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Joye Hummel, Golden Age “Wonder Woman” Writer, Dead at 97

By | April 8th, 2021
Posted in News | % Comments
Joye Hummel's yearbook
photo, 1941

The Washington Post reports Joye Hummel, who ghost-wrote several early “Wonder Woman” stories from 1944 to 1947, died at her home in Winter Haven, Florida, on Monday, April 5. She had only turned 97 the day before; the cause of death is unknown.

Joye Evelyn Hummel was born on April 4, 1924, and grew up on Long Island. She attended high school in Freeport, New York, and enrolled at Middlebury College in Vermont, but left a year later following her parents’ divorce, to keep her mother company. She subsequently attended Katharine Gibbs’s secretarial school in Manhattan. In March 1944, aged only 19, one of her instructors, Wonder Woman co-creator William Moulton Marston, told her he was impressed by her essays on a take-home test, and asked if she’d like to help him write the increasing number of Wonder Woman titles, like “Sensation Comics,” and “Comic Cavalcade.”

Initially Marston’s typist, Hummel took on a greater workload when he was diagnosed with polio five months into her job, going on to write over 70 scripts of her own. Hummel is often considered by experts to be the first woman to pen a Wonder Woman story, but like Marston and others involved in the comics, she was credited under the name Charles Moulton, making it difficult to determine exactly if it was her, or fellow ghost-writer Dorothy Woolfolk. Recent reprints from DC have credited her with the more fantastical stories, involving mermaids and winged maidens: Hummel described her own work as less “sexy” than Marston’s, meaning editor Sheldon Mayer “always OK’d mine faster.”

In 1947, Marston died from cancer, and Hummel married David W. Murchison, an Army veteran and home builder from 1947. She retired to look after her stepdaughter, but also because she was irritated by the less feminist direction the publisher were taking the character into: she opined, “Even if I had not left because of my new daughter, I would have resigned if I was told I had to make [Wonder Woman] a masculine thinking and acting superwoman.”

Joye Kelly, 2018

Hummel noted comics were a relatively small part of her life, though she would often tell her grandchildren about writing Wonder Woman, much to their disbelief. When she was 40, she took a job as a secretary at a brokerage firm in Hollywood, Florida, and eventually trained to become a stockbroker at the New York Stock Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade. “I believe Marston would feel proud of me,” she said. In 2018, she attended San Diego Comic-Con to receive the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing, which was also posthumously awarded to Dorothy Woolfolk for her work at DC.

After Murchison’s death in 2000, Hummel married her second husband, Jack Kelly. She is survived by him, as well as her son Robb Murchison; her stepdaughter Sally Boyd; two stepchildren from her second marriage, Kimberly Hallberg and Jeffrey Kelly; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. Her son David Murchison Jr. died in 2015.


//TAGS | obit

Christopher Chiu-Tabet

Chris is the news manager of Multiversity Comics. A writer from London on the autistic spectrum, he enjoys tweeting and blogging on Medium about his favourite films, TV shows, books, music, and games, plus history and religion. He is Lebanese/Chinese, although he can't speak Cantonese or Arabic.

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