So, have you heard about Wonder Woman’s haircut yet?
If you haven’t, here’s the story in a nutshell: In the current storyline by writer Walt Simonson and artist Jerry Ordway, Wonder Woman’s suffering from amnesia, but that’s not stopping any number of dangerous folks from trying to kill her. WW’s held off her attackers thus far, but she wants to get to the bottom of this. So with the aid of a dedicated fan, she adopts a brilliant disguise – she cuts her hair and puts on a pair of glasses. The issue in question comes out this week, and the story has hit the Associated Press and other media outlets. (Glad there’s nothing else going on in the world.)
The whole thing seems silly, of course. Who cares about a fictional character’s sense of style? Then again, we’re still digging out from Oscar night fashion coverage. So why shouldn’t the big stars of the comics world get the same treatment? But the coverage also highlights the odd relationship the media, and American society in general, have with comics’ major pop culture icons. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, the Hulk – we know them all, but we barely know their stories and history.
The headline of the AP article, for example, is ‘After 60 years, Wonder Woman gets a makeover.’ Now, I think it’s probably true that this is the first time Wonder Woman’s been depicted in short hair. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, DC unveiled a new-look Wonder Woman, who eschewed her costume and most of her powers for a white jumpsuit and some crimefighting kung-fu action. In fact, the current amnesiac-out-of-costume storyline has included direct homages to those stories.
So this news isn’t really news. Even moreso because a new writer is taking over the series when this storyline is over, and it’s quite likely that everything will return to the status quo. It’s an odd pairing – the general media isn’t aware that change frequently occurs in long-running comics series, so when they do get wind of a (probably temporary) change in the status quo, they treat it as a groundbreaking alteration of our cultural landscape.
The biggest reason for this is probably that the major comics characters have transcended comics. Wonder Woman 190 was the 83rd-ranked comic for the month of March; industry analyst icv2 estimates that North American comic and pop culture stores ordered fewer than 25,000 copies. Super Friends reruns on Cartoon Network probably get more viewers; the network’s current Justice League series certainly does (to the tune of 1 million to 1.5 million). We may not remember what Wonder Woman was wearing in the comics in the 60s and 70s, but Lynda Carter’s TV version still lives on in reruns and the popular consciousness almost three decades after the fact.
It’s not just Wonder Woman, though. Batman is the top-selling title for March, with industry analyst icv2 estimating around 123,000 copies sold this month. Batman: The Animated Series drew millions of viewers when it aired on Fox and the WB in the early to mid 90s. At minimum, given Justice League’s ratings, ten times as many people are getting their notions about Batman, Superman and company from the cartoons as they are from the comics. Millions of people bought tickets to see X-Men, Spider-Man and Daredevil, but only thousands of people buy their comics.
Like Wonder Woman’s hair, this is not news. For decades, no one has really been paying much attention to the contemporary comic adventures – the comics helped establish an archetype in the pop culture consciousness once upon a time, but even by the 70s, they weren’t important enough to keep track of. This did allow for some experimentation in the comics of that time; for a while, Clark Kent was a TV reporter with no vulnerability to Kryptonite, Batman left stately Wayne Manor for a penthouse apartment in the city, and we’ve already mentioned Wonder Woman’s wardrobe changes.
In the 80s and 90s, publishers often tried to refocus attention on the comics themselves with major stunts. A reader poll led DC to kill off Robin to a hailstorm of media attention. This required mainstream journalists to grasp the difference between Dick Grayson – the Robin created in 1940 – and his 80s successor, Jason Todd. The Grayson character grew up, ditched the short pants, became Nightwing, and stars in his own series today. Todd found himself on the wrong end of an automatic dialer after only a few years. It was a difference likely lost on an audience raised on Adam West and Burt Ward, who just heard ‘Robin died’ and went crazy.
In 1993 and 1994, DC went for the whole enchilada and killed off Superman, broke Batman’s back, and turned Green Lantern into a homicidal maniac. The Death of Superman became a huge media phenomenon, as mainstream journalists somehow failed to pick up on the notion that very few characters in comics stay dead for long. But the shock events had diminishing returns, and often annoyed the existing readership without really changing the way the public at large thought of the characters. The other-media adaptations stuck to the same archetypes they always had.
Gradually, the comics publishers have decided that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, creating spinoff versions and alternate publishing lines whose purpose was to reflect the versions of the characters that a larger audience might be familiar with – in short, they began adapting to the adaptations. It remains to be seen if this will help draw in the mass audience that has eluded comics over the last few decades. In the worst case scenario, it could cause a stagnation in the major characters’ ongoing storylines and accelerate the sales decline as the last of the diehards leave and no new casual readers come in to replace them. In the end, comics has to find some way to change the fact that the public at large doesn’t really want to know what’s in the comics – they just want to know that they’re still there.