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3.72 AVERAGE
3.72 AVERAGE
adventurous
funny
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Obsessed with the ways early Wonder Woman comics serve two masters: at once blunt WWII propaganda and thinly (VERY thinly) veiled fetish porn. Every issue provides an excuse to put a woman in bondage and ends with a plea to buy war bonds. The worldview in both manners is blindingly simple, colorful and blunt - same as the paneling, art, and coloring. There's something so compelling about it? These comics are bursting at the seams, conflicted by their own contradictions. It grapples with some incredibly complex ideas: what is freedom? Who deserves it? If freedom is good then why do girls in shackles make me feel tingly?
And always they are forced to find an easy solution.
"If girls want to be slaves there's no harm in that. The bad thing for them is submitting to a master or to an evil mistress like Paula! A GOOD mistress could do wonders with them!"
The comics are thoroughly shaped by their culture. Unreadably racist at times (the Japanese portrayals are exactly what you may expect) (shout-out to my favorite bit villian, the horrible racist caricature and inexplicable crossdresser, Dr. Poison). Of particular note is Sensation Comics No. 7, in which a company price-gouging milk is revealed as an evil German scheme to raise a generation of weak American children. So many very particular preoccupations of the time rolled into one! Fixation on milk (courtesy of the dairy industry), generational panic over children's health and strength (because weak children can't grow up to be soldiers), the general miasma of fear and paranoia– and, of course, seeing the fruits of American industry and capitalism and pinning them on foreign invasion. Some of this stuff is perhaps not so outdated.
It's one thing reading weird old pulp that has been buried in the annals of memory, but it's something else when it has the weight of culture on it. Like, I know these characters! I'm American! This bitch has been in the miasma of pop culture my entire life! I know Wonder Woman, I know her origin, I know her lasso! And yet they're SO goddamn weird. I can't get over this. Why didn't anyone tell me?
Would not recommend anyone read these. They suck. The actual reading experience is kind of a slog. But I'm obsessed. Forever maybe.
(I have to at least read until Dr. Poison, the love of my life, shows up again)
This is an 775-page tome of the earliest Wonder Woman comics, which I read over the course of several months. A substantial chunk of the time that elapsed between the start date and the end date was a period when the book was returned to the library and I was waiting for it to be put on hold for me again, though, so in actuality I really did mostly read these issues back to back. This did them a disservice: comic books were written to be digested episodically, and they are wildly tropey and repetitive when read in quick succession. I'm not at all displeased that I read this, because it's extremely interesting to see exactly how the character and the stories of Wonder Woman were originally conceptualized and executed. At the same time, I'm every glad to be done with this book and able to move on to something else for reading material.
I had loads of thoughts while reading through these comics, and no one to really discuss them with, so I'm just going to dump some opinions onto the page in the rest of this review. If you really came for a review itself, let me just summarize my thoughts by saying: Wonder Woman is innovative for its time but also flawed in all the ways you can expect for a vintage piece of work. In the vintage fashion community they like to say "vintage style not vintage values" and a lot of that idea holds validity here. Wonder Woman is a new 'ideal woman,' a very different model of femininity than the effete, helpless damsel idealized by much of cinema and other pulp literature. She's wholesome (no femme fatale or vamping here), but competent to the core - much more competent than Steve Trevor, her erstwhile love interest. In fact, one of the amusing riffs of the earliest issues is that Trevor gets credit for all the things she does, despite his protesting that it wasn't him at all.
Wonder Woman is strong, she's smart, she's cheerful, she's courageous. She comes from her home on Paradise Island, an enclave of Amazons and female empowerment, to help America in the war effort (and to get her man...). Her big-picture goal, assuming the war is won, is to help usher in an age of female world domination, in which women will rule the world through love and understanding, rather than violence and aggression, as men do. Obviously there is a lot of gender essentialism tied up (get it!?) in all this. Amazons are simultaneously brave and powerful but also gentle and kind, and not at all given to warmaking or misusing their own power. Not only is it a fantasy, but it's a fantasy that is based on assumptions that don't really bear up under much scrutiny. But although Wonder Woman is a man's fantasy, just a different kind than we're used to seeing, it is enjoyable and refreshing to watch her take apart evil schemes, toy with and ultimately disarm her enemies, and do it all pretty much on her own terms. This extends even to the way she is drawn. Although her skimpy costume got a lot of flack back in the day, the way she is drawn is athletic and distinctly unsexualized, at least when compared to more modern female superheroes. You get effectively sinuous twisting, showing off both the ass and the breasts at the same time. She is basically never drawn like a pin-up girl, and it's kind of nice.
What's less nice is the pervasive racial and national stereotyping. You get plenty of Nazi characters with their butchered German dialogue and ugly soldier faces, which is not great, but you also get a great many Japanese enemy soldiers and spies, who are routinely drawn with ugly 'monkey' faces, awful pidgen English, etc. The same goes for Mexicans, Arabs, or anyone African-American. It's WWII propaganda, obviously, but it's also obviously and uncritically placing white Americans at the top of a racial hierarchy, and this is the number one reason I wouldn't give this material to children in 2020. There's also a certain amount of unconscious sexism, though for obvious reasons given the subject matter and major themes this is less pervasive than the rest and is sometimes undermined to good effect.
So, moving on to random musings. First off, the plot. I know, it was written piecemeal over years and I shouldn't expect too much, however, I do feel that despite this the central plot started off pretty strongly and then sort of wandered away as Marston got farther and farther into it. In his quest to present new and engaging scenarios, I think he let himself get carried away, which is how you have nonsense like Diana having completely unhindered telepathy skills that she is able to use and share with anyone she wants, a magic sphere that she can visit on Paradise Island that reveals anything at all about the past or the future, and an entire sorority girl army on call at any moment. There is also the unceasing tension of trying to conceal her double personality from Steve Trevor, which grows more and more precarious the longer it goes on, only.... it doesn't really make any sense, the longer it goes on? She took up the secret identity of Diana Prince in the first place in order to have an excuse to stay close to Steve early on when he didn't know who she was, but in later installments it becomes this bizarre love triangle in which Diana is in love with Steve but Steve is in love with Wonder Woman, and he doesn't realize they're the same person. However, instead of sensibly observing that the double persona has run its course and just acknowledging to Steve that she loves him (she wouldn't even have to tell him that she was Diana Prince if she didn't want to... she could just let Diana Prince stay dead one of the dozen of times she nearly dies and then disappears for ages while Wonder Woman is saving the day), she instead gives him the cold shoulder. Repeatedly. Forever. I realize that allowing them to have a real relationship would ruin the dramatic will-they-won't-they tension, but it becomes sort of ridiculous after awhile.
Right, the bondage thing? I started this reading (after having read a biography of William Moulton Marston) with the opinion that the chaining, shackling, and tying up of Wonder Woman was more symbolic than a BDSM thing. Because she always breaks her chains, right? Often in the very next frame? The symbology clearly points to her being tied up SO SHE CAN ESCAPE.
Well, reading this has caused me to amend my opinion somewhat. I still do think that the 'breaking the chains that bind you' imagery is very important. But it's also become obvious to me after reading (how many are there in this book? Sixty. I read sixty Wonder Woman comics, you guys.) SIXTY of these things, that yeah, there are some serious BDSM undertones too. Like, there is the tying up, and then there is the complete hogtie, wrapped in chains, etc. There's even one issue where Wonder Woman is literally zipped into a gimp suit, then chews her way free. But aside from the literal bondage imagery, there is some intense domination/submission material being explored as a central theme of the work. It's perplexing to me because it never seems to quite settle on a central tenet - Marston clearly feels strongly about women having agency and ruling the world with the power of love, but it's not clear whether he thinks women should dominate men, men should dominate women, the strong should dominate the weak, or what. It's certainly a topic for exploration, though. I assume some better scholars than I have taken stabs at this and I'd be interested in reading their work.
But yeah! Interesting stuff, empowering in some ways and cringeworthy in others. More BDSMy than I gave it credit for. The end.
I had loads of thoughts while reading through these comics, and no one to really discuss them with, so I'm just going to dump some opinions onto the page in the rest of this review. If you really came for a review itself, let me just summarize my thoughts by saying: Wonder Woman is innovative for its time but also flawed in all the ways you can expect for a vintage piece of work. In the vintage fashion community they like to say "vintage style not vintage values" and a lot of that idea holds validity here. Wonder Woman is a new 'ideal woman,' a very different model of femininity than the effete, helpless damsel idealized by much of cinema and other pulp literature. She's wholesome (no femme fatale or vamping here), but competent to the core - much more competent than Steve Trevor, her erstwhile love interest. In fact, one of the amusing riffs of the earliest issues is that Trevor gets credit for all the things she does, despite his protesting that it wasn't him at all.
Wonder Woman is strong, she's smart, she's cheerful, she's courageous. She comes from her home on Paradise Island, an enclave of Amazons and female empowerment, to help America in the war effort (and to get her man...). Her big-picture goal, assuming the war is won, is to help usher in an age of female world domination, in which women will rule the world through love and understanding, rather than violence and aggression, as men do. Obviously there is a lot of gender essentialism tied up (get it!?) in all this. Amazons are simultaneously brave and powerful but also gentle and kind, and not at all given to warmaking or misusing their own power. Not only is it a fantasy, but it's a fantasy that is based on assumptions that don't really bear up under much scrutiny. But although Wonder Woman is a man's fantasy, just a different kind than we're used to seeing, it is enjoyable and refreshing to watch her take apart evil schemes, toy with and ultimately disarm her enemies, and do it all pretty much on her own terms. This extends even to the way she is drawn. Although her skimpy costume got a lot of flack back in the day, the way she is drawn is athletic and distinctly unsexualized, at least when compared to more modern female superheroes. You get effectively sinuous twisting, showing off both the ass and the breasts at the same time. She is basically never drawn like a pin-up girl, and it's kind of nice.
What's less nice is the pervasive racial and national stereotyping. You get plenty of Nazi characters with their butchered German dialogue and ugly soldier faces, which is not great, but you also get a great many Japanese enemy soldiers and spies, who are routinely drawn with ugly 'monkey' faces, awful pidgen English, etc. The same goes for Mexicans, Arabs, or anyone African-American. It's WWII propaganda, obviously, but it's also obviously and uncritically placing white Americans at the top of a racial hierarchy, and this is the number one reason I wouldn't give this material to children in 2020. There's also a certain amount of unconscious sexism, though for obvious reasons given the subject matter and major themes this is less pervasive than the rest and is sometimes undermined to good effect.
So, moving on to random musings. First off, the plot. I know, it was written piecemeal over years and I shouldn't expect too much, however, I do feel that despite this the central plot started off pretty strongly and then sort of wandered away as Marston got farther and farther into it. In his quest to present new and engaging scenarios, I think he let himself get carried away, which is how you have nonsense like Diana having completely unhindered telepathy skills that she is able to use and share with anyone she wants, a magic sphere that she can visit on Paradise Island that reveals anything at all about the past or the future, and an entire sorority girl army on call at any moment. There is also the unceasing tension of trying to conceal her double personality from Steve Trevor, which grows more and more precarious the longer it goes on, only.... it doesn't really make any sense, the longer it goes on? She took up the secret identity of Diana Prince in the first place in order to have an excuse to stay close to Steve early on when he didn't know who she was, but in later installments it becomes this bizarre love triangle in which Diana is in love with Steve but Steve is in love with Wonder Woman, and he doesn't realize they're the same person. However, instead of sensibly observing that the double persona has run its course and just acknowledging to Steve that she loves him (she wouldn't even have to tell him that she was Diana Prince if she didn't want to... she could just let Diana Prince stay dead one of the dozen of times she nearly dies and then disappears for ages while Wonder Woman is saving the day), she instead gives him the cold shoulder. Repeatedly. Forever. I realize that allowing them to have a real relationship would ruin the dramatic will-they-won't-they tension, but it becomes sort of ridiculous after awhile.
Right, the bondage thing? I started this reading (after having read a biography of William Moulton Marston) with the opinion that the chaining, shackling, and tying up of Wonder Woman was more symbolic than a BDSM thing. Because she always breaks her chains, right? Often in the very next frame? The symbology clearly points to her being tied up SO SHE CAN ESCAPE.
Well, reading this has caused me to amend my opinion somewhat. I still do think that the 'breaking the chains that bind you' imagery is very important. But it's also become obvious to me after reading (how many are there in this book? Sixty. I read sixty Wonder Woman comics, you guys.) SIXTY of these things, that yeah, there are some serious BDSM undertones too. Like, there is the tying up, and then there is the complete hogtie, wrapped in chains, etc. There's even one issue where Wonder Woman is literally zipped into a gimp suit, then chews her way free. But aside from the literal bondage imagery, there is some intense domination/submission material being explored as a central theme of the work. It's perplexing to me because it never seems to quite settle on a central tenet - Marston clearly feels strongly about women having agency and ruling the world with the power of love, but it's not clear whether he thinks women should dominate men, men should dominate women, the strong should dominate the weak, or what. It's certainly a topic for exploration, though. I assume some better scholars than I have taken stabs at this and I'd be interested in reading their work.
But yeah! Interesting stuff, empowering in some ways and cringeworthy in others. More BDSMy than I gave it credit for. The end.
Comics have come a long way since the "Golden Age", and it is kind of difficult to enjoy this collection without any kind of context or background knowledge - at least if you are above the age of ten years and aren't a camp affocionado. These were simpler times, with vastly different values and outlooks ("haha, the fat girl wants more candy!").
However, there is another, fascinating aspect to this. Wonder Woman was intended to be didactic, and her creator was a polyamorous BDSM practitioner who believed in women's rights and celebrated strong women. With this in mind, the silly 1940s strips reveal their true potential, their subversive quality.
However, there is another, fascinating aspect to this. Wonder Woman was intended to be didactic, and her creator was a polyamorous BDSM practitioner who believed in women's rights and celebrated strong women. With this in mind, the silly 1940s strips reveal their true potential, their subversive quality.
adventurous
funny
hopeful
relaxing
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
The Actual Book
At 776 pages in a large format hardback this book is a monster...and that's the biggest problem. The story needs to be thumbed through. You need to be able to curl up in bed or on a recliner and read it without getting an ache and that's just not possible.
It's too beautiful for grubby hands so reading it is torture....sitting at a desk carefully turning the pages. I'm hoping I can find a second copy in a large format paperback, or perhaps an eBook so I can give this book the love it deserves. Until then it's on the shelf and protected.
The Actual Contents
I want female super heroes. I want Tank Girl and Squirrel Girl and Kamala Khan. Well it all started with Wonder Woman on TV in the 1970s. And finally this book gives me the entire origin story as it was first published way back in 1940.
I love it! Everyone should read it! If you're a woman, a man, a child, it doesn't matter Wonder Woman is important and not given the kudos she deserves. It's not high literature, it's much more important than that.
At 776 pages in a large format hardback this book is a monster...and that's the biggest problem. The story needs to be thumbed through. You need to be able to curl up in bed or on a recliner and read it without getting an ache and that's just not possible.
It's too beautiful for grubby hands so reading it is torture....sitting at a desk carefully turning the pages. I'm hoping I can find a second copy in a large format paperback, or perhaps an eBook so I can give this book the love it deserves. Until then it's on the shelf and protected.
The Actual Contents
I want female super heroes. I want Tank Girl and Squirrel Girl and Kamala Khan. Well it all started with Wonder Woman on TV in the 1970s. And finally this book gives me the entire origin story as it was first published way back in 1940.
I love it! Everyone should read it! If you're a woman, a man, a child, it doesn't matter Wonder Woman is important and not given the kudos she deserves. It's not high literature, it's much more important than that.
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3708841.html
I got this in 2019 because one of the stories, "Battle for Womanhood", was up for the Retro Hugo that year, which I was administering, and it won - topping the poll at nominations stage and convincingly carrying the final ballot. I voted for it too, and on reflection I'm really not sure why; these are a weird set of stories combining an attractively subversive feminism with some pretty awful racism against the Japanese. (But the Chinese, who of course are allies and victims of Japan, are all right.) I almost gave up after the first few, which were all about Wonder Woman biffing either the Germans or the Japanese, though getting tied up a lot. Then it starts getting interesting, with weird alien creatures and ancient gods getting involved, and an interesting mentoring relationship between Wonder Woman and human girl; along with the full-figured Etta Candy and her sorority, and recurrent villains Dr Psycho and the Cheetah, and Wonder Woman still gets tied up a lot. Oh, and Steve as well.
But honestly, it's not all that good. Inspiration for what came later, of course, and it's not like any comics were especially brilliant by today's standards at the time. But I am a bit surprised at my own vote, in retrospect.
I got this in 2019 because one of the stories, "Battle for Womanhood", was up for the Retro Hugo that year, which I was administering, and it won - topping the poll at nominations stage and convincingly carrying the final ballot. I voted for it too, and on reflection I'm really not sure why; these are a weird set of stories combining an attractively subversive feminism with some pretty awful racism against the Japanese. (But the Chinese, who of course are allies and victims of Japan, are all right.) I almost gave up after the first few, which were all about Wonder Woman biffing either the Germans or the Japanese, though getting tied up a lot. Then it starts getting interesting, with weird alien creatures and ancient gods getting involved, and an interesting mentoring relationship between Wonder Woman and human girl; along with the full-figured Etta Candy and her sorority, and recurrent villains Dr Psycho and the Cheetah, and Wonder Woman still gets tied up a lot. Oh, and Steve as well.
But honestly, it's not all that good. Inspiration for what came later, of course, and it's not like any comics were especially brilliant by today's standards at the time. But I am a bit surprised at my own vote, in retrospect.
This was good, but for the DC Trinity's Golden Age adventures, its probably the weakest. It might due to how more comedic the stories are compared to the previous two books and unfortunately, men abusing their wives is presented here as jokes when back in Superman's GA stories, abusing women was met by punishment by Superman.
I loved the character of Etta Candy, so far she's my favourite Golden Age sidekick. She and her sorority beat the shit out of Nazis without a moment's hesitation and drive this big car with "Blondes prefer Gentlemen" painted on it, I love them so much.
I loved the character of Etta Candy, so far she's my favourite Golden Age sidekick. She and her sorority beat the shit out of Nazis without a moment's hesitation and drive this big car with "Blondes prefer Gentlemen" painted on it, I love them so much.
I finished the beast! 800 pages of original Wonder Woman = lots of nazi punching good times. There are problematic elements here too, but over all I enjoyed these zany adventures.