Wonder Woman: The Dark Ages
Before beginning our regular read-through I wanted to take a moment to give you some backround info into what was going on behind the scenes at this point. Issue #22 marks a major change for the Wonder Woman comic stylistically, for the first time the comic will feature three unrelated stories instead of one big one divided into three chapters. This wouldn’t have been shocking for readers at the time since several other titles used a similar format. The reason for this abrupt change was likely William Moulton Marston’s declining health. After a bout of polio left him partially paralyzed in 1944 he would learn he had skin cancer a few years later.
With his poor health preventing him from maintaining his many projects, it seems Marston was forced to relent somewhat in his aggressive oversight of his creation and turn more control over to his ghost writers. The three story approach meant that now the individual stories for the main comic would be the same length as the Wonder Woman stories for Sensation Comics and Comic Cavalcade. Meaning Marston could produce scripts at his own pace without worrying about publishing schedules. The scripts would simply be assigned to the next comic that needed them while his ghosts filled in the cracks.
Because of these changes the comic would suffer a severe dip in quality for issues #22-27. Several stories are borderline unreadable. Exactly who wrote what is unclear, but in addition to Marston the two most likely suspects are:
Joye Murchison-A former star pupil of Marston’s whom he hired as an assistant writer after her graduation. The first woman to write Wonder Woman. She would’ve already been writing WW scripts for years by the time of this new policy.
Robert Kanigher-A DC company man originally brought on as an assistant editor to Sheldon Mayer, in this capacity he may have been called upon to produce material to keep the comics on schedule. He would be appointed WW’s main writer after Marston’s death.
Sheldon Mayer, HG Peter, as well as Elizabeth and Olive have also been suggested as possible ghosts over the years, with varying degrees of plausibility.