Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

Tue, 30 Mar 2021 10:38:04 GMT

I finally checked out some of the DC animated movies. The good ones were quite good. Sadly, neither of the Wonder Woman animated movies released to date were in that category.

Wonder Woman (2009) has a nonsensical villain - Ares is a god, and gods crave worship, so why the heck does he want to exterminate humanity and thus deny him any worshippers? But the real problem is that it oozes frat boy sexism, from a slimy Steve Trevor to an Amazon who turns against her people because she was denied the opportunity to marry and have children (bleah). And Trevor saves Paradise island from being destroyed, because behind every powerful woman there has to be a slimy man without whom the day would not have been saved. 🤬 Best avoided.

Wonder Woman: Bloodlines, on the other hand, is an incoherent mess of a film. The only explanation I can come up with is that DC had the script for a TV miniseries, but then a wild goat got loose, scattered the pages, and ate half of them at random. And rather than print out a new copy, they decided to just film the remaining half of the pages and call it a movie. It feels like a much longer story with all of the connective tissue removed. It never once stops to explain motivations, give characters a second to be themselves, or make much sense at all. Again, best avoided.

On the other hand... All Star Superman is a marvellous film that is just as good as the comic book miniseries it adapts. That's right, a film version that is fully faithful to the original material: something I would never have expected was possible from Warner Brothers.

Finally, Batman Soul of the Dragon is a fun love letter to 70's martial arts movies. Thankfully it makes Richard Dragon (DC's version of Iron Fist/white guy who becomes the world's best kung fu master), into an Asian man, thus reducing, slightly, the orientalist and racist nature of the material it's reworking. If it was all about Batman I'd not like it nearly as much, but he is just one of an ensemble cast of martial artists (and he is the only white person among them) who have to band together to defeat the bad guys. Plus, instead of being the best, Bruce Wayne is explicitly called out as the least skilled among them, which was I thought a nice touch.

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Wonder Woman, Etta Candy, queerness, and Dr Wertham.

Sun, 27 Dec 2020 17:09:18 GMT

So, I came across a post about queer themes in Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman's war-era sidekick Etta Candy, and Dr Wertham. Which was so riddled with errors that I just had to write a post of my own (because comments were not enough).

Wonder Woman started out as feminist propaganda. Kinky, queer, bondage-obsessed, with a very different from modern ideas 19th century kind of feminism (women are not equal but different from men and women should be in charge because they will do a better job), but nonetheless, feminist propaganda. The queer kinkiness was filtered and coded of course by being published in comic books for children in the 40's, but it was still undeniably there.

Wonder Woman's sidekicks and Diana Prince's friends were Etta Candy and the girls of Beeta Lambda sorority at Holliday college. They were part of that propaganda message - promoting women's colleges, women's education and independence, and the idea that any woman can be a heroine like Wonder Woman if she puts her mind to it. Etta and her girls were also (coded, filtered) gay or bi characters, modelled on women that Marston's bisexual partners had known in the women's colleges they attended and the women's college sororities they had belonged to.

However, Etta was never Wonder Woman or Diana's girlfriend, even in subtext. From day one, the Wonder Woman comic adopted a genderswapped version of the Superman-Lois Lane dynamic, with Diana infatuated with Steve Trevor, who was infatuated with Wonder Woman.

Marston and his female partners co-created Wonder Woman and co-wrote each story, but sold them under Marston's name. When Marston died, the editors at DC refused to hire his uncredited women co-writers, and instead handed the comic over to Robert Kanigher, a typically sexist man who had no truck with all this feminist stuff.

Kanigher jettisoned the feminist messages that had appeared in every story, jettisoned most of the bondage themes, and jettisoned Etta and her sorority sisters. He kept (and enhanced) the eclectic, magic-meets-sf-meets-mythology-meets-fairy tales setting of Paradise Island, and kept the Diana-Steve-Wonder Woman love triangle. Because the love triangle was boring as fuck, he set a lot of his stories on Paradise Island. Without Etta and company, and without queer women co-writing behind the scenes, the comic became completely heterosexual, despite being often set on an island populated only by women.

Fast forward to 1953, when psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published a screed against violence and sexuality in comic books (expanded into a book the following year), which he felt were the root cause of juvenile delinquency and of the sexual irregularities of his child patients. Wertham's primary targets were crime and horror comics, but he did devote a little space to superhero comics like Batman ("a wish dream of two homosexuals living together") and Wonder Woman ("for boys... a frightening image. For girls... a morbid ideal"). Wertham's book states that it's based on seven years of research, which might explain why he called out the Holliday girls in Wonder Woman, as "gay party girls, gay girls" - despite the fact that Holliday college had been dropped from the comics for six years by the time his book was published.

Wertham was successful in virtually exterminating crime and horror comics, but he didn't actually have all that much effect on superhero comics - Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson continued sleeping in twin beds in the same room together long after Wertham, and in the case of Wonder Woman, the censoring of gay themes had already been done several years before he came along.

Sources: Seduction of the Innocent, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (both on my shelf), various comic nerd web sites, and my own personal knowledge from having read tons of Wonder Woman comics, including reprints of dozens from the war years and a few from the post-war, post-Marston era.

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Amazons in Greece and in comics

Sat, 12 Aug 2017 20:44:21 GMT

The backstory for Wonder Woman's people has always been a bit strange and never made all that much sense. Attempts by DC to "modernize" the Amazons in the 80's and more recently have fixed some cosmetic issues but the underlying lack of sense has continued or even gotten worse.

( Let's start with the Greeks )

America has the Wild West of the 1880's, Japan has the era of the Samurai; similarly, the ancient Greeks had their Heroic Age, roughly corresponding to what archaeologists today call the Mycenaean period in Greece (1500-1100 BCE). While the Scythian culture with its warrior women seems to have emerged in the 9th century (around the same time as archaic Greece), in fiction, the Greeks backdated Amazons to make them contemporaneous with their beloved legendary heroes and demigods. Which had the unfortunate effect of making centuries of classics scholars dismiss the whole concept of Amazons as a myth, despite the very level-headed accounts of them in surviving Greek non-fiction.

Amazons in the comics

Enter William Marston, who needed a particular kind of backstory for the character of Wonder Woman. His goal was propaganda, pushing for a vision of the world in which women were seen as superior to men and their right to rule the world was self-evident. Which meant Wonder Woman had to be an outsider, someone from a culture where women were powerful and in charge, who could look upon American customs of sexism as quaint and silly. What better background to give her than to make her an Amazon? ( Warning, bad mythology next 500 meters )

Next time, I'll continue by looking at the revamped origin story that the Amazons got from DC in the late 80's.

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Review: "The secret history of Wonder Woman," by Jill Lepore

Mon, 03 Jul 2017 14:55:18 GMT

As oursin likes to remind her readers, "secret history" is an overused marketing term for "actually quite well established history that people buying the book were maybe not acquainted with," but in this case it's definitely appropriate, as the history of Wonder Woman is inextricably tied to the polyamorous union of four adults who created her, and who did everything they could to keep their relationship an utter secret not just from the world but from their own children.

Various histories of Wonder Woman written by comics fans in this century have included details about William Marston's unconventional family and his fetishism for bondage, but all of them are frustratingly superficial and give little or no credit to his partners as co-creators, or to the political and social movements that influenced their creation of Wonder Woman.

Jill Lepore's book reveals that Wonder Woman, like all the writings attributed to William Marston, was a collaborative effort between Marston and his three partners, all feminists and suffragists like himself. Clues from college yearbooks and the like suggest that Elizabeth Holloway, Olive Byrne, and Marjorie Huntley were all bisexual and that the Marston family was not just polygamous but fully polyamorous. ( It is a truth universally acknowledged that bisexual women in want of children should find themselves an agreeable donor )
Overall, an excellent history not only of Wonder Woman, but also a look at one slice of the history of feminism in the years between the passage of suffrage and women's liberation, showing how there was never actually an end to activism and the push for greater equality. Recommended.

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