Our Gods Wear Spandex (23 page)

Whatever Wonder Woman's feminist virtues, the fact remains that she is a scantily-clad beauty taking part in stories engineered to appeal to bondage fetishists. To read Marston and Peter's
Wonder Woman
adventures is to confront stories that are absolutely drenched in transgressive sexuality and rendered in a style that betrays a distinctly decadent influence. And Wonder Woman's favorite exclamation is “Suffering Sappho,” a reference to the poet laureate of Lesbos.

Bondage and submission are constant leitmotifs in Wonder Woman's adventures. Josette Frank, another psychologist hired to consult for All-American, resigned in disgust over Wonder Woman in 1944. In her resignation letter, she was blunt in her opinion of Marston's work: “Intentionally or otherwise, the strip is full of significant sex antagonisms and perversions. Personally, I would consider an out-and-out striptease less unwholesome than this kind of symbolism.” Fredric Wertham agreed, claiming that Wonder Woman presented “an undesirable ideal for girls, being the exact opposite of what girls are supposed to be.”
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Indeed, Wonder Woman's predominantly male audience was “at least unconsciously titillated by all the sexual undertones.”
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Undaunted, Marston wrote ecstatically about the benefits of bondage and went so far as to claim that women enjoy it.

Marston died in 1947. He had been a relentless workaholic and, without his guidance, the strip floundered. H. G. Peter was shown the door at the dawn of the Silver Age, replaced by the slick art team of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. Sales still dwindled, so a revamp was ordered in 1969 to bring the character more in line with heroines in then-popular TV shows like
The Avengers
and
The Mod Squad
. The revamp was instigated by
Justice League
artist Mike Sekowsky, who had Wonder Woman renounce her powers so she could stay on Earth. She gained a mentor in the form of an elderly Chinese dwarf named I Ching, and an ever-changing wardrobe of clumsily interpreted “mod” fashions. Despite all this, the revamp was successful.

Mysteriously, however, Wonder Woman changed back into her original incarnation in 1973. An apocryphal story has it that feminist Gloria Steinem complained to DC Comics owner Steve Ross about the new, mortal version of Wonder Woman and the character reverted. Steinem put the old Wonder Woman on the cover of the first issue of her
Ms
. magazine in 1972. She also edited a Wonder Woman hardcover collection that was published under the
Ms
. banner.

Wonder Woman entered the popular mainstream again in 1976, when a new TV series was developed that hewed closely to the original Wonder Woman concept—right down to the 1940s setting. The starring role was given to former beauty queen Lynda Carter, perhaps the greatest living embodiment of a comic-book character in history. In the words of Alex Ross, Carter was “the greatest single impression on the character in the 20th century—ironically, more than any artist who ever drew her.”
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The series later moved from ABC to CBS, who updated the series to take place in the present time.

After a long fallow period, the
Wonder Woman
comic series was revived in 1987. Writer Greg Potter and superstar artist George Perez turned the title into a mythological fantasy series, with touches of sword-and-sorcery. Perez wanted to bring Wonder Woman back to her roots: “I wanted to get back to the mythology, I wanted to purify the concept.”
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In 1996, Wonder Woman was brought to her greatest glory in
Kingdom Come
as the warrior queen who girds Superman's loins for battle and later bears his child. Ross retained the heart-stopping beauty of Lynda Carter for his Wonder Woman, giving her ice-blue eyes to create a more otherworldly effect.

Wonder Woman was by no means the only Amazon of the Golden Age, nor was she even the first. One of the earliest superheroines was, like her male counterparts, specifically occult in origin. Marvel's Black Widow first appeared in
Mystic Comics
#4 in 1940. Her secret identity was Clare Voyant, a psychic who is murdered after a seance goes awry. Satan claims her soul, grants her supernatural
powers and an unusually sexy outfit, and puts her back on Earth so she can dispatch evildoers to his dark domain. The Widow had the power to kill with the touch of a finger, which burnt a spider-shaped brand in her victims' flesh.

Another superheroine that beat Wonder Woman to the stands was Black Cat, a movie stuntwoman turned crimefighter who first appeared in
Pocket Comics
in 1941. A year later, Phantom Lady debuted in
Police Comics
as a society girl turned crime fighter who was blessed with extremely sexy art by Matt Baker. One heroine, Miss Fury, created by a very beautiful female cartoonist named Tarpe Mills, distinguished herself by making her start in newspapers. Miss Fury first appeared in 1941 as Black Fury, dressed in a black satin catsuit later appropriated by DC's Catwoman. Miss Fury's adventures are rife with bondage, lingerie, and cat fights.

The Black Canary first appeared in
Flash Comics
#86 in 1947 dressed like a streetwalker in fishnet stockings, satin, and a skintight top with plunging neckline. Black Canary was later revived as a feminist heroine as Green Arrow's love interest. And in 1943, even Lois Lane got her shot at superherodom when she dreamt that she gained powers after a transfusion of blood from Superman (
Action Comics
#60).

The Silver Age also produced a number of female supersidekicks, including Supergirl, Hawkgirl, Namora, and Black Widow, as well as team members like Invisible Girl, Marvel Girl, Crystal, Medusa, and the Scarlet Witch. The Seventies saw a spate of female counterparts like Spider-Woman, Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk, as well as assorted genre heroines like Starfire and Rima. In a 1976
X-Men
storyline, Marvel Girl becomes Phoenix when she embodies the cosmic Phoenix Force (
Uncanny X-Men
#101). She is later driven mad by this power and becomes the murderous Dark Phoenix. She is then killed and resurrects as plain old Jean Grey.

In the original lineup of the new
X-Men
, Storm, an African mutant who can control the weather, became one of the more popular characters in the Marvel Universe. Two other popular heroines in
The X-Men
got their start as villains—Rogue, a formerly evil mutant with the ability to absorb the power of anyone she touches, and Emma Frost, a.k.a. the White Queen, who is usually pictured dressed in extremely revealing fetish wear. Frost was originally a member of the Hellfire Club, which took its name from an English secret society of the 18th century that was dedicated to paganism and sex magic.

Frank Miller redefined the concept of the comic-book Amazon with the creation of the assassin named Elektra. In doing so, he changed the role of female action heroes in the media at large. There had never been a female character so ruthless in comics—and certainly not a protagonist.

Elektra is a Golem, but a less literal one than Wonder Woman. Trained in the martial arts from childhood, Elektra becomes a ruthless assassin after her father's murder. This event seems to trigger a nihilistic impulse. After being rejected by the
sensei
Stick and his “good” ninjas, she is recruited by the evil ninjas of The Hand. Her signature weapon is the
sai
, a phallic-looking round knife used in the martial arts.

As with so much of Miller's work, Elektra represents a new and radical blurring of gender boundaries in comic books. She is the lover of Matt Murdock and the foe of Daredevil, but takes the dominant, assertive role in both relationships. In Miller's stories, Elektra is essentially devoid of a recognizably feminine personality, and became quite square-jawed and muscular in his later renderings. One can even argue that Elektra is essentially a transvestite or transsexual character, and that the trauma of her father's death effectively removes her femininity.

In 1982, following the popular “Death of Phoenix” storyline in
The Uncanny X-Men
, Miller killed Elektra off in an epic and unforgettable fashion (
Daredevil
#181). Unfortunately, he mitigated the power of that story by reviving her shortly after (
Daredevil
#190). Miller then wrote the
Elektra: Assasin
miniseries in 1986, in which she plays the dominant partner to a sexually neutered, cybernetic SHIELD agent.
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Here, Elektra is not only a ninja, but is possessed of supernatural powers. Her foe in the story is the Antichrist, who, in typical Miller fashion, takes the form of a liberal Presidential candidate. In 1991, Miller returned to the character with
Elektra Lives Again
graphic novel, which focuses more on Matt Murdock's obsession with Elektra's death than on the character herself. Over Miller's objections, Marvel continued to use Elektra after he stopped working on the series.

Since so many top creative minds in Hollywood are also comics fans, the new Amazon archetype offered by Elektra found its way into big-budget action movies
almost immediately. In 1986, comics fan Jim Cameron borrowed Elektra's take-no-prisoners attitude for his revamping of the Ripley character in
Aliens
. In 1991, Cameron took it up a notch in his second Terminator film (
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
), which reinvented the weepy waitress Sarah Connor as a bone-cracking commando. Later, Cameron created
Dark Angel
, a sci-fi spin on Elektra that ran on the Fox network and starred the unambiguously feminine Jessica Alba.
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A French comics fan named Luc Beeson tried his hand at the Elektra archetype in the 1990 film
La Femme Nikita
, about a teenage delinquent who murders a cop during a drugstore heist. The French secret service are impressed enough with Nikita's aggressive nature that they fake her execution and enroll her in spy school, where she trains as an assassin. The film was promptly remade by Hollywood as 1993's
Point of No Return
starring Bridget Fonda, and later became a cable TV series starring the glamorous Peta Wilson. The archetype plunged into total incoherence with Quentin Tarentino's
Kill Bill
movies, starring Uma Thurman. Elektra was also a featured character in the 2003
Daredevil
film, which drew heavily on Miller's early 1980s work. She was the star of her own film the following year. Neither offering lit Tinseltown ablaze.

The Brotherhood archetype, represented by the superhero team, started off as commercial ploy, but has since come to dominate the market. The most notable teams appear in
The X-Men, The Justice League, The Ultimates
, and
The Avengers
. Lesser titles like
The Legion of Super-Heroes, The Defenders
, and
The Teen Titans
wax and wane in popularity, but enjoy a hardcore audience. These comic-book brotherhoods form the backbone of the market today and provide opportunity for high-return multi-title “crossover” events published by the Big Two (DC and Marvel). One of the most successful recent crossover events was
Identity Crisis
, which centered on the murder of the Elongated Woman's wife by the Atom's estranged wife. The title was created by novelist Brad Meltzer, whose 2006 novel,
The Book of Fate
, deals with Freemasonry and conspiracy theory. Another recent crossover,
Civil War
, divides the countless heroes of the Marvel Universe into two warring camps—one led by Captain America, the other led by Iron Man.