Dec 12th 2020 Advent Calendar
A beautiful woman's manacled wrists are chained to the ceiling of a dark, featureless torture chamber--
Her already skimpy dress is torn to shreds, evidence that she has already been man-handled--
And the man who has been handling her? A grim figure out for revenge against the Amazonian who has disfigured his face. But what form might that revenge take...?
Her costume might be different, but beyond that very little has changed for Diana Prince-- here she is on the cover of WONDER WOMAN #188 dated June 1970. Diana is presented by artists Mike Sekowsky and Dick Giordano with her white dress almost torn off her revealing titillating glimpses of flesh. She has been shackled and chained to the ceiling in a way that is wholly suggestive of the sorts of activities associated with a BDSM dungeon.
Today's Advent Calendar takes a quick look at some of the other times Wonder Woman has ended up bound, tied or chained in some way, always with a subversive sexual subtext. Warning-- if drawings of a beautiful woman in a skimpy outfit being presented for titillation offends you in any way, please move away now-- this blog entry is not for you. That said, if you are offended you might want to think about why exactly you read comics in the first place... The cover below from 1954's #68 might seem relatively tame compared with later examples, but look closer and it's not so innocent after all. Wonder Woman has been tied with a simple piece of rope to a life buoy, but the sausage-shaped missile heading her way has been drawn by Irving Novick at the exact angle that makes it appear to be heading right between her legs--
In the 60s and 70s Wonder Woman started being bound up on the covers of her title comic fairly frequently. For the cover of #161 Andru and Esposito depicted her trussed up with a mummy's bandages which wrap themselves tightly around her slender figure. Of course the bindings still allow sufficient skin to be on show to help create the desired response in readers who might be into this sort of thing--
Here on the cover of #162, she is chained at the ankles and wrists by an icy foe named as Minister Blizzard. The cunning lass is leaping assertively towards her assailant, seemingly tricking him into zapping the manacles. But the way the frozen Steve has been drawn behind her gives the effect that he is thrusting towards her-- purely coincidental or evidence of the artists' naughty sense of humour?
#196 sees Diana making another visit to that feature-free BDSM dungeon it seems, this time being chained and presumably whipped so that her clothes hang torn from her back. Her devious torturer has drawn a circular target on her back (with her own lipstick perchance?) and levels the long cylindrical barrel of his sniper rifle in her direction. This picture, again by artists Sekowsky and Giordano seems less the kind of thing you'd expect to see on a kids' comicbook cover, and more akin to what their dads might see adorning their pulp crime novels. I wonder if the stalwart guardians of the Comics Code Authority were in any way phased by this image before proudly awarding it their hallowed seal of authority--
Then by #199 and #200 Diana has made an apparent return to a torture dungeon in a pair of subversively suggestive covers by Jeffrey Catherine Jones. The latter issue finds her shackled to a torture table, at the mercy this time of a masked female dominatrix. She has also been gagged, but the chains holding her legs are long enough to allow her to writhe around, throwing her dress off to reveal one raised, exposed thigh--
By #205 Wonder Woman has donned her original costume once again and, courtesy of Nick Cardy, returned to the great outdoors to be tied suggestively astride a distinctly phallic missile. Her words reveal the risk that she is headed for one hell of a bang--
WONDER WOMAN #207 doubles down on the Sapphic element by presenting our heroine securely tied back-to-back to another Amazonian beauty-- her own mother! Both ladies are gagged as well as bound and the artistic team of Estrada and Colletta have taken care to draw each ladies' upturned breasts as the identical shape to the other's (yes, it's a curious detail, the sort of thing I guess you might only notice if you stare at a picture like this for long enough)--
Dick Giordano's cover for #219 is especially notable as the first in a trilogy of issues which for each consecutive month presented Diana tied up in different ways. Here she has voluntarily bound herself using her lasso of truth as she proclaims herself "helpless" and invites the five men brandishing their upraised pistols in her direction to "kill" her. The artist's choice of framing the picture from a worm's eye view helps emphasise the suggestiveness of those erected weapons. "What are you waiting for?" she teases, and by the smile on her face, and her coquettishly tilted head, the inescapable implication is that it's not really this gang's guns she wants to go bang--
The following issue saw Giordano's portrait of Wonder Woman held in bondage by the metamorphosed arms of a town clock. That look of surprise on her face and her arched body bring to mind the male-gaze-inviting paintings produced by artists like Gil Elvgren, whose images often showed women taken by surprise by inanimate objects that seem to be conspiring to rip off their clothes and reveal their underwear--
Then for the subsequent issue, Ernie Chan depicts Wonder Woman tied by a cord and being forced to look at herself in the mirror by a scarred female antagonist. Once again the bonds have been carefully arranged at the sketchbook stage to show off the curves of her thighs and breasts over any consideration of their effectiveness in holding her securely for the bad-lady to carry out the anaesthetic-free surgery she is promising--
And Diana didn't have to wait too long before she was manacled once again on the cover of #229 as drawn with such loving precision by Jose Garcia-Lopez and Vince Colletta. This time Diana has been chained up by a Nazi robot -the Red Panzer- who is gleefully steering a remote-controlled steel phallus straight towards our concerned looking heroine--
After this superfluity of such images coming in fairly quick succession to each other, Wonder Woman's cover artists seemed to steer away from tying their leading lady up for a while. Maybe changed sensibilities meant that the idea of portraying a woman in such a subservient role wasn't the most enlightened approach. Then again, drawing her in increasingly diminutive shorts might suggest that not to be in any way the case. In the decades that followed the 70s, WONDER WOMAN covers have continued unashamedly to be all about what film critic Laura Mulvey terms 'the male gaze'. And from time to time later artists have elected to contribute to the time-honoured tradition of trussing the Amazonian princess up, for instance this variation on a theme from 1987 by George Perez, in which Diana is clutching an incredibly long snake in her fist--
And in 1994 noted cover artist Brian Bolland made sure he got in on the act with the meticulously rendered chains draped rather loosely over her here. Perhaps the plain background is also Bolland's sneaky homage to those BDSM dungeon images from the early Seventies--
And those loose fitting, finely articulated chains make a shiny return to the cover of the collected edition of WONDER WOMAN EARTH ONE Vol 1, as Diana now looks assertively out at her readers--
It's a beautiful painting by Yanick Paquette, but I think it sets a very different tone from the earlier covers. Because despite the chains, the subservience is not there. And despite the sexiness of the image, the element of sexual availability is less certain. With that direct gaze fixed on us, Wonder Woman is confidently breaking the fourth wall, a post-modernist technique which can unsettle the onlooker as well as challenge their pre-held opinions or beliefs. The reader's 'male gaze' is being met by a confident, assertive returning 'female gaze'. And, as we gaze at her, it's as if this strong, powerful woman is looking straight at us, and knows exactly what we're thinking. But let's be perfectly honest, guys-- as she gazes out at us, there's absolutely no way she's going to be thinking the same thing.
For Day 10 of this Advent Calendar click here--
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