The US hunt for truth serum during WWII shaped our superheroes

In 1941, Wonder Woman made her breakthrough in the comics world – and in America’s burgeoning war effort. While the superpowered Amazon joined World War II in the pages of DC Comics, the United States tested the waters with its new international spy agency, the Office of Strategic Services. Though the OSS would disband several months after World War II ended, the organization’s impact on Wonder Woman and the comics she called home is still felt today. And the connection runs deep: just a year after she debuted, the OSS began a serious search for ‘truth serum’, a questionable scientific endeavor that became a classic and recurring comic book device.

Established in 1942, the OSS was created to coordinate the global espionage activities of the US government. While Wonder Woman debuted months before the OSS was created, when she left Paradise Island in January 1942, she quickly joined the ranks of the spy agency. While not an American herself, the royal Amazon acted like an American agent thanks to her passion for Steve Trevor, the human who was shot down over the waters of her remote home.

How did a foreign princess with no paperwork or alias become part of a secret US government agency? Adam Karenina Sherif, an academic historian and writer who has written about World War II and American comics, including the earliest Wonder Woman appearances, brazenly calls it “identity theft” when unpacking the career move. In 1942 Sensational comics #1, Wonder Woman has a chance encounter with an army nurse that leads to her getting the iconic alter ego of Diana Prince, though it’s a less than fair superhero setup.

“She meets the real Diana Prince on the street in DC,” Sherif tells Polygon. “And she’s like, ‘Oh, if you take off your glasses, we’re pretty similar. Can I buy your ID, please?’ And Diana Prince says, “Yeah, mate, you can have it,” and sells her identity to Wonder Woman, and then Wonder Woman starts cosplaying as this woman in her day job and just keeps her identity forever. Two issues later, the new Diana Prince leaves her role as an army nurse to follow Steve Trevor to the OSS as a secretary.

As war consumed the world, Wonder Woman rose through the ranks of the OSS, becoming more powerful and increasingly involved in America’s national interests. But her role in the OSS and the publisher’s output had to reflect the real world. “Having Diana be an OSS agent is a way of getting her involved in the war that aligns with where the US was at,” says Sherif. “It’s not a frontline because at that time isolationism was still one of the prevailing attitudes, so they couldn’t put it directly in the theater of war.” The OSS gave DC, then All-American Comics, a space to center Diana in war stories while following the political line. It was also a realistic reflection of the fact that America had no women on the battlefield, although many were involved in the war effort.

It’s no coincidence that Wonder Woman’s early appearances would focus on espionage, spy work, and the danger of truth and lies. Co-creator William Moulton Marston was a psychologist who preceded the creation of Wonder Woman with another invention: the systolic blood pressure test, which would later become part of the polygraph machine. Much of Marston’s academic work as a psychologist was concerned with lying and telling the truth, and when he moved into comics, those interests seeped into Wonder Woman’s adventures.

While Diana Prince played in her fictional spy world, wielding her lasso to squeeze answers out of her opponents, the actual OSS hoped to crack the code on a real “truth serum.” The organization would try both mescaline and scopolamine – which was popular in the 1920s as a so-called truth serum – before settling for a marijuana extract. There was something incredibly intoxicating about the concept of the truth serum in both reality and fiction. “Because of technology and mass communication, WWII was about intelligence, information, spies and sabotage,” says Sherif. “It’s an aspect of what they call ‘total war’ where, in every aspect of your life, the war is there. That is more common in Europe at the time, but later it becomes a thing everywhere.”

The war era saw an explosion of fear-based propaganda, with famous examples such as the British propaganda campaign Talking carelessly costs liveswhich spawned films such as The immediate family (later released in America with voiceover by J. Edgar Hoover!). Those reporting efforts are directly related to why truth serums were so appealing in both real life and superhero fiction. In a world where espionage and secrets are everything, there’s nothing more powerful or terrifying than something that lets you learn an enemy’s secrets or lets an enemy discover yours. “That emphasis on not giving away critical information is where the truth serum comes from. The ultimate fear is that someone could get this information out of you, or you could accidentally say something and a Nazi agent has your back. Those real-life fears quickly made their way into the world of comics and spy stories. “That way, truth serums become the weapon of choice for your fictional enemies.”

In the often binary world of superheroes, truth is a paragon that the purest of fictional heroes live by. Since his first appearances, Superman’s catchphrase has included the word “truth” and he still does to this day. Wonder Woman has long had her trusty magic lasso by her side, and much of Batman’s status as a loner stems from the fact that he often keeps secrets from his peers and doesn’t pay as much attention to the truth as his fellow DC characters. heroes. Importance is placed ironically on the truth, while an important part of almost all superhero stories is the importance of an alter ego, which inherently makes any superheroes that have them liars. This juxtaposition made truth serums an easy tool for superhero storytelling.

Image: Brian Michael Bendis, Mahmud Asrar/Marvel Comics

It’s not just DC Comics either. Thanks to the importance of the secret identity in Marvel Comics, the impact and legend of truth serums has made the trope a regular occurrence in the comics and even the company’s blockbuster movies. In Brian Michael Bendis and Mahmud Asrar Brand New X-Men, Doctor Doom drugs Beast with a truth serum, causing the stoic hero to lose his nerve. In an interesting twist, Beast eventually reveals his emotional truths as a way to hide the heroic team’s strategic plans. Marvel has also seen heroes use the real “truth serum” sodium thiopental, when an early version of Reed Richards’ alt-universe discovered it in Marvel 1602: Fantastic Four. In an obvious homage to Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth, X-Men fan favorite Quentin Quire’s power includes the ability to compel people to tell the truth and reveal their deepest and darkest secrets.

Truth serum has also had an impact on the Marvel movie and television universe. Agents of SHIELD had an ongoing storyline centered on the use of truth serum, and most famously, Ant-Man and the Wasp plays with the truth serum trope when Luis (Michael Peña) is given a mix of drugs that are “definitely not a truth serum”, thus hilariously and hyper lucidly summarizing all the happenings of the Ant-Man movies. Again, it directly plays on that ultimate fear: that a villain could use a truth serum to make you or your confidants reveal vital information. It’s a concern that’s been central to superhero storytelling from the get-go.

Many Golden Age DC Comics focused on debunking heroes and revealing their true faces. Superman often encountered magical objects such as the Mirror of Truth – which revealed his true identity to anyone who saw his reflection. And in 1955 Superboy #41, that powerful fiction known as truth serum, threatened young Superman’s identity. Not only were the comics and adaptations of the Golden Age directly based on the rise of espionage in the real world, but truth serum also posed a direct threat to everything the heroes held dear.

However, Wonder Woman’s lasso counterbalances that threat, forcing enemies to obey the Amazon and reveal their secrets. “It makes her the ultimate spy because she has the perfect version of this thing that can solve so many problems in the intelligence war,” says Sherif, “but it’s comic book safe because she doesn’t inject people with barbiturates.”

Image: Brian Azzarello, Cliff Chiang/DC Comics

From the beginning it has been a clear analogue for the power of truth serum. Inside for the first time Sensational comics #6, it was just a lasso — and also something deeply tied to creator Marston’s own interest in bondage. However, in the next issue, she used it to extract the truth from criminals, explaining that they were “forced by Aphrodite” to obey her, including telling her the truth. Despite that thread, it was pass Wonder Woman reboot by George Perez in the 1980s that it would be dubbed the “Lasso of Truth”, officially assuming the role and position of power it holds today.

Decades later, during DC’s New 52 event, Lex Luthor created a truth serum synthesized from Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth, taking the analog and making it literal. It’s one of the serum’s more inventive uses in comic book history, and one that goes right back to the earliest days of its presence in the minds of Americans. Heroes and villains as varied as Batman, Superman, and the Joker have all been used or targeted for truth serum over the years in stories that have long since strayed from the trope’s espionage roots.

So what still appeals to us in stories centered on truth serum? According to Sherif, truth serums represent “an objective clarity about what has unfolded,” not only a useful narrative tool, but also something that reality cannot provide. “If there’s a truth serum, you could actually get someone to say what really happened, you could actually know something. It is a way to give structure and meaning to a chaotic world.”