Investigating Lois Lane by Tim Hanley

Lois Lane is one of the most recognized names among superhero comic book characters even though she is not a superhero. The intrepid reporter made has been around for more than 80 years, and her history is recounted by Tim Hanley in Investigating Lois Lane.

Lois was not in the original Superman stories created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. As they worked and reworked the character, setting and supporting cast in an attempt to come up with something that would sell, they took inspiration or the girl reporter movies of the time to add a love interest for the man of steel. Several popular movies in the mid-1930s featured smart, tough, fast-talking, blonde female reporters such as Torchy Blane, a character that premiered in 1937’s Smart Blonde.

Schuster’s innovation was to make Lois brunette. He took inspiration from Jolan (Joanne) Kovacs, a high school student in Cleveland who advertised herself for modeling.  Schuster was apparently smitten with her—she was his model Lois, and all his other heroines resembled Lois—and they stayed in touch as she moved around the country pursuing her modeling career. They met up again in New York after World War II. He invited her to a ball—even rented a gown for her. Jerry Siegel was there, too, and she left with him. Siegel left his wife and young son to marry Kovaks.

Not only was Lois a career woman, an unusual thing when she premiered with Superman in 1938, she was also headstrong, cunning, independent and determined to become a top reporter. However, the writers of Lois’ stories were men; the first Lois Lane story written by a woman, Tasmyn O’Flynn, was published in 1982.  Though she remained a working woman, she was often depicted as a damsel in distress or a love-struck cheerleader for Superman.

Depictions of Lois changed over time as the status of women changed in American society. Sometimes she was at the forefront, as she briefly was in the women’s liberation movement during the 1970s. Other time she lagged and reflecting traditional role for women, or Superman and others shamed her unfeminine ambition. Too often she was simply a background player in Superman stories, even though she was more than able to carry a story on her own in the hands of writers who cared.

Such ups and downs will likely be Lois’ fate for a while. We can hope that she get the treatment she deserves with stories that let her shine.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer

The Caped Crusade by Glen Weldon

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

Reckless by Chrissie Hynde

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Seduction of the Innocent by Max Allan Collins

Suggestible You by Erik Vance

The Supergirls by Mike Madrid

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Why Comics? by Hilary Chute

Hanley, Tim. Investigating Lois Lane: The Turbulent History of the Daily Planet’s Ace Reporter. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014.

The Computers of Star Trek by Lois Gresh & Robert Weinberg

Star Trek fans, I’m one of them, have praised the show for the way it has anticipated technology. It used to be quite the thing to compare a flip phone to the Trek communicator.

However, have you ever watched a rerun of the show and seen something that now seems quaint, even ridiculous, especially when it comes to computers? Back in 1999, Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg published observations like this, along with a few kudos for the shows, in The Computers of Star Trek.

The book covers episodes from the original series (TOS), The Next Generation (TNG), Deep Space Nine, Voyager and the films through Insurrection. While all the series, even the more recent prequel series Enterprise, depict a technologically advance future, none are focused on technology. They are more focused on telling stories that deal with the social issues in the periods in which they were made.

Gresh and Weinberg note this: Trek computers are mainly supersized versions of the computers of the time the show is made. In some ways, the Federation computers in the show are throwbacks to 1970s and earlier era mainframes, even though smaller, networked computers were becoming the dominant model when the revival series started in the late 1980s. This continued even as the Internet emerged and became part of the popular culture.

Of course the producers of the show aren’t especially interested in how computers actually work; they want to make an entertaining TV show and sometimes explore what is going on the society around them through the lens of a fictional future. Trek is interesting in this regard because it shows the attitudes of people about computers over time. In TOS computers are regarded with skepticism: computers break down, Spock is a hacker who takes over the ship, artificial intelligences take over planets but get fried by the illogic of emotions. By the time of TNG, computers are ubiquitous and acceptable—everyone uses them—but the threat of the Borg show concerns that computers might take over our lives and cause us to be depersonalized, destroying our individual identities.

An almost 20 year old book can’t help to be out of date, and the authors inevitably miss on some predictions. For instance, in their criticism of Trek’s take on medicine (not very advanced at all except when it is practically magic), the mention Army research into smart shirts that will monitor wearers for vital signs and injuries. It was a tee shirt with sewn in sensors that could be made for $30 (in 1998 dollars). Though we now have a lot of wearable technology, hospitals, soldiers and health nuts aren’t making use of cheap tees that keep track of their status moment by moment.

I don’t bring this up to knock the authors’ predictions. It’s hard to predict the future, especially by projecting from the current state of the art. Trek writers arguably haven’t tried very hard, but the show really isn’t about technology anyway.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in:

A Little History of Science by William Bynum

Ada's Algorithm by James Essinger

How to Build an Android by David F. Dufty

I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Gresh, Lois, & Robert Weinberg. The Computers of Star Trek. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Making the American Body by Jonathan Black

In Making the American Body, journalist Jonathan Black explores the history of health and fitness from aerobics to Zumba. Promotion of physical fitness goes back to the founding of the United States; Black notes that Benjamin Franklin praised the use of dumbbells. Franklin was known to be a fan of swimming, too. It began to gain some momentum in the middle 1800s when German immigrants brought the gymnasium (they called it a Turnverein) to the U.S.

I was draw to the book because it has a touch of Missouriana in the person of Bernarr Macfadden, self-proclaimed “Father of Physical Culture.” Macfadden had a classic story of the early bodybuilder. He was a sick, weak kid from the Ozarks who was transformed into a paragon of masculine pulchritude by his commitment to weight training, healthy eating and clean living. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Macfadden believed clean living included an active sex life and he campaigned against prudery. His magazines, headed by Physical Culture, featured photographs of nearly naked men and women in swimsuits.

Fitness promotion is a small world, and many of its leading figures are connected. Macfadden organized a contest (probably fixed) that crowned Charles Atlas the “World’s Most Beautiful Man.” Atlas’ ads in pulp magazines and comic books are probably some of the most well-known ever, especially the bully of the beach ad. The story of this ad, told in comics form, is based on a real event in Atlas’ life when he was shamed by a muscular life guard for his scrawny form and weakness while on a date at the beach.

Macfadden and many others were inspired by Prussian strongman Sandow. They saw him at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, where his show was produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr.

California became a focus of health and fitness trend that would spread across the country. Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach was a place for weight lifters and gymnasts to have fun and show off. Steve Reeves, known for playing Hercules in several films, was a product of Muscle Beach. Jack LaLanne, another wimpy kid transformed, opened gyms, brought workouts to television, and encouraged women to exercise and do strength training.

Other trends gained popularity, especially fitness focused on cardiovascular health. This brought into popular culture Dr. Kenneth Cooper, a physician to astronauts whose 1968 book Aerobics launched an industry. That industry provided a career for Richard Simmons and a second career for Jane Fonda, who was the first to emphasize exercise as a way for women to lose weight (though this was an unspoken appeal long before the 1970s). Bodybuilding made a comeback, though, especially fueled by the popularity of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I’m not especially interested in the health and fitness industry, but I found this book to be very interesting. It provides a historical context for many of the health and fitness trends that are still part of American culture.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson with Miriam Z. Klipper

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Black, Jonathan. Making the American Body: The Remarkable Saga of the Men and Women Whose Feats, Feuds, and Passions Shaped Fitness History. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.

Why Comics? by Hilary Chute

I enjoyed reading comic books as a kid. Sometimes I enjoy reading them as an adult. Comics have always been for adults (and kids, too). While popular superhero comics have told stories of the physical and moral paragons of our fantasies, comics have also been a place accessible to those who didn’t see themselves represented in other media. The combination of words and pictures, sometimes more of a juxtaposition, that are the language of comics can powerfully present a point of view. Hilary Chute considers the power of comics to communicate the experience of individuals and subcultures in Why Comics?

While Chute focuses on comic books, she considers cartooning more broadly, especially the early cartoons that appeared in British magazines (quickly imitated in the U.S.) and the American newspaper comic strip. While some newspaper comics were designed to appeal to kids, many were meant to attract adult readers. They often depicted people from poor and immigrant communities. In addition, cartooning could also be very artistic and even in the early days of comic strips some artists were recognized for the quality of their images and storytelling, such as Winsor McCay and George Herriman.

Because Chute generally focuses on groups that were historically or currently marginalized, much of the book focuses on underground and independent comics. I’ll admit that I’ve not particularly been a fan of underground comics. My earliest introduction to underground comics in the 1980s was mostly to 1960s and 1970s books that featured drug culture and bizarre or pornographic depictions of sex. In the subsequent years, I’ve come across some incredibly good underground, literary or artistic comics. Chute discusses some of them such as Art Spieglman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor. I’m a Midwesterner and I was amazed to see Pekar’s depictions of scenes I might see in my own town.

Comics were born as a mass media, which may explain some of the stigma attached to them, and mainstream comics have always been produced in factory-like manor with a division of labor (writer, penciler, inker, etc.). Some creators were uncredited, or one name appeared on the work of many (this practice was common in the newspaper comic strips, too). Undeground and art comics were more often the work of an auteur, who produced the entire work. This opened up comics to more individual perspectives that strayed farther from the mainstream. Comics can powerfully represent personal experience or memories because it is like memory: it mixes words and images, it can readily present comparisons and contrasts, and it can show past, present, future, real and imagined on the same page.

I don’t plan on adding a lot of underground comics to my reading list, but I did enjoy Chute’s book. If someone is looking for an introduction to comics that are outside the mainstream and done well, Why Comics? is a good place to start.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Amazing Fantastic Incredible by Stan Lee, Peter David & Colleen Doran

American Splendor

The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Stan Lee by Bob Batchelor

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Chute, Hilary. Why Comics?: From Underground to Everywhere. New York: Harper, 2017.

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe

Marvel Comics has a long history in comic books, especially superhero comics. It’s first superheroes, the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, debuted in 1939 and the company is currently unrolling popular series of films based on a The Avengers, a superhero team that first appeared in comics in 1963.

The extended, interconnected, iterative melodrama of Marvel’s comics is a complicated fictional world. The real-world company has a complicated history, too. It started as a scion of a pulp magazine publisher seeking diversify and is now a part of media powerhouse Walt Disney Company. Sean Howe provides a detailed history of the company in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

Howe divides the history of the Marvel into five major ages. He discusses the early history of the company, but Marvel as we know it today could mark its origins in the resurgence of superhero comics of the early 1960s, after a post-World War II slump that all but the most popular titles.

The succeeding ages roughly correspond to the decades. The 1960s marked the birth of modern Marvel. The 1970s were a time of artistic experimentation when comics, especially Marvel, were embraced on college campus and in the counterculture.

In the 1980s, kids who grew up reading Marvel became adults writing the comics. It was also a time when corporate culture began to consume the company—though the priority of making money, executive interference and possibly shady business was something that went back to the days of the pulps. This decade also marked a change in the way comics were sold, shifting from newsstands and grocery-store spinners to specialty shops, which created opportunities and problems for comics publishers.

The 1990s was a period of excess. Comics creators were finally making money (at least some of them were), but old contentions between publishers—especially Marvel—and writers and artists led to the rise of superstars spinning off to publish works to which they would retain the rights. The growth in comics collecting encouraged marketing practice, especially at Marvel, that eventually led to a bust.

Throughout this time, Marvel’s various owners had been attempting to transition the company from a comics publisher to a media company that leveraged its intellectual property in many ways. In the 2000s, Marvel has done that. A criticism often leveled against Marvel today is that the comics are driven by decisions to make the characters marketable in other media, especially movies and toys.

Comics have come a long way since I started reading them as a kid. For one thing, they cost 10 times as much. Howe wraps up with the opinion that Marvels products are better, and in some ways I agree. However, I think comics often uses the words mature and adult when they are simply prurient, and that the improvement in printing quality is not always accompanied by improvements in story or art. I have mixed feelings about the multi-issues stories designed for collection into graphic novels aimed at book retailers, but I think the event-driven mega-crossovers that have become standard for Marvel and DC don’t move me much—I’d rather read a good short story than an overblown novel.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Amazing Fantastic Incredible by Stan Lee, Peter David & Colleen Doran

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

1939 by David Gelernter

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Howe, S. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. New York: HarperCollins, 2012.

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

Lithium is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. It is also in important part of the small, light, energy-packed rechargeable batteries that make our portable devices possible. It is also likely an important part of future batteries that might make longer-running electric cars and large-scale energy storage possible. Journalist Seth Fletcher describes the history of lithium as a battery material, especially in batteries for electric and hybrid cars, in Bottled Lightning.

Fletcher goes way back to the batteries made by Alessandro Volta in 1800 and, possibly more important, the first rechargeable batteries made by Gaston Planté in 1859 (a lead acid battery).

Fletcher treats this older history briefly. Like his readers, he is not as interested in batteries as in the uses of energy batteries enable. One of these uses is transportation. Many early cars were electric vehicles (EVs) that were powered by batteries. The technology of the time required large batters to hold relatively modest charges, which limited the range of the cars. Gasoline held much more energy than batteries, was widely available and cheap. For most motorists, gasoline beat batteries hands down.

Of course, priorities and technologies change. The energy crisis of the 1970s, along with a growing environmental movement, pressured automakers to develop electric car concepts. The technology of the time probably wasn’t up to the task for what most drivers wanted, and in combination with a return of low oil prices and automotive industry inertia the electric car development of that era came to an end.

Technology rolled on, as it does, and the development of cell phones—and the portable, networked computers they have become—put pressure on the battery industry to come up with lighter, longer lasting, rechargeable batteries. They found the answer in lithium-based batteries, especially the lithium-ion type that is common today.

When the automakers were again needing to look at alternatives to oil, mostly for fuel economy and emission control reasons, the new lithium-ion batteries changed the equation for the effectiveness and affordability of electric and hybrid cars. It is yet to become cheap, as attested by the price of the high-end electric cars made by Tesla. Even cars marketed for the mass market like the Chevy Volt is expensive without subsidies. (The Volt is technically a plug-in hybrid, but for the majority of drivers who travel less than forty miles a day it can be all-electric.)

There is a lot of potential for advance batteries becoming the industrial driver of the future. A growing electric car market will create a demand for a lot of batteries. The increased uses of renewable energy, and the eventual retirement of coal-burning and other fuel-consuming power plants, depends on energy storage to even out the waxing and waning of energy sources that vary with the cycles of the sun and the whims of the weather. The 2009 stimulus bill put a lot of money into new battery research and manufacturing, but Asia is still ahead of the U.S. in manufacturing capacity if not in innovation. If America wants a piece of this revolution (we’re going to buy a lot of these batteries, so maybe we should reap some of the benefits of making them), we’ll need to invest in these industries (as China is) and not leave to Asian manufacturers to lengthen their lead.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

Technology in World Civilization by Arnold Pacey

Fletcher, Seth. Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cards, and the New Lithium Economy. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011.

Reckless by Chrissie Hynde

As I get older, I start noticing some strange connections. If Peter Parker aged naturally, he’d be the same age as my father. I also learned that Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders (one of my favorite bands), is only three years younger than my parents. I can hardly believe it, though there is an unreliable part of my mind that seems convinced that I’m still in my early 20s.

This bit about Hynde’s age is hardly the most interesting thing in her autobiography, Reckless. You find many things you normally find in autobiographies. For instance, her early childhood in Ohio was surprisingly and pleasantly normal.

Things get more interesting in her teen years. She became a teenager in the 1960s and she was swept up into the youth culture of the time. She had two loves, music and drugs.

Hynde did a lot of drugs. She doesn’t dwell on the term addiction, but she doesn’t hide that she clearly was addicted. She subjected to herself to may dangers and abuses for the sake of getting high. A person would not do that if she was thinking straight, but addicts don’t think straight.

Unfortunately, drugs got in the way of the music. Drugs took the lives of many innovative musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, and Hynde mentions many of them that she knew. Two members of the Pretenders, Jimmy Scott and Pete Farndon, died of drug-related causes. It seems that there are several occasions in her story, before the Pretenders, when her dream of being in a band was interrupted by drugs, either her own pursuit of them or her potential bandmates’.

Hynde was adventurous. She traveled far from her childhood home in Akron to Canada, Mexico and France before settling in London. London became her home, largely because of the music scene. There she finally put together a band, though an unusual British band with an American lead. She met an amazing number of other musicians, famous then or later, who were there. It may seem like name dropping to discuss the Clash or the Sex Pistols, but these were people she knew and she lived their ups and downs with them.

The final section of the book, covering the career of the Pretenders, is surprisingly short. Admittedly, the original line-up did not last long due to the deaths of Scott and Farndon.

Hynde’s tone is not nostalgic. She has nostalgia for a Midwestern urbanism that was almost dead by the time she came along. She speaks frankly about her own days. She expresses a strong sense of agency and does not blame anyone for the way they treated her or depict herself as a victim. She seems to regret that the drugs people thought would set them free did not, and that as addicts they kept using drugs long after they knew it was a trap.

If you’re interested in rock and roll (and rhythm and blues and punk), you’ll likely enjoy this book. Hynde clearly loves this music and was around when it was undergoing much innovation. She was friends with some of the first stars of punk. He story is also an interesting section of the 1960s and 1970s. For instance, she was a student at Kent State University and witnessed the protests and other events that led to the National Guard firing on students.

If you’r interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Hynde, Chrissie. Reckless: My Life as a Pretender. New York: Doubleday, 2015.

Waste and Want by Susan Strasser

An old proverb relates trash and treasure as a matter of perspective. In Waste and Want, Susan Strasser describes American’s changing perspectives on waste from the colonial era to our own day.

In the colonial and revolutionary period of American history, manufactured objects were rare and expensive. Repair and mending were common even among the wealthy because it was difficult and costly to replace objects. In addition, the various types of home industry practiced by both men and women equipped them with skills in handling materials that made them adept at repair. Even when and object was beyond repair, it parts, or the material it was made of, might be usefully repurposed themselves or as part of an assembly. This lack of goods and facility with handling materials made bricolage common. Because things had durable value, people had a sense of stewardship relating to them.

Strasser establishes this as a beginning state. The development of industry and consumerism led to a current state in which all of these have been reversed. We have an abundance of goods, and many of them are inexpensive. We work in factories and offices where we do not develop skills for repair, and particularly have lost familiarity with materials needed for practical bricolage. These and other forces, particularly those related to health and cleanliness, have resulted in waste being something of the home where additional value may be extracted to something that is the realm of specialists that is taken away and handled by government agencies or specialized companies.

There are many stages in this development. It is interesting to me that the value of household waste as raw materials American industry provided a mechanism for poor and rural people to purchase manufactured goods. Even so, as industrialization made more goods available, along with larger quantities of more manageable waste, household waste became less valuable, and reuse and recycling became associated with poverty.

By the end of the 1920s, consumer culture was established in America, and it reinforced the trends identified by Strasser.  Planned obsolescence was developed in the automotive industry, and along with the craze for fashion, it took hold for almost all consumer goods. Even during the Great Depression, when lack of credit and unemployment made doing it yourself attractive, there was an assumption that people had access to new and old consumer goods and their packaging. Even during this period of economic distress, demand for certain types of consumer goods grew. Thrift was reimaged for a consumer age. For instance, refrigerators became commonplace, and instead of being presented as luxury items they were sold on the notion of thrift, allowing housewives to save on food by keeping leftovers and buying in bulk.

People were encouraged to conserve and recycle to support the war effort during World War II. However, this did little to reverse changing attitudes that valued the new over the old and saw little value in trash. People had jobs and money, and wartime rationing created a pent up demand for goods that was unleased after the war. Disposable goods and packaging represented cleanliness and convenience; it was freedom from dirt and drudgery. There was no value in trash, which was taken away by collectors.

There were reactions against this even in the 1950s. They grew into the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, which were skeptical of corporations and consumerism. The environmental movement also grew out of this counterculture. Reuse of second-hand goods became more acceptable for even middle-class families, though few had the skills needed to rework these items to make them seem new or adapt them to current fashion. Little used goods were seen to have some value that could be recovered through yard sales. (I grew up on a stretch of highway that now boasts and annual 100 mile yard sale.)

This counterculture has not resulted in a broad return to a stewardship of things. Strasser suggests that a rising ethic of environmental or resource stewardship may lead to the mitigation of problems related to the abundant trash created by disposable and rapidly obsolete goods. There is no turning back, but we might find new reasons and ways to reduce use, reuse, and recycle.

Stasser, Susan. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Wonder Woman is one of most popular comic book characters. Because she is about to be featured in a film that will bring Batman and Superman together in epic battle, and is expected to be featured in a film of her own, the Internet is already beginning to buzz with concern over how badly she may be portrayed and hopes that the filmmakers will get her right. She has starred in some great stories, but often the stories about her have disappointed for various reasons. The difficulty of depicting a woman superhero has its roots in sorting out the roles of women in society, something we’re still working on. It is a struggle Wonder Woman was born to fight.

Jill Lepore explores the birth of this female superhero in The Secret History of Wonder Woman. In one of her various comics origins, the demigoddess was formed from the mud of Paradise Island, but Lepore describes how she was formed in the suffrage and feminist movements of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and an unusual family with strong ties to these movements.

Wonder Woman first appeared in print in 1941. When she became the title character of her own comic, her creator came from behind his pseudonym, with some fanfare, and revealed himself as psychologist William Moulton Marston.

Marston’s lifestyle is known now, but it was a closely held secret during his lifetime. For all practical purposes, if not legally, he had two wives. Surprisingly, both women were feminists. They both loved Marston and found in this arrangement a way to live the lives they wanted. They had a pragmatic, flexible feminism that was accepting of the unconventional. I can hardly do it justice in a few words, but Lepore explores the early days of feminism that shaped the arrangement Marston had with these two women.

Marston met Elizabeth Holloway while they were undergraduates, he at Harvard and she at Mount Holyoke. They were both advocates of women’s suffrage. They married in 1915. Marston received a doctorate and Holloway a master’s degree. Holloway claimed to be deeply involved in Marston’s early research. The Marston household became full of writers and editors, and overtime attribution became a matter of convenience or marketing rather than identification of individual authorship.

Olive Byrne met Marston as an undergraduate at Tufts, where she became his research assistant. She quickly became more and moved into the Marston household. Eventually they worked out the arrangement that Holloway would work full-time (over time she had several jobs as an editor) while Byrne raised the children (each had two children with Marston). Byrne eventually felt the need to contribute the finances and in the 1930s wrote for Family Circle as Oliver Richards (Richards from the marriage and widowhood she faked to obscure the parentage of her children). Byrne, like the Marstons she joined, had ties to the feminist and birth control movements. She was the daughter of Ethel Byrne  and her aunt was the more famous Margaret Sanger.

Holloway, Byrne, and even Sanger, were to varying degrees the models for Wonder Woman. She was to be feminist propaganda, and under Marston’s pen she was. One would guess that this would have attracted criticism, but it was not the feminism of Wonder Woman that most stirred up critics.

Bondage was depicted on almost every page of Marston’s comics. In addition, Wonder Woman’s costume was skimpy. Lepore links the bondage in these comics to the use of bondage as a symbol used by suffragists and feminists. Sometimes Marston drew very consciously on images associated with these movements. In addition, the bondage represented notions of domination and submission rooted in Marston’s theories of personality and the relationship between the sexes. Bonds, and the breaking of them, represented the misappropriation of power by men and the power of women to free themselves and take their place as leaders in society. Similarly, Wonder Woman’s bare limbs were emblematic of her athleticism, strength, power and essential equality to make heroes. It’s hard to say that the depiction of Wonder Woman is completely free of sexual undertone, Marston wanted her to be beautiful. Lepore shows the clear link between the symbolism of Wonder Woman and the symbolism  of suffrage and feminism that Marston consciously referenced.

When Marston passed away in 1947, Wonder Woman fell into the hands of writers and editors who did not share his vision. She hasn’t been the same since. After World War II, the feminism she represented was not welcome in the broader culture or by the men who wrote her comics. Even after the second wave of feminism adopted her as an emblem in the 1970s, she’s not been quite at home. Perhaps we’ll have trouble getting Wonder Woman right as long as we have conflict about the roles of women in our culture.

If you’re interested in either comics or feminism, I recommend Lepore’s book. It is thoroughly researched and thoroughly readable.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Lepore, Jill. The Secret History of Wonder Woman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.