Mayer was twenty-two in 1939 and was a geek who certainly understood

superheroes—he was the one who got Superman sold—but he was also a humor cartoonist
who couldn't help finding them ridiculous. Even during his editing tenure he kept his own
series going: Scribbly, about a comic book-obsessed kid whose rotund mother puts on red
underwear and drops a saucepan on her head to become that nemesis of crime, the Red
Tornado. As editor, Mayer bought the silliest one-trick ideas from whatever artists walked
through the door, as long as they were superheroes. But it worked. An advertising artist
named Marty Model, who never knew comics existed until he needed a job, took samples to
Mayer and was told to "come back with a superhero." Marty walked to the subway trying to
think of ideas and saw a workman holding a green lantern. So he threw together a hero clad
in green, red, yellow, and black—with a huge purple cape—who finds a green railroad
lantern, powered by a meteorite from ancient China, that generates a magic ring. It made no
sense at all, but Mayer bought it. And then the kids bought it. Green Lantern was a hit.
Gaines was a contrast: a former schoolteacher pushing fifty who wanted to do
something better, something more challenging with comics. His pet project was Picture
Stories from the Bible, which he envisioned as the foundation of a whole educational "Picture
Stories" line. At first he rejected Shelly Mayer's urgings to create new superheroes and may
finally have given in only after loud fights with his junior partner, Jack Liebowitz. Gaines
didn't have Liebowitz's cool devotion to the balance sheet nor Harry Donenfeld's joy at
whatever came around the bend. He worked hard, gimping around the offices on his bad leg,
yelling at the people around him. Staffers would tell of the screaming matches that rose in
volume and diminished in coherence from behind Liebowitz's closed office door (Jack always
waited for the other guy to come to his office-he never went there), ending with a slam and
the arhvthmic thump of Charlie's angry stalk down the hall. On paper, was the majority
partner, but Liebowitz had Donenfeld's ear, and Harry was the real power.
So Charlie would scream at Shelly Mayer, who would scream back. Or he'd scream at
his son, Bill, who worked in the office until he turned eighteen and started at NYU. Bill was
bright but fragile, a doughy kid, a letdown to a father who liked intellectual toughness.
Charlie would call his son fat, stupid, and incompetent. Bill would flush, tremble, and try
clumsily to go on doing his job, not looking his father in the eye. When his father was gone,
he would turn to Shelly Mayer for protection and reassurance. Shelly was only five years
older, but Bill treated him like the father he wished he had. Mayer's daughter would
remember Bill coming by their house even years later, when Bill was in his midtwenties and
Mayer about thirty, asking Mayer to meet his new girlfriend and tell him if fee approved. The
consolation that Bill kept repeating to himself was that he was only doing this until he could
get through college and become a science teacher. Then the comics industry would never
hear the name William M. Gaines again.
Maybe that was part of Charlie Gaines's rage, that his long, hard struggles in junk
culture would enable his son to have the teaching career he couldn't afford to keep. Maybe
that was why he was so intrigued when a psychologist in Family Circle magazine complained
about the crude violence of so many comics but also thought they could touch those "tender
spots of universal human desires and aspirations." Gaines invited the psychologist, William
Moulton Marston, to join the new DC/All American "Editorial Advisory Board," and
promptly found himself among the strangest bedfellows any comic book publisher could have
imagined.
Marston was another of those middle-class WASPs, like many people in Frank
Armer's nudie-magazine crowd and Bernarr MacFadden's self-improvement movement, who
developed unconventional ideas about sex and gender as they came of age around the time of
the First World War, then plunged feet first into the great social experiment of the 1920s only
to find themselves high, dry, and rather quaint in the Depression. Marston was a big man,
obese in his middle years, given to loud laughter and overflowing affection. He studied both
lawa and psychology at Harvard and married a brilliant, hardheaded woman named Elizabeth
who had studied the same subjects at Boston and Radcliffc While still a graduate student, he
explored the relationship between increased blood pressure and emotional distress, which
made him a key player in the development of the modern lie detector. With a bright
reputation by the time he earned his doctorate in 1921, he promptly landed a position at Tufts
University- Unfortunately, he just as promptly began to display the three cravings that would
undo his career: for panaceas, for publicity, and for the domination of a good woman.
His continuing interest in human emotion, persuasion, and power led him to observe a
"baby party," a weird sorority initiation at a women's college in which new pledges dressed
like babies and were tied up, poked with sticks, and wrestled into submission by other girls.
His research assistant was a graduate student named Olive Byrne, with whom he was also
having an affair. Not long after that he revealed his affair to his wife, Elizabeth, but rather
than ending either relationship, that only drew them tighter. Olive moved in with the
Marstons in a ménage à trois. Eventually each woman had two children by Marston, all of
whom were raised mainly by Olive as Elizabeth supported the family with a series of
academic and editorial jobs.
 In 1928 Marston cited the "baby party" and other adventures in his most popular book,
The Emotions of Ordinary People, in which he argued that we can all be understood in terms
of four "elementary behavior units," dominance, influence, steadiness, and compliance. It was
an easily applicable look at the social power games of daily life, and if there was any doubt
that he intended it to make him a popular pundit rather than a respected researcher, he even
gave his system an acronym: DISC. All this was perfect for a tale of the Twenties, but not so
perfect for academia, and that was the end of Marston's professorial career.
For the next decade, he rolled from coast to coast exploiting his reputation for DISC
and the lie detector. He did public relations at Universal Studios for a year and appeared in
magazine ads for Gillette razors (a lie detector test showed that men really thought Gillette
shaved closest). Much of the time, he couldn't find work at all. One year the whole family—-
Marston, four children, and mistress—moved in with his wife's parents in Massachusetts
while Elizabeth herself lived in New York, working at Metropolitan Life and mailing home
checks. Finally, at the end of the decade, he made his arrangement with Family Circle. Psy-
chologists weren't yet a standard component of the child-rearing industry, and his modest
fame was enough to overcome his peculiar reputation. He cleverly boosted his apparent value
by making his contributions not through articles under his name but through worshipful
interviews by a journalist named "Olive Richard"—who was, of course, Olive Byrne.
This is where Charlie Gaines found him in 1940. The two hit it off well, the former
teacher resentfully selling junk and the fallen intellectual trying to survive on sales pitches.
They saw value in each other too, as money and academic credentials usually do. Gaines
needed ammunition in his power struggles with Jack Liebowitz, something that would put
him across as the idea man who ought to be listened to. Marston needed income. So Gaines
listened when Marston said that "comics' greatest offense was their blood-curdling
masculinity." There were a few minor heroines scattered through the comics, but none who
had a chance against the supermen who were giving the industry such a rough reputation.
Marston offered his psychological expertise in creating a superheroine who would appeal to
children and reassure parents. He believed that women were stronger than men because they
wielded the force of love, that war and evil were produced by men's violent quest for illusory
power over women, and that secretly boys and men were "looking for an exciting, beautiful
girl stronger than they are."
It was odd stuff for comics, but Marston was famously persuasive. His arguments
were often based on crackpot science: "Woman's body contains twice as many love
generating organs and endocrine mechanisms as the male. What woman lacks is the
dominance or self assertive power to put over and enforce her love desires." And he knew
how to pepper his speech with condescending chuckles and phrases like "The layman may
think so, but as a psychologist ..."in the end, Gaines fered Marston the chance to create his
own superheroine. Marston he'd do it only if he retained ownership of the character and
royalties sales in perpetuity. He even got Gaines to build a clause into the contract that the
rights would revert to him or his heirs if the publisher ever failed to bring out an issue. The
early comics publishers would give away a lot if they were pushed.
So William Moulton Marston, forty-eight-year-old maverick psychologist, joined the
ranks of comic book writers. He used a pseudonym, "Charles Moulton" (a nod there to
Charlie Gaines), although he never hesitated to tell the world who he was and use his comic
book work to attract attention to his other writings. The heroine he created was an Amazon
from Paradise Island who came to the world of men to put an end to war and exploitation. He
called her "Suprema, the Wonder Woman." Sheldon Mayer nixed the "Suprema." He also
tried to nix Marston's choice of artist, a cartoonist named Harry G. Peter whose naive,
antiquated style looked charming to the older academic but boring to the young comics
editor. Marston liked the way Peter made his heroine look queenly and innocent, and dug in.
Knowledge of the story behind Wonder Woman's conception would not have inspired
any reader to hope for much. The words of educational apologists for junk entertainment are
always pallid compared to the fire and brimstone of their critics and the messy reality of the
material itself. But something happened when Marston engaged with his fantasy heroine. He
learned—as did Gaines, somewhat to his discomfort—that superheroes can come alive when
a creator begins to work out his own dramas through the ritual of costumes, battles, victories,
and defeats. They can impel a man to enter the dark and scary and heartfelt.
"Wonder Woman," Marston said, "is psychological propaganda for the new type of
woman who should, I believe, rule the world." His core belief, his explanation of the world's
ills (and perhaps his secret to happy polygamy), was that hatred and violence could be
eliminated only by the surrender of male power to female. He gave Wonder Woman two
main weapons. First, a pair of bullet-deflecting bracelets (based on the "Arab protective
bracelets" worn by Olive Byrne). But there was more to them than prophylaxis—they were
manacles as well, worn by the Amazons "to remind them of what happens to a girl when she
lets a man conquer her. The Amazons once surrendered to the charm of some handsome
Greeks [who] put them in chains of the Hitler type, beat them, and made them work like
horses in the fields." The second weapon was a magic lasso that compelled whomever it
ensnared to submit to her will. Marston intended it as a symbol of the real power of women,
what he called "Love Allure." "Normal men retain their childish longing for a woman to
mother them," he said. "At adolescence a new desire is added. They want a girl to allure
them. When you put these two together, you have the typical male yearning that Wonder
Woman satisfies. . . the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by
a woman who loves them."
Every Wonder Woman story included at least one prominent scene— usually
several—of someone bound. One story opens with a chained slave girl being berated by the
god Mars, then proceeds to Dr. Psycho tying up a man and torturing him to death. Next
Psycho suspends his fiancé, Marva, by her wrists, hypnotizes her, forces her to marry him,
ties her to a chair, blindfolds her, and "uses her for occult experiments." He puts her on
display in a glass box, still blindfolded; Wonder Woman arrives but is conned into tying her
to the chair again ("Ow! Please don't tie me so tight!" "Why, that isn't half tight enough!")
and then, two pages later, induced into tying her up yet again ("Oh, I hate to be bound—can't
I please remain free?" "Certainly not, my dear! No woman can be trusted with freedom!").
Next the Amazon, in her secret identity as Diana Prince, helps manacle three office girls and
strip them to their camisoles, panties, and garter belts. She discovers that her beloved Steve
Trevor is locked in a cage, but in trying to rescue him, she's electrocuted and manacled to a
wall—at ankles, wrists, arms, and throat. She escapes, frees Steve, and bursts into a vault to
find poor Marva blindfold and shackled to a bed. In the end, a gang of sorority sisters echoes
the "baby game" of Dr. Marston's early life as they chase Dr. Psycho to "give him a Lambda
Beta treatment!" "Paddles up, sisters! Give ‘im the works!"
The story is called "The Battle for Womanhood." The final panel squeezes the moral
into Marva's lament and Wonder Woman's exhortation: "Submitting to a cruel husband's
domination has ruined my life! But what can a weak girl do?" "Get strong! Earn your own
living fight for your country! Remember, the better you can fight the less you’ll have to!"
What the story leaves in us, however, is not the message to work for one's own living but
images of bodies trussed and exposed.
Josette Frank, Marston's fellow member of DC's Editorial Advisory Board, warned
Gaines that Wonder Woman "does lay you open to considerable criticism ... partly on the
basis of the woman's costume (or lack of it), and partly on the basis of sadistic bits showing
women chained, tortured, etc." Marston's pat response was that "binding and chaining are the
one harmless, painless way of subjecting the heroine to menace and making drama of it." But
later in the same letter, he entered the thicket of the issues that his editors probably hoped he
never would. "Women are exciting for this one reason—it is the secret of women's allure—
women enjoy submission, being bound. This I bring out in the Paradise Island sequences
where the girls beg for chains and enjoy wearing them." And that, he said, was "the one truly
great contribution of my Wonder Woman strip to moral education of the young. The only
hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being
bound… Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion
of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society."
Then he laid bare what no one else in that moment could or would have: "Giving to
others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable
without a strong erotic element." The eroticism of superheroes was not something a young
man would ordinarily allow himself to see. But it was there, not only in the fetishism of
Wonder Woman but in the crushing fists and twisting sinews of Jack Kirby, in the nocturnal
masques of Bob Kane and lerry Robinson, in the boyish smugness of Joe Shuster's great
bodybuilder and the Charles Atlas ads across the page. The superhero conuc book was about
the body, the body in duress and supple joy the body stripped-down and made pure, the body
discovered and glorified and also pushed away to a place unreal and unthreatening. It wasn't
such a steep step from Artists and Models and Pep Stories to the comic books after all.
It turned out that Marston knew what he was doing. Despite its female protagonist,
jumbled stories, and odd art, Wonder Woman was a huge and immediate success. Soon that
erotic Utopian polemic was appearing regularly in three comics, often outselling Batman and
sometimes even Superman. And it sold mainly to preteen and teenage boys. A customer
survey found that the Amazon's audience was 90 percent male; far more girls read Superman
than Wonder Woman. That advertisers knew it is shown by the fact that Wonder Woman's ads
are mostly of the "Hey fellers, tell Dad to buy you a BB gun" genre. "By their comics tastes
ye shall know them!>> chortled Marston. "Tell me anybody's preference in story strips and I'll
tell you his subconscious desires." Wonder Woman was less the model for girls that she's
been made out to be than a way for boys to approach the most frightening mysteries.
After all those years of shilling and roaming and failing to grab the American
imagination, Marston had found the themes he knew best and the passions he shared with
millions of other males. And in the superhero comic book, he had found a field young
enough, naive enough, unsupervised enough to let him bring those passions to the masses.