Tag Archives: Harry Peter

Wonder Woman: It’s In Her DNA

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This is part of a roundtable on Wonder Woman #28.
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Never having been much of a fan of older comics (Wonder Woman or otherwise) I have spent an embarrassingly small amount of time really thinking about how they affect the modern comics that I alternately love and hate. It’s a terrible confession for someone that loves comics and writes about them to admit to, but there it is.

So it was with interest that I dove into Wonder Woman #28 for this roundtable discussion. Though I didn’t expect to like the book much (and of course found plenty to point and laugh at/with) I was surprised to find the core of the Diana I have come to love in recent years here, in full and intact.

Sure, the book had silliness to it that sometimes made me wince the same way reading the diary of my 13-year-old self would, but there was also such love and adoration for Diana on the page. She was the hero who could save the day no matter what. She could do no wrong.

But hadn’t I read so many times that was exactly the “problem” with Wonder Woman? That she was too perfect? I wrote back in 2010 about falling in love with Wonder Woman for the first time through Gail Simone’s excellent work with Diana. And it was then that I realized there was nothing “wrong” with Diana, and nobody needed to “fix” her, despite what publishers and creators seemed to constantly think (and be tasked with). Wonder Woman had it rough simply because she was the lone marquee female superhero for a very long time. In truth, she’s still that today. Though there are a great many wonderful superheroines out there in modern comics, there is no still no other that can stand up to Wonder Woman in any sense – whether it be as IP, consistent comics history, or yes, even power profiles. But being that sole woman is a lot to bear. It means that she must be everything to everyone at all times. It means she can never make a mistake or be controversial, because to stumble when you are the only marquee female superhero sends a too universal sign about female superheroes and more importantly perhaps, women.

And so Diana became a paragon. And you can see it in Marston’s love for her in this issue. He began her as a flawless paragon, he believed her better than all others and he made her that way, over and over again. And that worked for her then, it was a different time, and it was a different way of telling stories. And surely Marston could never have imagined that she would have to hold up the superheroine mantle alone for SO long. Who can manage such a thing?

But reading Wonder Woman #28 helped me re-think what it was about the great portrayals I’ve seen of Diana over the years, and why they resonated so deeply for me. The basis for everything great I have seen of Wonder Woman in recent years was established right here and over 70 years ago. All of the stuff I love is intrinsic to her…it’s in her DNA. And it is in the reinventions of Diana that are most true to that DNA – to Marston’s original vision of her – that have resonated most strongly for me over the years. The soul of what Marston created was there in those new stories that I loved…living and breathing.

Gail Simone’s Diana was particularly compassionate and humorous. Simone found Diana’s modern woman’s heart and her sharp wit, and gave it to us over and over again.

Greg Rucka’s Diana was all honor and self-sacrifice, and Rucka took her to new heights of superheroics, giving us a Diana that broke your heart with gratitude for her very existence.

Darwyn Cooke found the powerful feminist, and gave her to us with zero apologies.

And that last one is so very important. Because some 70 years after Marston created this powerful female superhero, this bastion of femininity and power, this ode to feminism and matriarchy, we are still struggling with these issues as a society. Many readers, both male and female, still wrestle with the idea of female power. Even the idea of a matriarchal society as anything other than a horror show is counter to what so many want to accept as a possibility. And this only further emphasizes how important what Marston was doing 70 years ago truly was. It was important work, whether some of it was silly or not, because we still have not managed to catch up to him. He blazed a trail that we’re still searching for. In 2012 you can’t even write about Wonder Woman and the word feminism without the freaking Internet going boom. And that is just bizarre.

What Marston did with Wonder Woman was revolutionary for its time. But it should not be revolutionary for OUR time, and yet it is. And that alone should tell us how much further we have to go. How much more work we have to do. How much we need others to continue picking up what Marston did and carrying it forward. And there’s nothing wrong with modernizing Diana. There’s nothing wrong with updating her and re-thinking her in interesting ways, but it has to be done with a careful eye and hand and the utmost respect for what she is, where she’s been, and where she still needs to take us.

All of the things that the greatest creators of Wonder Woman since Marston managed to find and bring to the surface so beautifully over the years were there in Marston’s original Wonder Woman. They may have come cloaked in far too many villains, some over the top writing, and way way too much weird bondage for my tastes (what the hell man?!) but they’re all still there. That deep love and respect for a character – a character that is at heart the best kind of superhero a reader could hope for – it was there from the beginning and it leaves me confident that no matter what, it will never be driven out, no matter who holds the reigns (or lasso, as it were).

How do you solve a problem like Diana?

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This is part of a roundtable on Wonder Woman #28.
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So there’s this warrior princess, right? Think of her as Xena avant la lettre, only with more lesbian subtext. Although, actually, it’s more than subtext; hell, it’s more than text-text. Anyway, she’s a warrior princess from a hidden island of Amazons, sent out into the world during WWII to teach men and women the joys of loving-submission, spanking and being spanked, playing with ropes, and dressing up in a deer costume that gives me funny feelings in my underpants.

No, wait, she’s just an ordinary superhero and member of the Justice Society of America, even though she’s just a secretary, and not even a glorified secretary.

No, wait, she doesn’t have any powers and dresses suspiciously somewhat exactly like Emma Peel.

No, wait, she has powers again and has to rejoin the boys’ club.

No, wait, she’s reduced to primordial protoplasm and reborn from clay. Then back to being an ambassador for peace from the island of Amazons.

No, wait, she’s a total hard-case warrior, willing to make the hard decisions to do whatever hard things need to be done by hard men and hard women in a hard world full of hardness.

No, wait, she’s being written by a grown-up actual novelist who’s written, like, real books (!) for grown-ups (!!) and is a chick, besides (!!!).

No, wait, in a shocking twist that will reshape the very foundations of the DC universe for years to come she — you’d better be sitting down for this one — wears pants.

AND — stand up again, so you can sit back down — also a jacket.

No, wait, she who the fuck gives a shit?

***

Pretend for a moment that you could make it through something like this wikipedia entry on Wonder Woman without your eyes rolling back into your skull and your brains dribbling out your ears. If you could do this, you’d quickly realise that Wonder Woman, from all the available evidence, has been in constant need of ‘fixing’ pretty much from the moment that her creators keeled over and stopped working on her — first William Moulton Marston and, eleven years later, H.G. Peter.

Indeed, here’s some pseudo-research I’ve done through Google, when I wasn’t busy searching for crossover fanfic between Twilight and A la Recherche (Team Swann!) or working on my 1100-page spec script for Etta Candy: Year One.

Search for “Wonder Woman”: 27,700,000 results

Superman: 179,000,000

Batman -Arkham*: 1,970,000,000

Okay, so Batman >> Superman >> Wonder Woman. Now try adding the phrase “how to fix” to each of these, and we get:

“how to fix Wonder Woman”: 15,000

“how to fix Superman“: 4,150

“how to fix Batman” -Arkham*: 2,220

[without the extra restriction, the Batman search produces thousands of results about how to fix bugs in a particular series of video games, rather than how to fix the character]

So there are approximately one zillion fewer pages about Wonder Woman than about Batman, but there are seven times as many pages about how to fix her. The internet has spoken: Wonder Woman needs fixing. Luckily there are 15,000 budding writers (sic), comics critics (double-sic), comics historians (triple-sic) and other comics researchers (infinity-tuple sic) who know exactly what she needs in order to be fixed.

***

All right, so everybody and his dog thinks Wonder Woman needs fixing. But why does Wonder Woman “need” fixing?

The obvious answer is twofold: first, the character is a valuable “intellectual property” with a high “Q rating” which can be transformed into desirable “branding” for various consumer items such as little girls’ underwear

HELLO GOOGLERS WELCOME TO THE PRONOGRAPHY

and thereby turned into oblations and offertories for our benevolent corporate overlords.

Second, the people who make superhero comics in America couldn’t sell crack to crackheads, so you can imagine how they struggle selling [obligatory joke: superhero comics suck] to [obligatory joke: fanboys suck].

The result is that, every few weeks, someone at DC-HQ realises that they could replace all the toilet paper in the building with rolls of hundred dollar bills, and it would still be more profitable than trying to sell Wonder Woman comics. So, every few weeks, it’s a Bold! New! Direction! in an ever more desperate attempt to boost her sales to a level befitting the distaff member of the “DC Trinity” (double-infinity-tuple sic). And, every few weeks, sales still suck, and it’s time for another Bold! New! Direction! You can see the flop-sweat on every page.

***

The thing is, this is not an isolated case of DC not knowing what to do with one of their “iconic” characters — i.e. characters that are underwearable because they were once on a TV show. Consider the case of Captain Marvel, created by C.C. Beck, Bill Parker and Otto Binder.

Phenomenally successful in the 1940s, the character — then published by Fawcett — was essentially sued out of the business by DC in the ’50s. Twenty years later, in a move showing all the class we associate with the North American comic book industry, DC actually licensed the rights for Captain Marvel — the character they had sued out of business — from Fawcett — the business they had sued him out of. As the Bard said, that’s

like making a soldier drop his weapon,

shooting him, and telling him to get to steppin’.

Obviously, they came to portion of his fortune

Sounds to me like that old robbery-extortion.

Which, come to think of it, describes the entire business-model of DC (and Marvel).

Anyway, DC’s 1970s revival of the character stayed fairly faithful to the original but fizzled out soon enough. He hung around as a back-up feature until the 1985 Crisis on Infinite Earths, and if you don’t know what that is, consider yourself lucky and leave it at that. In the wake of Crisis, DC revamped most of its “intellectual properties” including Captain Marvel. In his new origin, his arch-nemesis Dr Sivana became his abusive uncle. This revamp stuck for only a few years, until journeyman writer/artist Jerry Ordway rerevamped the Big Red Cheese back closer to the original.

This version lasted for another fifteen years or so, until 2005, when DC kills off the kindly wizard Shazam (who gave Marvel his powers). Marvel takes on the role of Shazam and promptly turns into a schizophrenic — literally, he goes nuts and hears voices. Shortly afterwards, his wholesome gal analogue Marvel Marvel gets turned into a Bad Girl. More boring, unreadable shit happens, Marvel loses his powers, then DC rerererererererevamps its comics and there’s no Marvel again for a little while…until now.

The updated Captain Marvel for a whole new generation is to be called Shazam, have a darker origin prominently involving, I don’t know, the war on drugs or something, and wear a hat made from the skins of dead orphans and hookers.

He probably also has a tattoo of some kind.

…

TO THE MAX.

***

Any sane person would look at this weak-ass publishing history and ask herself a couple of questions: Why haven’t there been any decent Wonder Woman comics since the originals? Ditto for Captain Marvel? Ditto for the Spirit; ditto for Plastic Man? Why can’t DC sell comics starring these characters? What’s a Grecian urn? And why is my cat sending me telepathic warnings that “the Jews” are out to get me?

Uh, maybe that last one is just me. But, any sane person, you otherwise ask some good questions. Why do all the other Wonder Woman comics suck? And — since severe suckitude is not now, and has never been, an impediment to popular success — why don’t those comics sell, when (by contrast) DC could print a hundred issues of Batman watching the Batgrass grow, one blade at a time, and still make a mint?

There are, I submit, three main reasons.

1) Pure goddamn chance.

When we try to explain history of any kind, in art or anywhere else, it’s way too easy to spin out elaborate just-so rationales, and overlook the importance of sheer luck. But, pace Grant Morrison, there’s not some ineluctable cosmic law that the World Spirit will lead to, e.g., Superman’s enduring status as an icon, or Batman’s. On the contrary, a lot of that status is due to one lucky break after another. Had things gone slightly differently, there might never have been a popular TV series in the sixties about Batman, and the character might have faded into the same general obscurity as Barney Google, Li’l Abner or Herbie the Fat Fury.

Hell, there could have been a popular TV series about Lil’ Abner instead, and decades later we’d all be praising Heath Ledger’s cross-dressing performance as Sadie Hawkins.

“Christopher Nolan has given the comic strip movie some much-needed gravitas by returning Li’l Abner to his grim and gritty roots as a violent, pig-fucking hillbilly…”

So, to some extent, the failures artistic and financial of Wonder Woman comics post-Marston/Peter really are just accidents of history. They don’t sell for a bunch of different random reasons, and they aren’t any good because…well, to some extent because no one of the caliber of Marston or Peter has given it a shot. I mean, look at the list of people who’ve worked on the comic after them; we’re not talking Kurtzman or Giraud here.

Ditto for Captain Marvel, ditto Plastic Man, ditto your mom.

2) The original comics are fun and whimsical

But since it’s easy to spin out elaborate just-so rationales, here’s one I prepared earlier. The obvious feature that Wonder Woman has in common with Plastic Man and Captain Marvel is that they’re all light-hearted. Certainly, Wonder Woman has a heavy intellectual foundation in Marston’s crackpot unconventional theories about men, women and bondage — and I’m not 100% sure about this, but I have a crazy hunch that Marston’s theories might be discussed elsewhere in the roundtable — but it’s all covered with a giant bouncing castle and fairground. Certainly in all of these comics what’s above the surface is thoroughly unserious — and, for a boring set of boring reasons that it’s too boring to go into here, “fun” superheroes are an exceedingly hard sell in today’s Direct Market. This has got to be part of the explanation for why DC can’t sell comics which return to the original spirit of these characters.

3) The original comics are good

…And here’s another just-so story. There’s an uncomfortable truth about superhero comics from the 30s and 40s, a truth that’s not generally acknowledged but is thuddingly apparent as soon as you start reading most of them: 90% of those comics are complete shit.

I don’t want to be a troll here, and just baldly make some sweeping aesthetic judgement for which I provide no evidence other than my suave and confident manner. The Hooded Utilitarian is no place for that kind of thing. But seriously, people. Seriously. Try reading five pages of almost any superhero comic from those times. Just try it. I guarantee that, by the time you get to page three, you’ll wish you had a time machine so you could go back to the past and make sure you never started reading it, if need be by shooting yourself in the face.

Superman is shit. Batman is shit. Green Lantern is shit. The Human Torch is shit. Ka-Zar is shit. The Seven Soldiers of Victory is shit. The Angel is shit. The Justice Society of America is shit. The Claw is shit. Daredevil is shit. Sandman is shit. The Newsboy Legion is shit. Captain America is shit. (Sorry, Kirby fans, but it’s true)

Apologists try to gloss over this with a range of euphemisms. These comics are “lively”, “boisterous”, “crudely energetic”, “charming”, “rough and tumble”. Behold the soft bigotry of low expectations. To euphemize thus is to insult the genuine comic artistry that you could find in the funny pages at that time, or the decades beforehand. The 30s and 40s, after all, were a genuine golden age for comic strips; even if we limit ourselves to adventure continuities, there’s Terry and the Pirates followed by Steve Canyon, Thimble Theatre, Prince Valiant, Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy followed by Buz Sawyer, Mickey Mouse, Alley Oop, Dick Tracy, Li’l Abner, The Spirit and probably others that I’m forgetting. Show me a single page from Action or Detective Comics that is equal to anything in any of those strips and I’ll eat my words. Hell, I’ll eat every single word in this goddamn post.

No, 90% of those superhero comics were poorly written and, though it hardly seems possible, even worse drawn.

But there were 10% that were okay to good, sometimes even great. Wonder Woman was one of them. So were Captain Marvel and associated strips; so was Plastic Man; so was Sub-Mariner, at least intermittently; so were Fantomah and Stardust. I don’t know their work well enough to comment, but I’d imagine Meskin, Fine, Wolverton and Powell also did some good work in the genre. Probably a few others. But that’s pretty slim pickings for a so-called Golden Age.

So, Wonder Woman was an island of above-average art in a sea of mediocrity, so what? Why should that mean that almost every later Wonder Woman comic is not very good? Two reasons: regression to the mean, and what I call the BOOS hypothesis.

Regression to the mean is a simple mathematical fact about any set of things that contains variation — comics, bananas, comics about bananas… If you pick one of these items at random and it’s at the extreme in some value or other, the next item you pick at random is likely to be closer to the average. If you’ve got 100 bananas and you pick out the fifth biggest banana, the next one you pick is probably going to be smaller.

Similarly with comics. The Wonder Woman comics produced by her creators were well above the average superhero comic; therefore it’s highly probably that most other Wonder Woman comics are going to be worse.

But regression to the mean can’t be the whole story, because that only explains why subsequent Wonder Woman comics haven’t been as good as Marston/Peter. It doesn’t explain why they generally haven’t been good full-stop.

Which is where I offer — verrrry tentatively — the Benefit Of Original Shittiness hypothesis, or BOOS. BOOS is a hypothesis about comics that (a) were financial successes fairly early on and (b) have since been written/drawn by artists other than their creators. We’re basically talking corporate-owned “properties” like Wonder Woman, Archie, et al., or syndicated comic strips like Gasoline Alley or Garfield.

BOOS, then, claims that the shittier these original comics were, the more likely it is that later versions by other artists will be good. Why have there been good Batman and Superman stories decades after Bill Finger “and Bob Kane”, and Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, in spite of the fact that those original comics are pretty lousy? Why have there been so few good Wonder Woman stories in spite of the fact that the originals are so good? BOOS inverts the logic of those questions: it’s because the original Superman and Batman comics suck that later ones are good; and it’s because the original Wonder Woman comics don’t suck that later ones do.

My thought here — and, as I say, I offer it very tentatively — is that it’s no coincidence that the better superhero comics from the 30s and 40s have had generally shitty afterlives with later artists, but that the most influential and long-lasting comics — viz. Batman and Superman — had shitty beginnings. Whatever it was that made Batman and Superman popular, it was absolutely, utterly, definitely, assuredly, etceterally in no way whatsoever the artistic or narrative skills of their creators. Those guys couldn’t write or draw for shit. (None of this is to deny that DC treated them disgracefully). And that means that later artists working with the same materials can do even better.

By contrast, the original Wonder Woman comics were popular because Marston and Peter were genuinely talented. And that’s a lot harder for later artists to replicate.

Is this all just an extraordinarily long-winded way of saying that Superman and Batman are just stronger concepts or better characters than Wonder Woman? Maybe — but whatever made the original Superman and Batman comics popular need not have been the intrinsic superiority of the concepts. It could have been that they tweaked a certain demographic a certain way, and that demographic still likes to be tweaked in that certain special way even today, you know what I’m talking about

HELLO GOOGLERS

but Wonder Woman doesn’t do that kind of tweaking any more.

But even if we ultimately accept that Superman and Batman are “intrinsically better”, the logic by which we got there was very different from the way “comics scholars” normally do. They usually get there by arguing either (a) the concepts “alien in underpants as milquetoast daydream” and “playboy fetishist beats up poor people” are obviously better than “empowered warrior princess” QED, or (b) the concepts are obviously better because they’ve been more financially and critically successful over the years.

By contrast, I’m arguing that, if BOOS is right, Wonder Woman may not be as “strong” a concept, but it’s not because she can’t sell books, or support great art post-Marston/Peter. I’m arguing that Wonder Woman isn’t as “strong” a concept because the original Superman and Batman comics suck.

***

In conclusion: how do you solve a problem like Diana?

I’m thinking…a jacket — with shoulder-pads.

There’s Something Besides Fire To Contend With Here!

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So as I mentioned earlier in this roundtable, my son has been really into the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman. So I asked him if there was a panel he’d like to draw from Wonder Woman #28. He picked this one.
 

 
And here’s his version of it.
 

 
I figured I’d draw it as well. Here’s mine:
 

 
My son looked at it and said, “that’s a mess.” My wife looked at it and said, “her chin seems a bit prominent, doesn’t it?”

Everybody’s a critic.

Villainy, Thy Name Is Woman (Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #28)

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This is part of a roundtable on Marston/Peter’s Wonder Woman #28. The roundtable index is here.
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I gave my son some Marston/Peter Wonder Woman comics…and he looooooves them. He’s especially into Etta Candy, who he thinks is just hysterical. And he’s right!

Anyway, at one point he said, “This must be written by a woman, right? Because all the characters are women.” And so I explained that no, it was written by a guy who just really believed that women were great — that they were better than men, even. Or as Marston said:

Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world. There isn’t love enough in the male organism to run this planet peacefully.

I didn’t bother reading that to my son, though. I just summarized.

In any case, my son wasn’t put out, though he did think Marston was a little confused. “Men and women are equal,” he said. “Neither is better than the other.” Gloria Steinem would’ve been proud.

Anyway, he brought it up again, I think after he read this issue, #28, from the Greatest Wonder Woman stories collection.

“Daddy, the guy who writes Wonder Woman thinks women are better than men, right?”

I said that that was the case.

“So how come all the villains are always women?”

It’s a good question…and one which incidentally seems to have flummoxed Gloria Steinem as well. It flummoxed her so thoroughly, in fact, that in a 1995 introduction to an Abbeville Press collection of Wonder Woman covers, she said:

Looking back at the post-Marston stories…I could see how littler her later writers understood her spirit. She became sexier-looking and more submissive, violent episodes increased, more of her adversaries were female, and Wonder Woman herself required more help from men in order to triumph. [my italics]

It’s true that Marston enjoyed creating the odd stunted male misogynist enemy (such as Dr. Psycho or the Duke of Deception). But I don’t see how you can read this issue and come away thinking that female antagonists, in whatever quantities, are unfaithful to his spirit.

So how do female villains square with the idea that woman are superior — and superior precisely because they are peaceful and loving? What are all these peaceful, loving women doing running around trying to drop rocks on each other?
 

 
or devising bizarre bondage tortures for each other?
 

 
or devising bizarre bondage tortures for each other?
 

 
or, for variety, devising bizarre bondage torture for men?
 

I love that last panel. Clea and Giganta clustered shoulder-to-shoulder at the left merge into a single malevolent four-armed, two-headed feminine deity of castration, their mouths twisted into identical sneers of fury, those awesome Peter eyebrows flexing, and that blade aimed right where it’s aimed, with some adorable little effect lines to make sure we watch the point. And, of course, Steve at the right, with his shirt stripped off, is totally sexualized cheesecake. “Go ahead and heave your fun” indeed.

This is probably the sort of thing Gloria Steinem is talking about when, in an introduction to a 1995 collection of Wonder Woman covers, she gently chides Marston for being too masculinist.

Instead of portraying the goal of full humanity for women and men, which is what feminism has in mind, [Marston] often got stuck in the subject/object, winner/loser paradigm of “masculine” versus “feminine,” and came up with female superiority instead. (p.12)

She’s certainly got him dead to rights here. Marston might as well be saying, “Hey, girls, you can do anything — even have torture/rape fantasies! Just like men!

The thing is…girls and women do in fact have torture/rape fantasies. And not just fantasies of being raped and tortured (as amply documented in Nancy Friday’s *My Secret Garden*), but fantasies of doing the raping and torturing. Tabico’s really extremely, NSFW fable about putting insects into the brains of her family members so she can have her sexual way with them is pretty extreme, but not isolated. Sharon Marcus in Between Women writes that during the Victorian era in England “fantasies of girls punishing dolls and being punished by them appeared regularly in fiction for young readers.” In showing women as sexualized aggressors, Marston was just giving girls the sorts of stories they had long enjoyed.

Of course, there’s no particular shortage of female, castrating villainesses in contemporary culture either. Here’s one:

In the new Wonder Woman, Azzarello and Chiang have their evil woman doing that thing that evil women do — using her sensual wiles to lure men into her clutches so she can cut their bits off. Women; their power is love gone wrong.

You’d think that would be Marston’s take too. After all, women are powerful because they understand love; ergo, if they are evil, shouldn’t they use the evil side of love and compel men with their dreaded Maxim poses?

Marston villainesses — in skin tight outfits and showing lots of skin — are clearly meant to be sexy. And he’s not adverse to having one or the other of them seduce Steve on occasion. But, unlike Azzarello’s Amazons, Marston’s villains are less likely use sex to gain the upper hand, and more likely to simply outgun, outfight, and outthink their male opponents. They don’t need to be shaped by male fantasies in order to be powerful.

Perhaps this helps explain in part why Marston is so fond of cross-dressing villainesses.
 

 
You could see Byrna, Dr. Poison, and Hypnota as a nod to Marston’s misandry; men are evil, therefore women who are evil are manly — “not a sissy in the lot!” as Eviless declares. Still, while they may not be sissies, Zara and the Cheetah certainly can’t be said to be butch. Moreover, Marston goes out of his way to insist that the cross-dressing women are in fact women:
 

 
They may be able to pass, but that doesn’t mean they’ve cast their gender aside. You don’t have to wear certain clothes (or even be clean-shaven) to be a woman.

So why all the cross-dressing? Well, in the first place, Marston — who never met a fetish he didn’t like — probably found it sexy in itself. And of course it’s a metaphor for male to female cross-identification; many of Marston’s readers (like my son!) were boys identifying with a female hero.

But I think the cross-dressing could also be a metaphor for female to male cross-identification. It’s a winking acknowledgment that usually it’s boys who get to be roguishly evil, that usually it’s boys who get to be the mad scientists with their dripping needles or the mad hypnotists with their glowing eyes, controlling others not through seduction, but through force and evilness. Who hasn’t wanted to ditch the boring hero on occasion and be the scheming villain for a change? And if boys can do that, why not girls too?

All of which is to say…being bad. It’s fun. If you’re a kid and you have the choice between being powerful and good like Wonder Woman or powerful and irresponsible like Clea or Giganta, probably you’d choose Clea and Giganta, at least occasionally. Marston certainly believed in peaceful women and loving women. But he also believed in superior women, and if women are superior, then that means they’re not only the best heroes, but the best villains too.

Re-Inventing Wonder Woman — Again!

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This is part of a roundtable on Marston/Peter’s Wonder Woman #28. The roundtable index is here.
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Wonder Woman #28 is a great example of the Marston-Peter team at its most gloriously over-the-top. A group of prisoners on Transformation Island, the Paradise Island reformatory, escape and spend thirty-six pages trying to destroy Wonder Woman, Queen Hippolyta, the Amazons, and Wonder Woman’s sidekicks, the Holliday Girls, only to be (of course) foiled at the end by everybody’s favorite Amazon. The prisoners are a piece of work: almost half of them are drag kings. One of them is an evil snowman.
 

 
Could anyone get away with using such wacky characters today? Maybe. In the 1990s, John Byrne resurrected Egg Fu, not only wacky but racist to boot, and got away with it. Personally, I love the beautiful villains — and for the most part, Marston’s and Peter’s villainesses were beautiful — like Giganta, “formerly a gorilla.” In fancy bras and filmy skirts, they resembled a cross between Hollywood harem girls of the period, and all the beautiful but evil women on the cover of every science fiction pulp magazine. Queen Clea of Atlantis and Zara, priestess of the Crimson Flame, are dressed almost alike in outfits like that, except that one’s blonde and the other’s a comic book redhead, with crimson hair.

The plot is as wacky as the villains. Wonder Woman is forced to steal a submarine and tow it with her teeth. But she’s plucky and bounces back with a wisecrack: “You’re so kind, Clea!” Earlier, when the villains had chained the princess and her mother to a pillar with flaming chains, she had quipped, “What sweet girls you are!” Indeed, Wonder Woman rarely seems to be afraid for herself , perhaps because she knows she will win in the end. She fears for the other people in peril: her sister Amazons, the Holliday Girls, who have been shoved into a devolution machine and turned into gorillas, all except for their heads. She even fears for the villain mastermind, Eviless the Saturnian. Attempting to escape while tied to a boat full of villains, Diana pulls the boat under water. But Saturnians can’t swim! So Wonder Woman rescues her: “Aphrodite commands us to save lives always–enemies or not!”

And by the way, Steve Trevor, despite the fact that he always needs to be rescued by Wonder Woman, isn’t as wimpy as he’s been made out to be. When Cleo and Giganta tie him up and threaten to burn his eyes out and cut him to ribbons, he’s brave enough to quip, “You’re certainly playful girls! Go ahead and have your fun!”

And it is fun. You don’t take it seriously. The entire story is fun.

With a few exceptions, Wonder Woman hasn’t been fun for quite some time now, but you still don’t take it seriously. Gale Simone, in my opinion one of the two best Wonder Woman writers (The other is Bill Messner-Loeb) got into the spirit of the original when she gave the amazon princess white talking gorilla sidekicks, to take the place of Etta and the Holliday girls. They move in with her, and apologize for the “flinging incident.”

But more often, it seems that when the almost 100% male writers Wonder Woman has had get their hands on her, they just can’t wait to re-invent her. Sometimes the re-inventing is mild, if annoying, as when Wonder Woman’s suit keeps shrinking while her bust size increases. Depending on the artist, her hair bounces from curly to straight and back again. But sometimes it’s a very violent re-invention, as when in the late 1960s writer Denny O’Neill completely disempowered Princess Diana, removing her from both her powers and from Paradise Island, giving her a male guru (and a what a racist depiction that was!), taking off her iconic starry costume and garbing her in a white Emma Peel-style jumpsuit. The result was a story arc about a karate-using woman in a white jumpsuit with a male guru. What it was not was Wonder Woman.

J. Michael Straczynski gave Diana a wardrobe makeover again, in 2010, putting her into what looked like a 1980s disco outfit with long pants. Fans hated it and amazingly, DC Comics actually listened to them for a change, and restored the Amazon princess’ starry shorts.

And now it’s Brian Azzarello’s turn. He has taken everything that made Wonder Woman special, and done away with it, so that Wonder Woman isn’t special anymore. He can’t shove Princess Diana back into a white jumpsuit — been there, done that — so instead he destroys the Amazon’s very origins, which are as iconic as her star-spangled costume. As Prometheus made mankind out of clay, as the Navajo gods molded all the animals of the Earth from clay, as the supreme deity molds the first man from clay in Judeo-Christian and Islamic mythology, Queen Hippolyta molds her baby from clay. And as if this divine origin, which Wonder Woman shares with the first of all creatures, is not enough, Marston gives it a feminist twist: the goddess Aphrodite breaths life into the statue. Thus, little Diana has two mommies.

It is highly unlikely in Marston’s original version that her tribal sisters would sneer at her for her origins, as they do in Azzarello’s version, and call her “Clay.” In fact, according to the first issue of Marston’s Wonder Woman, Aphrodite originally molded the entire race of Amazons from clay, and breathed life into them.

But Azzarello has taken care of that by demoting Wonder Woman, putting her at the end of a long line of mythic heroes fathered by Zeus, and of course, in taking away her feminist origins, making her a child of the patriarchy. And as for Diana originally being the only baby born on Paradise Island, Azzarello’s nouveau Amazons seduce sailors (and then dump the sailors overboard!), keep the girl babies that result from the union, thus keeping up their tribe’s population, and they sell the boys into slavery. Marston’s Amazons would never seduce or kill anybody, and they have no need to. They drink from a fountain of eternal youth, and as Hippolyta says, “Beauty and happiness are your birthright as long as you remain on Paradise Island.”

Azzarello/ChiangWonder Woman #7

This makes Diana’s sacrifice, when she leaves her island to go to “Man’s World” all the more poignant: she is giving up immortality in order to fight evil in a blighted land.

If Azzarello has demoted the Amazons to mean and ruthless killers, the gods have fared no better. Hera (Remember how Wonder Woman used to say “Great Hera?”) is now a soap opera-style bitch, a kind of Joan Collins dressed in nothing but a peacock cape. Her daughter Eris, the goddess of strife, is a bald anorexic crusty. The other gods look like London hipsters and have become ironic. Diana has no personality at all, and definitely utters no quips. The gods lead her around and show her stuff, and she reacts rather than acts. Her expression changes from a pout to a shout and back again. Diana, who, Jesus-like, gave up her immortality for mankind, has become so vicious that she stabs Eris’ hand with a broken wine glass.

Azzarello/ChiangWonder Woman #4

To many of us, including yours truly, the Amazon princess is almost real. Yet in our saner moments we have to admit that she is a construction, a thing of paper and ink who is a slave to anyone who writes her. Thank Hera for my reprints!

Bound to End: Wonder Woman #28 Index and Introduction

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Index
 
Trina Robbins, Re-Inventing Wonder Woman — Again!

Noah Berlatsky, Villainy, Thy Name Is Woman

Noah Berlatsky and son, There’s Something Besides Fire to Contend With Here!

Jones, One of the Jones Boys, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Diana?

Kelly Thompson, Wonder Woman: It’s In Her DNA

Sina, Goddesses of the Lesbiverse

Vom Marlowe, On Wonder Woman, Bondage, and Princess Leia

William Marston, On Sorority Baby Parties

Sharon Marcus, Wonder Woman vs. Wonder Woman

Ben Saunders, Loving Authority: Some Thoughts on Wonder Woman #28

Ben Saunders, on William Marston and Sex

Vom Marlowe, Wonder Woman and the Space Crocs of Nikszkelion

Richard Cook, A Fanboy Denied

Derik Badman, A Peter That Never Existed

Charles Reece, On Second Thought, I Really Don’t Like Wonder Woman, part 1, part 2.

 
 
Introduction
 
Three years and a month ago I started a series called Bound to Blog in which I blogged my way through the entire Marston/Peter run on Wonder Woman. It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally come to the last Marston script — Wonder Woman #28. To celebrate, I’ve asked a bunch of friends and fellow Marston/Peter travelers to contribute to a roundtable focusing on this final issue.

And if that all isn’t enough Wonder Woman reading, you can check out my first ever post on Wonder Woman, which coincidentally focuses on Wonder Woman #28.
 

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman Chronicles volume 1

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I just finished DC’s Wonder Woman Chronicles volume 1, which collects Wonder Woman’s appearances in chronological order. This first volume collects Wonder Woman’s first appearance in All-Star Comics 8 (December 1941-January 1942) through Sensation Comics no. 9 in September 1942, and also includes Wonder Woman number 1.

I’ve already talked about several of these comics in the Bound to Blog series (for example, I talk about Wonder Woman #1 here, and Sensation Comics #1 here.) But there are a couple of things that struck me while reading the collection as a whole.

No Intro

There’s absolutely no introductory material at all, unless you count a small note in the table of contents that says, “The comics reprinted in this volume were produced in a time when racism played a larger role in society and popular culture, both consciously and unconsciously.” That is undeniably true

but still, it seems like there might be more to say. Who wrote these comics? Who drew them? How popular were they? What did people think of them? Why are we reprinting them?

Of course, the answer to the last question is basically, “because they are there,” and also, “Wonder Woman still has a fanbase, so if you stick her face on a cover, you can sell some copies, even if no one really thinks this material is particularly worthwhile — or, for that matter, thinks anything about it at all.”

Not that this is just about Wonder Woman. I’m sure DC’s other chronicles editions don’t have intros…the point is to make them as cheap as possible, I’m sure, in the hopes of selling to a not-especially-well-defined audience of WW fans, kids, and the curious or confused. But even the DC Wonder Woman Archive Edition (hard backed, more expensive, slightly more material) has an intro (by folk singer Judy Collins) that is more along the lines of an extended blurb than an actual effort to provide some context.

I’m sure some might say this is for the best — why have some professor get between the kids and their pop culture ephemera? The problem is that pop cultural ephemera is ephemera; if that’s what it is, why reprint it? And, indeed, DC’s various archival projects have tended to founder from lack of interest, being released at glacial speeds before instantly going out of print. Those boring professors, it turns out, are part of minimal cultural validation — and without that minimal validation, old pop cultural ephemera is largely irrelevant.

Steve Trevor, He-Man Convalescent

Steve Trevor appears on the very first page of Wonder Woman’s first story in All Star comics. In that debut appearance, he’s unconscious.

He then stays unconsious throughout the entire tale. He gets some moments of lucidity in flashback, but by the end of the story, he’s still conked out. It’s only in the 2nd WW tale (in Sensation Comics #1) that he comes to his senses. After that he’s in the hospital convalescing. He sneaks out when he learns of deadly danger to the country…but by the end of the comic, he’s back in bed again, with WW as Diana Prince (who changed places with his nurse…don’t ask) caring for him. Next issue he’s up and around, but by the end:

It’s only in Sensation Comics 3, the fourth WW story, that Steve Trevor escapes from the hospital, forcing Diana Prince to get a job not as his secretary, but as his boss’ secretary.

In other words, the ur-Steve Trevor, as Marston conceived of him, is not a fighter nor a love, but a hospital patient. The true Steve Trevor is the wounded — or, perhaps more accurately, infantilized — Steve Trevor.

In Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power, and Reistance, Gill Plain argues that:

War creates a situation in which the gender debate is subsumed by a meta-narrative of power. It represents a conflict that divorces and prioritises the division between activity and passivity from the founding binary opposition masculine/feminine. War almost represents itself as a constructive reinscription, or even a rejection of the age-old formulations of gender…. In the course of purusing the division between a non-gender-specific activity and passivity, woman is ‘decentered’… The woman has once again become invisible.

For Plain, then, war destabilizes gender by divorcing activity/passivity from gender — but in so doing, it erases women’s difference, and so erases women.

I think, though, Marston, radical feminist and dirty old coot, has found a way around this dilemma. He uses the destabilizing effect of war to create an emasculated hero — the wounded soldier, whose incapacity is the sign of his boldness and strength. But for Marston, the fact that passivity is disconnected from women does not result in ungendering. On the contrary, it becomes a masochistic fetish. Steve regresses, authority is upended…and patriarchy becomes matriarchy. Woman isn’t erased; she’s explicitly elevated as caregiver and (maternal) hero. Which is (in Marston) what men want:

That’s an awesomely, fluidly flaccid twisted leg Peter has drawn there — and Steve is, of course, explicitly getting off on his own castration. War for Marston isn’t a disaster so much as an opportunity for men to embrace their weakness…and let women take over.

Myself for a Rival

A number of the stories in this volume end with a panel like this

What’s interesting about this is that…that’s it. The trope is stated…and then dropped, over and over again. The love triangle is pointed at, but never really becomes central to the plot (the way it is with the Clark/Lois/Superman triangle, even in the early years to some extent.)

It seems like, for Marston, there’s a pleasure in the masquerade of changing identities, and a frisson in the unrequited melodrama…but very little interest in actually presenting either Diana or Wonder Woman as angst-ridden or, for that matter, weak. There’s almost a condescension about it, like she’s pretending she’s worried to make Stevie feel important, the little darling. As I’ve mentioned before, double identities in Wonder Woman feel more like play than agonized bifurcation, a polymorphous feminine role-play rather than an agonized Oedipal bifurcation. After Marston died, of course, Diana’s love vicissitudes move from marginal tease to major plot points. With Marston’s feminism removed, everybody seemed more comfortable with a passive object of desire, rather than with the all-powerful Mommy, stooping to love.