This year has been a phenomenal year for Wonder Woman. The iconic Amazon has risen to new heights of popularity thanks to the instant-classic story told by Greg Rucka, Liam Sharp, Nicola Scott and Bilquis Evely as part of DC Rebirth, a blockbuster feature film which blew the doors off even the wildest of expectations, and a new biopic chronicling the life and times of Wonder Woman’s creator William Moulton Marston, his wife Elizabeth and their lover Olive.

However, among all those works there’s one name that you won’t see: Harry George Peter, the artist who helped bring Wonder Woman to life along with Marston in the page of 1941’s All-Star Comics #8.

REVIEW: Professor Marston and The Wonder Women

More often than not, comic books are a collaborative format, and everyone deserves credit for their role in that collaboration. The history of comics as an industry is riddled with horror stories of creators being mistreated by publishers when it comes to work-for-hire projects, but recent years has seen those same publishers attempt to make amends. HG Peter created Wonder Woman as much as William Moulton Marston did, and he deserves to be credited for that right alongside his collaborator.

Suffragette City

Harry George Peter — or HG Peter as he was credited — was born in 1880 in San Rafael, California as the youngest of three children to French parents, Louis and Louisa. His career in comics started as the nineteenth century became the twentieth, as he produced comic strips for the local newspaper, the San Francisco Bulletin. It was there that he met fellow cartoonist Adonica Fulton and they became partners, both romantically and professionally. The couple moved to New York City in 1907 and married in 1912. Together, they collaborated on illustration work for a number of magazines such as The New York American, inspired by the work of Charles Dana Gibson.

HG-Peter-Illustration

While many know that Wonder Woman was influenced by William Moulton Marston’s strong views concerning women’s liberation and empowerment, HG Peter was just as dedicated to the cause. Over the course of five years, he provided many different illustrations for a regular editorial in Judge magazine called “The Modern Woman” which advocated for women’s suffrage and ran from 1912 to 1917, several years before the implementation of the 19th Amendment which allowed (white) women to vote.

By the comic book boom of the 1940s, HG Peter was already a veteran of illustration and began working on a number of different titles for different publishers, including the obscure superhero Man O'Metal in Reg'lar Fellers Heroic Comics and a comic book adaptation of the life of U.S. general George C. Marshall in the pages of True Comics. In 1941, HG Peter teamed up with psychologist William Moulton Marston to create Wonder Woman, one of the most iconic comic book characters of all-time.

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='HG%20Peters%27%20Role%20in%20Introducing%20the%20World%20to%20Wonder%20Woman']



Introducing: Wonder Woman

While much — if not all — of what we know of Diana of Themyscira’s personality and background came from Marston, the professor was unusually loose with his instructions to Peter on how their superhero should look. The only guide Peter was given was “to draw a woman as powerful as Superman, as sexy as Miss Fury, as scantily clad as Sheena the Jungle Queen, and as patriotic as Captain America” and aside from a small change here or there, Peter knocked it out of the park in his first try. The very earliest known design of Wonder Woman is instantly iconic and instantly recognizable, and that was all down to Peter.

Wonder-Woman-Original-Sketch

Following the success of Wonder Woman, Marston opened the Marston Art Studio in Manhattan, with HG Peter working just one floor above his collaborator. The Marston Art Studio provided opportunities for women in the industry to work on superhero comics, and Peter employed a number of assistants to help with background art and inking, while colors were provided by watercolor artist Helen Schepens-Kraus and Marston’s daughter-in-law Louise assisted with lettering.

William Moulton Marston passed away in 1947, but HG Peter continued to draw Wonder Woman for just over a decade until his own death in 1958. During his time with the character, HG Peter co-created Wonder Woman herself, Hippolyta, Etta Candy and the Holiday Girls, Steve Trevor, The Cheetah, Ares, Doctor Pycho, Baroness Paula Von Gunther and many more. Without his contributions to the character and franchise, both with and without his collaborations with Marston, Wonder Woman simply would not be the character we know her to be today and the shape of modern comics would be vastly different.

Credit Where Credit is Due

It wasn’t that long ago that Bill Finger’s name was absent from all forms of Batman-related media, and the idea that the writer’s contributions would ever be acknowledged officially by DC Comics was inconceivable. But thanks to a fan campaign led by writer Marc Tyler Nobleman — alongside his biography Bill The Boy Wonder — DC eventually acknowledged Finger’s contributions to Batman, although he’s listed as “Bob Kane with Bill Finger” rather than “Bob Kane and Bill Finger” (Bill Finger with Bob Kane would be more accurate, but sometimes in comics you have to take the victories where you can.

Sensation-Comics-1

DC generally do a stellar job of crediting creators these days. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster are credited as creating Superman, but even those comics come with a note that says “by special arrangement with the Jerry Siegel family” which is the result of a number of lawsuits. Even newer creations such as Bane and Deathstroke now carry creator credit when they appear in a comic and DC reportedly has an excellent system put into place by Paul Levitz during his time as president and publisher of DC Comics.

HG Peter is a name that people deserve to know, but it isn’t on any modern Wonder Woman comics and he isn’t even represented as a character in the upcoming Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. The recent Wonder Woman feature offers "Special Thanks" to George Perez, Robert Kanigher, Brian Azzarello, Cliff Chiang among others, even James Bonny and Tony S. Daniel who created the Godkiller sword in Deathstroke, but no mention of Harry George Peter. It’s past time that the comic book industry paid respect to one of the creators of the most iconic female character of the twentieth century and add Peter’s name to the credits of any Wonder Woman media that also credits Marston. It’s literally the least DC could do.