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. 

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

I've only got one piece at a website that is not this website this week, a review of Tim Hanley's Wonder Woman Unbound at Robot 6.

You can go read it now, if you like, and then come back and we can talk a little bit more about it.

...

Are you back?

Cool. So, as I noted over there, Hanley doesn't spend a whole lot of time on the post-Perez, "modern age" of Wonder Woman comics. In fact, here's pretty much everything he has to say about the Wonder Woman comic proper during the time in which I was aware of Wonder Woman comics (I didn't read the John Byrne run as it was ongoing—I think Phil Jimenez's was when I first picked up the title—but I do recall flipping through the Byrne run in my hometown mall's Waldenbooks, back when my hometown still had a mall, and there were still Waldenbooks):

John Byrne took over as writer and artist after Messner-Loebs left and largely ignored everything that had happened before. He moved Wonder Woman to the fictional Gateway City, gave her a new supporting cast, and even killed her for a few issues. The book wasn't terrible, but nor was it particularly good. By the mid-1990s, the series had settled into a middling quality with middling sales, and it never came back in any lasting way.

There were some good moments: Phil Jimenez's run on the book as writer and artist is very well respected; writer Greg Rucka was twice nominated for an Eisner, the comics industry's biggest award, while writing Wonder Woman; and Gail Simone became the series' first regular female writer. There were occasional sales jumps, but they quickly petered out. Another relaunch in 2006 lit up the sales charts briefly, but delays and a tie-in to Amazons Attack, a poorly executed miniseries in which the Amazons invaded America, soon dragged the book down. When Wonder Woman was renumbered to mark its 600th issue overall, J. Michael Straczynski came onboard as writer and sales rose initially until Straczynski abruptly left the book. Then sales plummeted again.

Hanley probably did DC a favor by not bringing up Jodi Picoult, which is still maybe the most mind-bogglingly self-defeating screw-up I've seen from the publisher. They scored one of the most popular and successful prose writers of the day, and then forced her to write some dumb-ass Amazons Attack tie-in instead of doing, say, anything at all she wanted to do (All-Star Wonder Woman, for example). He also probably does Brad Meltzer a favor by not mentioning the writer by name, despite spending a few paragraphs tearing apart Identity Crisis.

Still, I found it pretty astounding how much he skims over there, essentially reducing about 20 years worth of Wonder Woman comics into just two paragraphs.

After I finished writing my review of the book, I saw it still had a bunch of strips of press releases and the corners of empty sugar packets sticking out of it here and there where I marked something I thought I might want to mention in the review or follow up on here later.

Let's talk about those too, shall we?

First, I was really intrigued by this passage from Hanley's section of the book dealing with her 1968-1972 mod era, during which she lost her powers and costume:

For over twenty-five years, Wonder Woman had been kind-hearted and peaceful, using force only when her diplomatic solutions were rejected. This all changed with the mod Diana Prince; her anger perpetually boiled just below the surface and erupted with anysort of provocation. Violence was her response to nearly every situation.

...

In an issue ominous titled "Red for Death!" Diana traveled to China and ended up strafing Chinese fighter jets with a massive machine gun. Another story arc had Diana trapped in the interdimenstional kingdom of Chalandro, where she killed at least twenty men with blazing sword work before she was captured. Diana later escaped, joined a local rebel group, and taught them to make gunpowder. She and her fellow rebels then shot down the enemy's air ships with cannons,blowingup the gas-filled and heavily manned flying machines. Diana's solution for any problem was to hit it or blow it up or, more often than not, kill it.

I found it intriguing because I associate the hot-headed, violence-first, killing's-not-so-bad, ultimate warrior version of Wonder Woman with the modern age. I've long assumed it was a sort of unfortunate result of the popularity of Kingdom Come, in which she played a sort of Lady Macbeth role in Superman's decision-making process, pushing him to become a bad guy, who we could root for Batman to beat (And she does so in much more extreme fashion in the Injustice: Gods Among Us comics, which are heavily influenced by Kingdom Come).

There are other factors that may have contributed to Wonder Woman becoming  a violence-monger always willing to resort to deadly force, of course: The portrayal differentiated her from her fellow Trinitarians Superman and Batman, it played off of the concept of the Amazons as a Classical Age warrior race (instead of the utopians Marston re-created them to be), it seemed to fit in better with the mythological milieu that got increasing play in Wonder Woman comics and, finally, it helped serve as an over-correction for fears on the part of the writers, artists and editors working on her that a female character wouldn't be seen as a bad-ass enough character.

Hanley, however, traces this violent streak in Wonder Woman all the way back to the Bronze Age of comics. I guess Wondy's willingness to kill comes and goes...?

In a rather long section (for this particular book) discussing Wonder Woman and feminism, I found this passage quite striking:

It's quite impressive that [Gloria] Steinem and company were able to translate Marston's particular feminisim into something that resonated with a modern audience. It was a fascinating evolution of the character, and one that made Wonder Woman relevant for the first time in decades. While it may have been an inaccurate depiction of Marston's Wonder Woman, what's more significant is that Wonder Woman meant so much to these women and that they were able to remake her into a massively popular feminist icon. Authorial intent is important, but writing isn't a one-way street. What resonates with readers and what they see in a character is just as relevant, and Steinem and her friends saw a fantastic role model in Wonder Woman.

That bit about writing not being a one-way street is probably particularly important when it comes to Wonder Woman, as the feminists of the 1970s were hardly the first readers to see what they wanted in Marston's Wonder Woman comics, nor were they the last. A lot of people have their own personal Wonder Woman, and I often think that the "wrong" Wonder Womans are the ones that are embraced by the most people. Certainly the Wonder Woman of the TV show, of Superfriends and the Justice League cartoons, of Greg Rucka or Gail Simone's runs are more pervasive then Marston's version, despite the fact that he had what seems to me an unusual amount of control over his creation...at least compared to some of Wonder Woman's peers from around that time.

Marston was the only writer on any Wonder Woman comics for the first six years of her fictional life (at which point Marson passed away, and Robert Kanigher took over as writer/editor for a few decades).

Superman, Batman and Captain Marvel had several different men writing and drawing them during their developmental years, and in some cases they were rather forcefully and famously pried away from the control of their creators (Superman) or were a case of creation-by-committee from the outset (Batman). Additionally, those three supermen all spawned movie serials and radio shows that cross-pollinated their comics iterations, whereas Wonder Woman didn't have the same multi-media success during her formative years (and never would catch up to Batman and Superman in that regard; I think she's surpassed Captain Marvel by this point, her 1970s live-action TV show proving more popular than his, and her cartoon appearances dwarfing his, thanks to her Justice League membership).

It was likely circumstance as much as anything else—Marston being older and having more power relative to his publishers than Joel Siegel and Joe Shuster did, for example, or Superman proving more popular than Wonder Woman—but the original Golden Age Wonder Woman ended up being much more the product of her creator and her creator's collaborator, artist H.G. Peter, than many other heroes of the era.

Marston's vision of the character has been eclipsed over the decades, and, I'd argue, to the character's detriment. But, as Hanley wrote, writing's not a one-way street and, right or wrong, good or bad, Wonder Woman endures, having taken on a life of her own, one given to her by decade after decade of fans, who see what they want to in the character, rather than what she was conceived as.

You know who would like Wonder Woman's new origin story? Wertham.

Diana has two mommies?!

I've been working my way through Tim Hanley's Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World's Most Famous Heroine (Chicago Review Press; 2014), and I'm currently on a chapter dealing with the way Wonder Woman was portrayed in the Silver Age, after her creator William Moulton Marston had passed away and Robert Kanigher took over writing her adventures.

In this section of the book, Hanley spends some time discussing Fredric Wertham's crusade against comics, the detrimental effects it had on the comic book industry (and, perhaps more importantly, the comic book medium) and how DC's post-congressional hearings superhero comics line conformed to the Comics Code Authority.

Wonder Woman, like Superman and Batman and Robin, were among the few superheroes specifically singled out by Wertham in his influential-at-the-time (and now much-ridiculed) Seduction of the Innocent, in which Wertham referred to Wonder Woman as the "lesbian counterpart" to Batman's barely-coded homosexual ideal. While Wertham's objection to the character as a sort of insidious recruiting poster for lesbianism—Wertham, like too many people of his day, thought homosexuality was in and of itself an unnatural and unhealthy thing—it turns out another thing he objected to was her origin story.

Her original origin story was told in 1941's All Star Comics #8, and repeated and refined elsewhere, as in the H.G. Peter-drawn panel from Wonder Woman #1 at the top of this post. It was this version, the only one the then still-young character had, that Wertham objected to. It went like this: Centuries ago, after their encounter with all-male hero Hercules during his famous twelve labors, Queen Hippolyte and her Amazons were led by the goddess Aphrodite to a hidden island, where they would be free of the violent, fallen world of men...and free to build their own advanced society and science. There, Athena taught Hippolyte the art of sculpting, and she made a little girl out of clay. Her patron goddess Aphrodite brought the little statue to life, and she was named after another Greek goddess Diana. The magically born girl would of course grow up to be the princess of the Amazons and, ultimately, Wonder Woman.

Writes Hanley:

Furthermore, Wertham decried the fact that "Wonder Woman is not the natural daughter of a natural mother, nor was she born like Athena from the head of Zeus." In 1954, the Golden Age Wonder Woman origin story still stood, and she was made of clay and brought to life by the gods. Her lack of a "natural" mother or father placed her further outside the maternal, familial norms than her fellow female heroes and made her the archetype of Wertham's narrow-minded deduction.

Wertham would therefor probably prefer the current origin story. While it has been revised before, including by Kanigher himself (although, somewhat amusingly, Hanley points out that Kanighter has no memory of altering Marston's original origin story, despite doing so rather drastically), the current version concocted by Brian Azzarello as part of 2011's "New 52" reboot gives Wonder Woman a much more "natural" origin.

In Azzarello's version, which is apparently going to be the one used in Wonder Woman's feature film debut, Wonder Woman was conceived of a sexual union between her mother Hipplyte and her father Zeus, king of the Olympian gods.

You just don't see the point of conception in too many superhero origin stories, do you?

The whole molded-from-clay thing was, in this new version, a pretty story her mother sold her to keep the truth about her demi-god status and familial relationship with the petty, bickering, often-at-war-with-one-another Olympians from her.

I suppose it would be petty and reactionary to blanketly state, "If Wertham would have liked it, then it's probably a bad idea" as some sort of rule for comic book-making, even when it came to Wonder Woman, the character he seemed to have the most trouble with for the least substantiated reasoning. But I'd be quite okay with comic book-makers having a poster on their office walls saying something like, "If Wertham would have liked it, let's give it a little more thought, just to be safe, shall we?"

Granted, much of Azzarello's soon-to-conclude run on the book has hinged on Wonder Woman being an Olympian, but his change in origin never sat well with me (the other bits of Wonder Woman's back-story he changed, like those concerning the Amazons kidnapping, mating with and then murdering sailors and then selling their male offspring for weapons sat worse still). That is, for the most part, because of how radical a change it was from Marston's conception of the character, which, unlike so many other superheroes, seems to get more and more diluted and generic the more writers work on her over the decades, rather than more and more complex and compelling. (For example, it's hard to find a Batman story that isn't at least as interesting as his first, Golden Age adventures, whereas it's damn near impossible to find a Wonder Woman comic as compelling as those Marston and Peter first crafted).