Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id SAA21023 (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 18:25:24 +0100 From: <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 12:27:35 -0500 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Or the oversight of the instant response? Message-ID: <3B0E4FB7.9659.1AD222@localhost> In-reply-to: <20010525132208.AAA20816@camailp.harvard.edu@[128.103.125.215]> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On 25 May 2001, at 9:21, Wade T.Smith wrote:
Cross-posted from the Memetics List:
> 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.
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
> For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
> see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
>
>
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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