by Jill Lepore
26. Dorothy Roubicek to MCG, February 8, 1944, Memo, WW Letters, Smithsonian. And see Gaines to LB, February 8, 1944, Bender Papers, box 16, folder 2.
27. See also “Wonder Woman Syndication,” Independent News, April 1944. This article includes a photograph of John Connolly, the president of King Features, signing a contract with Gaines, Marston and two other guys looking on. A complete set of the Wonder Woman comic strip, edited by Dean Mullaney, will be published in 2014 by the Library of American Comics.
28. On Bender joining the editorial advisory board, see MCG to LB, February 8, 1944; Harry E. Childs (of Detective Comics) to LB, February 25, 1944 (this letter is the contract for her services); and LB to Harry E. Childs, March 1944, enclosing correspondence she has had with the American Academy of Medicine, documenting that her serving on this board does not violate the academy’s code of ethics. Bender’s interest was always chiefly in Wonder Woman. See, e.g., LB to M. C. Gaines, November 16, 1944: “Wonder Woman is still my chief interest because of the problems of femininity and masculinity and passivity and aggression which it deals with.” All in Bender Papers, box 16, folder 2. As described by Childs in the February 25, 1944, letter, the duties of the members of the “Editorial Advisory Board of the Superman D-C publications” were to read the comics (all of which would be sent) and to render “any thoughts—favorable or unfavorable—that you may have on their content or any suggestions you might care to make for future issues”; to allow one’s name to appear in the magazines; to “consult with us on the subject of children’s entertainment in magazines or radio and render us opinions of abstract questions on the subject”; and to “permit us to refer to your position on the Editorial Advisory Board in our direct mail and advertising trade paper for promotion.” She was paid $100 per month.
29. WMM’s typescripts for the strips for week 1 and week 37 can be found in WW, Selected Continuities, Smithsonian.
28. SUPERPROF
1. On the location of the Marston Art Studio, see EHM to Jerry Bails, sometime in the 1970s, quoted in Roy Thomas, “Two Touches of Venus,” Alter Ego 3, no. 1 (Summer 1999): 16. The address is given in WMM to JHMK, March 3, 1944, in the possession of JHMK. The office was in room 1403. The business is referred to as the Marston Art Studio in EHM to JHMK, receipt of payment for services, February 3, 1948, in the possession of JHMK.
2. WMM, Psychology Exam, January 25, 1944, typewritten examination, in the possession of JHMK; WMM to JHMK, March 3, 1944. Marston had decided that he needed to hire someone outside the family to help with Wonder Woman. Hummel told me that Olive Byrne, while a beautiful writer, “was not able to write the comic strip,” while Holloway “was a lawyer, and not that type of writer at all.” JHMK, interview with the author, January 12, 2014.
3. JHMK, e-mail to the author, January 29, 2014.
4. HGP, Draft Registration card, April 1942, U.S., World War II Draft Registration Cards, 1942 (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com, 2010); EHM quoted in Daniels, Wonder Woman, 47; and EHM to JE, January 11, 1973, in the possession of JE.
5. MM, interview conducted by Steve Korte, July 29, 1999, DC Comics Archives.
6. “I got a call from Bellevue Hospital that they had a Harry G. Peter in their charity ward. He was a clean person. But he never worried about how he dressed at all. So when he got a chicken bone in his throat, I had to go rescue him out of the charity hospital.” JHMK, interview with the author, January 12, 2014.
7. Olive Ann Marston Lamott, interview conducted by Steve Korte, August 25, 1999, DC Comics Archives; Olive Ann Marston Lamott, interview with the author, July 15, 2013; BHRM, “Memories of an Unusual Father,” 28; and BHRM, interview conducted by Steve Korte, summer 1999, DC Comics Archives. “Mr. Peter was a quiet, thoughtful, sensitive man and he liked and approved of Wonder Woman,” Huntley said. MWH to JE, June 14, 1972, Steinem Papers, Smith College, box 213, folder 5.
8. JHMK, interview with the author, January 26, 2014; JHMK, interview with the author, January 12, 2014. JHMK also said to me, “Dotsie, although she was related to Margaret Sanger and wrote a beautiful dissertation about Margaret Sanger, she did not, she was not able to write the comic strip.” OBR gave oral history interviews about MS, but, as far as I have ever been able to tell, never wrote much about her, beyond testimonials here and there. Walowit corresponded with Hummel in 1974; MS did not come up. “Marston and I would get together at his home in Rye and talk.… We definitely had ESP with one another and thought on the same wave lengths. Then the ideas were written into later scripts embodying his psychological beliefs,” Hummel wrote on March 8, 1974, in a letter to Walowit, cited in Walowit, “Wonder Woman,” 39–40. Walowit was not convinced that Hummel wrote the scripts she claims to have written (see Walowit’s discussion of “Wonder Woman and the Winds of Time,” Wonder Woman #17, on p. 118 of her dissertation).
9. BHRM, “Memories of an Unusual Father,” 12; Sue Grupposo, interview with the author, July 15, 2013; and WMM, March On!, 214–15.
10. Sheldon Mayer, 1975 DC Convention: Wonder Woman Panel, transcript in the DC Comics Archives.
11. Olive Ann Marston Lamott, interview with the author, July 15, 2013, and BHRM, “Memories of an Unusual Father,” 21.
12. Olive Ann Marston Lamott, interview with the author, July 15, 2013.
13. WMM to BHRM, August 16 and 24, 1944, in the possession of BHRM.
14. OBR to MS, May 7, 1936, MS Papers, Library of Congress, microfilm edition, L006: 0948.
15. WMM to BHRM, July 17, 1944, in the possession of BHRM; and WMM, “Queen Hepzibah’s Revenge,” typewritten script for an extra episode for Wonder Woman #2, never printed, DC Comics Archives. The story involves a giant rabbit with wings named Butch.
16. WMM to BHRM, August 4, July 11, and July 21, 1944, in the possession of BHRM.
17. MSML to BHRM and Audrey Marston, February 27, 1963, in the possession of BHRM.
18. WMM, “Sew and Sow,” Family Circle, March 19, 1943.
19. WMM, “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics,” 35–44.
20. Cleanth Brooks and Robert B. Heilman, letter to the editor, American Scholar 13 (Spring 1944): 248–52. Brooks was, at the time, defending New Criticism. See Cleanth Brooks, “The New Criticism: A Brief for the Defense,” American Scholar 13 (Summer 1944): 285–95.
21. Holloway recalls the date and the title of the play in a letter to BHRM, April 5 [no year given but it must be c. 1963], in the possession of BHRM. Her memory was remarkably good. School for Brides was staged at the Royale Theatre from August 1, 1944, to September 30, 1944.
22. Diary of WMM, entry for August 25, 1944, in the possession of BHRM; JHMK, interview with the author, January 12, 2014. On MWH and Ethel Byrne: “She had come up from Ethel’s at Cape Cod to meet me,” Marston wrote in his diary. Diary of WMM, entries for August 26–29, 1944, in the possession of BHRM.
23. Diary of WMM, entry for September 25, 1944, in the possession of BHRM.
24. BHRM, “Memories of an Unusual Father,” 17, 21–22. On the leg braces in WW, see “The Case of the Girl in Braces,” Sensation Comics #50, February 1946.
25. Almost every Wonder Woman comic-book story written in 1945, all of which were published under the name “Charles Moulton,” has since been credited to either JHMK or Kanigher. For a list, see Wonder Woman Archives, vol. 7, table of contents. But see also my Comics Index. Kanigher is often thought to have claimed credit for stories he didn’t write. The source of the commonly accepted attributions is a set of questionnaires distributed by Jerry Bails in the 1960s, according to an e-mail from Roy Thomas to the author, July 16, 2013.
26. JHMK, interview with the author, January 12, 2014.
27. Ibid.
28. Charles W. Morton (Atlantic) to Walter J. Ong, January 19, 1945; Editors of Harper’s Magazine to Walter J. Ong, undated; H. L. Binsse (Commonweal) to Walter J. Ong, March 29, 1945; Editor of the Yale Review to Walter J. Ong, received April 15, 1945; Editors of the Kenyon Review to Walter J. Ong, received May 18, 1945; Walter J. Ong Papers,
St. Louis University, and I have lost track of the box and folder numbers.
29. Walter J. Ong, “Comics and the Super State,” Arizona Quarterly 1 (1945): 34–48.
30. Harry Behn to Walter J. Ong, August 20, 1945, Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection, box 7, St. Louis University, and Aldo Notarianni to Walter J. Ong, October 30, 1945, Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection, box 7.
31. A journal kept by Hummel in 1946 and 1947 records her work, day by day. The work she did that year included typing scripts for Marston, checking art, proofing copy, writing synopses for new stories, writing new stories, and typing them. A record of travel expenses, for taking a train from New York to Rye and a taxi to Cherry Orchard, demonstrates that Hummel went to Rye every two or three days, although there were, at times, gaps of a week or more between visits. JHMK, “Record: Time taken to write Scripts, General work schedule, & Diary,” handwritten bound journal, April 24, 1946–January 6, 1947, in the possession of JHMK.
32. BHRM, e-mail to the author, July 25, 2013.
33. “The Battle of Desires,” Comic Cavalcade #16, August–September 1946.
34. “The Bog Trap,” Sensation #58, October 1946.
35. BHRM, “Memories of an Unusual Father,” 17, 29; JHMK, interview with the author, January 12, 2014; and JHMK, interview with the author, April 26, 2014.
36. “Only a day and a half before his death he was correcting art work on the Wonder Woman strip.” C. Daly King, “William Moulton Marston,” Harvard College Class of 1915: Thirty-fifth Anniversary Report (Cambridge, MA: Printed for the Class, 1950), 212.
37. BHRM, “Memories of an Unusual Father,” 17, 29.
38. Olive Ann Marston Lamott, interview with the author, July 15, 2013, and BHRM, “Memories of an Unusual Father,” 29–30.
39. “Dr. W. M. Marston, Psychologist, 53,” New York Times, May 3, 1947. Similar obituaries appeared in Boston: e.g., “Dr. Wm. M. Marston Developed ‘Lie Detector,’ Taught, Lectured Widely,” Boston Globe, May 3, 1947. A one-sentence death notice appeared in Los Angeles: “Death Takes Inventor,” Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1947.
29. THE COMIC-BOOK MENACE
1. EHM to Jack Liebowitz, January 5, 1948, DC Comics Archives.
2. JHMK, interview with the author, January 12, 2014, and JHMK, e-mail to the author, January 29, 2014. It appears, though, that Hummel’s last day of work may have been May 31, 1947. EHM to JHMK, receipt of payment for services, February 3, 1948, in the possession of JHMK, is payment for services rendered between Janu-ary 1 and May 31, 1947, in the amount of $1,366. This appears to have been a closing of the account. The sum covers twenty-two weeks of work, at about $62 per week. A note written in pencil on the receipt reads, “Hi Joye! Zazzie”: greetings from Huntley.
3. Sheldon Mayer, 1975 DC Convention: Wonder Woman Panel, transcript in the DC Comics Archives.
4. EHM believed that the contract WMM had written in 1941 gave his heirs some control over the hiring of writers, and she was determined to exercise it. “The Marston family seemed to have some legal rights to say yea or nay to who took over Wonder Woman,” she told Robert Kanigher. Interview, undated, DC Comics Archives.
5. EHM to Jack Liebowitz, January 5, 1948.
6. Donna Woolfolk Cross, interview with the author, October 30, 2013, and e-mail to the author, November 13, 2013.
7. EHM to Jack Liebowitz, January 5, 1948. Donna Woolfolk Cross did not corroborate that her parents created Moon Girl; she had never heard of it. But she did corroborate her mother’s departure from DC Comics in 1947. My identification of the creator of Moon Girl comes from EHM’s description of “a very intelligent, well educational professional writer on a share basis, whose wife, for a short time at least, was editor of Wonder Woman.” That can’t have been anyone else except Woolfolk and Roubicek.
8. Moon Girl, initially called Moon Girl and the Prince, was published between 1947 and 1949. Issues 1–5 and 7–8 are housed at the Library of Congress (some in print, some on microfiche). “Future Man” appears in Moon Girl #2, Winter 1947.
9. EHM to Jack Liebowitz, January 5, 1948. “This summer and fall my work at the Met. has been light so that I have been able to spend whole days on WW,” Holloway wrote, but “I will have to decide very soon now whether I am working for Metropolitan Life Ins. Co. or National Comics.”
10. Robert Kanigher, interview conducted by Les Daniels, 2004, DC Comics Archives.
11. EHM, “Information for Wonder Woman Scripts,” addressed to Robert Kanigher and dated February 4, 1948, DC Comics Archives.
12. Robert Kanigher, “Deception’s Daughter,” Comic Cavalcade #26, April–May 1948.
13. Allan Asherman, interview with the author, August 12, 2013, and Christie Marston, interview with the author, July 25, 2012.
14. The symposium, “The Psychopathology of Comic Books,” was held in New York on March 19, 1948, at the Academy of Medicine. LB appears to have attended but not to have presented. A typescript of the proceedings can be found in Bender’s papers, box 16, folder 4. The quotations from Gershon Legman are from pp. 20, 36, Bender Papers, box 16, folder 4. And see also Legman quoted in Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 39.
15. Fredric Wertham, “The Comics . . . Very Funny!” Saturday Review of Literature, May 29, 1948, 6–7, 27. Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, 118–19. See also John A. Lent, ed., Pulp Dreams: International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti-Comics Campaign (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999); William W. Savage Jr., Comic Books and America, 1945–1954 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), chapter 7; and David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
16. Baker, Margaret Sanger, 199–201.
17. Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 88–89; Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, 16–17; Wertham, “Psychiatry and Sex Crimes,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 28 (1938): 847–53; and Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart, 1972), 68–69.
18. Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 76; and Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, 118.
19. “Psychiatrist Asks Crime Comics Ban,” New York Times, December 14, 1950; and Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, 120–25, 156–57.
20. LB to Estes Kefauver, August 17, 1950, Bender Papers, box 16, folder 4, and Kefauver to Bender, August 7, 1950, in the same folder.
21. “Psychiatrist Asks Crime Comics Ban.”
22. Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, 156–57.
23. LB to Whitney Ellsworth, August 22, 1951; Ellsworth, in a letter to Bender on August 27, 1951, agreed. Both letters are in the Bender Papers, box 16, folder 5.
24. Wertham, “Paid Experts of the Comic Book Industry Posing as Independent Scholars,” undated scrap. Wertham Papers, box 122, folder 2. Wertham’s description of Bender as the nation’s top comics flunkie reads, in full: “1. Most important: Dr. Lauretta Bender, whose name appears on the Editorial Board of the National Comics group (National Comics Publications, Inc. 480 Lexington Ave. NYC). She gives as her titles: Assoc. Prof. of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, NYU; Psychiatrist, NY University; Bellevue Medical Center. She has a full-time job in charge of the children’s ward in Bellevue Hospital NYC. On crime comics payroll since 1941. Boasted privately of bringing up her 3 children on money from crime comic books.” My thanks to Carol L. Tilley for calling this item to my attention.
25. Vernon Pope to LB, October 23, 1953, Bender Papers, box 16, folder 6. Pope had been on the editorial staff of Look magazine.
26. Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 93.
27. Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 103, 33, 188–91.
28. Ibid., 192–93.
29. Ibid., 166–67, 192–93, 233–35.
30. The hearings were held in New York to accommodate witnesses from the comic-book industry. Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 52–53. Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquenc
y.
31. Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, p. 154. Subsequent research on Wertham’s papers may bear Bender out. The “case studies” Wertham reported in Seduction of the Innocent seem to have been selectively edited composites. Carol L. Tilley, “Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comics,” Information & Culture: A Journal of History 47 (2012): 383–413.
32. LB to Estes Kefauver, August 17, 1950, Bender Papers, box 16, folder 4, and Kefauver to Bender, August 7, 1950, in the same folder.
33. Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 76.
34. Ibid., x; Comics Magazine Association of America Comics Code, 1954, as reproduced in Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 166–69; and LB to Jack Liebowitz, November 5, 1954, and Liebowitz to LB, November 10, 1954, Bender Papers, box 16, folder 6. Lauretta Bender’s name stopped appearing in DC Comics magazines in November 1954.
35. Robert Kanigher, interview conducted by Les Daniels, 2004, DC Comics Archives.
36. Cover, Sensation Comics #94, November–December 1949.
37. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988; repr., New York: Perseus, 2000), chapter 3. Fortune quoted in Evans, Born for Liberty, 221.
38. Daniels, Wonder Woman, 93–102. After “Wonder Women of History” stopped appearing in Wonder Woman, it ran, irregularly, in Sensation Comics. About Kanigher, Walowit wrote, “Shortly after the original author’s death, the cohesive concepts which governed the early stories are ignored, and the series focuses almost entirely on Wonder Woman’s physical strength. The later comic exhibits neither the imaginative quality for the affirmative image of both human nature and of women which characterize the early stories.” Walowit, “Wonder Woman,” abstract. Marjorie Wilkes Huntley was distressed as well. In 1955, she was surprised to find that Wonder Woman was still on Parents’ Magazine’s list of objectionable comics. She wrote to Parents’ Magazine to complain, noting that Kanigher had taken away from Wonder Woman everything that had been controversial in the 1940s: “I know that the present editor has from his own choice, aside from the pressure of criticism, deleted all those elements which were objectionable in the magazine. So she, Wonder Woman, is now a character which is active in the ways that Superman is active—which you do approve of.” MWH to the Cincinnati Committee on Evaluation of Comic Books, c/o Parents Magazine, August 24, 1955, CSAA Papers, box 14, folder 140. Huntley sent copies of her exchange on this subject to Josette Frank.
