The Architecture of Belief : Two Tribes

PSY-434 - Maps of Meaning : 

The Architecture of Belief

“…and The Thing about Familiar Territory for us is,

most of the Familiar Territory that you inhabit

most of the time — is Other People.

Lecture: 2017 Maps of Meaning 01: Context and Background

“In this lecture, I discuss The Context within which 

The Theory I am delineating through 

this course emerged : that of The Cold War. 

What is Belief? 

Why is it so important to people? 

Why will they fight to protect it? 

I propose that Belief unites a culture's 

Expectations and Desires 

with The Actions of it's People, 

and that the match between those two 

allows for cooperative action 

and maintains emotional stability. 

I suggest, further, that Culture 

has a deep narrative structure, 

presenting The World as 

A Forum for Action, with characters 

representing The Individual, 

The Known, and The Unknown --

-- or The Individual, Culture and Nature --

-- or The Individual, Order and Chaos.”

A Child is Like A Flower, His Head is just floating in The Breeze

Jim Morrison - Dawn's Highway

Indians scattered on Dawn's Highway, bleeding --

Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile, eggshell mind.

Me and my -ah- mother and father - 

and a Grandmother and a grandfather - 

were driving through The Desert, at dawn.... 

and a truck load of Indian workers 

had either hit another car, or just - 

I don't know what happened

But there were Indians scattered 

all over The Highway, bleeding to death.

So the car pulls up and stops. 

That was the first time I tasted Fear.

I musta' been about four - like A Child is Like A Flower,

His Head is just floating in The Breeze, man.

The reaction I get now thinking about it, looking back --

Is that The Souls of The Ghosts of those dead Indians

Maybe one or two of 'em, 

were just running around, freaking out --

And just leaped into My Soul.

And They're still in there.

Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding

Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind.

Blood in the streets in the town of New Haven

Blood stains the roofs and the palm trees of Venice

Blood in my love in the terrible summer

Bloody red sun of fantastic L.A.

Blood screams her brain as they chop off her fingers

Blood will be born in the birth if a nation

Blood is the rose of mysterious union

Blood on the rise, it's following me.

Indian, Indian 

What Did You Die For?

Indian says, 

'Nothing at All.'

You're late.

Cowboy sneak-attack, Chief!

How are you?

Good to see you, pal.

Okay, big man!

Good to see you.

Ah, yes!

Good to see you, My Friend.

You Beauty!

Who is This?

And I am Diana.

Where did you find her?

She found me.

I plucked him from the sea.

It's a long story.

We don't have to talk about that right now.

What's there?

British tea for the Germans,

German beer for the British.

And, Edgar Rice Burroughs novels for both.

And guns!

Well, May We get What We Want!

May We get What We Need.

But May We never get What We Deserve.

She is sitting right there, next to you all, Fellas.

Strange thunder.

German 77s.

....Guns. Big ones.

It's The Front, out there.

The Evening Hate.

So, who do you fight for in This War?

I don't fight.

You're here for Profit, then?

No better place to be.

Nowhere better to be than in A War 

where you don't take A Side?

I have nowhere else.

The Last War took everything from My People.

We have nothing left.

At least here, I'm Free.

Who took that from Your People?

His People.

Don't go...

Don't go in. Don't go!

Don't! Boys, no!

Don't go in there!

You're safe.

You're safe. Are you okay?

Get off me, Woman!

Stop making a fuss! God!

He sees Ghosts.

You're going to get cold.

Oh, I don't...

Don't worry about Charlie.

He doesn't mean anything by it.

Get out of there, now.

We've got to move!

You bloody animal, move!

Go on! Get on!

These animals, why are they hurting them?

Because they need to move, quick!

Like Us!

But This is not The Way.

I could Help Them.

There's no Time. 

Come on, Woman!

Mama!

That Man. He's wounded.

There is Nothing You can Do about it, Diana.

We must keep moving!

What is This?

You wanted me to take you to The War.

This is it.

So, where are The Germans?

A couple hundred yards across the field.

Their trench is...

Watch out!

Chief! It's good to see you!

Oi! Chief's back! He's back!

All right, let's move!

Diana, We have to go.

We need to help these people.

We have to stay on Mission.

The next safe crossing is at least a day away.

What are we waiting for?

We cannot leave without helping them.

These People are Dying.

They have nothing to eat, and in The Village.... 

Enslaved, she said!

I... I...

Women.

I understand that.

Children!

We need to make our next position by sundown.

How can you say that?

What is the matter with you?

This is No Man's Land, Diana!

It means no Man can cross it, all right?

This battalion has been here for nearly a year

and They barely gained an inch.

Because, on The Other Side, there are a bunch of Germans

pointing machine guns at every square inch of this place.

This is not something you can cross.

It's not possible.

So what? So, we do nothing?

No We, We are Doing Something.

We are. We just...

Steve.

We can't Save Everyone in This War.

Steve, Steve.

This is not What We Came Here to Do.

No -- But it's What I'm Going to Do.

Diana!

What the bloody hell is she playing at?

She's taking all the fire!

Let's go!

Stay down! Stay down!

That's an order!

Go, now!

She's done it!

She's got them on the run!

Get down, get down! She's done it!

Steve!

Let's go!

Come on, go!

Stay here. I'll go ahead.

What the...

Let's move!

We need more firepower.

Sniper!

Go!

Get in!

Charlie, Bell Tower!

Come on, Charlie. Shoot him!

Hey, it's okay.

Huh.

Follow me! Give me some cover!

Right!

We're going to put this on our backs,

and when I say go, lift hard!

Okay.

Diana! Shield!

Go!

Stay very, very still for me, My Friends.

Please. So important.

Thank you very much.

This has been such An Honour for me,

taking Your Photograph.

Thank You so much.

For all his talk of shooting,

he cannot shoot.

Not everyone gets to be

what they want to be all the time.

Me, I am an actor.

I love acting.

I didn't want to be a soldier.

But I'm the wrong color.

Everyone is fighting

their own battles, Diana.

Just as you are fighting yours.

It's too much.

I wish you well.

Thank you, thank you.

I'm on the, o the phone.

It's Veld. V-E-L-D.

It's a...

tiny village.

It may not even be on the map.

I found it! I found it!

Did you find Ludendorff's operation?

No, no, no. But I located him.

And, oh, lucky you,

he's only a few miles away,

at German High Command.

German High Command?

And so, intel reports

that Ludendorff is hosting a gala.

A sort of last hurrah

before the Germans sign the armistice.

And the Kaiser himself

is going to be there.

As well as Dr. Maru.

Actually, the gala could be perfect cover.

Captain Trevor.

Yes, sir.

You are under no circumstances,

to go anywhere

near that gala tomorrow night.

Do you hear me?

You'd be jeopardizing

everything we've worked for.

You cannot compromise the armistice.

Sir, there will be no armistice...

Steve!

Once Ludendorff bombs

the entire front line.

Hold on one second, sir.

You shouldn't...

You shouldn't be bothered

about upsetting the peace accord.

Why not?

Ares would never let...

What?

What is it?

Of course. It makes complete sense.

Ares developed a weapon,

the worst ever devised.

Ares? You mean Ludendorff.

No.

I mean Ares.

Ludendorff is Ares!

Sir, this is our last chance,

our final chance to find out where

the gas is and to learn how,

Ludendorff plans on delivering it.

No, no, no, no, no. I forbid it.

Do you hear me? I forbid it.

Sir, I'm losing you! Sir?

Hello?

Sir...

How likely is he to respect my wishes?

Not very likely, I'll be honest.

Sammy. Sammy, no, no, no, no.

Sammy, I have to work.

Please stop.

I gotta rustle up a German uniform.

I still have to plot the course

for tomorrow.

That's easy, boss. Come on.

There is nothing we can do

until tomorrow.

You said it yourself, Steve.

So, Madame, s'il vous plaît.

Incroyable!

Magnifique!

Thank you. Thank you.

Monsieur, s'il vous plaît.

Et voilà!

Merci, Sammy.

Et voilà!

You did this.

We did.

Do you have dancing on,

Paradise Island?

Dancing, yeah. Of course.

But these people are just,

swaying.

Okay, if you're going to...

be fighting the God of War,

I may as well teach you...

how to dance, you poor thing.

All right, probably without the gun.

Madame.

If you would.

Well,

if I'm going to a gala,

I'll need to know...

You're not going to the gala.

Of course I am.

No, you're not.

Why wouldn't I?

Well, for one,

you don't know how to dance.

I would argue that, they...

don't know how to dance.

Be polite, be polite.

All right. So, give me your hand.

Like so.

And I'm gonna put my arm,

around you like so.

And we just...

What did you call it? Sway?

Then you just sway.

You're awfully close.

That's what it's all about.

I see.

I haven't heard him sing in years.

It's... It's a snowfall.

Touch it.

It's magical!

It is, isn't it?

Steve Trevor :

Yeah it is.

Wonder Woman :

Is this what people do

when there are No Wars to fight?

Steve Trevor :

Yeah.

Yeah, this and other things.

Wonder Woman :

What things?

Steve Trevor :

They have breakfast.

They really love a breakfast.

And... They love to wake up,

and read the paper and go to work.

They get married.

Make some babies, 

grow old together. I guess.

Wonder Woman :

What is it like?

Steve Trevor :

I have no idea.

The Villagers gave them to us.

A gracious gift.

And They call us Heroes.

Wonder Woman :

You are.

Hey, fellas. I know that

I said This Job was Two Days and...

A Deal's a Deal.

You'd get lost without us.

Yeah.

We all know Diana is capable

of taking care of herself.

I'm worried that you won't make it.

There's no more money.

We've been paid enough.

Charlie :

….Maybe you're better off

without me, yeah?

Wonder Woman :

No, Charlie —

Who Will Sing for Us?

Yeah.

Oh, no, please.

Sing?

EVERY Lie We Tell Incurs A Debt to The Truth.

“I Lied. My Testimony in Vienna was A Lie.

I lied to The World.

I'm not the only one 

who kept this secret —

There are many —

We were following ORDERS, 

from The KGB, 

from the Central Committee.

And right now, there are 16 reactors in the Soviet Union with the •SAME• FATAL flaw.

THREE of them are still running 

less than •20• kilometers away AT Chernobyl..!!

“Professor Legasov, if you mean to suggest the Soviet STATE is somehow responsible for What Happened, then I must warn you, 

•You are treading on very DANGEROUS Ground.•”

“I've already  TRODEN on Dangerous Ground —

We're ON Dangerous Ground RIGHT NOW 

BECAUSE of our SECRETS 

and our LIES.

They're practically what •define• us.

When The Truth offends, 

We LIE and we LIE 

until we can no longer remember 

it is even there….

But it IS still There.

EVERY Lie we tell incurs 

a debt to The Truth.

Sooner or later, that debt is •paid•.

THAT is How an RBMK Reactor Core Explodes :

LIES.

The Old Maid of Anchorhead

“The exuberance of blood –the erect spirit – of Edwardian times had been drained. 

“Though in theory there were enough men for most women to marry, that was cold arithmetical nonsense for the hundreds of thousands who had lost The Only One They Ever Loved, and who were still wearing black and would never wed. 

The current author is old enough, just, to remember great-aunts who did not marry ‘because of the War’ and lived single lives – albeit quite cheerful ones – focused on fruit cake and friendship. 

THE IMPORTANT DISCUSSIONS WE AVOID 

Just one of the negatives of portraying life as this endless zero-sum game, between different groups vying for oppressed status, is that it robs us of time and energy for the conversations and thinking that we do need to do. 

For example, why is it, after all these decades, that feminists and others have been unable to more fully address the role of Motherhood in Feminism? 

As the feminist author Camille Paglia has been typically honest enough to admit, motherhood remains one of the big unresolved questions for feminists. 

And that isn’t a small subject to miss or gloss over. 

As Paglia herself has written, 

‘Feminist ideology has never dealt honestly with the role of The Mother in Human Life. 

Its portrayal of history as male oppression and female victimage is a gross distortion of the facts.’

If asked to name her three great heroes of twentieth-century womanhood, Paglia says that she would select Amelia Earhart, Katharine Hepburn and Germaine Greer : three women who Paglia says ‘would symbolize the new twentieth-century woman’. 

Yet as she points out, ‘All these women were childless. 

Here is one of the great dilemmas facing women at the end of the century. 

Second-wave feminist rhetoric placed blame for the female condition entirely on men, or specifically on “patriarchy” . . . 

The exclusive focus of feminism was on an external social mechanism that had to be smashed or reformed. 

It failed to take into account women’s intricate connection with nature – that is, with procreation.’ 

Or why, ‘in this era of the career woman, there has been a denigration, or devaluing of the role of motherhood.’  

The ongoing dishonesty about this leads to presumption being piled on dishonesty, and ugly, misanthropic notions of the purpose of women becoming embedded in the culture. In January 2019 CNBC ran a piece flagged with the heading, ‘You can save half a million dollars if you don’t have kids’.

As the piece went on: ‘Your friends may tell you having kids made them happier. They’re probably lying.’ 

It then referenced all the outweighing problems of ‘extra responsibilities, housework and, of course, the costs’.

Or here is how The Economist recently chose to write about what it called ‘the roots of the gender pay gap’, a gap which the magazine claimed has its roots in childhood. 

One of the main factors which is responsible for women on average earning less than men during the course of their working life is the fact that women are the ones who bear children. As The Economist put it, 

‘Having children lowers women’s lifetime earnings, an outcome known as the “child penalty”.’ 

It is hard to imagine who could read that phrase, let alone write it, without a shudder. 

If it is assumed that the primary purpose in Life is to make as much money as possible, then it is indeed possible that having a child will constitute a ‘penalty’ for a woman and thereby prevent her from having a larger sum of money in her bank account when she dies. 

On the other hand, if she chooses to pay that ‘penalty’ she might be fortunate enough to engage in the most important and fulfilling role that a human being can have. There is in that Economist viewpoint something which is widely shared and which has been spreading for decades. On the one hand women have–largely– been relieved of the need to have children if they do not want them, the better to pursue other forms of meaning and purpose in their lives. 

But it is not hard for this reorientation of purpose to make it look as though that original, defining human purpose is no purpose at all.

The American agrarian writer Wendell Berry put his finger on this almost 40 years ago when there were already, as he put it, ‘bad times for motherhood’. 

The whole concept of motherhood had come to be viewed in a negative way: ‘A kind of biological drudgery, some say, using up women who could do better things.’ 

But then Berry hit on the central truth: 

“We all have to be used up by something. 

And though I will never be a mother, I am glad to be used up by motherhood and what it leads to, just as–most of the time–I gladly belong to my wife, my children, and several head of cattle, sheep, and horses. 

What better way to be used up?”

Is this not a better way to think about motherhood and life? 

In a spirit of love and forgiveness rather than the endless register of resentment and greed?

“Superhero stories were written to be universal and inclusive, but often they’ve been aimed, it must be said, at boys and young men. Perhaps that’s why a mainstream myth has developed in which comic-book superheroines are all big-breasted Playboy girls with impossibly nipped waists and legs like jointed stilts in six-inch heels. But while it’s true that superhero costumes allow artists to draw what is effectively the nude figure in motion, there have in fact been more female superhero body types than male. 

The first superheroine, you may be surprised to learn, was not a voluptuous cutie in thigh boots but a raw-faced middle-aged housewife called Ma Hunkel, who wore a blanket cape and a pan on her head in her debut appearance, All-American no. 20, 1940. A harridan with the build of a brick shithouse she was the first “real-world” superhero—with no powers, a DIY outfit, and a strictly local beat—and the first parody of the superhero genre all in one. Ma Hunkel, aka the Red Tornado, was a Lower East Side lampoon of Siegel and Shuster’s lofty idealism. 

The mainstream has forgotten Ma Hunkel, although, like all the rest, she’s still a part of the DC universe and now has a granddaughter named Maxine Hunkel, a talkative, realistically proportioned, and likeable teenage girl who also challenges the superbimbo stereotype. But, of course, the comic-book industry in the throes of the war machine did churn out its fair share of pinup bombshells and no-nonsense dames with names like Spitfire and Miss Victory, or the strangely comforting Pat Parker, War Nurse. 

With no particular ax to grind against the Axis forces, Pat Parker was driven only by her desire to dress up like a showgirl and take to the battlefields of Western Europe on life-threatening missions of mercy. 

She was prepared to take on entire tank divisions with a refugee quivering under each arm. What made her tank-battling activities especially brave was the fact that this war nurse had no special powers and wore a costume so insubstantial, there could be nothing secret about her lunch, let alone her identity. But, absurd as she may seem, she did her best to exemplify the can-do, Rosie the Riveter spirit of those women who were “manning” the home front. 

And then there was the most famous superheroine of them all. Wonder Woman was the creation of William Moulton Marston, the man who, not incidentally, invented the controversial polygraph test apparatus, or lie detector, that is still in use today. 

Marston was a professor at Columbia and Tufts universities, and Radcliffe College —and a good one, according to accounts of the time— and the author of several respected works of popular psychology. Like other forward thinkers, Marston saw in comics the potential to convey complex ideas in the form of exciting and violent symbolic dramas. He described the great educational potential of the comics in an article titled “Don’t Laugh at the Comics,” which appeared in the popular women’s magazine Family Circle in 1940 and led to his getting hired as an educational consultant at DC-National. 

Marston coupled his ideas with an unorthodox lifestyle: his wife, Elizabeth, was also a psychologist, and is credited with having suggested a superheroine character. 

Both were enthusiastic proponents of a progressive attitude toward sex and relationships. They shared a mutual lover, a student of Marston’s named Olive Byrne, said to be the physical model for the original Harry Peter drawings of Wonder Woman. Together, Marston and Peter (with indispensable input from Elizabeth and Olive) developed a fantasy world of staggering richness. 

For sheer invention, for relentless dedication to the core concept, the Wonder Woman strip far surpassed its competitors. But unlike traditional pinups, the girls of Wonder Woman were athletic and forceful. 

They wore tiaras and togas while they engaged in violent gladiatorial contests on the backs of giant, genetically engineered monster kangaroos. 

Wonder Woman was traditionally sexy—there were pinup shots—but in most panels, she yomped and stomped like some martial arts majorette, outracing automobiles for fun. 

1941’s “Introducing Wonder Woman” began when an air force plane crashed on an uncharted island inhabited exclusively by beautiful scantily clad women capable of carrying the full-grown air force pilot “as if he were a child.” 

The man, Captain Steve Trevor of US Army Intelligence, was the first to ever set foot on Paradise Island, and within moments, the queen’s daughter, Princess Diana, had fallen in love. 

A two-page illustrated-text section revealed the history of the Amazons since their slavery at the hands of Hercules. Encouraged by their patron goddess Aphrodite, they liberated themselves and set sail for a magical island where they could establish a new civilization of women, far from the cruelty, greed, and violence that typified “Man’s World.” 

On Paradise Island, the immortal women set about fashioning their fabulous alternative to patriarchal, heliocentric society. 

In this first issue, Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, consulted apparitions of Aphrodite and Athena, who clarified that Trevor had been sent deliberately by the gods. 

It was time, apparently, for the Amazons to emerge from seclusion and join the worldwide struggle against Axis tyranny. 

Trevor had to be sent home to complete his mission against the enemy—but he was not to return alone. 

“YOU MUST SEND WITH HIM THE STRONGEST OF YOUR WONDER WOMEN!—FOR AMERICA, THE LAST CITADEL OF DEMOCRACY, AND OF EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN, NEEDS YOUR HELP!” 

A contest was declared to identify the most appropriate candidate. 

Tests included outrunning a deer and culminated in the favorite sport of these immortal ladettes: bullets and bracelets. A kind of Russian roulette, the game saw the final contenders facing one another with loaded revolvers (where the staunchly antiwar Amazons managed to get hold of working firearms remains a mystery). Bullets were fired at the opponent, who was obliged to deflect them with her bracelets in order to win the game. The loser took a flesh wound to the shoulder. 

In the end one champion remained: a masked brunette, revealed in a not entirely unexpected twist to be Princess Diana herself. 

“AND SO DIANA, THE WONDER WOMAN, GIVING UP HER HERITAGE AND HER RIGHT TO ETERNAL LIFE, LEAVES PARADISE ISLAND TO TAKE THE MAN SHE LOVES BACK TO AMERICA—THE LAND SHE LEARNS TO LOVE AND PROTECT, AND ADOPTS AS HER OWN!” 

However, within this world—and supplying it with depth and enticing richness—lurked barely hidden libidinal elements. 

To begin with, it has to be said that these Amazons were drawn to be sexy. 

Whereas Siegel rendered Superman in dynamic futurist lines and Bob Kane gave Batman the look of a Prague potato print, Peter brought a flowing, scrolling quality to his drawings of superwomen in action and at play. Everything was curved and calligraphic. The lips of his women were modishly bee stung and glossy, as if to suggest that Hollywood-style glamour makeup never went out of vogue among the warrior women and philosopher princesses of Paradise Island. 

However, as you may expect in a society of immortal women cut off from the rest of the world since classical antiquity, the diversions of the Amazons turned out to be somewhat specialized, to say the least. 

As the strips developed, Marston’s prose swooned over detailed accounts of Amazonian chase and capture rituals in which some girls were “eaten” by others. 

Moreover thousands of years of sophisticated living without men had bled the phallic thrust out of sexuality, leaving the peculiar, ritualistic eroticism of leash and lock. 

Marston and Peter built slavery and shackles into “Meet Wonder Woman,” and as the strip progressed, the bondage elements became more overt, increasing sales. 

For instance, chief among Wonder Woman’s weapons of peace was a magic lasso, which compelled anyone bound in its coils to tell the absolute truth and only the truth—shades of Marston’s polygraph. 

Moreover, it wasn’t long before she was breathlessly demonstrating the joys of submission to “loving authority”: A Nazi villain’s slave girls were released in one story, with no idea what to do with their lives out of captivity. 

Wonder Woman’s solution was to allow them to continue to express their nature as born slaves by relocating to Paradise Island, where they could enjoy bondage under the loving gaze of a kind mistress instead of the crop-cracking Hitler-loving Paula von Gunther. 

The flipside of the Amazons’ essentially benign and formalized endorsement of healthy S/M was the dungeon world of sadistic bondage, humiliation, and mind control that existed in the world beyond Paradise Island. 

These were crystallized in the form of Doctor Poison, a twisted dwarf in a rubber coat. Wielding a dripping syringe, Poison hated women and loved to humiliate them. In a surprising twist, “he” was revealed to be a mentally ill woman acting out of her frustrations. 

The women of Paradise Island embodied an enticing blend of the politically right-on and the libidinous. As such, they were exemplars of a newfangled twentieth-century creed that was the same old bohemian “free love” with a new lexicon culled from psychoanalytical theory and the pink and squeezy world of dreams and desire. 

Theirs was a kind of radical Second Wave separatist feminism where men were forbidden and things could only get better as a result. 

Indeed, in Marston’s feminine paradise, happiness and security were in far greater supply than elsewhere in the superworld. 

In looking at other superhero comics he had noted, “it seemed from a psychological angle that the comics’ worst offence was their blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to the child as the breath of life.” 

And so, while Batman was a brooding orphan, and the destruction of Superman’s Krypton had robbed him of his birth parents, the magnificent scientists Jor-El and Lara, Wonder Woman could ride her invisible plane down the rainbow runway to Paradise Island and check in with Mom any time she wanted. 

Queen Hippolyta even had a magic mirror that allowed her to observe her daughter at any location on Earth. 

It was closed-circuit television by any other name, but in late 1941, Hippolyta’s magic mirror could only be a product of imaginary feminist superscience. 

There were some similarities with Wonder Woman’s male predecessors. Like Superman, in his way, Wonder Woman fearlessly championed alternative culture and a powerful vision of outsider politics. And, like Batman, she was thoroughly the progressive sort of aristocrat. 

She preached peace in a time of war, although she was as eager as any other superhero to tackle her fair share of Nazis. 

Unlike the essentially solitary Batman and Superman, Wonder Woman had a huge cast of friends. Her allies, the Holliday Girls of Beta Lamda, were a rambunctious group of sorority sisters fronted by the immense, freckled redhead Etta Candy. 

As the gorgeous Wonder Woman’s inevitable fat pal, Etta’s positive energy and physicality added an earthiness and humor that complemented Diana’s cool grace and perfect poise. 

When Marston died of cancer in 1947, the erotic charge left the Wonder Woman strip, and sales declined, never to recover. Without the originality and energy that Marston’s obsessions brought to the stories, Wonder Woman was an exotic bloom starved of rare nutrients. 

Once the lush, pervy undercurrents were purged, the character foundered. The island of Themiscyra was scraped clean of any hint of impropriety, and all girl-chasing rituals ceased, along with reader commitment to the character. 

It wasn’t long before Wonder Woman was coming across as an odd maiden aunt—a disturbing cross between the Virgin Mary and Mary Tyler Moore; but Elizabeth and Olive, her inspirations, continued to live together. 

The unconventional, liberated Elizabeth was one hundred years old when she died in 1993, the true Wonder Woman of this story.”

Stan “The Legend” Lee

The Legend

First appearance is issue 7. An as-yet-unnamed elderly man who, while not an official member of the Boys, works as their informant.

He is a former comic editor/writer who worked for Vought-American’s Victory Comics subsidiary, writing all the comics based on Vought’s superheroes to “give people supes like they wanted supes to be”. 

His work on superhero comics gives him incredible knowledge of them and Vought-American.  

He hates “that comic-book crap”, though he lives under a comic store surrounded by his work.

The Legend has no family other than his two sons, both of whom are deceased. 

His elder son was killed in Vietnam as a result of faulty rifles produced by Vought-American (which ironically resemble the British Army’s SA80 bullpup rifles). 

His son’s death is the impetus for his association with Vought: to gather information in the hope he could one day assist in their destruction. 

It is also revealed in issue 54 that once Vought-American introduced The Homelander to the world in 1969, The Legend made a strategic move and got himself filmed at a memorial service for the air cav that his first son served in. 

Greg Mallory didn’t buy the fact that a Vought-American man felt guilty about what his company was doing. 

His second son is revealed in issue 22 to be the Teenage Kix member Blarney Cock, from whom he was estranged and was satisfied that Hughie killed him.

He was produced by The Legend and Queen Maeve during a relationship that the two had together, which was confirmed in issue #57 when Hughie discover surveillance photos and transcripts of The Legend having sex with Queen Maeve.

Unlike other heroes, the Legend has shown a certain fondness for Queen Maeve, serving as her confidant at times, and showing an almost fatherly approach during her encounter with the Boys after 9/11 and on Doc Peculiar’s transcripts. 

Butcher has accused The Legend of developing feelings for Queen Maeve, which could set up dire consequences for both The Boys and The Seven. 

 In issue 67, after informing Hughie of the death of Vas, he is confronted by Butcher and dies from a heart attack.