When I told my wife about the blog entry I was preparing to write, she quoted Tom Lehrer's dictum that "When correctly viewed, everything is lewd."

I can see that point of view about most things — but Wonder Woman of the early 1940s is hard to view "incorrectly".

Of course, when (in the early 1960s) I read about her in Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, I was as skeptical as the next guy. Wertham called Wonder Woman "the lesbian counterpart of Batman", and his view of the Batman/Robin relationship is well known, He called her series "a crime comic which we have found to be one of the most harmful". (In Wertham's lexicon, a "crime comic" was any that depicted a crime, e.g., Donald Duck's nephews raiding the cookie jar.) He added:

"Superwoman (Wonder Woman) is always a horror type. She is physically very powerful, tortures men, has her own female following, is the cruel, 'phallic' woman. While she is a frightening figure for boys, she is an undesirable ideal for girls, being the exact opposite of what girls are supposed to want to be."

Even without the sexism — what a crock! I mean, to me (at the time), Wonder Woman was this bland, sexually unexciting creature drawn by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. I could remember the Harry G. Peter days (I was 12 when Peter died and the early '60s team took over), but she'd been bland then, too. Robert Kanigher's scripts were quirky enough (who else would write an origin story for the blue highlights in a character's black hair?) — but frightening? Undesirable? Come on!

If her magic lasso had still been a prominent part of the series, maybe it would have occurred to me to wonder why she always carried a rope.

Over the next dozen or so years, I managed to glimpse a 1940s Wonder Woman story now and again, and occasionally even read one, tho neither the reprint situation nor the collector market were what they are today. Didn't see very many from the early part of the decade, tho.

In 1975, DC reprinted Wonder Woman #1 as part of its Famous First Edition series, and I finally saw what Wertham could have been talking about. And let me add, if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it. You can see it too, if you happen to have picked up the Millennium Edition of that issue a few years ago.

There were four Wonder Woman stories in that book, and each one contained at least two top-notch bondage scenes. Entirely too frequent to be accidental — in fact, I doubt they passed up a single excuse to get a rope around a woman. And what ropes! Big and thick, with every fiber lovingly delineated, often with a big, phallic stub sticking out of the ball-like knot. If Wertham had included a couple of those panels among the exposed navels and Miss Lace swipes that passed for his illustration section, I might have taken him a little more seriously.

My favorite is in the third story. A kid in a cowboy suit, looks about 4 or 5, gets hold of Wondy's magic lasso (which, as you may recall, gives its user certain powers over anyone tied up with it). He wraps it around his sister, maybe about 12, just starting to "develop" (or as Wertham might have said, "pubescent"), and says, "Down on your knees, woman, and beg for mercy!" When she obeys him, as anyone tied by it must, he thinks, "She's doin' it! She must like this game!"

I'd add a comment, but nothing seems adequate.

Wertham found it deplorable that a reputable psychiatrist (whom he didn't name) endorsed such a comic book as Wonder Woman. He gave no sign of having known Dr. William Marston actually created the character and wrote her early stories under the pen name "Charles Moulton" (a combination of his middle name with that of publisher Maxwell C. Gaines).

Marston was on the DC/All American advisory board at the time. His advice included the observation that comic books placed too much emphasis on the male aspects of heroism — violence, macho swaggering and suchlike. He created Wonder Woman, and talked Gaines into publishing her, to provide a measure of balance.

So, was Marston an early believer in sexual equality? A feminist before feminism was cool? Not exactly. He believed women superior to men in terms of honesty, reliability, speed, courage — everything except possibly physical strength. If he had anything in common with today's feminists, it was only with the radical, male-bashing fringe of the movement.

Comics historian Mike Benton once quoted Marston as having said, in a scholarly journal, "Give men an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to, and they'll be proud to become her willing slaves." But editor Sheldon Mayer, according to historian Les Daniels, saw it the opposite way: "Marston's idea of feminine supremacy was the ability to submit to male domination."

The early Wonder Woman provides copious evidence for either point of view.

Apparently, tho, Marston was pretty convincing on the subject, because Gaines gave Wonder Woman a humongous launch. She was introduced in an eight-page insert in All Star Comics, increasing the book's thickness at no additional cost to the reader, a promotional technique the company had never used before and didn't use again until the 1980s. A few weeks later, she became the cover feature of a new monthly title, Sensation Comics; and six months after that — long before Sensation's sales figures could have come in, given contemporary distributor reporting times and publishing lead times — she had her own book.

Was Gaines so convinced by Marston's reasoning that he promoted Wondy as a public service? Did he think the world was eagerly poised to embrace a female superhero (not, of course, that she was the first)? Or did he, knowing Marston, expect this feature to have a luridly kinky appeal quite unlike anything else in popular entertainment?

And the early Wonder Woman was unique. Even if (as a kid reading funnybooks years later) I'd correctly guessed the significance of the lasso, I'd certainly never have divined the purpose of another relic among her accoutrements, the bullet-proof bracelets. They were there for the convenience of anybody who might want to put her in chains — and with the possible exception of The Spook in The Wizard of Id, Wonder Woman was seen in chains more often than anybody else in comics.

The bondage was only part of it. There was also the group Wertham called "her own female following", i.e., Etta Candy and the Holliday Girls. Just a bunch of buddies from all-female Holliday College, but there was something about them … I can't quite put my finger on it … Maybe if you contemplate this scene of them interrogating a villain, from Sensation Comics #3 (March, 1942), you'll understand.


As a result of this treatment, by the way, "Blondie" repented her evil ways and became a productive citizen. Wouldn't you?

However we might view this stuff sixty-odd years later, at the time, Wonder Woman definitely validated Gaines's faith in her. She appeared on every single cover of Sensation Comics, a feat made all the more impressive when you consider even Superman and Batman missed a few early covers of Action and Detective. Along with Green Lantern and The Flash, she was a mainstay of Comic Cavalcade, an extra-size comic designed to get extra mileage out of the publisher's most popular characters. Her own comic survived the superhero die-off of the late 1940s, and all through the lean years of the '50s. She lost a lot of circulation in 1947, when Marston died, but what she had left over was more than most characters start out with.

As for Wertham — you might expect me, at this point, to make the "broken clock" acknowledgment, i.e, in this one single instance, by sheer accident, the guy who got everything else wrong just happened to be right.

No, the fact is, Wertham was still wrong. You can search his book from beginning to end (in fact, I did), and you won't find "Wonder Woman" and "bondage" in the same sentence — which I very much doubt would have been the case had he known about the stuff I've just described.

Wertham's "study" of comics (the word is in quotes because his methodology has been questioned by everyone who knows beans about the scientific method) took place later, after the character was toned down. It's possible, even likely, he never so much as looked inside an issue Marston wrote.

In fact, he didn't have to look inside a copy at all to say what he said, because it's purely generic. It's what some men have always said about strong, assertive women. Lesbian — how predictable! Of course he thought she was a lesbian!

Wertham couldn't have been right about Wonder Woman, because he didn't really say anything about her. In her, as in everything else upon which he cast his critical gaze, Fredric Wertham saw nothing but a reflection of his own prejudices and expectations. Maybe the character wasn't above criticism, but he had no idea why.

— DDM