Tag Archives: Ben Saunders

Ben Saunders on William Marston and Sex

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Ben Saunders had a great comment which I wanted to highlight in a post for Marston’s birthday. So here ’tis.

Thanks for your comment, Mike. To elaborate on Noah’s response: part of the difficulty, I think, is that Marston was an extraordinary sexual optimist who believed in the liberatory potential of desire. Although it is Freud who is usually associated with the logic of repression (“your neurozis iz a funktion of your represt longink for your muzzer!”), he was in fact far less optimistic about the idea that facing and overcoming repressions might lead to “health” than Marston. There’s a dark side, an almost cthonic element, to Freudian libido. Marston, on the other hand, seems much more cheery; “free yourself from your repressions, give in to your (real) desire to be dominated, and you will be happy.” It’s really a kind of sex-faith – to the point that the possibility of acknowledging a sexual element in all the non-sexual scenarios you suggest (child-parent, student-teacher, good citizen before the law) would not be seen by Marston as a distortion or corruption of those scenarios. Marston would probably say that the very need to insist that those scenes are non-sexual is itself a sign of our tendency to view sexual energy (falsely) as inevitably corrupting.

Of course, that’s exactly how a puritan culture DOES see sex – as dangerous, forbidden, shameful, corrupt, and having NO PLACE in any of the social interactions you have described. In some ways, it’s that puritanism that Marston is responding to – but he really doesn’t think he’s being subversive by insisting that sexual energy does play a role in all those interactions, because sexual energy is an unqualified good, in his vision.

I don’t actually agree with that, and would be hard put to point to one place in his writings where he flat out says it – it’s more an implication of the larger theories. But I think it’s a fair characterization of his thought, and it helps to explain why his comics seem weirdly sexy and sexless at the same time (to our perhaps jaded, puritan-in-reverse, pornotopic culture). His vision of sex is simply too sunny for us. To that extent, the observation that Marston was less cynical than us is probably right on – although I wouldn’t attribute a lack of cynicism to his culture at large, for all that their standards for sexual display were very different from our own.

The entire roundtable on Marston/Peter’s Wonder Woman is here.

Loving Authority: Some Thoughts On Wonder Woman #28

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“There is no enemy so cruel or so ruthless as a once-defeated criminal who seeks revenge.” With this typically portentous opening sentence, William Moulton Marston lets us know that we can expect to see a few familiar villainous faces over the course of Wonder Woman #28. And sure enough, the story makes enjoyable use of a device that has since become a cliché of the genre: the super-villain team-up. But Marston’s resort to this now standard trick from the hack-writer’s grab bag was probably prompted by something more than the ordinary motivations of a professional comic-book scribe. Having recently received a fatal diagnosis of cancer, he knew he faced the ultimate deadline, and that this story would likely be his swan song. Whereas the standard comic book “blast from the past” is an opportunity to say hello, again, to members of the rogue’s gallery that we have come to know and love, Marston was saying goodbye. Wonder Woman #28 is his fond farewell, then, not only to the character that had finally brought him fortune and fame, after a long search for the spotlight, but also to her entire supporting cast.

Writers such as Ken Alder, Geoffrey Bunn, Les Daniels, and Gerard Jones, among others, have provided a wealth of information regarding Marston’s career prior to the creation of Wonder Woman. Consequently, we now know that Marston’s various previous attempts to convert his academic credentials into money and celebrity had met with a measure of success, but had not provided him with a platform on the scale of his dreams, let alone financial security. From his earliest correspondence with pioneer publisher M. C. Gaines, however, Marston seems to have grasped both the commercial and communicative potential of comic books — seeing possibilities for both profit and proselytizing in a new medium that most members of his generation and class could only dismiss with disdain. His faith proved well placed. He scored big on his first try-out, creating one of the most immediately recognizable and indelible images of female empowerment to emerge from the mass-cultural milieu of 20th century America. But Wonder Woman was no mere lucky strike, or the product of a sudden epiphany. On the contrary, she was in many ways the culmination of more than twenty years of sustained intellectual work on Marston’s part — the comic book incarnation of half a lifetime’s meditation on the subjects of human psychology and sexuality.

Inspired by and at some level perhaps even a partial composite of Elizabeth Marston and Olive Byrne, the two real women with whom Marston lived in a polyamorous relationship, Wonder Woman was without doubt conceived as part of a sincerely feminist vision (which is one reason why she can claim such prominent figures as Gloria Steinem among her fans). But Wonder Woman was also a complex fantasy object for her creator, a projection of and vehicle for the transmission of his erotic and political desires — two categories that were equally inextricably linked in many of the publications he produced throughout his academic and journalistic careers. I’ve written about Marston’s intellectual and emotional investment in Diana at considerable length elsewhere, so I won’t belabor the point here; but suffice it to say that at times Marston seems to have imagined (perhaps only half-seriously, but nevertheless with all the creative energy at his command) that he could change the world through his Wonder Woman comics. Working through her, he believed he could contribute to the reformation of the basic structure of sexuality itself, at least as manifest in 1940s American society.

As Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt hopefully opined from his own deathbed: “He that no more must say is listened more/ Than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose.” Marston surely felt a similar hope when he sat down at his typewriter to enter Diana’s world for the last time; for in Wonder Woman #28 his idiosyncratic liberationist project resurfaces with a fresh urgency and insistence. The resulting three-part tale — “Villainy Incorporated,” “Trap of the Crimson Flame,” and “In the Hands of the Merciless” — is therefore more than just an affectionate backward looking glance at some of the weird and wonderful antagonists from Wonder Woman’s past (though it is clearly that, too). It is also a restatement of many of Marston’s key themes, as they had been sounded throughout his entire tenure on the title. More poignantly, it is his last attempt to lay out a set of principles that he seems to have honestly believed might mitigate some perennial aspects of human suffering.

The story begins in media res, reminding readers of Wonder Woman’s recent defeat of an invasion from Saturn. The first illustrated panel (the second on the page, the first being taken up entirely with text) shows Diana having captured a large group of Saturnites in her golden lasso — which seemingly could expand or contract in length as needed, and here must be a few hundred yards long. Interestingly, artist H. G. Peter initially depicts a mixed group of Saturnite invaders, of both male and female genders.

But in what I would regard as a telling slip, by just the second illustrated panel, the men in this group have mysteriously vanished; Diana (and Marston) is apparently only interested in the disposition of the female captive Saturnites, while the fate of the males is simply passed over. Attractively coiffed, and garbed in skintight costumes of bright scarlet, these “evil” young women are bound together in single file with their hands behind their backs, and transported by Diana in her invisible plane to the ominously named “Transformation Island” — the Amazon correctional facility. There, we are told, all prisoners are required to wear Venus girdles, a garment made from a “magic metal” that “compels complete obedience to loving authority.” This last phrase is spoken by the chief Amazonian prison officer in the final panel of the first page of the story; but it is repeated almost verbatim in the final panel of the very last page, by Diana’s mother Hippolyta: “The only real happiness for anybody,” we are assured there, “is to be found in obedience to loving authority.”
 

 
“Obedience to a loving authority.” Even for a reader unfamiliar with Marston’s psychological theories about the “primary emotions” of dominance and submission, the bookend status of this recurrent phrase signals the thematic significance of such concepts for the story at hand. And, indeed, the adventures that take place in between this repeated assertion depict several dizzying and occasionally hilarious oscillations between expressions of the impulse towards dominant assertion, on the one hand, and expressions of longing for a life of service, on the other. Thus, over the course of the first few pages, Eviless, a villainous (if rather unimaginatively named) Saturnite, turns the tables on her Amazon captors by forcing them to wear the Venus Girdles they have imposed on their prisoners, and thereby inverting the hierarchical structure of dominance and submission that characterizes the healthy “norm” of Transformation Island. However, while briefly wearing a Venus Girdle herself, even Eviless is momentarily tempted to surrender to the joy of captivity: “Now to remove this girdle … But I want to wear it — I feel so peaceful and happy!” As if to confirm the validity of those swiftly denied feelings with regard to the pleasure of obedience, several of the prisoners that Eviless subsequently attempts to release proclaim that they do not actually wish to be liberated at all. (“No, No! We don’t want our girdles removed!”). Eviless dismisses their desire to remain captive, of course — “You’ve let these Amazons break your spirit,” she declares — but later in the story, when some of these same happy prisoners have their girdles removed anyway, against their will-to-submit, we discover that a more profound change has actually taken place. “Without the girdle I feel dominant — invincible!” a girl named Irene discovers, “But I don’t feel cruel and wicked as I used to — the Amazons have transformed me! I love Wonder Woman and Queen Hippolyte … I must save them!”
 

 
At this moment, the regime of Transformation Island would seem to have produced the paradoxical ideal female of Marston’s psychological theories. Irene is “dominant” rather than submissive, but ruled by “love” rather than selfish “appetites.” (Marston’s preferred word in his academic writings for selfish-dominants is “appetitive”; he contrasts the appetitive type with unselfish-dominants, who he thinks can save the world by taking up the role of “Love Leaders.” Seriously. Read the last five or six pages of The Emotions of Normal People if you don’t believe me.)

In other words, the newly liberated Irene is just like Wonder Woman herself. She is an ideal personality type (in Marston’s preferred psychological terms), with a strong will to dominate that is nevertheless somehow conjoined with an equally strong will to love and serve others. We are encouraged to draw this parallel between Irene’s “new” post-Venus-girdle personality and that of Wonder Woman’s when she subsequently (and suddenly) develops Wonder-Woman-like powers: breaking free of her bonds, bending the bars of her cage, and freeing the other “good” prisoners. Irene goes on to lead a second rebellion of submissive-dominant prisoners against the prior rebellion led by Eviless and her dominant-dominant prisoners (the redundancy seems necessary if we are to keep track of who gets to “top” whom in this curious world of dominant and submissive flip-floppers). Irene then frees Wonder Woman (who had also been captured by Eviless), and together they restore order to Transformation Island; by which I mean that aggressively dominant types such as Eviless are once again placed in Venus Girdles, which cause them to happily accept roles of submission and service, while their mistresses (now including the formerly submissive prisoners who had earlier refused liberation at Eviless’s hands) once again dominate over them — lovingly, of course.

The inversions and reversal of the categories of top and bottom that produce this strange and paradoxical notion of order — in which loving-submissives-who-have-learned-to-dominate rule over recalcitrant dominant personalities that have been magically converted into submissives — are head-spinning. But they are also an inevitable consequence of Marston’s attempt to fuse his psychological theories, which assume the fundamental importance of the oppositions of dominance and submission in all human relations, with a liberationist-feminist philosophy of loving kindness.

This fusion should render certain arguments about Marston’s comics moot. For example, Trina Robbins has stated, on this website and elsewhere, that it is male readers (or “boys” as she sometimes calls them) that like to worry the issue of bondage in these comics, while female readers prefer to focus on the message of empowerment. Robbins is a creator and comics historian whose work I respect, but I’m strongly disinclined to accept this dubious gendering of our interpretive responses. (In fact, I can only wonder what Robbins would say to a woman who is interested in the depiction of bondage in these comics; would she accuse her of having more in common with “the boys” than with a woman such as herself, on the basis of such an interest?) But even if I were willing to reduce individual interpretive responses according to such gendered and heterosexist lights, the specific example of Wonder Woman #28 finally suggests to me that the very concepts that Robbins wants to separate — bondage and empowerment — actually cannot be disentangled in Marston’s imagination. As strange as many of Marston’s ideas undoubtedly seem, surely one of the single most frequently reiterated messages of his Wonder Woman stories is that there is no necessary contradiction between taking pleasure in bondage games (which, after all, form part of the regular recreational life of Paradise Island) and a commitment to female empowerment. On the contrary, for Marston, submission — of a very particular kind — turns out to be the best route to liberation. He said as much, prominently, twice, in this last story, so we wouldn’t miss it: “The only real happiness for anybody is to be found in obedience to loving authority.” The bondage sequences of his comics only make sense in the context of that curious philosophy.

Sharon Marcus describes the resultant imagery as “maternalist bondage.” This is a superb locution, in part because it acknowledges the fetishistic dimension of Marston’s scenarios while at the same time providing a strong indication as to the degree to which those scenarios depart from the typically polarized power structures of “traditional” BDSM, as superficially understood. (And yes, it is I think part of Marston’s achievement that a serious discussion of his work will lead one to posit a kind of BDSM that is “traditional,” simply in order to understand what the hell he is doing that is different.) But at the same time, and as Marcus has also clearly recognized, the phrase “maternalist bondage” also suggests some of the limits or problems inherent in Marston’s vision. At bottom (so to speak) the idea of submitting to your loving Mom is probably more disturbing or even icky than it is sexy for most of us. Of course, the reasons why that may be so are the basic stuff of psychoanalysis, and (as Marcus’s hints in her brief expositions of Jessica Benjamin’s work) these questions may even bring us closer to some of the (repressed) origins of the erotic charge present in what I am again forced (with delighted irony) to call more “normal” bondage. In other words, what we have here might have considerable potential as a psychoanalytic allegory — even if it probably isn’t going to bring about Marston’s larger project, which, as I’ve already said, was nothing less than the attainment of world peace through the reformation of sexuality. If we understand Marston’s logic, then, we can perhaps avoid getting caught up in a few older arguments about the politics of bondage — and even generate some newer and more productive ones.
 

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The index to the entire roundtable on Wonder Woman #28 is here.

The Real Action

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Has anyone “really” read Action #1?

This question — on the face if it, a rather strange one — was raised by cartoonist and scholar Don Simpson, comic book artist and art historian, on the COMIXSCHOLARS-L list serve maintained at the University of Florida just a few days ago. (And if you haven’t signed up for the list yet, what are you waiting for? After all, the only requirement for membership is an intellectual interest in comic-art.) The context for Don’s question was a thread devoted to what is nowadays an increasingly contentious issue for lovers of all kinds of literature: the shift from print to digital culture. More specifically, we were discussing the aesthetic and formal consequences of that shift, debating the losses and gains, and considering the question of when and whether the transformation in the material instantiation of comics (from print to screen) constitutes a fundamental transformation of the comic art form itself. (I say “we,” but the truth is I was mostly lurking, while letting others handle the heavy lifting; my usual mode.)

The terms of the debate may seem rarified, but the stakes were high. For example, if a given comic was originally designed for the medium of print, and you have “only” read it in an electronic format on a screen, is there a sense in which it might be said you have not “really read” it at all? (And I apologize now for the proliferation of scare-quotes in that sentence; I’m just trying to avoid leading the witness. As I hope will become clear, my purpose is not to diminish the glories of the digital archive, nor to romanticize the encounter with print, but to insist nevertheless that the differences between these two modes of transmission are worth thinking about.)

The challenge of this question will be familiar to anyone who has ever debated film with a true cinephile; it’s a variant on the insistence that if you didn’t see a movie in a real-live public movie theatre, then you didn’t really see it. It is hard not to respond to such challenges defensively; after all, they question the validity of our experiences, implying that our encounter with the artwork in question was in some way impoverished, and hence less than fully legitimate. Very quickly, such conversations can degenerate into debates about the relative merits of the opposed technologies of transmission, and the larger, more abstract questions — “what does it mean to have ‘seen a movie’?” or “what does it mean to have ‘read a comic’?” — get sidelined.

But Don hit upon a provocative way of re-framing the debate. Instead of contrasting print with digital comics, he pointed out that there is obviously a difference between reading a copy of Action #1 from 1938, and reading a facsimile or reprint. But while the majority of people have not had and will never have the first experience, Don felt that “one would be hard pressed to argue that of the thousands if not millions who have read some kind of facsimile edition of greater or poorer quality are somehow missing out on some ontological dimension of great import.”

Partly because I just like playing devil’s advocate, but more because I was inspired by Don’s initial observation — that hardly anyone alive today can be said to have “really” read Action #1 — I fired off a response to the list suggesting that there were some important and even fundamental (if not necessarily ontological) dimensions worthy of our consideration when comparing the experiences of these different readers. Good ol’ Noah Berlatsky read it, and invited me to resubmit my thoughts here; and so, for what it’s worth, I offer up the ruminations that Don’s provocation inspired in me, only slightly tweaked for public consumption.
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Whether you can afford to read an insanely priced original copy of Action #1 (and that oxymoronic phrase, “original copy,” already suggests that we are in philosophically paradoxical territory), or whether you have read a facsimile of the entire book, or whether (like most of us) you have only read the Superman story, sans commercials and accompanying adventure strips, in a modern reprint collection such as the DC Archive Edition — or (indeed) whether you have read Action #1 in some version online — it was clearly a very different experience to read Action #1 in the late Spring or early Summer of 1938.

That difference is obviously partly a function of history — which is why it wouldn’t be the same thing to read the “original” comic today, even if you happen to be one of those members of the 1% who can afford to buy that particular thrill. But for most of us, the different reading experience is not simply or only a matter of temporal distance. The text that we have read is likely to be significantly materially different from that of the “original”: if we have read a print version, then we are talking about different paper stock; different standards of line reproduction; different color quality; different weight and heft, whether we are reading a hardcover or paperback; different surrounding contexts (most likely other Superman stories, rather than the generic mix of adventure tales that first accompanied the Man of Steel on the newsstands). If we are reading an electronic version, our experience will be still further transformed; we may have gained the ability to expand single panels to many times their usual size with the swipe of a finger, for example, even as we will have inevitably lost the phenomenological dimensions of the encounter with print.

I’m not sure that any one of these reading experiences could be said to be more authentic or legitimate in some absolute sense than any other. But on the other hand, I do think that when we write about comics critically, and especially when we teach them (something I am privileged to do as part of the University of Oregon’s Undergraduate Minor in Comics and Cartoon Studies), we are obligated to at least think about the experiential difference that these material differences make.

When I teach the first year of Superman stories from Action, using the (wonderfully practical and reasonably priced) Superman Chronicles Volume One collection from DC, I want students to understand that while my choice of text has put some interesting old comics in their hands, their reading experience will nevertheless be radically different from that of Siegel and Shuster’s first audiences. I therefore also ask them to read some excerpts from Gerard Jones’s Men of Tomorrow, so they can start to get a sense of those lost historical contexts. (Some of these are harder to invoke than others. For example, imagining the world before TV may be difficult for many of my students, as it is for me; sadly, however, it is easier for my students to identify with the experience of living through a profound economic depression.) I try to recreate some pop-cultural contexts, too, by lecturing about and providing examples of some of Superman’s literary and comic-strip precursors — things that were just part of Jerry and Joe’s consciousness but which are obviously obscure to most contemporary teenagers (newspaper adventures strips such as Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, SF pulps, excerpts from Philip Wylie’s crappy novel, and so on).

But we also have an archive of Golden Age comics at the UO (left to us by Gardner Fox himself — and yes, it was a good day when I discovered that resource!). This archive includes copies of Action and Superman from as early as 1940 (as well as examples of early Flash Comics, Adventure Comics, and other cool stuff), and the last time I taught my course on the “Modern American Superhero” I built an assignment around it. The students were required at some point in the term to go to Special Collections, where the books are housed, and order up a 1940s superhero comic — I didn’t even specify a title — and then asked to write about the different experience of reading the “original” comic versus reading the modern reprints they have been assigned.

These essays were a treat to read. For a start, the students tended to write with more sensory and tactile awareness than was the norm in their other papers. They would find themselves describing the feel of the paper, even the smell of the paper, and the different quality of the colors as they appeared on newsprint. (Which is to say, they responded with enhanced aesthetic awareness, from the get go.) Almost without exception, they seemed compelled to talk about the strange advertisements and curious government-sanctioned messages they encountered interleaved between the stories. (Which is to say, they responded with a heightened sense of political and cultural transformation.) And many of them then went on to draw illuminating contrasts between the superhero strip that headlined the book they had chosen, and the accompanying adventure strips that made up the anthology in their hands. (Which is to say, they came away with a more acute sense of the generic contexts in which superhero comics were first established.) Some talked about the comics as paradoxical “time machines” that provided them with a glimpse of a lost historical reality even as they paraded a cavalcade of fantasies that never were.

Again, I would not mean to suggest that these students were having something closer to the “original aesthetic experience” of a person who read superhero comics in the 1940s — or to suggest that the experience of such a person should be regarded as more “authentic” than that of a contemporary reader. This discussion is not (or need not) lead to the reassertion of some metaphysics of presence by the backdoor. My point is simply that the students were having a different experience from that of reading a reprint or a digital scan. Moreover, this experience is one that, from a pedagogical and scholarly point of view, might be thought of as educational and productive — an experience that deepened their knowledge and appreciation of the history of the comics form, and the processes of comics reading.

It was also a privileged experience — no question. (I hadn’t read many golden age books before I discovered this archive, either.) And (to bring us back to the question of whether it matters whether you have read an “original” comic if you have “only” read it online), it is by no means obvious to me that many salient aspects of this experience could be reproduced digitally — even if we were to scan the “original” books in their entirety.

If I may be allowed to invoke a parallel from my own education: when I was trained as a scholar of Renaissance Literature, I was required to spend some time setting type by hand for an old-school letter press, working from a piece of manuscript written in Elizabethan secretary hand. The project was not scrupulous in its historical verisimilitude; the press itself dated from the 18th century rather than the 16th, for example, although the systems were still close enough for the purposes of my teachers. I blush now to recall how petulant and dismissive I was about this assignment at the time; it seemed only a short step away from dressing up for an SCA gathering, and I couldn’t imagine what I would learn from it. But actually this forced encounter with an older printing technology actually taught me a huge amount, very quickly, and in a way that stuck. I learned in a practical way about the differences between early modern printed books and modern mass-market paperbacks. I learned how errors occurred, and how difficult it was to correct those errors even once they had been noticed. I felt first hand the temptation to set verse as prose, for reasons of expedience, and to tamper with authorial spelling and syntax rather than undo and re-set a whole page of type to correct a mistake I had noticed too late. I came to understand in a phenomenological way the differences involved when reading, say, a modern edition of Othello versus the (radically different) print versions that we have from early 17th century. In short, it was an experience that made me a stronger reader of Shakespeare (and other early modern writers), from a scholarly point of view — much better placed to interpret and contest contemporary editorial choices.

So: at the risk of repeating myself — to ask students to be aware of the differences that both material and cultural contexts make in the reception of texts is not necessarily to argue for the privileged “authenticity” of a particular instantiation of the text. It is not to elevate the experience of print over the experience of digital texts on the grounds of a mystified or fetishistic understanding of the “original” book. It is simply to insist that how and when and in what form you encounter something makes a difference; and to insist further than once you become aware of those differences, your whole response to that artwork can change.

As comics scholars today, we live in a true “golden age” of reprints from quality publishers such as IDW and Fantagraphics — while the digital archives of sites such as comicbookplus.com have made available an incredible range of rare materials: comics I had only read about or seen cover images for; comics I never knew existed. Faced with such an embarrassment of four-color riches, it is easy to forget (or repress) the potential difference that the material instantiation of those comics makes to the reading experience. But Donald Simpson’s observation that, in an important way, very few of could be said to have “really read” Action #1 reminded me of those differences (even though I think Don was ultimately making a different point).

It’s a counter-intuitive observation that raises issues that, for me, are more epistemological than ontological; it goes less to the question of “What is a comic?” and more to the question of “What is reading?” What do we mean when we say we have read something? Again, the question may seem rarified and abstract, but the stakes remain high (I personally believe the world would be a better place if more people asked how it is they think they “know” stuff, after all).

To put it another way; while most of the time it’s probably not that big a deal, there are circumstances in which it might be considered a problem that most people who would claim to have read Action #1 have in fact “really” “only” looked at a modern reprint of the Superman story that Action #1 contained. Not to say that this itself would not be a worthwhile thing to have done; in fact, if you have done it, then if nothing else you have already met the minimum requirement for one of my classes. But the kind of reading I am trying to encourage is finally a little more imaginatively and historically engaged than that.

For the record, and lest I be misunderstood, it may be worth reiterating that I have no problem with digital comics, and am not speaking against them. I read quite a few and when print versions are unavailable or prohibitively expensive I require my students to read PDFs on their computers.

But I think that as comics scholars and critics, we need to remember that the experience of reading a comic digitally is not the same as reading it in print; and that the experience of reading a reprint is not the same as encountering an “original” comic; and further, that reading a printed comic is not the same as actually being lucky enough to look at original production art (something else I try to make possible for students by bringing in examples of original comic art, and organizing exhibitions of the stuff). Good critical work on comics must remain conscious of these differences. This is not an elitist position or a metaphysically dubious one. It is merely a scholarly one.