I got a big-ass email from a relative yesterday. It was CC’ed to pretty much the entire family, actually. It was about her tattoos and their significance to her. Anyway, this bit here caught my eye:

I thought that Wonder Woman was a forgotten hero and I wanted to have the symbol tattooed on my lower stomach.

Not quite forgotten just yet, but it’s certainly possible, what with Heinberg’s dodgy writing and the recent slip to one issue every two months.

What is forgotten is that her creator, William Moulton Marston, was kind of a weirdo. Early Wonder Woman comics weren’t so much littered as packed with bondage themes: her one weakness is that she loses all her power if she’s tied or bound in some way, so that would happen pretty much every issue, plus her main weapon is a lasso which she’d use to tie other folks up with. And just in case anyone thought that was simply a product of more innocent times he’s got a whole mess of quotes like this one:

“The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound … Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element”

So yeah, world peace through bondage and submission. He’s been accused of trying to influence the sexual development of young, impressionable comic-reading kids, or maybe just using the book as an outlet for his own fantasies. Either way, the comics code? Largely down to Marston, I’d say.

Also, did I mention he lived with his wife and his mistress? He had two kids with each of them, and they all lived together as one big, happy, polyamorous family.

Freaky~

Anyway, if you’re in the market for a strong yet forgotten female hero you could go further wrong than Spoiler. A teenage single mother who shopped her retarded super-villain father and put on a cape of her own. She even became Batman’s fourth Robin for a while, but she ended up dying, another victim of girlfriend-in-refridgerator-syndrome.