That’s Not the Truth! — OOCWVG 9

Posted on March 2, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

Previous posts on WW in this series: One Two Three Four Five, Six, Seven and Eight.
__________

So I’ve been talking here and here about the first issue of Wonder Woman by her creators, Charles Moulton and Harry Peter. One of the (many) panels from that issue which made me laugh out loud was this one:

As you can see, this is the moment where Wonder Woman gets her magic lasso. In later iterations, this lasso forces you to tell the truth, right? But, as it turns out, that’s a later watering down of the lasso’s power. It’s actually…a mind control lasso! It forces anyone captured by it to obey.

Presumably the bondage/mind-control/erotic implications of this were a bit too (ahem) naked. But if later writers were embarrassed, you can bet that Moulton himself wasn’t. It’s only a panel or two later that we have this:

Yep, that’s Diana, our hero, mischievously misusing her power for cheap thrills.

That, of course, is not a characterization of WW that you see too much of anymore. Which is really a shame, because it’s probably the most enjoyable take on the character I’ve read. In the first WW story, Diana is portrayed as super-courageous, super-talented, super-smart, super-beautiful — and also as a typically bratty adolescent who runs around after boys and loves pretty dresses and is…well, check this out.

“I have to take him to my secret lab so that I can invent a ray to bring people back to life — but don’t tell Mom!”

Or there’s this, where WW tries the old, “everybody else is doing it!” gambit.

Moulton’s WW, in other words, isn’t a goody two-shoes. She’s not all tragic and noble and self-sacrificing. She’s got desires, both serious (her love for Steve) and whimsical (wanting to see the doctor stand on her head.) Moreover, acting on those desires doesn’t end in disaster, or make her less of a hero. This is pretty standard for men, of course (for whom being rebellious and dangerous is part of being heroic — think Han Solo, or Wolverine, for that matter.) But women don’t usually get cut as much slack. They don’t get to revel in their power — and when they do have power, it’s as likely as not to be something saccharine like being super-truthful. Certainly, WW has, over the years, become a kind of tedious paragon — Spidey gets to crack jokes, Batman gets to be grim and vicious…but WW is always the adult, regretting the need for violence when she has any personality at all. You certainly don’t get to see her dressed in a masquerade outfit riding a kanga-horse while gratuitously and alliteratively mocking her opponents weight.

For Moulton, Wonder Woman’s the hero, which means she gets to act like a hero — and part of what it means to be a hero is that you get to be dashing and thoughtless and maybe even a little mean-spirited because you’re just that cool. And he ties that devil-may-care attitude into a rebellious girl adolescence (rather than the typical rebellious boy adolescence) in a way that’s both funny and, I think, extremely appealing. And he also does it while keeping Diane femme — usually, this sort of combination would end up as butch, or tomboyish, but Moulton (and Peter) always put Diana in frills and lace; in fact, in that panel above, her opponent is taunting her for being too femme, and she snaps right back by taunting her for being too butch. Obviously, you could find fault with this from a feminist standpoint in various ways: Moulton has strange issues with heavy women, it’s got to be said. But writing a story in which you have a feminine girl being strong, snotty, heroic, smart, and mean while staying femme and not being punished for any of it — that’s just not something you see that often in the oughts, much less 1942.

Hey girls! Disobey your Mom and you too can have new clothes and a ticker-tape parade!

And to show just how unlikely you are to see it in the oughts….I give you Greg Rucka’s Hiketeia. Moulton’s Diana is all about possibility; excitement and fun and adventure; she does what she wants, and is praised and admired for it. Rucka’s WW on the other hand, is all about duty and restriction. She doesn’t even get to defend the weak by choice. The Hiketeia is (in the comic at least) a Greek ritual in which a supplicant asks for protection. Some random girl (Danny) shows up on WW’s doorstep and invokes the ritual; WW accepts the supplication, which means that she is responsible for protecting the girl, no matter what, or the Furies will kill her. It turns out Danny has killed a bunch of bad men who raped and pimped out her sister; Batman is following her, so WW and Batman have to fight, and then there’s a much-foreshadowed tragic finish. Through it all, WW never gets to act or even think for herself; her initial moment of impulsive sisterly bonding and compassion trap her completely — “I have no choice” and “It doesn’t matter” are her mantras.

Danny talks about how much she wants to be like WW, but it’s hard to see why any girl would be especially inspired by this dour vision of toilsome female duty. In taking from Diana choice, he also takes away her heroism; she becomes a boring mother/victim, sacrificing herself not because she’s dashing or brave, but because that’s what moms do. Even her battles with Batman seem rote and, oddly, diminish her. She beats him easily — so easily that it seems less like two fierce competitors battling for glory than like a mother smacking down a wayward child. Batman’s effort to evoke the Hiketeia towards the end (which WW rejects) makes the masochistic mother-fetishization even more explicit. And then, of course, Danny kills herself — because she can’t bear coming between WW and Batman. So much for sisterhood.

Rucka is going for noir here, of course. Linking Greek tragedy with noir isn’t a bad idea; both forms are about the disaster caused by human weaknesses; tragic flaws leading noble, or charming, or compassionate people into death and defilement. There are two problems with this approach, though. First, noir gets across in large part on its stylish visuals, and while there are many adjectives one could use to describe J.G. Jones’ art (lumpy, muddy, cluttered, ugly), stylish isn’t really among them.

Second, noir requires a certain amount of bloody-mindedness. Rucka is willing to do depressing and he’s willing to do melodrama, but his stomach for gore and unpleasantness isn’t up to the story he’s written. Danny, for example, is a frustratingly blah character as well…frustrating because Rucka seems to go out of his way to make her as passive as possible. This is a naive, tiny woman who, supposedly, hunted down, outsmarted, outfought, and murdered a bunch of older, meaner, streetwise thugs. How’d she do it? How did she feel about it at the time? How did they feel about it? What happened? Rucka tells us none of that. The entire sequence is elided, barely shown even in flashback. The defilement of Danny’s sister is shown in at least passing detail, but the humiliation of the victimizers? Nada. Rucka has written a rape-revenge story — that’s the actual interesting part of the narrative, not the nonsense with the furies and Batman and Wonder Woman. But he won’t tell it, perhaps because he’s squeamish, and/or because imagining a woman as active and vicious, rather than as victim, doesn’t engage him.

All of which just makes me appreciate rape-revenge exploitation movies that much more. In They Call Her One Eye, for example, Christina Lindberg doesn’t need her sister or Wonder Woman to come help her our when she’s raped and beaten; she sets out on a rigorous training regime (like Batman) and then she systematically and brutally just murders everyone who fucked with her (literally or figuratively.) I think in the denoument she buries her chief tormenter in filth, ties a rope to his neck, ties a horse to the rope, and then has the horse decapitate the baddy. I guess if Danny did stuff like that, you can see why Batman is upset. Maybe Rucka feels like we wouldn’t sympathize with her if we saw her wreaking havoc? If so, that’s a deep, deep misunderstanding of the way genre fiction and heroism work…. More likely he just wanted to focus on his boring, precious Wonder Woman.

The above is not nearly as gruesome as this movie gets. But it’s pretty gruesome, so be warned.

Which leads us to the third problem. Noir (and Greek tragedy for that matter) needs flawed characters. The flaws not only move the plot and create the tragedy; they also make the characters sympathetic and interesting. In that great Haney Batman/Deadman story I blogged about a while ago, for example, everybody involved in the story is shown to be a fool/cad/bounder; Batman’s a selfish grandstander; Deadman’s a whiny little loser so desperate for love that he commits murder; the main romantic interest is a cold thug. They’re selfish and dumb and they deserve what they get…which makes the story all the more poignant. They’re in control of their destinies — that’s the tragedy.

But this isn’t the case for Rucka’s WW. She’s not selfish or flawed. That means she isn’t a villain, but it also prevents her from being a hero. Even her initial moment of compassion she talks about as if it were out of her hands; something she had to do rather than a choice she made. She’s just this boring maternal paragon, who the Fates have decided to torment, perhaps because they find her insufferably tedious as well.

Rucka has talked in various places about how he wants to respect and honor the Wonder Woman character. And he does respect and honor her. He respects and honors her right onto a pedestal which, as feminists have argued for a while, is not an especially comfortable place to be. Heroes need flaws, or at least moxy. Moulton breathed life into Diana by making her impish and somewhat selfish and excited about her powers. Rucka, on the other hand, seems determined to turn her back into a lifeless figurine.

_____________________

As a somewhat final note: I’ve watched a couple of the old Lynda Carter Wonder Woman TV shows recently. I wouldn’t say they’re good exactly; the writing can be dreadful, and the plotting and pacing are leaden. And, of course, the outfit looks really, really silly on a real person. And Lynda Carter is in no way comfortable playing an action heroine; she always looks distinctly uncomfortable with the physical, ass-kicking portions of the show — like an embarrassed middle-schooler going through the motions in gym class.

Still, I can see why the show was popular. Better than maybe any comics adaptation I’ve seen, the show does capture the excitement of those early stories. Seventies camp isn’t exactly analogous to Moulton’s blend of zany innocence/kinkiness, but the two aren’t completely divorced either. Lynda Carter is a charismatic actor, and the show always takes care to make Wonder Woman the hero; the appeal to girls is pretty clear. Especially, I must say, in the transformation scenes. The spinning-change from Diana Prince to Wonder Woman is more Shazam than Moulton, but it has an exuberance and a visual punch that I think is very true to Moulton’s original conception. The sense that girls can vertiginously grasp hold of power, and that the results will be, not dangerous or horrible, but exciting, fun, and heroic….I don’t see how Moulton could have disapproved of that.

_______________

And I do think that’ll end my Wonder Woman blogging for at least a bit; I’ve got some other projects I need to work on. But thanks to everyone who commented or stopped by. And I may pick it up again — I still want to check out Gail Simone’s work, and would like to read more of the O’Neill/Sekowsky run. So never say never!

______________

Update: This series is now continued with a post about the WW animated movie here

Eagle Eyes (OOCWVG 8)

Posted on February 26, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

Previous posts on WW in this series: One Two Three Four Five, Six, Seven.
______________________

So yesterday I started talking about the first issue of Wonder Woman, then got distracted by Darwyn Cooke and Ms. and so forth. But we’ll try again.

So one surprising thing about WW #1 is that, in Moulton’s telling, WW’s mission actually makes sense.

As I’ve mentioned before in this series one of the perennial problems with Wonder Woman is that her mission to man’s world is always really stupid. Has she come here to lead us to peace? To be an international UN do-gooder? To hit lots of bad guys and flirt with Superman? Any way you look at it, none of it quite rings true.

But in Moulton’s telling, her mission is pretty straightforward, as Aphrodite explains.

Wonder Woman is going to man’s world to help America win World War 2. That neatly resolves the peace/battle contradiction; the forces for war are the Axis; they must be defeated to restore peace, so an Amazon will journey to the homefront to restore love and amity by slugging evildoers. Niebuhr would be pleased.

This, of course, also resolves the difficulty of WW’s costume. If she comes from the back-end of the mythologicalverse, why is she wearing the stars and stripes? Well, logically enough, because she represents America not as the embodiment of national ideals, but as the embodiment of international and even universal ones. World War II was probably the one time in history where this could actually make sense; there was really a case to be made that America (whatever its own sins) was, at that time, the last best hope for civilization and peace.

Since that moment, of course, it’s been a lot harder to argue that the interests of America and the world align — but WW has been stuck with that costume. Not sure how Moulton handled it after the war ended (I’ll have to look into that) but other creators have had difficulties. George Perez did some sort of utterly ridiculous retcon, if I remember precisely, where Steve Trevor’s mother had come to paradise….you know what, forget it. The point is you end up on the one hand, with moments like this from Phil Jimenez, which egregiously beg the question:

Please Keep Your Eyes Off the Eagles

Or with efforts like this, from the Playboy shoot

Please Keep Your Eyes On the Stars

Playboy actually used these Wonder Woman photos to illustrate an essay on “American Sensuality” or some such. Not sure how sensual that image above is supposed to be exactly; it really looks more jokey or parodic than sexy; Fallon’s intense “I’m fighting for truth, justice, and the American Way” is pretty thoroughly contradicted by the (literally) painted-on costume, which is even more silly-looking in real-life than on the page. In fact, it seems likely that that’s the point; Playboy isn’t using Wonder Woman to make fun of feminism; rather they’re using trite misogyny to poke fun at America in a bland, we-lived-through-the-60s kind of way. For Moulton, a woman was the perfect representative of the U.S., since he saw the U.S. as engaged in a fight for peace. For Playboy, a sexy woman wearing the flag is just the level of edgy irony they’re looking for; they can claim a sort of jokey yes we do, no we don’t pride in America. It’s all more or less predicated on the idea that a woman being strong or representing America is in itself funny-quaint-snicker-worthy.

[Update: Matthew argues out in comments that this isn’t part of the Playboy body paint shoot; it’s just Tiffany Fallon wearing a Wonder Woman costume. I think that’s right; it was used to illustrate this article about Fallon and Playboy. I’m not sure if it was in the original mag or not, though obviously it’s somewhat related. More evidence for the ongoing “Noah doesn’t know what he’s talking about” thesis, though.]

Playboy isn’t alone though. Jimenez also tries to distance WW and America, as do most recent takes on the character. One of the (many) problems with Greg Rucka’s Hiketeia is that its all about WW’s Greek heritage and mythological connections, and she’s talking to the furies and agonizing about ancient ritual — and she’s wearing star-spangled underoos. It’s hard to maintain the profundity…unless, like Moulton, you are willing to link the U.S. to the mythological, and happen to live at a historical moment when doing so was at least somewhat defensible.

It’s interesting that Captain America has kept his close ties with Americanism, while WW has spent much of her career trying to avoid the implications of her costume. Probably it’s partly because Cap has a much less complicated narrative (he fights Nazis because he loves America, as opposed to because he loves peace.) I wonder if it’s also because, or related to, some difficulty in imagining, or figuring out what to do with, female patriotism. It’s also interesting that the (relatively) politically engaged Denny O’Neill is the one who took WW out of the stars and stripes. I mean, there are a lot of reasons to ditch that costume, but…did he dislike the patriotic connotations?

__________

Anyway, more next week, hopefully; magic lassos and why Moulton’s characterization of Diana is still the best….

Update: Last Wonder Woman post here.

Wonder Woman #1 (OOCWVG Part 7)

Posted on February 25, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

Previous posts on WW in this series: One Two Three Four Five, Six .

________________

So I already expressed my growing enthusiasm for the original Charles Moulton/Harry G. Peter Wonder Woman comics. I haven’t read a ton of them, though, so I decided to start at the beginning with Wonder Woman #1, from 1942 (and yes, I know that Wonder Woman started a couple years earlier in Sensation Comics…but this is what I could get my hands on.)

Anyway, the first thing I noticed was, holy shit, comics were really long back in the day. 64 pages, pretty small panels, lots of text, four full Wonder Woman stories, plus a story about Florence Nightingale, plus a short prose story about something or other plus some random funnies, all for a dime. Even taking inflation into account, that’s some value for money.

Of the four WW stories, three of them are…a little disappointing. Artist Harry Peter doesn’t seem to have quite hit his stride yet; his layouts and stylization aren’t as adventurous as his best work. The stories are all also set on the home front, with WW fighting Axis spies and essentially normal folk, so there’s less opportunity for some of the nuttier visuals (mystic fires leaping out of typewriters, attacking Seal Men, that sort of thing.) Instead, we’re treated to busloads of racial caricatures (not surprising) and an equal number of ungulates (which did take me somewhat aback.) And, of course, there’s bondage too.

Ungulate

Racist Caricature

Ungulate with Racist Caricature

Playful Underage Bondage

Ungulate Role-Play

More Ungulate Role-Play

Looking at these, I’ve gotta say; even if it’s not his absolute best work, I still love Harry Peter’s art. That (obviously completely morally reprehensible) panel of the evil Burmese doing their unholy rituals while WW watches through the mask eyeholes, with the overlapping circles, the bizarre twisted faces, and the lovely colors…or the scribbly line-work on the elephant, with that misshapen shadow under it… or the weirdly stiff bondage children drawings, with the aggressive use of blank space; –those are all just beautiful drawings.

Another thing you notice on reading thorugh these; I’ve seen some commentary on the implied lesbianism on Paradise Island, but has anyone commented on WW’s relationship with Etta Candy. It is…strangely intense. Obviously, Etta’s oral fixation (she’s always eating or begging to eat candy. That’s her character. All of it.) seems suggestive. And I don’t think Steve Trevor ever got to ride on Wonder Woman’s back like that. Or to put his face in her backside — it’s Etta who is the hindquarters in that elephant costume (in the previous panel, WW comments “I’ve never dressed up as an elephant before!” As if someone would have assumed that she had.)

So…maybe I was underselling these stories. They’re pretty insane. But, for all their virtues, they pale in comparison to the first story in the issue, which I think is now one of my favorite comics stories ever. It’s just a delight.

I mentioned before that George Perez’s first issue was, by a fair margin, my favorite part of his run. I hadn’t realized the extent to which he’d cribbed it from this story. Most of the major plot points come from Moulton; the Amazons are created by the Gods to teach love and be stronger than men. Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons is given a girdle which makes her invincible; Ares (who hates love and women), sends Hercules to fight Hippolyta; he fails, but uses treachery to get her girdle from her and then he and his men conquer them. But the Gods come to the aid of the Amazons, and show them the path to an island where they can live in peace. Hippolyta, inspired by the gods, crafts a image of clay which comes to life as Diana. Eventually the Amazons need to choose a champion to go to man’s world; after a series of contests, Diana wins, much to her mother’s chagrin, and so heads off to man’s world as Wonder Woman.

It’s a great story; as I noted in my discussion of Perez, it has a lot of the inevitability and — especially in Moulton’s telling — a lot of the weirdness of the actual Greek myths. Perez played the tale for drama and pathos; the Amazons are explicitly raped in his version, for example. Moulton’s tone is lighter — he’s writing for a younger audience — but the submerged violence is still there, just distanced and ritualized. It comes across as iconic rather than as soap opera.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Moulton/Peter and Perez, though…or, actually, between Moulton/Peter and any later WW writer I’ve seen — is that Mouton and his artist are willing to just go ahead and hate men. It’s refreshing, both because you don’t see enough of that sort of thing in popular culture, damn it…and because it just makes so much sense for the story. No amount of whining about man’s world or man’s evil or whatever is going to be as effective as a good, vicious, scurrilous caricature:

There personified is the extreme feminist vision of ravaging masculinity; dumb, animalistic muscle-bound, wiedling a giant penis-substitute which, in Peter’s rendering, is bigger than Hercules’ entire body. (And again, what kick-ass drawings these are. I love the crazy motion lines, which are solid enough to actually stop connoting motion and end up as a still design element. And I love the way the stiffness of Hippolyta’s arm contrasts with the curves of her blowing dress. Her anatomy is deliberately out of whack, too; the legs and the torso couldn’t actually meet, I don’t think, which makes her look broken, like her sword.)

Making Hercules (and also the masculine God Ares) so thoroughly repugnant allows Moulton’s Amazons a coherence they never really got to have again. There’s still not a logical philosophy, but there is a myythological one. Moulton is a real gender essentialist; he believes in the idea of a male archtype and a female archetype. As a result, the exact philosophical content of the Amazonian code (do they represent love? do they represent strength in battle?) can be resolved by that appeal to essentialism. An Amazon bashing Hercules is different than Hercules bashing an Amazon because men and women are different, and their acts are disproportionate. (This is, in fact, true, I think; at least percentage wise, for example, men murder women for quite different reasons than women murder men.) The Amazons represent love — in comparison to men, which means that when they fight they fight for love, and when men love, they love as a strategem of battle (when Hercules loses the fight, he tricks Hippolyta by, as he puts it, making love to her.) Amazon strength, likewise, is a mystical offshoot of the power of love; the Venus Girdle, which means love, is their strength. And it’s weakness, too, since it’s her love or lust for Hercules which allows him to trick her out of the girdle, and so capture her.

Moulton, in other words, believes in what he’s doing. He’s kind of a crank, basically. And if you’re not a crank, it’s hard to take the character seriously…which is why Darwyn Cooke’s frank satire from the New Frontier JLA annual, with very cartoony art by J. Bone, is about the best take on Wonder Woman I’ve seen outside of Moulton:

(Thanks to Bryan for tipping me off to this story, by the by.)

Cooke’s actually interpreting the character correctly: Moulton believes that love is best expressed by having a dominating woman with a perfect figure and a swimsuit beat the tar out of you. That’s funny; Cooke gets it — and he goes on in the story to make fun of WW’s supposed connection to feminism (she roughs up the guys at the Playboy Club, to the amusement of an undercover Gloria Steinem.)

However, when Cooke tries a more sober take on the character in the first story of the annual (with art by Cooke himself, I believe) we get this:

She’s all about overcoming anger and conflict with love, and bringing men together…which means that in this here adventure comic, Superman and Batman get to have the big cool fight where they smack the snot out of each other, and WW has to be the peacemaker and talk about how happy she is to have her story be boring and subordinate. On the next pages she burbles along happily about how much darkness and pain there is in the Batman’s soul, and how “Kal” is to be the “savior” of them all. Fucking gag me.

So yeah, Moulton’s a crank, but maybe you still, even now, in fucking 2008, need to be a crank to be willing to do this:

That’s a funny panel too…but it’s funny at the guy’s expense. Hercules is a bumbling oaf who gets beaten down; Hippolyta’s the hero — and still feminine (her power comes form Aphrodite, after all.) For Cooke, Wonder Woman is either strong and beating people up (in which case she’s a masculinized hypocrite and therefore amusing) or she’s standing around pacifically helping her men (in which case she’s feminine and boring.) Moulton doesn’t have to make that choice; his women are feminine even if they’re bashing the hell out of some brute (there’s even a nipple lurking in that first panel, if you look close.) Indeed, the women can do the bashing because they are feminine.

Cooke gets tripped up on the pacifist/violence dichotomy, but it’s just as easy to bump over the feminist/erotic one. George Perez, for example, made Hippolyta’s defeat more traumatic and realistic, and in doing so seemed to be trying to put across a a sincere feminist message about the evils of violence and rape. But Perez couldn’t resist the exploitation imagery, somewhat undercutting his stance:

It’s hard to take an anti-rape message seriously when it’s draped in classic cheesecake imagery; if sexualized violence is bad, you probably shouldn’t be sexualizing your violence.

Or here’s a third way WW can trip you up:

I talked about this cover a bit earlier in the week Thinking about it more, I think that maybe what’s really messed up about this image isn’t that the eroticism undercuts the feminism (as with the Perez cover), but rather that the use of dominance imagery is very confused. The artist has made WW into a giant. Presumably this is to make her seem powerful and important. But making her into a rampaging Brobdingnagian doesn’t project authority (Wonder Woman for President!) Instead, it makes her grotesque…and, I think, along with that swimsuit, serves to sexualize her. Chaging scale this way emphasizes WW’s body and the manipulation of it…which is why “Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman” for example, has, and is meant to have, an erotic charge. Ms. is trying to show a woman in control, but instead they get sexualized, deformed femininity — femininity that is sexualized because it is deformed, and deformed because it is sexualized. (Again, when Moulton and Peter show Hippolyta beating up Hercules, he’s the sexualized monster, not her.)

On the other hand, there’s this:

This panel is about women gaining power through a connection with each other. At the same time, this is, and is meant to be, a sensual image; Hippolyta’s stiffness as she is bound, the intimacy between the two women, the fact that their outfits show a fair bit of skin, etc. In Moulton, though, there’s no contradiction; eroticism, strength, and submission all make sense together, because they are all linked to femininity. Bondage is made a metaphor, or a stand in, for close, (eroticized) female bonds, and so for feminist community.

I’m not saying that Moulton’s take on women is impregnable (if that’s really the word I want.) Obviously, you could critique as misogynist or just ridiculous the idea that feminine bonding is either (A) innately erotic, or (B) somehow akin to bondage. But, whether you like what he has to say or not, he’s aesthetically coherent; the eroticism and the bondage don’t work against his feminist vision; they’re integrated into it, creating a frisson of desire and devotion and political hope that’s both unique and sublime.

_________________

…and this post is really spinning out of control, lengthwise. I’ve got more to say about Wonder Woman 1 (what is Diana’s real mission anyway, for example? And what is the lasso really supposed to do?)…but I’ll have to put it off for at least a short while. In the meantime, I’d recommend checking out Miriam’s post about why Rogue is a better feminist icon than Wonder Woman and Bill’s post about, among other things, whose fault it is that people keep writing WW stories.

Update: More on Wonder Woman 1 here.

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle, Part 6 (Ms./Playboy)

Posted on February 22, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

Well, obviously, I’ve gotten completely obsessed with Wonder Woman. If you’re just checking in, you can find the rest of my posts on this subject here: One Two Three Four Five.

So far the basic thesis I’ve been arguing is that the original Moulton/Peter Wonder Woman was a very odd and original creation, and that nobody else has ever really figured out a way to use the character that isn’t ridiculous or offensive or boring or all three.
_________________

I’m going to take a slight turn here. I want to talk a little about Wonder Woman’s status as a feminist icon, and how that does or doesn’t really seem to make sense.

____________

I was aware that WW is generally thought of as a kind of feminist hero; an embodiment of strong, independent, heroic womanhood. I didn’t realize, though, that Gloria Steinem had actually put WW on the cover of the first issue of Ms. in 1972.

Steinem also wrote an essay about how strong and powerful Wonder Woman was, and about…well here’s a quote (taken from this very entertaining post on Comic Coverage:

“Looking back now at these Wonder Woman stories from the forties, I am amazed by the strength of their feminist message…Wonder Woman symbolizes many of the values of the women’s culture that feminists are now trying to introduce into the mainstream.” — Gloria Steinem

Anyway, because WW is supposed to symbolize feminism and female power, there was something of an outcry when this hit the stands, early in 2008

That’s Tiffany Fallon nude, with a Wonder Woman suit painted on her.

Greg Rucka, Wonder Woman writer, said “I’d rather have my daughter see this [the Ms. cover] than ever see that [the Playboy cover.]” And he added “Bastards all. You’ve no idea the damage you’ve done. No idea at all.”

I agree. The cover is a desecration. It goes against everything Charles Moulton believed; everything he stood for. How on earth could Playboy put Wonder Woman on the cover, and not have her tied up?

Slightly more seriously, I do have to wonder how, or what kind of, damage this sort of thing really does. In the first place…you really probably wouldn’t show Playboy to little kids anyway, would you? And in the second, how is this out of sync with Wonder Woman’s image (other than that it’s not bondage, I mean?) WW’s costume is pretty thoroughly sexualized to begin with. I guess you could argue that WW is about her strength and heroism, not her shallow physical charms — but that’s just not true. In fact, shallow physical charms are one of her super-powers. This is from the first issue of WW:

Note all the stuff about Aphrodite? WW’s beauty is, like her strength or her speed, a divine gift (from the God of Love, no less). This has been pretty consistent down through the years, too; she’s still got super-beauty in George Perez’s reboot, for example, and even the dragon notices she’s hot in League of One.

Valerie D’Orazio makes more or less the same point:

As for me, like I said, I wasn’t surprised by the Playboy thing. It was a cheap shot by the magazine, to be sure. But I would be far more outraged if this happened to Batgirl or Supergirl. To me, Batgirl was always the true feminist superheroine — smart, independent, and under-sexualized. Supergirl was the virginal innocent — originally portrayed as your own kid sister or cousin.

But, Wonder Woman was created by a dude with really strong and weird opinions about women & sex — he referred to women’s vaginas as their “love parts” — and all that baggage couldn’t help but taint that character. Adventurous, resourceful Batgirl is the superheroine I wanted to be. Wonder Woman was half-naked. ….Which is not to say that WW can’t be/has not been redeemed and made into a character that women and girls can truly look up to. But I will finally believe this when she’s no longer drawn by cheesecake artists. I’ll believe it when she’s no longer half-naked.

And yet…though I agree with the argument up to a point, I think D’Orazio’s missing something. After all, Ms. Magazine didn’t put Batgirl on the cover. And that’s in part because nobody except hardcore comics geeks like D’Orazio gives a rats ass about Batgirl. Wonder Woman has more name recognition; she’s got more appeal. In fact, there’s some evidence that Tiffany Fallon is painted to look like Wonder Woman not solely because some guy thought “Wonder Woman is hot” but because, you know, Tiffany Fallon really likes Wonder Woman. As she says:

I’m obsessed with Wonder Woman. I grew up and I had the Wonder Woman Underoos, when Underoos first came out. And I was always a big fan of the show and Lynda Carter. And the older I got, the more I would get these comments like, “My god, you look like Lynda Carter in that picture!” And it doesn’t happen all the time, but I just grew to appreciate her and the character and the campiness of the project. I was Wonder Woman at one of the Playboy Mansion parties, and I just started getting all these comments, like, “My god! You would make a great Wonder Woman!” And I’m like, “You know, I would!” [Laughs]. And so I just have fun with it. And I heard they were starting to make a movie about it, and so I was like, “You know… Stranger things have happened in my life!” You never know. But that would be something I’d be really proud to be a part of.

In other words, WW’s on the Playboy cover for the same reason she’s on the Ms. cover — because girls like her.

Just because women, or some women, or a woman likes something doesn’t necessarily make it feminist or liberating, of course. Pictures of super-thin models are quite popular with girls of all age; does that mean they’re necessarily liberatory? Or is the popularity arguably, from a feminist perspective, perhaps a problem?

Tania Modeleski in her second wave manifesto Feminism Without Women has a great little bit of snark where she points out that often cultural critics fall into a mode of thinking that goes something like: “I am progressive. I like Dynasty. Therefore, Dynasty must be progressive.” I think there’s more than a little of this going on with Gloria Steinem’s decision to put WW on the cover of Ms. I mean, your pilot issue of your feminist magazine, you put a young aggressively sexualized women in a swimsuit on your cover — a women who, moreover, is tricked out in bondage gear (that lasso doesn’t go away)? Yes…sub/domme for President! Especially if she’s been created and, even in this instance, drawn by a man!

(And, of course, the same goes for Fallon and the Playboy cover — she made have had input into the image, and the PR may have talked about how accomplished and wonderful she is, but that doesn’t mean that it’s especially empowering for women as a whole to have this image out there.

Though I’ve gotta say…there seemed to be a fair number of people who were shocked, shocked, shocked that Fallon would dare compare herself to Lynda Carter. I mean…Lynda Carter! I like Lynda Carter fine and all…but she’s a minor celebrity. Fallon’s a minor celebrity. It’s not like Fallon compared herself to Gloria Steinem or something.

Where was I? Oh yeah…)

Still, the question remains…granted that she’s a problematic feminist icon, why do girls like WW? Is it just because they’re all victims of false consciousness and propaganda and can’t tell that she’s an erotic tool of the patriarchal oppressor? Or what?

There are a bunch of reasons that girls might like Wonder Woman I think.

1. One of her powers is super-beauty. Girls are into being pretty. You can argue about whether this is cultural or biological (I lean towards the former) and about whether its unfortunate or not, but it is indisputably true

2. She’s got lots of strong female friendships and relationships. That’s not especially true for, say, Batgirl (except in more recent incarnations) but it’s always been true of Wonder Woman. (Trina Robbins talks about this here, in an essay I may discuss more at some point….)

3. She’s the star. Batgirl is Batman’s assistant; Supergirl is a secondary Superman; Storm’s part of a team, etc. etc., but Wonder Woman in those 40s adventures was the focus of the narrative. And that leads us to:

4. Moulton really did go out of his way to preach self-confidence and self-reliance to women. Say what you will about him, but he thought women were strong and that they should have confidence in themselves. He shows WW and other women beating the tar out of men, outwitting men, and generally overthrowing their oppressors (after being tied up, of course.)

5. She’s a princess.

6. She’s a princess. Duh.

All of the above can be summed up by saying that Moulton’s Wonder Woman really, truly, gratuitously, and effectively pandered to girls in a way very few other American super-hero comics have. Girls have traditionally liked Wonder Woman because it was marketed to them by someone who actually knew what he was doing.

Of course, Moulton was also pandering to his own fetishes. The genius of the character, if you want to call it that, is the way that she plugs into fetishes for men and women a the same time — whether it’s her beauty, or her relationships with other women, or her sub/dom/sub/dom flip-flopping. The story functions both as genre literature for girls and as “fanny” genre literature for guys. As a result, both the Ms. cover and the Playboy cover are logical places for the character to end up.

So where does that leave WW as a feminist icon? Well, about the same place it leaves her as stroke material, I guess. Because while it makes sense to use her in Ms. in some sense, Gloria Steinem still, still looks like kind of a doofus for putting her on the cover. And while Fallon certainly looks hot in those Playboy photographs, the magazine couldn’t resist puffing her as a champion of truth, justice and American Sensuality”, which is just dumb. And, it must be said again, it’s pretty lame to do a porn shoot based on a kid’s comic book and manage to be less kinky than the source material.

I guess we’re back at the thesis for this whole series of posts, which is that using Moulton’s character for your own purposes tends not to work very well (aesthetically I mean — commercially is something else, of course.) Putting WW on the cover made Playboy and Ms. look naive and clueless. You mess with the Amazon, you take your lumps.

Update: Fixed chronology error….

Update: the sage continues, with more on the Ms. cover, among other burblings…

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle, Part 5 (League Of One)

Posted on February 19, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

This is my umpty-umpth post about Wonder Woman. Umpty tumpty umpty umph.

Anyway, I just read “League of One.” As you may or may not know, it’s basically a fantasy/super-hero cross-genre hybrid. WW is hanging out with cutesy wood-nymphs and mermaids on Themyscira when she hears a prophecy that the JLA will be killed by the last dragon, who has just risen form its sleep somewhere off in Europe. So WW decides to beat up all the other members of the league, take on the mantle of the league her own self, and go fight the dragon and die bravely, thus saving her comrades. She fights the dragon and wins and drowns, but then she’s given artificial respiration by Superman so she comes back to life. The prophecy is fulfilled…and yet Wonder Woman is still alive! Thank goodness!

Or maybe not so much. This book really demonstrated in startling and new ways why this character is just impossible. I mean, Wonder Woman is supposed to be a hero for girls, right? So putting her in a fantasy adventure, complete with fairy sprites and cute gnomes and sacrificing for your friends and one-alone-against-the-dragon…it seems perfect doens’t it? If you can’t use her in a story like this, what story can you use her in?

And yet, everything goes horribly wrong. Let’s take it one by one, I guess:

1. Sacrificing for your friends — This is an absolute iron trope of girls adventure fiction. Boys (like Spider-Man, for example) are always fighting for folks who don’t like them very much — oh the nobility! oh the self-pity! etc. Girls have nobility and self-pity too, but it tends to be spent not on random strangers, but on people with whom they have a bond (think Buffy or Cardcaptor Sakura.) So, okay, Wonder Woman is sacrificing herself for the JLA. Great! Except…well, they’re all guys. And she isn’t allowed to have any real romantic tension with any of them. The JLA is this weird boy’s club; she can burble on about how much she loves and admires the Flash or Green Lantern or whatever, but the emotional connection isn’t real. The pseudo-sublimated-romance with Superman is too distanced and unacknowledged to serve as a source of emotional resonance either. The whole thing ends up seeming stupid and clueless. This panel pretty much sums it up:

That’s a monument with the names of all the leaguers on it, by the way. Later WW knocks the top off it, leaving only her own name. You always castrate those you love…I guess. Or those you are supposed to love because of the bizarre exigencies of corporate continuity. Or whatever.

If you’re telling a fantasy story, incidentally, the heroine is supposed to get the guy in the end. And…yeah, artificial respiration with the big boy scout that is Superman doesn’t count.

2. Brave girl triumphs thorugh inner-resources and purity she didn’t know she possessed — The way this is supposed to work is, you get a normal everyday girl, see, and she discovers she’s got a special destiny, and she goes and overcomes amazing odds through her exemplary bravery and courage.

The problem here is that…well, Diana isn’t a normal everyday girl. She’s super-powered. And she’s been doing this sort of thing forever. And it’s really pretty darn unclear why she should find *this* particular challenge especially frightening. The super-hero tropes just make the whole thing dumb; I mean, she’s Wonder Woman. We know she’s all pure and light and goodness and super strong. Fantasy stories are supposed to be Bildungsroman…but there’s no building here.

Also, did I mention there’s an obligatory Diana-ties-herself-in-her-magic-lasso-to-force-herself-to-be-truthful scene? In other words, she’s not an ordinary girl with whom you can identify; she’s a weird bondage freak.

Not that there’s anything wrong with weird bondage freaks. At all. It just doesn’t work with the fantasy tropes, is all I’m saying.

3. painted fantasy art — I don’t want to be rude or anything, but sometimes….well. Ahem.

DON’T PAINT THE FUCKING SUPER-HEROES!!!!

Just don’t do it, okay? Unless you’re Bill Sienkiewitz and want to do the expressionist thing. But the Alex Ross realism; please stop. You don’t want to make your super-heroes look realistic. It looks dumb. Especially Wonder Woman. In the swimsuit. Really; the more realistic you make her, the more I’m looking at her saying, “Damn! She looks like she must really be cold!” (That’s always what I think when I see those Lynda Carter shows too, incidentally.)

Please God, can I exchange this for an electric blanket?

A detailed, painterly dragon looks nifty; a detailed, painterly Green Lantern looks like someone has left the world’s biggest action figure lying around the watchtower.

Love Among the Collectibles

Admittedly, it’s not all terrible. The scene where Wonder Woman gets rid of Superman is clever and even moving — Superman sees the tears in her eyes before she starts to beat the snot out of him. Plus there are vulture reaction shots, which I appreciate. And then the playful sequence where Diana’s mermaid friend grabs her and magically gives her a fish tail could almost come from Moulton; it’s got a weird lesbian tinge that he’d appreciate anyway. And I like the gnomes. They fit in the fantasy setting. They’re likable and flawed, and bad things happen to them, and you care. But then you go back to the super-heroes and Batman’s using elementary reverse psychology because he’s such a fucking genius and Superman’s beating his breast because he’s been betrayed,..and who gives a shit? They’re invulnerable and pure and boring and you can’t tell any story with them that’s worth a damn.

At least, no story that doesn’t feature…Seal Men!

_______________

So…this is probably the last WW post for at least a bit. I’ll weigh in on Greg Rucka’s take on the character at some point, and hopefully Gail Simone’s too…and maybe on the TV series. But there will be a pause. (I think I promised that before; but I really mean it this time.)

Update: Okay, so I’m not ready to review the Hikawhatsis, but you should read this.

Update 2: Okay, I lied, and there’s yet another Wonder Woman post up; this one about Ms. Magazine and Playboy.

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle, Part 4 (Perez)

Posted on February 18, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

This is my fourth post on Wonder Woman this week; for the earlier ones see one, two, three.

_______________________

Way back when I was bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and not filled to my ears with congealed bile, bitterness, and general cantankeousness, George Perez was pretty much my favorite comics artist. As a result, I bought the first couple years of his late eighties Wonder Woman reboot.

Time passed, and with all the filling up with bile and what-not…well, anyway, I haven’t read or much thought of either George Perez or his run on Wonder Woman in a long, long time. But since I was writing about Wonder Woman, I thought I’d disentomb the back issues from the fossilized long boxes, redistributing large piles of lint and small piles of cats.

So, now that I’ve reread these things for the first time in at least a decade, what’s the verdict?

First, and somewhat inevitably, I have to admit that Perez is no longer one of my favorite artists. Not that I think he’s bad, by any means. He’s obviously quite technically gifted, and he has an especial gift for faces. I actually remembered the sequence below, where Diana first does her bullets and bracelets thing, and I still think it’s pretty great, with a lot of the expressive charm that I appreciate in good shojo:

As is evident even in that little sequence above, Perez draws women with real sensuality and grace. His layouts are interesting and varied too. He’s a good artist; when his stuff is put in front of me, I like looking at it, which puts him head and shoulder, and, hell, waist above the vast majority of mainstream artists working today. But… compared to super-hero artists who really thrill me, like Jim Aparo or Nick Cardy or Neal Adams, or, for that matter, Mike Sekowsky in his WW run, or Harry Peter, Perez seems — well, kind of bland, I guess. His drawing is good, but not great; and his design sense always seems more utilitarian than inspired. For example, look at his wraparound cover for the first issue of WW.

This is supposed to be a tour de’force; lots of stuff happening, the whole issue shown in a single two page image. But basically it just sort of falls into a layout no-man’s land — not supremely detailed enough to be ravishing, not decisive enough in its use of space to be striking. There’s nothing wrong with any individual piece of it, or with the overall effect, even, but there’s nothing about it that makes me look at it and say “holy shit!”

Look, for example, at the (barely there) drapery on the mostly-nude Hippolyta kneeling before hercules on the left side of page. That cloth should cling and curve to her body…but it doesn’t. It just kind of sits there. Again, there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s not bad…it’s just not great.

All right, now that I’ve won that argument with my 17-year-old-self….

I’d actually remembered the first issue story as being pretty good…and it is pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. Greg Potter’s dialogue is overcarbonated in the mighty Marvel manner, but without the nudgy jocosity that made Stan Lee’s scripts tolerable (random selection: “But even into Paradise there can one day come a serpent!” groan. Still, you can see that Perez and Potter brought a lot of love and a lot of thought to the character. In particular, Perez and Potter went to town on the mythological background. There is, of course, lots of name-dropping deities and showing off erudition (Ares and Aphrodite are married! Isn’t that cool!) But there’s also several moments when all their reading actually allows them to approximate the tone and some of the power of actual myth. The sequence where Hippolyta and the Amazons are betrayed and raped by Hercules and his men has a brutal, tragic inevitability — a sense of smart, noble people entwined in betrayal and bloodshed by their own weaknesses. Similarly, Wonder Woman’s creation is both strange and poetic. The Amazons in this telling are the souls of women who were murdered by men, reincarnated by the Gods. Hippolyta (presumably the spirit of the cave-woman with whom the comic opens, though, in a very nice touch, this is never spelled out) was pregnant when she was murdered by her husband, and Diana is that unborn child’s spirit, infused into a body of clay that Hippolyta molds by the sea. It sounds complicated and kind of goofy I guess, but it’s done quietly and it’s really moving — as is the excitement of the immortal Amazons at the chance they now all have to help raise a child. ( Actually, this is somethng I probably appreciated less when I first read the book. I didn’t have a kid of my own then.)

Overall, then, I would say that this was easily the best take on Wonder Woman after Moulton. I would say that except for one thing. Wonder Woman isn’t in the comic. The story is all about Hippolyta and the Amazons. Diana shows up in the last pages, but she doesn’t become Wonder Woman till the last page. And, alas, that last page is ridiculous. That swimsuit with the pneumatic bustier and the star-spangled bottoms…all the mythological verisimilitude Potter and Perez have put so much effort into is just sacrificed on the altar of an old dead guy’s anachronistic fetish-wear.

And that’s kind of it. The rest of the series never really recovers from the fact that it has to focus on Diana. Sure, Potter and Perez do what they can to salvage the situation. They ditch the invisible plane, for example; this Wonder Woman can just fly under her own power. And they do their best to untangle the Steve Trevor/Diana Prince mess. In canon, WW pretty much becmae Diana Prince in order to attract Steve/not intimidate him; she was slumming for love. This is obviously fairly icky and not especially empowering — especially as Steve has over the years vacillated between being a rank fool and a manipulative asshole.

Steve Trevor, Fool; by Moulton and Harry Peter

Steve Trevor, Dick, by Robert Kanigher and Ross Andru

So, anyway, Potter and Perez just got rid of the Diana Prince identity altogether, and relegated Trevor to being an older uncle figure. Indeed, in the series itself, Diana has, through the whole first two years, exactly zero (0) romantic interests. (I think she had an abortive date with Superman in John Byrne’s miniseries at this time. Some ideas are so obvious they’re brilliant. And then, some ideas are so obvious they’re just fucking stupid. The Superman/Wonder Woman pairing is one of the latter (now Wonder Woman/Martian Manhunter on the other hand…or Wonder Woman/Black Canary….))

Where was I? Oh, right. Perez and Potter tried to rejigger the character to make her less ridiculous. And they had some success. The supporting cast, in particular — which is almost entirely female — is interesting and vared; there’s a scholar of ancient Greece, her daughter, a publicist, Steve Trevor, a (much-much-revised) Etta Candy; they all are fairly interesting and personable. I wouldn’t mind just reading about them and what they’re up to and how they related to Diana, how she adjust to living in a new world — stuff like that.

But, alas, we’re in a super-hero comic. And that means there have to be villains and super-battles and high-minded diatribes and everything bigger than life. And, man, it’s stupid. By the third comic or so, the whole — oh, no, I’ve been defeated, what shall I do, wait I’ll use my magic lasso! — has already become an over-used cliche. And when she’s not suddenly remembering how to use her main fucking weapon, Diana’s always thinking deep thoughts like “how strange these mortals are! I have much to learn from their courage and beauty!” Or some such. She’s the Silver Surfer, only with (slightly) more clothes.

Part of the problem is just mid-level super-hero storytelling, and a desperate dearth of interesting bad guys — Ares, the main villian of villains, just gives up when he realizes that his plan to destroy the earth will…cause the destruction of the earth. Part of the problem, though, is though they’ve fiddled with the character, they’re still saddled with Moulton’s creation. And while they avoid (at least for the most part) the bondage, they are stuck with some of his other preconceptions

The core of Perez’s story (scripted after the first few issues, and somewhat unfortunately, by Len Wein) is Diana’s mission as an emissary from Paradise Island, bringing alien knowledge, educating man’s world. But this mission is completely incoherent. What does Diana have to teach? If it’s peace, she should probably stop hitting people. If it’s how to be a strong woman…isn’t that a little condescending? Especially since she’s being written by men? Who keep drawing her in a one-piece? (Perhaps the message is that boned corsettes can do wonders.)

Basically, the problem with the series is that it wants to be an adventure series and it wants to have a message. But Moulton’s message (women are strong…because they are tied up!) won’t do — and yet they can’t quite abandon it either. So the series wanders on, mostly as a pro-forma super-hero book, but with half-digested pretensions. It can’t loosen up enough to be goofy, but it can’t spit out any words of wisdom which make sense. The series certainly has some nice moments — the sad death of Mindi Mayer, reprinted in the Greatest Wonder Woman stories, is touching. But it’s also really irritating; in a story about a woman’s sad suicide and about (presumably) female relationships, why is the narration in the head of a male detective drooling over Diana’s charms? For the most part, though, the stories aren’t either touching or irritating; they’re just tedious. I can’t believe I got this for two whole years. This time through, I couldn’t hack that many. I made it through ten, and that’s all. Back to the longbox for you, WW.

Update: All right, several folks in comments have goaded me to try Greg Rucka’s run…so I’ll give that a shot and report back…maybe next week? We’ll see how the schedule is….

Update 2: …and fixed embarrassing naming error. Duh.

Update 3: And part 5.

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle, part 3 (O’Neill/Sekowsky)

Posted on February 17, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

Here and here I argued that Wonder Woman is a the result of a particular idiosyncratic, fetishistic vision. Charles Moulton was more like R. Crumb than he was like Jerry Siegel or Lee/Ditko. As a result, Wonder Woman as icon is essentially a decades long disaster; she’s particular, not universal, and every effort to prove otherwise makes both the perpetrator and the character look ridiculous.
_______________

So…I’ll stand by the argument that, outside of Moulton’s work, there aren’t any Wonder Woman stories that I’ve seen which I’d call “great” or even “really good.” There are a couple of takes, though, that are at least relatively unobjectionable. I thought I’d take a post to look at some of them, and talk about why they manage to do better than some of their peers.

(And just to get this out of the way: no, I haven’t read the current Gail Simone run on the Wonder Woman title. I’m willing to give it a go if anyone’ll vouch for it…though, jeez, the internets are not exactly abuzz with news of the series…is she even still on the title? Oh well…anyway…)

______________

First off..the love it/hate it Denny O;Neill/Mike Sekowsky run, where Diana gets to wear a full suit of clothes in exchange for losing all her powers (doesn’t sound like such a bad deal, really.) There’s one of these stories in the Greatest Wonder Woman Stories Ever Told (from before she changed her outfit and lost her powers)…and reading it through the first time I was fairly appalled. Even after reading the Kanigher stories, it’s hard to believe how dumb, dumb, dumb Diana is in this outing. It’s like someone popped her head open and scooped her brain out with a mellon-baller. First of all, she lets some random lech crawl all over her at some random party…and then it’s Steve who bashes his head in, not her. Then Steve cheats on her, and tells her…and she doesn’t notice! Then she’s forced to testify against him in court, is obviously broken up about it…and Steve whines and bitches and tells her she betrayed him…and she just sort of sits there and takes it and feels bad. And then she goes undercover and gets dressed up in fab hippie clothing…and all of a sudden she realizes that she’s good looking! I mean, okay, many lovely women have body issues…but she’s been running around in her underwear for 20 years at this point! The idea that a change to sexier clothes is going to reinvent her self image seems…confused.

But after the initial shock wore off, I started to see some of the appeal of O’Neil’s approach. In the first place, Mike Sekowsky’s art is fantastic.

Really dramatic, off-kilter page compositions, with figures occasionally breaking out of the panels; beautiful giant-eyed faces emoting, almost art nouveau clothing deisgns — it would make me think of manga, if the trippy, psychedelic colors weren’t so central. I don’t think I like it more than Harry Peter’s original art for the series, but these are the only WW visuals I’ve seen that are even in the same ballpark. (And, no, alas, George Perez is nowhere near the artist that Peter or Sekowsky are…I’ll discuss him a bit more below.)

So, yeah…great art can salvage a lot. And even the story…I mean, the story isn’t good. It’s dumb and insulting; the gestures at hipness are just embarrassing, the gestures at feminine psychology are ludicrous; the whole thing makes you wonder if O’Neill ever met an actual hippie, or an actual woman…or an actual human being for that matter.

But all that aside…you do sort of have to admire the way he’s managed to get around the pitfalls of writing a Wonder Woman story. Because, while this is not good, it’s not good in a Denny O’Neill way. The problems here aren’t really the problems Moulton has bequeathed his heirs. Their isn’t any bondage nonsense bizarrely tripping things up. There isn’t the snickering frat-boy snickering at the character’s sexuality. There isn’t the desperate confusion over setting — where the hell does Wonder Woman even make sense? — that is often a problem. O’Neill avoids all that by pretty much ignoring it. His Wonder Woman isn’t Wonder Woman at all, really — yes, she still has the character design (though he got rid of even that a couple issues down the road.) But he treats her pretty much as if she’s just some random chick. I think this panel sums it up:

There she is, at a cocktail party, looking off semi-vacuously as the men talk, the way any woman might in a dumb romance comic. There’s nothing wonderful about her; she’s just some random dame who accidentally put on the wrong duds this morning. Similarly, even though WW spends most of the comic investigating a mystery, and even though she has this magic lasso which supposedly makes people tell her the truth, she never uses it to further her investigation. Magic truth-making lassos? No way; you can’t tell a story and make sense of that! Not unless you’re Charles Moulton, anyway. O’Neill isn’t, knows he isn’t, and wants as little part of the mystic clap-trap as he can get away with.

Of course, at some point, you’ve got to ask…if you don’t want to write about Wonder Woman, if you have not interest in Wonder Woman, if, in fact, you’ve realized that it isn’t really possible to write Wonder Woman — why not just get a new character to put in your mediocre, misogynist story with the great art? Why call it Wonder Woman at all? But such are the whims of marketing.

I do think, though, that this is pretty much the only way a great Wonder Woman story will ever get written, if one ever does. Somebody will come along, say, right, I’m going to create a completely new character, put the name “Wonder Woman” on her, and tell a story that doesn’t have anything to do with the character’s origin, not to speak of her 60 plus years of history. If a great writer did that…well, the story would have at least a chance of being great. Alan Moore’s Promethea is I guess the hypothetical that almost/coulda/shoulda been, except that he didn’t call it Wonder Woman, and it turned into a lame-ass treaty on the Kabbala half-way through. So we’re stuck with O’Neill’s effort instead, which isn’t great, or even necessarily good, but of which is, at least, his own failure. And lord knows, reading those Kanigher/Andru stories, he could have done a lot worse.
___________________

Update: and here’s a discussion of George Perez’s run…

Update 2: And part 5.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: Wonder Woman