Our Gods Wear Spandex

by Chris Knowles

  A big hit for Marvel, Wolverine has been used in thousands of comic-book stories and is often drafted when a particular comic-book title needs to increase its sales. As portrayed by Australian actor Hugh Jackman, Wolverine is the undisputed favorite character in the X-Men films, and, as of this writing, a solo film is reportedly in the works. It's interesting to note that Jackman pulls off an uncanny Dirty Harry impersonation in his portrayal of Wolverine.

  125 Later writers recast Stark as an alcoholic, Iron Man #120-128, 1979.

  126 When comics came under scrutiny for their violent storylines, Batman came under attack as “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” Wertham, in his Seduction of the Innocent, claimed that “if Batman were in the State Department he'd be dismissed.” (New York: Reinhart, 1954), pp. 190, 191.

  127 Kim Thompson, “Frank Miller: Return of the Dark Knight,” The Comics Journal #101, August 1985, pp. 59, 61.

  128 Daniels, DC Comics, p. 190.

  129 Daniels, DC Comics, p. 44.

  130 Maurice Horn, ed., World Encyclopedia of Comics (New York: Chelsea House, 1976), p. 629.

  131 Grimm himself was later revealed to be of Jewish origin. (Fantastic Four, vol. 3 #56)

  CHAPTER 17

  THE AMAZONS

  The comic-book Amazon is essentially the female counterpart of the Messiah archetype. Female superheroes have always been problematic, however, with the comics' predominantly male fans. Younger fans tend not to be interested in female characters and older ones tend to objectify them as sex objects. The most successful female characters have, therefore, been members of teams—Jean Grey, Rogue and Storm in The X-Men, and Scarlet Witch and the Wasp in The Avengers. Other female characters have been sidekicks to popular male heroes—Hawkgirl, Black Widow, and the Black Canary. Wonder Woman is by far the best-known of the superheroines, and her audience has always been predominantly male. Young girls are generally not interested in superheroes and gravitate more toward romance, humor, and teenage comics.

  The Amazon comes to us from Greek mythology. The word itself is of uncertain origin, some claiming it comes from the Aryan root ha-mazan, meaning “warrior,” while some believe it comes from the root amastos, meaning “those without a breast”—a reference to the fact that Amazons reportedly removed their right breasts to facilitate archery. Homer referred to the Amazons as the Antianeirai, meaning “the man-haters.”

  There are several references to Amazon tribes in literature. Greek heroes like Hercules and Achilles fought them, and they are reported to have fought in the Trojan War. The horse was a magical totem to these Amazons, who, legend tells us, invented the calvary.

  Although many scholars today believe the Amazons are simply a myth arising from observations of undomesticated barbarian women or female animals in the wild, Plutarch credited them with the sack of Athens and Herodotus said they were absorbed into the Scythian nation. It is certain, however, that there were warrior goddesses like Diana, Athena, and Nike in the Greek pantheon. There were also fierce goddesses like Ishtar and Sekhmet in other cultures.

  With the rise of feminism in the 1960s, a new crop of Amazon characters appeared on television—Emma Peel in The Avengers, The Girl From UNCLE, Batgirl, and Catwoman. The Seventies introduced Blaxploitation characters like Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones. The success of long-running series featuring sexy Amazons, like Charlie's Angels, Police Woman, and The Bionic Woman, eventually inspired a TV revival of Wonder Woman. Amazon characters have been less prominent in recent years, however, a result of a post-feminist spirit that argues that femininity best exerts a powerful control over men. Female aggressiveness appears to have fallen out of fashion.

  WONDER WOMAN

  The ultimate feminist icon was not invented by a woman, but by an extremely peculiar man named William Moulton Marston (1893–1947). A true Renaissance man, Marston was a psychiatrist, a novelist, a journalist, a pioneering feminist, a bondage enthusiast, inventor of the polygraph, and a practicing polygamist. He was ambivalent about the emerging comic-book industry, first writing a defense of comics in 1940 for Family Circle magazine and later lambasting the comics in an article in the American Scholar, saying their “worst offense was their blood curdling masculinity.”132 Regardless, he offered his services as a consultant to various publishers, and was hired by Max Gaines to consult for All-American Comics, DC's sister company. Seeing how much money was changing hands in this new industry, Marston decided to try his hand at creating his own character.

  Marston originally called his new heroine “Suprema,” but All-American editor Sheldon Mayer renamed her Wonder Woman. The strip was illustrated in a whimsical and archaic fantasy-illustration style by the 61-year-old cartoonist H. G. Peter, who used several attractive female cartoonists as his assistants. Wonder Woman was outfitted with a skimpy, star-spangled swimsuit and a magic lasso worn at the hip, and traveled hither and yon in her invisible plane. The heroine's look was apparently modeled on Marston's younger wife, Olive Byrne.

  Marston subscribed to a dualist worldview in Wonder Woman. He suggests that mankind is under two opposing forces—Mars, god of War, and Aphrodite, goddess of love. He believed that women should conquer men through the power of love and ensure peace on Earth for eternity. As a consequence, his stories tend to fall in a gray area somewhere between fairy tales, pagan hagiography, and soft-core porn. Marston said of his creation: “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world. There isn't love enough in the male organism to run this planet peacefully. Woman's body contains twice as many love generating organs and endocrine mechanisms as the male.”133

  Though Marston's portrayal of Wonder Woman is a primer on classical paganism and mythology, he took great liberties in fashioning Wonder Woman's complex identity. She's not merely a female superhero; she is a pagan goddess. She is sculpted from mud by her mother, Hippolyte, at the command of the goddess Aphrodite, who then gives her the breath of life. As such, she is also a female Golem in the classical sense. Wonder Woman recalls Captain Marvel in that she enjoys the patronage of several gods. She has the beauty of Aphrodite, the strength of Hercules, the wisdom of Athena, and the speed of Mercury.

  Wonder Woman's Amazon cohorts wear bracelets as a reminder of potential slavery to men and live on the idyllic Paradise Island, which is ruled by Queen Hippolyte. These Amazons are portrayed as ultra-feminine goddesses, not man-hating warriors as in the old myths. Aphrodite is a frequent guest star in Wonder Woman's adventures; Mars is a frequent villain, representing everything women must fight against.

  Whatever Wonder Woman's feminist virtues, the fact remains that she is a scantily-clad beauty taking part in stories engineered to appeal to bondage fetishists. To read Marston and Peter's Wonder Woman adventures is to confront stories that are absolutely drenched in transgressive sexuality and rendered in a style that betrays a distinctly decadent influence. And Wonder Woman's favorite exclamation is “Suffering Sappho,” a reference to the poet laureate of Lesbos.

  Bondage and submission are constant leitmotifs in Wonder Woman's adventures. Josette Frank, another psychologist hired to consult for All-American, resigned in disgust over Wonder Woman in 1944. In her resignation letter, she was blunt in her opinion of Marston's work: “Intentionally or otherwise, the strip is full of significant sex antagonisms and perversions. Personally, I would consider an out-and-out striptease less unwholesome than this kind of symbolism.” Fredric Wertham agreed, claiming that Wonder Woman presented “an undesirable ideal for girls, being the exact opposite of what girls are supposed to be.”134 Indeed, Wonder Woman's predominantly male audience was “at least unconsciously titillated by all the sexual undertones.”135 Undaunted, Marston wrote ecstatically about the benefits of bondage and went so far as to claim that women enjoy it.

  Marston died in 1947. He had been a relentless workaholic and, without his guidance, the strip floundered. H. G. Peter was shown the door at the dawn of the Silver Age, repla
ced by the slick art team of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. Sales still dwindled, so a revamp was ordered in 1969 to bring the character more in line with heroines in then-popular TV shows like The Avengers and The Mod Squad. The revamp was instigated by Justice League artist Mike Sekowsky, who had Wonder Woman renounce her powers so she could stay on Earth. She gained a mentor in the form of an elderly Chinese dwarf named I Ching, and an ever-changing wardrobe of clumsily interpreted “mod” fashions. Despite all this, the revamp was successful.

  Mysteriously, however, Wonder Woman changed back into her original incarnation in 1973. An apocryphal story has it that feminist Gloria Steinem complained to DC Comics owner Steve Ross about the new, mortal version of Wonder Woman and the character reverted. Steinem put the old Wonder Woman on the cover of the first issue of her Ms. magazine in 1972. She also edited a Wonder Woman hardcover collection that was published under the Ms. banner.

  Wonder Woman entered the popular mainstream again in 1976, when a new TV series was developed that hewed closely to the original Wonder Woman concept—right down to the 1940s setting. The starring role was given to former beauty queen Lynda Carter, perhaps the greatest living embodiment of a comic-book character in history. In the words of Alex Ross, Carter was “the greatest single impression on the character in the 20th century—ironically, more than any artist who ever drew her.”136 The series later moved from ABC to CBS, who updated the series to take place in the present time.

  After a long fallow period, the Wonder Woman comic series was revived in 1987. Writer Greg Potter and superstar artist George Perez turned the title into a mythological fantasy series, with touches of sword-and-sorcery. Perez wanted to bring Wonder Woman back to her roots: “I wanted to get back to the mythology, I wanted to purify the concept.”137 In 1996, Wonder Woman was brought to her greatest glory in Kingdom Come as the warrior queen who girds Superman's loins for battle and later bears his child. Ross retained the heart-stopping beauty of Lynda Carter for his Wonder Woman, giving her ice-blue eyes to create a more otherworldly effect.

  AND OTHERS JUST LIKE HER

  Wonder Woman was by no means the only Amazon of the Golden Age, nor was she even the first. One of the earliest superheroines was, like her male counterparts, specifically occult in origin. Marvel's Black Widow first appeared in Mystic Comics #4 in 1940. Her secret identity was Clare Voyant, a psychic who is murdered after a seance goes awry. Satan claims her soul, grants her supernatural powers and an unusually sexy outfit, and puts her back on Earth so she can dispatch evildoers to his dark domain. The Widow had the power to kill with the touch of a finger, which burnt a spider-shaped brand in her victims' flesh.

  Another superheroine that beat Wonder Woman to the stands was Black Cat, a movie stuntwoman turned crimefighter who first appeared in Pocket Comics in 1941. A year later, Phantom Lady debuted in Police Comics as a society girl turned crime fighter who was blessed with extremely sexy art by Matt Baker. One heroine, Miss Fury, created by a very beautiful female cartoonist named Tarpe Mills, distinguished herself by making her start in newspapers. Miss Fury first appeared in 1941 as Black Fury, dressed in a black satin catsuit later appropriated by DC's Catwoman. Miss Fury's adventures are rife with bondage, lingerie, and cat fights.

  The Black Canary first appeared in Flash Comics #86 in 1947 dressed like a streetwalker in fishnet stockings, satin, and a skintight top with plunging neckline. Black Canary was later revived as a feminist heroine as Green Arrow's love interest. And in 1943, even Lois Lane got her shot at superherodom when she dreamt that she gained powers after a transfusion of blood from Superman (Action Comics #60).

  The Silver Age also produced a number of female supersidekicks, including Supergirl, Hawkgirl, Namora, and Black Widow, as well as team members like Invisible Girl, Marvel Girl, Crystal, Medusa, and the Scarlet Witch. The Seventies saw a spate of female counterparts like Spider-Woman, Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk, as well as assorted genre heroines like Starfire and Rima. In a 1976 X-Men storyline, Marvel Girl becomes Phoenix when she embodies the cosmic Phoenix Force (Uncanny X-Men #101). She is later driven mad by this power and becomes the murderous Dark Phoenix. She is then killed and resurrects as plain old Jean Grey.

  In the original lineup of the new X-Men, Storm, an African mutant who can control the weather, became one of the more popular characters in the Marvel Universe. Two other popular heroines in The X-Men got their start as villains—Rogue, a formerly evil mutant with the ability to absorb the power of anyone she touches, and Emma Frost, a.k.a. the White Queen, who is usually pictured dressed in extremely revealing fetish wear. Frost was originally a member of the Hellfire Club, which took its name from an English secret society of the 18th century that was dedicated to paganism and sex magic.

  THE COMPLEX ELEKTRA

  Frank Miller redefined the concept of the comic-book Amazon with the creation of the assassin named Elektra. In doing so, he changed the role of female action heroes in the media at large. There had never been a female character so ruthless in comics—and certainly not a protagonist.

  Elektra is a Golem, but a less literal one than Wonder Woman. Trained in the martial arts from childhood, Elektra becomes a ruthless assassin after her father's murder. This event seems to trigger a nihilistic impulse. After being rejected by the sensei Stick and his “good” ninjas, she is recruited by the evil ninjas of The Hand. Her signature weapon is the sai, a phallic-looking round knife used in the martial arts.

  As with so much of Miller's work, Elektra represents a new and radical blurring of gender boundaries in comic books. She is the lover of Matt Murdock and the foe of Daredevil, but takes the dominant, assertive role in both relationships. In Miller's stories, Elektra is essentially devoid of a recognizably feminine personality, and became quite square-jawed and muscular in his later renderings. One can even argue that Elektra is essentially a transvestite or transsexual character, and that the trauma of her father's death effectively removes her femininity.

  In 1982, following the popular “Death of Phoenix” storyline in The Uncanny X-Men, Miller killed Elektra off in an epic and unforgettable fashion (Daredevil #181). Unfortunately, he mitigated the power of that story by reviving her shortly after (Daredevil #190). Miller then wrote the Elektra: Assasin miniseries in 1986, in which she plays the dominant partner to a sexually neutered, cybernetic SHIELD agent.138 Here, Elektra is not only a ninja, but is possessed of supernatural powers. Her foe in the story is the Antichrist, who, in typical Miller fashion, takes the form of a liberal Presidential candidate. In 1991, Miller returned to the character with Elektra Lives Again graphic novel, which focuses more on Matt Murdock's obsession with Elektra's death than on the character herself. Over Miller's objections, Marvel continued to use Elektra after he stopped working on the series.

  Since so many top creative minds in Hollywood are also comics fans, the new Amazon archetype offered by Elektra found its way into big-budget action movies almost immediately. In 1986, comics fan Jim Cameron borrowed Elektra's take-no-prisoners attitude for his revamping of the Ripley character in Aliens. In 1991, Cameron took it up a notch in his second Terminator film (Terminator 2: Judgment Day), which reinvented the weepy waitress Sarah Connor as a bone-cracking commando. Later, Cameron created Dark Angel, a sci-fi spin on Elektra that ran on the Fox network and starred the unambiguously feminine Jessica Alba.139

  A French comics fan named Luc Beeson tried his hand at the Elektra archetype in the 1990 film La Femme Nikita, about a teenage delinquent who murders a cop during a drugstore heist. The French secret service are impressed enough with Nikita's aggressive nature that they fake her execution and enroll her in spy school, where she trains as an assassin. The film was promptly remade by Hollywood as 1993's Point of No Return starring Bridget Fonda, and later became a cable TV series starring the glamorous Peta Wilson. The archetype plunged into total incoherence with Quentin Tarentino's Kill Bill movies, starring Uma Thurman. Elektra was also a featured character in the 2003 Daredevil film, which drew heavily o
n Miller's early 1980s work. She was the star of her own film the following year. Neither offering lit Tinseltown ablaze.

  132 Quoted in Trina Robbins, Great Women Superheroes (Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1996), p. 7.

  133 Les Daniels, Wonder Woman: The Complete History (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), p. 22.

  134 Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart, 1954), pp. 34, 63.

  135 Daniels, Wonder Woman, p. 68. “There was a lot in these stories to suggest that Wonder Woman was not so much a pitch to ambitious girls as an object for male sexual fantasies and fetishes.”

  136 Ross quoted in Chip Kidd and Geoff Spear, Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross (New York: Pantheon, 2003), no pagination.

  137 Les Daniels, Wonder Woman, p. 194.

  138 SHIELD is Marvel's super-powered version of the FBI.

  139 “Dark Angel” is also the pet name that Marjorie Cameron gave to Jack Parsons. See John Carter, Sex and Rockets (Los Angeles: Feral House, 20004 ed.), p. 219.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE BROTHERHOODS

  The Brotherhood archetype, represented by the superhero team, started off as commercial ploy, but has since come to dominate the market. The most notable teams appear in The X-Men, The Justice League, The Ultimates, and The Avengers. Lesser titles like The Legion of Super-Heroes, The Defenders, and The Teen Titans wax and wane in popularity, but enjoy a hardcore audience. These comic-book brotherhoods form the backbone of the market today and provide opportunity for high-return multi-title “crossover” events published by the Big Two (DC and Marvel). One of the most successful recent crossover events was Identity Crisis, which centered on the murder of the Elongated Woman's wife by the Atom's estranged wife. The title was created by novelist Brad Meltzer, whose 2006 novel, The Book of Fate, deals with Freemasonry and conspiracy theory. Another recent crossover, Civil War, divides the countless heroes of the Marvel Universe into two warring camps—one led by Captain America, the other led by Iron Man.