“Stop portraying women being chained up in some skeevy pose!” That’s the outraged pronouncement of Goodreads critic Anne in a spoiler-filled review getting a lot of attention among comic book fans.

Anne is critiquing the eagerly anticipated Wonder Woman Earth One by Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette, due out in the spring. Wonder Woman is supposed to be an icon of feminism, Anne argues; her isolated homeland of Paradise Island is supposed to be an empowered all-female community. But Morrison and Paquette instead put her in bondage poses. They also present the Amazons as lesbians who, Anne says with disdain, “do sexy lesbian things”. Anne also objects to the prominence of a rotund sorority girl named Beth who helps Wonder Woman out – and to the Amazons’ giant battle kangaroos. Or, as Anne says, what the hell “are they jousting on kangaroos for?!”

Anne’s certainly correct that Morrison and Paquette’s version of Wonder Woman is very different from the popular conception of the character. This isn’t a betrayal though. Instead, it’s a faithful return to the character’s origins. Virtually everything Anne objects to is taken directly from the original Wonder Woman series by William Marston and Harry G Peter. Yes, even the sorority girls and those wonderful giant battle kangaroos.

In particular, Marston’s Wonder Woman was filled with bondage. Marston was a psychologist, a carny, a crank and the (self-declared) inventor of the (non-functional) lie detector. He believed that women were superior to men because they had a greater capacity for loving submission. For him, this meant that women should rule as “love leaders”, whose erotic fascination would lead men to be subjects of a peaceful matriarchy. And not just men; Marston lived in a polyamorous relationship with his wife Elizabeth and their love, Olive Byrne – he was very aware of lesbian relationships, and of a lesbian audience.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wonder Woman’s 2010 makeover. Photograph: Reuters

Wonder Woman was Marston’s vision of a perfect love leader. Her magic lasso – originally a lasso of command, not of truth – was, in his own words, “a symbol of female charm, allure, oomph attraction” and of the power that “every woman has …over people of both sexes.” In fact, the bondage games in Wonder Woman, a comic for children published in the 1940s, are in many ways more explicit, and more startling, than those in Morrison and Paquette’s 2016 reboot for grownups. In one sequence from the original comics, Wonder Woman’s Amazon sisters on Paradise Island engage in a game where some dress as deer, and the others pretend to hunt them, tie them up by their feet and then eat them. In another memorable bit, Wonder Woman is trapped in a gimp mask and breaks free while providing some historical info about bondage. “The French girls who wore this contraption must have had weak teeth,” she muses.

This aspect of Wonder Woman has drawn censure in the past; scholars such as Trina Robbins, Gloria Steinem and, most recently, Jill Lepore, have all tried in various ways to downplay or denigrate the role of bondage in Wonder Woman. But for Marston himself (as for many third-wave feminists), there was no contradiction between feminism and BDSM play. On the contrary, the erotic play of Wonder Woman comics, in which Wonder Woman was tied up and then tied up the bad guys in turn, was meant as a rejection of the “blood-curdling masculinity” of male superheroes. For Marston was healthy, fun, and utopian. Love-leader-led bondage play would lead overly aggressive men (and women too) to feminist matriarchal peace.

When Morrison and Paquette refer repeatedly to “loving submission”, and when they show images of BDSM, they’re walking in Marston’s chains. And they’re also showing why DC Comics has had so much trouble creating decent Wonder Woman stories for the past 75 years. Wonder Woman’s bondage past is, after all, part of her costume. Her main weapon is a lasso; her main defenses are bracelets which look like chains. Yet, those very bondage accoutrements to many fans seem like the antithesis of feminism and female empowerment. When you are true to the original, people like Anne are horrified. But how do you incorporate bondage and feminism in a meaningful way if you’re not true to the original? The Marston/Peter Wonder Woman was genuinely weird. If you aren’t Marston and Peter, it’s hard to figure out what to do with her.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman in the 70s TV series. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Feature

That difficulty extends to Morrison and Paquette, too. In their version, they make Steve Trevor a black man, an effort to address the 1940s racism of the original series which, as Anne says, is not entirely successful. But their real deviation from the original is that they present Paradise Island as being adamantly, ideologically opposed to men. Because of Queen Hippolyta’s rape by Hercules, Paradise Island is off limits to all males, and the Amazons are not allowed to travel to man’s world. Women and men are separate – at least until Wonder Woman goes against tradition to unite them.

Superficially, this is true to Marston’s vision. Hercules’s sexual violence, and the all-female Paradise Island, come from the original comics. But in the Marston/Peter version, the taboo against men is more a kind of flirtatious pose than a real ideological commitment. In the original, when Steve Trevor crash-lands on Paradise Island, the Amazons are a bit distressed at first, but they heal him happily enough, and then by consensus send a champion off to man’s world to help in the war against Hitler. Similarly, in Wonder Woman #23, cat-headed aliens land on Paradise Island, leading the Amazons to fear they’ve been invaded by men. But it turns out that the aliens are really women – and they join the Amazons in loving submission.

For Wonder Woman’s original creator, female relationships, and female-female bonds, didn’t have to exclude men. Rather, men who go to Paradise Island are changed, and become sisters themselves. For Marston, feminism and female power, were congruent with the erotic self-interest of both men and women (not least lesbians.) As Morrison, Paquette and Anne’s review demonstrate, that’s still a vision that makes just about everyone uncomfortable.