“No other comic-book character has lasted as long”

In articles derived from her new book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Jill Lepore has been talking up that comic-book heroine’s place in superhero history.

In Smithsonian:

Wonder Woman is the most popular female comic-book superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, no other comic-book character has lasted as long.

In The New Yorker:

Superman débuted in 1938, Batman in 1939, Wonder Woman in 1941.

Who’s missing from this discussion? “The Sensational Character Find of 1940,” of course.

Dick Grayson has appeared in stories for nearly three-quarters of a century, about a year and a half longer than Wonder Woman. He’s been a major character in two movie serials, a television series, and two feature films. Plus, half a dozen television cartoons have featured some version of Robin.

I suspect Robin is a pop-culture reference as recognizable as Wonder Woman. In fact, the name “Dick Grayson” might be better known than Wonder Woman’s occasional alias, “Diana Prince.”

Of course, Robin has always been a sidekick to Batman, and thus a supporting character or one in an ensemble instead of a lead. Though he appeared on more comic-book covers in the 1940s than Batman, not until the 1990s was there a comic book with the Robin name in its official title. In contrast, there’s been a Wonder Woman magazine since 1942 (with a yearlong break in 1986-87), and she’s usually worked on her own as well as with the Justice Society and Justice League.

So I’m not arguing that Wonder Woman is less prominent than Robin, just that he qualifies as a famous, long-lasting comic-book crime-fighter on the same level.

(And I won’t even mention that Archie Andrews made his debut in comic books in the same month as Wonder Woman, so those two comic-book characters have lasted the same time.)

Two Warrior Women

Tonight I went to two author events, one after another, both about female fighters.

One was Jill Lepore’s talk at the Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge about The Secret History of Wonder Woman. Comics fans already know about the unorthodox sexual habits of Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston, but Lepore has also linked Marston to Margaret Sanger and her circle of women‘s-rights activists.

The second was Alex Myers’s talk at the Old South Meeting House in Boston about his novel Revolutionary, based on the life of Deborah Sampson, soldier in the Continental Army at the end of the Revolutionary War. I was pleased to learn that Myers is another example of the generous mentorship of Alfred F. Young, author of the Sampson biography Masquerade.

Putting Distance between Green Arrow and Batman

As I described on Thursday, DC Comics’s syncretism meant the company sometimes ended up owning two quite similar characters/trademarks. That pushed its staffers to come up with creative ways to distinguish them, expanding the bounds of its superhero stories.

Thus, in 1986 the company put Superman and his most successful equivalent from another publisher, Captain Marvel, in the same universe. And the editors and writers started emphasizing what made them different.

The fact that Captain Marvel is really a kid named Billy Batson—i.e., even more of a naïf than Kansas farmboy Clark Kent—became the defining aspect of his character. Storytellers also found more significance in how Captain Marvel’s powers arose from some form of magic (rather than, like Superman’s, through science).

Wonder Woman didn’t present such problems because no other company had such a powerful female hero. Instead, DC had to struggle with America’s changing picture of the ideal woman—and that’s another story.

As for Batman’s equivalents, it’s important to note what defined that character for most of his 75-year history. It wasn’t being dark and brooding and driven by vengeance. In fact, from the early 1940s through the mid-1980s, Batman was a cheery special independent agent of the Gotham police who just happened to dress as a bat. What defined him was:

• He had no special powers beyond being a very smart, very athletic man.
• He wore a mask to preserve his real identity.
• He was an immensely rich socialite.
• He had a lot of cool bat-themed gadgets and vehicles to deploy in a fight.
• He worked with a teen-aged assistant.

That formula proved so popular that in 1941 DC’s sibling company, All-American Publications, created its own version: Green Arrow. He, too, wore a mask to disguise his life as Oliver Queen, an immensely rich bachelor. He used trick arrows, an Arrow Car, an Arrow Plane, an Arrow Signal, and even an Arrow Cave. And of course Green Arrow had his own kid sidekick, Speedy.

For a long time, DC kept Batman and Green Arrow apart. While Batman was an occasional member of the Justice Society of America, Green Arrow was relegated to a lesser hero team, the Seven Soldiers of Victory. Stories about him and Speedy appeared in World’s Finest after Batman and Robin’s, but the heroes never met. Green Arrow survived in backup stories through the early-1950s crash of superhero comics, probably because DC editor Mort Weisinger had co-created him, but he never had his own magazine.

When DC launched the Justice League of America, first in The Brave and the Bold and then in its own title, Batman made brief appearances. But Green Arrow didn’t show up at all, prompting fans to ask why he was left out. The problem, I suspect, was that he seemed too similar to Batman—why would the team need them both?

After popular demand, Green Arrow finally joined that group in Justice League of America, #4. Batman then stopped appearing so often, and it wasn’t until issue #10 that both characters showed up on the same cover.

Eventually the proximity of two similar characters prompted a new generation of creative minds to come up with ways to distinguish them—and to take superhero comics in a new direction. In 1969 artist Neal Adams gave Green Arrow a new look with a Van Dyke beard (at a time when facial hair had a politic meaning). Writer Dennis O’Neil made radical changes in the character of Oliver Queen. He lost all his money—no longer a millionaire with an unending supply of gadgets. He started a romance with an independent crime-fighting colleague, Black Canary.

While Bruce Wayne was then showing a new sort of social conscience with the Wayne Foundation, O’Neil had Oliver Queen start speaking loudly for political justice and change. Now the character stood out in Justice League meetings—in fact, he came to alienate some members of the group. It wasn’t just his politics but his temper and attitude. Green Arrow thus became one of DC’s first examples of a superhero who wasn’t a paragon in every way.

As a result, Green Arrow became an interesting character, perhaps for the first time. O’Neil and Adams partnered him with Green Lantern in a series of stories exploring social issues in America. Those highly regarded tales didn’t sell well enough to keep the Green Lantern magazine from cancellation in 1972, but they did cement the new character of Oliver Queen for readers. As a result, it became possible for him to be a foil for Bruce Wayne/Batman in subsequent decades rather than a pale green copy.

A similar process occurred in the late 1980s after DC introduced the Charlton character of Ted Kord, the Blue Beetle, into its main line. He, too, was a masked man without powers but with a lot of gadgets and smarts. He ended up on the Justice League with Batman. But that was the start of the grim, antisocial Batman we know today, and the magazine’s creators moved that Blue Beetle in the opposite direction, toward comedy.

With the “New 52,” DC brought Wildstorm Comics’s Batman equivalent, Midnighter, into its standard universe. Already Midnighter had been established as gay and happily partnered with the Wildstorm equivalent of Superman, providing more distance from the Caped Crusader. Now Midnighter is showing up in Grayson, actually offering storytelling value in how the character is a version of Batman.

A Look at Leroy Lettering

Letterer Todd Klein describes using the Leroy tool used regularly on EC horror comics in the 1940s and ’50s. That lettering was done by Jim and Margaret Wroten, occasionally with assistants.

I’d made the common assumption that those letters were produced by some form of typesetting machine, but Klein explains that they were still drawn by hand:

It has a mechanical look, but is actually pen and ink, made with the Leroy lettering system of scriber and templates manufactured by the Keuffel and Esser company, and created for comics almost exclusively by Jim Wroten and his wife Margaret. The Leroy system was intended for technical artists doing things like machine parts diagrams and architectural drawings.

The letterer drew each letter by following a groove in the template.

According to the Tales from the Crypt collection, Jim Wroten was originally a salesman for Keuffel and Esser, which made tools for architectural and drafting firms. Wroten found a market for the Leroy tool in comics when the industry boomed in the early 1940s. In 1945 he and his wife Margaret joined William Moulton Marston’s Wonder Woman team, according to Bhob Stewart at Potrzebie, who apparently interviewed Margaret Wroten in 1996.

Klein thinks the Wrotens had worked on the earliest Wonder Woman pages; perhaps they’d done so as freelancers, or perhaps someone else was using a Leroy template. That’s the problem with Leroy lettering—it has very little individual style.

Max Gaines, publisher of the Wonder Woman magazines at All-American, gave the Wrotens more business when he started Educational/Entertaining Comics, and his son Bill kept them on after suddenly inheriting the firm. By the 1950s, Klein notes, the Wrotens’ system had become more flexible:

By the time of their work in EC Comics, the Wrotens had a variety of Leroy templates to use for different size lettering. They used vertical letters for regular text and a larger size slanted to the right with a thicker pen point for emphasized words. I believe the Wrotens did only the actual lettering, leaving the balloon and caption borders for the artists of the stories. This accounts for the wide variety of balloon shapes and styles at EC in particular.

Though editor Al Feldstein didn’t care for the Leroy style, it fit well with his approach to writing comics: he scripted the stories, laid out the pages, and had the Wrotens insert the text at the tops of the panels. Only then did the pages go to the illustrators to fill with art. Feldstein’s stories often had a lot of text, and the Leroy characters kept that text clearly legible, if characterless.