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On Wonder Woman’s 85th birthday Oct. 21, �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder scholar Sarah Barkin reflects on the limits of corporate mythmaking and why feminist icons are made in the reading, not just the writing

From her very first appearance, Wonder Woman was drawn a woman in motion—hurling villains through the air or freezing enemies mid-strike with a flick of her wrist—all while her black curls remained unstirred. Yet by the end of that same first issue, Wonder Woman calls herself a “very feminine woman,” happily in love with a man.

The artwork tells a more active story than the dialogue. “In most panels, she’s in action, while the other characters are more static or passively represented,” says��Sarah Barkin, an assistant teaching professor in the �鶹��Ѱ����� Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

Sarah Barkin is an assistant teaching professor in the �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

Barkin teaches the first two issues of the original Wonder Woman (1941) comics and Absolute Wonder Woman in her course Topics in Writing: Comics and the Graphic Novel, making her the perfect person to ask: After more than 80 years in the public consciousness, does Wonder Woman hold up as a feminist icon?

“I’m not a fan of absolutes,” Barkin says, cautioning against a simple yes or no. She says the answer is nuanced.

Some critics point to Wonder Woman’s uneven relevance as evidence of feminist failure. But her ebbs and flows aren’t unique, Barkin explains, noting that many Golden Age comic-book characters faded and resurfaced as social attitudes shifted, such as patriotic heroes, who fell out of favor during the Vietnam War.

So, why has Wonder Woman specifically endured? Barkin points to something simpler: scarcity.

“There are so many different male superheroes to represent an array of masculinities,” Barkin says. “Women and nonbinary people have fewer options.”

Throwing bad guys with one hand

When Barkin teaches Wonder Woman’s first issue, released in October 1941, she says the form is usually what strikes her students first: dense pages, images duplicating the text, a “busy, incredibly text-heavy” reading experience. What surprises them comes next—a heroine who is strong and active, and far less hyper-sexualized than most students expect for a comic of its era. “She can throw a bad guy through the air with one hand,” Barkin says.

What troubles students is what comes after: an abrupt romance and a love triangle that pits two women against each other as rivals. The romance itself, Barkin says, “doesn’t feel like he earns it in any way.” Her verdict on the earliest issues is blunt: “The earliest issues fail the Bechdel test big time. In other words, it’s complicated!”

Newer comics tackle some of these problems head-on. Characters are given more complex motivations, and reworked origin stories flesh out the Amazons and the world Wonder Woman comes from—a shift from her earliest appearances. “In the earliest issues of Wonder Woman, she sort of just arrives on the scene fully formed,” Barkin says.

Students tend to engage more with these later versions, but Barkin says they still see the earliest Wonder Woman as “a kind of interesting artifact in comics history”—the first brick in a structure that’s been expanding ever since. What holds constant across every iteration is agency: “Wonder Woman is still an active agent, both in physical and ethical and moral terms,” says Barkin, “That’s the element that really resonates with me as a feminist.”

Just as the earliest Wonder Woman failed to depict a version of womanhood that could withstand the test of time, the early waves of feminism fell short of their promise to speak for women of all races, classes and identities. “Mainstream feminism still has a lot of work to do to be more intersectional and inclusive,” Barkin says.

“Wonder Woman is still an active agent, both in physical and ethical and moral terms. That’s the element that really resonates with me as a feminist,” says �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder scholar Sarah Barkin. (Photo: Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman; Clay Enos/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and Ratpac-Dune Entertainment LLC)

That gap isn’t unique to Wonder Woman. Looking ahead, Barkin hopes for more depictions that push beyond the gender binary—including transgender and nonbinary representation—and racial representation that goes deeper than tokenism. “This is something I’d love to see in comics more generally, not just Wonder Woman,” she says.

No 'golden key'

Many critics argue that a corporate product can’t be a feminist icon. Barkin partly agrees: “The commercialism creates a kind of limiting frame around the character and what she can do.” But she pushes back just as hard against the opposite extreme—rigid loyalty to “canonical” readings, which she argues is equally limiting. “There’s never a ‘golden key’ to how we read a text or character,” Barkin says. “If there were, there’d honestly be no reason to read and interpret for ourselves.”

That idea draws on cultural theorist , who argued that audiences don’t just passively absorb a text the way its creators intended—they can read it in ways that push back against or reshape its original meaning. Fan fiction is one everyday example: writers reimagining Wonder Woman’s world on their own terms, outside corporate control. Barkin points to a real-world version of the same instinct. Kelly Sue DeConnick and the artists of Historia rebuilt the Amazons and their mythology after the 2017 film’s version of them fell flat.

Looking ahead, Barkin hopes for “more Wonder Woman in general, and a Wonder Woman who continues to question the world we live in.” In some ways, that’s the same instinct�� had eight decades ago. He conceived Wonder Woman as a counterweight to the violent, hyper-masculine heroes of his era, a hero who would win through love rather than force. Barkin hopes future iterations can sharpen that original critique of the status quo, pairing it with a more complex, intersectional view of womanhood.

As a medium, comics demand both visual and textual literacy, with real interpretive work happening in the spaces between the panels. “Readers are asked to ‘fill in the blanks’ between panels, to actively and imaginatively immerse themselves in the stories they’re reading,” Barkin says. Despite the medium’s reach worldwide, Barkin says it remains undervalued—like a comic, a feminist icon only works when the reader participates.

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