In “Stories Are Weapons,” best-selling author Annalee Newitz traces the way disinformation, propaganda and violent threats — the essential tool kit for psychological warfare — have evolved from military weapons deployed against foreign adversaries into tools in domestic culture wars. Newitz delves into America’s deep-rooted history with psychological operations, beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s Revolutionary War–era fake newspaper and nineteenth-century wars on Indigenous nations, and reaching its apotheosis with the Cold War and twenty-first-century influence campaigns online. In the following excerpt, Newitz tells the story of Wonder Woman, detailing the conception of the character, the anti-comic movement and the character’s evolution in the decades since her creation. Read a Q&A with Newitz about the book here.

Annalee Newitz is a journalist and author of the national bestseller “Four Lost Cities.” They write for the New York Times and New Scientist and co-host the Hugo Award–winning podcast “Our Opinions Are Correct.” They live in San Francisco.

Excerpted from Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind by Annalee Newitz. Copyright © 2024 by Annalee Newitz. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Chapter 6: Dirty Comics 

When school is the battleground in a culture war, sometimes educators have to leave academia in order to teach. That’s what happened to psychology professor William Moulton Marston, who wanted to teach the world to respect women. But it wasn’t until he created the Wonder Woman comic book that he found a classroom where he could do it.

Working at Harvard, Marston had made a name for himself in the 1910s by promoting a lie-­detector test he’d invented. During World War I, he taught military psychology in the US Army, then spent the next decade rattling around various university psychology departments and conducting experiments on what he called the “psycho-­neural mechanisms of emotion.” In 1928, he published a book called Emotions of Normal People, co-­written without credit by his partner Olive Byrne. He and Byrne suggested that most sexual desires were perfectly normal—­even if society frowned on them—­because humans were hardwired to want a wide range of sexual activities. There was no “normal,” they argued, and it was toxic to teach people otherwise.

Marston wanted fiction to serve as a vector for his deeply held beliefs about female power.

This argument came from personal experience as well as professional conviction. Marston was in a long-­term polyamorous relationship with Byrne; his wife, Elizabeth Holloway, an attorney; and Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, a librarian.¹ Their polycule wasn’t just some kinky lark: these relationships lasted Marston’s entire adult life. He lived in a sprawling home with Holloway, Byrne, and their four children, while Huntley visited often enough to have her own room in the house. Inspired by the free-thinking women in his life, Marston began to layer feminism into his theories of emotion. But his family was deemed so scandalous that it got him booted from academia. One of his former colleagues at Harvard put a letter in Marston’s file alluding obliquely to “rumors” about him. It was, as his biographer Jill Lepore notes, “the kind of thing said about homosexuals,” and it was enough to get him blackballed from academia for life.² This setback seems to have solidified Marston’s belief that he was in the psychological vanguard, and he continued to search for jobs that would allow him to normalize the idea of women’s liberation.

Marston’s career took a turn when Universal Studios hired him as a “mental showman” in 1928, to help predict where pictures were going and what people wanted from them. Hollywood had observed the way psychologists like Edward Bernays had revolutionized the advertising industry, and wanted some of that magic for themselves. Marston told execs that emotions should be “authentic,” and that in romance movies, the “woman should be shown as the leader every time.” After working on hit movies like Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Marston had created an odd but productive role for himself in the culture industry. Unlike Paul Linebarger, who drew a strict line between his psyops work and his fiction, Marston wanted fiction to serve as a vector for his deeply held beliefs about female power. In 1937, he gave a front-­page interview to the Washington Post where he declared that “the next 100 years will see the beginning of an American matriarchy—­a nation of Amazons . . . and in 1,000 years, women will definitely rule this country.”³

He managed to make that dream come true, at least in comic books. Max Gaines, who ran DC Comics, hired him in 1940 to create the character of Wonder Woman. Marston famously pitched the comic as “psychological propaganda for a new type of woman.” His hope was that readers would be inspired by Diana Prince, an Amazon princess who could rule over men with love and truth. Indeed, one of Wonder Woman’s greatest weapons is her Lasso of Truth; when she ensnares someone in it, they cannot lie. Marston explicitly rejected the Bernays approach to psyops, even going so far as to pit Wonder Woman against a supervillain named the Duke of Deception, who runs an ad firm. Marston wanted to empower women, not sucker them into buying cigarettes. He wanted to educate them about their histories, too. Each issue contained an essay about a real-­life woman who had made important contributions to science and the arts, alongside an action-­packed story about the Amazon who fought Nazis with her wits and superpowers. For Marston, propaganda was a progressive force, and like all propaganda, it contained an element of truth.

Wonder Woman immediately became one of DC’s most popular characters, alongside Superman and Batman. Though Marston wrote the comic for only six years, until his death in 1947, Wonder Woman’s influence has continued unabated until the present day. But almost immediately, her adversaries weren’t limited to the Duke of Deception, Mars (the god of war), and the misogynistic Dr. Psycho. Her greatest enemies were other psychologists, often working with the US government and the courts to convince the public that comics were filling kids’ minds with filth.

Keep your brains clean, kids

In 1946, President Harry S. Truman signed the National Mental Health Act into law. He likely had no idea how it would be used against comic books. The bill allocated federal funding for research into mental health issues—­especially those suffered by returning soldiers that today we would call PTSD—­and to preventive therapies rather than institutionalization. The law was a long time coming, and was based in part on the progressive idea of “mental hygiene,” a field of psychology that focused on promoting mental health through community services and education.⁴ After World War II, however, mental hygiene became a kind of foil to brainwashing—­it was the “good” form of mind control that could save people from falling prey to all kinds of menacing ideas.

Bolstered by support from the government, mental hygiene made the jump to popular culture. A new subgenre of documentary called the “educational film” entered US classrooms, giving kids mental hygiene lessons about everything from proper dating etiquette and gender roles to drug use and driver safety. Often produced by ex-­GIs who had worked for the Office of War Information, where Paul Linebarger began his career in psyops, these films were both lucrative and ubiquitous. They were also, like the Wonder Woman comic book, conceived from the outset as what film historian Ken Smith calls “tools of social engineering, created to shape the behavior of their audiences.”⁵ The difference was that mental hygiene films did it by threatening viewers with the specter of insanity caused by inappropriate behavior and crime—­including J. Edgar Hoover’s favorite crime of “sex perversion,” aka homosexuality.

By the mid-­1950s, experts viewed pop culture as a psychological battleground, a war between mental hygiene and dirty minds.

By the mid-­1950s, experts viewed pop culture as a psychological battleground, a war between mental hygiene and dirty minds. Into the breach stepped a psychologist and moral crusader named Fredric Wertham, who published a best-­selling book in 1954 called The Seduction of the Innocent, in which he argued that comics were the direct cause of violence, drug use, and homosexuality among young people. If classroom movies could prevent mental illness, then it stood to reason that comics could cause it. Wertham’s book led to a national movement to keep comics away from children and teens. One immediate result was a restrictive editorial code, similar to the Motion Picture Code, issued by the Comics Magazine Association of America “for the protection and enhancement of the American reading public.”⁶ Among other rules, the code forbade representations of “sex perversion” and “indecent or undue exposure.” Comics that touched on the topic of romance would always “emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.” While those rules were clearly aimed at Wonder Woman and other titles with female protagonists, the Comics Code was also focused on limiting what could happen in stories more generally. There would be no “glamorous criminals,” and “in every instance, good shall triumph over evil.” Also prohibited were scenes involving “walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism.” So many things were forbidden that it was almost impossible to stay within the code, especially because items like “undue exposure” were difficult to define.

For the next decade, Wertham fought comic books in lectures and in Congress, noting in a Senate hearing that “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-­book industry. They get the children much younger.”⁷ As if it weren’t already obvious that Wertham considered this a war, he had now openly compared comics publishers to the nation’s most hated adversary. Comics, he suggested, weren’t just threatening children’s mental health. They threatened the very fabric of democracy.

Wertham’s public advocacy for mental hygiene went back to the 1920s, when he began his career as an advocate for the poor and mentally ill. As an expert witness in the courtroom, he helped establish the idea that mentally ill people should not always be held responsible for their crimes. Most of the research he did for Seduction was at Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, the first psychological clinic in the predominantly Black neighborhood. Celebrated Black writer Richard Wright, long an advocate for psychotherapy, had spearheaded the project to build a clinic in his community. He and Wertham met after the publication of Wright’s novel Native Son, which explores the destructive impact of racism on a young Black man’s sanity. Wright was impressed that Wertham seemed to understand that poverty and racism can make life and mental health precarious.⁸ And yet, Wertham ended up believing that the troubled children he worked with in Harlem were not suffering under Jim Crow⁹ in a redlined city. Instead, they were being led astray by violent and sexual images in comics.

In the 1940s, comics were as ubiquitous in kids’ lives as video games are today: at that time, more than 90 percent of children and 80 percent of teens in the US were reading comics regularly.¹⁰ These statistics worried Wertham, who saw something “psychologically un-­hygienic” in Wonder Woman.¹¹ As he wrote in The Seduction of the Innocent, she was a hero stronger than men, a “phallic woman,” which he condemned as “an undesirable ideal for girls, being the exact opposite of what girls are supposed to want to be.”¹² Describing a fourteen-­year-­old “delinquent” at his clinic who had “been in contact with some twenty-­five social agencies,” Wertham wondered why she couldn’t overcome her “difficult social circumstances,” including poverty and an unstable home. His answer? “Her ideal was Wonder Woman. . . . She was prevented from rising above [her circumstances] by the specific corruption of her character development by comic-­book seduction. The woman in her had succumbed to Wonder Woman.”¹³ And the problem wasn’t just Wonder Woman, according to Wertham. It was the representation of all women in the comic book. “They do not work. They are not homemakers. They do not bring up a family,” he complained. “Mother-­love is entirely absent. Even when Wonder Woman adopts a girl there are Lesbian overtones.”¹⁴

Wertham managed to gaslight a generation of young people who looked to the Amazon princess for guidance, truth, and a sense of hope.

At one point in The Seduction of the Innocent, Wertham makes a reference to Marston’s contention that Wonder Woman offered a model of “advanced femininity” where women are equal to men. “If a normal person looks at comic books in the light of this statement he soon realizes that the ‘advanced concept of femininity and masculinity’ is really a regressive formula of perversity,” he argued.¹⁵ Having Wonder Woman as a role model was, to Wertham’s mind, a cause of mental illness. The values she embodied were “unhygienic,” leading women to believe they could work alongside men as equals—­and even choose sexual partners who were not male. And thus, with one book, Wertham managed to gaslight a generation of young people who looked to the Amazon princess for guidance, truth, and a sense of hope. The mental hygiene psyop has the same built-­in defense against criticism that the bell curve psyop does. Anyone who argued against Wertham was, by definition, mentally unfit—­and therefore not trustworthy to advance an argument. Culture wars often produce these kinds of blanket diagnoses of whole classes of people, and these diagnoses are a difficult weapon to deflect.

Still, despite Wertham’s best efforts, Wonder Woman did not go out of print, nor did her popularity decline—­especially after the rise of second-­wave feminism in the 1960s and ’70s. Acknowledging the character’s role as a feminist icon in the culture war, Gloria Steinem put Wonder Woman on the cover of Ms. magazine in 1972. A popular Wonder Woman TV series starring Lynda Carter gave the character a 1970s reboot, and she appeared in two blockbuster movies, in 2017 and 2020. Along the way, her character inspired countless other heroic women in pop culture, from Batwoman to the protagonists in an annual feminist science fiction anthology series that began in the mid-­1970s with Women of Wonder.

Wertham’s reputation has not stood the test of time as well as Diana Prince’s. A recent investigation of Wertham’s papers by University of Illinois comics historian Carol Tilley revealed that the psychiatrist fabricated, exaggerated, and selectively edited his data to bolster his argument that comics caused antisocial behavior.¹⁶ Tilley’s work was based on unprecedented access to two hundred cartons of Wertham’s private papers at the Library of Congress, which were under seal until 2010. She pored over the extremely detailed notes Wertham kept on interviews and sessions with the teens he worked with throughout most of his life. Soon, Tilley realized that there were major discrepancies between what Wertham recorded in them and what he wrote in The Seduction of the Innocent.

Some of Wertham’s case studies in his book turned out to be stories he’d heard secondhand from colleagues. A famous anecdote about a Sheena-­obsessed teen named Dorothy with a history of violence came from another doctor. Tellingly, Wertham’s account glossed over the real-­life violence that might have influenced Dorothy’s behavior. Tilley writes:

In the case notes, Wertham commented that the images of strong women reinforced “violent revenge fantasies against men and possibly creates these violent anti-­men (therefore homosexual) fantasies. . . . Sheena and the other comic book women such as Wonder Woman are very bad ideals for them.” Yet Wertham omits from Seduction—­and seemingly from his analysis—­a revealing story about Dorothy’s everyday reality. In the case notes, she related an incident in which her aunt was accosted by gang members, taken to a rooftop, and robbed of less than one dollar.

Here we see Wertham refusing to acknowledge what Dorothy told her case worker about the real-­life traumas she suffered. He believed that comics made her mentally unfit to explain what truly ailed her.

When it came to violence inspired by comics, Wertham’s greatest informant was a fifteen-­year-­old gang member named Carlisle. Wertham had carefully transcribed interviews with Carlisle, and in the process of writing Seduction wound up attributing Carlisle’s words to a succession of fictional young people. He’s split into two different boys in one section, and Carlisle’s words also find their way into the mouths of two more boys, ages thirteen and fourteen. So one informant became four. This was part of a general pattern where Wertham exaggerated the scope of his research. Though he testified to the Senate that he’d examined five hundred young people per year for several years, the archival evidence shows that for the ten years he worked at the Harlem clinic, only five hundred people under seventeen were admitted.

Tilley also found evidence in the Library of Congress papers that Wertham’s observation that he’d seen children “vomit over comic books” was actually taken from a report by the psychiatrist’s friend, the folklorist Gershon Legman. Legman was not an expert by any means, and ironically he was best known for books about dirty jokes and a guide to “ora-­genital stimulation,” or oral sex. But Legman had become an anti-­comics crusader in the late 1940s, and that was enough for Wertham to include his anecdote as evidence. Wertham also claimed in Seduction that he’d seen comics for sale to children in stores where prostitutes peddled their wares. This was actually from an unverified report given to him by his colleague Hilde Mosse; Wertham himself never witnessed any prostitutes at comic book stores.

Though Wertham’s influence had waned long before his lies and exaggerations came to light, the culture war over women’s representation in comic books did not fade out. Instead, it moved to a new battlefield within the world of comic book creators and fans, where feminists were changing the scripts again.

“I thought Wonder Woman was Puerto Rican”

In the late 1990s, a comic book fan named Gail Simone noticed something odd. “I found that I most enjoyed reading about the girl heroes, or Superchicks. And it had been nagging me for a while that in mainstream comics, being a girl superhero meant inevitably being killed, maimed or depowered,” she wrote. She made a list of 112 “superchicks who had gone down in one of those ways,” including Wonder Woman, and was stunned. “When I realized that it was actually harder to list major female heroes who HADN’T been sliced up somehow, I felt that I might be on to something a bit . . . well, creepy.”¹⁷ Simone posted the list on a website she called Women in Refrigerators. The name is a reference to a notorious issue of Green Lantern that came out in 1994, at the height of the “grimdark” trend in comics, which foregrounded gritty violence. One of the high-­ranking members of the Green Lantern Corps, Kyle Rayner, discovers that the bad guys have chopped up his girlfriend Alex DeWitt and left her remains inside his refrigerator. It’s a horrific scene, and avenging her death becomes Kyle’s primary motivation throughout that arc in the book.

As she said when she first compiled the “women in refrigerators” list, the world of comics was changing, and she was part of a new wave of women writers, editors, and fans who spoke out loudly when their heroes were forced to wear ridiculous cheesecake outfits, or to die in order to motivate male characters.

After posting her list, Simone emailed a few dozen comic book creators—­most of whom were male at the time—­and asked what they thought. Their answers ranged from horror at the realization¹⁸ to apathy because male superheroes are often killed in terrible ways too.¹⁹ Still, no matter how people in the world of comics felt about Simone’s list, it touched a nerve. In 1999, Women in Refrigerators was at the center of one of the first meme wars on the internet, galvanizing fans and creators to reexamine the role of women in comics. It also launched Simone’s career. In the early 2000s, she was invited to write Birds of Prey, an all-­female superhero team that included fan favorites Black Canary and Oracle. Her run on the comic inspired the 2020 Birds of Prey movie, which centered on Harley Quinn. Simone also became the longest-­running female writer on Wonder Woman. As she said when she first compiled the “women in refrigerators” list, the world of comics was changing, and she was part of a new wave of women writers, editors, and fans who spoke out loudly when their heroes were forced to wear ridiculous cheesecake outfits, or to die in order to motivate male characters. In an interview shortly before she took the reins on Wonder Woman, Simone mused:

Women respond strongly to . . . myths and fairy tales where the end is not always the prince and the knight come in to rescue them. . . . A lot of [people] really enjoy Birds of Prey because it shows that there’s diversity there . . . different types of strength and different ways to stand up in that situation.²⁰

One of those people was Vita Ayala, a nonbinary Afro-­Latinx comics fan who loved Simone’s Birds of Prey as a teen. As an adult, she became an editor at Marvel. Ayala also co-­authored the first Wonder Woman series starring Nubia, a Black warrior who became queen of the Amazons while Wonder Woman was busy in Man’s World. Hitting stores in fall 2022, it was called Nubia: Queen of the Amazons. I caught up with Ayala on video to find out what it’s like to work in comics over seventy years after the birth of Wonder Woman. Growing up in the Bronx in the 1980s and ’90s, there was no question in Ayala’s mind that Wonder Woman was a person they could identify with. “I always thought Wonder Woman was Puerto Rican,” they admitted with a laugh. “She’s wearing a Puerto Rican outfit, with little shorts. She comes from an island of strong women. She looks like my cousin. She speaks Spanish sometimes—­I remember her saying ‘hola.’ Finally, when I was sixteen, my mom said, ‘No, she’s Greek. She’s involved with the Greek gods—­her villain is Ares!’ ” Ayala shook their head, amused at the memory.

Despite their early identification with Wonder Woman, Ayala didn’t always aspire to be a comic book writer. They started out wanting to be a teacher, and spent a semester in graduate school studying education. But they quickly grew disenchanted with institutions that “were not conducive to learning.” They wanted to teach, but not in a system they saw as “pitted against” the very kids it was supposed to help. Like William Moulton Marston, who went from Harvard to Hollywood, they believed that superhero stories were a way to inspire kids outside the system.

“[Superheroes] don’t have a moral with a capital M. But they are a way for us to talk about the things we find aspirational. To talk about hope in a way that’s not too on the nose,” they explained. That was especially the case with Nubia, a character they thought about very carefully with co-­writer Stephanie Williams, a Black artist who has a longtime fascination with comic book history. The two of them decided that their first move would be to “modernize” the backstory of the remote Amazon island of Themyscira, where Nubia becomes queen. Nubia’s origin in 1970s comics was not going to fly in the 2020s, they explained wryly. “Hippolyta prays for daughters, and makes one out of white clay who is good—­that’s Diana—­and one out of black clay who was not so good. Nubia was raised on a parallel ‘bad Amazon’ island.” As they discussed this origin story with Williams, Ayala realized that the story wasn’t just racist but also undermined the idea that women have control over their own actions. The “white clay” Wonder Woman doesn’t choose to be good but is simply built to be good, like an automaton. “It takes agency away from Diana,” Ayala said. And obviously it made Nubia into a depressing stereotype of the Black woman who can’t help but be bad.

Williams and Ayala gave Nubia a new origin story, where she climbs out of the magical Well of Souls on Themyscira along with many other Black and Brown women, all of whom have been saved from their oppressive lives in Man’s World. After serving as a warrior on the island for many years, Nubia wins a contest of bravery and is crowned the Amazons’ new queen. The question was, what would her powers be? Nubia doesn’t have a Lasso of Truth like Diana, but she does have the power of understanding. “What is truth without empathy?” Ayala mused. “She can’t compel you to tell the truth, but she can bring both of you to a place of understanding each other.” She also has to learn that she matters to her people, which is why Ayala and Williams set the action on Themyscira—­a place where Marston’s Wonder Woman also spent a lot of her time.

‘Understanding the perspective of the antagonist is part of being a hero,’ Ayala said.

In the story, Nubia must fight one of the Amazons’ greatest foes, Medusa, who has escaped from a prison on the island. “We asked, what does it look like when a Black woman deals with that problem [of imprisonment]?” Ayala recalled. In the end, Nubia uses her power of empathy, and realizes that Medusa has been victimized, raped and turned into a monster against her will. “Understanding the perspective of the antagonist is part of being a hero,” Ayala said. And there’s another lesson folded into the comic as well: “Maybe jail isn’t that great.” They continued, “It’s a lie to say you can create art without an agenda. It’s about communicating, and you’re communicating [your beliefs].” Marston imagined a world of powerful women, and Simone imagined a world where those women survived. Ayala and Williams imagined a world where women abolished prisons.

I asked Ayala if there are harmful tropes equivalent to “women in refrigerators” for Black and Brown characters in comics. Without hesitation, they replied, “Getting shot.” As a writer and editor, they said, “I fight very hard not to have guns pointed at young Brown characters. I’m very aware of what is going on there. I try to allow young Black and Brown characters as much innocence as I can. I don’t mean making them naïve. You can preserve their wonder and excitement and big emotions and not make [their stories] just trauma-based.” Ayala and their wife recently had a baby, and as they spoke to me, Ayala gently cradled their newborn in a soft blanket, occasionally pausing for a quick nursing break. It made me wonder what kind of worlds that sleeping baby would discover in the pages of comic books written a decade from now.