by Jill Lepore
Batman’s new backstory tempered his critics, but it hardly stopped them. On May 8, 1940, the Chicago Daily News declared war on comic books. “Ten million dollars of these sex-horror serials are sold every month,” wrote Sterling North, the newspaper’s literary editor. “Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the ‘comic’ magazine.” Twenty-five million readers requested reprints of North’s article, in which he’d called comic books “a national disgrace.”4
In June 1940, Germany conquered France. Much of the comic-book trouble had to do, by then, with Superman, who’d begun to look to a lot of people like a fascist. Comic books would “spawn only a generation of Storm Troopers,” the poet Stanley Kunitz predicted in Library Journal. In September 1940, the New Republic published an essay called “The Coming of Superman” by the novelist Slater Brown. “Superman, handsome as Apollo, strong as Hercules, chivalrous as Launcelot, swift as Hermes, embodies all the traditional attributes of a Hero God,” Brown wrote, but in Germany, “it is not the children who have embraced a vulgarized myth of Superman so enthusiastically; it has been their elders.” Time magazine would eventually ask the question Kunitz and Brown had circled around: “Are Comics Fascist?”5
In the heat of the controversy, Olive Byrne pitched an article to her editor at Family Circle: Who better to explain to American mothers whether comics are dangerous for children than Dr. William Moulton Marston? She got the assignment. Her article was published in October 1940. It begins, as her articles always began, with the fiction that she had traveled to Marston’s house to interview him, in this case, troubled by “terrible visions of Hitlerian justice.”
“Do you know anything about comics magazines?” she asked him.
Oh, he knew plenty. “He told me that he had been doing research in this field for more than a year—and that he had read almost every comics magazine published during that time!” There were more than one hundred comic-book magazines on the nation’s newsstands, reaching forty to fifty million readers every month, he said.
“But do you think these fantastic comics are good reading for children?” she asked.
Mostly, yes, Marston said. They are pure wish fulfillment: “And the two wishes behind Superman are certainly the soundest of all; they are, in fact, our national aspirations of the moment—to develop unbeatable national might, and to use this great power, when we get it, to protect innocent, peace-loving people from destructive, ruthless evil. You don’t think for a minute that it is wrong to imagine the fulfillment of those two aspirations for the United States of America, do you? Then why should it be wrong or harmful for children to imagine the same things for themselves, personally, when they read ‘Superman’?”
“But what about other comics?” she pressed. “Some of them are full of torture, kidnapping, sadism, and other cruel business.”
“Unfortunately, that is true,” Marston admitted. “But there are one or two rules of thumb which are useful in distinguishing sadism from exciting adventure in the comics. Threat of torture is harmless, but if the torture itself is shown in the strip, it becomes sadism. When a lovely heroine is bound to the stake, comics followers are sure that the rescue will arrive in the nick of time. The reader’s wish is to save the girl, not to see her suffer. A bound or chained person does not suffer even embarrassment in the comics, and the reader, therefore, is not being taught to enjoy suffering.”
Convinced by the professor’s every argument, “Olive Richard” leaves his house and, on her way to the train, picks up the latest copy of Superman.6 Superman’s publisher, Charlie Gaines, read Olive Byrne’s article and was so impressed that he decided to hire Marston as a consulting psychologist.7
To defend himself against the assault on comics, Gaines needed experts. George Hecht, the publisher of Parents’ Magazine, had announced his plan to publish True Comics. “Every page in this new comic magazine is filled with action and excitement,” Parents’ editor Clara Savage Littledale promised. “But the heroes are not impossible creatures. They are real.” Its first issue included stories about Winston Churchill and Simón Bolívar. But what really set True Comics apart was that it was overseen by an editorial advisory board of experts: professors, especially historians, educators, and even the public-opinion pollster George Gallup.8
Gaines decided to form his own editorial advisory board. “ ‘Doc’ Marston has long been an advocate of the right type of comic magazines and is now a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of all ‘D.C. Superman’ Comics,” Gaines announced in a memo to his staff in 1940, enclosing a copy of Olive Byrne’s Family Circle article.9 DC also decided to stamp all comic books in which Superman and Batman appeared with a logo reading, “A DC Publication” or “A Superman-DC Publication.” In October 1941, in a message in More Fun Comics, the publishers told readers (and their parents) that the company’s logo—a circle containing the letters DC, short for Detective Comics—ought to be considered a stamp of quality, a mark of the endorsement of the board, whose members included Robert Thorndike, a professor of educational psychology at Columbia; Ruth Eastwood Perl, another psychologist; C. Bowie Millican, who taught literature at NYU; Gene Tunney, a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and director of a Catholic youth organization; and Josette Frank, an expert on children’s literature and the executive director of the Child Study Association of America (she’d worked with Holloway at Child Study in the 1920s).10 Though Gaines had initially appointed Marston to the board, Frank asked Gaines to remove him, since Gaines had also signed Marston on as a writer.11
As consulting psychologist, Marston convinced Gaines that what he really needed to counter the attack on comics was a female superhero. In some versions of the story, this was Holloway’s idea. “Come on, let’s have a Superwoman!” she’d told Marston, according to her son Pete. “Never mind the guys.”12 But Holloway herself was more likely to say she never had anything to do with Wonder Woman: “I’ve always had my own work and pay which meant there was no time left over for Wonder Woman nor was it necessary,” she wrote. A female superhero might have been Olive Byrne’s idea, though she’d have been the last person in the world to take credit for it. In any case, Marston, who at a press conference in 1937 had predicted that women would rule the world, and had named Margaret Sanger as the second-most-important person on the planet (second only to Henry Ford), as measured by “contributions to humanity,” knew very well who he had in mind for a female superhero.13
At first, Gaines had objected. Every female pulp and comic-book heroine, he told Marston, had been a failure. “But they weren’t superwomen,” Marston countered. “They weren’t superior to men.” A female superhero, Marston insisted, was the best answer to the critics, since “the comics’ worst offense was their bloodcurdling masculinity.” He explained,
A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as the breath of life. Suppose your child’s ideal becomes a superman who uses his extraordinary power to help the weak. The most important ingredient in the human happiness recipe still is missing—love. It’s smart to be strong. It’s big to be generous. But it’s sissified, according to exclusively masculine rules, to be tender, loving, affectionate, and alluring. “Aw, that’s girl’s stuff!” snorts our young comics reader. “Who wants to be a girl?” And that’s the point; not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, power. Not wanting to be girls they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peaceloving as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weak ones. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.14
In making this argument, Marston braided together more than a century of women’s rights rhetoric, his own very odd brand of psychology, and, inevitably, his peerless hucksterism. Gaines was sold.
“Well, Doc
,” Gaines said, “I picked Superman after every syndicate in America turned it down. I’ll take a chance on your Wonder Woman! But you’ll have to write the strip yourself. After six months’ publication we’ll submit your woman hero to a vote of our comics readers. If they don’t like her I can’t do any more about it.”15
In February 1941, Marston submitted a typewritten draft of the first installment of “Suprema, the Wonder Woman.” For an editor, Gaines assigned Marston to Sheldon Mayer, who edited Superman. Mayer, who’d grown up in Harlem, had drawn since he was a little boy. He once wrote the story of his life as an aspiring comic-book artist in a comic book called Scribbly. He’d been working for Gaines since 1936, pasting newspaper strips into comic books. Mayer and Gaines would regularly work all night, then shave together in the office bathroom in the morning. Even after Gaines made Mayer an executive editor, he still sent him out to buy cigarettes. Mayer was small and rangy; he wore glasses and smoked a pipe, but he still looked like a kid.16
Mayer was twenty-four; Marston was forty-eight. Most of the writers and artists Mayer worked with were even younger than he was. He counted Marston’s age, not to mention his Harvard degrees, against him. “When we first started Wonder Woman,” Mayer later said, “I seriously hoped it wouldn’t last more than 20 minutes.” He found it easier “to take a former haberdashery salesman with a flair for writing” and teach him about comics than to work with “a guy who was already a writer.” But the more Mayer got to know Marston, the better he liked him.17 Marston was always disarming.
In a letter Marston sent Mayer with his first script, he explained the “under-meaning” of the story:
Men (Greeks) were captured by predatory love-seeking females until they got sick of it and made the women captive by force. But they were afraid of them (masculine inferiority complex) and kept them heavily chained lest the women put one over as they always had before. The Goddess of Love comes along and helps women break their chains by giving them the greater force of real altruism. Whereupon men turned about face and actually helped the women get away from domestic slavery—as men are doing now. The NEW WOMEN thus freed and strengthened by supporting themselves (on Paradise Island) developed enormous physical and mental power. But they have to use it for other people’s benefit or they go back to chains, and weakness.
It might sound like a fantasy, Marston admitted, but “all this is true,” at least as allegory, and, really, as history, because his comic was meant to chronicle “a great movement now under way—the growth in the power of women.” He didn’t mind Mayer editing it, though he preferred to be consulted. “I hope you’ll call me up about any changes in the story, names, costumes or subject-matter,” he told Mayer. “That’s your business.” But about the story’s feminism, he was unmovable. “Let that theme alone,” he told him, “or drop the project.”18
Mayer made one change: he nixed “Suprema.” Better to call her just “Wonder Woman.” As for the rest, it sounded like a lot of crap to Shelly Mayer, but he figured, What the hell.
AS LOVELY AS APHRODITE
WHAT WOULD SHE LOOK LIKE? Botticelli’s Venus? The Statue of Liberty? Greta Garbo?
“I am sending Peter, the artist, a carbon,” Marston wrote to Mayer when he mailed him the first script. “Let me know when you want him and I’ll send him down.”1
Marston had hired his own artist: Harry G. Peter.2 Peter was sixty-one, an antique by comic-book standards. “Harry seemed like quite an elderly gentleman to me,” Mayer said.3 Mayer didn’t approve; he also thought Peter’s drawings were awful. But he couldn’t get Marston and Gaines to agree to accept anyone else.4 When Marston hired Peter, Peter’s only experience in comics was having drawn panels for George Hecht’s True Comics. (In the spring of 1941, Peter would begin drawing a superhero named Man o’ Metal, a flammable foundry worker, for Reg’lar Fellers Heroic Comics—but that came after Wonder Woman.)5 Gaines must have liked the idea of swiping an artist from George Hecht; he hated him. In 1941, Gaines wrote a letter to Hecht inviting Hecht and True Comics’ editorial advisory board to have lunch with Gaines and DC Comics’ editorial advisory board, in order to stage a public debate about comics, pitting Gaines’s experts against Hecht’s. “I will be glad to underwrite the expense,” Gaines told Hecht. Meanwhile, though, he hired one of Hecht’s artists to draw Wonder Woman.6
Marston liked to say that Wonder Woman was meant to be “psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world,” but neither he nor Gaines seem to have given much thought to hiring a woman to draw her. Fiction House employed dozens of women artists, but Gaines only ever hired one: Elizabeth Burnley Bentley. (Her work was uncredited, but she did lettering and backgrounding for Superman and Batman.)7 It wasn’t for a lack of choices. There were experienced editorial cartoonists, like Lou Rogers; in 1940, she was illustrating children’s books. There were women who drew daily newspaper strips. Dalia Messick, using the name Dale Messick, began drawing Brenda Starr in 1940. And there were experienced comic-book artists. June Tarpé Mills, who’d studied at the Pratt Institute, paying her tuition by working as a fashion model, started drawing comics for Reg’lar Fellers Heroic Comics in the late 1930s. She was the first woman artist to create her own action hero. Early in 1941, a newspaper syndicate hired her to write and draw a daily comic strip called, at first, Black Fury and, later, Miss Fury. Miss Fury, sleek and glamorous, is a socialite named Marla Drake who fights crime while dressed as a black panther. Mills published using the name “Tarpé Mills.” (“It would have been a major letdown to the kids if they found out that the author of such virile and awesome characters was a gal,” she said.) By 1942, Miss Fury was appearing in her own comic book, published by DC’s chief rival, Timely Comics (later Marvel Comics).8
From Tarpé Mills, Miss Fury, Strip 285 (illustration credit 23.1)
Instead of hiring a woman artist who’d worked on comics, Marston hired a man. He said he liked that Peter knew “what life is all about.”9 But Peter’s age also meant that he had lived through the suffrage movement.
Left to right: Marston, Harry G. Peter, Sheldon Mayer, and Charlie Gaines, 1942 (illustration credit 23.2)
Henry George Peter was born in San Rafael, California, in 1880. He was very likely named after the San Francisco newspaper editor and reformer Henry George, whose most famous work, Progress and Poverty, a wildly popular inquiry into economic inequality, was published in 1879. Henry George was an early and ardent advocate for women’s education and for female suffrage. “In all questions of politics,” George wrote, “women have as direct and vital an interest as men.”10 If Henry George Peter was named after Henry George, his parents were radicals. Both Peter and his older brother became artists. By the time Peter was twenty, he was working for a newspaper.11 He signed his work “H. G. Peter”; sometimes people called him Harry; sometimes they called him Pete. He may have worked for the San Francisco Bulletin. By 1906 he was a staff artist for the San Francisco Chronicle, the newspaper that, in 1907, published the first daily comic strip, Mutt and Jeff. Marston later claimed that Peter had worked on Mutt and Jeff, but it’s not clear that he really had. He did, though, draw for the Chronicle during the years when its pages closely covered the suffrage movement in the state, led by the California Equal Suffrage League. The woman Peter eventually married was a newspaper artist, too, and, very probably, a suffragist.12
Adonica Fulton was a staff artist for the San Francisco Bulletin.13 She studied at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art. Both Peter and Fulton were much influenced by the American illustrator Charles Gibson; he’d introduced the Gibson girl in the 1890s. She wore her haired piled on top of her head. She was wealthy, elegant, fashionable, and full of disdain. Her mouth was pouty, her eyes half-lidded, her breasts heavy, her waist pinched. Gibson’s influence can be seen in Peter’s work and in Adonica Fulton’s early drawings of women, too.
A Gibson girl, pen and ink drawing by Charles Gibson, c. 1891 (illustration credit 23.3)
I
n San Francisco, both Peter and Fulton were members of the Newspaper Artists’ League, an organization limited to “the leading men and women employed upon the local newspapers and magazines.” In 1904, they both had work displayed in San Francisco at a newspaper artists’ exhibition, where Fulton’s twenty drawings were singled out as among the most distinguished.14
Adonica Fulton, pen and ink drawing, 1904. From The Newspaper Artists’ Exhibit, San Francisco Call, October 9, 1904 (illustration credit 23.4)
Peter and Fulton moved to New York in about 1907, following friends and fellow newspaper artists Rube Goldberg and Herbert Roth. Peter started drawing for the New York American. By 1908, he was making pen and ink illustrations for Judge. In 1912, Peter and Fulton married. Their courtship had been unusually long. The year they married, they both turned thirty-two.15
Harry G. Peter, “Seeing Miss America First,” Judge, February 27, 1915 (illustration credit 23.5)
At Judge, Peter met the feminist cartoonist Lou Rogers. Between 1912 and 1917, both Peter and Rogers contributed illustrations to Judge’s regular pro-suffrage feature “The Modern Woman.” Rogers’s work was better known than Peter’s. In 1915, her name appeared in a Judge advertisement on a list of “the kind of writers of real humor and the distinctively skillful artists whom our readers choose”; Peter’s name is not included.16