“"One Superman is worth three Wonder Woman's," I conceded, stacking, counting, and restocking comics on the sidewalk. I was an avid comic-book reader, but I pretended not to like Wonder Woman. After all, it wasn't a real advantage in our daily comic trades. The boys on my block always bid for Superman, the Green Lantern, or Batman; even Donald Duck. But never Wonder Woman. "She's just a girl," they said. And so, being "just a girl" myself, I hid my admiration for Wonder Woman and put my stakes on Superman.

But up in my apple tree, I read Wonder Woman anyway. "Breaking the fetters of evil with her strength; parrying bullets with her steel bracelets; sweeping through dimensions of time and space in her invisible plane, Wonder Woman, the Amazonian princess from Paradise Isle, brought enemies to their knees and to her command with her golden magic lasso." Who could resist a role model like that? In America she lived as Diana Prince — secretary, nurse, army intelligence officer — but she could change into Wonder Woman costume and appear from nowhere to do battle with the forces of evil. In the mid-forties she even jumped into politics with a campaign for President — a woman to save the country from war and destruction.

I loved her comic cohorts, too.

Etta Candy: fat and frustrated — who stuffed her problems with chocolate and her comments with "Woo, Woo!"

Merboy: her underwater boyfriend — all boy above and all fish below.

Hyppolyte: her mother and queen of the Amazons (like the mythical Hyppolyta), who taught goodness and justice and kept close tabs on her daughter through a mental radio-TV.

As a kid trading comics on the sidewalk, I wish I'd known that, even though Superman never existed outside the comic-book world, Amazonian princesses did. In 16th-century Brazil, for instance. Picture a civilization of jungle women living in caves deep in the rain forests of the Amazon River. These fierce female warriors and powerful victors kidnapped males from neighboring tribes, and brought them to a copulatorium for a mating ritual complete with dancing and flute music. (In memory of this fearful time of women's superiority, some modern-day tribes of Indians in Brazil will not allow their women to play flutes.) Mothers slaughtered their male infants, or maimed them so that they could be used as servants. Daughters were raised in the strong, self-sufficient, and ruling-class images of their mothers.

Many historians have rejected this Amazon society as pure myth; an expression of men's fear of women. But recent archaeological discoveries support the stories of such tribes. Caves painted with triangular female symbols, a copulatorium where a male symbol appears for the first and only time, and a slaughtering basin for male infants or animal sacrifices; all this evidence has been found deep in the jungles of Brazil by German and Brazilian scientists.

Hundreds of similar societies may have existed in other cultures over a period of several thousand years. They were probably backlash societies — a reaction to the cruel, patriarchal takeover of a previously gynocratic world.

Greek myths and legends abound with stories of Amazons. Herodotus and other ancient historians and geographers wrote of such societies in the Black Sea area, Greece, and northeast Africa.

Wonder Woman captured the Amazonian spirit of strength and self-sufficiency, but added the peacefulness and revulsion toward killing that have culturally distinguished women from men.

Wonder Woman herself first appeared in 1941, the invention of a psychologist named William Moulton Marston. Attorney, inventor of the lie-detector test, prison reformer, and businessman, Marston (who wrote comics under the thinly disguised pen name of Charles Moulton) conceived of Wonder Woman as a counter to the "bloodcurdling masculinity" of most comic books. Both plot and characters were based on Marston's self-styled vision of feminist philosophy. "Women represent love; men represent force," he wrote. "Man's use of force without love brings evil and unhappiness. But Wonder Woman has force bound by love and, with her strength, represents what every woman should be and really is. She corrects evil and brings happiness. Wonder Woman proves that women are superior to men because they have love in addition to force."

Not all of Marston's characters were heroines. "Women have been submissive to men and taken men's psychology [force without love] as their own," explained Marston, so women villains still existed, and appeared regularly in Wonder Woman comics. Cheetah, for example, was a feline fury who represented "uncontrolled power."

So much for Marston's theories. Though Wonder Woman in battle reigned supreme, Wonder Woman in love, as if lassoed back into conventionality, became the simpering romantic maiden, willing to relinquish her Amazonian birthright to follow a man. In fact, what brought her to America in the first place was her love (illicit for an Amazon) for Capt. Steve Trevor, U.S. Army.

Wonder Woman's adventures were and are full of violence, but Marston insisted that Wonder Woman herself never sought revenge, nor hurt any villain. "Evil destroys itself, unless Wonder Woman can bind it for constructive use," Marston explained. (After six pages of fierce battle in which Wonder Woman defeats a Nazi spy, for instance, he accidentally slips off a pier and drowns.) Usually Wonder Woman saved her worst enemies and reformed their characters. Exceptions included the distorted and villainized Nazis and Japanese who invaded all good American comics during World War II.

Marston died in 1947, but Wonder Woman lived on. The new writers didn't understand her spirit, however, and she lost some of her original feminist orientation. Her superhuman strength remained, but her violence increased. Rather than proving her superiority over men, she become more and more submissive. In 1968, she relinquished her superhuman Amazon powers along with her bracelets, her golden magic lasso, and her invisible plane. She became a human being. Diana Prince, clad now in boutique pant suits and tunics, acquired conventional emotions, vulnerability to men, the wisdom of an adviser (a man, of course, named I Ching), and the skills of karate, kung fu, and jiujitsu. In other words, she became a female James Bond, but without his sexual exploits. The double standard applied even to her.

Next year, Wonder Woman will be reborn. With the help of her first woman editor, Dorothy Woolfolk, she will rise again as an Amazon, complete with superhuman powers. Ms. Woolfolk also plans to decrease violence in the plots and return our heroine to the feminism of her birth. And maybe to politics, too?

"Great Hera!" says one of the new 1973 comic-book covers. "Wonder Woman, the beautiful Amazon Princess, is alive and well and living on Paradise Isle." And why not? After all, even Wonder Woman needs a Key Biscayne.

But will she still have to trade 3 for 1 against Superman?”