Wonder Woman and The Free Love Experiment
The ubiquitous character gets the most attention, but the little-known comic that introduced her deserves praise as well. DC Comics. Everybody knows about Wonder Woman, but not many people know about Wonder Woman.
Wonder Woman, of course, is the superhero. Most people are familiar with her from the 1970s television show, in which Lynda Carter put out her arms and spun herself into a big ball of light and a star-spangled swimsuit. Others may have seen her in the Justice League Unlimited television series, on the MAC cosmetics line, or (much less likely) in her own comics. She occasionally gets referenced on television shows such as Bones (where wonder sleuth Temperance Brennan dresses up as Wonder Woman for Halloween) or The O.C. (where Summer dresses up as Wonder Woman to titillate her boyfriend).
Wonder Woman hasn’t been very successful for a long time—certainly not as successful as Batman or Spider-Man or other comic-book properties with major motion-picture series to their name (She’s being played by Israeli actress Gal Gadot in next year’s Superman/Batman film and in a standalone Wonder Woman film in 2017). Still, she remains reasonably visible, if not exactly necessary. Among the hordes of strong female heroes, from Buffy to Katniss Everdeen to Dora the Explorer, Wonder Woman is notable mostly for wearing a sillier costume and for having more improbable weaponry. (A magic lasso? Bullet-stopping bracelets? An invisible plane?) Sometimes she’s a bad-ass warrior; sometimes she’s an avatar of peace; sometimes she’s a feminist icon (as when she appeared on the first cover of Ms. magazine in 1972); sometimes she’s a fetish symbol (as in a June 2011 spread for Playboy Mexico). In general, though, she’s what most pop-culture icons are—a placeholder for nostalgia and recognizability, whose image provokes strong emotions in some people and moderate amusement in everybody else. She’s an unassuming brick in the post-modern bricolage, famous for being famous—like Paris Hilton but significantly more charming, not least because she’s less real.
Wonder Woman, but not many people know about Wonder Woman . Wonder Woman, of course, is the superhero. Most people are familiar with her from the […]
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