Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #1

Posted on April 2, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

So I have threatened on a number of occasions to blog my way through the entire William Moulton Marston/H.G. Peter run on Wonder Woman. I still don’t know if I’m going to make good on that, but at least we’ll give it a try. Starting this week, I’ll try to post on one issue each Thursday without fail unless I have something better to do, pledging to stop only when I have reached Marston’s last issue or when I feel like it.

So both longtime readers may remember that I already have spilled a lot of electrons writing about Wonder Woman #1 (here, here, and here. Most bloggers might say, hey, I’ve covered this, let’s move on to 2. But those most bloggers are not neurotic-completist me. If I’m doing a series where I blog about every Wonder Woman issue, I’m going to start with #1, damn it. Bring on the cover!

So…what’s to say that hasn’t been said? As I mentioned in the previous three posts, the first story in this issue is pretty amazing. This isn’t WW’s first appearance (she’d been appearing in Sensation Comics since 1941, the previous year) but for her own debut title Marston created what has become her more or less canonical origin (retold with some variations by George Perez in the 80s and by the WW animated movie, to name just two I’ve seen.) Compared to Superman or Batman or Spiderman, Wonder Woman’s origin is more complicated, and more unhinged by about a factor of five. Rocketed from a doomed planet? Pshaw. Parents murdered? Please. Bathed in radiation? Ha. How about created-out-of-clay-by-the-leader-of-a-race-of-loving-warrior-woman-and-then-brought-to-life-by-the-divine-will-of-Aphrodite?

That made out of clay bit still kills me, incidentally. It’s a genius fusion of Golden Age off-hand nonsense and Greek myth. It also has some surprising emotional resonances.

Those three panels are really, to me, heart-breaking, though it’s so compressed you’ll miss it if you blink. Athena teaches Hippolyta how to sculpt, and what Hippolyta chooses to create is the image of a child. She wants a kid, in other words, but she can’t have one, and so she becomes obsessed with the image she has created. She prays, and a miracle occurs; the baby comes to life. With Peter’s art, the moment that Diana is “born” is ritualized; the mother and daughter both stiff, shown in the moment before they touch in a frozen tableau, rather than in the moment when they embrace. The whole sequence seems very poignant to me; it reminds me a little bit of the end of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man, where Buddy’s family is magically resurrected — or of the end of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, with its unexplained resurrection. The power in all three moments is in having the heart’s desire granted, and in the recognition that the heart’s desire just doesn’t actually get granted in this way. Love demands miracles, and a creator granting a miracle to a creation is sometimes an act of love. That’s at least provisionally part of what the Christian faith is about (a connection both Morrison and Shakespeare make.) Marston’s vision is more pagan — and, perhaps coincidentally, more female.

In Morrison and Shakespeare, men pray for the resurrection of their wives/lovers, and their wish is granted. Here, though, a woman prays to have a child. That prayer is also linked explicitly to artistic creation. Often in various misogynist discourses, you get a contrast between the creation of the artist (done by men) and the creation of children (done by women). But Hippolyta is both artist and mother; the two roles aren’t separable. The love of artist for art object, and of mother for child, are commensurate rather than opposed. Aphrodite is god of both.

I think this does a few things. Most obviously, it emphasizes Hippolyta’s femininity. She may be a warrior queen and an artist, but she’s still a woman. In contrast, the Wonder Woman animated movie that came out this year ended by essentially reprimanding Hippolyta for turning her back on children and men and family; for not being feminine and loving enough. But for Marston, you don’t need men to have family, or even, it seems, children. Women can be sculptors and warriors and Aphrodite is still their patron.

Another aspect of this scene is that it makes a fairly clear analogy between Marston and Hippolyta. After all Marston, like Hippolyta, creates Diana; and brings her to life — and I don’t think it’s too much to say, especially considering that the character was based on Marston’s wife and their lover, that he brings her to life through his love. In general, most commentators (including myself) tend to see Marston’s investment in WW as, you know, sexual; revelatory of the kind of women he wants to be with, and of the way he wants to be with them. But the link with Hippolyta suggests that Marston’s interest seems not only romantic, but aspirational; he doesn’t just want the women he portrays; he wants to be them.

That’s fetishistic too, of course; male sexual fantasies about being women are pretty common — and probably have something to do with the cross-gender identification in exploitation flicks that Carol Clover talks about in “Men, Women and Chainsaws” (though Clover herself doesn’t really make this point.) Even if it is a fetish, though, Marston goes interesting places with it. If you see him as Hippolyta in this sequence, what he wants is to be creative, like women, and a creator of children, like women, and loving, like women. It’s an idealized view, clearly, which can be problematic – but it’s not an idealized view that seems especially limiting for women in the usual ways; Diana starts out on the pedestal, after all, but she gets off it fairly quickly. Hippolyta isn’t barred from masculine activities. Indeed, in many ways Marston seems to want to be a woman as a fantasy of being more, not less masculine — stronger, more competent, even more artistic in traditionally male ways. Marston’s comic, in other words, situates male and female readers in pretty much the same way; both are supposed to look on Wonder Woman and the Amazons as ideals to emulate (both are also supposed to look at Wonder Woman and the Amazons erotically, I think..but that’s a discussion for another day, maybe.)

I also think it’s worth pointing out how odd it is in a super-hero comic to have the kind of celebration of child-hood that Marston provides. I’m thinking of the two panels that follow the three above:

The ostensible purpose, of course, is to show how strong and great Diana is — stronger than Hercules! Faster than mercury! Etc etc. But — not to be too gloppy — to a parent, every child is a wonder child. Diana is amazing, not just because she’s a super-hero, but because she’s a kid. Most male superheroes are all about being orphaned, outcast, alone, agonized, cut off by their powers and their origins. WW’s origin, on the contrary, is all about community; she has a hundred mothers who love her. If that sounds kitschy…well, yep. That second panel above in particular is both sublime and sublimely hokey. I love the elongated deer so outdistanced it doesn’t even get any motion lines, and the way it’s sleekness contrast with the frilly tree leaves above. The effect is strange, especially since the deer’s anatomy isn’t quite right; it looks like medieval drawings of horses where they didn’t have stop motion photography to show them how those creatures actually ran. At the same time, the outdoor scene, the stiffness, the indecently healthy child, all also suggest garage-sale art; something you’d find with “We love our happy home,” scrawled across it — if, you know, you’re happy home was an island populated by an all-female band of warriors.

One of the implications of this is that her story is all about security. Ground zero for her is a happy home. That’s not that unusual for girl’s fiction, I don’t think (Cardcaptor Sakura, for example, doesn’t have family angst; I don’t think Sailor Moon does either.) But in the world of comics, more geared to boys, it’s very odd, and writers tend not to know how to deal with it. (Greg Rucka’s Hiketeia is a particularly flagrant violation.)

As this suggests, the relative lack of angst in Diana’s origin is probably meant to appeal to girls to some degree. But I bet it’s also meant to appeal to, and probably to educate boys — to provide a different vision of heroism that didn’t involve clinging to outcast status and perpetrating bloody revenge.

I was reading an all ages Jeff Parker Marvel Avenger’s comic to my son recently. Giant-Girl (Janet Van Dyne) has run amok (one of those mind-control things) and the team goes to consult her father to see if he can help. Anyway, Dad starts explaining G-Girl’s origin, and at one point, Storm, I think, interrupts and says something like, “So then Giant Girl swore to avenge her mother’s death by fighting crime?” And the dad says “What? No, no. My wife’s fine. She’s away on a ski trip right now. Janet just likes to help people.” I think Marston would approve of that.
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All right; so next week we’ll go to number 2. And I’ll do my best to cover more than five panels.

You Still Can’t Wear the Venus Girdle, But Maybe You Can Hold It for a While

Posted on March 19, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

In my last post on the Wonder Woman animated movie, I talked a little about how I felt the film wasn’t very comfortable with femininity. I was thinking about that a bit more, and it struck me again how very few female characters WW meets, and how much that tilts the movie. Basically, WW runs into a little girl who is being prevented from playing pirates, and the sexed up Etta Candy who is ickily dependent on men and on her own sex-kittenish charm. Neither of those two characters is on screen for any time at all, really. So what you’re left with is Amazons (who are tough and manly for the most part) and guys like Steve Trevor and Ares representing man’s world.

As I suggested in my earlier post, this isn’t the way things worked in Marston, where WW was always surrounded by female characters, both Amazon and human. But it also wasn’t true in what I think was probably the (distant) second best take on the WW character; Geoge Perez’s run on the series. I talked about some of my problems with that run here. But the one thing Perez really did right was to have lots of female characters. Etta Candy as a loyal, courageous, slightly older and still chunky military career woman; Julia, a late fiftiesish Greek scholar; her (Kitty Pryde-influenced) teenaged daughter Vanessa; Myra, the quite-but-not-entirely head of an advertising agency…they were all interesting, well-developed characers, with distinct personalities and (even more rarely for super-hero comics) body types.

What was especially nicely done was that Diana was, if anything, *more* interested in these woman than she was in Steve, or in men in general. And she found them interesting not only because they were sisters, or similar to her, but because they were *different.* There’s one line where she comments that Etta is as thick as two of her…but it’s not a dis, she’s fascinated. Perez doesn’t make Diana actually fall in love with any of the women (or with anybody, for that matter), but the excitement at strangeness she feels is a close analog, I think, to romantic excitement — the sense of difference, or unknowability, which is part of what makes love exciting.

You get just a touch of this in the movie, when Diana first sees the crying child and starts to talk about how there are no children on Paradise Island. But it’s pretty much dropped to focus instead on her relationship with Steve — indeed, the whole interaction with the girl seems more about getting Steve a couple of good quips and developing the Diana-is-disillusioned-with-man’s-world meme than it is about exploring Diana’s relationship with kids. Whereas, in Perez, Diana’s relationship with the teenaged Vanessa is a big part of the series — much bigger than her relationship with Steve Trevor, who is more of a marginal character.

Perez seems to have figured out something that the movie didn’t — which is that Wonder Woman goes to man’s world not for men, but for women. Steve Trevor always had a “well, there has to be a romantic interest” afterthought kind of feel; it was WW’s interactions with women that really had some oomph behind them for Marston.

Trina Robbins has an interesting article about WW in which she argues along similar lines:

Girls have needed, at least in their fantasy lives, a safe place to be with other girls, where they could express themselves without being threatened by boys. British girls’ magazines seem to have recognized this need. In my study of four British girls’ magazine annuals, from 1956, 1958, and 196325, I found comics in which the protagonists, usually students from all-girl schools, interacted with other girls, and any male in the stories is usually a villain. In a typical story from 1958, three school girls dress up as “The Silent Three,” in hooded robes and masks26, to help a younger girl whose dog has been stolen by a wicked man, who hopes to use the dog to retrieve a hidden paper that will lead to treasure.

In “Staunch Allies of the Swiss Skater,” from 1956, two British schoolgirls, vacationing in Switzerland, befriend a young Swiss ice skater, buying her a dress to wear for a skating contest. When the girl’s cruel uncle locks her up, forbidding her to enter the contest, they free the girl and find a paper proving he is an impostor, masquerading as her dead uncle “to steal the legacy her mother left her!” One of the contest judges knew the real uncle and would have recognized him. In the end, a British girl hugs the skater and says, “Your troubles are over, Odette dear. You’re free – free to skate!”

American girls’ comics from that period are very different. Instead of the sisterhood themes of the British comics, the American comic stories usually revolve around the theme of the eternal triangle — two girls, one of which is the protagonist, fighting over the Token Boyfriend. Patsy Walker and Hedy Wolfe fight over Buzz Baxter, Betty and Veronica fight over Archie Andrews, and so on. In the women’s community of Paradise Island, girls did not have to have boyfriends; they could be “free – free to skate!”, or free to be themselves and to interact with other girls.

Obviously, and as Robbins notes too, there are lesbian implications here if you want them. But whether or no, the decision in the movie was to make Diana’s most important relationship be with Steve — and Hippolyta’s most important relationship be with Ares actually — it’s because she is spurned by Ares in particular that she closes the Amazon’s off from men for 100s of years, as opposed to other versions of the story, where the personal betrayal (by Hercules, not Ares) is much less emphasized. Men just take up a lot more emotional space than seems warranted in a Wonder Woman story, basically. Perez figured out a better balance.

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Before I leave the wonder woman animated movie forever, I wanted to acknowledge this post at Comic Fodder. Ryan has a couple of thoughtful comments.

Noah Berlatsky live blogged his viewing of the Wonder Woman movie, which I think is kind of a bad idea. Going MST3K on any movie is pretty easy and gets you in the mode of “what can I make fun of” rather than any actual critical analysis of the darn thing. And in your riffing, you can wind up saying really stupid things about how people from the South must hate Abraham Lincoln.

After live blogging, he did post a fairly strong rebuttal to the movie, which i found far more readable, even if I don’t necessarily agree. But he DOES offer up a thoughtful sort of challenge to the filmmakers as per how they could have handled some of the sequences. I’m not sure he noted that the film was actually directed by, voice directed by (and had input from Simone)… all women. That’s not to say women can’t fall into the same traps as male directors, but it does make one pause when considering some of the accusations lobbed the way of the movie.

As far as the Steve Trevor thing: Overall, and on reflection, I think it was actually a nice move by the movie to have the main character be a southerner and not comment on it overtly. So…not my best moment. Apologies.

As far as the movie being made by women…I didn’t look up the creators names, though I assumed it might be a possibility.
Obviously, it’s somewhat problematic for a guy to go around telling women they’re not sufficiently feminist. But then, to go back and say “oh, it’s all right now that I know they’re women!” would be pretty condescending. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t…so I might as well just stick with my original assessment: it still seems like a movie that raises its feminism mostly to cut it down, which is way too kind to its frat boy main character, which generally is dumb and even dishonest about gender issues, and which is quite uncomfortable with femininity.

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Other posts in which I explain why no one is as cool as Marston:
One Two Three Four Five, Six, Seven and Eight, Nine.

Update: I’m starting a reread of all the Marston Wonder Womans; first one in the series is here.

I Don’t Care How Animated You Are, You Still Can’t Wear the Venus Girdle

Posted on March 18, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

I just liveblogged my way through the WW animated film. If you want to see my thoughts as I went along, here’s the Update: First thread,second thread, third thread.

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Well, overall, the movie was about the level of bad I expected, I guess. I pretty much agree with everything in Chris’s review. The violence and sex seems calculated to go just so far and not farther in a way that ends up reading as smarmy and not much else. Exploitation can be fun if it’s either explored or used to push stories in odd directions. Here, though, it’s all controlled without much curiosity; the exploitation elements seem ladled out with a spoon, and the rest of the story doesn’t have enough thematic coherence or adventurousness to go anywhere. The twin goals (tell a typical Wonder Woman story; throw in (limited) gore and (limited) sex)) lead to paralysis rather than energetic frisson. As just a for instance, if you’re going to do WW exploitation, it seems like one of the more interesting ways would be to explore lesbian themes — but that would be R, and besides we’re not really willing to do that with a DC property — and so the only lesbian suggestion is done in the most banal way possible; set up as a sexual fantasy for Steve (who sees some Amazons cavorting in a pool) rather than as a real possible female alternative to dealing with man’s world. Thus, the only real love is love between men and women, which philosophically stacks the cards against Paradise Island as a viable community. The “moral” of the movie ends up being that Hippolyta must learn reach out to men in order to learn to love. In this (as in just about every other) way, the film is less adventurous than the source material; Marston did suggest implicit lesbianism in various ways, and while he had Diana fall in love with Steve, I don’t think he suggested that that love vitiated the Amazon’s community.

Indeed, when William Moulton Marston created WW, the whole point of the Amazons was that they were going to teach man’s world love — not vice versa. This, I think, points to the film’s central failure of imagination. The filmmakers just can’t figure out a way to admire femininity. They can admire women — but pretty much only insofar as the women are tough, violent, self-sufficient — masculine, in other words. You see this again and again throughout the film; the librarian is mocked for not being tough enough in the opening battle scene; then she gets brutally offed, essentially because she’s too girly to live. Wonder Woman herself taunts femininity at various points, mocking Ares for getting beaten by a girl, or teasing Steve for expressing his emotions like a girl. The end tries to walk this back a little, with Hippolyta rebuked for rejecting children and love — hallmarks of femininity. But the only way to get those back is supposed to be by opening themselves up to men.

Marston, on the other hand, had a vision of a femininity which was both strong and self-sufficient. For him, the Amazons weren’t unloving because they’d cut themselves off from men; on the contrary, cutting themselves off from the masculine was what made them embody love. In the film, being strong (masculine) precludes love (feminine); for Marston, being feminine is what creates strength (and submission and lots of bondage.)

The point here is that the movie’s vision of gender is just much, much more clearly designed of, by, and for men. The Amazons are essentially pictured *as* men. The reason their cool is their masculine attributes (kicking ass) and their problems are masculine problems — they’ve gone off into their cave, cutting themselves off from emotional attachments to be safe. The “message” could have been written by Robert Bly — trust your emotions! don’t be afraid to love! It’s focusing on male anxieties around castration and being tough and not wanting to be vulnerable.

In Marston, though, what’s glorified is not only strength, but female bonds…and, indeed, bonds in general. Marston’s emphasis on submission as a form of love and strength is decidedly kinky…but it also allows femininity to be something other than just opening yourself to a man. It can be opening yourself to a woman, for example. “Obedience to loving authority” (as he puts it) is, in Marston’s vision, not actually about patriarchy first, but about femininity first; after all, the loving authority doesn’t have to be male, and, in those old Wonder Woman comics, often isn’t. For Marston, femininity is an archetype that can exist entirely without reference to men.

A female community built around mutual submission and love is the ultimate source of strength in Marston’s world. For him, women are going to save man’s world. Whereas, for the filmmakers, the Amazons need men to save them.

Which is why the movie, with a kind of tedious inevitability, finds itself morphing into “Steve Trevor: The Animated Film.” Trevor gets a ton of screen time, and we actually learn more about his inner life than about Diana’s; it’s quite clear at the end why he kisses her, but it’s way less clear why she kisses him. The fact is, the filmmakers are more interested in the entirely pedestrian horniness and self-pity of this banal frat boy who find the girl of her dreams than they are in the journey of their putative star. In the end, her objections to man’s world are shown to be hollow feminist propaganda; all she really needs to cure her restlessness is a good man…or even a mediocre one.

Or, to put it more briefly: Marston’s Wonder Woman was a male fantasy that cared deeply about women and girls. And while that’s not ideal in every way, I would argue that this film is good evidence that a male fantasy which cares about women and girls is, overall, and in almost every way, better than a male fantasy that doesn’t.

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Update: Other posts in which I explain why no one is as cool as Marston:
One Two Three Four Five, Six, Seven and Eight, Nine.

Update: And a follow up post on the animated movie vs. George Perez

The Cowardly and the Castrated: Color Coda

Posted on March 17, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

Bill did a post about coloring in the Watchmen comic and movie, inspiring me to finally get to this post I’ve been sitting on for some time now.

A little while back Tucker Stone and I coblogged our way through the 2nd phonebook volume of Bob Haney Brave and Bold stories. Our mutual favorite of the tales was an amazing Batman/Deadman crossover, which is pretty easily The Best Batman Story I’ve Ever Read.

Anyway, after we’d finished the series, Tucker (who, unlike me, occasionally visits comics stores) purchased and sent me a copy of the original Batman/Deadman team-up which he’d found in one of those storied longboxes. If I’d found it myself, of course, I would have just kept it…but Tucker’s a better person than I am (like Kim Deitch…and probably most other folks for that matter….)

But to get back to the point at hand; I was especially excited to see the original artwork, because I was curious how the color would affect the visuals. The story is a bleak noir, for the most part, so black and white suited it well, I thought. I wasn’t sure whether the color would help or hinder.

I think overall it helps. I’m not sure who the colorist is (could it be Aparo himself? Probably not…though I know he did his own inks) but whoever had the chores does a very nice job. Take the panel below:

The muted blues in the costume and the weird neutral orange/red background actually accentuate the shadow on the face; Batman ends up looking pretty scruffy, which I think is just right.

Similarly, this image is great in black and white:

But I think it’s equally good in color; where, again, the brown really brings out the crazy shadow, actually emphasizing the noir feel rather than detracting from it. (Plus it really drives home the “this is a minority bit” — if you’re going to be racist, I guess it’s best to be as explicit as possible. Or, actually, maybe not, on second thought….)

The panel below is improved too, I think; in black and white it’s not clear where your eye is supposed to go. With the yellow and red added, the contrast is much clearer. I love the way the car is turned more or less red to match the flames, so you have basically a few solid areas of color; yellow, black, red…and even white, as the speech bubbles are nicely incorporated into the aesthetics of the image as well. It emphasizes the stylization of the flames and of the truck…and really of the whole composition. It has a poster art, almost constructivist feel.

Everything doesn’t work equally well. The color on the lips here makes Lilly (the woman in the center) look oddly unnatural.

Though, on the other hand, I think the color helps add to her dyspeptically fierce expression here:

And I love the way the touch of red shading makes Deadman’s path out of the body here more solid; it’s almost like he’s at the end of a twisty ectoplasmic fabric; an effect which is present, but more muted, in the black and white:

So the color was quite successful overall, I think. Things really were better back there in the days before computers….

That’s Not the Truth! — OOCWVG 9

Posted on March 2, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

Previous posts on WW in this series: One Two Three Four Five, Six, Seven and Eight.
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So I’ve been talking here and here about the first issue of Wonder Woman by her creators, Charles Moulton and Harry Peter. One of the (many) panels from that issue which made me laugh out loud was this one:

As you can see, this is the moment where Wonder Woman gets her magic lasso. In later iterations, this lasso forces you to tell the truth, right? But, as it turns out, that’s a later watering down of the lasso’s power. It’s actually…a mind control lasso! It forces anyone captured by it to obey.

Presumably the bondage/mind-control/erotic implications of this were a bit too (ahem) naked. But if later writers were embarrassed, you can bet that Moulton himself wasn’t. It’s only a panel or two later that we have this:

Yep, that’s Diana, our hero, mischievously misusing her power for cheap thrills.

That, of course, is not a characterization of WW that you see too much of anymore. Which is really a shame, because it’s probably the most enjoyable take on the character I’ve read. In the first WW story, Diana is portrayed as super-courageous, super-talented, super-smart, super-beautiful — and also as a typically bratty adolescent who runs around after boys and loves pretty dresses and is…well, check this out.

“I have to take him to my secret lab so that I can invent a ray to bring people back to life — but don’t tell Mom!”

Or there’s this, where WW tries the old, “everybody else is doing it!” gambit.

Moulton’s WW, in other words, isn’t a goody two-shoes. She’s not all tragic and noble and self-sacrificing. She’s got desires, both serious (her love for Steve) and whimsical (wanting to see the doctor stand on her head.) Moreover, acting on those desires doesn’t end in disaster, or make her less of a hero. This is pretty standard for men, of course (for whom being rebellious and dangerous is part of being heroic — think Han Solo, or Wolverine, for that matter.) But women don’t usually get cut as much slack. They don’t get to revel in their power — and when they do have power, it’s as likely as not to be something saccharine like being super-truthful. Certainly, WW has, over the years, become a kind of tedious paragon — Spidey gets to crack jokes, Batman gets to be grim and vicious…but WW is always the adult, regretting the need for violence when she has any personality at all. You certainly don’t get to see her dressed in a masquerade outfit riding a kanga-horse while gratuitously and alliteratively mocking her opponents weight.

For Moulton, Wonder Woman’s the hero, which means she gets to act like a hero — and part of what it means to be a hero is that you get to be dashing and thoughtless and maybe even a little mean-spirited because you’re just that cool. And he ties that devil-may-care attitude into a rebellious girl adolescence (rather than the typical rebellious boy adolescence) in a way that’s both funny and, I think, extremely appealing. And he also does it while keeping Diane femme — usually, this sort of combination would end up as butch, or tomboyish, but Moulton (and Peter) always put Diana in frills and lace; in fact, in that panel above, her opponent is taunting her for being too femme, and she snaps right back by taunting her for being too butch. Obviously, you could find fault with this from a feminist standpoint in various ways: Moulton has strange issues with heavy women, it’s got to be said. But writing a story in which you have a feminine girl being strong, snotty, heroic, smart, and mean while staying femme and not being punished for any of it — that’s just not something you see that often in the oughts, much less 1942.

Hey girls! Disobey your Mom and you too can have new clothes and a ticker-tape parade!

And to show just how unlikely you are to see it in the oughts….I give you Greg Rucka’s Hiketeia. Moulton’s Diana is all about possibility; excitement and fun and adventure; she does what she wants, and is praised and admired for it. Rucka’s WW on the other hand, is all about duty and restriction. She doesn’t even get to defend the weak by choice. The Hiketeia is (in the comic at least) a Greek ritual in which a supplicant asks for protection. Some random girl (Danny) shows up on WW’s doorstep and invokes the ritual; WW accepts the supplication, which means that she is responsible for protecting the girl, no matter what, or the Furies will kill her. It turns out Danny has killed a bunch of bad men who raped and pimped out her sister; Batman is following her, so WW and Batman have to fight, and then there’s a much-foreshadowed tragic finish. Through it all, WW never gets to act or even think for herself; her initial moment of impulsive sisterly bonding and compassion trap her completely — “I have no choice” and “It doesn’t matter” are her mantras.

Danny talks about how much she wants to be like WW, but it’s hard to see why any girl would be especially inspired by this dour vision of toilsome female duty. In taking from Diana choice, he also takes away her heroism; she becomes a boring mother/victim, sacrificing herself not because she’s dashing or brave, but because that’s what moms do. Even her battles with Batman seem rote and, oddly, diminish her. She beats him easily — so easily that it seems less like two fierce competitors battling for glory than like a mother smacking down a wayward child. Batman’s effort to evoke the Hiketeia towards the end (which WW rejects) makes the masochistic mother-fetishization even more explicit. And then, of course, Danny kills herself — because she can’t bear coming between WW and Batman. So much for sisterhood.

Rucka is going for noir here, of course. Linking Greek tragedy with noir isn’t a bad idea; both forms are about the disaster caused by human weaknesses; tragic flaws leading noble, or charming, or compassionate people into death and defilement. There are two problems with this approach, though. First, noir gets across in large part on its stylish visuals, and while there are many adjectives one could use to describe J.G. Jones’ art (lumpy, muddy, cluttered, ugly), stylish isn’t really among them.

Second, noir requires a certain amount of bloody-mindedness. Rucka is willing to do depressing and he’s willing to do melodrama, but his stomach for gore and unpleasantness isn’t up to the story he’s written. Danny, for example, is a frustratingly blah character as well…frustrating because Rucka seems to go out of his way to make her as passive as possible. This is a naive, tiny woman who, supposedly, hunted down, outsmarted, outfought, and murdered a bunch of older, meaner, streetwise thugs. How’d she do it? How did she feel about it at the time? How did they feel about it? What happened? Rucka tells us none of that. The entire sequence is elided, barely shown even in flashback. The defilement of Danny’s sister is shown in at least passing detail, but the humiliation of the victimizers? Nada. Rucka has written a rape-revenge story — that’s the actual interesting part of the narrative, not the nonsense with the furies and Batman and Wonder Woman. But he won’t tell it, perhaps because he’s squeamish, and/or because imagining a woman as active and vicious, rather than as victim, doesn’t engage him.

All of which just makes me appreciate rape-revenge exploitation movies that much more. In They Call Her One Eye, for example, Christina Lindberg doesn’t need her sister or Wonder Woman to come help her our when she’s raped and beaten; she sets out on a rigorous training regime (like Batman) and then she systematically and brutally just murders everyone who fucked with her (literally or figuratively.) I think in the denoument she buries her chief tormenter in filth, ties a rope to his neck, ties a horse to the rope, and then has the horse decapitate the baddy. I guess if Danny did stuff like that, you can see why Batman is upset. Maybe Rucka feels like we wouldn’t sympathize with her if we saw her wreaking havoc? If so, that’s a deep, deep misunderstanding of the way genre fiction and heroism work…. More likely he just wanted to focus on his boring, precious Wonder Woman.

The above is not nearly as gruesome as this movie gets. But it’s pretty gruesome, so be warned.

Which leads us to the third problem. Noir (and Greek tragedy for that matter) needs flawed characters. The flaws not only move the plot and create the tragedy; they also make the characters sympathetic and interesting. In that great Haney Batman/Deadman story I blogged about a while ago, for example, everybody involved in the story is shown to be a fool/cad/bounder; Batman’s a selfish grandstander; Deadman’s a whiny little loser so desperate for love that he commits murder; the main romantic interest is a cold thug. They’re selfish and dumb and they deserve what they get…which makes the story all the more poignant. They’re in control of their destinies — that’s the tragedy.

But this isn’t the case for Rucka’s WW. She’s not selfish or flawed. That means she isn’t a villain, but it also prevents her from being a hero. Even her initial moment of compassion she talks about as if it were out of her hands; something she had to do rather than a choice she made. She’s just this boring maternal paragon, who the Fates have decided to torment, perhaps because they find her insufferably tedious as well.

Rucka has talked in various places about how he wants to respect and honor the Wonder Woman character. And he does respect and honor her. He respects and honors her right onto a pedestal which, as feminists have argued for a while, is not an especially comfortable place to be. Heroes need flaws, or at least moxy. Moulton breathed life into Diana by making her impish and somewhat selfish and excited about her powers. Rucka, on the other hand, seems determined to turn her back into a lifeless figurine.

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As a somewhat final note: I’ve watched a couple of the old Lynda Carter Wonder Woman TV shows recently. I wouldn’t say they’re good exactly; the writing can be dreadful, and the plotting and pacing are leaden. And, of course, the outfit looks really, really silly on a real person. And Lynda Carter is in no way comfortable playing an action heroine; she always looks distinctly uncomfortable with the physical, ass-kicking portions of the show — like an embarrassed middle-schooler going through the motions in gym class.

Still, I can see why the show was popular. Better than maybe any comics adaptation I’ve seen, the show does capture the excitement of those early stories. Seventies camp isn’t exactly analogous to Moulton’s blend of zany innocence/kinkiness, but the two aren’t completely divorced either. Lynda Carter is a charismatic actor, and the show always takes care to make Wonder Woman the hero; the appeal to girls is pretty clear. Especially, I must say, in the transformation scenes. The spinning-change from Diana Prince to Wonder Woman is more Shazam than Moulton, but it has an exuberance and a visual punch that I think is very true to Moulton’s original conception. The sense that girls can vertiginously grasp hold of power, and that the results will be, not dangerous or horrible, but exciting, fun, and heroic….I don’t see how Moulton could have disapproved of that.

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And I do think that’ll end my Wonder Woman blogging for at least a bit; I’ve got some other projects I need to work on. But thanks to everyone who commented or stopped by. And I may pick it up again — I still want to check out Gail Simone’s work, and would like to read more of the O’Neill/Sekowsky run. So never say never!

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Update: This series is now continued with a post about the WW animated movie here

Eagle Eyes (OOCWVG 8)

Posted on February 26, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

Previous posts on WW in this series: One Two Three Four Five, Six, Seven.
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So yesterday I started talking about the first issue of Wonder Woman, then got distracted by Darwyn Cooke and Ms. and so forth. But we’ll try again.

So one surprising thing about WW #1 is that, in Moulton’s telling, WW’s mission actually makes sense.

As I’ve mentioned before in this series one of the perennial problems with Wonder Woman is that her mission to man’s world is always really stupid. Has she come here to lead us to peace? To be an international UN do-gooder? To hit lots of bad guys and flirt with Superman? Any way you look at it, none of it quite rings true.

But in Moulton’s telling, her mission is pretty straightforward, as Aphrodite explains.

Wonder Woman is going to man’s world to help America win World War 2. That neatly resolves the peace/battle contradiction; the forces for war are the Axis; they must be defeated to restore peace, so an Amazon will journey to the homefront to restore love and amity by slugging evildoers. Niebuhr would be pleased.

This, of course, also resolves the difficulty of WW’s costume. If she comes from the back-end of the mythologicalverse, why is she wearing the stars and stripes? Well, logically enough, because she represents America not as the embodiment of national ideals, but as the embodiment of international and even universal ones. World War II was probably the one time in history where this could actually make sense; there was really a case to be made that America (whatever its own sins) was, at that time, the last best hope for civilization and peace.

Since that moment, of course, it’s been a lot harder to argue that the interests of America and the world align — but WW has been stuck with that costume. Not sure how Moulton handled it after the war ended (I’ll have to look into that) but other creators have had difficulties. George Perez did some sort of utterly ridiculous retcon, if I remember precisely, where Steve Trevor’s mother had come to paradise….you know what, forget it. The point is you end up on the one hand, with moments like this from Phil Jimenez, which egregiously beg the question:

Please Keep Your Eyes Off the Eagles

Or with efforts like this, from the Playboy shoot

Please Keep Your Eyes On the Stars

Playboy actually used these Wonder Woman photos to illustrate an essay on “American Sensuality” or some such. Not sure how sensual that image above is supposed to be exactly; it really looks more jokey or parodic than sexy; Fallon’s intense “I’m fighting for truth, justice, and the American Way” is pretty thoroughly contradicted by the (literally) painted-on costume, which is even more silly-looking in real-life than on the page. In fact, it seems likely that that’s the point; Playboy isn’t using Wonder Woman to make fun of feminism; rather they’re using trite misogyny to poke fun at America in a bland, we-lived-through-the-60s kind of way. For Moulton, a woman was the perfect representative of the U.S., since he saw the U.S. as engaged in a fight for peace. For Playboy, a sexy woman wearing the flag is just the level of edgy irony they’re looking for; they can claim a sort of jokey yes we do, no we don’t pride in America. It’s all more or less predicated on the idea that a woman being strong or representing America is in itself funny-quaint-snicker-worthy.

[Update: Matthew argues out in comments that this isn’t part of the Playboy body paint shoot; it’s just Tiffany Fallon wearing a Wonder Woman costume. I think that’s right; it was used to illustrate this article about Fallon and Playboy. I’m not sure if it was in the original mag or not, though obviously it’s somewhat related. More evidence for the ongoing “Noah doesn’t know what he’s talking about” thesis, though.]

Playboy isn’t alone though. Jimenez also tries to distance WW and America, as do most recent takes on the character. One of the (many) problems with Greg Rucka’s Hiketeia is that its all about WW’s Greek heritage and mythological connections, and she’s talking to the furies and agonizing about ancient ritual — and she’s wearing star-spangled underoos. It’s hard to maintain the profundity…unless, like Moulton, you are willing to link the U.S. to the mythological, and happen to live at a historical moment when doing so was at least somewhat defensible.

It’s interesting that Captain America has kept his close ties with Americanism, while WW has spent much of her career trying to avoid the implications of her costume. Probably it’s partly because Cap has a much less complicated narrative (he fights Nazis because he loves America, as opposed to because he loves peace.) I wonder if it’s also because, or related to, some difficulty in imagining, or figuring out what to do with, female patriotism. It’s also interesting that the (relatively) politically engaged Denny O’Neill is the one who took WW out of the stars and stripes. I mean, there are a lot of reasons to ditch that costume, but…did he dislike the patriotic connotations?

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Anyway, more next week, hopefully; magic lassos and why Moulton’s characterization of Diana is still the best….

Update: Last Wonder Woman post here.

Wonder Woman #1 (OOCWVG Part 7)

Posted on February 25, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

Previous posts on WW in this series: One Two Three Four Five, Six .

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So I already expressed my growing enthusiasm for the original Charles Moulton/Harry G. Peter Wonder Woman comics. I haven’t read a ton of them, though, so I decided to start at the beginning with Wonder Woman #1, from 1942 (and yes, I know that Wonder Woman started a couple years earlier in Sensation Comics…but this is what I could get my hands on.)

Anyway, the first thing I noticed was, holy shit, comics were really long back in the day. 64 pages, pretty small panels, lots of text, four full Wonder Woman stories, plus a story about Florence Nightingale, plus a short prose story about something or other plus some random funnies, all for a dime. Even taking inflation into account, that’s some value for money.

Of the four WW stories, three of them are…a little disappointing. Artist Harry Peter doesn’t seem to have quite hit his stride yet; his layouts and stylization aren’t as adventurous as his best work. The stories are all also set on the home front, with WW fighting Axis spies and essentially normal folk, so there’s less opportunity for some of the nuttier visuals (mystic fires leaping out of typewriters, attacking Seal Men, that sort of thing.) Instead, we’re treated to busloads of racial caricatures (not surprising) and an equal number of ungulates (which did take me somewhat aback.) And, of course, there’s bondage too.

Ungulate

Racist Caricature

Ungulate with Racist Caricature

Playful Underage Bondage

Ungulate Role-Play

More Ungulate Role-Play

Looking at these, I’ve gotta say; even if it’s not his absolute best work, I still love Harry Peter’s art. That (obviously completely morally reprehensible) panel of the evil Burmese doing their unholy rituals while WW watches through the mask eyeholes, with the overlapping circles, the bizarre twisted faces, and the lovely colors…or the scribbly line-work on the elephant, with that misshapen shadow under it… or the weirdly stiff bondage children drawings, with the aggressive use of blank space; –those are all just beautiful drawings.

Another thing you notice on reading thorugh these; I’ve seen some commentary on the implied lesbianism on Paradise Island, but has anyone commented on WW’s relationship with Etta Candy. It is…strangely intense. Obviously, Etta’s oral fixation (she’s always eating or begging to eat candy. That’s her character. All of it.) seems suggestive. And I don’t think Steve Trevor ever got to ride on Wonder Woman’s back like that. Or to put his face in her backside — it’s Etta who is the hindquarters in that elephant costume (in the previous panel, WW comments “I’ve never dressed up as an elephant before!” As if someone would have assumed that she had.)

So…maybe I was underselling these stories. They’re pretty insane. But, for all their virtues, they pale in comparison to the first story in the issue, which I think is now one of my favorite comics stories ever. It’s just a delight.

I mentioned before that George Perez’s first issue was, by a fair margin, my favorite part of his run. I hadn’t realized the extent to which he’d cribbed it from this story. Most of the major plot points come from Moulton; the Amazons are created by the Gods to teach love and be stronger than men. Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons is given a girdle which makes her invincible; Ares (who hates love and women), sends Hercules to fight Hippolyta; he fails, but uses treachery to get her girdle from her and then he and his men conquer them. But the Gods come to the aid of the Amazons, and show them the path to an island where they can live in peace. Hippolyta, inspired by the gods, crafts a image of clay which comes to life as Diana. Eventually the Amazons need to choose a champion to go to man’s world; after a series of contests, Diana wins, much to her mother’s chagrin, and so heads off to man’s world as Wonder Woman.

It’s a great story; as I noted in my discussion of Perez, it has a lot of the inevitability and — especially in Moulton’s telling — a lot of the weirdness of the actual Greek myths. Perez played the tale for drama and pathos; the Amazons are explicitly raped in his version, for example. Moulton’s tone is lighter — he’s writing for a younger audience — but the submerged violence is still there, just distanced and ritualized. It comes across as iconic rather than as soap opera.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Moulton/Peter and Perez, though…or, actually, between Moulton/Peter and any later WW writer I’ve seen — is that Mouton and his artist are willing to just go ahead and hate men. It’s refreshing, both because you don’t see enough of that sort of thing in popular culture, damn it…and because it just makes so much sense for the story. No amount of whining about man’s world or man’s evil or whatever is going to be as effective as a good, vicious, scurrilous caricature:

There personified is the extreme feminist vision of ravaging masculinity; dumb, animalistic muscle-bound, wiedling a giant penis-substitute which, in Peter’s rendering, is bigger than Hercules’ entire body. (And again, what kick-ass drawings these are. I love the crazy motion lines, which are solid enough to actually stop connoting motion and end up as a still design element. And I love the way the stiffness of Hippolyta’s arm contrasts with the curves of her blowing dress. Her anatomy is deliberately out of whack, too; the legs and the torso couldn’t actually meet, I don’t think, which makes her look broken, like her sword.)

Making Hercules (and also the masculine God Ares) so thoroughly repugnant allows Moulton’s Amazons a coherence they never really got to have again. There’s still not a logical philosophy, but there is a myythological one. Moulton is a real gender essentialist; he believes in the idea of a male archtype and a female archetype. As a result, the exact philosophical content of the Amazonian code (do they represent love? do they represent strength in battle?) can be resolved by that appeal to essentialism. An Amazon bashing Hercules is different than Hercules bashing an Amazon because men and women are different, and their acts are disproportionate. (This is, in fact, true, I think; at least percentage wise, for example, men murder women for quite different reasons than women murder men.) The Amazons represent love — in comparison to men, which means that when they fight they fight for love, and when men love, they love as a strategem of battle (when Hercules loses the fight, he tricks Hippolyta by, as he puts it, making love to her.) Amazon strength, likewise, is a mystical offshoot of the power of love; the Venus Girdle, which means love, is their strength. And it’s weakness, too, since it’s her love or lust for Hercules which allows him to trick her out of the girdle, and so capture her.

Moulton, in other words, believes in what he’s doing. He’s kind of a crank, basically. And if you’re not a crank, it’s hard to take the character seriously…which is why Darwyn Cooke’s frank satire from the New Frontier JLA annual, with very cartoony art by J. Bone, is about the best take on Wonder Woman I’ve seen outside of Moulton:

(Thanks to Bryan for tipping me off to this story, by the by.)

Cooke’s actually interpreting the character correctly: Moulton believes that love is best expressed by having a dominating woman with a perfect figure and a swimsuit beat the tar out of you. That’s funny; Cooke gets it — and he goes on in the story to make fun of WW’s supposed connection to feminism (she roughs up the guys at the Playboy Club, to the amusement of an undercover Gloria Steinem.)

However, when Cooke tries a more sober take on the character in the first story of the annual (with art by Cooke himself, I believe) we get this:

She’s all about overcoming anger and conflict with love, and bringing men together…which means that in this here adventure comic, Superman and Batman get to have the big cool fight where they smack the snot out of each other, and WW has to be the peacemaker and talk about how happy she is to have her story be boring and subordinate. On the next pages she burbles along happily about how much darkness and pain there is in the Batman’s soul, and how “Kal” is to be the “savior” of them all. Fucking gag me.

So yeah, Moulton’s a crank, but maybe you still, even now, in fucking 2008, need to be a crank to be willing to do this:

That’s a funny panel too…but it’s funny at the guy’s expense. Hercules is a bumbling oaf who gets beaten down; Hippolyta’s the hero — and still feminine (her power comes form Aphrodite, after all.) For Cooke, Wonder Woman is either strong and beating people up (in which case she’s a masculinized hypocrite and therefore amusing) or she’s standing around pacifically helping her men (in which case she’s feminine and boring.) Moulton doesn’t have to make that choice; his women are feminine even if they’re bashing the hell out of some brute (there’s even a nipple lurking in that first panel, if you look close.) Indeed, the women can do the bashing because they are feminine.

Cooke gets tripped up on the pacifist/violence dichotomy, but it’s just as easy to bump over the feminist/erotic one. George Perez, for example, made Hippolyta’s defeat more traumatic and realistic, and in doing so seemed to be trying to put across a a sincere feminist message about the evils of violence and rape. But Perez couldn’t resist the exploitation imagery, somewhat undercutting his stance:

It’s hard to take an anti-rape message seriously when it’s draped in classic cheesecake imagery; if sexualized violence is bad, you probably shouldn’t be sexualizing your violence.

Or here’s a third way WW can trip you up:

I talked about this cover a bit earlier in the week Thinking about it more, I think that maybe what’s really messed up about this image isn’t that the eroticism undercuts the feminism (as with the Perez cover), but rather that the use of dominance imagery is very confused. The artist has made WW into a giant. Presumably this is to make her seem powerful and important. But making her into a rampaging Brobdingnagian doesn’t project authority (Wonder Woman for President!) Instead, it makes her grotesque…and, I think, along with that swimsuit, serves to sexualize her. Chaging scale this way emphasizes WW’s body and the manipulation of it…which is why “Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman” for example, has, and is meant to have, an erotic charge. Ms. is trying to show a woman in control, but instead they get sexualized, deformed femininity — femininity that is sexualized because it is deformed, and deformed because it is sexualized. (Again, when Moulton and Peter show Hippolyta beating up Hercules, he’s the sexualized monster, not her.)

On the other hand, there’s this:

This panel is about women gaining power through a connection with each other. At the same time, this is, and is meant to be, a sensual image; Hippolyta’s stiffness as she is bound, the intimacy between the two women, the fact that their outfits show a fair bit of skin, etc. In Moulton, though, there’s no contradiction; eroticism, strength, and submission all make sense together, because they are all linked to femininity. Bondage is made a metaphor, or a stand in, for close, (eroticized) female bonds, and so for feminist community.

I’m not saying that Moulton’s take on women is impregnable (if that’s really the word I want.) Obviously, you could critique as misogynist or just ridiculous the idea that feminine bonding is either (A) innately erotic, or (B) somehow akin to bondage. But, whether you like what he has to say or not, he’s aesthetically coherent; the eroticism and the bondage don’t work against his feminist vision; they’re integrated into it, creating a frisson of desire and devotion and political hope that’s both unique and sublime.

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…and this post is really spinning out of control, lengthwise. I’ve got more to say about Wonder Woman 1 (what is Diana’s real mission anyway, for example? And what is the lasso really supposed to do?)…but I’ll have to put it off for at least a short while. In the meantime, I’d recommend checking out Miriam’s post about why Rogue is a better feminist icon than Wonder Woman and Bill’s post about, among other things, whose fault it is that people keep writing WW stories.

Update: More on Wonder Woman 1 here.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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