Marston was and still is, I think, one of the best idea-people comics ever saw. Alongside Otto Binder and Jack Kirby, few could generate the sheer number of wild, weird and interesting ideas, that just had not been before until they did.

Wildly creative and imaginative.

A lot of times people reduce the work to just 'sex/fetish comics' and laugh, using that as a way to dismiss them and I've seen a number of creators do it (James Robinson comes to mind, for a start), but it's so, so much more.

It is some of the best, most interesting comics ever.

Everything from trippy LSD trips across dimensions, the soul zipping across space-time to political dramas of wacky weirdness played out in the work. And Marston did it before Ditko ever did and he had way, way, way better politics.

His Wonder Woman is unlike anything, even now.

It was this deeply personal mechanism for self-expression, where everything was symbolic or metaphorical, everything meant something and stood for something and you had these moral dramas play out on a canvas of fairy tale-esque pulpy science-fantasy.

It was and is fascinating.

So you had Fairy Godmothers from Venus, Slavers from Saturn (ruled by The Devil, who Wonder Woman makes sign a Peace Deal), War Gods from Mars and all kinds of weird, imaginative and creative insanity.

Marston found the wildest way to express himself and get his message across.

That original Wonder Woman isn't a superhero comic. It's a dude doing the most personal indie comic that's full of the most personal stuff.

It's closer to Kirby's The Fourth World, the New Gods, than it is to, say, Batman. It is fundamentally about something in a massive way.

And that's part of why so many trip up with WW, much like New Gods.

It can't be generic, it's not 'easy'. It asks you to be openly politics, it asks you to engage and critique systems of power and talk about important things, rather than do generic beat-up plots.

But since most writers can't or just aren't interested or refuse to, you get the 'warrior' permutation and comics in line with that.

Easier to reduce the character and book to generic sword-toting warrior who fights monsters or gods and what not, than do the harder thing.