"It was perhaps a bit over the top, but I think Frank and I invited that," is how Bill Sienkiewicz remembers his lost Wonder Woman pitch, which he was due to collaborate on with (that name again) Frank Miller. DC's premiere superheroine had a particularly bizarre origin story, having began life as a mouthpiece for psychologist and radical feminist William Moulton Marston, who believed that human society would be greatly improved if women were dominant over idiotic men, and also had a kinky thing for bondage. That's why Wonder Woman lives on the Amazon island entirely populated with women, and why she has that lasso for tying people up (and being tied up herself). Miller and Sienkiewicz's proposal would've returned those themes to the fore in the not-so-subtley titled Wonder Woman: Bondage, which never even made it to DC before the duo decided to bin it. Apparently Miller was looking to reinvigorate a flagging character in the same manner as Batman in The Dark Knight Returns, and Sienkiewicz was jazzed to be in the artist's chair for a story that would've returned to those kinky roots. The practice illustration seen above was drawn by him "to visually test the water, so to speak and my own comfort level, if not everyone else's, about how far it could be pushed". Apparently, he wasn't all that comfortable.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
