Polyamory and the Secret History of Wonder Woman

wonder womanSnow is falling, and I am elbow deep in putting together the next Bulletin for the Study of Religion, which among other things carries an article called “What is a Superhero? How Myth Can Be a Metacode,” by Kenneth MacKendrick of the University of Manitoba.

So, with comics on the mind, here is “The Surprising Origin Story of Wonder Woman.

Back story? Oh yes, not to mention polyamory, eugenics, and chains.

Some of [the comic books] are full of torture, kidnapping, sadism, and other cruel business,” she said.

“Unfortunately, that is true,” Marston admitted, but “when a lovely heroine is bound to the stake, comics followers are sure that the rescue will arrive in the nick of time. The reader’s wish is to save the girl, not to see her suffer.”

2 thoughts on “Polyamory and the Secret History of Wonder Woman

  1. Pingback: The Surprising Origin Story of Wonder Woman | Robert Mitchell Jr.

  2. My sense is that, all in all, Marston’s Wonder Woman probably did not have much influence on an emerging post-WWII North American Pagan sensibility. Because comics were controversial and associated with pop culture depravity during the 50s-60s. And Wonder Woman was a girl in a boy’s comics world.

    Of more interest, to me, at least, to the development of post-
    WWII Pagan sensibility is the run of Trina Robbins on the Wonder Woman comic. First woman to draw the character. And drawing on underground, feminist, and Pagan roots…I think that Trina was making the boy’s world of comics into a boys and girls together world.

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