AMAZON ATROPHY

 Yesterday I decided to do a deep dive into a section of the shallow pool known as "Robert Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN." I didn't want to try reading everything that he might have written since he (almost exclusively) took over writing the DC feature following the passing of William Marston in 1947. But since I think Kanigher was a guy who had real talent, I wanted to get as much info as possible about why he didn't seem to show any of that creative ability during the decade of the sixties. He was doing some good scripts in that decade for BATMAN, METAL MEN, and the war books, but as far as WONDER WOMAN was concerned, a Kanigher script from the 1960s reads just like anything he did in the 1950s. I don't fault him so much for being dull in the 1950s, because the majority of the stories from DC Comics were dull then, as the company sought to keep its squeaky-clean image amid industry controversies. But why couldn't he seem to craft a decent story for the Amazing Amazon?

In this essay I suggested one reason:  

"[Kanigher's] 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.” Another reason may have related to his insider knowledge that DC wanted to keep control of the franchise in those days, before the company bought the character from the Marston estate outright. His knowing that the company wanted to keep their hold on the character, and that they didn't seem to have any concept of what to do with the Amazon except to emulate Marston (but without as much bondage), probably contributed to Kanigher's sense that he could do anything he wanted, as long as he kept turning in scripts on time.   

I started collecting superhero comics after the debut of the Batman teleseries, so Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN was my first experience with the heroine. I remember thinking at some point that I didn't initially like the Andru-Esposito art or the romantic aspect of the Amazon's ongoing romance with Steve Trevor. Was any of that just the usual antipathy of a pre-teen toward matters of sex? Possibly, but if so, the phase didn't last, as I welcomed the change to "Mod Wonder Woman" with the new editorship of Mike Sekowsky, and even bought those issues off the stands new-- and there was a fair amount of romance appeared in those stories.

I didn't confine my study only to issues in the 1960s but rather extended it from issue 105 (April 1959) through issue #176 (May-June 1968). I did so because #105 introduced the aforementioned "Wonder Woman as a girl." Since these stories usually took place before the juvenile Wonder Woman became a superhero, a lot of them took place in the fantasy-domain of Paradise Island and various vague fantasy-domains. But here, as described, Kanigher just tossed out his concepts willy-nilly, with no attempt to ground them in any knowledge-system, as one could find in titles of the time like FLASH and SUPERMAN. Thus even though Wonder Girl might have been introduced to give the title "teen appeal," both her character and her adventures were superficial. As time went on, Kanigher devised ways for all three members of the Wonder Family -- Wonder Girl, her adult self, and Wonder Tot, a baby-wonder-- to appear in the same adventures. But this merely made Kanigher's attempt to imitate the "Superman Family" of the more popular SUPERMAN titles more forced and therefore pathetic. In both sets of stories, the authors were attempting to get readers invested in the recursive nature of the SUPERMAN and WONDER WOMAN worlds; worlds in which repetition of motifs was intended to be reassuring. But though there were a lot of dull 1950s SUPERMAN stories too, there were also tales that sustained a sense of juvenile charm, particularly in the late 1950s, when editor Mort Weisinger became somewhat more venturesome in his choice of story-subjects.    

The Marston feminist message was given no more than lip service during the sixties decade, even in the brief period when Kanigher and his artists emulated the general look of Golden Age WONDER WOMAN. However, there was an aspect of the Superman books that both Marston and Kanigher imitated: the hero's use of incredible powers to perform unique feats. Kanigher's concoctions of bizarre tasks were no better or worse than those of Marston, but generally speaking Marston usually provided some rationale for the menaces WW faced. In the above excerpt from WW #154, Kanigher wastes no energy figuring out why a giant flaming humanoid happens to be dwelling right under Paradise Island. Is the Boiling Man a member of a subterranean race? An ancient Greek Titan confined to the underworld by the Olympians? It's astounding that Kanigher worked in comic books for so long but had so little insight into what his audience wanted. Yes, the flashy super-feats might be the primary concern of kid-audiences. But Marston sold well in part because he challenged his audience, while Kanigher seemed to have had a low opinion of their capacities.

Yet there was one type of super-feat Kanigher avoided in the six years of my survey: the hand-to-hand fight-scene. Marston's Amazon was a jock; she liked not only entering athletic contests but challenging opponents, particularly conceited males, to fights. Kanigher didn't show any reluctance to show his Golden Age creation Black Canary duking it out with male crooks, so he wasn't personally repelled by "tough females." Even his female robot Tina of the contemporaneous METAL MEN was a spitfire. So it's possible that the low incidence of fight-scenes in the five-plus years from #105 to #155 (July 1965) was a dictate from DC editorial not to make the heroine seem too masculine, since that had been a major complaint about the character from the fanatic Frederic Wertham, the man whose fulminations made the 1955 Comics Code necessary for the comics-industry. However, evidently by 1965 sales on WW had declined enough for Kanigher to attempt impressing readers with his Marston-imitation, beginning in issue #156. Sales probably did not appreciably improve, but this new direction resulted in much more physical violence between the Amazon and her opponents for the remaining three-or-so years of Kanigher's tenure. Here are a few examples from that period:

    

This development certainly allowed artists Andru and Esposito to make the art more dynamic. Another possible factor is that even though the Marston-emulation took place before the debut of BATMAN in January 1966, by 1965 many DC superheroes began getting more "punchy," possibly in recognition that Marvel Comics was cutting into DC's action with the hyperkinetic fight-scenes of Kirby, Ditko and others. But apparently, even once the Marston-schtick ran its course in about eight issues, Wonder Woman's sales did not improve despite more fight-scenes either. This resulted in the aforementioned phase of "Mod Wonder Woman," which seemed to do a little better for the first year before its sales also declined.

Of all the stories I studied, only one merited the designation of a myth-comic, and I'll devote a separate essay to Kanigher's only exceptional WW story of the 1960s.