So this is my second longish post on Wonder Woman. In the last one I talked about Charles Moulton, Wonder Womans’ creator, and why I thought it was very difficult for other writers to put together decent stories using his character. Basically, I argued that whereas Superman, Batman, Spider-man, etc., are to some extent just interchangeable adventure heroes, Wonder Woman stories were much more like something by Tom Of Finland or R. Crumb — that is, Moulton had an idiosyncratic vision based on his (fairly explicit) sexual kinks (basically strong woman, bondage, control, submission — that kind of thing.) Again, you might want to read the whole thing here if you haven’t.

All right. So I was going to look now at why or in what ways Wonder Woman has been a problem for the writers who have come after Moulton.

Basically, Moulton’s Wonder Woman is (ahem) bound up with his a very particular set of fetishes and fantasies. Moulton made his stories about those fetishes and fantasies; that’s what he wanted to talk about, and in that context WW’s appearance (girly, uncovered) her tools (the magic lasso, the bracelets) and her contradictory image (powerful, but always being dominated) all make at least a kind of sense. His weird blend of feminism/misogyny (“I love strong women — tie them up so I may love them more!”) which means you can’t get the feminism without the misogyny, but also means you can’t get the misogyny without the feminism. In particular, the way and the extent to which Moulton presents and fetishizes female relationships seems equally tied up with his own sexual peccadillos (lesbianism is never very far below the surface here) and with ideas about girls supporting each other in a feminist or protofeminist way. Certainly, Moulton comics are far, far from the first thing I’d give to my daughter, but I can see why young girls might have found something to connect with in them. Women have power (they are so, so powerful!) and they love each other (oh, please, love each other more!)

I guess the point I’m making is that there’s misogyny, but it’s not gratuitous. Moulton has a vision. It’s not PC and it’s totally sexually twisted, but at least he’s thought about it. He cares about women. You can mock that, or argue with that, or even suggest that it might be better for everyone if he cared about women a little less, but at least there’s the sense that he’s paying attention. This is someone in particular’s misogyny –which means it’s also someone in particular’s feminism. He’s not trying to sell you a bill of goods and then backhanding you. The whole thing is up front. To me, that just seems less oppressive, in various senses.

When other folks use Wonder Woman, though…well, things don’t work quite as well. The fetishization and bondage weirdness are at least somewhat disavowed…but you don’t get rid of them that easily.

Disempowerment in various forms is a staple of super-hero covers. For men, though, it usually involves bodily transformation (Flash’s big head) or humiliations in which the sexual implications are at least a bit more repressed. But here…Wonder Woman tied up and smiling as she playfully cocks her crotch and begs for it with the (ahem) Elongated Man looking on eagerly; Wonder Woman tied up and legs spread with a missile propitiously aimed; kneeling with legs spread…I mean, it’s not especially subtle, is it?

Again, the point here is that this isn’t a perversion of the character — this is the character. But still, something has definitely gone wrong. Part of the problem is the art; after the Moulton era, WW moved towards the standard semi-realistic super-hero art meme. The result is that what is a kind of iconic fantasy in Peter’s work ends up looking a lot more like basic cheesecake illustration. Or, to put it another way, it becomes more generic, less about whatever cathexis of strength/dominance/idealism/smuttiness went into Moulton’s Wonder Woman, and more about whatever expected thing guys want to look at. As a result, these covers don’t seem odd or bizarre, the way Moulton’s work did. They seem predictable. Wonder Woman was always wank fodder, I think, but here she ends up as just wank fodder. There’s nothing else going on. We’ve gone from someone’s particular hothouse boudoir to a generalized locker-room for geekish fanboys.

As witness the unfortunately named 1959 gem “Wanted — Wonder Woman” by Robert Kanigher and Ross Andru (reprinted in Greatest WW stories ever told). The story features a race of short, unusually ugly multi-limbed green aliens, who control Diana’s mind and force her to agree to marry Steve Trevor.

Can I just say…ewwww. The little aliens all jubilant together because they’ve romantically-sexually manipulated the heroine; it’s like a bunch of thirteen-year-old-boys celebrating after stealing their Mom’s friend’s panties — or like a bunch of comics geeks chortling to themselves about the off-color WW fan-fic they just wrote. It’s comic creator as pre-adolescent tyrant, guiltily manipulaiting his little plastic toy (and in Ross Andru’s art, all the characters do indeed look plastic.) The whole thing is just smarmy and repressed and depressing. Compared to this, good honest bondage — or good honest parasite fetishism, if that’s the way Kanigher swings — would seem positively healthy.

As usual, Grant Morrison channels the zeitgeist most effectively:

©Grant Morrison and Howard Porter, aka, the worst artist in the world.

Wonder Woman: she’s a super-hero…and a victim of sexual harassment! Who says you can’t have it all, ladies! (That’s a real honest to goodness angel with the smarmy patter there, too. Now you know…there are frat boys in heaven.)

Admittedly, not all Wonder Woman writers have necessarily gone for cheap titillation and demeaning, half-disavowed power fantasies. If they don’t take Moulton to the most obvious stupid place, though, he often ends up ambushing them. Here’s a memorable panel:

This is from an old 70s Super-Friends comic. As the caption says, Wonder Woman has been forced to discard her bracelets for various reasons. And, as a result, she turns into a beserker, because Amazons need metal bracelets to restrain them. It’s a total Charles Moulton plot device — bondage, restraint, blah, blah. But nothing else in the Super-friends has anything to do with these themes. Wonder Woman herself is completely bland; like all the other super-friends, she talks and acts like a boy scout crossed with Calvin Coolidge and a primary school teacher. Then, all of a sudden, she’s some sort of primal deadly female force who threatens us all! You’ve got this basic boring kids comic, and suddenly comics’ horny atavistic past rears up (in various senses) and your tots are looking at Charles Moulton’s fetish problems. This is certainly bizarre — but it still isn’t exactly individualistic. It just feels like nobody’s at the tiller; the misogyny is just a flat accident, it’s an ignorant flub, attributable equally to (A) the creator’s lack of interest in Wonder Woman and (B) the creator’s lack of interest in woman. Thus, while the moment does have an aphasiac charm, it’s also undeniably a parodically casual desecration. Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Green Arrow, even Spider-Man; none of them were really meant to say anything in particular. But Wonder Woman was; Moulton intended to use her to embody his own ideas (however cracked) about feminism and femininity. His successors overwhelmingly didn’t give a shit.

One last story: this one by Phil Jimenez. Called “She’s a Wonder,” it’s from 2001, and was reprinted in the Greatest WW stories ever told volume, The narrative’s about Lois Lane writing a puff piece about Wonder Woman. In some ways, it’s really not bad. Jimenez is a talented draftsman; following in George Perez’s footsteps, his Wonder Woman actually looks Greek, for example, and he obviously has a lot of fun drawing her in different costumes. He also has a nice way with (often bitchy) dialogue, and as a result the very talky script doesn’t seem burdensome. We see WW talking to President Luthor (“more full of dung than the Augean stables”), getting rejected by a hot humanitarian do-gooder (“isn’t he beautiful?”) chatting with some flaming friends (“you think all men are gay!” “well they are — especially the men.”) It’s actually a lot like reading an actual puff piece — a good one. Diana comes across as beautiful, likable, smart, dedicated — sort of a hyped-up Angelina Jolie, down to the Third-World charity work. The whole story is obviously fairly idiotic in some sense — why do we want to read celebrity journalism about a fictional character again? But it’s done with enough humor and grace that it’s hard to feel sour about it.

Until right at the end. Lois, who’s somewhat resentful of Diana’s relationship with Superman, demands to know how Wonder Woman does it all — how she can be the modern woman — so strong and yet so feminine — how she can fight bad guys all day but still smell morning fresh — how she can “accept her contradictions.” It’s a pretty dumb thing to ask, but the answer is even dumber — WW proudly sticks out her magic bondage lasso of truth, and explains that it’s what keeps her honest. She is all the woman she can be because she ties herself up every night before she goes to bed.

Charles Moulton would be proud, presumably. But is that really what Jimenez wanted to say? He started out trying to tell a story about a complex woman for the oughts, and he ends up saying the road to feminist paradise is through New Age B&D? The puff piece just kind of deflates with a giant “frrraaaaappppppppp.” Poor Jimenez. Unlike most of his peers, he obviously does care about this character, but…well, what can you do? Dress her up, make her talk like a human being, give her nice clothes and tell her you really admire her for her mind; it doesn’t matter. Wonder Woman’s still going to be true to the weirdo who brung her. Moulton’s still her man.

Update: And Part 3 now up. Also, part 4.

Update 2: And part 5.

A couple weeks or so I wrote about female super-heroes and the way that the major properties of the big two are justly not as popular as, say, Sailor Moon. In particular, I talked a little about Wonder Woman, and how she was just not necessarily what girls were looking for in a pulp genre, and for good reason.

I was thinking about that a little more and (er) wondering if I’d overstated the case. After all, the Lynda Carter TV series was quite popular back in the day, wasn’t it? Admittedly, compared to Superman or Batman or Spiderman or…well, lots of properties, really, WW hasn’t had a ton of multi-meida success — one three-season TV series is fairly small beer as these things go (I guess she did have an animated series, but it didn’t really go anywhere, I don’t think. And there’s a movie in development hell….)

Anyway, then Dirk posted a link to this strip and article about how the original Wonder Woman creator, Charles Moulton (real name William Moulton Marston, apparently), struggled with censorship — it seems he wanted to constantly tie the character up in chains, and editorial felt he needed to find other materials with which to truss up his Amazon. (No, really.) That article is by Dr. K, who also included a strip showing our heroine in a gimp mask.

©DC Comics, Charles Moulton, and Harry G. Peter in some combination.

Dirk commented that Wonder Woman was probably DC’s most problematic character.”

So now I was kind of intrigued. I’d known that Moulton was…um, idiosyncratic, but I’d never read a ton of his stuff. So I turned to trusty Amazon in the hopes that they had one of those cheap black and white showcase book of his early strips. No dice, unfortunately; the only thing available is one of the hardback golden age treasuries for 50 bucks, and I’m not that interested. They did have a volume of “The Greatest Wonder Woman Stories Ever Told” though. Not too pricey, and I figured I could read some Moulton and see what other writers had done with the character over the years.

There were only two Charles Moulton stories as it turned out, with art by Harry G. Peter. The first is what I think must be Wonder Woman’s first appearance (there is no historical notation to speak of — nice job, DC) and it’s more or less unreadable. It starts in media res, after Wonder Woman saved Steve Trevor and he calls her beautiful and so she falls in love with him. Then she window shops (cause that’s what woman do) in her underwear (because that’s what super-heroes do) while men stare at her and women make jealous quips. Then she enters into a business deal to go on the stage performing her bullets-and-bracelets wheeze. Unfortunately, the deal is made with an unpleasant Jewish caricature who has a big nose and is money-grubbing, so he rips her off, but she’s Wonder Woman! So she beats up the Jew and then later beats up what I presume are Nazis (the script is not especially clear) — thus bashing anti-semite and Jew alike, which is kind of nice message of peace and equality, I guess. She saves Steve again too, in there.

©Charles Moulton, Harry G. Peter, DC Comics

Oh, yeah, and there’s a totally bizarre sequence where she pays a nurse to switch places with her so the nurse can go off to be with her husband and WW can be the caretaker for the bedridden Steve Trevor. The nurse’s name is Diana Prince, of course, which is a coincidence, because WW’s name is also Diana! How about that! And that’s how WW gets her secret identity — in aphasiac, passive-agressive pursuit of the man she loves because he threw her a casual compliment. Empowerment aplenty here, ladies!

So not an especially auspicious beginning — and you’ve got to be thinking, if these are the greatest wonder woman stories, what in god’s name do the worst ones look like? Luckily, the second story in the collection is more like it. This is from 1948, and in the intervening six years Moulton and Peter have managed to figure out more clearly what they were doing. Specifically, there’s a lot less mooning around after Steve Trevor and a lot more girls being tied up and dominated. Also, the plot has moved from merely being annoyingly vague and scattershot into a sublime realm of utter nonsense. Evil women from Saturn; Venus Girdles which force the wearer to be loving and obedient; WW’s entire rogues gallery, including Giganta, a gorilla who has been turned into a woman (or as she introduces herself, “I’m Giganta, formerly a female gorilla!); WW’s side-kicks, the Holiday Girls, transformed into gorillas from the neck down; Hypnota controlling the will of unsuspecting typists; Etta Candy, WW’s fat sidekick, shouting “Woo-woo! This is as easy as cutting chocolate fudge!”

Also, did I mention all the girls being tied up and dominated? What with Hypnota, the Venus Girdles, and various hostage situations, someone’s will is always being bent, and when a will isn’t being bent, then someone’s being tied up — and often, gratuitously, you get both at once. (As one lovely haplessly declares, “You don’t have to tie the ropes to tight! I can’t break even the weakest rope you bind me with while I wear this Venus Girdle!)

Harry Peter isn’t a great artist — he doesn’t have the design chops or the color sense of Fletcher Hanks, for example — but he’s not bad either. For Wonder Woman, he may even be perfect. His untrained, cartoony figures are far enough from reality that you’re never asked to actually try to imagine WW as an actual person, actually wearing that ridiculous outfit which, in real life, would just not be all that flattering (as you can see from the standard, ill-conceived, hyper-real Alex Ross cover…or from the Lynda Carter TV series, for that matter.)

©Alex Ross

On the other hand, Peter’s got enough command of the female form to capture a certain submerged (or not so submerged) sensuality. His penchant for crowded panels with lots and lots of women and breasts and curves is also serendipitous; nothing you look at in particular is all that hot, but the overall impression is of a diffused voluptuousness. Even the stiffness of his drawings works well; whether or not the characters are actually bound, they seem to be restrained or frozen. For instance, check out this illustration (page 41). Wonder Woman is hanging outside the window looking in on another woman hiking up her skirt with her face obscured. The bare legs and hidden face is a classic cheesecake pose, and WW looking through the window unobserved certainly has erotic connotations as well. Perhaps most striking, though, is WW’s body position; she’s all pulled in on herself, clutching the rope, her feet crossed over each other, her arms stiff…and her face turned away from the reader. A girl exposes herself as WW watches, and we (both male and female) watch WW as she is positioned in a way which has to be read as submissive.

©Moulton, Peter, DC Comics

I really love those stylized flame-blots too, and the way the typist’s hands are thrown up in an almost ritualized gesture, like she’s on a frieze; really beautiful and weird. Maybe I do think he’s a great artist.

Or look at this panel:

©Moulton, Peter, DC Comics

That’s Clea, some sort of Atlantean baddie, binding Wonder Woman. Obviously the perspective is totally screwed up; Clea is way bigger than she should be in comparison to her captive. The result, though, is that Wonder Woman looks extremely fragile and vulnerable while Clea looks gigantic and dominating. The art, in other words, helps with the fetishization.

Despite the inarticulate plot and the borderline-outsider art, then — or because of them — the Moulton/Peter Wonder Woman is coherent; there’s a vision here, albeit a perverse one. Hipployta says it all in the last panel: “The only real happiness is to found in obedience to loving authority.” Yes, precisely — as long as we realize we’re talking about Moulton’s happiness. Obedience, disobedience, strength bound and compelled, healthy women frolicking together one moment and being reduced to animals the next — the sexual subtext isn’t even really sub (as it were). To the extent that Wonder Woman is supposed to be some sort of strong female role model, it’s because Moulton loves the rush of controlling strong women, and of being controlled by them. This is still male power fantasy; it’s just focused on men thinking about women rather than with Superman or Batman, where it’s all men thinking about men (the fanny vs. dick distinction again.)

What this means is that the Moulton Wonder Woman is a lot more like, say, R.Crumb’s work, or Tom O’Finland’s, than it is like the adventures of WW’s betighted peers. Superman and Batman and even Spider-Man are basic adventure narratives, and while there are certainly Freudian implications to the way those work out, those implications are generic, not individual. Superman may tell you something about sexuality or masculinity in general, but he doesn’t tell you all that much about Jerry Siegel in particular; same with Spider-Man and Stan Lee. On the other hand, Wonder Woman is repetitive sexual idiosyncracy as aesthetic vision — I now know more than I maybe want to about what Charles Moulton and quite possibly Harry G. Peter), in particular, likes. And while that (in my opinion) makes their particular Wonder Woman stories more enjoyable and creative than the Siegel/Schuster Superman or the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man, it has created something of a quandry for future creators. It’s one thing to writer Superman fan fic; it’s another to write R.Crumb fan fic. Doing the first seems natural enough; doing the second seems like an enormously bad idea. And writing Wonder Woman is, as I suggested, a lot more like the second than it is like the first. Which is maybe why Wonder Woman stories by Moulton’s successors have tended to be not just bad, but embarrassingly bad. As I’ll hopefully discuss tomorrow, if all goes well…..

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Just an addendum: I love this image as well:

©Moulton, Peter, DC Comics

Lovely colors, especially that orange background and that red against the blue pole. Can’t get enough of those stylized flames. And the dead center composition…totally clunky, but again the stiffness works in context. I do definitely like this art more than Ditko’s stuff on Spider-Man (though not on Dr. Strange necessarily.) He is great, damn it. Does anyone know if he ever did anything else? Wikipedia only mentions Wonder Woman, which I guess was at the end of his career….

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Hey, and poking around I found another Moulton/Peter WW story on my shelves, in the Greatest Golden Age Stories hardback. This issue’s from 1945, apparently. Man, I love this page. The upper-left panel particularly, with the stylized light turning into faux stained glass. What on earth is that band of yellow across the middle even supposed to be? It’s garage sale medieval, obviously — but done so well, with the oddball geometric lines breaking up the only very notionally 3-D image into distinct color blocks. And that picture next to it, with the girls with wings looking up transfixed — the preciousness is so unhinged, and yet so insistently formalized, it’s like a ritualized sugar rush. Did Henry Darger ever see this stuff I wonder? You’d like to think he did; I think Peter must have been his long-lost soul mate….

And this image, with the invisible plane’s wake as a weird purple rainbow…

This issue also has more of Moulton’s oddball inspirational feminism. Apparently the girls on Paradise Island aren’t believing in themselves enough, and are having trouble with their super tasks. So Wonder Woman inspires them. Then she goes off and inspires girls in the garden of Eden, who aren’t from Eden but from Venus maybe? So she leads them to victory over Seal Men, but not before their captured and frozen in blocks of ice. And Wonder Woman gets tied up too, because you can’t show everyone how strong you are unless you are tied up and break free and dominate others. It’s wholesome fetish fun, and empowering too!

Update: Second Wonder Woman post here.

Update 2: part 3 and part 4.

Update 3: And part 5.