Wonder Woman Unbound Page 13
Star Sapphire
Carol Ferris first appeared in Showcase Comics #22 in September 1959 as the daughter of the boss of Green Lantern’s alter ego, the test pilot Hal Jordan. Early in the issue, Hal asked Carol out on a date, but later that day her father announced that he was going to travel around the world for two years and that Carol would be in charge of the company. When Hal later asked Carol if they were still going out that evening, she replied, “Mr. Jordan, puh-lease! From now on the relations between us will be strictly business!” Hal tried to change her mind, but she stated, “During the next two years I’ll have absolutely no time for romance! I’m your boss. Mr. Jordan—and that’s orders!”
In her first appearance, Carol appeared to break out of the Silver Age mold. She purposefully set aside romance in favor of a career, and a very high-powered one at that, and committed herself wholly to her job. While other female characters were wrapped up in relationships with domineering boyfriends and wishing they could trade their careers for marriage, Carol did the opposite and swore off men so she could best run her company. It was a remarkably progressive stance, and it lasted for two-thirds of an issue.
By the end of Showcase Comics #22, Carol was out on a terrace kissing Green Lantern, and two issues later she was sure that he was going to propose to her and was terribly excited to accept. Naturally, he didn’t propose, and instead a classic love triangle was born. Carol loved Green Lantern, and he loved her too but wanted Carol to love his alter ego, Hal, not his superpowered self.
Carol immediately became fixated on the notion of marrying Green Lantern, and in Green Lantern #1* thought to herself while sitting in her office, “Night and day … day and night … all I think about is Green Lantern! I wonder if my dream will ever come true … and that someday he and I will marry?” Her commitment to her job had faded; instead of working, she was daydreaming. Soon she even rescinded her dating embargo on Hal and the two sporadically went out on the town. Carol the high-powered businesswoman very quickly turned into Carol the love interest.
The narration of the series unsubtly reinforced this role; in Green Lantern #7, Carol was on another date with Hal, and an editor’s note stated, “Carol Ferris, in the absence of her father, is in sole charge of the Ferris Aircraft Company where Hal works! Nominally, therefore, she is Hal’s boss … but actually, and mainly, she is his romantic interest!” Several issues later, Carol was described as “the young and pretty ‘boss’ of the Ferris Aircraft Company,” with boss in quotation marks.
However, the narrow scope of her character was given the opportunity to grow when she became the villainous Star Sapphire. In Green Lantern #16, Carol was kidnapped by a race of alien women called the Zamarons, who told her that she would be their new queen. The Zamarons were described as coming “from a world tremendously in advance of ours scientifically! A place inhabited solely by women! And if what they say is true, they are all immortal.”† There was only one caveat to their immortality: their queen was mortal. Whenever their queen died, the Zamarons scoured the universe to find a woman who was the exact physical duplicate of their queen, and that woman happened to be Carol. They wanted to take Carol back to their planet, where she would be crowned Queen Star Sapphire and rule their advanced world. To a business-minded woman involved in the high-tech aerospace industry, becoming queen of the Zamarons would be the biggest promotion possible. On Earth, she was already in charge of her company and had essentially reached the top of the ladder. Leading the technologically advanced Zamarons was a significant step up and a great honor, which Carol promptly refused.
She just couldn’t bear to leave the man she loved and wanted to stay on Earth with Green Lantern. But the Zamarons were persistent, declaring, “As our future queen you must be made to realize, highness, how far superior even the lowest Zamaron is to any man— no matter who he be!” The Zamarons thought that if Carol could see that the powers of the Star Sapphire were greater than those of the Green Lantern, she wouldn’t be in love with him anymore, and so they gave Carol superpowers and manufactured a confrontation.
The powers gave Carol a split personality, where her Star Sapphire side wanted to defeat Green Lantern but her Carol side wanted him to win. Ultimately, she beat Green Lantern and returned to the Zamaron ship, but instead of agreeing to go with them Carol begged them to give Green Lantern another chance. The Zamarons could barely believe it; one cried out, “She doesn’t seem to realize that men are a distinctly inferior species!” and another chimed in, “She acts as if a man could be something important!” The head Zamaron warrior agreed to give Green Lantern a second chance, and this time he defeated Carol by surrounding her with an impenetrable barrier that cut her off from the source of her powers. Inside this box, she thought, “I feel so weak … so helpless …” but then realizing she was beaten, “I’m defeated! How terrible … no! How wonderful!” The Zamarons, disgusted with Carol, wiped her memory and left her in the middle of the desert while they resumed their quest for a queen.
When the Zamarons departed, they left Carol with the Star Sapphire gem that gave her superpowers. Green Lantern took the gem away from Carol, but in future issues she’d occasionally stumble upon it and again be transformed into Star Sapphire. In one of these adventures, she decided to show up Green Lantern and prove that she was the superior hero to weaken his will so she could convince him to marry her. Her Star Sapphire side only wanted to be queen but her Carol side only wanted to marry Green Lantern, so the two sides reached a compromise whereby Green Lantern could become her consort while she ruled the Zamarons.
Using her impressive powers, Star Sapphire captured a criminal gang before Green Lantern could. She then thwarted an alien attack after Green Lantern’s initial tactic failed. Star Sapphire took advantage of the demoralized Green Lantern’s weak will and convinced him to marry her, but before they were married he wanted to see who Star Sapphire really was. As she took off her mask, he exclaimed “Carol Ferris!”—the magic words for breaking the hold of the Star Sapphire gem—and she reverted to her normal self. Like her previous stint as Star Sapphire, Carol had no recollection of what happened. The story actually ended sweetly, with Green Lantern thinking that it really didn’t matter who married who, Green Lantern and Star Sapphire or Hal and Carol, because it was all the same and he loved her.
Unlike Wonder Woman, Lois, and Supergirl, Carol wasn’t dealing with a selfish, frustrated man. Hal / Green Lantern could be a little brash and arrogant, but he certainly was no Superman or Steve. This change cast Star Sapphire in a slightly different light than the other three females, but at her core she still wanted the same things they did. She just went about it in a more blatant, extreme manner, ratcheting up her efforts to get married. Star Sapphire’s man was far and away the most important thing to her, just like Wonder Woman, Lois, and, albeit in a slightly different way, Supergirl. Star Sapphire actively resisted the superpowers that could defeat the man she loved, only embracing them when she realized she could use them to get Green Lantern to marry her. Even though she was a villain, she remained focused on marriage and the inevitable happy nuclear family it would bring about.
Four of a Kind
Uniformity was the hallmark of female characters in the Silver Age, and the differences between all four of our women were very slight. Their circumstances were varied, but their end goals and their relationships with men followed the same pattern. Rather than presenting readers with an array of the many things women could do or be, every female character was pigeonholed into the same male-dependent role. This uniformity not only narrowly redefined womanhood, it also sucked in Wonder Woman.
The Golden Age Wonder Woman was unique among the diverse female archetypes of the time, combining elements of each into an entirely new sort of character. She wasn’t an exemplar of a larger category of characters, but rather something completely new and different. This distinctiveness was lost for the Silver Age Wonder Woman. She faced the same predicaments as her fellow female characters, and handled them
in the same ways. Wonder Woman wasn’t a critique of male-dominated women any longer, but instead was an embodiment thereof.
*Technically, the cannibal clam should have eaten other clams, but in actuality it seemed to only like to eat humans. This doesn’t make it a cannibal but instead an anthropophagus.
*Bizarro was a craggy, backward version of Superman created by a malfunctioning duplicator ray, who then created a whole race of Bizarros who lived on the planet Htrae (Earth spelled backward).
*When Supergirl’s powers returned, she wasn’t vulnerable to Kryptonite anymore and was thus stronger than Superman; a mischievous troublemaker from the fifth dimension, Mr. Mxyzptlk, had purposely granted her better powers. Noting this, Superman thought, “Now that she’s superior to me, maybe our relationship ought to be reversed! Perhaps I should become her assistant!” But he never did. After two issues, Supergirl’s superior powers disappeared and the original power dynamic was restored, and in those two issues Superman made no further mention of taking on a subordinate role.
*After three issues in Showcase Comics, Green Lantern moved to his own eponymous series in August 1960.
†With their advanced technology and female superiority, these space warriors were an alien analogue of the Amazons. “Zamaron” is even the letters of “Amazon” rearranged, plus an r.
6
Conforming to the Code
Inarguably, the most significant event for comic books in the 1950s was the publication of Seduction of the Innocent. The appearances of comic book publishers at the Senate juvenile delinquency hearings and the subsequent adoption of the Comics Code Authority were both the result of the anti-comics fervor created by Dr. Fredric Wertham’s book. While most of the book dealt with crime and horror comics, Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman were among the very few characters Wertham mentioned by name, and these mentions were in no way complimentary.
The crime and horror comics soon disappeared, wiped out by opportunistic publishers in a mad fervor to appease the public, but the superheroes remained. The genre was again an instant hit, and the new and revised superheroes of the Silver Age embodied the values of the post-Wertham, Comics Code Authority era from their first day. However, Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman had some strong criticisms to deal with. Wertham’s hatchet job on Wonder Woman was particularly brutal, and for the most part the response to his allegations sunk Wonder Woman further into the mire of Silver Age conformity. Nearly everything from the Marston era was lost, but a new subversive element remained.
Fredric Wertham and the Seduction of the Innocent
In the modern comic book community, Fredric Wertham is generally reviled and seen as an alarmist crackpot. This hatred stems from a misunderstanding of Wertham and Seduction of the Innocent; most of those who vilify Wertham think that he believed that comic books directly caused juvenile delinquency and that he wanted to eliminate comic books entirely. While Wertham was prone to hyperbole and overstatement, like in his testimony before the Senate committee, most of his claims weren’t that extreme. Wertham believed that comic books were one of many contributing factors to juvenile delinquency, and the one that could be most easily remedied. The remedy he prescribed wasn’t to eliminate comic books, but rather to put age restrictions on the sale of comic books where the content was of a violent, frightening, or sexual nature. It was a valid idea; crime and horror comics from the early 1950s routinely featured gruesome plot lines and imagery that weren’t suitable for young children, even by today’s standards.
Wertham wasn’t a bad guy. His controversial support for Ethel Rosenberg, his stance against segregated schools, and his mental health work in Harlem all showed a tolerance and liberalism that was ahead of the time. Although he’s most often viewed as a simplistic crusader today, many of Wertham’s arguments were fairly nuanced and his more provocative claims were tempered with reasonable qualifiers. There are many problems with Seduction of the Innocent in terms of Wertham’s research methodology, his focus on sketchy anecdotal evidence, and his blatant sexism and homophobia, but there are interesting points as well, especially about superheroes. People scoff at them today, but he presented some thought-provoking theories.
Superman was one of the heroes singled out by Wertham. “Superman (with the big S on his uniform—we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an S.S.) needs an endless stream of ever new submen, criminals and ‘foreign-looking’ people not only to justify his existence but even to make it possible.” It’s easy to contend that Wertham was just calling Superman a Nazi and a racist, but there was more to his critique than that simple interpretation. Wertham was saying that Superman solved problems with violence, and that this approach taught young readers to acquiesce toward strong, violent people or to become strong, violent people themselves. To Wertham, Superman comics equated violence with power and presented a message that “might makes right.”
Furthermore, Wertham argued that the bad guys Superman defeated, and thus showed to be inferior, were foreign-looking criminals, which is a fair point. Heroes in the Golden Age were handsome men with chiseled, typically Aryan features, while the criminals tended to be unattractive, with exaggerated features that could be read as stereotypical of various ethnicities. One can disagree with Wertham about Superman, but his points weren’t inherently unreasonable. There was more to Wertham than just strong rhetoric.
Nowhere was this truer than with Wertham’s discussion of Batman. Many people think that Wertham claimed that Batman and Robin were gay. It wasn’t that simple: Wertham’s argument was that young readers read homoerotic undertones in Batman and Robin comic books. Wertham described how Batman and Robin were always together and took care of each other, writing that “they live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases, and have a butler, Alfred,” which he called “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.”
But Wertham wasn’t leafing through Batman comics looking for homoerotic subtext and warning the world that it could be dangerous for young readers; his comments on Batman and Robin were rooted in his psychiatric work with gay teenagers who identified Batman and Robin as an example of the lifestyle they desired. Many of these young men wanted a handsome, older man to take care of them and to have fun adventures with before retiring to the mansion for the evening, and Wertham listed several quotes from his patients that said just that.
Of course, being the 1950s, this gay subtext was presented as dangerous for young readers. America was in the midst of a gay panic, worried that if their boys weren’t raised to be strong, manly men then they’d turn into gay psychopaths who molested and murdered children. Homosexuality was seen as unnatural, a psychiatric disorder to be cured rather than something to be in any way accepted or encouraged. Wertham pointed out this subtext as a warning to parents and authorities to prevent these desires from being awakened in other boys.
Apart from his homophobia, though, the research in the Batman and Robin section of Seduction of the Innocent was generally sound, rooted in interviews instead of his own interpretations.* His claim wasn’t that Batman and Robin were gay, but that they were often read as gay, and he had evidence to back it up.
While there were actually well argued, reasonable points in Seduction of the Innocent, when it came to Wonder Woman, Wertham engaged in the sort of poor research and unsubstantiated claims for which he is generally reviled today. Gone were the rational arguments and well-evidenced interpretations of characters.
Wertham wrote that “the lesbian counterpart of Batman may be found in the stories of Wonder Woman” and argued that “the homosexual connotation of the Wonder Woman type of story is psychologically unmistakable.” He quoted an editorial from Psychiatric Quarterly that decried Wonder Woman for its “extremely sadistic hatred of all males in a framework which is plainly lesbian.”* However, his evidence for his claims was nonexistent.
While his work on Batman was based on extensive interviews, his Wonder Woman work was pure supposition. He claimed that “for boys,
Wonder Woman is a frightening image,” and “for girls, she is a morbid ideal,” but presented no evidence of young readers who saw Wonder Woman comics in that way. Wertham’s only proof of Wonder Woman’s supposed lesbianism was that she was always hanging around the Holliday Girls. He then launched into a nonsensical extrapolation:
Her followers are the “Holliday girls,” i.e. the holiday girls, the gay party girls, the gay girls. Wonder Woman refers to them as “my girls.”
That, plus their mutual rescuing, was Wertham’s only “evidence” for Wonder Woman’s lesbianism.
This supposed lesbianism came up again in Seduction of the Innocent, entirely without any proof. Wertham stated that “even when Wonder Woman adopts a girl there are Lesbian overtones,” referencing “Little Miss Wonder Woman,” a story from Wonder Woman #49 in September 1951. In the story, Wonder Woman rescued Jan, a young girl lost at sea whose parents had gone missing, and adopted her instead of leaving her in an orphanage. Wertham offered no explanation about what the lesbian overtones of this story were. The relationship between the two was clearly parental: Wonder Woman instructed Jan on the importance of a good night’s sleep, a healthy breakfast, and dental hygiene, and helped her fit in at school. Ultimately, they found Jan’s parents and the family was reunited.
Nothing in the story matched the homosexual model Wertham outlined in his discussion of Batman and Robin. Jan wasn’t Wonder Woman’s protégé in some pederastic relationship, nor were they overly affectionate. Also unlike in his Batman section, Wertham didn’t mention any of his patients seeing lesbian overtones in this story. This interpretation was purely Wertham’s, and frankly, if he was looking for a Wonder Woman story with a lesbian subtext, there were far better ones to choose from. What this adoption story did offer was a female superhero in a maternal role and that, for Wertham, was an inherently impossible situation.