Wonder Woman debuted in 1941 as a bizarre mix of progressive feminism and hot bondage action. Wonder Woman's superpowers were roughly equivalent to those of Superman, who had debuted a couple years earlier. (In the those days, Superman was somewhat less omnipotent than his later incarnations.)

Her costume consisted of a bustier, a tiny skirt, manacles on her wrists and a pair of red, knee-high boots with spiked heels, all in the colors and patterns of the American flag to boot. Wonder Woman also carried a golden lasso for binding her opponents and making them submit to her loving allure.

Week after week, Marston placed Wonder Woman into peril and bondage, even featuring several bondage scenes within a single story when he got carried away. Wonder Woman frequently found herself tied to beds, or bound by the wrists with her ass in the air, but sometimes she got to play the dominatrix as well, tying up men and women individually or in groups. Marston's editors were vaguely suspicious -- wink wink, nudge nudge -- that there might be a sexual subtext to all this imagery.

If they had bothered to read Marston's academic writings, his editors might have been more suspicious. If they had happened to read his high-profile interviews with national magazines in which he enthusiastically boasted that he was subliminally implanting bondage imagery in the minds of American youth, well, they might have been even more suspicious. But Wonder Woman had become one of D.C.'s best-selling comic books, so the editors were content to let these issues fall by the wayside.