Samantha and Babysitting Villains

Readers of my previous comic strip, Greystone Inn, will recognize the woman at the end of the table in today's comic.

It's Samantha Miller, Mac's wife, who was hired into the Evil Inc Public-Relations department.

Sam's pregnancy is the topic of the "Best of Greystone Inn" book, Prodromal Teeth (And Other Perils of Pregnancy and Parenthood).

She started out as the Greystone publicist, but was later fired. Despite a strong resume, she was unable to find another job in public relations.

She finally found a job as a day-care provider for children of super-villains at the League of Evil.

The League of Evil was the precursor to Evil Inc. In Evil Inc continuity, it was a villainous start-up that Evil Inc quickly bought and assimilated.

Tales of the Black Freighter Redux

This belongs directly under the heading of "Why didn't I think of that?"

[ComicBookResources] "The kid reading the pirate comic at the newsstand" is one of Dave Gibbons' most famous images from "Watchmen," yet the "Tales of the Black Freighter" portions themselves are rarely discussed. Naturally, due to Moore's scheme of juxtaposing only short passages against the larger story of "Watchmen," the pirate tale is generally thought of as a powerful narrative device; a comic-within-a-comic, but not really a remarkable story in its own right.

Well, just when you thought there was nothing left to say about "Watchmen," ... Oakland, California's Steven Johnson ... excavated and reassembled all that exists of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' "Tales Of The Black Freighter: Marooned" into a complete and uninterrupted narrative on the Web. Read more.

Johnson's work can be read here. He imagines how that story would have been told in its entirely. He uses only the relevent panels from "Watchmen" -- with the non-relevant dialogue removed. Said Johnson, ""Dave Gibbons did spectacular work and I can't even begin to guess what he'd put in the 'missing' panels." Those panels are blank with text only.

I don't know writer Alan Moore's reaction, but Dave Gibbons wrote Johnson to say "nice work."

Indeed.

Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston

Remember when I complained that a story about the history of Wonder Woman in the The Philadelphia Daily News lacked any mention of the pervading themes of bondage?

Check out this fascinating piece by Charles Lyons, contributing writer for ComicBookResources:

She wasn't jettisoned from a doomed planet, she didn't witness the brutal murder of her parents, and she was never injected with radioactive venom, but the true story of Wonder Woman's origin is one of the strangest and most fascinating of any superhero...

...Wonder Woman's creator was William Moulton Marston, a Harvard-educated psychologist, lawyer and provocateur who invented a precursor of the modern polygraph (the likely inspiration for Wonder Woman's lie-detecting lasso)...

As he told interviewer Olive Richard in the August 14, 1942 "Family Circle," "Wonder Woman satisfies the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them."

But Marston was intent on more than merely fulfilling the fantasies of his male readers. In a letter to comics historian Coulton Waugh, he wrote, "Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world." Marston believed that submission to "loving authority" was the key to overcoming mankind's violent urges, and that strong, self-realized women were the hope for a better future. Wonder Woman was very consciously Marston's means of spreading these notions to impressionable young minds.

With this unusual brand of feminism as his stated aim, Marston filled his stories with bondage (both male and female), spanking, sorority initiation rituals, cross-dressing, infantilism, and playful domination. Armies of slave girls were everywhere, and hardly an issue went by without a full-body panel of Wonder Woman bound from head to toe. In "Sensation Comics" #35 (November 1944) Wonder Woman even lets slip that rope bondage was a popular pastime back home.

Read more.

The excerpts don't do it justice. This is one engaging, well-written piece on a fascinating subject.