Last week I blogged about the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman #11, which featured a cross-dressing villain named Hypnota among other things. In reading that issue, I wasn’t exactly sure what Marston thought about Hypnota in particular, or about cross-dressing in general. So I thought I’d take a brief break from going through all the issues of WW, and instead read another Marston cross-dressing villain story from a bit earlier, in one of his first Wonder Woman efforts, Sensation Comics #2.

Before I talk about that story, though, I wanted to mention another book I just finished: Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World. This is going to go on for a little bit, but we’ll get back to Wonder Woman, I promise.

I’ve talked about Rawle’s collage cartoons before. Woman’s World is collagy as well; Rawle wrote the text using words and phrases from women’s magazines published in the early 60s. It’s an impressive technical achievement in some ways. In other ways, you read it and you say, how could such an innovative process have resulted in such a staid narrative?

The narrative is particularly predictable when it comes to gender and cross-dressing. The story is narrated by Norma, and is mostly about her brother, Roy. Eventually Rawle reveals that Norma and Roy are the same person; the real Norma was killed as a child, the trauma caused her brother, Roy, to freak out, so that he started to wear women’s clothing and think that he was Norma part of the time. “Norma” is obsessed with women’s magazines and clothes, which gives Rawle the chance to use a lot of the cleaning product descriptions and advertising slogans and superficial cliches he found in all those women’s magazines he’s using to write his book.

So basically, Rawle presents us with a male-to-female cross-dresser who is (1) incredibly superficial and obsessed with surface femininity (Norma gets into big trouble because she just has to, has to, has to get a photograph of herself all dolled up and beautiful); and (2) completely insane. Sound familiar?

It sounds familiar to me anyway; both tropes are incredibly overused, to the point of rote idiocy, in popular representations of cross-dressers. The “they cross-dress, so they must be insane” schtick is used in just about every other major horror film, it seems — from Psycho, most obviously, down to Silence of the Lambs. The notion seems to be that before a guy would dress like a woman he’d have to have gone completely round the bend, to the extent of actually being a victim of multiple-personality disorder.

The “obsession with surface” thing is also really tired. Trans-activist Julia Serano has a great anecdote in her book “Whipping Girl” about being approached by some television show which wanted her to appear on a segment they were doing about male-to-female trans folks. The television people asked her if they could film Serano getting dressed to go out…putting on her make-up and dresses and that sort of thing. Unfortunately, Serano dresses the way a lot of women dress, which is to say, she doesn’t really wear make-up, often wears pants, and generally doesn’t get all dolled up to go off to her not especially glamorous job (she’s an academic biologist.) All of which she told the television producers, who, of course, decided not to film her, because they wanted yet another story about how obsessed trans people were with surface femininity and appearances and so on and so forth.

In short, when Graham Rawle thought to himself — “who would be obsessed with reading women’s magazines and learning how to be a woman and learning how to be feminine…um…I know! A cross-dressing man! And wouldn’t it be funny if she was really overblown and campy and not actually all that good at behaving like a real woman!” — again, when he thought all that, he was thinking just like those television producers. Which is to say, he wasn’t exactly thinking at all; he was just trying to be titillating and transgressive in the most banal and unthreatening way possible.

Okay, so…back to Wonder Woman and Sensation Comics #2. This story starts off with Nurse Diana Prince caring for a badly injured Steve Trevor. Steve is quickly kidnapped by a mysterious evil-doer named Dr. Poison. Lots of hijinks ensure, involving a chemical formula that makes soldiers interpret orders backwards and a bevy of courageous sorority girls— but the point is, at the end of the story, it is revealed that Dr. Poison…is a woman!

What’s interesting about this to me, in comparison to the Rawle story, is how thoroughly anti-climatic it is. There isn’t any effort to explain why she’s dressing up as a man. There isn’t any effort to ridicule her for dressing up as a man. There’s barely any effort to suggest that what she was doing was incongruous in any way.

Because Marston provides so little in the way of exegesis, it’s hard to know what he thinks, or what we’re supposed to think, about the cross-dressing. I can think of a bunch of possible ways to parse the scene — but, as I’ll discuss, none of them seem to fit perfectly.

1. Women who dress as men are ridiculous or incongruous, or going against nature in some way.

There’s a little evidence for this; WW makes a crack about Dr. Poison’s delicate hands, suggesting that a woman can’t perfectly imitate a man. The remark is somewhat undercut, though by Steve’s obvious and complete befuddlement. He couldn’t tell she was a woman, clearly. Moreover, I don’t think the reader can tell she’s a woman until WW reveals the truth. There isn’t any effort to tip us off; she doesn’t do or behave in a womanly manner at any point. It’s not even clear whether we’re supposed to see the cross-dressing as funny, exactly. It’s true that the scene after the unmasking has a farcical air about it…but the one thing that is more or less specifically mocked is Poison’s ethnicity, not her drag king status:

There’s certainly evidence, here and elsewhere that Marston had unpleasant racial opinions, but he’s more circumspect about cross-dressers.

2. Cross-dressing is evil and perverse, and so is the provenance of villains.

Richard Cook suggested this was what Marston was up to in a comment on the Wonder Woman #11 thread.

You say that Marston didn’t think that cross-dressing was wrong, but none of the “good” women (Diana, Etta, or the Holiday Girls) ever dressed as a man.* The cross-dressers, like Hypnota or the Blue Snowman, are invariably villainesses. The impression I get is that Marston believed there was something evil (and sexy) with a woman who wanted to be a man.

Vom Marlowe made a similar point in the same thread.

I wonder if the portrayal of cross-dressing is part of the skanky villain sex convention. This happens a lot in modern romance. You can portray non-vanilla stuff quite explicitly, but it has to be done by villains. The goal is titillation, for certain. The non-vanilla sex is not necessarily a way to show that the person is evil but sometimes it is. I wonder if this is something that Marston wanted to include, but didn’t think he could get away with doing for a good girl.

Again, this is feasible, but Marston never quite says it…and in other cases, he doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with women taking on male roles:

That’s heroine Etta candy, looking far more butch and tough in this early story than she would later on. The butch-femme dynamic, complete with a barely sublimated oral tease, is awfully hard to miss. And then there’s this panel:

Unlike the last example, I don’t think this is a joke, per se; Etta is really the hero here, and Marston is, as far as I can tell from other issues, completely fine with women’s sports (and indeed, more than fine with them.) The image of Etta dressing up as a football player isn’t meant to be either ludicrous or evil, I don’t think. Given that, it’s hard to see why Poison dressing as a man would necessarily strike him as evil in itself.

3. Men are evil, so women have to dress as men to be evil.

Sort of dovetails with Marston’s philosophy, but doesn’t seem especially likely given (a) the number of female villains he uses in other instances and (b) this panel:

She seems to remain fairly evil even when femme, as far as I can tell.

4. Women are weak, so they need to pretend to be men to gain power.

This is why MTF cross-dressing is always pretty much seen as odder than FTM; culturally, it makes sense for a woman to want to be a man, because men are higher status in various ways. And you could see a later version of this story having Poison reveal that because of the sexism of Japanese culture, she needed to dress as a man to be taken seriously, and so on and so forth.

Again, though, it’s hard to imagine Marston making this argument. Marston thought women were stronger than men in just about every way. In this issue alone, he goes out of his way to make Steve weak and helpless (wheelchair bound), and has not only WW as the superior strong woman, but also Etta, who is (as we’ve seen) quite tough herself.

Ultimately, I think the fact that it’s difficult to pin Marston down here is maybe the most interesting aspect of his use of cross-dressing. I have no doubt (as Richard suggested above) that Marston found role-play and cross-dressing sexy and exciting. But beyond that, he doesn’t explicitly stigmatize it, and, moreoever, doesn’t even really seem to feel that it needs an explanation.

Rawle’s book, on the other hand, is basically nothing but explanation, first, of who would be shallow enough to live their life based on a woman’s magazine (answer: a cross-dresser) and second, of why a man would dress as a woman (answer: because he’s insane.) Explanations are a big part of how society decides who or what is abnormal. You don’t need to explain why men dress as men because that’s normal, but if a man dresses as a woman, you have to explain that, because it’s weird. Except that Marston doesn’t seem to think that it is, particularly.

Steven Grant in commments on one of my recent posts said this about Marston:

As for Marston’s proclivities, I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere, but it’s hard not to suspect he liked being tied up and restrained, probably responded initially with shame, and egotistically concocted a bondage worldview that obviated any need for shame. So bondage – and the “freedom” that comes with it – becomes not his secret shame but everyone’s secret desire, and the path to emotional liberation. (As with the jargon of most cults, we can assume he believed anyone who didn’t like being restrained was simply repressed, and even more in need of “therapy.” His creation of the lie detector suggests that he had at least some fixation on the notion of secret shame, inventing a (specious. if well-promoted) device that would bring secret shame to light and, from his perspective, begin “correction” of it.

I don’t doubt that there’s something to this…but on the other hand, I think it’s worth noting that Marston’s investment and interest in perversions of various sorts doesn’t manifest solely as a desire to control or correct or diagnose. On the contrary, it often manifests as something that looks rather like tolerance. There are instances, at least, where Marston’s just not especially judgmental about other people’s desires — in part because he’s fetishizing those desires himself, no doubt. Still, speaking as a boring straight guy, it seems to me overall like it would be better to be obliquely fetishized by Marston than to be condescended to and clinicalized by Rawle.

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Just a couple other notes about this story formally; it’s pretty clear that both Marston and Peter are still kind of finding their feet. Peter’s linework is lovely as always: I really like the curves in this broken door, for example:

Still, you can see Peter struggling a bit with layout and panel composition. This image for example:

the dancing is great, and all the action is nice…but the inset panel is just weird, and looks like it was done at the last minute (look how that one girl is cropped off almost at random.) Partially as a result, the big panel looks crowded and messy, rather than formal and frozen in a way Peter would master shortly.

Marston’s also not quite where he would end up. The plot here involves sorority girls led by WW using their feminine whiles to trick and capture Poison’s guards. Marston, of course, believed that women used their feminine allure to overpower men and force them to submit. Marston never exactly abandons these ideas…but in future issues he tends not to represent them quite so schematically, I think. Certainly, WW does not, as a rule, beat the bad guys by dancing with them. Usually, she slugs them, or outthinks them, or some combination of those. I guess maybe he figured it would strain credulity if she danced her way to victory in every issue.

I’ve been poking away at the Les Daniels “Wonder Woman: The Complete History.” It’s quite interesting, as much for the tidbits of information (Harry Peter did cartoons for Judge!) as for the topics it elides (there’s no way around the fact that Marston had sexual relations and lived with two women (Elizabeth Marston and Olive Richard). But the two women…what was their relationship exactly? Did that have any influence on the many, arguably sensual, female-female relationships in Wonder Woman. Daniels doesn’t even ask the question.

Anyway, at one point (page 34) Daniels talks a bit about WW’s villains:

It seems that Wonder Woman’s foes should have been male (and certainly many were), yet a surprising number of her most interesting and energetic opponents were female. Some of Wonder Woman’s comments indicate that men were just too feeble to be worthy antagonists. Marston was apparently intrigued by the dramatic possibilities of depicting Princess Diana battling various vivacious vixens (they were invariably gorgeous), or perhaps he had calculated that such encounters would be most appealing to male readers.

I’m sure Marston did enjoy the woman-on-woman action just fine. But at the same time, I’m not sure there’s any sense in which Wonder Woman’s opponents “should have been male.” It’s true, as Daniels discusses, that Marston wanted women to rule over men. But that’s not quite the same thing as saying that all women are good and all men are evil. On the contrary, Marston has plenty of good men (Steve Trevor, most noticeably, who is certainly noble, if often kind of dumb) and plenty of evil women.

Moreover, the use of women villains can’t just be chalked up to prurience. In several cases, as Daniels notes, male villains are revealed to actually be cross-dressing women at the last moment. If you’re going for the sex element, surely it would be more effective to have your villainous hotty wear a bikini or a diaphanous gown (as, of course, Marston frequently does) rather than deck them out in drag-king attire.

For example, as these things go, this just isn’t a very prurient cover:

The fellow decked out in the pseudo-orientalist get-up (very nicely rendered by Peter, I might add — love those art-nouveau curlicue patterns) is, we learn at the end of the book, actually a girl. Because Marston’s decided to dress the she as a he, we lose the opportunity for two sexy girls on the cover instead of one. Which is not the way to go for marketing purposes.

So if women-as-villain isn’t strictly for cheesecake purposes, what’s the deal? Daniels doesn’t really have an explanatory framework, because he’s stuck on Marston’s utopian claims about the goodness of women and the loving matriarchy. But if you actually read the Wonder Woman comics, it’s clear enough that, while Marston likes kind mistresses well enough, he also has a thing for cruel ones:

“Hussy” has definite sexual connotations; Diana sounds jealous that someone other than WW is forcing Steve to obey.

And similarly, this girl-on-girl hypnotism, with the kneeling veiled slave, surely has sexual connotations.

In short, Marston is fascinated by female power — as a force for good, sure, but also just in itself. The sexual payoff isn’t just in the opportunities for cheesecake (though certainly those are fun), but also in the enforced submission.

Which is to say, the fetish here is not attractive female bodies in disarray, but the hypnotism itself.

The first three are clear enough; hot girl in short skirt being controlled, hot girl in negligee being controlled, hot nurse being controlled (everyone likes nurses.) But — as someone with a bit of a button for eroticized mind-control I think I can say with some certainty that Marston got a thrill from that last one as well. The control and submission aren’t an excuse for the cheesecake; they’re the point in and of themselves. (Incidentally, WW comes onto the ice and saves the game (which was against a men’s team) for the Holiday college women.)

In other words, this is one place where Marston’s fetish and his feminism arguably part company; the use of control for evil purposes (or even for silly ones, as with Etta in the image above) is exciting. But this kind of control, thrilling as it may be, can’t really be described in terms of loving submission. The tension is most clear in those instances where it’s Wonder Woman who is placed in hypnotic thrall. As the Amazonian hope for a new tomorrow, WW generally makes others obey her with the use of her magic lasso (though that gets turned around a fair bit, too…but not to digress). But there’s obviously some payoff to be had by showing her will bent to the power of Hypnota. So how does Marston resolve things? Well, he vacillates:

On the one hand, we get to see WW all wide-eyed and receptive…..

But then she’s stronger than Hypnota….

But then she gets tied up in the golden lasso and has to submit; though only reluctantly (does that make it less or more appealing?)

She breaks out of that and gets free…but later, we do finally see her being taken over by Hypnota:

Though soon she’s back to being immune…and only pretending to be hypnotized….

Marston, in short, goes to some trouble to have it both ways. WW is both too heroic to be a thrall to the evil hypnotist…and yet, we also get to see her being a thrall to the evil hypnotist. Everybody’s happy!

It’s also worth asking…what’s the deal with all cross-dressing? Again, I think Marston is probably just fascinated with the possibilities of gender switching and dress-up in themselves.

It’s a little hard to follow what exactly the trick here is supposed to be…but basically Hypnota and her identical twin are switching places back and forth. I can’t really see any reason to devote this much space to it, other than Marston’s enthusiasm for the surreptitious swapping of clothes and bodies and genders.

In some versions of masochism, gender swapping is used to as a way to undermine or invalidate patriarchy. For instance, in Jack Hill’s women in prison movie “The Big Doll House,” we find out at the end that the sadistic torturer is actually a woman…which essentially makes it possible to rape her. (I talk about this at much greater length in this essay. Turning a man into a woman, in that case, seems like a way to sneer at, and get back at, authority; the mother invalidates the father.

There’s maybe a touch of this in Marston’s story as well. Hypnota binds WW hands…which should rob WW of her strength, if Hypnota was a man. But, of course, Hypnota isn’t a man…so WW retains her strength, and (after some confusion) to break free.

Overall, though…I don’t know. In Marston, femininity isn’t ridiculed…quite the contrary. In some ways, Hypnota’s power, influencing others, seems like actually like a corruption of feminine influence — the dark side of WW’s magic lasso. From that perspective, you might see Hypnota’s cross-dressing as a sign that she’s using female power for evil male ends.

Again, though, I’m not quite sure that’s right. If cross-dressing were a sign of evil, then cross-dressing should itself be evil or wrong — and I don’t know that Marston thinks it is. Hypnota seems quite natural; as a man, she’s slender and boyish looking, perhaps, but not noticeably unattractive.

The truth is that, Marston can tend to see masculinity as wrong or deformed; men like Hercules and Dr. Psycho are caricatured and even ludicrous in their maleness. In some sense, Hypnota — who isn’t caricatured at all — is a better man than either of those real men. Women, for Marston, can and should do anything…and that includes being men.

Or being super-villains. After all, had Marston decided to make all his villains men, he would have robbed women of some of the best roles in the comic. It’s not necessarily especially feminist to paint all women as pure and virtuous and good. Why should men get to be the only ones who are powerful and bad? Marston seems to think it’s more fun for everyone, male and female alike, if women get to be villainesses, and villains too.

Wonder Woman #9 was a high point for both Marston’s script and Peter’s art. After that, #10 is a bit of a let-down. Not that it’s bad; it’s just, comparatively (and comparatively only) kind of tame. This issue the enemy is the Saturnians who (surprise!) keep lots of slaves and fly back and forth from their planet to ours tying people up and then letting them escape and being tied up themselves and…well, you ge the idea.

Here’s the cover:

That’s a pretty great drawing. In general, Peter’s best moment in this issue involve those trippy, computer-graphics-looking pathways made out of circles. The Saturnians have decided that the best way to invade earth is to build a giant bridge out of space debris stretching all the way between the two planets. I”m pretty sure that you’d have to run into some structural problems there…but of course, I don’t wear skintight green jumpsuits either. Just goes to show whose an advanced interplanetary genius and who isn’t I guess….

You’ve got to love that in that second one they appear to be moving those space-rocks with a toy crane.

Anyway, as I said, the intricacies of the plot aren’t especially revelatory this go round. There were a bunch of moments that made me laugh, though. First is this:

That cracked me up. Diana is worried about going swimming with the Holiday girls because if she’s wearing a swimsuit, they’ll recognize her as Wonder Woman! Obviously, that’s a pretty logical concern…but that’s just why it’s funny. I mean, she’s only wearing glasses; how hard would it be to recognize her anyway?

This got me too:

His name is Mephisto Saturno. Gee, I wonder if he’s a bad guy from the planet Saturn? I guess no one will recognize him as long as he doesn’t dress in a bathing suit though.

Looking at this panel, I was reminded of Man-Thing (if you can believe that). Me and Tucker Stone have been blogging our way through the first Man-Thing essential volume. Writer Steve Gerber names his villainous evil developer F.A. Schist, which I think is both dumb and irritating. Yet, I find Mephisto Saturno charming. I was trying to figure out why that would be; why does one goofy, over-determined name make me groan, while the other makes me giggle?

I think part of it has to do with the language itself; F.A. Schist is awkward; it’s actually even difficult to pronounce. Whereas Mephisto Saturno bounces right off the tongue; it’s almost like something out of a children’s book. Come to think of it, Marston has a real affinity for nonsense language in general. Wonder Woman #9 had goofy cave man speak, and this issue has a bunch of gibberish nonsense code (in the upper right panel)

I was going to say that this is one of the few Marston ticks that I can’t really link up to any of his fetishes…but now that I think about it, I wonder. I’ve just started Les Daniels book about WW, and it talked about some of Marston’s experiments with sorority girls. Apparently, he attended a sorority ritual known as the:

“baby party”, a strange sorority ritual in which freshman initiates “were required to dress like babies.” They were also bound, blindfoded and prodded with sticks, when they resisted, wrestling ensued. Four pages of charts documented the responses of the young scholars to these activities, with Marston concluding that “the strongest and most pleasant captivation emotions were experienced during a struggle with girls who were trying to escape from their captivity.”

Who experienced those pleasant emotions again? Anyway, the point is that baby talk as a prelude to some bondage play may well have pushed some of Marston’s buttons.

Back to F.A. Schist vs. Mephisto Saturno, though. Besides the fact that the second name is more fun to say than the first, it’s also just less heavy-handed. Calling a developer a fascist is the dumbest kind of knee-jerk clichéd liberal insult. It’s bone-headed and obvious. Whereas Mephisto Saturno is just silly. Marston does have a lot of political axes to grind, and he grinds them assiduously and openly…but not oppressively. Part of it is that his ideas are nutty enough that when he lays them out there, you (or at least I) tend to laugh rather than groan. Also, I think he’s actually just more subtle than Gerber is:

Steve’s thinking how great it would be if WW stayed homed and cooked for him…but I don’t think the reader is supposed to think that’s great. In fact, later in the comic, Steve gets punished for wanting to make WW his domestic by being turned into a (sexualized) domestic himself —and significantly, he’s prattling on about food here, too:

I’m not sure the point here is exactly that Steve shouldn’t have wished servility on WW, incidentally; rather, it seems more like Marston is asying that it’s sexy to have everyone, man or woman, in a position of servility.

Along those lines, I thought this page was interesting:

Despite the claims of someas we see here, Steve doesn’t always get rescued. On the contrary, in this scene, he and WW rescue each other. It’s true that overall, WW is more likely to rescue Steve throughout the series than vice versa…but he’s hardly entirely helpless.

In fact, the more I read WW, the more the Steve-WW relationship comes across as…I don’t know if subtle is the word exactly. Vaguely viable, maybe? I was just thinking about it in relation to the Wonder Woman animated film, which also has Steve mouth obnoxious misogynist canards at points, and treats him as a somewhat equal partner in kicking ass. But the animated film is shot through with anxiety; Steve and WW have lots of dramatic tension around Steve’s issues with letting WW go into danger and his need to in general force WW to admit that men are really okay too. Whereas, in this version, when Steve talks about keeping WW out of danger, it’s more an exasperated aside than a real argument. And then there’s this:

I guess that could be seen as a misogynist diss in some sense. But it really comes across more as friendly flirtation than as an actual effort to run WW down. Especially given this:

I think he’s bragging about her there; he’s saying. The point isn’t that she did all this amazing stuff, but she’s still a silly little woman, but that despite all of this amazing stuff she did and all the danger she was in, she wasn’t perturbed…and also wasn’t unfeminine. I think that’s really the point; Marston likes femininity, so pointing out WW’s femininity can be teasingly affectionate; it’s banter, not an insult. Whereas the animated DVD was a lot less comfortable with femininity, and so many of Steve’s chauvinistic comments came across not as teasing or as friendly banter, but as anxious and mean-spirited — if I remember correctly, there’s a moment of borderline workplace harassment.

It’s also worth pointing out this sequence:

That’s from WW #2, and it’s almost an exact reversal of the scenes we just looked at; in this case, WW is teasing Steve for behaving just like a man even though he’s been captured and endangered on another planet (Mars in this case.)

All right, to finish up with the boots:

Nobody’s going to notice her running around in a gaudy swimsuit…but not wearing boots! Everybody will point and stare at her then!

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I just looked ahead, and after this mild downturn, #11 features a cross-dressing hypnotist. So I’m looking forward to that.

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….