Wonder Woman Unbound

by Hanley, Tim

  In this new origin story, Wonder Woman’s superpowers were gifts from the gods that made her unique among her Amazon sisters. She was given beauty, wisdom, speed, and strength when she was an infant, and as Wonder Girl she demonstrated these abilities at a young age. Her fellow Amazons all marveled at her prowess; Wonder Girl could accomplish in minutes what would have taken days or weeks for everyone else. This Wonder Woman was clearly stronger and more skilled than the rest of the Amazons.

  In the Golden Age, Wonder Woman gained her abilities from being raised in the advanced, utopian society of Paradise Island, and her fellow Amazons had the same skills. The original Wonder Woman wasn’t special or different, and she didn’t have any sort of divine giftings; she was simply the most capable warrior in a race of advanced, powerful women. By making Wonder Woman unique and changing the source of her powers, Kanigher further unraveled the messages Marston had instilled in the character. The benefits of female rule went by the wayside when everyone else became normal. It’s also significant that two of Wonder Woman’s benefactors were men. Half of her abilities, and the ones that were actual superpowers, came from males, obliterating Marston’s focus on female superiority.

  One of these men was Hercules, the greatest enemy of the Amazons in Greek myth. In Apollodorus’s ancient account of Hercules’s ninth labor, Hercules took Hippolyta’s girdle and then, when the Amazons rose up to stop him, he killed the queen. Other accounts have him imprisoning the queen and killing her later, or letting Theseus take her to be his tamed Amazon bride. Hercules was never a friend of the Amazons, and this continued with Marston. Hercules was the ultimate symbol of male dominance, the archetype for the aggressive, violent male that Marston believed led to the world’s wars and strife. To Kanigher, Hercules was the source of Wonder Woman’s strength, and even the subject of a few screwball romance stories with Hippolyta later in the series. Kanigher’s Wonder Woman fought crime and wore the same outfit as Marston’s Wonder Woman, but the similarities end there.

  Now, it looks like Kanigher performed a terrible hatchet job on Wonder Woman and blatantly undid everything that Marston instilled in his creation. We should be appalled at Kanigher’s campaign to reverse the very nature of the character. Regardless of which version we prefer, this degree of disrespect for what came before is hardly becoming. However, such outrage would be based on the notion that Kanigher consciously undid Marston’s underlying messages and intentionally replaced them with his own view of the world. Marston was a creator who wrote with a message and plan, and submission and female superiority was at the core of every single thing he did. He put a great deal of thought and effort into Wonder Woman.

  Robert Kanigher didn’t. By all accounts, Kanigher was winging it; the man just sat down and typed.

  Although he was quite prolific, Kanigher wasn’t very well regarded as a writer. Throughout the 1960s, the Academy of Comic Arts and Sciences gave out the Alley Awards, annual prizes to comic books based on fan votes. The awards were closely associated with Alter Ego, a comic book fan magazine, and were the first ever fan-based awards for comic books. The categories were generally positive, celebrating “Best Writer” or “Best Series,” and even their negative categories were politely named, like “Comic Most Needing Improvement.” Robert Kanigher’s work on Wonder Woman holds the dubious distinction of winning the only two Alley Awards ever given for “worst” comic book. In 1961, Wonder Woman won the award for “Worst Comic Book Currently Published,” and in 1964 it was awarded “Worst Regularly Published Comic.” They were also the only two Alley Awards the series ever garnered.

  Kanigher’s work was repetitive and his grasp on continuity was practically nonexistent. In The Comic Book Heroes, Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones write that “Kanigher’s plots hurtled from event to event with an illogic that even the most lax editor couldn’t have approved (had he not also been the writer).” His writing style was haphazard, and it didn’t bring him a great deal of praise. In an interview with the Comics Journal in 1983, Kanigher described his methods by stating, “I’m an instinctual writer. I am not a writer who sits down, knowing what he is going to do in advance.” Throughout the course of the interview, it became very clear that Kanigher wasn’t interested in underlying messages or planning ahead. His sole focus was the story, which he began not knowing where it was going.

  The interviewer even asked Kanigher a question about giving Wonder Woman a father in his origin story, and Kanigher replied, “Impossible! She never had a father.” He then added, “According to Marston’s origin, she COULDN’T possibly have had a father. Wonder Woman was fashioned out of clay.” Kanigher remembered Marston’s origin very well and had no recollection of ever writing his own, contrary version. In fact, Kanigher felt that he had been very faithful to Marston’s vision, saying that after Marston died his family still had a “strong influence” on how Wonder Woman was written, and that they had selected him to take over the character.* Kanigher believed that he’d carried on Marston’s legacy, and the very notion that he would write anything contrary to what Marston had established struck him as impossible.

  This doesn’t change the fact that he did write a completely contrary origin story for Wonder Woman, but it illustrates how insignificant the story was to him. It was likely a story he came up with on the spur of the moment; it wasn’t intended to radically revise the character. Nonetheless, the new origin story exists, and it became a staple of the Silver Age Wonder Woman. When DC Comics released a series entitled Secret Origins in 1961 to reprint the origin stories of all of its superheroes, Kanigher’s new story appeared for Wonder Woman.

  *In fact, the stories were still credited “By Charles Moulton,” and continued as such until the mid-1960s. During his twenty years writing Wonder Woman, Kanigher was never credited as a writer, only as an editor. This was the fate of many Superman and Batman writers as well, whose stories still bore the taglines “By Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster” and “By Bob Kane” long after those men had stopped working on the books.

  *Tales from the Crypt was later adapted as an HBO television series of the same name, which ran in the early 1990s and was hosted by the congenial Crypt Keeper.

  *Wertham further alleged that Batman, Robin, and Wonder Woman were homosexuals and that Superman was a Nazi.

  †Gaines was set up to be a scapegoat, but he didn’t do himself any favors by appearing before the Senate after taking diet pills earlier in the day that were wearing off. In the 1950s, diet pills usually meant dexedrine, a powerful stimulant with quite a comedown.

  *In modern DC Comics continuity, both Hal Jordan and the Martian Manhunter have more tragic origin stories. Hal’s father was a test pilot, and Hal witnessed his father’s death in a terrible plane accident when he was a child, while the Martian Manhunter is the last living Martian and his entire family and race were wiped out. Both of these stories are retcons, or retroactive continuity, a story that is written later on and retroactively added to the canon of a character. In their original Silver Age incarnations, neither story was present.

  *Bat-Mite was a mischievous creature who idolized Batman and popped into Gotham City sporadically to set up strange adventures for his hero.

  *The spelling of the queen’s name has changed several times over the decades. Marston favored “Hippolyte,” but Kanigher switched to “Hippolyta” when he took over the book. That spelling remained until the relaunch of Wonder Woman in 1987, when George Pérez went back to “Hippolyte,” but “Hippolyta” became the norm again after Pérez left the title, and has been so ever since.

  *The story was entitled “The Million Dollar Penny,” and Wonder Woman enthusiasts might know that Kanigher had written another Wonder Woman story entitled “The Million Dollar Penny” five years before in Wonder Woman #59. Kanigher and repetition go hand in hand.

  *Including flight, even though she only learned that skill when she was an adult and left Paradise Island to become Wonder Woman. Kanigher wasn’t much for continuity.

  *
In reality, the widows Marston didn’t much care for Kanigher’s work, but Kanigher’s memory was not the best. Simultaneously, he also maintained a very high opinion of himself, which may have colored his recollections.

  5

  Focus on the Family, or Superman Is a Jackass

  Love, marriage, and family were constant themes for the women in superhero comic books in the 1950s, even the ones with superpowers. Normal women longed for husbands and children, superpowered women longed to be able to give up their life of fighting crime and settle down, and teenage girls longed to learn the skills that would soon land them a husband and domestic bliss. At DC Comics, it seemed that every woman in the Silver Age had marriage on the brain.

  Along with this focus on marriage came another peculiar phenomenon: the men were complete jerks. They either callously rejected advances or were irate when their own advances were brushed aside. There was a constant attitude of “How dare you?” no matter the circumstances, stemming from the notion that men knew better. Indignant outrage was common, leading to a lopsided gender dynamic whereby women had to constantly jump through hoops to appease men. Whether they were attempting to sooth their damaged egos or being taught a valuable lesson after upsetting them, women acquiesced to men’s every demand and the men always had full control of the relationship. Several archetypical female characters in the Golden Age had markedly different experiences, but in the Silver Age they were all in the same boat.

  In the late 1950s, the championing of marriage and the nuclear family was ubiquitous in American popular culture. In Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, historian Elaine Tyler May calls this “domestic containment.” In a world of uncertainty, May writes, the nuclear family “would create a feeling of warmth and security against the cold forces of disruption and alienation.” The outside world seemed rife with godless communist spies, atomic bombs, and numerous other threats, so Americans looked inward to their families for stability. This resulted in a celebration of traditional roles: the father as the stalwart head of the home, the mother as the loving caregiver and domestic wizard, and the children as precocious but obedient.

  Coupled with the rise of suburbia and strong economic growth, a family with a working father and a stay-at-home mother became the norm. Such a setup was common in the TV shows of the day: Leave It to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and The Donna Reed Show are but a few examples. The wife cooked and cleaned and took care of the children. When the husband came home, dinner was on the table and his wife was at the door in a lovely dress, his favorite drink in hand, waiting to take his coat. And, of course, she loved it.

  The Comics Code Authority had a rule that stated that “the treatment of love-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.” But there was one caveat for romance stories in superhero comic books: no one could really settle down, leading to frustration all around.

  The serialized, almost timeless nature of storytelling in comic books made marriage impossible. Lois Lane could never land Superman as a boyfriend, much less as a husband with kids and a house in the suburbs. Doing so would kill the suspense and eliminate a whole slew of possible love triangle story lines. Plus, the neighbors would probably notice Superman shooting off from the Kents’ backyard. This constant limbo aggravated every character involved. Ozzie and Harriet were already married, and the show revolved on their escapades as a family; superhero comics were about adventures and thwarting villains, and marriage was a secondary story that could never be fulfilled.

  This limbo took several forms for female characters in the Silver Age, but they all centered on not being able to have the life they desired. Everyone wanted to settle down and be part of a family, and the dictates of the medium just didn’t allow it. This exacerbated tensions for everyone involved so each woman, from the superpowered Wonder Woman to the everywoman Lois Lane, was in the same position, trying to please the increasingly frustrated man in her life.

  Wonder Woman

  Despite the oppressive Cold War culture, Wonder Woman was still a superhero, as powerful and capable as ever. Her origins had changed and she became mired in ridiculous romantic situations, but when a villain needed defeating or someone needed saving, she was there. Steve remained as inept as ever, and Wonder Woman saved him from various exploding aircraft, spaceships, volcanoes, and other deadly scenarios. She may have lacked the female superiority underpinnings of the Marston area, but she was still a superhero.

  When DC Comics decided to assemble its best superheroes into the Justice League of America in 1960, Wonder Woman was the only female member. During the Golden Age, Wonder Woman was a part of the Justice Society of America but was relegated to the role of the team’s secretary. In the Justice League, Wonder Woman was a full-fledged member. For almost the entire duration of the Silver Age, she was the sole woman alongside Superman, Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom, Martian Manhunter, Green Arrow, and Hawkman. Finally Black Canary joined nearly a decade later, and Zatanna became an official member in the mid-1970s.

  Wonder Woman’s teenage adventures as Wonder Girl were equally heroic. Wonder Girl saved Paradise Island from countless sea monsters and mythical beasts, and she also protected a nearby underwater city of mer-people from various aquatic threats. In terms of her superpowers and heroic prowess, the Silver Age Wonder Woman was as strong and capable as ever. However, the campy nature of the era brought her a slew of new, fantastical creatures to defeat.

  Kanigher wasn’t creative in his choice of villainous beasts. He had a few favorites and they appeared frequently with just slight variations. One of these was his regular use of clams in underwater tales. For example, in one issue, a clam was a gateway to travel through time, and in another Wonder Girl battled a cannibal clam.* Enormous creatures were a common foe in Wonder Woman generally, particularly giants and massive birds. As both an adult and a teenager, she fought giants from different dimensions, planets, and time periods as well as pterodactyls, rocs, dimorphodons, and even a space eagle. Her adventures were larger than life, her enemies fantastical and mythological as opposed to rooted in any semblance of reality. With such a proliferation of absurd and extraordinary enemies, it was the romantic aspects of her stories that brought Wonder Woman back into something reminiscent of the real world, though not in a good way.

  Steve had always been in love with Wonder Woman, though it never got him far in the Golden Age. Whenever he tried to make a move on Wonder Woman, he was rebuffed, often violently, and when he asked for her hand in marriage Wonder Woman would say that Amazon law forbade it and end the discussion.

  By the Silver Age, Steve and Wonder Woman were an item. They were referred to as “sweethearts” and often went on dates together. Moreover, Wonder Woman was far more affectionate with Steve, like in Wonder Woman #102 when Steve gave Wonder Woman perfume for her birthday and got a kiss in return. When asked on a date, she’d eagerly reply, “I’d love to, Steve! You know I like to be with you!” She still rejected his marriage proposals, but for a different reason. Whenever Steve professed his love for her, she’d heartily pledge her love in return but would add, “I can’t marry you—until my services are no longer needed to battle crime and injustice! Only then can I think about myself!” Wonder Woman would have loved to marry Steve but for that pesky superhero job.

  She was also very concerned about being a good wife, and asked Steve, “How can I become your wife 100% of the time—and also fulfill my mission as an Amazon and help anyone in distress?” If Wonder Woman married Steve and continued her superheroic mission, she wouldn’t be able to be a proper wife and give him all of her attention. She cemented this point in another issue, stating, “It would be unfair to marry you unless I could be a full-time wife!” She pled with Steve to be patient and wait for her and the day when her abilities would no longer be needed.

  Along with this newfound romantic inclination came jealousy; it was rather unwise to trifle with the affection of an Amazon. As a teen, Wonder Girl da
ted Ronno the Mer-Boy, a half-boy, half-fish from the mer-people city near Paradise Island. She wore his seashell fraternity pin and they went to his sea dances, but Wonder Girl was very covetous of his attention. When Ronno danced with a mermaid, Wonder Girl left in a huff, thinking, “I’ve had enough! And to think of all the time I spent making myself pretty for that ungrateful wretch!”

  Steve often faced a jealous Wonder Woman, but with a twist. When he had to pick the real Wonder Woman out of a group of Wonder Woman robots and kissed them all to do so, Wonder Woman was furious. When Wonder Woman disguised herself as a movie star and Steve was attracted to her, she was again irate. Wonder Woman’s biggest rival was herself.

  These identity issues continued with Diana. In the Golden Age, Wonder Woman and Diana had always been separate personalities, one the real woman and the other merely a disguise. In the Silver Age, the two sides conflated and Wonder Woman wanted Steve to appreciate both sides of her personality. When he ditched Diana to spend time with Wonder Woman, she called him two-faced. When he rhapsodized about Wonder Woman in front of Diana, she later thought, “The nerve of Steve! Always praising Wonder Woman in my presence as if I were just a wooden post! He never says a single nice thing about my eyes—or my hair—or my figure!” While she was livid when Steve was interested in an exact copy of herself, at the same time she wanted him to be in love with her secret identity.