Another Peter animal cover. I really can’t get enough of those.

This issue is insane. I mean, sure, you could say that about every issue I guess…but this one really goes the extra mile of nuttiness.

I mean: gorilla bondage.

Need I say more?

All right; so the plot, such as it is, is that Professor Zool of Holiday College has invented an evolution machine, which he pithily calls “The Evolutionizer.” He gives it a test run on a convenient rogue gorilla:

This is the first issue, I think, where Peter’s layouts start to loosen up a little; and the effect is really impressive. That big panel shot of the gorilla woman with the stylized flames, naked except for the rope — I bet Marston studied that carefully. Peter emphasizes the voyeuristic aspect too in the next panel, where Etta’s so impressed that her line of sight busts through the panel borders, and WW seems a bit lascivious as well.

Maybe even more striking, though, is that image at the top of the gorilla evolving. It recalls this image from #7:

I’ve talked a lot over these posts about the relationship between Marston’s fetishes and his feminism. I think there’s obviously a connection there between his fetishes and his utopianism as well. The idea of people, and particularly women, becoming more evolved or perfected is exciting to him…and yes, he thinks turning a gorilla into a human is really hot. I think there’s some sense that he’s thrilling to the idea of a women retaining animalistic characteristics, which is a fairly standard issue fetish (just think Tigra.) But I think it’s also exciting because of the control aspect; the sense of seeing someone change and directing the change. Sociological and psychological liberal do-gooding turns him on.

Though devolving is fun too.

Steve pulling open his shirt as he turns into Neanderthal Steve is fairly priceless, as is Etta posing like a semi-monkey person.

And, hey, WW throws the devolver out the window, and that means everyone can get in on the act…as the entire world (or just the immediate neighborhood? It’s kind of unclear….) is sent back to the past, where we’ve got some beautiful prehistoric fauna for Peter to draw the heck out of:

And how about this:

Yes, you got that right, kiddies; that is Wonder Woman lassoing a tiger backwards with her hands tied behind her back. I’m sorry, but that is fucking bad ass. Peter gives the image what is I think his biggest non-splash panel so far in the series, and it so deserves it. In the first place, the color balance is lovely; making WW a uniform grey really makes the tiger pop.  And the tiger itself is unreal; cutting it off at the edge like that makes it appear enormous, and I love the paw; all misshapen bulging knuckles and giant claws. I am in general a fan of Peter’s shoulder-blades and back muscles, and he uses them to fine effect here. Most of all, though, WW’s expression just perfect as she peers over her shoulder. She’s not worried, not even all that intent, just kind of blasé, with that little Elvis sneer, because hell, she lassoes tigers backwards all the time.

Obviously, this is more off the cuff than Alan Moore’s Rorschach stunts or even than Frank Miller’s Dark Knight why-do-I-wear-a-target-on-my-chest, but it has some of the same “holy shit!” pulp cool about it. It’s not something Marston and Peter generally manage, or even try for in quite this way, but they do nail it here.

Did I mention it’s really hot, too? Or have I just been reading too many of these things?

Anyway, speaking of inappropriate interests, back in the evolutionary past there are — what do you know? — evil masculine tree people who like to tie women up. Giganta (that’s the gorilla-turned-woman) learns a trick or two from them and…well, you know what happens.

That’s a superb panel too. It’s the linework on Giganta’s dress, and the way she’s hunched and her crossed legs, and that tree just underneath her in the background, that looks like it was scribbled by a child.

Even beyond catering to his usual fetishes, though, Marston is clearly having a blast and a half; the devolution gives him and Peter an opportunity to dabble in some broad slapstick….

As you can see in that second example, Peter delights in having the characters talk in a ridiculous pidgin caveman dialect. He also, and a little uncharacteristically, decides to mock both ends of the gender war. Etta claims women are strong enough to care for themselvs; Steve says women need men to protect them; both have their pretentions to competence slapped down with vaudeville aplomb. (Though, of course, in the end women win, since it’s WW who saves the day.)

Anyway, eventually they re-evolve, though not all the way. Instead of getting to modern times, they end up in — well, let WW tell you:

Yes, it’s the evolutionary golden age when everything was perfect. The sun always shines, birds flit about, the rich live in hovels because they’ve given all their goods to the poor, Etta loses weight, and Steve is transformed into a bishonen Edwardian metrosexual.

.

It’s hard to know exactly what Marston is thinking here. Surely his grasp of history isn’t this poor, right? I said right?

Be that as it may, I assume this era he’s talking about is supposed to be the much-vaunted but probably entirely fictitious anthropological matriarchal age. In any case, the golden age is, of course, ruled over by women, who are wise and good, but who, unfortunately, don’t yet understand the joys of forcible restraint.

So Giganta gets free and wreaks havok, the upshot of which is that men decide they want to rule instead of women, on the grounds that men are stronger than women. So WW beats the tar out of the lead male guy who has a caveman forehead. However, that doesn’t quite settle things:

For Marston, women are actually stronger than men, but they like to pretend that men are stronger, presumably for romantic/sexual reasons.

From a feminist perspective, you can see where this might be maybe a problematic position. On the one hand, Marston is claiming women are superior (even in physical strength.) On the other, he seems to be arguing that their oppression is their fault.

There’s an article I stumbled on over at the League of Substitute Super-heroes (I couldn’t find the author’s name) which goes off on this point:

On a more complex level, Marston was not a feminist because he believed women were the keepers of men through their sexuality. Ignoring the rampant heterosexism in such an idea (not to mention the disturbing idea of blaming others as an entire group for the behaviours of other individuals or groups) making women responsible for men’s problems is a trait Marston shares with most misogynists, whether they are the Promise Keepers, backlash “Femme-Puppets” 2 or even the religious wowsers who would be deeply opposed to Marston and his lifestyle if the man was alive today. He believed that, “Normal men retain their childish longing for a woman to mother them” and that “[a] woman’s charm is the one bond that can be made strong enough to hold a man against all logic, common sense, or counterattack.” This is a dangerous position to hold in regards to gender relations, though in Marston’s case, one probably borne more out of ignorance and privilege than outright malice. To come out in the 21st century and tell a domestic abuse victim that all she needs to do is use her “feminine allure” more on her husband is mind-boggling, but from Marston’s point-of-view, it would be the chosen response. Never mind that victim-blame is the great feeder of the mentality that causes most domestic violence and gender-related violence in society. The manifestation of this attitude in the Wonder Woman comic series was the tokenism of Steve Trevor, always being “rescued” by his girlfriend, much the same way as Lois is always caught by Clark after plummeting through the air for a bit as she is so often found doing. Both cliches are two sides of the same misogynistic coin.

As I said, there’s definitely something to that. But on the other hand…I mean, Marston seems to be suggesting, at least in this comics sequence, that domestic abuse victims should slug their husbands and tie them up…which maybe wouldn’t work ideally either, but isn’t quite as squicky, at least (or differently squicky, anyway). In addition, a big part of the point here really seems to be an argument about false consciousness. That is, Marston identifies the problem as women downrating themselves (for whatever reason); he wants women to realize that they’re as good as men, or better than men. And he’s also got a very explicit statement that women need to have political power for everyone’s sake…which was the argument women used towards the beginning of the century when they were trying to get the vote (women’s vote was supposed to abrogate a number of moral evils, including drink — temperance and suffrage were closely linked.)

I actually think that claiming women are morally superior to men is a really problematic strategy for feminism — I don’t think it’s true, for one thing, and the distance between rhetoric and reality can be painful. The suffragette movement in England, for example, ended in unhappy success; they did get the vote, but he social transformation they promised because of that didn’t happen, which caused a fair amount of bitterness within the movement. Though, on the other hand, the promise of moral rejuvenation was an effective one in rallying groups who might not otherwise have been interested in women’s political fortunes…basically, all radical movements have to overpromise if they’re going to succeed.

Feminism, or any movement for oppressed people, has always got a tension around the issue of victimization. On the one hand, of course, you need to point out that you are victimized, and emphasize the injustice and how it needs to be changed. On the other hand, nobody likes to see themselves as a victim, and if you emphasize victimization too much, you can end up arguing that your oppression has essentially broken you and made you incapable of equality (this is what happened to slaves following the Revolution; the argument about oppression ended up being used against them; it was claimed they “weren’t ready” for freedom, an argument which was used to justify another hundred years of oppression.) So you need to have a positive vision too; you need to say “Black is Beautiful,” or women are moral beacons, or whatever — you have to say that your particular experience or essence is valuable. But if you go too far in this direction, then it becomes unclear what you’re complaining about, exactly…if oppression hasn’t harmed you, if you’re better off than your oppressors, then why should the oppressors even consider themselves oppressors?

So, yes, Marston is pretty far out on one end of that debate, and it causes real problems when he tries to analyze oppression. And it’s worth pointing that out. But on the other hand, what he really sees himself doing in WW, I think, is encouraging girls to value themselves, and I think that, you know, that’s probably a worthwhile goal as well. Improving self-esteem in girls could even have positive effects on domestic abuse statistics down the road, at least arguably.

Also, I have to say, Steve being rescued by a woman is pretty different than Lois being rescued all the time by Superman. The essence of sexism is disproportion. It means something different to have genre conventions fulfilled (by having a man rescue a woman) and to violate them (by having a woman rescue a man.)

And, anyway, Steve isn’t always rescued by his girlfriend. Sometimes Etta rescues him.

Well, I’ve nattered on kind of endlessly. Let’s finish up; everyone eventually evolve all the way up to ancient Greece, at which point Wonder Woman meets her mom before she (WW) was born, which is sweet, I think. Also, Steve is hunted as a husband by hordes of rope-wielding Amazons.

I like Giganta’s reasoning there, too; masochists love legalistic loopholes in their bondage contracts. Or that’s what Deleuze tells me.

Oh yeah, and Wonder Woman fights Achilles and beats him. And then she unties Steve:

That’s a cute, sexy little flirtation: I can almost see there why one commenter on an earlier post said that Steve and WW actually seem to like each other. Though, of course, the punch line is that you can’t both save the world and get married. That’ll show me for defending Marston’s feminist bona-fides, I guess. Did he really believe that wives needed to stay home and tend to their husbands? On the one hand, both his wife and their mistress worked at various points. On the other hand; his female President in WW#7 and his female ruler in this issue both appeared to be unmarried. I guess when you’re married you need to keep your husband in line full time; it’s only when you’re not tied down to one guy that you can go off and rule them all. Though the mole men seemed to eventually agree to some sort of collective government by their wives…. And his golden era includes a proviso that men and women divide work in and out of the home equally….

In any case, I’ll try to pay a little more attention to Marston’s views on marriage in the issues I’ve got left — only 19 to go….

As long as I’ve been blogging my way through the William Moulton Marston/Harry Peter original run on Wonder Woman, I thought I’d see if I could unearth some of Marston’s other writing as well. Thanks to my trusty University library, I managed to unearth what’s probably his best known essay: “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics,” published in 1944 in the American Scholar, the magazine of Phi Beta Kappa.

As you’d expect from Marston, the essay is somewhat bizarre: a mix of unabashed hucksterism, earnest utopianism, insightful criticism, and what I can only assume was calculated subterfuge. He starts out by claiming that 70 million people read comics every month; a number he gets by taking 18 million (the number of comics magazines sold each month) and multiplying by 4 or 5, since that’s the number of readers who look at every magazine according to “competent surveys.” Then he adds in the figures for the number of kids who read comics…40, 600,000, according to other competent surveys, I guess. Loosely adding all those numbers together gives him something like the 100 million readers of the title — though since he gives no citations for any of his figures, I’m forced to assume that he may well just be pulling them out of his ass.

Be that as it may, Marston goes on to defend comics from their detractors. He does this, not on artistic grounds, but on the basis of popularity and what I think can be technically described as “pseudopsychological nonsense.”. “Eight or nine people out of ten get more emotional ‘kick’ out of seeing a beautiful girl on the stage, the screen, or the picture-magazine page displaying her charms in person, or via camera or artist’s pen, then they drive from verbal substitutes describing her compelling charms. It’s too bad for us ‘literary’ enthusiasts, but it’s the truth nevertheless — pictures tell any story more effectively than any words.” You have to admire the way he slips almost accidentally into the sex element…and then disavows his own interest almost instantly. Who me? I’m a literary enthusiast. You think I write picture stories about scantily clad women in bondage because I like that sort of thing? No, no. In my free time, I get all my kicks from E.B. White.

Anyway, Marston goes on to give a brief history of “picture stories,” starting with the ancients — he was the Scott McCloud of his day, I guess. He bolsters his theories here by gratuitously name-dropping an article by Mr. M. C. Gaines, Marston’s publisher on WW, and presumably a man not immune to flattery.

Marston’s historical arguments may be shaky, but his analysis of his contemporaries is quite astute:

The third comics period began definitely in 1938 with the advent of Superman and constitutes a radical departure from all previously accepted standards of story telling and drama. Comics continuities of the present period are not meant to be humorous, nor are they primarily concerned with dramatic adventure. Their emotional appeal is wish fulfillment. There is no drama in the ordinary sense, because Superman is invincible, invulnerable. he can leap over skyscrapers, fly through the air and catch air-planes, toss battleships around, or repel bullets with his bare skin. Superman never risks danger; he is always, and by definition superior to all menace.

Superman and his innumerable followers satisfy the universal human longing to be stronger than aall opposing obstacles and the equally universal desire to see good overcome evil, to see wrongs righted, underdogs nip the pants of their oppressors, and, withal to experience vicariously the supreme gratification of the deus ex machina who accomplishes these monthly miracles of right triumphing over not-so-mighty might….”

In short, Marston sees Superman as a Mary Sue; a character that gratuitously and obviously fulfills the desires of the young reader. But where Mary Sues these days are generally seen as immature aesthetic disasters, Marston sees in them an opportunity for, as he says, “moral educational benefits.” Marston argues that:

What life-desires to you wish to stimulate in your child? Do you want him (or her) to cultivate weakling’s aims, sissified attitudes. Your youngster may not inherit the muscles to do 100 yards in nine seconds flat, or make the full-back position on an All-American football team. But if not, all the more reason why he should cultivate the wish for power along constructive lines within the scope of his native abilities. The wish to be super-strong is a healthy wish, a vital, compelling, power-producing desire. the more the Superman-Wonder Woman picture stories build up this inner compulsion by stimulating the child’s natural longing to battle and overcome obstacles, particularly evil ones, the better chance your child has for self-advancement in the world.

Marston adds that kids don’t believe that good will triumph over evil, nor that God will make everything all right in the end…but they do understand a hero pounding a bad guy to pulp. Thus, heroes can teach morality — “The Superman-Wonder Woman school of picture-story telling emphatically insists upon heroism in the altruistic pattern. Superman never kills; Wonder Woman saves her worst enemies and reforms their characters.”

Marston admits that comics do have some faults…though none that he can’t fix:

It seemed to me, from a psychological angle, that the comics’ worst offense was their blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as the breath of life. Suppose your child’s ideal becomes a superman who uses his extraordinary powers to help the weak. The most important ingredient in the human happiness recipe still is missing — love. It’s smart to be strong. It’s big to be generous. But it’s sissified, according to exclusively masculine rules, to be tender, loving, affectionate, and alluring. “Aw, that’s girl stuff!” snorts our youn gcomics reader. “Who wants to be a girl? And that’s the point; not even girls want to girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, power. Not wanting to be girls they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peaceloving, as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weak ones. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of a Superman plu all the allure of a good and beautiful woman. This is what I recommended to the comics publisher.

My suggestion was met by a storm of mingled protests and guffaws. Didn’t I know that girl heroines had been tried in pulps and comics and, without exception, found failures? Yes, I pointed out, but they weren’t superwomenthey weren’t superior to men in strength as well as in feminine attraction and love-inspiring qualities. Well, asserted my masculine authorities, if a woman hero were stronger than a man, she would be even less appealing. Boys wouldn’t stand for that; they’d resent the strong gal’s superiority. No, I maintained, men actually submit to women now, they do it on the sly with a sheepish grin because theyr’e ashamed of being ruled by weaklings. Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to and they’ll be proud to become her willing slaves!

Marston goes on to assert that Wonder Woman won a popularity contest over “seven rival men heroes,” a success he attributes not to the writing or drawing but rather to Wonder Woman herself, or rather to “the wonder which is really woman’s when she adds masculine strength to feminine tenderness and allure. The kids who rated Wonder Woman tops in an otherwise masculine galaxy of picture story stars…were saying by their votes, “We love a girl who is stronger than men, who uses her strength to help others and who allures us with the love appeal of a true woman!”

So there’s the latest formula in comics — super-strength, altruism, and feminine love allure, combined in a single character.”

There are several interesting things in all that, I think. First, Marston seems to view Wonder Woman as almost exclusively for boys. Wonder Woman was designed to help boys by legitimizing their desire to submit; Wonder Woman was voted tops because boys love to see a strong woman with, ahem, feminine allure and “love appeal.” It’s an odd argument for a couple of reasons. First, it seems really needlessly obtuse; after all, if Wonder Woman beat seven male heroes, might the reason not have been that the seven male heroes simply split the guy vote, while girls (with no one else to choose) voted overwhelmingly for the female hero? And second…it’s very hard to believe that Marston was in fact, this obtuse. The Wonder Woman stories are just not, by any stretch of the imagination, addressed exclusively to boys. They’re filled with exhortations to girls to be strong, to trust in themselves, to trust in their femininity, and to take control of men. In addition, they make extensive and quite clever use of traditionally female genres, especially fantasy adventure.

In short, Marston definitely wrote for girls as well as for boys — it’s part of the reason so many girls, from Gloria Steinem to Judy Collins, have testified to enjoying his work. So…why not say as much? That seems the more natural argument after all — emphasize that Wonder Woman is a role model for girls, and maybe stay away from the masochistic talk about how boys like to be slaves. Perhaps he just couldn’t help himself, I guess…or maybe he thought that to the American Scholar’s middle-brow readers, his feminism would actually be less acceptable than his (muted) fetish? In any case, I’m certainly curious to know if he ever talked about a female audience for his comic, or about what he hoped to teach girls. I do finally have that Les Daniels book, so perhaps there will be some hints in there….

One last thing: I was caught off guard by the use of “sissified.” Most of the other language here (“allure”” for instance) is familiar enough from the Wonder Woman comic. But I don’t remember ever seeing him call anyone a “sissy.” It’s a weird word for him to use, inasmuch as he seems to really like it when men are sissies — like the llittle girlie men in Wonder Woman #8 for example. Again, hopefully I’ll find some more of his prose and see if I can’t figure out more clearly what he thinks he’s doing, exactly. I mean, I guess my question is, does he really worry about men being sissies? Or is it more than he knows that men worry about being sissies, and they need to find an excuse not to do that? It sort of sounds like he believes the second; that women need to be strong so that men will no longer worry about being weak when they are loving. But then, are men not weak when they submit to a strong woman? Or is the whole appeal that they are weak?

Ah well. Who cares when the essay has…two Harry Peter drawings!

It’s fun to see them in black and white, actually. The first of them makes the explicit feminist statement that Marston was leery of:

The second is pretty hysterical:

The black and white makes this look more cartoony and less children’s-booky than the comics themselves. You can perhaps see Peter’s versatility even more clearly though. WW is stiff and iconic; elegant and posed. The editor, though, is an animated caricature, rushing up from behind the desk with motion lines and smoke out of his phallic pipe; limbs bents, clothes ruffled.

I just checked the Daniels book; it’s not going to tell me who did the coloring for the series I don’t think. Instead we’ve got lots of pictures of — Wonder Woman dolls! Fucking Chip Kidd….

Good lord is that cover fantastic. Peter’s animal drawings are always among the absolute best things he does; the wavery lines are so tactile, and the liberties he take with anatomy, halfway between cartooning and those Renaissance prints where it was clear they’d never seen a rhinoceros, or whatever, but damned if they weren’t going to draw the best of whatever bizarre rhinoceros-like thing had gotten lodged in their heads…I don’t know, it’s late and I’m babbling, but the misshapen ears on that boar, and the look of confusion in its little pig eye, and the way its hooves just sort of stick out stiffly, like it doesn’t know what to do with them… Dayenu, as my people say. But the rest of the drawing is fabulous too; I love the way the motion lines are a compositional device, drawing the attention just off dead center. and WW’s position is really lovely; it’s stiff and weird, like all Peter’s drawings, but there’s also a sense of actual movement. And the back muscles on the gladiator ; they’re not right, but the lines are so mobile that they seem righter than right…and the pattern on that kilt. I love Peter’s red swirly things, these perfect art nouveau patterns dropped into his insane outsider-art compositions.

Also, I like that Peter has chosen to draw this so it looks like Wonder Woman is assaulting some anonymous gladiator with a giant pig. I think (from the interior) that that is actually Steve Trevor, and she’s saving him…but you sure wouldn’t know that to look at it.

Anyway, the plot: it has something to do with the lost continent of Atlantis, which is, improbably, underground. It’s ruled by extraordinarily large and powerful women, which gives Peter a chance to have a lot of fun with scale:

Tiny little baby sailor men. Cute!

Not surprisingly , exact relative sizes are awfully unclear, but in theory the Atlantean men (or “manlings”) are supposed to be unusually small and weak. It’s like that episode of Star Trek the Next Generation, where the crew lands on a planet with powerful women who oppress their male compatriots, and we all learn that sexism is bad because, after all, guys, you wouldn’t like it if it were done to you, right? Except, of course, Marston does like it when it’s done to him. You can almost hear him chuckling maniacally in the background. Helpless sailors! That’s hot! hot! hot!

I talked a little in the discussion of Wonder Woman #7 about how Steve is really played as a himbo; a dumb, hunky slab of cheesecake for the young female reader. There’s certainly more evidence for that here, as you see in the panel below, where Clea, the evil ruler of Atlantis, has Steve brought before her in an interesting ceremonial outfit:

“…sacred serpents! He’s as big as a woman!” indeed. What exactly is she seeing under that loin-cloth that made her start prattling about snakes, I wonder?

Of course, a woman wouldn’t actually have a bigger snake than Steve…except, in Marston, she really might. Marston isn’t just interested in straightforward role reversal, as the Star Trek episode was. He’s interested in something a bit more…queer. With that fabulous headdress and the outfit out of burlesque, Clea might as well be in drag, and Steve’s outfit…well, say no more. As I’ve mentioned before, WW is in some sense Marston’s ideal self; he wants to be a goddess. Part of being female, naturally enough, would be desiring men. In this scene, I think Marston both desires and desires to be both Clea and Steve. The excitement is in the slippage from identity to identity and desire to desire; in the severing and subsequent circulation or diffusion of the phallus. In masochism, the appeal is that you escape the law and your identity in relation to the law in order to become someone and something else — including the phallus itself. That’s what fetishizing the female body is; it’s turning a woman’s body into the phallus — the source of authority and power. So when Clea says “He’s as big as a woman!” she’s actually comparing his phallus to *the* phallus; she is, in other words, fetishizing him right back.

I’ve talked about the agonized, repressed gay content in Cerebus before (to speak of another swords and sandalsish example.) The investment here seems very different though…basically, because, while I guess it might be considered repressed in some sense, it’s just not especially agonized. For Cerebus, holding onto male identity involves a rather desperate rejection of femininity…a rejection which, in turn, carries connotations of homosexuality (if you don’t like women, what do you like?) This quandary has no power over Marston. It’s true that the Steve-Clea relationship and/or the Steve-Marston relationship can be seen as queer…but Marston doesn’t shy away or run scurrying from the implications. He embraces them:

That’s flirting behavior, that is. And sure, he’s punished for it and sentenced to die because he’s just too, too flamboyantly strong. But that’s an excuse, not for torment and agony, but for a expulsive release of testosterone and romping with boars. And, of course before Steve can be crushed by a “mammoth peccary”, as Marston puts it, he’s quickly rescued from phallic immolation by the arrival of Marston-in-drag, aka Wonder Woman.

This sort of thing makes it awfully hard to take seriously Marston’s half-hearted gestures at traditional romance comics tropes…are we really supposed to believe WW and Steve are shy with each other after they’ve rolled around in their underwear with pigs?

Anyway, I also like this scene, where Clea wanders around with a suggestive hose spraying her unsuspecting adversaries as they swoon ecstatically.

Or this one, where WW has concealed herself in a intriguingly shaped projectile:

And then there’s Etta, who’s butchness and artificiality — Parker makes her more and more distorted and dwarfish as the series goes along — could, I think, also be read as a kind of transvestite drag. Certainly, she’s carrying around a big-enough phallic substitute here:

And then there are moments like the below.

WW has frequently been read (starting with Frederic Wertham) as a lesbian fantasy, whether for women or men. The fact that it could almost as easily be read as gay fantasy (again for men or (shades of yaoi) for women) has gotten a lot less attention. The point, though, is less that it’s gay, or straight, or lesbian, or all three, than it is the sloughing off of stable identity in the interest of deliriously clunky role-playing. Thus, in the above image, Marston surely gets off on the idea of two women together, but he’s also as surely identifying with both of them; he’s viewer and role-player, excited by both the lesbian connotations and by the sublimated male impersonation. As Linda Williams writes in Hard Core, her classic study of pornography, sexual identity in masochistic scenarios is “an oscillation between male and female subject positions held simultaneously, in a play of bisexuality, at the level of both object choice and identification.”

The obsession with identity play is also indicated by Marston’s obsession with masks and concealment:

That last one doesn’t include a mask, of course, but it is a case of dual identities and role-playing. Wonder Woman is in her Diana Prince disguise; meanwhile the Atlantean Princess she’s talking to is disguised (not super-effectively, I’ll grant you) as a college football enthusiast. Moreover, the disguises are, I think, meant to be sexy or exciting in large part because of gender ambiguity. Both costumes are butch; Diana in her severe military uniform and the Atalantean in her football outfit. And not satisfied with that, Marston has to hand her the biggest phallic cliche in the book:

Yep, she’s smoking a cigar there. This scene could be lifted, almost as is, and put in a cross-dressing screen comedy of the day, where the joke would be that the agressive, giant, cigar-smoking woman and her uncomfortable, nerdy companion are actually both men. Or it could be dropped into a women in prison movie, and the butchness would connote lesbianism. For Marston it’s both, more or less; the shivers of pleasure come from imagining himself as the powerful, phallus wielding woman and imagining himself dominated by her as the nerdy Diana is…or dominating her, as WW inevitably does:

Of course, we all know that Marston loves, loves, loves everyone to submit to loving authority. But he also loves role-playing, which means he loves drama…and you don’t get a whole lot of drama if everyone is submitting lovingly. Like most masochists, Marston may say he wants to be dominated, but he also wants to rebel — so there can be more domination and more rebellion and etc. etc. It’s not enough for Marston to have the weakling manlings of Atlantis be subjugated; he has to have them rebel and dominate their captors so they can be tied up again too.

It’s interesting in this context how theatrical Peter’s art is; everything looks like it could be taking place on stage. He almost always shows the action form the mid-distance, so entire bodies are visible; close-ups are few and far between. The costumes and backgrounds look more like dress-up and stage sets than like real life. The king with the crown and the cigar really looks like a diminutive gangster playing dress up on a throne too big for him. And the stiffness of Peter’s figures generally suggests tableaux; the scenes look frozen and staged even at their most action adventurey:

The paracutes in that second panel come out of the volcano like jack-in-the-boxes; the motion lines don’t so much rush them from the opening as anchor them to it. And that last panel; the center parachuting pirate almost seems to be posing for the camera . The men in the foreground act as a kind of cinema audience — their hands are even raised as if they’re about to clap.

As long as I’ve worked my way back around to Peter’s art maybe I’ll finish with these:

I love those arrows tieing themselves in knots around the plane, and that adorable, tiny, misshapen whale on the map. I just ordered the Les Daniels WW book, and I’m hoping it’ll maybe tell me a little more about Peter’s background and his relationship with Marston. You can’t help but wonder what he thought about all this stuff; he certainly embraced the fetish aspects enthusiastically enough. But then, maybe he would have been just as happy drawing miniature cetaceans….

WW at this point seems to have gone back to being 4 times a year, after an issue or two of pretending to be 6 times a year. I couldn’t figure out how Peter was going to draw a page a day plus, and apparently neither could he.

That’s the Marston/Peter cover for Wonder Woman #7. And this is the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine:

I talked about the Ms. Magazine cover here and here already, so I won’t go into what I see as its weaknesses. In any case, this isn’t necessarily the best Harry G. Peter cover ever either….though I do like a lot of the details. The stylized curlicues of the women’s hair in the foreground, for instance, and the tension lines in the fabric of the banner at the corners, and the frills on the architecture int he back, and the way WW’s fist at the center of the composition is too small, making the whole perspective go vertiginously kablooey.

But what I really wanted to point out was how different the two visions are. The Ms. Magazine cover sees a female presidency as a violent, weirdly monstrous event — the female president is a kind of King Kong, laying waste to man’s world. For Marston and Peter, a female president seems much more natural (albeit 1000 years in the future.) WW isn’t destroying MegaTokyo; she’s giving a campaign speech, which is more or less what you’d expect a Presidential candidate to do (though maybe not dressed in a swimsuit.) Moreover, there are men in that audience cheering her on — a reminder again that Marston sees female empowerment as benefiting men as much as (or maybe more than) women.

As the cover suggests, this is the most explicitly political Marston effort yet. Hippolyta, it seems, has a magic sphere, which allows her to see into the future. (There’s some hard deterministic nonsense about how the future is set ineluctably by the past, but I think it’s just a plot device rather than actual sincere crankery.) And in the future, it turns out, everyone will realize that women are better than men, and so women will rule the world by common acclamation, spreading peace and prosperity and the end of war. Plus, as a bonus, there will be one-world government. It’s Dave Sim’s worst nightmare, basically…though ultimately I think Marston’s future visions are even nuttier than Sims’. Or at least, they’re more entertaining:

Yes, in the future, liberated secretaries will dress in mini-skirts and submit themselves to routine mind control. Because “when women choose their own styles they’re bound to be picturesque and alluring,” and because when women choose their own career they’ll prefer to be turned into male-voice-controlled automatons.

I’m always a sucker for futures past, and Marston’s particular vision of a 1930s feminist future is hard to resist. On the one hand, gender roles remain the same as ever; Diana has been a secretary for 1000 years, and doesn’t really seem to have any ambition to do anything else. And yet, on the other hand….when forced, and almost despite herself, she goes right from being a secretary to running for President, with Etta as her VP. And she’s successful too, since, as Marston tells us, “Diana’s able speeches and Etta’s humor appeal equally to men and women.”

Diana is forced to run for president because the current office-holder, “Mistress President”, refuses to run against Steve Trevor, who has been nominated by the men’s party. Steve comes off worse here than anytime so far in the series, I think. Not that he’s evil at all…but he’s a completely brainless bimbo, who sticks a pipe in his mouth to prevent himself from absent-mindedly drooling all over his ripppling muscles.

Thanks to the mooning-women vote, and to ballot stuffing, Steve wins…but soon falls out with his crooked vice-President, who is named, rather inevitably, Manly. Manly catches Steve and puts him in some cryogenic death trap, which is especially uncomfortable because Trevor’s wearing short-shorts.

That outfit Peter has desinged for Steve, let me just emphasize again, couldn’t be much more ridiculous. It’s obviously a super-hero suit, with the US emblazoned on it…almost a Robin costume, actually. But the way Steve’s standing, straight and stiff, emphasizes the discomfort and awkwardness and, indeed, the vulnerability of it. Which is to say…I think Marston and Peter are fetishizing him. He’s supposed to be a sex symbol, and his predicament, I think, is supposed to be sexy. If Marston had a women trapped in that way in that position, it would be deliberately provocative — and I think it’s supposed to be here, as well.

You see some of the same impulse in this drawing:

This is at the end of this segment of the story; WW has freed Steve and Diana has been acknowledged as the victor of the Presidential race. Nobody blames Steve for his actions, because he’s so dumb and so cute — and in this image, he really does look dumb and cute. He’s still wearing that outfit, which is the only one he has, and he’s off to the side, appearing (through Peter’s weird use of scale) significantly smaller than Diana. Indeed, with the scale and the shorts, and the oddly blank, expectant expression on his face, he really seems like a child waiting for his mother. The two women, on the other hand, are both impossibly thin and decked out in flattering, elegant dresses. Diana looks, frankly, hot, and extremely in control — which is, I believe, intended to make her even more hot (I think Peter gets the effect in part by making her shoulders too wide; it makes her seem bigger and stronger than life.) But I think the scene is designed to fetishize Steve too; his childishness, awkwardness, and vulnerability, make him appealing, manipulable, in need of protection — his extreme stupidity is part of his charm. Men are like children, who need to be controlled by mothering women. Maybe I’m completely off-base, but it seems like girls might quite enjoy this vision of an elliptically sexualized romantic object/child surrogate. Certainly Marston does, anyway.

The back and forth between mother/child relationships and female political authority runs throughout the issue. It’s most charming right at the beginning of the book, when WW’s Mom asks her to come back to Paradise Island for the Harvest Festival (that’s Thanksgiving for you non-pagans.) WW decides to surprise her mom by appearing in her Diana Prince outfit. Her mother is indeed, surprised, and then delighted:

I think that’s just a really charming panel. Not least because it echoes the last one in this sequence from WWs origin in WW#1:

Hippolyta lifts her adult daughter as if she were a child (and again, Peter adjusts scale, so that Diana seems far smaller than her mother.) The intimacy and joy there taps into the adult desire to see the child remain a child…and into the pride in seeing her grow up. The decision to have WW dressed as Diana is inspired, and emphasizes the way in which Diana, who dresses in real clothes and has a real job, is much more grown-up than WW is.

This is, incidentally, one of the first times I’ve seen Marston do anything interesting with the secret identity. With male heroes, the secret identity division is often about male bifurcation; the distance between ideal masculine and individual male. Here, though, the split seems to be about child and adult; Wonder Woman is like a kid playing dress-up. In this sense, Diana may be as fun a fantasy object as WW; a kid can imagine being powerful and admired like WW, and can also imagine working and being a regular adult like…well, like Mom. I also love Hippolyta’s dialogue: “You little mischief!..I didn’t recognize you until you laughed!” I presume the main point is that the laughter let her know something was amiss…but when I read it first I took it to mean that she recognized her daughter by WW’s individual laugh.

After that very sweet scene, we move right on to major fucking weirdness. Hippolyta shows WW the future in the magic crystal…and the first thing she shows her is the death-bed scene of Etta Candy’s mother, Sugar Candy (believe it or not.) Etta has turned herself into a chemistry whiz in an effort to cure her mother, but all to no avail. So WW brings out some of the water of life. This only affects Amazons, but Etta, using her newfound scientific knowhow, drops some candy into it, releasing vitamin L-3, and — hey-presto! — the aged mother is filled with vim and vigor and there’s a little birdy singing outside the window:

By replicating the figure and especially the dress, you get a panel that’s all frills and folds and lace, conveying a kind of oversaturated voluptuous girlishness. The fact that Sugar’s first thought is for her husband so she can go “dancing” is certainly a subliminally sexual. On the one hand, the life-potion is a gimmick, to allow all of WW’s supporting characters to live on into the future storyline. But Marston also ties it back into his own fetishes; mothers for Marston are sexy, and the scene is about the excitement of releasing that sensuality.

Here’s another bizarre moment:

That’s Mistress President being tied up by former prisoners. But look at the prisoners tieing her up. They’re misshapen alien children out of something like Junko Mizuno. The panel is fetishizing, not just B&D, but specifically mother/child masochistic play.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, psychoanalysts often argue that all masochism is tied up (as it were) in a mother-child dynamic. Masochists are thought to be identifying with their mother in a confused Oedipal dynamic. For Marston, certainly, the idea of “loving authority” is a fairly explicit maternal alternative to the male paradigm of authority-as-law. You can see that pretty clearly in the sequence below:

Paula’s “loving submission” to mother Hippolyta is followed by an explanation that woman are more fit to rule because they “are more ready to serve others selflessly.” The model of authority is feminine and maternal, with ruler as mother and subjects as children.

Of course, bad mothers are quite exciting too.

No, we never learn what she did to the dog-woman to break her will. Maybe she made her stare at the pattern on that yellow pillow behind her. I could look at that for a good long while myself…whoa, getting kind of sleepy there….

Ahem. Anyway, this is all pretty much good clean fun…or good fun, anyway. Things get a little dicey, though, when Marston stops fetishizing metaphorical mother/child relationships and starts fetishizing actual children. He moves perilously close to doing the second in the last story of this book. As, for example, here:

The rigid disciplining of children is, in itself, fairly nauseating; add in Marston’s fetishistic investment in submission, and you get something which is — well, vile. I think vile is the right word. He’s basically suggesting torturing children for his sexual pleasure. Of course, he adds in layers of sanctimony in order to deny that that’s what’s going on — it’s actually all for the little kiddies’ good, you see:

The story goes on to suggest that Gerta, Paula’s daughter — the kid who throws the piano — will come to a horrible end because she doesn’t like to sit still for hours at a time just to satisfy Marston’s kinks. Wonder Woman, though, educates her by opportunistically harnassing Gerta’s love for her mother, Paula. This does give Peter a chance to draw a great octopus, with beautifully textured arms and a ludicrous, gigantic cartoony eye, but otherwise the situation can’t be said to be especially pretty.

The problem here is that, in raising children — and for that matter, in general — the ideal of loving submission can actually be even more oppressive than strict obedience to an arbitrary law. The father only cares what you do and how you behave; as long as you don’t break the law, you can think and feel what you wish. Of course, sometimes it’s impossible not to break the law, and, indeed, the point of even having the law is to get people to break it so they can be punished — but, still, the point is, you’re dealing with externals. Whereas, with the kind of mother love that Marston seems to be advocating, it’s about internal acquiescence — using love as a lever to break the will. That’s all well and good between consenting adults, but using it against kids is really not okay — especially since schools really have used this nonsense against kids, and for a long time. Here, for example, are some hints for psychological discipline for ushers at the Jesuit school at Port-Royal in 1615:

“A close watch must be kept on the children, and they must never be left alone anywhere, whether they are in ill or good health… this constant supervision should be exercised gently and with a certain trustfulness calculated to make them think that one loves them, and that it is only to enjoy their company that one is with them. This will make them love their supervision rather than fear it. (Aries, p. 265)”

“…calculated to make them think that one loves them.” Kind of says it all.

Obviously, kids need to be socialized, and the relationship with parents is one important way that that gets to happen. But there’s socialization and socialization; reasonable demands and unresasonable ones. And when you start to demand that a child substitute a state functionary like a teacher for the parent, and then you insist that she acquiesce to all that functionary’s demands with loving submission — well, you get a situation where a kid is labeled as evil because she doesn’t want to sit in one place all day.

So at the beginning of the story, Marston seems able to express the mother-daughter bond with both natural ease and sincerity. In the middle, he obsessively treats that same bond as metaphor and fetishizes its, and at the end he proposes a system of child-rearing which is both queasily sexualized and frankly monstrous. From which we can conclude that Marston was a very odd duck, and that people who love kids shouldn’t necessarily be teachers — or, at the very least, shouldn’t be allowed to craft the utopian school systems of the future.

_____________

Thanks to Bert Stabler for alerting me to that quote from the loving Jesuits.

Thanks to Glaurung, I now know that Marston wrote WW up through issue #28. So, 24 more to go, starting with this one:

In a post a couple of days ago I mentioned that Marston doesn’t actually seem all that interested in magic, myth and imagination in themselves. It’s true, of course, that WW’s origin is informed by Greek mythology, and that the Amazons are essentially supposed to be ancient Greeks, worship Greek Gods, and so forth. But there’s little effort to mine those myths for mystery, or awe as Neil Gaiman does in Sandman, or as Marley does in Dokebi bride. Instead, Marston mixes magic and science together more or less indiscriminately in the interest of goofy fun and/or catering to his fetishes around mental control, hypnosis, and so forth.

Thus, issue #5 features a villain who is part scientist, part spiritualist, and all…god knows what, really.

Doctor Psycho is this little scientific genius with a beautifully ugly caricatured face who hates women because his fiance betrayed him and he ended up in jail and then he goes and hypnotizes her and uses her to conduct spiritual experiments and turns himself into an ectoplasmic doppelganger of George Washington who issues oracular pronouncements about the dangers of allowing women to contribute to the war effort. Also somewhere in there he makes his rival in love swallow radium. Oh, yeah, and he’s inspired by Martian emissaries from Ares who don’t want women to contribute to the war effort because then women will become too powerful and will dominate men.

What was I talking about, anyway?

Oh right. So, as I was saying, the point here is that Marston veers back and forth between science and magic — seamlessly isn’t the right word — more like with an unconscious, drunken stagger. In the page below, for example, we start at the top with our villain killing a victim with radiation poisoning, move right on to hypnosis (no explanation for how he learned how to do hypnosis, incidentally) and end up (below the cut) with ectoplasm spilling out all over the place — ectoplasm that Dr. Psycho can use to turn himself into a dead ringer for John L. Sullivan, we learn at the top of the following page.

One of the reasons this sort of crazed shifting of gears works so well is the art. Peter is a deceptively supple illustrator; his stiff poses tend to bely how fluid his lines are and how quickly he can switch modes. For instance, in this illustration, where Steve (as per usual) is getting pwned:

Steve’s body and face are, in typical Peter fashion, stiff and not especially expressive. But then you’ve got Dr. Psycho standing there with his enormous head and preposterous eyebrows, looking for all the world like he’s strolled in from an editorial cartoon. And, of course, there’s the very gestural curly smoke-ectoplasm just sitting there on Steve’s chest. It’s a preposterous image, with different levels of reality clunking against each other apparently unconsciously — it’s almost like an incongruous arrangement of clip art. Except that Peter’s style, his moving hand, really does pull everything together — the lines on Steve’s uniform, for example, have the same tactile motion as the ectoplasm splot. Peter creates a world where both scientific laws and magic seem equally hokey and equally vivid; where anything can become part of the clunky tableaux.

Here’s another example of what I’m talking about:

What’s that, you ask? Why it’s Wonder Woman and her scientific genius friend Paula riding a giant Amazon Sky Kanga to the moon in order to rescue the goddess Diana from the cruel grip of Ares. What else would it be? And, more importantly, why hasn’t DC taken this image and blown it up and released it as a wall-sized poster so I can fucking buy one? Because holy shit is that completely, insanely beautiful. The different weight lines making up the space-kangaroo’s hide are just so lovely — and the bizarre way Peter has the creature foreshortened makes it look truly cosmically sized, like it’s head is just disappearing into the distance. It reminds me of some of Winsor McCay’s animal drawings, though clumsier and less finished in a way that really sends me. (Also, I love that whip in the lower left; all one snaky, narrowing line.)

The full-page extravaganza has to be the Sky Kanga image that owns my heart…but it’s a close battle between that and the ones where we see the space kangaroo hanging out next to Grecian architecture. (Did you know the Greeks actually trained kangaroos? For space travel. God’s truth.)

There’s actually a pseudo-scientific explanation for why the Kangaroo is able to fly through space, incidentally; “upper space is not empty but dotted with thousands of gravity-marooned fragments from whirling planets” y’see. So it’s a scientific Grecian sky kanga, rather than a mystical Grecian sky-kanga. But the real point is clearly not any kind of effort at actual scientific verisimilitude (such as with Spiderman, or even Superman), nor mystical wonder, but trippy adventure nuttiness. I mentioned in my last post that Marston’s WW reminds me a lot of the Oz books…and it’s also reminiscent of the Doctor Doolittle stories — in fact, if I recall correctly, Doolittle flies to the moon on the back of a giant moth. I wonder if Marston was thinking of that?

Oh, okay, I can’t resist: more sky kanga porn:

I love how the kangaroo has seemingly grown to about twice the size to accommodate all the people who need to ride on it.

Again, last time I talked a bit about the way that children’s literature can dovetail with eroticism, and how that fits nicely into Marston’s fetishes. And there’s certainly plenty of bondage in this issue too, what with the hypnotism and the mersmerism and scenes of all of Ares’ female slaves on Mars, and Diana’s archers penchant for using arrows that tie you up rather than kill you and so forth. But I think it’s also worth pointing out that writing in a children’s literature tradition is just in general a good way to appeal to children, of whatever gender. Silliness and lots of action; kids like that. Marston gave it to them. Why wouldn’t these comics have been popular? I’m just remembering a Kyle Baker quote where in describing the Hawkman story he was working on, he said, “There’s also action on Dinosaur Island, because dinosaurs are always cool.” I feel like the giant Kangaroo has a similar rationale. Kangaroos jumping to the moon…that’s always cool. (Well, I think it is anyway.)

Along those lines, I was also thinking about the Steve Trevor romance, such as it is. A commenter (I can’t find the exact comment; my apologies) said recently that he really liked the Steve Trevor/Wonder Woman romance, because it seemed like they were really in love; he pointed especially to the fact that Steve always uses terms of endearment like “angel!” to refer to WW.

I have to say, I really don’t see this. For the most part, the romance between WW and Steve seems more notional than actual. Steve does refer to her with excessive endearments…but that just seems part of their general lack of communication. For instance, in the scenes below, Steve’s life has been threatened, and WW is worried…and Steve just keeps laughing and laughing like a jackass.

For an actual relationship, that’s deeply wrong; even if he isn’t worried about getting hurt himself, he should be worried about how WW feels.

And despite all the endearments, they never exactly seem all that intimate; even when she rescues him, the closest they get is holding hands at arms length. Not even a chaste kiss:

Compare the very next panels, in which WW rescues Dr. Psycho’s wife:

This woman who WW hardly knows gets significantly more cuddling than Steve does. This is typical, I think; WW has plenty of close, even sensual relationships, but they’re all with other women, not with Steve. Here she is with her Mom, for example:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen her share such casual intimacy with Steve. And, then, of course, she’s always getting tied to other women, like her buddy Paula…..

I’ve talked a little in other places about the importance of romance to genre literature for girls. And I think that that holds true. However…I think there is some sort of age cut off there. I mean, from my experience with my son’s classmates, even 4 and 5 year old girls are more interested in marriage and romance, in some sense, than their male peers. But that interest is pretty abstract — you know, they say, “I’m going to marry *that* boy!” but they don’t mean they actually want to marry that boy, or even hold his hand at this stage. As Eric B. said in comments to my much maligned Spider-Girl post

My daughter hates female superheroes that are directly derivative of male superheroes. She likes Wonder Woman ok when the story is decent (a dicey prospect), but prefers The Flash (Silver Age reprints) as her favorite. Perhaps it does make sense to market (and write) a title like “Spidergirl” to young girls…but will they be buying? I’m not so sure. Maybe some 8 year old girls want romance, but I think what they actually want is action, adventure, and humor…just like 8 year old boys. For these things, superhero comics are perfectly fine.

I think young girls do like a bit of romance…but they don’t want you to go overboard with it. Given that, it seems like the Steve/WW romance is just about right; it’s there, but it’s not especially obtrusive or fraught. WW isn’t constantly worrying about whether Steve likes her, or even whether he’s going to find out her secret identity, the way Clark Kent worries about Lois Lane. She doesn’t pine after Steve except in the most perfunctory way; she just saves him and he’s grateful and then she moves on to share intimate moments with her real friends — and just as is the case with most young girls, her most important friends tend to be other girls.

And, when there are close physical relationships with boys, they tend to be worked out through other means:

That’s Dr. Psycho coming at you, giant mug dead center, while Etta and the Holiday College gang chases him with paddles.

Again, it’s amazing how competent and generally tough Etta is, and how much she gets to do in these stories. Originally, looking at her, I wondered what the hell Marston was doing. This goofy, obese, monomaniacal buffoon — are we supposed to laugh at her? Identify with her? Or what? But the more I read it, the more it’s clear that the answer is, yes, both. How different is Etta, really, from Cookie Monster — certainly one of the most beloved creations for children? Kids love to eat and fight; Etta loves to eat and fight; ergo, kids would like Etta. She certainly gives Peter a chance to show he can do visual slapstick with the best of ’em:

I love those giant swoops, and you can feel that woman’s face hitting the floor. Or how about this:

I mean, who would you rather hang out with, poncy Steve with his oh-so-proper “oh, excuse me, I’ll accooooomodate you,” pole so far up your butt that you’ve got perfect posture even in a fist-fight — OR, with Etta, who beats up two guys at once while yodeling and apparently having the time of her life? It’s not much of a contest…which is why it’s Etta who gets to put WW’s lasso back on her hip while Steve is off somewhere in the background playing with his gun.

_________________

I did drift away from talking as much about the bondage in this post. So just in case you’re suffering withdrawal:

Hopefully that’ll hold you till next week.

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

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

and hot Chinese girls showing off their whip scars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey! Is that Mort Weisinger?)

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

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

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

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

because if you shirk authority, Aphrodite will reprimand you:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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