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Adrianne Palicki Will Not Wear the Venus Girdle

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The Wonder Woman TV show got canned, and comics fans of various stripes are rushing to explain why it should or shouldn’t have. The Beat has a roundup. They link to dcwomenkickingass, who has a heartfelt rant saying in part:

Why is Thor so easy to get to screen, but Wonder Woman is reduced to a television drama by David E. Kelley where she’s a superhero but also a female who worries about her body and pines for her boyfriend? Why when that treatment fails do the stories focus not on the execution but on the character?

Why is it when it comes to a male character like the Hulk, we don’t see that reaction. “Oh gee, it couldn’t possibly be the character of the Hulk that is the problem. We’ll just make three movies until we get the execution right.” Three takes. Not one.

And we have seen treatments that have worked. For all its gender issues the animated movie showed that Wonder Woman can be badass and compelling.

DCU Online has Wonder Woman as a core character and anyone who has seen the cinematic trailer can see how bad ass she would look on screen.

And the original TV show, despite being 30 years ago, worked.

The problem with adapting Wonder Woman to the screen, either big or small, has nothing to do with the character other than her gender. The recent television show felt they needed to turn her into something she’s not. She’s not Ally McBeal. She’s Wonder Woman….

How fucking sad is it that we as a gender are forced to prove ourselves worthy as a film audience once again? Every time there is a hit or success outside the narrow little lens that Hollywood views us it is an aberration or a fluke.

Hollywood is certainly sexist. But…is it really the case that Hollywood and television are uninterested in promoting shows about kick-ass women? La Femme Nikita just got renewed. The terrible movie Priest features Maggie Q as a superninja kicking ass. Bones’ main character is a female physical anthropologist/best-selling novelist martial arts expert. There’s multiple killer female assassin movies just released or coming out. There’s Salt from last year. Is there really a reluctance on the part of entertainment media to show women in tight clothes kicking ass?

I think much more of a problem is that large numbers of viewers just don’t necessarily share dcwomenkickingass’ enthusiasm for Wonder Woman, whether she’s kicking ass or not. The cancellation of wonder woman isn’t a blow to women everywhere. It’s a blow to women who like Wonder Woman maybe…but that’s not all that many women.

I thought I’d reprint my comment from the Beat thread here.

I don’t think it’s a problem of growing expectations exactly. It’s a problem that the character is really, really weird. The costume is bizarre even by super-hero standards (yes, even by superhero standards); she’s all about bondage; she’s got nutjob accessories like the invisible plane; she’s supposed to be a pacifist who runs around hitting people. She’s goofy. Which I love, love, love about her — those early Marston/Peter comics are basically the best super-hero comics ever, damn it. But the fact that she’s so idiosyncratically weird it makes her much harder to sell than, say, a secret agent with a tragic backstory who shoots people like Salt.

WW was very popular 70 years ago in comics and for a few years on television back in the 70s. Outside of that, people have really had trouble figuring out what to do with her, even as female action heroes have become really really popular (Buffy, Xena, Angelina Jolie in everything, Kill Bill, La Femme Nikita (recently re-jiggered), there’s like three more female assassin movies just come out or coming out whose titles I can’t remember…there’s just no shortage of examples.)

I don’t exactly understand the logic of wanting new WW product anyway. The TV show looked like it was going to be dreadful. If you like WW, why not just go reread the old stuff? What’s so validating about having some corporation make some stupid show that uses the character you love in insulting and moronic ways? Why is Thor validated by some stupid movie? Why is Batman validated by being put in a ridiculous styrofoam suit and having a bunch of mediocre to bad films made about him? Why do you need your art to be a pop cultural phenomena for it to matter? Like I said, I don’t get it.

I make similar points in this essay here.

Just to expand a little…I agree with dcwomenkickingass that female superhero pop culture efforts can work. Twilight is a female superhero film in a lot of ways; Bella certainly gets superpowers at the end. Buffy was a female superhero project. Sailor Moon is a female superhero story which was crazy popular. And, again, women with ninja powers kicking butt are all over the pop culture landscape. Temperance Brennan from Bones (the anthropologist/novelist/martial artist mentioned above) even dresses up as Wonder Woman on occasion. As a joke.

So the issue isn’t whether female’s kicking ass or even female superheroes can be popular. The issue is whether female superheroes toeing the very narrow genre constraints of mainstream comics can be especially popular. The issue is whether most women really want their superheoines with secret identities and dressed in swimsuits and coming out of an industry that has been male-dominated for decades — an industry that has shown over and over again that it has only the vaguest idea how to appeal to a female audience. The answer in general to that question has been that no, they don’t, they’d rather get their kick-ass women fix elsewhere.

I can see where that’s really frustrating for fans like dcwomenkickingass, who are in the minority that really like the superhero women on offer by the big two. And I can see arguing that media is sexist. But I think it’s worth pointing out that less sexism in Hollywood really, really would not have to go along with more Wonder Woman in Hollywood. Because, like I said, WW just isn’t that popular and is very weird and has that costume that doesn’t exactly scream “independent woman” and doesn’t have a clear romantic interest with angst and tension, which is what you generally look for in female genre product, and…well the list goes on. But the upshot is that if you wanted to create a woman kicking ass, even if you were really committed to feminism, you might think twice before going with Wonder Woman.

I’ll end with another comment I left on the Beat, where DF said that WW had become boring except for maybe Darwyn Cooke’s version of her. I replied:

I like Darwyn Cooke’s version, including his satirical take. I’d agree that his version is probably as good as it gets after Marston…unless you go to once-removed versions like Alan Moore’s Glory or Promethea or Adam Warren’s Empowered.

I think the boredom is part of not knowing how to deal with the original concept. And the original concept is not going to be redone; you’re not going to see WW in a gimp mask or Amazons hunting each other in deer costumes or entire races of seal men subjugating themselves to women or even giant space-faring kangaroos. It’s just not going to happen. Which is a shame, and I strongly believe that all girls and boys and adults should read the original Marston/Peter run, which is one of the most ridiculously sublime pieces of work the comics medium has to offer. But I don’t need new stories with WW anymore than I especially need some random Hollywood development team to do the brand new adventures of Elizabeth Bennett.

Update: Aha! I was wondering why we were getting commenters all of a sudden. dcwomenkickinass has a response to this post here.

Can Wonder Woman Be a Superdick? (Part 2)

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So for those who don’t remember…more than a year ago I had written a series of posts about gender in comics. The basic argument is that a character like Superman is a male power fantasy. That fits in with Freud and the Oedipal conflict. Clark Kent can be seen as the “child” who imagines himself supplanting the Father/lawgiver/god. You can also take this one step away from Freud and argue (via the theories of Eve Sedgwick) that what we’re talking about here is not, or not solely, an internal psychological desire, but rather a cultural/social formulation. Men turn away from femininity in order to identify with patriarchal power; or, to see it another way, to be patriarchal requires the denigration or hiding of weakness.

That’s the closet; Clark Kent is living a lie, pretending to be powerful in order to be powerful, when his truth is actually a weak, wimpy child. And, again, the closet is powered by male-male desires and fantasies, making it homoerotic (though, as I argue at some length, it’s actually a straight person’s homoerotic fantasy — we’re talking about how straight men bond or interact with the patriarchy in particular, and arguing that that interaction is structured by ideas about, and within, gayness.)

I then talked about how the early Marvel titles messed with this formula. Characters like Spider-Man and the Thing were much more ambivalent about power; the superdick in them often becomes a devouring ogre (see The Hulk). You also see this in some super-hero satire, like Chris Ware’s Superman character. I argued, though, that the basic binary remains; these stories don’t reject the superdick. Weakness is still sneered at; it’s just that the anxiety around the superdick is greater. You want it but when you have it you don’t want it, and then when you don’t have it you want it again. I also noted that the fascination with power and the denigration of weakness ends up making superhero stories essentially sadistic (as opposed to horror, which works in a more masochistic mode.) This also makes it very difficult for superhero comics to create anti-status quo storylines. However anxiously, the law is always worshipped.

I then went on to talk about the way this relates to Wonder Woman. In particular, I argued that the anxiety and bifurcation of male identity doesn’t really work for Wonder Woman. Female identity is not seen as doubled in the same way; women are not split between patriarchal power and weakness. That’s because female identity is simply identified with weakness. Male writers of Wonder Woman like Kanigher and Martin Pasko tended to create narratives which were about robbing Wonder Woman of her power. There was anxiety around WW’s superdickishness, but much less so around her weakness. As long as she wasn’t in control, everybody was happy. You often got the sense from the books that nobody could figure out what Wonder Woman was doing with superpowers in the first place.

Of course, Wonder Woman had superpowers in the first place because William Marston gave them to her. Which is where we left off, and where I’m going to try and pick up now.
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One of the things I’ve mentioned a number of times in various Wonder Woman posts is that her secret identity doesn’t really work right. It’s a gender problem; superhero identities, as I indicated above, are supposed to be split along the frightened child/superdick Oedipal fissure.

Typically, superhero origins work like this; little Melvin Microbits is toddling along minding his microstuff when suddenly — transformative trauma! He is castrated by a radioactive giant tubular marine mammal! Quickly, miraculously, he grows a thing bigger than his dad ever had and decides to serve the Law as — Walrus-Man!

Or that’s the general idea, anyway. Batman’s maybe the most paradigmatic example (small boy, dad shot, takes dad’s place while still also remaining traumatized child.) It works for Superman too, though (baby, father dies, takes dad’s place while still also remaining puny child). And for Spiderman (young man, father-figure dies, takes dad’s place while still also remaining traumatized child.) There are some variations, like Green Lantern (young man, father-figure dies, takes dad’s place while still remaining asshole); or the Hulk (wimpy guy, traumatized, takes dad’s place while still also remaining wimpy guy.) But the general outlines remain discernible. It’s a meme.

But Wonder Woman’s origin doesn’t work like that. She’s born (or magically fashioned, actually) with super-powers. Her secret identity, Diana Prince, isn’t the “real” trace of the traumatized child she was and remains. It’s just an act.

And it’s an act, moreoever, undertaken to pander to the needs of her man, as we see in Sensation Comics #1.

That’s a deeply odd sequence. Wonder Woman trades places with a nurse who looks exactly like her and has the same name. Moreover, the nurse has the same problem; she needs to find a way to get to the man she loves. The two switch places, but they’re able to do it only because they were already in each other’s places to begin with.

So a couple of points about this.

— In my first essay about WW and superdickery I speculated on the place that female/female relationships had in enforcing femininity. That is, male/male relationships (between, say, Spiderman and Uncle Ben) are often part of Oedipal drama; they’re a spur to becoming more manly, as well as a taunt for not being manly enough.

Female/female relationships, though, often seem much less fraught. In some circumstances — as with the Amazons — sisterhood can be an alternative to, or a challenge to patriarchy. But female bonds can also enforce femininity, and reinforce (subordinate?) relationships with men.

This is basically the argument of Sharon Marcus in her book Between Women. Marcus claims that close, even eroticized friendships between women were seen as an essential part of being a women in the Victorian period. Thus, close female friendships didn’t make women homosexual — it made them more heterosexual.

Marston was significantly more aware of lesbian possibilities than many Victorians were; he had a long-standing polyamorous relationship with two bisexual women. Still, I think Marcus’ analysis perhaps makes it clear why we need this bizarre scene of doubling before WW can have her sort-of-tryst with Steve. Just as male/male relationships for theorist Eve Sedgwick enforce the agonized Oedipal doubling, so female/female relationships for Marston create a stable, domesticated femininity. WW needs Diana to teach her how to be a woman.

— I’ve sort of made this point already, but…the scenario here is not, at first glance, an especially empowering vision. Marston seems to be going out of his way to disempower his heroine from the get-go. Moreover, he’s disempowering her in the name of servitude to men! WW casts off her superpowers so she can wait on Steve hand and foot. As I noted in the first part of the essay, male superheroes are constantly striving and failing to be powerful (men). The feminine, though, doesn’t need to strive; it can just be. And that’s what happens here. WW chucks her goddessness so she can go change her guy’s bedpans. Not much of a feminist message.
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There are maybe other, less invidious ways to look at this though. Here’s comics critic Chris Boesel, with a different take on WW’s decision to become Diana Prince.

First the Why. Why does the god (the teacher) give herself (the eternal, the truth) to be known by the creature (the learner)? It must be for love — not by any necessity, but a free self-giving for the sake of the possibility of the relation itself. And love has a twofold dimension here. It is not only the god’slove for the creature that the god… [gives herself]; it is also for the sake of love, so that the creature might love the god, that the god and the creature might be joined in a relation of “love’s understanding.”

Okay, that’s my little joke. Boesel isn’t a comics critic; he’s a theologian. And despite the serendipitous use of the female pronouns there, he’s not talking about Wonder Woman. He’s talking about Kierkegaard’s ideas about the incarnation of Christ.

The essay is called “The Apophasis of Divine Freedom,” and it appears in a volume edited by Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller called Apophatic Bodies. For those, like me, not familiar with the terminology, apophatic theology means negative theology — the practice of describing God by talking about what he (or she, or ze) is not.

I’m going to quote a little more from Boesel, since it seems apropos to WW’s decision to shuck off her goddesshood for love. Again, Boesel is paraphrasing and sometimes quoting Kierkegaard here.

Second, the How. How is the god to create the “equality,” or “unity,” necessary in order to “make himself understood” without “destroy[ing] that which is different,” that is, the creature as creature? How does the god give herself to be known by the creature in and for love without obliterating the beloved?

Climacus [that’s Kierkegaard’s pen-name] rejects both the possibility of an “ascent,” an exaltation of the beloved creature to the heights of heaven…and of a divine “appearing” in overpowering, sacred splendor,” on the grounds that they would violate the integrity of the creature’s existence, as creature.

The “unity” of “love’s understanding,” then, must be “attempted by a descent.” And a descent, by the god, to the level of “the lowliest” of all…. Therefore, “in love [the god] wants to be the equal of the most lowly of the lowly,” and so comes to the creature “in the form of the servant.” This “form,” however, “is not something put on like the king’s plebian cloak, which just by flapping open would betray the king…but is [the god’s] true form.” The god does not deceive, but in the “omnipotence of love,” remains truly god while fully embodied as a particular human creature, just like any other human, even the lowliest of the low.

The whole analysis by Boesell/Kierkegaard fits WW almost perfectly. As a goddess, WW can’t appear to (be apprehended by?) Steve. For him to love her, and for her to love him, she has to descend and become, not just human, but a servant. She even takes over the form of a “real” human being; her double, both her and not her. The moment when Steve knows her and doesn’t know her:

is emblematic; when she is Diana (which is her real name and also her alias) Steve can recognize and love her. The angel cannot be loved as an angel, but only as a servant. From this perspective, you might argue that gender is irrelevant or secondary. Marston’s not telling a story about what women should be, or how they need to be weak and servile to attract a man. Instead he’s telling a story about the encounter with the divine, and the paradoxical manner in which one, of whatever gender, can only love the transcendent through the particular.

The thing is, though, Marston is obsessed with gender…and especially, one could argue, with the relationship between gender and Godhead. The particular divinity WW is, the transcendence she represents, is female.

Moreover, the embodiment of that transcendence is female as well. Obviously, WW and Diana are both women. But the particular formal representation of that embodiment in the comic is also, I think, coded female. I’m thinking specifically of this passage from Irigary’s essay “The Sex That Is Not One.”

Woman “touches herself” all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two — but not divisible into one(s) — that caress each other.

Also this:

Whence the mystery that woman represents in a culture claiming to count everything, to number everything by units, to inventory everything as individualities. She is neither one nor two. rigorously speaking, she cannot be identified either as one person or as two. She resists all adequate definition. Further, she has no ‘proper’ name.

Following Irigary’s formulation, when WW moves from transcendence to immanence, when she becomes embodied she does not merely split — she is not bifurcated within herself into two agonized and irreconcilable halves. Instead, she becomes two who remain one — neither one nor two.

The comic form itself literally embodies the indeterminacy. Comics are built around repetition of the same figure; on a given page, Peter will draw WW over and over again. The panel borders separate these images; each is each, identity in its place. But when WW needs to cast off her transcendence, the panel borders collapse, and suddenly two images of her occupy the same delimited space.

Once they are embodied together, Diana and Diana can touch — a self-caressing which opens the way for love — and not only of one another (or of one as another). Marcus noted that affection between women was seen as aiding, not hindering, love between men and women; similarly, Irigary sees women’s duality as opening into multiplicity.

So woman does not have a sex organ? She has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as ones. Indeed, she has many more. Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural….woman has sex organs more or less everywhere.

Again, the sequence here embodies the movement from two to many. The duality of Diana and Diana is multiplied on one page as they talk from panel to panel, so that we see, not just the one Diana that is two, but doubled Diana’s multiplying profligately. And then, inevitably, in the sixth panel, the one Diana replaces the other Diana while the other Diana is replaced in the frame by Steve.

A female self-caressing self opening to love for another; that’s a metaphor for motherhood. And indeed, Diana, incarnated as a nurse, treats Steve with matriarchal affection.

“Be a good boy now and keep quiet.” Diana’s love of Steve isn’t (just) romantic love, and isn’t (just) divine love — it’s the love of a mother for a child.

Paradise Island is a matriarchal heaven, and if WW is a Christ figure — and I think she is — then she remains a female Christ figure. And what’s perhaps most interesting about that is how easily it fits into Boesel/Kierkegaard’s formulation. WW does not need to overawe Steve with her transcendent power, challenging him to become a superdick like her. Instead, she lowers herself to him, showing her transcendent power through the servitude of love. The transcendent matriarch becomes human precisely to change bedpans. That’s what divine love is. That’s the point.

In this context, too, Marston’s obsession with loving submission, his conviction that women are superior to men because they know how to submit, and his determination to show WW’s power by tying her up, starts to make more sense.

Submission is godlike, especially submission to Marston’s ultimate authority, Aphrodite, the god of love. Because, as Christ and Nietzsche and lots of superheroes agree, the alternative to worshipping love is worshipping power. Marston’s WW isn’t a bifurcated, tormented child striving for an unattainable transcendent Oedipal Uberfatherness. She is bifurcated, but the way Christ is bifurcated, between human and divine, or the way a mother is split between herself and the child that comes from her. Wonder Woman’s not a superdick, but the super sex-which-is-not-one, which opens like a wound, giving birth to love. She sets aside her power to become a servant of that love, and, as they say in the comics…to save us all!

Wonder Woman Must Change!

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Denny O’Neil, Mike Sekowsky, others
Diana Prince: Wonder Woman vol. 1-4
DC Comics
$19.99 each

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Wonder Woman is virtually impossible to write well. The problem isn’t that the concept is dumb — on the contrary, the difficulty is that it’s not dumb enough. Most superheroes are artistic nonentities. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Wolverine — they’re defined by their powers and their backstory and maybe by one or two dabs of easily reproduced personality (Batman’s grim; Spider-Man’s down on his luck, Wolverine’s mean.) You can put them in different narratives because they aren’t integrated into any narrative. They aren’t the product of a coherent individual aesthetic in the first place, so imposing a different vision on them isn’t especially hard.

Wonder Woman’s different. Her creator, William Moulton Marston (with the help of his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and their lover, Olive Byrne) created the character to fulfill very specific political and sexual fantasies. Marston wanted to create a strong icon of femininity, so girls would be inspired to embrace feminine virtues, like love and… submissiveness. The result was Wonder Woman, a powerful heroine of justice who would preach about female empowerment in one panel, bash a bad guy in the second, and find herself trussed up like a turkey in the third. Harry G. Peter rendered Marston’s inspirational, fetishistic fantasies in one of the most distinctive styles of the golden age; his stiff figures, active lines, frilly imagery, and distinctive stylization gave Wonder Woman an outsider-art look somewhere between Fletcher Hanks and Henry Darger.

Together Moulton and Peter created a comic that had self-conscious ideological and aesthetic content. They set out, quite deliberately, to reconcile and explore binaries involving fetish and feminism, submission and strength, peace and violence, masculinity and femininity. Those contradictions, and the passion with which they were handled, give the early Wonder Woman stories an energetic, absurd sublimity like very little else in super-hero comics. But those same factors have made it extremely difficult for anyone else to use the character. Just as the most obvious example: how do you present Wonder Woman as an icon of strong womanhood when her costume is a ridiculous swim suit tricked out with fairly explicit bondage iconography (the rope, the metal bracelets)? Or, as another for instance, if Wonder Woman’s mission is supposed to be to bring peace and love to man’s world, how do you make that work with the fact that she spends most of her time hitting people? Moulton had specific answers to these questions because he was a crank and, I would contend, because he was a great artist. But if you’re not both a crank and a great artist, and you try to write Wonder Woman, you’re pretty much screwed. Which is why, while lots of people have written great Batman stories or Superman stories, I have yet to see a great Wonder Woman story written by anyone other than William Moulton Marston.

The one possible exception to that is “Wonder Woman’s Rival,” by Denny O’Neil and Mike Sekowsky. Initially published in Wonder Woman #178 way back in 1968, it’s the first story O’Neil and Sekowsky worked on, and thus the first entry in DC’s four volume “Diana Prince: Wonder Woman” reprint series.

Those four volumes are, by the by, utterly lacking in any contextual material; there’s no introduction, no commentary, no nothing. But, from what I’ve been able to determine from other sources, it seems that in the late ‘60s Wonder Woman was not selling especially well. DC was therefore open to letting Mike Sekowsky, the new editor and artist on the title, take some chances with the character. As a result, O’Neil and Sekowsky clearly feel liberated from any need to treat Wonder Woman with reverence or even respect, and the result is exhilarating. O’Neil turns in a script which is positively mean-spirited in its desecration of the Wonder Woman mythology. Steve Trevor, upright military man, is portrayed as a slimy, brutish, insecure Neanderthal. One particularly ludicrous scene shows him adopting hippie lingo to pick up some anonymous and much younger girl. Later, when he’s arrested on false murder charges, he behaves like a whiny baby-man, sneering at Wonder Woman when she, obviously heart-broken, is forced to testify against him. Meanwhile, Wonder Woman herself is depicted as deeply, weirdly insecure; “I’m not a woman, but a freak,” she cries after Steve has rejected her.

This is the last thing Moulton would have had the character say, obviously; for him, Wonder Woman was a paragon, not an aberration. But I think the outburst pretty clearly captures O’Neil and Sekowsky’s position; they want nothing to do with this nightmarishly outré heroine, nor with her ridiculous costume, nor with her unworkable mythos. Instead, they want to groove, baby. In an antithesis to Wonder Woman’s usual World War II honor-and-military associations, O’Neil sends the plot cavorting through hippie hang-outs, and sprinkles it with wannabe up-to-the-minute patois like “the fuzz frowns on chicks cruising in this pad solo” and “Yeah, man! We need some hens for a party!” Sekowsky, too, seems to be having the time of his life; the art is relentlessly modern retro-chic, with over-saturated psychedelic colors and bold, off-center constructivist layouts. The high-point is a full-page makeover sequence, where Diana Prince, preparing to infiltrate the burn-out underworld, goes on a shopping spree to get that happening look. Sekowsky uncorks everything he’s got: full-bore kaleidoscope effects, fabulous fonts, and dramatic patterned clothes. “Wow!” Diana declares when she’s done. “I…I’m gorgeous! I should have done this ages ago!” I guess, in O’Neil/Sekowsky’s world, Diana always secretly thought that the stars made her ass look big.

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The comic is a mess, continuity-wise; Wonder Woman seems to completely forget that she even has a magic lasso when she’s interrogating people, for example. But that’s part of the charm; O’Neil and Sekowsky seem, not only not to care about the character, but to actually be contemptuous of her and her milieu. “Wonder Woman must change…!” Wonder Woman herself mutters at the end, and you get the sense that O’Neil and Sekowsky really believe it. They. Want. To. Do. Something. Else! They’re going to be modern, they’re going to be hip, they’re going to be different, and no stupid canon left to them by some decade-dead crank is going to stand in their way.

Alas, while a barbaric yawp is certainly good fun, it’s hard to build on it for the long term. O’Neil and Sekowsky are great when they’re gleefully leaping about on Marston’s corpse. As soon as they try to create something of their own, though, things quickly go to hell.

In issue #179, O’Neil, in the space of about three pages, strips Diana of her powers and sends Paradise Island into another dimension. Shortly thereafter, he shoots Steve Trevor, putting him safely out of the way in a hospital bed, where he is quickly and summarily forgotten (you never even learn if he recovers or not.) So far, so good. Wonder Woman is now Diana, a non-super civilian, struggling to adjust to her new humanity.

But then O’Neil introduces I Ching (groan) a blind (groan) martial arts master (groan) who trains Diana in his techniques while spouting (you guessed it) wise parables that appear to have been lifted directly from fortune cookies. Diana and her attendant master/racial stereotype then head off to battle Dr. Cyber, a typical evil genius whose sole distinguishing characteristic appears to be that she is a woman. Along the way, Diana encounters and semi-falls for a disreputable private detective named Tim who is just about as familiar as I Ching, though less viscerally offensive.

Sekowsky took over the writing chores himself with #182, zapping Wonder Woman back to Paradise Island for a sword-and-sandal battle royale. As the title staggers on, there are a few other one-shot exercises — a fantasy adventure, a ghost story, a couple of street-level helping-the-colorful-neighbors-with-their inner-city problems stories — interspersed with further campaigns against the inevitable Dr. Cyber. The different genres allow for some playful stories: one comic has an entertaining battle with a witch summoned by some neighborhood kids; another, by the irrepressible Bob Haney and Jim Aparo, features the bizarre appearance of a pint-sized “Amazon guardian angel” with whom Diana communes in a Gotham alley.

For the most part though, there’s little effort to experiment, either for thrills or laughs. Instead the four collected volumes read suspiciously like hack-work, created by folks who aren’t paying too much attention for an audience that they distantly hope isn’t paying too much attention either. Nobody, for example, ever bothers to give Diana a personality. Sekowsky supposedly based her wardrobe on that of Diana Riggs in The Avengers…but it wasn’t the clothes that made Mrs. Peel, but the wit and sophistication. Diana has neither of these, nor, indeed, any consistent character at all. There is one interesting issue where she’s presented as advocating torture; a vicious Diana Prince might have been kind of fun. But the trope is dropped, and Diana drifts back to the blandly heroic default.

Not that it’s all bad. A Rober Kanigher-penned Superman/Wonder Woman team-up, where Wonder Woman and Lois Lane vie for Superman’s love, has the requisite Superman-is-such-a-dick Silver Age appeal — plus you get to watch Supes and WW dance together at a space-age hippie shindig (Supes sets the floor on fire — darn super powers.) Sekowsky’s Wonder Woman/Batman team-up seems to reignite his creative juices somewhat, with Bruce Wayne alternately leering over Diana and worrying about his male ego (“I can’t let a woman and a blind man rescue me!”) Throughout the run, too, Sekowsky’s art remains enjoyable; he has a gift for pretty female faces, and the fact that Diana stays in civies gives him a chance to design a plethora of outfits for her. But even he never really regains the dynamism of that first issue, with its hippie coloring and in-your-face modernism.

Sekowsky eventually got moved off the title; Denny O’Neil came back for a bit, and finally sci-fi master Samuel R. Delaney showed up for two issues. In the first of these, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser make a cameo because, apparently, Delaney wanted to prove that he could be boring with a whole range of other’s copyrighted properties. In the second story, Diana has her consciousness raised by a women’s lib group. I guess this last was somewhat controversial, and seeing Wonder Woman utter the words “for the most part, I don’t even like women!” is definitely jarring. But the whole thing’s so stupid anyway it’s hard to get too exercised about it. To say Delaney was phoning it in here is a disservice to telecommunications technology. The scripts read more like he leaned out the window and casually hawked them out between brushing his teeth and shaving.

The final story in volume 4 is the predictable reboot. Robert Kanigher, who’d written Wonder Woman stories through much of the fifties and sixties, came back to write another, while Don Heck supplied some strikingly awkward and ugly art. I Ching gets shot by a sniper, which is a lot less satisfying than you’d think it would be. Diana gets amnesia, Paradise Island is inexplicably back from its dimension- hopping, Wonder Woman regains her “special outfit.” It’s all so rote it’s hard to see why they even bothered; obviously continuity doesn’t really matter, so why even pretend to have a transition issue? Couldn’t you just put her back in the swimsuit without any explanation at all? Who would care?

I guess maybe somebody would have. Gloria Steinem cared that Wonder Woman had lost her powers, apparently; she’s supposed to have been the one responsible for getting DC to go back to the original, powered-up, scantily-clad version of the heroine. Soon thereafter WW was once more regularly appearing in tied-up bondage poses on her covers, something Sekowsky had kept to a minimum. A return to submissive cheesecake probably wasn’t exactly the outcome Steinem had hoped for, but you fool with Marston’s character at your own risk. O’Neil and Sekowsky had the right idea in trying to get as far from the original version as possible…even if, unfortunately, that was the only idea they had.
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This essay first appeared in the Comics Journal.

Update: This is the latest in a series on post-Marston takes on Wonder Woman. The rest of the series can be read at our old blogspot address here.

Can Wonder Woman Be a Superdick? (part 1)

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I’ve been doing a series of posts about superheroes and gender. In the most recent I talked about superdickery. Superdickery here refers to the way super-heroes tend to stand in for the uber-patriarch, both as benign law-giver and as evil ogre-father. In the post, I talked especially about how Marvel’s innovation was to shift more explicitly towards the idea of superhero as nightmare ogre-father (the Hulk! the Thing!) Ultimately, though, the ogre-father is still the father; Marvel comics are still about dreams of empowerment, rather than about denigrating or undermining those visions of absolute mastery.

Okay. So…if superheroing is all about superdickery, what happens when you have a female superhero? As the title up there says, can Wonder Woman be a superdick? And, if so, how, if at all, is that dickishness different when it’s attached to a woman?

There have been a couple of gestures at making Wonder Woman dickish. As I mentioned last post, Kate Beaton’s butch WW can be seen as dickish to some extent. And Greg Rucka’s WW in the Hiketeia might be considered superdickish in some sense too.

Overall, though, male writers have seemed distinctly uncomfortable with having Wonder Woman act as a superdick. I’m going to talk about some specific examples in a minute. First though, I want to discuss briefly why the superdickery meme is so hard (as it were) to apply to female characters.

In general, the whole point of the superdick is that you have some non-powered weakling (Bruce Banner, Clark Kent, whoever), and then the superhero acts as empowerment fantasy. Bruce Banner can’t lay down the law — but Hulk can smash. Peter Parker can’t replace Unlce Ben — but Spider-Man can! Bruce Wayne cant’ fight evil in his undies — but Batman will. Etc.

On the one hand, this is a pretty simple formulation. On the other hand, though, it is, I think, plugged into some fairly profound dynamics around male identity. As I discussed in this post, this post, and this post, male identity is built around a central incoherence. This incoherence can be seen as biologically Oedipal (with Freud), or as cultural (with Eve Sedgwick.) Either way, the point is that a male is both identified with patriarchal power (the father) and distanced from that power (the child.) To be identified with patriarchal power is to turn one’s back on femininity, and in some sense on humanity — so that the uberpatriarch is both a monster and, in some sense, unmasculine, since he rejects women (what gender is the Thing under those briefs, exactly?) But, on the other hand, to be a sniveling child outside of patriarchal power is to be feminized.

In short, the engine behind the super-hero split identity is the anxiety of maleness. Peter/Spider-Man is constantly vacillating between two people because neither one is stable. Peter is under pressure to take up the rod of superdickery and become a real man; Spider-Man is under pressure to cast aside the rod of superdickery and pay attention to the girls already so he can become a real man.

Women aren’t implicated in this psychodrama. Female identity isn’t incoherent — or at least, it’s not incoherent in the same way. A commenter on a recent article of mine at Reason put the point succinctly:

girls can think ninjas are cool without any blowback. Any man who likes sparkly emo vampires is probably sorting through some issues.

That’s exactly the point; a girl who likes ninjas doesn’t have her femininity called into question (on the contrary, butch women are often considered especially hot, as I argue here. Men who like romance, on the other hand, open themselves up (as it were) to the charge of not being sufficiently masculine.

So that means women have it easy compared to poor, conflicted men, right? Well, not exactly. It’s true that female identity is in some sense more stable…but there’s a certain amount of coercion which goes into enforcing that stability. Men are always defined by their lack of the phallus, always anxiously scurrying after the unattainable superdick…or dropping it like a hot potato and scurrying away when they get it. Women, on the other hand, aren’t supposed to have the superdick in the first place, so they’re just kind of supposed to sit there and be. Basically, for women, the ideal is more coherent, which means that individual slip ups (watching ninja movies) aren’t necessarily always as important. However, overall, a more coherent ideal can actually be more limiting. Always striving and failing is tiresome, but probably preferable overall to being stuck in prison.

Which brings us back to Wonder Woman.

That’s from Denny O’Neil and Mike Sekowsy’s first issue on WW from 1968. And, as you can see, the creators seem to be of the opinion that WW is a freak. And why is she a freak? Not because she’s actually a monster like the Thing, but simply because she’s got “muscles” and is a woman. And, not coincidentally, in the following issues of their run on the series, O’Neill and Sekowsky actually depowered WW, turning her into a civilian spy — still a crime fighter, but one who wouldn’t necessarily scare the (male) kiddies.

O’Neill and Sekowsky are more blatant than most, but they’re hardly alone in their discomfort with the super-powered WW. Throughout “The Greatest Wonder Woman Stories Ever Told,” there’s a constant, insistent effort to evade the image of Wonder Woman as superdick — to domesticate her, if you will. In Robert Kanigher’s “Top Secret,” Steve Trevor engages in an elaborate plot to get Wonder Woman to marry him. His scheme fails…but it forces WW to create her Diana Prince identity in which (of course) she serves under Steve in the military. In this story, then, Wonder Woman isn’t Diana’s empowerment fantasy; rather, Diana is *Steve’s* empowerment fantasy. WW does get the better of Steve, but only by doing what he wants. She bows to his superdickery and relinquishes her own.

Similarly, in Robert Kanigher’s revealingly titled “Be Wonder Woman…and Die!” the emotional focus of the story is on a terminally ill young actress who impersonates Wonder Woman and then expires beautifully. It’s pretty clearly a Mary Sue story in some sense — a WW fan appears, is lauded by her idol, and then shuffles off the mortal coil to great acclaim. But you do have to wonder — if this is a Mary Sue, whose Mary Sue is it? Who exactly is getting off on a depowered and dead WW clone? Could it be the male writer,by chance?

One final example; Wonder Woman #230, from 1977. (Todd Munson very kindly gave me this issue when I visited his class at Randolph-Macon a few weeks back. ) This issue is by Marty Pasko, and it’s set in the 1940s to tie in with the then-current TV series. It’s also obsessed with doubling. The villain is the Cheetah, who suffers from multiple-personality disorder; normally she’s an everyday socialite (Priscilla Rich), but when she sees Wonder Woman she has a psychotic episode and turns into a supervillain. In this sotry, Priscilla accidentally encounters WW and has her transformation triggered. As the Cheetah she then manages to discover WW’s secret identity, and makes plans to use the information to kill her. However, Cheetah turns back to Priscilla before she can take action. Priscilla then contacts Diana Prince…and hypnotizes her into forgetting she’s Wonder Woman, figuring that if Wonder Woman disappears, Priscilla herself will never change into the Cheetah again.

So along the way here there are several suggestive incidents.

— Early in the issue, Steve Trevor is gushing on and on about Wonder Woman. Diana Prince is clearly quite pissed about this; she’s jealous of her alter ego. Thus, there’s a definite implication that Diana *wants* to get rid of WW, just as Priscilla wants to get rid of the Cheetah.

— There’s an erotic tension between the female antagonists. Priscilla’s repressed emotions are released whenever she sees Wonder Woman; it’s not hard to read a lesbian subtext into that. Moreover, the hypnotic encounter between Priscilla and Diana is framed as seduction; Priscilla even comments (lasciviously?) on how “naive” Diana is.

In breaking the mirror here, Priscilla is banishing both Wonder Woman and the Cheetah. Where agonized male-male tensions tend to lead to heroes hitting villains and hyperbolic violence, the female-female encounter/seduction does the reverse. It doesn’t redouble anxieties around female identity; it eliminates them. Priscilla is ushering Diana back into femininity. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in the last panel Diana’s face seems definitely softer and less butch than it does towards the top of the page.)

Priscilla can be seen, in other words, as patrolling the boundaries of femininity. This is actually a fairly common dynamic, I think; women are often harsher on (small) infractions against femininity than men are. My wife pointed out that Patti Smith in the 70s once commented that there’s nothing more disgusting than seeing some woman’s breast hanging over a guitar. The quote is interesting too, because, like this encounter, there’s definitely some not quite dealt with eroticism there; Smith is perceiving female guitarists as sexual beings; there’s a same-sex frisson. I haven’t quite worked this through, but it seems like there’s a parallel here with Eve Sedgwick’s ideas about male homosociality. That is, men form homosocial bonds (and repress explicit homosexual ones) as a way of cementing patriarchal power. Women might be seen as forming homosocial bonds (and repressing explicit homosexual ones) as a way of policing or reaffirming femininity — which again essentially has the effect of cementing patriarchal power. That seems like a good description of what Priscilla is doing here, certainly — she seduces/explains the error of her ways to Diana in order to prevent Diana from becoming a superdick, and so leading Priscilla herself into superdickery.

On the one hand this ends up being a false consciousness argument (women reinforcing the patriarchal order out of a mistaken fear of their own power/acceptance of their natural role.) On the other hand, it might also be seen as a not unrational risk assessment. Priscilla is worried that Wonder Woman’s escape from femininity will bring reprisals against Priscilla herself (she’ll become the cheetah, get herself in trouble, and end up being punished.) Similarly, Patti Smith, as a female rockstar, could be seen as covering her own ass — too many female rockstars might cause trouble.

I don’t know; not sure that that’s all thought through as well as I might like. But I think there is definitely a sense in which bonds between women are used to patrol femininity just as bonds between men are used to patrol masculinity. And the obsessively doubled relationship between Priscilla/Cheetah and Diana/Wonder Woman seems to get at that.

Though at the same time, of course, there’s a tradition of feminist sisterhood which is about confronting or challenging patriarchy. It’s interesting in that regard how, even though this is set in the 40s when the Marston /Peter stories took place, there are just a lot less women here than in Marston’s writing. The only woman who’s around is Priscilla, which is obviously an antagonistic relationship….

— Because WW has disappeared, Steve has to take her spot in a video. (The director comments “I’d rather shoot a war hero than some broad in a silly get-up anyway!”) The Cheetah has booby-trapped the camera, though. Priscilla doesn’t want to kill anyone…so she figures she has to remind Diana of who she was. She leads Diana off to the side (which looks again very much like femme/butch seduction)

and this time the female/female encounter brings WW and the Cheetah both back.

Because we see this entirely from Priscilla’s perspective, though, this comes across more as sad necessity than triumphant victory. The return of female superpowers may be necessary, but it’s not ideal or normal. And, moreover, it really does result in bad news for Priscilla; she gets beaten up, captured, and sent off to Paradise Island for reeducation (where presumably she’ll be reintegrated back into femininity.)

—Soon after WW reappears we get this panel:

The reappearance of WW seems to humorously undermine Steve’s maleness. When a woman wields the superdick, men are less male. Not only can’t Steve take WW’s place, but even in wanting to he becomes ridiculous; less of a man.

— The comic ends with WW back in Diana Prince identity, talking to Steve. Steve is worrying about the possibility of WW disappearing again — and Diana suggests that if WW does disappear Steve should spend more time looking for her. There’s certainly a hint here that Diana would like WW to go away— she wants Steve to recognize, or respond, to Diana instead. Like Priscilla, Diana seems to in part want to lose her super-powers and her super-identity.

This isn’t that unusual a trope — as I mentioned in the last post, Spider-Man often wants to lost his powers, as does Bruce Banner, and so forth. The difference here is, perhaps, that when Diana is just Diana, there’s no indication that she wants to be anything else. She doesn’t wish she had her powers back, or think about WW. Instead, Priscilla has to remind her who she was. When Peter Parker, or whoever, is depowered, his identity remains incoherent; he still wants the superdick. But for Diana, the only tension is when she’s Wonder Woman. A feminized Diana, sans superdick, is perfectly happy — just as, presumably, a Priscilla without the Cheetah would be perfectly happy. There isn’t the attraction/repulsion for patriarchal authority that you tend to feel in male super-hero narratives. Instead, the energy of the story seems to push pretty firmly towards just turning superfemales into ordinary women and being done with it. Of course, it can’t end up there because, you know, Wonder Woman’s name is on the cover of the comic, and you need more stories with her. But that isn’t Marty Pasko’s fault. He didn’t create the character.

And next time we’ll talk about the guy who did create the character and how he felt about superdickery. Hopefully we’ll get to that next week.

In the meantime…this is actually part of a long series of posts on latter-day Wonder Woman iterations. You can read the whole series here.

Brave and Bold #140 — Batman and Wonder Woman

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I love Bob Haney and Jim Aparo’s run on Brave and the Bold; I have an unhealthy obsession with Wonder Woman. So Brave and Bold featuring Batman and Wonder Woman — that’s got to be good, right?

Well, not exactly. Haney and Aparo both seem more or less on autopilot here; it doesn’t suck, or anything, but neither is there any particular inspiration. Haney pulls out one of his usual plot gimmicks (some old geezer offers to give millions to Batman’s favorite charity if pointy-ears will rescue his daughter. It’s amazing how often this happens.) So Batman goes off, and there’s the usual Haney twists — malevolent, intelligent gorilla surgeons; Gotham City replicated on a floating barge; double-crossing heiresses, that sort of thing. Wonder Woman shows up, and Haney does his best to figure out why her presence doesn’t make Batman irrelevant. Maybe, I don’t know…she could not know her own strength until seeing Batman in danger causes her to free her inner Amazon? Sure, what the hell, that works. Meanwhile, Aparo entertains himself by drawing the protagonists from the boots down….

So good fun…but it never really fulfills the kinky promise of the bizarre splash page:

There’s some bondage/mind control for you in the best Marston tradition! Aparo seems to be especially having fun getting WW to twist around like a cat, curling up her fingers into claws. We get some more on the next page:

And…unfortunately that’s it for the super-heroes-as-mind-controlled-wild-animal subplot. It’s never actually even explained why Batman and WW are behaving like that; there’s one panel where Bats speculates vaguely about drugs or hypnosis, but it’s never followed up. Of course, the real reason is simply that Haney thought it would be cool/funny/sexy and make a good lead in. And then he just dropped it, because he got distracted. Haney doesn’t really write plots anyway; he just writes plot holes.

Still, I have to say; as far as versions of Wonder Woman go, this one has a certain aphasiac appeal. Haney doesn’t seem to have any great affinity or even enthusiasm for the character; he just sort of picks her up and drops her into one of his usual nutty plots, gratuitously noting each of her powers along the way (invisible plane! magic truth-telling lasso! amazon speed!) because that’s what you do in a comic. In that context, the scene at the beginning comes off in a similar, check the boxes kind of way — if you’ve got a Wonder Woman story, you throw in some bondage. And you might as well tie Batman up too, because, hey, he’s there, and why not?

And there’s something to that. Maybe it’s just the extent to which Haney so obviously doesn’t treat these characters as Mary Sues, or really as icons at all. He doesn’t want to honor them; he doesn’t want to desecrate them; he just wants to race through his story and have some laughs and come out the other end and get a paycheck. In that context, an Amazonian feminist avatar decked out in bondage gear isn’t any more or less ridiculous than a guy wearing a bat suit. Most latter-day Wonder Woman writers are tripped up because Marston’s WW is more coherent than your average super-hero, so when you try to put her into a storyline that functions differently than that propounded by her creator, things go awry. But Haney’s plots aren’t coherent; they don’t work anyway. Wonder Woman still looks like a nutty non-sequitor…but, in Haney’s world, that makes her fit right in.

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This is part of an occasional series of posts on latter-day iterations of Wonder Woman. You can read the whole series here.

And since arbitrary links are sort of in the Bob Haney spirit — I’ve been posting some downloadable music mixes over the last couple of weeks. The last one is titled Book Radio Mixer, the one before was called The Old Gospel Ship. Click through the links for tracklists and downloads, if that appeals.

Lose the Girdle, Get Empowered (OOCWVG)

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I doubt that Adam Warren was necessarily thinking specifically about Wonder Woman when he created his Empowered comic. Nonetheless, the two work off of many of the same touchstones: super-hero bondage fetishism; feminism, and an interest in presenting cheesecake for guys alongside girly stuff for everybody else.

To the extent that Empowered can be seen as a kind of Wonder Woman knock-off, it’s easily the best one out there, putting to shame even relatively successful efforts like Alan Moore’s Glory or Darwyn Cooke’s satirical take on the character. In large part this is because of how far away from the Wonder Woman concept Empowered strays. Though he uses a lot of the same ideas, Adam Warren comes at the material from a completely different place than Marston and Peter did.

The difference can maybe be summed up by saying that Marston was a system-builder — an actual honest to God academic crank who started from big-picture concepts about how feminism and bondage and gender fit together, and created a character and world to match his theories. Warren is not like that at all. He says he started Empowered as a bondage commission for fans with “special interests.” Similarly, the feminist title “Empowered” seems to be basically a goof. For Marston, feminism and fetish was his life work and his obsession; for Warren the confluence of the two is more a serendipitous passing fancy.

What Warren is really interested in, as it turns out, is the characters. Even in the first, throw-off three-pager, you can see this. A generic super-team (the “Super-Homeys”) stand around contemplating how to defeat the evil Death Monger. Various ideas are thrown out, until Empowered, very nervously, volunteers that maybe they should try cutting off his power source. This seems like a reasonable idea; but it is instantly dismissed when teammate Sistah Spooky points out that Empowered’s panty lines are clearly visible beneath her skin tight super suit! Everybody cracks up, Empowered scurries away weeping — and I guess they beat Death Monger somehow. Or, you know, not.

Empowered

The thing is, this isn’t just a gratuitous gag (as it would be in, say, Mini-Marvels) Empowered staggering off whimpering “stupid, I’m so stupid” is more Peanuts than Nancy; it’s actually painful. And it’s also feminist; the way Empowered is objectified and dismissed is, and is meant to be, textbook workplace harassment…at the same time as the character is obviously designed to be oggled by the reading fanboys. (And “designed” is the word — her skin tight costume won’t work if anything is worn over it. Also it rips easily. And when it rips, she is powerless, and gets tied up.)

Much like Marston, Warren is having it both ways. Where Marston pulled off that trick through constant and complicated theorizing, though, Warren manages it first of all by being genuinely funny. There’s plenty of the kind of witty sci-fi goofiness that made Warren’s Dirty Pair such a treat. He seems to have an endless supply of that sort of thing, from a gang of minions who make a living stealing from their super-villain bosses, to a support group for heroes who got their powers from exotic venereal diseases (watch out for the alien princesses and the anatomically correct robots, boys); to my absolute favorite, the evil Cthulhu like ancient evil which lives in a belt in Emp’s room watching DVD collections, listening to sports radio, and dispensing relationship advice to her Emp’s boyfriend. (“Bahh. Running out to the market of super to purchase feminine hygience products. Even among the eldritch ancient ones we had a word for such behavior. And that word was…P-whipped!”)

Even more important than the humor, though, is the fact that Warren seems to really care about his heroine. Empowered could easily have turned into a series of dumb blonde joke…but instead, Emp comes across as an incredibly likable character, way more competent and courageous than she or her teammates are willing to credit. As I said, Warren starts out by highlighting her unhappiness and humilitation, a la Charlie Brown — but he quickly heads for less depressing territory, giving her a yummy ex-evil minion as a boyfriend, and incidentally creating one of the best couples in super-hero comics. Thugalicious (does he have a name? He must, but I can’t find it. Oh well.) is incredibly sweet, setting up his villainous cohorts for defeat after defeat at Emp’s hands because “this stuff makes you happy, dinnit?” — and, less selflessly, because Emp “always gets completely sexed up and out of control after every super-hero outing.” In return, when thugalicious’ cohorts wise up and almost kill him, Emp, kicks the door over and with uncharacteristic competence blasts through a roomful of minions to get to her man (said man remarking, with heartfelt enthusiasm “Bad Ass!”)

Empowered

The end of this scene is pretty great as well. Generally when super-heroes save their loved ones, they’re pretty blase about it — along the lines of, “Aha, here I am again to rescue you just in time. You never doubted me, of course!” Emp, on the other hand, falls apart, weepingly cussing him out for being a macho asshole and getting himself in this pickle. It seems — and I think, is — such a natural reaction that it took me days to realize how unusual it was for the genre.

Warren’s decision to highlight Emp’s body-image issues also seems to me to be pitch perfect. Like all super-heroines, she is, of course, actually drop-dead gorgeous…but it’s the rare woman, drop-dead gorgeous or not, who wouldn’t have serious reservations about wearing a skin tight latex costume in public. Body issues are a real feminist concern, and treated as such (in the first strip for example). But they’re also a convenient way to make readers feel good about oggling the cheesecake. You’re not just enjoying the goodies on offer; you’re also sympathizing with the very likable heroine, and reassuring her that her ass is not, in fact, at all fat — or only fat in a good way.

In short, the book is both exploitation dreck and touching romantic sit-com — not to mention super-hero spoof — and the different genre modes all work to reinforce rather than undermine each other. it doesn’t hurt that Warrens’ artwork is excellent — and more than excellent for what he’s trying to do. His style is is very expressive in a manga vein — but it’s also got a scratchy, alternative 80s mainstream vibe that makes it look less slick and finished than most manga titles. It’s clear and stylish enough to deliver solid storytelling and very sexy cheesecake, but it also has a scrappy, smaller-than-life quality which sums up Emp herself.

In thinking about Emp and Wonder Woman, the “smaller than life” is I think the key. Wonder Woman is a paragon; that’s the point of the character. Emp is trying to be that, but it (usually) doesn’t quite work. Making that shift allows Warren to think about the issues Marston and Peter brought up in some new and interesting ways. Is it really ideal to have a feminist icon who is perfect at everything, for example? How courageous or heroic is Wonder Woman really when everything comes so easily to her? Is it really that important in a relationship to establish who is saving who, or, you know, can you save each other back and forth without keeping such merciless score? Can’t you just enjoy a little fetish porn without trying to make it part of some big right-minded philosophical system? The point isn’t necessarily that Empowered is better than Marston/Peter (I don’t think it is), but rather that to have a conversation with the original Wonder Woman that isn’t egregiously stupid, it seems like you maybe need to take a step back from it. Marston’s Wonder Woman was a very personal vision; so, in a lighter vein, is Warren’s Empowered. For my money, that makes Empowered a much more faithful daughter of WW than any of the “genuine” iterations of WW that have wandered zombielike across the DC universe for the last umpty ump years.

Update: More on Empowered as the savior of the DC universe.