Tentacle Tuesday: Wonder Woman in the Silver Age

Wonder Woman is probably my most recurring area of focus when it comes to TT posts – although this is just the third, as it turns out, despite feeling like the fifteenth. The first two were devoted to the Golden Age Wonder Woman (Tentacle Tuesday: H.G. Peter and Wonder Woman lend a hand and Tentacle Tuesday: More Golden Age Wonder Woman Wonders!), and having more-or-less exhausted the GA’s tentacles, we move on the Silver Age (which, in my assessment, is considerably less interesting, but sometimes has quite nice art).

All pages are scripted by Robert Kanigher, pencilled by Ross Andru and inked by Mike Esposito, except for the first page from Stamps Of Doom!, which was scripted by Bill Finger.

Page from **The Stamps of Doom!**, scripted by **Bill Finger** (credited as Charles Moulton). printed in **Wonder Woman no. 108** (August 1959).

I bitched about Kanigher WW in Tentacle Tuesday: Wonder Girl in the Silver Age, Part I and Don’t Let a Mysogynist Plan Your Wedding: Robert Kanigher and Wonder Woman’s Utterly Unsuitable Suitors. I’m starting to feel like my needle is stuck in the groove, but I will however note one more thing: in my righteous anger about Kanigher’s preposterous depiction of women, I’ve been ignoring that he’s not great at writing men, either. That is… he can write wonderful male characters (see Enemy Ace, for instance), as long as romance is totally off the menu. It’s as if he is saying that romance transforms intelligent, capable men into utter, snivelling dolts (a point of view that one could defend, but within limits). Take a look at what kind of suitors poor Wonder Woman gets saddled with (perhaps their stupidity is one more way of spiting her?) in these panels from Wonder Woman’s Impossible Decision, published in Wonder Woman no. 118 (November 1960):

To reiterate: man is sitting on a rock. One wouldn’t think that this is a particularly dangerous activity. And yet one minute he’s contemplating the injustices of life (sitting!), and the next he’s sinking (at the speed of a locomotive) into sea, right into the welcome arms of an octopus. I think the octopus planned it.

The guy’s suffocating, but he’s still fretting about Merman as a rival for WW’s affections.

This is **Wonder Woman no. 128** (February 1962). Cover by Andru and Esposito.

Allow me to drive one more nail into that coffin, and after this I shall forever hold my peace. I stumbled upon this rather entertaining quote, taken from an interview with Kanigher conducted by Tim Bateman and Steve Whitaker in 1989 (read the full thing here). Here it is, with no further comments from me:

« So Ditko […] tried to force meanings where meanings did not exist. But he tried to tell me that I knew nothing about romance, because his idea of romance was professorial, pedantic. I know what romance is, I’ve written more romance probably than anyone alive. Romance is an excess of passion, and I don’t care if there’re a thousand books that says romance is not that, romance is a time period. Tchaikovsky is a romantic. Excessive, that’s what romance is. So to say that my idea of excessive emotion is not romantic…»

And now, I shall remain mum, and let you savour these tentacles in peace!