A Tale of Two Olives When I began researching William Moulton Marston in the early 1990s, it struck me as odd that two of his collaborators shared the name Olive—Olive Byrne and Olive Richard. Olive Byrne had assisted Marston in his research for Emotions of Normal People in the 1920s. Olive Richard was a magazine columnist who interviewed him a few times ...

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What’s so special about the Girdle of Hippolyte? One rewarding aspect of reading Wonder Woman is how her story weaves through a broad literary world, from classical mythology to Shakespeare, endowing fantastical comics with a palpable sense of reality. That is rarely the case with other superheroes. If you look up Krypton in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, you will learn about ...

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“The truth does seem to change according to who is looking for it — and why.” Phyllis chesler In the pages of Wonder Woman, Marston took the story of Hercules’ Ninth Labor and turned it on its head, offering an alternate version, this time from the Amazons’ point of view. He constructed a cosmology for Wonder Woman’s universe that was particularly ...

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