Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 260 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is comic book historian Tim Hanley.

His blog Straightened Circumstances discusses women and comics, and he's also written about

comics for Bleeding Cool, DC Women Kicking As, and women write about comics.

He's also the author of several books about female comic book characters, including investigating Lois Lane and The the many lives of Catwoman,

as well as his first book, Wonder Woman Unbound,

which we'll be talking about today.

And now here's our interview with Tim Hanley.

All right, so we're here with Tim Hanley.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

Okay, so as I was reading your book, I was just like,

wow, you could not make up a weirder, more interesting story

for the creation of Wonder Woman.

Is that kind of how you felt about it as you were researching it?

Oh yeah, it's absolutely bizarre.

That's actually what got me into the character.

I was researching other topics in comic book history

and started to see odd references to different aspects of

Wonder Woman's history and I had to go look into them in just every single era of

Wonder Woman is bizarre in its own special way.

...