To this day, 25 years later, the argument goes unresolved in my mind: wouldn’t he have, like, totally crushed her or, like, popped her head off when he orgasmed? Well, creator Schuster sure had some fun dressing him up like a cartoon love doll. What was going on BEHIND all the “POW! BIFF! BAM!”? Turns out the answer is “POW! BIFF! BAM!”

The good guys never died, the bad guys always got caught or killed, and no one ever had sex. Didn’t even think about it. Never crossed their minds. In fact, no one ever got any kind of action with the opposite sex. If you wanted the saucier stuff, you bought the pulp magazines, with titles such as Spicy Detective or Weird Fantasy.

Although they hadn’t always been solely intended for kids, comic books pandered to an increasingly juvenile audience. Largely this was a result of the McCarthy-esque investigations that took place before the Senate in the early Fifties into the corrupting influence of “funny books” on young minds. This was triggered by the work of Fredric Wertham, whose book Seduction of the Innocent made the sensational claim that comic books were the major cause of juvenile delinquency in the USA. He also stated that comic books were implementing and reinforcing homosexual thoughts because Robin was drawn with bare legs and because he seemed devoted and attached to only Batman. Not only that, but Wonder Woman was giving little girls the “wrong ideas” about a woman’s place in society.
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In those heady, pre-internet days, when fetishes were buried deep, mainstream comic-books artists already provided a service of sorts to those who liked their sex lives spiced up with high heels and corsets. Wonder Woman not only had the requisite sexy shoes and bountiful bust, she also had a penchant for tying up her, usually male, adversaries in her magical lasso, rendering them powerless and unable to lie. She was created by the psychiatrist William Moulton Marston, who further defied convention by living happily in a polygamous and poly-amorous relationship with two women. How many young boys growing up in the 1940s and 1950s must have longed to have Wonder Woman fly into their bedrooms in her invisible plane, wrap her sexy rope around them and force them to admit what it was they really, really, wanted?