Grant Morrison Plans To Bring The Sex Back To Wonder Woman
“You can take the violence out of the original concept of Superman — all the drop-kicking bad guys into the ocean, which would basically kill them anyway,” said Morrison, “or you can take the gun out of early Batman, and these characters remain essentially the same. But you can’t take the sex out of Wonder Woman. That version of the character died with Marston in the 1940s and she hasn’t recovered her popularity since.
“Superman’s meant to be this ultimate expression of masculinity and he still gets to be sexual. Wonder Woman’s meant to be the ultimate expression of womanhood and yet she isn’t allowed anything to do with sex.”
It sounds as if what Morrison’s doing with the character fits more closely with his old pre-Vertigo reinventions of Doom Patrol and Animal Man than his current work on Batman and Superman. “It’s hard work trying to recreate what Marsden did without being exploitative or prurient,” he said. “I’ve had to do a ton of reading ahead of this, basically the history of feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir to Andrea Dworkin.”
A lousy headline for an otherwise intriguing story.
I love that a Wonder Woman relaunch is going to be based on the complete history of feminist theory.
“I’ve had to” made me laugh for some reason. Like it’s not self-imposed. Like there was a syllabus.
