Beschreibung:

WONDER WOMAN No. 18 Author: Place: Publisher: Date: Description: DC (Indicia: "Wonder Woman Publishing Co."). July-August, 1946. Fair (1.0). Incomplete. Cover intact at spine but pageblock split at spine with all pages loose. Missing four pages, but all story pages are present (48 pp. including covers, rather than the correct 52 pp.). Quarter-inch chip at bottom spine affecting covers and pages, chips at top spine and bottom right corner of front cover, color flakes to spine, small nicks and general wear. Sun shadow to right edge of front cover, dusty fingersoiling to back cover. Bottom right corner of pageblock rounded, marginal nicks, chips and short tears to pages, pages tanning. Cover penciled and inked by Harry Peter. Stories and art by Harry Peter, Joye Murchison, née Hummel (writing as William Moulton in an act of literary transvestism), Ed Wheelan, Alfonso Greene, Evelyn Gaines (M.C. Gaines' niece, writing as Lynne Lovelace). "Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world." —William Moulton Marston, 1945. Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston needed a break. As Jill Lepore writes in The Secret History of Wonder Woman, "He had so much work, writing for Sensation Comics, All-Star Comics, Comic Cavalcade, Wonder Woman, and now for a daily strip, that he needed as assistant." So he hired "a very pretty young woman named Joye E. Hummel" to write stories, which he published under his own byline. Ms. Hummel received her training from Olive Byrne, the third pillar of the Marston household's ménage à trois. According to Ms. Lepore, "Years later, when Marston hired a young woman named Joye Hummel to help him write Wonder Woman, Olive Byrne gave Hummel a copy of Woman and the New Race. Read this, she told her, and you'll know everything you need to know about Wonder Woman." In the closing days of WWII, Walter J. Ong, a Jesuit priest, published an article in the Arizona Quarterly titled "Comics and the Super State." In his article, Ong argued that "Superman and Wonder Woman comics, specifically, had a great deal in common with the Third Reich, not least Hellenism, paganism, and totalitarianism" -op. cit. Dr. Fredric Wertham also considered superhero comics to be loaded with fascistic concepts sugar-coated for kiddie consumption ("Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry"). One wonders what Wertham and Ong would make of Wonder Woman's apparent philosophical debt to Margaret Sanger's Woman and the New Race. In the book, Sanger states that the humanity can only achieve "racial progress" by "weeding out the unfit... preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives." Which leads one to wonder: in the confused semiotic intersection of comic book concepts and real-world concerns, are Wonder Woman and Hitler enemies? Or strange bedfellows? Lot Amendments Condition: Item number: 316932a