Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id OAA20619 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 25 May 2001 14:26:21 +0100 Subject: Or the oversight of the instant response? Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 09:21:54 -0400 x-sender: wsmith1@camail2.harvard.edu x-mailer: Claris Emailer 2.0v3, Claritas Est Veritas From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: "memetics list" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Message-ID: <20010525132208.AAA20816@camailp.harvard.edu@[128.103.125.215]> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Here's a snip from an interview with Samuel R. Delany, a personal
favorite of mine. But I'm not sure what this little tale really _is_...?
Is it an example of PC gone batty? A morality tale for paternalists? Or
just one of those stories about how life really is a series of fuck
ups...?
- Wade
Q: In the mid-seventies, you had a brief stint as a writer for Wonder
Woman comic books. How did this come to pass?
A: One of the glories of the late sixties comic book field was what were
then called "relevant comics." In reaction to the freedom and daring of
the then-burgeoning "underground comics," commercial comic books of the
era began to take on far more mature themes and problems--social topics
that had some punch: racism, child abuse, drugs, and what-have-you. The
leading writer in this movement was Denny O'Neil and the leading artist,
Neal Adams. It was an exciting moment in comics. The New York Times
Magazine even devoted a Sunday cover article to them.
Well, five or six years before that, Wonder Woman's writers had found
themselves with the "Superman problem": Because she was so powerful, none
of the villains could really offer any resistance, and Wonder Woman--nee
Diana Prince--had been reduced, for several years, to Saving the Entire
Earth from the Blue Meanies of Mars, or other equally mindless
adventures. So, finally, the editors had done the only sane thing: Most
of her super-powers had been taken away, and she was now just you
ordinary black-belt karate expert and generally super-brave kick-ass
heroine type--a sort of female Steven Seagal. She was still pretty damned
heroic. Instead of the flag bra and blue bikini briefs, she wore a white
karate gee with a black belt. Certainly it made it easier to come up with
reasonable plots for her, and alone made it possible for the plots to
have some relevance to the real world.
Once the new relevant comics came along, they editors decided an area
they wanted to tackle was women's problems. By that time Denny was
editing Wonder Woman; he asked me to write a series of scripts for Wonder
Woman that would touch on problems of actual women. (You might have
thought, if they were really serious, they would have gotten a woman
writer. But that, I suppose, was a bit too radical.) I came up with a
six-issue story arc, each with a different villain: the first was a
corrupt department store owner; the second was the head of a supermarket
chain who tries to squash a women's food co-operative. Another villain
was a college advisor who really felt a woman's place was in the home and
who assumed if you were a bright woman, then something was probably wrong
with you psychologically, and so forth. It worked up to a gang of male
thugs trying to squash an abortion clinic staffed by women surgeons. And
Wonder Woman was going to do battle with each of these and triumph.
Well, we only through two issues--and the first was a matter of writing
Wonder Woman out of the last adventure she was in and getting back into
her Lower East Side Neighborhood, which is where Diana lived by then
anyway.
One day about six weeks after I had come on board, Gloria Steinem was
being shown through the D.C. offices. Proudly they showed her the new
Wonder Woman. Steinem hadn't looked at a Wonder Woman comic, however,
since she was twelve. Immediately she exclaimed: "What happenned to her
costume? How come she isn't deflecting bullets with her magic gold
bracelets anymore and tying people up with her magic lasso?" Steinem
didn't get a chance to read the story of course. But she complained
bitterly: "Don't you realize how important the image of Wonder Woman was
to young girls throughout the country?"
She had a point, I admit.
But, a day later, an edict came down from management to put Wonder Woman
back in her American-flag falsies and blue bikini briefs and give her
back all her super powers. Well, that's what happened--and she went back
to Saving the Entire World from the Blue Meanies of Mars . . . There was
no way I could work those in with the relatively realistic plot lines I
had devised. So my stories were abandoned, and I was dumped as a
writer--and Wonder Woman never did get a chance to fight for the rights
of a women's abortion clinic.
It's a case of the world being over-determined--and over-determined in
some destructive ways. But Steinem had no idea of the stories her chance
comments were used to scuttle.
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