Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly was the first woman to write
scripts for the
Wonder Woman comic-book
franchise, but hardly anyone was aware
of that for almost 70 years. Then Jill Lepore tracked her down while writing
her 2014 book, “The Secret History of Wonder Woman,” and suddenly Hummel was a
cause célèbre in the fan universe.
اضافة اعلان
The late-life acclaim mystified her a bit.
“She was amazed that people made such a big deal over it,”
her son Robb Murchison said in a phone interview. “She’d say, ‘It’s just a
comic book.’ She kind of played it down.”
She was 19 and known as Joye Hummel in March 1944, when she
went to work for William Moulton Marston, a psychologist who had created Wonder
Woman three years earlier and found himself with a product that was in such
demand that he couldn’t keep up.
“At first, Hummel typed Marston’s scripts,” Lepore, who
teaches at Harvard University, wrote in “The Secret History.” “Soon, she was
writing scripts of her own.”
Hummel said she wrote the scripts for more than 70 Wonder
Woman adventures (though her name appeared on none of them), helping to form
what became the most enduring and widely recognized female figure in the
superhero universe. Then, in 1947, shortly after Marston died of polio, she
stopped. She had just married David Murchison, a widower with a young daughter;
being at home for that child, Hummel thought, was more important than her work
on Wonder Woman.
Hummel became largely invisible as far as the comic-book
world was concerned. Robb Murchison said that her family and a few others knew
of her role, but that she didn’t advertise it. Lepore, though, researching her
book, came across Hummel’s name and went looking for her.
“I found her by the usual detective work,” she said by
email. “Ancestry.com, online directories. I wrote her a letter, and then I
called her up. She told me she’d never agreed to speak with anyone about Wonder
Woman.”
Lepore’s book brought Hummel overdue recognition. Mark
Evanier, a noted comic-book writer and historian, helped arrange to bring her
to Comic-Con in San Diego in 2018 to accept the Bill Finger Award for
Excellence in Comic Book Writing. (Finger, too, was late in being recognized
for his accomplishments; he helped create Batman but went uncredited for
years.) It was Hummel’s first appearance at a comics convention.
“In all my years of Comic-Conning,” Evanier said by email,
“I can’t recall another moment when the audience was so eager to give someone a
long, loving ovation and the recipient was so delightfully surprised to be at
an event like that, receiving one.”
Hummel — Kelly since her 2000 marriage to Jack Kelly — died
on April 5, the day after her 97th birthday, at her home in Winter Haven,
Florida. Her son confirmed the death.
Hummel said that back when she was writing Wonder Woman
scripts, “we could not show a corpse, we could not show somebody putting a
knife in somebody, somebody shooting somebody, nothing against any race,
anything like that.”
“There were 10 of these restrictions,” she said in a panel
discussion at the 2018 Comic-Con. “I didn’t get in much trouble,” she added,
but Marston sometimes did.
Lepore interviewed Hummel by phone in 2014 and then visited
her in Florida.
“She told me about her rules for writing Wonder Woman,” she
said. “The plot: ‘There was a bad man and this good woman is going to stop him.
You don’t admire the bad man. You admire her.’”
Hummel thought that some later Wonder Woman writers had lost
sight of that guiding principle, Lepore said.
“She said she thought the character and the comics had
gotten worse after Marston died, because of viciousness,” she added. “Everyone
got vicious. That drove her nuts. Her most important rule for writing Wonder
Woman: ‘You can have excitement without glorifying evil and violence.’ She
wanted people to know that, as a rule for everything.”
Joye Evelyn Hummel was born on April 4, 1924, on Long
Island. Her father, Quenten, managed a grocery chain, assisted by her mother,
Mavis Hummel.
Hummel attended Middlebury College in Vermont for a year,
then switched to the Katharine Gibbs School, a secretarial school in New York,
where Marston taught psychology. (“It’s closed of course now,” she told Lepore,
“because nobody has to be accurate now.”) Her performance on an exam in his
class made such an impression that he offered her a job on his Wonder Woman
staff.
“She liked his intellect, and they just clicked,” her son
said. “It was like this mind meld.”
In her book, Lepore wrote that Marston had thought that
Hummel could help in particular with the slang of the day. But she also
understood his vision.
“He was not writing just an adventure book,” Hummel told The
San Diego Union Tribune in 2018. “He wanted those who read ‘Wonder Woman’ to be
inspired — that the young women who read the stories would be inspired to study
and enter the world and have confidence they could accomplish things. I think
he felt that a woman’s touch would make the world better.”
Hummel was paid $50 per script. In August 1944, just months
after she had started working for him, Marston was found to have polio.
Thereafter, she shuttled from the office he had established in New York City to
his home in Rye, New York, where he was increasingly confined. They would look
over the scripts each was working on, give each other suggestions, and try to
make sure that there was nothing that would run afoul of the 10-person panel
that reviewed each script. (Among the panel’s members, Hummel said, was writer
Pearl S. Buck.)
Churches, too, were beginning to take notice of this
alluring female character and express concern about her.
“There was always a battle of the shorts,” Hummel said in
the Comic-Con panel discussion. “One of the churches: ‘The shorts are too
short. We want the shorts longer.’ And Marston said, ‘I don’t want them to look
like men’s underwear.’”
Her first husband died in 2000. In addition to Kelly and her
son, she is survived by a stepdaughter from her first marriage, Sally Boyd; two
stepchildren from her second marriage, Kimberly Hallberg and Jeffrey Kelly;
five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. A second son from her first
marriage, David Jr., died in 2015.
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