Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [52]
Captain America could sock Hitler in the jaw or take on a platoon of Nazis and escape unscathed; in short, he was the fulfillment of many Americans’ aching fantasies.
“Here was the arch villain of all time,” Simon wrote of Hitler in his autobiography, The Comic Book Makers.
Adolf Hitler and his Gestapo bully-boys were real. There never had been a truly believable villain in comics. But Adolf was live, hated by more than half the world. What a natural foil he was, with his comical moustache, the ridiculous cowlick, his swaggering goose-stepping minions eager to jump off a plane if their mad little leader ordered it … I could smell a winner.
Unbeknownst to the producers of superhero comics, interest in the costumed crusaders had reached its peak and was about to decline. Older readers—the targets of this brand of comics only a few years earlier—were losing interest in muscle-bound men in tights, capes, masks and secret identities. Their fantasies were turning elsewhere, to more grown-up faire. Watching a grown man and his teenage sidekick wasn’t nearly as compelling as following the stories of well-proportioned young women squeezed into skimpy outfits and placed in harm’s way. It was a no-lose scenario: if the woman was strong and capable of taking care of herself, it tripped fantasy triggers everywhere; if the woman was a traditional damsel in distress, in need of a brave young man to save her and, ultimately, claim his reward … well, that was good, too. You didn’t have to hold a degree in psychology to figure this out or to appreciate how a reader, now in his early twenties, might find it a little unrealistic to see a virile young man so immersed in saving the world that he fails to notice (or at least interact seriously with) a world of beautiful young women surrounding him.
It was, in fact, a Harvard-educated, middle-aged pop psychologist who created Wonder Woman, the most enduring female superheroine to rise out of comics’ Golden Age. Dr. William Moulton Marston, an eccentric pop psychologist and author, collected credentials the way others collected stamps or coins, and he was just marginally good enough at each of them to have credibility. He’d been instrumental in the development of the polygraph machine, and using his background in psychology, he’d written for Family Circle and sat on DC’s advisory board. Now, writing under the name of Charles Moulton, he joined with abandon a medium that, in the not-too-distant past, he himself had criticized as being too darkly violent. His Wonder Woman, who made her debut in DC’s All Star Comics in 1941, was as much dominatrix as superhero, using a golden lasso and bracelets of submission in her battle with evildoers while oozing a sensuality that appealed to teenagers and young adult readers alike. An Amazon of incredible strength and agility, Wonder Woman was also erotic and vulnerable. Her adventures, filled with tools of bondage ranging from her golden lasso to whips, chains, and ropes, bore a not-so-subtle S&M underpinning designed to hold older readers’ interest and had enough uncovered skin to keep young boys turning the pages as well. You could have your heroine and those closest to her bound and beaten, tortured and berated, you could open an industrial-sized can of heavy-duty whup-ass on her, and all was well if, by the final panel, the forces of good came away victorious. Or as Marston would have you believe, there was a lesson buried somewhere in all that mayhem that males of the species would do well to hold close to their hearts: “Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant