Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes

"Wonder Women" would have been a very interesting book, had Robinson actually known the superhero comics which she attempts to analyze. Unfortunately, she doesn't -- she claims that a superhero's secret identity is not the superheroic one, but the one in plain clothes with a regular job. No, it's the other way around. She thinks that the Fantastic Four and nearly all other superheroes in the Marvel universe are mutants, when the idea of mutants as a well-defined minority is one of the cornerstones of that world. She claims that DC Comics's landmark crossover Crisis of Infinite Earths established a set of parallel realities in the company's stories, when the point of Crisis was to remove those parallel realities. Add to this a very aggressive attitude to just about anyone else who has ever written on the topic (especially Trina Robinson), and a tendency to wax poetic on her own short time as a comic reader in the forties, and it becomes surprising that the book manages to be interesting at times. It does manage that, but it could have been so, so much more.