CURIOSITIES #40: WONDER WOMAN'S "NEW GOLDEN AGE"

 

In WONDER WOMAN #156 (1965), editor/writer Robert Kanigher endeavored to goose sales by announcing a "New Golden Age" for the heroine. This brief reboot of the low-rated WW series only lasted about eight more issues, in which the words "Golden Age" would often be used on covers or splash pages. Kanigher revived a smattering of villains introduced by William Moulton Marston in the 1940s, and he even had his regular artists, Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, emulate the drawing-style of the feature's original artist H.G. Peter. Once sales came in, probably indicating little if any improvement, Kanigher and the artists largely went back to what they'd been doing on the title in years previous.

One might think that Kanigher, who was himself a graduate of the Golden Age hard-knocks school, might have been able to capture something of the resonance of the Marston series. Indeed, for some years after Marston's passing, Kanigher even wrote scripts for Peter before DC gave the older artist his walking-papers. Since I haven't read every Kanigher WW script from his run of twenty-plus years, I can't make a decisive statement about why the feature began to lose readers over time, and I can't even say when the decline began. But my considered opinion is that Kanigher generally imitated the daffier aspects of Marston's scripts-- things like having Amazons riding kangaroos-- but he couldn't deliver on the heartfelt meaning that Moulton conveyed in his scripts. I'm not saying that any of Moulton's 1940s readers were necessarily converted to his unique feminist philosophy, or even that those readers understood what Moulton was talking about. But young readers are often attracted by the sense of an author's conviction in his principles, as long as he makes those principles into good stories. That's something Moulton was often able to do, in contrast to the modern generation of Progressive political comics-writers.

In summation, I think Kanigher looked around at the sales success of other DC revivals of Golden Age characters-- one of whom, THE FLASH, Kanigher had written at the dawn of the Silver Age, circa 1956. But the FLASH stories produced by dominant writer John Broome did possess a strong conviction in the types of science fiction and fantasy appropriate to juvenile audiences. In contrast, Kanigher writing a WW script in 1965 wasn't much different than a WW script in 1956: almost non-stop wackiness with a small moral sop tossed in. Kanigher looked at the success of some (though not all) of the Julius Schwartz line of DC magazines, and he thought all one had to do was mindlessly emulate the outward form of Golden Age stories-- which was exactly what the Schwartz line did NOT do. It's at least of passing interest that 1965 was the same year as the first full comic-book convention in New York, which is probably why Kanigher worked in a lot of references to the comic-collecting hobby in #156.

BTW, the fact that I have no comments on the featured "novel," "Brain Pirate of the Inner World," should be enough to signify my opinion of it.