1. SHE WAS AN INSTANT SENSATION.
When Wonder Woman debuted in All-Star Comics #8 (dated December 1941, released in October 1941), she took the comics world by storm. But her then-publisher All-American Publications knew that they had something great. Her next appearance followed just a few weeks later in Sensation Comics #1 (dated January 1942), and she was one of the first superhero characters to get her own book, in the summer of 1942. "Superman was first, Batman was second, and Wonder Woman did it in less than a year from the moment she was first created," DC Comics archivist and librarian Benjamin LeClear tells mental_floss. "It's just mind-boggling." She initially had psychic powers like telepathy and astral projection, and she became invulnerable to electric shocks
before the Comics Code Authority and censorship hit the comics industry in the mid-1950s, Batman had guns and Superman was hanging criminals by their ankles over the edge of buildings. Wonder Woman's creator felt that his beloved character was made of sterner moral fabric. She also was not going to kill people. (That would change many, many years later.) "She had this thing that other superheroes didn't do in her era—she was looking to reform them," LeClear says. "Especially [with] the female super villains, she takes them over to Reform Island [also known as Transformation Island] and tries to get them rehabilitated back to their true nature of women, which Marston believed was a superior nature and, like many suffragettes, thought was the only recipe for peace—women being in charge of society."