Friday, December 6, 2019

NULL-MYTHS: "INVISIBLE TERROR" (WONDER WOMAN #19, 1946)




In 2016 I devoted three posts to disputing Noah Berlatsky's hyper-judgmental estimation of a 1946 WONDER WOMAN story. (Like most of  the full-length stories of the period, this one had three separate chapter-titles, and I've chosen to denote the story as a whole with the first such title, "Invisible Terror"). I also preserved some of my disputatious remarks on my own blog, which is fortunate for my own records, since as of late it would seem that much of the old Berlatsky HU (for "horribly useless,"  of course) has been deleted. The original NB essay survives on another site, however.

At the time that I wrote my conditional arguments against NB, he had one advantage over me, in that he'd apparently read the whole story, and I had to go on what he and one other blogger had posted online. Though WONDER WOMAN #19 had been reprinted in the DC ARCHIVES series by 2016, I wasn't interested enough to pay full price for the reprint, even if I could have found one (it's my memory that a lot of copies were marked up on Amazon, possibly because of the scandalous contents of "Terror"). However, this year someone recommended to me the site READ COMICS ONLINE, and lo and behold, it reprinted the full text of WONDER WOMAN #19. And that I have read the story, I would partly concur with NB that it is a racist story, though I have no idea why he would call it "enduring" in his essay-title. I suppose the evidence of Marston's racial beliefs "endures" insofar as persons of later generations keep referencing his works, but on the whole, I would say that whatever racial sins Marston committed in his lifetime have proven generally ephemeral in terms of their effect on popular culture.

Not surprisingly, NB did not bother to place the 1946 story into its temporal political context. The story takes place in the same "real-time" of its publication, about a year after the Axis powers have been defeated. This did not mean that the victorious Allies could assume that everything would become hunky-dory, though, and "Terror" is one of many "recrudescent Nazi" stories that circulated in pop culture for the next couple of decades. The "invisible terror" of the title is a "brain wave of death" perfected by a group of diehard goose-steppers, and it kills several top U.S. officers before serendipity, in the form of the Holliday Girls, puts Wonder Woman on the track of said Nazis. As it happens, they've come to the U.S. to abduct one particular woman who, for reasons never disclosed, can fuel the brain-wave machine really well: Marya, an eight-foot-tall Mexican mountain woman introduced in an earlier story.  The Amazon doesn't overtake the Nazis and their prisoner until their fleeing submarine has homed in on their base of operations in Africa, where the remainder of the story's action takes place.



It's in "Terror's" last two thirds that all the racial myths appear. In my essay SOMEWHERE, WONDER WOMAN IS BEING MISTREATED, I wrote:

I confess I have not read the story in question, but-- genocide? According to this blog-writeup of the same story, it looks to me like WW and her buddies manage to win back the Africans from the Nazis, who were "threatening [the natives] with their [the Nazis'] death-ray." It's true that WW and her buddies win out by playing upon the foolish superstitions of the natives, and their natural sense of rhythm, etc. But of what relevance is it that "Hitler loathed black people?" The story in question was dated September/October 1946, so it's long after the conclusion of WWII, and Hitler's presumptive death. The die-hard goose-steppers of this story have nothing to lose, and everything to gain, by attempting to persuade the natives that they can become part of the coming regime. I don't imagine Marston bothered to work out this scenario very carefully, but WW#19 is certainly of a piece with many wartime stories in which Axis agents are seen suborning or subverting established Third World cultures.

Now that I've read the story, I can't claim that the African natives of Marston's story are all being kept in line by the death-ray, as this page shows:



Dozens of Marston stories prior to this one had shown a conflict between two opposed groups, usually an all-women group and an all-male group. Here it's two all-male groups, given the ludicrous names of "the Meanugs," an aggressive tribe which allies itself to the Nazis, and "the Zoogoos," a victimized tribe who apparently have provided the Nazi scientist with the brain-energy he needed for his attacks, prior to his capturing Marya. NB excoriates Marston for having dared to depict the Meanugs wearing swastikas, and thus supposedly advocating the genocide of Africans, but there's no evidence in "Terror" that anyone plans to exterminate all Africans because one tribe tried to ally itself to the Nazis, nor does the swastika's use connote anything but the Meanugs' desire to share in the Nazi's return to power.


NB also assails Marston for not having written a story showing the African women being liberated, as he'd done with many other cultures, usually belonging to fantasy-domains. However, on the next page the Meanug leader remarks that Marya and the Amazon are "not weak like our women," and for me this opens the possibility that Marston simply knew nothing about the women of the various African tribes except a reputation for subservience. (Only one African woman is seen in the story, fanning the Nazi scientist, though later a tribesman makes a joke about a fellow being afraid of his wife.) I would hypothesize that Marston may not have sought to promote some ambitious project involving African women precisely because he was writing about a real world about which he knew little, and therefore he fell back on the better-known trope of two warring tribes of men. (I myself would tend to believe that in that period most Black African tribes were dominated by patriarchy.)

Still, Marston isn't all that concerned with liberating even the victimized male Zoogoos (some comical version of "Zulus?"). Some Zoogoos offer to become slaves to Steve Trevor when he rescues them from a lion, and another group act like sheep when Wonder Woman and Marya see them being summoned by so-called "voodoo drums." (FWIW, it was fairly common in those days for Americans to characterize native African beliefs as "voodoo," inaccurate though it was.) Such is Wonder Woman's heroism that she sacrifices herself to Meanug captivity to keep the Zoogoos from being slain.



To her good fortune, Steve Trevor arrives and saves Diana's bacon, after whch she captures the witch doctor. Interestingly, the native compares the death-ray to the alleged effects of voodoo, in that both can strike people dead at a distance.



Since the ray has such insuperable power, Wonder Woman fakes the Meanugs into capturing her, and as I noted in THOU ART THE WONDER WOMAN, this aggravated yet another online critic into attacking Marston for being insensitive to Black Africans and their history of bondage. But the Amazon's reference to being given a "dog collar" is just a toss-off joke, and really doesn't deserve so much acrimony.

Actually, the worst racial trope in the story occurs when Trevor enlists Etta Candy and the Holliday Girls to take advantage of the Meanugs' by playing on their sense of "rhythm."



Naturally, Wonder Woman inevitably defeats the villains and neutralizes the death ray. Admittedly nothing is said about how things will shake out between the overthrown Meanugs and their former victims, but that's a long way from assuming Marston was advocating "genocide."

Now, though I've said that most of the criticisms of "Terror" are hyperbolic and logically unjustifiable, I'll state that it's still a pretty bad story. But it's not bad simply because it played to dominant racial myths about Africans. It's bad because it's a dime-a-dozen colonialist fantasy, and because Marston doesn't devote any of his high-flown rhetoric to ironing out the differences between the warring tribes, as he'd done so often before. Maybe he had a racist disposition to believe that Black Africans couldn't sort out their own, and that they had to be guided by more civilized nations. I don't fault him for not being as progressive as modern readers think everyone should be, but he should at least have followed through on his professed beliefs across the board.

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