Mind Candy

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  And if he lets go of the guilt, if he admits to himself that his life is a mess and maybe Spider-Man should have a slightly lower priority, if he acknowledges that he’s done what he could to make up for letting Uncle Ben die—in short, if he grows up—then he’ll be letting Uncle Ben go, and he’ll be losing his excuse for spending so much of his time out there reveling in the sheer physical delight of swinging on his web, dodging danger, and punching out thugs.

  If he admits that he’s being Spider-Man for fun, rather than out of duty, then he can’t justify letting it ruin his life. The whole emotional structure he’s built up for so long will collapse.

  He’s not ready to face that. And with the system so wonderfully balanced, so perfectly self-sustaining, he probably never will be.

  For which all those New Yorkers whose purses might be snatched, who might be accosted in dark alleys, who might be injured or killed in the collateral damage of some super-villain’s attacks, can be very, very grateful.

  Wonder Woman: Diana Who?

  Diana, the Amazon princess from Paradise Island—that’s Wonder Woman, right? Clad in a red, white, blue, and gold costume, equipped with her magic lasso, her bulletproof bracelets, and other devices, she has come to Man’s World as a herald of peace; she has the strength of Hercules, the wisdom of Athena, the speed of Hermes, and the beauty of Aphrodite.

  So the karate-chopping chick in a white leather jumpsuit, traveling the world with an old blind Chinese guy and a tough-talking American P.I., is clearly someone completely different, right?

  Nope, that’s Wonder Woman, too.

  Honest, that’s her.

  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, bear with me; all will become clear. Although few people remember it—and some of those few would prefer not to—for about three years Wonder Woman was a very different character.

  You may ask, “How did that happen? What does it mean?” Well, that’s what I’m here to tell you.

  Let us quickly review the character’s history. Created just as the U.S. was entering the Second World War, Wonder Woman was deliberately designed by her creator, William Moulton Marston, as a feminist icon—a strong female character girls could look up to, as boys looked up to Superman and Batman. She was a success to the point that for decades, when people spoke of great American superheroes, the list usually ran “Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the rest.”

  Those early-forties years were the days of Rosie the Riveter, of women doing their part on the home front, of WACs and WAVEs. Although it was still very much a male-dominated society, women were expected to do their part in the workplace, in the military—and in comic books. Once Wonder Woman had blazed the trail there were lots of female superheroes in the comics of the period—Phantom Lady, Sun Girl, Venus, Mary Marvel, the Blonde Phantom, and dozens more, all the way down to the original Red Tornado.

  In the postwar world, though, women were sent back to the kitchen. In the movies the strong women played by Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn were replaced by airheads played by Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, while TV gave us the infantile antics of “I Love Lucy.”

  And in the postwar comics, romance comics were targeted at girls, and the surviving superheroes at boys; the likes of Moon Girl and Lady Luck faded away, until by the mid-fifties only Wonder Woman remained.

  Even she wasn’t exactly thriving; by the time the superhero revival of the so-called “Silver Age” began in 1956 Superman and Batman were still appearing in three titles apiece even without counting Superboy, while Wonder Woman was down to one bimonthly, and even in that one she had been toned down. Many of the more eccentric features of the character had been lost after Marston’s death; her sidekick Etta Candy had been written out, along with some of the bondage elements and the lesbian overtones, as part of the campaign to clean up the comics in the early fifties.

  (If you don’t know what bondage and lesbianism I’m talking about, you haven’t read a lot of the early Wonder Woman stories. It was pretty unmistakable. But it almost all got completely erased in the 1950s—the magic lasso stayed but got used far less, and sometimes a writer would remember that if a man bound her bracelets together she had to obey him, but the rest, the all-girl outings and the loving submission stuff, was gone without a trace.)

  By the 1960s Wonder Woman was a miserable shadow of her former glory; her adventures were virtually indistinguishable from those of any other DC hero. She spent her time battling lame supervillains like Angle Man and the King of Crime in incoherent, badly-drawn stories where Steve Trevor played the Lois Lane role of trying to convince her to marry him.

  Sales were terrible. Not surprising, considering what she had been reduced to, but still, they were terrible.

  When a title’s sales are terrible, there are really just two things you can do—you can cancel it, or you can revamp it. DC didn’t want to cancel Wonder Woman because under their original contract with the Marston family, then still in effect, if they ever stopped publishing the character for more than a set period of time (rumored to be two years) they would lose all claim to her; ownership would revert to the Marstons. The comic book might be losing money, but they were still profitably merchandising the character, and still thought she had untapped commercial potential.

  That meant it was time for a revamp.

  Comic books have a long history of revamping and reinventing characters, and generally speaking, there are two standard modes for doing it. One is to strip away all the accumulated clutter and take the character back to his roots—figure out just what the original appeal was and how it was lost, and try to get it back, streamlining the stories to remove distractions. The other is to modernize and reinvent the character—keep the core concept and throw out everything else, and build a new character around that concept. DC had successfully employed both these methods at various times, reinventing the Flash and Green Lantern, but taking Batman back to his roots.

  They had also botched them on occasion—the 1960s reinvention of the Blackhawks was a horror beyond description.

  With Wonder Woman, it’s not hard to imagine the editorial staff at DC Comics considering these two approaches and finding it an easy choice. Return her to her roots? Which roots would those be? The Amazon sent to bring peace to Man’s World, with the use of secret super-tech like telepathic radios? The leader of a gang of athletic young women who seem suspiciously friendly with each other and disinterested in men? The crypto-dominatrix with rope and cuffs? The golem daughter of Hippolyta who worships Athena and Aphrodite?

  Really, did any of that make any sense in the Swinging Sixties? Okay, maybe the bondage stuff… but would the Comics Code approve that?

  Let’s face it, the original Wonder Woman’s background was just weird, and more than a little kinky—and if you stripped all that away, all you were left with was a sort of female Superman, superhumanly strong and fast but with no real personality or motivation. There was no high concept like “last son of Krypton” or “dark avenger” to go with. “Amazon princess” just doesn’t carry the same impact.

  No, reinvention was clearly the way to go.

  So where does that get you? When DC reinvented the Flash, the basic concept was simple—the world’s fastest man. For Green Lantern, it was a guy with a magic ring. But what was the root concept for Wonder Woman?

  “Amazon princess” would be one approach—it’s been used in other, later revamps—but what the Powers That Were settled on in 1968 was apparently just “female superhero.” So if that’s your starting point, where do you go from there?

  Where they went—well, they appear to have looked around for female action heroes of the day, and found Diana Rigg playing Emma Peel on “The Avengers,” and Stephanie Powers as “The Girl from UNCLE,” and pretty much nothing else. American popular culture at the time had no equivalent of Buffy or Xena, and the folks at DC apparently didn’t want to try anything very daring—they were definitely more interested in following trends than in setting them at that time.


  Mrs. Peel and the girl from UNCLE were there, though, waiting to be imitated, so they determined to transform Wonder Woman from an Amazon in a one-piece swimsuit into a modishly-dressed karate-wielding super-spy.

  The first step was to dump all the existing background, none of which made sense for a spy, so the transformation began with an issue where the patron goddesses of the Amazons abruptly decided that “Man’s World” was becoming too powerful and intrusive, and that Paradise Island must therefore be transported into an alternate dimension and cut off from all contact with Earth. Princess Diana, a.k.a. Diana Prince, a.k.a. Wonder Woman, was informed that she must choose—return to Paradise Island and stay with her fellow Amazons forever, or remain on Earth, never to go home again, never to see her mother or her sister Amazons again. And as an extra kick in the head, if she stayed behind she would lose all her Amazon powers, as those came either from Amazon technology she would have to surrender, or from goddesses who were severing all ties to Earth. (One of the weirder aspects of the earliest Wonder Woman stories was how they blithely mixed high tech with magic—the Amazons were more scientifically and technologically advanced than the outside world, and they had goddesses supplying them with magic. Later versions tended to lose at least one of these two features.)

  Given this choice, Diana chose Earth, of course—if she hadn’t, the series would have ended. Her inexplicable and apparently asexual love for Steve Trevor would not permit her to leave Man’s World behind, so after tearful goodbyes to Queen Hippolyta and the rest, she watched as Paradise Island vanished “forever.” (In comic books, “forever” means “at least a couple of issues.”)

  She gave up her costume, which was the garb of an Amazon champion, along with her magic lasso, amazonium bracelets, boomerang tiara, and other weapons. She stopped calling herself “Wonder Woman,” as that was the title of an Amazon champion or a superheroine.

  Then she quit the Justice League, since she no longer had super-powers.

  That took care of her costume, her powers, her ties to other DC heroes, and the whole Amazon mythology—but they weren’t done with her yet. She had stayed on Earth to be with Steve Trevor.

  So the next step in reinventing her was to kill off Steve Trevor.

  This was not exactly a new idea; I think Steve Trevor may well hold the all-time record for “supposedly mortal character most often killed off and brought back,” and in comics that’s a heavily-contested title. He’s “died” over and over and over in the sixty-plus years since he first appeared, and his 1968 death was neither his first nor his last—but it may have been the longest-lasting.

  And it effectively left Princess Diana with nothing. She had given up her home, her family, her heritage, her super-powers, everything to be with this guy—who was now dead. She didn’t really have much else in the way of friends or family at that point, with Etta and the Holliday Girls all long gone, so this pretty thoroughly wiped her out emotionally. When she ran into trouble and found herself facing bad guys she could once have taken out in minutes, she was helpless. Without her super-powers she didn’t know how to fight.

  The writers had stripped away pretty much everything at that point, and were ready to rebuild her into the New, Improved Wonder Woman.

  Breaking someone down, stripping away his or her old life, in order to rebuild him better and stronger, is hardly a new idea; it’s been used in fiction for thousands of years, and in real life by religions, the military, and others. It’s a good, solid method for changing someone, real or fictional. DC had torn away everything Diana Prince had, and now it was time to give her a new life that would, they hoped, sell more comic books than the old.

  The first step was the appearance of a mysterious stranger, telling her that she need not be helpless after all, that she could rebuild her life and be a new Wonder Woman, even without her Amazon abilities.

  That might have been a nice idea if they’d handled it well, but alas, they didn’t. The mysterious stranger was an old blind Chinese guy in a dark suit and bowler hat, calling himself I Ching and prone to making pronouncements like, “Speed is useless if it rushes one to blank wall!”

  Even in 1968 that was an insulting ethnic stereotype, as well as a blatant Charlie Chan swipe. It didn’t help any that the colorist gave I Ching bright orange skin.

  And given that this was Wonder Woman, it didn’t help that he was male.

  One core element that had survived all the previous changes the series had gone through was that Wonder Woman was her own woman, not any man’s sidekick; she had always fought her battles as a man’s equal or better, and didn’t need a male to protect or guide her. Steve Trevor, however tedious a character he might have been, had never tried to tell her what to do; even Superman had respected her independence. She was a woman, not a girl. She had never acknowledged a male as her mentor, her better, or her teacher.

  Until now.

  Right there, quite aside from everything else, I think we have a very clear indication that the people responsible for the revamp had missed the point of the character, completely and totally.

  It didn’t really get better after that. I Ching did help Diana rebuild her life; he taught her karate, judo, and other mysterious Asian martial arts, advised her in finding a new career as the owner of a trendy boutique, and provided spiritual guidance. He fought beside her as she battled thugs, spies, saboteurs, and the minions of the mysterious Dr. Cyber—and when he did it was never very clear, at least not to me, which of them was the sidekick. This new Wonder Woman seemed incapable of functioning on her own.

  As if that weren’t enough, the writers then proceeded to shove various handsome detectives into the story, to accompany Diana on her various missions and provide at least the possibility of romance—first Tim Trench (who I believe was newly created for the role), and then Jonny Double (who had appeared in Showcase, but failed to get his own title). Where the old Wonder Woman had not needed any men, this new version appeared to need at least two.

  They really had thrown away everything and started fresh; the New Wonder Woman was not an independent super-hero, but a karate-chopping counter-spy working with two or more men as her advisors and teachers.

  It may have seemed like a good idea, a trendy thing to do, a way to build in a romantic element that they thought would attract girls as readers—but this lost everything that made the character unique, including the idea that she was a role model showing girls they didn’t need to depend on men.

  It wasn’t really Wonder Woman. This was a character named Diana Prince, but it was no longer the Wonder Woman William Marston had created back in the 1940s.

  And it apparently wasn’t a big hit with readers.

  I don’t have sales figures, but I do have the evidence of what DC published. Less than a year after sending Paradise Island away “forever” in issue #178, it reappeared in #183. (The title was bimonthly throughout this period, so that was an eight-month absence.) Oh, it was still in that alternate dimension, but somehow that wasn’t a problem any more—an Amazon messenger had no trouble reaching Earth and fetching Diana home to fight Ares, god of war. Who, it seemed, wanted the secret of inter-dimensional travel, which only Queen Hippolyta knew, but somehow the Amazons could still send a messenger while Hippolyta was in a coma; why Ares didn’t demand the messenger hand over the secret…

  Well, comic books have often had these little plot problems. The point is, DC had brought back all the mythic elements they had deliberated dumped less than a year earlier.

  This retreat to familiar ground might have been an attempt to stop a slump in sales, or it might have just been an editor having cold feet, but whatever DC’s reason was, it doesn’t seem that bringing back the Amazons produced a surge in sales, because after a two-part story Diana was back on Earth, once again without Amazon powers, fancy costume, or contact with Paradise Island, fighting international conspiracies alongside I Ching and the detective of the moment.

  At least she finally took charge of matter
s—after a few more issues it had at last become clear that she was the star, and I Ching was the sidekick. Ching no longer accompanied her everywhere; his role began to look more like her equivalent of Batman’s Alfred. And while she still nominally had no super-strength, her karate abilities reached superhuman levels.

  But the new format was still not a hit. By #199 DC was apparently getting a little desperate—they hired illustrator Jeff Jones to provide covers for two issues. The cover of #199, showing Diana Prince clad in a clingy white dress, kneeling and chained to the wall, looking frightened of the headsman behind her, was not exactly doing much for female empowerment, but it probably drew a few male readers.

  I doubt very much it attracted any girls, though. Wonder Woman had been created to be a role model for girls, and showing her chained and helpless… well, that’s not a role model I want for my daughter!

  When the Jones covers didn’t help, they threw Diana into an alternate world where she encountered Fritz Leiber’s sword-and-sorcery heroes, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Fantasy was trendy at the time; presumably they thought this would boost sales.

  It didn’t.

  Finally, with #204, cover-dated February 1973, they gave up. They killed off I Ching, and put Wonder Woman back in costume, with her powers restored and Paradise Island back where it belonged, without explanation.

  (Yes, they should have explained how Paradise Island came back to Earth, and all the rest of it. They didn’t.)

  I don’t know exactly why they gave up; they never said, and the people who made the decision are gone. I can make some guesses, though.

  It might be that sales were so bad they felt they had nothing left to lose.

  It might be that the Marston family finally noticed and protested.

  Most likely, though, it was because DC had just sold the rights to the character to TV—the first made-for-TV movie, “The New Original Wonder Woman,” starring Lynda Carter, premiered in 1975. Figuring in the lead time to finalize the deal and then write, cast, and produce the flick, that would work out just about right. After all, it would hardly do to let the Hollywood producers who had just bought the rights to film the World War II era Amazon princess notice that the current issues on the newsstands featured a bad imitation of Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel instead of the character they thought they were getting.