The earliest mention of them appears in Homer’s Iliad. She was portrayed as an Amazon, harkening to the warrior women Amazons of Grecian myth, who were second only to Hercules in popularity on vases depicting mythology.
Indeed, Wonder Woman was highly Grecian-and not only because of Marston’s allusions to his fraternity in the early comics. Wonder Woman-who Marston initially named “Suprema, the Wonder Woman” before his editor Sheldon Mayer, who’d also edited Superman, told him to cut “Suprema”-was explicitly American, her red, white, and blue outfit meant to parallel the then-new Captain America’s hyper-patriotic palette, but she was an American from the Mediterranean. Marston was already drawing parallels to gods from classical Greek literature.
“As lovely as Aphrodite-as wise as Athena-with the speed of Mercury and the strength of Hercules,” Marston, then writing under the penname Charles Moulton, proclaimed her in an introductory text above the opening panel of a comic in Sensation Comics #8, in which the striking new character-“a woman to whom the problems and feats of men are mere child’s play”-debuted.
Peter, made Wonder Woman’s literary connections clear. When the Amazonian heroine shouts “suffering Sappho!”-perhaps her most emblematic exclamation-this is no coincidence she was indeed built from the fragmentary poems of Sappho of Lesbos, alongside many other texts.įrom the beginning, Marston and the comic’s first artist, Harry G. If Wonder Woman has her origins in Paradise Island, the island itself-and its wondrous women alike-owe a debt to Greek epics, feminist utopian novels, and queer literature. “Wonder Woman was from the start a character founded in scholarship,” Phi Beta Kappa’s-Marston’s beloved fraternity- The Key Reporter declared in 1942, echoing this sentiment. (That the upcoming Wonder Woman film is the character’s first solo cinematic venture, despite her great fame, says much.) Marston was both right and wrong: his was the age of the rise of the more socially conscious, so-called “new woman” in the United States, yet Wonder Woman herself was only new in a visual, cultural-iconic sense, for she had been born from a long history of literary and political texts. “Frankly,” Marston-who created the lie detection test and was obsessed with bondage-said, “Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.” It was a telling, if ironic, statement: the Wonder Woman comics, from their birth in 1941, had always been about restoring sociopolitical power to women, yet these early texts were created predominantly by men.ĭespite this, Wonder Woman undoubtedly brightened the thunderous days of war for many American female readers of comics, as she seemed to show what we still, revealingly, struggle with today: that a woman could star in a successful franchise without it being directed primarily at any gender demographic.
Six months before the Second World War came to an end, William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman-both comics and character-declared his intention for the iconic comics.
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