Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #8

Posted on May 19, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

Good lord is that cover fantastic. Peter’s animal drawings are always among the absolute best things he does; the wavery lines are so tactile, and the liberties he take with anatomy, halfway between cartooning and those Renaissance prints where it was clear they’d never seen a rhinoceros, or whatever, but damned if they weren’t going to draw the best of whatever bizarre rhinoceros-like thing had gotten lodged in their heads…I don’t know, it’s late and I’m babbling, but the misshapen ears on that boar, and the look of confusion in its little pig eye, and the way its hooves just sort of stick out stiffly, like it doesn’t know what to do with them… Dayenu, as my people say. But the rest of the drawing is fabulous too; I love the way the motion lines are a compositional device, drawing the attention just off dead center. and WW’s position is really lovely; it’s stiff and weird, like all Peter’s drawings, but there’s also a sense of actual movement. And the back muscles on the gladiator ; they’re not right, but the lines are so mobile that they seem righter than right…and the pattern on that kilt. I love Peter’s red swirly things, these perfect art nouveau patterns dropped into his insane outsider-art compositions.

Also, I like that Peter has chosen to draw this so it looks like Wonder Woman is assaulting some anonymous gladiator with a giant pig. I think (from the interior) that that is actually Steve Trevor, and she’s saving him…but you sure wouldn’t know that to look at it.

Anyway, the plot: it has something to do with the lost continent of Atlantis, which is, improbably, underground. It’s ruled by extraordinarily large and powerful women, which gives Peter a chance to have a lot of fun with scale:

Tiny little baby sailor men. Cute!

Not surprisingly , exact relative sizes are awfully unclear, but in theory the Atlantean men (or “manlings”) are supposed to be unusually small and weak. It’s like that episode of Star Trek the Next Generation, where the crew lands on a planet with powerful women who oppress their male compatriots, and we all learn that sexism is bad because, after all, guys, you wouldn’t like it if it were done to you, right? Except, of course, Marston does like it when it’s done to him. You can almost hear him chuckling maniacally in the background. Helpless sailors! That’s hot! hot! hot!

I talked a little in the discussion of Wonder Woman #7 about how Steve is really played as a himbo; a dumb, hunky slab of cheesecake for the young female reader. There’s certainly more evidence for that here, as you see in the panel below, where Clea, the evil ruler of Atlantis, has Steve brought before her in an interesting ceremonial outfit:

“…sacred serpents! He’s as big as a woman!” indeed. What exactly is she seeing under that loin-cloth that made her start prattling about snakes, I wonder?

Of course, a woman wouldn’t actually have a bigger snake than Steve…except, in Marston, she really might. Marston isn’t just interested in straightforward role reversal, as the Star Trek episode was. He’s interested in something a bit more…queer. With that fabulous headdress and the outfit out of burlesque, Clea might as well be in drag, and Steve’s outfit…well, say no more. As I’ve mentioned before, WW is in some sense Marston’s ideal self; he wants to be a goddess. Part of being female, naturally enough, would be desiring men. In this scene, I think Marston both desires and desires to be both Clea and Steve. The excitement is in the slippage from identity to identity and desire to desire; in the severing and subsequent circulation or diffusion of the phallus. In masochism, the appeal is that you escape the law and your identity in relation to the law in order to become someone and something else — including the phallus itself. That’s what fetishizing the female body is; it’s turning a woman’s body into the phallus — the source of authority and power. So when Clea says “He’s as big as a woman!” she’s actually comparing his phallus to *the* phallus; she is, in other words, fetishizing him right back.

I’ve talked about the agonized, repressed gay content in Cerebus before (to speak of another swords and sandalsish example.) The investment here seems very different though…basically, because, while I guess it might be considered repressed in some sense, it’s just not especially agonized. For Cerebus, holding onto male identity involves a rather desperate rejection of femininity…a rejection which, in turn, carries connotations of homosexuality (if you don’t like women, what do you like?) This quandary has no power over Marston. It’s true that the Steve-Clea relationship and/or the Steve-Marston relationship can be seen as queer…but Marston doesn’t shy away or run scurrying from the implications. He embraces them:

That’s flirting behavior, that is. And sure, he’s punished for it and sentenced to die because he’s just too, too flamboyantly strong. But that’s an excuse, not for torment and agony, but for a expulsive release of testosterone and romping with boars. And, of course before Steve can be crushed by a “mammoth peccary”, as Marston puts it, he’s quickly rescued from phallic immolation by the arrival of Marston-in-drag, aka Wonder Woman.

This sort of thing makes it awfully hard to take seriously Marston’s half-hearted gestures at traditional romance comics tropes…are we really supposed to believe WW and Steve are shy with each other after they’ve rolled around in their underwear with pigs?

Anyway, I also like this scene, where Clea wanders around with a suggestive hose spraying her unsuspecting adversaries as they swoon ecstatically.

Or this one, where WW has concealed herself in a intriguingly shaped projectile:

And then there’s Etta, who’s butchness and artificiality — Parker makes her more and more distorted and dwarfish as the series goes along — could, I think, also be read as a kind of transvestite drag. Certainly, she’s carrying around a big-enough phallic substitute here:

And then there are moments like the below.

WW has frequently been read (starting with Frederic Wertham) as a lesbian fantasy, whether for women or men. The fact that it could almost as easily be read as gay fantasy (again for men or (shades of yaoi) for women) has gotten a lot less attention. The point, though, is less that it’s gay, or straight, or lesbian, or all three, than it is the sloughing off of stable identity in the interest of deliriously clunky role-playing. Thus, in the above image, Marston surely gets off on the idea of two women together, but he’s also as surely identifying with both of them; he’s viewer and role-player, excited by both the lesbian connotations and by the sublimated male impersonation. As Linda Williams writes in Hard Core, her classic study of pornography, sexual identity in masochistic scenarios is “an oscillation between male and female subject positions held simultaneously, in a play of bisexuality, at the level of both object choice and identification.”

The obsession with identity play is also indicated by Marston’s obsession with masks and concealment:

That last one doesn’t include a mask, of course, but it is a case of dual identities and role-playing. Wonder Woman is in her Diana Prince disguise; meanwhile the Atlantean Princess she’s talking to is disguised (not super-effectively, I’ll grant you) as a college football enthusiast. Moreover, the disguises are, I think, meant to be sexy or exciting in large part because of gender ambiguity. Both costumes are butch; Diana in her severe military uniform and the Atalantean in her football outfit. And not satisfied with that, Marston has to hand her the biggest phallic cliche in the book:

Yep, she’s smoking a cigar there. This scene could be lifted, almost as is, and put in a cross-dressing screen comedy of the day, where the joke would be that the agressive, giant, cigar-smoking woman and her uncomfortable, nerdy companion are actually both men. Or it could be dropped into a women in prison movie, and the butchness would connote lesbianism. For Marston it’s both, more or less; the shivers of pleasure come from imagining himself as the powerful, phallus wielding woman and imagining himself dominated by her as the nerdy Diana is…or dominating her, as WW inevitably does:

Of course, we all know that Marston loves, loves, loves everyone to submit to loving authority. But he also loves role-playing, which means he loves drama…and you don’t get a whole lot of drama if everyone is submitting lovingly. Like most masochists, Marston may say he wants to be dominated, but he also wants to rebel — so there can be more domination and more rebellion and etc. etc. It’s not enough for Marston to have the weakling manlings of Atlantis be subjugated; he has to have them rebel and dominate their captors so they can be tied up again too.

It’s interesting in this context how theatrical Peter’s art is; everything looks like it could be taking place on stage. He almost always shows the action form the mid-distance, so entire bodies are visible; close-ups are few and far between. The costumes and backgrounds look more like dress-up and stage sets than like real life. The king with the crown and the cigar really looks like a diminutive gangster playing dress up on a throne too big for him. And the stiffness of Peter’s figures generally suggests tableaux; the scenes look frozen and staged even at their most action adventurey:

The paracutes in that second panel come out of the volcano like jack-in-the-boxes; the motion lines don’t so much rush them from the opening as anchor them to it. And that last panel; the center parachuting pirate almost seems to be posing for the camera . The men in the foreground act as a kind of cinema audience — their hands are even raised as if they’re about to clap.

As long as I’ve worked my way back around to Peter’s art maybe I’ll finish with these:

I love those arrows tieing themselves in knots around the plane, and that adorable, tiny, misshapen whale on the map. I just ordered the Les Daniels WW book, and I’m hoping it’ll maybe tell me a little more about Peter’s background and his relationship with Marston. You can’t help but wonder what he thought about all this stuff; he certainly embraced the fetish aspects enthusiastically enough. But then, maybe he would have been just as happy drawing miniature cetaceans….

Golden Age Gallery: Eisner Monday

Posted on May 18, 2009 by Tom Crippen

Okay, scans. Last week we had Violent Women of the Golden Age and then, on Thursday, a selection of oddball covers sought by collectors. Now we have Spirit sections. No doubt Photobucket has shaved off the right edges, just like it did last week. But this time all we lose is some newsprint. (UPDATE: Son of a bitch!) (UPDATE 2: Noah told me how to fix the problem: edit the coding so that the picture’s width fits the width of the blog. Oh my.)

Below we have the very first Spirit section, followed by another early splash but one that already shows Eisner’s special touch; it was included by Jules Feiffer in The Great Comic Book Heroes. Note how the series logo is incorporated into the drawing! I’m not sure anyone has ever pointed that out before.

Gail Simone Hearts Diana Sue

Posted on May 17, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

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.

Partially Congealed Pundit: Sci-Fi Is Too Literature!

Posted on May 15, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

Back in the dim dark past, when I was only a hooded fetus, I carved my thoughts directly on the computer screen with crude stone tools, producing material more or less at random since I had no hit count to tell me what the people wanted. Most of this stuff has just been sitting on my hard drive for years and years now — poems, short stories, essays, zines, drawings, insulting notes about comics professionals; that sort of thing.

Anyway, I thought I might as well make like Dante Rossetti and disinter some of these effusions for your viewing indifference, dear blog reader. My plan is to post something from the archives every Friday. Eventually I’ll inflict poetry on you, but Bill’s piece about his own childhood encounters with science-fiction and suspending disbelief made me think of this essay, which I wrote way back when I was in college in 1991.

Reading it over, I still like the central idea, though the earnest defense of sci-fi’s literary bona-fides made me roll my eyes. Ah well. For better or worse, here it is.

_________________________

In his introduction to his anthology of science-fiction short stories The New Tomorrows, Norman Spinrad defines science-fiction as anything which is marketed with a sf label on its cover. Although this definition doesn’t seem to be very illuminating, the point which Spinrad is attempting to make is that the sf label is simply a marketing device rather than a true definition of a genre. In other words, science-fiction books have every bit as much (or as little) literary merit as any other form of literature, and that each science-fiction book should be read and judged individually rather than being forced into a single easily condemned category.

The difficulty with this is, of course, that science-fiction books do share certain characteristics which provide a large amount of fodder for the painfully (at least to those of us addicted to sci-fi) and just about uniformly nasty reviews which grace the pages of such publications as the New York Times Book Review when such journals stoop to writing about science-fiction at all. One of these characteristics is that works of science-fiction almost uniformly call for the reader to suspend disbelief to an extent which is far greater than that required in most other kinds of writing. Even in such stories as “Metamorphosis” by Kafka, which deals explicitly with fantastic elements, the suspension of disbelief is nowhere near as extreme as that required in a science-fiction book. In “Metamorphosis”, Gregor Samsa turns into a bug. In Brightness Falls From the Air by James Tiptree, Jr., faster than light travel exists, as do several alien races, at least one of which can communicate easily with humans, and another of which produces a substance which can heal the wounds from a deadly human poison for which there is no other cure. Besides this, the book also deals with several periods of time distortion and a vast alien entity of indeterminate characteristics. I could go on for paragraphs, but the point is fairly clear. And yet, if one is willing to accept all this, the book is really wonderful: exciting, surprising, and even thought-provoking. Still, it is most definitely (despite Norman Spinrad) a science-fiction book, insofar as the suspension of disbelief is a function of the reader’s willingness to accept the tenets of science-fiction rather than on any special effort on the part of the author.

In addition to the quantity of science-fiction’s demands on one’s suspension of belief, I think that there is also a difference in the kind of belief which science-fiction demands. In “Metamorphosis”, Gregor’s family realizes that it is a little strange for their son to have been turned into a bug. In most science-fiction works, the characters accept as natural incidents and occurrences which are patently not part of the reader’s experience. In “Blue Champagne” by John Varley, the characters are real and believable, and the reader (at least this reader) is able to feel real pain at the story’s outcome. Even so, the entire premise of the story rests on the development of scientific equipment which can register emotions: if one does not accept this, then the story can’t work. And this element is not what the story is about: the piece is about relationships, the “unbelievable” facets of the story are not, as they are in “Metamorphosis”, the focus of the story’s attention. I think that science-fiction’s extensive reliance on belief can help explain why several of the field’s most respected authors often deal with matters of reality and unreality. Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress and Brian W. Aldiss’ Cryptozoic! both contain extremely long hallucination sequences which the reader believes are reality because of the standard suspension of disbelief with which he or she usually approaches a standard science-fiction novel. And Philip K. Dick in The Man in the High Castle has his characters discover the flimsy nature of the world they inhabit, a world in which Germany won the Second World War due solely to the writer’s imagination and the reader’s acceptance.

The question, then, is not whether or not science-fiction is a genre, but whether or not the characteristics which make it a genre also somehow limit its worth as a form of literature. Ursula K. LeGuin contends that, to fulfill its true potential, science-fiction must be about people rather than about gadgets and hardware. In many cases, in the work of LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, and others, I think that this goal is achieved, and, moreover, it is achieved in writing about people who would not exist without the science-fiction worlds they inhabit: not because they are too weakly crafted to exist in the real world but because their actions and thoughts have been shaped by a different reality than that delineated in most works of fiction. Since the suspension of disbelief has allowed these characters to exist, it surely can’t be a wholly evil thing. Besides, science-fiction can be a lot of fun to read, which is, after all, a large part of what books are all about.

Golden Age Gallery: Freakout Thursday

Posted on May 14, 2009 by Tom Crippen

On Tuesday I posted some covers of women doing violent stuff. Here’s another installment of cover scans, one you can call either “Odd Stuff of the Golden Age” or “Tom: His Many Moods.” The covers here are all from comics that have sold for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. They’re big on the collectors market, and not because they involve famous characters or huge name artists. People want these comics just because the comics look so weird.

The issues in question sold little when they came out, then spent decades in obscurity while fandom evolved and Carl Barks and the Legion of Superheroes and Little Lulu and so many others received well-deserved attention. Not until the early 1990s did anyone become aware that most of these comics had ever been around. That was when the visionary Ernst “Ernie” Gerber published The Photo-Journal Guide to Comic Books, a collection of 21,000 (or so) color photographs of comic book covers. By his account, he had spent almost $900,000 on tracking down various comic book collections, photographing their covers, and producing the book. Let me note that his wife of the time, Mary, has a joint byline with him and that Comics: Between the Panels says she “helped sort the slides and cull the 22,000 cover photographs that made Gerber’s final cut.” (The 22,000 figure conflicts with the number given on the Photo-Journal‘s cover, at least as the cover is reproduced in Between the Panels. As you may have guessed, all the information in this post is from Panels’ entry on the Photo-Journal. If you have never read Panels, and if you like U.S. mainstream comics, you should check it out. It’s a great read and full of information.)

Readers of the Photo-Journal saw photos of Action 1 and Haunt of Fear 12 and so on, but they also saw thousands of covers of comic books they had never heard of. A few of these comics were so strange, so extreme, so absurd that collectors everywhere decided to buy them. The collectors did so, then spent a decade and a half selling the comics and buying them again until prices for the books climbed to more or less daffy levels.

Okay, now a few covers; just three this time out, because I want to keep these posts going a long time. No, I don’t know why the right edges are shaved off here; they’re fine when I preview the post, and you can imagine how happy I am about this little snag. (UPDATE: Noah set me straight. You can change the html so that the pictures’ width fits the blog’s column width.)

I made a joke up top about my many moods, so the first cover is called “Me and My Life”:

That’s Criminals on the Run, published by Curtis in 1947. The cover is drawn by L. B. Cole, who churned out countless crime, adventure, sci-fi, and horror covers. Just about everything really. Very often he did beautiful work; very often he was absurd, especially when people got involved in his scenes. A fish in the face.

I was writing about my hangover and attendant frustrations. So here’s Mr. Mystery 11, published by Aragon in 1953, cover by Bernard Baily.

Finally, a tribute to my good humor of recent days:

That’s Atomic War! 1, published by Ace in 1952. Don’t know who drew the cover.

More on Mark Waid’s Wonder Woman

Posted on May 14, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

I already posted this picture once before:

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 to Blog: Wonder Woman #7

Posted on May 13, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

WW at this point seems to have gone back to being 4 times a year, after an issue or two of pretending to be 6 times a year. I couldn’t figure out how Peter was going to draw a page a day plus, and apparently neither could he.

That’s the Marston/Peter cover for Wonder Woman #7. And this is the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine:

I talked about the Ms. Magazine cover here and here already, so I won’t go into what I see as its weaknesses. In any case, this isn’t necessarily the best Harry G. Peter cover ever either….though I do like a lot of the details. The stylized curlicues of the women’s hair in the foreground, for instance, and the tension lines in the fabric of the banner at the corners, and the frills on the architecture int he back, and the way WW’s fist at the center of the composition is too small, making the whole perspective go vertiginously kablooey.

But what I really wanted to point out was how different the two visions are. The Ms. Magazine cover sees a female presidency as a violent, weirdly monstrous event — the female president is a kind of King Kong, laying waste to man’s world. For Marston and Peter, a female president seems much more natural (albeit 1000 years in the future.) WW isn’t destroying MegaTokyo; she’s giving a campaign speech, which is more or less what you’d expect a Presidential candidate to do (though maybe not dressed in a swimsuit.) Moreover, there are men in that audience cheering her on — a reminder again that Marston sees female empowerment as benefiting men as much as (or maybe more than) women.

As the cover suggests, this is the most explicitly political Marston effort yet. Hippolyta, it seems, has a magic sphere, which allows her to see into the future. (There’s some hard deterministic nonsense about how the future is set ineluctably by the past, but I think it’s just a plot device rather than actual sincere crankery.) And in the future, it turns out, everyone will realize that women are better than men, and so women will rule the world by common acclamation, spreading peace and prosperity and the end of war. Plus, as a bonus, there will be one-world government. It’s Dave Sim’s worst nightmare, basically…though ultimately I think Marston’s future visions are even nuttier than Sims’. Or at least, they’re more entertaining:

Yes, in the future, liberated secretaries will dress in mini-skirts and submit themselves to routine mind control. Because “when women choose their own styles they’re bound to be picturesque and alluring,” and because when women choose their own career they’ll prefer to be turned into male-voice-controlled automatons.

I’m always a sucker for futures past, and Marston’s particular vision of a 1930s feminist future is hard to resist. On the one hand, gender roles remain the same as ever; Diana has been a secretary for 1000 years, and doesn’t really seem to have any ambition to do anything else. And yet, on the other hand….when forced, and almost despite herself, she goes right from being a secretary to running for President, with Etta as her VP. And she’s successful too, since, as Marston tells us, “Diana’s able speeches and Etta’s humor appeal equally to men and women.”

Diana is forced to run for president because the current office-holder, “Mistress President”, refuses to run against Steve Trevor, who has been nominated by the men’s party. Steve comes off worse here than anytime so far in the series, I think. Not that he’s evil at all…but he’s a completely brainless bimbo, who sticks a pipe in his mouth to prevent himself from absent-mindedly drooling all over his ripppling muscles.

Thanks to the mooning-women vote, and to ballot stuffing, Steve wins…but soon falls out with his crooked vice-President, who is named, rather inevitably, Manly. Manly catches Steve and puts him in some cryogenic death trap, which is especially uncomfortable because Trevor’s wearing short-shorts.

That outfit Peter has desinged for Steve, let me just emphasize again, couldn’t be much more ridiculous. It’s obviously a super-hero suit, with the US emblazoned on it…almost a Robin costume, actually. But the way Steve’s standing, straight and stiff, emphasizes the discomfort and awkwardness and, indeed, the vulnerability of it. Which is to say…I think Marston and Peter are fetishizing him. He’s supposed to be a sex symbol, and his predicament, I think, is supposed to be sexy. If Marston had a women trapped in that way in that position, it would be deliberately provocative — and I think it’s supposed to be here, as well.

You see some of the same impulse in this drawing:

This is at the end of this segment of the story; WW has freed Steve and Diana has been acknowledged as the victor of the Presidential race. Nobody blames Steve for his actions, because he’s so dumb and so cute — and in this image, he really does look dumb and cute. He’s still wearing that outfit, which is the only one he has, and he’s off to the side, appearing (through Peter’s weird use of scale) significantly smaller than Diana. Indeed, with the scale and the shorts, and the oddly blank, expectant expression on his face, he really seems like a child waiting for his mother. The two women, on the other hand, are both impossibly thin and decked out in flattering, elegant dresses. Diana looks, frankly, hot, and extremely in control — which is, I believe, intended to make her even more hot (I think Peter gets the effect in part by making her shoulders too wide; it makes her seem bigger and stronger than life.) But I think the scene is designed to fetishize Steve too; his childishness, awkwardness, and vulnerability, make him appealing, manipulable, in need of protection — his extreme stupidity is part of his charm. Men are like children, who need to be controlled by mothering women. Maybe I’m completely off-base, but it seems like girls might quite enjoy this vision of an elliptically sexualized romantic object/child surrogate. Certainly Marston does, anyway.

The back and forth between mother/child relationships and female political authority runs throughout the issue. It’s most charming right at the beginning of the book, when WW’s Mom asks her to come back to Paradise Island for the Harvest Festival (that’s Thanksgiving for you non-pagans.) WW decides to surprise her mom by appearing in her Diana Prince outfit. Her mother is indeed, surprised, and then delighted:

I think that’s just a really charming panel. Not least because it echoes the last one in this sequence from WWs origin in WW#1:

Hippolyta lifts her adult daughter as if she were a child (and again, Peter adjusts scale, so that Diana seems far smaller than her mother.) The intimacy and joy there taps into the adult desire to see the child remain a child…and into the pride in seeing her grow up. The decision to have WW dressed as Diana is inspired, and emphasizes the way in which Diana, who dresses in real clothes and has a real job, is much more grown-up than WW is.

This is, incidentally, one of the first times I’ve seen Marston do anything interesting with the secret identity. With male heroes, the secret identity division is often about male bifurcation; the distance between ideal masculine and individual male. Here, though, the split seems to be about child and adult; Wonder Woman is like a kid playing dress-up. In this sense, Diana may be as fun a fantasy object as WW; a kid can imagine being powerful and admired like WW, and can also imagine working and being a regular adult like…well, like Mom. I also love Hippolyta’s dialogue: “You little mischief!..I didn’t recognize you until you laughed!” I presume the main point is that the laughter let her know something was amiss…but when I read it first I took it to mean that she recognized her daughter by WW’s individual laugh.

After that very sweet scene, we move right on to major fucking weirdness. Hippolyta shows WW the future in the magic crystal…and the first thing she shows her is the death-bed scene of Etta Candy’s mother, Sugar Candy (believe it or not.) Etta has turned herself into a chemistry whiz in an effort to cure her mother, but all to no avail. So WW brings out some of the water of life. This only affects Amazons, but Etta, using her newfound scientific knowhow, drops some candy into it, releasing vitamin L-3, and — hey-presto! — the aged mother is filled with vim and vigor and there’s a little birdy singing outside the window:

By replicating the figure and especially the dress, you get a panel that’s all frills and folds and lace, conveying a kind of oversaturated voluptuous girlishness. The fact that Sugar’s first thought is for her husband so she can go “dancing” is certainly a subliminally sexual. On the one hand, the life-potion is a gimmick, to allow all of WW’s supporting characters to live on into the future storyline. But Marston also ties it back into his own fetishes; mothers for Marston are sexy, and the scene is about the excitement of releasing that sensuality.

Here’s another bizarre moment:

That’s Mistress President being tied up by former prisoners. But look at the prisoners tieing her up. They’re misshapen alien children out of something like Junko Mizuno. The panel is fetishizing, not just B&D, but specifically mother/child masochistic play.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, psychoanalysts often argue that all masochism is tied up (as it were) in a mother-child dynamic. Masochists are thought to be identifying with their mother in a confused Oedipal dynamic. For Marston, certainly, the idea of “loving authority” is a fairly explicit maternal alternative to the male paradigm of authority-as-law. You can see that pretty clearly in the sequence below:

Paula’s “loving submission” to mother Hippolyta is followed by an explanation that woman are more fit to rule because they “are more ready to serve others selflessly.” The model of authority is feminine and maternal, with ruler as mother and subjects as children.

Of course, bad mothers are quite exciting too.

No, we never learn what she did to the dog-woman to break her will. Maybe she made her stare at the pattern on that yellow pillow behind her. I could look at that for a good long while myself…whoa, getting kind of sleepy there….

Ahem. Anyway, this is all pretty much good clean fun…or good fun, anyway. Things get a little dicey, though, when Marston stops fetishizing metaphorical mother/child relationships and starts fetishizing actual children. He moves perilously close to doing the second in the last story of this book. As, for example, here:

The rigid disciplining of children is, in itself, fairly nauseating; add in Marston’s fetishistic investment in submission, and you get something which is — well, vile. I think vile is the right word. He’s basically suggesting torturing children for his sexual pleasure. Of course, he adds in layers of sanctimony in order to deny that that’s what’s going on — it’s actually all for the little kiddies’ good, you see:

The story goes on to suggest that Gerta, Paula’s daughter — the kid who throws the piano — will come to a horrible end because she doesn’t like to sit still for hours at a time just to satisfy Marston’s kinks. Wonder Woman, though, educates her by opportunistically harnassing Gerta’s love for her mother, Paula. This does give Peter a chance to draw a great octopus, with beautifully textured arms and a ludicrous, gigantic cartoony eye, but otherwise the situation can’t be said to be especially pretty.

The problem here is that, in raising children — and for that matter, in general — the ideal of loving submission can actually be even more oppressive than strict obedience to an arbitrary law. The father only cares what you do and how you behave; as long as you don’t break the law, you can think and feel what you wish. Of course, sometimes it’s impossible not to break the law, and, indeed, the point of even having the law is to get people to break it so they can be punished — but, still, the point is, you’re dealing with externals. Whereas, with the kind of mother love that Marston seems to be advocating, it’s about internal acquiescence — using love as a lever to break the will. That’s all well and good between consenting adults, but using it against kids is really not okay — especially since schools really have used this nonsense against kids, and for a long time. Here, for example, are some hints for psychological discipline for ushers at the Jesuit school at Port-Royal in 1615:

“A close watch must be kept on the children, and they must never be left alone anywhere, whether they are in ill or good health… this constant supervision should be exercised gently and with a certain trustfulness calculated to make them think that one loves them, and that it is only to enjoy their company that one is with them. This will make them love their supervision rather than fear it. (Aries, p. 265)”

“…calculated to make them think that one loves them.” Kind of says it all.

Obviously, kids need to be socialized, and the relationship with parents is one important way that that gets to happen. But there’s socialization and socialization; reasonable demands and unresasonable ones. And when you start to demand that a child substitute a state functionary like a teacher for the parent, and then you insist that she acquiesce to all that functionary’s demands with loving submission — well, you get a situation where a kid is labeled as evil because she doesn’t want to sit in one place all day.

So at the beginning of the story, Marston seems able to express the mother-daughter bond with both natural ease and sincerity. In the middle, he obsessively treats that same bond as metaphor and fetishizes its, and at the end he proposes a system of child-rearing which is both queasily sexualized and frankly monstrous. From which we can conclude that Marston was a very odd duck, and that people who love kids shouldn’t necessarily be teachers — or, at the very least, shouldn’t be allowed to craft the utopian school systems of the future.

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Thanks to Bert Stabler for alerting me to that quote from the loving Jesuits.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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