Frank Miller, Could Be Worse

Earlier this week Suat wrote a post on Frank Miller’s recent artwork, which shows signs of steep technical decline. Miller’s draftsmanship was never stellar, but he had a strong, dramatic sense of design, and a consistent, idiosyncratic stylization that mixed Kirby, Frazetta, and manga in a way that wasn’t off-puttingly derivative of any of them.
 

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As Suat says, Miller’s recent work shows a steep decent from this good-if-never-great peak.
 

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Interestingly, Dan Nadel expressed some appreciation for this late Miller of the ugly Frankenstein zombie Elektra with arms taken from some other, bigger zombie woman.
 

I understand why people would dislike this new stuff. It’s ugly and incoherent, but coherent Miller isn’t that interesting to me, and I like ugly sometimes. Free of his obvious influences — Eisner, Adams, Moebius, Kojima — he just made weird work. Intentional? Maybe not. Maybe so. We’ll probably never know. It’s not genius or anything… just odd end-of-career work by a pulp artist, kinda like Lee Brown Coye’s late work. Consistent in its weirdness. Certainly the covers he’s drawn in the last year are all of a piece, and make sense as slightly deranged mark-making.

That’s an outsider art take; Miller gets more interesting as he gets less controlled and less coherent. As the control over the material disintegrates, you can appreciate the images not as representations of superpeople, but simply as lines on the page; “deranged mark-making”, which happens to look like zombie Elektra, but really could just as easily be something else for all Miller, or the viewer, cares.

I don’t know that I entirely buy Nadel’s take; Elektra is too obviously a struggling picture of Elektra to appreciate it as simply disincorporated pencil tracings,and the ugly isn’t quite weird enough to send me. This isn’t Harry Peter, where confused proportions and oddly defined composition create a vertiginous sense of spacelessness, with the figures hovering between characters and two-dimensional pen marks.
 

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There’s incompetence and then there’s incompetence. Peter’s scattershot drafting and compositional skills resolve into an alienating, sublime effect. Miller’s ugliness just sits there, sadly, asking you to admire it as beauty.

Still, I don’t actually hate that Elektra drawing the way I hate, say, the art in Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, or for that matter the art in a lot of mainstream superhero books.
 

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I guess that’s by Mike McKone. I guess this is the sort of thing that comics fans think is acceptable, as opposed to Miller, but…that’s pretty sorry shit, isn’t it? There’s something seriously wrong with the foreground character’s anatomy; her stomach seems to trying to escape through her backbone. The composition is static and awful; they’re all just standing there looking serious, thinking deep thoughts like, “wow, we’re really poorly drawn, aren’t we?” The coloring is slick and bland, they’re all thin and bland and straight; it’s a bunch of superbored supersticks. If you could pan down, you’d expect to see that they all have wooden feet hammered into the ground.

Miller’s Elektra isn’t cool as shit action art a la Frazetta, and it’s not outsider art interesting—but at least it’s trying something. Elektra is supposed to be sexy and badass, and she fails at that…but at least the failure registers as a failure. He tried something and it didn’t work, and it’s kind of funny and kind of sad. It doesn’t get to ugly enough to be good or interesting, but it’s got enough ambition to get to ugly. Mike McKone’s drawing, on the other hand, is so bland it makes no impression; like much superhero art, it might as well just be a scrawl declaring, “art needed here on deadline.”

Frank Miller is a big enough deal that when he turns in art, he actually turns in art. Not good art, necessarily, but not personalityless corporate default, either. You look at Elektra, and you feel like Miller put some of himself in there, even if that self is an indifferent draftsman far past his prime. I guess that’s what it is to be a mainstream superhero artist these days; you work and work in the hopes that you’ll become popular enough that someday, somehow, you’ll be allowed to make the crappy art you’re truly capable of.

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!

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

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Figure 19, page 129, Wonder Woman #1

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page 130, The Rifleman (creators unkown)

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page 133, Wonder Woman #18

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

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Figure 21, page 139, Sensation Comics #31

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Figure 22, page 141, Wonder Woman #5

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page 140, Sensation Comics #31

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Figure 23, page 143, Wonder Woman #3

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Figure 24, page 155, Wonder Woman #5

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page 155, Wonder Woman #5

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page 156, Wonder Woman #18

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Figure 25, page 157, Wonder Woman #5

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Figure 26, page 166, Wonder woman #5

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page 167, Herbert Cole, illustration of Sleeping Beauty

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Figure 27, page 168, Sensation Comics #41

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

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

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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

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page 184, Courbet, The Grain Sifters

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This last one is NSFW
 
 
 

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

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“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.
 

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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.

Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism — Links Page

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My book, Wonder Woman: Feminism and Bondage in the Marston/Peter Comics is coming out January 14, 2015 (that’s the official release day; availability may vary a bit from place to place.) I’m going to use this page to house links to interviews, reviews, and so forth.

Excerpts

A color gallery of images discussed in the book.

The Atlantic has an excerpt adapted from the book’s intro.

Purchase Copies

Rutgers (20% discount here!)

Amazon

Google Play

Barnes and Noble

Interviews (most recent first)

Nell Minow interviewed me for Huffington Post.

Tara Burns interviewed me for Vice.

Catherine Kustanczy interviewed me for Mic (and did a review of the book, too.)

Suzette Chan interviewed me at Sequential Tart.

Lauren Davis interviewed me at io9.

Paul Semel at his site.

Alex Deuben at Comic Book Resources.

Arielle Bernstein interviewed me at the Rumpus.

On KPCC’s The Frame (audio and text)

Reviews (most recent first)

Anita McDaniel reviewed my Wonder Woman book at the American Journal of Communications.

Chris Reyns-Chikuma at Belphegor.

Joan Ormrod at Cinema Journal (behind paywall.)

Peter Tupper discusses my arguments about Wonder Woman and bondage.

Kent Worcester at Portside says nice things about my book at the end of this review.

Brian Patton in the Journal of Comics and Graphic Novels (paywalled, but you can see the first bit.)

Jancy Richardson at Movie Pilot puts together an article of my Vice quotes on Wonder woman and the coming kinky matriarchal utopia.

Cia Jackson has a review at The Comics Grid.

Irene Javors has a review at The Gay & Lesbian Review.

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela at Public Books.

Matthew Cheney at the Mumpsimus.

Joan Hilty at Wellesley’s Women’s Review of Books.

Liz Baudler at New City.

Aimee Levitt with a brief review and a preview of a reading.

Jeff Hill recommends the book for comics studies and women’s history classes. (Listen up, academics!)

Sheryl Kirby reviews my book and Jill Lepore’s together.

Tim Hanley at The Comics Journal. (Tim had a little more to say at his blog here.

Suzette Chan at Sequential Tart.

Emily Ballaine at Publik/Private reviews the book and thinks about comics as art and bondage as feminism.

Sean Kleefeld at Freaksugar (rates the book 9 out of 10!)

Publisher’s Weekly Review

Monika Bartyzel mentions my book in a piece on the upcoming Wonder Woman film.

Articles by me on Wonder Woman (most recent first)

On why Wonder Woman needs her Lasso of Control back. (New Republic)

On how copyright restrictions made writing about Wonder Woman difficult. (Pacific Standard)

On William Marston as male feminist. (Ravishly.com)

On publishing my book and being plunged into a neurotic fugue of terror. (Splice Today)

On the trauma of having Jill Lepore write your book. (Chronicle of Higher Education)

On Wonder Woman, Bella from Twilight, and love as a superpower. (University of Chicago Magazine)

On Why Marston Would Approve Of Laverne Cox as Wonder Woman (Comic Book Resources)

On Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman. (Atlantic)

We don’t need no stinking Wonder Woman movie. (Wired)

Tim Hanley’s Wonder Woman: Unbound. (Salon)

Wonder Woman shouldn’t be a film sidekick. (Atlantic)

The patriarchal assholery of the Azzarello/Chiang Wonder Woman. (Atlantic)

The gayness of the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman comics. (Slate XX)

Wonder Woman Blogging

All HU pieces on Wonder Woman.

A roundtable celebrating the book release, including interviews, reviews, and more.

A roundtable on the last Marston/Peter Wonder Woman.

I blogged through every issue of the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman.

I look at post-Marston/Peter Wonder Woman, for better and (mostly) worse

Events (may be subject to change)

Wednesday, January 28, 6:00 PM
Signing at First Aid Comics
1617 E 55th St, Chicago, IL 60615

Thursday, February 26, 7:30 PM
Reading at Women and Children First
5233 N Clark St, Chicago, IL 60640

Saturday, March 7, 6:00 PM
Reading at Indy Reads Books.
911 Massachusetts Avem Indianapolis, IN

Wednesday, March 11, 6:30 PM
Reading at 57th Street Books
1301 E 57th St, Chicago, IL 60637

Saturday, March 14, 2:00 PM
Reading at Urbana Free Library
210 W Green St, Urbana, IL 61801

Monday, March 23, 6:30 PM
Discussion with Sharon Marcus at The Institute for Public Knowledge
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor, New York, NY

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Gazing At Wonder Woman

I belatedly read Philip Sandifer’s A Golden Thread: An Unauthorized Critical History of Wonder Woman earlier this week. As the title says, this is a blow by blow reading of basically every Wonder Woman comic-book iteration from Marston all the way on up through Azzarello. It’s similar in focus to Tim Hanley’s Wonder Woman Unbound — though Hanley lets his focus drift a bit more, talking about other female superheroes, talking in depth about the matriarchal theories held by Gloria Steinem’s circle, and generally trying to position Wonder Woman as an important cultural force, or at least a center of interest. Sandifer is more committed to close readings of the comics (and the occasional related media property).

In some ways, then, Sandifer’s book has the same problem as Hanley’s only more so; that problem being, it’s not entirely clear why anyone would want to do close readings of all Wonder Woman comics from the primordial ooze to the present, given that (a) they were mostly horrible, and (b) they weren’t at all popular. Why does anyone want to analyze the ways in which this particular unread piece of pulp detritus is mediocre? Why would anyone but hard core fans want to read it? It seems like Sandifer has consigned himself to a misty, bleak pop purgatory, following that golden thread into a bland, milk-covered bog.

Given that he’s in that bog, though, there’s something heroic about Sandifer’s determination to wade through it. The entire history of Wonder Woman comics doesn’t really deserve a decent chronicler, but Sandifer nevertheless determines to provide it with one. His writing throughout is elegant and entertaining and even, almost impossibly, passionate. His respectful, fair, and blistering denunciation of Gloria Steinem’s blinkered take on Wonder Woman, feminism, and (not least) trans people is a highlight, but it’s got lots of company, such as the brilliant discussion of Harry Peter’s art, tracing it to Victorian pornography and Beardsley. His readings hardly ever dovetail with mine; he thinks the I Ching era was exciting and ambitious; I think it was largely dreck; he thinks Greg Rucka brilliantly incorporated Wonder Woman’s history of bondage imagery into the Hiketeia; I think Greg Rucka is a humorless, pompous ass; he thinks Marston was an interesting creator but not a genius, etc. etc. But Sandifer always makes a stimulating case, and if I think his Greg Rucka is a lot smarter and more sensitive to the character’s hsitory than the real Greg Rucka — well, that just means I got to read and enjoy that Wonder Woman story Phil Sandifer wrote. If DC was smart (which they are not), they’d hire Sandifer to write their Wonder Woman comics for them.

Anyway, I thought I’d just quickly talk about one of Sandifer’s discussions which I found intriguing. In his analysis of the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman series, he references Laura Mulvey, and notes that her ideas about the gaze seem to work uncomfortably well; Carter, he says, is consistently framed by a male gaze. For instance,”Shots in which the camera tracks the eye movements of male characters looking at Lynda Carter (whether as Wonder Woman or Diana Prince) are exceedingly common. Scenes where Diana and Steve talk in his office are routinely shot with the cameras positioned behind Steve’s desk.” Sandifer goes on:

Of course, Wonder Woman has always been overtly sexualized. Marston’s conception of her as a figure to which men would willingly submit is still based on the external idolization of women by men. But there’s an intrinsic difference between the sexualization of an ink drawing and the sexualization of an actual human being. Carnal desires projected on a page of ink necessarily exist entirely within the realm of imagination. The sexualization of Lynda Carter has an actual person as the object of desire.

Sandifer adds that Lynda Carter herself found the sexualization and objectification unpleasant; in a 1980 interview she said “I hate men looking at me and thinking what they think. And I know what they think. They write and tell me.”

Sandifer draws a distinction between Mulvey’s gaze and sexualization in comic books on the grounds that in film (or television) a real person there’s a real person being gazed at.

I think that’s an interesting take on Mulvey’s theory…but it’s not exactly the theory itself, at least as I understand it. Mulvey’s ethical argument against narrative cinema is not against the sexualization of people, but rather against the way that gender roles are inscribed through the power of the camera placement. I’m sure Mulvey would feel that Lynda Carter’s discomfort emphasizes and extends the criticism she was making…but the criticism doesn’t rely on that alone. Rather, Mulvey’s point was that narrative cinema inscribes men as the looker/doer, and women as the fetishized object of the gaze on whom the male looks/does. Narrative film is denigrated not because it makes individual actresses uncomfortable, but because it seduces its viewers to acquiesce in stereotypical and sexist gender roles.

And I would say that this is something that comics can do as well.
 

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This is a rather obvious example — but still instructive, I think. The pose here is deliberately designed to draw attention to the rear, and especially to what people in those neighboring buildings might possibly see, but which you can’t. The cover encourages you to mentally take Spider-Woman and turn her. There is no narrative, per se, but there remains the sadistic association of viewer (figured here pretty clearly as male) with action performed on a woman, who is frozen and fetishized, her individual body parts (the rear, the invisible crotch) presented as consumables.

And for an example featuring Wonder Woman, how about:

 

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That’s a cover (Update: by Dick Giordano) to a comic by Martin Pasko and Curt Swan. Sandifer argues that the comic itself is intentionally and effectively feminist — which may well be. The cover, though, seems like a textbook example of Mulvey’s theories. The Elongated Man, that virtual double-entendre, looks at Wonder Woman through a video camera while a circle of men point their phalluses, er, guns at her. Tied up, Wonder Woman coos with a come-hither tilt, asking to be “killed”, her hand hovering over her crotch. The heroine is immobilized by and for the male gaze, begging for action that is figured, not especially subtly, as sexualized violence. And note especially that the reader is specifically positioned with, and encouraged to identify with, the male with the camera; we are supposed to watch with Elongated Man, the good guy who stares at the willing, supplicant woman.
 
The bondage there is of course a holdover, and perhaps a nod, to Marston.
 

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Marston just about never fits that easily into Mulvey’s formulation, though. In this panel, for example, there is no man gazing; women are the actors, whooshing about with Peter’s energetic motion lines. But more than that, the motion, or the narrative, is not linear; the Amazons can be seen either as a group in motion, or as one replicating individual racing around the pole, a rushing frozen sequence of bodies with Wonder Woman at the fulcrum. The narrative is frozen in fetishistic contemplation of women…but it’s also a rush of motion, a narrative that doesn’t go anywhere, or need to go anywhere. The (male or female) viewer, is frozen giddily like Wonder Woman, watching without motion a motion that goes nowhere. Mulvey argues that women “connote something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying castration and hence unpleasure.” But the circle here doesn’t disavow the lack of a penis; rather it glories in it, as the still observer is merged with the still, bound woman in a game of delightful submission to disempowerment. Mulvey argues that narrative cinema is about denying male castration; Marston’s gaze, on the contrary, embraces it as an exciting option for children of every gender.
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Sandifer’s A Golden Thread is available here.

And, as you probably know, you can preorder my Wonder Woman book and read more about the joys of castration here.