Early on, I realized that Robert Kanigher hated Wonder Woman, the character he wrote and edited for 22 years.
Many stories were written with a randomness that suggested contempt, the plots taking illogical left turns — people gliding on air currents, dinosaurs and giant birds showing up for no reason. That was nothing like the loving care Kanigher lavished on his DC war comics.
In fact, as author Jill Lepore noted, Kanigher sneeringly referred to her as “…the grotesque, inhuman original Wonder Woman.”
He may well have resented the assignment. Thanks to clever contract negotiation by William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman’s creator, DC was forced to continually publish the character or lose the rights.
“I always felt the same way about Wonder Woman, but there were times when the whole dream-like approach did work,” Cheryl Spoehr wrote. “Mostly I preferred the stories of ‘The Wonder Family,’ although I hate Wonder Tot. It seemed odd that most of Wonder Woman’s adventures were on Paradise Island, and had nothing to do with bad guys in the world. But that was the way it was. I would have preferred the Golden Age Wonder Woman approach, if they would have used it… but leave out the bondage.”
“I had no idea Kanigher was writing and editing Wonder Woman for 22 YEARS!” Mark Engblom said. “One could argue his weird flights of fancy were merely a continuation of the utterly bizarre stories of the original Marston/Peter era, minus the radical psychological propaganda.”
“I think Bob resented most of his comic book work, except maybe for the war stuff,” Paul Kupperberg recalled. “I think he believed he had been destined for greater stuff — he bragged about winning a radio script writing contest when he was a teenager, and talked more about his painting than comics — and resented being stuck in comics his whole life.”
Howie Chaykin was harsher. “Robert Kanigher was a truly miserable human being, the worst sort of hack, who took his own self-loathing for being stuck in a career which he held in contempt on all those around him,” Chaykin said. “That said, these four-martini lunch scripts on Wonder Woman were my favorite things as a kid until Jack and Stan came along.”
“I read somewhere that Kanigher once said he couldn’t understand the appeal of Wonder Woman for a 12-year-old boy,” Stephen Leone said. “The target demo at the time. It shows in his writing. And, yet, I loved Wonder Woman as both a character and a comic when I was a 12-year-old boy.
But Kanigher’s distaste for the Golden Age Wonder Woman, with its overripe art by H.G. Peter, wasn’t entirely unfounded. Marston’s admirable promotion of peace and equal rights was, after all, delivered with an admixture of S&M fetishism about the glories of “loving submission.”
“It’s a really big transition time for comics anyway because after the Second World War — this is sort of like what happens to the Cold War in spy films — superheroes have no one left to fight,” Lepore told National Public Radio. “Wonder Woman carries on, though. And Kanigher reimagines her in the 1950s as a kind of daffy, besotted, lovestruck girl, who — all she wants to do is marry Steve Trevor, who’s the guy she’s rescued, which … brings her to the United States in the first place.”
Nevertheless, every dozen issues or so, Kanigher managed to turn out a decent story, always enhanced by the strong art of Ross Andru. And one of them was The Proving of Wonder Woman in Wonder Woman 131 (July 1962). The tale had underworld ghosts, Jove hurling thunderbolts, a trident-wielding Neptune and a gigantic, green, three-headed dog. What more, really, could a kid ask?
Funny how often, from her origin on, Wonder Woman would be required to prove herself in some test or other. That was in part merely a story angle made possible by the fact that other Amazons were available to replace her, I suppose. But she’s one superhero who always had to keep resubmitting her application.
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