This is really an amazing issue. As I intimated in the last post, Marston and Peter seem to be getting more and more adroit at integrating layout and narrative, and there are some absolutely stunning spreads in this issue.

The color here is amazing, and the diaphanous, ghostly bodies really show off Peter’s supple lines. There’s a great contrast, too, between the airy grace of the female figures and the caricatured, cartoony old man (that’s the evil Pluto) at the top of the first page. Peter has also loosened up his layouts again, using bigger and fewer panels, and dividing them up in more varied ways than has been his wont up till now. Also notice in the upper right of the second page, there’s actually a wordless action sequence. I think that’s the first one in the series, and it’s really a joy to see Peter working without all those cumbersome text boxes for once. There’s another wordless sequence later in the comic; hopefully we’ll see more of it in later issues as well.

Also, so many great details here. The weird test tube with those evil black figures lurking around it, all against that gorgeous orange background…Peter’s use of motion lines is lovely as always….and the movement of the green girl in WW’s arms is perfectly done; she looks entirely limp and yet rigid a the same time, with her stylized hair and gown flowing out behind WW.

I think this one may even be better:

Again, the motion lines become an intense design element; it’s almost like you’re looking at rapids with all the racing, turbulent patterns going every which way and yet still managing to form a coherent whole. The upper left panel, with WW and the Holiday girls spinning semi-conscious in cocoons against that weird abstract colored background is especially fine — and, of course, with its hints of helplessness and semi-involuntary transformation, intentionally fetishized.

If Peter has outdone himself, Marston also turns in a fine story, somewhat more ominous and dark than usual In traversing the planets and the Greek gods, he’s inevitably come to Pluto, and so he gets to retell the Persephone rape legend

and replay it using one of the Holiday girls as the unfortunate Persephone.

This is preceded by a suggestive sequence:

You have the threatened rape, the disbelief of the other girls…and then the tearful evocation of fatherly displeasure, followed by the actual rape, complete with discarded phallic accoutrement. We’re treading around issues of incest and abuse, with Pluto taking the part of rapist/ogre/father.

That would explain in part, too, some of the more ominous submerged themes in the issue. When they get to the planet Pluto, for example, the Holiday girls and WW are confronted by black, groping hands. The hands hold them while they are split apart into spiritual light bodies and physical black bodies.

So bifurcated, the girls are held under Pluto’s thrall:

What happens at that point is a little unclear, but if I understand right, Pluto uses the light bodies as decorations in his castle while the dark bodies becomes his hollow, robed servants. In any case, the separated forms are definitely in his service, and easier to destroy than whole selves.

Thematically, the evil black hands, the split between beautiful beloved colorful spirits and despised hollow black drones, the narrative quest to reunite the two — it all seems like it’s dealing with sexual trauma, and the subsequent sense of estrangement from, and loathing of, the self. It’s mixed in, too, with Marston’s odd theories about the power of colors (theories I don’t pretend to entirely understand), and with his usual male/female binaries (the spiritual forms actually seem more female than the abandoned physical, blackened shells — which makes sense since masculine/feminine is more archetype than physical reality for Marston.) The result is a narrative that veers vertiginously between (literally) colorful fantasy and a disturbing darkness, with a sense that love can slide from one into the other at a moment’s notice. For instance, look at these successive pages:

The color palette kind of tells you everything you need to know, almost without even reading it.

There’s another telling sequence late in the book I think. Pluto comes to steal Steve away. The story spends an unusual amount of time not on Steve’s reaction, but on his secretary’s:

Narratively, there isn’t a need for all this; why do we care about the secretary’s reaction, after all? And why is she quite so thoroughly freaked out? (I mean, yes, I’d be freaked out too, but in terms of the stuff that happens on a regular basis in this comic, this is pretty small beer.) I think the answer to both questions, maybe, is that this is important, and she’s freaked out, because it’s a primal scene…and more importantly, a primal scene as site of abuse. It’s not just a kidnapping; it’s a rape, and a rape linked to childhood abuse and perversion (it’s a male on male intergenerational rape, after all.) The secretary, in effect, is necessary because you need not only the rape, but *the witness to the rape*; not only the (child) abuse but the traumatized child-adult.

Given Marston’s usual ways, I think it’s valid to wonder if he’s fetishizing father/daughter rape. There’s probably a touch of that in a scene like this:

At the same time….I think I’d argue that this sort of scenario (submerged rape themes, submerged incest themes) probably has a fair amount of appeal for girls as well as for dirty old men…especially when the girls are as clearly the heroes, the older men are as clearly the villains, and the incest/rape is as sublimated as is the case here. Relationships between fathers and daughters — or, perhaps more to the point, between patriarchy and daughters — are definitely fraught. The patriarchal power is desirable and exciting, and yet (and because) it’s forbidden for girls. Marston’s providing a way around that; he’s saying that you can be like Wonder Woman, and keep hold of the danger and the excitement and the sex without having to split against yourself and become a patriarchal thrall/ornament. There’s a sense, in other words, in which I think Marston’s fetishization of feminism is appealing not only to men, but to women as well, since women, like men, are invested in both sex and power relations as desirable commodities.

Which isn’t to say that it’s not a tricky and uncomfortable issue. Freud started thinking about female incest and rape fantasies in the context of his own female patients, most of whom were the daughters of his colleagues. They all claimed they’d been raped by their fathers. Freud was like, well, of course, their fathers didn’t rape them, because they’re my friends, so…women must have incest fantasies. Which is bullshit; I have little if any doubt that his patients were in fact raped by their fathers. And yet…at the same time that they do actually get raped and abused, by their fathers and others,…many women also do have actual rape fantasies, and fetishized relationships with (sometimes abusive) father figures. Marston’s story here seems to be about acknowledging and enjoying those fantasies (or even those realities) in order…I don’t know, maybe not to transcend them, but to not let them cripple you. In this context, it’s interesting that for Marston the reintegration is actually sexualized as well:

I said above the Marston seemed to be sexualizing the helplessness of the transformation…but on second thought, I wonder. Maybe it’s the duality itself that he finds sexy; the image of women as both spirit and flesh, sexual and ethereal, merging into one? Instead of breaking women apart into virgin and whore and fetishizing the severed bits, Marston is excited by the integration; the fact that women can be both and neither and more than the sum of their parts. Pluto is misguided not only in his morals, but in his aesthetics and his cheesecake; women are most beautiful when they’re whole, not when their cut into bits and used as catspaws of the patriarchy.

And, of course, at the finish, WW is riding a stallion and clutching the uber-phallus/triton, vanquishing the evil father and taking his place…and then kneeling in loving submission before the over-mother, who promises that rape has been vanquished…at least until you turn back to the first page to read it again.

As I said earlier in the week, Wonder Woman #14 was okay but not great. For this one, though, Marston and Peter are back to form, with a tale that starts right out with preposterous and just snowballs from there. You know you’re in for a ride when the coverpage features a tigeape….

And the splashpage features a flying fish with octopus tentacles being ridden by a knight.

So anyway, the story begins with a giant chunk of the planet Neptune falling to earth as a new continent. You’d think that such an apocalyptic event, probably heralding the end of life on earth as we know it, might be the basis for the entire comic that follows…but, nah, not really. Continents hitting the planet just cause a few buildings to shake; not a big deal really. Instead, the really cool adventure happens when we go to visit that new continent and discover that..well, see for yourself:

And furthermore:

You have to adore the way Diana looks all hunched up and startled when she falls into the water…and also the fish swimming by her as she changes to WW…and the purply swirls. Underwater scenes just really bring out some of Peter’s best work, I think because of the chance to do all the swirling patterns and lines…and the undersea creatures of course. What a perfectly beautiful page.

You’re probably wondering why on earth the ocean water has parted and formed giant walls. Have no fear, all is explained:

There are tons of pseudoscientific explanations just like that throughout this issue, and every one is a keeper. Where does Marston get this stuff? The man’s a genius, I tell you.

Anyway, no sooner has WW gotten the ship back afloat than the crew (including the Holiday Girls, who, as always, have come along on the dangerous military mission) are attacked by those octoflyingfish we saw on the splash page

WW and crew defeat the flying fish, which are controlled, as it turns out, by good looking guys from Neptune.

This is a lovely page, I think, by the by; I think it’s partially the color palette that gets me; all those oranges and yellow oranges. But I also like the way that it’s sparse but balanced. And, of course, the toothy flying fish floating off to the side at the bottom are pretty hysterical.

WW and company take the Neptunians back to their home continent (strangely undamaged by its trip through space,) and while chitchatting they discover why it is that the Neptunians are so mean and unpleasant:

I like the way Marston just has WW state flat out that men will just fight, fight, fight if there aren’t women around. And the Neptunian doesn’t even really contradict her; he just explains that there’s no war because most of the men are turned into robots. It’s moments like this that you realize that Marston never did have a moments doubt; there was never an instant where he thought, “You know, almost no one agrees with me…maybe it’s just not true that women should rule over men.” This was a guy who was very secure in his worldview.

Here’s another stellar page:

Again, there isn’t any one thing or panel in this page that leaps out at you, but it works as a lovely whole, with lots of active lines and a unified, pleasing color palette. The filigree in the background, much of it obscured by the word balloons, lends a subtle, baroque feel to the whole image. It’s pages like this that make me want to compare Peter to Winsor McCay; he’s not as explicit about it, but he really does, like McCay, seem to see the page as an aesthetic unit, and work with it as such. It’s not something that is done very often or very well, especially not in super-hero comics of this era.

Here’s another, maybe clearer example;

The net there is used as a design element; the mesh pattern flowing through the different panels gives a dynamic sense of movement and unity to the page. The spiraling and shifting pattern is emphasized by the simple tiered layout — which itself has a nice rhythm (long, short, short, long, long short.) I think Les Daniels said at some point that Peter had trouble with page design early in the WW run. If that was ever true (and I think there is something to it) it’s certainly not the case by this point.

All right; repressing the urge to just post every single page of this book now…they’re all pretty much amazing….repressing, repressing…okay, more or less successful. Let’s move on to another awesome pseudo-science explanation:

They turn men into machines by robbing them of salt, because salt is what gives you flavor, doncha know. But the best part is…it doesn’t work on women. And why not? Witness:

Again I ask…why isn’t DC taking these panels and printing them as posters, damn it?

The Neptunians are so terrified of women now that they make a pact with the U.S. offering to become a vassal state if the Americans will guarantee that no women can come onto the Neptunian continent. The U.S. agrees…and so to keep tabs on the devilish Neptunians, WW is forced…to wear drag. Of a sort. I’d wondered before if Marston ever provided examples of good-girl cross-dressing (he has several of his villainesses cross dress.) This issue has the closest we’ve gotten so far, as WW and the Holiday girls dress up as at least nominally male tigapes.

Not really conclusive, but maybe another datapoint to suggest that Marston didn’t seem to see cross-gender dressing as particularly or innately evil. And it’s certainly more evidence for the fact that he just found dressing up in general hot; the Tigeape costumes were first donned during a sorority hazing ritual, which is one of Marston’s favorite things. (HIs academic research involved sorority hazing rituals, so of course his interest was strictly scholarly. Of course.)

Also, add “furry” to Marston’s impressive list of kinks. Of course, furries weren’t even invented when WW was penned…but he Marston was a pioneer in this, as in many things….

The comic ends happily ever after when the Neptunians plot is foiled and the island is given over to women to govern.

If only our actual political leaders were that docile. Go forth, WW, and teach unto Dick Cheney the loving submission. Barack Obama too, just as long as I don’t have to read the slash.

I’m actually doing a bit of catch-up here; I’ll have at least three and maybe four Bound to Blog posts up this week. Starting with:

Yep, it’s just like the teaser says: Wonder Woman in Shamrock Land. And while I love that cover — complete with bizarre scale variations, weird amorphous clover blob, bright yellow background, and a guy cut off at the waist in the best spirit of constructivist design — the story isn’t maybe as good as it might be. Part of it is the villain— the well-dressed cropped guy on the cover there. He’s called the Gentlemen Villain or something, and he’s so bland that I can’t even remember his name even though I just read the thing. He performs all the usual Marston villainy (forcing women to serve him, throwing around grenades — Marston loves grenades) but it feels pretty rote — perhaps in part because it’s mostly just in the interest of stealing stuff. I’ve seen some writing on this series that’s suggested that Marston was freed up by the end of the war…but there’s definitely something to be said for evil Nazis as enemies.

Or, you know, maybe Marston just wasn’t feeling all that inspired. Or maybe leprechauns just don’t hold that much appeal for me. I don’t know. I even felt like a lot fo the art wasn’t really all that exciting, especially compared to Peter’s ravishing work last issue.

Not that the book doesn’t have its moments. This is a great panel.

Marston definitely joins R. Crumb in having a thing for piggy-back rides. I assume it’s the masochistic implications that make it appealing for both of them; getting a piggyback is infantilizing and polymorphously (rather than explicitly sexually) intimate. WW emphasizes the mother/child aspect by calling him “funny boy” too. Their expressions are both priceless; Steve looks like his eyebrows are going to attain independent lift-off, and WW looks genuinely cranky.

Here’s a queasy moment as WW flirts with a leprechaun who has captured her:

Ick.

I like the fact that this looks more like Steve is being showered with bubbles than like he’s being buried alive:

I love the scribbly halo of WW’s lasso in this one:

And here’s the valentine day’s card. Steve has an opportunity to make WW kiss him since she’s trussed up in the lasso…and oh, she wishes he would…but he’s just too galant. It’s both romantic and fetishistic, innocent and winkingly kinky, in a way that reminds me of a certain amount of shojo:

This is a bizarre bit: are the Irish especially well known for throwing bricks? Or is this just something Marston made up?

And this is probably the best panel in the issue; I love the designs on the wall there, and the way the Princess Elaine looks impossibly diminutive. The white curved lines of the couch are really nice too; the ones to the right of Elaine almost seem like motion lines, actualy, giving the whole panel a sort of fantastical energy and motion.

The enormous bee as design element here is pretty great:

And the weird inky shadows here are very nicely done; it gives it almost a noirish feel, which is unusual for Peter (I wonder if he used a different assistant on this one or something?)

Oh, man, I’d almost forgotten the flying pigs. That pig looks so happy….

Men! They hate roses and make you sew!

Also… this is an oddly suggestive panel.

The way WW is arched with her arms thorwn back, and the energizing effects of the motion lines… And then you’ve got those weird veiny, phallic trees beneath her — we’ve definitely wandered out of Leprechaunland for a moment and into a Freudian dreamscape. And, of course, in the next panel, the excess of passion has given her amnesia. (I can’t actually remember if she’s gotten amnesia before, but it seems like a natural kink for Marston, fitting in nicely with the mind control and the dominance (fetishizing the obliteration of personality and the sense of control.))

So yeah, there’s a lot of individual things that work great; just overall it doesn’t quite fit together as well as it might. Thinking about it a little more, I think that maybe the Irish mythology just isn’t as well integrated as the Greek myths he sometimes uses, or as the more fantastic mole men or seal men or whatever settings. He seems to mostly see the Irish myths as an opportuniy for slapstick, maybe; in any case, it doesn’t jibe with his cosmic gender interests the way Mars and Venus and so forth do. The loss of the war setting also makes the whole thing seem a little directionless; instead of an epic battle between good and evil, it’s just some thieving schmo wandering around doing bad. I think the WW run really benefits from having the contrast between Marston’s set-in-stone binary crankitude and his scattershot, anything goes scripting (much the way that Peter’s art has a tension between extreme stiffness and extreme fluidity.) Marston’s ideology is certainly still present here (there’s a lot of mention of loving submission,) but it never solidifies thematically the way it does in many of the issues. But so it goes; they can’t all be gems, I guess. Hopefully Marston and Peter’ll be back on their game next issue.

We took a bit of a hiatus from the Marston/WW blogging there. My apologies; hopefully we’ll get back on track with out once a week posting, and push on through until the end of the run (which is #28…so 3 more months if I keep to the once a week schedule.)

Anyway, one of the things I tried to do with my time off was read Marston’s academic treatise, The Emotions of Normal People, from 1928. I have to admit I only got a handful of pages in. Marston is an entertaining writer, and you can see it even when he’s trying to be boring and academic…but, well, overall, it’s still kind of boring and academic. I thought this anecdote was nicely revealing though:

I can still remember vividly the fear I once experienced as a child, when threatened, on my way to school, by a half-witted boy with an air-gun. I had been taught by my father never to fight; so I ran home in an agony of fear. My mother told me, “Go straight by F____. Don’t attack him unless he shoots at you, but if he does, then go after him.” I was an obedient child and followed orders explicitly. I marched up to F_____ and his gun with my face set and my stomach sick with dread. F_____ did not shoot. I have known, ever since that well-remembered occasion, that fear does not give strength in times of stress. Part of the strength with which I faced F_____’s air-gun came from my own underlying dominance, newly released from artificial control. But most of it belonged to my mother, and she was able to use it in my behalf because I submitted to her. Dominance and submissions are the “normal”, strength-giving emotions, not “rage” and “fear”.

It’s all so Freudian you just can’t stand it. Though on the surface this may be a conflict between Marston and the “half-witted boy”, you don’t have to go too far into the subtext to see it as a conflict between paternal authority (it’s his father who forbade him to fight) and maternal dominance. It’s also telling, in terms of Marston’s general view of the world, that violence here is definitely gendered, but that gendering doesn’t break down quite the way you would expect. On the one hand, the half-wit boy has the gun (very phallic) and it’s the father who lays down the arbitrary law, which is universally applicable and not to be altered no matter the circumstances. Still, it is the Dad who is the pacifist, and the Mom who is willing to continence violence…albeit tailored to individual circumstances, and administered with love. And, of course, the whole point here is that fear and (typically male-identified) rage are less effective and powerful than submission to love. The phallic gun is no match for the mother’s will.

It’s fun, too, that Marston has apparently written a whole book here to demonstate, scientifically, once and for all, that everyone else is wrong, and his kink is normal, normal, normal. Speicfically, it’s a “normal emotion,” which is how he gets to call his book “Emotions of Everyday People,” rather than, say, “The Pleasures of Dominance and Submission: A Field Guide.”

Marston is, as always, easy to make fun – but there are also some interesting ideas here, I think. Dominance and submission maybe are a lot more common and important as motivating forces than we generally think about. People are certainly influenced by hierarchies and affection more or less constantly. Freud relates those to subconscious motivators, but it would be possible to think of them too as more natural, or above-board emotions. You can see too why Marston was occasionally accused of fascism by the advisors/censors in the editorial offices; strength through giving up your will to a higher authority must have sounded ominously familiar in the 1940s (though, of course, Hitler wasn’t a mother, which was probably an important distinction for Marston.)

(As a parenthetical aside to the parenthetical, I was just skimming some writing by medieval theologian Meister Eckhart (why? Never mind why.) Anyway, he was arguing that obedience was virtue; more important than love or humility or charity or anything else. The argument was basically that obedience brings you closest to God, since through obedience to a superior you most thoroughly abnegate self, and when self goes, God comes in. The best use of free will is to destroy your own will.

I can’t say I find that especially convincing – it seems to be deliberately abrogating moral choice in a way that seems pretty problematic from most moral standpoints, including Christ’s as far as I understand it. I actually have more sympathy for Marston’s position, which at least argues that obedience has to involve love and presumably some level of trust. Obedience in and of itself, to any random hierarchy, just doesn’t seem like a virtue, much less the virtue. But I’m a liberal secularist steeped in modernity, so I guess that’s what I would say.)

Anyway, on to WW #12, where we’ve got WW, not for the first time, seizing control of a suggestively shaped missile:

I believe this is the first WW issue written after the end of the war. Marston’s not quite ready to dispense with the military plots, though; this story is all about the evil European munitions manufacturers and their glamorous women spies who are plotting to cause yet another war for fun and profit.

I kind of feel bad for the European arms manufacturers, actually. I mean, they just helped win WW II; if they were ever going to enjoy any popularity, you’d think this would be the moment. But no, as soon as the wars done, Marston is blaming them for everything. Still, I guess I should be glad that Marston hasn’t gone right back to blaming the Jews.

In any case, as it turns out, the European munitions manufacturers are little more effective than that half-wit boy with the gun. Even Diana Prince can take them out:

So inevitably they’re defeated and taken for treatment…not to Paradise Island, but to another matriarchal, peace –and-dominance loving society (Marston’s got a million of them.) This one’s on Venus. You can tell the Venusians from the Amazons because the Venusians have wings, which Harry Peter seems more or less born to draw.

As you see at the end there, the Queen of Venus is promising to transform the evil munitions men and their glamorous girlfriends into good, loving law-abiding citizens. And though there are a couple of blips (as you see in the last panel) she does have some success, primarily because of the power of magnetic gold, which makes you happy to be captive.

Any similarities to the golden magical lasso are presumably intentional; I think Marston believed that the color yellow encouraged feelings of submission. Anyway, this is also where we first have the Venus Girdle, the belt made of magnetic gold which makes people happy with their captivity:

Marston’s paradises are so Edwardian and upper-class.

The thing here is that the men are all perfectly happy with their captivity; they all want to wear Venus Girdles all the time. It’s only Velma, one of the glamorous girlfriends, who has the gumption to figure out a way to break the spell, following the letter of the law (a patriarchal move, incidentally) in order to break free.

Later Velma, in pursuit of a nefarious plan, actually places the girdle on herself, and then summons the willpower to break free despite the post-coital spell.

Velma has to hold the men at gunpoint in order to get them to rid themselves of their girdles.

I’ve probably said this before, but I think this shows why it was that Marston so often resorted to female villains. Men in his world just don’t have that much gumption. It’s really hard to imagine any male in Marston’s world, from Steve to Ares, throwing off the matriarchal power of the girdle. Men, like young Marston, want to submit their will to a more powerful feminine control. Only another woman like Velma can resist Venus – and offer men the opportunity to be controlled by her will.

Of course, Velma is eventually captured and renounces her evil ways…which seems kind of too bad, since she was pretty fun to root for. But no fear; I’m sure they’ll be an evil villainess to root for in an upcoming issue.

Nothing much else to say about this issue…except that Harry Peter just keeps getting better and better, damn it The effects with the ray that transport everyone to Venus are thoroughly weird and lovely, for example:

as is this visit from the ghostly Queen of Venus:

Peter is also experimenting very effectively with some more complicated page layouts. I think this is the first time I’ve seen him use the kind of narrow tiny panel he does in the middle here:

and I know I’ve never seen him use that odd jagged panel before:

And then there’s this weird, sensuous ghost whispering sweet nothing in WW’s ear:

I think my favorite panel, though, is this one:

The perspective is so scattershot that it actually looks like Paula is floating in mid-air; like it’s some magician’s trick that Velma is demonstrating, with WW standing there thinking, “How on earth did she manage that!” The shadow adds to the effect too; it’s weird and doofy, and completely works with Marston’s themes of control and magic. I really wish there were still mainstream artists like this around. Darwyn Cooke is cool and all, but this is the shit.

Last week I blogged about the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman #11, which featured a cross-dressing villain named Hypnota among other things. In reading that issue, I wasn’t exactly sure what Marston thought about Hypnota in particular, or about cross-dressing in general. So I thought I’d take a brief break from going through all the issues of WW, and instead read another Marston cross-dressing villain story from a bit earlier, in one of his first Wonder Woman efforts, Sensation Comics #2.

Before I talk about that story, though, I wanted to mention another book I just finished: Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World. This is going to go on for a little bit, but we’ll get back to Wonder Woman, I promise.

I’ve talked about Rawle’s collage cartoons before. Woman’s World is collagy as well; Rawle wrote the text using words and phrases from women’s magazines published in the early 60s. It’s an impressive technical achievement in some ways. In other ways, you read it and you say, how could such an innovative process have resulted in such a staid narrative?

The narrative is particularly predictable when it comes to gender and cross-dressing. The story is narrated by Norma, and is mostly about her brother, Roy. Eventually Rawle reveals that Norma and Roy are the same person; the real Norma was killed as a child, the trauma caused her brother, Roy, to freak out, so that he started to wear women’s clothing and think that he was Norma part of the time. “Norma” is obsessed with women’s magazines and clothes, which gives Rawle the chance to use a lot of the cleaning product descriptions and advertising slogans and superficial cliches he found in all those women’s magazines he’s using to write his book.

So basically, Rawle presents us with a male-to-female cross-dresser who is (1) incredibly superficial and obsessed with surface femininity (Norma gets into big trouble because she just has to, has to, has to get a photograph of herself all dolled up and beautiful); and (2) completely insane. Sound familiar?

It sounds familiar to me anyway; both tropes are incredibly overused, to the point of rote idiocy, in popular representations of cross-dressers. The “they cross-dress, so they must be insane” schtick is used in just about every other major horror film, it seems — from Psycho, most obviously, down to Silence of the Lambs. The notion seems to be that before a guy would dress like a woman he’d have to have gone completely round the bend, to the extent of actually being a victim of multiple-personality disorder.

The “obsession with surface” thing is also really tired. Trans-activist Julia Serano has a great anecdote in her book “Whipping Girl” about being approached by some television show which wanted her to appear on a segment they were doing about male-to-female trans folks. The television people asked her if they could film Serano getting dressed to go out…putting on her make-up and dresses and that sort of thing. Unfortunately, Serano dresses the way a lot of women dress, which is to say, she doesn’t really wear make-up, often wears pants, and generally doesn’t get all dolled up to go off to her not especially glamorous job (she’s an academic biologist.) All of which she told the television producers, who, of course, decided not to film her, because they wanted yet another story about how obsessed trans people were with surface femininity and appearances and so on and so forth.

In short, when Graham Rawle thought to himself — “who would be obsessed with reading women’s magazines and learning how to be a woman and learning how to be feminine…um…I know! A cross-dressing man! And wouldn’t it be funny if she was really overblown and campy and not actually all that good at behaving like a real woman!” — again, when he thought all that, he was thinking just like those television producers. Which is to say, he wasn’t exactly thinking at all; he was just trying to be titillating and transgressive in the most banal and unthreatening way possible.

Okay, so…back to Wonder Woman and Sensation Comics #2. This story starts off with Nurse Diana Prince caring for a badly injured Steve Trevor. Steve is quickly kidnapped by a mysterious evil-doer named Dr. Poison. Lots of hijinks ensure, involving a chemical formula that makes soldiers interpret orders backwards and a bevy of courageous sorority girls— but the point is, at the end of the story, it is revealed that Dr. Poison…is a woman!

What’s interesting about this to me, in comparison to the Rawle story, is how thoroughly anti-climatic it is. There isn’t any effort to explain why she’s dressing up as a man. There isn’t any effort to ridicule her for dressing up as a man. There’s barely any effort to suggest that what she was doing was incongruous in any way.

Because Marston provides so little in the way of exegesis, it’s hard to know what he thinks, or what we’re supposed to think, about the cross-dressing. I can think of a bunch of possible ways to parse the scene — but, as I’ll discuss, none of them seem to fit perfectly.

1. Women who dress as men are ridiculous or incongruous, or going against nature in some way.

There’s a little evidence for this; WW makes a crack about Dr. Poison’s delicate hands, suggesting that a woman can’t perfectly imitate a man. The remark is somewhat undercut, though by Steve’s obvious and complete befuddlement. He couldn’t tell she was a woman, clearly. Moreover, I don’t think the reader can tell she’s a woman until WW reveals the truth. There isn’t any effort to tip us off; she doesn’t do or behave in a womanly manner at any point. It’s not even clear whether we’re supposed to see the cross-dressing as funny, exactly. It’s true that the scene after the unmasking has a farcical air about it…but the one thing that is more or less specifically mocked is Poison’s ethnicity, not her drag king status:

There’s certainly evidence, here and elsewhere that Marston had unpleasant racial opinions, but he’s more circumspect about cross-dressers.

2. Cross-dressing is evil and perverse, and so is the provenance of villains.

Richard Cook suggested this was what Marston was up to in a comment on the Wonder Woman #11 thread.

You say that Marston didn’t think that cross-dressing was wrong, but none of the “good” women (Diana, Etta, or the Holiday Girls) ever dressed as a man.* The cross-dressers, like Hypnota or the Blue Snowman, are invariably villainesses. The impression I get is that Marston believed there was something evil (and sexy) with a woman who wanted to be a man.

Vom Marlowe made a similar point in the same thread.

I wonder if the portrayal of cross-dressing is part of the skanky villain sex convention. This happens a lot in modern romance. You can portray non-vanilla stuff quite explicitly, but it has to be done by villains. The goal is titillation, for certain. The non-vanilla sex is not necessarily a way to show that the person is evil but sometimes it is. I wonder if this is something that Marston wanted to include, but didn’t think he could get away with doing for a good girl.

Again, this is feasible, but Marston never quite says it…and in other cases, he doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with women taking on male roles:

That’s heroine Etta candy, looking far more butch and tough in this early story than she would later on. The butch-femme dynamic, complete with a barely sublimated oral tease, is awfully hard to miss. And then there’s this panel:

Unlike the last example, I don’t think this is a joke, per se; Etta is really the hero here, and Marston is, as far as I can tell from other issues, completely fine with women’s sports (and indeed, more than fine with them.) The image of Etta dressing up as a football player isn’t meant to be either ludicrous or evil, I don’t think. Given that, it’s hard to see why Poison dressing as a man would necessarily strike him as evil in itself.

3. Men are evil, so women have to dress as men to be evil.

Sort of dovetails with Marston’s philosophy, but doesn’t seem especially likely given (a) the number of female villains he uses in other instances and (b) this panel:

She seems to remain fairly evil even when femme, as far as I can tell.

4. Women are weak, so they need to pretend to be men to gain power.

This is why MTF cross-dressing is always pretty much seen as odder than FTM; culturally, it makes sense for a woman to want to be a man, because men are higher status in various ways. And you could see a later version of this story having Poison reveal that because of the sexism of Japanese culture, she needed to dress as a man to be taken seriously, and so on and so forth.

Again, though, it’s hard to imagine Marston making this argument. Marston thought women were stronger than men in just about every way. In this issue alone, he goes out of his way to make Steve weak and helpless (wheelchair bound), and has not only WW as the superior strong woman, but also Etta, who is (as we’ve seen) quite tough herself.

Ultimately, I think the fact that it’s difficult to pin Marston down here is maybe the most interesting aspect of his use of cross-dressing. I have no doubt (as Richard suggested above) that Marston found role-play and cross-dressing sexy and exciting. But beyond that, he doesn’t explicitly stigmatize it, and, moreoever, doesn’t even really seem to feel that it needs an explanation.

Rawle’s book, on the other hand, is basically nothing but explanation, first, of who would be shallow enough to live their life based on a woman’s magazine (answer: a cross-dresser) and second, of why a man would dress as a woman (answer: because he’s insane.) Explanations are a big part of how society decides who or what is abnormal. You don’t need to explain why men dress as men because that’s normal, but if a man dresses as a woman, you have to explain that, because it’s weird. Except that Marston doesn’t seem to think that it is, particularly.

Steven Grant in commments on one of my recent posts said this about Marston:

As for Marston’s proclivities, I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere, but it’s hard not to suspect he liked being tied up and restrained, probably responded initially with shame, and egotistically concocted a bondage worldview that obviated any need for shame. So bondage – and the “freedom” that comes with it – becomes not his secret shame but everyone’s secret desire, and the path to emotional liberation. (As with the jargon of most cults, we can assume he believed anyone who didn’t like being restrained was simply repressed, and even more in need of “therapy.” His creation of the lie detector suggests that he had at least some fixation on the notion of secret shame, inventing a (specious. if well-promoted) device that would bring secret shame to light and, from his perspective, begin “correction” of it.

I don’t doubt that there’s something to this…but on the other hand, I think it’s worth noting that Marston’s investment and interest in perversions of various sorts doesn’t manifest solely as a desire to control or correct or diagnose. On the contrary, it often manifests as something that looks rather like tolerance. There are instances, at least, where Marston’s just not especially judgmental about other people’s desires — in part because he’s fetishizing those desires himself, no doubt. Still, speaking as a boring straight guy, it seems to me overall like it would be better to be obliquely fetishized by Marston than to be condescended to and clinicalized by Rawle.

_____________________

Just a couple other notes about this story formally; it’s pretty clear that both Marston and Peter are still kind of finding their feet. Peter’s linework is lovely as always: I really like the curves in this broken door, for example:

Still, you can see Peter struggling a bit with layout and panel composition. This image for example:

the dancing is great, and all the action is nice…but the inset panel is just weird, and looks like it was done at the last minute (look how that one girl is cropped off almost at random.) Partially as a result, the big panel looks crowded and messy, rather than formal and frozen in a way Peter would master shortly.

Marston’s also not quite where he would end up. The plot here involves sorority girls led by WW using their feminine whiles to trick and capture Poison’s guards. Marston, of course, believed that women used their feminine allure to overpower men and force them to submit. Marston never exactly abandons these ideas…but in future issues he tends not to represent them quite so schematically, I think. Certainly, WW does not, as a rule, beat the bad guys by dancing with them. Usually, she slugs them, or outthinks them, or some combination of those. I guess maybe he figured it would strain credulity if she danced her way to victory in every issue.

I’ve been poking away at the Les Daniels “Wonder Woman: The Complete History.” It’s quite interesting, as much for the tidbits of information (Harry Peter did cartoons for Judge!) as for the topics it elides (there’s no way around the fact that Marston had sexual relations and lived with two women (Elizabeth Marston and Olive Richard). But the two women…what was their relationship exactly? Did that have any influence on the many, arguably sensual, female-female relationships in Wonder Woman. Daniels doesn’t even ask the question.

Anyway, at one point (page 34) Daniels talks a bit about WW’s villains:

It seems that Wonder Woman’s foes should have been male (and certainly many were), yet a surprising number of her most interesting and energetic opponents were female. Some of Wonder Woman’s comments indicate that men were just too feeble to be worthy antagonists. Marston was apparently intrigued by the dramatic possibilities of depicting Princess Diana battling various vivacious vixens (they were invariably gorgeous), or perhaps he had calculated that such encounters would be most appealing to male readers.

I’m sure Marston did enjoy the woman-on-woman action just fine. But at the same time, I’m not sure there’s any sense in which Wonder Woman’s opponents “should have been male.” It’s true, as Daniels discusses, that Marston wanted women to rule over men. But that’s not quite the same thing as saying that all women are good and all men are evil. On the contrary, Marston has plenty of good men (Steve Trevor, most noticeably, who is certainly noble, if often kind of dumb) and plenty of evil women.

Moreover, the use of women villains can’t just be chalked up to prurience. In several cases, as Daniels notes, male villains are revealed to actually be cross-dressing women at the last moment. If you’re going for the sex element, surely it would be more effective to have your villainous hotty wear a bikini or a diaphanous gown (as, of course, Marston frequently does) rather than deck them out in drag-king attire.

For example, as these things go, this just isn’t a very prurient cover:

The fellow decked out in the pseudo-orientalist get-up (very nicely rendered by Peter, I might add — love those art-nouveau curlicue patterns) is, we learn at the end of the book, actually a girl. Because Marston’s decided to dress the she as a he, we lose the opportunity for two sexy girls on the cover instead of one. Which is not the way to go for marketing purposes.

So if women-as-villain isn’t strictly for cheesecake purposes, what’s the deal? Daniels doesn’t really have an explanatory framework, because he’s stuck on Marston’s utopian claims about the goodness of women and the loving matriarchy. But if you actually read the Wonder Woman comics, it’s clear enough that, while Marston likes kind mistresses well enough, he also has a thing for cruel ones:

“Hussy” has definite sexual connotations; Diana sounds jealous that someone other than WW is forcing Steve to obey.

And similarly, this girl-on-girl hypnotism, with the kneeling veiled slave, surely has sexual connotations.

In short, Marston is fascinated by female power — as a force for good, sure, but also just in itself. The sexual payoff isn’t just in the opportunities for cheesecake (though certainly those are fun), but also in the enforced submission.

Which is to say, the fetish here is not attractive female bodies in disarray, but the hypnotism itself.

The first three are clear enough; hot girl in short skirt being controlled, hot girl in negligee being controlled, hot nurse being controlled (everyone likes nurses.) But — as someone with a bit of a button for eroticized mind-control I think I can say with some certainty that Marston got a thrill from that last one as well. The control and submission aren’t an excuse for the cheesecake; they’re the point in and of themselves. (Incidentally, WW comes onto the ice and saves the game (which was against a men’s team) for the Holiday college women.)

In other words, this is one place where Marston’s fetish and his feminism arguably part company; the use of control for evil purposes (or even for silly ones, as with Etta in the image above) is exciting. But this kind of control, thrilling as it may be, can’t really be described in terms of loving submission. The tension is most clear in those instances where it’s Wonder Woman who is placed in hypnotic thrall. As the Amazonian hope for a new tomorrow, WW generally makes others obey her with the use of her magic lasso (though that gets turned around a fair bit, too…but not to digress). But there’s obviously some payoff to be had by showing her will bent to the power of Hypnota. So how does Marston resolve things? Well, he vacillates:

On the one hand, we get to see WW all wide-eyed and receptive…..

But then she’s stronger than Hypnota….

But then she gets tied up in the golden lasso and has to submit; though only reluctantly (does that make it less or more appealing?)

She breaks out of that and gets free…but later, we do finally see her being taken over by Hypnota:

Though soon she’s back to being immune…and only pretending to be hypnotized….

Marston, in short, goes to some trouble to have it both ways. WW is both too heroic to be a thrall to the evil hypnotist…and yet, we also get to see her being a thrall to the evil hypnotist. Everybody’s happy!

It’s also worth asking…what’s the deal with all cross-dressing? Again, I think Marston is probably just fascinated with the possibilities of gender switching and dress-up in themselves.

It’s a little hard to follow what exactly the trick here is supposed to be…but basically Hypnota and her identical twin are switching places back and forth. I can’t really see any reason to devote this much space to it, other than Marston’s enthusiasm for the surreptitious swapping of clothes and bodies and genders.

In some versions of masochism, gender swapping is used to as a way to undermine or invalidate patriarchy. For instance, in Jack Hill’s women in prison movie “The Big Doll House,” we find out at the end that the sadistic torturer is actually a woman…which essentially makes it possible to rape her. (I talk about this at much greater length in this essay. Turning a man into a woman, in that case, seems like a way to sneer at, and get back at, authority; the mother invalidates the father.

There’s maybe a touch of this in Marston’s story as well. Hypnota binds WW hands…which should rob WW of her strength, if Hypnota was a man. But, of course, Hypnota isn’t a man…so WW retains her strength, and (after some confusion) to break free.

Overall, though…I don’t know. In Marston, femininity isn’t ridiculed…quite the contrary. In some ways, Hypnota’s power, influencing others, seems like actually like a corruption of feminine influence — the dark side of WW’s magic lasso. From that perspective, you might see Hypnota’s cross-dressing as a sign that she’s using female power for evil male ends.

Again, though, I’m not quite sure that’s right. If cross-dressing were a sign of evil, then cross-dressing should itself be evil or wrong — and I don’t know that Marston thinks it is. Hypnota seems quite natural; as a man, she’s slender and boyish looking, perhaps, but not noticeably unattractive.

The truth is that, Marston can tend to see masculinity as wrong or deformed; men like Hercules and Dr. Psycho are caricatured and even ludicrous in their maleness. In some sense, Hypnota — who isn’t caricatured at all — is a better man than either of those real men. Women, for Marston, can and should do anything…and that includes being men.

Or being super-villains. After all, had Marston decided to make all his villains men, he would have robbed women of some of the best roles in the comic. It’s not necessarily especially feminist to paint all women as pure and virtuous and good. Why should men get to be the only ones who are powerful and bad? Marston seems to think it’s more fun for everyone, male and female alike, if women get to be villainesses, and villains too.