Creation Story
Wonder Woman is William Moulton Marston’s character. Marston was a Harvard-trained psychologist and the inventor of the systolic blood-pressure test that underlies the modern polygraph; he approached DC editor Sheldon Mayer in 1941 with a proposal for a female superhero whose framework would be explicitly feminist. DC accepted. Marston wrote under the pen name Charles Moulton. Harry G. Peter drew the debut and designed the visual character, including the star-spangled costume, the golden tiara, and the lasso of truth that drew directly from Marston’s polygraph work.
All Star Comics #8 (October 1941) introduced Wonder Woman in a nine-page “Introducing Wonder Woman” backup feature. The issue’s cover feature was Flash; Wonder Woman is inside, without cover billing. The feature establishes her Amazonian origin on Paradise Island, her rescue of American military pilot Steve Trevor, and her mission to bring Amazon ideals to “Man’s World.”
Sensation Comics #1 (January 1942) gave Wonder Woman her first cover and her first full solo feature. The anthology title was built around her; she was the lead feature for the book’s entire run. Wonder Woman #1 (June 1942) launched her self-titled series, which has run continuously (with various reboots) ever since. Only Superman and Batman predate Wonder Woman among continuously-published DC superhero titles.
The Golden Age framework
Marston’s Wonder Woman was explicitly political. The character’s Amazonian origin, her role as an emissary from a women-led civilization, her defeat of patriarchal antagonists, and her bondage-and-submission visual motifs (which Marston wrote into the scripts deliberately, tied to his psychological theories about loving submission to authority) made the character distinct from every other 1940s superhero. Marston’s collaborators Elizabeth Holloway Marston and Olive Byrne have been acknowledged by modern DC histories as uncredited creative contributors.
Marston died in 1947. The character’s tone softened significantly under subsequent writers, and much of Marston’s original framework was deliberately walked back through the 1950s and 1960s. The Silver Age Wonder Woman of the Kanigher era (1950s-1960s) is a substantially different character from the Marston original.
The Perez reboot
George Perez’s Wonder Woman #1 (February 1987) is the defining modern Wonder Woman book. Following Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC handed Perez the relaunch and he wrote and pencilled a Greek-mythology-grounded reintroduction that rebuilt Diana from first principles. Perez’s run ran through Wonder Woman #62 (February 1992) and is widely regarded as one of the best superhero reboots ever published.
Patty Jenkins’s 2017 Wonder Woman film drew substantially from Perez’s framework, as well as from Brian Azzarello’s 2011 New 52 Wonder Woman run. Gal Gadot’s performance made Wonder Woman one of the most commercially successful solo superhero films of the 2010s.
Collector context
All Star Comics #8 is one of the most valuable Golden Age DC books. High-grade CGC 9.0+ copies have crossed $1 million at auction. Low-grade reader copies trade in the mid-five-figure range. The book sits alongside Action Comics #1, Detective Comics #27, Marvel Comics #1, and Captain America Comics #1 at the top tier of Golden Age collector demand.
Secondary keys: Sensation Comics #1 (1942, first cover, first solo feature). Wonder Woman #1 (1942, first self-titled). Wonder Woman #1 (1987, Perez relaunch). All three are required for a complete Wonder Woman collection.
