Something for the girls
Something for the girls |
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Page 11 of 17  Cover, Jackie (DC Thomson, 19G5), the quintessential 'swinging sixties' title. The men in these early stories typically came off very badly. They were either misogynists, like the evil villain 'Dr Psycho', or helpless and ineffectual creatures needing to be rescued, such as Wonder Woman's own boyfriend, Steve Trevor. This kind of role reversal was quite deliberate on the part of Marston. 'Not even girls want to be girls,' he wrote in 1943, 'so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength and power." Yet, Marston was a psychologist, and he must have realized that male readers would be attracted to the comic by its Freudian sexual imagery. Most notoriously, scenes of bondage were everywhere, not just those involving the lasso, but also stories including whips, chains and manacles. The editor of the comic, Sheldon Mayer, was suspicious of this, but chose to play along. He commented later, that: 'There was a certain symbolism that Marston engaged in which was very simple and very broad ... I suspect it probably sold more comic books than I realized. After a period of spectacular sales in the early 1940s (mostly, it has to be said, to male readers), Wonder Woman's star began to wane. The political climate changed after the war: servicemen returned from overseas and there was a drive to push women back into the home. Moreover, the death of Marston in 1947 meant that thereafter the stories became more ordinary. Under successive writers, the heroine became just another superhero ('The Amazin' Amazon', as one strapline rather tackily put it), dependent on fists and gadgetry, and more inclined to become romantically distracted. In other words, although Wonder Woman has continued to be popular until the present day, and is one of the very few titles to have been continuously published since the 1940s, she was never really the same.  Page from 'Words of Love', Jackie (DC Thomson, 19G5). Art/script: Anon. This demonstrates a more 'adult' rendering style, plus a storyline about the love-life of an independent (wage-earning) woman. |