The “Wonder Woman Was Created For Girls” Myth OR Beyonce’s Super Bowl Halftime Show As An Example Of William Moulton Marston’s Approach To Feminism

Last week, PBS aired their latest installment of Pioneers of Television and the focus of the show was superheroes.  It was an entertaining program, with lots of fun, behind the scenes information, and Wonder Woman got an entire section centered around an interview with Lynda Carter.  Near the top of the show, Carter said:

The creator of Wonder Woman really felt that girls needed a hero too, and developed Wonder Woman.

Which is what’s generally believed.  These days, Wonder Woman is an iconic symbol of female strength, embraced by women of all sorts.  Wonder Woman is THEIR hero, created for them.  However, Carter is wrong.

Wonder Woman became a hero for girls, largely because she was the only real female superhero for decades, but that wasn’t her creator’s original intent.  William Moulton Marston was a unique feminist who thought that women were superior to men.  Men were aggressive and cruel, while women were peaceful and kind, and so he thought that women should be in charge.  In fact, he thought that women WOULD be in charge.  To Marston, female rule was inevitable.  Girls didn’t need a hero, because they were well on their way to becoming heroes themselves.  Boys needed a female hero to prepare them for the coming rise of women.

In the early 1940s, superhero comics were full of men fighting and threatening and generally being dominant jerks, reinforcing exactly what Marston hated about men in power.  So he came up with Wonder Woman as an antidote for this “blood-curdling masculinity.”  Wonder Woman had all the power of her male counterparts, but was loving and kind.  He wanted boys to see how much better things were when women had power, but he needed something else to keep them interested.

For Marston, sexuality was a key component women’s power.  He thought that there was a thrill inherent in submitting to a woman and having her control you, which is why women would eventually take over.  Men would actually like life better with powerful women in charge.  This may speak more to his own sexual tastes than anything else, but it’s what he thought nonetheless.  So he filled Wonder Woman with bondage imagery, showing the Amazons tying each other up, Wonder Woman tying up people with her lasso, and Wonder Woman getting tied up herself.  This was a pretty common scene:

The bondage imagery was a metaphor for women being in control, and it was also intentionally sexual.  It was meant to excite male readers, to give them a small taste of how much fun it would be if women were in charge all the time.

Obviously, this is kind of a screwed up theory, and contradictory.  It’s feminism and fetishism all rolled into one, and it’s all sorts of bizarre.  However, at the core there was a feminist message.  It was just packaged in a manner that was overtly sexual and aimed at boys, and that in many ways objectified the character.

Which brings us to Beyoncé.

While watching the Super Bowl halftime show, I was struck by the similarities between Beyoncé’s persona and Marston’s approach to Wonder Woman.  Because this is the sort of thing I think about when I watch a football game, because I’m a nerd.  There were some surface similarities, what with her outfit and boots roughly resembling Wonder Woman’s usual garb, but there were was more to it than that.

The show had a definite feminist vibe, or at the very least an incredibly strong message of girl power.  EVERYONE on that stage was a woman: the band, the dancers, everybody.  Beyoncé moved around the stage with the utmost confidence, singing songs like “Independent Woman” and others that embodied her perennial theme of what Nathan Rabin has labeled “Fuck you, I’m awesome.”  Beyoncé’s songs are very assertive in terms of her own power and desires, particularly as they pertain to her womanhood, and by surrounding herself onstage with an all-female team that message was thus extended to them as well.  All in all, it was a very empowering show.

At the same time, this was a show for boys.  Much like Wonder Woman was a lone woman in a sea of male superheroes, so too was Beyoncé a rare female presence smack in the middle of a testosterone-fueled, all-male event.  The sexy outfit, the shaking of her assets, the rolling around on stage, and the regular suggestive glances at the camera were, much like Wonder Woman’s bondage, intentionally sexual and aimed squarely at men.

(Or ladies who enjoy other ladies.  I’ve got some lesbian/bisexual women in my Twitter feed and the show went over huge with them too).

So what we’ve got is a message of female empowerment presented in a sexualized manner for male entertainment, which is basically what we had way back in the 1940s with Marston’s Wonder Woman comics.  Girls love Beyoncé too, just like girls loved Wonder Woman in the 1940s, but in both cases the presentation is aimed much more at a male audience.

Some would say that one side trumps the other: The message of female empowerment rises above the objectification of the heroine OR the blatant sexualization of the heroine contaminates any message of female empowerment.  I think we should just let the contradiction stand.  The world is complicated, things are bizarre.  Wonder Woman represents female superiority AND her creator’s fetishes.  Beyoncé is all about the power of women AND her show was meant to turn on a male audience.  It doesn’t have to be either.  Wonder Woman and Beyoncé encapsulate both sides, for numerous and complicated reasons.

So whenever someone says that Wonder Woman was created for girls, just think of Beyoncé.  It shouldn’t be too hard, really.  If you’re anything like me, you’ve had “Crazy in Love” stuck in your head off and on for the last decade.

Wonder Woman #0 Review OR Kind Of Cute On The Surface, But Troubling Below

I’m not entirely sure why this issue didn’t work for me, so this review might be a bit of a jumble.  The Silver Age throwback should’ve been right up my alley!!  They were clearly going for a Robert Kanigher, 1960s Wonder Girl vibe, and man oh man do I know that stuff like the back of my hand.  It’s classic, and sort of terrible, but also fun in its own weird way.  And doing the issue in a throwback style is SUCH a cool idea that really takes advantage of this whole zero issue mandate.  I guess it just didn’t go anywhere interesting for me.  I expected more, maybe.  We’ll dig into it, but first:

SPOILERS!!!!!

If you haven’t read the issue yet, GO AWAY!!

You know that spoilers are the worst… just spare yourself the shame of spoiling yourself.

Okay, so back to the book.  As a throwback, it was cute.  The whole thing with Ares was a nice little story where young Diana learns to be a great warrior but finds out that at the end of the day her compassion comes first AND she awakens some compassion in the god of war too.  Things end badly between her and Ares, but she has a better sense of who she is.  Lovely.

However, that’s all it is.  It was a straight forward, simple tale, generally unconnected from the past twelve issues.  I’m sure it’ll have ramifications in the future, but for right now, as a single issue, it didn’t really do a lot.  I expected more from it, and in a few different ways.

First, in a practical sort of way, I expected a better pastiche of a Silver Age Wonder Woman comic.  Maybe it’s because I’m all over early Wonder Woman stuff, but this issue was off the mark.  It was both overdone and underdone.  The dialogue was comicly extravagant, even by Silver Age standards.  Check out this introduction of Ares:

Kanigher could throw down some overblown dialogue, but he was never this Shakespearean with it.  At the same time, the story itself was way too simple.  There’s a Wonder Girl birthday story in Wonder Woman #113 where there’s an earthquake, a tornado, a roc, a sea monster, and a birthday cake that gets blown into space and orbits the Earth.  It had hilariously random panels like this:

Plus it was only NINE pages long.  Wonder Woman #0 is 20 pages, and she trains some and fights a minotaur.  That’s like a page and a half in a Silver Age book.  This issue just didn’t capture the Silver Age vibe properly.

Second, I expected it to be darker.  We’ve gotten twelve issues of horror stories, really, and when I saw the preview I thought it would be fascinating to see how that translated into the innocuous, fantastical world of the Silver Age where no one ever really got hurt and everything was always swell.  What we got instead was a watered down Ares, compared to his deadly and explosive previous appearances, and a book that’s wasn’t at all creepy or gruesome or dark.  I thought they’d try to subvert the Silver Age style, but instead they just played it straight.

Third, I expected some sort or intrigue or connection to the complex machinations of the Olympian gods that we’ve seen so far.  The book has had all sorts of twists and turns and betrayals, and you never know who you can trust, especially after the last issue.  I thought we might see seeds of where we are now and hints of where we could be going, but it was just a straight-forward, simple story with no real connection to the bigger plot.

Now, I probably expected too much.  Azzarello and Chiang are two of the best in the business, and I was looking for something really clever and involved and they gave me simple and cute instead.  There’s nothing wrong with cute, I just thought there would be more.

The only way I could see why they went for this comicly overdone yet simplistic storytelling is if this issue is a ruse, a cheerier, pleasant take on what was actually a horrific relationship between Ares and Wonder Woman and we’ll find out what actually happened down the road.  I don’t think that’s what’s happening, and I hope that’s not what’s going on because lord knows we don’t need Wonder Woman to have even more complicated and messed up father figure issues.  I’m just saying, that’s the only reason I can imagine they’d do a story this way after what we’ve come to expect from the twelve issues previous.

Aside from my many expectation problems, the whole Ares training Diana thing is kind of irksome.  She already has crazy powers because Zeus, a man, is her father, and now she’s got fighting skills because Ares, a man, trained her?  This is a lot of men for an Amazon.  Being an Amazon should be more than enough to make Wonder Woman awesome and bad ass.  They are fierce, epic warriors.  And if you’re thinking that maybe Diana needed the extra grit and brutality that only the god of war could provide, in current continuity the Amazons are straight up murderers.  They don’t play around.

By having Ares train Wonder Woman, the implication is that Amazon training isn’t enough, that Diana needs more than her Amazon background to be a real hero.  And it’s a double whammy with the new Zeus angle too.  You could argue that in this new continuity, the Amazons are almost useless.  They’re rapists who all seem to hate Diana, apart from her mom.  She gets cool superpowers from Zeus and awesome fighting skills from Ares.  All the Amazons are good for is Hippolyta providing a uterus and the rest of them teasing Diana enough that she’s got something to rebel against so she can be a cool bad ass.  Wonder Woman used to be great BECAUSE she was an Amazon, but now it seems that she’s great IN SPITE of being an Amazon.  That makes me sad.

I know the whole Amazon story is xenophobic and problematic, but the fact is that in such a ridiculously patriarchal genre, a female superhero being the product of a race of warrior women is kind of epic.  Strong men are EVERYWHERE in comics while strong women are few and far between, but Wonder Woman came from a whole island of them!!  It’s awesome, and that’s why she was created in the first place.  William Moulton Marston was sick of male superheroes being dicks and punching everybody, so he created Wonder Woman who was a more loving, happy superhero but at the same time just as strong as everyone else.  And she was all of these things because that’s how the Amazons raised her.  The Amazons were powerful, wise, and kind, and taught legions of women to be the same way.  Now, everything comes from men, and the Amazons just sort of suck.

Now, I doubt that this undermining of the Amazons and the new, male-based powers of Wonder Woman are some sort of scheme on Azzarello’s part to make Wonder Woman wholly dependent on men.  Instead, I think he’s just all wrapped up in trying to tell his story and not actively taking into account the character’s history and the significance of her Amazon heritage and the strength and power of women that it suggests.  I don’t think any sort of feminist, much less matriarchal, angle is on his mind, and because of that this history is being eroded and replaced.  It’s not malevolent.  Just careless.

Well know I dislike this issue a lot more.  That took a weird turn for me with the Ares thing at the end here.  I thought I had a handle on what I thought about that, but it seems that I’m more upset about it than I anticipated.  Oh well.  Again, I don’t think it’s an intentional thing.  I just don’t think they’re paying attention to Wonder Woman’s feminist history and taking into account what these new changes mean in that regard.

Overall, it’s a cute little issue, which is nice, but I expected a lot more out of it.  It also tweaks Wonder Woman’s origins in an even more male-based way, which is very annoying.  If you start reading between the lines, you end up in a dark place like I just did there.  It really sneaks up on you.

Anyway, I expected more in a great many ways, from an accurate throwback to feminist origins, and got none of it.  So it goes.  The art was pretty, and it was a nice story.  It’s the first issue in a while I could let my nieces read, though then we’d have to have a long talk about Ares and why the Amazons seem to be such bitches.  Maybe they don’t read this one, then.  But yeah, it was cute on the surface, and troubling below.

The 1940s Justice Society Of America Were A Surprisingly Progressive Bunch

A few weeks back we learned that Wonder Woman’s background role as the secretary of the Justice Society in the 1940s wasn’t some sort of patriarchal, sexist scheme.  Instead, it was actually about William Moulton Marston wanting complete control of his character.  Today we’ll gain an even better appreciation for the people behind All-Star Comics.  Not only were they not sexist jerks, there were also some really impressive messages of tolerance in the book.

All-Star Comics #22 begins with Dr. Midnite strolling to the Justice Society headquarters when he comes across some ruffians beating up another boy.  He asks them what their problem is, and then straightens them out after they explain:

For the rest of the issue, various members of the Justice Society get sent through time to fight prejudice in various historical eras.  They all return to the present, keen to teach others the importance of understanding your fellow man.  The entire Justice Society goes to a local school to spread their message and tell the kids that bullying others because they’re different is anti-American, and they all say the Pledge of Allegiance together:

SIDENOTE: You may have noticed that the phrase “under God” wasn’t included.  That’s because it wasn’t part of the original pledge.  It was added in the 1950s when everyone was all fired up about the godless commies, around the same time America put “In God we trust” on their money and legislated other religion-based empty gestures.  So if someone ever tries to point to “under God” as an example that America is a supposedly Christian nation, show them this issue of All-Star Comics!!  Separation of church and state, ya’ll!!

Anyway, after the school says the Pledge of Allegiance, Wonder Woman pops up with this impressively open-minded aside:

“Regardless of RACE, COLOR, or RELIGION!” is a pretty huge thing to say in 1944.  I mean, Catholic/Protestant was still a big divide, as evidenced by the beginning of this comic, much less hot button issues like race!!  It’s fitting that Wonder Woman is the one to point out the inclusionary nature of “liberty and justice for all”, seeing as equality and fairness were common themes in her own comics, and it’s nice to see them echoed in All-Star Comics as well, what with its different creative team.  Marston was a hardcore feminist, but Gardner Fox had some progressive ideas too!!

Then in ­All-Star Comics #27, we learn about another group that we need to treat fairly.  Covering race and religion wasn’t enough… the Justice Society is also all about helping people who are physically disabled:

The issue ended with the Justice Society writing a pledge that disabled individuals aren’t to be shunned or pitied but rather should be treated equally.  The pledge page also showed a series of physically disabled people who accomplished great things:

The Justice Society was REALLY into equality.  Regardless of your color, religion, or physical disability, the Justice Society had your back and considered you a friend.  It was an impressively progressive message for the early 1940s, and one I was surprised to find.  There’s a lot of bad stuff in Golden Age comics, and it’s really cool to see such positive messages.  It’s no wonder that the new Justice Society in Earth 2 has a gay Green Lantern… the team’s been tolerant and open-minded for ages!!

David Arquette Got A Tattoo Of Wonder Woman From Sensation Comics #81

While recently on Bethenny Frankel’s talk show Bethenny (SIDENOTE: I have NO idea who this is or why she has a talk show), David Arquette revealed that he got a new tattoo on his torso.  It’s impressively large, going from just above his waistband to halfway up his ribcage, and it depicts a panel from Sensation Comics #81, published in September 1948.  Here’s the tattoo:

And here is the panel:

The tattoo is on the right side of his body (his right, not our right) so it makes sense that they’d flip the art so as Wonder Woman would be looking towards the center of his chest.  That’s just Tattooing 101, really.  They couldn’t put it on the other side of his torso because he already had tattoos there.  So yeah, it’s a big tattoo, and a random panel to reference!!

The panel is from a story called “When Treachery Wore a Green Shirt”, where Wonder Woman breaks up an anti-immigrant organization in a small town that was about to lynch an immigrant named George Zenko and his employer.  Zenko sounds like a fairly Eastern European name, though his country of origin isn’t specified.  The Green Shirts are all up in arms that a “foreigner” got a job instead of an American, so they’re fixing to hang the two men when Wonder Woman comes by and busts them up.  Then she gives the lovely speech about being friendly to all that Arquette tattooed on his torso.

It’s worth pointing out that this story is SUPER white.  The message of tolerance thus comes across as a “white people should be nice to white people” speech.  There’s no mention of America’s massive racial problems at the time, be it the segregation of African Americans or the resentment towards Asians that lingered after the war.  Instead, we learn to be nice to people that look like us.  Of course, this is a very 21st century reading of it… for 1948, the speech was a reasonably progressive message.

The Grand Comics Database credits H.G. Peter with the writing for this issue.  Clearly it’s his art, but I don’t recall Peter ever writing anything.  Marston had died about a year before this issue came out, so I doubt he wrote it either (the story says “by Charles Moulton”, but they ALL did until the mid-1960s).  It was more likely Robert Kanigher, who was the regular writer on Wonder Woman and most of Sensation Comics at the time, or maybe Sheldon Mayer, the book’s editor.

The story usually gets credited to Marston, however, because the story was reprinted in the 1972 collection of Wonder Woman stories published by Ms. Magazine with introductions by Gloria Steinem.  All of the stories in the book are credited to Marston, though a couple of them are from late in the 1940s and his authorship is unlikely.  Also, a few of them seem to have actually been written by Joye Murchison, Marston’s assistant.  I bet Steinem would have loved to know that when she put the book together!!

I don’t know where David Arquette first encountered this panel, but I’m betting it was this book.  It’s that, or he’s got an EXTENSIVE Golden Age Wonder Woman collection.  This story has yet to be collected in an any of DC’s reprint series (Archives, Chronicles, Showcase, etc.) and the Ms. book is fairly well known. 

So good work getting a classy tattoo, David Arquette!!  I’m a little concerned for the guy, what with his divorce and lack of much of a career lately.  Getting a random, MASSIVE tattoo can sometimes be a step in a downward spiral (particularly if it’s of a strong, brunette woman and you just got divorced from a strong, brunette woman…), but hopefully he’s just really into Wonder Woman and things are going well for him.  Either way, it’s a cool tattoo!!

Wonder Woman: Secretary Of The Justice Society Of America

Way back in the 1940s, decades before the Justice League first appeared, DC’s premiere superhero team was the Justice Society of America.  The all-male team was always off fighting Nazis and other evildoers in All-Star Comics, but the most famous character to come from the book was Wonder Woman, who appeared for the first time ever in All-Star Comics #8.  She soon became an honorary member of the Justice Society, and some of you may have seen a version of this ad that listed her as the team’s secretary:

Some form of this ad appeared in several issues of All-Star Comics, and it’s been reprinted in various books and on several websites over the years, and the story behind Wonder Woman’s secretarial role is an unusual one.

In All-Star Comics #13, Wonder Woman fought alongside the team and so impressed her fellow members that they offered her the secretary gig for the team.  She was, of course, beyond thrilled to accept:

And here’s how the team was introduced the following issue:

All of the male heroes, Hawkman, Starman, Atom, Doctor Fate, Doctor Midnite, Spectre, Johnny Thunder, and Sandman, were listed, and then “as secretary to the Justice-Society” came Wonder Woman.  Her secretarial role was attached to her introduction for years to come.

Plus, she didn’t do much of anything.  Here she is later on in All-Star Comics #14, electing to stay behind while the rest of the team goes off to Europe to foil a nefarious scheme:

And this went on for a while.  Here’s Wonder Woman TWENTY issues later in All-Star Comics #33 staying behind yet again:

Damn patriarchy, right?!  You can’t have a woman be a full member of the team, she has to be a secretary.  And then anytime Hitler gets up to something, you have to leave the woman behind because it’s men’s work.  Those sexist fiends!!  Wonder Woman’s feminist creator, William Moulton Marston, must have been outraged!!

Well, he was outraged, but for completely different reasons.  When another author wrote Wonder Woman in one of her first Justice Society appearances, Marston was fairly irate.  He demanded to rewrite the story and wanted complete control of the character after that, which he was given.  But seeing as he and H.G. Peter were busy producing Wonder Woman stories for Wonder Woman, Sensation Comics, AND Comic Cavalcade, it ended up that All-Star Comics fell by the wayside.  The book had a couple Marston/Peter Wonder Woman stories over the years, but usually Wonder Woman just appeared in the first few pages, had a line or two, and then stayed behind while the rest of the team went off to fight the bad guys.

So the guys behind All-Star Comics weren’t actually patriarchal, sexist fiends.  Well, at least not in this regard.  Generally, chances are they were… it was 1940s America, after all.  But in this instance, Wonder Woman was relegated to the background because Marston wanted to be the only one to write her.  Ironically, the demands of Wonder Woman’s feminist creator led to Wonder Woman taking a very unfeminist role with the team. 

By the late 1940s, however, Marston had gotten very ill, and he passed away in 1947.  Around this time, Wonder Woman took a more active role in the Justice Society.  In fact, in All-Star Comics #38 it was Wonder Woman who brought in the Justice Society’s second female member, Black Canary:

Unfortunately, by the time Wonder Woman was able to do more in the Justice Society, All-Star Comics wasn’t long for the world.  The book was cancelled in 1951, and Wonder Woman was the only character whose solo series survived.  It would be more than a decade before most of the Justice Society would again appear in comics, but Wonder Woman stayed in print the entire time. 

So yeah, Wonder Woman was the Justice Society’s secretary, just not for the usual sexist reasons we’d expect.  There was no lack of sexism in 1940s comic books, but in this particular situation there were other factors at play.  Go figure!!

The Winged Citizens of Venus OR Did Wally Wood Steal Designs From H.G. Peter?!

No.  Of course Wally Wood didn’t steal designs from H.G. Peter.  But their winged Venusians were oddly similar.

Wally Wood is a comic book and science fiction legend.  In the 1950s and 1960s he illustrated countless stories by some of the biggest names in science fiction, both in prose digests and comic book adaptations.  His interpretations of these stories were huge in terms of setting the standards for how we think of science fiction visually.  Wood also compiled the famous “22 Panels That Always Work”, a handy guide still used by artists today.  Plus he did a million other super awesome things, and then it all ended tragically… Wood was epic all around.

In 1951, Wood illustrated An Earth Man on Mars, a one-shot comic put out by Avon Periodicals.  In the comic, scientist Myles Cabot is transported to Venus, where he battles giant ant creatures and falls in love with Lilla, princess of the conquered humanoids.  It’s a pretty great story, really.  Myles teaches them how to make gunpowder and they build guns and tanks and take down their oppressive giant ant overlords.  The Venusians have antennae and wings, as you can see from Princess Lilla here:

However, six years earlier, H.G. Peter drew Venusians in Wonder Woman #12, where Wonder Woman meets Desira, Queen of Venus, and saves the planet from invasion.  While Peter’s Venusians didn’t have antennas, they were certainly winged:

It seems that Wally Wood’s An Earth Man on Venus stole from H.G. Peter’s Wonder Woman!!  Scandalous?!  Not so much.  If anything, it may have been the other way around.

Now, it was probably just a coincidence… sticking wings on someone is hardly a unique idea when it comes to aliens.  However, An Earth Man on Venus was an adaptation of Ralph Milne Farley’s 1924 novel, The Radio Man, which had all of the same elements in the comic, including the wings.  Peter might have been familiar with the story and swiped part of the design for his Venusians in Wonder Woman, but that’s just speculation.

However, Wood did have his Venusian princess bound at one point:

And lord knows that William Moulton Marston’s Golden Age Wonder Woman was chock full of bondage, including this scene with Queen Desira:

Coincidence?  A likely excuse!!

No, really.  It’s the most likely excuse.  Marston and Peter hardly had a copyright on someone getting tied up, much less a damsel in distress.  That’s all sorts of common.

Nonetheless, it’s a fun coincidence!!  If you’re interested, you can check out An Earth Man on Venus by clicking here, or read it and several other stories in Vanguard’s recent Wally Wood: Strange Worlds of Science Fiction.  Wonder Woman’s Venus adventure is reprinted in Wonder Woman Archives Volume 5 for a small fortune, or you can patiently wait for another 4 or 5 Wonder Woman Chronicles books to come out.

Wonder Woman: Bondage By Frank Miller And Bill Sienkiewicz, And How Way Off It Would Have Been

Bleeding Cool ran this image today (first posted at DC Women Kicking Ass) of a bound Wonder Woman drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz.  It seems that Frank Miller and Sienkiewicz were talking about doing a Wonder Woman series called Wonder Woman: Bondage, inspired by the bondage themes in William Moulton Marston’s original Wonder Woman stories, and this was a test piece:

The date on the picture appears to be March 15, 2005, and the thought bubble reads: “I’ll bet Elektra never had to go thru this kind of humiliation… but I shouldn’t gloat.”

Sienkiewicz spoke to Bleeding Cool about the image, which was never meant to be seen by the public, and said:

[Wonder Woman’s] been simultaneously revered and handled poorly in some incarnations. To me she’s always been a ‘”symbol” more than a character that has been well-utilized in a story context. The most interesting stuff was the earliest – and felt the ripest for revisiting.

The fact that her creator William Marston also created the precursor to the lie detector and was into bondage lent a weird kinky vibe and made the idea of mucking with her and her origin a potentially fun trip.

The image was done by me to visually test the water, so to speak and my own comfort level, if not everyone else’s, about how far it could be pushed. I did some others that were far more extreme, no one has seen those, this one was relatively tame by comparison. Still it was perhaps a bit over the top, but I think Frank and I invited that.

I think Sienkiewicz pushed it too far.  Having spent three years researching Wonder Woman, I know way, way too much about her bondage-laden past and the theories/kinks behind it, but I still find the picture a little disconcerting.  Wonder Woman got tied up ALL the time, and even worse than in Sienkiewicz’s picture.  Check out this involved bondage scene from Wonder Woman #6:

She’s got a mask, a neck brace, tons of chains AND the golden lasso tied around her, plus after this she gets dropped in a big tank of water.  Sienkiewicz’s scenario seems like a bit of a tight spot, but Wonder Woman’s gotten out of worse.  The picture, however, is still very off-putting.

I think part of the problem is that we can’t see her face.  From the dialogue, it seems that she’s glad to be tied up, but a smile and a wink could go a long way here.  Wonder Woman was happy to be tied up lots of times:

Though she was also sad a lot, and those images don’t bother me as much as Sienkiewicz’s does.  Consider this panel from Wonder Woman #2 where a bound and crying Wonder Woman is taunted by her captor:

Now, this is not a fun image, but I don’t find it nearly as disturbing as the Sienkiewicz piece.  I think that ultimately, H.G. Peter’s artwork from the 1940s was much less visceral in two main ways.

First, Peter’s style was cartoonish.  He certainly had a unique style for the time… Wonder Woman and Sensation Comics looked rather different from anything else on the stands.  But it wasn’t anything near realistic.  Sienkiewicz, on the other hand, is certainly a very stylized artist, but with a far more realistic vibe. 

Second, this realism affects how we see the piece.  Sienkiewicz’s Wonder Woman is contorted and taut.  Her legs are bent back, her shoulders are pulled down… there’s a tightness to the piece that well communicates that her bonds have debilitated her.  With Peter, the layouts were far more basic.  Wonder Woman would be tied to a post, or chained to a table.  Her body was rarely twisted by her bonds.  Plus, it always felt like she could escape at any second… Peter’s Wonder Woman never seemed completely helpless.  Sienkiewicz’s picture looks like a really messed up murder scene, and Wonder Woman appears lifeless.  Peter’s art never sapped the life from the character.

I think this would have been a pretty terrible comic, as both men seem to be missing the tone/message of the original bondage entirely.  Bill Sienkiewicz is a fantastic artist, and Frank Miller is a great writer (I know a lot of Wonder Woman fans hate his take on the character in All Star Batman, but I think it’s far more hilarious and clever than people give it credit for), but they’re way off base.  I don’t know if Sienkiewicz or Miller came up with the dialogue for the image, but humiliation was absolutely not a part of Wonder Woman’s bondage past.

For Marston, what was good about bondage wasn’t a masochistic pleasure in being humiliated.  It was all about trusting the person who bound you, and being comfortable in giving control of yourself entirely to someone else.  It was a message of love and trust, and while super weird for a kid’s comic book, it’s kind of quaint and nice when you compare it to how we think about bondage today.  Marston believed that bondage went bad when this love and trust were removed and it became a dominance situation.  Rendering the bound party completely powerless or humiliated was a total perversion of how Marston thought bondage and submission should be.  When Wonder Woman was so bound, it was meant to illustrate the evils of our society. 

It all tied into his theories about how women should rule the world (bondage equals power; men tend to be dominant and cruel, while women tend to be loving and caring, thus we’d all be better off if we submitted to women and put them in charge), and it’s all very bizarre, but it’s a particular sort of bizarre.  Sienkiewicz and Miller’s interpretation of it, or at least what I can glean from this image, is WAY off the mark.  This image is bizarre in the wrong way.  Marston was certainly weird and kinky, and there are some serious problems with the way he presented his bondage theories, but Sienkiewicz seems to be operating from a far more modern concept of bondage and that’s not what the original comics were about.

So yeah, super off-putting picture.  I think that Sienkiewicz on a Wonder Woman book could be really cool, but maybe with a lighter sort of story.  Or at least dark in a different way.