Star-Spangled Panties

By Carol A. Strickland

You need some Wonder Woman in your life!

 

Fighting for our rights! Through the years Wonder Woman has shown us to be proud of who we truly are. To stand joyfully for principles that form our very hearts and who we want to be. To take a moment before using violence to solve a problem, and instead come up with a healing, win-win solution.

 

Now let lifelong WW fan Carol Strickland show you how she came to do that: how the character was concocted, how she was presented as a full-blown feminist in a comics world that was very much not so. Discover:

 

• That spectacular Wonder costume and how it's changed

• Is there really a need for perma-boyfriend Steve Trevor?

• WW's younger sister, Donna Troy

• Her most overused (yawn) villain

• Does eighty-year-old Wondie still hold a place in the 21st century?

 

Smash the patriarchy! Wonder Woman will save the world!

 

Join her in her cause and buy now!

 

"An exuberant manifesto about the Amazon's meaning and depiction." –BookLife Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carol A. Strickland
• Release date: Jan 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781941318386

Book preview

Foreword

What makes Wonder Woman unique? And why is she still alive?

She’s real to people. A hero. An inspiration. A role model who actually does make the world a better place. A comfort. A friend.

The true-life stories that I’ve read are mind blowing. I’ve received private messages from people all over the globe explaining to me why they love Wonder Woman. All too many started life in very bad circumstances, with abuse and neglect a common theme. These messages are from very different people, very diverse. Age, gender, politics, race, religious preference, sexual orientation, education, economic and social class all go by the wayside.

All of these people feel that the reason that they survived was because they had Wonder Woman in their lives. The best part is that they did not just survive; they went on to become positive and successful people. In a situation where it is so common for the abused to become an abuser, these people rose above the norm.

As to why so many love Wonder Woman, I think it can be summed up simply: human values. People want and need someone in their lives who represents and upholds values which are dear to them. People are sick of war and misery and lies and suffering; sickened by all of man’s inhumanity to man. People want a role model who points the way to a better life – and a better world.

Wonder Woman has been that someone for generations. She has inspired individuals to be their best. She has solaced and encouraged. She has helped people make that extra effort, go that extra mile.

Wonder Woman may have started out as pen and ink on a comics page, but she has become a very real – and very valuable – part of our world. May she live forever!

– Christie Marston

granddaughter of William and Elizabeth Marston

Introduction

As Wonder Woman would say, Hola, readers! To Amazons hola means hey there, or well met, great job, wow, look at that, etc. I pronounce the h to differentiate it from the Spanish. Holla! I mean, Hola!

Believe it or not, the character of Wonder Woman existed long before Lynda Carter played her on TV. And yes, there was a live action TV show before the Gal Gadot movies.

(Suddenly I feel old.)

I write this book not as a journalist would but as someone who has been avidly reading Wonder Woman stories since I was in fourth grade. Maybe third. Back when dinosaurs ruled the world, a neighbor a year or two older than I was a comics collector and allowed me to read her issues and vice versa. When her family moved, I inherited her vast collection. She must have owned over thirty comics!

I was in love not with Wondie herself but with her Wonder Family: Wonder Queen, Wonder Woman, Wonder Girl, and yes, Wonder Tot, which was in vogue in the comic at that time, though the concept is unduly disparaged these days. When my own family moved, I had to trim my collection down as well. Comics weigh so much to movers, you know, and movers charge by the pound. Bye bye, crazy-early Marvel comic$$$! I managed to hold on to my handful of Wonder issues as well as a few other female-friendly DC Comics titles.

I kept buying and reading Wonder Woman through her good times and bad. As a fan for so many years I not only have the benefit of a long view of the character herself within contemporary culture (likely that’s ancient history to you), but of a vantage point that allows me the hindsight to see elements that became missteps, as well as those that were pure gold. These latter withstood the passage of time and emphasized Wonder Woman’s amazing theme: empowerment.

I also have the benefit of being rather opinionated.

Well, I think that’s a benefit.

I’ve never interviewed any Wonder staff, but I have read interviews and asked the occasional online question that got an answer. I wish I’d asked more over the years, as so many Wonder people have now left this realm. I wrote a, um, busload of letters back when comics had lettercols, and sometimes received replies to those. One high school summer when I had a lot of time on my hands, I sent DC Comics a medium-sized dissertation on Wondie and how they should handle her. I got a response: They were interested in a lot of what I had to say, but there was this TV show coming up and...

Even so I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see bits and pieces of what I’d submitted appear in the comics. It might have come from my ideas or somewhere else, but I will proudly claim ownership of the Good Stuff.

(And yes, I believe that one neo-Nazi villain who appeared a decade or two later was named after me. The book’s writer at the time did not take kindly to my online comments about the book. Hmf.)

Now I’ve created a longer presentation, explaining (as if you didn’t already know!) that Wondie is the greatest comics hero of all tiiiime!

Hope you enjoy.

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Note: Out of habit and laziness I’ve utilized abbreviations from Internet and amateur press alliance terminology. DCU: DC Comics Universe, as seen in its comics. DCEU: The DC Extended Universe, which incorporates all its multimedia stuff, including movies. IMHO: In My Humble (hah!) Opinion. IMO: In My Opinion. (I don’t use that one in this book, but someone else does) TPTB: The Powers that Be. SMH: Shaking my head. Btw: By the way. BFF: Best friend forever! OTT: over the top. =W=: The Wonder Woman emblem. WWWWD: What Would Wonder Woman Do?

Wonder Woman in heroic pose, along with first three panels of the story showing her rescuing Steve Trevor on Paradise Island.

Wonder Woman’s first appearance, All-Star Comics #8, 1941. See? Those are culottes, not baggy shorts or a skirt.

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I found Wonder Woman in the early 70s when there weren't many role models for a ten-year-old girl. I remember standing in the news shop where my parents bought their cigarettes, looking over the comics shelf in the back and being totally amazed to see a woman with her own superhero comic. And then a few comics down, there was a JLA with her standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the men. It was the first time I'd ever seen a woman being treated as an equal when it came to being an action hero.

A couple years later when she went toe-to-toe with Superman, I was just floored. During a time when girls couldn't play Little League and women were just getting to be able to get their own credit cards, she was my one inspiration that taught me I could be just as good at things as the boys.

– Sue Grau

In the Beginning...

Hi, I’m Carol Strickland, I’d tell strangers. Actually, I go by Strick to my friends, but that’s not the point. I’m writing a book about Wonder Woman, and I’d like to know if you have any questions about her that I can answer in it. For instance, do you know her origin?

I asked a number of people this as I did my research. The vast majority had zero idea of how she got her powers. Of those few who said they were familiar with the idea of Wondie, perhaps eight out of ten people said, She’s from another planet, isn’t she?

No. No, she isn’t.

A part of me wanted to celebrate that people didn’t take the origin from The Movies to heart. We’ll give them points for that. Wonder Woman is not the daughter of a Zeus who was set up as a Yahweh stand-in.

But neither is she the daughter of any male. Nor do her people follow any male’s orders or make war their primary interest. Wonder Woman is not a god.

I’m going to tell you the real-life as well as fictional origins of Diana, aka Wonder Woman, because as Richard Dreyfuss said as he played with his mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, This is important.

And why is that?

Because Wonder Woman is the greatest comic book superhero ever.

Ever.

Let me explain...

Portrait of Dr. William Moulton Marston (1893-1947)

Dr. William Moulton Marston (1893-1947)

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There was a time when there wasn’t even a Superman. His stories were first published by DC/National Comics in 1938 and hit the world like an atomic bomb of excitement. After him came legions of compatriots. 1939: Batman. 1940: Robin. Over at Timely (which would become Marvel) we got the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch, followed by 1941’s Captain America. Later that year we got the greatest of all: Wonder Woman.

Dr. William Moulton Marston (WMM) was, among other accomplishments, a psychologist who at one point in his career was the first to utilize one of the indicators for a prototype of the polygraph. That sounds pretty vague, but what he did was measure blood pressure to determine truthfulness. He performed a number of studies concerning it, along with much publicity work and a ground-breaking attempt at getting blood pressure readings included as acceptable evidence in court cases. This is an impressive fact you can toss at people when they ask about him.

Dr. Marston and his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, LLB, had grown up as advocates of the US women’s suffrage movement. That movement used the term Amazon to describe the women working for women’s rights. Do you feel the beginnings of another idea there?

In 1940 Marston’s other domestic partner, Olive Byrne, who happened to be the niece of famed birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, wrote two interviews about him for Family Circle Magazine in which he talked about the educational value to kids of the then-new comic book craze.

Comics publisher Maxwell Charles Gaines read the interviews and invited Marston to be a member of an advisory board for his company. People had begun saying that comics were bad for kids. Now Marston’s job was to make sure they could pass a set of standards so parents could be sure their kids wouldn’t be harmed by Gaines’ publications.

According to Marston’s granddaughter, Christie Marston, on the Chew on This podcast of Oct. 23, 2017, It really was very, very simple. My grandfather was a psych advisor for the company [All-American Publications] that became DC Comics. And Charlie Gaines, who was the head honcho, just jokingly said, Hey, Bill, why don’t you write a comic?" since he already had all the right attitude and was working successfully in all the rest of the comics.

He went home and spoke with my grandmother [Elizabeth, also a psychologist among other things] about it that evening, and she said, Well yeah, go ahead and write one, but it’s going to have to be a woman. There are enough boys out there already."

Christie reminded us later on Facebook that [S]ince both [Marstons] were attorneys, WW was not DC-owned, so they didn’t suffer the dire economic fates that other Golden Age creators like Siegel and Shuster, the guys who came up with Superman, did. In modern times DC owns Wondie completely.

Charlie Gaines and Bill Marston combined their middle names to concoct the nom de plume for Wonder Woman’s creator: Charles Moulton. So as not to be so similar to Superman, the Amazon character’s original name of Suprema the Wonder Woman was shortened to just Wonder Woman.

Wondie’s character has been said to be an amalgam of both Elizabeth and Olive’s vivacity and drive. And yes, WMM was polyamorous with an open marriage. They were all consenting adults, so move along.

Wondie’s original artist was Harry (H.G.) Peter (1880-1958), a man who had been heavily influenced by the glamorous but prim Gibson Girl imagery back in the 1890s. He’d worked on pro-suffrage illustration before settling in to mainstream commercial artwork in the Twenties. In the Thirties he turned to comic books for work. He had a distinctive art style (I’ve seen it described as Art Deco, but would think Art Deco-ish with emphasis on the ish would be closer to the truth) that disregarded prurient depictions of his female characters. His Wondie was no lurid Sheena, Queen of the Jungle!

In The Great Comic Book Heroes, author Jules Feiffer says of this Golden Age WW, If she was as strong as they said, why wasn’t she tougher looking? Why wasn’t she bigger? Why was she so flat-chested? The author also noted he would have been frightened if he’d known that (gasp) girls read and liked comics. Our Wondie had to weather a lot of resistance! Thank goodness she had an artist like Peter to keep her away from Playboy-endorsed looks.

Even so, Peter’s editorial instructions on designing Wondie was to make her powerful and sexy, with as tiny a costume as the comic could get away with. When the first proposed designs for Wondie’s skirted outfit came through, it was Elizabeth Marston who nixed them, declaring that the skirt would be over Diana’s head during action sequences. Thus Wondie got first culottes (baggy, skirt-like shorts), which quickly transformed into tight walking shorts that got shorter as time went by.

As for Wonder Woman’s amazing bullet-deflecting bracelets, they were modeled after the bracelets Olive Byrne always wore.

Though it speaks to the bondage element of that early era, Wondie’s Magic Lasso to me has always hearkened to lariats owned by cowgirls, who were among the only legitimate purely action-adventure female types allowed in the movies before a certain point. Many early WW stories featured her astride horses, brandishing her lasso. We should also note that some famous suffragist parades used the iconography of women riding horses to create the proper exciting image for the movement.

Office photo: William Marston, H.G. Peter, editor Sheldon Mayer, and M.C. Gaines.

l-r: William Marston, H.G. Peter, editor Sheldon Mayer, and M.C. Gaines.

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In a 1943 issue of The American Scholar, Dr. Marston said: 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.

This final sentence has been ill-used over the years to justify the making of Wondie to be Superman with boobs instead of a character unique to herself.

I’m going to be blasphemous right now. I might be so a few more times in the book; who knows how much caffeine I’ll consume as I write? But I’m going to say that this strength of Superman thing was a sound byte that Marston would amend if he were alive today.

Wondie wasn’t the first female comic book superhero, but there were very few of them around. Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, was the most famous. One fan put together a list of 20 early characters, and others corrected her by adding a 21st. That’s still not very many, and most didn’t make much impact. You can find the list on my website.

In those days the majority of recurring female characters were wimpy, arm candy, victims, violent, overly sexualized, etc. Back then Superman couldn’t juggle planets on his pinky. He was unique; he didn’t have to struggle to be seen amid the mob of 9900 Superman-level comic book characters that there are today.

I think that what Marston meant (and here I’m using my keen, time-bending ESP) was that his creation should have the audience-pulling strength of the WONDER of Superman, a being with outrageous, entertaining action-adventure abilities, and yes, more strength than the average male.

The submissive stuff you can toss in the nearest garbage can until you recall that Marston was writing for kids, and kids should obey their parents (if that parental unit isn’t dysfunctional). All-American Pubs. editor Sheldon Mayer once said, Marston’s idea of feminine supremacy was the ability to submit to male domination. Adult male readers certainly seemed to eat up that idea.

Perhaps in a public, modern environment Marston might tout that people should honor the yin (the female aspect of things) in their lives much more than most do. I mean, when was the last time you heard someone extol feminine virtue beyond mere looks?

Or maybe he wouldn’t. He wrote a book about domination, submission, etc. and how different flavors of this in different situations mark every situation we come upon in life.

Steve grabs Diana, who discovers what it's like to be bossed by a strong man, but thinks, "Isn't it more fun to make the man obey?"

Steve Trevor suddenly becomes super-strong. Sensation Comics vol. 1, #46 (1945)

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Yin (the female aspect) and yang (male) are incomplete without balance with each other. In the modern world yin is often overbalanced or even smothered by the yang principle. Yin is more introverted than yang. It is wisdom, peace, persistence, imagination, gentleness, nurturing. It is inward-drawing, not outward-reaching.

At her core Wonder Woman has always been a balance of yin and yang. She is an action heroine who believes in peace. She gets things done as well as nurtures and teaches. She has courage and is also wise.

In other words, she’s healthily human. She is able to unbalance to either extreme in order to handle a particular situation and then balance again.

Feminist Mary Wollstonecraft said, Women do not want power over men, they want power over themselves. Everyone wants to live in a world where they are empowered to be themselves. The patriarchy is a prime method of disempowerment of far too many people in far too many ways. Empowerment is the foundation of the Wonder Mythos

Speaking of this beautiful stuff... Why does a woman have to be beautiful in order to merit an acknowledged position in society? Why does beauty equal goodness, and vice versa? Is this a valid view or one of the patriarchy? As lexicographer ErinMcKean said, Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.

I get that as the lead in a continuing entertainment series, Wondie should be good looking, but it shouldn’t be a requirement that she be the most beautiful woman in the world. Besides, who’s going to make that kind of judgment about anyone? Besides People Magazine, that is.

Feminine archetype I can get into. That’s Wondie! But remember: she’s that balance of yin and yang instead of permanently overbalancing to either. She’s a very human female character with qualities we can all aspire to.

That’s not just an entertaining idea.

That’s revolutionary.

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‪With a strong mother as a role model, I was immediately drawn to Wonder Woman as a character when I was a little kid. Her compassion and love, as well as her wisdom, was something that I could identify with and wished I could be like. Adding to that her physical strength and ability, I looked to Diana when I was struggling. I literally would ask myself, What would she do in this situation?‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

My entire home office is a shrine to Wonder Woman, and being in that room simply inspires me in myriad