PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 5

In the second part of PHASED AND INTERFUSED, in which I discussed how the icon of "Dick Grayson Robin" phase shifted his way into the separate identity of Nightwing. Here I'll deal with the retconned origins of the "First Wonder Girl," who was declared to have had a substantial existence in the annals of the WONDER WOMAN continuity, starting in WONDER WOMAN #105 (1959).

(Side note: was this the first time a DC story used the exact words "Secret Origin" in a title?)

Writer Robert Kanigher then continued to alternate between grown Wonder Woman and her teen self in the comic, and some fans have speculated that even in 1959, Kanigher might've been trying to reach kids who were tantalized by all the emphasis on "teens" in pop culture, in order to give WONDER WOMAN's sales a boost.

At first Kanigher kept the teen and adult Wonder Women separate, though issue #120 (1961), he found a way to cross over the respective icons by having each of them encounter the same peril, "the Mercurian Menace," but at different times in the Amazon's heroic career. Then in #122 he began to play with time, showing Princess Diana getting de-aged to her younger selves, including not just "Wonder Girl" but also "Wonder Tot."

Then in WW #124 Kanigher introduced the idea that through Amazon technology all three versions of the heroine could co-exist and participate in mutual adventures. Thus, for roughly the next three years, Wonder Woman and her teenaged self both existed in what I've termed a "semi-bonded ensemble" in these stories, though both icons continued to enjoy independent stories. Wonder Tot occasionally got her own stories as well, though there were so few of these that it would fair to call her "charisma-dominant," since her main function was to appear as part of the ensemble. In contrast, the Kanigher version of Wonder Girl did sustain a minor mythology of her own, however derivative, just as Superboy did in his starring feature. Given that both Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl were designed to generate their own separate cosmoses, every story with both characters after WW #124 would constitute a stature-crossover, just as much Thor and Iron Man are in every co-starring appearance in THE AVENGERS, which is also a semi-bonded ensemble, but only for those characters whose own features reached a certain level of escalation (as opposed to the earlier example of Giant-Man and the Wasp, explained here).

NULL-MYTHS: “WONDER GIRL’S STOLEN FACE” (WONDER WOMAN #153, 1965)

 

Despite Robert Kanigher’s considerable creativity, I’ve yet to see anything he wrote for the WONDER WOMAN feature—which he wrote and edited for over fifteen years—that qualified as a mythcomic. His use of myth-ideas was both derivative and desultory, giving one the impression that he could barely summon any enthusiasm for the series, even when dealing with characters he himself created, or at least substantially re-worked, like the idea of “Wonder Woman as a girl,” as I discussed here.

All that said, Kanigher gets a little closer to the mythic mark with the 1965 story “Wonder Girl’s Stolen Face,” though it’s such a jumbled mess that it only qualifies as a “null-myth.” Strangely, in other venues Kanigher seemed to be a fan of “strong women,” since he had created such DC Comics characters as Black Canary, Poison Ivy and Mademoiselle Marie. But the closest he comes to expatiating on a feminine theme in a WONDER WOMAN comic is the old saw about women being ruled by their vanity.

“Face” begins by showing Wonder Girl (a teenaged version of Wonder Woman, who could co-exist with her older self via a complicated time-trick) being celebrated by both her immediate family on Paradise Island, and by two young swains pursuing her: Mer-Boy, a half-fish merman who dwells in the ocean with his kindred, and Bird-Boy, who lives in the sky with his fellow bird-folk. But the teen Amazon’s good cheer is sabotaged by a longtime WONDER WOMAN villain, the alien Duke of Deception, who wants the entire Wonder-family eliminated so that he can invade Earth with his flying saucers. He decides to sow the seeds of dissension by depriving Wonder Girl of her normal good looks and making her into a monster embittered against society and her family.

Sure enough, the first part of the Duke’s plan works fine. At the very moment when Wonder Girl’s two beaus are singing praises for her Cleopatra-like beauty, the ray literally steals the heroine’s face—we know this because we see the disembodied face later on-- and replaces it with a half-human, half-gargoyle physiognomy. Upon finding herself transformed, does the teenager rush off to Paradise Island, to have her mother and the Amazon scientists examine her? No, she raves at her boyfriends for being taken aback by her face-lift, even though neither of them forswears her for her sudden hideousness. In fact, each in turn invites the gargoyle girl to attend functions in their respective domains, trying to buoy up her spirits. However, at both functions the mer-people and the bird-people both think Wonder Girl is putting them on with her horrific visage, and they laugh at her. In both domains the angry Amazon tears up a lot of real estate and flees back to her family’s island. However, the other members of the WW family-- Wonder Woman herself, her mother Hippolyta and Wonder Tot (don’t ask!) -- make the exact same mistake, with the result that once again the tormented teen tears things up and fights with her family.

This of course is just what the Duke wanted. However, the other members of the family refuse to strike Wonder Girl. This bit of charity clears some of the rage from the heroine’s mind, and instead of attacking further, she flies off, intending to exile herself (still with no reason to know that the transformation is permanent). The frustrated alien traps Wonder Girl, planning to draw the other Wonders into an ambush. The teen’s innate heroism asserts itself, and she wins free in time to give warning—after which the four fighting females demolish the Duke’s invasion force. From one of the destroyed saucers Wonder Woman saves her younger self’s stolen face—it really does look like just a disembodied face, of course—and later Amazon science manage to get rid of the gargoyle-visage and restore to Wonder Girl her normal cuteness, as well as returning everything to the status quo.

The best part of this story is not the villain’s predictable plot, but the wacky lengths to which Kanigher goes to justify the Duke’s face-swapping technology. In a monologue spoken for the reader’s benefit, the deceptive demon claims that he performed this perfidious act twice before on two famous icons: mythology’s Medusa and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll. I feel reasonably sure that the original story of Medusa—a beautiful mortal woman, whom a god transformed into a snake-haired horror—was probably the main inspiration for “Face,” and aside from the Duke’s participation, the Medusa story hews close to the original story’s outlines. However, the revision of Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll narrative is a classic example of an author playing the part of Procrustes, the manic innkeeper of myth who cut off his victims’ limbs so that they would fit on a bed. According to Kanigher, Jekyll wasn’t transformed into Hyde by his experimental potion as Stevenson claimed, but by the Duke replacing Jekyll’s normal face with a monstrous physiognomy. It’s of minor interest that the transformed Wonder Girl acts more like Hyde than like Medusa, which may be the only reason that Kanigher bothered to rewrite Stevenson. Further, it may be revealing that the Duke says he struck at Medusa and Jekyll out of envy for their accolades. Maybe the real reason Kanigher rewrote those classic stories was also out of envy, albeit of the authorial kind…

A SERIES OF UN-UDDERABLE EVENTS

 

The “events” to which my title refers are all the 1959-1966 appearances of DC Comics’ original “Wonder Girl” character, whose name I will henceforth abbreviate to “WG1.” Prior to 1959, the WONDER WOMAN continuity had made loose references to the idea that the heroine had passed from childhood to adulthood on Paradise Island before taking on her costumed mantle. However, in no previous period was a younger version of Wonder Woman a frequent element of the series. But in WONDER WOMAN #105, dated April 1959, writer/editor Robert Kanigher and artist Ross Andru began making repeated use of a teenaged version of the heroine, much as the feature SUPERBOY told stories of Superman when he was a youth. WG1’s adventures were sometimes featured on WONDER WOMAN covers, while at other times the teen Amazon was just a backup to her better-established older self. Not a lot of fans, even back in The Day, were especially fond of the character, though ironically WG1 indirectly spawned DC’s second Wonder Girl iteration, and that character enjoyed considerable cachet in the TEEN TITANS series-- more on which later.

Many fans, then, would have deemed WG1 an unfortunate result of editor Kanigher’s tendency to write down to the readers of WONDER WOMAN. But it only recently dawned on me that WG1 was also “un-udderable,” in a way I can only express in song:

No boobs at all,

No boobs at all,

Double-U Gee-One

Had no boobs at all!

(Approximate melody based on a song about Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, who was said to have no “balls” at all.)

While looking through one of the WG1 stories, a question occurred to me. If one presumes that Kanigher began writing stories of a teenaged Amazon, logic would dictate that he was doing so to improve sales. Movies about the new breed of American called the “teenager” had proliferated in the middle 1950s. Such films varied between stories about “clean teens” or about adolescents with somewhat raunchier proclivities. But all teen movies dealt with youths over fifteen, meaning that the female teenagers no longer looked like kids. However, WG1, despite being called a teen, always looked significantly undeveloped.

The WG1 stories do not explicitly state how old the young Amazon is. Yet in all the character’s appearances, she goes around clothed in a very loose tunic, whether it’s some Graeco-Roman garment or a version of the famous Wonder Woman costume. Since the mature Wonder Woman was reasonably well endowed, the logical conclusion is that the creators of WG1 meant to imply that the character was too young to have significant breastitude. If Kanigher was at all consistent about deeming WG1 a teenager, the youngest she could be would be thirteen, and for some individuals this can be too young for full development.

Of course, though WG1 was not technically a kid sidekick, I believe most if not all “young allies” of older superheroes were supposed to be in this same age-range. Michael Fleischer’s ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BATMAN offers evidence that Robin the Boy Wonder was supposed to be a perpetual thirteen or fourteen before he finally started aging in the late 1960s, and most boy sidekicks looked no older than Robin. Prior to WG1, there were few teenaged superheroines in comics, and the only long-lived one was Fawcett Comics’ Mary Marvel, sister of the aforementioned Captain Marvel. Mary’s age probably wasn’t stated either, but on the whole, her figure also suggested the appearance of a girl who had just recently passed into adolescence. All this circumstantial evidence suggests that the raconteurs who worked on Golden Age superheroes were convinced, probably not without merit, that most of their readers were pre-teens, and that the only ages they wanted to see represented were either (1) kids of middle school age or (2) adults, the latter embodying the fantasy of attaining temporal power. That’s also probably one reason that Kanigher decided to devote space to stories of a thirteen-year-old Amazon. The baggy clothing may have been calculated to dodge any question of the not-yet-budding youth being exploited, since a reader couldn’t even tell if she had breasts.

Of course, if you lived back in the 1950s and listened to the Abominable Doctor Wertham, all comics in all genres were replete with what the psycho psychiatrist called “headlights.” There can be little doubt that a few superheroines were especially well endowed, particularly some versions of the Phantom Lady. But most of the genres that accentuated the positive power of cleavage were those of crime, jungle-adventure, and teen-humor—the last being the only genre in which developed female teens regularly put their goods on display.

I doubt that during the middle 1950s the very conservative DC company had to clean up very much in the boobage department. Before the Code, the potential lubricity of Wonder Woman’s costume was restrained by the quasi-Classical art of H.G. Peter. After the Code, Andru and others tended to draw her as being a bit on the slender side. Most regular female characters—Lois Lane and Lana Lang (in the SUPERBOY feature) -- sported modest cleavage, while Catwoman, one of the few well-endowed DC femmes, found herself placed in exile for having drawn the wrath of Wertham. One character, Saturn Girl of the Legion of Super-Heroes, made her first appearance as a supporting character in a 1958 SUPERBOY story, and in that story she barely appears to have any tits at all. However, once the idea of the Legion earned some plaudits from the readers, Saturn Girl’s second appearance gave her a better costume and cleavage about the same as that of Lois and Lana. But then, she, unlike WG1, was supposed to be at least fifteen. On a side-note, though the lady Legionnaire’s first appearance predates that of Kanigher’s WG1, neither Saturn Girl nor any of her compatriots appeared in a regular feature until 1962.

In any case, there’s some irony in the fact that WG1 was the first teen heroine of the 1950s to appear on a semi-regular basis, for she only appeared on newsstands about a month ahead of ACTION COMICS #252, dated May 1959. The first version of Supergirl is explicitly said to be fifteen, a topic which comes up when she auditions to join the Legion of Super-Heroes. (In a twist typical of the period, the heroine washes out when she temporarily becomes an adult and violates the group’s “no one over 18” rule.) More relevantly, from the first Supergirl, unlike WG1, did have fully developed knockers, and though they probably weren’t any bigger than Lois Lane’s, the girl’s girls got a little more emphasis because of the “S” emblem she wore on her chest.

As for WG1, Kanigher had her making references to teenaged pursuits like dancing, dating, and listening to “platters.” But she was always a pale shadow of her older self, in contrast to Superboy, whose small-town background gave him a little distinction from his mature persona. So, in 1966, fading sales on WONDER WOMAN impelled Kanigher to make a show of dumping WG1 and many other wacky creations out of the comic. The gesture didn’t prevent the writer-editor from losing his access to the venerable Amazon property. Yet just as WG1 was being knocked off, her sort-of doppelganger, Wonder Girl II, debuted in TEEN TITANS.

In the first appearance of the TITANS, three kid sidekicks—Robin, Kid Flash, and Aqualad—assembled to fight a menace. Writer Bob Haney and artist Bruno Premiani made them all look like they were in the thirteen-year range, but this didn’t last long. In the group’s second appearance, WG2—who was never decisively stated to share the complicated origins of WG1—joined the group, and remained a member for the series’ initial run, and later revivals as well. Yet from WG2’s debut in the TITANS title, the artist did not follow Kanigher’s lead in terms of putting WG2 in a baggy toga. Instead she wore a version of Wonder Woman’s costume that conformed to the contours of her body. Naturally, the new character began with the same modest breasts of other DC heroines. But unlike her predecessor, her costume was tight enough to demonstrate that at least she HAD boobs.

By the end of the sixties, WG2, like both Wonder Woman and Supergirl, became better endowed. Further, Catwoman returned to the comics, and some new characters were breast-monsters from the first, like the Barbara Gordon Batgirl and the vampy Legionnaire Dream Girl. All of which just proves the non-existent adage, “You can’t keep a good--” …no, I just can’t say it. I invite my few readers to write their own bad pun.