Watchmen and Neoliberalism: An Interview with Andrew Hoberek

ProductImageHandlerAs I’ve said before, my book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism, came out last week. It’s published in the Comics Culture series at Rutgers University Press. My book is the second volume to be published; the first, released in late 2014, was Andrew Hoberek’s Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics, focusing on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen.

Andrew’s book is appreciative but not reverent; he’s especially skeptical of the political stance in Watchmen. HU has talked a lot about Alan Moore’s politics over the years — so I thought it would be interesting to talk to Andrew about his take as the last post in my book release roundtable. Andrew and I spoke by email.
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Noah: Your central argument about Watchmen’s politics, as I understand it, is that Watchmen is based in Moore’s sweeping distrust of institutions. For Moore, that connects to 60s anarchism and progressivisim, but your point is that it’s also the basis for the neoliberal attack on government institutions. So when Moore rejects political collective action, he ends up on the side of Reagan and Thatcher, who he hates. Have I got the argument right there? And maybe you could talk a bit about where or how you see Moore rejecting collective politics?

Andrew: I think one example, perhaps relevant now, is the protest against Nite-Owl and Silk Spectre freeing Rorschach from prison that spills over into a group of skinheads killing the original Nite-Owl, whom they confuse with Dan Dreiberg.
 

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Another way to think about it is the fact that Moore’s respect for individualism transcends actual political stances, to the extent that the rightwing Rorschach is a much more sympathetic character than the liberal Ozymandias. Ozymandias is a classic totalitarian figure, someone who (like Stalin) wants to impose plans from the top down and who doesn’t care if literally millions of people have to die in the process. This is very much the kind of figure that Reagan or Thatcher deployed to justify both their foreign policy and their domestic cuts, and that we still have with us in the form of the (absurd) assertions that Barack Obama is a socialist.

That said, I think “ends up on the side of Reagan and Thatcher is strong.” It’s probably more correct to say that he shares an anti-collective stance that hadn’t yet become totally the property of the neoliberal right at that point (It was still central to the sixties left from the Port Huron Statement to the anti-Vietnam movement), but was on its way to doing so.

Noah: So, do you think it’s possible to see Ozymandias as in some ways a critique of neoliberalism, or as trying to think through the connections between liberalism, capitalism, and authoritarianism? You say that Veidt is a classic totalitarian figure, but he’s awfully pro capitalism. And it’s not industrial Nazi-era capitalism either; it’s way more late capitalism, consumerism of the image, it seems like (part of his evil plot is essentially to make a movie.) Casting Veidt as the villain seems like it’s at least in part casting big business as the villain.
 

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Andrew: That’s a good qualification. As I was writing the book I had my eye on the way that Veidt’s portrayal exemplifies a general distrust of institutions that has gone from being a shared feature of both the left and the right in the cold war period to a hallmark of neoliberalism. But another way to think of Veidt is as a figure who embodies Moore’s distrust of large-scale capitalism–a thing I associate in the book with the way he stands for the big comic book companies who exploit the intellectual property of work-for-hire creators. At the same time, it’s when Ozymandias steps outside the profit motive, and attempts to perform what he believes is an altruistic act, that he becomes the villain of the piece. Moore’s thinking about the comic book industry and his general politics remain entwined here, in that the celebration of individual comic book creators remains entwined with a kind of romantic ideology of small property ownership (in this case intellectual property) that’s long been central to American thought, and in some ways has facilitated or served as cover for the rise of neoliberalism. We think of Reagan and his successors as champions of small business–in part because they continuously tell us so–but their policies have largely benefited big capital.

Noah: Veidt’s capitalism doesn’t end though. And in fact he takes advantage of his knowledge of the change in the world situation to switch his investments around and make even more money. Liberal one-worldism and neoliberal corporation seem to fit together seamlessly.

I guess I wonder in part whether the critique of institutions you point to, or the sympathy for Rorschach and the distrust of Veidt — the assumption in your book seems to be that that’s politically retrograde or problematic. But— I mean, for myself at least…if the book is anti-Stalinist, and anti-violent revolution, which I think it is, I’m kind of on board with that. I feel like Moore points out that revolutions are really bloody, kill real people, and don’t necessarily actually change all that much, or can’t be counted on for real transformation. Those all seem like reasonable points — and stand in contrast to V for Vendetta, for example, where V seems infallible and revolutionary violence and torture result in Evey’s personal transformation rather than in the kind of pointless pile of corpses you see in Watchmen.
 

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It also seems prescient in terms of our current political moment. Obama’s not Stalin, obviously, but like most of our Presidents he’s happy dropping bombs on people in the name of a better world. He really doesn’t look all that different from Veidt in a lot of ways (he’s even a successful creator of intellectual aesthetic content, right?)

Andrew: The Obama-Veidt comparison is a fascinating one, although I guess an even better comparison would be Veidt and Mitt Romney, since Romney too made a lot of money and now seeks to turn his attention to public service. (Of course he didn’t make it all on his own after starting from the bottom, the way Veidt and Drake did.) For my money, though, I think the things that are problematic about Obama actually have to do with his very Reaganesque dislike of large organization. For all the flak that he takes for his past as a “community organizer,” this is a figure whose commitment to ground up consensus building reflects a sixties left critique of big government in an era when anti-government sentiment has become a major tool of those in power. Obama’s missteps (including, one imagines, those with the security state, although we’ll probably never know the details there) seem to me to be a property of his desire to compromise and build consensus with everyone. To my mind I’d prefer a Lyndon Johnson who knows how to work within organizations and who isn’t afraid to strong arm opponents to get what he wants. I actually think Lyndon Johnson is–mistakes with Vietnam aside–an unacknowledged hero of the twentieth century. I’m getting a bit away from Watchmen here, but these days you don’t see too many celebrations of institutions on either side of the political fence: Spielberg’s Lincoln is one of the few I can think of, and a great, unheralded film for that fact.

Noah: Hah; I loathed Lincoln. Part of my broader loathing of all things Spielberg. I don’t think it does actually celebrate institutions, exactly. It celebrates Lincoln as white savior hero genius. Barf.

Andrew: My defense of Lincoln’s would be Adolph Reed’s, which is simply that it portrays politics and dealmaking as valuable and even dramatic activities, in contrast to a movie like Django Unchained which seems racially progressive but which actually personalizes both the critique of and solution to an institutional problem like slavery.

But to return to Watchmen in conclusion, I think this whole political question has a lot to do with the history of the superhero in which Moore and Gibbons play a key role. The pre-Watchmen history of the genre runs from 1938 or so to 1986, precisely the period in which Americans believed in the potential of government to make things better. In that respect, I tend to see the superhero as a figure for the New Deal state itself–a figure of extra-ordinary power committed to doing good in the world. The post-Watchmen idea of the superhero (in which Moore and Gibbons participate, even though they later come to bemoan it) as an obsessive or self-interested figure who claims to do good but in fact makes things worse nicely parallels, by the same token, neoliberal accounts of government.

Wonder Woman Questions

This is the week my book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is released. I’ve put together a week-long roundtable to celebrate.

Earlier in the week I asked folks to ask me Wonder Woman questions and I’d answer them here. A few people responded. So here’s my answers. If you have other questions, ask in comments and I’ll try to answer as best I can. (Questions about my book would be great too, if you are one of the few who have read it!)

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Andrew

Is there someone that you think could channel H.G. Peter?

I love Harry Peter too! His style is very different from current mainstream superhero art. He looks back to a Victorian illustration tradition in a lot of ways; stiff figures, fluid linework, just very different than the muscles-on-muscles pin-up style you get in Marvel and DC nowadays.

So, if you were going to have someone approximate that, I think you’d need to look to alternative and indie creators probably. I’d love to see Edie Fake do a Wonder Woman story. Edie’s fascinated with gender and sexuality in a way that’s reminiscent of Marston, and he’s really into fantasy landscape as well. It would be different than Harry Peter, of course, but I think he could get some of the same sense of overripe wrongness/rightness that Peter did.
 

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Leah

How do you think Wonder Woman has informed the portrayals of other women superheros. And why do you think there there not more leading lady superheros. Most of the well known ones these days seem to be part of teams (ex. XMen, Fantastic Four) rather than stand alones.

That’s tricky; I don’t think the original Wonder Woman comics have had much influence at all on other female superheroes, as far as I can tell. Marston’s mix of bondage and feminism isn’t something that many other mainstream creators have been all that interested in. There have been a few direct lifts, like Alan Moore’s Promethea, or Winged Victory in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City, or Wonder Girl. But for example Storm, from the X-Men, whose one of the higher profile superheroes, doesn’t owe much to Wonder Woman. Buffy and Sailor Moon, two very popular female superheroes, don’t look back to her much either.

And I think that’s part of the answer to your second question. There are stand along female superheroes, like Buffy and Sailor Moon. They tend not to come from Marvel and DC (the big two superhero companies). And that’s just because Marvel and DC have historically featured male characters by male creators mostly packaged for me. That’s changing somewhat as the movies create a more diverse audience, and so maybe we’ll see more stand alone superhero films featuring female heroes from those companies in the future.

Matthew

It seems that people are clamoring for a Wonder Woman movie, but do you think an interesting film could actually be made with the character in her current state? Or are her bizarre origins, years of retcons, constantly fluctuating characterization, and general difficulty to handle by modern comics writers too much to overcome?

Anything’s possible I guess. Somebody could just go back to Marston and Peter and make a movie with gorilla bondage and space kangaroos, if they wanted. I suspect though that the movie will be boring not because anyone is confused by years of indifferent comics, but just because most superhero movies are boring and unimaginative, and there’s no reason to think this will be different. In other words, the Wonder Woman movie will be bad because the Avengers and Superman and so forth are bad, not because Wonder Woman comics are bad. They’ll write a script where she hits people and has angst and things blow up, would be my guess.

I suppose they might try to incorporate feminism in some way. That could be bad, as the animated feature showed. For an actual feature there’s too much money at stake to screw around with trying to be true to the character or the comics fanbase, though, would be my guess.
 
Eric

What did you think of the David Kelly pilot?

I didn’t see it!

“How wonderful, a woman’s world”: Trina Robbins on Wonder Woman

Editor’s Note: This is the week my book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is released. I’ve put together a week-long roundtable to celebrate.
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Longtime comix artist Trina Robbins is also one of Wonder Woman’s biggest fans; she’s talked and written on numerous occasions about her love of the Marston/Peter comics in particular. I interviewed her after she’d read (at least some of) my book.

Trina: So you should know I’m only in the middle of your second chapter. It’s a bit of a slog. You do have a good sense of humor and I like some things about your writing. You just so over-analyze that it just becomes a slog.

Noah: (laughs) Well, that’s the academic thing, you know.

Trina: I know. Thank god I’m not an academic.

Noah: All right…well, could you talk a little about what you like about the Marston/Peter comics?

Well, as a kid, I foudn the mythology extremely liberating. And I’m still into the mythology. And of course people like Brian Azzarello obviously knows kowing nothing about mythology or just doesn’t care.

I mean, for me, Jewish girl, brought up in a not super orthodox home, for me Judaism was very boring. At the synagogue they spoke Hebrew, which I didn’t know. One God, and this very boring and very patriarchal guy with a white beard. I didn’t like that at all. And I couldn’t relate to it. And Wonder Woman had goddesses. A whole pantheon of gods and goddesses. The gods weren’t particularly nice, but the goddesses were wonderful. And this was so liberating for me as a kid to read this. It was almost as though Marston had given us permission to believe that there was something other than the patriarchal bearded guy.

And also just the concept of Amazons. I think I was introduced to the concept of Amazons in Wonder Woman. This whole tribe of beautiful women alone on an island, no men. You have to understand that as a girl…boys were threatening. Not all boys, I had some nice male cousins. But in general they were threatening. They were bigger than me, and they tended to be a little nasty — women were wonderful. I grew up during the war when women wore bright red lipstick, and most of the guys were off at war anywhere. And women were much more interesting. It’s interesting because I’m totally heterosexual, but these are just the feelings I had.
 

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An island full of women in pretty little dresses and they were all beautiful. It was just a wonderful thing to me. And as for the rest, what little girl doesn’t want princesses. She was an Amazon princess. So that’s what I saw in it. I saw stories in which women are all the ones who are the active ones. Not just Wonder Woman, but the Amazons and the HOliday girls, they’re active participants, they all fight the bad guys. It was wonderful for me.

Noah: One of the things we’ve disagreed about before is on how much bondage there is in the comics, and how important bondage is in them.

Trina: Well the thing is, as a kid I didn’t even notice the bondage. It went totally over my head. Obviously there are people who noticed it. I think they tended to be grownups. You know, like that soldier who wrote to Marston [about how he was a bondage fetishist and therefore loved Wonder Woman.] But I didn’t see it. Or if I did see it, I looked at all the other comics. It was traditional in Golden Age comics for people to get tied up. I’ve just been scanning in Girl Commandos drawn by Jill Elgin, and they always get tied up in each comic.
 

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Noah: Tim Hanley recently counted how much bondage there was in Wonder Woman, and found it was more than in most other comics of the era…

Trina: Obviously he’s right, because he counted, and numbers don’t lie. But I didn’t see that, I can tell you. Because in all the other comics people got tied up too, and I didn’t count!

Noah: I’m curious about the lesbianism in the comics and what you think about that.

Trina: Not many people have talked about that except for Frederic Wertham in Seduction of the Innocent. And he’s a riot. The connections he makes with Holliday equals gay are just hilarious.

But of course there are hints of lesbianism. But for me it was more about women interacting with other women. In the British girls comics it’s always girls saving other girls. But if you look at the comics for the same period for the same age, it’s always the love triangle. Betty and Veronica fighting over Archie. It’s almost as though they’re trying to show, look we can do comics about girls, but don’t worry, they’re not lesbians.

Noah: Marston was not worried about that.

Trina: But as a kid I just thought, how wonderful. How wonderful, a woman’s world.

Noah: Marston would be quite happy with that, I’m sure.

I wondered if you had thoughts on the relationship between Olive and Elizabeth and Marston?

Trina: Well, definitely they were polyamorous. And I think it’s pretty probable that Elizabeth and Olive were lovers.

It’s very funny because…Spain Rodriguez, I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, and he was a dear friend of mien — and he’s still a dear friend of mine, even though he’s no longer with us. But he was so funny, he used to say, “See, he lived together with two women!” As though, ha, ha, he wasn’t a feminist. And I was like, Spain, if Susan would let you, wouldn’t you like to live with two women?”

Noah: It wasn’t like he was living with them without their consent.

Trina: Exactly.

Noah: I presume…I mean they lived together afterwards. It doesn’t seem like it was just…

Trina: They weren’t doing it just for him, or they would have moved away after he died. Of course.

Noah: I know you had harsh words for the Azzarello run on Wonder Woman…

Trina: It’s not just…he’s so arrogant! He’s so fucking arrogant. There was this one shot, it was a Wonder Woman run shot which was about Wonder Woman as a girl. It was intended to be some kind of parody of the Stan Lee comics of the 60s. Which of course doesn’t make sense anyway, since it’s a DC character and it’s completely different. But he doesn’t even know as a writer and a historian — he’s trying to make it old fashioned, so he has Princess Diana use the term “shan’t.” Well, by 1955, no one was saying “shan’t”.

And then in case you thought that he was not trying to be an arrogant asshole…you know how the old Marvel comics, Stan Lee would give everyone nicknames like “Jolly Jack Kirby.” So he signs his name as Brian “Kiss My” Azzarello.” That’s his statement. The innermost circles of Hell for him.

Noah. You really didn’t like his Wonder Woman run.

Trina: (laughs) You could tell.

I loved what Gail Simone did. Her white gorillas were the equivalent of the Holliday girls I just loved what she did.

Resuscitating Wonder Woman

Editor’s Note: This is the week my book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is released. I’ve put together a week-long roundtable to celebrate.
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There’s long been talk about how superhero stories are getting ambitious. The histories and planetary layouts of comic book universes, once created haphazardly, are solidifying into un-breachable canon. Characters from diverse series will “cross over” and team up during climactic event episodes. Meanwhile, film adaptations attract talented, occasionally brilliant, actors, and pack in enough pseudo-philosophy and current polemics to merit thoughtful reviews, (or at least avoid outright dismissal.) Captain America fights military surveillance, dancing around his own imperial baggage. The Nolan Batman trilogy harnesses fearful imagery of mental illness and the Occupy movement to apologize for its own elitist and authoritarian nature, which it presents as perversely anti-heroic. Guardians of the Galaxy seems aware of its own ridiculousness, and so avoids stigmatization as overt camp. The cinematography, special effects, costume and set design are top-notch. The appearance of being an ambitious film counts more than the internal logic of the final work. It counts more than actual narrative ambitions, like championing a truly underdog protagonist, envisioning utterly alien societies and technologies, or portraying good and evil in an insightful way. Contemporary superhero narratives indulge in emotionally disconnected escapism, sexuality and violence, all carefully leavened with inside jokes and buddy comedy. These films, and their comic source material, feature all the bells and whistles of ambition, while being safe projects at heart. It’s a sad day when a quippy, trigger-happy raccoon (with a heart of gold) surprises audiences —he’s written exactly according to Marvel formula.

Some of this might be endemic to the superhero genre; in the words of Noah Berlatsky in a recent piece in The Atlantic,

“Tony Stark [of Iron Man] invents new magical energy sources three times before breakfast, but he uses them mostly to punch Thunder-Gods in the head, rather than, say, to completely transform the world’s technology and economy.”

It didn’t have to be this way. Noah’s recent book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948, records an alternative which had been present at the dawn of superhero comics. Unlike Superman, the original Wonder Woman comics were not a personal fantasy of power and assimilation, born already calibrated to the yearnings of depression-era, immigrant, and wartime youth. The Wonder Woman comics were an intentional manifesto, meant to instill radical concepts of femininity, masculinity, sexuality and heroism into children. Noah’s book elucidates William Marston’s radical philosophies and agendas, which informed every aspect of the forties run. If not for the kaleidoscopic visuals and zany scenarios, the barely-sublimated kinkiness and infectious fun, Wonder Woman might have been remembered as being propaganda designed to re-educate America’s youth. Instead, Marston and artist Harry Peter created one of the most original and unclassifiable comics in history. Despite its initial success, publishers didn’t know what to do with it, and America came out of the war more sexually repressed than it had entered. The Marston/Peter run hangs off comics history like a forgotten evolutionary branch. The indomitable Diana of the original comics faded away, and less interesting archetypes convergently evolved to take her girdle, to fit DC’s limited ‘heroine’ niche.

Even a casual glance at the original Wonder Woman issues elicits curiosity, if not alarm, as they depart from the standard procedure of most superhero work. The forties Wonder Woman comics featured a great deal of bondage, and a cavalcade of sexual reversals. Many villains are introduced as one gender, and then transform into or are revealed to be another. Occasionally their gender identity is never fully resolved. Wonder Woman binds enemies with her magic lasso, which makes them obedient to her will, but only after being bound and made helpless herself. The male protagonist, Steve Trevor, repeatedly injures himself, begins the series comatose, and is at points slung over the shoulder of a villain and kidnapped, yet he is never portrayed as being dithering or pathetic. Marston and Peter obsessively repeat classic melodramatic scenarios of bondage and hysterical emotion, while constantly changing who is doing what. This fetishizes the action, blends characters like a Venn diagram, and causes the linear narrative to coil in on itself, disrupting the temporal logic.

This entanglement allows all characters to participate in what Marston called the two “normal, strength-giving emotions” of inducement, or dominance, and submission, Marston’s key to a happy ending. An eminent psychologist of his time, Marston theorized that the world would be a better place if people learned to accept and practice both dominance and submission, as opposed to harshly overpowering others. Neither dominance nor submission was considered the superior state, and Marston links both in a pleasurable, loving cycle that ultimately leads to world peace.

Yet Marston and Peter don’t let the confounding cycle of bondage continue forever; Wonder Woman ultimately re-educates the villains, sometimes impressing the importance of love-leadership (and being sexually dominant,) on oppressed female characters. Marston intended Wonder Woman to be the model of female leadership. She is boisterous, positive, friendly and even-keeled– an athlete, adventure lover, caretaker, and confident romantic. Wonder Woman throws herself into the fray of battle one minute, while openly crushing on and nursing a wounded Steve Trevor the next. Marston saw no contradiction in these actions, nor in Steve’s vulnerability and strength. Wonder Woman anticipates the multi-dimensional “strong” female characters found with greater frequency today, although this chain was broken by decades, where Wonder Woman was treated like a glorified pinup.

Noah’s book resuscitates these largely forgotten, original comics by examining them as carefully and closely as they deserve, and by meeting Marston and Peter’s work on its own terms. Noah matches the recursivity of the comics with an interweaving analysis of Marston and Peter’s three major concerns: “feminism, pacifism and queerness—or, if you prefer, bondage, violence and heterosexuality.” As Noah explains, “For Marston, these topics were all inextricably intertwined… the book presents not so much a linear argument as a braided exploration, in which the same ideas and obsessions recur in slightly different formations and slightly different perspectives.” As not being strictly formal opposites, bondage and feminism may be the least intuitive pair of the bunch; fortunately, Noah starts there.

Noah argues that the comic’s sexualized fixation on disempowerment, binding, abuse, and manipulation resonates with women and girls, who have been traditionally disempowered in patriarchal society. The representation of subjugation matters as much to women as denunciation of it, (and possibly more,) an idea Noah supports through the theories of several respected literature and media scholars. The Marston/Peter comics have been criticized for eroticizing the bondage of women for a male audience, although Marston’s writings show that he deliberately geared the comics to be read by children of both genders, and at least some evidence indicates they were. Marston and Peter also turn bondage on its head, displaying male victims and female abusers. Noah makes the case that readers simultaneously desire and identify with both men and women, victims and abusers, which highlights a peculiar, and radical piece of Marston’s vision: he denounced rape and abuse as the greatest of evils, but preached the healthy pleasures of reciprocal, consensual, bondage. “Marston, [assistant writer] Murchison, and Peter want to provide these pleasures to everybody, even, or perhaps especially, to the most oppressed and the most wounded.” Noah writes, “That remains a rare ability and an extremely precious one… We can condemn child abuse or we can acknowledge children’s sexuality, but we have enormous difficulty doing both at once.”

Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism… also articulates what is problematic about Marston’s theories, often bringing dissenting voices into the mix. Noah largely supports and expands upon Marston’s ideas with a diverse range of supporting sources. This is brave, especially when Marston casually reconciles themes that many consider mutually exclusive. The chapters on pacifism and queerness contain many theoretical surprises, including alternative visions of the proper functioning of education, motherhood, and sexual orientation. Noah also contributes great ideas of his own. His exploration of gendered responsibility and heroism, and how expectations change for female characters, is both inspired and concise, and hopefully destined to enter into wider discussions of superheroism. Best of all, Noah does a great job of showing that these ideas clearly appear in the Wonder Woman comics themselves, and are not projected onto it by later minds.

Marston didn’t shy away from advocating a new world order ruled by a new order of women, and he casts the net of his imagination widely. Noah does well to bring a wide variety of scholars from many disciplines, tackling each component of Marston’s broad vision piece by piece. Occasionally, this diversity scatters the argument. Readers may question why Noah includes some voices, and not others: he extensively draws on Anne Allison, a scholar of post-war Japanese domestic life, and even then, on a very limited spectrum of her work dedicated to mother-son incest urban legends, (and a bit about lunchbox making.) Allison’s observations parallel the Wonder Woman comics in interesting ways, but an example of ‘matriarchal rule’ closer to the comic’s original context might have served better. I would have also appreciated a second, corroborating source. On the same note, is Pussy Galore the only available example of male fantasy lesbianism? Her significance to the discussion of Wonder Woman’s homosexuality feels both sketchy and undeserved. The most egregious cameo would be Luce Irigaray’s The Sex Which Is Not One. No matter how well her ideas match the argument, statements like “woman has sex organs more or less everywhere,” will seem anatomically preposterous to many, especially when left to float outside a considerate introduction to her work. Distracted by moments like this, a skeptical reader could disengage from the greater point.

My chief criticism of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is that there should have been more evidence from indisputably relevant and more general sources, and the argument should have relied less on isolated examples. Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is not a case for the application of Marston’s ideas, as much a case for their remembrance and relevance, particularly within comics and feminist scholarship. As the book stands, Marston’s ideas, freshly unearthed, may be unfairly vulnerable to re-burial, simply because of missing or dismissible evidence.

This would be tragic, considering that Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism illustrates the terrible stakes in making Wonder Woman the afterthought of DC Comic’s line. Noah details two contemporary runs of the Wonder Woman comics, one disturbingly anti-female, the other well-meaning but inane. I would have appreciated a run-down and time-line of the character’s entire development, particularly George Perez’s re-launch of the character in the mid eighties, as Noah goes against the grain in labeling it as trivializing. I would have also liked a discussion of why, after the close of WWII, Wonder Woman repeatedly targets imaginary misogynist dystopias, often on alien planets. The forties run seems equally split between war-propaganda and planetary colonization, and this schism seems rich for exploration.  Most of all, I felt the book skipped over an examination of early twentieth century melodrama. Was Marston’s obsession with bondage an exaggeration of existing bondage tropes, sawmills, train tracks, and all, that filmmakers repeatedly inflicted on the female daring-doers of popular cinema? How much of Wonder Woman comes from The Hazards of Helen?

These criticisms essentially come down to a wish the book had been longer, which I realize is a backwards compliment. I wish this because I too am convinced that the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman comics are relevant today. People love superheroes, perhaps now more than they ever did. The current popularity of superhero entertainment has lasted longer than their initial explosion in the forties. I hope there is room in mainstream entertainment for risky visions of what it means to be a hero. Even more, I hope there is room for visions like Marston’s, who was willing to embrace paradox, and attempted to describe the wonderful, ineffable, irrationality of love.

Color Illustrations for “Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism”

My book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is out today! I’m doing a little roundtable to celebrate.

The book includes a number of illustrations from the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman comics. Alas, in the print edition, the images aren’t in color — and, of course, even in the digital version, I wasn’t able to include as many images as I wanted.

So, I figured I would try to give folks a chance to see everything I wanted to put in here. For those who have the book and want to match images to the discussion in the text, I’ve included the figure numbers (for those included in the book) and the corresponding text pages of my book for everything else.

All images are by William Marston and Harry Peter’s run on Wonder Woman, unless otherwise noted. I’ll try to give issue numbers in most cases, but their may be a few where I’ve lost them. In many cases you should be able to click on the picture for a magnified look.
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Figure 1, page 17, Wonder Woman #18

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page 20, Wonder Woman #9

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Figure 2, page 27, Wonder Woman #16

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Figure 3, page 29, Wonder Woman #16

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Figure 4, page 32, Wonder Woman #16

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page 37, Wonder Woman #16

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pages 37-38, Wonder Woman #16

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Figure 5, page 47, Wonder Woman #16

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pages 51-52, Wonder Woman #16

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page 53, Wonder Woman #16

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pages 54-55, Wonder Woman #16

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Figure 6, page 56, Wonder Woman #16

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Figure 7, page 61, Wonder Woman #28

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Figure 8, page 67, Wonder Woman #16

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Figure 9, page 72, Wonder Woman #16

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page 77, Alan Davis, The Nail

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pages 80-81, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Amazing Fantasy #15

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page 86, Wonder Woman #1

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Figure 10, page 84, Wonder Woman #4

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Figure 11, page 91, Wonder Woman #4

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Figure 12, page 97, Wonder Woman #4

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Figure 13, page 98, Wonder Woman #7

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Figure 14, page 105, Sensation Comics #1

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Figure 15, page 105, Sensation Comics #1

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page 110, Wonder Woman #4

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Figure 16, page 113, Wonder Woman #1

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page 113, Wonder Woman #1

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Figure 17, page 116, Sensation Comics #31

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Figure 18, page 121, Sensation Comics #1

Figure 18

 
Figure 19, page 129, Wonder Woman #1

Figure 19

 
page 130, The Rifleman (creators unkown)

Figure 29

 
page 133, Wonder Woman #18

Figure 30

 
Figure 20, pages 134-135, Wonder Woman #2

Figure 20

 
Figure 21, page 139, Sensation Comics #31

Figure 21

 
Figure 22, page 141, Wonder Woman #5

Figure 22

 
page 140, Sensation Comics #31

Figure 33

 
Figure 23, page 143, Wonder Woman #3

Figure 23

 
Figure 24, page 155, Wonder Woman #5

Figure 24

 
page 155, Wonder Woman #5

Figure 37

 
page 156, Wonder Woman #18

Figure 38

 
Figure 25, page 157, Wonder Woman #5

Figure 25

 
Figure 26, page 166, Wonder woman #5

Figure 26

 
page 167, Herbert Cole, illustration of Sleeping Beauty

Figure 42

 
Figure 27, page 168, Sensation Comics #41

Figure 27

 
Figure 28, page 171, Wonder Woman #11 (the issue number is mislabeled in the book alas)

Figure 28

 
Figure 29, page 177, Wonder Woman #23 (issue number also mislabeled in the book. Sigh.)

Figure 29

 
page 178, Wonder Woman #11

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page 179, Wonder Woman #11

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Figure 30, page 183, Wonder Woman #1

Figure 30

 
page 184, Courbet, The Grain Sifters

Figure 45

 
This last one is NSFW
 
 
 

Figure 31, page 307, Nicole Eisenman, Alice in Wonderland, 1996, ink on paper, 30 x 22.5

Figure 31

“I am fond of hidden agendas:” Carla Speed McNeil on Wonder Woman

This is the week my book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is released upon a waiting and/or unsuspecting world. I’ve got a number of posts to celebrate, all of which will be posted under the “Bound to Be Released” tag.

This is the first; an interview about Marston, Peter, gender, and feminism with Carla Speed McNeil, creator of Finder.
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Noah: Are you a Wonder Woman fan of longstanding? What did (or didn’t) attract you to the character?

Carla: I’m not. I’ve only recently become attracted to super-heroes, I never really understood them as a reader. I thought they were science fiction, and since science fiction progresses from unfolding concepts (at least, the kind I enjoy does), they didn’t seem to be very GOOD science fiction. I’m getting a better grasp on them now, and I find I like the ones that have a blasting-powder mix of realism and fantasy to them, that are weird and dreamlike in ways. The closer a look I take at Wonder Woman, the more she surprises me. She turns up everywhere. I never knew until this past summer that my older sister is a huge WW fan. She’s got the look, too, maybe I’ll use her as a model if I ever draw her.

I know you’re said you’re a fan of the Marston/Peter comics. What do you like about them? Do you have a favorite Wonder Woman comic from their run, or a favorite aspect of those comics?

I like their sheer absurdity. I like their playfulness. I like the fact that Diana is superlative in many ways but is also very, very human. She may be some breed of demigoddess, but she’s also full of passions and humor. The fact that the first thing I saw her do with her lasso was to compel a dignified older Amazon to stand on her head just delights me.
 

Figure-16

 
She’s not above-it-all. It’s hard to write White Knights, because our definition of what constitutes a Galahad is so narrow. They’re not allowed to just do stupid things. Labeling nearly all human characteristics “flaws” and shaving them off of your paragons is like trying to make a cake having removed every ingredient.

Also, I am fond of hidden agendas. Not pamphleteering, but deeply-held beliefs and a desire to cast them into fiction. Dickens and Poe would never have written a line without them. Spider-man wouldn’t have been what he was, then or now, without Ditko, and Wonder Woman wouldn’t have existed without Marston’s agenda. He wasn’t unlike the Futurists.

There have, of course, been many other interpretations of Wonder Woman over her years. I plan on digging into them as well. But it’s wonderful to me that she has this time-of-legends quality to her early existence.

Your comic, Finder, plays with gender and drag in ways that are at least somewhat similar to what Marston and Peter are doing. How is your work similar to or different from theirs?

Wonder Woman is a “female man,” a woman from a world of women, living in “man’s world” where she exists as a cultural ambassador as well as an active, energetic person who doesn’t just stand on a box proselytizing. Although the campus evangelists would be pretty damned entertaining with her in the mix. It’s exactly the kind of thing I like to play with. I didn’t realize, when I designed Jaeger, my usual main character, how pretty I’d made him. Not until I realized that I can’t stand using any more than the least suggestion of modeling around his bottom lip, anyway– I step on my colorist all the time. “Don’t give him LIPS! I can’t take him seriously if he’s pouty!” Similarly, I created a “world of women” in the form of an extended family, a “clan,” in which all the members look vaguely like Marlene Dietrich. There are males in this family, but they all look like women too. There is a “world-of-men” clan in which there is a fairly strict division of labor; men are soldiers and cops, women are doctors and nurses. There is still another clan in which all members are attracted to their same sex, and are accustomed to marry only in same-sex pairs, making contractual arrangements for the conception, custody, and raising of children. The permutations are endless.
 

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from Carla Speed McNeil Finder: Voice

 
Marston’s idealized Themyscira was populated only by women. Given how much fun she has in man’s world, I can’t think that he thought separatism was the answer. I don’t know if other Amazons left the island to do the same, and if so, how many. I definitely need to get caught up.