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

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

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

____________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: Fixed chronology error….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love Among the Collectibles

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

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

_______________

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

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

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

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

_______________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Trevor, Fool; by Moulton and Harry Peter

Steve Trevor, Dick, by Robert Kanigher and Ross Andru

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update 3: And part 5.

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

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

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

______________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update 2: And part 5.