Joye Hummel (who was married twice over the years, and thus used the name Joye Murchison Kelly at the time of her passing), the first woman to ever write Wonder Woman's comic book adventures, has passed away at the age of 97.

Hummel wrote all of the Wonder Woman stories that appeared in Wonder Woman, Sensation Comics and Comics Cavalcade from early 1945 until she retired from writing in 1947, but all of the comics were credited to Charles Moulton (a pen name for William Moulton Marston, based on his name and Charles "Max" Gaines, the co-owner of All-American Comics, the subsidiary of National Comics that published Wonder Woman originally). Hummel was little-known over the decades before Jill Lepore spotlighted her in Lepore's 2014 book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman.

Hummel attended Katharine Gibbs School, a well-respected secretarial college of the time (back when there was not a lot of professional career options for young women), where she met Marston, who was one of her instructors. He hired her in early 1944 to be his assistant and help him work on the Wonder Woman feature, which was appearing in three different comic books at the time (the monthly Sensation Comics anthology, where it was the lead feature, the quarterly Wonder Woman solo series, which featured multiple Wonder Woman stories in each issue and the quarterly Comics Cavalcade series, which had features from all of All-American Comics' top characters, like Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and the Flash).

Five months after Hummel went to work for Marston, the Wonder Woman creator contracted polio, at which point he stopped writing the series and Hummel took over as the main writer. Her first solo issue was 1945's Wonder Woman #12.

Marston was then diagnosed with cancer, as well, and he passed away in May 1947. Hummel married David Murchison in August 1947. With Marston's death, Robert Kanigher, who had been working as an assistant editor on the series under Sheldon Mayer, took over the feature (by this time, All-American Comics was officially a part of National Comics and Gaines had left to form EC Comics). Hummel was likely leaving the series either way due to her impending marriage and new stepdaughter, but she later recalled, “Even if I had not left because of my new daughter, I would have resigned if I was told I had to make [Wonder Woman] a masculine thinking and acting superwoman."

Since Hummel was uncredited at the time, she went largely unknown until Lepore spotlighted her in her book about Wonder Woman in 2014. Hummel luckily received a lot of attention in her later years, including receiving the Bill Finger Award at San Diego Comic-Con International in 2018. Hummel recalled to Mark Evanier (who did a panel with Hummel and Trina Robbins that year) that her first comic convention was "the best weekend of my life."