28/11 Wonder Woman Earth One Annotations

My idea for a Wonder Woman movie was one of several I pitched during a creatively fruitless, if financially rewarding, time as a consultant at Warner Bros movies in 2008, alongside Geoff Johns and Marv Wolfman.

Other pitches included Teen Titans, Doom Patrol, Green Arrow, several versions of an Aquaman story which I really liked, and a few takes on a potential Superman movie (I used some bits and pieces from the Superman stuff for my Action Comics run. One iteration of a story had a scene where a terraforming expedition is in trouble on Mars, and an alarm goes out. Cut to the Daily Planet. Lois Lane peeking in a broom closet says ‘Kent?’ while our first glimpse of Superman shows a startled pigeon on a ledge as he hurtles by in a purpling UV blur, then a kid looking out of a plane window as Superman’s streaky upward progress continues, evoking ‘…is it a bird? Is it a plane?...’.

Then the Earth, seen from orbit – a tiny primary-coloured figure getting closer – closer – SUPERMAN!

Most of that sequence showed up in Action Comics #14.

(All my Superman pitches had a pre-credits cold open on pulp planet Krypton, and showed silly insignificant daily life in the city of Kandor ten seconds before the moment Brainiac arrives to shrink and bottle it for his collection. A version of this sequence appeared in Action Comics #3)

(At Marvel I pitched a good Dr. Strange, and I did Moon Knight, Morbius, Warlock - the X-Men alien robot one – and Terror Inc. among others. My published work is the tip of a vast iceberg of written material that will never be seen!)

I also submitted a take on Wonder Woman.

For reasons I’ll go into later, I wasn’t a fan of some more recent Red Sonja/Xena interpretation of Wonder Woman where she’s played as the pagan warrior woman from a throwback culture of snarly women. Armed with a sword and shield AND super-powers!

Her appearance in Dawn of Justice with Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL’s accelerated, manic ‘Is She with You’ theme is her finest cinematic moment and the best bit in that tale of sound and fury, but I did enjoy the first Wonder Woman movie. Gal Gadot was an engaging lead, operating past the edge of her acting abilities with such purity and determination you can see her talent blossom onscreen, it was impossible not to root for her. The second film didn’t work for me at all.

So to Wonder Woman Earth One.

The Earth One line was another of former DC supremo Dan Didio’s attempts to create a kind of ‘Ultimate’ DC Universe free from old school continuity baggage, where streamlined, modernised, more grounded ‘realistic’ versions of characters could appear in contemporary stories made to appeal to a 21^st century audience.

The failure of the line to accomplish this task lay not in the artistic merits of the individual books but in their unwillingness to cohere as a single new universe. The creators took an All-Star approach instead, developing standalone stories of characters that could also play as film trilogies. The Earth One books did not cross refer and the characters clearly existed in very different worlds with different rules. This lack of consistency meant that individual projects could easily be ignored or dismissed. Rather than uniting in the creation of a new fictional playground, the stories became showcases for personal interpretations of DC stalwarts.

J. Michael Straczynski had done his take on Superman and Geoff Johns was prepping Batman, with artist Gary Frank, when Dan Didio offered me the Wonder Woman Earth One assignment.

I was eager to accept the challenge. After work on Batman and Superman, Wonder Woman was the last of DC’s ‘trinity’ of major superheroes I’d yet to engage in depth. I’d written her as a competent powerhouse in JLA and as a compromised victim of Darkseid’s attack in Final Crisis, but I’d never had an opportunity to dig into the character and her mythos.

(I later discovered that disgruntled Greg Rucka fans were incensed because I’d taken a job apparently promised to Greg. What do I know? I’d heard nothing about this and was led to believe I was first in line for the gig! This creative shuffling was policy - I pitched a Flash Earth One story which Dan liked but he then handed the assignment to the aforementioned Straczynski).

Swings and roundabouts.

Magically, it was the right time for me to tackle Wonder Woman. I’d just completed a rigorous ordeal in the Abyss and found my consciousness released into the Sphere of Binah where everything about the world suddenly looked very different and suggested new ways to tell stories and to organise my work.

The essentially ‘feminine’ energies encountered in Binah (Binah is the primal matrix, the medium, inside which the pure intent of the next sphere, the ‘masculine’ Chokmah can be given form, much as the original impulse of the male ejaculation is contained, developed, and brought to term in the womb) can be seen permeating all my work from 2016 until quite recently.

Most of my stories since late 2015 are focused on a female protagonist who changes the world using non-masculine strategies – it’s there in my TV adapt of Brave New World, where we shifted Lenina Crowne to the forefront of the story. It’s there in the various drafts of The Invisibles for the screen. It’s in the TV version of Happy! Even Luda arose from the same impulse and a corresponding reappraisal of my own female aspects. This period includes Covid lockdown and my ‘coming out’ as ‘non-binary’.

As part of my initiation in Binah, I decided to align myself with occultist Kenneth Grant’s interpretation of the Thelemic Precession of the Equinoxes, itself informed by the work of Crowley acolyte Charles Stansfeld Jones or ‘Frater Achad’ (very quickly: the last 6000 years of recorded human history can be divided into 2000 year ‘aeons’, each governed by a presiding god-energy. Crowley and Thelema used Egyptian gods, so that the first 2000 years can be said to have fallen under the aegis of Isis, the mother goddess – agriculture, cyclical time.  The next 2000 years, roughly from the birth of Christ is the Aeon of the Dying and Resurrected God, Osiris - empires, linear time. This is the era of Patriarchy, Law, and the Word. Horus, Son of Osiris and Isis, is seen as a young and fiery force, dedicated to the overthrow of his Father’s ordered world and the inauguration of a new liberated age. To accomplish this, Horus (Lord of Force and Fire) must destroy all traces of the old ways. Crowley insisted that the Aeon of Horus began during the First World War, while I tend towards a conviction that it was announced by the fall of the World Trade Center twin towers in 2001.

It’s easy to watch any news bulletin these days and come away with the feeling that Horus is hard at work on the global stage! In this violent, site clearance stage of the Aeon, Horus can inspire feelings of doom and uncertainty. While we are assured that his Aeon will be one of liberation, self-realisation, and understanding, I still mistrust the general tenor of fascistic bully boy bullshit that seems attendant upon the young god’s arrival.

It’s unfortunately still possible that we might be faced with five hundred years of corrupt sci-fi billionaire corporate Dark Ages (Marvel Boy’s ‘Digital Koncentration Kamp 1’) to inaugurate this Aeon, but there may just be another ray of light in the murk of the undecided future.

Achad and Grant suggested a shadow Aeon. Developing alongside, underneath, the Boomer ‘Aquarian’ Age of Horus. This would be the Aeon of Ma’at, the Daughter, (of sun god Ra, not Osiris and Isis as I’ve sometimes asserted when mistakenly simplifying the scheme to suit myself – o, king of Chaos!), Sister of Thoth.

Ma’at is regarded as the Goddess of Truth, Harmony, and Balance, a description which also applies to Wonder Woman, of course, making her a significant pop culture avatar of this ancient/future/now force.

I could see Ma’at’s presence coming into focus all around me in these early decades of the 21^st century and it was becoming obvious that the image or symbol of the Aeon was no longer the Osirian hierarchical Pyramid, or the levelling Scorched Earth of Horus, but the distributed Ma’atian Net.

I decided to assist in manifesting these energies and set about hastening conditions for the inauguration of the Aeon of Ma’at!

(I will point out here that my interpretation of these concepts is often questionable and unique to me. Thelemites might balk at my free adaptation of doctrine but as a Chaos magician, I tend to appropriate repurpose, and recombine symbols and techniques as required for any given project and its exegesis. I am a working magician, not necessarily a scholar or member of any recognised Order. I’m only required to ‘believe’ in these ideas for as long as they are useful to my purpose. This is not religion or creed).

Ma’at’s signature is the blue feather (foregrounded in Season 2 of my Happy! TV adaptation alongside the symbol of the balance, the blue feather is the Feather of Truth against which the heart is weighed in the Land of the Dead) and she is regarded as the spirit of Justice and Fairness, as opposed to the enactment of ‘justice’ via laws and statutes (Egyptian law, incidentally, unlike that of the Greek and Roman empires, enshrined the rights of women to travel freely and own property).

With the conceptual engine in place, I immersed myself in Wonder Woman stories from every decade back to 1940.

Of the work I read, some great, some awful, the stories by the character’s creators, the psychologist William Moulton Marston (creator of the polygraph lie detector and the systolic blood pressure test) and artist Harry G. Peter, were the most appealing and distinctive. The tone was inventive, playful, subversive, and genuinely weird. It felt like queer science fiction in comic book form with kangaroos hopping through space and perverse Bacchanalian all-girl rituals.

Famously, of course, Marston had a polyamorous family set up – he and his wife Elizabeth shared their marriage and the children with student Olive Byrne, considered the physical model for Wonder Woman. Then there was Marston’s interest in bondage and control to consider.

‘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... Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element.’

William Moulton Marston

Part of his aim with the preponderance of tie-up scenes in Wonder Woman was to condition readers, male readers especially, so that they were more open to Submission to Loving Authority, as Marston called it.

Believing women to be more trustworthy, loving, emotionally intelligent and capable than men, the role of that Authority would of necessity be female (there’s a handy illustration of a similar idea on the Strength card of the Tarot).

Is he right, or is he wrong?

The old-timey psychologist proceeded to unpack his kink into a whole philosophy which animated his Wonder Woman stories with a revolutionary feminist energy unique to the comics (written and drawn by men, let’s note. But I’ll have something to say about this later in my annotations...).

It was no surprise to me, then, that Wonder Woman’s popularity dropped off after Marston’s cancer death in 1947 and Peters’ departure from the strip ten years later. The book lost its heart and Wonder Woman mislaid her queer soul. Sales nosedived and the character never really recovered.

After Marston, the book was written by Joy Murchison, its first female scribe (her stories are fascinating in their efforts to maintain but reconfigure Marston’s energy) but she was swiftly replaced by Robert Kanigher, who recast Wonder Woman as a generic DC superhero, hiding her true identity behind the mask of ‘plain Jane’ Diana Prince and mooning after boyfriend Steve Trevor. These insipid stories pitted her against an army of ridiculous throwaway foes (Mouse Man, because… girls are scared of mice!).

Then Diana lost her powers to become an Emma Peel/Modesty Blaise-inspired mod adventuress before a detour into ‘women’s lib’ and a return to the Justice League, her original costume, and more anodyne storylines. By now Diana had lost the wild Sapphic edge and her non-judgmental delight in the female and perverse. After Gloria Steinem put her on the cover of Ms. magazine as a feminist icon, Wonder Woman had her powers restored but not her eccentricity. After this time, she was often played as a virginal paragon of sweetness and light, or as a too-serious diplomat and ambassador for her culture. The range of expression that Marston and Peters brought to their character diminished to a collection of Marvel-esque ‘traits’ as writers tried to fit her into various boxes in a series of valiant efforts to revitalise the ailing comic books.

While the successful ‘70s television series - with Lynda Carter’s interpretation providing the most appealing Wonder Woman since Marston - kept the character alive in pop culture and found a formula that relied less on bondage, mind control and lesbianism, alas, the Wonder Woman comic book struggled to stay relevant. It was easy for new generations of writers and artists to replicate the science fiction America of Superman or the urban crime milieu of Batman, but Marston’s very personal idyll was perhaps more difficult to recreate if you couldn’t buy into it.

Some critics of the Earth One series were outraged by our decision to restore bondage to thematic primacy in a Wonder Woman story, and appeared convinced that the inclusion of these elements was indicative of nothing more than some personal kink or desire to sexualise Wonder Woman inappropriately, (our use of bondage in the story was described as my ‘obsession’ or as something we found ‘titillating’) but I’ve never been particularly turned on by restraint.

Nevertheless, I felt that the most interesting way for me to approach Wonder Woman was through the iconography and interests of her creators (it’s often a mistake to assume that the writer of Batman, Superman or Spider-Man shares the character’s beliefs, opinions, or politics, especially when the character was created by someone else in a very different historical context).

Seen through another’s eyes, the whole world looks different and, speaking as a writer, that brief but total surrender to a singular viewpoint is something I relentlessly strive towards.

Our intention was to present a story rooted in Marston’s particular ideas. We hoped to explore them and question their assumptions through a modern lens but without applying contemporary modes of judgment and condemnation.

By establishing Marston’s philosophies as the cultural basis of this fictional world, we could interrogate them using drama!

If the Amazons had decided that mind control was an acceptable way to ensure peace, then we chose to accept that idea and to proceed from a position where perhaps mind control could be justified, while at the same time presenting its more obvious dark side.

Our own culture relies on the relentless deployment of mind control techniques, of course; what else is advertising? Internet algorithms guide opinion and shape public perception. Demagogues use disinformation, ‘Fake News’ and propaganda to disorient populations and manipulate attitudes.

The Amazons’ reliance on mind control to reform violent sociopaths seems benign by comparison with our own cavalier use of the tool to sell things!

Even among those who acknowledge Marston’s creativity, there can be found a consensus that says he was wrong to introduce his personal quirks into the stories and that certain fundamentals of Wonder Woman’s creation are best left in the past where they belong.

While I disagree, (I’d rather see work that arises from personal passions than from none at all) there may be an argument that this dictum should hold true for the monthly, in ‘universe’, canonical adventures of Wonder Woman. The regular monthly book would do well keep up with its times and reflect changes in thinking.

I felt Marston’s unreconstructed personal peccadilloes were the most interesting thing about Wonder Woman as a character, and more worthy of exploration than the strip’s elements of Greek mythology or female weapons proficiency.

So we chose an image of Diana in chains and make-up for the first cover and proceeded from there. This depiction suggested the framing device for our restaging of the famous origin story; to expedite the storytelling, we would see Diana’s ‘arrest’ and trial before a court of Amazons! A different witness, a different voice, would relate different scenes prompting flashbacks to the ‘origin story’ of why Diana left Paradise Island and found herself in this situation.

The whole story could be told via testimony!

With all the pieces in place, we began what for me was a chance to create a myth for the Aeon of Ma’at using a globally recognised character.

The result would turn out to be one of my least popular pieces of writing, described as ‘woke nonsense’, ‘lefty fascism’, ‘misogynistic’ and ‘hateful sexist, misandristic propaganda’!..

To be continued