Credit: Dangerous Minds / DC Comics

All hail Diana of Themyscira, better known as Wonder Woman. There are few better sights in comic book history than Diana with her hands on her hips, lasso at her side, tiara and gauntlets glinting in the sun.

It’s a vision of hope, giving protection and support to those who need it most and giving righteous beatings to those who would subjugate and oppress others. The character’s history as presented within the pages of her comics is truly fascinating. However, Wonder Woman might just be the one character in comics whose real-life origin is just as interesting as her adventures on the page.

Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston, was born May 9th, 1893, and unlike pretty much every other major figure in the field of comics, he never spent much time in the industry. Instead, Marston was a psychologist, an academic and an inventor alongside his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston.

Together, they invented the polygraph and became sort of celebrities. Elizabeth, in particular, was the breadwinner of their family by lecturing and working as an editor for the Encyclopædia Britannica, while William wrote books and pamphlets on all kinds of pop-psychological topics, including taboo subjects like sex, BDSM and polygamy.

This wasn’t known to the public at the time, but these were topics that the Marstons had knowledge of that were far more than just theoretical.

In 1925, he was assigned Olive Byrne as his research assistant, whom he introduced to his wife soon afterwards. Before long, the trio were a live-in throuple. All three of them were genuinely in love with each other, cohabiting and eventually having children together, with William having two with Elizabeth and two with Byrne.

When wondering where to go next in the 1940s, Marston, a man fascinated by the possibilities of new media, became intrigued by the educational potential of comics, especially among young people.

However, he wasn’t so impressed with how these comic book superheroes like Batman, Green Lantern and Superman solved their problems with violence. With that in mind, Marston began to conceptualise a comic book superhero who would fight crime not with fists or firepower, but with love. When he raised this idea to Elizabeth, she just had one note for the project.

“Fine,” said Elizabeth, “but make her a woman.”

Marston pitched the core concept to Jack Liebowitz of All-American Publications (one of the companies that would later merge with Detective Comics, Inc to form DC Comics), and when he got the go-ahead, he started work on creating this new, female superhero. In essence, he took the intelligence of Elizabeth, the appearance of Olive, and the values of both of them to create the very first draft of the character, known then as Suprema, The Wonder Woman.

The name was shortened to just Wonder Woman in the pitching process, and a number of aspects from their private lives were folded into the character. Fittingly for the couple that invented the polygraph test (and for a couple so fascinated with the psychology of BDSM), one of the most iconic aspects of Wonder Woman, the Lasso of Truth that compels all those tangled within it to speak truthfully, was made by the Marstons and there from the very beginning.

The bulletproof Bracelets of Submission that Wonder Woman protects others with were added as a tribute to Byrne’s habit of wearing large, metal bracelets. Over time, the Marstons and Byrne completed their vision for the character, with William himself writing that the character’s mix of strength, intelligence and love made her “psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world.”

Wonder Woman first hit newsstands in January 1942 and, fittingly for a hero so ahead of her time, has had a chequered history with the world of comics. Her proudly feminist nature got lost in the patriarchal world that comics undeniably were at the time. Not for nothing was Wonder Woman’s first appearance in the Justice Society of America (the prototype of the Justice League), acting as its secretary. While this probably bothered William Marston at some level, the family had more important things on its mind.

Sadly, just as his creation was becoming a national sensation, William Marston was dying.

He had contracted cancer, succumbing to it on May 2nd, 1947, seven days before his 54th Birthday. Elizabeth and Olive stayed together afterwards, however, raising their four children as one big family and remaining together until their passing. Olive departed first in 1990, at 86 years old, before Elizabeth passed away three years later, aged 100.