Wonder Woman Unbound (15 page)

The origin stories of these new characters marked a significant change in tone from those of their Golden Age counterparts. Their abilities tended to be rooted in science and technology instead of magic and mysticism. The Guardians of the Universe who ran the Green Lantern intergalactic police force used power rings built with super advanced alien technology to give their members superpowers. Hawkman had the ability to fly because of Thanagarian technology and the antigravity Nth metal. The Atom could shrink down as small as the tiniest particle because he built a belt powered by a white dwarf star.

When Marvel Comics debuted its own superheroes in the early 1960s, it took this scientific focus even further and used fantastical versions of real-life science to explain its heroes’ powers. For example, the Fantastic Four gained superpowers after being exposed to cosmic rays while in space, Peter Parker became Spider-Man after being bitten by a radioactive spider, and gamma rays turned mild-mannered Bruce Banner into the raging Hulk. In this age of atomic science and the beginnings of space exploration, it was no wonder that the creators of Silver Age heroes looked to the stars and modern science for their origins.

More significantly, the origin stories of Silver Age superheroes often lacked the tragic genesis that was so common in the Golden Age. These new heroes were well-adjusted men who saw crime fighting as an adventure, not a sacred duty or quest for vengeance. The orphan motif disappeared, and most of the new heroes had a very stable home life, including a girlfriend or a wife. The Flash, Green Lantern, and the Atom all had girlfriends, while Hawkman arrived on Earth with his wife, Shayera, and Aquaman quickly found an undersea queen, Mera.

The tragic elements of their origin stories were minor at best. Hal Jordan inherited his ring from Abin Sur, who died when his spaceship crashed onto Earth, and the Martian Manhunter was separated from his family back on Mars, but these examples pale in comparison to being the last of an extinct race or witnessing the murder of your parents.
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The superheroes of the Silver Age were an upbeat, happy-go-lucky group, and the positivity of their origins seemed to reverberate throughout the entire DC Comics universe.

Before the Silver Age, Superman and Batman had some dark elements in their lives in terms of the tragedies at the root of their motivation. Both of them had lost their family in a deeply unpleasant way, and while they had pals like Jimmy Olsen and Robin, one buddy hardly made up for their loss. The Silver Age, however, brought with it a new lease on life for the Man of Steel and the Caped Crusader.

Under editor Mort Weisinger, Superman’s supporting cast started to resemble a family. Superman was the father, Lois Lane the mother, Jimmy and Supergirl were the children, and
Daily Planet
editor Perry White was like a curmudgeonly grandfather. Along with this faux family, the addition of Supergirl in 1959 gave Superman a real, Kryptonian family member in his cousin, Kara Zor-El. Furthermore, in 1958 Superman rescued Krypton’s capital city of Kandor, which had been miniaturized and bottled by the villain Brainiac before Krypton was destroyed. Superman couldn’t restore Kandor, but he kept it in his Fortress of Solitude and developed technology so he could shrink down and visit his fellow Kryptonians. His parents, real and adopted, were still dead, but he had a new family-like group of friends, his cousin, and the residents of his home world’s capital city for company.

Similarly, Batman’s supporting cast also grew; inspired by Batman’s war on crime, Kathy Kane became Batwoman, and her niece Betty Kane joined her as Bat-Girl. These women provided love interests for the Dynamic Duo while also creating a Superman-style faux family. In fact, in 1961
Batman Annual
#2 featured a pinup picture of the entire Bat-family. Batman and Batwoman were the parents; Robin and Bat-Girl were the two children; Batman’s butler, Alfred, and Gotham City’s police commissioner, James Gordon, appeared as grandfathers or kindly uncles; on the floor lay their pet, Ace the Bat-Hound; and perched on Batman’s shoulder was Bat-Mite, an imp from another dimension, who looked like a young toddler.
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The pinup read “Greetings from the Batman Family,” and the Caped Crusader, that dark denizen of the night, beamed broadly. The world was a happier place for heroes in the Silver Age, and that had a lot to do with the Comics Code Authority.

The Silver Age Batman faced all manner of unusual scenarios, including being turned into an alien, sent back to ancient Babylon, and battling gods, dragons, and interdimensional imps. The Silver Age was, frankly, rather silly. Under the strict guidelines of the CCA, regular crime stories and dangerous villains were strongly discouraged. The result was campy adventures with innocuous story lines and fantastical creatures, more juvenile science fiction than crime fighting. Aliens and bizarre creatures were nothing new for superhero comic books, but they became much more common after 1954.

Robert Kanigher Revises Wonder Woman

Kanigher’s Wonder Woman followed these dominant trends in terms of campy adventures and a familial focus, but he went the opposite direction with her origin. The Golden Age Wonder Woman had powers rooted in her utopian upbringing, unlike the tragedies of her peers. While Silver Age superheroes moved on to upbeat origins rooted in the hopefulness of science and space travel, Kanigher’s origin for the Silver Age Wonder Woman went backward into a tragic genesis. He removed the utopian aspects of her creation and changed the nature of her powers and mission.

The cover of
Wonder Woman
#105 declared that Wonder Woman would face “The
Amazon’s
Most Startling Opponent—
The EAGLE of SPACE!
” and the book certainly did deliver that riveting tale, but a small banner at the top promised the never-before-revealed secret origin of Wonder Woman. The story began centuries in the past, when baby Diana was visited by four impressive guests. The first was Aphrodite, who bequeathed to her the gift of beauty; second came Athena, who gave her wisdom; third was Mercury, who gave Diana speed; and finally came Hercules, who bestowed her with strength.

The story then jumped ahead several years to when Diana was a teenager, and horrible news reached Queen Hippolyta’s throne room.
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The Amazons had husbands, brothers, and sons who had all gone off to war, and they’d been wiped out by their enemies. The news prompted one distraught Amazon to cry, “Woe is us … we are alone … now—!” A tearful Hippolyta told Diana, “You must be … brave … Diana … as befitting … a … princess—!” The crying young princess responded, “Y-y-yes … mother … !” Everyone in the throne room wept and wailed in a very un-Amazon fashion.

Overcome with grief, Hippolyta decided to leave their home to escape the wars. The superpowered Diana built a boat by herself, and on their journey to a new home she saved her fellow Amazons from a whirlpool, a sea of fire, and a sea of dangerous gas fumes. Finally they reached Paradise Island, where Athena was waiting and granted them immortal life so long as they remained on the island. Diana singlehandedly built the Amazons a city to live in and became their guardian, battling any beast that came near their new home.

When the Silver Age Diana became Wonder Woman, it had nothing to do with World War II or America as a citadel of freedom and democracy. Instead, Athena appeared to Hippolyta in a dream one day and instructed her to choose an Amazon who would go to “man’s world to battle crime and injustice—and help people in distress!” Hippolyta held a competition to choose a champion and, to prevent favoritism, all of the Amazons dressed like Diana and wore Diana masks so Hippolyta couldn’t tell them apart. Kanigher’s tasks were less dangerous than Marston’s original tournament and included a tug of war, log rolling, and a wrestling match on a high wire. Of course, Diana won and was given a final task of going to man’s world and turning a penny into a million dollars.
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In a remarkable coincidence, just as Diana was about to leave, an airplane exploded overhead and Steve Trevor came plummeting toward Paradise Island. Wonder Woman caught him in midair and flew him back to America while he hailed her as an angel. Once in America, she learned that the city was looking to pay a million dollars for a new bridge. Using her Amazon strength and violating the laws of physics, she stretched the single, three-gram penny out into a long cord and wove an entire suspension bridge. Along the way she also disarmed a nuclear bomb, destroyed an enemy submarine, and saved a children’s camp.

Wonder Woman’s new origin story made some notable additions to the Wonder Woman mythos, including the ability to fly. While she could always jump extremely high with her superstrength, she needed her invisible jet for any sustained flight. However, when she saved Steve Trevor from falling to his doom, Wonder Woman realized that she could manipulate updrafts in order to propel herself toward Steve, and gained the power of flight.

Wonder Woman
#105 made further changes to the character, marking the beginning of Wonder Woman’s teenage adventures as Wonder Girl. The younger Amazon princess wore a modified Wonder Woman costume and had the same abilities as her adult self.
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The adventures of a teenaged Clark Kent as Superboy were very popular in Superman comics at the time, so it seems that Kanigher borrowed the idea to expand on the types of stories he could tell with Wonder Woman. Over the next decade, Wonder Girl appeared in the series almost as often as Wonder Woman.

Kanigher’s origin story also offered a new approach to the mythology of the Amazons. Marston was a mythology buff, and his stories were rooted in the Greek legends of the Amazons, but Kanigher appeared unconcerned with mythological consistency. Adding men to the Amazon homeland was an odd choice, made even more confusing by having them off fighting wars while Queen Hippolyta and the Amazon women stayed at home. There were men in a few Amazon myths, but they were the stay-at-home type, often because their Amazon mothers hobbled them as infants so they could never overthrow their female rule. The defining characteristic of the Amazons throughout history was that they were a race of warrior women, so having men fight for them, not to mention fleeing the wars after the men all died, was an unusual approach.

Looking at Kanigher in light of Marston, these changes drastically altered the message of the book. Marston’s Amazons were an extension of his psychological theories, however problematically, and Kanigher removed or altered all of the key components. For Marston, the Amazons willingly rejected involvement with men and were better because of it. For Kanigher, it appeared that the Amazons would gladly welcome their men back at any time, and only established Paradise Island so that the world wouldn’t bring them any more grief. This eliminated the Amazons’ original feminist message of female superiority, but Kanigher wasn’t done.

In this new origin story, Wonder Woman’s superpowers were gifts from the gods that made her unique among her Amazon sisters. She was given beauty, wisdom, speed, and strength when she was an infant, and as Wonder Girl she demonstrated these abilities at a young age. Her fellow Amazons all marveled at her prowess; Wonder Girl could accomplish in minutes what would have taken days or weeks for everyone else. This Wonder Woman was clearly stronger and more skilled than the rest of the Amazons.

In the Golden Age, Wonder Woman gained her abilities from being raised in the advanced, utopian society of Paradise Island, and her fellow Amazons had the same skills. The original Wonder Woman wasn’t special or different, and she didn’t have any sort of divine giftings; she was simply the most capable warrior in a race of advanced, powerful women. By making Wonder Woman unique and changing the source of her powers, Kanigher further unraveled the messages Marston had instilled in the character. The benefits of female rule went by the wayside when everyone else became normal. It’s also significant that two of Wonder Woman’s benefactors were men. Half of her abilities, and the ones that were actual superpowers, came from males, obliterating Marston’s focus on female superiority.

One of these men was Hercules, the greatest enemy of the Amazons in Greek myth. In Apollodorus’s ancient account of Hercules’s ninth labor, Hercules took Hippolyta’s girdle and then, when the Amazons rose up to stop him, he killed the queen. Other accounts have him imprisoning the queen and killing her later, or letting Theseus take her to be his tamed Amazon bride. Hercules was never a friend of the Amazons, and this continued with Marston. Hercules was the ultimate symbol of male dominance, the archetype for the aggressive, violent male that Marston believed led to the world’s wars and strife. To Kanigher, Hercules was the source of Wonder Woman’s strength, and even the subject of a few screwball romance stories with Hippolyta later in the series. Kanigher’s Wonder Woman fought crime and wore the same outfit as Marston’s Wonder Woman, but the similarities end there.

Now, it looks like Kanigher performed a terrible hatchet job on Wonder Woman and blatantly undid everything that Marston instilled in his creation. We should be appalled at Kanigher’s campaign to reverse the very nature of the character. Regardless of which version we prefer, this degree of disrespect for what came before is hardly becoming. However, such outrage would be based on the notion that Kanigher consciously undid Marston’s underlying messages and intentionally replaced them with his own view of the world. Marston was a creator who wrote with a message and plan, and submission and female superiority was at the core of every single thing he did. He put a great deal of thought and effort into Wonder Woman.