Wonder Woman and the public humanities: a reflection on the 2016 Wonder Woman Symposium

ABSTRACT

In honor of the 75th anniversary of the comic book super heroine Wonder Woman in 2016, Kent State University and Cleveland Public Library partnered to celebrate the intersections of public literacy, comics, and feminism in a jointly sponsored symposium with support from the Ohio Humanities Council. The 2016 Wonder Woman Symposium partnered these powerful public institutions in Northeast Ohio, taking up the historical trends that have changed the world of comics, American popular culture, and feminism. Centering on the figure of Wonder Woman and her heirs, this symposium featured addresses by major creators in the industry and historians of the comics world, and workshops by comics creators on creating graphic narratives and comics. This celebration paid respect to "herstory" while recognizing Wonder Woman's perpetual relevance to our present day, and beyond. This article reflects on the 2016 Wonder Woman Symposium, public humanities and the future of comics.

KEYWORDS:

• Wonder Woman
• Superheroine
• Public Humanities
• Feminism
• Gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Fredric Wertham infamously derided the form of comics in many articles, his testimony at a Senate Subcommittee hearing on juvenile delinquency, and in his book Seduction of the Innocent (1954). Today Medicine has begun to embrace the form of comics with the emergence of Graphic Medicine (Czerwiec, et al., 2015).

2. For the ways that high culture has often ignored or denied the form of comics see Bart Beaty, Comics Versus Art (2012) and Christopher Pizzino’s Arresting Development (2016).

3. For the history of comics, see David Hajdu (Hajdu 2008), Jared Gardner (2012), Van Lente and Dunlavey (2017), Hillary Chute (2017).

4. Trina Robbins (2016) details the history of Wimmen’s Comix in the Introduction to The Complete Wimmen’s Comix.

5. See Benjamin Woo (2011) and Dan Gearino (2017).

6. See Brad Ricca (2013) for the History of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s creation of the character of Superman and see Peter Coogan (2006) for the history of the superhero.

7. Wonder Woman’s history, origins and the personal life of her creators have been explored by Les Daniels (2004) and Lepore (2015). See also Joseph Darowski’s Ages of Wonder Woman (Darowski 2013) a collection of essays spanning the history of the character and Travis Langley and Mara Wood’s (2017) collection of essay on Wonder Woman and psychology. On the history of female superheroes, see Trina Robbins’ The Great Women Superheroes (1996) and Carolyn Cocca’s Superwomen (2016).

8. Nubia continues to be a popular character outside of the comics finding new life on the internet and in fan communities, despite her short-lived time in the comics. See Whaley (2015) and Fawaz and Scott (2018).

9. Trina Robbins notes in The Great Women Superheroes that by 1955 all action heroines besides Wonder Woman were gone. It was officially the era of the romantic heroine in comics (1996, 206).

10. As Hillary Chute has said, ‘girls are the new superheroes’ (2017, 275). See also Camden (2016) on the action heroine in popular culture.

11. Today Jessica Jones has been celebrated for this very idea of women saving women, saving themselves (Chhibber 2016).

12. At the end of Azzarello’s 35 issue run, too long to discuss here, Wonder Woman becomes the God of War, replacing Ares. The Wonder Woman, placed on the cover of Ms. magazine in 1972 is long gone. Wonder Woman no longer ends war, she is the embodiment of war. We will not review all of Azzarello’s Wonder Woman as we believe that Berlastky captures it best: the entirety of his ‘run’ on the series aims to destroy Wonder Woman’s history and also uncover that power comes from men.

13. As Neal Curtis argues, there is a ‘Unfortunately, there is a tragic inevitability to all this. It seems that women can be portrayed as strong as long as they mimic patriarchal representations of strength, and more importantly bend their knee to male authority as the normative source’ (2016, 308). Sadri () attempts to challenge Berlatsky’s reading unsuccessfully.

14. Rucka comments on the queerness of the Amazons. He suggests that some found love with one another and others identified other forms of love (Greg Rucka on Queer Narrative and Wonder Woman 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vera J. Camden

Vera J. Camden is Professor of English at Kent State University and Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University. She is Training and Supervising Analyst at the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center, and Geographic Rule Supervising Analyst for the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education of the NYU Medical School. She is associate editor of American Imago and American editor of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.

Valentino L. Zullo

Valentino L. Zullo is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Kent State University and a licensed social worker practicing as a maternal depression therapist at OhioGuidestone. He is the former Ohio Center for the Book Scholar-in-Residence at Cleveland Public Library where he continues to co-lead the Get Graphic program.  He is American editor of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.