A Sense of Doubt blog post #1972 - Comic Book Sunday - 1972 - pivotal year and Why Steve Ditko Quit
Welcome to Comic Book Sunday, my one day off from work each week in which I engage in self-care, which for me, often, means reading a bunch of comic books. I started making Sunday comic book day weeks ago at the beginning of the pandemic and with only two exceptions (for my Mother's and Father's Days) I have featured posts about comic books each week.
This week it's true that today is my one day off, where in with the exception of checking messages, I plan to do no work. I am hoping that after another week of working hard prepping materials I might be able to take the weekend off or at least keep Saturday work to simple maintenance of messages and discussions.
I know I write about work issues a lot, and it's not that I am trying for sympathy. Instead I am trying to be intentional about self-care and work life balance. Back in the winter when I was working seven days a week and in some cases until 10 p.m. on Saturday night while watching movies with my wife, I need to consider how such long hours for low pay affects my quality of life, even though I typically really like my work.
And so, though today will feature some reading of comics, I also have to work on a new short story to meet a workshop deadline next week. Fortunately, for me, writing is fun, and so this is not a burden.
I like this post a great deal. It turned out well. I like when posts evolve. I started with just the video on why Steve Ditko quit comics, particularly Marvel.
Then as I began to think about featuring comics from the year 1972 as this is post #1972, the post evolved more and more. I knew that 1972 was the year of Ms. Magazine's first issue, so that was an easy choice for cover art. And it was fun to collect several covers without too much theme, though some emphasis on some of the first issues, from that year.I was ten years old in 1972 and in fifth grade. I remember my fifth grade teacher -- Mr. Royer -- reading The Chariot of the Gods to his class. I remember the book being wildly popular that year, and I bought my own copy. The Bantam paperback edition and translation to English came out in 1971, which attests to its popularity.
I was pretty hardcore into comics in this year, and so a theory about UFO visitors helping ancient civilizations build huge pyramids fit nicely with the comic book contents.
Academic dismissals[edit]
Von Däniken's book, and much of his subsequent publications such as Gods From Outer Space and The Gold Of The Gods, have drawn largely negative receptions from the academic mainstream despite being popular best-sellers. Many scientists and historians have rejected his ideas, claiming that the book's conclusions were based on faulty, pseudoscientific evidence, some of which was later demonstrated to be fraudulent or fabricated, and under illogical premises
So, here's two photos and previously featured links from 1972. Given that I am born in January, I am the age I am the entire year minus 19 days.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #620 - Photo Series One #18 - Cubs trip 1972
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #504 - Me and Lori Jan-Feb 1972 - Photo Series One #4
And so, I evolved this comic book themed post with Ms. Magazine extra videos about Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and Marvel to go with the Steve Ditko one, and then two cool articles, one on the importance of this Ms. Magazine cover and the other on Wonder Woman's origin. I found both articles via a site that is new to me called BUNK HISTORY, which is an aggregator that pulls historically interesting links from other sites and hosts them on its sites, kind of like an RSS reader.
Bunk was designed and built by Journey Group.
There's also some other tidbits, like an article about the Man-Thing from a comic book blog that is new to me.
I collected all the 1972 issues of Wonder Woman, which seemed appropriate.
I also added a couple of advertisements from 1972 that appeared in comics in the "cover gallery."
I end with some select 1972 issues of my favorite comic: THE FANTASTIC FOUR.
Enjoy comic book Sunday.
Thanks for reading.
Leave me a comment.
How a Magazine Cover From the '70s Helped Wonder Woman Win Over Feminists
Nearly 45 years after they put the female superhero on the cover of Ms. magazine's first issue, the players behind the cover consider its impact.
One hardly had even enough time to shout "Suffering Sappho!" before feminist critiques of the new Wonder Woman film emerged online following the film's release in early June. As superheroes go, Wonder Woman had some serious feminist credentials: She's the brainchild of William Moulton Marston, a psychologist who created her in the early 1940s in order to counter what he called "the bloodcurdling masculinity" of comics, and was inspired by the suffragette movement. But the film's fight scenes have been more polarizing, prompting some female audiences to shed both real and figurative tears of joy, and others to decry that the new Wonder Woman (played by Gal Gadot) is a token woman in a men's film, too scantily clad to be a figure of female empowerment. "By the time the action got too fast-paced and loud for any more characters to marvel at Diana’s fine bod and bone structure, I was about an hour past being sick of the 'sexy lady is also hypercompetent' joke," wrote Slate's Christina Cauterucci.
None of this hand-wringing is new: Wonder Woman and her looks have been the subject of feminist debate for nearly as long as she's been published. Moreover, Wonder Woman is the first film starring a female superhero to emerge since 2005's ill-fated Elektra: It's only natural that viewers starved of representation onscreen should scrutinize that representation.
But the particular attention that feminists are paying to the film in 2017 also owes something to the debut of Ms. magazine nearly 45 years ago. In 1972, Ms.'s first cover featured Wonder Woman underneath a banner reading "Wonder Woman for President." It helped secure the hero's place as an icon for liberal second-wave feminism. Even today, the cover is still hailed as a seminal moment: Those curious about Wonder Woman before the new movie was released on June 2nd might have bumped into a mention of the Ms. cover on one of the several feminist histories of the character on the Internet. Once the film was released, some of those joining in on the debate about whether Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman is feminist cited the cover—as evidence both that feminists should embrace the movie, and that Wonder Woman bears an impossible burden as a symbol for an entire movement. Though Marston planted the seeds for feminist debate in his first wave-inspired storylines, Ms. gave Wonder Woman the veneer of institutional approval 30 years later.
The Ms. cover made a powerful statement, one that shaped how feminists talked about her for years to come. Wonder Woman had, in the '40s, drawn female readers with storylines that demonstrated how women's compassion makes them a greater agent for social justice. They were thus "superior" to men, in Marston's words.
IN A SEA OF WOMEN'S MAGAZINES FEATURING MODELS, ACTRESSES, AND DELICATE HORS D'OEUVRES, THE MS. COVER SUGGESTED FEMALE READERS HAD MORE ON THEIR MINDS THAN BEAUTY HACKS AND DINNER.
But the Ms. cover "cemented her place as a feminist icon, albeit in a slightly new form," comics historian and Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World's Most Famous Heroine author Tim Hanley writes in an email. "Ms. updated Wonder Woman, shifting the focus away from female superiority to sisterhood and equality, essentially making her a mascot of the women's movement." That's an ethos that still lives on: Viewers of the Wonder Woman film are divided between lauding the titular character's stand for equality for all people, or criticizing the movie for not doing enough with themes of sisterhood.
And so, after the release of the new film, we asked two women responsible for the cover about the story behind it—and what they thought of the new movie.
Pat Carbine was an editorial director at McCall's when she began talking to the prominent writer and activist Gloria Steinem about starting the publication that would become Ms. Steinem wanted to directly address issues modern women cared about, rather than the domestic topics often covered in the so-called "Seven Sisters" magazines—publications like Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, and, yes, McCall's. She also cared deeply about keeping publication ownership and editorial control in women's hands.
In one of two brainstorming meetings that Steinem helped organize to discuss the idea, Steinem suggested that the venture resemble one of the several radical newsletters of the time. Carbine was one of several journalists and editors present who protested. "In order to be taken seriously and really effect change, it was going to have to look and feel like a woman's magazine," Carbine says she told Steinem.
In order to secure financing, the volunteer Ms. staff published a preview issue; it sold out in eight days. In January of 1972, as the issue was selling out, Carbine resigned from McCall's and came on board as publisher. She soon tasked the staff with brainstorming the first magazine's cover. "One of the things one had to think about as crucial—really crucial—was a stunning statement that was going to make a difference in terms of how it appeared on newsstands in combination with other magazines," Carbine says.
The Ms. staff wanted to compete on the newsstands with women's magazines, but also convey that it was closer in spirit and content to news and analysis magazines like Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report than it was to Vogue. The staff also didn't want to feature an individual woman on the cover, which it figured would place too much pressure on an individual to symbolize the entire feminist movement. For its preview issue one year earlier, for instance, Ms. had used an illustration of a many-handed woman juggling objects representing disparate tasks and pressures in a woman's life—a clock, a skillet, a typewriter, a rake, a mirror, among other items—that resembled an Indian god, rather than a real-life figure.
"We wanted something that was more representative," says Joanne Edgar, a writer and editor who joined Ms. magazine while it was producing the preview issue.
/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/5c/52/5c52beda-b4ef-4756-9e6f-77e0c7b8518f/oct14_g12_wonderwoman-1.jpg)
The Surprising Origin Story of Wonder Woman
The history of the comic-book superhero's creation seven decades ago has been hidden away — until now.
"Noted Psychologist Revealed as Author of Best-Selling ‘Wonder Woman,’” read the astonishing headline. In the summer of 1942, a press release from the New York offices of All-American Comics turned up at newspapers, magazines and radio stations all over the United States. The identity of Wonder Woman’s creator had been “at first kept secret,” it said, but the time had come to make a shocking announcement: “the author of ‘Wonder Woman’ is Dr. William Moulton Marston, internationally famous psychologist.” The truth about Wonder Woman had come out at last.
Or so, at least, it was made to appear. But, really, the name of Wonder Woman’s creator was the least of her secrets.
Wonder Woman is the most popular female comic-book superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, no other comic-book character has lasted as long. Generations of girls have carried their sandwiches to school in Wonder Woman lunchboxes. Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike every other superhero, she also has a secret history.
In one episode, a newspaper editor named Brown, desperate to discover Wonder Woman’s past, assigns a team of reporters to chase her down; she easily escapes them. Brown, gone half mad, is committed to a hospital. Wonder Woman disguises herself as a nurse and brings him a scroll. “This parchment seems to be the history of that girl you call ‘Wonder Woman’!” she tells him. “A strange, veiled woman left it with me.” Brown leaps out of bed and races back to the city desk, where he cries out, parchment in hand, “Stop the presses! I’ve got the history of Wonder Woman!” But Wonder Woman’s secret history isn’t written on parchment. Instead, it lies buried in boxes and cabinets and drawers, in thousands of documents, housed in libraries, archives and collections spread all over the United States, including the private papers of creator Marston—papers that, before I saw them, had never before been seen by anyone outside of Marston’s family.
The veil that has shrouded Wonder Woman’s past for seven decades hides beneath it a crucial story about comic books and superheroes and censorship and feminism. As Marston once put it, “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world.”
To defend himself against critics, Gaines, in 1940, hired Marston as a consultant. “‘Doc’ Marston has long been an advocate of the right type of comic magazines,” he explained. Marston held three degrees from Harvard, including a PhD in psychology. He led what he called “an experimental life.” He’d been a lawyer, a scientist and a professor. He is generally credited with inventing the lie detector test: He was obsessed with uncovering other people’s secrets. He’d been a consulting psychologist for Universal Pictures. He’d written screenplays, a novel and dozens of magazine articles. Gaines had read about Marston in an article in Family Circle magazine. In the summer of 1940, Olive Richard, a staff writer for the magazine, visited Marston at his house in Rye, New York, to ask him for his expert opinion about comics.
“Some of them are full of torture, kidnapping, sadism, and other cruel business,” she said.
“Unfortunately, that is true,” Marston admitted, but “when a lovely heroine is bound to the stake, comics followers are sure that the rescue will arrive in the nick of time. The reader’s wish is to save the girl, not to see her suffer.”
Marston tried to showcase Wonder Woman's athleticism whenever possible. In this 1942 comic, she plays baseball; in other episodes, she plays ice hockey and tennis and even founds a chain of fitness clubs.
Marston, who ws generally considered the inventor of the polygraph test, administers it to the secretary of his law firm in 1921 - Smithsonian Libraries
Marston was a man of a thousand lives and a thousand lies. “Olive Richard” was the pen name of Olive Byrne, and she hadn’t gone to visit Marston—she lived with him. She was also the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most important feminists of the 20th century. In 1916, Sanger and her sister, Ethel Byrne, Olive Byrne’s mother, had opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States. They were both arrested for the illegal distribution of contraception. In jail in 1917, Ethel Byrne went on a hunger strike and nearly died.
Olive Byrne met Marston in 1925, when she was a senior at Tufts; he was her psychology professor. Marston was already married, to a lawyer named Elizabeth Holloway. When Marston and Byrne fell in love, he gave Holloway a choice: either Byrne could live with them, or he would leave her. Byrne moved in. Between 1928 and 1933, each woman bore two children; they lived together as a family. Holloway went to work; Byrne stayed home and raised the children. They told census-takers and anyone else who asked that Byrne was Marston’s widowed sister-in-law. “Tolerant people are the happiest,” Marston wrote in a magazine essay in 1939, so “why not get rid of costly prejudices that hold you back?” He listed the “Six Most Common Types of Prejudice.” Eliminating prejudice number six—“Prejudice against unconventional people and non-conformists”—meant the most to him. Byrne’s sons didn’t find out that Marston was their father until 1963—when Holloway finally admitted it—and only after she extracted a promise that no one would raise the subject ever again.
Gaines didn’t know any of this when he met Marston in 1940 or else he would never have hired him: He was looking to avoid controversy, not to court it. Marston and Wonder Woman were pivotal to the creation of what became DC Comics. (DC was short for Detective Comics, the comic book in which Batman debuted.) In 1940, Gaines decided to counter his critics by forming an editorial advisory board and appointing Marston to serve on it, and DC decided to stamp comic books in which Superman and Batman appeared with a logo, an assurance of quality, reading, “A DC Publication.” And, since “the comics’ worst offense was their blood-curdling masculinity,” Marston said, the best way to fend off critics would be to create a female superhero.
“Well, Doc,” Gaines said, “I picked Superman after every syndicate in America turned it down. I’ll take a chance on your Wonder Woman! But you’ll have to write the strip yourself.”
In February 1941, Marston submitted a draft of his first script, explaining the “under-meaning” of Wonder Woman’s Amazonian origins in ancient Greece, where men had kept women in chains, until they broke free and escaped. “The NEW WOMEN thus freed and strengthened by supporting themselves (on Paradise Island) developed enormous physical and mental power.” His comic, he said, was meant to chronicle “a great movement now under way—the growth in the power of women.”
Wonder Woman made her debut in All-Star Comics at the end of 1941 and on the cover of a new comic book, Sensation Comics, at the beginning of 1942, drawn by an artist named Harry G. Peter. She wore a golden tiara, a red bustier, blue underpants and knee-high, red leather boots. She was a little slinky; she was very kinky. She’d left Paradise to fight fascism with feminism, in “America, the last citadel of democracy, and of equal rights for women!”
It seemed to Gaines like so much good, clean, superpatriotic fun. But in March 1942, the National Organization for Decent Literature put Sensation Comics on its blacklist of “Publications Disapproved for Youth” for one reason: “Wonder Woman is not sufficiently dressed.”
Gaines decided he needed another expert. He turned to Lauretta Bender, an associate professor of psychiatry at New York University’s medical school and a senior psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital, where she was director of the children’s ward, an expert on aggression. She’d long been interested in comics but her interest had grown in 1940, after her husband, Paul Schilder, was killed by a car while walking home from visiting Bender and their 8-day-old daughter in the hospital. Bender, left with three children under the age of 3, soon became painfully interested in studying how children cope with trauma. In 1940, she conducted a study with Reginald Lourie, a medical resident under her supervision, investigating the effect of comics on four children brought to Bellevue Hospital for behavioral problems. Tessie, 12, had witnessed her father, a convicted murderer, kill himself. She insisted on calling herself Shiera, after a comic-book girl who is always rescued at the last minute by the Flash. Kenneth, 11, had been raped. He was frantic unless medicated or “wearing a Superman cape.” He felt safe in it—he could fly away if he wanted to—and “he felt that the cape protected him from an assault.” Bender and Lourie concluded the comic books were “the folklore of this age,” and worked, culturally, the same way fables and fairy tales did.
That hardly ended the controversy. In February 1943, Josette Frank, an expert on children’s literature, a leader of the Child Study Association and a member of Gaines’ advisory board, sent Gaines a letter, telling him that while she’d never been a fan of Wonder Woman, she felt she now had to speak out about its “sadistic bits showing women chained, tortured, etc.” She had a point. In episode after episode, Wonder Woman is chained, bound, gagged, lassoed, tied, fettered and manacled. “Great girdle of Aphrodite!” she cries at one point. “Am I tired of being tied up!”
The story behind the writing and editing of Wonder Woman can be pieced together from Bender’s papers, at Brooklyn College; Frank’s papers, at the University of Minnesota; and Marston’s editorial correspondence, along with a set of original scripts, housed at the Dibner Library at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. In his original scripts, Marston described scenes of bondage in careful, intimate detail with utmost precision. For a story about Mars, the God of War, Marston gave Peter elaborate instructions for the panel in which Wonder Woman is taken prisoner:
“Closeup, full length figure of WW. Do some careful chaining here—Mars’s men are experts! Put a metal collar on WW with a chain running off from the panel, as though she were chained in the line of prisoners. Have her hands clasped together at her breast with double bands on her wrists, her Amazon bracelets and another set. Between these runs a short chain, about the length of a handcuff chain—this is what compels her to clasp her hands together. Then put another, heavier, larger chain between her wrist bands which hangs in a long loop to just above her knees. At her ankles show a pair of arms and hands, coming from out of the panel, clasping about her ankles. This whole panel will lose its point and spoil the story unless these chains are drawn exactly as described here.”
Later in the story, Wonder Woman is locked in a cell. Straining to overhear a conversation in the next room, through the amplification of “bone conduction,” she takes her chain in her teeth: “Closeup of WW’s head shoulders. She holds her neck chain between her teeth. The chain runs taut between her teeth and the wall, where it is locked to a steel ring bolt.”
Gaines forwarded Frank’s letter of complaint to Marston. Marston shrugged it off. But then Dorothy Roubicek, who helped edit Wonder Woman—the first woman editor at DC Comics—objected to Wonder Woman’s torture, too.
“Of course I wouldn’t expect Miss Roubicek to understand all this,” Marston wrote Gaines. “After all I have devoted my entire life to working out psychological principles. Miss R. has been in comics only 6 months or so, hasn’t she? And never in psychology.” But “the secret of woman’s allure,” he told Gaines, is that “women enjoy submission—being bound.”
Gaines was troubled. Roubicek, who worked on Superman, too, had invented kryptonite. She believed superheroes ought to have vulnerabilities. She told Gaines she thought Wonder Woman ought to be more like Superman and, just as Superman couldn’t go back to the planet Krypton, Wonder Woman ought not to be able to go back to Paradise Island, where the kinkiest stuff tended to happen. Gaines then sent Roubicek to Bellevue Hospital to interview Bender. In a memo to Gaines, Roubicek reported that Bender “does not believe that Wonder Woman tends to masochism or sadism.” She also liked the way Marston was playing with feminism, Roubicek reported: “She believes that Dr. Marston is handling very cleverly this whole ‘experiment’ as she calls it. She feels that perhaps he is bringing to the public the real issue at stake in the world (and one which she feels may possibly be a direct cause of the present conflict) and that is that the difference between the sexes is not a sex problem, nor a struggle for superiority, but rather a problem of the relation of one sex to the other.” Roubicek summed up: “Dr. Bender believes that this strip should be left alone.”
Gaines was hugely relieved, at least until September 1943, when a letter arrived from John D. Jacobs, a U.S. Army staff sergeant in the 291st Infantry, stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. “I am one of those odd, perhaps unfortunate men who derive an extreme erotic pleasure from the mere thought of a beautiful girl, chained or bound, or masked, or wearing extreme high-heels or high-laced boots,—in fact, any sort of constriction or strain whatsoever,” Jacobs wrote. He wanted to know whether the author of Wonder Woman himself had in his possession any of the items depicted in the stories, “the leather mask, or the wide iron collar from Tibet, or the Greek ankle manacle? Or do you just ‘dream up’ these things?”
(For the record, Marston and Olive Byrne’s son, Byrne Marston, who is an 83-year-old retired obstetrician, thinks that when Marston talked about the importance of submission, he meant it only metaphorically. “I never saw anything like that in our house,” he told me. “He didn’t tie the ladies up to the bedpost. He’d never have gotten away with it.”)
Gaines forwarded Jacobs’ letter to Marston, with a note: “This is one of the things I’ve been afraid of.” Something had to be done. He therefore enclosed, for Marston’s use, a memo written by Roubicek containing a “list of methods which can be used to keep women confined or enclosed without the use of chains. Each one of these can be varied in many ways—enabling us, as I told you in our conference last week, to cut down the use of chains by at least 50 to 75% without at all interfering with the excitement of the story or the sales of the books.”
Marston wrote Gaines right back.
“I have the good Sergeant’s letter in which he expresses his enthusiasm over chains for women—so what?” As a practicing clinical psychologist, he said, he was unimpressed. “Some day I’ll make you a list of all the items about women that different people have been known to get passionate over—women’s hair, boots, belts, silk worn by women, gloves, stockings, garters, panties, bare backs,” he promised. “You can’t have a real woman character in any form of fiction without touching off a great many readers’ erotic fancies. Which is swell, I say.”
Marston was sure he knew what line not to cross. Harmless erotic fantasies are terrific, he said. “It’s the lousy ones you have to look out for—the harmful, destructive, morbid erotic fixations—real sadism, killing, blood-letting, torturing where the pleasure is in the victim’s actual pain, etc. Those are 100 per cent bad and I won’t have any part of them.” He added, in closing, “Please thank Miss Roubicek for the list of menaces.”
In 1944, Gaines and Marston signed an agreement for Wonder Woman to become a newspaper strip, syndicated by King Features. Busy with the newspaper strip, Marston hired an 18-year-old student, Joye Hummel, to help him write comic-book scripts. Joye Hummel, now Joye Kelly, turned 90 this April; in June, she donated her collection of never-before-seen scripts and comic books to the Smithsonian Libraries. Hiring her helped with Marston’s editorial problem, too. Her stories were more innocent than his. She’d type them and bring them to Sheldon Mayer, Marston’s editor at DC, she told me, and “He always OK’d mine faster because I didn’t make mine as sexy.” To celebrate syndication, Gaines had his artists draw a panel in which Superman and Batman, rising out of the front page of a daily newspaper, call out to Wonder Woman, who’s leaping onto the page, “Welcome, Wonder Woman!”
Gaines had another kind of welcome to make, too. He asked Lauretta Bender to take Frank’s place on the editorial advisory board.
In an ad King Features ran to persuade newspapers to purchase the strip, pointing out that Wonder Woman already had “ten million loyal fans,” her name is written in rope.
Hidden behind this controversy is one reason for all those chains and ropes, which has to do with the history of the fight for women’s rights. Because Marston kept his true relationship with Olive Byrne a secret, he kept his family’s ties to Margaret Sanger a secret, too. Marston, Byrne and Holloway, and even Harry G. Peter, the artist who drew Wonder Woman, had all been powerfully influenced by the suffrage, feminism and birth control movements. And each of those movements had used chains as a centerpiece of its iconography.
In 1911, when Marston was a freshman at Harvard, the British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, who’d chained herself to the gates outside 10 Downing Street, came to speak on campus. When Sanger faced charges of obscenity for explaining birth control in a magazine she founded called the Woman Rebel, a petition sent to President Woodrow Wilson on her behalf read, “While men stand proudly and face the sun, boasting that they have quenched the wickedness of slavery, what chains of slavery are, have been or ever could be so intimate a horror as the shackles on every limb—on every thought—on the very soul of an unwilling pregnant woman?” American suffragists threatened to chain themselves to the gates outside the White House. In 1916, in Chicago, women representing the states where women had still not gained the right to vote marched in chains.
In the 1910s, Peter was a staff artist at the magazine Judge, where he contributed to its suffrage page called “The Modern Woman,” which ran from 1912 to 1917. More regularly, the art on that page was drawn by another staff artist, a woman named Lou Rogers. Rogers’ suffrage and feminist cartoons very often featured an allegorical woman chained or roped, breaking her bonds. Sanger hired Rogers as art director for the Birth Control Review, a magazine she started in 1917. In 1920, in a book called Woman and the New Race, Sanger argued that woman “had chained herself to her place in society and the family through the maternal functions of her nature, and only chains thus strong could have bound her to her lot as a brood animal.” In 1923, an illustration commissioned by Rogers for the cover of Birth Control Review pictured a weakened and desperate woman, fallen to her knees and chained at the ankle to a ball that reads, “UNWANTED BABIES.” A chained woman inspired the title of Sanger’s 1928 book, Motherhood in Bondage, a compilation of some of the thousands of letters she had received from women begging her for information about birth control; she described the letters as “the confessions of enslaved mothers.”
When Marston created Wonder Woman, in 1941, he drew on Sanger’s legacy and inspiration. But he was also determined to keep the influence of Sanger on Wonder Woman a secret.
When Marston created Wonder Woman, in 1941, he drew on Sanger’s legacy and inspiration. But he was also determined to keep the influence of Sanger on Wonder Woman a secret.
He took that secret to his grave when he died in 1947. Most superheroes didn’t survive peacetime and those that did were changed forever in 1954, when a psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham published a book called Seduction of the Innocent and testified before a Senate subcommittee investigating the comics. Wertham believed that comics were corrupting American kids, and turning them into juvenile delinquents. He especially disliked Wonder Woman. Bender had written that Wonder Woman comics display “a strikingly advanced concept of femininity and masculinity” and that “women in these stories are placed on an equal footing with men and indulge in the same type of activities.” Wertham found the feminism in Wonder Woman repulsive.
“As to the ‘advanced femininity,’ what are the activities in comic books which women ‘indulge in on an equal footing with men’? They do not work. They are not homemakers. They do not bring up a family. Mother-love is entirely absent. Even when Wonder Woman adopts a girl there are Lesbian overtones,” he said. At the Senate hearings, Bender testified, too. If anything in American popular culture was bad for girls, she said, it wasn’t Wonder Woman; it was Walt Disney. “The mothers are always killed or sent to the insane asylums in Walt Disney movies,” she said. This argument fell on deaf ears.
Wertham’s papers, housed at the Library of Congress, were only opened to researchers in 2010. They suggest that Wertham’s antipathy toward Bender had less to do with the content of the comics than with professional rivalry. (Paul Schilder, Bender’s late husband, had been Wertham’s boss for many years.) Wertham’s papers contain a scrap on which he compiled a list he titled “Paid Experts of the Comic Book Industry Posing as Independent Scholars.” First on the list as the comic book industry’s number one lackey was Bender, about whom Wertham wrote: “Boasted privately of bringing up her 3 children on money from crime comic books.”
In the wake of the 1954 hearings, DC Comics removed Bender from its editorial advisory board, and the Comics Magazine Association of America adopted a new code. Under its terms, comic books could contain nothing cruel: “All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted.” There could be nothing kinky: “Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Violent love scenes as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable.” And there could be nothing unconventional: “The treatment of love-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.”
“Anniversary, which we forgot entirely,” Olive Byrne wrote in her secret diary in 1936. (The diary remains in family hands.) During the years when she lived with Marston and Holloway, she wore, instead of a wedding ring, a pair of bracelets. Wonder Woman wears those same cuffs. Byrne died in 1990, at the age of 86. She and Holloway had been living together in an apartment in Tampa. While Byrne was in the hospital, dying, Holloway fell and broke her hip; she was admitted to the same hospital. They were in separate rooms. They’d lived together for 64 years. When Holloway, in her hospital bed, was told that Byrne had died, she sang a poem by Tennyson: “Sunset and the evening star, / And one clear call for me! / And may there be no moaning of the bar, / When I put out to sea.” No newspaper ran an obituary.
Elizabeth Holloway Marston died in 1993. An obituary ran in the New York Times. It was headed, “Elizabeth H. Marston, Inspiration for Wonder Woman, 100.” This was, at best, a half-truth.
WONDER WOMAN IN 1972
Apparently, the Wonder Woman was published bi-monthly in 1972.
Coincidentally, connecting to last week's post memorializing Dennis O'Neil, he was the writer and editor of these issues.
Here's the covers of the issues from 1972, ending at the link below in the Comic Vine archive.
https://www.cbr.com/jack-kirby-100-birthday-10-important-innovations/
Jack Kirby at 100: His 10 Most Important Innovations
To mark the 100th anniversary of Jack Kirby's birth, CBR examines 10 of the most important innovations he brought to the comic book art form.
https://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/dynamics/2010/04/04/kirby-self-portraits/
Kirby Self-Portraits
Posted in Uncategorized.
This Kirby self-portrait is from Forever People # 4 (1971). Vince Colletta inks.
NIGHT NURSE - COMICS
Night Nurse is a Marvel Comics comic book series published in the early 1970s, as well as the alter ego later taken on by one of its characters, Linda Carter. Carter was one of three central characters who first appeared in Night Nurse #1 (cover-dated November 1972), though she was previously the lead of another Marvel series, Linda Carter, Student Nurse, published in 1961. Carter later adopted the name "Night Nurse" for herself, and in this incarnation, first appeared in Daredevil #58 (May 2004), as a medical professional specializing in helping injured superheroes.
Rachel McAdams portrayed Christine Palmer in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Doctor Strange (2016). This version is a surgeon who is an old friend of Doctor Strange.
Another cool blog about comics.
THE PATRON SAINT OF SUPERHEROES
“CHRIS GAVALER EXPLORES THE MULTIVERSE OF COMICS, POP CULTURE, AND POLITICS”
JULY 20, 2015THE MOST OBSCURE, UNINTERESTING COMIC BOOK CHARACTER
“What if an American comic book company were to ring me up (not that it was going to happen) and they offered me my first U.S. assignment, only it was the most obscure, uninteresting character I could imagine? So let’s, out of the blue, pick the most obscure American comics character I could think of and just see if I could reinterpret him and make him interesting.”
That’s Alan Moore describing himself, just before an American comic book company really did ring him up. It was DC editor Len Wein offering him a shot at SWAMP THING.
Weirdly, the “most obscure American comics character” Moore had practiced on was The Heap—the 1940s character Wein had knocked-off to create Swamp Thing in 1971.
The character type was oddly popular in the early 70s. Roy Thomas had been a Heap fan as a kid, and so when he got a staff writer job at Marvel, he created the Heap-like Glob for THE INCREDIBLE HULK #121 in 1969.
A year and a half later, Skywald comics resurrected the original Heap.
Thomas had told his pal, former Marvel employer and Skywald co-founder Sol Brodsky, it was a good band wagon to jump on since Marvel had its own Heap knock-off, Man-Thing. Stan Lee dreamt up that name, but apparently the Glob was all the regurgitated Heap Thomas could swallow, so he handed the assignment to scripter Gerry Conway. Gray Morrow’s drawings even include a visual homage to the Heap’s vine-like nose in SAVAGE TALES #1 (May 1971).
Thomas tossed the next Man-Thing assignment to Len Wein and Neal Adams who worked up a second episode, but Marvel cancelled SAVAGE TALES after the first issue. Wein also freelanced at DC where he created Swamp Thing with artist Bernie Wrightson for HOUSE OF SECRETS #92 (June–July 1971). It took another year, but the Wein-Adams Man-Thing eventually surfaced in ASTONISHING TALES #12 (June 1972), just a few months before Wein and Wrightson updated their HOUSE OF SECRETS Swamp Thing for DC’s SWAMP THING #1 (October–November 1972).
That’s a murky swamp of overlapping characters and creators to sift through. Worse, Wein and Conway were sharing an apartment at the time, and yet Wein swore Swamp Thing had nothing to do with Man-Thing—even though Man-Thing’s premiere is dated a month before Swamp Thing’s.
Thomas’s timetable doesn’t add up either: Skywald’s Heap premiered in PSYCHO #2 March 1971, three months before Man-Thing in SAVAGE TALES #1. Add in the unknowable differences in production time, and the quagmire keeps deepening.
Neither Marvel nor DC tried to sue the other for copyright infringement, since both their characters were infringing on the Heap that Harry Stein and Mort Leav created for Hillman Periodicals’ AIR FIGHTERS COMICS #3 in 1942. But Stein and Leav don’t get original credit either, since the Heap looks a lot like Theodore Sturgeon’s short story “It,” published two years earlier in Street and Smith’s UNKNOWN.
Wein says he conceived Swamp Thing in December 1970, but
“Why I decided to make the protagonist some sort of swamp monster . . . I can no longer recall. . . . Coincidentally, Joe [Orlando, then-editor of THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY and THE HOUSE OF SECRETS] had been thinking of doing a story along the lines of Theodore Sturgeon’s classic fantasy tale ‘It’ . . . a story I had actually never read.”
And the swamp goes full circle when Roy Thomas scripted Marvel’s “It” adaptation for SUPERNATURAL THRILLERS #1 (December 1972).
Sturgeon was invited to the 1975 San Diego Comic Convention so Ray Bradbury could hand him a Golden Ink Pot award. “I learned,” wrote Sturgeon, “for the very first time that my story ‘It’ is seminal; that it is the great granddaddy of THE SWAMP THING, THE HULK, THE MAN THING, and I don’t know how many celebrated graphics.”
The comic book swamp, however, was already draining, since MAN-THING was cancelled in 1975, and SWAMP THING the year after. It’s hard to explain the initial rise, though it probably has something to do with the 1971 change in the Comics Code:
“Vampires, ghouls and werewolves shall be permitted to be used when handled in the classic tradition such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and other high calibre literary works written by Edgar Allen Poe, Saki, Conan Doyle and other respected authors whose works are read in schools around the world.”
The Heap, after all, is a reanimated corpse. Though the cause of that reanimation is as murky as Swamp Thing’s creative origins. Is “the unearthly transformation” because World War I German pilot Baron Emmelmann’s “will to live” is such a “powerful force” that it merges his body with the slime and vegetation of the Polish swamp where his plane crashed, causing him to rise two decades later as “a fantastic heap that is neither man nor animal”? If so, why does the Heap “die” two issues later, only to be reanimated by a nefarious zoologist’s “serum”? And what does that mysterious serum have to do with “Ceres, Goddess of Soil,” who in 1947 is retconned (by an uncredited writer) into the origin, raising the dead pilot as an agent of peace in defiance of the god Ares?
Alan Moore did an even deeper retcon to Swamp Thing. Instead of a man transformed into a plant, the 1984 Swamp Thing is a plant transformed into a man.
The 2005 MAN-THING movie (it apparently was intended to be theatrical release before demoted to the Syfy channel) goes for supernatural agency, though the Lee-Thomas-Conway-Morrow original was pure scifi: the inventor of a super-soldier serum injects himself and crashes his car into a swamp to keep the serum from the bad guys. The “formula”—updating Captain America’s premise for the Vietnam-era—is apparently napalm-based (a newspaper headline reads “NAPALM BOMB” as the inventor laments: “It’s bad enough the chemical will be used for more killing”), and so Man-Thing’s touch burns. Or it did until the second episode, when Wein decided it only burns those who feel fear because . . . that’s how napalm works? Steve Gerber ran with that non-scifi premise, mixing more supernatural agency into his revised swamp, which, it turns out, is really a doorway to multiple dimensions.
Although Man-Thing hasn’t been lying completely dormant for the last few decades, I’d say he’s still a descent contender for the current “most obscure, uninteresting comic book character” category. Or at least a mindless, shuffling heap of muck that reflexively burns people who are afraid isn’t a superhero high on Marvel Entertainment’s film and TV project list. Like Thomas for the Heap though, I have a squishy spot in my heart for him. So let me take on Alan Moore’s thought experiment, and see if I can “reinterpret him and make him interesting.” Or maybe the problem is Man-Thing is already TOO interesting? So my assignment is to cover his range of weirdness while sticking to a single, scifi-only premise.
I’m placing my swamp near New Orleans and staffing it with weapon designers. Instead of napalm and super-soldiers, it’s a burning black plasma that swirls and geysers when in contact with a remote control beacon, incinerating everything else it touches. But to be practical in the field, you’d need a live soldier to operate it. So the new design is a hazmat body suit with direct neural interface. The head gear includes two large red “eyes” and tubes down the nose and sides. Things are going great until the suit-tester starts getting nervous. As his vitals rise, the plasma hits new levels of heat and mobility. It starts burning through the suit, and before they can shut it down, it incinerates him, leaving only a blackened skeleton and gas mask. But since the plasma is encoded with the last neural input, it’s now moving on its own, splashing and lurching around the complex with its puppet of a charred corpse. When it breaks outside, it vanishes into the swamp, where the plasma merges with the muck and bonds around the skeleton. What emerges isn’t sentient. It’s not even alive. It just roams randomly or sits dormant until its eyes glow red with internal heat when it senses human fear—which it then extinguishes with its burning touch.
The original Conway script includes a scantily-clad female spy who betrays the inventor and then later gets her face burnt off by Man-Thing—so let’s please avoid that double dose of misogyny. Maybe the inventor is the woman this time, and the guy testing the suit is the spy who’s seduced her to steal the tech. His vitals spike because she’s about to find him out—so it’s not just fear but his guilt too. To his own surprise, he really does love her, and it’s only his bursting into flame that prevents the discovery of his betrayal, giving his transformation a redemptive edge. Turning into a monster stops him from being a monster. And I’m betting at the end she’s the only one who can face him without fear, an act of forgiveness that also allows the plasma to finally shut down and Man-Thing to collapse into a puddle of mud and bones.
Okay, so maybe not the light PG-13 tone of the current Marvel movie universe, but what do you expect from a mindless, fear-burning swamp beast? I suggest Marvel use the character for a multi-episode subplot during season three of AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D, not unlike how they used Deathlok (another early 70s super-soldier monstrosity) in season one.
Now let’s see if anyone rings me up.
(Meanwhile, instead of sitting by his own phone, Swamp Thing is headed to Reykjavik, Iceland, for the International Popular Culture Association Conference at the end of July. Nathaniel Goldberg, a colleague from the Washington and Lee University Philosophy department, and I are presenting our paper, “Donald Davidson and the Mind of Swamp Thing.”)
COMIC BOOK COVER GALLERY - FROM 1972
https://comicvine.gamespot.com/fantastic-four-129-the-frightful-four-plus-one/4000-12737/
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2007.12 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1836 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
No comments:
Post a Comment