Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Bound to Blog: Sensation Comics #2

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Last week I blogged about the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman #11, which featured a cross-dressing villain named Hypnota among other things. In reading that issue, I wasn’t exactly sure what Marston thought about Hypnota in particular, or about cross-dressing in general. So I thought I’d take a brief break from going through all the issues of WW, and instead read another Marston cross-dressing villain story from a bit earlier, in one of his first Wonder Woman efforts, Sensation Comics #2.

Before I talk about that story, though, I wanted to mention another book I just finished: Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World. This is going to go on for a little bit, but we’ll get back to Wonder Woman, I promise.

I’ve talked about Rawle’s collage cartoons before. Woman’s World is collagy as well; Rawle wrote the text using words and phrases from women’s magazines published in the early 60s. It’s an impressive technical achievement in some ways. In other ways, you read it and you say, how could such an innovative process have resulted in such a staid narrative?

The narrative is particularly predictable when it comes to gender and cross-dressing. The story is narrated by Norma, and is mostly about her brother, Roy. Eventually Rawle reveals that Norma and Roy are the same person; the real Norma was killed as a child, the trauma caused her brother, Roy, to freak out, so that he started to wear women’s clothing and think that he was Norma part of the time. “Norma” is obsessed with women’s magazines and clothes, which gives Rawle the chance to use a lot of the cleaning product descriptions and advertising slogans and superficial cliches he found in all those women’s magazines he’s using to write his book.

So basically, Rawle presents us with a male-to-female cross-dresser who is (1) incredibly superficial and obsessed with surface femininity (Norma gets into big trouble because she just has to, has to, has to get a photograph of herself all dolled up and beautiful); and (2) completely insane. Sound familiar?

It sounds familiar to me anyway; both tropes are incredibly overused, to the point of rote idiocy, in popular representations of cross-dressers. The “they cross-dress, so they must be insane” schtick is used in just about every other major horror film, it seems — from Psycho, most obviously, down to Silence of the Lambs. The notion seems to be that before a guy would dress like a woman he’d have to have gone completely round the bend, to the extent of actually being a victim of multiple-personality disorder.

The “obsession with surface” thing is also really tired. Trans-activist Julia Serano has a great anecdote in her book “Whipping Girl” about being approached by some television show which wanted her to appear on a segment they were doing about male-to-female trans folks. The television people asked her if they could film Serano getting dressed to go out…putting on her make-up and dresses and that sort of thing. Unfortunately, Serano dresses the way a lot of women dress, which is to say, she doesn’t really wear make-up, often wears pants, and generally doesn’t get all dolled up to go off to her not especially glamorous job (she’s an academic biologist.) All of which she told the television producers, who, of course, decided not to film her, because they wanted yet another story about how obsessed trans people were with surface femininity and appearances and so on and so forth.

In short, when Graham Rawle thought to himself — “who would be obsessed with reading women’s magazines and learning how to be a woman and learning how to be feminine…um…I know! A cross-dressing man! And wouldn’t it be funny if she was really overblown and campy and not actually all that good at behaving like a real woman!” — again, when he thought all that, he was thinking just like those television producers. Which is to say, he wasn’t exactly thinking at all; he was just trying to be titillating and transgressive in the most banal and unthreatening way possible.

Okay, so…back to Wonder Woman and Sensation Comics #2. This story starts off with Nurse Diana Prince caring for a badly injured Steve Trevor. Steve is quickly kidnapped by a mysterious evil-doer named Dr. Poison. Lots of hijinks ensure, involving a chemical formula that makes soldiers interpret orders backwards and a bevy of courageous sorority girls— but the point is, at the end of the story, it is revealed that Dr. Poison…is a woman!

marston wonder woman

What’s interesting about this to me, in comparison to the Rawle story, is how thoroughly anti-climatic it is. There isn’t any effort to explain why she’s dressing up as a man. There isn’t any effort to ridicule her for dressing up as a man. There’s barely any effort to suggest that what she was doing was incongruous in any way.

Because Marston provides so little in the way of exegesis, it’s hard to know what he thinks, or what we’re supposed to think, about the cross-dressing. I can think of a bunch of possible ways to parse the scene — but, as I’ll discuss, none of them seem to fit perfectly.

1. Women who dress as men are ridiculous or incongruous, or going against nature in some way.

There’s a little evidence for this; WW makes a crack about Dr. Poison’s delicate hands, suggesting that a woman can’t perfectly imitate a man. The remark is somewhat undercut, though by Steve’s obvious and complete befuddlement. He couldn’t tell she was a woman, clearly. Moreover, I don’t think the reader can tell she’s a woman until WW reveals the truth. There isn’t any effort to tip us off; she doesn’t do or behave in a womanly manner at any point. It’s not even clear whether we’re supposed to see the cross-dressing as funny, exactly. It’s true that the scene after the unmasking has a farcical air about it…but the one thing that is more or less specifically mocked is Poison’s ethnicity, not her drag king status:

marston wonder woman

There’s certainly evidence, here and elsewhere that Marston had unpleasant racial opinions, but he’s more circumspect about cross-dressers.

2. Cross-dressing is evil and perverse, and so is the provenance of villains.

Richard Cook suggested this was what Marston was up to in a comment on the Wonder Woman #11 thread.

You say that Marston didn’t think that cross-dressing was wrong, but none of the “good” women (Diana, Etta, or the Holiday Girls) ever dressed as a man.* The cross-dressers, like Hypnota or the Blue Snowman, are invariably villainesses. The impression I get is that Marston believed there was something evil (and sexy) with a woman who wanted to be a man.

Vom Marlowe made a similar point in the same thread.

I wonder if the portrayal of cross-dressing is part of the skanky villain sex convention. This happens a lot in modern romance. You can portray non-vanilla stuff quite explicitly, but it has to be done by villains. The goal is titillation, for certain. The non-vanilla sex is not necessarily a way to show that the person is evil but sometimes it is. I wonder if this is something that Marston wanted to include, but didn’t think he could get away with doing for a good girl.

Again, this is feasible, but Marston never quite says it…and in other cases, he doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with women taking on male roles:

marston wonder woman

That’s heroine Etta candy, looking far more butch and tough in this early story than she would later on. The butch-femme dynamic, complete with a barely sublimated oral tease, is awfully hard to miss. And then there’s this panel:

marston wonder woman

Unlike the last example, I don’t think this is a joke, per se; Etta is really the hero here, and Marston is, as far as I can tell from other issues, completely fine with women’s sports (and indeed, more than fine with them.) The image of Etta dressing up as a football player isn’t meant to be either ludicrous or evil, I don’t think. Given that, it’s hard to see why Poison dressing as a man would necessarily strike him as evil in itself.

3. Men are evil, so women have to dress as men to be evil.

Sort of dovetails with Marston’s philosophy, but doesn’t seem especially likely given (a) the number of female villains he uses in other instances and (b) this panel:

marston wonder woman

She seems to remain fairly evil even when femme, as far as I can tell.

4. Women are weak, so they need to pretend to be men to gain power.

This is why MTF cross-dressing is always pretty much seen as odder than FTM; culturally, it makes sense for a woman to want to be a man, because men are higher status in various ways. And you could see a later version of this story having Poison reveal that because of the sexism of Japanese culture, she needed to dress as a man to be taken seriously, and so on and so forth.

Again, though, it’s hard to imagine Marston making this argument. Marston thought women were stronger than men in just about every way. In this issue alone, he goes out of his way to make Steve weak and helpless (wheelchair bound), and has not only WW as the superior strong woman, but also Etta, who is (as we’ve seen) quite tough herself.

Ultimately, I think the fact that it’s difficult to pin Marston down here is maybe the most interesting aspect of his use of cross-dressing. I have no doubt (as Richard suggested above) that Marston found role-play and cross-dressing sexy and exciting. But beyond that, he doesn’t explicitly stigmatize it, and, moreoever, doesn’t even really seem to feel that it needs an explanation.

Rawle’s book, on the other hand, is basically nothing but explanation, first, of who would be shallow enough to live their life based on a woman’s magazine (answer: a cross-dresser) and second, of why a man would dress as a woman (answer: because he’s insane.) Explanations are a big part of how society decides who or what is abnormal. You don’t need to explain why men dress as men because that’s normal, but if a man dresses as a woman, you have to explain that, because it’s weird. Except that Marston doesn’t seem to think that it is, particularly.

Steven Grant in commments on one of my recent posts said this about Marston:

As for Marston’s proclivities, I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere, but it’s hard not to suspect he liked being tied up and restrained, probably responded initially with shame, and egotistically concocted a bondage worldview that obviated any need for shame. So bondage – and the “freedom” that comes with it – becomes not his secret shame but everyone’s secret desire, and the path to emotional liberation. (As with the jargon of most cults, we can assume he believed anyone who didn’t like being restrained was simply repressed, and even more in need of “therapy.” His creation of the lie detector suggests that he had at least some fixation on the notion of secret shame, inventing a (specious. if well-promoted) device that would bring secret shame to light and, from his perspective, begin “correction” of it.

I don’t doubt that there’s something to this…but on the other hand, I think it’s worth noting that Marston’s investment and interest in perversions of various sorts doesn’t manifest solely as a desire to control or correct or diagnose. On the contrary, it often manifests as something that looks rather like tolerance. There are instances, at least, where Marston’s just not especially judgmental about other people’s desires — in part because he’s fetishizing those desires himself, no doubt. Still, speaking as a boring straight guy, it seems to me overall like it would be better to be obliquely fetishized by Marston than to be condescended to and clinicalized by Rawle.

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Just a couple other notes about this story formally; it’s pretty clear that both Marston and Peter are still kind of finding their feet. Peter’s linework is lovely as always: I really like the curves in this broken door, for example:

Still, you can see Peter struggling a bit with layout and panel composition. This image for example:

marston wonder woman

the dancing is great, and all the action is nice…but the inset panel is just weird, and looks like it was done at the last minute (look how that one girl is cropped off almost at random.) Partially as a result, the big panel looks crowded and messy, rather than formal and frozen in a way Peter would master shortly.

Marston’s also not quite where he would end up. The plot here involves sorority girls led by WW using their feminine whiles to trick and capture Poison’s guards. Marston, of course, believed that women used their feminine allure to overpower men and force them to submit. Marston never exactly abandons these ideas…but in future issues he tends not to represent them quite so schematically, I think. Certainly, WW does not, as a rule, beat the bad guys by dancing with them. Usually, she slugs them, or outthinks them, or some combination of those. I guess maybe he figured it would strain credulity if she danced her way to victory in every issue.

The Invisible Man

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Well, I knew it would happen eventually: Culture 11 is no longer archived on the web, alas.

Since everything I wrote for them has now vanished into the ether, I thought I might start reprinting it here in order to make it available. So…below is probably my favorite piece for them, an essay on C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy. I think they altered the end a little bit, but this is my original version.
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The Invisible Man

“Be comforted,” said Malacandra. “It is no doing of yours. You are not great, though you could have prevented a thing so great that Deep Heaven sees it with amazement. Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad. Have no fear, lest your shoulders be bearing this world. Look! It is beneath your head and carries you.”

That passage is from Perelandra, the second volume in C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy. I cried when I read it. I’m still not entirely sure why.

To give some context: the speaker in this passage is Malacandra, an extraterrestrial entity and also a Christian angel. He’s talking to Ransom, a human-being who has been summoned to Venus by God. Venus is, as it turns out, a second Eden, and Ransom’s task was to prevent a second fall by a different (and, somewhat improbably, green-skinned) Eve. To do this, he had to literally beat and then slay the Devil, who has incarnated in the form of a middle-aged space-traveling physicist. The passage above occurs just after Ransom realizes that he has been successful, and that, on Venus, there will be no fall. He is overwhelmed…and so Malacandra comforts him by telling him that he needn’t worry, because God doesn’t think he’s done anything particularly special.

It’s an odd moment in a very odd series. Lewis uses many of the standard tropes of sci-fi adventure — a rocket trip to Mars in the 1938 Out of the Silent Planet; mad scientists reanimating the dead in That Hideous Strength from 1946. But these hoary plots are used in the interest, not of adventure narrative, but of Christian apologetic. The rocket flight occurs not through empty space, but through something very like the Christian heaven; raising the dead is specifically diabolic in a way that Frankenstein and Herbert West only hinted at. The knowledge out there — in distance or time — is not better ray guns, or new social structures, or hideously unspeakable Lovecraftian fish-things. It’s simply God.

Lewis has, in other words, created a kind of holy doppelganger; a series which takes the form of sci-fi in order to undo it. Historically, sci-fi has always, especially in its more literate reaches, been studiously materialist. It’s not an accident that the first story of the genre’s first modern practitioner, H. G. Wells, is a vision of Darwinian apocalypse. In The Time Machine, man’s work, his reason, and his soul are first bifurcated and then crushed by the sheer weight of centuries. The future, for Wells and for those who followed him, is a kind of idiot potter, molding mind, gender, and form beneath its blind fingers. We may become one gender, or we may turn into superbabies, or we may devolve into hopping rabbit-like herbivores, or we may all die. The process may be liberating or terrifying or both, but we will change somehow. Time and space are enormous; they make and unmake. Man is small , and is made or unmade.

You might expect Lewis, as a Christian, to reject this view entirely — to deny the importance of time and space, and instead to focus on an eschatology in which human beings play a central role. In fact, Lewis’ intellectual mentor G.K. Chesterton pointed in this direction. In his story “The Blue Cross” in which he declared:

“Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star. Look at those stars. Don’t they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don’t fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, ‘Thou shalt not steal.”‘

Lewis agrees with Chesterton to a certain extent; lying, for example, is wrong on Earth, is wrong on Mars, and is wrong on Venus…if anything, in fact, it’s more wrong on the last two. But other laws are different, or change with time and space. For instance, on Venus the inhabitants must live on floating islands; God has decreed they cannot spend the night on dry land. Similarly, Lewis suggests that in the past, it was not necessarily wrong to use magic; in modern days it is. And, most significantly, in the past, intelligent creatures could come in all shapes and sizes; on Mars, there are man-sized river otters and elongated giants and weird snouty tapir-frogs. After the incarnation of Jesus, however, all intelligent creatures are created in the form of man.

For Lewis, then, the future does not change man; rather, man has changed the future. Except, of course, it’s not really, or only man; the future is altered not by the human race as a race, but by Christ. It’s not man, but God who is important…and God is everywhere. “Though men or angels rule them,” Lewis says, “the worlds are for themselves.” Man’s individual moral choices are certainly important; God cares whether Eve falls, or whether Ransom beats the devil. But it’s God, not man, who is the measure of all things. “Be comforted, small immortals,” Malacandra says. “You are not the voice all things utter.”

But why is it comforting to be insignificant? Isn’t insignificance at the heart of the fiction of Wells and his heirs? Isn’t man’s nothingness at the base of the horror in Wells or (for example) in Lovecraft? At first it seems..but when you look closer, it’s less clear. In The Time Machine, for example, what terrifies and disgusts the narrator is not the absence of man, but his presence — the hideous hopping creatures which, in more and more degenerate form, populate the far future. Frankenstein’s monster is horrifying not because he isn’t human, but because he is. The gothic tradition on which much of sci-fi rests is about doubling; about recognizing one’s own twisted visage in the face of infinity. The supposed evolutionary ruthlessness, the acknowledgment of the “truth” of man’s insignificance, is, in these books, a kind of ruse. The real emotional power is in man’s proliferation; man is everywhere, inescapable. The future does not create the sci-fi writer; rather it is the sci-fi writer who creates, in his or her own image, the future.

Lewis created The Space Trilogy too, of course. But it’s not a romantic or agonistic creation; it’s an imaginative extension of truths which, for Lewis, apply to man, but don’t originate with him. The future doesn’t have to be about us; we don’t have to be there to make it matter. Science-fiction is just a dream, after all; the twisted gothic face it sees in time’s mirror is just a phantom. “Have no fear, lest your shoulders be bearing this world. Look! It is beneath your head and carries you.”” Lewis waves his hand, and the whole genre dissolves, leaving instead the universe. I’m still not sure why it moved me so much. But I think it was partly the sense of being freed, or saved.

Nightmares for Sale

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Kaoru Ohashi
Nightmares for Sale #1
Aurora
B&W/226 pages
Softcover/$10.95
978-1934496046

I’ve seen several successful effort to combine horror and shoujo, but *Nightmares for Sale* is not one of them. The series is set around the pawn-shop of a supposedly mysterious, but in reality bland devil/demon/plot device named Shadow. People come into Shadow’s store planning to buy and sell trinkets, but what they purchase instead is darkness, incoherent plots, and tedious melodrama. The staple tropes of the horror anthology (ironic distance, twist endings, gory art) battle with the tropes of shojo (intense attachments, dreamy pacing, girly art) and the result is a big, fat, aesthetic nonentity — supposedly intense emotions attached to nothing, endings that collapse rather than startle, art that is busy but unmemorable.

*Nightmares for Sale*, in other words, lacks conviction, or even a point — and as a result its exploitative elements come across as particularly mean-spirited. Neither writing nor art is distinctive enough to provide a hook, so the only thing left to enjoy (if that’s the word) is the gratuitously banal suffering. In the first story in the volume, for example, we see a girl bullied by her peers into shop-lifting, prostitution, and madness; she’s supposedly redeemed at the end, but only, we are assured, so that she can get hurt again later. Even this description makes the whole sound too interesting by half. The girl as a character doesn’t even exist; we know next to nothing about her except for her unhappiness, and her fall into degradation is choreographed with the wallowing moralism of an after-school special. The story manages to be both uninvolving and sordid — a little like visiting the Las Vegas strip or watching Riki Lake, two other things that, like reading this series, I hope never to do again.

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This review first appeared in The Comics Journal.

Free Rein on Fundamentals

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I recently finished Les Daniels’ Wonder Woman: The Complete History, designed by Chip Kidd. I did enjoy it. The book is definitely tilted towards the earliest WW stories, with lots of info about William Moulton Marston and (to a lesser extent) Harry Peter — which is fine with me. Overall, I could have done with significantly less pictures of WW toys and ephemera, but that sort of thing isn’t nearly as irritating in this context as it was in Kidd’s Charles Schulz book. Schulz retained control over his creation till the end and beyond, and was always careful to keep the licensing schlock separate from the strip. In that context, Kidd’s insistence on mashing the two together came off as deliberate sacrilege. Whereas, like it or not, WW long ago left Marston’s control and became just another piece of corporate detritus. That’s not Kidd’s fault, and while I don’t necessarily need to see the process reverently documented, at this point I can’t work up a lot of bile about it either.

Anyway, as I said, Daniels includes a lot of interesting information about Marston. One of the most entertaining revelations is that Marston was a big, fat, duplicitous, self-promoting snake-oil salesman. I sort of knew this was the case already, but I hadn’t quite grasped the extent of his shillishness.

For example, in an earlier post I discussed Marston’s essay in The American Scholar. In that essay, he argues that WW was more popular than male heroes because boys want to be dominated by a strong woman. In support of his contention, he wrote as follows:

After five months the publishers ran a popularity contest between Wonder Woman and seven rival men heroes with startling results. Wonder Woman proved a forty to one favorite over her nearest male competitor, capturing more than 80 per cent of all the votes cast by thousands of juvenile comics fans….They were saying by their votes, “We love a girl who is stronger than men, who uses her strength to help others and who allures us with the love appeal of a true woman!

This all sounded fairly dubious to me for various reasons (couldn’t it have been female readers who swung the vote?) I somehow hadn’t considered the possibility, though, that the vote had just been rigged. Les Daniels sets me straight by reprinting what appears to be the poll that Marston was referring to.

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First, of course, it’s only WW against 5 other heroes, not 7…which could have been an honest enough mistake. The point though, is that this is a survey page which was printed in Sensation Comics…where WW was the star feature. The other heroes featured were the back up stories in the book, I believe. WW is even shown bigger than all the other characters — and she’s drawn twice. Moreover, anyone taking this survey is likely to be a Wonder Woman fan already. Plus, the heroes she’s going up against are all second stringer, or fourth stringers (the Gay Ghost indeed.) Thus, the survey shows us that people who buy Sensation Comics liked WW, which doesn’t seem like much of a news flash.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that WW wasn’t popular with boys; her books sold a lot of copies, and Daniels thinks the majority of that audience was male. But using the survey to suggest that she was categorically more popular than major male heroes is, it seems to me, deliberately deceitful. Moulton’s building his pseudo-scientific theories on premeditated blarney.

Furthermore, from Daniels account at least, this balderdash appears to have been extremely effective. Marston’s professional standing as a psychiatrist, and his sheer willingness to deploy that standing in all sorts of ridiculous way, gave him leverage that it seems like virtually no other comic writer of his day had. Moulton’s editors treated him with kid gloves. He had final say on scripts. He had final say on artistic choices — in fact, he hired Harry Peter himself and paid Peter himself, a situation which I imagine was virtually unprecedented. Marston apparently was very involved in the artwork as well; his scripts supposedly included detailed directions for panel content and layout. I doubt he was quite Alan Moore, but it sounds like he was closer to that model than he was to Stan Lee.

Marston did have various tussles with censors and with editorial. I was first inspired to start blogging about WW when I heard about one of those tussles: Marston’s editors wanted to tone down the series by having him tie WW up with things other than chains. What the account I read didn’t quite say, though, is that Marston won that fight. The editor suggested less chains, Marston said no way, and so the chains stayed.

And this seems to have been repeated whenever there was a battle over content. For instance, Josette Frank of the Child Study Association was employed to make sure that the comics weren’t too…well, just too. She pointed out, quite logically, that Wonder Woman “does lay you open to considerable criticism…partly on the basis of the woman’s costumes (or lack of it) and partly on the basis of sadistic bits showing women chained, tortured, etc.” Marston responded by calling Frank “an avowed enemy of the Wonder Woman strip” and by claiming that the strip was not sadistic because “binding and chaining are the one harmless, painless way of subjecting the heroine to menace and making drama of it.” He went on:

confinement to WW and the Amazons is just a sporting game, an actual enjoyment of being subdued. This, my dear friend, is the one truly great contribution of my Wonder Woman strip to moral education of the young. The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound….Women are exciting for this one reason — it is the secret of women’s allure — women enjoy submission, being bound…because all this is a universal truth, a fundamentla subconscious feeling of normal humans, the children love it….I have devoted my entire life to working out psychological principles…[and should have] free rein on fundamentals.

And free rein is what he got. The combination of professional credentials, high sales, and a very friendly relationship with his editor meant that Frank (in a decidedly unfeminist outcome) was essentially dismissed as a repressed harridan who was seeing evil where there was none.

I’ve compared Marston to artists like Henry Darger and R. Crumb in the past; creators who elaborated their fetishes into individual visions. Reading Daniels, it becomes clear that, in many ways, Marston was a lot closer to artists like Darger and Crumb than he was to the hired hands who surrounded him in the comics industry. Not because he had more genius (though I think in most cases he did), but rather because he was really in control of his creation in a way that most of his peers probably didn’t even bother to dream about. Marston did get script ideas and input from others (especially family members), but he — not an editor, not a censor board — had the last word on what went into his comics. In fact, when (I think) Gardner Fox wrote a solo WW story for Justic Society, Marston rejected it and rewrote it himself.

As this suggests, Marston was devoted to his character. In 1945, he contracted polio and was confined to a wheelchair. He did take an assistant, Joyce Murchison, who became a co-writer on the title…but Marston continued to write, to plot, to approve art, and to maintain control of the series. in 1947 he was diagnosed with lung cancer. But he just kept on. According to his wife he “wrote a script the week before he died. Two days before the end he was editing pencils, in writing so faint we could scarcely read it, but catching errors we had passed up.”

In short, Marston had a level of control over Wonder Woman, and a level of devotion to her, that none of his successors on the title could hope to match. Robert Kannigher, as editor and writer on the title for years, certainly had great control over the character — but he didn’t hire the artists out of his own pocket, and he couldn’t prevent her from being used by other creators on other titles, the way Marston could. George Perez obviously had a lot of affection for the character, but he certainly wasn’t going to work on her on his death bed; on the contrary he quit of his own volition to work on more popular titles elsewhere.

Marston was impassioned. He wasn’t a corporate drone doing a 9 to 5; this was his dream, which he controlled, and to which he was willing to devote the last days of his life. Everybody else who has worked on Wonder Woman, on the other hand, has been doing work-for-hire, subject to a string of corporate whims, in the full knowledge that at some point they’ll get a better offer (more money, more creative freedom) and they’ll jump ship.

Work-for-hire isn’t necessarily everywhere and always worse than creator-controlled work, of course. Still, looking at Marston’s WW and comparing him to others’ work , it’s hard not to agree with Marston’s editor, Sheldon Mayer. When it came to writing Wonder Woman, Mayer said, “there was just one right guy, and he had the nerve to die. And he shouldn’t have done it. “
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This post is part of a series discussing Wonder Woman, Marston, and other WW creative teams. You can read the rest of the series here.

The Mystery of Mark Waid

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A while back I read one of Mark Waid’s JLA stories and found it one of the more depressing iterations of super-hero genre douchebaggery extant. (Update: I also had a troll tussle with Waid, which you can read about at that link.) On the other hand, Waid’s goofball pseudo-Silver Age comics’ covers were deliriously demented in the best possible way. I didn’t figure that Waid’s Captain America would be as good as the second, but I was hoping it wouldn’t be as lousy as the first.

And I got my wish…barely. Operation:Rebirth — the trade collection of Waid’s first few issues on Captain America — isn’t quite as thoroughly godawful as Waid’s Midsummer Night’s Dream storyline for JLA. The art by Ron Garney is marginally better than the JLA art, for one thing. And with only one hero, there’s less self-congratulatory puffery about how we’re all just the greatest heroes ever, aren’t we so cool?

I mean, don’t get me wrong; there’s still plenty of that. Tthe comic opens with a by-the-numbers eulogy about how Cap is the best in all of us, how will we survive without him, and on and on and on. Because everyone thought Cap was dead. But he’s not. And then he wakes up and Sharon what’s her name is there back from the dead too, except now she’s all cynical and hardened and has a frizzier hairstyle. And then the Red Skull pops up and has to stand in line to kiss Art Spiegelman’s ass, after which he travels back in time to take Noah’s place on the ark — but Captain America and Sharon dress up as warthogs (Cap in red, white, and blue, of course) and then they….

Okay, right, none of that happens, no matter how much I would have liked it to. Instead Cap and the Red Skull team up to find the cosmic cube inside of which Hitler may or may not be trapped and then Cap goes inside it and lives his perfect dream life until he self-actualizes and comes back to face reality. And then he and Sharon whatshername banter a little. Along the way, Cap hits a soldier or two and tightens his jaw like Tom Cruise to show us that it pains him. Sharon makes some cracks about what a goody-two-shoes Cap is. And there’s the obligatory panel where we see her dim-lit, perhaps nude ass and she makes some vague comment about how she was degraded because intimations of prostitution are always welcome.

I do think, having read this, that Waid is at some sort of extreme of what super-hero comics can be. It’s not that he’s the worst writer in the world. Steve Gerber’s Man Thing is worse. The original Power Man is worse. But they manage to be worse by actually making some sort of effort. Gerber and the folks who worked on Power Man had pretentions to social and moral relevance that were tediously presented and hideously executed, and which made them very bad comics indeed.

But those same pretentions gave you at least some sense of why the comics existed in the first place. They were hackwork, no question…but you felt like the creators had put something of themselves into the creation. Gerber had a whiny, existentialist persecution complex; the guys who did Power Man had some sort of ax to grind about racial and social justice. Stupid, sure, and poorly handled, but the stuff from which actual artists who don’t suck have created actual art.

Whereas with Waid, there’s just nothing. Oh, sure, there’s the usual mouthings about truth, justice, and the American way, and there’s the fight against the Nazis. But there isn’t even a token effort to pretend that Waid or the readers give a crap. The Nazis are just central casting heavies; there’s no ideology involved. The best Waid can do is burble on about how Cap was born or reborn or rereborn or manufactured to defeat HItler…which, what does that even mean? Cap is Hitler’s natural arch-enemy? I mean, what about Winston Churchill? If anybody was going to go into a cosmic nether-space and self-actualize about trouncing Adolf, why not Winston Churchill? Oh, sure, he doesn’t wear his underthings on the outside, but he looks kind of like a bulldog. Surely that counts for something?

Anyway, the point is…Waid wrote this thing with his brain on call-waiting and his heart in the other room snoozing to infomercials. Really, it could have been composed by a computer or a monkey — except then there’d be absurdist touches. But here…you finish this and you figure, Mark Waid must be the absolute dullest man on earth. Cliché after cliché flows effortlessly across the page (teaming up with the villain; spiritual reunion with lost partner; saving enemy from certain death, and on and on) without any spark of life or even interest. The bland grey surface is unmarred by either skill or incompetence. There are no ideas, either bad or good. The book just sits there, like a lump on a bump, but without that much personality.

So I’m baffled. I know Waid does have a personality; that he can be witty and arch and goofy and mean-spirited. Maybe he feels it’s just not appropriate to bring that stuff to his mainstream bread-and-butter series? But, good lord, if you have a brain and heart, not to mention a sense of humor, as he appears to, how could you sit down and write this without slitting your throat? Even if it’s just hackwork for a paycheck…how could you resist doing something, anything, to show that it was you, and not some faceless drone, who put this book together?

In my review of JLA, I said that Waid made me despair of super-hero comics, and that kind of holds true here as well. When I read Man-Thing, I just hated Man-Thing and Steve Gerber and wanted it to stop. But you can’t really hate Waid when you read Captain America, because there’s no sense that he even exists. You’re left with just absence; with characters who move and speak and pretend to be human, but who are really just empty masks perched upon a void. The super-heroes seem like hollowed out tropes, dead but somehow upright. It’s uncanny and depressing. Management missed a trick, I think, when they didn’t have Waid write Marvel Zombies.

Partially Concealed Pundit: Picture for Edra

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This actually is a recent drawing.Edra Soto has an exhibition at the MCA. She asked a number of artists and friends to contribute drawings combining her face with the face of a gorilla. Most people followed the assignment, but, unfortunately, I can’t really draw, so I ended up with this:

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Edra’s face is under there somewhere, truly.

Anyway, you can go to the MCA at the moment and see the original drawing, with many other more competent drawings of Edra as a gorilla and an amazing stage set constructed by Edra’s husband Dan if you happen to be in Chicago. Here’s Edra’s description of her show, open through June 28.

Soto’s installation, The Chacon-Soto Show, focuses on Iris Chacon, the charismatic Puerto Rican performer who starred in the 1970s variety television show El Show de Iris Chacon. Despite sexually provocative costumes and performances, the legendary diva became a popular family entertainer. Flamboyantly dressed and flanked by male backup singers and dancers, Chacon became a symbol of the liberated Puerto Rican woman. For this work, the artist analyzes issues of sexuality specific to Puerto Rican culture through the double filter of her adult understanding of US feminist issues and childhood memories of Chacon on television.