Wonder Woman Unbound (27 page)

The letter column appeared in almost every single issue of
Wonder Woman
once it began, providing an excellent set of data on the series’ audience. By tabulating the names by gender and charting them, the broad strokes of how
Wonder Woman
’s readership changed from 1961 to 1975 can be seen.
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While the numbers by year are somewhat scattered, the trends are clear. Female writers to
Wonder Woman’s
letter column declined fairly steeply over the fifteen years examined, while there was a commensurate growth in male writers.

In terms of reliable information, there’s some subjectivity in letter columns. Editors didn’t painstakingly craft each column to statistically reflect all of the letters they’d received that month. Rather, a slew of factors likely affected which letters were chosen. For example, in the early 1960s DC encouraged kids to form fan clubs for their characters, so letters about fan clubs probably had a better chance of being published. When “Marriage a la Mode” and other female-directed features dominated
Wonder Woman,
they may have chosen letters from female readers to showcase their intended audience. Similarly, when a feminist outcry led to Wonder Woman’s return to her Amazon roots in the 1970s, the editors might’ve been more likely to publish letters from women.

Nonetheless, the trends over these fifteen years are compelling. The marked drop in letters from girls and the corresponding rise in letters from boys suggest a change in readership and indicate a diminishing female audience over this period.

Advertisements

Ads from the Silver and Bronze Ages were charming and fun. Super-heroes told you about their favorite Hostess products,
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you could buy onion gum or a bald cap for pocket change, get buff after a bully kicked sand in your face at the beach, and own a bowlful of happiness and have instant pets with sea monkeys! There weren’t many ads in the Golden Age, but publishers worked hard to maintain the price of comics by lowering page counts for their comics and increasing the number of ads over the course of the 1950s.
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By 1960, ads made up a substantial part of every comic book, and a sense of who advertisers thought were reading
Wonder Woman
can be derived by examining the ads’ intended audience.

Comic book ads weren’t subtle. Many ads proclaimed their intended audience with bolded headlines that read “BOYS!!” or “GIRLS!!” Others showed images of their intended audience using the product, like boys playing with toy cars or girls applying makeup. For ads without those helpful hints, stereotypical assumptions can be made about which gender the product was traditionally associated with. Boy ads consisted of things like toy soldiers, race cars and other vehicles, monsters, guns, and the NFL Punt, Pass, and Kick Competition. Girl ads included dolls, hair accessories, makeup and beauty products, jewelry, and helpful books like
How to Slenderize Heavy Legs.
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There were also many ads for products that were gender neutral, like records, stamps, amusement parks, televisions and radios, and those classic full-page spreads that showed a variety of items that could be purchased, earned, or won.

The chart above shows a gendered breakdown of the ads in
Wonder Woman
for every second year from 1961 to 1973. Astoundingly, of nearly five hundred ads, only one was aimed at girls. It appeared in
Wonder Woman
#197 from November 1971 and was for Kenner’s Easy Care Manicure Set. It was an impressive product that included tools to smooth, shape, and buff your nails, along with two bottles of nail polish. Other than that, it was all boys or gender neutral, and they each averaged out to about half of the total ads examined.

The ads for dolls, hair accessories, and the rest listed above were all from the pages of
Young Love,
one of DC’s romance comics, because no examples could be found in
Wonder Woman.
In fact, advertisers seemed to go out of their way to avoid aiming ads only at girls. Jewelry ads featuring smiling women with rings, bracelets, and necklaces always included a set of cufflinks or a ring for military men, making them gender neutral. The ads for Iverson bicycles featured laughing boys having adventures, but each ad ended with a reminder that they had a model “especially for girls.” After a few months, though, Iverson cut any mention of their girls’ bicycle.

The furthest that advertisers were willing to go to sell to girls were ads that appealed to both genders. This is largely due to the nature of ad sales at the time. Advertisers didn’t buy ads in individual books, but in lots. For example,
Wonder Woman
and
Aquaman
came out on similar schedules, and over the course of the 1960s both titles featured the exact same selection of ads 97 percent of the time.
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By grouping
Wonder Woman
with their other superhero titles, it’s clear that DC Comics and its advertisers felt that
Wonder Woman
’s readership was akin to DC’s other superhero books. And, as evident from the intended audience of these ads, this readership was predominantly male.

DC had another group of series that were aimed at female readers with ads to match, composed of romance series like
Heart Throbs
and
Young Love.
A stark example of this gender divide for ads comes from Marvel comics and an ad for the Wayne School, a way to finish high school at home. In
Fantastic Four,
the ad showed a young man being told by a woman in the personnel department, “Sorry, we only hire high school graduates.” In
Millie the Model,
it was the
exact
same ad, except the young man was replaced by a young woman. Both publishers had a boy group and a girl group for ads, and
Wonder Woman
was in the boy group. This choice speaks volumes about her audience.

Not Who, but How Many

The above data has obvious limitations and doesn’t provide us any definitive numbers for
Wonder Woman
’s readership, but the trends are quite clear.

An area that’s much more definitive, however, is sales. Regardless of how many boys or girls read
Wonder Woman,
there weren’t a lot of them. The sales data from the 1960s is fairly solid, showing that
Wonder Woman
was in rough shape. From 1960 to 1969, the book averaged sales of just over 200,000 copies per issue. By today’s standards those numbers would be fantastic, but in the 1960s
Wonder Woman
sold barely a quarter of what the top book sold and averaged forty-seventh place on the charts. For a series that had occasionally outsold
Superman
and
Batman
in the Golden Age, this was a big drop.
Superman
and
Batman,
along with the many other titles starring the two heroes, consistently owned the top of the charts, but
Wonder Woman
floundered.

It probably came as little surprise when DC announced a new direction for the series in 1968. The industry was changing rapidly and
Wonder Woman
was very much behind the times, so Robert Kanigher was out and a new, younger team came in to revitalize Wonder Woman and make her a more modern character. The dawn of the Bronze Age brought with it the newly depowered Diana Prince, who caused quite a stir.

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Among these writers were several young men who later became famous in the comic book industry, including Marv Wolfman, a noted comic book writer; Mark Evanier, a multiple Eisner award winner; Mark Gruenwald, a writer and editor at Marvel Comics; and Michael Uslan, a producer on all of the modern Batman films.

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Every name mentioned in each column was counted as male, female, or unspecified (less than 4 percent of all letters writers were unspecified). The totals for each year were turned into percentages, and then charted with a trend line to show the larger pattern in the data.

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Wonder Woman appeared in at least eight different Hostess ads, and her favorite treat by far was Twinkies. Wonder Woman did five Twinkies ads, two for chocolate cupcakes, and one for fruit pies.

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Despite the increase in ads, the ten-cent price rose to twelve cents in 1962. After holding steady at ten cents for twenty years, the twelve-cent price only lasted seven years, and
Wonder Woman
jumped to fifteen cents in 1969. It then leaped to twenty-five cents in 1972, to thirty cents in 1976, and to forty cents in 1978. Three decades later,
Wonder Woman
is $2.99.

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Along with its counterpart
How to Add Alluring Curves to Skinny Legs
; both offered a “tested and proven method” in “only fifteen pleasant minutes a day.”

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Having the ads match so closely was quite an impressive achievement. A lot of the ads in the 1960s were a half or a third of a page, so the comic’s story would have to end at a certain point on the page for the ad to fit. Corralling the writers and artists of the various comics to all hit the same spots every month must have been quite an editorial feat. With
Wonder Woman
and
Aquaman
specifically,
Wonder Woman’s
letter column was only one page while
Aquaman’s
was often two pages. That’s a one-page deficit for
Aquaman
in terms of potential ad space every issue, yet they still fit in 97 percent of the ads that they ran in
Wonder Woman.

PART 3