Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #15

Posted on September 1, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

As I said earlier in the week, Wonder Woman #14 was okay but not great. For this one, though, Marston and Peter are back to form, with a tale that starts right out with preposterous and just snowballs from there. You know you’re in for a ride when the coverpage features a tigeape….

And the splashpage features a flying fish with octopus tentacles being ridden by a knight.

So anyway, the story begins with a giant chunk of the planet Neptune falling to earth as a new continent. You’d think that such an apocalyptic event, probably heralding the end of life on earth as we know it, might be the basis for the entire comic that follows…but, nah, not really. Continents hitting the planet just cause a few buildings to shake; not a big deal really. Instead, the really cool adventure happens when we go to visit that new continent and discover that..well, see for yourself:

And furthermore:

You have to adore the way Diana looks all hunched up and startled when she falls into the water…and also the fish swimming by her as she changes to WW…and the purply swirls. Underwater scenes just really bring out some of Peter’s best work, I think because of the chance to do all the swirling patterns and lines…and the undersea creatures of course. What a perfectly beautiful page.

You’re probably wondering why on earth the ocean water has parted and formed giant walls. Have no fear, all is explained:

There are tons of pseudoscientific explanations just like that throughout this issue, and every one is a keeper. Where does Marston get this stuff? The man’s a genius, I tell you.

Anyway, no sooner has WW gotten the ship back afloat than the crew (including the Holiday Girls, who, as always, have come along on the dangerous military mission) are attacked by those octoflyingfish we saw on the splash page

WW and crew defeat the flying fish, which are controlled, as it turns out, by good looking guys from Neptune.

This is a lovely page, I think, by the by; I think it’s partially the color palette that gets me; all those oranges and yellow oranges. But I also like the way that it’s sparse but balanced. And, of course, the toothy flying fish floating off to the side at the bottom are pretty hysterical.

WW and company take the Neptunians back to their home continent (strangely undamaged by its trip through space,) and while chitchatting they discover why it is that the Neptunians are so mean and unpleasant:

I like the way Marston just has WW state flat out that men will just fight, fight, fight if there aren’t women around. And the Neptunian doesn’t even really contradict her; he just explains that there’s no war because most of the men are turned into robots. It’s moments like this that you realize that Marston never did have a moments doubt; there was never an instant where he thought, “You know, almost no one agrees with me…maybe it’s just not true that women should rule over men.” This was a guy who was very secure in his worldview.

Here’s another stellar page:

Again, there isn’t any one thing or panel in this page that leaps out at you, but it works as a lovely whole, with lots of active lines and a unified, pleasing color palette. The filigree in the background, much of it obscured by the word balloons, lends a subtle, baroque feel to the whole image. It’s pages like this that make me want to compare Peter to Winsor McCay; he’s not as explicit about it, but he really does, like McCay, seem to see the page as an aesthetic unit, and work with it as such. It’s not something that is done very often or very well, especially not in super-hero comics of this era.

Here’s another, maybe clearer example;

The net there is used as a design element; the mesh pattern flowing through the different panels gives a dynamic sense of movement and unity to the page. The spiraling and shifting pattern is emphasized by the simple tiered layout — which itself has a nice rhythm (long, short, short, long, long short.) I think Les Daniels said at some point that Peter had trouble with page design early in the WW run. If that was ever true (and I think there is something to it) it’s certainly not the case by this point.

All right; repressing the urge to just post every single page of this book now…they’re all pretty much amazing….repressing, repressing…okay, more or less successful. Let’s move on to another awesome pseudo-science explanation:

They turn men into machines by robbing them of salt, because salt is what gives you flavor, doncha know. But the best part is…it doesn’t work on women. And why not? Witness:

Again I ask…why isn’t DC taking these panels and printing them as posters, damn it?

The Neptunians are so terrified of women now that they make a pact with the U.S. offering to become a vassal state if the Americans will guarantee that no women can come onto the Neptunian continent. The U.S. agrees…and so to keep tabs on the devilish Neptunians, WW is forced…to wear drag. Of a sort. I’d wondered before if Marston ever provided examples of good-girl cross-dressing (he has several of his villainesses cross dress.) This issue has the closest we’ve gotten so far, as WW and the Holiday girls dress up as at least nominally male tigapes.

Not really conclusive, but maybe another datapoint to suggest that Marston didn’t seem to see cross-gender dressing as particularly or innately evil. And it’s certainly more evidence for the fact that he just found dressing up in general hot; the Tigeape costumes were first donned during a sorority hazing ritual, which is one of Marston’s favorite things. (HIs academic research involved sorority hazing rituals, so of course his interest was strictly scholarly. Of course.)

Also, add “furry” to Marston’s impressive list of kinks. Of course, furries weren’t even invented when WW was penned…but he Marston was a pioneer in this, as in many things….

The comic ends happily ever after when the Neptunians plot is foiled and the island is given over to women to govern.

If only our actual political leaders were that docile. Go forth, WW, and teach unto Dick Cheney the loving submission. Barack Obama too, just as long as I don’t have to read the slash.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #14

Posted on August 30, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

I’m actually doing a bit of catch-up here; I’ll have at least three and maybe four Bound to Blog posts up this week. Starting with:

Yep, it’s just like the teaser says: Wonder Woman in Shamrock Land. And while I love that cover — complete with bizarre scale variations, weird amorphous clover blob, bright yellow background, and a guy cut off at the waist in the best spirit of constructivist design — the story isn’t maybe as good as it might be. Part of it is the villain— the well-dressed cropped guy on the cover there. He’s called the Gentlemen Villain or something, and he’s so bland that I can’t even remember his name even though I just read the thing. He performs all the usual Marston villainy (forcing women to serve him, throwing around grenades — Marston loves grenades) but it feels pretty rote — perhaps in part because it’s mostly just in the interest of stealing stuff. I’ve seen some writing on this series that’s suggested that Marston was freed up by the end of the war…but there’s definitely something to be said for evil Nazis as enemies.

Or, you know, maybe Marston just wasn’t feeling all that inspired. Or maybe leprechauns just don’t hold that much appeal for me. I don’t know. I even felt like a lot fo the art wasn’t really all that exciting, especially compared to Peter’s ravishing work last issue.

Not that the book doesn’t have its moments. This is a great panel.

Marston definitely joins R. Crumb in having a thing for piggy-back rides. I assume it’s the masochistic implications that make it appealing for both of them; getting a piggyback is infantilizing and polymorphously (rather than explicitly sexually) intimate. WW emphasizes the mother/child aspect by calling him “funny boy” too. Their expressions are both priceless; Steve looks like his eyebrows are going to attain independent lift-off, and WW looks genuinely cranky.

Here’s a queasy moment as WW flirts with a leprechaun who has captured her:

Ick.

I like the fact that this looks more like Steve is being showered with bubbles than like he’s being buried alive:

I love the scribbly halo of WW’s lasso in this one:

And here’s the valentine day’s card. Steve has an opportunity to make WW kiss him since she’s trussed up in the lasso…and oh, she wishes he would…but he’s just too galant. It’s both romantic and fetishistic, innocent and winkingly kinky, in a way that reminds me of a certain amount of shojo:

This is a bizarre bit: are the Irish especially well known for throwing bricks? Or is this just something Marston made up?

And this is probably the best panel in the issue; I love the designs on the wall there, and the way the Princess Elaine looks impossibly diminutive. The white curved lines of the couch are really nice too; the ones to the right of Elaine almost seem like motion lines, actualy, giving the whole panel a sort of fantastical energy and motion.

The enormous bee as design element here is pretty great:

And the weird inky shadows here are very nicely done; it gives it almost a noirish feel, which is unusual for Peter (I wonder if he used a different assistant on this one or something?)

Oh, man, I’d almost forgotten the flying pigs. That pig looks so happy….

Men! They hate roses and make you sew!

Also… this is an oddly suggestive panel.

The way WW is arched with her arms thorwn back, and the energizing effects of the motion lines… And then you’ve got those weird veiny, phallic trees beneath her — we’ve definitely wandered out of Leprechaunland for a moment and into a Freudian dreamscape. And, of course, in the next panel, the excess of passion has given her amnesia. (I can’t actually remember if she’s gotten amnesia before, but it seems like a natural kink for Marston, fitting in nicely with the mind control and the dominance (fetishizing the obliteration of personality and the sense of control.))

So yeah, there’s a lot of individual things that work great; just overall it doesn’t quite fit together as well as it might. Thinking about it a little more, I think that maybe the Irish mythology just isn’t as well integrated as the Greek myths he sometimes uses, or as the more fantastic mole men or seal men or whatever settings. He seems to mostly see the Irish myths as an opportuniy for slapstick, maybe; in any case, it doesn’t jibe with his cosmic gender interests the way Mars and Venus and so forth do. The loss of the war setting also makes the whole thing seem a little directionless; instead of an epic battle between good and evil, it’s just some thieving schmo wandering around doing bad. I think the WW run really benefits from having the contrast between Marston’s set-in-stone binary crankitude and his scattershot, anything goes scripting (much the way that Peter’s art has a tension between extreme stiffness and extreme fluidity.) Marston’s ideology is certainly still present here (there’s a lot of mention of loving submission,) but it never solidifies thematically the way it does in many of the issues. But so it goes; they can’t all be gems, I guess. Hopefully Marston and Peter’ll be back on their game next issue.

Lose the Girdle, Get Empowered (OOCWVG)

Posted on August 10, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #13 (with Bonus Twilight Nattering)

Posted on August 9, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

I read the Twilight novel this week as well as Wonder Woman #13. And after finishing both, I have come to a conclusion. Girls like to read about pale, cold, spooky guys.

Yes, that’s right, this is the issue with Seal Men! (Not to be confused with Mole Men.) Anyway, the Seal Men are badguys rather than love interests… at least theoretically. It’s a little hard to tell, honestly. The head Seal Man does seem to have some kind of frisson with WW: there’s some mutural complimenting going on here, for example:

And then, at the end, the Seal Men renounce their evil ways and agree to worship Venus, in return for which the women they’ve oppressed agree to cook for them.

It’s kind of fun to think about what Marston would make of Twilight, actually. As I mentioned in my review of the movie, Twilight is obsessed with safety — vampire Edward is always talking about how he wants to keep human Bella safe. In fact, Bella’s major trait is that she’s accident prone. She’s incredibly physically clumsy, constantly endangering herself and others in gym. But that’s the least of it — she’s actually a magnet for danger. First, of course, she has some sort of superpowerful attractiveness for Edward in particular, which makes him want to bite her (because isn’t that what all tween girls secretly want?) And, of course, in later books, she’s also beloved by a giant werewolf with self-control issues. But more than that, she seems to really and truly attract everything dangerous within like 100 miles. In the first book, she’s almost gang-raped in a town that we are told (somewhat gratuitously) has no crime. Then she meets up with another vampire, and he too, decides that it is the goal of his life to drink her blood. At least in the second book she starts to actually take steps to put herself in danger (Edward leaves her, and she goes all bad girl), so it’s not all left up to chance…but even so, it’s pretty excessive.

This is a plot device, of course; we’ve got to have some vampirey super-stunts in here, after all. But it’s not *just* a plot device; it’s part of the wish-fulfillment. That is, where boys fantasize about being the heroic savior who sweeps the damsel in distress to safety, girls fantasize about being in danger so that the super-hero can come along and protect her. Bella isn’t actually a weak character; she’s very strong-willed and stubborn, and she’s pretty smart (not Elizabeth Bennet smart, as one snarky writer noted, but that really seems like a cruelly high standard.) In a lot of ways, she’s stronger, or at least more vivid than Edward, who is always a bit too unreal and perfect as much more than an over-perfect paper cutout. But she can’t be too strong, or the fantasy doens’t work; she’s got to have a weakness, and that weakness is physical. She’s not only weaker than the vampire; she’s weaker, physically, than everybody. She hurts herself playing volleyball.

It’s kind of amazing how blatant this is…and how it seems to have been this blatant forever. That is, you look at Twilight, and female physical power, or lack thereof, is absolutely front and center in gender relations. And you look at Wonder Woman, written sixty years earlier…and it’s the same thing. Marston’s fantasy of female equality is absolutely centered on his insistence that women can be as strong as — no, check that — can be stronger than men. This is the case for WW herself, obviously, but Marston also presents it as true more generally; inspired by her example, the Amazons perform amazing feats, for example.

In both Twilight and WW, too, women’s weakness is fairly explicitly linked to male insecurity. That is, both Twilight and WW seem to assume that women are weak more or less as a sop to male egos. Edward is obsessed with keeping Bella safe…so much so that he veers right over the line between cutely attentive and creepily stalkery; he has major, major control issues, which Bella more or less, and the narrative absolutely, caters to. And those control issues are supposed to be attractive from a female perspective. That is, the book’s fantasy is of having someone so into you that they want to keep you from all harm. Which is a fantasy which obviously requires you not to be able to take care of yourself.

Marston analyzes relationships in the same way, though he comes to somewhat different conclusions. In the first place, he’s a good bit more merciless in his assessment of the gap between male ego and male reality:

This is Steve diving into icy cold water in his boxer shorts to save WW. And, of course, this is played for laughs, with the shivering and the striped shorts and the fact that we know that WW doesn’t need the himbos help. And, indeed, Steve just gets himself in trouble:

For Marston, men are ridiculous when they try to be strong rescuers. Which is why WW refuses to marry Steve:

To have a relationship with a man, you have to pretend you’re weaker than he is. So far, Twilight and WW seem to agree. But Twilight differs in assuming that you should choose the relationship, while WW chooses the strength.

On the one hand, Marston does actually seem to be rejecting male-female relationships altogether; thus, perhaps, his obsession with female only communities. Another one pops up here, and is introduced and explicated in one of Peter’s most ravishing pages:

This is essentially a pagan, female recasting of the Garden of Eden. In this version, women don’t cause the fall; rather, they are so worthy that they are placed to rule alone in Eden, where they appear to propagate happily without the help of men at all. And when the dark, evil Seal Men do show up, it is they who are the tempters, luring women into their dark realm (what this luring consists of exactly is delicately passed over.)

The thing is that, of course, Marston doesn’t *really* hate men. It’s just that, what he wants as a man, is more or less the same thing that Bella seems to want as a woman. He wants someone to protect and control him, basically; as I mentioned, once the Seal Men submit to Venus, they and the women can live in peace, and the women will even cook for them (Bella is an excellent cook as well, perhaps not so coincidentally.)

Masochism, in other words, does appeal to both men and women. One of the things that appeals about a relationship is that you get the chance to be weak and have somebody else take care of you; you get mothered, and have somebody setting down laws and limits because they love you, not because they are just (which is a more stereotypically male mode.) Because Stephenie Meyer is female, Mormon, and (I think) conservative, and because Marston is male, a crank, and radical, the way the masochism works out in terms of gender politics is pretty different. But I think the impulse for, and the pleasures of, the fantasies are pretty similar

_____________________

Just to add: this is one of Peter’s most impressive issues to date. I don’t have much to add to my already ga-ga enthusiasm for his work, but I did want to reproduce a few more pictures. So here you go:

His animals as always kill me. That cloth in the lower-right panel is also something pretty special, I think.

The way he blends detailed linework with goofy cartooning is really phenomenal; he reminds me both of Winsor McCay and somebody like Uderzo here. It’s ravishing slapstick.

As I’ve said before, I wish I knew who did the color work on these. It’s some of the most beautiful effects I’ve seen in comics, I think. I love the dark color palette in a lot of these underground scenes.

Notice how the fish and the water swirls complement the patterns in WW’s costume. He really was the only one who’s ever been able to make anything out of that outfit.

And finally: beware the Walrus Idol!

_________

Obviously the whole once a week thing with these isn’t quite happening…but I am going to finish them eventually, damn it. So 14 will show up at some point…maybe even next week, if I’m lucky.

Let Venus Wear Her Girdle, Damn It (OOCWVG)

Posted on July 28, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

In my post about Greg Rucka’s Wonder Woman yesterday, I realized I forgot to sneer adequately at one of the things that most annoyed me in his scripting for WW 196-200. Namely, the gods.

I don’t mind that Rucka turns all his gods into irritating American suburbanites and/or hipsters (Aphrodite as bored housewife; Cupid as stoned California drop-out, etc.) That’s fine; whatever. Some of the dialogue is kind of funny, I guess. I sort of laughed when Ares told Cupid to stop hitting on his great aunt and Cupid says “like that ever stopped anyone in this family from getting game.” I don’t know. I don’t expect a ton from Rucka at this point; I guess I appreciate any indication that he’s trying at all to entertain me rather than educate me or encourage me to fawn over his Amazon paragon.

So, right; updated gods — not especially clever, but par for the course. What really irritates me, though, is the theology. At one point, Ares explains at length to WW that he (Ares) is now more powerful than Zeus, because nobody is scared of the sky but everybody loves war. Putting aside the question of whether Zeus couldn’t somehow piggyback on climate change fears, I just want to say — I am so, so, so sick of the whole “it isn’t the worshippers who get power from the Gods — it’s the Gods who get power from their worshippers” wheeze. It was tired when George Perez dragged it out for his WW series, and after Neil Gaiman picked it up, dusted it off, and then (in his elegantly canny British way) jumped up and down on it for years…well, there wasn’t a whole lot left.

And yet, here’s Rucka, trundling along years later, spouting this crap like it’s actually insightful or meaningful or anything but the tedious ploy of a nonbeliever who wants to have a deity for verisimilitude while pissing on him (or her) too. The logic is patently ridiculous…and as a result it makes the Amazons look like idiots. If they know that their prayers and belief give the Gods power, then, you know, why not think about something else for a while? Why worship a figment of your imagination? Doing so isn’t profound, and it’s certainly not an alternative to man’s world, where everybody is always already worshipping their own immaculate feces. (And, yes, Alan Moore’s worship of his own imagination also irritates me, though at least, unlike Rucka, he actually does have an imagination.)

It seems to me like if you’re going to use gods in a super-hero comic, you can do one of two things. First, you can just treat them as super-heroes, which is more or less what Lee/Kirby did with Thor (at least in all the Thor I’ve read; maybe somewhere they try to build a theology/philosophy to explain the gods, but I mercifully missed that.) Nothing wrong with gods as superheroes; it’s entertaining and goofy and involves people hitting each other with unusual weapons andl/or force blasts, which is what comics are all about.

Or, second, you can actually, you know, have some kind of concept of transcendence and use the gods to explore that. That’s what Marston did in the first WW series. His Aphrodite and Ares are archetypes connected to his ideas about femininity and masculinity and love and war. Aphrodite especially is definitively transcendent; she’s wiser and more powerful than any other character. It makes sense that the Amazons worship her, because she actually seems to know things they don’t.

Of course, the things she “knows” about submission and love and gender roles are things you could disagree with — but Marston believes in them. What’s most irritating about the “gods are there because we believe in them” meme is that it true to some extent — but the truth is vitiated by putting it so clumsily. Yes, fictions do have power, and the power has something to do with belief. But that belief is at least in large part the artist’s belief in his or her own work, and it is created not just through saying, “hey, I believe in that,” but through genius and craftsmanship. Marston’s Aphrodite means something because Marston took the time to make her mean something; she’s transcendent because Marston thought there was transcendence, and thought about how to express that in his work. Rucka’s Ares, on the other hand, just says, “conflict is important,” as if anybody couldn’t have figured that out for themselves. And then he says he’s powerful because people think conflict is important. Just give it up, already. Don’t lecture me on the meaning of existence when you can’t even figure out how to tell a decent comic book story.

Wonder McDonnell (OOCWVG)

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

So; Wonder Woman #196-200, Greg Rucka’s first few issues on the title, I think, with art by Drew Johnson and Ray Snyder.

Wonder Woman publishes a book filled with wisdom. We don’t get to hear much of that wisdom in detail, but apparently she thinks peace is good, eating meat is bad for the environment, and you should support your local U.N. The comics, in other words, are kind of like listening to World View, except with all the actual information about world events replaced with platitudes and remarkably poorly rendered, unstylish art. It can also be distinguished from World View because it has less action. Wonder Woman wanders around to signings and readings while a shadowy, nefarious organization attempts to…ruin her reputation! Like in Legends! Remember Legends! Except, this time, instead of Darkseid, we’ve got some blandly blond executive type and Dr. Psycho. Not the Marston version with ectoplasm and kinky hypnotism. No, this is a tedious, latter-day version who does nothing for five issues and finally is unleashed at the end to…start a mild riot, which the police break up by themselves without even Wonder Woman’s help. That’s because Wonder Woman is engaged in a by-the-numbers slugfest with Silver Swan. Who apparently is the tortured, mind-twisted Vanessa Kapetelis, the teen Mary Sue from George Perez’s run on the title. I presume the obligatory desecration of Vanessa isn’t Rucka’s fault. Still, it does suck that every minor character, no matter how innocent, has to eventually show up as a super-villain. It sort of makes you think that the people writing this stuff don’t actually have more than two ideas to rub together.

Who the fuck wants to read this crap? Whose idea of a hero is a NPR commentator in a swimsuit? Rucka just seems endlessly fascinated by how busy WW is; how she’s racing from one do-gooding enterprise to another. The supporting characters are mostly her staff, because, damn it, social secretaries are fascinating. The series often feels like a journalistic puff piece from a fashion magazine or something; it’s like WW is Angelina Jolie. And I know that lots of folks like to read about Angelina Jolie and her doings, sure. But Jolie exists; why do you want to invent her? I can understand the appeal of Twilight; I can understand the appeal of Superman; I can understand the appeal of the Marston Wonder Woman, who was fun because she had amazing adventures and exciting powers. But Wonder Woman as ersatz, earnest celebrity? For God’s sake, why?

In fact, to see how wrong-minded this approach is, you don’t have to go any farther than the back-up features in WW #200, an annual sized volume. A short story by Robert Rodi with art by Rick Burchett called “Golden Age” essentially retells Rucka’s story in the style of Marston/Peter. And — despite the fact that artist Rick Burchett disgraces himself in trying to imitate Peter, and despite the fact that Rodi is unwilling to fully embrace Marston’s bondage fetish — the result is delightful. We ditch the leaden plot, and instead rush blithely from enjoyably ridiculous complication to enjoyably ridiculous action feat. WW refuses to endorse Veronica Callow’s perfume, so Callow builds a super-robot which imitates WW and performs numerous evil deeds (painting a moustache on the statue of liberty! kissing Steve Trevor!) WW despairs as her friends turn against her…but then, with the help of Etta Candy, she uncovers the dastardly deeds…and convinces the robot to turn to the good! And at the end the goddess Aphrodite appears and turns the robot into a real girl. WW sum up by noting that she defeated the robot with “my powers of persuasion! That’s all any girl needs to be a Wonder Woman!” By this point, anyone willing to satirize Rucka is okay in my book…and, as a bonus, we also get to see one of the Amazon kangaroos, lost for many years in the seas of continuity.

This is one of the only bondage scenes in the story (the villain is tied up at the end. Artist Rick Burchett gets Peter’s stiff poses, more or less, but Peter’s fluid linework not so much. The motion lines for the spanking for example, are uniform weight, simple boring strokes, clumsily positioned. No way would Peter draw them that way.

Again, this doesn’t actually read like it’s by somebody who really understand, or likes, or even read the Marston/Peter run that closely. Having WW’s friends turn on her and the anxiety about kissing Steve — that’s way, way Silver Age. Marston’s WW would never cut and run back to Paradise Island…and no way would Marston’s Steve reject a kiss from WW. But that’s neither here nor there; the point is that this is silly, action-filled fun, with the central messages (persuade, don’t fight! women power, yay!) presented with tongue-in-cheek, perhaps, but still with less pomposity and greater clarity than in Rucka. If they published a WW comic like this now, I’d probably have to buy it, even if the art did suck this badly.

(There’s also a moderately entertaining silver age story called “Amazon Women on the Moon” which is about what is says (by Nunzio Defilippis and Chistina Weir with actually competent art by Ty Templeton). And then there’s an adequate retelling of the Perseus legend by Greg Rucka. And hopefully that’s the last Greg Rucka I’ll read for quite some time.)

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For those who want more Rucka-bashing, I made fun of the Hiketeia here.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #12

Posted on July 19, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

We took a bit of a hiatus from the Marston/WW blogging there. My apologies; hopefully we’ll get back on track with out once a week posting, and push on through until the end of the run (which is #28…so 3 more months if I keep to the once a week schedule.)

Anyway, one of the things I tried to do with my time off was read Marston’s academic treatise, The Emotions of Normal People, from 1928. I have to admit I only got a handful of pages in. Marston is an entertaining writer, and you can see it even when he’s trying to be boring and academic…but, well, overall, it’s still kind of boring and academic. I thought this anecdote was nicely revealing though:

I can still remember vividly the fear I once experienced as a child, when threatened, on my way to school, by a half-witted boy with an air-gun. I had been taught by my father never to fight; so I ran home in an agony of fear. My mother told me, “Go straight by F____. Don’t attack him unless he shoots at you, but if he does, then go after him.” I was an obedient child and followed orders explicitly. I marched up to F_____ and his gun with my face set and my stomach sick with dread. F_____ did not shoot. I have known, ever since that well-remembered occasion, that fear does not give strength in times of stress. Part of the strength with which I faced F_____’s air-gun came from my own underlying dominance, newly released from artificial control. But most of it belonged to my mother, and she was able to use it in my behalf because I submitted to her. Dominance and submissions are the “normal”, strength-giving emotions, not “rage” and “fear”.

It’s all so Freudian you just can’t stand it. Though on the surface this may be a conflict between Marston and the “half-witted boy”, you don’t have to go too far into the subtext to see it as a conflict between paternal authority (it’s his father who forbade him to fight) and maternal dominance. It’s also telling, in terms of Marston’s general view of the world, that violence here is definitely gendered, but that gendering doesn’t break down quite the way you would expect. On the one hand, the half-wit boy has the gun (very phallic) and it’s the father who lays down the arbitrary law, which is universally applicable and not to be altered no matter the circumstances. Still, it is the Dad who is the pacifist, and the Mom who is willing to continence violence…albeit tailored to individual circumstances, and administered with love. And, of course, the whole point here is that fear and (typically male-identified) rage are less effective and powerful than submission to love. The phallic gun is no match for the mother’s will.

It’s fun, too, that Marston has apparently written a whole book here to demonstate, scientifically, once and for all, that everyone else is wrong, and his kink is normal, normal, normal. Speicfically, it’s a “normal emotion,” which is how he gets to call his book “Emotions of Everyday People,” rather than, say, “The Pleasures of Dominance and Submission: A Field Guide.”

Marston is, as always, easy to make fun – but there are also some interesting ideas here, I think. Dominance and submission maybe are a lot more common and important as motivating forces than we generally think about. People are certainly influenced by hierarchies and affection more or less constantly. Freud relates those to subconscious motivators, but it would be possible to think of them too as more natural, or above-board emotions. You can see too why Marston was occasionally accused of fascism by the advisors/censors in the editorial offices; strength through giving up your will to a higher authority must have sounded ominously familiar in the 1940s (though, of course, Hitler wasn’t a mother, which was probably an important distinction for Marston.)

(As a parenthetical aside to the parenthetical, I was just skimming some writing by medieval theologian Meister Eckhart (why? Never mind why.) Anyway, he was arguing that obedience was virtue; more important than love or humility or charity or anything else. The argument was basically that obedience brings you closest to God, since through obedience to a superior you most thoroughly abnegate self, and when self goes, God comes in. The best use of free will is to destroy your own will.

I can’t say I find that especially convincing – it seems to be deliberately abrogating moral choice in a way that seems pretty problematic from most moral standpoints, including Christ’s as far as I understand it. I actually have more sympathy for Marston’s position, which at least argues that obedience has to involve love and presumably some level of trust. Obedience in and of itself, to any random hierarchy, just doesn’t seem like a virtue, much less the virtue. But I’m a liberal secularist steeped in modernity, so I guess that’s what I would say.)

Anyway, on to WW #12, where we’ve got WW, not for the first time, seizing control of a suggestively shaped missile:

I believe this is the first WW issue written after the end of the war. Marston’s not quite ready to dispense with the military plots, though; this story is all about the evil European munitions manufacturers and their glamorous women spies who are plotting to cause yet another war for fun and profit.

I kind of feel bad for the European arms manufacturers, actually. I mean, they just helped win WW II; if they were ever going to enjoy any popularity, you’d think this would be the moment. But no, as soon as the wars done, Marston is blaming them for everything. Still, I guess I should be glad that Marston hasn’t gone right back to blaming the Jews.

In any case, as it turns out, the European munitions manufacturers are little more effective than that half-wit boy with the gun. Even Diana Prince can take them out:

So inevitably they’re defeated and taken for treatment…not to Paradise Island, but to another matriarchal, peace –and-dominance loving society (Marston’s got a million of them.) This one’s on Venus. You can tell the Venusians from the Amazons because the Venusians have wings, which Harry Peter seems more or less born to draw.

As you see at the end there, the Queen of Venus is promising to transform the evil munitions men and their glamorous girlfriends into good, loving law-abiding citizens. And though there are a couple of blips (as you see in the last panel) she does have some success, primarily because of the power of magnetic gold, which makes you happy to be captive.

Any similarities to the golden magical lasso are presumably intentional; I think Marston believed that the color yellow encouraged feelings of submission. Anyway, this is also where we first have the Venus Girdle, the belt made of magnetic gold which makes people happy with their captivity:

Marston’s paradises are so Edwardian and upper-class.

The thing here is that the men are all perfectly happy with their captivity; they all want to wear Venus Girdles all the time. It’s only Velma, one of the glamorous girlfriends, who has the gumption to figure out a way to break the spell, following the letter of the law (a patriarchal move, incidentally) in order to break free.

Later Velma, in pursuit of a nefarious plan, actually places the girdle on herself, and then summons the willpower to break free despite the post-coital spell.

Velma has to hold the men at gunpoint in order to get them to rid themselves of their girdles.

I’ve probably said this before, but I think this shows why it was that Marston so often resorted to female villains. Men in his world just don’t have that much gumption. It’s really hard to imagine any male in Marston’s world, from Steve to Ares, throwing off the matriarchal power of the girdle. Men, like young Marston, want to submit their will to a more powerful feminine control. Only another woman like Velma can resist Venus – and offer men the opportunity to be controlled by her will.

Of course, Velma is eventually captured and renounces her evil ways…which seems kind of too bad, since she was pretty fun to root for. But no fear; I’m sure they’ll be an evil villainess to root for in an upcoming issue.

Nothing much else to say about this issue…except that Harry Peter just keeps getting better and better, damn it The effects with the ray that transport everyone to Venus are thoroughly weird and lovely, for example:

as is this visit from the ghostly Queen of Venus:

Peter is also experimenting very effectively with some more complicated page layouts. I think this is the first time I’ve seen him use the kind of narrow tiny panel he does in the middle here:

and I know I’ve never seen him use that odd jagged panel before:

And then there’s this weird, sensuous ghost whispering sweet nothing in WW’s ear:

I think my favorite panel, though, is this one:

The perspective is so scattershot that it actually looks like Paula is floating in mid-air; like it’s some magician’s trick that Velma is demonstrating, with WW standing there thinking, “How on earth did she manage that!” The shadow adds to the effect too; it’s weird and doofy, and completely works with Marston’s themes of control and magic. I really wish there were still mainstream artists like this around. Darwyn Cooke is cool and all, but this is the shit.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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