Weekly Reading: Glory #2

Glory #2

Published by Avatar in January 2002

The covers:

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

Title: Alan Moore's Glory and the Gate of Tears Chapter 2: The End of Delight

(As always: Glory is currently out of print. There are a number of ways to read it, which can be found on the How do I read Moore's Awesome works page.)

Welcome to the unintentional final issue of Glory. It still amazes me that they couldn't even make it through the four issues Avatar promised. I guess even Avatar had license to be Awesome. (I'll show myself out.)

Anyway, getting into the story, we pick up in Gloria's apartment the morning after her "date" with Granger Troy. She wakes up, but from her captions, we quickly realize that Glory is in charge of the body for a while. She's quickly off to work as Glory, saving people from an apartment fire.

Then she's off to the diner, where she lets Gloria take over the body once more. It's such an interesting way to deal with a secret identity, to have it be two separate ones. It reminds me a bit of the Mike Moran/Miracleman relationship, if anyone remembers that. Hopefully this one will turn out better for the human half.

Gloria starts discussing her night with Phoebe while the volume on the lettering is turned down, revealing Glory in Thule, watching the scene play out in the Earthly realm.

Demeter approaches and Glory can tell that something is wrong. Demeter tells Glory about Lilith's visit, and how her garden hasn't been the same since. In fact, Demeter's ten of swords, also called Ruin, approaches and tells Glory that when ten blades turn against her, it will be the end of delight.

Demeter asks about Glory's human aspect, and finds out about Granger Troy, which Demeter admits is not the luckiest name.

Demeter: "Please be careful, my darling. Don't get tied to anyone. You tend to get enchanted so easily..."

Glory meets up with Hermoine and they head off to talk.

Meanwhile, Granger starts waking up and getting dressed. He's feeling ashamed at having slept with Gloria, even though she's clearly crazy. He notices her comics and thinks that maybe Gloria identifies with Glory, the superhero. He picks up one from 1954 and then we get our flashback... except it doesn't try very hard to feel like a flashback. Consider that this is an image of the Holliday Girls, whom the Danger Damsels are based on:

...and then look at what artist Matt Martin drew for the flashback:

The style ruins the whole point of the flashback, which was to lovingly capture the weird split between the fetishism of being bound and the innocence of the artwork. Instead, the whole thing feels tawdry and cheap.

There's a rumor that the reason Avatar stopped publishing Glory with issue #2 was because as part of the agreement with Rob Liefeld, Liefeld had final say in artists on the series. Liefled didn't sign off on Matt Martin and wanted Melinda Gebbie to continue doing the flashbacks (at least partly to stay in Moore's good graces). After this debacle, Liefeld pulled the plug on the whole thing.

In the flashback, Glory is summoned telepathically by the Danger Damsels. At Miss Smart's School for Girls, Glory finds out that the Danger Damsels have been abducted by Madame Manacle, the ruler of Slaveria. In Slaveria, she finds the four Damsels bound up. They introduce themselves, revealing their characters as the rich girl, the fat girl, etc., but Matt Martin's art does nothing to distinguish any of them, ruining the joke. Ugh.

Glory agrees to submit to four traps in order to free the girls. The first is a giant record player with a diamond needle, getting closer and closer to scratching her skin. But she manages to shift her weight and send the whole thing crashing. The next is a giant beaker with water slowly threatening to drown Glory. But she manages to mix the water with sulphuric acid to explode her way free. The third is to be pulled by two horses, but she quickly charms the horses.

The last is that Madame Manacle pretends to be Glory's sweetheart Trevor Tracey, and asks Glory to marry him/her. Glory says yes, and Trevor asks that she cook and clean for him. The Danger Damsels unmask the villain just before the ultimate submission and they attach her to a wagon to pull them all back to school.

And the flashback ends on a personal not for Granger:

"All people who try to tie women down have got a nerve, Wanda... especially ones who'd screw a poor lonely schizophrenic like that buttwipe Granger Troy did."

Granger has to look twice before the comic returns to normal. He decides he needs to get out of Gloria's apartment before he goes crazy himself. He runs into Lillian the hooker, who tells him that she can get him a drug for schizophrenia, which he agrees to give to Gloria.

Meanwhile, in Thule, Glory explains to Hermoine about her feelings for Granger.

Glory: "He loves Gloria so much, and he's afraid of hurting her. It's so silly..."

Hermoine: "How could you ever hurt somebody by loving them?"

During their next date, Granger slips the drug into Gloria's drink.

Glory, in Thule, wanders through Demeter's art pavilions, where artists come while they're working. The sky soon starts to grow dark and windy. The ten of swords is trying to wave to her.

Meanwhile Gloria, under the drug, is starting to realize that she may be crazy.

In Thule, the earth opens up and swallows Glory. In the Ninth Kingdom, Hecate, the goddess of magic, witchcraft, the night, moon, ghosts and necromancy, hears a cry. In the Sixth Kingdom, Helios, the sun god, says, "Oh no. Not again."

And Demeter comes running to find Glory gone beneath the ground.

The next issue would have been called Paradise Lost, but well, I guess it's just lost. It's such a shame, because, while very flawed, it was an interesting comic playing with some new ideas. Unfortunately, I haven't found any copies of the last two scripts Moore did for Glory nor any fan-creator issues.

Drat.

Okay, next week we'll finish off the last of Moore's Awesome works with Supreme #63. Prepare for the mother of all cliffhangers!

As always, please check out the Annotations Page for more details and references and be sure to let me know any that I missed.

William Moulton Marston

It's impossible to talk about the beginnings of Wonder Woman without talking about the weird fetishist/feminist who created her: William Moulton Marston. He was already a psychologist and inventor of an early prototype lie detector when he created Wonder Woman.

While a professor he fell in love with one of his students, Olive, and brought her home to his wife, Elizabeth, and demanded that Olive be allowed to live with them or he was going to file for divorce. So the three of them lived together with the wife out working and the mistress taking care of each woman's two children.

Marston showing off his lie detector

This wasn't the only different way he handled the usual roles of the sexes. From his psychological work, Marston became convinced that women were more honest than men in certain situations and could work faster and more accurately. During his lifetime Marston championed the latent abilities and causes of the women of his day.

Marston was also a writer of essays in popular psychology. In 1928 he published Emotions of Normal People, which elaborated the DISC Theory. Marston viewed people behaving along two axes, with their attention being either passive or active, depending on the individual's perception of his or her environment as either favorable or antagonistic. By placing the axes at right angles, four quadrants form with each describing a behavioral pattern:

• Dominance produces activity in an antagonistic environment
• Inducement produces activity in a favorable environment
• Submission produces passivity in a favorable environment
• Compliance produces passivity in an antagonistic environment. 

Marston posited that there is a masculine notion of freedom that is inherently anarchic and violent and an opposing feminine notion based on "Love Allure" that leads to an ideal state of submission to loving authority.

Dominance and submission were themes that played a large role in Wonder Woman, as Alan Moore noted in his Glory proposal.

Marston (l) and Gaines (r)

In a 1940 interview conducted by his mistress published in The Family Circle, Marston said that he saw "great educational potential" in comic books. The interview caught the attention of comics publisher Max Gaines, who hired Marston as an educational consultant for National Periodicals and All-American Publications, two of the companies that would later merge to form DC Comics.

Marston recommended an idea for a new kind of superhero, one who would conquer not with fists or firepower, but with love. "Fine," said Elizabeth, "but make her a woman." Marston introduced the idea to Gaines. Given the go-ahead, Marston developed Wonder Woman, basing her character on the unconventional, liberated, powerful modern women of his day.

In a nice little connection, apparently Suprema was going to be the name for Wonder Woman, but was replaced with WW, which was a popular term at the time that described women who were exceptionally gifted.

Marston with his four children

Marston used a lot of bondage themes that were entering popular culture in the 1930s. Physical and mental submission appears again and again throughout Marston's comics work, with Wonder Woman and her criminal opponents frequently being tied up or otherwise restrained, and her Amazonian sisters engaging in frequent wrestling and bondage play. These elements were softened by later writers of the series.

Though Marston had described female nature as being more capable of submission emotion, in his other writings and interviews, he referred to submission as a noble practice and did not shy away from the sexual implications, saying:

"The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound... Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society... Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element."

One of the purposes of these bondage depictions was to induce eroticism in readers as a part of what he called "sex love training." Through his Wonder Woman comics, he aimed to condition readers to becoming more readily accepting of loving submission to loving authorities rather than being so assertive with their own destructive egos. About male readers, he later wrote: "Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to, and they'll be proud to become her willing slaves!"

Marston died in 1947. After his death, Elizabeth and Olive lived together until 1990, when Olive died.

Wonder Woman's first appearance

Wonder Woman wasn't a superhero I ever followed regularly. Of the big three, Batman was always my favorite, although that's changed quite a bit once Batman got oversaturated in the 1990s. So it's been kind of fun to explore some of the history of Wonder Woman through my interest in Awesome's Glory. And as always, it's a shame we didn't get more of it.

Anyway, since we're talking Glory/Wonder Woman for the next two weeks, I thought it'd be fun to take a look at Wonder Woman's first appearance, as a backup feature in All Star Comics #8.

It's a well-constructed little story, starting with Steve Trevor crash landing on Paradise Island, learning more about the island from Hippolyte in a text-only section, before seeing how Steve came to crash the plane. Then there's a contest where Diana proves herself the most capable Amazonian and becomes Wonder Woman.

See what you think: