One bad thing and one good thing about picture book A True Wonder: The Comic Book Hero Who Changed Everything

I've read a handful of these non-fiction picture book biographies of certain comic book creators and/or their greatest creations before. Writer Kirsten W. Larson and artist Katy Wu's A True Wonder: The Comic Book Hero Who Changed Everything (Clarion Books; 2021) obviously focuses on Wonder Woman. I found two things of particular interest in it: one good, one bad.

I should note that this is more a biography of the character than it is her creators, starting by introducing Wonder Woman, then turning to comic books, then her famous 1972 Ms. magazine cover, then her 1975-1977 TV show and finally her 2017 feature film, with several pauses to focus on broad changes for women in American society and Wonder Woman's ability to inspire women in the real world.

It opens with a two-page spread with three comic book-like narration boxes, the first two featuring quotation marks (It won't be clear to most readers until the last page's source notes, but the words in quotations are taken from a story in 1942's Wonder Woman #1, which actually came along about half a year after Wonder Woman debuted in Sensation Comics #1):

"As lovely as Aphrodite—as wise as Athena—with the speed of Mercury and the strength of Hercules—

she is known only as Wonder Woman, but who she is, or whence she came, nobody knows!"

Until now!

Dominating the foreground Wu's version of Wonder Woman, rendered and costumed in a way that is quite visually (and, one imagines, legally) distinct from the DC Comics character, an athletic, black-haired beauty who seems to be made of pastel light and cartoon stars, only the vaguest suggestion of any kind of costume beyond a trailing red ribbon. (We'll talk more about Wu's Wonder Woman a bit further down.)

Behind her are the four Greek mythological figures mentioned.

From there we cut to "America, 1941" and what appears to be a comic book studio, in which we see a half-dozen handsome, even pretty young men in business attire all looking like drawings based on clip art search results for "business guy." They don't really look all that much like they came from the 1940s; indeed, no one's even smoking!

Two of them are busy at drawing tables, one leans over one of the artists, three gather around a drawing of a caped strongman labeled "He Boy." On the walls are colorful images of various Supermen, and an open box is full of a comic labeled "Zoom Man."

"The comic book industry is dominated by white men," the first narration box says. And, indeed, there are free-floating labels with arrows pointing out that all the characters on this page are "white men." (One says "Another white man" and another "Also white men.")

This is a) true, with so few exceptions so as to prove the rule and b) weird, because as you and I, comic book fans, are well aware, Wonder Woman is also the creation of white men: William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter...although you wouldn't know that Peter had anything to do with Wonder Woman, given that he's not mentioned at all in the story. This is the bad thing. 

As the story unfolds, important players behind-the-scenes of Wonder Woman's comic book career (and, later, TV and film careers) are highlighted with baseball card-like boxes depicting their images, names and some details about them.

The first of these come on pages seven and eight, and feature Marston and his wife, Elizabeth Marston. After a spread showing how much kids loved comic books and that grownups were worried about the violence in them, we cut to the Marstons' home, where Bill is deep in thought in an easy chair, while Elizabeth stands nearby, cajoling him, "Come on, let's have a Superwoman! There's too many men out there."

For that suggestion alone (that's all the role she plays in this book, anyway), she gets a baseball card, but Peter does not. In fact, he's left completely out of Wonder Woman's creation story, as the next spread features Marston with a briefcase and sketch of Wonder Woman. Of where she came from, Larson only says, "Inspired by the idea of a female superhero, Bill proposed a new comic book character, one who would be a good influence on children—Wonder Woman."

And then it's to the offices of All-American Comics, where M.C. Gaines okays the idea, and gets his baseball card. So, both Elizabeth Marston, who suggests a woman hero, and Gaines, who okays the hero, are pivotal parts of Wonder Woman's origin, but not the guy who drew here? There's a step missing here, obviously.

Peter's omission gets only more annoying as one reads on, given that other key figures named and "carded" include associate editor and "Wonder Women of History" writer Alice Marble, Marston's assistant-turned-ghostwriter Joye Hummel, Ms. cofounders Gloria Steinem and Joanne Edgar, television actress Lynda Carter and the Wonder Woman film's director Patty Jenkins. 

Now, certainly these folks all contributed to the evolution of Wonder Woman as an important character in American pop culture, and they all played roles of various degrees in helping maintain or increase her popularity, but none of them helped create Wonder Woman the way Peter did. Imagine, if you would, a book about Marvel's Incredible Hulk that includes the contributions of Stan Lee, Martin Goodman, Lou Ferrigno and Ang Lee, but never mentions Jack Kirby.

Because Peter didn't just come up with Wonder Woman's basic look and costume. He drew all of the Wonder Woman stories in both Sensation and Wonder Woman, covers included, as well as her newspaper comic strip (granted, with assistants helping on much of the background inking), from Wonder Woman's first appearance in 1942 until his own death in 1958. That's Wonder Woman's entire Golden Age career (outside of the Justice Society strips, I suppose, although I noticed when reading the earliest JSoA stories in DC Finest collections recently that Peter even drew some of her initial stories there). 

That means Peter designed and co-created not just Wonder Woman, but also Hippolyta and the Amazons, Steve Trevor, Etta Candy and the Holiday Girls and just about everyone Wonder Woman villain you can think of (Unless you want to be cheeky and say, I don't know, Veronica Cale).

And, as we now all know—we do all know this now, right?—drawing the art in comics stories isn't a simple act of illustration, but another form of writing, just writing with pictures rather than words. Marston is the creator who obviously gets talked about the most, given how colorful his personal life was, how interesting his psychological theories were, and how he used Wonder Woman to try to popularize those theories, but Peter is just as much Wonder Woman's father as Marston was. 

So that seems like a pretty big omission on Larson's part, and one that makes me question everything else in the book. 

After the 34-page story concludes, there are two pages devoted to short text features in the back. One is entitled "The Origin Story...Of This Book," and details how Larson was a Wonder Woman fan as a child (thanks to the TV show), and notes that seeing the 2017 film made her wonder where Wonder Woman came from, which is how this book came about. She notes that she wasn't a comic book reader, which will seem obvious after reading the book.

The other page is entitled "The Women of Wonder Woman". It's only five paragraphs long, but it lists seven women, their names all in bold. It is, interestingly, here that Peter gets his only mention:

Wonder Woman's looks, created by artist Harry G. Peter, may have been inspired by Olive Richard, who lived with Bill Marston's family, had dark hair, and wore signature cuff bracelets.

"Lived with Bill Marston's family," you say? Huh. I wonder if there's anything more to that story, maybe something less likely to make it into a children's picture book? Notably perhaps, this is Richard's only mention in the book, as well. 

Anyway, the decision to omit one of Wonder Woman's creators from a story about Wonder Woman's creation is the bad thing, and, perhaps, a fatal flaw in this book. 

Now, what is the good thing?

Well, I was kind of fascinated by how Katy Wu draws Wonder Woman throughout the book. I am, quite obviously, not versed in copyright or trademark law (If you know me at all, you'll know I'm not terribly well-versed in anything useful; pretty much just comic books, and, to a lesser extent, giant monster movies and cryptozoology). 

But I would have thought that, this being a work of non-fiction about Wonder Woman, it might have been free to use Wonder Woman's likeness throughout. Certainly, the previously discussed With Great Power and Along Came a Radioactive Spider by Annie Hunter Eriksen and Lee Gatlin were full of accurate images of Spider-Man and other Marvel superhero characters (as well as a few others, like Fawcett's Captain Marvel). 

I've never read it, but, working in a library, I've definitely seen and handled What Is the Story of Wonder Woman?, one of those Who HQ non-fiction books for kids in which the subjects have big heads on the covers, and that Wonder Woman is wearing her traditional costume on the cover. 

Regardless, Wu opts to draw a Wonder Woman who looks like Wonder Woman if you squint, or from far away...at least at a few points in the book (Her other take on the character is more interesting, I thought).

You see this almost-but-not-quite-Wonder Woman version of Wonder Woman on the cover. She looks a bit like a fully colored thumbnail version of herself. Yes, she's got the read bustier with a bit of gold at the top, the blue shorts, a tiara and bracelets, but the details are missing: There's no star on the tiara, no eagle or "WW" on the bustier, no white stars on her shorts (I would have thought that Wu could have gone ahead and used a version of the eagle on Wondy's chest, as I thought the reason DC changed it to the "WW" symbol in the first place was because they learned they couldn't trademark an eagle...?)

This version also appears on the faux covers of Wonder Woman comics kids happily hold aloft on one page, and striding like a giant in the background on a page labeled "Present day," where she is missing her tiara (and facial features) but does hold a glowing golden lariat.

More interesting, I thought, was the Wonder Woman Wu drew on the first page, one that seemed more idea than character, made of something insubstantial, a black-haired being of fluid, shimmering red and blue light. In that image, she is trailing a solid if sheer-looking red ribbon, a motif that appears throughout the book, as if a literal manifestation of the thread of her story. 

On two pages devoted to a readers' poll of who should "serve alongside Hawkman, Johnny Thunder, and the others" in the Justice Society, we see this Wonder Woman seeming to explode out of a ballot box,  a fist raised in victory. She's more solid here, with flesh-colored skin and silvery rather than golden bracelets, but her costume is part red and part blue, partially obscured by the ribbon, and stars abound.

The very next page has a panel of her in this costume, the bustier seemingly changing from blue to red and back before readers' eyes. And then later, on the page devoted to the debut of her TV show, Wu draws an image of Wonder Woman hanging from a helicopter's landing skids and she's outfitted similarly to the way she is on the cover, although here she seems to wear a golden belt and her shorts have a golden trim, and while her boots are comic book-accurate in design (at least circa 1977, with the point at top and the stripes), the colors are blue and gold rather than red and white. Again, the ribbon plays a big part, drawn entering the page from one side and exiting on the other, while it entwines Wonder Woman's not-quite-right costume, as if to artfully obscure it.

As much as I liked Wu's attempts to draw Wonder Woman in a way that was recognizable but off enough not to make any DC or Warner Bros. lawery's fingers twitch, I think there were also some funny attempts to draw generic superheroes.

There is, obviously, that scene in 1941 with all the white men, where the various heroes all look like the kind one might find in a child's birthday card, or a coloring book, or a clip art file that comes up when searching "superhero", all capes and generic chest symbols (I assume she could have used a faux Superman here, a caped, dark-haired strongman in red and blue, just leaving off the trademarked "S" symbol? She probably also could have used some public domain heroes, although maybe the creators didn't want to suggest a specific studio or publisher in that image.)

Where it gets positively ludicrous is a drawing the Justice Society:

You know, J-Man. And H-Man. And G-Man. And the other guy.

Surely there was a better way to draw the JSoA without violating any trademarks, perhaps drawing them all in silhouette...? I don't know. I just find it funny to see the words "Justice Society" (and then the names Hawkman and Johnny Thunder) juxtaposed with those images, as if the artist read the script and was like, "Justice Society, huh? So, just some random group of vaguely superheroic looking guys, then!"

Now that I think about it, maybe J-Man is supposed to be Johnny Thunder and H-Man Hawkman...? (And maybe G-Man could be Green Lantern? He's got a cape like Alan Scott and he is wearing green! Maybe this is the JSoA of an alternate Earth in the old DC multiverse, like Earth-W or something...)

Anyway, A True Wonder is interesting enough to look at, in part to see an artist wrestling with drawing one of the most iconic of superhero characters when they aren't permitted to use any of the specific iconography, but if you, like me, care at all about where comic book superheroes actually come from, its excision of H.G. Peter from the story of his own greatest, most lasting work is sure to irritate. 

For more of Katy Wu's art, visit here or here.