wonder woman

As promotion for my forthcoming book on They Might Be Giants’ Flood (out this Thursday!), my co-author and I are guest-editing the 33 1/3 blog at 333sound.com this week. That’s right, you get double the blogging from me this week. Our first post is here, featuring bits of our interview with the band that didn’t fit into the book.

So, you’ve bought A Golden Thread, my critical history of Wonder Woman. And you’re one of the readers who hasn’t read any Wonder Woman comics – which is fine, as I wrote the book assuming a reader who hadn’t. But now you want to go read some because you’re interested.

Or perhaps you haven’t bought it yet because you don’t know enough about Wonder Woman, but you’re curious why I think the topic is so interesting.

Either way, here are my picks for the five Wonder Woman collections/eras somebody interested in knowing more about the fascinating history of the character should read. Or just the five Wonder Woman collections anyone looking for a good comic should read. Really, just read them. Then go buy A Golden Thread. Even if you’ve bought it already; just buy another copy. They make great Christmas presents.

The Wonder Woman Chronicles (Volume 2)

Volume 1 of this series is currently out of print, but the original William Moulton Marston/Harry G. Peter stories don’t really require chronological ordering anyway. What’s important is that this is nearly two hundred pages of World War II era Wonder Woman by her creators themselves. This is the era of Wonder Woman in which she was a propaganda figure for her creator’s imagined female supremacist bondage utopia.

What jumps out about stories in this era is twofold. First is their weird inventiveness. Marston was completely barmy, and his stories are packed with strange and wonderful ideas. Second is the fact that Marston has a radical vision of the world that is as idiosyncratic and sweeping as that of William Blake or Philip K. Dick. Wonder Woman is a part of a larger philosophical and intellectual system for him, and though the full nature of that system isn’t clear from the strips alone, they sparkle with a sort of mad passion lacking in any other superhero comic I’ve read. These are some of the weirdest comics ever to have a major cultural impact.

Diana Prince: Wonder Woman (Volume 4)

One of my favorite parts of A Golden Thread is the two chapters devoted to the so-called I Ching era, a period in the late 60s/early 70s in which Wonder Woman lost her superpowers and adventured as an ordinary human being. This era was pilloried by Gloria Steinem, whose objections were used as a pretext for sacking the creative team and replacing it. In practice, though, the creative team was a bunch of fabulous writers and artists, headed by Denny O’Neil, whose angry leftist take on Green Arrow remains one of the iconic comics of the 1970s. For the last two issues of the era they had Samuel Delaney writing, who was doing one of the most serious-minded feminist takes on the comic ever, before or since.…

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The cover art is, as ever, by the fantastic James Taylor, who talks about his process over here.

Last War in Albion will run on Saturday this week, in lieu of the usual waffling.

I am pleased to announce that A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman is at long last available from Eruditorum Press. It’s priced at $7.99 for the US ebook edition, with all other editions priced to give me the same royalty. You can buy it now at Amazon (Print, Kindle), Amazon UK (Print, Kindle), and Smashwords, which can provide you with ebook versions for any non-Kindle devices. It’s available in most other Amazon stores, and will be on Nook, iBooks, and Sony stores in a few weeks.

The book is a critical history of Wonder Woman, focusing primarily but not exclusively on her comic book appearances. It starts in 1941, as William Moulton Marston, a pop psychologist, creates a female superhero to advance his idiosyncratic goals about the relationship between men and women, through the days when she was more feminist than Gloria Steinem, and all the way to the present day, where the character is stuck in DC’s woeful New 52 relaunch, looking at every era of Wonder Woman in between.

It’s written to be understandable and interesting to audiences who have never read a Wonder Woman comic before, but has enough detail that even the most die-hard fan will learn a few things. It doesn’t just cover the canonical “major eras” like the Marston era and the Pérez era, but every era from 1941 on is there, in varying levels of detail.

Why, one might ask, a history of Wonder Woman? Because she’s simultaneously one of the most recognized figures in popular culture and one of the least well-understood. She’s a wildly popular character, and yet save for three seasons of television in the 1970s it’s hard to point to her iconic or beloved version. There are not stories like The Dark Knight Returns or The Death of Gwen Stacy that everyone points to as the iconic Wonder Woman story. There’s no movie version.

And yet she’s fascinating. Not just because she was designed as propaganda for Marston’s imagined female supremacist bondage utopia, but because she’s spent over seventy years in continual publication by a company that has never seemed to understand the character. Where Batman and Superman feel easy to understand, Wonder Woman is strangely amorphous, resisting an easy definition. This has made her comics often frustrating, but rarely, if ever, boring. And because she is, by her nature, a symbol of feminism and of social justice, the highs and lows of her comics are often fascinating.

Inevitably, a book drifts over two years of being written and produced. When I envisioned the book, of course, it was called Paradise Dungeons, playing off of Wonder Woman’s Paradise Island and the oft-remarked upon bondage components of Wonder Woman. But when I finished the book it wasn’t quite that book.…

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