The Secret History of Wonder Woman

by Jill Lepore

  John Reed Papers

  Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collection Division

  Margaret Sanger Papers

  Fredric Wertham Papers

  Malden Public Library, Malden, Massachusetts

  The Oracle

  Clippings files

  Massachusetts Archives

  Metropolitan State Hospital Records, 1931–69

  Metropolitan Life Insurance

  Michigan State Library

  Comic Art Collection

  Mount Holyoke College Archives

  Jeanette Bickford Bridges Papers, 1914–86

  MHC Records, Student Life, Political Activities Through 1930s

  National College Equal Suffrage League Papers, 1912–19

  One Hundred Year Directory

  Sadie Elizabeth Holloway Marston, Transcript, Office of the Registrar

  Sadie Elizabeth Holloway Marston alumna file

  National Academy of Sciences Archives

  National Research Council Papers

  National Archives, Boston

  United States v. William M. Marston

  National Archives, Washington

  Curtis v. Francis, RG 21

  Frye v. United States, RG 276

  James A. Frye, Applications for Clemency, RG 204

  United States v. Bowie, Frye et al., RG 21

  United States v. Frye, RG 21

  New York Public Library

  1939 World’s Fair Collection

  Northwestern University Archives

  John Henry Wigmore Papers

  Saint Louis University

  Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection

  Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe

  Clara Savage Littledale Papers

  College Equal Suffrage League Records, 1904–20

  Elizabeth Holloway Marston, Graduate Record File

  Letters to Ms., 1970–87

  Letters to Ms., 1970–98

  Smith College Archives, Sophia Smith Collection

  Ms. Magazine Papers, 1972–

  Margaret Sanger Papers

  Gloria Steinem Papers, 1940–2000

  Planned Parenthood Federation of America Papers

  Smithsonian Institution, Dibner Library

  Wonder Woman Letters, 1941–45

  Wonder Woman, Selected Continuities

  Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives

  Alpha Omicron Pi, photographs

  Class material, 1922–27, UA039/Classes, 1858–1997

  The 1925 Jumbo Book

  The Tufts College Graduate

  The Tufts Weekly

  University of Minnesota, Social Welfare History Archives

  Child Study Association of America Collection

  University of Virginia, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library

  Papers of Rita Mae Brown, 1929–2001

  U.S. Department of Justice, William Moulton Marston FBI File

  Yale University Manuscripts and Archives

  Robert M. Yerkes Papers

  COMICS INDEX

  Display ad, Ms. magazine, 1972 (illustration credit post.10)

  Between 1941 and 1948, Wonder Woman appeared in four different comic books: All-Star Comics, Sensation Comics, Comic Cavalcade, and Wonder Woman. Between May 8, 1944, and December 1, 1945, a Wonder Woman comic strip appeared in newspapers distributed by King Features. A complete run of all of these comic books and strips is held in the DC Comics Archives, at 1700 Broadway, New York.

  Many of the original Wonder Woman stories are reproduced in two anthologies published by DC Comics. Wonder Woman comic-book stories from December 1941 to September 1946 are available in William Moulton Marston and H. G. Peter, Wonder Woman Archives (New York: DC Comics, Archives Editions, 1998–2012), 7 volumes, while stories from December 1941 to July 1943 appear in The Wonder Woman Chronicles (DC Comics, 2010–12), 2 volumes. The Wonder Woman Chronicles includes Wonder Woman stories from Comic Cavalcade; these do not appear in Wonder Woman Archives. The publication of these two anthologies is ongoing, and not all of the Wonder Woman stories published during Marston’s lifetime have appeared yet. Moreover, these anthologies lack advertising pages, and, importantly, they lack the four-page centerfold, “Wonder Women of History,” that appeared in Wonder Woman and, later, in Sensation Comics, where it was more usually only two pages. A complete collection of the 1944–45 Wonder Woman comic strips will be published in 2014 by the Library of American Comics.

  The best pictorial history of Wonder Woman comics is Les Daniels, Wonder Woman: The Complete History (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000). A useful reference is Michael L. Fleisher, The Original Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes, volume 2, Wonder Woman (New York: DC Comics, 1976, 2007).

  Many of Marston’s original scripts survive, as does some original art by Harry G. Peter, much of which is held by private collectors. In 1970, Elizabeth Holloway Marston donated to the Smithsonian Institution’s Dibner Library a number of original Wonder Woman scripts, chiefly typescripts authored by William Moulton Marston, including a typescript for one of the newspaper strips.1 Holloway had contemplated selling these materials to collectors in 1968 and in 1969 still had cartons of scripts in her possession.2 Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly, who worked with Marston from 1944 to 1947, has in her possession an additional eighteen scripts, along with a diary she kept from 1946 to 1947, recording which scripts she wrote and which scripts she typed for Marston that year. I visited and interviewed Kelly at her home in 2014. As this book went to press, she had arranged to generously donate these and other Wonder Woman materials to the Smithsonian.

  A number of Wonder Woman scripts written by Marston but never published in his lifetime were published between 1969 and 1974, after Elizabeth Holloway Marston brought them to light. Some of these unpublished scripts are discussed in Roy Thomas, “Queen Hepzibah, Genghis Khan, and the ‘Nuclear’ Wars!” Alter Ego #23 (April 2003), 4–17.

  Who wrote what is often murky in the early history of comics. Writers, artists, story editors, and editors generally all contributed to the storytelling. This was less the case with Marston, who wielded a great deal of control over the writing of Wonder Woman scripts, especially between 1941 and 1944. Attributions of authorship date, for the most part, to research conducted in the 1960s and 1970s by comic historian Jerry Bails, who created an index of comic-book figures from the so-called golden age. Bails sent questionnaires to dozens of writers, artists, and editors and their heirs, including Elizabeth Holloway Marston. The most easily searchable set of this and subsequent data is the Grand Comics Database, an online reference wiki, at www.comics.org. Not all the attributions in the Grand Comics Database are accurate. In particular, several 1940s stories credited to Robert Kanigher cannot possibly have been written by him. Earlier researchers expressed different doubts. In 1974, Karen M. Walowit, a Berkeley graduate student writing a dissertation on Wonder Woman, questioned the attribution of particular scripts to Joye Hummel (then Joye Murchison).3 “Her Ph.D. thesis is brilliant,” Holloway wrote of Walowit in 1976. “I think she is the only human being who has read and understood every word Bill Marston ever wrote.”4 Walowit’s work is very well researched, but she relied on information provided chiefly by Holloway and by Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, understanding Hummel’s role.

  In the inventory below, stories written by Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly are marked JHMK. Stories attributed to Robert Kanigher are marked RK. In a handful of cases, Frank Goodwin replaced Harry G. Peter as Wonder Woman’s artist; these are marked FG. Following Wonder Woman’s initial appearance in All-Star Comics, Marston did not write the episodes of the Justice Society in which Wonder Woman appeared. Most of those stories were written by Gardner Fox, marked below as GF. I do not know for certain who wrote any of the “Wonder Women of History” stories that appeared in Wonder Woman and later in Sensation Comics. With that exception, in this list, all stories were written by William Moulton Marston and all art was created by Harry G. Peter, unless otherwise indic
ated.

  Some comic-book stories were published with titles, but many were not. In many cases, story titles used in anthologies and databases refer to titles assigned by the editors of anthologies and compilers of databases, decades after the stories were written. In some cases, these titles are different from titles given in original scripts. For stories originally published without a title, I have used the title used on the script, if the script survives; if no script survives, I have used the title assigned in the Grand Comics Database.

  The dates published on the covers of comic books—the “cover dates”—were generally about three months ahead of the actual date of publication. A comic book whose cover dated it as April–May 1942 may have first appeared on newsstands in February 1942. Marston appears to have submitted his scripts about three to six months ahead of the cover date. For instance, Marston’s draft for Wonder Woman #1, cover date Summer 1942, is dated April 18, 1942. His draft for Sensation Comics #25, cover date January 1944, is dated May 13, 1943. Some scripts lingered for years rather than months. Another of Marston’s scripts, for Comic Cavalcade #25, cover date February–March 1948, is dated August 23, 1946. Some stories written by Marston were published years after his death.

  A useful source for identifying the lag between the design of an issue and its cover date is Marston’s diary. “Gaines’s office—finished art WW 8,” he wrote in his diary for Friday, July 30, 1943, adding, “Pete’s office WW8 roughs completed.” Wonder Woman #8 had a cover date of March 1944 and a release date of, approximately, December 1943, which would suggest that the design might have been completed about four months ahead of distribution.5 Joye Hummel’s 1946–47 diary is similarly illuminating: it makes clear that she, too, was at that point writing well in advance of publication. Hummel resigned within months of Marston’s death in 1947, but stories written by her were published into 1949. My inventory ends with the publication of the last scripts known to have been written by either Marston or Hummel.

  ALL-STAR COMICS

  I have not listed numbers of All-Star Comics in which Wonder Woman makes no appearance at all or where she appears in a panel or two but has either no lines or one throwaway line. In all of the stories listed here, Wonder Woman is a character, although in many of them she makes only a very brief appearance.

  #8 Dec. 1941–Jan. 1942 Introducing Wonder Woman

  #11 June–July 1942 The Justice Society Joins the War on Japan (GF)

  #12 Aug.–Sept. 1942 The Black Dragon Menace (GF)

  #13 Oct.–Nov. 1942 Shanghaied into Space! (GF, rewritten by WMM)

  #14 Dec. 1942–Jan. 1943 Food for Starving Patriots! (GF)

  #15 Feb.–Mar. 1943 The Man Who Created Images (GF)

  #16 Apr.–May 1943 The Justice Society Fights for a United America (GF)

  #17 June–July 1943 The Brain Wave Goes Berserk (GF)

  #19 Winter 1943 The Crimes Set to Music (GF)

  #21 Summer 1944 The Man Who Relived His Life (GF)

  #24 Spring 1945 This Is Our Enemy! (GF)

  #31 Oct.–Nov. 1946 The Workshop of Willie Wonder (GF)

  #34 Apr.–May 1947 The Wiles of the Wizard (GF; WW drawn by Irwin Hasen)

  #35 June–July 1947 The Day That Dropped Out of Time (written by John Broome; WW drawn by Irwin Hasen)

  #36 Aug.–Sept. 1947 5 Drowned Men (writer unknown; WW drawn by Irwin Hasen)

  #37 Oct.–Nov. 1947 The Injustice Gang of the World (RK; WW drawn by Irwin Hasen)

  #38 Dec. 1947–Jan. 1948 History’s Crime Wave (GF; WW drawn by Carmine Infantino)

  SENSATION COMICS

  #1 Jan. 1942 Wonder Woman Comes to America

  #2 Feb. 1942 Dr. Poison

  #3 Mar. 1942 A Spy in the Office

  #4 April 1942 School for Spies

  #5 May 1942 Wonder Woman Versus the Saboteurs

  #6 June 1942 Summons to Paradise

  #7 July 1942 The Milk Swindle

  #8 Aug. 1942 Department Store Perfidy

  #9 Sept. 1942 The Return of Diana Prince

  #10 Oct. 1942 The Railroad Plot

  #11 Nov. 1942 Mission to Planet Eros

  #12 Dec. 1942 America’s Guardian Angel

  #13 Jan. 1943 Wonder Woman Is Dead

  #14 Feb. 1943 The Story of Fir Balsam

  #15 Mar. 1943 Victory at Sea

  #16 Apr. 1943 The Masked Menace

  #17 May 1943 Riddle of the Talking Lion (FG)

  #18 June 1943 The Secret City of the Incas (FG)

  #19 July 1943 The Unbound Amazon (FG)

  #20 Aug. 1943 The Girl with the Gun

  #21 Sept. 1943 War Against Society (FG)

  #22 Oct. 1943 The Secret Submarine

  #23 Nov. 1943 War Laugh Mania

  #24 Dec. 1943 The Adventure of the Pilotless Plane

  #25 Jan. 1944 Adventure of the Kidnappers of Astral Spirits

  #26 Feb. 1944 The Masquerader

  #27 Mar. 1944 The Fun Foundation

  #28 Apr. 1944 The Malice of the Green Imps

  #29 May 1944 Adventure of the Escaped Prisoner

  #30 June 1944 The Blue Spirit Mystery

  #31 July 1944 Grown-Down Land

  #32 Aug. 1944 The Crime Combine

  #33 Sept. 1944 The Disappearance of Tama

  #34 Oct. 1944 Edgar’s New World

  #35 Nov. 1944 Girls Under the Sea

  #36 Dec. 1944 Battle Against Revenge

  #37 Jan. 1945 The Invasion of Paradise Island

  #38 Feb. 1945 Racketeers Kidnap Miss Santa Claus

  #39 Mar. 1945 In the Clutches of Nero

  #40 Apr. 1945 Draska the Deadly

  #41 May 1945 The Octopus Plants (JHMK)

  #42 June 1945 Peril on Paradise Island (RK)

  #43 July 1945 Three Pretty Girls (JHM)

  #44 Aug. 1945 Chains and Bracelets (RK)

  #45 Sept. 1945 In the Enemy’s Hands (RK?)

  #46 Oct. 1945 The Lawbreakers’ League

  #47 Nov. 1945 The Terror of the Tycoon Club

  #48 Dec. 1945 The Midget Mystery (JHMK)

  #49 Jan. 1946 The Mystery of Lake Iceberg (JHMK)

  #50 Feb. 1946 The Case of the Girl in Braces

  #51 Mar. 1946 The Crime of Boss Brekel (RK)

  #52 Apr. 1946 The Brand of Madness (JHMK)

  #53 May 1946 The Case of the Valiant Dog (JHMK)

  #54 June 1946 The Treachery of Fiendo (JHMK)

  #55 July 1946 The Bughuman Plague (JHMK and WMM)

  #56 Aug. 1946 Anti-Atomic Metal

  #57 Sept. 1946 The Hatchet of Death (JHMK)

  #58 Oct. 1946 The Bog Trap

  #59 Nov. 1946 The Blue Snow Man (JHMK)

  #60 Dec. 1946 The Ordeal of Queen Boadicea

  #61 Jan. 1947 The Million Dollar Tennis Game

  #62 Feb. 1947 The Mysterious Prisoners of Anglonia

  #63 Mar. 1947 The Wall of Doom

  #64 Apr. 1947 The Adventure of the Little Cloud People (JHMK)

  #65 May 1947 Treachery in the Arctic (JHMK)

  #66 June 1947 Prisoners of Cops and Robbers

  #67 July 1947 The Secret of the Bar-L Ranch

  #68 Aug. 1947 The Secret of the Menacing Octopus

  #69 Sept. 1947 Mystery Behind A, B, C

  #70 Oct. 1947 The Unconquerable Women of Cocha Bamba

  #71 Nov. 1947 The Invasion of the Sun Warriors (JHMK)

  #72 Dec. 1947 The Menace of the Blue Seal Gang (JHMK)

  Wonder Women of History: Louisa May Alcott

  #73 Jan. 1948 The Witches’ Trials (JHMK)

  #74 Feb. 1948 The Adventure of the Undersea Cowboys (JHMK)

  Wonder Women of History: Mary Lyon

  #75 Mar. 1948 The Return of Shaggy the Lephrechaun (JHMK)

  Wonder Women of History: Rosa Bonheur

  #76 Apr. 1948 Murder Referees the Round (JHMK)

  Wonder Women of History: Margaret Brent

  #77 May 1948 Tress’s Terrible Mistake (JHMK)

  #78 June 1948 The Mistress of Masquerade (JHMK)

  Wonder Women of Hi
story: Dr. Mary E. Walker

  #79 July 1948 Land of Mirrors (JHMK)

  #80 Aug. 1948 The Swinging Scimitar (RK)

  #81 Sept. 1948 When Treachery Wore a Green Shirt (JHMK)

  Wonder Women of History: Clara Schumann

  #82 Oct. 1948 Brain Pirates from the Inner Moon World (JHMK)

  #83 Nov. 1948 The Sinister Olympics (RK)

  Wonder Women of History: Ellen E. Richards

  #84 Dec. 1948 Bottle Cast Up By the Sea (attributed to Sheldon Mayer)

  Wonder Women of History: Selma Lagerlof

  #85 Jan. 1949 The Girl Who Wanted to be an Amazon (JHMK)

  Wonder Women of History: Anna Pavlova

  WONDER WOMAN

  #1 Summer 1942 Wonder Woman Goes to the Circus

  Wonder Woman of History: Florence Nightingale

  Wonder Woman Versus the Prison Spy Ring

  The Greatest Feat of Daring in Human History

  #2 Fall 1942 The God of War

  The Earl of Greed

  Wonder Woman of History: Clara Barton

  The Duke of Deception

  The Count of Conquest

  #3 Feb.–Mar. 1943 A Spy on Paradise Island

  The Devilish Devices of Baroness von Gunther

  Wonder Women of History: Edith Cavell

  The Secret of Baroness von Gunther

  Ordeal of Fire

  #4 Apr.–May 1943 Man-Hating Madness

  Mole Men of the Underworld

  Wonder Women of History: Lillian D. Wald

  The Rubber Barons

  #5 June–July 1943 Battle for Womanhood

  Etta Candy and Her Holliday Girls

  Mars Invades the Moon

  Wonder Women of History: Susan B. Anthony

  The Return of Dr. Psycho

  #6 Fall 1943 Wonder Woman and the Cheetah

  The Adventure of the Beauty Club

  Wonder Women of History: Madame Chang Kai-shek

  The Conquest of Paradise

  #7 Winter 1943 The Adventure of the Life Vitamin

  America’s Wonder Women of Tomorrow