I didn’t realize, though, that Gloria Steinem had actually put WW on the cover of the first issue of Ms. in 1972.

Steinem also wrote an essay about how strong and powerful Wonder Woman was, and about…well here’s a quote (taken from this very entertaining post on Comic Coverage:

“Looking back now at these Wonder Woman stories from the forties, I am amazed by the strength of their feminist message…Wonder Woman symbolizes many of the values of the women’s culture that feminists are now trying to introduce into the mainstream.” — Gloria Steinem

Anyway, because WW is supposed to symbolize feminism and female power, there was something of an outcry when this hit the stands, early in 2008

That’s Tiffany Fallon nude, with a Wonder Woman suit painted on her.

Greg Rucka, Wonder Woman writer, said “I’d rather have my daughter see this [the Ms. cover] than ever see that [the Playboy cover.]”  And he added “Bastards all.  You’ve no idea the damage you’ve done.  No idea at all.” 

I agree. The cover is a desecration. It goes against everything Charles Moulton believed; everything he stood for. How on earth could Playboy put Wonder Woman on the cover, and not have her tied up?

Slightly more seriously, I do have to wonder how, or what kind of, damage this sort of thing really does. In the first place…you really probably wouldn’t show Playboy to little kids anyway, would you?  And in the second, how is this out of sync with Wonder Woman’s image (other than that it’s not bondage, I mean?) WW’s costume is pretty thoroughly sexualized to begin with. I guess you could argue that WW is about her strength and heroism, not her shallow physical charms — but that’s just not true. In fact, shallow physical charms are one of her super-powers. This is from the first issue of WW:

Note all the stuff about Aphrodite? WW’s beauty is, like her strength or her speed, a divine gift (from the God of Love, no less). This has been pretty consistent down through the years, too; she’s still got super-beauty in George Perez’s reboot, for example, and even the dragon notices she’s hot in League of One.

Valerie D’Orazio makes more or less the same point:

As for me, like I said, I wasn’t surprised by the Playboy thing. It was a cheap shot by the magazine, to be sure. But I would be far more outraged if this happened to Batgirl or Supergirl. To me, Batgirl was always the true feminist superheroine — smart, independent, and under-sexualized. Supergirl was the virginal innocent — originally portrayed as your own kid sister or cousin.

But, Wonder Woman was created by a dude with really strong and weird opinions about women & sex — he referred to women’s vaginas as their “love parts” — and all that baggage couldn’t help but taint that character. Adventurous, resourceful Batgirl is the superheroine I wanted to be. Wonder Woman was half-naked. ….Which is not to say that WW can’t be/has not been redeemed and made into a character that women and girls can truly look up to. But I will finally believe this when she’s no longer drawn by cheesecake artists. I’ll believe it when she’s no longer half-naked.

And yet…though I agree with the argument up to a point, I think D’Orazio’s missing something. After all, Ms. Magazine didn’t put Batgirl on the cover. And that’s in part because nobody except hardcore comics geeks like D’Orazio gives a rats ass about Batgirl. Wonder Woman has more name recognition; she’s got more appeal. In fact, there’s some evidence that Tiffany Fallon is painted to look like Wonder Woman not solely because some guy thought “Wonder Woman is hot” but because, you know, Tiffany Fallon really likes Wonder Woman. As she says:

I’m obsessed with Wonder Woman. I grew up and I had the Wonder Woman Underoos, when Underoos first came out. And I was always a big fan of the show and Lynda Carter. And the older I got, the more I would get these comments like, “My god, you look like Lynda Carter in that picture!” And it doesn’t happen all the time, but I just grew to appreciate her and the character and the campiness of the project. I was Wonder Woman at one of the Playboy Mansion parties, and I just started getting all these comments, like, “My god! You would make a great Wonder Woman!” And I’m like, “You know, I would!” [Laughs]. And so I just have fun with it. And I heard they were starting to make a movie about it, and so I was like, “You know… Stranger things have happened in my life!” You never know. But that would be something I’d be really proud to be a part of.

In other words, WW’s on the Playboy cover for the same reason she’s on the Ms. cover — because girls like her.

Just because women, or some women, or a woman likes something doesn’t necessarily make it feminist or liberating, of course. Pictures of super-thin models are quite popular with girls of all age; does that mean they’re necessarily liberatory? Or is the popularity arguably, from a feminist perspective, perhaps a problem? 

Update: Fixed chronology error….

Update: the sage continues, with more on the Ms. cover, among other burblings…

This is my umpty-umpth post about Wonder Woman. Umpty tumpty umpty umph.

Anyway, I just read “League of One.” As you may or may not know, it’s basically a fantasy/super-hero cross-genre hybrid. WW is hanging out with cutesy wood-nymphs and mermaids on Themyscira when she hears a prophecy that the JLA will be killed by the last dragon, who has just risen form its sleep somewhere off in Europe. So WW decides to beat up all the other members of the league, take on the mantle of the league her own self, and go fight the dragon and die bravely, thus saving her comrades. She fights the dragon and wins and drowns, but then she’s given artificial respiration by Superman so she comes back to life. The prophecy is fulfilled…and yet Wonder Woman is still alive! Thank goodness!

Or maybe not so much. This book really demonstrated in startling and new ways why this character is just impossible. I mean, Wonder Woman is supposed to be a hero for girls, right? So putting her in a fantasy adventure, complete with fairy sprites and cute gnomes and sacrificing for your friends and one-alone-against-the-dragon…it seems perfect doens’t it? If you can’t use her in a story like this, what story can you use her in?

And yet, everything goes horribly wrong. Let’s take it one by one, I guess:

1. Sacrificing for your friends — This is an absolute iron trope of girls adventure fiction. Boys (like Spider-Man, for example) are always fighting for folks who don’t like them very much — oh the nobility! oh the self-pity! etc. Girls have nobility and self-pity too, but it tends to be spent not on random strangers, but on people with whom they have a bond (think Buffy or Cardcaptor Sakura.) So, okay, Wonder Woman is sacrificing herself for the JLA. Great! Except…well, they’re all guys. And she isn’t allowed to have any real romantic tension with any of them. The JLA is this weird boy’s club; she can burble on about how much she loves and admires the Flash or Green Lantern or whatever, but the emotional connection isn’t real. The pseudo-sublimated-romance with Superman is too distanced and unacknowledged to serve as a source of emotional resonance either. The whole thing ends up seeming stupid and clueless. This panel pretty much sums it up:

That’s a monument with the names of all the leaguers on it, by the way. Later WW knocks the top off it, leaving only her own name. You always castrate those you love…I guess. Or those you are supposed to love because of the bizarre exigencies of corporate continuity. Or whatever.

If you’re telling a fantasy story, incidentally, the heroine is supposed to get the guy in the end. And…yeah, artificial respiration with the big boy scout that is Superman doesn’t count.

2. Brave girl triumphs thorugh inner-resources and purity she didn’t know she possessed — The way this is supposed to work is, you get a normal everyday girl, see, and she discovers she’s got a special destiny, and she goes and overcomes amazing odds through her exemplary bravery and courage.

The problem here is that…well, Diana isn’t a normal everyday girl. She’s super-powered. And she’s been doing this sort of thing forever. And it’s really pretty darn unclear why she should find *this* particular challenge especially frightening. The super-hero tropes just make the whole thing dumb; I mean, she’s Wonder Woman. We know she’s all pure and light and goodness and super strong. Fantasy stories are supposed to be Bildungsroman…but there’s no building here.

Also, did I mention there’s an obligatory Diana-ties-herself-in-her-magic-lasso-to-force-herself-to-be-truthful scene? In other words, she’s not an ordinary girl with whom you can identify; she’s a weird bondage freak.

Not that there’s anything wrong with weird bondage freaks. At all. It just doesn’t work with the fantasy tropes, is all I’m saying.

3. painted fantasy art — I don’t want to be rude or anything, but sometimes….well. Ahem.

DON’T PAINT THE FUCKING SUPER-HEROES!!!!

Just don’t do it, okay? Unless you’re Bill Sienkiewitz and want to do the expressionist thing. But the Alex Ross realism; please stop. You don’t want to make your super-heroes look realistic. It looks dumb. Especially Wonder Woman. In the swimsuit. Really; the more realistic you make her, the more I’m looking at her saying, “Damn! She looks like she must really be cold!” (That’s always what I think when I see those Lynda Carter shows too, incidentally.)

Please God, can I exchange this for an electric blanket?

A detailed, painterly dragon looks nifty; a detailed, painterly Green Lantern looks like someone has left the world’s biggest action figure lying around the watchtower.

Love Among the Collectibles

Admittedly, it’s not all terrible. The scene where Wonder Woman gets rid of Superman is clever and even moving — Superman sees the tears in her eyes before she starts to beat the snot out of him. Plus there are vulture reaction shots, which I appreciate. And then the playful sequence where Diana’s mermaid friend grabs her and magically gives her a fish tail could almost come from Moulton; it’s got a weird lesbian tinge that he’d appreciate anyway. And I like the gnomes. They fit in the fantasy setting. They’re likable and flawed, and bad things happen to them, and you care. But then you go back to the super-heroes and Batman’s using elementary reverse psychology because he’s such a fucking genius and Superman’s beating his breast because he’s been betrayed,..and who gives a shit? They’re invulnerable and pure and boring and you can’t tell any story with them that’s worth a damn.

At least, no story that doesn’t feature…Seal Men!

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So…this is probably the last WW post for at least a bit. I’ll weigh in on Greg Rucka’s take on the character at some point, and hopefully Gail Simone’s too…and maybe on the TV series. But there will be a pause.  (I think I promised that before; but I really mean it this time.)

Update: Okay, so I’m not ready to review the Hikawhatsis, but you should read this.

Update 2: Okay, I lied, and there’s yet another Wonder Woman post up; this one about Ms. Magazine and Playboy.

This is my fourth post on Wonder Woman this week; for the earlier ones see one, two, three.

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Way back when I was bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and not filled to my ears with congealed bile, bitterness, and general cantankeousness, George Perez was pretty much my favorite comics artist. As a result, I bought the first couple years of his late eighties Wonder Woman reboot.

Time passed, and with all the filling up with bile and what-not…well, anyway, I haven’t read or much thought of either George Perez or his run on Wonder Woman in a long, long time. But since I was writing about Wonder Woman, I thought I’d disentomb the back issues from the fossilized long boxes, redistributing large piles of lint and small piles of cats.

So, now that I’ve reread these things for the first time in at least a decade, what’s the verdict?

First, and somewhat inevitably, I have to admit that Perez is no longer one of my favorite artists. Not that I think he’s bad, by any means. He’s obviously quite technically gifted, and he has an especial gift for faces. I actually remembered the sequence below, where Diana first does her bullets and bracelets thing, and I still think it’s pretty great, with a lot of the expressive charm that I appreciate in good shojo:

As is evident even in that little sequence above, Perez draws women with real sensuality and grace. His layouts are interesting and varied too. He’s a good artist; when his stuff is put in front of me, I like looking at it, which puts him head and shoulder, and, hell, waist above the vast majority of mainstream artists working today. But… compared to super-hero artists who really thrill me, like Jim Aparo or Nick Cardy or Neal Adams, or, for that matter, Mike Sekowsky in his WW run, or Harry Peter, Perez seems — well, kind of bland, I guess. His drawing is good, but not great; and his design sense always seems more utilitarian than inspired. For example, look at his wraparound cover for the first issue of WW.

This is supposed to be a tour de’force; lots of stuff happening, the whole issue shown in a single two page image. But basically it just sort of falls into a layout no-man’s land — not supremely detailed enough to be ravishing, not decisive enough in its use of space to be striking. There’s nothing wrong with any individual piece of it, or with the overall effect, even, but there’s nothing about it that makes me look at it and say “holy shit!”

Look, for example, at the (barely there) drapery on the mostly-nude Hippolyta kneeling before hercules on the left side of page. That cloth should cling and curve to her body…but it doesn’t. It just kind of sits there. Again, there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s not bad…it’s just not great.

All right, now that I’ve won that argument with my 17-year-old-self….

I’d actually remembered the first issue story as being pretty good…and it is pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. Greg Potter’s dialogue is overcarbonated in the mighty Marvel manner, but without the nudgy jocosity that made Stan Lee’s scripts tolerable (random selection: “But even into Paradise there can one day come a serpent!” groan. Still, you can see that Perez and Potter brought a lot of love and a lot of thought to the character. In particular, Perez and Potter went to town on the mythological background. There is, of course, lots of name-dropping deities and showing off erudition (Ares and Aphrodite are married! Isn’t that cool!) But there’s also several moments when all their reading actually allows them to approximate the tone and some of the power of actual myth. The sequence where Hippolyta and the Amazons are betrayed and raped by Hercules and his men has a brutal, tragic inevitability — a sense of smart, noble people entwined in betrayal and bloodshed by their own weaknesses. Similarly, Wonder Woman’s creation is both strange and poetic. The Amazons in this telling are the souls of women who were murdered by men, reincarnated by the Gods. Hippolyta (presumably the spirit of the cave-woman with whom the comic opens, though, in a very nice touch, this is never spelled out) was pregnant when she was murdered by her husband, and Diana is that unborn child’s spirit, infused into a body of clay that Hippolyta molds by the sea. It sounds complicated and kind of goofy I guess, but it’s done quietly and it’s really moving — as is the excitement of the immortal Amazons at the chance they now all have to help raise a child. ( Actually, this is somethng I probably appreciated less when I first read the book. I didn’t have a kid of my own then.)

Overall, then, I would say that this was easily the best take on Wonder Woman after Moulton. I would say that except for one thing. Wonder Woman isn’t in the comic. The story is all about Hippolyta and the Amazons. Diana shows up in the last pages, but she doesn’t become Wonder Woman till the last page. And, alas, that last page is ridiculous. That swimsuit with the pneumatic bustier and the star-spangled bottoms…all the mythological verisimilitude Potter and Perez have put so much effort into is just sacrificed on the altar of an old dead guy’s anachronistic fetish-wear.

And that’s kind of it. The rest of the series never really recovers from the fact that it has to focus on Diana. Sure, Potter and Perez do what they can to salvage the situation. They ditch the invisible plane, for example; this Wonder Woman can just fly under her own power. And they do their best to untangle the Steve Trevor/Diana Prince mess. In canon, WW pretty much becmae Diana Prince in order to attract Steve/not intimidate him; she was slumming for love. This is obviously fairly icky and not especially empowering — especially as Steve has over the years vacillated between being a rank fool and a manipulative asshole.

Steve Trevor, Fool; by Moulton and Harry Peter

Steve Trevor, Dick, by Robert Kanigher and Ross Andru

So, anyway, Potter and Perez just got rid of the Diana Prince identity altogether, and relegated Trevor to being an older uncle figure. Indeed, in the series itself, Diana has, through the whole first two years, exactly zero (0) romantic interests. (I think she had an abortive date with Superman in John Byrne’s miniseries at this time. Some ideas are so obvious they’re brilliant. And then, some ideas are so obvious they’re just fucking stupid. The Superman/Wonder Woman pairing is one of the latter (now Wonder Woman/Martian Manhunter on the other hand…or Wonder Woman/Black Canary….))

Where was I? Oh, right. Perez and Potter tried to rejigger the character to make her less ridiculous. And they had some success. The supporting cast, in particular — which is almost entirely female — is interesting and vared; there’s a scholar of ancient Greece, her daughter, a publicist, Steve Trevor, a (much-much-revised) Etta Candy; they all are fairly interesting and personable. I wouldn’t mind just reading about them and what they’re up to and how they related to Diana, how she adjust to living in a new world — stuff like that.

But, alas, we’re in a super-hero comic. And that means there have to be villains and super-battles and high-minded diatribes and everything bigger than life. And, man, it’s stupid. By the third comic or so, the whole — oh, no, I’ve been defeated, what shall I do, wait I’ll use my magic lasso! — has already become an over-used cliche. And when she’s not suddenly remembering how to use her main fucking weapon, Diana’s always thinking deep thoughts like “how strange these mortals are! I have much to learn from their courage and beauty!” Or some such. She’s the Silver Surfer, only with (slightly) more clothes.

Part of the problem is just mid-level super-hero storytelling, and a desperate dearth of interesting bad guys — Ares, the main villian of villains, just gives up when he realizes that his plan to destroy the earth will…cause the destruction of the earth. Part of the problem, though, is though they’ve fiddled with the character, they’re still saddled with Moulton’s creation. And while they avoid (at least for the most part) the bondage, they are stuck with some of his other preconceptions

The core of Perez’s story (scripted after the first few issues, and somewhat unfortunately, by Len Wein) is Diana’s mission as an emissary from Paradise Island, bringing alien knowledge, educating man’s world. But this mission is completely incoherent. What does Diana have to teach? If it’s peace, she should probably stop hitting people. If it’s how to be a strong woman…isn’t that a little condescending? Especially since she’s being written by men? Who keep drawing her in a one-piece? (Perhaps the message is that boned corsettes can do wonders.)

Basically, the problem with the series is that it wants to be an adventure series and it wants to have a message. But Moulton’s message (women are strong…because they are tied up!) won’t do — and yet they can’t quite abandon it either. So the series wanders on, mostly as a pro-forma super-hero book, but with half-digested pretensions. It can’t loosen up enough to be goofy, but it can’t spit out any words of wisdom which make sense. The series certainly has some nice moments — the sad death of Mindi Mayer, reprinted in the Greatest Wonder Woman stories, is touching. But it’s also really irritating; in a story about a woman’s sad suicide and about (presumably) female relationships, why is the narration in the head of a male detective drooling over Diana’s charms? For the most part, though, the stories aren’t either touching or irritating; they’re just tedious. I can’t believe I got this for two whole years. This time through, I couldn’t hack that many. I made it through ten, and that’s all. Back to the longbox for you, WW.

Update: All right, several folks in comments have goaded me to try Greg Rucka’s run…so I’ll give that a shot and report back…maybe next week? We’ll see how the schedule is….

Update 2: …and fixed embarrassing naming error. Duh.

Update 3: And part 5.

Here and here I argued that Wonder Woman is a the result of a particular idiosyncratic, fetishistic vision. Charles Moulton was more like R. Crumb than he was like Jerry Siegel or Lee/Ditko. As a result, Wonder Woman as icon is essentially a decades long disaster; she’s particular, not universal, and every effort to prove otherwise makes both the perpetrator and the character look ridiculous.
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So…I’ll stand by the argument that, outside of Moulton’s work, there aren’t any Wonder Woman stories that I’ve seen which I’d call “great” or even “really good.” There are a couple of takes, though, that are at least relatively unobjectionable. I thought I’d take a post to look at some of them, and talk about why they manage to do better than some of their peers.

(And just to get this out of the way: no, I haven’t read the current Gail Simone run on the Wonder Woman title. I’m willing to give it a go if anyone’ll vouch for it…though, jeez, the internets are not exactly abuzz with news of the series…is she even still on the title? Oh well…anyway…)

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First off..the love it/hate it Denny O;Neill/Mike Sekowsky run, where Diana gets to wear a full suit of clothes in exchange for losing all her powers (doesn’t sound like such a bad deal, really.) There’s one of these stories in the Greatest Wonder Woman Stories Ever Told (from before she changed her outfit and lost her powers)…and reading it through the first time I was fairly appalled. Even after reading the Kanigher stories, it’s hard to believe how dumb, dumb, dumb Diana is in this outing. It’s like someone popped her head open and scooped her brain out with a mellon-baller. First of all, she lets some random lech crawl all over her at some random party…and then it’s Steve who bashes his head in, not her. Then Steve cheats on her, and tells her…and she doesn’t notice! Then she’s forced to testify against him in court, is obviously broken up about it…and Steve whines and bitches and tells her she betrayed him…and she just sort of sits there and takes it and feels bad. And then she goes undercover and gets dressed up in fab hippie clothing…and all of a sudden she realizes that she’s good looking! I mean, okay, many lovely women have body issues…but she’s been running around in her underwear for 20 years at this point! The idea that a change to sexier clothes is going to reinvent her self image seems…confused.

But after the initial shock wore off, I started to see some of the appeal of O’Neil’s approach. In the first place, Mike Sekowsky’s art is fantastic.

Really dramatic, off-kilter page compositions, with figures occasionally breaking out of the panels; beautiful giant-eyed faces emoting, almost art nouveau clothing deisgns — it would make me think of manga, if the trippy, psychedelic colors weren’t so central. I don’t think I like it more than Harry Peter’s original art for the series, but these are the only WW visuals I’ve seen that are even in the same ballpark. (And, no, alas, George Perez is nowhere near the artist that Peter or Sekowsky are…I’ll discuss him a bit more below.)

So, yeah…great art can salvage a lot. And even the story…I mean, the story isn’t good. It’s dumb and insulting; the gestures at hipness are just embarrassing, the gestures at feminine psychology are ludicrous; the whole thing makes you wonder if O’Neill ever met an actual hippie, or an actual woman…or an actual human being for that matter.

But all that aside…you do sort of have to admire the way he’s managed to get around the pitfalls of writing a Wonder Woman story. Because, while this is not good, it’s not good in a Denny O’Neill way. The problems here aren’t really the problems Moulton has bequeathed his heirs. Their isn’t any bondage nonsense bizarrely tripping things up. There isn’t the snickering frat-boy snickering at the character’s sexuality. There isn’t the desperate confusion over setting — where the hell does Wonder Woman even make sense? — that is often a problem. O’Neill avoids all that by pretty much ignoring it. His Wonder Woman isn’t Wonder Woman at all, really — yes, she still has the character design (though he got rid of even that a couple issues down the road.) But he treats her pretty much as if she’s just some random chick. I think this panel sums it up:

There she is, at a cocktail party, looking off semi-vacuously as the men talk, the way any woman might in a dumb romance comic. There’s nothing wonderful about her; she’s just some random dame who accidentally put on the wrong duds this morning. Similarly, even though WW spends most of the comic investigating a mystery, and even though she has this magic lasso which supposedly makes people tell her the truth, she never uses it to further her investigation. Magic truth-making lassos? No way; you can’t tell a story and make sense of that! Not unless you’re Charles Moulton, anyway. O’Neill isn’t, knows he isn’t, and wants as little part of the mystic clap-trap as he can get away with.

Of course, at some point, you’ve got to ask…if you don’t want to write about Wonder Woman, if you have not interest in Wonder Woman, if, in fact, you’ve realized that it isn’t really possible to write Wonder Woman — why not just get a new character to put in your mediocre, misogynist story with the great art? Why call it Wonder Woman at all? But such are the whims of marketing.

I do think, though, that this is pretty much the only way a great Wonder Woman story will ever get written, if one ever does. Somebody will come along, say, right, I’m going to create a completely new character, put the name “Wonder Woman” on her, and tell a story that doesn’t have anything to do with the character’s origin, not to speak of her 60 plus years of history. If a great writer did that…well, the story would have at least a chance of being great. Alan Moore’s Promethea is I guess the hypothetical that almost/coulda/shoulda been, except that he didn’t call it Wonder Woman, and it turned into a lame-ass treaty on the Kabbala half-way through. So we’re stuck with O’Neill’s effort instead, which isn’t great, or even necessarily good, but of which is, at least, his own failure. And lord knows, reading those Kanigher/Andru stories, he could have done a lot worse.
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Update: and here’s a discussion of George Perez’s run…

Update 2: And part 5.

So this is my second longish post on Wonder Woman. In the last one I talked about Charles Moulton, Wonder Womans’ creator, and why I thought it was very difficult for other writers to put together decent stories using his character. Basically, I argued that whereas Superman, Batman, Spider-man, etc., are to some extent just interchangeable adventure heroes, Wonder Woman stories were much more like something by Tom Of Finland or R. Crumb — that is, Moulton had an idiosyncratic vision based on his (fairly explicit) sexual kinks (basically strong woman, bondage, control, submission — that kind of thing.) Again, you might want to read the whole thing here if you haven’t.

All right. So I was going to look now at why or in what ways Wonder Woman has been a problem for the writers who have come after Moulton.

Basically, Moulton’s Wonder Woman is (ahem) bound up with his a very particular set of fetishes and fantasies. Moulton made his stories about those fetishes and fantasies; that’s what he wanted to talk about, and in that context WW’s appearance (girly, uncovered) her tools (the magic lasso, the bracelets) and her contradictory image (powerful, but always being dominated) all make at least a kind of sense. His weird blend of feminism/misogyny (“I love strong women — tie them up so I may love them more!”) which means you can’t get the feminism without the misogyny, but also means you can’t get the misogyny without the feminism. In particular, the way and the extent to which Moulton presents and fetishizes female relationships seems equally tied up with his own sexual peccadillos (lesbianism is never very far below the surface here) and with ideas about girls supporting each other in a feminist or protofeminist way. Certainly, Moulton comics are far, far from the first thing I’d give to my daughter, but I can see why young girls might have found something to connect with in them. Women have power (they are so, so powerful!) and they love each other (oh, please, love each other more!)

I guess the point I’m making is that there’s misogyny, but it’s not gratuitous. Moulton has a vision. It’s not PC and it’s totally sexually twisted, but at least he’s thought about it. He cares about women. You can mock that, or argue with that, or even suggest that it might be better for everyone if he cared about women a little less, but at least there’s the sense that he’s paying attention. This is someone in particular’s misogyny –which means it’s also someone in particular’s feminism. He’s not trying to sell you a bill of goods and then backhanding you. The whole thing is up front. To me, that just seems less oppressive, in various senses.

When other folks use Wonder Woman, though…well, things don’t work quite as well. The fetishization and bondage weirdness are at least somewhat disavowed…but you don’t get rid of them that easily.

Disempowerment in various forms is a staple of super-hero covers. For men, though, it usually involves bodily transformation (Flash’s big head) or humiliations in which the sexual implications are at least a bit more repressed. But here…Wonder Woman tied up and smiling as she playfully cocks her crotch and begs for it with the (ahem) Elongated Man looking on eagerly; Wonder Woman tied up and legs spread with a missile propitiously aimed; kneeling with legs spread…I mean, it’s not especially subtle, is it?

Again, the point here is that this isn’t a perversion of the character — this is the character. But still, something has definitely gone wrong. Part of the problem is the art; after the Moulton era, WW moved towards the standard semi-realistic super-hero art meme. The result is that what is a kind of iconic fantasy in Peter’s work ends up looking a lot more like basic cheesecake illustration. Or, to put it another way, it becomes more generic, less about whatever cathexis of strength/dominance/idealism/smuttiness went into Moulton’s Wonder Woman, and more about whatever expected thing guys want to look at. As a result, these covers don’t seem odd or bizarre, the way Moulton’s work did. They seem predictable. Wonder Woman was always wank fodder, I think, but here she ends up as just wank fodder. There’s nothing else going on. We’ve gone from someone’s particular hothouse boudoir to a generalized locker-room for geekish fanboys.

As witness the unfortunately named 1959 gem “Wanted — Wonder Woman” by Robert Kanigher and Ross Andru (reprinted in Greatest WW stories ever told). The story features a race of short, unusually ugly multi-limbed green aliens, who control Diana’s mind and force her to agree to marry Steve Trevor.

Can I just say…ewwww. The little aliens all jubilant together because they’ve romantically-sexually manipulated the heroine; it’s like a bunch of thirteen-year-old-boys celebrating after stealing their Mom’s friend’s panties — or like a bunch of comics geeks chortling to themselves about the off-color WW fan-fic they just wrote. It’s comic creator as pre-adolescent tyrant, guiltily manipulaiting his little plastic toy (and in Ross Andru’s art, all the characters do indeed look plastic.) The whole thing is just smarmy and repressed and depressing. Compared to this, good honest bondage — or good honest parasite fetishism, if that’s the way Kanigher swings — would seem positively healthy.

As usual, Grant Morrison channels the zeitgeist most effectively:

©Grant Morrison and Howard Porter, aka, the worst artist in the world.

Wonder Woman: she’s a super-hero…and a victim of sexual harassment! Who says you can’t have it all, ladies! (That’s a real honest to goodness angel with the smarmy patter there, too. Now you know…there are frat boys in heaven.)

Admittedly, not all Wonder Woman writers have necessarily gone for cheap titillation and demeaning, half-disavowed power fantasies. If they don’t take Moulton to the most obvious stupid place, though, he often ends up ambushing them. Here’s a memorable panel:

This is from an old 70s Super-Friends comic. As the caption says, Wonder Woman has been forced to discard her bracelets for various reasons. And, as a result, she turns into a beserker, because Amazons need metal bracelets to restrain them. It’s a total Charles Moulton plot device — bondage, restraint, blah, blah. But nothing else in the Super-friends has anything to do with these themes. Wonder Woman herself is completely bland; like all the other super-friends, she talks and acts like a boy scout crossed with Calvin Coolidge and a primary school teacher. Then, all of a sudden, she’s some sort of primal deadly female force who threatens us all! You’ve got this basic boring kids comic, and suddenly comics’ horny atavistic past rears up (in various senses) and your tots are looking at Charles Moulton’s fetish problems. This is certainly bizarre — but it still isn’t exactly individualistic. It just feels like nobody’s at the tiller; the misogyny is just a flat accident, it’s an ignorant flub, attributable equally to (A) the creator’s lack of interest in Wonder Woman and (B) the creator’s lack of interest in woman. Thus, while the moment does have an aphasiac charm, it’s also undeniably a parodically casual desecration. Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Green Arrow, even Spider-Man; none of them were really meant to say anything in particular. But Wonder Woman was; Moulton intended to use her to embody his own ideas (however cracked) about feminism and femininity. His successors overwhelmingly didn’t give a shit.

One last story: this one by Phil Jimenez. Called “She’s a Wonder,” it’s from 2001, and was reprinted in the Greatest WW stories ever told volume, The narrative’s about Lois Lane writing a puff piece about Wonder Woman. In some ways, it’s really not bad. Jimenez is a talented draftsman; following in George Perez’s footsteps, his Wonder Woman actually looks Greek, for example, and he obviously has a lot of fun drawing her in different costumes. He also has a nice way with (often bitchy) dialogue, and as a result the very talky script doesn’t seem burdensome. We see WW talking to President Luthor (“more full of dung than the Augean stables”), getting rejected by a hot humanitarian do-gooder (“isn’t he beautiful?”) chatting with some flaming friends (“you think all men are gay!” “well they are — especially the men.”) It’s actually a lot like reading an actual puff piece — a good one. Diana comes across as beautiful, likable, smart, dedicated — sort of a hyped-up Angelina Jolie, down to the Third-World charity work. The whole story is obviously fairly idiotic in some sense — why do we want to read celebrity journalism about a fictional character again? But it’s done with enough humor and grace that it’s hard to feel sour about it.

Until right at the end. Lois, who’s somewhat resentful of Diana’s relationship with Superman, demands to know how Wonder Woman does it all — how she can be the modern woman — so strong and yet so feminine — how she can fight bad guys all day but still smell morning fresh — how she can “accept her contradictions.” It’s a pretty dumb thing to ask, but the answer is even dumber — WW proudly sticks out her magic bondage lasso of truth, and explains that it’s what keeps her honest. She is all the woman she can be because she ties herself up every night before she goes to bed.

Charles Moulton would be proud, presumably. But is that really what Jimenez wanted to say? He started out trying to tell a story about a complex woman for the oughts, and he ends up saying the road to feminist paradise is through New Age B&D? The puff piece just kind of deflates with a giant “frrraaaaappppppppp.” Poor Jimenez. Unlike most of his peers, he obviously does care about this character, but…well, what can you do? Dress her up, make her talk like a human being, give her nice clothes and tell her you really admire her for her mind; it doesn’t matter. Wonder Woman’s still going to be true to the weirdo who brung her. Moulton’s still her man.

Update: And Part 3 now up. Also, part 4.

Update 2: And part 5.

A couple weeks or so I wrote about female super-heroes and the way that the major properties of the big two are justly not as popular as, say, Sailor Moon. In particular, I talked a little about Wonder Woman, and how she was just not necessarily what girls were looking for in a pulp genre, and for good reason.

I was thinking about that a little more and (er) wondering if I’d overstated the case. After all, the Lynda Carter TV series was quite popular back in the day, wasn’t it? Admittedly, compared to Superman or Batman or Spiderman or…well, lots of properties, really, WW hasn’t had a ton of multi-meida success — one three-season TV series is fairly small beer as these things go (I guess she did have an animated series, but it didn’t really go anywhere, I don’t think. And there’s a movie in development hell….)

Anyway, then Dirk posted a link to this strip and article about how the original Wonder Woman creator, Charles Moulton (real name William Moulton Marston, apparently), struggled with censorship — it seems he wanted to constantly tie the character up in chains, and editorial felt he needed to find other materials with which to truss up his Amazon. (No, really.) That article is by Dr. K, who also included a strip showing our heroine in a gimp mask.

©DC Comics, Charles Moulton, and Harry G. Peter in some combination.

Dirk commented that Wonder Woman was probably DC’s most problematic character.”

So now I was kind of intrigued. I’d known that Moulton was…um, idiosyncratic, but I’d never read a ton of his stuff. So I turned to trusty Amazon in the hopes that they had one of those cheap black and white showcase book of his early strips. No dice, unfortunately; the only thing available is one of the hardback golden age treasuries for 50 bucks, and I’m not that interested. They did have a volume of “The Greatest Wonder Woman Stories Ever Told” though. Not too pricey, and I figured I could read some Moulton and see what other writers had done with the character over the years.

There were only two Charles Moulton stories as it turned out, with art by Harry G. Peter. The first is what I think must be Wonder Woman’s first appearance (there is no historical notation to speak of — nice job, DC) and it’s more or less unreadable. It starts in media res, after Wonder Woman saved Steve Trevor and he calls her beautiful and so she falls in love with him. Then she window shops (cause that’s what woman do) in her underwear (because that’s what super-heroes do) while men stare at her and women make jealous quips. Then she enters into a business deal to go on the stage performing her bullets-and-bracelets wheeze. Unfortunately, the deal is made with an unpleasant Jewish caricature who has a big nose and is money-grubbing, so he rips her off, but she’s Wonder Woman! So she beats up the Jew and then later beats up what I presume are Nazis (the script is not especially clear) — thus bashing anti-semite and Jew alike, which is kind of nice message of peace and equality, I guess. She saves Steve again too, in there.

©Charles Moulton, Harry G. Peter, DC Comics

Oh, yeah, and there’s a totally bizarre sequence where she pays a nurse to switch places with her so the nurse can go off to be with her husband and WW can be the caretaker for the bedridden Steve Trevor. The nurse’s name is Diana Prince, of course, which is a coincidence, because WW’s name is also Diana! How about that! And that’s how WW gets her secret identity — in aphasiac, passive-agressive pursuit of the man she loves because he threw her a casual compliment. Empowerment aplenty here, ladies!

So not an especially auspicious beginning — and you’ve got to be thinking, if these are the greatest wonder woman stories, what in god’s name do the worst ones look like? Luckily, the second story in the collection is more like it. This is from 1948, and in the intervening six years Moulton and Peter have managed to figure out more clearly what they were doing. Specifically, there’s a lot less mooning around after Steve Trevor and a lot more girls being tied up and dominated. Also, the plot has moved from merely being annoyingly vague and scattershot into a sublime realm of utter nonsense. Evil women from Saturn; Venus Girdles which force the wearer to be loving and obedient; WW’s entire rogues gallery, including Giganta, a gorilla who has been turned into a woman (or as she introduces herself, “I’m Giganta, formerly a female gorilla!); WW’s side-kicks, the Holiday Girls, transformed into gorillas from the neck down; Hypnota controlling the will of unsuspecting typists; Etta Candy, WW’s fat sidekick, shouting “Woo-woo! This is as easy as cutting chocolate fudge!”

Also, did I mention all the girls being tied up and dominated? What with Hypnota, the Venus Girdles, and various hostage situations, someone’s will is always being bent, and when a will isn’t being bent, then someone’s being tied up — and often, gratuitously, you get both at once. (As one lovely haplessly declares, “You don’t have to tie the ropes to tight! I can’t break even the weakest rope you bind me with while I wear this Venus Girdle!)

Harry Peter isn’t a great artist — he doesn’t have the design chops or the color sense of Fletcher Hanks, for example — but he’s not bad either. For Wonder Woman, he may even be perfect. His untrained, cartoony figures are far enough from reality that you’re never asked to actually try to imagine WW as an actual person, actually wearing that ridiculous outfit which, in real life, would just not be all that flattering (as you can see from the standard, ill-conceived, hyper-real Alex Ross cover…or from the Lynda Carter TV series, for that matter.)

©Alex Ross

On the other hand, Peter’s got enough command of the female form to capture a certain submerged (or not so submerged) sensuality. His penchant for crowded panels with lots and lots of women and breasts and curves is also serendipitous; nothing you look at in particular is all that hot, but the overall impression is of a diffused voluptuousness. Even the stiffness of his drawings works well; whether or not the characters are actually bound, they seem to be restrained or frozen. For instance, check out this illustration (page 41). Wonder Woman is hanging outside the window looking in on another woman hiking up her skirt with her face obscured. The bare legs and hidden face is a classic cheesecake pose, and WW looking through the window unobserved certainly has erotic connotations as well. Perhaps most striking, though, is WW’s body position; she’s all pulled in on herself, clutching the rope, her feet crossed over each other, her arms stiff…and her face turned away from the reader. A girl exposes herself as WW watches, and we (both male and female) watch WW as she is positioned in a way which has to be read as submissive.

©Moulton, Peter, DC Comics

I really love those stylized flame-blots too, and the way the typist’s hands are thrown up in an almost ritualized gesture, like she’s on a frieze; really beautiful and weird. Maybe I do think he’s a great artist.

Or look at this panel:

©Moulton, Peter, DC Comics

That’s Clea, some sort of Atlantean baddie, binding Wonder Woman. Obviously the perspective is totally screwed up; Clea is way bigger than she should be in comparison to her captive. The result, though, is that Wonder Woman looks extremely fragile and vulnerable while Clea looks gigantic and dominating. The art, in other words, helps with the fetishization.

Despite the inarticulate plot and the borderline-outsider art, then — or because of them — the Moulton/Peter Wonder Woman is coherent; there’s a vision here, albeit a perverse one. Hipployta says it all in the last panel: “The only real happiness is to found in obedience to loving authority.” Yes, precisely — as long as we realize we’re talking about Moulton’s happiness. Obedience, disobedience, strength bound and compelled, healthy women frolicking together one moment and being reduced to animals the next — the sexual subtext isn’t even really sub (as it were). To the extent that Wonder Woman is supposed to be some sort of strong female role model, it’s because Moulton loves the rush of controlling strong women, and of being controlled by them. This is still male power fantasy; it’s just focused on men thinking about women rather than with Superman or Batman, where it’s all men thinking about men (the fanny vs. dick distinction again.)

What this means is that the Moulton Wonder Woman is a lot more like, say, R.Crumb’s work, or Tom O’Finland’s, than it is like the adventures of WW’s betighted peers. Superman and Batman and even Spider-Man are basic adventure narratives, and while there are certainly Freudian implications to the way those work out, those implications are generic, not individual. Superman may tell you something about sexuality or masculinity in general, but he doesn’t tell you all that much about Jerry Siegel in particular; same with Spider-Man and Stan Lee. On the other hand, Wonder Woman is repetitive sexual idiosyncracy as aesthetic vision — I now know more than I maybe want to about what Charles Moulton and quite possibly Harry G. Peter), in particular, likes. And while that (in my opinion) makes their particular Wonder Woman stories more enjoyable and creative than the Siegel/Schuster Superman or the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man, it has created something of a quandry for future creators. It’s one thing to writer Superman fan fic; it’s another to write R.Crumb fan fic. Doing the first seems natural enough; doing the second seems like an enormously bad idea. And writing Wonder Woman is, as I suggested, a lot more like the second than it is like the first. Which is maybe why Wonder Woman stories by Moulton’s successors have tended to be not just bad, but embarrassingly bad. As I’ll hopefully discuss tomorrow, if all goes well…..

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Just an addendum: I love this image as well:

©Moulton, Peter, DC Comics

Lovely colors, especially that orange background and that red against the blue pole. Can’t get enough of those stylized flames. And the dead center composition…totally clunky, but again the stiffness works in context. I do definitely like this art more than Ditko’s stuff on Spider-Man (though not on Dr. Strange necessarily.) He is great, damn it. Does anyone know if he ever did anything else? Wikipedia only mentions Wonder Woman, which I guess was at the end of his career….

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Hey, and poking around I found another Moulton/Peter WW story on my shelves, in the Greatest Golden Age Stories hardback. This issue’s from 1945, apparently. Man, I love this page. The upper-left panel particularly, with the stylized light turning into faux stained glass. What on earth is that band of yellow across the middle even supposed to be? It’s garage sale medieval, obviously — but done so well, with the oddball geometric lines breaking up the only very notionally 3-D image into distinct color blocks. And that picture next to it, with the girls with wings looking up transfixed — the preciousness is so unhinged, and yet so insistently formalized, it’s like a ritualized sugar rush. Did Henry Darger ever see this stuff I wonder? You’d like to think he did; I think Peter must have been his long-lost soul mate….

And this image, with the invisible plane’s wake as a weird purple rainbow…

This issue also has more of Moulton’s oddball inspirational feminism. Apparently the girls on Paradise Island aren’t believing in themselves enough, and are having trouble with their super tasks. So Wonder Woman inspires them. Then she goes off and inspires girls in the garden of Eden, who aren’t from Eden but from Venus maybe? So she leads them to victory over Seal Men, but not before their captured and frozen in blocks of ice. And Wonder Woman gets tied up too, because you can’t show everyone how strong you are unless you are tied up and break free and dominate others. It’s wholesome fetish fun, and empowering too!

Update: Second Wonder Woman post here.

Update 2: part 3 and part 4.

Update 3: And part 5.