But, of course, the comic-book industry in the throes of the war machine did churn out its fair share of pinup bombshells and no-nonsense dames with names like Spitfire and Miss Victory, or the strangely comforting Pat Parker, War Nurse. With no particular ax to grind against the Axis forces, Pat Parker was driven only by her desire to dress up like a showgirl and take to the battlefields of Western Europe on life-threatening missions of mercy. She was prepared to take on entire tank divisions with a refugee quivering under each arm. What made her tank-battling activities especially brave was the fact that this war nurse had no special powers and wore a costume so insubstantial, there could be nothing secret about her lunch, let alone her identity. But, absurd as she may seem, she did her best to exemplify the can-do, Rosie the Riveter spirit of those women who were “manning” the home front.
And then there was the most famous superheroine of them all. Wonder Woman was the creation of William Moulton Marston, the man who, not incidentally, invented the controversial polygraph test apparatus, or lie detector, that is still in use today. Marston was a professor at Columbia and Tufts universities, and Radcliffe College—and a good one, according to accounts of the time—and the author of several respected works of popular psychology. Like other forward thinkers, Marston saw in comics the potential to convey complex ideas in the form of exciting and violent symbolic dramas. He described the great educational potential of the comics in an article titled “Don’t Laugh at the Comics,” which appeared in the popular women’s magazine Family Circle in 1940 and led to his getting hired as an educational consultant at DC-National.
Marston coupled his ideas with an unorthodox lifestyle: his wife, Elizabeth, was also a psychologist, and is credited with having suggested a superheroine character. Both were enthusiastic proponents of a progressive attitude toward sex and relationships. They shared a mutual lover, a student of Marston’s named Olive Byrne, said to be the physical model for the original Harry Peter drawings of Wonder Woman. Together, Marston and Peter (with indispensable input from Elizabeth and Olive) developed a fantasy world of staggering richness. For sheer invention, for relentless dedication to the core concept, the Wonder Woman strip far surpassed its competitors.
But unlike traditional pinups, the girls of Wonder Woman were athletic and forceful. They wore tiaras and togas while they engaged in violent gladiatorial contests on the backs of giant, genetically engineered monster kangaroos. Wonder Woman was traditionally sexy—there were pinup shots—but in most panels, she yomped and stomped like some martial arts majorette, outracing automobiles for fun.
1941’s “Introducing Wonder Woman” began when an air force plane crashed on an uncharted island inhabited exclusively by beautiful scantily clad women capable of carrying the full-grown air force pilot “as if he were a child.” The man, Captain Steve Trevor of US Army Intelligence, was the first to ever set foot on Paradise Island, and within moments, the queen’s daughter, Princess Diana, had fallen in love.
A two-page illustrated-text section revealed the history of the Amazons since their slavery at the hands of Hercules. Encouraged by their patron goddess Aphrodite, they liberated themselves and set sail for a magical island where they could establish a new civilization of women, far from the cruelty, greed, and violence that typified “man’s world.” On Paradise Island, the immortal women set about fashioning their fabulous alternative to patriarchal, heliocentric society.
In this first issue, Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, consulted apparitions of Aphrodite and Athena, who clarified that Trevor had been sent deliberately by the gods. It was time, apparently, for the Amazons to emerge from seclusion and join the worldwide struggle against Axis tyranny. Trevor had to be sent home to complete his mission against the enemy—but he was not to return alone.
“YOU MUST SEND WITH HIM THE STRONGEST OF YOUR WONDER WOMEN!—FOR AMERICA, THE LAST CITADEL OF DEMOCRACY, AND OF EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN, NEEDS YOUR HELP!”
A contest was declared to identify the most appropriate candidate. Tests included outrunning a deer and culminated in the favorite sport of these immortal ladettes: bullets and bracelets. A kind of Russian roulette, the game saw the final contenders facing one another with loaded revolvers (where the staunchly antiwar Amazons managed to get hold of working firearms remains a mystery). Bullets were fired at the opponent, who was obliged to deflect them with her bracelets in order to win the game. The loser took a flesh wound to the shoulder. In the end one champion remained: a masked brunette, revealed in a not entirely unexpected twist to be Princess Diana herself.
“AND SO DIANA, THE WONDER WOMAN, GIVING UP HER HERITAGE AND HER RIGHT TO ETERNAL LIFE, LEAVES PARADISE ISLAND TO TAKE THE MAN SHE LOVES BACK TO AMERICA—THE LAND SHE LEARNS TO LOVE AND PROTECT, AND ADOPTS AS HER OWN!”
However, within this world—and supplying it with depth and enticing richness—lurked barely hidden libidinal elements. To begin with, it has to be said that these Amazons were drawn to be sexy. Whereas Siegel rendered Superman in dynamic futurist lines and Bob Kane gave Batman the look of a Prague potato print, Peter brought a flowing, scrolling quality to his drawings of superwomen in action and at play. Everything was curved and calligraphic. The lips of his women were modishly bee stung and glossy, as if to suggest that Hollywood-style glamour makeup never went out of vogue among the warrior women and philosopher princesses of Paradise Island.
However, as you may expect in a society of immortal women cut off from the rest of the world since classical antiquity, the diversions of the Amazons turned out to be somewhat specialized, to say the least. As the strips developed, Marston’s prose swooned over detailed accounts of Amazonian chase and capture rituals in which some girls were “eaten” by others.
Moreover thousands of years of sophisticated living without men had bled the phallic thrust out of sexuality, leaving the peculiar, ritualistic eroticism of leash and lock. Marston and Peter built slavery and shackles into “Meet Wonder Woman,” and as the strip progressed, the bondage elements became more overt, increasing sales. For instance, chief among Wonder Woman’s weapons of peace was a magic lasso, which compelled anyone bound in its coils to tell the absolute truth and only the truth—shades of Marston’s polygraph. Moreover, it wasn’t long before she was breathlessly demonstrating the joys of submission to “loving authority”: A Nazi villain’s slave girls were released in one story, with no idea what to do with their lives out of captivity. Wonder Woman’s solution was to allow them to continue to express their nature as born slaves by relocating to Paradise Island, where they could enjoy bondage under the loving gaze of a kind mistress instead of the crop-cracking Hitler-loving Paula von Gunther.
The flipside of the Amazons’ essentially benign and formalized endorsement of healthy S/M was the dungeon world of sadistic bondage, humiliation, and mind control that existed in the world beyond Paradise Island. These were crystallized in the form of Doctor Poison, a twisted dwarf in a rubber coat. Wielding a dripping syringe, Poison hated women and loved to humiliate them. In a surprising twist, “he” was revealed to be a mentally ill woman acting out of her frustrations.
The women of Paradise Island embodied an enticing blend of the politically right-on and the libidinous. As such, they were exemplars of a newfangled twentieth-century creed that was the same old bohemian “free love” with a new lexicon culled from psychoanalytical theory and the pink and squeezy world of dreams and desire. Theirs was a kind of radical Second Wave separatist feminism where men were forbidden and things could only get better as a result.
Indeed, in Marston’s feminine paradise, happiness and security were in far greater supply than elsewhere in the superworld. In looking at other superhero comics he had noted, “it seemed from a psychological angle that the comics’ worst offence was their blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to the child as the breath of life.”
And so, while Batman was a brooding orphan, and the destruction of
Superman’s Krypton had robbed him of his birth parents, the magnificent scientists Jor-El and Lara, Wonder Woman could ride her invisible plane down the rainbow runway to Paradise Island and check in with Mom any time she wanted. Queen Hippolyta even had a magic mirror that allowed her to observe her daughter at any location on Earth. It was closed-circuit television by any other name, but in late 1941, Hippolyta’s magic mirror could only be a product of imaginary feminist superscience.
There were some similarities with Wonder Woman’s male predecessors. Like Superman, in his way, Wonder Woman fearlessly championed alternative culture and a powerful vision of outsider politics. And, like Batman, she was thoroughly the progressive sort of aristocrat. She preached peace in a time of war, although she was as eager as any other superhero to tackle her fair share of Nazis. Unlike the essentially solitary Batman and Superman, Wonder Woman had a huge cast of friends. Her allies, the Holliday Girls of Beta Lamda, were a rambunctious group of sorority sisters fronted by the immense, freckled redhead Etta Candy. As the gorgeous Wonder Woman’s inevitable fat pal, Etta’s positive energy and physicality added an earthiness and humor that complemented Diana’s cool grace and perfect poise.
When Marston died of cancer in 1947, the erotic charge left the Wonder Woman strip, and sales declined, never to recover. Without the originality and energy that Marston’s obsessions brought to the stories, Wonder Woman was an exotic bloom starved of rare nutrients. Once the lush, pervy undercurrents were purged, the character foundered. The island of Themiscyra was scraped clean of any hint of impropriety, and all girl-chasing rituals ceased, along with reader commitment to the character. It wasn’t long before Wonder Woman was coming across as an odd maiden aunt—a disturbing cross between the Virgin Mary and Mary Tyler Moore; but Elizabeth and Olive, her inspirations, continued to live together. The unconventional, liberated Elizabeth was one hundred years old when she died in 1993, the true Wonder Woman of this story.
CHAPTER 4
WITH THE WORLD on the verge of war, readers couldn’t get enough of the superheroes, especially in the comic books. Superheroes flowed into every free and available conceptual niche and found publishers eager to mass-produce the color fantasies of a generation of children, servicemen, and science fiction fans. If one short-lived company was having brief success with a bird-winged star, another would inevitably try out a guy with a tail. There were superhero cowboys (the Vigilante), superhero knights (the Shining Knight), superhero cops (the Guardian), and then there was the Gay Ghost, a sixteenth-century Cavalier. What had been one superhero tentatively testing the possibilities of the market became two, then too many to count. This grand condensation from nothing into storms and rainbows brought forth a florid array of extraordinary, archetypal, and outright weird mystery men and women.
The race to create superheroes with fresh gimmicks crashed headlong into one spectacular dead end with the Red Bee, the crime-fighting persona of a man named Rick Raleigh. Rick took to the streets wearing a costume that would result in immediate arrest if worn anywhere outside of Studio 54 in 1978. But whereas the Green Lantern was able to defend himself with a magic ring that could do virtually anything, the Red Bee had chosen a more specialized weapon.
Raleigh was clever enough to have invented his own “sting gun,” which shot effective knockout darts. He could have simply loaded up his sting gun, stopped right there, and still made a perfectly serviceable Golden Age mystery man called the Red Bee. But for Rick Raleigh, only one thing guaranteed his crucial edge over the violent underbelly of society: the hive of trained crime-fighting bees he kept confined in the buckle of his belt—a space no bigger than a pack of ten cigarettes—until crime reared its snout. Ever eager to be set free in the cause of justice, the lead bee and chief offensive weapon in Raleigh’s apian arsenal was somewhat endearingly named Michael. However, as the writer of the Red Bee’s Wikipedia article cruelly observes, male bees do not sting, calling into question Michael’s effectiveness in any potential struggle against armed thugs or machete-wielding Triad enforcers.
If it seems ridiculous, it’s because it is. But there was something else going on here: a radical enchantment of the mundane. As the creators of the superheroes pitched their nets ever wider in search of fresh and original gimmicks, they touched more and more of the everyday world with childlike wonder dust. Bees could be special, just as they were in medieval illuminated texts and mysteries. Boring gym equipment could become the lethal arsenal of the criminal known as Sportsmaster. A discarded railroad lantern could be a mystic artifact capable of bestowing immense power. In the world of the superheroes, everything had value, potential, mystery. Any person, thing, or object could be drafted into service in the struggle against darkness and evil—remade as a weapon or a warrior or a superhero. Even a little bee named Michael—after God’s own avenging angel—could pitch in to win the battle against wickedness.
There was a superhero or villain for every profession, every class, every walk of life. Need a superhero lawyer? Call Native American Jeff Dixon, the Bronze Terror. Navy lieutenant Peter Noble kept the oceans safe as the Fin. Ted Knight, aka Starman, was an astronomer. Duke O’Dowd, the Human Meteor, drove a taxi. The blind doctor Charles McNider, whose particular condition enabled him to see in the dark, cleverly assumed that no one in his right mind would see any connection between handsome six-foot-two Doctor McNider and handsome six-foot-two Doctor Mid-Nite. Dinah Drake, the Black Canary, ran a small flower shop when she wasn’t rough-riding her motorcycle into the face of urban crime. This was the first explosion of the rainbow, the Precambrian abundance of memes before the imminent mass extinction.
Like jazz and rock ’n’ roll, the superhero is a uniquely American creation. This glorification of strength, health, and simple morality seems born of a corn-fed, plain-talking, fair-minded midwestern sensibility. But superheroes were nothing if not adaptable, and as they grew and multiplied across the comic-book pages of the Free World, they happily took on the flavor of their surroundings, like milk left in a fridge with onions, or bananas.
British superheroes were a rum bunch, beginning with odd cargo cult creations like 1944’s the Amazing Mr. X from The Dandy, the first homegrown Superman rip-off. Clad in a black cape and cowl, with black tights and a white vest on which a red X was marked, this abject knockoff was saved from being completely derivative only by his utter rejection of Superman’s professionalism. X was Len Manners, whose superstrength was the result of nothing more than vigorous exercise. He looked like a man who’d tried enthusiastically to copy a description of Superman supplied to him by another man with early-onset Alzheimer’s. The design was simple and graphic, but the character had about him—like almost all UK superheroes—the stink of the bargain bin, the jumble sale, and the Sunday flea market. He left behind the stale odor of rationing and austerity, in a costume that may as well have been assembled from oddments found at a Salvation Army thrift store.
Then there were Ace Hart, Atoman, Captain Magnet, and the questionable Electroman, who was archcriminal Dan Watkins endowed with the powers of the electric chair when his planned execution went wrong, resulting in a change of heart and a vow to fight evil wherever he found it. Like their American cousins, British heroes dressed in what were intended to be tight-fitting jumpsuits, but somehow they contrived to look rumpled, wrinkled, and ill fitting. The strongmen of Blighty eschewed the Charles Atlas method and nurtured their doughy, unimpressive muscles on a diet of porridge and corned beef.
Elsewhere abroad, there were further mutations. In Japan, there was Astro Boy (1951), with his odd hieratic gestures and staccato cries. He was a robot boy, a techno-Pinocchio in a story that was updated and subjected to ruthless real-world logic and drama in Naoki Urasawa’s 2007 Pluto. Gigantor (1964) spoke directly to my own childhood dream of owning a remote control box that put me in charge of a thirty-foot-tall mechanical man. I imagined sitting on his back, manipulating the joysticks to make him demolish the walls and roof of my school. Later there was 1967’
s Marine Boy, who chewed “oxy-gum” so that he could breathe underwater. Japan’s Superman clone was Ultraman—a faceless robot with the soul of a hero.
France had Le Chat, Fantax, Satanax, and several other Scrabble high-score hits. These heroes, you may not be surprised to learn, were racy and often unscrupulous heirs to the tradition of Fantômas, the Parisian superthief created by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain and beloved by surrealists. Their heroines, like Jean-Claude Forest’s space girl Barbarella, based on Brigitte Bardot, were leggy practitioners of free love, capable of extending their amorous intent toward robots or even monsters. Barbarella would fuck her way across the cosmos with the untroubled gaze of a wide-eyed debutante. She was played by Jane Fonda in Roger Vadim’s camp 1968 movie version, a film that was, I have to admit, responsible for my own feverish sexual awakening and retains a fond place in my imagination.
Italy had all the sexy, violent antiheroes. In 1962 the sisters Angela and Luciana Giussani would create Diabolik, a kind of Batman in reverse, and dressed in white. He was the hero Batman would be if he’d chosen to really fuck with the law. Diabolik was yet another chic Fantômas reworking: a master thief, handsome, intelligent, and immensely wealthy. He drove an E-type Jag, and his constant companion was the drop-dead-brilliant über-woman Eva Kant. The characters were played to beautiful, deadpan perfection by John Phillip Law and Marisa Mell in the 1968 film Danger: Diabolik. This character’s success would inspire a rash of copycat antiheroes and the rise of Italy’s controversial fumetti neri or “black comic books.” Characters like Kriminal, Satanik, and Sadistik developed Diabolik’s Nietzschean amorality through new extremes of sadism and sexual violence that eventually led to the banning of the fumetti neri in the mid-1960s. Even the monstrous Kriminal was castrated and forced to reemerge as a debonair gentleman thief with, it must be said, no particular appeal for readers (his strip was subsequently canceled in 1974).