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Serial and Year: 1981.
SHE CAME FROM peaceful Paradise Island to a world torn by war, and decided to stay.
She is Wonder Woman, and her creator was a remarkable man. By the time he was asked to be a consultant by Max Gaines's new comic book company, William Moulton Marsden was already well-known as a psychologist and writer. He had a doctorate in psychology from Harvard. His articles and essays frequently appeared in national magazines. He had invented the systolic blood-pressure test used in lie detectors. Then Gaines called him.
The two met sometime in 1940. Gaines wanted Dr. Marsden's ideas about how comics might be made appealing to a female audience.
"Simple," the doctor might have said. "Use a female character -a heroine."
"Can't be done," Gaines could have replied. "The heck it can't."
"Okay, prove me wrong."
The doctor did. He had a script written, decided he didn't like it, and rewrote it himself. Next, he asked Harry Peter to translate his words into pictures, because he liked the simplicity of Peter's drawings. Max Gaines looked at the finished product and made a place for it on his publishing schedule. Wonder Woman has been on publishing schedules ever since. She is one of only three comic book characters to be published without interruption. (Superman and Batman are the others.)
Wonder Woman was unique from the very beginning. The story that introduces her contains two pages of regular text interspersed with Peter's cartoons; it reads like an illustrated story rather than a comic book. Perhaps Dr. Marsden wasn't familiar enough with comic book technique to tell his tale in the accepted form; perhaps he simply decided the text-and-cartoon format best suited his purposes. It doesn't really matter. What's important is the Doctor's content. He gave his Wonder Woman an origin derived from ancient myths. It relates how evil gods enslaved a race of super women - the Amazons - and how they escaped to a hidden island to establish a society of perfect harmony. Although this is obviously fiction, in a way Dr. Marsden believed it.
"My husband regarded comics as a medium for getting his ideas over," Dr. Marsden's wife once told a writer. "Wonder Woman was an embodiment of his ideas, rather than mere entertainment. He was expressing a fundamental psychological doctrine."
For her creator, then, Wonder Woman's biography was a fable -a story designed to teach a lesson. It was also a terrific comic book. When Wonder Woman leaves Paradise Island, she discovers she has virtually no equal in what her mother scorns as a "man's world." She is strong as a herd of oxen. She is quick as a flash -quick as The Flash, in fact. She has a magic lasso that compels people to speak the truth. She has bracelets that can ward off bullets. She gets around in an invisible plane that responds to telepathic commands.
She isn't the comics' only heroine, of course, just the most popular one. There is Captain Marvel's Shazam-saying sister, Mary, and Superman's cousin, Supergirl, another survivor of the doomed Krypton. Batman has been helped by two females, Batwoman and, more recently, Batgirl. The blonde-wigged Black Canary has shared adventures with Green Arrow and Green Lantern. (A wit remarked that they were surely a colorful crew.) Bulletgirl, Black Cat, Lady Luck, Hawkgirl, Miss America, Sheena -these and dozens of other feminine justice fighters have struggled alongside their male counterparts, and alone. But none were ever as special as Wonder Woman. Truly, she has no equal in man's world - or anywhere else.
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