Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Wonder Woman, Glory, Trans Artists & Once Bitten
by Travis Hedge Coke
Recently, the question came up, of who really were the fist women to work on Wonder Woman. There are stories, and there are bits of mythology, bits of received wisdom. That the bracelets Diana wears as Wonder Woman are derived from a piece of jewelry or a type of jewelry that Olive Byrne liked to wear. (That one is false.) That Byrne and Elizabeth Marston were co-writers or the writers of some of the Wonder Woman comics. (That one depends on how you define co-writer, but by those in the most know, they were not especially, no.) That when Dr William Marston was too sick to continue writing Wonder Woman, Joye Hummel wrote many of the comics. (True.) But, when it comes to who drew the first Wonder Woman solo stories, the press, at least, likes to claim that every new woman to draw one is the first.
It is most likely that the first woman to draw Wonder Woman solo comics, explicitly Wonder Woman comics and not just comics that have Wonder Woman in them, is Trina Robbins. Robbins is a noted scholar, historian, booster, artist, writer, and enthusiast in the field of comics. We love Trina Robbins. I love Trina Robbins.
I could not help but remember that Catherine Jones, also known as Jeffrey Catherine Jones, had done covers for Wonder Woman comics earlier than the miniseries that Robbins did with Kurt Busiek and other collaborators in the middle 1980s.
I saw many names bandied around, including insistences that Ramona Fradon had drawn some (I could find none, though), or that there had not been a real woman drawing a real Wonder Woman comic until someone drew issues of the monthly ongoing under that title, and not a miniseries or one off story. I did not see anyone mention Jeffrey Catherine Jones, and I did not mention her.
Why did I not mention her? some of you might wonder.
The first is that I am not a historian nor an expert (in anything). I am a dilettante with inexhaustible parentheticals. Second, I do not have a fantastic memory. (I would not trust my memory against someone else’s facts; I would check.) Third, maybe covers do not count, here, and I do not want to get bawled out by people who take this sort of thing and any possibility of being challenged very very seriously. And, atop all that, what if the reason nobody says, Catherine Jones, is that they do not think of her as a woman?
I know that is not Trina Robbins’ position. Or, the position of any of the professional artists or writers who have worked on Wonder Woman whose opinion would really affect me.
But, the wider fandom and the broader academic base? Some of those cats are wild. And, if they feel challenged, or smell blood in the water, they can and might just dog you for days with harassment. Some comics people have no other life going on and just live for a reason to hound someone who has a different notion than they do about anything.
So, I kept my mouth shut. And, so (if anyone else also wanted to throw her name into the hat) did everyone else.
And, we do this all the time.
I am a huge fan of Jo Duffy’s run on Glory, a character created and owned by Rob Liefeld. I think it is some of the strongest work anyone has done with any of Liefeld’s personally-owned creations. To that end, I wanted to reread those, but also, to reread the followup run by Keatinge and Campbell. And, I could not remember why there had been a controversy about it, only that there had been. That, for some reason, Campbell had really upset some prospective audience or professional worriers that we could call fans, but probably never were.
Did Campbell do something really bad?
You know what it was? It was that, like Catherine Jones, Sophie Campbell is trans and was, at that time, still using an earlier name and not being seen as trans by the general audience.
That was it.
Sophie Campbell is trans and that bothered some people. And, I am so careful now, so worried that someone’s going to be milkshake ducked, that someone will reveal themselves as something horrible, that this ludicrous, offensive problem almost stopped me from picking back up this comic I remembered being very, very good.
In both these cases, perhaps I was overly careful, but in both cases, I had been bit; I had been bit twice or more. So why not be shy? Why not shy off?
There is no win, here (in any direction). A toxic environment, systemic toxicity, does not allow for a win. You get survival, if you are lucky. No wins.
The sharp turn from when Jo Duffy reinvented Glory as the kind of Wonder Woman DC Comics might not publish – older, experienced, in charge of her won life, direction, and sexuality, permanently barbified and surrounded by men who tried to market the barbieness to men – and the Alan Moore reinvention which was then, after, refined into Promethea, which was instead about immaturity, naivety, and “fat” and “schizophrenic” people. Sharp turn. A turn you are still discouraged from criticizing or looking at too critically.
Barbie, herself, in comics and stories, is a certifiable genius, a doctor, an attorney, an astronaut, Olympic-level sports competitor. The Barbie doll out-qualifies every individual GI Joe and there are less chances she commits a war crime.
I am a chicken bawk-awk-ak-kawk! but a chicken gets to live and peck at the ground another day if they do not walk straight into a crocodile’s mouth. You can pretty that up (and I just have), but it really is life or death.
A woman once opined that a Teen Titans cover was a little wonky and she got hounded horrendously. She had credentials. I don’t have credentials. I have the off chance someone reads me as male and lets me slide as one of the boys.
It is probably why Catherine Jones also still went by Jeffrey, until their death, or Jeffrey Catherine. It is why so many trans people allow others to use names they have abandoned. Why so many women are seen as a balancing influence or easy to talk with because they will just not argue past a point. Why, if you are an ethnic minority, you know when and where to stop talking.