As I said in our last installment, Wonder Woman #21 was great. Marston died in May 1947, but you’d never know he was on his deathbed when #21 came out in January/February of that year. One of the high points of the series, it shows Marston enthusiastically grappling with and even more enthusiastically fetishizing the latest, most up-to-date technology of atomic power. Most people would stop adding kinks to their repertoire when they were dying, but Marston is not the sort to let a little thing like cancer get his libido down. It’s an inspiration to us all, I tell you.

But that was 21. In #22, things are…well, they’re not so great. In fact, I strongly suspect that the very, very ill Marston did not have complete creative control over this issue. Marston had sometimes worked with collaborators before, I think — his sons were supposed to have given him story ideas at least — and certainly he’s had less than stellar issues before. But this is the first one that actually starts to look in spots like hackwork.

Among other problems, this is the first issue since the second or third that isn’t a single long story; instead, it’s split up into three shorter tales. The initial one of these is definitely the worst; I’d wager something of moderate value that somebody ghosted large chunks of it. Wonder Woman goes to Hollywood, where a evil mastermind is stealing the color from the faces of actresses and then forcing them to pay to have their color restored. So basically, instead of Wonder Woman saving the world, she’s helping a handful of vain actors deal with cosmetic surgery. The low stakes and the stereotypical focus on appearance is a painful forshadowing of the crappy Silver Age Robert Kanigher scripts to come…and just to drive that point home there’s a completely pointless sequence where WW is taken by the police and thrown in prison, a typical Silver Age twist which here (as in the future) serves to generate some vague suspense in a plot that is basically going nowhere. Towards the second half of the story things start to come alive a little as the Holiday girls and then Wonder Woman are tied up and the evil scientist reveals that he has a brain control ray which he uses to make a bunch of nurses his slaves (not sure I’ve seen the nurse fetish from Marston before?).

And of course WW is almost placed in his thrall too, but Steve comes in in the nick of time and rescues her…and again, having Steve as the deux ex machina just is not Marston in prime form.

The second and third stories are somewhat better — or at least more characteristic. Number two involves the Saturnians again (remember them from way back in issue 10?) They use hypnotism to prevent people from seeing them, and there’s some sort of electrical bonds which makes WW all weak and kitteny and then they can tie her up. Not really covering any new ground, but it’s okay for that.

Three has the most potential; one of the Holiday sorority girls, Gel, is jealous…and her jealousy almost destroys the planet Venus! Before it does, though, she’s punished by…well see for yourself:

That’s the stuff! The jealousy theme is pretty interesting too; it’s come up before in Marston, specifically in #6 in the battle with the Cheetah. In some ways this is actually more successful. In #6, the Cheetah’s resentment of the stuck-up Amazons and their compulsive condescension seemed a lot more sympathetic than I think Marston wanted, whereas in this one, Gel’s jealousy of her fellow students seems pettier and less rationally motivated. (Not that Gel isn’t somewhat sympathetic too.)

It’s also interesting to think about why jealousy seems important to Marston. In my post about the Cheetah, I said that it seemed to be about self-esteem — that is, woman should feel good about themselves and not inferior to anyone. But I also wonder if there’s a sense in which Marston finds jealousy especially problematic because it’s a primary source of conflict between women. Or to look at it another way; the flip side of female-female friendships or female-female desire can be jealousy — wanting to be somebody else instead of wanting to be with them (as friends or…well, you know.) On the one hand, then, jealousy is the acid that dissolves the bonds of sisterly love. On the other hand, it’s a kind of extension of that love twisted into desire. Which means that, for Marston, jealousy is exciting and fetishized — which is why jealous Gel gets placed so quickly in the cat suit. Her punishment is stimulating, but so is her rebellion.

Though not as stimulating as they might be alas. The splash page to this story promises that Gel will bring jealousy to Venus, and I had visions of her somehow spreading jealousy throughout the perfect Venusian society through some sort of ray or serum or other weirdness — which sounded pretty great. But in the end she just shows up and frees some prisoners and causes a garden variety ruckus…and then it all resolves in two really fast pages, as if everyone just ran out of script. Which is maybe what happened; Marston may just have gotten too sick to finish the thing (or they could be using an earlier ms that he abandoned or never completed.)

Along those lines, perhaps the most interesting or revealing thing about this issue is that the art isn’t very good. Not that it’s terrible; Peter still has some nice set pieces, like this weird and funny undersea clump of Holiday girls:

But in general, compared to much of the remarkably adventurous art in this run, this issue is both tame and bland. The layouts are fairly boring, and Peter makes little effort to unify pages visually (using colors, shapes, or themes as he does in many other issues.) The wordless sequences which the duo have been experimenting with are also abandoned. Costuming is less detailed, and layout and rendering are all less imaginative throughout. Peter is still Peter, and the art is still fun to look at, but he seems to have lost much of the visual spark that pushed him from being a very good illustrator to (in my mind) one of the all time greats.

So what was that visual spark? I can’t know for sure, obviously, but I really wonder if it wasn’t Marston. I’ve noted before that when Marston’s scripts aren’t so great, the art also seems to falter. Here I’m pretty sure that Marston was side-lined — and sure enough, the art suffers badly. Which makes you wonder…was it Marston who was specifying those wordless sequences? Was he involved closely in layout? How specific were his scripts?

I suppose it’s possible that Peter was just more inspired when he had good material. But the fact that so much of his more interesting stylistic choices disappear here where Marston seems out of the loop — it just makes me think that Marston (who, as I’ve mentioned before, actually hired and paid Peter himself) may have had substantial direct input into the art. How I would love to get my hands on one of his scripts….
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So…there are in theory 6 more Marston/Peter WW issues left. I know that #28 is very good…but now I’m more than a little worried that the next five are going to be a slog. Marston was supposed to have been writing scripts on his death bed, so it’s possible that he generated some more first class material. We’ll see, I suppose….

We’re up to #21 of the Marston/Peter run on Wonder Woman. The last few have been not so hot, and I have to admit that I’ve had a moment or two of doubt. After all, this is January/February 1947 here; when it was published Marston, who died of cancer in May, had only a couple of months to live. So…it seemed reasonable to wonder if maybe he hadn’t lost the spark, the edge, the compulsive and not at all unchaste desire to watch bound and blindfolded women perform surprising acrobatics with their teeth. Maybe the best was over.

I needn’t have worried. #21 is — well, let’s let it speak for itself.

And Grant Morrison thinks he’s weird.

So, yes, as you may have guessed, this issue is, in post-Hiroshima mode, all about the perils and possibilities of atomic energy. Only, you know, it’s Marston, so the perils aren’t oh-my-god-the-bomb-will-fall-on-us-and-incinerate-us-to-death. Instead, the fear is that an evil matriarch ruling over a mixed community of females and robots on the surface of an atom may find a way to conquer the world!

Not very probable, you say? Well sure. But…look! Pretty colors!

This is a lovely meta-moment from early in the comic; Wonder Woman and the Holiday girls are looking at a Uranium atom through an Amazon microscope. At first, they see just random bits of clumpy, sciency-looking stuff — inert, not human, and not especially Marston. But as they stare, the atom takes on more familiar characteristics. The protons look like red women, and the neutrons are “turning into creatures like robots!” That is, the way WW phrases it, it’s not just that she is able to see better or focus more clearly; rather, the atom is actually transforming before her eyes. It’s like the microscope looks into Marston’s brain, where the idea of atomic power lodged and, after a bit of a struggle, got transmuted by the alchemy of fetish into something closer to his usual concerns.

This is an amazing panel:

WW and the Holiday Girls are being shrunk down to the atom planet here…but the stiff stylization, the solid red background, and those awesome Harry Peter curlicue scribbles all make it look more like they’re being turned into wallpaper…or maybe dolls.

The way Marston links scientific miniaturization (atoms, protons, neutrons) to a feminized miniaturization (dolls, dainty frills) is brilliant, I think — it’s fascinating to see him incorporate cutting edge pop science into his preexisting edifice of crankery. But beyond that…well, thinking about this comparison has led me to realize the extent to which Peter, throughout WW, looks like he’s drawing, not people, but dolls.

The contrast between the stiffness of the figures in that upper left panel and the frilly, poofy expressiveness of the dresses — they look like porcelain figures.

I mentioned Sharon Marcus’ Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England last week. Anyway, in the book, Marcus devotes a great deal of space to talking about women’s relationship with their (female) dolls. She talks especially about “doll tales,” a genre of stories about girls acquiring, loving, and often abusing and leaving their dolls. Or as Marcus puts it:

Children’s literature tendered stories of imperious girls punishing, desiring, adoring, and displaying dolls that resembled fashionable adult women. In Victorian children’s literature, dolls are…beautifully dressed objects to admire or humiliate, simulacra of femininity that inspire fantasies of omnipotence and subjection…..Vicotrians did not confine objectification, domination and idealization of women to men. The stories they told about girls and their dolls show that Victorians imagined girls…enmeshed in indealizing and aggressive homoerotic fantasies.

You can see Marston having to stop at that point in order to fan himself vigorously.

Marcus argues that this kind of cultivation of homoerotic fantasy was not, in the Victorian context, lesbian. Victorians didn’t draw the strong lines between heterosexual and homosexual that we do…as a result, women desiring women or fantastizing about women didn’t necessarily make one less heterosexual. In fact, Marcus argues, the cultivation of homoerotic fantasy (through fashion plates or doll tales or through romantic female friendships) was seen as an important part of heterosexual female identity. Marcus notes, for example, that girls who treated their dolls well were supposed to make better wives; the cultivation of a partially maternal, but also potentially sisterly, bond, was indicative of one’s general capacity for love and care.

Since Marston lived with two female bisexual lovers, it seems, shall we say, unlikely that he didn’t see homoerotic fantasy in a potentially lesbian context. Still, I think Marcus’ take on doll tales gives a context for Marston’s particular interests. For instance, look at these pages again:

It’s not so hard to imagine the queen here as the little girl in a doll tale, abusing her dolls, commanding them about, gloating over their beauty (“pretty protons”!) and anticipating with relish a the continuing and ever-more-restrictive action of her own will. As in a doll tale, or in doll ownership, the female reader (or doll owner) is called upon to appreciate, manipulate, and sadistically control an icon of femininity. On the one hand, as Marcus notes this gives her a freedom of action to experience what are usually considered masculine pleasures — pleasures which would in most (Victorian and later) venues be denied her. On the other hand, (and here Marcus is suggestive but less clear) the sadistic inhabitation of femininity is a kind of practice. Linda Williams in Hard Core argues that the point of much pornography is to uncover or expose women’s inner self — that it’s primary impulse is a drive for total (sadistic) knowledge and occupation — an eradication of female self and replacement with male will or fantasy. Doll play, then, might be seen similarly as a drive to sadistically penetrate to the core of femininity — to pleasurably occupy it not in order to replace it with male will, but rather to settle down inside it as a grown woman.

What’s great about Marston is that he takes this already-queer woman-on-woman eroticized pedagogy and fetishistically flips all the genders. It’s not just boys who get to inhabit the feminine and so assert masculine power and mastery — girls can do the same.

Here the Queen is strapped into a Venus Girdle, making her loving and peaceful and generally the soul of femininity. And as soon as that happens she can go off and….participate in violent deeds of daring sport atop giant kangaroos!

By the same token, it’s not just girls who sadistically inhabit the feminine in order to become mature women — rather, boys also get to manipulate the feminine in order to become mature women.

Here Steve is positioned as the doll owner; his giant hand set beside the miniaturized WW and Holiday girls. He is, moreoever, feminized — he’s the worry wort fretting about when hubby will come home. The last panel dialogue could be a sitcom back and forth “Wife: Where were you! I was worried sick!; Husband: Aw, it was so sweet of you to worry you pretty thing!” With a little imagination, you could see this as showing Steve playing with dolls in order to prepare himself for his (proper) feminine roll.

Of course, the genders are also mashed because WW was read by, and aimed at, both boys and girls. Marston wants everyone, boys and girls, to enjoy dominating and controlling femininity in order to teach themselves how to become better women. The male gaze, so despised by feminist film theory, is here seen as the key to ushering in a feminine, and indeed a feminist, utopia, where boys and girls join in joyful sisterhood, and militant atomic power is transformed into love which heals the crippled children.

And what better symbol for this new age than…enormous mechanical yanic penis!

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Okay; I have to show this too.

That’s WW rescuing a ship from a runaway overgrown atom.

And then there’s this:

My favorite thing about this is that you know — you know — that Marston thinks it’s sexy to have an atomic world filled with women lodged on Wonder Woman’s ear. He’s in his fifties, he’s dying of cancer — and he’s still updating his masturbatory repertoire with the very latest technological advances. It kind of makes me tear up.

It’s been a long time since I last worked on the Bound to Blog series, in which I was blogging my way through every issue of the original William Marston/Harry Peter run on Wonder Woamn. The last issue I wrote about was the squickily racist Wonder Woman #19, way back in November shortly before we left the blogspot address. So (as you can probably figure out) that puts us at #20.

So…with a good eight months or so of anticipation, was it worth the wait? Well, no, not really. This issue is decidedly weak tea. In a lot of ways it’s a rerun of the lackluster Wonder Woman #17, which was also focused around time travel and which was also disjointed and not especially spirited.

The issue still looks great, of course. I love that cover, with Redbeard (Redbeard! hah!) looking absolutely enormous through the miracle of shaky scaling, ridiculous beard flapping every which way. And check out those gnarled hands — they each look big enough to cover WW’s entire head.

I think this is the best page in the book.

Redbeard’s face in the upper right corner is fantastic, with those elaborately curving eyebrows, the half-moon irises, that magnificent nose. WW sinking thorugh the water with the giant fish behind her is also hard to resist (Peter has used the fish trick before, but it never gets old for me.) And I love the way in the last panel the ocean spray mirrors the stars on WW’s shorts. And the guys falling out of the ship, with their elongated arms making them looks more dynamic and twisted as they drop….and Redbeard’s beard again in that final panel. It’s just a solid sequence all around.

I really like this too:

Those are the hands of a giant time monster (I’ll talk a little more about him ) shortly). And they’re great hands. But what I’m really enjoying here is the way Peter dispenses with speech bubbles, just writing “Zounds!” and “Help!” and “Quarter!” directly on the art. There’s an analogous effect here, in one of his silent sequences, which includes a couple well-placed “Bonk”s and the like:

This is an interesting shift for Peter; when he did wordless bits in earlier issues, they were mostly without sound effects as well — for instance, in this bullfight the knocked out bull snores with an image rather than a sound effect. It’s clear, in other words, that Peter is still experimenting, still trying to do new things with the comics form.

Here’s another nice moment:

The hothouse B & D lesbian seraglio, complete with the veiled and ample Etta in the foreground, is of course hard to resist — but what really makes the panel is the picture within the picture, with the quickly sketched, golden-haired, (entirely?) nude winged cherubs hovering together suggestively — mirroring the triptych of the mistress and the two kneeling slaves in front of it.

There are a couple of interesting narrative points as well. WW gets her bracelets welded together, robbing her of her powers…but Marston cheats and lets her do a bunch of feats of super strength anyway. He offers the excuse that even without her Amazon abilities, she’s still no weakling — but really you get the sense that it was just helpful to the plot — and maybe too that he couldn’t quite stand having her helpless.

There’s also some back and forth with Julius Caesar:

Marston wrote a whole erotic novel about Julius Caesar, and he’s clearly borrowing from himself. In the book, as here, Caesar worships Venus and understands women, which is the source of his greatness. And in the book, as here, Caesar is really pretty dull and I wish Marston would talk about something else.

Like this:

This sequence occurs right at the beginning of the story, and it’s maybe the oddest and most fraught moment in the comic. Peter draws Nifty with extra oomph even for him; her tight dress and low neckline certainly seems to have caught Steve’s attention in that second panel. But, of course, it’s not Steve who reacts to her most strongly, but Diana. A giant ghostly monster materializes (with a ridiculously prominent (ahem) nose)…and Diana leaps upon Nifty…incidentally giving us a fetching shot of her rear, just in case we’d forgotten what a butch woman and a femme woman wrestling mean to Marston.

Diana’s sudden burst of enthusiasm/passion knocks off her glasses — almost allowing Etta to pierce her double-identity. And as soon as Diana scurries off, we learn that Nifty has a double identity of some sort too — she’s the leader of a “gang,” and also apparently the avatar or other self of the weird monster with the phallic nose.

Marston, then, seems to be circling around ideas of doubling and ideas of lesbianism; Di and Nifty have a bond of attraction/repulsion which is tied to their split selves. Furthermore, the monster is a “time monster”, pulling Nifty back into the past so that she can have revenge. Connecting the past, violence, and disassociation of the self strongly suggests trauma.

There are a lot of ways to go from here. Marston could have examined the idea of bifurcation/trauma and its relationship to patriarchy/incest, as he did in issue 16. Or he could have gone further into the Diana/Nifty relationship and female bonding as a powerful, potentially dangerous force, which can either be used on behalf of patriarchy or against it (I talk about this more here. Or, you know, he could have just let us see a whole lot more of the crazy monster and given us more background on how it related to Nifty, since that’s the easily the nuttiest idea in the book,and the one with the most potential for ridiculous/unlikely/entertaining elaboration.

But he doesn’t do any of those things. Instead he gets wrapped up in how cool Caesar is and we never find out what the deal is with the Time Monster, or why Nifty is bonded to it, or what it wants. At the end there’s a kind of half-hearted suggestion that it was summoned by Nifty’s desire for revenge — directly contradicting earlier suggestions that it was itself pushing Nifty towards desiring revenge. I guess you could see the monster as an avatar of maleness; when women embrace violence, they are possessed by the patriarchy or some such. Again, though, Marston usually makes these points pretty explicitly when he’s paying attention. This one feels like he was mostly just going through the motions.