Tag Archives: William Marston

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #21

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We’re up to #21 of the Marston/Peter run on Wonder Woman. The last few have been not so hot, and I have to admit that I’ve had a moment or two of doubt. After all, this is January/February 1947 here; when it was published Marston, who died of cancer in May, had only a couple of months to live. So…it seemed reasonable to wonder if maybe he hadn’t lost the spark, the edge, the compulsive and not at all unchaste desire to watch bound and blindfolded women perform surprising acrobatics with their teeth. Maybe the best was over.

I needn’t have worried. #21 is — well, let’s let it speak for itself.

And Grant Morrison thinks he’s weird.

So, yes, as you may have guessed, this issue is, in post-Hiroshima mode, all about the perils and possibilities of atomic energy. Only, you know, it’s Marston, so the perils aren’t oh-my-god-the-bomb-will-fall-on-us-and-incinerate-us-to-death. Instead, the fear is that an evil matriarch ruling over a mixed community of females and robots on the surface of an atom may find a way to conquer the world!

Not very probable, you say? Well sure. But…look! Pretty colors!

This is a lovely meta-moment from early in the comic; Wonder Woman and the Holiday girls are looking at a Uranium atom through an Amazon microscope. At first, they see just random bits of clumpy, sciency-looking stuff — inert, not human, and not especially Marston. But as they stare, the atom takes on more familiar characteristics. The protons look like red women, and the neutrons are “turning into creatures like robots!” That is, the way WW phrases it, it’s not just that she is able to see better or focus more clearly; rather, the atom is actually transforming before her eyes. It’s like the microscope looks into Marston’s brain, where the idea of atomic power lodged and, after a bit of a struggle, got transmuted by the alchemy of fetish into something closer to his usual concerns.

This is an amazing panel:

WW and the Holiday Girls are being shrunk down to the atom planet here…but the stiff stylization, the solid red background, and those awesome Harry Peter curlicue scribbles all make it look more like they’re being turned into wallpaper…or maybe dolls.

The way Marston links scientific miniaturization (atoms, protons, neutrons) to a feminized miniaturization (dolls, dainty frills) is brilliant, I think — it’s fascinating to see him incorporate cutting edge pop science into his preexisting edifice of crankery. But beyond that…well, thinking about this comparison has led me to realize the extent to which Peter, throughout WW, looks like he’s drawing, not people, but dolls.

The contrast between the stiffness of the figures in that upper left panel and the frilly, poofy expressiveness of the dresses — they look like porcelain figures.

I mentioned Sharon Marcus’ Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England last week. Anyway, in the book, Marcus devotes a great deal of space to talking about women’s relationship with their (female) dolls. She talks especially about “doll tales,” a genre of stories about girls acquiring, loving, and often abusing and leaving their dolls. Or as Marcus puts it:

Children’s literature tendered stories of imperious girls punishing, desiring, adoring, and displaying dolls that resembled fashionable adult women. In Victorian children’s literature, dolls are…beautifully dressed objects to admire or humiliate, simulacra of femininity that inspire fantasies of omnipotence and subjection…..Vicotrians did not confine objectification, domination and idealization of women to men. The stories they told about girls and their dolls show that Victorians imagined girls…enmeshed in indealizing and aggressive homoerotic fantasies.

You can see Marston having to stop at that point in order to fan himself vigorously.

Marcus argues that this kind of cultivation of homoerotic fantasy was not, in the Victorian context, lesbian. Victorians didn’t draw the strong lines between heterosexual and homosexual that we do…as a result, women desiring women or fantastizing about women didn’t necessarily make one less heterosexual. In fact, Marcus argues, the cultivation of homoerotic fantasy (through fashion plates or doll tales or through romantic female friendships) was seen as an important part of heterosexual female identity. Marcus notes, for example, that girls who treated their dolls well were supposed to make better wives; the cultivation of a partially maternal, but also potentially sisterly, bond, was indicative of one’s general capacity for love and care.

Since Marston lived with two female bisexual lovers, it seems, shall we say, unlikely that he didn’t see homoerotic fantasy in a potentially lesbian context. Still, I think Marcus’ take on doll tales gives a context for Marston’s particular interests. For instance, look at these pages again:


It’s not so hard to imagine the queen here as the little girl in a doll tale, abusing her dolls, commanding them about, gloating over their beauty (“pretty protons”!) and anticipating with relish a the continuing and ever-more-restrictive action of her own will. As in a doll tale, or in doll ownership, the female reader (or doll owner) is called upon to appreciate, manipulate, and sadistically control an icon of femininity. On the one hand, as Marcus notes this gives her a freedom of action to experience what are usually considered masculine pleasures — pleasures which would in most (Victorian and later) venues be denied her. On the other hand, (and here Marcus is suggestive but less clear) the sadistic inhabitation of femininity is a kind of practice. Linda Williams in Hard Core argues that the point of much pornography is to uncover or expose women’s inner self — that it’s primary impulse is a drive for total (sadistic) knowledge and occupation — an eradication of female self and replacement with male will or fantasy. Doll play, then, might be seen similarly as a drive to sadistically penetrate to the core of femininity — to pleasurably occupy it not in order to replace it with male will, but rather to settle down inside it as a grown woman.

What’s great about Marston is that he takes this already-queer woman-on-woman eroticized pedagogy and fetishistically flips all the genders. It’s not just boys who get to inhabit the feminine and so assert masculine power and mastery — girls can do the same.

Here the Queen is strapped into a Venus Girdle, making her loving and peaceful and generally the soul of femininity. And as soon as that happens she can go off and….participate in violent deeds of daring sport atop giant kangaroos!

By the same token, it’s not just girls who sadistically inhabit the feminine in order to become mature women — rather, boys also get to manipulate the feminine in order to become mature women.

Here Steve is positioned as the doll owner; his giant hand set beside the miniaturized WW and Holiday girls. He is, moreoever, feminized — he’s the worry wort fretting about when hubby will come home. The last panel dialogue could be a sitcom back and forth “Wife: Where were you! I was worried sick!; Husband: Aw, it was so sweet of you to worry you pretty thing!” With a little imagination, you could see this as showing Steve playing with dolls in order to prepare himself for his (proper) feminine roll.

Of course, the genders are also mashed because WW was read by, and aimed at, both boys and girls. Marston wants everyone, boys and girls, to enjoy dominating and controlling femininity in order to teach themselves how to become better women. The male gaze, so despised by feminist film theory, is here seen as the key to ushering in a feminine, and indeed a feminist, utopia, where boys and girls join in joyful sisterhood, and militant atomic power is transformed into love which heals the crippled children.

And what better symbol for this new age than…enormous mechanical yanic penis!

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Okay; I have to show this too.

That’s WW rescuing a ship from a runaway overgrown atom.

And then there’s this:

My favorite thing about this is that you know — you know — that Marston thinks it’s sexy to have an atomic world filled with women lodged on Wonder Woman’s ear. He’s in his fifties, he’s dying of cancer — and he’s still updating his masturbatory repertoire with the very latest technological advances. It kind of makes me tear up.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #20

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It’s been a long time since I last worked on the Bound to Blog series, in which I was blogging my way through every issue of the original William Marston/Harry Peter run on Wonder Woamn. The last issue I wrote about was the squickily racist Wonder Woman #19, way back in November shortly before we left the blogspot address. So (as you can probably figure out) that puts us at #20.

So…with a good eight months or so of anticipation, was it worth the wait? Well, no, not really. This issue is decidedly weak tea. In a lot of ways it’s a rerun of the lackluster Wonder Woman #17, which was also focused around time travel and which was also disjointed and not especially spirited.

The issue still looks great, of course. I love that cover, with Redbeard (Redbeard! hah!) looking absolutely enormous through the miracle of shaky scaling, ridiculous beard flapping every which way. And check out those gnarled hands — they each look big enough to cover WW’s entire head.

I think this is the best page in the book.

Redbeard’s face in the upper right corner is fantastic, with those elaborately curving eyebrows, the half-moon irises, that magnificent nose. WW sinking thorugh the water with the giant fish behind her is also hard to resist (Peter has used the fish trick before, but it never gets old for me.) And I love the way in the last panel the ocean spray mirrors the stars on WW’s shorts. And the guys falling out of the ship, with their elongated arms making them looks more dynamic and twisted as they drop….and Redbeard’s beard again in that final panel. It’s just a solid sequence all around.

I really like this too:

Those are the hands of a giant time monster (I’ll talk a little more about him ) shortly). And they’re great hands. But what I’m really enjoying here is the way Peter dispenses with speech bubbles, just writing “Zounds!” and “Help!” and “Quarter!” directly on the art. There’s an analogous effect here, in one of his silent sequences, which includes a couple well-placed “Bonk”s and the like:

This is an interesting shift for Peter; when he did wordless bits in earlier issues, they were mostly without sound effects as well — for instance, in this bullfight the knocked out bull snores with an image rather than a sound effect. It’s clear, in other words, that Peter is still experimenting, still trying to do new things with the comics form.

Here’s another nice moment:

The hothouse B & D lesbian seraglio, complete with the veiled and ample Etta in the foreground, is of course hard to resist — but what really makes the panel is the picture within the picture, with the quickly sketched, golden-haired, (entirely?) nude winged cherubs hovering together suggestively — mirroring the triptych of the mistress and the two kneeling slaves in front of it.

There are a couple of interesting narrative points as well. WW gets her bracelets welded together, robbing her of her powers…but Marston cheats and lets her do a bunch of feats of super strength anyway. He offers the excuse that even without her Amazon abilities, she’s still no weakling — but really you get the sense that it was just helpful to the plot — and maybe too that he couldn’t quite stand having her helpless.

There’s also some back and forth with Julius Caesar:

Marston wrote a whole erotic novel about Julius Caesar, and he’s clearly borrowing from himself. In the book, as here, Caesar worships Venus and understands women, which is the source of his greatness. And in the book, as here, Caesar is really pretty dull and I wish Marston would talk about something else.

Like this:

This sequence occurs right at the beginning of the story, and it’s maybe the oddest and most fraught moment in the comic. Peter draws Nifty with extra oomph even for him; her tight dress and low neckline certainly seems to have caught Steve’s attention in that second panel. But, of course, it’s not Steve who reacts to her most strongly, but Diana. A giant ghostly monster materializes (with a ridiculously prominent (ahem) nose)…and Diana leaps upon Nifty…incidentally giving us a fetching shot of her rear, just in case we’d forgotten what a butch woman and a femme woman wrestling mean to Marston.

Diana’s sudden burst of enthusiasm/passion knocks off her glasses — almost allowing Etta to pierce her double-identity. And as soon as Diana scurries off, we learn that Nifty has a double identity of some sort too — she’s the leader of a “gang,” and also apparently the avatar or other self of the weird monster with the phallic nose.

Marston, then, seems to be circling around ideas of doubling and ideas of lesbianism; Di and Nifty have a bond of attraction/repulsion which is tied to their split selves. Furthermore, the monster is a “time monster”, pulling Nifty back into the past so that she can have revenge. Connecting the past, violence, and disassociation of the self strongly suggests trauma.

There are a lot of ways to go from here. Marston could have examined the idea of bifurcation/trauma and its relationship to patriarchy/incest, as he did in issue 16. Or he could have gone further into the Diana/Nifty relationship and female bonding as a powerful, potentially dangerous force, which can either be used on behalf of patriarchy or against it (I talk about this more here. Or, you know, he could have just let us see a whole lot more of the crazy monster and given us more background on how it related to Nifty, since that’s the easily the nuttiest idea in the book,and the one with the most potential for ridiculous/unlikely/entertaining elaboration.

But he doesn’t do any of those things. Instead he gets wrapped up in how cool Caesar is and we never find out what the deal is with the Time Monster, or why Nifty is bonded to it, or what it wants. At the end there’s a kind of half-hearted suggestion that it was summoned by Nifty’s desire for revenge — directly contradicting earlier suggestions that it was itself pushing Nifty towards desiring revenge. I guess you could see the monster as an avatar of maleness; when women embrace violence, they are possessed by the patriarchy or some such. Again, though, Marston usually makes these points pretty explicitly when he’s paying attention. This one feels like he was mostly just going through the motions.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #19 (Black and White and Startlingly Offensive All Over)

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This is the first in a roundtable on race in comics titled Black and White and Startlingly Offensive All Over. It’s also the latest in a series of posts on the Marston/Peter run on Wonder Woman.

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William Marston indulges in the occasional vicious asian or Jewish stereotype during his run on Wonder Woman. He doesn’t, however, tend to have many black characters. Wonder Woman 19, therefore, is something of a departure. But, as is their way, Marston and Peter make the most of it. Practically every comics creator from Herge to McCay to Crumb, has retailed offensive black stereotypes. But how many of them have done this?

No, you’re not seeing things. Those are primitive African natives with swastika’s on their loincloths. The Nazis have allied with some evil natives, y’see, and the natives have, as a gesture of subservience, placed the Nazi symbol on their persons to demonstrate that they hold to the ideals of Hitler, including, presumably, the genocidal cleansing of both themselves and their entire continent. Really, it’s a kind of genius; the stereotypical, gibberish-spouting, African native has to be one of the most viscerally offensive images our quaint pictographs offer. You might think that there wasn’t really any way to take that and make it decidedly more vile. But I think Marston and Peter have managed it. Way to go, fellas.

I guess I could, at this point, go through the entire issue pointing out some of the more egregious incidents of racism — but I’m not sure there’s really a point, exactly. Marston and Peter buy every stereotype you’d imagine they’d buy. The natives think white people are gods; they have rhythm (Etta and the Holiday girls distract the natives by playing band music, because Africans can’t resist dancing when they hear indifferently-played college march tunes.) And, of course Africans are superstititious — WW mocks them for believing in voodoo, as opposed to in, I don’t know, invisible planes, (and, of course, voodoo is a syncretic New World phenomena, not based in Africa at all — though I guess maybe that’s pretty far down on the list of things to complain about at this point). In short, while Marston’s wackiness does shine through in certain ways (the swastika’s on the loincloths; his resolute refusal to sideline his slavery fetish no matter how hideously inappropriate it is in this particular context), he spends relatively less time on his own crackpottery and relatively more on the familiar crackpottery of racial prejudice.

In fact, in some ways the most surprising thing about this issue is not that Marston is a big old racist, but rather the extent to which he has to, or is willing to, compromise his own vision in order to accommodate that racism. As I’ve mentioned a time or two, Marston isn’t shy about indulging his obsessions. One of his standard plots/fantasy scenarios involves societies of more-or-less subhuman men paired with parallel societies of beautiful/enslaved women. I’m thinking particularly of the mole men (from Wonder Woman 4) and the Seal Men (from Wonder Woman 13).

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In both of these stories, Marston uses the split between animalistic men/lovely women to work through his fetishes and his feminism. The bestial men enslave and dominate the women (which is fun, obviously); then the women turn the tables, conquer the men, dominate them, and make them fully human (because men can only reach their full potential when they’re ruled by women.) It’s a narrative near and dear to Marston’s kinky, kooky heart..

This issue of Wonder Woman initially seems like a perfect forum for him to break out those old tropes one more time. After all, the African men here are explicitly portrayed as animalistic:

Moreover, they are portrayed as almost exclusively male. When women are shown in the background, as here

they fit the standard Marston/Peter formula you’d expect; that is, they look more human and appealing than they’re bestial mates. There is even one panel where Marston toys with the idea of giving these women a more prominent (and dominant) role:

This comment denigrates the chief in some sense (suggesting he’s in thrall to his wife.) But within Marston’s framework, men are *supposed to* be dominated by their wives. In the normal course of a Marston story, this would be the moment to bring out that wife, and have her influence transform and save her mate, turning him not only into a good man, but into a human being.

But while that can work for Mole Men and Seal Men, it can’t work for Africans. Marston is chary about portraying African women with good reason. Women for him are always superior; Africans are, and have to remain, inferior. A major role for an African women in a Marston comic is, therefore, literally unthinkable — in the sense that he doesn’t seem to be able to think it. Not only his feminism, but his interest in gender politics seems to buckle under the pressure of his racism.

It’s perhaps interesting in this regard that WW #19 includes one of Marston’s most explicit elucidations of romantic female friendship. For most of the adventure, Wonder Woman is aided by Marya, a giant Mexican woman who idolizes WW, referring to her as “My preencess!” Trina Robbins summarizes this relationship nicely in her essay Wonder Woman: Lesbian or Dyke?

Another story deals with Marya, a beautiful eight foot tall “Mexican mountain girl,” who definitely has a crush on Wonder Woman. She calls Wonder Woman “brave princess” and “beautiful princess.” When the two women are captured in nets, Wonder Woman, ungraciously considering only her dumb blond “boyfriend,” Steve Trevor, tells her, “I’m sorry for you, Marya, but at least we’ve saved Steve…” Marya, with the selflessness of true love, replies, “I care not what happen to me if I help save your friend, Preencess!” Finally, Marya is encased in cement up to her chest. But when the amazon princess is about to be killed, “Driven desperate by her great love for Wonder Woman, Marya wrenches savagely at the solid cement which encases her legs.” Leaping from the cement she shouts, “My preencess — I come!” Finally, Wonder Woman freed and the villains vanquished, Wonder Woman declares, “The credit goes to the biggest girl and the bravest — my little friend Marya!” Marya kneels at the amazon’s feet, clutching her hand rapturously, saying, “Oh Preencess!”

Female-female relationships (bordering on, or more than bordering on, lesbianism) are important throughout Marston. But it seems telling that one of the most explicit appears in, and takes so much space in, this particular issue. It’s interesting too that Marya is essentially a white Latina marked as racially different (her size, her accent) and yet also as white (the “natives” call her white repeatedly.) It’s as if Marston started, say, the Seal Men story, suddenly realized he couldn’t run variations on his women-dominating-men fetish, and so instead backed-and-filled in order to run variations on his lesbian fetish.

The thing about the lesbian fetish, at least as represented here, is that it doesn’t have any political or social implications. The WW/Marya story is of personal friendship and love; in this case Marston doesn’t connect his fetishes to broader social ideals the way he does in the Seal Men and Mole Men stories. Marston can’t think of African women having power; therefore, though he can imagine individual examples of sisterhood, he can’t, in this particular comic, imagine a collective feminist movement. Marston’s racism, in other words, actually and actively gets in the way of his feminism. Reading this, I was reminded of the fate of numerous civil rights struggles after Reconstruction failed — basically, when the U.S. abandoned its commitment to equality for black people, it also abandoned its faith in social justice generally, with the result that women’s rights, for example, were set back for generations. This comic maybe provides an insight into why that might have been; to the extent that you don’t believe in equality, it becomes difficult to imagine, or to work for, equality.

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Update: Again, the rest of the roundtable on race is here.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #18

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That’s a kind of generic cover for Peter; the knight’s certainly nicely drawn (love that plume), but overall it’s fairly static and boring by his standards. Part of that may be that it’s trying to be coy: Marston/Peter have a secret return villain, and they don’t want to give it away. But here I come spoiling it 60 years later: the villain in this issue is:

Dr. Psycho!.

Remember him from Issue #5? Little dwarf guy? Hated women so hypnotized them to cause them to send forth ectoplasm so he could take on different shapes? How could you forget, right?

Well, anyway, as so often happens with sequels, this one isn’t nearly as much fun as the original. No giant space kangas, for instance. No battle with Ares (who was originally using Psycho to prevent women from getting involved in the war effort.) Instead, there’s a much less convoluted plot involving Psycho trying to wreak revenge on WW and her pals. There’s as always some nice art, and Marston/Peter do seem committed to the wordless sequences now:

That last one, with Peter showing the movement through ghost images as WW throws herself into a backflip with her hands tied behind her back, is pretty spectacular. Despite such moment, though, this one isn’t the best of all possible Marston/Peter efforts.

But even mediocre Marston/Peter has some pretty interesting stuff going on. In particular, this one made me wonder about that all important question: Is the phallus female? (I know you’ve always wondered.) To answer that, we’re going to make a detour and talk about John Carpenter’s Christine.

Christine is about Arnie Cunningham, a nerdy, sweet high school kid who discovers a sentient car named Christine. The car possesses him, and he turns into a cool fifties greaser type, who’s attractive to girls and emotionally inaccessible and really dangerous. I talked briefly about Christine a ways back:

Christine the car is, of course, supposed to be a woman…but any car is obviously literally genderless, and the secretive nature of his relationship with her, plus her violence and the fact that, hey, she’s a car…if she’s a woman, she’s awfully, awfully butch, is all I’m saying. Arnie,of course, gets more and more manly and tough and evil the more time he spends with the car — which on the one hand suggests that, hey, he’s got a girl now, so he’s a man — but on the other hand suggests that he becomes more of a man by caring less and less about girls. Yeah; total agonized male fantasy of being simultaneously consumed by femininity and consumed by masculinity; the orgasmic collapse/reification of male identity — being castrated so you can turn into a penis (at the close Arnie is penetrated by a piece of glass from Christine’s windshield, caressing her one last time before he dies. Being violated by her, having her in control, is what makes him most male; emotionally inaccessible, commanding, finally murderous. Christine is ultimately masculinity itself, which possesses Arnie; but at the same time that masculinity is feminine — since it doesn’t reside in a particular body, and ambiguous genders are always coded feminine.

Christine in the movie functions as a phallus; before he gets her, Arnie is a typical feminized nerd; when he gets her, he becomes a manly embodiment of pitiless law, hunting down those who attack his car, or who steal his girl, or who just look at him funny, really. So Christine is what makes him a man. But she’s also, obviously, a woman, or at least feminized, which suggests that what makes you a man is a woman.

That’s not all that odd a concept…the whole point of the trophy girlfriend, for example, is that you demonstrate your manliness by walking around with a female status appendage. But Christine pushes the idea to an unusual extreme; Christine isn’t just a status symbol; she’s actually the source of power — not so much a sign of the phallus as the phallus itself. That’s part of the anxiety in the movie. Ta-Nehisi Coates has talked at various points about the idea that misogyny stems in part from male fears of being rejected, or being unable to deal with the emotional vulnerability inherent in having a relationship with a woman who can accept or reject you. I can see that…but at the same time I think there’s also an anxiety around the fact that women hold the keys to masculinity;men are forced to rely on women to prove that they are as men. Arnie puts himself in thrall to female power, and while that makes him a man, it also makes him a monster.

So, back over to Dr. Pyscho. As I mentioned, Psycho’s power, like Arnie’s, actually derives from women. The ectoplasm he uses to change form comes out of his female mediums. And you can tell it’s female, because it’s pink!

Psycho, like pre-Christine Arnie, isn’t very masculine. He needs to tap into female power to turn himself into a man’s man such as….Tyrone Gayblade, the great lover!

There’s a certain logic to that; if male power comes from women, then it should be queer (this is the case in Christine too, where Arnie’s secretive relationship with Christine reads as gay in certain ways, as I mentioned above.)

The kind of power Psycho gets from the women is also arguably female in nature. In the first place, he keeps turning himself into women, inlcuding the paragon of womanhood herself:

I bet that Marston really enjoyed the chance to write briefly about an evil WW…and perhaps especially about a man masquerading as an evil WW. (There’s another duplicate WW story here. At the same time, it’s interesting that the WW double didn’t show up on the cover. Duplicate WW clones of various stripes would become an obsession for Silver Age writers — a way, maybe, for creators to express their distaste and distrust of the character, or perhaps just their indifference by throwing oodles of generic clones into the plot. Marston, on the other hand, tosses the idea off and moves on to something else. There is a note or two about how the military brass mistrusts WW briefly because she appears to have stolen their secret weapon…but it’s treated as an aside, whereas in the Silver Age it would have been the main focus of the story. Marston isn’t interested in having people hate WW; she’s not Spider-Man. The point is everybody loves her! That’s what being a hero is all about, damn it.

Where was I?

Oh, right.

So Psycho gets to be a powerful guy by deriving power from women. Partly, that means that he’s more manly. Partly, it means he’s more queer. Partly it means he’s more female. But above all, it means he’s got the phallus:

I love that; the pastor who is about to perform a wedding dissolves into pink, ropy, sticky tendrils, binding the wedding party in sticky bondage goo. Luckily, though, WW is more of a man, and more of a woman, than Psycho, so she can turn the phallus on him:

Great panel at the end: “You’ll live happily in our Amazon prison, Joan.” Joyful bondage, hooray!

As in Christine, there’s some anxiety here — but it seems more connected to male power than to female power. In Christine, the female power corrupts the man (turning him into an uber man); here, it’s more like the man corrupts female power (turning it into a phallus.) The wedding turns into an abject nightmare of goopy penis tentacle rape because the man is in control; once WW reclaims the ectoplasm for femininity, all is well.

You may be wondering who’s getting married, incidentally. Why, it’s…Etta Candy and Tyrone Gayblade!

Who knew Etta was so eager to get married? It does seem kind of out of character for our butch, independent, entirely orally oriented comic relief. But on the other hand, Etta doesn’t seem especially distressed when things don’t pan out.

Easy come, easy go. And yes, her long-suffering, nerdy, dominated suitor is named Sweetgulper.

Oh, and I couldn’t leave this issue without showing you this:

Psycho hypnotized one of his mediums by drawing his own eyes on a piece of paper and sending it to her. He really is tricky.

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Just as a final thought: Greg Rucka used Dr. Psycho in his run on the issue. Basically, he turns Psycho into a mental rapist, controlling women with the power of his mind for sexual thirlls. The fact that Psycho’s power derives from women is entirely lost…making the character a lot more rote and boring, I think. Also, you know, there aren’t pink strands of ectoplasm everywhere. Which seems like a missed opportunity.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #17

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Marston and Peter’s Wonder Woman 16 may have been the best of the run so far, both in terms of the unusually ominous story and the adventurous art. #17 starts out well, with a marvelous cover.

Peter uses almost all of his favorite tricks here: the bison is out of scale, so WW looks almost like a doll, and even the horse seems bizarrely tiny. The motion lines are incredibly dynamic…in part because the circle is split up, I think. He also uses some of his scribbly linework for the bison’s breath…and that little cue cartoony squirrel is hard to resist. Plus, it looks like we’re going to get WW in the wild west, which sounds like it has potential. The last time travel episode, with evolving gorillas and dinosaurs and Steve turning into a cave man, was pretty great, so I was optimistic that a second might work as well.

Unfortunately, after that cover, the issue itself is pretty much…eh. Part of the problem is that the entire plot is built around a scientist Lana, her love for the no-good Carl, and WW and the Holiday girls’ efforts to cure her of same. Lana’s confusion is such that it causes her to whip up time winds which cause all and sundry to fall back into the past and relive former lives in roman and colonial times…but even such full-bore nuttiness can’t disguise the fact that this is a pretty staid man-done-her-wrong plot. Marston’s fetishes are kept mostly under wraps (as it were); Lana triumphs simply by getting rid of the bad guy in her life, not by teaching him the joys of bondage and loving submission. The feminism is less conflicted, but also a good bit duller. Or maybe the problem is just that pure, naive Lana is not a particularly sparkling protagonist; whether as modern scientist, Roman maiden, or pioneer daughter, her trust in her blandly evil boyfriend and love for her blandly gruff father are equally uninvolving. You can see why Marston didn’t care enough about her to even bother tying her up.

As is often the case in this series, as Marston goes, so goes Peter; the artist doesn’t seem nearly as inspired as in his last couple of outings. Still, there are a couple of moments. The duo does some more experimenting with wordless action sequences, and again the effect is lovely:

This is an interesting moment too.

Wonder Woman is using a pole to pick up a fan so the blades can cut the ropes tying Etta. I’m not sure the sequence entirely works; it’s hard to figure out whether WW is supposed to be moving up or down in that first panel, and the way the image is cropped, cutting off the end of the pole and the bottom two-thirds of Etta, seems awkward. But, again, I like the experiment with wordlessness, and the use of mutliple, Flash-like images of WW to convey motion is intriguing. Again, I wonder if this is something we’ll see more of in future issues. (I know we’ll see more of bound WW manipulating objects with her teeth — Marston lives for that.)

Going into the past also allows Etta to fully embrace her butchness:

Yep; in a past life, Etta was a gun-toting madam…er, that is, cantina owner. I like this intimation of jealousy as well:

Peter also makes Etta rather handsome there. The borderline men’s attire suits her. (More evidence that Marston doesn’t necessarily see women in drag as evil.

And…yeah, I think that’s really about all I’ve got to say here. You can tell the issue wasn’t firing on all cylinders because I’m not having to stifle the impulse to reproduce every single page. Peter’s art is still worth looking at, but there’s little evidence here of the breath-taking double page layouts that made last issue so stunning. But that’s the way it goes sometimes. We’ll see hope for better on the next one….

Bound to Blog: The Private Life of Julius Caesar

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Marston published his one novel, The Private Life of Julius Caesar, in 1932, nine years before he started his Wonder Woman series.

It’s…pretty bad, honestly. Marston’s cloying prose, which can be kind of charming when sprinkled about amongst pretty pictures, is well-nigh intolerable over 300-plus pages.

“I love you dear,” she said simply, “it’s an awful funny feeling — as though you were blown up with feathers that tickle you inside from head to foot! I never felt that way before. Do — you love me — a little?”

See? Even a sentence or two is too much.

Moreover, the Mary Sue aspect of his version of Julius Caesar is gag-worthy, not to mention deadly dull. Caesar sleeps with this slave girl, Caesar saves that slave girl, Caesar fights off twenty men, Caesar pardons that evil-doer, everybody hails Caesar, and on and on. The ruthless, battle-hardened, ambitious tyrant ends up as a invincible do-gooder, motivated mostly by chivalric gallantry towards the fairer sex.

That chivalry gets at the heart of why this early Marston vision is so much more irritating than his work on Wonder Woman. In “Caesar”, as in WW, Marston is devoted to showing the superiority of all things female. Caesar himself is repeatedly described as effeminate (high voice, delicate, etc.), and that effeminacy is clearly meant to demonstrate his superiority) Further, Julius Caesar (like WW after him) is a worshipper of the God of Love (Venus, in this case), and Marston’s goal is to show that all the great things Caesar did were inspired by women. For instance, Caesar broke the strength of the pirate fleets because they captured one of his loves; he made Octavius his heir rather than Brutus at the behest of his female political advisor and lover, a British barbarian princess, etc. etc. There are other girl-power notions tossed about…for instance, it’s revealed that women are more disciplined and effective (and perhaps even stronger) galley slaves than men (is that girl power exactly? well anyway…)

But, of course, effeminate or not, and lover of women or otherwise, the protagonist is still male, and the whole “man is inspired to great deeds by woman” narrative is just a lot more tired, and a lot less feminist, than having women cut out the middle, er, man, and just do the great deeds themselves. Marston very much wants to turn chivalry into feminism — to make the case that love of and fetishization of women translates into power for women. Unfortunately, that’s just pretty much nonsense; love and fetishization are as likely as not to translate into oppression, not power…and if that weren’t true, you’d have a Julia Caesar on the throne, not a Julius.

The historical setting, in other words, is a real problem. The feminist and imaginative strength of WW, I’d argue, is that it’s aspirational — it’s a utopian vision. That freedom is what gives it its ideological force (“women can do anything!”) and its vertiginously nutty dream logic (flying octofish! gorillas evolving into apes! peace-bestowing venus girdles! etc.) In writing about actual people and events, though, Marston is more constrained…to using a male ruler, for example, rather than the numerous female ones he would sprinkle about in his WW stories. (He does have a female barbarian princess, but we don’t get to see her do much ruling.) And, you know, no seal men, or magical lassoes, or invisible airplanes, or space kangaroos, or…well, you get the idea.

Perhaps even more importantly, the historical setting is bad for Marston because dealing with the real world simply isn’t his forte. As a thoroughgoing crank, he’s best when expounding the nuttiness occurring between his ears. When it comes to real gender relations, or how people actually interact with each other in any situation, or how power actually works — he kind of doesn’t know jack. Visionaries can certainly make great visionary art…but you don’t want Henry Darger writing “The Prince.” Oh, sure, it sounds kind of fun in the abstract…but the Private Life of Julius Caesar demonstrates pretty conclusively that, in practice, it doesn’t work out so well.

Though it is a failure in most senses (aesthetically, entertainment wise, etc.), “The Private Life of Julius Caesar” does provide a couple of interesting insights into Marston’s thinking. He doesn’t like eunuchs, for example…and the utter absence of male homosexuality from a milieu in which it did in fact exist suggests, perhaps, a level of discomfort there as well. Most telling, maybe, is the lesbianism, which is a lot more explicit in this than in the WW stories. For example…

“Woman is made for love. She knows how to love, and how to be loved. Consequently, if a loving couple is composed of two women, it is perfect.”

There are several examples of such loving female couples in the book…and though there aren’t sex scenes, per se, there is at least one instance of impassioned canoodling. After reading this, it becomes very, very difficult to believe that Marston was unaware of the lesbian implications of Paradise Island, or of his other female-only communities in general. And, yes, it also suggests fairly strongly that the polyamorous relationship between Marston, his wife Elizabeth, and their live in friend Olive Byrne was a triangle that was, shall we say, aware of lesbianism as a possibility.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #16

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

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

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

I think this one may even be better:

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

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

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

This is preceded by a suggestive sequence:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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