Publication History of Wonder Woman - The Golden Age

The Golden Age

Wonder Woman was introduced in All Star Comics #8 (December 1941), during the era known to comics historians as the "Golden Age of Comic Books". Following this auspicious debut, she was featured in Sensation Comics #1 (January 1942), and six months later appeared in her own book (Summer 1942). Wonder Woman took her place beside the extant superheroines or antiheroes Fantomah, Black Widow, Invisible Scarlet O'Neil, and Canada's Nelvana of the Northern Lights. Until his death in 1947, Dr. William Moulton Marston wrote all of the Wonder Woman stories. H. G. Peter penciled the book in a simplistic yet easily identifiable style.

Armed with bulletproof bracelets, magic lasso, and Amazonian training, Wonder Woman was the archetype of Marston's perfect woman. In Wonder Woman's origin story, Steve Trevor, an intelligence officer in the United States Army, crashed his plane on Paradise Island, the Amazons' isolated homeland. Using a "Purple Ray", Princess Diana nursed him back to health and fell in love with him. When the goddess Aphrodite declared that it was time for an Amazon to travel to "Man's World" and fight the evil of the Nazis, a tournament was held to determine who would be the Amazon champion. Although forbidden by her mother Queen Hippolyte to participate in the tournament, Princess Diana did so nevertheless, her identity hidden by a mask.

After Diana won the tournament and revealed her true identity, Queen Hippolyte relented and allowed her daughter to become Wonder Woman. Diana returned Steve Trevor to the outside world and soon adopted the identity of Army nurse Lt. Diana Prince (by taking the place of her exact double by that name) in order to be close to Trevor as he recovered from his injuries. Afterward, he became Wonder Woman's crime-fighting partner and romantic interest.

In her guise as a nurse, Diana cares for Trevor and frequently overhears his intelligence discussions, allowing her to know where she is needed. Prince is eventually hired to work for Trevor in the War Department as his assistant. Trevor periodically suspects that Diana and Wonder Woman might be the same person, especially since he frequently catches Diana using her tiara or lasso.

Wonder Woman was ably assisted by the Holliday Girls, a sorority from a local women's college led by the sweets-addicted Etta Candy. Etta stood out for several reasons: she had a distinctive figure, she occupied a central role in many storylines, and had an endearing propensity for exclaiming "woo-woo" (which echoed the "hoo-hoo" catchphrase associated with the popular vaudevillian comedian Hugh Herbert). Etta took her place with Steve Trevor and Diana as the series' most enduring characters.

During 1942 to 1947, images of bound and gagged women frequently graced the covers of Sensation Comics and Wonder Woman. In Wonder Woman #3, Wonder Woman herself ties up several women, dresses them in deer costumes and chases them through the forest. Later she rebinds them and displays them on a platter. In addition, Diana is rendered powerless if a male manages to chain her bracelets together. The comic's sexual subtext has been noted, leading to debates over whether it provided an outlet for Dr. Marston's sexual fantasies or whether it was meant (perhaps unconsciously) to appeal to, and possibly influence, the developing sexuality of young readers.

The bondage and submission elements had a broader context for Marston, who had worked as a prison psychologist. The themes were intertwined with his theories about the rehabilitation of criminals, and from her inception, Wonder Woman wanted to reform the criminals she captured (a rehabilitation complex was created by the Amazons on Transformation Island, a small island near Paradise Island). A core component in Marston's conception of Wonder Woman was "loving submission", in which kindness to others would result in willing submission derived from agape based on Moulton's own personal philosophies.

During this period Wonder Woman joined the Justice Society of America featured in All Star Comics as its first female member. Reflecting the mores of this pre-feminist era, Wonder Woman served as the group's secretary, despite being one of the group's most powerful members.

A Wonder Woman newspaper comic strip was produced in 1944 but lasted less than a year.

Upon William Moulton Marston's death in 1947, Robert Kanigher took up the writing duties on Wonder Woman. Diana was written as a less feminist character, and began to resemble other traditional American heroines. Peter produced the art on the title through issue #97, when the elderly artist was fired (he died soon afterward). During this time, Diana's abilities expanded. Her earrings provided her the air she needed to breathe in outer space, and she piloted an "invisible plane", originally a propeller-driven P-40 Warhawk or P-51 Mustang, later upgraded to a jet aircraft. Her tiara was an unbreakable boomerang, and a two-way wrist radio similar to Dick Tracy's was installed in one of her bracelets, allowing her to communicate with Paradise Island.

Dr. Fredric Wertham's controversial and influential Seduction of the Innocent (1954) argued that comic books contributed to juvenile delinquency, and alleged that there was a lesbian subtext to the relationship between Wonder Woman and the Holliday girls. Reacting to Wertham's critique and well-publicized Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency, several publishers organized the Comics Code Authority as a form of preemptive self-censorship. Due to a confluence of forces (amongst them the Code and the loss of Marston as writer), Wonder Woman no longer spoke out as a strong feminist; she began to moon over Steve Trevor, and, as time wore into the Silver Age, also fell for Merman and Birdman.