AMAZON
Powers:______
Strengths:______
Weaknesses:______
Home:______
Residence:______
Friends:______
Enemies:______
Describe Morality and Ethics of the Character:
______
Wonder Woman 2009 to be watched in class.
The Legacy of Wonder Woman
An enlightening look at the feminist ideals that informed this American icon
By Philip Charles Crawford -- School Library Journal, 03/01/2007
This year marks the 65th anniversary of one of comics’ oldest and most enduring characters, Wonder Woman. For over half a century, she has entertained and inspired millions, appearing in comic books, newspapers, novels, television, and cartoons. Her image is known throughout the world, licensed on everything from Halloween costumes, Kraft brand macaroni & cheese, and Underoos, to cookie jars, toothbrushes, and the American Library Association (ALA) poster, “The World’s Greatest Heroes @ your library.” Along with Batman and Superman, she shares the distinction of having been continually published in comic book form for more than six decades. Like Snoopy, James Bond, Superman, and Tarzan, she has entered the collective consciousness of 20th-century pop culture.
In the early 1970s, she was adopted as a role model by the feminist movement and appeared on the cover of the inaugural issue of Ms. magazine. Yet few know that Wonder Woman was created as a distinctly feminist role model whose mission was to bring the Amazon ideals of love, peace, and sexual equality to “a world torn by the hatred of men.”
While Wonder Woman is one of the most fascinating comic book characters ever created, she is seldom mentioned in professional books, Web sites, and ALA lists about graphic novels. Perhaps many see her as too “old school,” no longer relevant in a world among such kick-ass, girl-power heroines as Buffy, the Birds of Prey, Electra, and Manhunter. Maybe, in a world dominated by pastel, tartan, and lollipop-colored “chick lit,” Wonder Woman’s overtly feminist message has no bearing on a readership who seems to prefer (and adore) consumer-driven, self-obsessed heroines. For whatever reason, our most enduring feminist icon of American popular culture seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. A brief exploration of Wonder Woman’s history will, I hope, demonstrate why this heroine is important and deserving of a wide readership and a prominent place on the library shelves.
When superheroes first began to appear in comic books of the late 1930s, the genre was ostensibly an “all-boys club.” In fact, prior to Wonder Woman, there were very few costumed heroines of any kind. Among the hundreds of comic books published during the 1930s, only a scant few featured stories about costumed women heroes such as Black Widow, Invisible Scarlet O’Neil, The Woman in Red, and Miss Fury. More common was the depiction of women as evil seductresses, as the hero’s girlfriend (Lois Lane), or as his “help mate” (Bulletgirl and Hawkgirl). In general, superhero comics of this era reflected and reinforced cultural norms about gender. Images of male superheroes celebrated brute strength, physical perfection, male bonding, and phallic imagery, while women were typically portrayed as helpless and in need of rescuing, or as sexy, buxom pin-ups models, often in provocative bondage poses. Moreover, most superhero comics were also violent and the hero resolved any and all conflict with physical force. For example, in the earliest Batman stories, the caped crusader was a ruthless vigilante who carried a gun and even murdered a couple of his adversaries.
In the early 1940s, a psychologist and feminist, Dr. William Moulton Marston, sought to change this paradigm. Writing in The American Scholar, he discussed the negative effects of gender stereotyping in popular culture: “Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power…. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.”
Marston wanted to create a positive role model for girls that would serve as a counter to the high level of violence and the “blood curdling masculinity” he felt pervaded superhero stories. At the time, he was already famous as the author of several best-selling books on psychology (and for inventing the lie detector). As a columnist for Family Circle, he wrote an article extolling the merits of comic books. In 1941, he was hired by M. C. Gaines to serve on the advisory committee for DC Comics where he would further develop his ideas and create the first major and important female superhero–Wonder Woman.
In late 1941, Wonder Woman made her debut in the pages of All-Star Comics and became the lead feature in Sensation Comics #1 the following month, written under the pseudonym Charles Moulton and illustrated by H. G. Peters. From the beginning, Marston infused the series with a feminist ideology. Wonder Woman was an Amazon princess who had been sent by the goddess, Aphrodite, to aid America in the war effort and to spread the Amazons’ message of love, peace, and sexual equality. One of the central ideas of the strip was that through hard work and discipline women could become strong and independent and free themselves from their economic and psychological dependency on men.
Wonder Woman’s approach to crime fighting was different than male counterparts as well. Where they used force to defeat the villain, she tried to reason with them and often convinced them to reform. Only when this failed did she use force, or her magic lasso, which, like Marston’s own lie detector, forced anyone bound by it to tell the truth.
However, like all superheroes Wonder Woman has her Achilles’ heel; if her bracelets are bound together by a man, she loses her powers. In countless stories, she is chained and bound by male villains, only to break free and triumph. The ropes and chains are symbols of patriarchy and the drama is her ability to break the shackles of male domination they symbolize. Unfortunately, most comic historians have ignored the feminist elements of the series, and focused on these elements of bondage, reducing the complexity of Marston’s Wonder Woman mythos to little more than a thinly disguised sadomasochistic sexual fantasy.
Dr. Marston’s heroine proved to be a tremendous success. At the height of her popularity, Wonder Woman had a readership of 10 million and appeared in a total of four comics and a daily newspaper strip. Unfortunately, this success would be short-lived. In 1947, Marston died, leaving his heroine in the hands of writers who didn’t seem to understand or care about her. In the postwar era of the 1950s and 1960s, Wonder Woman would lose much of her trademark feminism and become more conventionally feminine with her adventures focusing on two central topics: marriage anxiety and battling duplicates of herself.
By the late 1960s, DC Comics scrapped Marston’s concept entirely: they killed Steve Trevor, got rid of Amazons, and stripped Wonder Woman of her superpowers. This “new” Wonder Woman was Diana Prince, an ordinary woman who ran a mod-clothing boutique and fought crime in her spare time. For many she was a thinly veiled imitation of Mrs. Emma Peel from the British TV show The Avengers. Feeling that the character had been stripped of her power, Steinem and others pressured DC Comics to bring back the original character. With some reluctance, they agreed. Wonder Woman got back her powers, her costume, and her Amazon sisters, but the series lacked the complexity and feminist flare of Marston’s original stories.
During the 1970s, Wonder Woman entered America’s living rooms in the Saturday morning cartoon Superfriends and in her own prime-time show. Meanwhile, the comic book series suffered from constant changes in direction. Creatively, the Wonder Woman book was dying a slow and painful death.
With nowhere left to go but down, DC Comics decided to give the character a new start. They cancelled the original and launched a brand new series with help from Gloria Steinem. Beautifully written and illustrated by George Perez, this new series splendidly updated the original while staying true to the concepts established by Marston. This new Wonder Woman provided readers with the best and most faithful version of the character since Marston’s original.
For anyone interested in reading the original stories, I would recommend Wonder Woman Archives series (DC Comics), which collects the first four years worth of strips. These stories are some of the most unique of the 1940s, featuring a complex blend of feminism, wartime patriotism, Greek mythology, and bondage imagery in stories that move seamlessly through the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and mythology. The best stories from Perez’s tenure have been collected into a four-volume series that begins with Wonder Woman: Gods and Mortals (DC Comics, 2004). Other volumes such as Paul Dini’s Wonder Woman: Spirit of Truth (2001) and Greg Rucka’s Wonder Woman: Land of the Dead (2006, both DC Comics) provide a thoughtful analysis of Wonder Woman’s heroism.
The best Wonder Woman stories inspire us to imagine a more equalitarian world and encourage us to become agents of social change. They have the power to inspire girls (and boys) to become heroes in their own lives. In this era of books about gossiping, “mean girls,” and YA novels about distressed young women who starve, mutilate, and kill themselves, doesn’t Wonder Woman’s feminist message of peace, justice, and sexual equality need to be heard?
Author InformationPhilip Charles Crawford is the Library Director for Essex High School (VT). His review of Greg Rucka’s Wonder Woman: Mission’s End appears on p. 238.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6417196.html
http://girl-wonder.org/papers/robbins.html
Suffering Sappho! A Look At The Creator & Creation of Wonder Woman
by Charles Lyons
Posted: Wed, August 23rd, 2006 at 12:00AM PST
NOTE: The following article deals with adult situations.
She wasn't jettisoned from a doomed planet, she didn't witness the brutal murder of her parents, and she was never injected with radioactive venom, but the true story of Wonder Woman's origin is one of the strangest and most fascinating of any superhero. The Amazon princess debuted in the back of "All-Star Comics" #8 in December 1941, graduated to the cover story of "Sensation Comics" #1 in January, and merited her own title by the summer of 1942. Her powers were similar to those of Superman (who had not yet learned to fly, see through walls, or fear Kryptonite), but with a couple of interesting twists: she could deflect bullets with the heavy metal bracelets she wore on her wrists, and she carried a magical golden lasso which compelled anyone it snared to tell the truth.
Wonder Woman was not the first female superhero - she had been beaten to the punch by the likes of the Black Widow (no relation to the Marvel character) and Bulletgirl - but she quickly became the most successful and remains to this day the best known. DC Comics recently relaunched the "Wonder Woman" title with a new #1 written by Allan Heinberg, Co-Executive Producer of "The OC," and a feature film is in the works from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" creator Joss Whedon. Wonder Woman has been popular for over sixty years - and controversial from the moment she was born.
Wonder Woman's creator was William Moulton Marston, a Harvard-educated psychologist, lawyer and provocateur who invented a precursor of the modern polygraph (the likely inspiration for Wonder Woman's lie-detecting lasso). In October 1940, the popular women's magazine "Family Circle" published an interview with Marston entitled "Don't Laugh at the Comics," in which the psychologist discussed the unfulfilled potential of the medium. Maxwell Charles Gaines, then publisher of All-American Comics, saw the interview and offered Marston a job as an educational consultant to All-American and sister company DC Comics. Realizing that strong female role models in comics were virtually nonexistent, Marston sold Gaines on the concept of a superheroine who would combine "all the strength of a Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman" and began writing stories under the pen name Charles Moulton, combining his and his publisher's middle names.
Subtext is as much a part of comic books as superpowers, from the unconscious (Superman as the ultimate assimilated immigrant) to the unintentional (Fredric Wertham saw Batman and Robin's relationship as pedophilia). Wonder Woman's world is one that practically begs for analysis: coming from a utopian island inhabited only by women, she wears heavy manacles on her wrists and carries a rope everywhere she goes; she spent many of her early stories in bondage or restraining others, and even disciplined villains on Transformation Island, an Amazonian rehabilitation center that trained its all-female prison population to submit to "loving authority." Even her classic catch-phrase raises the eyebrow - what's with all that suffering Sappho is always doing, anyway?
Restraining the protagonist isn't necessarily sexual - after all, it's one of the few ways the villain has to incapacitate the hero or heroine without killing them (and thereby ending the story) - but in Marston's case much of this subtext was indeed intentional. As he told interviewer Olive Richard in the August 14, 1942 "Family Circle," "Tell me anybody's preference in story strips and I'll tell you his subconscious desires...Superman and the army of male comics characters who resemble him satisfy the simple desire to be stronger and more powerful than anybody else. Wonder Woman satisfies the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them."