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The Five Wonder Woman Comics You Must Own

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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 Doctor, Polly and Jamie have been condemned to the pits, to the ‘Danger Gang’, for the crime of proving to the Pilot that his world is run by secret things that constantly order him to not notice them. 

The trio are entering the pithead to begin their work as miners, mining the deadly gas that the Colony collects for its unseen masters.  One of the Colony’s jolly little work ditties plays in the background.  A loud, insanely chipper voice sings lyrics about how happy everyone should be to work and serve the Colony.

The Doctor groans as if in terrible pain.

“What’s the matter?” asks Polly.

“Ooooh, dreadful!” exclaims the Doctor, “Did you hear that rhyme? The man who wrote that ought to be sent to the Danger Gang, not us!”

Jamie laughs.

The Doctor’s concern isn’t for the danger of the mines.  It’s for the ugly, crass, aesthetic banality of tyranny; for its kitsch horrors; for its lack of imagination.  This might seem like a failure of proper priorities… until you remember that such crassness is a symptom of the infection in the social wound, the same wound in which the macra teem.

In a society that demands you work for hidden, secret, ineffable, insane masters that you never see and can’t control, the mass-produced art that surrounds you is always going to be so much slop.  Its function is to soothe, to reassure, to distract.  It may not be consciously crafted to do these things, but if it doesn’t do them it simply doesn’t get mass-produced in the first place.  In a world so riddled with secrecy and injustice that psychosis becomes a necessary feature of social life, the songs you hear on the radio are always going to hide repressed lunacies within their mindless platitudes.  When you are expected to never question and never stop smiling, what chance is there that culture will be anything other than bland, safe, comforting pap?

And shitty, rubbishy, worthless, careless songs hurt us.  Songs that side with power are injurious, especially if they’re dripped into your ears day after day after day.  Songs that are just ugly and dull, because they are made in the same way as spam, are just as bad.  They hurt our hearts and souls and guts.

The Doctor’s priorities are just fine.…

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Enlightenment and Persuasion have walked in on the Doctor and his friends.  They now look human.  A man and a woman, created from a sketch Tegan drew.  Pale, impassive, handsome, impeccably-groomed people in clothes that Tegan thought fashionable.  They look like she modelled them on First Class passengers on Concorde.  The Jet Set. 

Persuasion hands round drinks.  Nothing more persuasive than that.

Enlightenment is explaining her transformation from frog to aspirational 80s princess.  She speaks in cut-glass vowels and icicle consonants.

“We enjoy the most advanced technology in the universe,” she claims, her voice suffused with nonchalant arrogance.

She was kissed by technology.

“The dominant emotion on planet Earth is fear,” says Persuasion suavely.  Yes, that’s always how the ‘natives’ look to the ‘explorers’.  Fearful little things.  “When last we were there, our reception was hostile.”

Tegan, a woman from a nation built on the destruction and subjugation of ‘natives’ by ‘explorers’, is not fooled.

“Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me,” she sneers.

“Well, we must read your history books,” says the Doctor.  There is no better way to learn about the mindset of the rulers of any civilisation than to read their official history books.  You can read a lot between the lines.

“You will be welcome to do so,” says Enlightenment, “but first it will be necessary for me to instruct you in our computer languages.”

There is, it goes without saying, no conceivable possibility than a non-Urbankan might already have the ability to read Urbankan books.

“One couldn’t wish for a more enchanting teacher,” says the Doctor.  He almost seems to be flirting with her.

“A very elevated one,” adds Persuasion, regarding this insolent bug with lofty amusement.

“Enlightenment,” says the Doctor.

“Minister of Enlightenment,” Persuasion corrects him.  Just so you know where you stand.

“Yes, of course,” replies the Doctor, his eyes icy with contemptuous understanding, “And you must be Minister of Persuasion.”

Of course, every ‘civilised’ nation that ever set about conquering the ‘primitives’ always thought themselves superior, always thought they were bringing the benefits of their ‘advancement’, always said they were helping the child-races to grow… or at least to stop being a hindrance in lands they were too inferior to use properly.

And such ‘civilised’ nations always aimed for ‘hearts and minds’, always brought their greater ‘wisdom’ with them as a justification and a gift, holding it before them as they invaded and conquered and slaughtered and enslaved. 

And they always needed – need – their Ministers of Enlightenment.  And Persuasion.…

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Tobias Vaughn shows Jamie and the Doctor into his office at the International Electromatics factory.

“Confusing, isn’t it?” chuckles Vaughn smoothly when he sees Jamie’s astonishment.

“It’s exactly the same as your office in London!” says Jamie.

“In all basic essentials, yes,” replies Vaughn, “That’s the secret of my success.  Uniformity.  Duplication.  The very essence of business efficiency.  My whole empire is built on that principle.”

In the script (but not in the televised story) ‘Doctor Who’ comments: “Mass production.”

Mass production of uniform duplicates.  From disposable radios to micro-monolithic circuits (tiny things that form a massive slab or wedge of power).  From identical offices to endless copies of Watkin’s ‘teaching machines’.

This is why the Cybermen have chosen Vaughn as a business partner.  This is why he is going to co-ordinate and distribute their troops.  This is why they arrive at his depot in packing crates, waiting to be activated.  His company is the perfect delivery system for their virus.  The synergy is obvious.…

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Lytton and Griffiths are wandering across a quarry.  It actually is a quarry.  Something is being dug up or mined there, by slaves watched over by Cybermen.

Lytton has a device that detects Cybermen.

“There are two very close,” he says.

“That’s right!” shouts a very human voice from behind him.

Bates and Stratton – two escapees from the Cybermen’s labour gangs – disarm and frisk Lytton and Griffiths.

Lytton has been looking for them, and they’ve been looking for him.

“Are they Cybermen?” asks the perplexed Griffiths.

“Almost,” says Lytton, amused.

“This is what the Cybermen do to you…” sneers Bates, removing his glove and sleeve to reveal a cybernetic arm, a chilly construct of steel and pulleys.  His metal hand closes on Griffiths’ fleshy one and squeezes.  Bates watched Griffiths’ pain with dead eyes.

“How much of you?”

“Arms and legs.”

Bates and Stratton are rejects from the Cyber-conversion process.  The Cybermen turn their rejects – the ones that cannot be entirely consumed – into labourers in their quarry.

So… the Cybermen start with the arms and legs.  The legs that give locomotion.  The arms and hands that lift and move and dig and manipulate.  The organs of physical work.

When the Cybermen catch Lytton and subject him to conversion, they start with his arms.

The original Cybermen had human hands.

The severed hand is a recurring motif of the gothic.

The gothic is about dead labour, the living death of alienated work, the physical invasion and evisceration wrought by capital upon the working body, and the occult process whereby wealth is created from labour.

The Cybermen – with their skull-faces – are gothic things.  Zombies, in the old fashioned sense.  People reduced to pure labour power.…

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Outside the Government: From Out of the Rain

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It’s March 12th, 2008. Duffy are at number one with “Mercy,” with Taio Cruz, Alphabeat, Westlife, and Flo Rida also charting. In news, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer gets wrapped up in a prostitution bust and resigns, Barack Obama wins some more primaries, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling unveils his first budget.

On television, meanwhile, it’s Peter J. Hammond’s other Torchwood story, From Out of the Rain. Hammond’s two Torchwood scripts are, by any reasonable account, oddities. Hammond, as mentioned, is a longstanding television writer. He’s the closest thing to a writer shared between the classic series and the new series, in that he has, in effect, near-misses for both; he had a script rejected for Trial of a Time Lord (Pip and Jane Baker were, alarmingly, preferred), and wrote two for Torchwood. And unsurprisingly, there’s something a bit dated and old-fashioned in his Torchwood scripts. Characterization is lax at best. Hammond is clearly interested in the fact that Jack is over a hundred years old, but this is about the only aspect of Jack that comes up in either of his stories. The other characters are interchangeable – there’s nothing about Ianto that makes him the sensible choice to be fascinated by old film, and nothing about Gwen and Owen that would make them likely to randomly tag along with Ianto to the cinema, even with the vague mutterings of some historical rift activity. Tellingly, every scene of this is about revealing plot information; nothing hinges on anybody’s character traits. The only thing that happens to advance the plot is people finding out new details about the Night Travellers.
All of which is to say that most of the advances in televisual storytelling since Sapphire and Steel was on the air are ignored here, at least on the level of writing. This is old-fashioned storytelling, and the closest thing to a good argument that those who wish Doctor Who were more like the classic series have. Because it does more or less work. It doesn’t have the spark and snap that Small Worlds did, but that’s mostly a factor of its more esoteric subject matter. Small Worlds was an efficient and compelling take on a longstanding and classic bit of mythology that took Torchwood’s basic premise and its specific connection to the Welsh landscape in a direction that was essentially inevitable. From Out of the Rain is far more idiosyncratic – evil early 20th century circus performers and the preservation of old filmstock is an interesting premise, but it lacks the straightforward hook of Small Worlds. 
Still, it largely works and ends up as one of the stronger entries in an admittedly weak season of television. This is largely for the reasons discussed last time. Whatever its idiosyncratic simplicity, it is very much its own story with its own focus and interests. There’s a sense of vision here. What happens is clearly happening according to a logic unique to this story, as opposed to according to the logic of Torchwood’s format.
…

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“You’re very good-Are you a puppetmaster?”: The Lights of Zetar

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“This is the song that doesn’t end/Yes it goes on and on my friend…”

“The Lights of Zetar” is Ron Moore’s least favourite episode of Star Trek. Naturally, as part of my apparent mission to disagree with one of the greatest writers in the entire franchise on absolutely everything, I found it thoroughly fascinating. It’s not especially great, and the usual season three problems submarine it, but it’s one of the most enjoyable and provocative episodes, at least in theory, we’ve seen in awhile. Quality-wise it’s at least on par with the last month of scripts.

It even opens on an enchanting note. Kirk’s log entry begins

“Captain’s log : stardate 5725.3. The Enterprise is en route to Memory Alpha. It is a planetoid set up by the Federation as a central library containing the total cultural history and scientific knowledge of all planetary Federation members. With us is specialist Lieutenant Mira Romaine. She is on board to supervise the transfer of newly designed equipment directly from the Enterprise to Memory Alpha.”

Kirk then goes on to explain how Scotty has fallen in love with Lieutenant Romaine in one of the most captivating and poetic bits of dialogue in the entire show:

“When a man of Scotty’s years falls in love, the loneliness of his life is suddenly revealed to him. His whole heart once throbbed only to the ship’s engines. He could talk only to the ship. Now he can see nothing but the woman.”

And naturally, William Shatner delivers a grand slam of a reading. Unfortunately, this is the most interesting Kirk is in the whole story, and this is a decent microcosm of “The Lights of Zetar”’s problems.

But before we get to that, let’s talk about the episode’s background a bit. For the first time since Harlan Ellison and “The City on the Edge of Forever” (and arguably Robert Bloch), we have a celebrity writer this week: Shari Lewis, famous for her television puppet shows from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1990s starring herself and her puppets, the iconic Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse and Hush Puppy. Although the episode is credited first to Jeremy Tarcher (her husband) the overwhelming majority of the episode, at least the basic story, is quite obviously Lewis’, and it’s her positionality that really clarifies what “The Lights of Zetar” is about. I must confess I did a bit of a double-take when I learned Lewis was behind this script: There are some things that simply cannot cross in my mind, no matter how open I may try to keep it. Lamb Chop and Star Trek are two of those things.

Although upon closer examination, they really do turn out to be a solid match for one another. Firstly, Lewis was an enormous fan of Star Trek, and it was a dream of hers to write for it. And furthermore, though her routine was ostensibly a variety act for children, Lewis always had higher aspirations: She performed for children sadly more often than not because children were the only ones who would watch her.…

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The Doctor, Zoe and Jamie are brought in to see the Master of the Land of Fiction.  He has dossiers on them.  He is, as Zoe says, very well organised.

“We have to be,” he says, “The running of this place requires enormous attention to detail. It’s a responsible position, but very rewarding”

A ‘responsible position’.  So it’s a job.

“Responsible to who?” asks the Doctor.

Not to a person, says the Master, to “another power. Higher than you could begin to imagine.”

A system, an inhuman hegemon.

He congratulates them on the way they handled their tests.  They have passed the job interview.

It transpires that the Master is a writer.

“Did you ever hear of the Adventures of Captain Jack Harkaway?” he asks.

“No, I can’t say that I… wait a minute, a serial in a boys’ magazine?”

“The Ensign!  For twenty-five years, I delivered five thousand words every week!”

“Twenty-five years, five thousand words a week…” Zoe adds it up… “that’s well over half a million words!”

“That’s why I was selected to work here,” says the Master.  He got headhunted.

He spent his life working to create copy for a publisher, who took his words and turned them into commodities.  The commodities were copies of his own ideas, his own characters, taken from him and transformed.  They piled up around him.  They took on a life of their own, apart from him.  Now he lives in a world of characters who were created by human labour, taken and turned into commodities.  They too have lives of their own.  In Marxism, this is called reification: the objectification of the social relations of production as things.  And it’s also commodity fetishism: the treatment of commodities (in this case, fictions) as though they people… and the treatment of people as though they were commodities.  One form of this is wage labour, and on that subject…

“And you’re the one that’s in charge of all of this?” asks Jamie.

The ‘Master’ hedges.

“Or is all this in charge of you?” asks the Doctor.
 
“My brain is the source of the creative power which keeps this operation going.”

So he doesn’t control it, but it won’t run without him, without his work.  Just like the magazines wouldn’t get made without the intellectual, creative labour of people like him… just like the printing presses wouldn’t print them without the manual labour of printers… just like the printed magazines wouldn’t get sold if it weren’t for the manual labour of distributors…

He’s now in a world literally run by an alien power that robs minds, just as his mind was robbed to make magazines.  And it wants to turn humanity into a string of sausages, all the same.

He denies that he’s a prisoner, but then the globe behind him glows and a siren sounds and the machinery demands his attention.  Soon it speaks through him, its stentorian commands coming from his mouth.  He tries to negotiate with it. …

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A flying ship has plunged into a tall public building, causing panic.

Outside 10 Downing St., the media have been sat around for hours with their cameras trained on the closed black door, waiting for someone official to come out and hand them their version of events… which will, of course, be repeated verbatim as The Story. 

Luckily for these relentless seekers after truth, a politician comes out to give them a press conference.

“Our inspectors have searched the skies,” he tells the journalists, “and they have found massive weapons of destruction, capable of being deployed in 45 seconds.  We face extinction unless we strike first.”  He goes on to beg the UN for “an emergency resolution” which will give them permission to launch this pre-emptive strike.  His words are relayed on the TV news without comment… except by the Doctor and the other people watching.

As satire, this isn’t subtle.  It’s like a sledgehammer to crack a nut… because that’s what the WMD story always was: an easily cracked nut.  But in a world in which barely anyone in the global media is capable of cracking nuts even with a nutcracker, maybe it’s time to get out the sledgehammers… if only to make a sarcastic point.

As a satire of US/UK foreign policy in the wake of 9/11, it’s crude… but then US/UK foreign policy in the wake of 9/11 was crude.  It didn’t need to be anything else.  The media could be relied upon to discount the idea that respectable politicians in ‘democracies’ might have cynical or imperialistic motives.  They could be relied upon to train their cameras at closed doors.  They could be relied upon to accept the contents of press conferences as basic common sense, and then amplify those press conferences and call them The Story.

This is the aspect of RTD’s satire that is so often overlooked: what we might call ‘the Andrew Marr aspect’.  Marr did a cutesy little cameo in this episode, in which he stands outside 10 Dowing St., wittering about personalities and process, while the government within – which now comprises evil, sniggering babies hidden inside the fleshsuits of respectable, well-groomed, sincere professionals – plots mass murder in order to make a killing on fuel profits.  Again, about as subtle as the truth.

On April 9th 2003, as the invasion of Iraq proceeded, beginning a process which would lead to the takeover of Iraq’s economy and perhaps more than a million Iraqi deaths, Andrew Marr stood outside 10 Downing St. and said this:

Well, I think this does one thing – it draws a line under what, before the war, had been a period of… well, a faint air of pointlessness, almost, was hanging over Downing Street. There were all these slightly tawdry arguments and scandals. That is now history. Mr Blair is well aware that all his critics out there in the party and beyond aren’t going to thank him – because they’re only human – for being right when they’ve been wrong.

…

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In the War Room of the War Lord’s War Base, two of the War Lords are playing Risk… but with real people’s lives.

“If my troops make a push here,” says Smythe, an alien who has taken on the identity of a General in the British Army in 1917, gesturing across the game board, “what resistance can you put up?”

“Along here we shall have pillboxes, machine gun nests, landmines,” replies Von Weich, an alien who has taken on the identity of a General in the German Army in 1917.

(Notice how nobody ever refers to these alien creatures as anything other than ‘Smythe’ and ‘Von Weich’.  It isn’t that they have real names beneath these identities; they are these identities.)

“You will have no chance,” continues Von Weich from behind his monocle, “but it will be an excellent test of the morale of your humans. Your entire force will be wiped out.”  This evidently amuses him.

They are standing over a game board, moving little pieces around.  Just like real Generals did, using real big boards and real little pieces, which really did represent real people, being slaughtered as they were moved across real people’s lands and homes.  This little board represents the War Zone that Smythe and Von Weich are playing with, but the whole map of all the War Zones is a game board.  It’s a map of the world, and of history.  On it, the War Lords are playing “the great game” of imperialism.

“Ah,” replies Smythe, his voice brimming with smug satisfaction at the idea of winning this little bit of the game, “but I will use my reinforcements to turn your flank.  Here!”

He shows Von Weich his move on the board.

“Then it will not be a fair battle!”

“Perhaps not, but it will be an excellent test of your morale!”

Despite their competition, these men are the same kind of creature; a kind of creature utterly alien to the men they move around on their board.  They both keep their alien communications devices behind portraits of their respective monarchs.  They both report to the same superiors, the same callous system of expansion and conquest.  The justification their system uses is that when it has conquered the universe, there will be no more war.  The motives are always humanitarian.  The current war is always “the war to end war”.

The Generals and Chiefs and Lords on both sides certainly fight each other, for power and territory and resources… as do Smythe and Von Weich, as do the War Chief and the Security Chief.  But, ultimately, they always have more in common with each other than they do with the little people on their game board.

Ultimately, the war is always waged by the rulers against the people, by the dice-rollers against the pieces. …

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