Wonder Woman Unbound

by Hanley, Tim

  Although she was inspired by Batman and borrowed his name, Batgirl didn’t rely on Batman for anything. She made her own costume and got her own supplies, all without the benefit of Bruce Wayne’s vast fortune. Furthermore, she was no sidekick; she worked independent of the Dynamic Duo, crossing their paths only when their cases coincided. This independence might have been due to the fact that Batman and Robin didn’t exactly take a shine to Batgirl right away.

  In her first appearance, both Batgirl and the Dynamic Duo separately attempted to track down the villain Killer Moth. Unbeknownst to Batgirl, Batman had set a trap for Killer Moth, which Batgirl inadvertently stumbled upon. As Batgirl fought Killer Moth and his goons, a hiding Robin declared, “Holy interference! She’s ruining all our plans!” To which Batman replied, “We can’t let Batgirl fight our battles now, can we?” Batman and Robin jumped out of hiding to join the fight, but in the chaos Killer Moth escaped. Batgirl chastised Batman for interfering with her work, but Batman angrily retorted, “No, Batgirl! We didn’t spoil anything … you did!!” When she asked to help them track down Killer Moth, Batman said, “No, Batgirl! This is a case for Batman and Robin! I’m sorry—but you must understand that we can’t worry ourselves about a girl.” Robin echoed Batman’s opinion on female crime fighters in a later issue; when Batgirl wasn’t at the scene of a robbery, Robin declared, “That suits me fine! Nabbing crooks is man’s work!”

  Batgirl eventually won Batman and Robin over by proving herself to be a smart and capable crime fighter. After Batgirl nabbed Killer Moth when Batman couldn’t, the trio of vigilantes delivered him to police headquarters and Batman said of Batgirl, “I’ll welcome her aid, Commissioner Gordon—when and where the occasion arises! From what I’ve seen, she doesn’t have to take a backseat to anybody!” The commissioner was even more impressed and, not knowing his daughter was actually Batgirl, told Barbara that “Batgirl sure is tops in my book!”

  Not only was Batgirl strong, independent, and well educated, she also addressed and flipped stereotypical female traits head-on. In a story entitled “Batman’s Marriage Trap,” the women of Gotham City decided Batman should get married and formed a protest group called the W.E.B., Women to End BATchelorhood. Batgirl quickly joined, carrying a sign that read “Batman Unfair to Gotham Girls” amidst similar signs of “Pair Power!” and “Down with Singles!” Although Batgirl looked like a Silver Age marriage junkie, she’d actually infiltrated the organization to root out the mob agent who was using the W.E.B. to try to take out Batman. Batgirl’s marriage enthusiasm was an elaborate ruse so she could save the day.

  In another issue, Batgirl dealt with vanity and personal appearance. While chasing bank robbers, Batgirl noticed that her mask was crooked and stopped to adjust it, and this pause almost allowed the criminals to escape. Frustrated with herself, she said, “My vanity betrayed me!” and later clarified that “It wasn’t personal vanity that made me adjust my headgear—it was an instinctive female reaction!” Batgirl saw her femininity as a weakness but was determined to turn it into a strength. Later, she pretended to stop chasing criminals to fix a run in her stocking, showing off her leg to distract them. As the lawbreakers stared, whistled, and called out, “What a pair of gams!” Batgirl and the Dynamic Duo capitalized on their distraction and apprehended them. While the idea of vanity as an instinctive female trait wasn’t particularly enlightened, this clumsy beginning took an intriguing turn as it became a crime-fighting aid.

  Batgirl starred in her own semiregular backup feature in Detective Comics, which became permanent in June 1970; she appeared in every issue of the series for the next two years. Having a separate feature further established Batgirl as her own hero. Although the Dynamic Duo occasionally appeared, Batgirl was the undisputed star of the stories, developing her own cast of characters while investigating her own cases. She was popular elsewhere in the DC Comics universe as well, guest-starring in series such as Adventure Comics, Justice League of America, Superman, and World’s Finest.

  Her backup feature only ran regularly for two years but it ended on a high note, with Barbara Gordon’s election to the US House of Representatives. Commissioner Gordon was asked to run for Congress but didn’t really want the job, while Batgirl was increasingly frustrated with the limits of vigilantism. She revealed her secret identity to her father and asked to run in his stead, asserting, “It’s the only way I can really fight crime—prevent it—through prison reform! Legislation—law that creates order … not disorder!”

  Barbara took her campaign to the streets of Gotham, holding rallies and calling for change in Washington. In one impassioned speech, she asked, “Will they clean up the slums? Create new jobs … ? Stop dope-traffic … ? I say they won’t! I say—boot the rascals out—elect me!” She became known as “Babs the Boot” and ultimately won the election by inspiring massive turnout from young voters. Her vigilante adventures in Detective Comics ended, but Congresswoman Barbara Gordon soon starred in The Batman Family, where she was glad to set aside her legislative duties and dig out her Batgirl costume if the need arose.*

  Before she even became Batgirl, Barbara Gordon was more impressive than Diana Prince. She earned her doctorate with highest honors, ran the library system of one of the biggest cities in America, and was a judo expert on the side. Diana Prince beat people up and very occasionally ran a small clothing boutique. Once Barbara became Batgirl, she quickly became the equal of her peers, while Diana was regularly shown to be inferior. Batgirl flipped traditional stereotypes, while Diana embodied them.

  Much like Diana, Barbara was also the victim of betrayal. She sponsored the rehabilitation and parole of a criminal she’d locked up as Batgirl, only to have him turn around and steal valuable books from the library. Barbara was livid, but instead of trying to cripple him and get vengeance, this betrayal made her decide to run for Congress and attempt to reform the prison system. Betrayal brought out the worst in Diana and only added to her quest for personal revenge, but for Barbara it created a desire to work for the betterment of society as a whole. Barbara was a modern, empowered woman, capable of achieving anything she set her mind to. She was exactly what a superpowerless Wonder Woman should have been.

  Emerald Empress

  The Legion of Super-Heroes was a club of teenage superheroes from the thirtieth century. Created in 1958, the Legion was made up of teens from a variety of planets with a wide range of superpowers, including a time-traveling Superboy.* The Legion first encountered the group that would become their chief villains, the Fatal Five, in Adventure Comics #352 in January 1967. This group of nefarious criminals included Mano, who used his antimatter touch to destroy his home planet; the Persuader, whose atomic axe could cut through almost anything; Tharok, a powerful cyborg; Validus, a dull-witted giant easily controlled by his teammates; and the fiendish Emerald Empress.

  Her real name was Sarya, and she came from the planet Venegar, the former home of the ancient Ekron civilization. Sarya found the Emerald Eye of Ekron, an ancient object of near limitless power, and took over her home planet in a matter of hours, becoming the Emerald Empress of Venegar. When her people revolted, she left her home world to raise an army to someday return and again subjugate the planet. The Legion’s database called Emerald Empress “the most wanted female criminal in the history of the universe! She is guilty of every crime from murder to space-piracy!”

  Facing the threat of a Sun-Eater and lacking the firepower to stop it, the Legion assembled the Fatal Five to help them save the galaxy and offered them pardons in exchange for their help. They did stop the Sun-Eater, but afterward the Fatal Five decided to join forces and try to conquer the galaxy. The Emerald Empress was a key part of this team of supervillains and was often the most capable member of the group.

  Tharok’s cyborg brain gave him superintelligence, and so he led the team and controlled the mighty Validus, but the Empress was clearly second in command. She was also vitally important to the team because the Emerald Eye teleported the Fatal Fi
ve wherever they needed to go, allowing them to get the jump on the Legion or escape them. While her teammates regularly clashed, the Empress was the most reasonable member of the team and did her best to keep her hot-headed associates focused on fighting the Legion instead of each other.

  Quarreling with the Emerald Empress rarely went well for her teammates. When Mano suggested that he and the Empress join together and ditch the rest of the Fatal Five, she rejected his offer. An angry Mano tried to attack her with his antimatter touch, but the Empress used the Emerald Eye to bind him in energy handcuffs. Mano scoffed at the restraints, declaring that he would burn through them in seconds, but before he could do so the Empress blasted him out of the room, ending their discussion. Similarly, when the Persuader and Mano were arguing over who was more powerful, the Empress separated the two with large energy bonds and incapacitated them so their fighting wouldn’t destroy the ship.

  When battling the Legion, the Emerald Empress was as capable a warrior as her teammates, if not more so. One blow from the Persuader’s atomic axe, one touch from Mano’s antimatter hand, or one punch from Validus would mean certain death, making those three (and, by extension, Validus’s controller Tharok) generally useless in combat. The crafty Legionnaires deftly avoided each villain’s sole dangerous move, leaving them ineffective, while the Empress had a whole array of possible attacks with her Emerald Eye.

  In a fight scene in Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #231, Shadow Lass kicked Mano and Colossal Boy punched Validus, while the Persuader was just swinging at air against Mon-El and Ultra Boy, but the Empress handled Brainiac 5, Element Lad, and Sun Boy with ease. The Empress was also especially good at fighting the Legion’s most powerful member, Superboy. She hammered the Boy of Steel with her energy blasts and in one issue encased him in a force field that put him in a state of suspended animation. Aware of his one weakness, the Empress wisely carried around a piece of Kryptonite; her ultimate plan was to control Superboy with the Kryptonite and use him to reconquer Venegar. The Empress may have lacked the death blow powers of the rest of the Fatal Five, but her many abilities made her a more effective fighter than anyone else on the team.

  What’s most striking about the Emerald Empress is that her portrayal had nothing at all to do with her being a woman. Female villains tended to use their sexuality against their opponents, be betrayed by some sort of inherent compassion, or use villainy only as a way to try and marry the hero. The Empress did none of this. Her only concern was power. She gained amazing powers with the Emerald Eye, took power on her home planet in a swift coup, and saw her union with the Fatal Five as a means to regain power over Venegar and then the entire galaxy.

  Using her sexuality was unnecessary because she had such immense strength at her disposal. Compassion or emotion never came into play either; she was completely ruthless and focused. In fact, her teammates were far more emotional than she: Validus was a cauldron of rage, while the Persuader and Mano were constantly angry and often lost sight of the mission at hand because of it. Only Tharok was as even-keeled as the Empress, and he was half-robot. The Empress was strong, rational, and cunning and lacked any of the stereotypes associated with female characters. At her core, the Emerald Empress was first and foremost a villain, and everything else was secondary. Being a woman didn’t define her; it didn’t even come into play.

  For Diana Prince, her gender was at the heart of the character. Everything about Diana was rooted in an attempt to make her a modern, normal woman. This was Diana’s defining quality, to such an extent that she didn’t actually have a personality, particularly in the early issues of the mod era. The story wasn’t ruled by the author considering what Diana would do, but rather by an attempt to depict a character who acted as a male author thought a woman would: loving clothes, falling in love, and being emotional. The result was one-dimensional; Diana was a combination of stereotypical female reactions and feelings instead of an actual, fleshed-out character. There was no Diana the person, just Diana the generic woman.

  Lagging Behind the Times

  Despite the best of intentions, the mod Diana Prince paled in comparison to her fellow female characters. Once ahead of her time, the times had left her behind. The idea of stripping the genre’s strongest, oldest, and most famous female character of her superpowers ran contrary to the contemporary movement toward female empowerment. Diana engaged in all of the stereotypes and clichés that other female characters had escaped and real-world women denounced. Ultimately, it was so bad that the depowered Wonder Woman resulted in feminists leading a campaign for a return to the feminist heights of the Golden Age.

  *Having a character named the “Invisible Girl” was a spectacular, unintentional metaphor for female characters in the Silver Age.

  *The issue included stirring dialogue, with Superman declaring, “Diana … in another second or so, I’ll feel like kissing you—and we both know I shouldn’t!” and Diana responding, “Right you are—darn it!” Superman always knows best. It’s another Denny O’Neil issue, by the way, not to pick on the poor guy. Seriously, he’s done a lot of excellent comic books. Just not any with Wonder Woman in them.

  *The title of this story was “I Am Curious (Black)!”—an obvious homage to director Vilgot Sjöman’s Swedish art house film I Am Curious (Yellow), which addressed social issues and included a brief interview with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The film was also fairly sexually explicit and was banned or protested in several American states after being labeled pornographic.

  †In the end, the baby’s father was found alive in a Viet Cong prison camp, and when he came home Lois returned Little Moon to him.

  *There’s a reason that people talk about Green Lantern/Green Arrow instead of Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane in terms of race relations in the Bronze Age. The stories were somewhat hackneyed and contained racial stereotyping despite their attempt at a progressive message. It may not be surprising to learn that these four issues were written by Robert Kanigher. Still, this was a significant shift for the series that had Lois spending time on real-world problems instead of obsessing over marrying Superman.

  †Dorothy Roubicek, Wonder Woman’s assistant editor during the Golden Age bondage situation, went on to marry William Woolfolk and return to DC Comics as a full editor.

  *The Lois Lane adventures in The Superman Family were mostly old reprints from Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane, but occasionally there were new stories. The first of these involved Lois working alongside the S.I.A. (Secret Intelligence Agency) to track down a dangerous assassin, but within a few issues Lois was back to her old reporting job. Her romance with Superman was back as well, rekindled even before the Superman Family merger.

  *While it’s commonly believed that Batgirl was brought into the comic books because of the popularity of Yvonne Craig’s Batgirl on the Batman TV show, her comic book debut actually predated her television debut.

  *The Batman Family was published from 1975 to 1978, when it was merged with Detective Comics. Barbara Gordon remained a congresswoman until 1980, when she lost her bid for reelection. She returned to Gotham City and became a member of the Humanities Research and Development Center, where she led the social services department.

  *The team wasn’t only diverse in terms of planet of origin, but in gender too; Lightning Lad, Cosmic Boy, and Brainiac 5 fought alongside Saturn Girl, Shrinking Violet, and Phantom Girl.

  9

  Restoration and Re-creation

  The novelty of a new Wonder Woman initially gave the series a slight sales bump, but the book soon returned to its unimpressive numbers. O’Neil and Sekowsky’s attempted portrayal of a modern woman didn’t go over well, particularly with modern women. Chief among those disappointed with the comic was Gloria Steinem, a writer and political activist who had become the face of feminism in America. She had been a fan of Wonder Woman as a child and wanted her to return to her Amazon roots. Steinem was also friends with DC Comics’ owner Steve Ross, and occasionally stopped by the DC of
fices in New York City. She lobbied for the old Wonder Woman to return, and DC soon announced that the mod era would end with January 1973’s Wonder Woman #204; Diana Prince would be Wonder Woman again. Pleased by the news, Steinem splashed the return of Wonder Woman across her new project.

  The women’s liberation movement was growing rapidly, and Steinem wanted to introduce its ideas and values to a mainstream audience, so she and her associates launched Ms. magazine in 1972. Most women’s magazines at the time were of the Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping variety, focused on recipes and cleaning products and how to keep a proper home. Ms. was an alternative to these magazines and discussed women’s issues, politics, and the feminist lifestyle. It was an instant success, and when the first issue hit the newsstands in July 1972, Wonder Woman was on the cover.

  She was a giant, striding forward, with half of her body in an average American street on the left and the other half in a Vietnam War scene on the right. The image suggested that Wonder Woman could be a force for good in both worlds; in one hand, she rescued a group of buildings with her golden lasso, and with her other hand she swatted a fighter plane out of the sky. A sign in the town read “Peace and Justice in ’72” while the magazine’s headline declared “Wonder Woman for President.” The issue included an article by Joanne Edgar about the history of Wonder Woman that ended with the news that she would soon return to her Amazon roots. They also reprinted a few pages from William Moulton Marston and H. G. Peter’s first Wonder Woman story from All Star Comics #8.