ABSTRACT
Comic books can be of great use to historians, through careful decoding, with the ultimate goal of incorporating comics into the palette of historical evidence and making fresh contributions to serious subject areas. In order to be of use to the historian, a given piece of documentation must be shown to be the bearer of verifiable historical content. Drawing on the theory of a “web of imaginative construction” (Collingwood 1935) and its parallel in the poststructuralist conceptualization of meaning, this tailored methodology employs the dual processes of close reading content analysis and corroboration by means of historiography. This approach will be demonstrated through analysis of the first year of published Wonder Woman stories, 1941–1942, by William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter in conjunction with relevant Second World War historiography.
