- Grand Comics Database Project
- Wonder Woman’s first comic-book appearance.
It’s a terrible injustice that Wonder Woman has not yet gotten her own superhero movie (let alone franchise), but it’s even worse that a movie has not been made about her creator, William Moulton Marston. The material is right there, presented in entertaining form, in Tim Hanley’s new book, Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine.
After Marston died in 1947, and after Frederic Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, his study of how reading comic books led to degeneracy among the nation’s youth, which led to a Senate hearing in 1954, and the establishment of the Comics Code Authority to police the funnybook industry, Wonder Woman became much less radical. “Wonder Woman of History” was replaced by “Marriage A La Mode,” descriptions of various wedding customs around the world. The new writer, Robert Kanigher, gave Wonder Woman a new origin story in which her superpowers were bestowed upon her by two males, Mercury and Hercules, and completely ignored Marston’s underlying philosophy about female superiority. Wonder Woman, Hanley writes, became just a generic superhero. And Marston was forgotten. Which is a pity. Bondage, polyamory, lab coats, comic books, feminism: his story has everything. It’s weird and complicated, but at least it has a good interpreter in Hanley.
