The Student Prince of Camperdown

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Leisure activities, Local history, Memorabilia, Society & Culture

I went to the ‘Student Prince’ in the 1970s, only the once I think. The pub was pretty well packed with students from across the road, befitting its reputation as the unofficial watering hole of Sydney University students in those days (I was probably one of the few people there who were not actually going to USyd).

The interior was dimly-lit, the furniture well-used and the place definitely not decorated in the fashion of Old Heidelberg. I recall music playing however it was not a Mario Lanza record but a scrawny-looking band out the back playing something that wasn’t the “Drinking Song’ from the 1954 movie bearing the hotel’s name.

(Source: G’day Pubs)

The public house changed hands several times in the years before 2001 when it closed its doors for good, having been the perennial refuge for countless undergrads after a day spent in the mental grind of lecture halls and swotting up in Fisher Library. While many former patrons of the pub no doubt fondly recall their time drinking and waxing lyrically about some newly-acquired parcel of esoteric knowledge, other habitués associate the Student Prince with other memories – Russell Crowe for instance confessed to the Twitterati in 2010 that the roof of the pub was where his ten-year-old self first got his nicotine addiction!

The Student Prince after loitering on the market for a protracted period of time was bought by what the Sydney Morning Herald called “a mysterious consortium of Asian businessmen” who spent two years and $11 million turning the old uni student watering hole into an upmarket brothel (‘Sexclusively yours’, SMH, February 17, 2003).

‘Stiletto’ (the name it trades under) was described on the DA (development application) as an “adult entertainment facility”, or translated into street parlance, a “very high class knocking shop”. In 2011 plans to expand Stiletto into a “42-room megaplex” (the “largest short-stay bordello in the world”) ran into a hitch when Westpac the principal financier got cold feet. The establishment went ahead with the new development, but after a moral backlash (‘Sydney sinking into sin’, Daily Telegraph, November 12, 2010), the eventual expansion was appreciably more limited in size than initially proposed by the developers.

(Photo: ANU Open Research)

Footnote: There was an earlier pub dating from the 1880’s on the site at 82 Parramatta Road, Camperdown, called the ‘Captain Cook Hotel’ (‘Former Student Prince Hotel in Camperdown (NSW)’, www.gdaypubs.com.au).

Labelled ‘Degenerate’: Nazi Germany’s War on Modern Art

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Comparative politics, Popular Culture, Regional History, Society & Culture

In 1937 the Nazi regime organised two art exhibitions in Munich concurrently, separated only by a park and a few hundred metres. One was intended to hammer home to the German volk the inequity of the type of art that the führer Adolf Hitler found abhorrent, ie, anything in art that even hinted of modernity. The other representing all that Hitler found good in art was the complete antithesis of this – a paean to traditional, realistic painting and sculpture and art that conformed to classical themes and forms.

⇧ A Hitler, landscape (Source: Widewalls)

Hitler’s early experiences and his perceived emotional pattern suggest a motive of personal revenge contributing to the Nazis’ fanatical war on the modern and the avant-garde in art. As a young man Hitler dreamed of a career as an artist but a double rejection by the Vienna art academy saw those aspirations dashed. His paintings were summarily dismissed as passe by the art establishment in favour of abstract and modern styles (Burns), leaving the future Reich leader with a bitter aftertaste and a grudge①.

In Mein Kampf Hitler avers that “Cubism and Dadaism are symptoms of biological degradation threatening the German people”, Werckmeister, O. K. “Hitler the Artist.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 2, 1997, pp. 270–297. JSTOR www.jstor.org/stable/1343984. Accessed 2 March 2021.

The purging of so-called “degenerate art”
The Degenerate Art Exhibition (Entartete Kunst) in 1937 was the culmination of a concerted campaign waged by the Nazis to root out all manifestations of avant-garde art in Germany. The first efforts by Hitler’s henchmen were a reaction to the preceding liberal and permissive Weimar era which had embraced the modern style in art and especially Expressionism. In 1933 the Nazis held their first art exhibit of the supposed “degenerate art” in Dresden. Allied to this, the systematic confiscation of modern artworks from museum across Germany took place. Hundreds of thousands of the plundered art pieces including works by modern masters were sold by the Third Reich (some of the proceeds were siphoned off into armament production)②. Much of the minor, less marketable art works were ultimately burnt.

⇧ Beckmann: ‘The Night’

The “wrong type” of art
Hitler rejected the avant-garde and modernity in part for aesthetic reasons. Hitler like many of his Nazi followers had an innate conservative aesthetic taste in art. Politics and ideology also played a part, the führer associated modernism with Jews and communism, and by extension, with democracy and pacifism. Jewish influences, Hitler held, had contaminated the classical art styles so beloved by him. At the same time he denounced what he called “cultural Bolshevism” for weakening German society. Modern art, the Nazis believed was an evil plot against the German people, a “dangerous lie” which would poison German minds. In chilling words given the Nazis’ later unbridled lethal use of eugenics Hitler stated that “anyone who paints a green sky and fields blue ought to be sterilised”.

⇧ Kokoschka: ’Portrait of a Degenerate Artist’

“Sick art” and culture as a propaganda tool
Hitler and the Nazis believed that art played a critical role in defining society’s values. Expressionism③ and the group Die Brücke (“The Bridge”) and artists like Oscar Kokoschka and Ernst Kirchner got singled out for extra repressive measures. The Nazis depicted avant-garde art as the lowest of the low—”impure and subversive”, it’s artists ‘diseased’ specimens corrupted by mental, physical and moral decay—conversely they elevated classical Greek and Roman art to a sublime place, the highest of cultural planes.

⇧ Hitler viewing the ‘Degenerates’

The Degenerate Art Exhibition
The Nazis’ 1937 exhibition was carefully stage-managed as a propaganda vehicle to mock and deride the modern art Hitler so detested. The exhibition comprised Expressionist, Dada, Cubism, Abstract (allocated its own room designated the “Insanity Room”) and New Objectivity artworks. Paintings were hung in a careless, haphazard fashion, with graffiti scrawled on the walls which defamed the artists. Actors were hired to prowl through the gallery loudly denouncing the “Modernist madness”. Adolf Ziegler, the Reich”s top arts bureaucrat and Hitler’s favourite artist, declared the displayed works “monstrosities of insanity, insolence, incompetence and degeneration”. And to ram home the degeneracy point, the vilified artworks were juxtaposed alongside paintings by the enfeebled and the disabled, by psychotic patients and the like. According to the Nazis, degenerate art was the product of Jews and Bolsheviks, but interestingly only six of the 112 artists whose work was displayed in the exhibition were Jewish. The 650 paintings, prints and sculptures included works by Grosz, Dix, Klee, Beckmann, Nolde, Chagall, Picasso, Wandinsky, Marc and Mondrian.

⇧ Führer taking in the “good art”

Exhalting in the “pure Aryan art”
To provide Germans with a favourable point of comparison, the Nazis simultaneously held the Great German Art Exhibition in the same Munich neighbourhood. This displayed ‘Ayran’ art➃, the type of art Hitler approved of. Often gargantuan in scale⑤ – statuesque blond nudes, idealised heroic and duty-bound soldiers and imagined pastorals and idyllic landscapes (reflecting Hitler’s predilection for realistic paintings of outdoor rustic settings). Characteristically the favoured Nazis’ male figures in art represented the concept of the Übermensch (an idealised ‘superman’). Hitler’s intention was that the Groß deutsche Kunstausstellung propaganda would help mobile the German people behind the Nazis’ values.

Footnote: The outcome of the dual 1937 exhibitions was not anticipated by Hitler and the Nazis: Entartete Kunst proved wildly popular, attracting more than two million visitors, whereas Groß Kunstausstellung only managed less than a third of this number. The “Degenerate Art” show was such a hit that it was toured on display throughout the German Reich after the Munich premiere closed.

☬ ☬ ☬

Postscript: German artists deemed ‘degenerate’ understandably were more at risk of persecution from the Nazis from those outside the country. Special attention was given to artists like George Grosz and Oscar Dix who were openly critical of the totalitarian regime. Grosz mocked Hitler on canvas while Dix earned the enmity of the Nazis for his excruciating depictions of the horrors of war. As one writer put it, “the Nazis labeled Dix a ‘degenerate,’ but the term is better applied to the society he depicted—cannibalizing itself and hurtling toward destruction” (Alina Cohen).

Dix’s ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ (1933)

•━ ━ ━ •━ ━ ━ •━ ━ •━ ━ ━ ━•

① Hitler’s own preference for subject matter as an artist was for painting buildings and largely unpopulated pastoral landscapes (the future “world leader” had no talent for capturing the human form)
② Hitler and the National-Socialists’ notion of modern art as being the product of entartung (degeneracy) can be traced to a Jewish Austro-Hungarian social critic Max Nordau who decried the new art and literature in 1890s Europe as being the work of diseased minds
③ the focus on Expressionism as a target for the Nazi “culture police” proved a particular problem for Joseph Goebbels. The propaganda minister had early on championed the Expressionist movement and had to backtrack swiftly on this to avoid the führer’s opprobrium
➃ Ayran art uniformly infuses a celebration of youth, optimism, power and eternal triumph
⑤ the Nazi taste for mega-scale art reached its apogee in architecture, massive structures like ‘Germania’. “Monumentality and solidity (exuding power), simplicity and timeless eternity” were the bywords of Nazi architecture

𓇬 𓇬 𓇬

Bibliography
‘Degenerate art: Why Hitler hated modernism’, (Lucy Burns), BBC News, 06-Nov-2013, www.bbc.com
‘Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937’, (Jason Farago), The Guardian, 13-Mar-2014, www.theguardian.com
‘Degenerate art’, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org
‘Nazi architecture’, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org
‘Why “Degenerate” Artist Otto Dix Was Accused of Plotting to Kill Hitler’, (Alina Cohen), Art Sy, 11-Feb-2019, www.artsy.net
‘Art as Propaganda: The Nazi Degenerate Art Exhibit’, Facing History and Ourselves, (Video, 2017)
‘Adolf Hitler’s war against modern art’, The Canvas, (Video, 2019)

Germania, Mega-City Stillborn: Hitler’s Utopian Architectural Dream we

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Built Environment, International Relations, Regional History, Society & Culture

In Robert Harris’ speculative novel Fatherland—a “what if”/alternative view of postwar European history set in 1964—Adolf Hitler is very much alive, having won the Second World War. Through his “Greater German Reich” the Führer rules an empire stretching from “the Low Countries to the Urals” with Britain reduced to a not-very-significant client state. In the novel’s counterfactual narrative Hitler’s architect Albert Speer has completed part of Hitler’s grand building project for Berlin – including the 120m high “Triumphal Arch” and the “Great Hall of the Reich” (the “largest building in the world”). We know that none of the above scenario came to fruition, but we do know from history that part of Hitler’s plans post-victory (if he won) was to radically transform the shape and appearance of his capital city Berlin.

Weltreich or Europareich?
Under a future German empire, Berlin, to be known as Germania※, would be the showcase capital. Historians are divided over whether the Nazis’ ultimate goal was global dominance (Weltherrschaft)—in which case Germania would be Hitler’s Welthauptstadt (‘world capital’)—or was more limited in its objective, intent on creating a European-wide reich only (as posited by AJP Taylor et al). Either way, Hitler’s imperial capital was to be built on a monumental scale and grandeur which reflected the “1,000-Year Reich” and its stellar story of military conquests and expansion – in effect a theatrical showcase for the regime [‘Story of cities #22: how Hitler’s plans for Germania would have torn Berlin apart’, (Kate Connolly), The Guardian, 14-Apr-2016, www.theguardian.com].

Nazi utopia  
Showing off Germania to the world for the Führer was all about one-upping the capitalist West. Immense buildings symbolising the strength and power of Nazism convey a message of intimidation, a declaration that Hitler’s Germany could match and exceed the great metropolises like New York, Paris and London. Accordingly, the Hamburg suspension bridge had to be on a grander scale than its model in San Francisco, the constructed East-West Axis in Berlin had to outdo the massive Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires [Thies, Jochen, ‘Hitler’s European Building Programme’,  Journal of Contemporary History, July 1, 1978, http://doi.org/10.1177/002200947801300301].

Hitler & Speer: (Source: www.mirror.co.uk)

The architect/dictator
Hitler put Speer in charge of the massive project but always fancying himself as having the sensibility of an architect, Hitler retained a deep interest in its progress✪. Rejecting all forms of modernism▣ Hitler’s architectural preferences were rooted in the past – “Rome was his historical model and neoclassical architecture was his guiding aesthetic” [Meng, M. (2013). Central European History. 46 (3), 672-674. Retrieved October 24, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43280636]. The Germania building projects writ on a gargantuan scale, were an unmistakable statement, a means for the dictatorship “to secure (its) place in history and immortalise (itself) and (its) ideas through (its) architecture [Colin Philpott, Relics of the Reich: The Buildings the Nazis Left Behind, (2016)].

(Source: http://the-man-in-the-high-castle.fandom.com/wiki/)

On the Germania drawing board
Taking pride of place, the architectural centrepiece of the Germania blueprint, was the Volkshalle (‘People’s Hall)✦, a staggeringly large edifice inspired by the Pantheon in Rome—a dome 290m high and 250m in diameter—which had it been completed would have been the largest enclosed space on Earth, capable of holding up to 180,000 people. Linking with the Volkshalle via an underground passageway similar to a Roman cryptoporticus was to be the palace of Hitler (Führerpalast). The monolithic domed People’s Hall would have dwarfed and obscured the close-by, existing structures, the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate.

Among a host of other uncompleted buildings in Germania was the Triumphal Arch (Trumpfbogen), at over 100m high three times the size of the iconic arch in Paris it was modelled on. Hitler’s utopian Berlin metropolis was scheduled for completion in 1950, the onset of war however delayed construction which then ceased for good after the Wehrmacht suffered serious setbacks on the Russian Front in 1943 [‘Hitler’s World: The Post War Plan’, (Documentary, UKTV/SBS, 2020]. The Nazis planned thousands of kilometres of networks of motorways spanning the expanding empire (linking Germania with the Kremlin, Calais to Warsaw, Klagenfurt to Trondheim, etc). These too remained unrealised under the Third Reich (Thies). Another project reduced to a pipe dream was the Prachtallee (Avenue of Splendours), a north-south boulevard which was intended to bisect the East-West Axis.

Model of ‘Germania’

Costing Germania
The projected cost of all the regime’s building projects has been estimated at in excess of 100 billion Reichsmarks (Thies). But for the Nazis, how to bankroll a building venture of such Brobdingnagian proportions, was not a major concern. Their reasoning was that once victory was attained, the conquered nations would provide all of the labour and materials necessary for the construction projects (Connolly).

A slave-built Germania
German historian Jochen Thies’ pioneering study, Hitler’s Plans for World Domination: Nazi Architecture and Ultimate War Aims’ (English translation 2012), argues that as well as reintroducing the architectural solutions of  antiquity for its mega-city, the Nazi elite sought to replicate “the society and economy of that time, i.e. a slave-owning society”, as the basis for Hitler’s “fantasy world capital” (Thies). For a venture of such scale the program firstly needed ein großer Raum (a large space), requiring thousands of ordinary Germans, both Jews and Gentile, to be forcibly evicted from their homes which were then bulldozed✮. Concentration camps were established deliberately close to granite and marble quarries to facilitate the building projects…in proximity to Berlin, the Nazis used Jewish prisoners at Sachsenhausen concentration camp (Oranienburg) for the slave and forced labour force⌖ [‘Inside Germania: Hitler’s massive Nazi utopia that never came to be’, Urban Planning’, (Chris Weller), Business Insider, 24-Dec-2015, www.businessinsider.com].

Germania – a Nazi utopia to see but a nightmarish dystopia to live in
The plan if it had been realised would have seen huge swathes of the city torn down to make way for the mega-construction mania. With a multiplicity of ring-roads, tunnels and autobahns, Germania would have been pedestrian-unfriendly, lacking in amenities for city-dwellers, sterile, not green (outside of the grand stadium there was no parks or major transit lines)…a city almost completely bereft of human dimension – what was once an attractive living space would have disappeared under the Third Reich’s urban planning imperatives (Roger Moorhouse in Weller).

Nuremberg: Macht des dritten Reiches (Source: The Art Newspaper)

Of course Berlin wasn’t the only city in the German Reich singled out to get an extreme physical makeover. Four other cities were also awarded special Führer City Status and earmarked for the same grandiose Nazi treatment – Linz (where Hitler grew up), Hamburg, Munich and Nuremberg. The last city, made famous for holding the mass Nuremberg party rallies, its Zeppelin Field Grandstand, now a racetrack, had a capacity for up to 150,000 party faithfuls.

Endnote: A neo-German city on the Vistula
The newly acquired lands of the empire were also subjected to the NSDAP urban transformation template. Warsaw was to be rebuilt as a new German city (the Pabst Plan⊞) – a living space for a select number of ‘Ayran’ Germans, while its more numerous, “non-Ayran” Polish residents were to be shepherded into a camp across the River Vistula, a separate but handily located slave labour force for the ‘renewal’ (i.e. rebuild) of Warsaw…had the Pabst Plan proceeded historic Polish culture in the city would have been obliterated in the upheaval (‘Hitler’s World: The Post War Plan’).

⧾𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪⧾

 

※ ‘Germania’ was the name ascribed to the lands of the Germanic peoples in Ancient Roman times

✪ Hitler had always been intrinsically interested in architecture, back in his Linz days the failed artist had been advised to take up architecture instead

▣ the same applies to art, Hitler rejected the modern movements like Cubism, Surrealism and Dada, labelling them “degenerate art”

✦ also known as the Große Halle, the ‘great hall’

✮ leading to a housing crisis in Berlin, aggravated by some over-zealous officials who destroyed houses prematurely and unnecessarily, simply in the hope of earning the Führer’s approval (Thies)

⌖ as demands for labour intensified, the Nazis widened the pool of forced labour to include PoWs and anyone deemed deviant by the state, ie, beggars, itinerants, Gypsies, leftists, homosexuals  (Connolly)

⊞ Pabst was the Nazis’ chief architect for Warsaw

Wonder Woman’s Oscillating History in Comics

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Cinema, Creative Writing, Gender wars, Memorabilia, Popular Culture, Society & Culture

After Wonder Woman’s creator Bill Marston dies in 1947, Robert Kanigher takes over the writing duties, the first of many subsequent writers to take on pop culture’s most famous female superhero. DC Comics wastes little time in ringing the changes with Wonder Woman, both to her physical appearance and to her abilities, disposition and purpose.

There are several reasons for the change. One motive is simply commercial, Wonder Woman like her male superhero counterparts, experiences a fall-off in popularity after the war. Another relates to expectations of gender roles in America. So much of America’s manhood is away during the world war on the front line engaging the enemy. Born of necessity, American women move into the work force, invading traditional male domains of employment as never before. With the war’s end, men return to their jobs relegating thousands of women back to unpaid work in the home. There is a re-solidifying of the traditional gender roles. A casualty of this is Wonder Woman herself. In Marston’s hands she reflects empowerment, ie, freedom from male domination. The feminist overtones she embodies are a challenge as the US attempts to re-establish the status quo ante order [‘The Fitful Evolution of Wonder Woman’s Look’, (Diana Martinez), The Atlantic, 07-Jun-2017, www.theatlantic.com].

Superhero Nazi hunters
Wonder Woman’s superhuman exertions and physicality—as with everyone else in the superhero comic universe—have an aptness during WWII. The superheroes in the comics spearhead the fight against the Nazis, promoting a patriotic agenda and helping to boost morale. When the war is won, this agenda loses its relevance for the American readership [‘Women of Comics: Objectified, Sexualize and Disempowered’, (Nia Aiysha), Wild Black Orchids, 07-May-2016, www.wildblackorchids.wordpress.com].

Making the iconic feminist warrior a bit less super
In wanting to rein in Wonder Woman’s powerful persona DC Comics are responding to prevailing (male) society’s anxieties about women’s independence. By 1950, the toning down is well underway, WW’s crime-fighting exploits are taking second fiddle – in Sensation Comics #97 she is the editor of a newspaper lonely hearts column❋. During the decade WW becomes a reluctant superheroine, love-struck and longing to settle down with her beau Steve Trevor [‘Publication history of Wonder Woman’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine, Tim Hanley (2014)].

Wonder Woman is not just a feminist, she’s also a sexy feminist! Accordingly, there is a lot of scrutiny on her salacious attire as well by the “morally self-appointed” in society. Eventually, the raunchy bathing suit and sexually-confident red boots will be traded in for a more demure look. Psychologist Fredric Wertham’s full-on crusade against the deleterious effects of comics on children in the early 1950s includes WW in its cross-hairs. WW’s sexually provocative bondage fetish (involving herself or other females) leads Wertham to ‘blacklist’ the depicted character as a promoter of lesbianism (which he took as evidence of misandry)(Martinez), pressuring DC Comics to remove Marston’s message of WW as a harbinger of matriarchy (Hanley).

The Amazonian princess returns to ‘civies’ – “Emma Peeled”
In the 1960s other comic book action heroines come forward such as secret agent Modesty Blaise. Reflecting the early rumblings of what would evolve into the second wave feminism of the Seventies, Blaise exhibits Wonder Woman-like “badass fighting capabilities” to triumph in a male world. At this time however WW loses that same original verve✪, getting a Sixties ‘mod’ makeover which transforms her into an Emma Peel clone (from the cult British TV series The Avengers), complete with martial arts moves, jumpsuits and Carnaby Street attire〥 [‘Four-Colour Yesteryears: Wonder Woman – the Emma Peel Years’, (Rob N), Paradox Comics Group, 22-Aug-2009, www.paradoxcomicsgroup.com; Hanley].

1970s, the women’s movement and empowerment
Gloria Steinem and the burgeoning women’s movement comes into the story at this time. Steinem, dismayed at DC Comics’ relegation of Wonder Woman to a “powerless 1950s car hop”, lobbies DC to restore WW’s superheroine stature. Steinem puts WW on the cover of the first edition of Ms. magazine in 1972, tagging it “Wonder Woman for President”. [‘How Gloria Steinem Saved Wonder Woman’, (Yohana Desta), Vanity Fair, 10-Oct-2017, www.vanityfair.com]. WW in Ms. becomes a kind of masthead to promote sisterhood and equality among women (the magazine depicts WW confronting store owners who deny their female employees equal pay and defending abortion clinics against male thugs [‘How A Magazine Cover From The 1970s Helped Wonder Woman Win Over Feminists’, (Katie Kilkenny), Pacific Standard, 21-Jun-2017, www.psmag.com]. Steinem and Ms.’ agitation on behalf of WW forces DC to restore her special powers including the “Lasso of Truth” and re-draw her in her original voluptuous form.

With the critical spotlight turned on DC’s portrayal of Wonder Woman, DC made further concessions to the comic. Diversity was introduced —a nod to the Black Power Movement in the US and perhaps belated recognition of a lack of ethnic diversity in its comics—with the inclusion of Nubia, WW’s African half-sister (Martinez). The perception of Wonder Woman as a feminist icon is given a further boost along by the cult success of the 1975-79 television series. WW, played by Lynda Carter, embodies the qualities of strength, fearlessness, wisdom and determination, restored in the comics post-1972✧.

PostScript: The Wonder Woman comic books over the past 40 years has seen the WW character and image undergo sundry transitions, a procession of “conflicting and seemingly incompatible versions” of WW – alternating between ramped-up raunchiness and less overt sexuality, between a muscular Amazonian physicality and a “heroin chic” fashion model (Martinez).

◦ ∘ ◦ ∘ ◦ ∘ ◦ ∘ ◦ ∘ ◦ ∘ ◦ ∘ ◦ ∘ ◦ ∘ ◦ ∘ ◦ ∘ ◦ ∘ ◦ ∘ ◦ ∘ ◦ ∘ ◦ ∘

❋ in other Fifties comics Wonder Woman or her alter ego Diana Prince appears as a model and a film star

〥 WW becomes younger and thinner too. She also gets labelled as a “female James Bond” during this period

✪ DC Comics’s hegemony in the superhero comic popularity stakes in the late Sixties is seriously being challenged by Marvel Comics, a factor in the decision to revamp WW along with the entire ‘stable’ (Rob N)

✧ subsequent interpretations of Wonder Woman on the screen follow, the most recent in 2017 (with a sequel slated for release this year) sees WW reconnect with her Amazonian roots