Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #8

Posted on May 19, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

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

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

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

Tiny little baby sailor men. Cute!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there are moments like the below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gail Simone Hearts Diana Sue

Posted on May 17, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

I finally read the first collection of Gail Simone Wonder Woman comics, (“The Circle”). It’s definitely an interesting take on the character. In fact, among post-Marston creators, Simone is, I think, alone in avoiding the pratfalls which have plagued virtually every creator who has tackled WW after Marston. (Unless you want to count Alan Moore’s Glory.)

So how does Simone manage not to be tripped up by the bondage lasso, or the incredibly poorly defined mission to man’s world, or any number of other traps Marston has set for his unwary followers? Well, she does it primarily by writing fan fiction, and by treating WW as a Mary Sue — a character who the author loves too much. Fantasy author Mercedes Lackey says as much in the introduction to the volume, where she starts out by saying that she never liked Wonder Woman the character, and then goes on to praise Simone for creating a Wonder Woman that she (Lackey) could love. The ultimate standard, in other words, is not craft, or thoughtfulness, or originality, but loveability. Lackey wants a Mary Sue, and Simone delivers.

“Mary Sue” is usually a term applied to fan-fiction characters, where it tends to be seen as as a deadly insult. And there are many manifestations of it which are certainly unpleasant. I talked in an earlier post, for example, about the way in which League of One is basically all Mary Sue fanscruff pander, reveling in WW’s strength and purity and general awesomeness until you just wish she’d die tragically and beautifully already and get it over with. And there’s definitely more than a touch of that in Simone’s version too, with everyone and their aunt racing to tell WW how mega-awesome she is. Super-intelligent gorilla warriors fall on their knees before her; intergalactic genocidal Khund warriors build statues in her honor all over their planet. And while I don’t need WW to whine as much as Spider-Man or (god forbid) Greg Rucka’s version of the character does, it would have been nice to see Simone give the sainted Diana a self-doubt once or twice in the volume (and no, accepting your inevitable death without blinking doesn’t count as a self-doubt.)

Still, the truth is that WW was more or less intended as a Mary Sue to begin with. Marston loved her (even arguably overmuch) and he created her more or less to be loved by his readers — girls and boys alike. Nor was Marston’s version especially given to self-doubt (though unwavering confidence is a lot less irritating when you’re not subjected to it in internal monologues.)

So there’s a sense in which Simone’s Mary Sue pandering — her transparent puffery of the character — is very much in the spirit of the original. And Simone’s love of the character allows her to deal with the character’s structural problems as any good fan-fiction writer would — by reducing them to fan in-jokes. WW’s embarrassing bondage heritage is mentioned in passing by a callow Nazi, who cracks wise about wanting her to tie him up in her magic lasso. Then WW swoops in and threatens him with the real Lasso of Truth and he goes all weak-kneed like a baby man. The unfortunate sartorial choices Marston bequeathed are similarly deflated; there’s a really cute moment where an admiring onlooker mentions “I just want to say as a gay man that I miss the high heels on your boots…” The lesbian implications of Paradise Island get similarly defused in a joking aside (WW’s love-interest notes that courtship on Paradise Island must be between women, and WW responds “Aren’t you the observant one.”)

The humor in the book is probably the best thing about it — and the best moments of humor are those in which WW is most like a Mary Sue. Which is to say, since Mary Sue is often thought of as being an author surrogate, the high points of the book are those in which WW and Gail Simone seem closest to one another. My single favorite line in the comic comes when Diana Prince is having a birthday party at work. She’s musing about the fact that hugging her coworkers in gratitude for the surprise party would be frowned upon, and she thinks: “It is a strange culture that outlaws the hug. On the other hand…there is cake, and that excuses much.” Another gem is when WW looks at the statues the Khund have erected to her…which attempt to honor her by depicting her as a brutish looking Khund. WW looks at them, and then thinks to herself that she wants to call a friend (Donna Troy, I think) on her cell phone because she’d be really amused.

In some alternate timeline, perhaps, there’s a perfect Gail Simone fan-fic Wonder Woman, which is entirely composed of such moments — all romantic comedy banter, goofy relationship moments, and slice-of-life silliness, with the super-heroics mentioned occasionally in passing but never allowed to interfere with the real focus. Unfortunately, in the more hum-drum world we inhabit, Simone is writing a corporate comic, and there are certain hoops she’s got to jump through to get her paycheck. She has to, for example, make her story a comic, which means she needs art. And so we’ve got drawings by a number of pencillers (Terry Dodson and Bernard Chang predominantly). As mainstream illustrators go, neither is horrible. But just because they don’t make me want to gouge my eyes out doesn’t mean that they actually add anything of value to the story.

Simone also needs DCU continuity porn, and she needs pulp action. She provides the first of these eagerly enough, and with some panache. Sure, the level of background knowledge needed to follow the story is pretty much ridiculous; I was occasionally at sea, and I’ve been obsessively reading Wonder Woman comics for months now, plus I actually know who Gorilla Grodd and the Green Lantern Corps and the Khund are — lord knows what an actual novice would make of this. Still, if you’ve already decided you don’t care if anybody but die-hards can follow you, it’s pretty great to end up with gorillas fighting Nazis. That’s genuine silver-age wackiness, damn it.

The pulp action is a little dicier. Simone has a certain amount of pulp smarts; she’s able to make Wonder Woman’s tactical ability somewhat believable — but only somewhat. . Whenever WW makes a brilliant military move the special pleading is audible. When Alan Moore has Rorschach outthink people, you feel outthought yourself. When Simone has WW outthink people, you always feel she’s throwing the character a bone. “Oh, the super-villain has you by the neck in your Diana Prince form…but luckily for you, the wall behind you is rotten, and you can knock through it with your head! The alien Green Lantern is going to beat the snot out of you — but luckily he flinches every time you say “Khund”, and you can use that to your advantage!” It’s not that it’s especially dumb. It’s just that it’s advertising itself as especially smart, and it’s not that either.

The real problem, though, is with the handling of one of the characters central contradictions: she’s supposed to be an avatar of peace, but she constantly is battling costumed yahoos. To her credit, Simone confronts this problem directly: every time WW goes into battle, she starts thinking about how much she likes fighting and how, at the same time, the Amazon code calls for ending fights as quickly as possible.

The problem is that repeating something and actually thinking about it are two different things. The issues of peace, violence, and non-violence which Simone raises are both complicated and (to me at least) important ones. They’re worth struggling with. But neither Simone nor WW struggle with them; instead, they merely present facile answers and treat the problems as solved. This is irritating and, frankly boring; it robs the narrative of much of its tension. For example, in the last story, WW is faced with a situation where she has to try to save the Khund, even though if she does so they’ll return to their genocidal ravaging of neighboring stars. The alien Green Lantern I mentioned before is all for wiping out the Khund, who murdered his daughter and threaten his homeworld and the rest of his space sector.

I mean, I am adamently opposed to the death penalty, and I think genocide is A Bad Thing. But…the way Simone structures the problem here, there is a pretty fucking good argument for allowing the Khund world to be destroyed. Reinhold Niebuhr would almost certainly say pull the trigger; I think you’d have a really good case under Just War theory as well. Gandhi would no doubt say you shouldn’t do it — but Gandhi was an extreme pacifist, and Wonder Woman is , you know, not. So you’d think, given all that, that our heroine might have doubts, or be conflicted, or have some level of moral conflict. But WW and her loyal sidekick Etta Candy don’t even hesitate; they’re just like — no, no, we have to show mercy to the Khund, that’s obviously the right thing to do. And not only are they certain down to their socks, but they convince everyone else too! Etta talks to a godlike ichor for five minutes and, hey presto! Godlike ichor reverses its position on capital punishment. These moral problems are just that simple. If only Orson Scott Card had known; Ender’s Game could have been a lot shorter and less tortured.

In the end, then, maybe I spoke too quickly when I said that Simone managed to avoid the traps Marston laid for her. She does outmaneuver several of them…but she’s left with maybe the biggest one of all, which is that, unlike most any other super-hero outside of Mr. A, Wonder Woman was actually about something. Marston had stuff to say, in his cranky way, about real issues, peace and war among them. His solutions to these problems were more or less crazy (have woman rule over the world and teach men submission and love as a way to combat war), but they were thought through and existed in a coherent (if cracked) belief system. Marston, in short, wasn’t glib. Simone, at least on these issues, is. When you write a comic about the glorious icon that is Superman, you don’t need to really think too hard about what the character means, because the character has always been vacuous. Writing Wonder Woman, though, forces you to confront some actual content — which is unfortunate when all you really want to do is love her and maybe create some entertaining genre product, more or less in that order.

_____________

This is the latest in a series on post-Marston version of Wonder Woman.

Update: Simone herself has a gracious note or three in comments (keep scrolling.) She points out that there are currently two volumes of her WW series available, and that a third is forthcoming shortly.

More on Mark Waid’s Wonder Woman

Posted on May 14, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

I already posted this picture once before:

But I thought I’d talk about it a little more. As I said, it’s Mark Waid and Ty Templeton, and it’s part of a seriesof crazed Silver Age Tribute Elseworlds covers they did. You should look at them all if you haven’t already; the one with Gorilla Grodd as Christopher Columbus is amazing, as is the one with Batman as the Biblical Adam worried that Eve will discover his double identity.

This cover is great too though. I’ve spent a fair bit of time here talking about the ways in which Wonder Woman is an impossible character to get right. Even doing Wonder Woman satire often falls flat…and when it works, as in Darwyn Cooke’s WW meets Playboy goof, it’s rarely anywhere near as funny as the Marston/Peter original series.

This is an exception though; that image is truly cracked. Part of its success, I think, is that it plugs into, and scrambles, some of the weird gender dynamics that inspired Marston in the first place. Basically, that cover is extremely, bizarrely Freudian. Luthor goes into the past to despoil the matriarchal paradise, “romancing” not only Hippolyta, but WW as well, who remakes herself in his image. Having her shave herself bald is just an awesomely ridiculous thing to do; on the one hand, it’s the ultimate negation of the character (who is more or less defined by her connection to the beauty of Aphrodite;) on the other hand, though, it makes her really butch, which is something that was definitely implicit (and often explicit) in the early WW stories. There’s also more than a tinge of Marston’s control fetish here: Big Daddy Luthor can make Wonder Woman do “whatever her father commands!” And the text up top is funnier if you know Steve Trevor at all…that incompetent is supposed to replace the uber-patriarch? Yeah, I can picture that scene.

It’s true that Ty Templeton is no Harry Peter…but the art is serviceable, and its stiffness (reminiscent of Ross Andru?) is charming in context. And what a completely insane idea. I’ve called Mark Waid a hack in the past, but this cover and the others in this series, are really brilliant. I almost wish he’d write one of these stories out…or do some other humor tale. Has he ever written an entire book that looks anything like this? Because I would buy it in a second.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #7

Posted on May 13, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You see some of the same impulse in this drawing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s another bizarre moment:

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

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

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

Of course, bad mothers are quite exciting too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________

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

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #6 (with Mary Sue tie-in)

Posted on May 6, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

For those who care about such things, this is both part of my ongoing series on the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman run and part of our ongoing roundtable on Mary Sue characters.

I wrote this over the weekend, incidentally, before I’d convinced myself that Mary Sues had some positive aspects. I could have rewritten, I guess, but…eh, why bother? Consistency is the hobgoblin of my little mind.
___________.

In this post I argued that the comic Legion of One, and much of contemporary Wonder Woman — and indeed, much of contemporary super-hero comics in general — are essentially Mary Sue stories. Mary Sues is usually used to refer to a non-canon, author-surrogate character of exceptional and irritating wonderfulness introduced into a fan-fiction story. I argued that, in contemporary comics, the canon itself is riddled with Mary Sueism, such that you get stories whose main point seems to be the reiteration of how great Wonder Woman is, or how mythical Superman is, or how everyone wants to be in the Justice League. Whole comics seem devoted to puffing the putative protagonists, as if the reader won’t believe that Captain Marvelous is really Marvelous unless he or she is reminded of that fact every fifth panel.

One could argue, I guess, that this is in general true of all super-heroes; after all, the whole point of Superman is for him to be super, the whole point of Wonder Woman is for her to be wonderful. That’s true to a certain extent, sure — but I think that in general, golden age and silver age comics tended to be less self-conscious about this sort of thing. I think this is especially true of the Marston run; certainly, Wonder Woman was always wonderful, and Marston liked that about her…but his plots tended to be as much or more about his own weird fetishes and his goofy imagination as about reiterating her greatness. If the plot called for it, he’d cheerfully have Wonder Woman be saved by Etta Candy, and damn WW’s supposed superiority. If his fetishes called for it, he’d happily have WW fail in her duty to be authoritative and be chastised for it by Aphrodite.

You can see the sort of thing I’m talking about in the first few pages of Wonder Woman #6. In the ostensible plot, WW is putting on a show to raise money for “restored countries” (presumably nations retaken from the Axis by the Allies.) She’s there to demonstrate just how great she is, to do spectacular feats, to wow the crowd. And yet, Marston just can’t keep his focus; his mind drifts…and suddenly, before you know it, we’re talking, not about WW’s greatness, but about the wonders of multi-ethnic restraint technology. Priscilla Rich, the socialite who organized the benefit, has a hobby, you see…she collects manacles from around the world! Or, as WW puts it “Priscilla’s hobby is collecting chains…mine is breaking them!”

This scene climaxes (as it were) with the sequence that first got me intrigued with the Marston/Peter run in the first place: WW in a gimp mask underwater, sneering at the weak jaws of French girls as she braeks free of the gimp mask with her teeth (Marston loves, loves, loves to have WW tied up in such a way that she can only escape by using her teeth. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.)

Basically, Marston’s fantasy uber-self is a trussed-up woman with phenomenal jaw strength. You can call that a Mary Sue in a sense…but it’s a Mary Sue so preposterously idiosyncratic that it really seems like she needs another name. Masoch Sue, perhaps.

So that’s that for that argument…or rather, I wish that were that. Because the fact is that, while Marston’s obsessive eccentricity usually does allow him to avoid most of the Mary Sue pitfalls, things don’t always work out quite so neatly. Specifically, in this issue, Marston does actually, and with some consistency, treat Wonder Woman and the Amazon race in general as something of a typical Mary Sue. As a result, this issue is (by Marston-Peter standards) relatively boring. It also, and I think not coincidentally, highlights some of the less pleasant implications of Marston’s gender politics.

As you can see from the cover at the top of the post, this issue involves WW in a fight against the Cheetah. The Cheetah, as it turns out, is actually Priscilla Darling (the socialite who likes to collect chains.) Said chain-collecting socialite is jealous of WW, and also owns a mirror — the combination, apparently, drives her insane, and she becomes…evil!

The rest of the issue is given over to the Cheetah’s sneaky plans to destroy WW. These are for the most part typical Marston fare; fairly entertaining, though not as crazed as he sometimes gets. The moment where she dresses up some captives as zebras is probably the highlight.

Overall, though, the Cheetah is a problematic villain in a couple of ways. First of all, she’s actuated entirely by jealousy; she’s a super-villain just because WW makes her feel inferior. From Marston’s perspective, this is supposed to be a cautionary tale about women’s self-esteem, I think — that is, women should feel good about themselves.

Which is okay I guess, but…the thing is the Cheetah really is inferior to Wonder Woman. In past issues, WW’s enemies have been gods like Ares, or evil geniuses like Dr. Psycho or the Baronness, or entire subterranean races. They were real threats. But the Cheetah’s just this socialite with multiple personality disorder. Yes, she uses lots of cowardly tricks, and she’s supposed to have agility because she’s dressed like a cheetah I guess, but…come on. She’s screwed; she’s the underdog. And if she’s the underdog…well, you feel bad for her, or at least I did. You sort of want her to win.

In other words, you have a classic Mary Sue set-up — WW is too good to root for. She’s got an unfair advantage; you feel like the author has his hands on the scale. It’s especially painful because WW seems to know, just by osmosis, that the Cheetah’s real problem isn’t that she’s evil, but that she’s just misunderstood.

I mean, in that two-panel sequence, the Cheetah is clearly a more appealing personality. She’s all crazed bluster and braggadocio, while Wonder Woman comes across as some kind of sanctimonious super social worker.

Things only get worse in the book’s final chapter, though. For obscure reasons, WW decides to stage a contest between her friend Paula’s slave girls who are being trained by Amazons on Paradise Island and the greatest women athletes of earth. The Amazon-trained women are, of course, stronger, faster, and more awesome, primarily because they wear chains.

So, inevitably, the sportswomen of earth get their butts kicked by the chain-wearing submissives.Paula, the slave-girls’ leader, even insists that her girls compete in the running events while wearing ankle chains.

The woman on the right in the picture above is the Cheetah in disguise. And, I have to say, she’s got a point. Running a race with ankle-chains on does seem like an effort to deliberately humiliate your competition; it’s a shitty thing to do. Moreover, while it’s not a trick of Wonder Woman’s diagetically, it does seem like a trick of Marston’s — the Amazons all seem like Mary Sues, boosted into wonderfulness by authorial favoritism.

What’s especially icky about all this, of course, is that the favoritism is explicitly linked to the women’s submissiveness. This isn’t exactly new, of course; Marston is always riffing on the virtues of submission as power, or power as submission. Often, Marston presents that submission/power as an alternative to low self-esteem and weakness — “you girls really can do anything! Don’t let me hear you say you can’t crush the seal-men! I know you can if you just learn to love giving and receiving bondage!” It’s ridiculous, but at least the overall arch is about depowered women gaining strength and control over their fate, at least in some sense. Here, though, the women who Marston is supposedly educating about the virtues of self-confidence are already world-class athletes. And as a result, you really start to wonder…do these women actually need a skanky perv, no matter how well-intentioned, lecturing them on the virtues of self-esteem? I mean, let’s say you’ve got an Olympic level runner there, someone who has been training for years; someone who has bucked the general prejudice against women’s athletics, which certainly existed back in the 1930s. How exactly is it liberating to pretend that she’d be better off as a runner and as a human being if she learned to love being chained?

Marston’s fetish and his feminsm often work together, as I argued in this essay. In this narrative, though, they don’t…and forced to choose, he unhesitatingly goes with the fetish. The bondage girls of his wet dreams beat the real-world athletes, and even humiliate them. And just to clinch things, he gives the only word of protest to the piece’s villain:

That’s the Cheetah in disguise again…and, again, she’s absolutely right (and I’m not just saying that because I love those Peter-drawn eyebrows.) The Amazons, or rather Marston through the Amazons, are being condescending assholes. You do sort of want to see them (or rather him) get a comeuppance. Let’s have the damn Mary Sues trip over their stupid chains, already.

Cheetah makes a go of it, but, of course, it doesn’t work out. She does get to tie up Hippolyta, but really, who doesn’t? Ultimately, WW wins. And as if that’s enough, with the help of the magic lasso, she makes the delinquent confess and beg, not for forgiveness, but for discipline — “keep me a prisoner here and train my cheetah self!”

In our Helter Skelter discussion I expressed some doubts about bad-girl, Courtney Love style feminism; the whole idea that being a jerk is an effective way to fight the power. This story, though, made me recosider. I still don’t think that being a jerk is necessarily a particularly useful strategy…but if the choice is between more or less futilely acting like an evil jerk and meekly acquiescing in your own disempowerment — well, one can see why the first option has some charm. Marston connived to make the Cheetah feel inferior, and so she got pissed right the fuck off. The getting pissed off is supposed to make her evil…but in fact, getting pissed off seems like a reasonable, and even, dare I say, a feminist response. Marston decides to discipline her because she’s not sufficiently restrained, and then he sanctimoniously suggests that restraint will make her stronger. In fact, though, power doesn’t necessarily always come from restraint — or, at least, it depends on who is doing the restraining. The Cheetah represents, it seems to me, an angry feminine — a feminine not bound by Marston’s particular obsessions, and not especially interested in his games. He doesn’t handle it well.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #5

Posted on April 30, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

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

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

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

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

What was I talking about, anyway?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_________________

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

Hopefully that’ll hold you till next week.

People Hate Me! They Really Hate Me!

Posted on April 28, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

Various members of the When Fangirls Attack crowd explain why I was wrong, wrong wrong in this post.

The only thing I really wanted to respond to was that a couple people accuse me of being prejudiced against fan fiction, and (by extension) kind of sexist (since fan fiction is mostly written by women writers.) I just want to say, again, for the record: I have no problem with fan fiction. Some of my closest friends write fan fiction: notably kinukitty, who is now writing a yaoi column for this site — a column which, I am informed, will also probably discuss slash fiction at some point in the not too distant future. In my Gay Utopia project, I included a number of fan fiction related contributions by Kinukitty and others (here; here and here.) I’m a fan of Clamp, a collective that started out doing dojinshi, or fan-fiction Japanese comics. I wrote an essay in praise of Torchwood’s fan-fiction roots.

I think fan fiction, like most genres, is prone to some characteristic weaknesses. I think those weaknesses are exacerbated in super-hero comics, where corporate stewardship tends to pander to the lowest common denominator and excise the more interesting visions (which in fan fiction often involve unexpected romantic pairings.) Given that, my guess would be that there’s WW fan-fiction out there that’s better than most of what has been done with the character since Marston died.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: Wonder Woman