On Sea Monsters and the Holocaust

WONDER WEDNESDAY

On Wednesdays I look at various chapters in Wonder Woman’s history. Click here for previous installments.

OK, we’re still on that weird period in 1977 when the Wonder Woman comic shifted abruptly from the present day to World War II because that was the setting of the TV show (but only for one season, after which both the show and the comic returned to the 1970s). For existing comic book fans, the explanation was that we were going from Earth-1, where the modern Wonder Woman lived, to Earth-2, home of the original versions of the DC heroes from actual 1940s comics. Of course, keen-eyed fans noticed right away that even that explanation didn’t quite add up because in most instances where the TV show differed from the old comics, the new comics took their cue for the show. So now Steve Trevor had brown hair, whereas he had always been blond; Diana Prince was a yeoman rather than a lieutenant; and their boss was General Blankenship, a character created for the show, rather than General Darnell.  In the letters column of issue 233, the editor explains that all this was intentional, because they didn’t want fans of the show to be confused when they read the comics, and because DC wasn’t really reprinting 1940s stories at the time, they figured hardly anyone would notice.

Just look at that Gray Morrow cover. I mean, goddamn!

Wonder Woman #233, DC Comics, July 1977.

“Seadeath!” is a two-parter by new WW writer Gerry Conway, with Don Heck and Vince Colletta on art duties. We open with Wonder Woman mopping up a group of Nazi saboteurs in an American munitions factory. Interrogating with the ol’ magic lasso, she finds out their boss is code-named Armageddon, but they don’t know much more than that.

Speaking of names, she reports her findings to a couple of US Army officers who happen to be named Colonel Balushi and Lieutenant Ackroyd. Spelling aside, I don’t think that needs much explanation, though they don’t resemble the actors. I’d wondered if the movie 1941, starring both Belushi and Ackroyd, had come out yet, but that wouldn’t be for another couple of years.

See? No resemblance.

But all that is ultimately just background stuff. The point is that someone’s siccing sea creatures on Allied ships, from whales to sharks to giant sea monsters. Could it be…Aquaman? The Sub-Mariner? Nope! The guy leading the attack is a typical sinister Nazi commandant called Captain Strung.

And yeah, she got tied up in her own lasso, but that happens all the time.

Captain Wilhelm Strung is, weirdly enough, a Nazi doppelganger of Captain William Storm, a DC Comics World War II hero from the 1960s, created by longtime Wonder Woman writer Robert Kanigher (for whom war comics were a specialty)—right down to the missing eye. Of course, being an evil Nazi, Strung covers it not with an honest patch but with a black monocle.

Right. This guy.

There’s some of usual bondage stuff as Wondy’s invisible plane gets downed by flying fish and Strung ties her up in her own lasso, chains her up to the anchor and sends her out the torpedo tube—you know, the usual. Of course, none of this works, and she starts wrecking Strung’s U-boat—until she’s interrupted by a giant freaking sea monster.

Hey, who released the Kraken?

The twist is that Strung isn’t controlling the sea creatures, at least not directly. Instead, he has a Jewish guy named Freidrich who has some kind of psychic connection to sea life doing it for him. And why’s a Jew working for the Nazis? Because his usefulness is all that’s keeping his family alive, of course. Pretty grim stuff.

Oh, and Steve Trevor gets himself captured by that saboteur ring we met in the beginning. Because that’s what he does.

That’s the first Superman movie, mind you.

Wonder Woman #234, DC Comics, August 1977.

Wonder Woman isn’t making much headway with the giant freaking sea monster until she realizes that the monster itself seems to be getting sluggish. In a clever twist, it seems like it has the bends from rising so quickly from the deep. So she manages to take advantage of its confusion by tricking it and Strung’s submarine into attacking each other, sending the hurt monster into retreat. But Wondy gets knocked out in the process, and you know what that means—she’s gonna get chained up again.

A gentle reminder of why we hate Nazis so much.

Steve, meanwhile, meets the mysterious saboteur ringleader Armageddon, who turns out to be yet another masked Nazi villain, this one with an axe.

I’ve got a good feeling about this guy.

Wonder Woman escapes her bonds, of course, using her usual method of tricking the bad guys into shooting them off. And what does she do while Sturm is forcing Freidrich into attacking the Allies with sharks? She flies off and frees Freidrich’s children from the concentration camp so that he’s at last free to rebel. And what about everybody else in that concentration camp? Or in all the concentration camps? Um, well, let’s talk about the sea monster again instead.

Now that his children are safe, Freidrich calls up that same monster to drag the U-boat down to the briny deep, with himself, Sturm and everybody else aboard. And Steve? Beaten down and feverish, he manages to escape Armageddon’s hideout, but it’s pretty clear that’s what Armageddon wanted him to do. Doubtless there’ll be more on that in future issues.

So okay, why doesn’t Wonder Woman do something about the concentration camps? The traditional explanation in DC Comics about why the dozens and dozens of American superheroes didn’t just go over and crush the Axis was that Hitler had managed to get his hands on the Spear of Destiny, which has powerful magical mojo from piercing Jesus’s side, and used it to protect the Third Reich from superpowered invasions. Any superhero who crossed over into its sphere of influence would find himself or herself Hitler’s puppet. But that explanation wouldn’t be introduced until All-Star Squadron in the 1980s, so it’s not surprising that it doesn’t come into play here. The real answer is that, well, that’s not what happened. A world in which the Holocaust was just nipped in the bud because there were superheroes powerful enough to do it may sound appealing, but that would make stories set in the present day based on a history so different that it would be pretty hard to explain. So all the big, terrible stuff in established history still happened, even if there were seemingly people around who would have been powerful enough to stop it. If we were going to try to pull a moral out of it besides “whoa man, there’s only so much of a fantasy world that we’re creating here,” I guess it would be that there are some things we can’t just wait around for a superhero to fix.