Barbelith Underground > Comic Books

OK, so, Crisis on Infinite Earths. I realise that talking about why Wonder Woman’s high profile is not matched by sales inside comics or exploitation of her intellectual property outside comics in terms of something that nobody outside comics has ever heard of is a bit of a tangent, but bear with me.

One of the main problems - arguable term, but let’s go with it - that the Crisis was supposed to address was that you had two Batmen, two Supermen, two Justice _things_ of America. Old Batman and young Batman, old Superman and young Superman. Thing is, this doesn’t really apply to Wonder Woman - she’s probably immortal, and she doesn’t necessarily age as we understand aging (opinions seem to differ) - unlike Superman, she doesn’t need to start off as a baby, since her narrative starts when she is injected into “our” society not as a baby but as an adult. This should make things easier, but doesn’t, because you can’t have Wonder Woman kicking around showing up the joins in the other characters' timelines.

Thus is born a godawful continuity kludge which makes the character totally incoherent. Enter the Fury, a character introduced purely for the purpose of taking the place of Wonder Woman in the All-Star Squadron, who is also called Hippolyta, which is also the name of Diana’s mother, who becomes Wonder Womoh my God shoot me.

Wonder Woman was looking for coherence for a fair bit before the Crisis - note her incarnation as a mod superspy, which the recent OYL stuff attempted to refer back to with the white jumpsuit and the TIME membership. However, this really knocked the stuffing out of the character, I think. Grant Morrison was making good progress on getting her back into coherent shape, primarily by ignoring her own series and her backstory, but then got caught by the editors (painful) and had to swap her out for Hippolyta again, so Hippolyta could be killed off in “Our Worlds at War” - which neatly slips between “Kingdom Come” and “Civil War” in the pantheon of comics in which people in tights hit each other while captions relate great speeches by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Livy or God.

Faced with this mess of different agents, I think I’d be less certain of getting name recognition or even a decent kind of a plot out of the property - this before you bring in the scaffolding around the Wonder Women - Cassie Sandsmark, Artemis, Donna Troy et hoc genus omne. All of this _could_ be jettisoned in a film treatment, but the desire to “honour” the franchise, and the desire to bring comic and film treatment vaguely into line with each other for cross-selling purposes create the kind of problems that can end up killing a treatment, as seems to have occurred. So, part of the difficulty Miss W. is having in understanding the character is that the character makes very little sense, which means there are fewer comic-to-mainstream-media transitions, which means and so on. It’s a vicious cycle.

Which sideswipes grant’s statement - I think another problem with the cloudy branding is that Wonder Woman wasn’t conceived as a comic for girls. She was conceived as a comic for men who were into bondage. I’m slightly amused that so far we have only looked at Marston's own selling of this as the accidental arousing of erotic reveries in young men caused by a strong female character. Yeahright. However, you have a limit to the number of people who will want to write that, and how obvious it can be before people will not want to read it - at least in public, and ironically as your audience become more exposed to the idea of superheroines who use their tentacular labia to fight crime (Witchblade, take a bow), the harder it is to have a character who ties people up and makes them say things they don’t want to say but is in no way so associated. An unkind writer might add that possibly some comic book writers are not so happily aligned with their own sexualities as Marston seems to have been. Joe Kelly, if I recall correctly, seemed to go through a period of having Batman joking about Diana’s lassoo offering “bondage therapy” and John Jones being forced to confront his shame and guilt through the healing power of forced confession. However, there is a limit to how much play you can give this in a “clean”, to quote, character, which is awkward.

So, she is a strong female character, who relies largely on a male potential readership and until very recently largely male writers. She is a “character for girls” who wears a miniskirt or skintight lower garment and a straining bustier. She is an alien, sort of, but also a goddess, sort of, and a secret agent, sort of. I’m astounded that she sells 48,000 a month, really.

On the plus side, Gail Simone has a good track record on doing interesting things with compromised properties (Deadshot, Ragdoll III, Catman), and writes good women, so there might be some decent stories, but there just doesn’t seem to be an iconic heft to Wonder Woman’s narrative - no Death and Return of Wonder Woman (I mean, she died and came back, but nobody really noticed) or Wonderfall. Longevity probably helps sales somewhat, assuming that one accumulates a small number of long-term collectors each year, but I can’t really imagine who actually reads Wonder Woman month in, month out. Does anyone here?

Wonder Woman!!!