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Thread: Wonder Woman

  1. #1
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    Wonder Woman

    I thought we had a thread on this. Maybe it's just random mentions on other threads.

    Gal Gadot on Wonder Woman casting, fan criticism, training, and more (video)
    By Chris Begley on December 26th, 2013


    For the first time since being cast as Wonder Woman in Batman vs. Superman, model/actress Gal Gadot has commented on landing the huge role. Gadot was interviewed on Good Evening with Gai Pines, the top entertainment show in Israel. She talked about the casting news, fan criticism, training, and more. The entire interview was conducted in Hebrew, but thanks to Batman News reader Maxim, we have a full transcript below.

    Where were you when you heard the news that you’d been cast as Wonder Woman?

    I was just on my way to shooting at LA. I landed at NY in a connection flight when my agent, Hadass Lichtenstein, called me. She says to me “Wonder Woman!” and I’m like “What??” – “The role is yours!…and it’s a secret and the news are not yet announced and you can’t tell anyone…”. I’m saying to her “Are you serious??”- and we both scream! Now it’s a plane from Israel to NY and I can’t make loud noise, and so I lean on a window, bending down to my legs, and just try to understand. Long story short – I was totally alone in NY, I got to a hotel at 12 pm, I needed to wake up in the morning for shootings. I remember laying in the darkness by myself, staring at the ceiling, and I was telling myself “It’s not real!”…it shouldn’t be like that, I’m supposed to be like… “where’s the champagne?”.

    It’s been said that you’re too skinny for the part. Wonder Woman is large-breasted, is that going to change?

    Hmm. I represent the Wonder Woman of the new world. Breasts… anyone can buy for 9,000 shekels and everything is fine. By the way, Wonder Woman is amazonian, and historically accurate amazonian women actually had only one breast. So, if I’d really go “by the book”…it’d be problematic.

    So you’re not going to gain a little weight and start eating carbs before filming begins?

    It’s the physical preparations that I’m starting now. A very serious training regimen – Kung Fu, kickboxing, swords, jujutsu, Brazilian…1,000 and 1 things…I’ll gain body mass.

    If you speak Hebrew and would like to see the video for yourself (and help add to the translation), check it out:


    Big thanks once again to Batman News reader Maxim for the heads up, and for sending in the translation above. Maxim is a PC modder whose modding team has created a “Batman vs. Bane” mod for Wolfenstein 3D.
    click the link above to get to the video.
    Gene Ching
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  2. #2
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    a threesome

    Wonder Woman’ Gal Gadot Signs Three-Picture Deal with Warner Bros.


    Donato Sardella/WireImage
    January 23, 2014 | 08:49AM PT
    Justin Kroll
    Film Reporter @krolljvar

    Gal Gadot, the Israeli actress who was recently cast as Wonder Woman, has signed a three-picture deal with Warner Bros., Variety has confirmed.

    We’re told Gadot will play the role in not only the upcoming Batman-Superman pic, but in a Justice League movie and a Wonder Woman standalone film.

    The Israeli entertainment show “Good Evening with Gai Pines” reported that Gadot will earn $300,000 per film.

    Limiting the deal to three pictures makes sense for Warners, since the studio still doesn’t know how auds will react to Wonder Woman in the untitled Batman-Superman movie. Since its taken so long to find the right parts to make a Wonder Woman movie work, WB and DC don’t want to rush into a large commitment if fans are still not drawn to a standalone movie featuring the character.

    The untitled Batman-Superman film was originally scheduled to open next year, but has been pushed back to May 6, 2016.
    Meanwhile, as DC gets off these three pictures, how many Marvel films and TV shows will be made?
    Gene Ching
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    Gina chimes in

    I guess we must put those rumors to bed now, but I'm clinging to my fantasies of Gina and a golden lasso.
    Henry Cavill Girlfriend Gina Carano Speaks Up On Wonder Woman Rumors; Says She Was ‘Never Approached’ & ‘Don’t Know If I Was Considered’
    By Staff Writer | May 15, 2014 06:39 AM EDT


    Source: Flickr/Az29c

    Henry Cavill girlfriend Gina Carano is one of those actors who’s nearly as well known for what she’s not doing as for what she is notes the Toronto Sun. For a while, there has been this ongoing buzz about Carano possibly playing the role of Wonder Woman.

    Last month, the actress finally set the record straight on rumors that she was offered the role of Wonder Woman for the film. Speaking with the Toronto Sun, the actress said that she was “never approached” role despite reports suggesting otherwise. “I don’t know if I was considered,” she added. But She praised Gal Gadot for clinching the role of the heroine in the movie.

    “She’s such a great person with such solidness in her character, so I’m very excited for her to do that,” the actress said. She also added that she and Gadot were co-stars in “Fast & Furious 6.”

    Superman’s on again, off again girlfriend also addressed the negative criticism that Gal Gadot received from fans saying that she’s “too skinny” to play Wonder Woman.

    "I think people have an idea what they consider Wonder Woman. I definitely know [Gadot] had been training and there's so much more than goes into being a strong female character," Carano said.

    "I think people have their own idea, but I always like the underdog, I'm always rooting for the underdog. If the world says you can't do something, I couldn't care less because that's not how anybody should live their lives."

    According to the HGN, many superhero fans have pegged the MMA fighter-turned-actress for the female superhero lead. Many thought that she had the perfect look to play Wonder Woman in Zack Snyder’s “Batman vs. Superman.”

    Gina Carano is an American actress, TV personality, fitness model and former mixed martial artist. She began her training with straight Muay Thai to compete in the MMA where she had tenures in organizations such as Strikeforce and EliteXC.

    The actress’s first big break came when Ocean Eleven’s director Steven Soderbergh cast her as the lead in his smart, arty 2011 thriller Haywire.
    Gene Ching
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    Gina just makes me all tingly...

    I wonder about this part though:
    It’s the physical preparations that I’m starting now. A very serious training regimen – Kung Fu, kickboxing, swords, jujutsu, Brazilian…
    Since she separated brazilian from Jujutsu, maybe she (Gal) means Brazilian wax?

    Psalms 144:1
    Praise be my Lord my Rock,
    He trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle !

  5. #5
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    Why does your mind always go there, s_j?

    Okay, maybe our minds go there too but we just don't post it out loud.

    I'm glad Gal's training Kung Fu. You really got to train Kung Fu if you want to make it in the movies. Movie fu is the most powerful ******* child of Kung Fu.

    If only Gina would start Kung Fu. Remember my interview with her?
    I've got to ask you a kung fu question because that's the basis of our magazine.

    Gina: (laughs) OK.

    Everyone feels you have the charisma to go into movies. If you did that, do you think you'd ever train in something more showy like kung fu?

    Gina: Absolutely. I would love to train in kung fu. You know, kung fu, I'm all about training and learning. And especially if it was to just learn - I'd love to actually. You know what really is a beautiful thing I've - it's not anything related - well, I don't know if people use it in fighting, is capoeira. That's beautiful. I think if I had to do those flips and that dance - that would be awesome.

    If you ever start training kung fu, just let us know. I'll have you on our cover so fast, it'll make your head spin harder than Cyborg's punch.

    Gina: (laughs)

    Gene Ching
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    Playing balls, getting sweaty, and scraping knees with Gal Gadot

    This should probably go on the Batman-vs-Superman thread, but I don't really care about them.

    Wonder Woman in ‘Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice’ Knows Tons of Martial Arts Styles
    Posted By: Kazem Sedighzadeh Posted date: March 26, 2015In: TV

    The third most popular superhero or superheroine in the upcoming DC movie “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice” is obviously Wonder Woman.

    It’s very evident on the first posters of the DC superhero film which will hit theaters on March 25, 2016. In addition to Batman and Superman, Wonder Woman is also featured as the metamorphosis of goddess Diana, with god-like superpowers. After all she is also one of the daughters of Greek supreme god Zeus.

    Those who have had the opportunity to see Wonder Woman on TV back in the late 70s and early 80s know that the superheroine’s main strengths are her unique hand-to-hand combat skills and her bracelets which can deflect bullets. In the cartoons and the comics, Wonder Woman also has her invisible jet which she uses to fly and join Superman in the sky.

    However, in the upcoming DC movie, Director Zack Snyder has given Wonder Woman some realism in terms of her superpower abilities. According to Screen Rant, Diana will have unbelievable endurance and will be exceptionally strong.

    She is capable of jumping really high and practically fly, which would remind moviegoers of how Marvel did it with the Incredible Hulk. Most of all, Wonder Woman is a fighting expert because she knows tons of martial arts styles.

    Bulking up

    Given the premise of Wonder Woman’s superpowers, which are more realistic than say flying an invisible jet or having a wonder beam emanating from her crown, which she actually used to do in the cartoons before, it was imperative for Israel actress Gal Gadot, who’s playing Wonder Woman, to really bulk up.

    Gadot disclosed recently that she had undergone training at the hands of Mark Twight of Gym Jones, who was the same trainer who turned Henry Cavill the muscle man that he is and become the largest actor rendition ever to Superman.

    The idea behind the training is to make Gal Gadot bulk up more so that she would look really capable in defeating her opponents not unlike her previous slender and model-like figure. Snyder simply wanted her to become a convincing warrior, and Gadot was more than happy to oblige.

    She recalled that the training was quite easy for her because she also worked once as a fitness instructor for the Israel Defense Forces before she joined the movies. Gadot was more than just a pretty face because she was also loaded with fitness and fighting skills as an individual.



    The actress also said that it was also easy for her to go to the gym without any inhibition since she was more like a tomboy when she was little. She explained that her daughter did not take after her because her little one likes dressing up like a princess and putting on makeup and lipstick. She was more like one with the boys, and likes playing balls, getting sweaty, and scraping her knees too.
    Gene Ching
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    Lynda needs a cameo

    Lynda Carter: The Wonder Woman movie needs the female perspective
    by C. Molly Smith


    (Michael N. Todaro/FilmMagic)
    Wonder Woman

    Posted April 14 2015 — 6:10 PM EDT

    Monday, news broke that Michelle MacLaren will no longer direct Wonder Woman, which stars Gal Gadot and is slated for a 2017 release.

    Less than 24 hours later, Lynda Carter, who played Diana Prince (a.k.a. Wonder Woman) in the 1970s TV series, caught up with Jessica Shaw and Sara Vilkomerson on EW Radio’s “Inside TV.”

    In an interview clip, Carter said she’s excited to see the story of Wonder Woman continue on, and added that the film, director or otherwise, needs the female perspective. Could Carter become involved herself?

    “I would love to be involved in a creative position of it,” Carter said. “I know so much about what people want from it, I think, that just being as a consultant on a movie. I think it needs a woman.” She explained that women understand women.

    Carter said she hasn’t talked to the studio about any kind of involvement in the film, but she may. And as for onscreen time, Carter is open to the idea of playing a role—but would prefer it be something more than a cameo.
    Follow the link for a sound clip.
    Gene Ching
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  8. #8
    That girl in the Justice League poster is my kind of hot.

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    Wonder Woman (2017) Exclusive First look [HD] by The CW

    Gene Ching
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    First look

    After seeing B v S last Tuesday, well, I'm not a spoiler kind of person, but I will say that it's all about WW.

    Wonder Woman exclusive: Meet the warrior women training Diana Prince
    BY NICOLE SPERLING
    Posted March 24 2016 — 9:00 AM EDT

    Themyscira is a hidden island where Amazon women of Greek myth have thrived for centuries, living in harmony and free to self-govern away from the gaze of man. It’s also, of course, the birthplace of Wonder Woman, who after years of false starts, is finally a movie star. With a much heralded introduction in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) is now a cornerstone in Warner Bros.’ DC Comics multiverse, with a crucial role in the first Justice League movie (out November 2017), and the center of her own long-awaited film, which will hit screens next June.

    Directed by Patty Jenkins (Monster), Wonder Woman will be an origin story illustrating the transformation of a young Princess Diana into the greatest female warrior of all time.

    She will need some help getting there, though. Preparing her for a world of men are three regal women: Diana’s mother, Queen Hippolyta (Gladiator’s Connie Nielsen), and her two military aunts – General Antiope (Robin Wright) and Antiope’s lieutenant, Menalippe (Force Majeure’s Lisa Loven Kongsli). This trio of immortals is responsible for both raising and training Diana — the only child on this estrogen heavy isle — but they don’t always agree. Hippolyta, a revolutionary leader, longs to shelter her beloved daughter from the outside world, but Antiope, the Amazon responsible for Diana’s training, wants to prepare her. “She is the only child they raised together,” says Jenkins, calling from outside London, where she is deep into the film’s production. “And their love for her manifests in a different way for each of them.”


    Image Credit: Clay Enos/DC Comics

    To create Themyscira, Jenkins and her team used exotic islands off the coasts of Italy and southern China to enhance the otherworldliness of scenes filmed on Italy’s Amalfi coast. Still, designing a fantastical place proved challenging. Every decision about it, she says, came back to a central question: “How would I want to live that’s badass?”

    Adds producer Charles Roven, “Themyscira is influenced by the Greek but it’s clearly more then that,” he says. “It’s a place that has the ‘you’ve never been to’ kind of feel. But once you’re there you’re not so sure you really want to leave so fast.” ​

    That uniqueness extended to how the Amazons look, too. “To me, they shouldn’t be dressed in armor like men,” Jenkins says of the women’s battle wear. “It should be different. It should be authentic and real – and appealing to women.” Jenkins and her costume designer, Lindy Hemming (The Dark Knight), crafted a look that showed off the women’s ripped shoulders and toned legs, in outfits that looked practical but that still featured the tropes of the comic book, in particular the braces on their wrists and, yes, even the high heels.

    Jenkins defends the impractical footwear. “It’s total wish-fulfillment,” she says, adding that the warriors have flats for heavy fighting. “I, as a woman, want Wonder Woman to be hot as hell, fight badass, and look great at the same time – the same way men want Superman to have huge pecs and an impractically big body. That makes them feel like the hero they want to be. And my hero, in my head, has really long legs.”

    Wonder Woman is slated to debut on June 23, 2017.
    Gene Ching
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  11. #11
    Greetings,


    ttp://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/amazon-women-there-any-truth-behind-myth-180950188/?no-ist


    mickey

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    I'm not really the type who gets into all that boring crap about 'celebrity hotness', at least not for many years, but IMO, Gal Gadot is definitely one of, if not THE, hottest-looking actresses today.

    And I've always felt that Wonder Woman was a more interesting character than Superman.
    Last edited by Jimbo; 03-25-2016 at 09:53 AM.

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    The Secret History of Wonder Woman By Jill Lepore

    The Surprising Origin Story of Wonder Woman
    The history of the comic-book superhero's creation seven decades ago has been hidden away—until now


    As soon as Wonder Woman appeared in Sensation Comics, beginning with her cover debut in 1942, she caused a stir. "Wonder Woman is not sufficiently dressed," one bishop groused. (Dibner Library / NMAH, SI)

    By Jill Lepore
    SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2014

    “Noted Psychologist Revealed as Author of Best-Selling ‘Wonder Woman,’” read the astonishing headline. In the summer of 1942, a press release from the New York offices of All-American Comics turned up at newspapers, magazines and radio stations all over the United States. The identity of Wonder Woman’s creator had been “at first kept secret,” it said, but the time had come to make a shocking announcement: “the author of ‘Wonder Woman’ is Dr. William Moulton Marston, internationally famous psychologist.” The truth about Wonder Woman had come out at last.

    Or so, at least, it was made to appear. But, really, the name of Wonder Woman’s creator was the least of her secrets.

    Wonder Woman is the most popular female comic-book superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, no other comic-book character has lasted as long. Generations of girls have carried their sandwiches to school in Wonder Woman lunchboxes. Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike every other superhero, she also has a secret history.

    In one episode, a newspaper editor named Brown, desperate to discover Wonder Woman’s past, assigns a team of reporters to chase her down; she easily escapes them. Brown, gone half mad, is committed to a hospital. Wonder Woman disguises herself as a nurse and brings him a scroll. “This parchment seems to be the history of that girl you call ‘Wonder Woman’!” she tells him. “A strange, veiled woman left it with me.” Brown leaps out of bed and races back to the city desk, where he cries out, parchment in hand, “Stop the presses! I’ve got the history of Wonder Woman!” But Wonder Woman’s secret history isn’t written on parchment. Instead, it lies buried in boxes and cabinets and drawers, in thousands of documents, housed in libraries, archives and collections spread all over the United States, including the private papers of creator Marston—papers that, before I saw them, had never before been seen by anyone outside of Marston’s family.

    The veil that has shrouded Wonder Woman’s past for seven decades hides beneath it a crucial story about comic books and superheroes and censorship and feminism. As Marston once put it, “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world.”


    The Secret History of Wonder Woman
    A riveting work of historical detection revealing that the origins of one of the world's most iconic superheroes hides within it a fascinating family story-and a crucial history of twentieth-century feminism Wonder Woman
    Comic books were more or less invented in 1933 by Maxwell Charles Gaines, a former elementary school principal who went on to found All-American Comics. Superman first bounded over tall buildings in 1938. Batman began lurking in the shadows in 1939. Kids read them by the piles. But at a time when war was ravaging Europe, comic books celebrated violence, even sexual violence. In 1940, the Chicago Daily News called comics a “national disgrace.” “Ten million copies of these sex-horror serials are sold every month,” wrote the newspaper’s literary editor, calling for parents and teachers to ban the comics, “unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one.”

    To defend himself against critics, Gaines, in 1940, hired Marston as a consultant. “‘Doc’ Marston has long been an advocate of the right type of comic magazines,” he explained. Marston held three degrees from Harvard, including a PhD in psychology. He led what he called “an experimental life.” He’d been a lawyer, a scientist and a professor. He is generally credited with inventing the lie detector test: He was obsessed with uncovering other people’s secrets. He’d been a consulting psychologist for Universal Pictures. He’d written screenplays, a novel and dozens of magazine articles. Gaines had read about Marston in an article in Family Circle magazine. In the summer of 1940, Olive Richard, a staff writer for the magazine, visited Marston at his house in Rye, New York, to ask him for his expert opinion about comics.

    “Some of them are full of torture, kidnapping, sadism, and other cruel business,” she said.

    “Unfortunately, that is true,” Marston admitted, but “when a lovely heroine is bound to the stake, comics followers are sure that the rescue will arrive in the nick of time. The reader’s wish is to save the girl, not to see her suffer.”
    continued next post
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    Continued from previous post



    Marston tried to showcase Wonder Woman’s athleticism whenever possible. In this 1942 comic she plays baseball; in other episodes she plays ice hockey and tennis and even founds a chain of fitness clubs. (Smithsonian Libraries)

    Marston was a man of a thousand lives and a thousand lies. “Olive Richard” was the pen name of Olive Byrne, and she hadn’t gone to visit Marston—she lived with him. She was also the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most important feminists of the 20th century. In 1916, Sanger and her sister, Ethel Byrne, Olive Byrne’s mother, had opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States. They were both arrested for the illegal distribution of contraception. In jail in 1917, Ethel Byrne went on a hunger strike and nearly died.

    Olive Byrne met Marston in 1925, when she was a senior at Tufts; he was her psychology professor. Marston was already married, to a lawyer named Elizabeth Holloway. When Marston and Byrne fell in love, he gave Holloway a choice: either Byrne could live with them, or he would leave her. Byrne moved in. Between 1928 and 1933, each woman bore two children; they lived together as a family. Holloway went to work; Byrne stayed home and raised the children. They told census-takers and anyone else who asked that Byrne was Marston’s widowed sister-in-law. “Tolerant people are the happiest,” Marston wrote in a magazine essay in 1939, so “why not get rid of costly prejudices that hold you back?” He listed the “Six Most Common Types of Prejudice.” Eliminating prejudice number six—“Prejudice against unconventional people and non-conformists”—meant the most to him. Byrne’s sons didn’t find out that Marston was their father until 1963—when Holloway finally admitted it—and only after she extracted a promise that no one would raise the subject ever again.

    Gaines didn’t know any of this when he met Marston in 1940 or else he would never have hired him: He was looking to avoid controversy, not to court it. Marston and Wonder Woman were pivotal to the creation of what became DC Comics. (DC was short for Detective Comics, the comic book in which Batman debuted.) In 1940, Gaines decided to counter his critics by forming an editorial advisory board and appointing Marston to serve on it, and DC decided to stamp comic books in which Superman and Batman appeared with a logo, an assurance of quality, reading, “A DC Publication.” And, since “the comics’ worst offense was their blood-curdling masculinity,” Marston said, the best way to fend off critics would be to create a female superhero.

    “Well, Doc,” Gaines said, “I picked Superman after every syndicate in America turned it down. I’ll take a chance on your Wonder Woman! But you’ll have to write the strip yourself.”

    In February 1941, Marston submitted a draft of his first script, explaining the “under-meaning” of Wonder Woman’s Amazonian origins in ancient Greece, where men had kept women in chains, until they broke free and escaped. “The NEW WOMEN thus freed and strengthened by supporting themselves (on Paradise Island) developed enormous physical and mental power.” His comic, he said, was meant to chronicle “a great movement now under way—the growth in the power of women.”

    Wonder Woman made her debut in All-Star Comics at the end of 1941 and on the cover of a new comic book, Sensation Comics, at the beginning of 1942, drawn by an artist named Harry G. Peter. She wore a golden tiara, a red bustier, blue underpants and knee-high, red leather boots. She was a little slinky; she was very kinky. She’d left Paradise to fight fascism with feminism, in “America, the last citadel of democracy, and of equal rights for women!”

    It seemed to Gaines like so much good, clean, superpatriotic fun. But in March 1942, the National Organization for Decent Literature put Sensation Comics on its blacklist of “Publications Disapproved for Youth” for one reason: “Wonder Woman is not sufficiently dressed.”

    Gaines decided he needed another expert. He turned to Lauretta Bender, an associate professor of psychiatry at New York University’s medical school and a senior psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital, where she was director of the children’s ward, an expert on aggression. She’d long been interested in comics but her interest had grown in 1940, after her husband, Paul Schilder, was killed by a car while walking home from visiting Bender and their 8-day-old daughter in the hospital. Bender, left with three children under the age of 3, soon became painfully interested in studying how children cope with trauma. In 1940, she conducted a study with Reginald Lourie, a medical resident under her supervision, investigating the effect of comics on four children brought to Bellevue Hospital for behavioral problems. Tessie, 12, had witnessed her father, a convicted murderer, kill himself. She insisted on calling herself Shiera, after a comic-book girl who is always rescued at the last minute by the Flash. Kenneth, 11, had been raped. He was frantic unless medicated or “wearing a Superman cape.” He felt safe in it—he could fly away if he wanted to—and “he felt that the cape protected him from an assault.” Bender and Lourie concluded the comic books were “the folklore of this age,” and worked, culturally, the same way fables and fairy tales did.

    That hardly ended the controversy. In February 1943, Josette Frank, an expert on children’s literature, a leader of the Child Study Association and a member of Gaines’ advisory board, sent Gaines a letter, telling him that while she’d never been a fan of Wonder Woman, she felt she now had to speak out about its “sadistic bits showing women chained, tortured, etc.” She had a point. In episode after episode, Wonder Woman is chained, bound, gagged, lassoed, tied, fettered and manacled. “Great girdle of Aphrodite!” she cries at one point. “Am I tired of being tied up!”

    The story behind the writing and editing of Wonder Woman can be pieced together from Bender’s papers, at Brooklyn College; Frank’s papers, at the University of Minnesota; and Marston’s editorial correspondence, along with a set of original scripts, housed at the Dibner Library at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. In his original scripts, Marston described scenes of bondage in careful, intimate detail with utmost precision. For a story about Mars, the God of War, Marston gave Peter elaborate instructions for the panel in which Wonder Woman is taken prisoner:

    “Closeup, full length figure of WW. Do some careful chaining here—Mars’s men are experts! Put a metal collar on WW with a chain running off from the panel, as though she were chained in the line of prisoners. Have her hands clasped together at her breast with double bands on her wrists, her Amazon bracelets and another set. Between these runs a short chain, about the length of a handcuff chain—this is what compels her to clasp her hands together. Then put another, heavier, larger chain between her wrist bands which hangs in a long loop to just above her knees. At her ankles show a pair of arms and hands, coming from out of the panel, clasping about her ankles. This whole panel will lose its point and spoil the story unless these chains are drawn exactly as described here.”

    Later in the story, Wonder Woman is locked in a cell. Straining to overhear a conversation in the next room, through the amplification of “bone conduction,” she takes her chain in her teeth: “Closeup of WW’s head shoulders. She holds her neck chain between her teeth. The chain runs taut between her teeth and the wall, where it is locked to a steel ring bolt.”

    Gaines forwarded Frank’s letter of complaint to Marston. Marston shrugged it off. But then Dorothy Roubicek, who helped edit Wonder Woman—the first woman editor at DC Comics—objected to Wonder Woman’s torture, too.

    “Of course I wouldn’t expect Miss Roubicek to understand all this,” Marston wrote Gaines. “After all I have devoted my entire life to working out psychological principles. Miss R. has been in comics only 6 months or so, hasn’t she? And never in psychology.” But “the secret of woman’s allure,” he told Gaines, is that “women enjoy submission—being bound.”

    Gaines was troubled. Roubicek, who worked on Superman, too, had invented kryptonite. She believed superheroes ought to have vulnerabilities. She told Gaines she thought Wonder Woman ought to be more like Superman and, just as Superman couldn’t go back to the planet Krypton, Wonder Woman ought not to be able to go back to Paradise Island, where the kinkiest stuff tended to happen. Gaines then sent Roubicek to Bellevue Hospital to interview Bender. In a memo to Gaines, Roubicek reported that Bender “does not believe that Wonder Woman tends to masochism or sadism.” She also liked the way Marston was playing with feminism, Roubicek reported: “She believes that Dr. Marston is handling very cleverly this whole ‘experiment’ as she calls it. She feels that perhaps he is bringing to the public the real issue at stake in the world (and one which she feels may possibly be a direct cause of the present conflict) and that is that the difference between the sexes is not a sex problem, nor a struggle for superiority, but rather a problem of the relation of one sex to the other.” Roubicek summed up: “Dr. Bender believes that this strip should be left alone.”
    continued next post
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
    Support our forum by getting your gear at MartialArtSmart

  15. #15
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    Gaines was hugely relieved, at least until September 1943, when a letter arrived from John D. Jacobs, a U.S. Army staff sergeant in the 291st Infantry, stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. “I am one of those odd, perhaps unfortunate men who derive an extreme erotic pleasure from the mere thought of a beautiful girl, chained or bound, or masked, or wearing extreme high-heels or high-laced boots,—in fact, any sort of constriction or strain whatsoever,” Jacobs wrote. He wanted to know whether the author of Wonder Woman himself had in his possession any of the items depicted in the stories, “the leather mask, or the wide iron collar from Tibet, or the Greek ankle manacle? Or do you just ‘dream up’ these things?”

    (For the record, Marston and Olive Byrne’s son, Byrne Marston, who is an 83-year-old retired obstetrician, thinks that when Marston talked about the importance of submission, he meant it only metaphorically. “I never saw anything like that in our house,” he told me. “He didn’t tie the ladies up to the bedpost. He’d never have gotten away with it.”)

    Gaines forwarded Jacobs’ letter to Marston, with a note: “This is one of the things I’ve been afraid of.” Something had to be done. He therefore enclosed, for Marston’s use, a memo written by Roubicek containing a “list of methods which can be used to keep women confined or enclosed without the use of chains. Each one of these can be varied in many ways—enabling us, as I told you in our conference last week, to cut down the use of chains by at least 50 to 75% without at all interfering with the excitement of the story or the sales of the books.”

    Marston wrote Gaines right back.

    “I have the good Sergeant’s letter in which he expresses his enthusiasm over chains for women—so what?” As a practicing clinical psychologist, he said, he was unimpressed. “Some day I’ll make you a list of all the items about women that different people have been known to get passionate over—women’s hair, boots, belts, silk worn by women, gloves, stockings, garters, panties, bare backs,” he promised. “You can’t have a real woman character in any form of fiction without touching off a great many readers’ erotic fancies. Which is swell, I say.”

    Marston was sure he knew what line not to cross. Harmless erotic fantasies are terrific, he said. “It’s the lousy ones you have to look out for—the harmful, destructive, morbid erotic fixations—real sadism, killing, blood-letting, torturing where the pleasure is in the victim’s actual pain, etc. Those are 100 per cent bad and I won’t have any part of them.” He added, in closing, “Please thank Miss Roubicek for the list of menaces.”

    In 1944, Gaines and Marston signed an agreement for Wonder Woman to become a newspaper strip, syndicated by King Features. Busy with the newspaper strip, Marston hired an 18-year-old student, Joye Hummel, to help him write comic-book scripts. Joye Hummel, now Joye Kelly, turned 90 this April; in June, she donated her collection of never-before-seen scripts and comic books to the Smithsonian Libraries. Hiring her helped with Marston’s editorial problem, too. Her stories were more innocent than his. She’d type them and bring them to Sheldon Mayer, Marston’s editor at DC, she told me, and “He always OK’d mine faster because I didn’t make mine as sexy.” To celebrate syndication, Gaines had his artists draw a panel in which Superman and Batman, rising out of the front page of a daily newspaper, call out to Wonder Woman, who’s leaping onto the page, “Welcome, Wonder Woman!”

    Gaines had another kind of welcome to make, too. He asked Lauretta Bender to take Frank’s place on the editorial advisory board.

    In an ad King Features ran to persuade newspapers to purchase the strip, pointing out that Wonder Woman already had “ten million loyal fans,” her name is written in rope.

    Hidden behind this controversy is one reason for all those chains and ropes, which has to do with the history of the fight for women’s rights. Because Marston kept his true relationship with Olive Byrne a secret, he kept his family’s ties to Margaret Sanger a secret, too. Marston, Byrne and Holloway, and even Harry G. Peter, the artist who drew Wonder Woman, had all been powerfully influenced by the suffrage, feminism and birth control movements. And each of those movements had used chains as a centerpiece of its iconography.

    In 1911, when Marston was a freshman at Harvard, the British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, who’d chained herself to the gates outside 10 Downing Street, came to speak on campus. When Sanger faced charges of obscenity for explaining birth control in a magazine she founded called the Woman Rebel, a petition sent to President Woodrow Wilson on her behalf read, “While men stand proudly and face the sun, boasting that they have quenched the wickedness of slavery, what chains of slavery are, have been or ever could be so intimate a horror as the shackles on every limb—on every thought—on the very soul of an unwilling pregnant woman?” American suffragists threatened to chain themselves to the gates outside the White House. In 1916, in Chicago, women representing the states where women had still not gained the right to vote marched in chains.

    In the 1910s, Peter was a staff artist at the magazine Judge, where he contributed to its suffrage page called “The Modern Woman,” which ran from 1912 to 1917. More regularly, the art on that page was drawn by another staff artist, a woman named Lou Rogers. Rogers’ suffrage and feminist cartoons very often featured an allegorical woman chained or roped, breaking her bonds. Sanger hired Rogers as art director for the Birth Control Review, a magazine she started in 1917. In 1920, in a book called Woman and the New Race, Sanger argued that woman “had chained herself to her place in society and the family through the maternal functions of her nature, and only chains thus strong could have bound her to her lot as a brood animal.” In 1923, an illustration commissioned by Rogers for the cover of Birth Control Review pictured a weakened and desperate woman, fallen to her knees and chained at the ankle to a ball that reads, “UNWANTED BABIES.” A chained woman inspired the title of Sanger’s 1928 book, Motherhood in Bondage, a compilation of some of the thousands of letters she had received from women begging her for information about birth control; she described the letters as “the confessions of enslaved mothers.”
    continued next post
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
    Support our forum by getting your gear at MartialArtSmart

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