Category Archives: Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle

Super Wonder Frontier (OOCWVG)

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This is the latest in a series of posts about post-Marston iterations of Wonder Woman. For those of you waiting for me to continue my blogging through the original Wonder Woman series; my apologies for the delay. I promise I will get back to it next week.
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I dumped on Darwyn Cooke’s mediocre New Frontier yesterday, and I’ll stand by that. I do like his art, though; nice color palette, and he combines the cartoony TV show style with a tactile realism that’s really charming. I like the way Superman and Flash’s costumes are a little baggy, for example.

I also quite like his Wonder Woman drawings. He very cleverly finds lots of excuses to get her out of the swimsuit, and he also draws her in a zaftig cheesecake pin-up style that’s hard to resist. This panel is positively luscious.

Darwyn Cooke Wonder Woman

Cooke’s obviously quite plugged into Marston’s lesbian fantasy dreaming there, with tongue all the way in cheek (if that is the metaphor I want.) His characterization of WW is fairly enjoyable too; there’s one sequence where he has her free a bunch of Vietnamese women from their captors, allows them to butcher the villains, and then leads them in celebration. It’s true that this is a rather tasteless effort to gin up meaningfulness by piggybacking on Important World Tragedy –but if you can get past that, you have to admit that it’s a pretty entertaining twist on Marston’s bondage fetish. I also enjoyed seeing WW all bloodthirsty and cheerful about it, rather than earnest and dour as she is so often portrayed. Instead, it’s Superman who has to be all boring; he’s the stuffed shirt appalled at the butchery, while WW gets to be the loose canon (“I’m over here winning the hearts and minds of the disenfranchised,” she tells him confidentially).

There is a problem, though. WW does get to be the wise free spirit, a la Wolverine. But she gets to be so only in relation to that stuffed-shirt, Superman. WW hardly has a scene in the whole comic that doesn’t also feature Superman, and her function is essentially to serve as a muse for his conflict/self-actualization. Yes, she is supposed to have come to some sort of understanding about American policy herself, I guess…but Cooke cuts her off, literally in mid-sentence, before she can articulate it. But that’s okay, because her own thinking isn’t really all that important. She’s beautiful and smart and thoughtful and adventurous and daring…and all of that is in the service of getting Superman to realize that he’s the symbolic icon of wonderfulness who must lead America to greatness. That scene in south asia is thematically staged for Superman’s benefit. So, I think, is the lesbian daydream in the image above. We see WW and her Amazon sisters frolicking…and then one of them gasps “It’s a man!” and we see Superman fly in, and Diana tells him “Come fly with me, Kal,” and if that isn’t enough of a come on, she then goes on to tell him how wonderful his values are. Yay! Later she gives him a kiss and that inspires him to assume the leadership role that he’s fated for because he’s…Superman!

This is hardly the first time this has happened, of course. In these massive crossover alternate universe things, WW is always getting relegated to the helpmate/soulmate/lead you to your destiny role in support of Superman and/or Batman. It happens in DKII, and seems to more or less be a theme in Kingdom Come as well (I’ve only skimmed that.) Darwyn Cooke uses it himself in other stories. League of One is kind of the exception which proves the rule; there, WW takes up all the oxygen, and everyone else (especially Superman) is just a nonentity revolving around her psychodrama. Basically, it just seems very hard for people to figure out a way to have Supes and WW exist in the same space without treating one of them as an appendage.

Which makes sense, since, basically, they’re the same character. I mean, of course, all superheroes are based on Superman to some degree, but Wonder Woman was deliberately designed not just to riff on the superhero idea, but to actually function, narratively and psychologically the way Superman does. Marston said this himself; he was basically creating a female Superman. Now, making Superman female meant a number of very specific things to Marston (more bondage for example), and WW is different than Superman in a lot of ways. But she’s the same in that her point is really to be a paragon; the quintessence of heroism. She’s not like the Flash who’s just superfast, or Batman who’s just smart and resourceful, or even Green Lantern, who has a defined power. She’s everything to everybody. She’s superfast, she’s got superstrength, she’s superwise, and she’s just the best at everything she does. That’s the character; that’s what her stories are about.

So when you put her in a story with Superman…well, one of them has to lose focus. If it was Marston, of course, that one would be Superman, and it would be all about how men, even superman, have to submit to women, and love their submission, and so forth. But, alas, Marston’s dead, and what we get instead is the much more conventional idea that women (even wonder women) are mostly there to serve as supportive figures in male psychodrama.

It’s too bad, too, because, as I said, I think Cooke likes the character, and has some good ideas for her, and overall could probably write a decent story about her if he wasn’t so desperate to use her to shore up Superman’s ego (or Batman’s, I guess.) I shudder to read Trinity, though. I can see that being quite, quite bad.

Update: Richard points out in comments that Darwyn Cooke did not, in fact, have anything to do with the Trinity series. So maybe I should check it out after all. Or, then again, probably not.

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.

Gail Simone Hearts Diana Sue

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I finally read the first collection of Gail Simone Wonder Woman comics, (“The Circle”). It’s definitely an interesting take on the character. In fact, among post-Marston creators, Simone is, I think, alone in avoiding the pratfalls which have plagued virtually every creator who has tackled WW after Marston. (Unless you want to count Alan Moore’s Glory.)

So how does Simone manage not to be tripped up by the bondage lasso, or the incredibly poorly defined mission to man’s world, or any number of other traps Marston has set for his unwary followers? Well, she does it primarily by writing fan fiction, and by treating WW as a Mary Sue — a character who the author loves too much. Fantasy author Mercedes Lackey says as much in the introduction to the volume, where she starts out by saying that she never liked Wonder Woman the character, and then goes on to praise Simone for creating a Wonder Woman that she (Lackey) could love. The ultimate standard, in other words, is not craft, or thoughtfulness, or originality, but loveability. Lackey wants a Mary Sue, and Simone delivers.

“Mary Sue” is usually a term applied to fan-fiction characters, where it tends to be seen as as a deadly insult. And there are many manifestations of it which are certainly unpleasant. I talked in an earlier post, for example, about the way in which League of One is basically all Mary Sue fanscruff pander, reveling in WW’s strength and purity and general awesomeness until you just wish she’d die tragically and beautifully already and get it over with. And there’s definitely more than a touch of that in Simone’s version too, with everyone and their aunt racing to tell WW how mega-awesome she is. Super-intelligent gorilla warriors fall on their knees before her; intergalactic genocidal Khund warriors build statues in her honor all over their planet. And while I don’t need WW to whine as much as Spider-Man or (god forbid) Greg Rucka’s version of the character does, it would have been nice to see Simone give the sainted Diana a self-doubt once or twice in the volume (and no, accepting your inevitable death without blinking doesn’t count as a self-doubt.)

Still, the truth is that WW was more or less intended as a Mary Sue to begin with. Marston loved her (even arguably overmuch) and he created her more or less to be loved by his readers — girls and boys alike. Nor was Marston’s version especially given to self-doubt (though unwavering confidence is a lot less irritating when you’re not subjected to it in internal monologues.)

So there’s a sense in which Simone’s Mary Sue pandering — her transparent puffery of the character — is very much in the spirit of the original. And Simone’s love of the character allows her to deal with the character’s structural problems as any good fan-fiction writer would — by reducing them to fan in-jokes. WW’s embarrassing bondage heritage is mentioned in passing by a callow Nazi, who cracks wise about wanting her to tie him up in her magic lasso. Then WW swoops in and threatens him with the real Lasso of Truth and he goes all weak-kneed like a baby man. The unfortunate sartorial choices Marston bequeathed are similarly deflated; there’s a really cute moment where an admiring onlooker mentions “I just want to say as a gay man that I miss the high heels on your boots…” The lesbian implications of Paradise Island get similarly defused in a joking aside (WW’s love-interest notes that courtship on Paradise Island must be between women, and WW responds “Aren’t you the observant one.”)

The humor in the book is probably the best thing about it — and the best moments of humor are those in which WW is most like a Mary Sue. Which is to say, since Mary Sue is often thought of as being an author surrogate, the high points of the book are those in which WW and Gail Simone seem closest to one another. My single favorite line in the comic comes when Diana Prince is having a birthday party at work. She’s musing about the fact that hugging her coworkers in gratitude for the surprise party would be frowned upon, and she thinks: “It is a strange culture that outlaws the hug. On the other hand…there is cake, and that excuses much.” Another gem is when WW looks at the statues the Khund have erected to her…which attempt to honor her by depicting her as a brutish looking Khund. WW looks at them, and then thinks to herself that she wants to call a friend (Donna Troy, I think) on her cell phone because she’d be really amused.

In some alternate timeline, perhaps, there’s a perfect Gail Simone fan-fic Wonder Woman, which is entirely composed of such moments — all romantic comedy banter, goofy relationship moments, and slice-of-life silliness, with the super-heroics mentioned occasionally in passing but never allowed to interfere with the real focus. Unfortunately, in the more hum-drum world we inhabit, Simone is writing a corporate comic, and there are certain hoops she’s got to jump through to get her paycheck. She has to, for example, make her story a comic, which means she needs art. And so we’ve got drawings by a number of pencillers (Terry Dodson and Bernard Chang predominantly). As mainstream illustrators go, neither is horrible. But just because they don’t make me want to gouge my eyes out doesn’t mean that they actually add anything of value to the story.

Simone also needs DCU continuity porn, and she needs pulp action. She provides the first of these eagerly enough, and with some panache. Sure, the level of background knowledge needed to follow the story is pretty much ridiculous; I was occasionally at sea, and I’ve been obsessively reading Wonder Woman comics for months now, plus I actually know who Gorilla Grodd and the Green Lantern Corps and the Khund are — lord knows what an actual novice would make of this. Still, if you’ve already decided you don’t care if anybody but die-hards can follow you, it’s pretty great to end up with gorillas fighting Nazis. That’s genuine silver-age wackiness, damn it.

The pulp action is a little dicier. Simone has a certain amount of pulp smarts; she’s able to make Wonder Woman’s tactical ability somewhat believable — but only somewhat. . Whenever WW makes a brilliant military move the special pleading is audible. When Alan Moore has Rorschach outthink people, you feel outthought yourself. When Simone has WW outthink people, you always feel she’s throwing the character a bone. “Oh, the super-villain has you by the neck in your Diana Prince form…but luckily for you, the wall behind you is rotten, and you can knock through it with your head! The alien Green Lantern is going to beat the snot out of you — but luckily he flinches every time you say “Khund”, and you can use that to your advantage!” It’s not that it’s especially dumb. It’s just that it’s advertising itself as especially smart, and it’s not that either.

The real problem, though, is with the handling of one of the characters central contradictions: she’s supposed to be an avatar of peace, but she constantly is battling costumed yahoos. To her credit, Simone confronts this problem directly: every time WW goes into battle, she starts thinking about how much she likes fighting and how, at the same time, the Amazon code calls for ending fights as quickly as possible.

The problem is that repeating something and actually thinking about it are two different things. The issues of peace, violence, and non-violence which Simone raises are both complicated and (to me at least) important ones. They’re worth struggling with. But neither Simone nor WW struggle with them; instead, they merely present facile answers and treat the problems as solved. This is irritating and, frankly boring; it robs the narrative of much of its tension. For example, in the last story, WW is faced with a situation where she has to try to save the Khund, even though if she does so they’ll return to their genocidal ravaging of neighboring stars. The alien Green Lantern I mentioned before is all for wiping out the Khund, who murdered his daughter and threaten his homeworld and the rest of his space sector.

I mean, I am adamently opposed to the death penalty, and I think genocide is A Bad Thing. But…the way Simone structures the problem here, there is a pretty fucking good argument for allowing the Khund world to be destroyed. Reinhold Niebuhr would almost certainly say pull the trigger; I think you’d have a really good case under Just War theory as well. Gandhi would no doubt say you shouldn’t do it — but Gandhi was an extreme pacifist, and Wonder Woman is , you know, not. So you’d think, given all that, that our heroine might have doubts, or be conflicted, or have some level of moral conflict. But WW and her loyal sidekick Etta Candy don’t even hesitate; they’re just like — no, no, we have to show mercy to the Khund, that’s obviously the right thing to do. And not only are they certain down to their socks, but they convince everyone else too! Etta talks to a godlike ichor for five minutes and, hey presto! Godlike ichor reverses its position on capital punishment. These moral problems are just that simple. If only Orson Scott Card had known; Ender’s Game could have been a lot shorter and less tortured.

In the end, then, maybe I spoke too quickly when I said that Simone managed to avoid the traps Marston laid for her. She does outmaneuver several of them…but she’s left with maybe the biggest one of all, which is that, unlike most any other super-hero outside of Mr. A, Wonder Woman was actually about something. Marston had stuff to say, in his cranky way, about real issues, peace and war among them. His solutions to these problems were more or less crazy (have woman rule over the world and teach men submission and love as a way to combat war), but they were thought through and existed in a coherent (if cracked) belief system. Marston, in short, wasn’t glib. Simone, at least on these issues, is. When you write a comic about the glorious icon that is Superman, you don’t need to really think too hard about what the character means, because the character has always been vacuous. Writing Wonder Woman, though, forces you to confront some actual content — which is unfortunate when all you really want to do is love her and maybe create some entertaining genre product, more or less in that order.

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This is the latest in a series on post-Marston version of Wonder Woman.

Update: Simone herself has a gracious note or three in comments (keep scrolling.) She points out that there are currently two volumes of her WW series available, and that a third is forthcoming shortly.

More on Mark Waid’s Wonder Woman

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I already posted this picture once before:

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But I thought I’d talk about it a little more. As I said, it’s Mark Waid and Ty Templeton, and it’s part of a seriesof crazed Silver Age Tribute Elseworlds covers they did. You should look at them all if you haven’t already; the one with Gorilla Grodd as Christopher Columbus is amazing, as is the one with Batman as the Biblical Adam worried that Eve will discover his double identity.

This cover is great too though. I’ve spent a fair bit of time here talking about the ways in which Wonder Woman is an impossible character to get right. Even doing Wonder Woman satire often falls flat…and when it works, as in Darwyn Cooke’s WW meets Playboy goof, it’s rarely anywhere near as funny as the Marston/Peter original series.

This is an exception though; that image is truly cracked. Part of its success, I think, is that it plugs into, and scrambles, some of the weird gender dynamics that inspired Marston in the first place. Basically, that cover is extremely, bizarrely Freudian. Luthor goes into the past to despoil the matriarchal paradise, “romancing” not only Hippolyta, but WW as well, who remakes herself in his image. Having her shave herself bald is just an awesomely ridiculous thing to do; on the one hand, it’s the ultimate negation of the character (who is more or less defined by her connection to the beauty of Aphrodite;) on the other hand, though, it makes her really butch, which is something that was definitely implicit (and often explicit) in the early WW stories. There’s also more than a tinge of Marston’s control fetish here: Big Daddy Luthor can make Wonder Woman do “whatever her father commands!” And the text up top is funnier if you know Steve Trevor at all…that incompetent is supposed to replace the uber-patriarch? Yeah, I can picture that scene.

It’s true that Ty Templeton is no Harry Peter…but the art is serviceable, and its stiffness (reminiscent of Ross Andru?) is charming in context. And what a completely insane idea. I’ve called Mark Waid a hack in the past, but this cover and the others in this series, are really brilliant. I almost wish he’d write one of these stories out…or do some other humor tale. Has he ever written an entire book that looks anything like this? Because I would buy it in a second.

Bound for Glory

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I’d posted a bit back about Alan Moore’s proposal for Glory. Basically I argued that for the most part Moore didn’t seem to understand what made the Marston/Peter run great; in his proposal he tended to take weird, absurd ideas (like the invisible plane), note that they were weird and absurd, and then go on to suggest changing them in ways that made them more conventional and boring (turning the invisible plane into a more mythologically appropriate, and therefore less goofy, transforming chariot thingee, for example.)

Well, my brother very kindly sent me the three issues of Glory that Moore actually wrote (numbered 0, 1, 2) — and I was pleasantly surprised. I think the actual book is a good bit better than the proposal.

Not that Moore has suddenly figured out the Marston/Peter run. There’s no particular evidence that he has. Rather, it’s that, despite some lip service to the WW history and mythos, he really largely manages to ignore Marston and get on with his own ideas. For instance, I noted that the most interesting part of the proposal seemed to be Moore’s ideas about Glory’s secret identity. WW did have a secret identity in the Marston run, of course, but it always seemed tacked on — there because super-heroes were supposed to have secret identities rather than because it was an integral part of Marston’s politics or fetishes. WW always seemed to be slumming as Diana Prince — presumably because she wanted to be near Steve Trevor…but since WW always hung out with Steve Trevor anyway, the motivation didn’t seem especially coherent.

For Moore, however, the secret identity expands and becomes essentially the entire point of the book (or of the couple of issue he wrote anyway). Glory wants to know what it’s like to be human — which isn’t an original trope, exactly. But the trick is that the person she chooses to become/inhabit, Gloria, is a waitress who’s a schizophrenic. She’s Gloria’s secret identity, and Glory is her fantasy. The tension between those two perspectives is funny and poignant and even a little disturbing, especially at the cliff-hanger ending (never resolved), where the gap between Glory and Gloria, or between imagination and reality, swallows both of them up.

In the proposal, Moore suggested that the comic should be “disingenuous” and “coy” in its portrayal of cheesecake, lesbian subtext, sex, and so forth. I felt that this was really a fundamental misunderstanding of Marston, and overall just not a good way to go. And, indeed, the moments where the series goes that direction are, in general, not of the best. In issue #0, for example, there’s a flashback/retelling of Glory’s history which includes a lot of badly-rendered gratuitous cheesecake which is irritating and dull. And then there’s the cameo by a female comic reader in a half-shirt who a skeevy old book-retailer keeps refers to as “child”, and who behaves more or less like a kid (deferential to old skeevy guy, eager for new book,…she’s an analogue to that comic-reading kid in Watchmen, actually), but who has the hard-bodied, half-shirted, butt-falling-out-of-her-bottoms look of a poorly-drawn pin-up.

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On the other hand, the retro-bondage flashback story in issue #2 with cross-dressing, serious butch-femme play, and tongue-in-cheek parodically second-wave sneering at the bonds of matrimony was quite entertaining…though its knowing satire, its exploitation, and its clever plotting with the twist ending is world’s away from Marston/Peter (it reads much more like Moore’s own efforts for 2000 AD, actually, albeit with less explicit violence and more implicit sex.)

In any case, the point is, these are largely aberrations; the bulk of the series doesn’t go for coy or disingenuous or cheesecake especially. Instead, it treats sex and love in an above-board, respectful manner. Gloria the waitress sleeps with a marginal drifter character, and its sweet and sexy and cute (“I like his name and how he talks,” Glory thinks, “I like his bottom.”) Similarly, Hermione, Glory’s companion, has an unrequited crush on her…Moore threatened to mine that for titillation in the proposal, but in the actual comic it’s played almost entirely for bittersweet pathos. Maybe Moore wrote the proposal figuring that Liefield wanted coy cheesecake? In any case, there’s much less of it in the comic than he promised, which is all to the good.

Overall, I think the fact that this isn’t actually Wonder Woman helped Moore a good bit. Glory’s costume is no great shakes, but it’s not the dreaded swimsuit of Americana. She isn’t tricked out with bondage gear. She doesn’t have tons of baggage about, for example, the mission of peace (Moore basically has her going to man’s world initially because Hitler pisses Demeter off by being a jerk, and later just because she feels like it), or feminism (which Moore uses as an off-hand joke a couple of times, but doesn’t otherwise bother with.) There isn’t any need to make any homage to the idea that she’s an icon of any sort. Though he takes some things from the WW mythos, Glory ends up as much less WW than Supreme was Superman. Instead of fetish and feminism, Moore uses the title to talk about magic, imagination, and relationships — his obsessions, not Marston’s at all.

Maybe this is clearest in the retelling of Glory’s origin, illustrated by Melinda Gebbie. The first image of the story is this:

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This reminded me of the Ms. cover image where WW is shown as a giant. Here, though, the sexualizing effects of manipulating body size are much more thought through and under control; the children’s book stylized whimsy, the girly outfit, the fashion pose, the skin, and the tiny figures showering her with adulation; she’s powerful, but also a sexual object in a whimsical way. I mean, Marston wasn’t exactly whimsical, I don’t think — more cracked. But this seems like a nice nod to his themes; a way to point to them without pretending to take them as seriously as the man himself did. It is coy, I guess, but almost nostalgically or poignantly so — especially as those very elliptically suggested themes of sexual power and submission don’t really play out in the following narrative at all. Instead, the story Moore tells is actually much more like a Neil Gaiman Sandman tale than like a Marston fever dream — it’s a reworking of the Persephone myth, with Demeter impregnated by a demon in the form of a silver rain about halfway thorugh. There’s no bondage or purple healing rays or caricatured masculine stereotypes anywhere in sight. Gebbie’s artwork does share some traits in common with Peter — a somewhat simplified cartoony style, some frilly filigree, a penchant for stiff poses creating frieze-like compositions. Her faces, though, are much more expressive, and her linework less so. The feel ends up being more conventional and sentimental, as in the image below:

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I really like that panel, with the diamond patterns in the back and the demon thinking in Lichtenstein melodrama. We get love and mystery and magic. It’s nothing like Marston/Peter, the putative object of the tribute. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

This isn’t to say that Glory is overall comparable in quality to the Marston/Peter WW run. In the first place, other than Gebbie’s eight-page cameo, the art is typical mainstream crap; ugly stylistic nullity mottled in that horrible computer coloring. Moore tries for a couple of Winsor McCay effects and you just want to tell him to stop, man; nobody here has the skill for that. You’re just embarrassing everyone. Give it up.

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Art problems aside, Moore’s authorial vision, in this title at least, isn’t nearly as weird, as funny, or, I’d argue, as thoughtful as Marston’s original. What with the flashbacks and the backstories and the diner drama and Glory running off to fight badness every so often…the characterization and plot are clever and fun, but they’re too diffuse to really seem urgent or to add up to all that much. As with Supreme, you get the sense that Moore (like Glory) is slumming; running along and entertaining himself without breaking too much of a sweat. The themes around imagination are things we’ve seen from him before…stories affecting the world, stories breaking into the world, etc. etc. In a couple of sequences, characters in the comic are reading comics, and then the comic within a comic turns around and breaks the fourth wall and talks to the character in the comic…and you think, yep, whatever, Alan — comics are a metaphor for existence. Can we move on now?

The thing is, since I don’t find these ideas that compelling in the first place, I’d just as soon see Moore treat them as toss offs; better that than Promethea, certainly. The air of improvisation doesn’t hurt the book;on the contrary, I like the breeziness of it, and there’s still enough depth to keep things engaging and even affecting. It’s not genius, but it is one of the few versions of WW that isn’t an aesthetic pratfall. Marston/Peter’s character is impossible to deal with, and so Moore, very reasonably, refuses to, and comes up with something else entirely.

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One complaint though; Moore puts an Etta Candy analogue in one of his flashback stories…and she’s thin and hot! What’s with that? Did Liefield decreed that there couldn’t be any fat women in his comics, no not even one?

Only One Can Wear the Pointy Ears

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My good friend Bryan alerted me to the existence of this, a 1967 attempt at a Wonder Woman pilot commissioned by the producer of the Batman TV show.

Basically, Diana Prince gets berated by her mother for not having a man, then she runs through a revolving wall, emerging as Wonder Woman who (to paraphrase the voice-over by the regular Batman announcer) “knows she has the strength of Hercules; knows she has the speed of Mercury, and *thinks* she has the beauty of Aphrodite!”

It’s certainly something completely different. And I did laugh a couple of times at the sheer unexpected snideness of it.

Ultimately, though, it’s hard for me to get behind it enthusiastically. Part of what was so much fun about the Batman TV series is that the target of the humor was the establishment; Batman and Robin are basically policemen/boy scouts; in all their humorless do-gooding, they’ve got the law and the powers-that-be on their side. The show was a masterpiece of having your cake and eating it too; you get to sneer at the ridiculous dated morality (refusing to drive through red light; refusing to hit women, etc. etc.) while still rooting for that morality to win. Batman’s the show where even cops could laugh at crime-fighting and even hippies could cheer for the establishment.

This Wonder Woman pilot, though…it tries to make fun of Wonder Woman the way that the Batman TV show made fun of Batman…but it’s just not as easy to get the balance right. The main problem is just that Wonder Woman is a woman…and as such she can’t be assimilated to the establishment the way Batman can. Instead, because she’s a women, she’s automatically marginal in certain ways. As a result, making fun of her doesn’t feel edgy or clever — it feels hackney and tired and dumb…and, yeah, sexist too. Jokes about aging unmarried daughters who are desperate for men; jokes about women’s vanity; jokes about women being incompetent…where have I heard *that* before?

For WW humor, I much prefer Darwyn Cooke’s pissed-off 2nd wave feminist version, which makes fun of WW for being overly sensitive and clueless, but also ridicules men for being venal and predictable and generally getting their asses kicked. Gender roles and wars of the sexes can be funny, and often are. But even when it’s written with some wit, I just don’t find sexism all that humorous.

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And as I’ve been pointing out at the end of each of these, this is the latest in a series of posts on post-Marston takes on WW. The whole series is here.

Diana Sue

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In comments a couple days back I was encouraged to check out Bluefall’s series on Wonder Woman When Wondy Was Awesome. I didn’t read the whole thing, I must admit, but I poked about a bit here and there, and did read through her post on the book League of One, which I read and reviewed earlier myself here.

Bluefall’s certainly an entertaining writer and an attentive reader. She makes a strong (though to me, not convincing) case for League of One being something other than a complete piece of crap. For example, she has a nice point about WW’s attentiveness to relationships:

Diana’s plans, on the other hand, rely entirely on the League’s greatest strength, on her assumption that her friends will look out for each other. She’s able to defeat J’onn and Kyle because they trust her; she gets Clark out of the picture by forcing him to rescue their friends. She’s able to launch the League into space in the first place because she knows they’ll be okay. He plan succeeds because she sees things in terms of relationships and reactions, rather than individual physical traits.

For me, unfortunately, this is largely vitiated by the fact that all the relationships in the book are both unbelievable and vapid; it’s not especially impressive to be able to parse interpersonal dynamics when all your interpersonal dynamics basically consist of bland corporate boy scouts declaring allegiance to one another (except for Batman, who, you know, is dark because he uses reverse psychology.) Not even bluefall’s quixotic insistence on referring to them all by their first names can convince me that these badly painted figurines have any inner lives not imposed by front office dictat. Still, I guess the book should get points for the earnestness with which it attempts to move the corpses about in a lifelike manner.

What I mainly took away from reading these posts is that bluefall really likes Wonder Woman (or “Diana”.) That’s a big part of how she reacts to WW comics, it looks like. That is, she knows she likes WW, and she judges the comics to some extent on how well they live up to her image of what Wonder Woman should be. For instance, in talking about John Byrne’s run, she commented that she liked the way that Byrne made Diana as powerful as she should be relative to other characters in the DC universe.

I think this is maybe part of the reason some of my posts have rubbed some WW fans the wrong way. Because, the thing is, I really couldn’t give a pile of kangaroo-horse poop (to cite a creature indigenous to Paradise Island in Marston’s run) about whether WW is as powerful as she should be, or about whether she’s as noble as she should be, or whether she behaves in character, or out of character, or is depowered and dressed in white, or whatever. I love the original Marston/Peter run, which I think is one of the few truly idiosyncratic works of art to come out of the super-hero genre. And it’s fun to see other creators try (and largely fail) to deal with the bizarre thing Marston and Peter created. But I don’t care if creators get her “right” except insofar as they tell a story that seems worth reading. If you can tell a good story making WW able to push planets around, that’s fine; if you can tell a good story making her only slightly stronger than Etta Candy, that’s fine too (Marston probably did both of those things at some point.) If you want to make her impulsive and eager to hit people and that works, cool; if you want to make her preach peace and love and you can get that to work, more power to you (I suspect Marston did both of those things as well.) I don’t like most of the WW stories I’ve read by folks other than Marston because they’re boring and dumb, not because WW isn’t sufficiently noble or iconic or whatever. In short, I’m not a fan in the usual sense; at least not of the character.

I don’t necessarily have anything against fans…or even against fan fiction, which is where this kind of investment in a character abstracted from a particular story tends to lead. I haven’t read a ton of fan fiction, but there is some of it I like quite a bit. Some of it I really don’t want to look at, but that’s just personal preference, not an aesthetic line in the sand.

Still, I think super-hero comics do run into a problem with the fan-base…that problem being that there isn’t in fact a canon. The WW bluefall likes isn’t the Marston/Peter WW, which is old and embarrassing and weird. It’s not really the Silver Age WW either, which was embarrassing in different ways; nor is it really the modern day WW, who, after all, bluefall tends to judge against an ideal, and often to find wanting (the swimsuit, for example, would be ditched if bluefall had her way.) And I think that’s all fairly typical; the ideal WW that fans enthuse about is…an ideal; it’s not an actual character or version of the character, but rather some platonic vision of the way the character would be if the perfect writer wrote her, or, I guess, if she were real.

The thing is, when you unmoor the character from any actual creative team, you drift into one of two problems. On the one hand, you end up with stories written by folks who don’t care about the character and don’t really have any idea what to do with her…and WW has certainly had that happen to her over the years. On the other hand, though, you can also end up with stories that are just devoted to showing how wonderful the character is…and WW has had her share of those, too. In fact, that seems to be the whole point of “League of One”; it’s aggrandizing fan scruff for WW fans who want to be assured that WW is just the awesomest there is. See, she beats the whole Justice League! And she beats a big bad dragon because she’s so much purer than everyone, even Superman! She’s so good and brave and awesome, just like WW should be! (Bluefall does object slightly because the script intimates that Superman could actually beat WW in a fair fight, which bluefall feels is wrong because, I guess, nobody can beat WW, damn it. But since WW beats Superman by trickery anyway, bluefall is willing to let it pass.)

In short, with no agreed upon canon,there’s a strong tendency for the character to drift towards that bane of fan-fiction, the Mary Sue. Wikipedia has a good definition:

Mary Sue, sometimes shortened simply to Sue, is a pejorative term used to describe a fictional character who plays a major role in the plot and is particularly characterized by overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as wish-fulfillment fantasies for their authors or readers. Perhaps the single underlying feature of all characters described as “Mary Sues” is that they are too ostentatious for the audience’s taste, or that the author seems to favor the character too highly. The author may seem to push how exceptional and wonderful the “Mary Sue” character is on his or her audience, sometimes leading the audience to dislike or even resent the character fairly quickly; such a character could be described as an “author’s pet”.

Mary Sues are, as I said, usually created by fans…but everyone writing WW is pretty much just a fan at this point, the original creators being long, long gone and their concept in most respects abandoned. In any case, there’s a self-conscious reiteration of, well, wonderfulness in League of One that is extremely tiresome, and which is a consistent though less discussed aspect of super-hero decadence. At its core, League of One isn’t all that different from Marvel Zombies. The second is characterized by desperate desecration, the first by desperate consecration. But both are more interested in the act of burnishing/befouling the icon than they are with telling a story. (Which, come to think of it, is what I said about All Star Superman, now that I think about it. And, of course, I was right then too!)
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Incidentally, this post is part of a series on WW’s post-Marston iterations. The entire series is called Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle and you can see all the relevant posts here.