AMAZON ART #37

Oddly, I just realized I never did a post on the 1970s karate-chopping version of Wonder Woman, which was certainly notable for action packed scenes.

Parenthetically, this was one of the first times that Catwoman began to be portrayed as a tuff girl with karate-skills, though the WW-CW matchup doesn't amount to much.

And even Lois Lane briefly got in on the girlfight action.

AMAZON ART #12

A quick look at a couple of the more dynamic covers of 1960s WONDER WOMAN. They're far from classic, but a vast improvement over the "goofy problem" covers that dominated the 1950s title.

BTW, on a longago BEAT column Heidi complained about WW showing butt in the first one. I suppose it would have been OK if one of the scuba guys had been nice enough to come up behind her and block such a horribly objectivizing image.

YEAR 2009: WONDER WOMAN

I've done a fuller review of the 2009 direct-to-video WONDER WOMAN movie.

For the purposes of this blog, the main significance of this video is that it's the first effort by an audiovisual medium to emulate the "sexual politics" aspect of the original William Moulton Marston creation-- albeit in a very different, sometimes more superficial manner.

It is, however, a pretty gory affair for a DC Comics franchise, which may have kept it from enjoying the apparent success of the Superman DTV franchise.

YEAR 1974: WONDER WOMAN

By late 1972 DC Comics had abandoned their experiment with the WONDER WOMAN title, in which the Amazing Amazon lost her super-powers and had to fight evil with the use of mundane martial arts.  Thus the super-powered heroine had been back on comics-racks for over a year when ABC-TV debuted the first live-action version of the character.

There had been one earlier attempt to film Wonder Woman as a live-action TV-show pilot in 1967, co-written by Stanley Ralph Ross of the BATMAN teleseries fame.  The short pilot, which played the heroine for lowbrow comedy, was never broadcast but has been since been exhumed on sites like You Tube.  The 1974 TV-movie WONDER WOMAN, also intended as a pilot for a never-realized teleseries, treated the character seriously but took the same approach as the DC experiment.  Thus this incarnation of the heroine (played by former tennis pro Cathy Lee Crosby) was also a former inhabitant of Paradise Island who had left her otherworldly culture behind in order to fight evil in man's world with essentially down-to-earth weapons and abilities.  One may speculate that the telemovie's production team (including STAR TREK alumnus John D.F. Black) chose this approach less because of DC's short-lived Wonder Woman experiment but because the mundane approach was cheaper.  Crosby did adequately in the role and the telemovie was allegedly a ratings success, but its only effect was to encourage the development of a new series, more in tune with the super-powered heroine as seen in the current comics and the SUPER FRIENDS TV show.

Stanley Ralph Ross was brought in once more, this time for a considerably "straighter" version of Wonder Woman (albeit with more than a few of the farcical touches found in BATMAN); in addition, a new production team, including Douglas "DYNASTY" Cramer, took over the filming of the telemovie pilot THE NEW ORIGINAL WONDER WOMAN.  Viewer response for the series was again favorable, so that in 1976 ABC released 11 more episodes of a WONDER WOMAN series (set in the WWII era of the original Marston series).  The series' expense discouraged ABC from continuing the project, but CBS picked it up for two more seasons, cutting costs by setting the immortal Amazon's adventures in the present day.

The TV-show's scripts were rarely better than average, and in that respect were far inferior to the original Marston comics.  The show's use of FX and fight-choreography was better, but only just.  What keeps the show alive for fans today is the perfect casting of statuesque Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, who embodied the bright-eyed, not-qutie-naive innocence of the juvenile heroine-ideal.  As if this writing, no further live-action adaptations of the Amazon have been officially broadcast, though segments of a 2011 David E. Kelley pilot, starring Adrienne Palicki, have surfaced on the Internet. 

YEAR 1941 : WONDER WOMAN

1941's actually a pretty good year for femmes formidables, but there's no question that WONDER WOMAN rises to the top of the heap.

Though she was not the first costumed superheroine-- even if one disincluded types like SHEENA and FANTOMAH-- she seems to have been the first coherent "femme formidable" response to Superman.  Her original name in William Moulton Marston's proposal was "Suprema," which sounds fairly close to the name of the Siegel-Schuster creation, while two years later Marston remarked upon the resemblance in an issue of THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR:

Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. 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.

Patently Wonder Woman did allow Marston to elucidate a concept of woman as a "best of all possible female characteristics," allowing her to show evidence of tenderness and what Marston often calls "lovingkindness" even when she's also demonstrating "force, strength and power."  This might be a very loose critique of the "tough guy" ethic embodied by the early Superman and most of his imitators.  Since Marston was executing an adventure comic book aimed at children, he must have known that most of them would be drawn to the selling-point of amazing feats of power.  What distinguishes Marston's hero from most others is that Marston's scripts (quirkily but winningly executed by artist Harry G. Peter) consistently emphasize the need to build a new society of equals following the defeat of the forces of evil.

Marston's conceptualiztion of the Amazon's "dominance-and-submission" society has been the topic of much heated discussion on contemporary message boards.  It's easy to poke holes in many of Marston's concepts, but whatever its failings, WONDER WOMAN stands as the first American comic book to evince any sort of philosophical stance.  Even comic books and comic strips which critics judge to be superior in terms of script and art (such as Will Eisner's SPIRIT) usually have no philosophical underpinnings as such.

One small hole I can't resist poking myself is that despite all of the Amazon's lip-service to the nobility of submission, Wonder Woman isn't often seen in a submissive posture.  Occasionally she's put in bondage and makes some mental comment about enjoying it, but my perception of the emotional appeal of bondage (speaking as an outsider) is that one *can't* get out of it; that one has to make some mental adjustment in order to submit with grace.  Largely Wonder Woman doesn't walk her own walk; it's always someone ELSE who has to submit, not her.

That said, Marston's insight into the interdependence of those qualities that Socrates called "valor" and "temperance" is little short of inspired.  In an ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE essay I wrote:

The action-heroine is a better symbol of the Schopenhaurean Will than the male action-hero.

If I had to choose a particular heroine to embody that symbol, no other would be even close.

TOP 50 FEMALE/MALE FIGHTS IN COMICS: 46

Yes, Wonder Woman alone gets two posts. Why? If you have to ask the question, you won't understand the answer.

My main reason for including JUSTICE LEAGUE #143, written by Steve Englehart and drawn by Dick Dillin, is for its "clash of icons" resonance. The battle itself is just two pages, and comes about because Wonder Woman has been made the pawn of a villain. She and Superman trade blows briefly until the Amazon Princess trumps the Man of Steel by subduing him with her magic lasso. This therefore is a somewhat ambivalent victory, not least because the Amazon's not fighting of her own will. Still, though DC has never stated outright that Wonder Woman is equal in power to Superman-- and has strongly suggested the opposite in the character's own feature-- I approve of Englehart treating the two heroes as equals in power during the duration of the fight. It's the "old school" in me, no doubt.

Ironically, though I like Englehart's treatment of the heroine's powers, I don't like his treatment of her character. This Wonder Woman is needlessly abrasive and arrogant, both apparently in compensation for a crisis in the character's self-confidence. Perhaps this attitude could have been justified within the sphere of the Amazon's own series, but here in JUSTICE LEAGUE, it just seems like typical Marvelesque "hero with a problem" schtick. Perhaps an intemperate Wonder Woman would've been an improvement over the more typical "plaster saint" conception, but again, the world will never know.

TOP 50 FEMALE/MALE FIGHTS IN COMICS: 20

What? I haven't put WONDER WOMAN on the list yet? Well, here she is, though the cover of WW #169 does show her getting the worst of it. However, one may rationalize that not only does she beat the villain, she beats him so badly that even Grant Morrison won't dare bring him back.

I wish that my first (if not only) representative WW post could hail from the classic Marston-Peter run. Trouble is, like many superhero comics of the Golden Age, many of the battles therein were short-rounders. I haven't yet read all the Golden Age WONDER WOMAN stories, but of the substantial number I have read, none of them seem all that noteworthy, with the possible exception of a two-page struggle in which WW sword-fights the Greek hero Achilles. But that would be a measure of last resort.

As silly as the Silver Age WONDER WOMAN stories are (with or without villains named the Crimson Centipede), writer Robert Kanigher and artists Ross Andru and Mike Esposito did deliver in the big-ass battle department, particularly in the latter half of the sixties, just before WW's transformation into an Emma Peel/Modesty Blaise clone. One interesting touch in WW #169 is that although the heroine initially finds it tough to duke it out with a many-armed opponent, those difficulties fall away when the criminal Centipede makes the mistake of swiping WW's "bracelets of restraint." In less than a dozen panels she swats that bug and then almost goes for Steve Trevor as well, except that the resourceful soldier-boy manages to slip the heroine's bracelets back on.

The battle with this villain may not be the absolute best of the Kanigher-Andru period, but the absurdity of the villain goes a long way toward making it a personal favorite.

THE FEMININE WILL PART II

Usually, due to the strength disparities between male and female homo sapiens, the catfight is the primary method by which modern entertainment illustrates the feminine will to power. While I've shown several examples on this blog of fantasy-situations in which women triumph over men-- sometimes with erotic overtones, sometimes not so much-- the womano-a-womano battle is one that automatically seems to perk up erotic interest. Male audiences seem to be particularly attuned to the excitatory appeal of the catfight, but there seems to be (from what one can judge on the Internet) a sizeable female audience also interested in the phenomenon from an erotic standpoint. On one messageboard devoted to the subject, a purportedly-female poster even disparaged the tendency of TV shows like XENA to show the heroine defeating men and women alike. Apparently when the poster saw a female heroine kick male butt, this automatically destroyed the poster's ability to credence that a female opponent could give Xena any trouble.

This need for credibility in a female/female fight may account for the widespread appeal of the catfight, at least a little better than Jerry Seinfeld's more famous "maybe they'll kiss" explanation. After all, Jerry, if all you want is a lesbian encounter, why do you need the catfight at all? It's not like lesbo action is hard to find.


I'm led to the conclusion, then, that whereas the fight-fantasy in which a female triumphs over a bigger and stronger-looking male, which I examined here, is one more openly defiant of consensual reality, in that "the normal rules of weight and mass" do not apply. The catfight scenario might then be seen as more prone to stick to said reality, resulting in a fictional world where women can only exercise the "will to power" against other women.

WONDER WHAT SHOULD COME FIRST

So I'll be predictable with my first visual example.

It's interesting that in MEN OF TOMORROW, Gerald Jones observed that most of the ads in Golden Age WONDER WOMAN were directed at male readers. It's problematic as to whether or not this meant that the majority of readers were males, but it does poke some holes in certain current theories that would claim that superhero comics are all about "excluding" the female.

But the opening shot said that this liberality toward female characters-- the example being ALIEN'S Ellen Ripley-- wasn't a tendency of modern "Nerd Culture."

Oh, reaaalllllyyy???