Not exactly, no, but compare these two images and tell me which one depicts the main character in a more clearly sexual, more clearly violent, and more clearly submissive situation:






In this instance, the torn clothes and exposed skin certainly exacerbate the sexiness, the violence, and the submissiveness.

For me, Wonder Woman #196 is maybe the most disturbing of all the Wonder Woman bondage covers. It just has a level of sadism the others don't. There's an interior ad by Giordano (I think at the end of #198) that has a more disturbingly rapey vibe, but #196 just is unsettling for me.

I don't mind bondage covers, but they can be pretty tough to pull off without going too far one way or the other. There are a lot of Golden Age bondage covers (not Diana specifically) that go too far into sadism and outright misogyny for me to appreciate them. But if done well, they can certainly be appealing.

As for the broader question, I'm in the camp of people who don't really think of Wonder Woman as a "sexy" character. She's a character that can be sexy when she wants, on her own terms, but she's not designed to be sexy like a lot of female comic book characters. I think her sexiest moment is the very ambiguous "ending" to her long flirtation with Keith Griggs in the Mishkin run. She invites him up to her apartment one evening to discuss their mutual attraction and... we never find out what happens next. But it reads to me as a very empowering scene of Diana as a sexual person in control of her personal life. A very nice breath of fresh air from the silly pining after the milquetoast Steve Trevor from days gone by.

Superman was WAY more interesting when he was bullying Mayors and killing gangsters in the protection racket.

*end thread derailment mode*

Lynda Carter has done a nude scene or 2...just sayin'...

Off-topic, but that WW 196 is a really badly drawn cover. Can anyone's head twist 180 degrees around like that? The whole thing looks extremely awkward and totally un-sexy to me, like a hastily drawn sketch that somehow made it to the published cover stage with no polishing.

WW 205, OTOH, is a very attractive cover, simple, but nicely-drawn. While still in keeping with the bondage theme, I think it's light enough that it doesn't jar. You know WW is gong to escape, most likely through her own efforts rather than being rescued (is this accurate? I haven't ever read the issue), and though one can't deny that there's more than a hint of the damsel in distress, I assume that there was a reversal of that idea in the story itself.

Checking the GCD gallery, My own first memories of Wonder Woman are WW 176 & 177. They must have made an impression, because I think I remember the stories and some of the panels pretty well, even though I haven't seen either issue ever since, which would be over 40 years ago.

From what I recall, the bondage theme was definitely present in 176, though of course I wouldn't have known anything about all that at the age of 6. But I retain mental images of WW being held by the arms by the male villains, struggling in vain to escape their grasp, etc, etc, until she turns the tables on them later.

I think it's undeniable that in superhero comics the female characters are more sexualized than the male - though it's equally undeniable that the latter are also sexualized, although to a significantly lesser degree, IMO. I'm about as straight as you can get, but there's obviously an element of homo-eroticism and perhaps sadism to a genre that's largely concerned with muscle-men in colourful skin-tight uniforms who spend most of their time physically fighting one another.

But the female characters are sexualized in a more direct manner: their uniforms often show more naked skin - which is why male characters like Robin or the Sub-Mariner stand out, in their different ways - and the body language and facial expressions often contrast to those of the male characters, even when they're in similar situations or predicaments. There are of course many counter-examples, but I think anyone familiar with American superhero comics will be able to confirm this to themselves from their own impressions and memories.

Berk said:

I don't see the need of the frequent "homo-eroticism" slam at superheroes. If the current audience stands accused of constantly wanting to see sexy women in various states of undress, what kind of logic is supposed to explain that the same audience also derives homo-erotic pleasure from watching big musclemen?

I guess you can go with some sort of "polymorphous perversity" to explain all, but it doesn't track for me.

One could argue that a character like Marvel's Conan was even more visually sexualized than the females in his own title. That's a rarity.