Wonder Woman Unbound (14 page)

Andru and Esposito’s modern style was a big change from Peter’s old-fashioned art. Peter’s work was compact and uniform, and it felt very flat, especially toward the end of his run when Peter was getting old and the art was churned out by committee. Andru and Esposito used different perspectives and angles to communicate the action of a scene, and their work more resembled contemporary comic book art than Peter’s unique but dated style.

Wonder Woman
#98 marked a clear break from the Marston-influenced run on the book. It was followed seven issues later by Kanigher’s brand-new origin story for Wonder Woman. Aspects of Kanigher’s new Wonder Woman were very much a product of DC Comics’ Silver Age approach to superheroes, and this approach was born out of the ashes of this chaotic decade.

Prelude to the Silver Age

When World War II ended, so too did the superhero boom. After Superman premiered in 1938, superhero comics had dominated the comic book industry, but the end of the war also meant an end to the desire for costumed heroes. Many books were canceled, and superheroes began to disappear. At DC Comics,
Flash Comics
and
Green Lantern
both ended in 1949, and the last adventure of their superhero team, the Justice Society of America, was published in 1951. Timely Comics’ Human Torch and Namor the Sub-Mariner both ended in the late 1940s, and attempts to revive the characters throughout the 1950s routinely failed. Even Captain Marvel, who regularly had the top-selling comic book during the war, faced a staggering drop in sales. The decreasing profitability of the character was a major factor in Fawcett’s decision to settle DC Comics’ copyright infringement lawsuit and shut down its comic book division in 1953.

By 1954, only three superheroes still had comic books. Superman and Batman both survived the superhero collapse and starred in two books each, as well as costarring in a third,
World’s Finest.
Wonder Woman also survived, but only with her self-titled series.
Comic Cavalcade
changed its format in 1948 and ended a few years later, and
Sensation Comics
was canceled in 1952.

Nothing better exemplifies the shift in the comic book market than the fate of Captain America. He had been hugely popular during the war but ran into the same sales decrease that rocked the genre in the late 1940s. Just before his series,
Captain America Comics,
was canceled, Timely Comics changed the name to
Captain America’s Weird Tales
and tried to salvage the book as a horror series. The revamp failed and the series was canceled in 1950; Captain America didn’t even appear in its final issue. Throughout the industry, horror, crime, and suspense comic books became the new hot genres.

Coincidentally, the most infamous publisher of horror and crime comics had direct ties to Wonder Woman. In 1944, National Comics officially merged with All-American Publications to form DC Comics, and Harry Donenfeld bought out All-American’s publisher, Max Gaines. Gaines left the publisher, taking only
Picture Stories from the Bible
with him, and formed a new company he called Educational Comics. When Gaines died in a boating accident in 1947, his son, William, took over.

Bill Gaines, as he was better known, had a very different vision for the company. He changed the name to Entertaining Comics and found a slew of writers and artists with distinctive styles and a taste for the macabre. EC Comics began to publish several horror comic books, most famously
Haunt of Fear, Tales from the Crypt,
and
Vault of Horror,
all of which featured gruesome and frightening artwork.
*
EC also had a strong stable of crime and suspense series, including
Crime SuspenStories, Shock SuspenStories, Two-Fisted Tales,
and
Weird Stories.
They were all luridly illustrated and presented shocking tales of horrific crimes, revenge, and violence.

EC Comics wasn’t the only publisher of such series; nearly every company still in the business in the early 1950s had some horror or suspense comic books on the newsstands, but no one did it quite like EC. Despite its numerous imitators, EC remains the gold standard for horror and suspense comic books to this day. In fact, the art of EC Comics is often heralded as some of the most innovative and influential art to ever appear in comic books. However, in the 1950s these sensationalistic comic books faced a slew of very powerful critics.

Dr. Fredric Wertham was a noted psychologist who did some remarkable work in the 1950s. In 1953, he argued against Ethel Rosenberg’s solitary confinement during the trial of the famous American communist spies. In 1954, he gave testimony during the landmark
Brown v. Board of Education
case in which he described the adverse psychological effects of segregation on African American children. Throughout the entire decade, he ran a mental health clinic in Harlem in order to serve the often-ignored minority community. Despite these impressive actions, though, Wertham is today best remembered as the man who nearly destroyed the comic book industry.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Wertham wrote several articles about the dangers of comic books, calling them out as a contributing factor to juvenile delinquency. His comic book research culminated in his 1954 book
Seduction of the Innocent,
which received several favorable reviews in national magazines and was even excerpted in an issue of
Reader’s Digest.
In the book, Wertham outlined his major objections to comic books, which were:

1) The comic-book format is an invitation to illiteracy.

2) Crime comic books create an atmosphere of cruelty and deceit.

3) They create a readiness for temptation.

4) They stimulate unwholesome fantasies.

5) They suggest criminal or sexually abnormal ideas.

6) They furnish the rationalization for them, which may be ethically even more harmful than the impulse.

7) They suggest the forms a delinquent impulse may take and supply details of technique.

8) They may tip the scales toward maladjustment or delinquency.

Wertham’s major concern was that the horror and suspense stories that dominated the genre spent most of their time depicting crimes, violence, and offensive/racist rhetoric, and very little time showing that those things were wrong. He argued that while the perpetrator was regularly caught and punished at the end of a story, for a young mind that last page of justice didn’t balance out the twenty pages of injustice that preceded it.

As such, Wertham believed that comic books placed a strong focus on negative activities, and that this focus was a contributing factor to the alarming rise in juvenile delinquency in the mid-1950s.
*
The popularity of
Seduction of the Innocent
was noticed by the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, which was led by Senator Estes Kefauver, famous for his hearings on organized crime. Soon Wertham was invited to speak before the committee.

The Senate hearings were a disaster for the comic book industry. Wertham stepped up his rhetoric; while his book focused primarily on crime and horror series, he painted all comic books with the same brush before the Senate, decrying the output of the industry as a whole. Ultimately, Wertham stated that “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry. They get the children much younger. They teach them race hatred at the age of four before they can read.” Wertham’s alarmist testimony shocked many, and Bill Gaines had to follow his blistering attack later that afternoon. Unfortunately, Gaines was even more damaging than Wertham.
^†

Gaines started off well enough, but when he was asked what were the limits of what he would print in a comic book, Gaines stated, “My only limits are the bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.” Senator Kefauver then showed the cover of
Crime SuspenStories
#22, which depicted a woman’s body lying on the floor and a man holding a bloodied ax and the woman’s severed head. The senator asked Gaines if the cover was in good taste and Gaines, having painted himself into a corner, had to say that it was. He added that “a cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.” Gaines made the front page of the
New York Times
the very next day with the headline No H
ARM IN
H
ORROR,
C
OMICS
I
SSUER
S
AYS;
C
OMICS
P
UBLISHER
S
EES
No H
ARM IN
H
ORROR,
D
ISCOUNTS
“G
OOD
T
ASTE.
” The Senate hearings received national press coverage, and the comic book industry came out of them in terrible shape.

Back in the 1930s, educational and parental groups had some problems with comic books, but their ire was more of the angry letter variety and was calmed by advisory panels. After the Senate hearings, several municipal governments across America banned comic books outright, and there were even comic book burnings. With a full-blown crisis on its hands, the comic book industry had no choice but to band together.

Rather than having the government impose regulations upon them from the outside, comics publishers came up with their own rules and created the Comics Code Authority. The CCA was extremely strict and specific; the goal was to make comics as unobjectionable as possible so that the
Seduction of the Innocent/Senate
hearings outrage would fade away as quickly as possible. The CCA prohibited vulgar language and poor grammar, salacious or exaggerated depictions of women, and the ridiculing of religious groups, racial groups, or the police and other authority figures. According to the Code, comic books were supposed to show that “in every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds.” Basically, the publishers took every criticism leveled against them and made it mandatory that comic books do the exact opposite.

Most important for the industry, the CCA forbade the use of the words “terror” and “horror” from comics titles, as well as the depiction of gruesome imagery and “scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism and werewolfism.” These rules destroyed horror comics, and intentionally so. All of the publishers without a solid horror line saw an opportunity to kill the genre that was slaughtering them on the sales charts, and they went for it. Retailers wouldn’t sell comic books without the CCA’s “seal of approval” on the cover, and publishers who refused to participate, like Gaines’s EC Comics, very quickly went out of business.

For the publishers who survived, there was still a lot of work to do. Without the genres that had dominated the newsstands for years, publishers began to look for new, more wholesome and unobjectionable types of comic books to replace them. The editors at DC Comics decided to return to their superhero properties, and thus the Silver Age of comics began.

The Dawn of the Silver Age

In the early 1940s, DC Comics had been the biggest publisher of superhero comic books, and after the catastrophic events of 1954 it decided to revitalize some of its old characters. The first hero to come back was the Flash, who was revamped by John Broome, Carmine Infantino, and, coincidentally, Robert Kanigher. This new Flash was Barry Allen, a police scientist who developed superspeed when lightning struck his laboratory and spilled electrified chemicals over him. His first appearance in
Showcase
#4 in October 1956 is generally agreed upon as the official start of the Silver Age.

Many other reimagined heroes soon followed. Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern, had a magical power ring, but Hal Jordan, who appeared as the new Green Lantern in October 1959, was a member of an intergalactic police force with a power ring given to him by an alien. The new Hawkman, Katar Hol, was a policeman as well; he first appeared in February 1961 as a police officer from the planet Thanagar, unlike the original Hawkman, who was a reincarnated Egyptian god. The original Atom, Al Pratt, was just a short guy with a superpunch, but the new Atom, Ray Palmer, was a physicist who could shrink down to subatomic size. Other heroes were brought back without significant changes, like Aquaman, who kept his original costume and powers and was given a slightly different backstory.

There were entirely new characters too, like the Martian Manhunter, a shape-shifting Martian accidentally transported to Earth who became a police detective, and Supergirl, Superman’s younger Kryptonian cousin. All of these new and revitalized characters led to an explosion of new series, and superheroes became a dominant force in the comic book industry again.