William Marston's secret identity: The strange private life of wonder woman's creator.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Cultures & Reviews - Brief Article

From their inception, comic books, like other forms of mass entertainment, have had detractors. None is more famous--or more fondly remembered--than Fredric Wertham, the child psychiatrist and author of Seduction of the Innocent, Who charged that comic books turned their readers into juvenile delinquents and sexual deviants. If Wertham, who died in 1981, hadn't existed, he would have surely been invented by a clever satirist looking for a sex-obsessed, puritanical foil.

A true arch-enemy of the form, Wertham's critique of comics went beyond criminological concerns: Comics didn't just pervert children, you see, but ruined their ability to appreciate fine literature and art later on in life. He argued that tales about Batman--not to mention Tales from the Crypt--were like heavily seasoned food that destroyed young aesthetic palates before they could be trained to appreciate delicate, refined fare. Shakespeare, he fretted, just couldn't follow Superman.

If Wertham was the Lex Luthor of comics, hell-bent on their total annihilation, then William Moulton Marston was their Man of Steel, dedicated to championing their cause Marston was a Harvard-trained psychologist who had a law degree to go along with his Ph.D. In the '20s and '30s, Marston was best known as a tireless advocate of the polygraph--he developed an early lie detector machine--and he lobbied unsuccessfully for its use in the courts.

Never one to slough off publicity, Marston even appeared in a 1938 Gillette razor blade advertisement that used a lie detector test to discover men's "true" feelings about various shaving aids. (The "scientific shaving tests," which measured subjects' subconscious reactions, overwhelmingly found that Gillette blades minimized the subtle "emotional disturbances" caused by competitors' products.)

In 1941, under the pseudonym Charles Moulton, Marston created the first great female comic book hero, Wonder Woman, a displaced Amazon princess who helped the Allies defeat the Axis Powers while seeking romance on the side. (Unsurprisingly, Wertham was appalled by the character, which he denounced for its "lesbian overtones.") Unlike most intellectuals, Marston celebrated the popularity of the comic book form and saw it as an opportunity to get kids to read--and to circulate radical feminist notions. Writing in Phi Beta Kappa's journal, The American Scholar, in the early '40s, he noted: "It's too bad for us 'literary' enthusiasts, but it's the truth...