Sunday, February 6, 2022

NULL-MYTHS: “WONDER GIRL’S STOLEN FACE” (WONDER WOMAN #153, 1965)

 



Despite Robert Kanigher’s considerable creativity, I’ve yet to see anything he wrote for the WONDER WOMAN feature—which he wrote and edited for over fifteen years—that qualified as a mythcomic. His use of myth-ideas was both derivative and desultory, giving one the impression that he could barely summon any enthusiasm for the series, even when dealing with characters he himself created, or at least substantially re-worked, like the idea of “Wonder Woman as a girl,” as I discussed here.


All that said, Kanigher gets a little closer to the mythic mark with the 1965 story “Wonder Girl’s Stolen Face,” though it’s such a jumbled mess that it only qualifies as a “null-myth.” Strangely, in other venues Kanigher seemed to be a fan of “strong women,” since he had created such DC Comics characters as Black Canary, Poison Ivy and Mademoiselle Marie. But the closest he comes to expatiating on a feminine theme in a WONDER WOMAN comic is the old saw about women being ruled by their vanity.



“Face” begins by showing Wonder Girl (a teenaged version of Wonder Woman, who could co-exist with her older self via a complicated time-trick) being celebrated by both her immediate family on Paradise Island, and by two young swains pursuing her: Mer-Boy, a half-fish merman who dwells in the ocean with his kindred, and Bird-Boy, who lives in the sky with his fellow bird-folk. But the teen Amazon’s good cheer is sabotaged by a longtime WONDER WOMAN villain, the alien Duke of Deception, who wants the entire Wonder-family eliminated so that he can invade Earth with his flying saucers. He decides to sow the seeds of dissension by depriving Wonder Girl of her normal good looks and making her into a monster embittered against society and her family.



Sure enough, the first part of the Duke’s plan works fine. At the very moment when Wonder Girl’s two beaus are singing praises for her Cleopatra-like beauty, the ray literally steals the heroine’s face—we know this because we see the disembodied face later on-- and replaces it with a half-human, half-gargoyle physiognomy. Upon finding herself transformed, does the teenager rush off to Paradise Island, to have her mother and the Amazon scientists examine her? No, she raves at her boyfriends for being taken aback by her face-lift, even though neither of them forswears her for her sudden hideousness. In fact, each in turn invites the gargoyle girl to attend functions in their respective domains, trying to buoy up her spirits. However, at both functions the mer-people and the bird-people both think Wonder Girl is putting them on with her horrific visage, and they laugh at her. In both domains the angry Amazon tears up a lot of real estate and flees back to her family’s island. However, the other members of the WW family-- Wonder Woman herself, her mother Hippolyta and Wonder Tot (don’t ask!) -- make the exact same mistake, with the result that once again the tormented teen tears things up and fights with her family.



This of course is just what the Duke wanted. However, the other members of the family refuse to strike Wonder Girl. This bit of charity clears some of the rage from the heroine’s mind, and instead of attacking further, she flies off, intending to exile herself (still with no reason to know that the transformation is permanent). The frustrated alien traps Wonder Girl, planning to draw the other Wonders into an ambush. The teen’s innate heroism asserts itself, and she wins free in time to give warning—after which the four fighting females demolish the Duke’s invasion force. From one of the destroyed saucers Wonder Woman saves her younger self’s stolen face—it really does look like just a disembodied face, of course—and later Amazon science manage to get rid of the gargoyle-visage and restore to Wonder Girl her normal cuteness, as well as returning everything to the status quo.







The best part of this story is not the villain’s predictable plot, but the wacky lengths to which Kanigher goes to justify the Duke’s face-swapping technology. In a monologue spoken for the reader’s benefit, the deceptive demon claims that he performed this perfidious act twice before on two famous icons: mythology’s Medusa and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll. I feel reasonably sure that the original story of Medusa—a beautiful mortal woman, whom a god transformed into a snake-haired horror—was probably the main inspiration for “Face,” and aside from the Duke’s participation, the Medusa story hews close to the original story’s outlines. However, the revision of Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll narrative is a classic example of an author playing the part of Procrustes, the manic innkeeper of myth who cut off his victims’ limbs so that they would fit on a bed. According to Kanigher, Jekyll wasn’t transformed into Hyde by his experimental potion as Stevenson claimed, but by the Duke replacing Jekyll’s normal face with a monstrous physiognomy. It’s of minor interest that the transformed Wonder Girl acts more like Hyde than like Medusa, which may be the only reason that Kanigher bothered to rewrite Stevenson. Further, it may be revealing that the Duke says he struck at Medusa and Jekyll out of envy for their accolades. Maybe the real reason Kanigher rewrote those classic stories was also out of envy, albeit of the authorial kind…

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