| Posted: 02 January 2007 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | 10
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When Marston created WW, the notion of comparing and contrasting various characters as if they existed within a single reality did not exist, and certainly not in its present form. WW stories were expected to be consistent within themselves and owed nothing to the events in Superman, Detective, or any of the other National/ All-American magazines.
When the Justice Society began to meet, cleverly stopping the giant robot and saving the town of mining folk from the rock troll invasion were the main concerns of the day. It was a passing issue at best whether Starman's Gravity Rod could exert a stronger pull than GL's power ring and such. The fans began to conjure with those possibilities while the creators of that era continued to merely write the characters in their own individual styles as much as possible. The look and tone of WW's world was unique, and therefore her adventures differed from those of the other JSA'ers. Editors realized the readers enjoyed seeing the characters interact, but they did not impose a single, overriding "reality" onto their adventures. Marston even went out of his way to preserve the integrity of his approach by writing her chapters in the JSA novel-length adventures. WW still dealt with magical, winged fairie queens and planets where evil men had enslaved the female populations while the Flash went to go battle the Fiddler or some other gimmicky felon. Anything else would have been fairly insulting to the creators who had not, after all, just created an adventure hero and a small list of superpowers for them to possess. They'd created the entire milleu in which that character existed (even if that meant merely borrowing one from pulps and crime films.)
WW was plenty tough enough to whip Hercules' butt and send him and his buddy Mars scurrying back to Olympus like scolded dogs. She'd then offer encouragement to the Holliday Girls assuring them all that they too could do exactly as she had done, with the proper training and belief system. Superman's creators later wrote stories in which Hercules would go toe-to-toe with the Metropolis Marvel only to reach a stalemate. As readers we could then fairly assume that if WW can best Hercules with no trouble, and Superman can't do so on strength alone, then WW could easily pummel that carnival costumed Patriarchal showboater with one or both hands tied behind her back. (She's used to working in restraints, after all...) Heck, with proper diet and exercise, the Holliday Girls could take him! That's fine, but the writers didn't play those games back then. They gave you this month's story and did what they could to keep it reasonably consistent with the stories they'd been writing for the past five years or so... Anything older than that was open to revisiting or revision.
And the world got along just great that way. Sales were high, readers seemed to like the stories they got...Sure, you wound up with WW, Superman, Rip Hunter, and heaven only knows who else all battling different versions of Circe at one point or another, but it was up to the fans to reconcile those "inconsistencies." The books' creators merely asked themselves if they'd written an engaging, entertaining adventure and moved on to next month's story.
It's the fans coming into comics later who insisted we cross-verify and catalog these "errors" so that all can be in complete and utter sync with the great "super-hero universe" concept. Even Marvel's continuity wasn't tidily kept when they came up with the "Marvel Universe" fairly late in their genesis. Once DC bought into the notion, characters purchased from other companies who owed even less to their neighbors on the comic racks were subsequently pounded into the requisite round holes to the point that unique and wonderful heroes like Captain Marvel and Plastic Man had to be reimagined as child-men and drug addicts to maintain any sort of connection to the richly imaginative universes in which they once lived. Today, any sort of individualism a character may once have possessed is subsumed into universe-crashing grand guignol and the results are freakshow scenes like "Days of Vengeance" in which Captain Marvel battles the Spectre to avenge the brutal death of Shazam while Detective Chimp, Ragman, and Blue Devil look on. That's asking the average reader to buy an awful lot of baloney for their meal, when really just the talking monkey alone might've been enough for most...
Marston created WW to be a female Superman in terms of potential sales, wonderful stories, and a positive role model for young readers. I don't think he ever thought that he'd better equip her with lazer-beam eyes just in case she someday has to defend herself from the Big Blue Thug after she's justly and properly broken the neck of Maxwell Lord...
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