My Favorite Childhood Softporn

Posted on June 14, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

It’s 1977, so I’m eleven, older if the magazine I found in one of my cousins’ bedrooms wasn’t his most recent newsstand purchase. The cover price is $1.50. I paid $8 after pulling it from a vendor’s long box at the Roanoke Comicon. Frank Frazetta painted it in 1971 for Warren Publishing’s planned POW!, a magazine that was never published. I don’t know what his fee was, but Warren must have paid it, since they used it six years later for Eerie.

The timing is no mystery. No. 81 is cover-dated February, so it was on newsstands after the Christmas release of King Kong. My father probably took me to see the remake that same month. I was annoyed that the promotional poster featured King Kong straddling the twin towers, while in the movie he has to take a running leap. The poster hung on my bedroom wall for years. It’s also on the Eerie back cover.

I was a Frazetta fan in middle school and high school, but I doubt I recognized the artist as a sixth grader. “Queen Kong,” like most of his other artwork, is about titillation. It’s a picture of a giant naked woman. Warren Publishing used it on the cover to sell copies of the issue to heterosexual males. My eleven-year-old self felt it too–but I was puzzled by the nonchalant placement of the magazine on my cousin’s bed, his bedroom door left wide open. Where was the Catholic shame? I apparently still felt enough residual embarrassment that, after giving into nostalgic urges, I did not share my new purchase with my fourteen-year-old son on our drive home from Roanoke.

And yet if you’re going to indulge in softporn, it’s not the worst choice. Type a Google search, and you’ll find Caroline Liddell includes “Queen Kong” on her Pinterest page “Images of Powerful Women,” explaining: “The male fear of what happens when women refuse to behave according to expected gender stereotypes–they run amok! It’s a wonder we all haven’t climbed up the Empire State building, swatting away annoying little gnat like buzzing planes since the vote made us all too big for our britches!!”

Maybe Frazetta was influenced by Dick Giordana’s Gulliver-esque cover art for the July 1971 issue of Lois Lane.

Those are actualy tiny Justice League clones tying her down, but the effect is the same. Gloria Steinem, a former assistant at Warren’s Help! magazine, also featured a Kong-sized Wonder Woman on a 1972 Ms. cover:

But not even a titillated eleven-year-old could mistake Eerie for second-wave feminism. Look over the previous year of covers, and all of the women are damsels in distress incapable of saving themselves from the monster of the month.

Rape is a thinly-coated subtext.

Frazetta, one of Warren’s most employed cover artists, was a big fan of women-in-peril. Each sprawls uselessly on the ground while a muscular hero battles to protect her. In terms of composition, the women are foreground, the heroes are central, and the on-coming threats are furthest from the viewer. In order to be heroic, the hero must be smaller than the threat, and so the woman crouches to give him comparative stature. The pose is inherently absurd, but the repetition is comic.

But Frazetta was okay with women-in-peril minus the heroes too. That sometimes requires her to take a more active position, occasionally substituting twirling hair for the missing hero’s combat gestures. Sometimes Frazetta even reverses angles.

When not in peril, Frazetta women fall into typical good girl and bad girl poses, the eroticism unmitigated by other action. Rather than presenting their backs, they face the viewer, though only a seductress offers direct eye contact.

Though all of Frazetta’s women are sexualized, and many are imperiled, not all are powerless–or their power is not always exclusively sexual. Erase the heroes, and the threatening animals can become an extension of the woman’s power.

Although the body of a Frazetta woman is too idealized to be monstrous in itself, she can command other larger and more monstrous bodies.

Which is why “Queen Kong” is unique. When not climbing the Empire State Building, Frazetta’s Fay Wray is just another seductress or imperiled-woman-sans-hero.

But Queen Kong is the monster herself. She follows the gender-flipping impulse of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, the 1958 knock-off of The Amazing Colossal Man. Although previews warned that actress Allison Hayes, “once a beautifully voluptuous woman,” would become “the Most Grotesque Monstrosity of All,” Hayes appears no different after her transformation. It is simply the sight of a giant woman (even an initially unconscious one) that produces Horror, Shock, Frenzy, and Devastation!

Queen Kong is beautiful and revolting too. Since all Frazetta women are first and foremost sexual objects, her body remains proportionally unchanged, but the context establishes her monstrous size. Her twirling hair isn’t emblematic of her gendered helplessness anymore. It is an extension of her combat pose, a nearer equivalent to a hero’s bow or sword. And though the foregrounded biplane is nearly her size, she is larger than the threats circling her–and so compositionally larger than Frazetta’s typical heroes.

Queen Kong embodies what Carol J. Clover terms “the female victim-hero,” that gender-disrupting monstrosity born from Stephen King’s 1974 Carrie and first embodied by Sissy Spacek in the 1976 film adaptation–both still popular when Eerie No. 81 shipped. We’re happy when Carrie kills all those high school bullies–just like we rooted for Kong against those pesky biplanes.

Provided, of course, the sympathetic monster knows when to die. “Monster” shares its etymology with “warn” and “demonstrate,” and a giant woman usurping King Kong’s crowning spectacle is a warning against and a demonstration of 70s gender revolution. Frazetta doesn’t paint her corpse after its plummet, but her death is implied. Queen Kong’s beautiful revolt must fail. Even a titillated eleven-year-old reading softporn comics on his cousin’s bed understood that.

Frank Miller Triumphant

Posted on May 2, 2016 by Ng Suat Tong

Frank Miller (c. 2016) is the Donald Trump of comics. Not merely because he’s demonstrated some ebullient racism, not because he really hates Muslims, not because of his warped ideas about women, but because of the general incoherence of his vision. The sad thing is that Miller considers Trump a bit of a “buffoon.”

There’s a whole article to be written about Miller’s political beliefs from the 1980s to the 2010s: how a man who wrote a satire on Reagan and Nuclear Armageddon could transform (?) in latter years into such a reactionary (presumably he always was one); how an artist who created a comic about an all conquering female ninja and her masochistic, castrated male partner (he only gets an erection when he submits) could come to see women in latter years as harlots. I guess Freudians would put this down to a Madonna-Whore complex.

Frank Miller the thinker is a slightly knotty problem, but there’s nothing especially complex about the drawing hand of Frank Miller circa 2016. The one time master of dynamic movement and page composition has hit rock bottom and his fans aren’t amused.

He has a 12-page back-up story in The Dark Knight III: The Master Race #4 which is little more than one big fight scene with some barely sketched out characters just limply hanging in blank space. Then Aquaman appears in all his shoddy glory and…the end. This is a rigorous reflection of the story in the main body of the comic which is also little more than an extended fight scene between Superman and his daughter, with Batman and Carrie Kelley as spectators. Remember the scene in The Dark Knight Returns where Batman beats Superman to a bloody pulp under some street lights like the lowlife street mugger he is? Well, the new comic is yet more fanservice for Batfans who think the Man of Steel sucks (Miller is the inspiration here, not the cause).

But it’s not all corrupt—if you take individual panels out of context you can still see some remnants of the old artist. A silhouette here and some adequate superhero posing there.

Still, no one really cares about Miller’s subliterate backup story; the internet is far more disgruntled by his series of covers for DC. The most recent culprit is his portrait of Wonder Woman for a DK3 #4 variant cover.

Yet for me, this seems closer to that time when Trump emerged from a relaxing spa a few months back and said that he would be friendly with Russia—which is infinitely preferable to World War 3 I should add.

Yes, she looks a bit sullen but not everything needs to be fun and games a la Marston and Peter. He’s on song again because of the nostalgia he has for the warrior-child motif from his days as a fan of Lone Wolf and Cub. The thing isn’t conventionally erotic or pornographic; this Wonder Woman doesn’t want to make love to you; she doesn’t even want to be tied up with her sorority girlfriends. She just wants to beat you up, hence the gorilla-like stance with her fists on the ground. The breasts are a wee bit big but they’re covered and it could just be the armor doing the talking. The bicycle shorts are cool and the stars quite well drawn. Anyone who knows anything about recent Miller will tell you that this is “decent” Miller as opposed to OMFG Miller. To wit:

I will accept intimations that this image is a natural extension of Miller’s penchant for night spots of all sorts in his sequential work, and thus a homage to drag queen clubs; maybe a bad homage but a homage nonetheless.

Every few months, Miller releases his new modernist vision of superheroes to the world to the general consternation of the Twittersphere. And every time, one of these images appears, the internet expresses equal parts astonishment, outrage, and delight that something so grotesque should exist in this universe. It’s like stepping on some dog poo just as you’re about to get into work—you have to tell someone because it just stinks. If you don’t, they’ll find out and then where would you be?

Everytime one of these things hits the stands, it’s as if Miller is pulling out his dick and saying, “Fuck you, DC! And fuck your pet rabbit!” The most obvious screw you was his infamous Superman with a package (he packs to the right) splash page/cover.

Miller fans point to moments like these as expressions of his genius and his innate feminist instincts—the drawing hand may be withering but that brain! It still works and wants to let the supermen (and their cocks) have it as good as the superwomen.

The people who go to conventions and collect original art were well apprised of this paradigm shift in Miller’s abilities at least a few months in advance of the general public, with responses ranging from delight at owning a hand drawn masterpiece from the Master to earnest attempts at retrieving whatever vestiges of dignity remained in the art—the equivalent of trying to pick a really dry piece of snot from your nostrils. Utterly disgusting for all concerned.

Any hesitation to declare this a sharp deterioration in artistic prowess does not simply reside in the level of respect Miller has garnered over the years from the fan community but the simple fact that you simply don’t make jokes about the afflicted. And Miller has looked pretty ill for some years (the exact nature of his ailment is a mystery). The internet gasped with incredulity when Miller took a photo with Stan Lee recently.

But there’s every indication that he’s on the mend. The recent photos while far from hearty are still a significant improvement over those from not so long ago. Like a mud-caked Batman in The Dark Knight Triumphant, Miller is having it out with the Mutant Leader. Something is telling him to stop with the art but he’s not listening to it; and that’s all for the best.

So if you’re sick (and there is by no means any public confirmation of this) and are still able to support yourself, I think more power to you. And if you want to do a Dark Knight IV all by your lonesome in years to come, well, I guess why not—DC deserves it, and fuck “artistic legacy.” But, you know, get Klaus Janson to help out a bit I think, now that you’ve both kissed and made up. Because there’s really no shame in getting help, especially when not getting help results in this:

These monstrous ninja zombies are of course depictions of Miller most famous creation, Elektra; which sort of makes sense considering her resurrection in Miller’s early Daredevil comics. I guess if you created the character, you get to decide if the lady has flat-rectangular shaped nipples or has a tattoo of Matt Murdock on her left thigh or has glow in the dark areolae. There’s little doubt that Miller considers most of these images transcendent spank material.

Speaking of which, how much do you think this wank material is worth? $2000 maybe? You need to account for the fact that we’ve had several suppositories of Quantitative Easing for close on 10 years (though with nary an effect on inflation). So maybe $4000-5000? Miller is a living legend in superhero circles afterall. Apparently a nice big Batman sketch like this goes for somewhere in the region of $10-12K.

The Elektras? 8.5-9.5K. There were nasty rumors circulating that customers who bought an Elektra stood a better chance of getting a Batman. When I heard about this from a fellow collector, I assumed it was a buy one and get one free deal. But no chance, Frank Miller (and his handlers) are nothing if not great businessmen.

Which only goes to show that you don’t need close readings or a smattering of comics history to understand the baseline ethic at work here. When exciting new conceptions of the decaying female form are greeted with ready wallets, then Capitalism dictates that we sell them. As for the rest, DC will just have to suck it up because they started it first.

Wonder Woman in Batman vs. Superman

Posted on December 3, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

There’s a new (new!) Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer. Watch it now!

Online reaction seems pretty skeptical, centering on Jesse Eisenberg’s jittery camp. People don’t want jittery camp from their supervillains anymore, I guess. No love for Frank Gorshin.

Anyway, as you’ll see if you can make it to the end, Gal Gadot shows up as Wonder Woman right at the close, in a moment also played for cutesy laughs. Doomsday (I guess that’s Doomsday) shoots some sort of special effect thing at Batman, and our dour hero is about to be incinerated, when Wonder Woman leaps in with her shield. “Is she with you?” Superman asks, with Henry Cavill demonstrating that he’s got nice comic timing. “I thought she was with you,” Batman replies in grim dark bat voice.

Part of the joke is about the wrong-footed testosterone. Wonder Woman, as a woman, should belong to either Superman or Batman. But (feminism!) she doesn’t. The conflicted bromance m/m romantic comedy (complete with meet cute at the trailer’s beginning) is interrupted; the gritty ballet of manly men thumping each other gives way to the sit-com shuffle of manly men belching in confusion as the woman of the house swoops in to be competent.

William Marston, Wonder Woman’s creator, would probably find a bit to like here; Wonder Woman as invader of man’s world (metaphorically and literally) resonates with his original themes to some degree, and of course it’s nice to have her saving the bat dude rather than the other way around. The perspective, though, is inevitably wrong way round. Wonder Woman, the original comic, started out after all with Steve Trevor invading Paradise Island, and even in Man’s World, Diana was surrounded by sorority girls and fellow Amazons, so that Steve was always the lone dude in a female community.

The whole point of the original Wonder Woman was that Wonder Woman was the standard; women were the normal thing, and men were the sometimes odd, sometimes sexy, but always secondary other. Wonder Woman in Dawn of Justice is heroic, but she’s heroic through the eyes, and from the perspective, of the two guys whose relationship is the title of the film. Which isn’t surprising, really, but does mean that, Supergirl, Jessica Jones, Buffy, or any superhero show where the woman is in the title, is going to be truer in many ways to Marston’s vision than the character called Wonder Woman in a film titled Batman vs. Superman.

Is a Feminist Wonder Woman a Defeminized Wonder Woman?

Posted on June 2, 2015 by Philip Smith

I have been reading a lot about Wonder Woman recently. Actually, I have been reading a lot about Darna recently, but it is very difficult to theorise Darna without turning to theories about Wonder Woman because, as readers of this blog are no doubt aware, the Wonder Woman comics can often seem to be to the study of superhero comics as gravity is to physics; they were there (almost) from the beginning of the genre, they have been at the center of many important debates, and, despite being the subject of work by some of our best minds, one has the sense that we have barely scratched the surface of all there is to be said about them.

I would like to center this discussion on an incarnation of Wonder Woman who exists only in a single image (discussed in two separate posts), created by one Aaron Diaz, proprietor of the webcomic Dresden Codak and blog Indistinguishable from Magic. This incarnation of Wonder Woman is noteworthy, I believe, because Diaz is highly engaged in issues of gender representation in popular culture and one finds in his work a palpable feminist agenda (I should probably add, in the interest of full disclosure, that I am a long-time fan and supporter of Diaz’s work). While, in my argument below, I read Diaz’s work as a compelling intervention, I nonetheless believe that his Wonder Woman creates problems with regard to gender even as she solves others, thereby opening up interesting questions with regard to female superherodom.

Diaz’s Wonder Woman was created in direct response to DC’s New 52, but also provided an opportunity for him to address some long-standing characters who he finds to have historically suffered from poor design. He chose Wonder Woman on the grounds that ‘[a]lthough a feminist pop icon, her origins are too tied up with creator William Marston’s obsession with bondage. Because of this (and an all-too-frequent parade of poor or sexist writing), she’s never had a solid, progressive design.’ As other contributors to this blog have shown, the (to put it mildly) recurring bondage theme Marston’s Wonder Woman comics need not be read as anti-feminist. Diaz is not entirely incorrect, however; as many have argued, Wonder Woman’s apparent status as em(super)powered woman and feminist icon has historically been undercut by images of her as erotic spectacle (these links are work safe this one is not). One may not agree with his dismissal of the Marston/Peter run, but can at least understand his desire to reinvent Wonder Woman in light of the New 52 and other incarnations.

Diaz does not dispose of Wonder Woman’s swimsuit, but covers it with a ‘more conservative’ mid-thigh Greek-style dress, thereby moving away from the overtly sexualised Wonder Women. Diaz’s Wonder Woman is, in accordance with her origin story, made from clay. Where, in other incarnations of the character, this statue then became flesh, Diaz’s Wonder Woman remains a ‘statue come to life.’ Diaz thus draws a link between sculpture and superhero comics as two mediums which have historically fixated on bodily perfection. Because she is made from hardened clay, Diaz’s Wonder Woman resonates with the ‘metalisation’ of the male body one encounters in films during the 1980s when, in light of the AIDS crisis, cinema sought to enforce masculine bodily boundaries. This tradition certainly continues in superhero comics today, where characters such as Colossus play out the fantasy of impenetrable metallic bodies.

Diaz also replaces Wonder Woman’s lasso with a sword ‘that contains the lightning of Zeus.’ Given that Wonder Woman’s lasso is, as Berlatsky contends, ‘a vagina as surely as James Bond’s gun is a phallus’, Diaz thus symbolically makes Wonder Woman a man or, at least, equips her with the idealised hyper-male attributes of an impenetrable body and impressive phallus. The powers of her lasso are transferred to a shield ‘containing the wisdom of Athena (which, when using its reflection, can reveal a person’s inner self and compel them to tell the truth)’. Where the lasso contains her enemies, the shield repels them, further enforcing the impenetrability of Wonder Woman’s metallised body.

Clearly, Diaz’s work is motivated by a strong feminist agenda. His Wonder Woman is deliberately drawn against the eroticisation of the female superbody. She also continues the appropriation of (super)male attributes begun in her inception; she not only possesses the strength and invulnerability of Superman, but has been given the hardened body and phallus traditionally reserved for other male superheroes. One might ask, however, if the accruing of (super)male signifiers is truly a step-forward, or if it requires the evacuation of that which makes Wonder Woman such a powerful feminist icon? One might argue that the appropriation of the phallus serves, ultimately, only to reiterate its primacy. The loss of the lasso (which ends violence) in favour of a sword (which is a tool of violence) removes her capacity for pacifism. Has Diaz’s Wonder Woman been denied the opportunity to create alternative, feminised forms of power? If Wonder Woman is, effectively, transformed into a man, what becomes of her pacifism, her feminism, and her queerness? Is the equipping of female characters with a phallus an effective answer to the male gaze?

To reiterate, in the battle over the representation of gender in comics, Diaz is inarguably one of the good guys, and his Wonder Woman addresses many of the problems which typically plague female characters in superhero comics. His answers, however, present certain problems which, I believe, highlight many of the flaws which surround the place for gender in the superhero genre – that, in order to avoid eroticisation or negative signifiers of femininity, Diaz’s Wonder Woman must cast aside the very things which make her a woman.

Darna: ‘The Filipino Wonder Woman’

Posted on May 18, 2015 by Philip Smith

Darna by Ghettobrigante

Darna is often described as ‘The Filipino Wonder Woman’ and there are many persuasive reasons why such a comparison might be made. In the 1951 comic Darna is described as having ‘kisig ni Apolo at lakas ni Samson’ (which I translate as ‘the elegance of Apollo and the strength of Samson’ – Tagalog speakers, please correct me – I am still learning), which almost directly quotes Wonder Woman who was described in 1944 is ‘as beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, stronger than Hercules and swifter than Mercury’ (issue 38, 1944 quoted in Berlatsky’s book on Wonder Woman, page 139). Darna was later seen as a Wonder Woman clone when, in 1991, a film version showed her blocking bullets with bracelets. This became a key aspect of the character and was repeated in the 2009 television show.

Darna paratexts have encouraged the comparison; in 2013 Marianne Riviera, the current most recent Darna, posed in Wonder Woman cosplay for a magazine shoot. The comparison between the two is almost inevitable, and is dramatised in fan art such as that by Glee Chan.

Darna/Wonder Woman fan art by Glee Chan and Marian Rivera as Wonder Woman

Darna clearly borrows tropes from other American characters. Her powers are similar to those possessed by Superman. She transforms from her non-hero incarnation Narda into Darna by saying ‘Darna’, in a manner very similar to Captain Marvel saying ‘Shazam!’ That she is derivative is hardly surprising – many superheroes in the 1940s were variations on a well-established formula and the industry at the time did not particularly reward originality.

Conversely, there are those who maintain that Mars Ravelo, Darna’s creator, was pitching the idea of a female superhero in 1939, two years before Wonder Woman’s first comic book appearance. In such a timeline Darna is not a Wonder Woman clone, but a character who emerged independently around the same time.

I am not particularly interested in answering the question of which character came first. What does interest me is the question of why it matters. I believe that this is important because it is rooted in the artistic relationship between the Philippines and the U.S. Filipino comics. Both Filipino superhero comics and Pinoy Manga have often had to fight accusations of being derivative with the implication that Filipino comic book creators simply recycle the cultural work done elsewhere. If Darna is nothing more than the Filipino Wonder Woman, then, it follows, she has little value alone and can be subsumed into Wonder Woman studies. The argument that she exists independent to Wonder Woman, then, can be read as an assertion of Filipino national identity through comics.

One of the reasons why I find this interesting is that different incarnations of Darna seem to cycle between being an icon of Filipino identity and an outward-looking international figure. We have had English-speaking Darnas whose identity and attitudes are largely indistinguishable from an American equivalent, and we have had Tagalog-speaking Catholic Darnas whose enemies draw heavily from Filipino folk-law – see, for example, Roberto Feleo’s ‘Darna’s Fortress of Solitude’ (1987). It is noteworthy in this regard that in the original comics Darna looks distinctly Western, and the first actress to play Darna, Rosa Del Rosario, was biracial, as was Nanette Medved, who played her in 1991 and Anjanette Abayari who played Darna in two films in 1994.

So, is Darna more than a Wonder Woman clone? And, more importantly, does it matter?

Wonder Woman Questions

Posted on January 18, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This is the week my book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is released. I’ve put together a week-long roundtable to celebrate.

Earlier in the week I asked folks to ask me Wonder Woman questions and I’d answer them here. A few people responded. So here’s my answers. If you have other questions, ask in comments and I’ll try to answer as best I can. (Questions about my book would be great too, if you are one of the few who have read it!)

____________

Andrew

Is there someone that you think could channel H.G. Peter?

I love Harry Peter too! His style is very different from current mainstream superhero art. He looks back to a Victorian illustration tradition in a lot of ways; stiff figures, fluid linework, just very different than the muscles-on-muscles pin-up style you get in Marvel and DC nowadays.

So, if you were going to have someone approximate that, I think you’d need to look to alternative and indie creators probably. I’d love to see Edie Fake do a Wonder Woman story. Edie’s fascinated with gender and sexuality in a way that’s reminiscent of Marston, and he’s really into fantasy landscape as well. It would be different than Harry Peter, of course, but I think he could get some of the same sense of overripe wrongness/rightness that Peter did.

Leah

How do you think Wonder Woman has informed the portrayals of other women superheros. And why do you think there there not more leading lady superheros. Most of the well known ones these days seem to be part of teams (ex. XMen, Fantastic Four) rather than stand alones.

That’s tricky; I don’t think the original Wonder Woman comics have had much influence at all on other female superheroes, as far as I can tell. Marston’s mix of bondage and feminism isn’t something that many other mainstream creators have been all that interested in. There have been a few direct lifts, like Alan Moore’s Promethea, or Winged Victory in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City, or Wonder Girl. But for example Storm, from the X-Men, whose one of the higher profile superheroes, doesn’t owe much to Wonder Woman. Buffy and Sailor Moon, two very popular female superheroes, don’t look back to her much either.

And I think that’s part of the answer to your second question. There are stand along female superheroes, like Buffy and Sailor Moon. They tend not to come from Marvel and DC (the big two superhero companies). And that’s just because Marvel and DC have historically featured male characters by male creators mostly packaged for me. That’s changing somewhat as the movies create a more diverse audience, and so maybe we’ll see more stand alone superhero films featuring female heroes from those companies in the future.

Matthew

It seems that people are clamoring for a Wonder Woman movie, but do you think an interesting film could actually be made with the character in her current state? Or are her bizarre origins, years of retcons, constantly fluctuating characterization, and general difficulty to handle by modern comics writers too much to overcome?

Anything’s possible I guess. Somebody could just go back to Marston and Peter and make a movie with gorilla bondage and space kangaroos, if they wanted. I suspect though that the movie will be boring not because anyone is confused by years of indifferent comics, but just because most superhero movies are boring and unimaginative, and there’s no reason to think this will be different. In other words, the Wonder Woman movie will be bad because the Avengers and Superman and so forth are bad, not because Wonder Woman comics are bad. They’ll write a script where she hits people and has angst and things blow up, would be my guess.

I suppose they might try to incorporate feminism in some way. That could be bad, as the animated feature showed. For an actual feature there’s too much money at stake to screw around with trying to be true to the character or the comics fanbase, though, would be my guess.

Eric

What did you think of the David Kelly pilot?

I didn’t see it!

“How wonderful, a woman’s world”: Trina Robbins on Wonder Woman

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Editor’s Note: This is the week my book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is released. I’ve put together a week-long roundtable to celebrate.
_________

Longtime comix artist Trina Robbins is also one of Wonder Woman’s biggest fans; she’s talked and written on numerous occasions about her love of the Marston/Peter comics in particular. I interviewed her after she’d read (at least some of) my book.

Trina: So you should know I’m only in the middle of your second chapter. It’s a bit of a slog. You do have a good sense of humor and I like some things about your writing. You just so over-analyze that it just becomes a slog.

Noah: (laughs) Well, that’s the academic thing, you know.

Trina: I know. Thank god I’m not an academic.

Noah: All right…well, could you talk a little about what you like about the Marston/Peter comics?

Well, as a kid, I foudn the mythology extremely liberating. And I’m still into the mythology. And of course people like Brian Azzarello obviously knows kowing nothing about mythology or just doesn’t care.

I mean, for me, Jewish girl, brought up in a not super orthodox home, for me Judaism was very boring. At the synagogue they spoke Hebrew, which I didn’t know. One God, and this very boring and very patriarchal guy with a white beard. I didn’t like that at all. And I couldn’t relate to it. And Wonder Woman had goddesses. A whole pantheon of gods and goddesses. The gods weren’t particularly nice, but the goddesses were wonderful. And this was so liberating for me as a kid to read this. It was almost as though Marston had given us permission to believe that there was something other than the patriarchal bearded guy.

And also just the concept of Amazons. I think I was introduced to the concept of Amazons in Wonder Woman. This whole tribe of beautiful women alone on an island, no men. You have to understand that as a girl…boys were threatening. Not all boys, I had some nice male cousins. But in general they were threatening. They were bigger than me, and they tended to be a little nasty — women were wonderful. I grew up during the war when women wore bright red lipstick, and most of the guys were off at war anywhere. And women were much more interesting. It’s interesting because I’m totally heterosexual, but these are just the feelings I had.

An island full of women in pretty little dresses and they were all beautiful. It was just a wonderful thing to me. And as for the rest, what little girl doesn’t want princesses. She was an Amazon princess. So that’s what I saw in it. I saw stories in which women are all the ones who are the active ones. Not just Wonder Woman, but the Amazons and the HOliday girls, they’re active participants, they all fight the bad guys. It was wonderful for me.

Noah: One of the things we’ve disagreed about before is on how much bondage there is in the comics, and how important bondage is in them.

Trina: Well the thing is, as a kid I didn’t even notice the bondage. It went totally over my head. Obviously there are people who noticed it. I think they tended to be grownups. You know, like that soldier who wrote to Marston [about how he was a bondage fetishist and therefore loved Wonder Woman.] But I didn’t see it. Or if I did see it, I looked at all the other comics. It was traditional in Golden Age comics for people to get tied up. I’ve just been scanning in Girl Commandos drawn by Jill Elgin, and they always get tied up in each comic.

Noah: Tim Hanley recently counted how much bondage there was in Wonder Woman, and found it was more than in most other comics of the era…

Trina: Obviously he’s right, because he counted, and numbers don’t lie. But I didn’t see that, I can tell you. Because in all the other comics people got tied up too, and I didn’t count!

Noah: I’m curious about the lesbianism in the comics and what you think about that.

Trina: Not many people have talked about that except for Frederic Wertham in Seduction of the Innocent. And he’s a riot. The connections he makes with Holliday equals gay are just hilarious.

But of course there are hints of lesbianism. But for me it was more about women interacting with other women. In the British girls comics it’s always girls saving other girls. But if you look at the comics for the same period for the same age, it’s always the love triangle. Betty and Veronica fighting over Archie. It’s almost as though they’re trying to show, look we can do comics about girls, but don’t worry, they’re not lesbians.

Noah: Marston was not worried about that.

Trina: But as a kid I just thought, how wonderful. How wonderful, a woman’s world.

Noah: Marston would be quite happy with that, I’m sure.

I wondered if you had thoughts on the relationship between Olive and Elizabeth and Marston?

Trina: Well, definitely they were polyamorous. And I think it’s pretty probable that Elizabeth and Olive were lovers.

It’s very funny because…Spain Rodriguez, I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, and he was a dear friend of mien — and he’s still a dear friend of mine, even though he’s no longer with us. But he was so funny, he used to say, “See, he lived together with two women!” As though, ha, ha, he wasn’t a feminist. And I was like, Spain, if Susan would let you, wouldn’t you like to live with two women?”

Noah: It wasn’t like he was living with them without their consent.

Trina: Exactly.

Noah: I presume…I mean they lived together afterwards. It doesn’t seem like it was just…

Trina: They weren’t doing it just for him, or they would have moved away after he died. Of course.

Noah: I know you had harsh words for the Azzarello run on Wonder Woman…

Trina: It’s not just…he’s so arrogant! He’s so fucking arrogant. There was this one shot, it was a Wonder Woman run shot which was about Wonder Woman as a girl. It was intended to be some kind of parody of the Stan Lee comics of the 60s. Which of course doesn’t make sense anyway, since it’s a DC character and it’s completely different. But he doesn’t even know as a writer and a historian — he’s trying to make it old fashioned, so he has Princess Diana use the term “shan’t.” Well, by 1955, no one was saying “shan’t”.

And then in case you thought that he was not trying to be an arrogant asshole…you know how the old Marvel comics, Stan Lee would give everyone nicknames like “Jolly Jack Kirby.” So he signs his name as Brian “Kiss My” Azzarello.” That’s his statement. The innermost circles of Hell for him.

Noah. You really didn’t like his Wonder Woman run.

Trina: (laughs) You could tell.

I loved what Gail Simone did. Her white gorillas were the equivalent of the Holliday girls I just loved what she did.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: Wonder Woman