Not sure anyone but diehards are reading this at this point…but in case you’re new, I’m blogging my way through the entire original Marston/Peter run on Wonder Woman. We’re up to issue 4. And here’s the cover….

I’d sort of hoped to see the last of Baroness Paula Von Gunther last issue when she pulled a Bleak House and got her ugly mug replaced. I’m not that interested in her, and she’s always involved in espionage plots, which aren’t necessarily my favorite Marston efforts. No luck, though; she’s back for this entire issue apparently, being subjected to a series of tests by Aphrodite to prove that she’s sufficiently submissive or dominant or good or some combination of all three. And sure enough, the first story is pretty underwhelming. I mean, oh sure, you’ve got hot Chinese girls showing off their whip scars….

and hot Chinese girls showing off their whip scars

and then there’s the hot Chinese girls showing off their whip scars

And there’s also hot Amazon on Amazon action with some poorly motivated competition involving catching each other with ropes, and then there’s the girls attached to weird rejuvenation machines (Paula invents one, everyone having apparently forgotten that WW invented one in issue #1). Also some really nasty Japanese caricatures. But most of it’s pretty familiar by now, and there aren’t any deer costumes or anything to push it over the edge into utter jaw-dropping WTF absurdity. Except maybe for the Japanese gnats that bite women and cause them to attack men.

That’s pretty crazy. But even there….I don’t know, I was hoping for more than just a couple of panels of murderous women…and kind of hoping to see WW herself flip out. But doesn’t happen; she’s drunk from the fountain of youth on Paradise Island, you see, which apparently gives you immunity to rabid gnats. Those Amazons think of everything.

The next sotry, though, is more like it. Instead of espionage, we’ve got a mysterious race of mole men lurking under Holiday College. Of course, the Mole Men keep herds of chained and semi-willing female slaves tied up in their underground kingdom. Though the mole men are blind from their long time in the dark, they keep track of their slaves by covering them with special paint that emits ultraviolet rays which can penetrate the mole men’s sealed eyelids. Amidst a subterranean performance by the Holiday College band, WW and Paula free the female slaves, and then perform non-consensual surgery on all the mole men, restoring their sight. Now that they’re able to see the beauty that is women, they become all submissive, and beg their former slaves to take command of them. Happy endings all round.

In their own bizarre way, the WW comics are definitely part of a tradition of children’s fantasy literature. Underground kingdoms show up in many classics — Journey to the Center of the Earth obviously, but a a more likely precursor in terms of trippy oddness might be L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. (not “of Oz”; this one involves them wandering in the underworld beneath Oz.) In one panel, Paula says as she drops and drops, “this is like a dream of falling,” which seems like it has to be a deliberate nod to Carroll. There are several other similar scenes as well….

I love that drawing, especially; Parker’s scribbly curls of smoke setting off the elegantly controlled lines of the tuba and Peter’s characteristically stiff figure drawing. I like the way the smoke opening up in the off-center middle gives the sense of a great deal of space just out of vision; it’s almost like you’re seeing a small segment of an infinite universe of plummeting co-eds. There’s a touch of Winsor McCay, if McCay were, say, 10 years old. And horny.

Because, and to no surprise, Parker’s evocation of childish scribblies is matched by prepubescent eroticism. Dropping through space, the girls unconsciously assume the position; bent over, butt high, or even just legs pointing straight up, face obscured. The helplessness of falling is definitely fetishized, even more so here:

Cartoony cartoony sound effects give way to bouncing about helplessly in the dark, with Paula unconsciously pointing her posterior towards the camera. (They’re bouncing on a taut fabric held held by numerous women — kind of the adventure version of a sleepover pillow fight.)

I guess one could say that Marston and Peter are perverting the Alice story…but it might be closer to the truth to say that they’re explicating a perversion that was already there. Lewis Carroll had his own sexual interests (though they were probably less kinky than Marston’s) and you don’t have to read “Lost Girls” to pick up tinges of polymorphous pleasures in Alice. Falling into holes, “Eat Me!”, “Drink Me!”, flesh stretching and twisting and elongating…. I know, at least, when I was a kid, I found John Teniel’s illustrations of Alice growing and telescoping to be oddly suggestive. Same with the various weird bodies described in “Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz” — in fact, truth to tell, I don’t remember a ton from that book except the sense of bizarrely sublimated bodies wandering through a subterranean landscape.

There’s at least some literature on the link between the fantasy genre and masochistic fantasy. A bit back I read a 1923 essay by Anna Freud called “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams”; she was talking about a 15-year old girl who had early masturbatory beating fantasies which were elaborated into an extensive fantasy life with a whole cast of characters, a complex history, multiple scenarios that she’d go back into and tweak or revise or rethink. She called the stories “nice stories” because they weren’t explicitly sexual, but she came to see them as springing from that original primal beating fantasy; as being inherently masochistic. (And a quick search of the web reveals that the girl was not in fact an anonymous girl, as she claimed, but rather Anna Freud herself.)

I think masochism generates, and thrives on stories; on pretending or adopting different power relations — let’s pretend you control me, or that you are going to hurt me. Those stories are often as much the object of fetishization as the masochistic acts themselves (which is what I was getting at in this post.). Certainly for Marston’s narratives seem to be both fantasies and fantasies, as it were, and I suspect that this is the reason that WW’s origin story isn’t as elegant a some other heroes, like Superman, Spiderman, Batman, etc. Tom suggests it’s because Marston had trouble imagining powerful women but I think it’s more likely that Marston had a stake in complicated stories — stories particularly with lots of characters, lots of relationships, and lots of power reversals. (And I think the “lots of relationships” part, at least, is actually often typical of genre literature aimed at girls, as opposed to more solitary-hero literature aimed at boys. But I digress….)

You can see some of what I mean when I say “the narrative is a fetish” by looking at how Marston uses it didactically. That is, Marston actually spends a lot of time essentially providing instructions about being a strong/good woman. Women must always trust their strength:

They must have a strong self-image (and you can find out whether they do by using a machine which reveals their subconscious thoughts…because involuntary confession is healthy…and stimulating!)

(This is from the third story, where we also get to see the subconscious image of themselves that men have, incidentally. Here’s one representative example:

Hey! Is that Mort Weisinger?)

Sorry about the detour. Back to instructions for healthy young women: they should carry themselves like queens not slaves.

And they must never, ever abandon the scenario or…disaster!

Similarly, you must never deny responsibility or turn away from authority; woman need to accept their mothering, reforming role even if it means burning their images into the brains of unprepossessing middle-aged idiots

Or even if it means arbitrarily deciding to keep folks in non-consensual slavery

because if you shirk authority, Aphrodite will reprimand you:

(I think I’ve mentioned before how much I like Peter’s use of scale. WW is here drawn way smaller than perspective calls for, which emphasizes her vulnerability and submission. He does that sort of thing all the time.)

The point here is that the instructions are all basically narrative in nature; they’re about telling stories correctly, or participating in role-playing in the correct way. And, of course, these instructions are themselves part of the story; correction and instruction is itself part of masochistic fetishization. This is part of the reason that Marston’s moralizing instructions never feel tacked on or like gratuitous pandering to the condescending uplift view of the role of children’s literature. The instructions for living he provides are integrated, idiosyncratic, and charged; they’re clearly as much the point for him as are the fight scenes, or the bondage scenes.

It’s also why when it’s on, WW has a a fetishistic frisson between form and content which is like little else in comics. I’ve compared the series to Henry Darger before, and I think looking to outsider art makes a lot of sense; there’s an obsessive pleasure in the craft — the storytelling and I think the art as well — which is echoed in the obsessive pleasure in the content in such a way that the two are almost inseparable, reinforcing each other in a kind of cascade.

To go back to the mole man story…details are piled on details in a way that seems almost random and certainly excessive (as fetishes tend to be excessive.) Thus, the mechanics of mole-men/slave relations and interactions are explained in loving and really ridiculous detail: in the deep dark, women’s eyes adjust to the dark quickly, but men’s don’t, and so the men go blind, like the mole men. But the mole men can nonetheless see the slaves, even though mole men eyes are sealed shut from disuse. How can they see the slaves you ask? Well, because they slather the slaves in a special glowing paint which gives off ultra-violet radiation, penetrating the mole-men’s lids and allowing them to whip their slaves. And that’s just the exposition for one page…never mind the static earth electricity or the horrible dancing trap or the escape plot involving the Holiday Girls breaking into song, or…well, you get the idea.

These narrative tergiversations, though, all circle around and lock into Marston’s (and probably Peter’s) obsessions; you can almost hear the series of sighs as they elaborate and close, elaborate and close. The glowing paint, for example, creates the narrative necessity (or excuse) for some of Peter’s most striking visuals; panel after panel of women glowing like beacons in the dark, with Peter picturing their radiance through quick, thick obsessive lines merging into inky cocoons — mysterious and contained, transcendent and controlled, otherworldly in bizarre lurid green and purple. (Again I ask, who did the colors for these books?)

The emphasis on sight, blindness, and invisibility is another Marston obsession, and here you can really see how it locks in with his bondage and masochistic and narrative preoccupations:

Again, that’s such a great drawing by Peter, with those lovely scribbly lines defining the floor and the regimented series of stalactites obtruding into the foreground to give the sense of contained, claustrophobic space, both oppressive and womb-like. On one level, the mole man is the master; he’s whipping her. But on another level, she is the only thing he can see. Her submission and denigration (being slathered in paint (and yes, I’m sure Marston thought that was kinky in itself) so she can be better punished) makes her the center of his vision. He’s blind because he’s a man, and so a fool…but there’s also the sense that he’s blind contractually, as part of the negotiation whereby the top in a B&D relationship pretends to be in control. Not that this is necessarily a metaphor or a coded symbol of any of these things in particular, but rather that all of the tropes — control, blindness, single-focus, debasement, the promise of a fantastic and unduplicatable intimacy, the sense of a shared dark space, the narrative explanation and negotiation — are pleasurable in themselves, and then get combined and recombined in a kind of fractal fetish.

All of which means that Marston’s statements about power always have at least as much to do with rubbing the fetish as they do with actual analysis or advocacy. Thus, when he makes feminist statements — I don’t think they’re totally useless to a feminist cause, but they are compromised, in that the goal of his feminism is always more about the men’s desires than women’s. As a for instance — why *should* Wonder Woman have to take control of the lives of a bunch of middle-aged male idiots? Her tomboyish response of, hey! forget this! I’ve got better things to do! seems entirely reasonable and even admirable, and when Aphrodite scolds her for it, it seems unjust and transparently done on Marston’s behalf. Similarly, at the end of the Mole-Men episode, when the mole men regain their site and beg their former slaves to rule over them, you’d really like the slaves to say, “hell no! fuck off!” Especially since, if the female slaves were actually the ones with the power (as it intimated in various ways) it makes sense that the male slaves will now be, in some sense, the topping bottoms. Having women rule is about allowing the men to become self-actualized — or allowing Marston to get his rocks off.

And yeah, that last panel is Etta Candy so blinded by oral desire and subterranean dimness that she starts sucking on a stick of dynamite. I was sort of hoping she’d get a mole-man of her own, but no such luck. Maybe next issue.

So it occurred to me as I started to work on blogging my way through the third Marston Wonder Woman that I wasn’t really sure when to stop. That is, what was the last issue of WW that Marston wrote? I know he died in 1947…but I haven’t been able to find anyone to tell me the number of his final issue. The problem is compounded by the fact that I think DC kept labeling the books as Marston-penned for some time after his death. So…anyone out there know which was his final effort?
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Anyway, while fruitlessly trying to determine when I could lay this burden down, I did find some juicy Marston quotes:

“The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound … Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society. … Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element”.

“Tell me anybody’s preference in story strips and I’ll tell you his subconscious desires…Superman and the army of male comics characters who resemble him satisfy the simple desire to be stronger and more powerful than anybody else. Wonder Woman satisfies the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them.”

“I am one of those odd, perhaps unfortunate men who derive an extreme erotic pleasure from the mere thought of a beautiful girl chained or bound…Have you the same interest in bonds and fetters that I have?”

That last one was apparently from a letter Marston wrote to William Gaines. To which Gaines replied (and this is a direct quote) — “Oy.”

I also found out that Marston apparently hand-picked Harry G. Peter over the objections of his editor, Sheldon Mayer. Marston liked Peter’s mix of innocence and sensuality, it sounds like. Mayer felt Peter was too old-fashioned. Score another one for Marston.
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Enough shilly-shallying. Let’s see that cover to #3:

I think that’s the best cover so far, actually. Completely insane juxtaposition of fantasy chariot and big honking disembodied head. And the colors! Saturated orange sky, gaudy green bubbles — Wonder Woman’s ridiculous red and blue suit is rendered relatively sedate in comparison. (Who did the color on these books, I wonder? Does anyone know?) That giant curvy eyebrow on the floating face is worth the price of admission alone, I think. Or the dragon-entwined cigarette holder; or the sledding cherubs, Or the incredibly expressive, frilly lines making up the horse’s leg.

Did I mention that I love Peter?

Also, notice that WW apparently went to bi-monthly with this issue. The book must have been selling well. Coming out six times a year, that means Peter must have been banging out about a page a day for just this title alone, plus what I presume was a comparable amount of work for Sensation Comics. So…two pages a day? That’s a pretty serious workload.

As far as the plot goes, this issue is devoted to a battle against, and the ultimate conversion of Nazi agent Baroness Paula von Gunther. Wikipedia informs me that the Baroness was knocking around for a while before this issue, showing up on several occasions in Sensation Comics, and on one occasion plotting to monopolize the American milk supply so that U.S. citizens would have weak bones and be unable to defeat Hitler’s stronger-boned armies. She also showed up in a fairly unmemorable adventure in Wonder Woman #1, where she appears to have been drowned. But (as is the way with the super-villains) it didn’t take, and she’s back now.

The first chapter is easily the best. Paradise Island seems always to fire Marston’s, um, imagination. This was a Christmas issue, I think…but of course, the Amazons don’t celebrate Christmas, because they’re pagans. Instead, they celebrate a solstice festival called Diana’s Day. Diana’s Day rituals include gift giving…and, to no one’s surprise, also masquerade and bondage. Oh, yes, and dressing up as deer to be hunted, hog-tied, and ritually fake-eaten.

“You make my mouth water. How about feeding me to myself?” Not really much to add to that.

One of the things this chapter really brought home to me was the extent to which Paradise Island functions as a kind of gay utopia; defined by some clueless straight guy as “an imaginary future in which gender, sexuality, and identity are fluid and in which pleasure is unregulated by either external or internal censors. It’s a place where taboos dissolve and sublimation vanishes; every relationship is erotic, every action sensual.” Paradise Island is literally paradise; it’s prelapsarian. The knowledge of good and evil, of shame, is suspended. The women on Paradise Island don’t behave like grown women; they behave like polymorphously perverse children. They love gifts; they throw themselves bodily into play and pretend; they have no particular inhibitions.

They’re innocents — but innocence here is charged with eroticism. They haven’t fallen, so they don’t perceive sex as sin, which means that anything goes (or is, at least, implied, this being an all-ages title.)

In particular, not having fallen means that the incest taboo is repealed. Radical feminist Shulamith Firestone (writing some time after Marston) argued that without the incest taboo

adults might return within a few generations to a more natural “polymorphously perverse” sexuality, the concentration on genital sex and orgasmic pleasure giving way to total physical/emotional relationships that included that. Relations with children would include as much genital sex as the child was capable of…. Adult/child and homosexual sex taboos would disappear, as well as nonsexual friendships…. All close relationships would include the physical, our concept of exclusive physical partnerships (monogamy) disappearing from our psychic structure as well as the construct of a Partner Ideal.

For Firestone, getting rid of the patriarchal law would eliminate hierarchy; prejudice and authority would dissolve in a warm polymorphous rush. Marston’s vision is analagous, even if he doesn’t exactly see the law disappearing. Rather, he wants the law of the father replaced with the law of the mother; force replaced with “loving obedience” (a term I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him use a couple of times.) Aphrodite’s rule (and by extension Hippolyta’s rule) over Paradise Island is a mother’s rule. But more than that, *all* the relationships on Paradise Island are essentially eroticized mother/daughter relationships. Wonder Woman sitting in a compromising position on Hippolyta’s lap is the blueprint for how all the Amazon’s relate to each other; maternal sentiment bleeding over into eroticism.

Everybody gets to be lovingly obedient and to enforce loving obedience. It’s all daughters playing at being mothers playing at being daughters, sending each other to their rooms — or, you know, to their bonds. Or whatever.

The charged mother worship here is analagous to that in Tabico’s awesomely squicky story “Adaptation”, in which an alien female insect implants mind-controlling larvae in human hosts, precipitating an escalating mother-love apocalypse of incestuous, cross-species prelapsarian obedience and abjection. (The story is both extremely X-rated and viscerally disgusting…we’re talking sex with bugs here, people. Explicit sex with bugs. So, don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Update: Tabico’s not a widely known author, but I explain at length why you should care about her (or why I do, anyway) at the end of this essay.

And, as in Tabico’s story, when mother love dissolves the Law — you don’t have the law. Babies don’t worry about good vs. evil; they think about what feels right and what they need. Tabico is rooting for the insects…and while Marston isn’t exactly rooting for the Nazis, I think it’s safe to say that he isn’t exactly unsympathetic to the Baroness either.

In fact, in terms of the erotic economy of this first story, the Baroness and her minions serve exactly the same funciton as the Amazons themselves. According to the plot, the Baroness has sent one of her slaves, Keela, to Paradise Island to cause mischief. Keela infiltrates the Amazons, ties up Etta Candy (who’s visiting for Diana’s Day) and steals Hippolyta’s girdle, which makes its wearer invulnerable. This allows her to wrestle with and defeat Wonder Woman.

The point here is that Keela acts basically exactly like the Amazons she is supposedly infiltrating. That is, she plays the same bondage games in much the same way:

In theory, of course, the Amazons are “just playing” while Keela is in earnest. But surely, the extra earnestness is just a way to increase the erotic charge — and a way, moreover, to put Wonder Woman in a position of submission as well as in a position of dominance. The theft of the girdle gives Keel the power of the mother, who overpowers WW. And then, inevitably, Etta and WW come right back and overpower and control her.

Etta’s fat, as she says, but she gets to participate in the orally erotic mother/daughter back and forth too…as does even Paul von Gunther herself, who the Amazons capture and imprison at the end of the story…only to let her escape immediately. One suspects that they did it on purpose; the play’s the thing, after all, and a mother tied up is no fun unless she can come right back and tie you up as well.

In any case, in the second story in the comic, the Baroness is free…which gives WW the chance to interrogate her slaves using a Brain Detector (a magically more efficient version of the lie detector machines Marston helped develop.) You’d think WW would just use her lasso to command them to tell her what they know…but obviously the machine is fun too…pretty girls hooked up to wires and forced to confess…oh, yes, that’s quite nice….

Ahem.

Oh, by the by, the Baroness’ slaves not only do everything she commands, but they also refuse to be taken out of their chains because they just love being dominated so much. (The Amazons, of course, also wear their bracelets as a symbol of subservience. But they are subservient to a good mother, you see, while the Baroness’ slaves are subservient to a bad mother. It’s much different. No, really.)

Anyway, there’s also a bunch of hoo ha with the Baroness turning various things invisible with some kind of ray (Marston had a thing for invisibility too…and no, I don’t know what was up with that.) Eventually we learn that the Baroness has corrupted Steve Trevor and turned him into a slave as well, which is very broadminded of her, since she seems to generally prefer female thralls.

(One of the ways that WW figures out that Steve is not quite right, incidentally, is that he starts to make eyes at Diana Prince and totally ignores Wonder Woman. I just wanted to point out in passing that the whole love triangle thing with Steve-Diana-WW has never yet seemed anything but tacked on. Diana never actually seems put out, WW and Steve seem completely an item; the whole Diana identity seems more like a way to further humiliate/mock Steve than an actual excuse for melodrama. Don’t get me wrong; it’s kind of fun as an excuse to mock Steve…it just seems very much a leftover from somebody else’s concept. Basically, I think the double-identity thing is a very natural metaphor for masculine identity, but doesn’t really have as much resonance for female identity. Or, at least, it probably could have resonance in a story about women, but Marston wasn’t sufficiently interested in it, it doesn’t seem, to move it away from the Clark Kent/Superman roots in any very interesting way.)

So, to free Steve, WW lets herself be captured by the Baroness to try to figure out how she puts the whammy on her slaves. And she discovers that she does it the good, old-fashioned motherly way — with imprinting.

Evil hypnotic art. That’s probably how Wertham saw comics, I guess.

Meanwhile, Steve gets all masculine on Etta:

But Etta, through the imporbable exigencies of plot, has WW’s magic lasso, and so comes out on top, forcing Steve to take her to his leader:

I love that picture, with the dueling mother-heads. It’s so manga…and Etta over to the side is even kind of hyper-deformed. Did Tezuka ever see this stuff? Probably not…though you’d think he’d appreciate it, what with all the bizarre gender goings on.

Seeing WW bowed and broken by the mind control snaps Steve out of his trance…though Etta actually does most of the fighting.

So the purveyor of perverted mother love is defeated…though again, one wonders why her particular brand of perverted mother love is necessarily evil, while everybody else’s perverted mother love seems perfectly okay. When the Baroness is shipped back to Paradise Island, we get several more eyefulls of her devoted slaves, and…well, let’s say there’s a certain amount of cognitive dissonance:

The slaves love building their prison and wearing their chains; they won’t even take them off to play sports. When the chains are removed, they become violent, demanding that they be reinstated. In the final panel, one of the Amazon’s says that the slaves are fighitng for “women’s bondage — the Hitler principle that women must remain men’s slaves!” Oookay…but if it’s an evil principle, why are y’all so enthusiastic about fetishizing it? The girls are all dressed in short, short skirts and bikini tops; they seem happy, and even willing to, as Marston put it, exercise vigorously. And that last panel, which is supposed to show their violence, looks, more like a dance or (with the typical girl fight shouts of “eek!” and “hussy!”) like a pillow fight. Indeed, with the careful choreography, the colorful, frilly, fabric, and bare skin, it’s not that different from Peter’s drawing of the Diana day rituals — maybe slightly more energetic, but certainly not dangerous or even mildly disturbing, in the way that, say, Steve’s animalistic attack on Etta is.

That girl in the center there, for example, has she been thrown to the ground, or is her hair teased up for some kind of windswept photo-shoot look?

And, indeed, despite all the Hitler principle talk, Marston quickly backtracks. In one panel WW is arguing that the love of slavery is all about women’s false consciousness…and in the next, she’s proscribing, not feminism or equality, but a more benevolent slavery to a good woman (not to a bad woman or to a master.)

So, of course, to release the prisoners into better living through submission, WW and her sidekick Mala set up some B&D roleplaying, the upshot of which is that the slaves transfer their allegiance to Mala. Mala at first says she doesn’t want slaves…but then she says, well, okay, she’ll have strong, independent slaves, who don’t wear their chains while they’re exercising. Let’s all go swimming, girls!

And, hey, you know what? Good for Marston, really. False consciousness arguments are pretty dreary, not to mention condescending. The whole Tom Frank these-folks-don’t-know-what’s-good-for-them-let’s-educate-them argument…I mean, obviously, propaganda matters, and people are often dumb and women don’t necessarily make good choices any more than men do. But I think it’s generally worth acknowledging that when people acquiesce in oppression or discrimination, they generally have some motivation that can’t be reduced outright to stupidity. It’s not wrong to want someone to take care of you…though obviously you’d want to be careful about the person. Marston’s feminist diagnosis isn’t coherent — it’s a contradictory mess of false consciousness, legitimate emotional goals, fetishization, and pro-lesbian radicalism. That doesn’t make it precisely wrong, though.

Alas, it’s at about this point that the comic starts to go off the rails. Marston is fine when he’s dealing with metaphorical adult-child women and their weird mother bonds. When he tries to write about real mothers and their children, though, we exchange eroticism for sentimentality, which doesn’t tend to work out so well. Right before she was shipped off to paradise island, the Baroness tries to run over a child named Kibby Maxwell who says things like “keen!” and whose name, as I mentioned is “Kibby.” So you can see why the Baroness wants to kill him…but Marston doesn’t see the logic, and instead decides that Paula hates all children because the Nazi’s took her own daughter. Soon enough we’re rescuing children from the evil Nazis, a plotline which even the sight of Etta Candy beating German soldiers with a box of chocolates can’t really redeem.

Update: …though I guess she’s actually just distracting him with the candy on second look, isn’t she?

Reunited with her little cherub, Paula becomes all good and sacrificial, plus in the last story we see more of game, insufferable little Kibby. As the emotional content heads for maudlin melodrama, Marston’s plotline shifts towards conventional; instead of crazed stag-masquerades and bizarre invisible rays, we’re stuck with by-the-numbers rescues from burning buildings, tragic facial scarring, and tiresome (though mercifully very brief) courtroom drama. Marston had worked with prisoners and was actually very involved in prison reform, but, unfortunately, that particular interest doesn’t seem to have the same imaginative kick as his bondage obsessions.

The story only really regains its energy on the final page, when (not coincidentally) Marston moves back to Paradise Island and its humid atmosphere of eroticized power dynamics. Paula, in return for all of Wonder Woman’s kindnesses, offers herself as WW’s slave. The last panel shows WW tying herself up in her own lasso and commanding herself “never to use your influence over Paula for your own selfish purposes or to make yourself feel smart” — in other words, to be a good mistress/mother.

It’s a neat moment for several reasons:

First, we’ve actually seen Wonder Woman use her lasso for selfish purposes; in WW #1 she playfully ties up an Amazon doctor and makes her stand on her head. It’s hard to know how much continuity there’s supposed to be here, really, but even in the phrasing (“make yourself smart”) you get the sense of WW as a tomboyish girl who likes a bit of mischief (no, not that kind of mischief…get your mind out of the gutter) …but who has also been affected by the responsibility she’s confronted with, and is trying to do the right thing (and “trying” is the operative word; she’s not certain that giving herself commands will actually work, which is quite true to most people’s experience of parenthood, I think.)

Second, the trope of WW tying herself up in her own lasso is one that actually has gotten a good bit of play down through the years, and it’s worth pointing out that this is the only time I’ve seen it done that it isn’t just offensively stupid. It helps a lot that for Marston the lasso is about dominance and submission, while for most later writers (like Jimenez or whoever wrote League of One) it’s about truth. Tying yourself up in a lasso of truth is an exercise in self-knowledge, which makes it basically about staring at your navel in order to be all pure and wonderful…which is fine if you’re the Buddha, but is tedious, incongruous, and arguably insulting to actual mystics if you then immediately go back to kicking the snot out of your enemies. Tying yourself up in a lasso of submission, though, is about self-control…which is actually something that it makes sense for a warrior to (a) want and (b) struggle with. In fact, now that I think of it, the whole idea of a lasso of control is much, much more logical for an action hero than is a lasso of truth. I wonder if a lasso of control was seen over time as not sufficiently feminine? The lasso of truth makes WW pure instead of powerful; instead of being super-forceful, she’s super-good, which jibes more easily with stereotypical feminine behavior and is (not coincidentally) a hell of a lot less fun.

I mean, if she’d had her original lasso of control, she could have just wrapped Maxwell Lord up and told him *not to do it again*. No dilemma, no angst, no incessant whining. Then she could have, I don’t know, told Supes and Bats to dress up as stags and join her for some fun Diana’s day rituals. Wouldn’t that have been more fulfilling for everybody?

(And just in case you’re wondering, no, I haven’t read that Maxwell Lord storyline, in large part because it sounds insufferable. I’d much rather continue working my way through Marston, thank you very much.)

As I said last week at about this time, I’m trying to blog through all the issues of the Marston/Peter run on Wonder Woman. I’m hoping to post about one issue every Thursday and this is the second.

And yeah, I know this is Wednesday. I jumped the gun; maybe I’ll do it Wednesday or Thursday, depending? We’ll see, I guess.
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So I do love that cover, but it’s nothing compared to the initial splash page:

Thank you sir, may I have another?

It’s probably wrong for me to admit this, but I’ve danced around it before, and I might as well just come out and say it — I often find Peters’ soft-core efforts quite sexy. There’s something about the unabashed flowery femme of the designs and the stiffness of the figures that I definitely find appealing. He must have too, surely; WW is usually seen as all about Marston’s sexual obsessions, which I’m sure it was, but Peter must have had a fair bit to do with the goings on as well. In this drawing, for example — was it Marston who suggested that the big, tough Greek warriors should be wearing such frilly kilts? And the armor he’s got with all the filigree — and the colors! Ares (standing in the background yucking it up) really looks like he’s wearing a red dress. Peter has decided to make the God of War a transvestite. I don’t know…maybe it could all be Marston turning in incredibly detailed scripts a la Alan Moore…but I’m skeptical.

Anyway, unlike the last effort, this is essentially a single story — which means it’s virtually as long as a mini-series, clocking in at more than 60 pages. Even with a short story about Clara Barton and a prose piece, that’s a hell of a lot of pages…was this thing monthly? No, it says “Fall” on the cover, so I guess it must have been quarterly. Though Peter was also drawing WW’s adventures in Sensation Comics at the same time…it’s a lot of drawing, anyway you look at it.

So what is the plot of this gigundus story? Well, Ares is pissed because WW keeps catching Nazi spies. This pisses off Ares because, as he says in that little inset panel above, “If America wins, war on Earth will end!” So Ares sets out to capture Wonder Woman, throw her in chains, make her his slave…you know the drill. He does this by arranging for the capture of Steve Trevor’s astral form. (How this works is a little unclear…but onward!) Steve is then taken to Mars, because Mars is where you live if you’re the God of War. WW leaves her body in the care of Etta Candy:

With those “woo-woos” WW whooshes up to Mars, where, after wearing a lot of chains and engaging in a series of healthy tests of strength, with some light spanking thrown in for good measure, she frees Steve and travels back to earth. Enraged, Ares sends a series of minions to recapture her: the Earl of Greed, the Duke of Deception, and the Count of Conquest. After many trials (by baseball, among other things) WW defeats them all, even Ares — ending war on earth! Okay, not quite; I guess he’s still got minions around or something. There will be more issues, in any case; they promise.

Since we’ve raised the weighty and altogether unfortunate profile of Etta Candy — it’s really worth pointing out what a completely bizarre character she is. It’s not just the “woo-woos!” and the fact that practically every speech bubble she’s given has to mention at least once how much she likes candy. That would just make her the comic relief. But what’s really strange is how important she is to the plot. As we saw above, Etta tended WW’s body while our hero was off on Mars. Etta’s far more than just a passive helper, though. In the battle with the Duke of Deception, for example, the Duke creates a fake Wonder Woman duplicate body (no, I don’t know why. Don’t ask silly questions.) Wonder Woman manages to capture the fake body…and then puts Etta’s mind in the duplicate body.

And in the final battle against Ares, when WW is tied up and helpless, she sends a mental radio message to Etta who somehow goes astral, brings acid (astral acid?) and frees WW.

In other words, plot-wise Etta isn’t really comic relief; she’s the indispensable assistant — even the cavalry. It’s *her*, not Steve Trevor, who gets to save Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman seems to treat her more or less as an equal, and Etta seems to see herself that way as well — Etta certainly, and bizarrely, doesn’t seem to see WW as someone to envy or aspire to — when her brain is placed in that slender, perfect body, all Etta can think about is how much she wants to go back to eating candy.

Obviously, it’s a bit of a leap to see Etta Candy as some kind of feminist icon. But…I don’t know. Compared to some of her later iterations (sex kitten cameo on the animated movie; loyal sidekick and romantic interest for Steve in the Perez run), fat, self-confident, and (perhaps mystifyingly, but still) competent doesn’t seem too bad.

Certainly, she seems to have it all over Steve.

As you can see, in the last page of the first section, when they’ve escaped from Mars, it’s Etta who actually gets to share an embrace with WW. In the next panel, Steve expresses a very natural confusion about what the hell happened to a slave girl who helped them escape from Mars — and WW positively condescends to him. “You *would* think of her!” Silly man; you’ve only got one thing in your pretty little heads! But don’t worry, Steve, your little friend trotted back to her consensual B&D relationship with, ahem, the Count of Conquest! Now you silly little thing, let me tie you up and explain to you that you must never, never leave the house without an escort. You just have to have a firm hand with these men or the little dears will get themselves into trouble. Now let’s just settle things between us women, Etta. Could you fly to Mars with a bottle of acid, sneak into the dungeon of the God of War, and burn through my chains please? By tomorrow? And don’t tell Steve…he worries so!

You may be wondering why on earth Wonder Woman needed to get Etta out to Mars anyway; why not just break her chains herself?

The answer is that Wonder Woman allowed her bracelets to be chained together by a man, which robs her of her powers:

Oooookay. But…what about this?

There’s Wonder Woman from earlier in the same issue. Looks to me like her wrists are changed together, right? And she’s looking pretty super there (incidentally, note that Peter appears to have gratuitously drawn in visible nipples on the woman WW is defeating. He does that occasionally.)

Of course, Marston isn’t a stickler for continuity. Still, what’s different between *this* binding and the other one?

The answer seems to be that in the instance where she lost her powers, WW was bound by a dark, handsome Italian.

As the Count of Conquest’s minion explains:

WW, in other word, is being punished for the weakness of allowing a man to hold sway over her (though she certainly never seems to be that interested in the guy…but I guess Marston holds his women to a high standard in these matters.) When she tearfully regrets failing Steve, the suggestion is that she’s been unfaithful. This is emphasized by the fact that she’s embarrassed to explain to Steve exactly what happened….

Again, though, what’s interesting is that the particular drama of unfaithfulness which is being suggested is one in which WW takes what is essentially the male role; she falls for the dark, seductive femme fatale, betraying the helpless, noble woman at home.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that there’s an actual feminine femme fatale in the book as well — and by all appearances she is also bent on seducing Wonder Woman — or at least in luring her onto a cruise ship and engaging in…well, no surprises, really.

Leading her around with her hands secretly tied under her coat, huh? You have to wonder if Marston was trying that one at home. (Bonus points for fetishizing the exotic minority…and for implying that said exotic minority wears her colorful, diaphanous, scanty ethnic attire whereso’er she goes.)

Oh, and last time I promised cross-gender body swapping. Here you go:

That’s Deception sneaking around in the body of a slave girl. Real women wear chains; real men wear tutus.

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So I thought I was done, and then I keep thinking of more things I wanted to say. Stupid brain.

In terms of WW’s apparent need to avoid submission to, or even perhaps romantic relationships with men — there’s definitely something going on with a kind of butch tomboyishness, and perhaps a hint of a (cross-gendered) Peter Pan as well. There was a bit of that in the first issue as well; when Diana says she wants to leave Paradise Island to follow Steve, her mother says that that will mean giving up her “birthright” of immortality. That is, there’s a suggestion (thought it doesn’t seem to be much worked through) that Paradise Island is, like NeverNeverLand, a kind of metaphor for childhood, and that WW is a kind of magical and eternal child (she is made out of clay after all.) Again, in the second issue, we see WW has a real weakness for contests of strength:

She’s like a kid, unable to resist the opportunity to prove that she’s the strongest.

There’s probably something of that in all early super heroes…Superman certainly is a kid’s fantasy. It’s just that that’s really remained a part of Superman to some degree, but the corresponding meme for Wonder Woman has gotten a little lost, I think. Wonder Woman is a pretty sober character now; she’s more about standing up for women or peace or whatever, and maybe less about just beating the tar out of the boys at baseball. Which seems kind of too bad.

All right, that’s it…except, man, look at this Hitler caricature.

That is one gloriously saggy-faced ubermensch. And in the second panel, Marston has him so nuts he’s chewing the carpet. Literally. That cracked me up.

So I have threatened on a number of occasions to blog my way through the entire William Moulton Marston/H.G. Peter run on Wonder Woman. I still don’t know if I’m going to make good on that, but at least we’ll give it a try. Starting this week, I’ll try to post on one issue each Thursday without fail unless I have something better to do, pledging to stop only when I have reached Marston’s last issue or when I feel like it.

So both longtime readers may remember that I already have spilled a lot of electrons writing about Wonder Woman #1 (here, here, and here. Most bloggers might say, hey, I’ve covered this, let’s move on to 2. But those most bloggers are not neurotic-completist me. If I’m doing a series where I blog about every Wonder Woman issue, I’m going to start with #1, damn it. Bring on the cover!

So…what’s to say that hasn’t been said? As I mentioned in the previous three posts, the first story in this issue is pretty amazing. This isn’t WW’s first appearance (she’d been appearing in Sensation Comics since 1941, the previous year) but for her own debut title Marston created what has become her more or less canonical origin (retold with some variations by George Perez in the 80s and by the WW animated movie, to name just two I’ve seen.) Compared to Superman or Batman or Spiderman, Wonder Woman’s origin is more complicated, and more unhinged by about a factor of five. Rocketed from a doomed planet? Pshaw. Parents murdered? Please. Bathed in radiation? Ha. How about created-out-of-clay-by-the-leader-of-a-race-of-loving-warrior-woman-and-then-brought-to-life-by-the-divine-will-of-Aphrodite?

That made out of clay bit still kills me, incidentally. It’s a genius fusion of Golden Age off-hand nonsense and Greek myth. It also has some surprising emotional resonances.

Those three panels are really, to me, heart-breaking, though it’s so compressed you’ll miss it if you blink. Athena teaches Hippolyta how to sculpt, and what Hippolyta chooses to create is the image of a child. She wants a kid, in other words, but she can’t have one, and so she becomes obsessed with the image she has created. She prays, and a miracle occurs; the baby comes to life. With Peter’s art, the moment that Diana is “born” is ritualized; the mother and daughter both stiff, shown in the moment before they touch in a frozen tableau, rather than in the moment when they embrace. The whole sequence seems very poignant to me; it reminds me a little bit of the end of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man, where Buddy’s family is magically resurrected — or of the end of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, with its unexplained resurrection. The power in all three moments is in having the heart’s desire granted, and in the recognition that the heart’s desire just doesn’t actually get granted in this way. Love demands miracles, and a creator granting a miracle to a creation is sometimes an act of love. That’s at least provisionally part of what the Christian faith is about (a connection both Morrison and Shakespeare make.) Marston’s vision is more pagan — and, perhaps coincidentally, more female.

In Morrison and Shakespeare, men pray for the resurrection of their wives/lovers, and their wish is granted. Here, though, a woman prays to have a child. That prayer is also linked explicitly to artistic creation. Often in various misogynist discourses, you get a contrast between the creation of the artist (done by men) and the creation of children (done by women). But Hippolyta is both artist and mother; the two roles aren’t separable. The love of artist for art object, and of mother for child, are commensurate rather than opposed. Aphrodite is god of both.

I think this does a few things. Most obviously, it emphasizes Hippolyta’s femininity. She may be a warrior queen and an artist, but she’s still a woman. In contrast, the Wonder Woman animated movie that came out this year ended by essentially reprimanding Hippolyta for turning her back on children and men and family; for not being feminine and loving enough. But for Marston, you don’t need men to have family, or even, it seems, children. Women can be sculptors and warriors and Aphrodite is still their patron.

Another aspect of this scene is that it makes a fairly clear analogy between Marston and Hippolyta. After all Marston, like Hippolyta, creates Diana; and brings her to life — and I don’t think it’s too much to say, especially considering that the character was based on Marston’s wife and their lover, that he brings her to life through his love. In general, most commentators (including myself) tend to see Marston’s investment in WW as, you know, sexual; revelatory of the kind of women he wants to be with, and of the way he wants to be with them. But the link with Hippolyta suggests that Marston’s interest seems not only romantic, but aspirational; he doesn’t just want the women he portrays; he wants to be them.

That’s fetishistic too, of course; male sexual fantasies about being women are pretty common — and probably have something to do with the cross-gender identification in exploitation flicks that Carol Clover talks about in “Men, Women and Chainsaws” (though Clover herself doesn’t really make this point.) Even if it is a fetish, though, Marston goes interesting places with it. If you see him as Hippolyta in this sequence, what he wants is to be creative, like women, and a creator of children, like women, and loving, like women. It’s an idealized view, clearly, which can be problematic – but it’s not an idealized view that seems especially limiting for women in the usual ways; Diana starts out on the pedestal, after all, but she gets off it fairly quickly. Hippolyta isn’t barred from masculine activities. Indeed, in many ways Marston seems to want to be a woman as a fantasy of being more, not less masculine — stronger, more competent, even more artistic in traditionally male ways. Marston’s comic, in other words, situates male and female readers in pretty much the same way; both are supposed to look on Wonder Woman and the Amazons as ideals to emulate (both are also supposed to look at Wonder Woman and the Amazons erotically, I think..but that’s a discussion for another day, maybe.)

I also think it’s worth pointing out how odd it is in a super-hero comic to have the kind of celebration of child-hood that Marston provides. I’m thinking of the two panels that follow the three above:

The ostensible purpose, of course, is to show how strong and great Diana is — stronger than Hercules! Faster than mercury! Etc etc. But — not to be too gloppy — to a parent, every child is a wonder child. Diana is amazing, not just because she’s a super-hero, but because she’s a kid. Most male superheroes are all about being orphaned, outcast, alone, agonized, cut off by their powers and their origins. WW’s origin, on the contrary, is all about community; she has a hundred mothers who love her. If that sounds kitschy…well, yep. That second panel above in particular is both sublime and sublimely hokey. I love the elongated deer so outdistanced it doesn’t even get any motion lines, and the way it’s sleekness contrast with the frilly tree leaves above. The effect is strange, especially since the deer’s anatomy isn’t quite right; it looks like medieval drawings of horses where they didn’t have stop motion photography to show them how those creatures actually ran. At the same time, the outdoor scene, the stiffness, the indecently healthy child, all also suggest garage-sale art; something you’d find with “We love our happy home,” scrawled across it — if, you know, you’re happy home was an island populated by an all-female band of warriors.

One of the implications of this is that her story is all about security. Ground zero for her is a happy home. That’s not that unusual for girl’s fiction, I don’t think (Cardcaptor Sakura, for example, doesn’t have family angst; I don’t think Sailor Moon does either.) But in the world of comics, more geared to boys, it’s very odd, and writers tend not to know how to deal with it. (Greg Rucka’s Hiketeia is a particularly flagrant violation.)

As this suggests, the relative lack of angst in Diana’s origin is probably meant to appeal to girls to some degree. But I bet it’s also meant to appeal to, and probably to educate boys — to provide a different vision of heroism that didn’t involve clinging to outcast status and perpetrating bloody revenge.

I was reading an all ages Jeff Parker Marvel Avenger’s comic to my son recently. Giant-Girl (Janet Van Dyne) has run amok (one of those mind-control things) and the team goes to consult her father to see if he can help. Anyway, Dad starts explaining G-Girl’s origin, and at one point, Storm, I think, interrupts and says something like, “So then Giant Girl swore to avenge her mother’s death by fighting crime?” And the dad says “What? No, no. My wife’s fine. She’s away on a ski trip right now. Janet just likes to help people.” I think Marston would approve of that.
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All right; so next week we’ll go to number 2. And I’ll do my best to cover more than five panels.