This week — alongside the latest collections of Batman, X-Men, and Iron Man — your friendly, neighborhood comic book store will also be selling Wonder Woman Bondage And Feminism In The Marston/Peter Comics 1941-1948 (hardcover, paperback, digital).
A thoughtful look at her real-world origins and how she’s impacted, and been impacted by, feminism, submission, and matriarchal ideas, the book comes from Noah Berlatsky, the editor of TheHoodedUtilitarian.com and a contributor to Slate, The Atlantic, and The Comics Journal.
But while this isn’t the first book to tackle this subject, Berlatsky explains why he thinks, “The overlap is minimal to nonexistent.”
It’s somewhat self-explanatory, obviously, but what is Wonder Woman: Bondage And Feminism In The Marston/Peter Comics 1941-1948 about, and what prompted you to write it?
Well, the book is about the original Wonder Woman comics by William Marston and Harry Peter. And what prompted me to write it was that I saw an image from them in 2009 which showed Wonder Woman in a gimp mask thinking about the history of bondage. And I was hooked.
Is the book more about the character and comics or more about bondage and feminism? And why did you decide to go that route, as opposed to the other?
It’s not really about the character. As I say in the book’s introduction, I don’t really care about Wonder Woman as an icon all that much, it’s just not of much interest to me. But I am very interested in the original comics, because they are beautiful and strange and filled with gorilla bondage and space kangaroos and other unlikely and wonderful things.
It’s about bondage and feminism because those were the concerns and obsessions of Marston and Peter when they were creating the comic, and because I think what they did with that, or how they thought about it, is fascinating and worth thinking about.
Your book obviously only covers the early years of the Wonder Woman comic books, but she got tied up after that, including a bunch of times on the TV show. Why did you decide to concentrate on just the Marston/Peter years?
I wanted to talk about the Marston/Peter comics because I think those comics are surprising and beautiful and profound and wise and bizarre. They’re great art, basically. There hasn’t really been any other iteration of Wonder Woman that even manages to be consistently good art, I don’t think, much less great art.
Wonder Woman does occasionally get tied up in later versions. But it’s never as omnipresent as in the Marston/Peter comics, and it’s also not connected to Marston’s ideas about female matriarchy and power through submission.
Along with the text, Wonder Woman: Bondage And Feminism In The Marston/Peter Comics 1941-1948 features a number of pages from the comics. Given that you were, as the title says, writing about the bondage and feminism aspects of Wonder Woman, was it hard to get the rights to include those illustrations?
We didn’t get rights. Reproduction of images for purposes of scholarly analysis is covered under fair use in the U.S. Some comics presses have been reluctant to exercise their fair use rights. So I’m pleased that Rutgers was willing to do so, both because I want people to see the pictures, and because I think robust fair use is important to the study and creation of good art and good criticism. Heaven forbid that critics have to be vetted by those they criticize.
The reason I know about Wonder Woman: Bondage And Feminism In The Marston/Peter Comics 1941-1948 is because they have it at my local comic book store, Golden Apple…
That’s great to hear. I knew it was getting out to comics shops, but I wasn’t sure how widely or not it had been distributed.
But do you think it’s a book that comic book fans would be interested in?
I hope it’s a book comic fans would be interested in. It is a scholarly book, and I talk about a lot of issues that I guess people might not think of in terms of comics: sexual abuse, pacifism, queerness. But I think there are a lot of thoughtful comics, superhero and otherwise, that talk about such issues, and that comics fans of various sorts are interested in. And the book is really motivated by a love of these comics, and an appreciation of how exciting and ambitious they are. So I hope that would appeal to people.
What do you think comic book fans will get out of reading the book?
I hope what they’ll get out of it is a desire to go read the Marston/Peter comics. And maybe a renewed appreciation for how great the medium can be.
Wonder Woman: Bondage And Feminism In The Marston/Peter Comics 1941-1948 is not the only recent book to cover Wonder Woman’s origin. Last year, Jill Lepore published The Secret History Of Wonder Woman (my review of which you can read here). First off, have you read her book?
I’ve read Lepore’s book, and I reviewed it at the Atlantic (which you can read here) and later talked about it a bit more at my own site (which you can read here).
The brief version is that I was hugely impressed by her research, and found a lot of her discussion helpful. It answered some specific questions for me, which was great. But I wish she’d done a little more to highlight work of earlier scholarly researchers, and I wish she had a little more love for the comics themselves, which she doesn’t really seem to care about that much.
Our books are completely different. She’s writing a biography of Marston and his family in the context of early twentieth century feminist history. I’m doing a close reading of the Wonder Woman comics in the context of feminist and queer theory. The overlap is minimal to nonexistent.
So do you have any plans to write a follow-up, something that covers the way she’s been depicted in the years since the Marston/Peter comics?
Well, I’ve blogged a bunch about her later iterations (which you can read here), but I doubt I’d ever write a book about it. First, I don’t like her later iterations, so it would be depressing to write a whole book on them. Second, there are a couple of quite good books out this year that trace her later history, such as Tim Hanley’s Wonder Woman Unbound and Phil Sandifer’s A Golden Thread.
Speaking of which, yours is the fourth scholarly book about Wonder Woman to come out in the last year-and-a-half. Why do you think there’s been such academic interest in both this character and her real-world origins and implications?
I think it’s probably just coincidence. Or bad luck from my perspective. Probably it’s also due to the general interest in superheroes over the last years, what with all the films.
Has there been any thought on your part of writing a similar book about a different female comic book character? Or is there really not another one you could write a book like this about?
I’ve got various book projects floating about in my head. Will anyone pay me to write them? Well, that’s another question.
Wonder Woman is, as you know, going to be in the upcoming movie Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice. What do you think of their choice of Gal Gadot to play Wonder Woman?
Eh, I can’t say I care that much one way or the other. Having seen Zach Snyder’s movies before, I doubt the character will have much to do with Marston and Peter’s vision. It’ll just be another angsty sexy tough female action hero.
Why do you think Hollywood has had so much trouble bringing Wonder Woman to the big screen, even though they’ve had no trouble with Batman or Superman, and also did such a good job when they brought her to small screens back in the ’70s?
Some of it’s probably just bad luck. But I also think Wonder Woman is a difficult character because she originally was actually an idiosyncratic and inspired work of art. Superman and Batman are just pulp heroes who hit people; Wonder Woman is a vision of feminist bondage matriarchal utopia. The first two fit easily into DC’s business model; the last not so much. That’s part of why Wonder Woman comics have been consistently terrible, while Superman and Batman comics have occasionally been pretty good.
As far as movies go, I think there’s also some sexism involved. I think the male creative people who are largely in control — because of sexism — are sometimes nervous about creating movies headlined by women. So that’s probably a factor.
Of the non-book depictions she’s had over the years, is there one that stands out as a personal favorite? Like are you really into the way she was in the Justice League cartoon, or maybe in the video game LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes?
I haven’t seen a ton of them, to be honest. My brief glimpses have never led me to look into any of those iterations more closely. I did see The Wonder Woman animated movie from a bit back; it was pretty bad.
Finally, if someone wanted to read some of the comics you talk about in Wonder Woman: Bondage And Feminism In The Marston/Peter Comics 1941-1948, what’s the best collection of them?
There aren’t a ton of good collections of the entire Marston/Peter Wonder Woman, unfortunately. The first Wonder Woman Chronicles edition is relatively easy to get and not too expensive. DC never finished reprinting the entire run, unfortunately. The Collector’s editions get further, but they’re quite expensive.
