Wonder Woman Unbound

by Hanley, Tim

  The initial TV movie was a fairly faithful adaptation of Wonder Woman’s origin story from All Star Comics #8 and Sensation Comics #1. In what was probably not a coincidence, these were the two stories that opened up the Ms. Wonder Woman book too. The first year of the series followed the same basic setup as Marston’s comics: Steve Trevor was a pilot and Diana Prince was his secretary who would turn into Wonder Woman whenever danger arose. The show even borrowed some characters from the original comics, with Etta Candy becoming a coworker of Diana’s and Paula von Gunther showing up as a villain for an episode.

  Carter played her dual role with the same contrast as the Marston years. Her Wonder Woman was vibrant and bright, a brave and confident heroine, while her Diana Prince was a meek and dowdy wallflower. Carter captured both sides well, especially in a scene where she explained her life in America to her sister, Drusilla. As Wonder Woman, she nobly declared, “If the Nazis win, the whole world would be subjected to slavery. I feel that by staying here, I can help in some small way towards preventing this catastrophe.” She then pulled the classic spin change, and in her Diana garb she giggled and said that working for the military “allows me to stay close to Steve … Major Trevor. I work for him.” Carter’s Wonder Woman focused on being a hero and her Diana was a doe-eyed gal in love with Steve.

  Marston’s utopian message made it into the initial TV movie as well, but it was soon undermined. Queen Hippolyta exclaimed, “I named this island ‘Paradise’ for an excellent reason: there are no men on it. Thus it is free of their wars, their greed, their hostility, their barbaric, masculine behavior.” She added, “We are stronger, wiser, and more advanced than all those people in their jungles out there. Our civilization is perfection!” This sounds like Marston on paper, but the way it was played on screen told a different story. Cloris Leachman’s Hippolyta was more feminazi than feminist, slightly crazed and full of hatred for men. These words weren’t said with the peace and serenity of a noble queen but with a sneer of contempt.

  Furthermore, Wonder Woman soon found herself disagreeing with her mother’s take on humanity, and on men in particular. Throughout the first season, Hippolyta wanted her daughter to come back to Paradise Island for good and get away from the corrupting influence of man’s world, but she always refused. Wonder Woman saw the good in men, American men like Steve Trevor in particular, and didn’t find them barbaric like her mother did. Just like Steinem downplayed Marston’s focus on the superiority of the Amazons, so did the TV show, and the similarities with Ms.’s take on Wonder Woman continued from there.

  While Steinem and Edgar downplayed the racist elements in Golden Age Wonder Woman comics, the TV show just eliminated race altogether. Almost everyone on the show was white, even in the background. The show also changed the focus of the war. The original Wonder Woman fought the Japanese more than the Germans, but on the TV show the war was solely between the Americans and the Nazis. The Pacific front didn’t come up. This made the show even whiter, eliminating Asians from the equation. They avoided the issue of racism entirely by not having any other races on the show, which in itself is rather racist.

  Steinem and Chesler also expressed concerns about Wonder Woman’s warmongering and “super-patriotism,” but the Wonder Woman TV show reframed the entire war. By turning World War II into a fight just between America and the Nazis, the war became a battle between the forces of ultimate good and the forces of ultimate evil. No villains in the history of the modern world were more evil than the Nazis. It wasn’t just a fight between warring nations but, as Wonder Woman told Drusilla, this was freedom versus slavery, with the fate of the entire world in the balance.

  Bondage was ignored as well. Wonder Woman got tied up from time to time, and used her lasso on the occasional villain, but it didn’t amount to much. Batman and Robin got into far more elaborate bondage situations each week on their TV show. While Marston’s Wonder Woman was an intentionally kinky book, the only thing remotely titillating about the TV show was Wonder Woman’s outfit.

  The net result was a show that lacked nuance. Steinem and her friends portrayed a cleaned-up, modernized Wonder Woman that sidestepped a lot of the complexities of Marston’s tenure, but the Wonder Woman TV show erased any potential problems entirely, presenting an ideal version of the character. The good versus evil, freedom versus slavery version of the war was a simplified setting, and within this setting Wonder Woman became the representative of the ultimate good. She was a hero who was powerful, independent, and virtuous, but who was only powerful, independent, and virtuous. Wonder Woman wasn’t just cleaned up; she was, to borrow Wright’s term for past matriarchies, sanctified. Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman was heroic and wholesome, with nothing impeachable about her character, making her an excellent role model.

  Helping other women was a big part of the show, and anytime a female character was poorly treated by a man, Wonder Woman would speak up. For instance, when she was interrogated by a female Nazi agent who was constantly insulted by her male commanding officer, Wonder Woman told her, “Fraulein Grabel, you are a woman of great intelligence and should not be taking orders from that man.” Wonder Woman later declared, “Women are the wave of the future and sisterhood is stronger than anything.”

  Even though Wonder Woman regularly encouraged women to be more self-reliant, it was made abundantly clear that normal women could never be as impressive as Wonder Woman. That point was hammered home in this exchange:

  STEVE: She is a wonder. Strong and fearless, and still compassionate. All the virtues of femininity with none of the vices.

  ETTA: You’re right. Sometimes I wish I was like Wonder Woman…. Most of the time I wish I was like Wonder Woman.

  STEVE: (laughs) There’s only one Wonder Woman, Etta.

  DIANA: Etta, I think the most we can do is be the best women we can possibly be.

  STEVE: Sound advice, Diana.

  The TV show didn’t demonstrate the superiority of women but instead focused on the uniqueness of Wonder Woman herself. While liberal feminists looked to Wonder Woman as an inspiration for the traits they wanted to develop in themselves, the program made Wonder Woman an unattainable ideal, a role model that no woman could ever hope to match.

  Wonder Woman the TV show wasn’t intended to be feminist propaganda. TV was a business, and the show was meant to appeal to a wide audience and make money for the network. Wonder Woman, like Charlie’s Angels, The Bionic Woman, and several other 1970s female-led action shows, combined snippets of feminism for female viewers and pretty girls for male viewers. Tellingly, producer Douglas Cramer said of casting Carter: “We needed a large woman, a statuesque woman, a buxom woman, and an angelic face.” As an afterthought he added, “Beyond all that we needed someone that could play it, that could act and sustain a television movie.” With cup size and beauty as the primary criteria, it’s clear that the TV show was motivated by more than promoting feminism.

  Replacing the Past

  In the 1970s, William Moulton Marston’s approach to Wonder Woman slipped by the wayside. As did Robert Kanigher’s, and Denny O’Neil and Mike Sekowsky’s. Marston was overwritten by Steinem and her friends, so while the Golden Age Wonder Woman became a hero for liberal feminists, it wasn’t actually his messages that were being celebrated. With the “original” Wonder Woman now a feminist icon, the work of Kanigher, O’Neil, and Sekowsky is often dismissed for not being true to the “original” version of the character and deemed inconsequential.

  Of course, there is no “true” version of Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman was a character who evolved and changed in fascinating ways, but our modern perception of her is fairly generic. She’s loved for being a female hero in a male-dominated genre, but outside of that she doesn’t have much of an identity, nor has she had much of a presence in the years since the TV show ended.

  *It was simply titled Wonder Woman but will here be referred to as the Ms. Wonder Woman book to avoid confusion with the comics series.

  *“Radical” is
just as shifty a term as “liberal,” and the two make up a bit of a false dichotomy. There are many books about feminism cited in the bibliography, so please consult those for more information on the wider array of feminism.

  *“Banded together” actually meant “banded together for a little while until someone got angry and formed their own splinter group.” Radically changing society was a complicated job, and it led to many heated debates and divisions. This constant splintering may be part of the reason that the patriarchy has yet to be overthrown.

  *Alpert was involved with some radical leftists, including the Weather Underground, and conspired in the bombings of several federal buildings. In fact, she was on the lam when she wrote this piece for Ms. magazine, sending it unsolicited and with a copy of her fingerprints to prove her identity.

  *Diner and Bachofen were both long dead by 1972, so although the conversation wasn’t described as fictional in the book, it couldn’t have been real.

  *As problematic as these theories are, this is a well-written piece. Chesler makes a very interesting, although ultimately fruitless, case for originary matriarchy.

  *It seems unlikely to me that Peter wrote a story, but that’s what the Grand Comics Database says. The story is from Sensation Comics #81 in September 1948, which is a bit of a gray area—after Marston’s death but before Kanigher officially took over. Kanigher seems the most likely author, and it could also be a posthumous Marston script. The GCD credits Peter with a few other writing gigs in the 1940s, but with question marks, so I’m incredulous about Peter’s supposed writing career.

  *Amusingly, some of the most well-known Wonder Woman bondage images come from the Ms. Wonder Woman book. Until the late 1990s, when the Archive editions started to come out, the only way to read Marston’s stories was in expensive back issues. Thus, most of the many discussions of Wonder Woman and bondage from scholarly journals to Internet forums used images from the Ms. Wonder Woman book. While there are more extreme images of a bound Wonder Woman than are shown in the book, there are few, if any, that are more widespread.

  *Woolfolk was replaced as editor on all of her series in the fall of 1972. There are reports that Woolfolk’s outspoken feminism didn’t go over well with the many men who ran DC, so she may have been removed or forced out because of that. However, she soon became the author of the Donna Rockford teen detective series from Scholastic, so she might have left DC to pursue her own writing. As for Kanigher taking over the book, he was the only person at DC with any experience writing or editing a superpowered Amazon Wonder Woman, which may explain why he got the job.

  *If the data we saw in interlude 2 is any indication, by the early 1970s DC seemed much more interested in male readers than female readers. After all of the publicity surrounding the original Wonder Woman’s return, things likely settled back into the old status quo at the DC offices and appeasing feminists was no longer a concern. Not a lot has changed since then.

  †Another animated version of Wonder Woman actually predated her Super Friends incarnation when she guest-starred on an episode of the cartoon Brady Bunch spinoff, The Brady Kids, in 1972. Wonder Woman was sent back in time with the Brady Kids, and they all attended the Olympics in ancient Greece while learning a valuable lesson about cheating and brains versus brawn.

  *Though it did have Ricardo Montalban in it, which is always fun.

  10

  The Mundane Modern Age

  By the late 1970s, Wonder Woman was rather popular. Her TV show ran for three years with decent ratings, and she costarred in the animated series Super Friends with the rest of the Justice League. You could see Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman on CBS at 8:00 PM on Fridays and then watch her in cartoon form on ABC’s Saturday morning cartoons. You could also buy her comic book every month, but not many people did. Nor were they buying anyone else’s comics either. The comic book industry hit a big slump in the 1970s, and in some ways it has never come back from it.

  The industry faced a perfect storm of problems in the 1970s, starting with the rise of the direct market. Interest in comics had started to dwindle, in part due to price increases. Newsstands and drugstores made less and less on comics, and the big distributors weren’t particularly concerned when orders started to drop, because they made the bulk of their money in magazines. After decades of spinner racks being a fixture at corner stores, comics became a niche product available primarily in specialty comic shops. Retailers bought the books directly through smaller, more amenable distributors instead of from major distribution conglomerates. This new system had its advantages and kept the industry alive, but it also limited the availability of comic books.

  Marvel remained more popular than DC Comics, so DC attempted a big push to gain ground on its competitor. It rolled out its poorly timed “DC Explosion” in the mid-1970s, premiering several new series and increasing the page count of all of its books. Soon after, America slipped into a recession, so money was tighter for customers; inflation and rising paper costs cut into DC’s profits; and huge blizzards in 1977 and 1978 wreaked havoc with distribution. Nothing was going well for DC. The “DC Explosion” was followed by what became known as the “DC Implosion” in 1978. Over twenty series were canceled and several other books merged together. It was a massive contraction of DC’s comics line and the company limped into the new decade. In 1970, its average monthly circulation had been about 6 million; by 1980 it was under 3 million. Marvel wasn’t spared either, sliding from 7.5 million in 1970 to about 5 million in 1980.

  Things slowly improved as the direct market caught on and the rise of comic book shops led to an increased interest in back issues. Old comics were suddenly worth money, and many fans started to see new comics as an investment, thinking that a $1.50 comic could be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars down the road if it was well preserved. Inevitably, this bubble burst spectacularly in the mid-1990s. With collectors stockpiling comics, nothing was rare and worth never increased. Things got so bad that Marvel declared bankruptcy, and it took almost another decade for the comics industry to return to any kind of stability. Today, DC and Marvel are relatively solid, but they are also kept alive by the corporations that own them (Time Warner and Disney, respectively) and which are interested in them primarily for their film, TV, and licensing prospects.

  Superhero comic books aren’t terribly relevant these days. There’s a lot of great work being done by fantastic creators, but their range of influence is a far cry from the days when kids bought Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman in the millions and exchanged them on the playground. Comics are a niche market and have been for some time. Things like Senate hearings and spotlights from national feminist magazines are long past. The characters are doing well on TV and in the movies, but the general public isn’t all that concerned about what’s going on in the funny books.

  This is especially true for Wonder Woman. In a time when comics aren’t all that popular to begin with, Wonder Woman has averaged about sixty-fourth on the monthly sales charts over the past two decades. Many other superheroes have stayed in the public eye on the big and small screens, but not Wonder Woman. Batman has had seven major motion pictures, and Superman has had six movies and two TV shows, while Wonder Woman has only made sporadic appearances in cartoons.

  Wonder Woman still comes out every month, but there’s been nothing as unusual or fascinating as the adventures of her early incarnations, good or bad. For the past thirty years, Wonder Woman has been an afterthought in the comic book world.

  The George Pérez Era

  In 1985, DC began Crisis on Infinite Earths, a twelve-issue mini-series that amalgamated its various fictional universes into one unified whole. After nearly fifty years of comics, continuity was muddled and complicated, and Crisis on Infinite Earths streamlined the many different characters and worlds into a single, new universe. The agent of this reorganization was the evil Anti-Monitor, and all of the heroes came together one last time in the final issue to save the new world. Wonder Woman was hit by the Anti
-Monitor’s antimatter blast and disintegrated into nothingness, but instead of dying, she regressed back through time, de-aging and ultimately reverting back to the clay from which she was formed back on Paradise Island. Wonder Woman was about to be reborn.

  The only problem was that DC wasn’t sure what to do with her. Crisis on Infinite Earths #12 had a cover date of March 1986, and it was almost an entire year before a new Wonder Woman #1 debuted.* As Crisis wound down, Wonder Woman was DC’s worst-selling series, and the company wanted a strong, exciting take on the character for the relaunch. Several creators pitched ideas, most of which resembled Wonder Woman in name only. Finally Greg Potter came in with a proposal that retained most of Wonder Woman’s classic elements, and even then DC was unsure. Knowing the book was having trouble getting off the ground, Crisis on Infinite Earths artist George Pérez stopped by the DC offices to pitch his take on the character and offer his artistic services. Most high-profile creators didn’t want to touch Wonder Woman, with her checkered history and decades of tangled continuity, but Pérez saw potential for something new. He got the job right away.

  A lot of Potter’s proposal was used, and he stayed on the new series as scripter and co-plotter for a few issues, but Wonder Woman soon became Pérez’s book. While he’d only planned to help launch the series and stick around for six months or so, Pérez ended up staying on the book for five years.

  Pérez’s new origin story for Wonder Woman had a framework that was similar to her Golden Age origin and retained a feminist message, but it was also more involved. The story began in 1200 BCE, when the Olympian goddesses finally had enough of the constant war and violence of mankind. They proposed a new female race of humans who would be “strong … brave … compassionate” and set an example for the rest of mankind. Ares, the god of war, was fiercely opposed to this because all of his power came from mankind worshipping war. Ultimately, Zeus refused to pick a side and the female goddesses, with the help of Hermes, set about creating the Amazons.