What made the 1940s Wonder Woman comic successful?

Hi everybody!
As we discussed earlier, by compromising WONDER WOMAN's natural development as a person (by separating her aging with WONDER TOT, WONDER GIRL and QUEEN HIPPOLYTA, three completely different people), DC Comics avoided the hard publishing choices that would have kept WONDER WOMAN relevant and made her a more dimensional character.
WONDER WOMAN has long served as a once-over-lightly mythologically-based hero, but her creator William Moulton Marston introduced her as a direct descendant of the greek god pantheon first, and as a contemporary woman a distant second. Every common experience for WONDER WOMAN came as an afterthought: Moulton's focus was unfailingly directed toward the WONDER, only ever-reluctantly on the WOMAN.
It is the mythology; lovingly doled-out by Marston during his 5 year tenure on the character; which gave WONDER WOMAN her completely unique appeal. No comics character was more wedded to a mythology; a culture other than America; than was WONDER WOMAN. To see that constant cultural tension on display in story after story throughout the darkest days of WWII gave WONDER WOMAN an unmatched escapist appeal.
Marston understood that having a strong woman extol the virtues of willing submission to a loving authority was a singular opportunity. Marston did not care that it was a comic book, and it turned out that the WONDER WOMAN comic book ended up being Marston's primary source of income.
As good as being in the WONDER WOMAN business was, Marston never hesitated to push his bondage themes to the limits in every story.
A WONDER WOMAN story would often depict unwilling bondage, playful bondage on Paradise Island, and nefarious bondage by the villain of the piece in the space of the same 8 pages.
Marston knew that he was instructing young boys that it was okay to be bigger than their britches, that even the most wonderful woman in the world wanted nothing more than to be under the control of a loving spouse.
Of course, the unasked question of that gender equation is: why would a loving authority put an obedient spouse in chains?
Gloria Steinem once said that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle", yet she was thrilled by WONDER WOMAN's adventures as a child. I believe that seeing a woman fully powered-up back in the day was so unusual as to be thrilling despite the driving under-theme, the "racial truth" that Marston was marinating-in that women enjoyed being bound up.
Surely when Steinem put WONDER WOMAN on the cover of the first issue of MS. magazine the furthest thing from her mind was how delightful it was to be chained up like Houdini.
Somehow, there are as many images of 1940s-era WONDER WOMAN being tied up as there are images of 1950s-era fetish queen Bettie Page in the same dire straits. However, WONDER WOMAN was never bound recreationally (except on Paradise Island, which is an entirely different bottle of weird), she was always bound in the course of her adventures and she unfailingly escaped her chains.
It must be this quality that spoke to Steinem; not the chains, but the breaking of the chains. Not the humiliation of the Amazon people by the forces of Hercules, but the salvation of the Amazons by the grace of Aphrodite. Not the rape of Hippolyta, but the image of WONDER WOMAN in her Visible Plane.
It is this combination of elaborate culture, independent behavior and winning personality that made WONDER WOMAN an instant hit in 1941, but it is also the insistent subversive themes that made the WONDER WOMAN comic so wildly successful during the most explosive sales which comic books have ever enjoyed from 1941-1947.
When Moulton passed away, this intoxicating mix of impulses left the WONDER WOMAN comics, never to return. To be fair, no other comic book has ever captured these qualities.
WONDER WOMAN the movie has to be edgy, but it needs different edges to succeed as an entertainment in this less-innocent age. What Marston brought to the party does not translate to these modern times, but we need to be as adventurous in our thinking as Marston was in his to give WONDER WOMAN her due.
Tomorrow, more goodies! Be good!
Brad