Deep State Double Agent

The thing people who want to lump all the portrayal of "poc" in Marston's comics is that he did not have Peterson simply draw people with features of another race. He did that for every race to accentuate the details of them and build character. The specific anti black sentiment in his comics was that unlike all the other flavor of war criminal that was touched on in the Golden Age comics the black characters were specifically a caricature. The only time a black person appeared was to be of service. They did not get written as the intelligent villain that is causing issues for the country working for another country. They also did not get heartfelt backstories that humanized them and told you why they were acting the way they did nor gave hope for rehabilitating their bad ways.

The black characters were solely the help in those comics. They were also comedically happy and aloof. There was no exploration of any black character from anywhere around the world. They were not humanized or written with any positive traits. Their were no villains from any part outside of Mediterranean Africa, any latin countries, etc. that you would expect to see an international black character from given the nature of the types of stories Diana would be involved in. The most egregious is that despite being an "American" comic the stories did not even humanize African Americans, despite being the one non white demographic you would almost certainly count on being included in a story like this.

A note from Pete’s brother Byrne in his official obituary offers an inside peek at Pete’s role in early Wonder Woman comics:

My brother Pete was always a man of enormous imagination. As a kid, he was a dreamer. When we were teenagers our dad, who was often under pressure to produce scripts for his Wonder Woman superheroine, offered $100 to anyone writing a usable scenario for a Wonder Woman episode. Though $100 was a fortune at that time, Pete was the only one of us who could dream them up.

Pete seemed to have had a good relationship with his father. On top of pitching plots for Wonder Woman, Pete also left Harvard in the mid-1940s to return home and help care for his father. William Moulton Marston had polio and cancer, and passed away in 1947. It’s lovely that Pete created such a testament to his father’s creation with his Wonder Woman Museum. The museum is also a testament to the women who raised him; Pete’s mother, Elizabeth, gave Marston the idea to create a female superhero, and the Marstons lived in a polyamorous relationship with Olive Byrne, who raised the kids (Marston had two with each woman) and also inspired key elements of Wonder Woman’s look and personality.

Regrettably, I never got the chance to interact with Pete directly, though his daughter Christie was a great help when I was researching Wonder Woman Unbound and I know that Pete had a big hand in the materials that she sent me and the recollections that she was able to share. By all accounts, he was a kind and warm man; everyone who visited the museum (a guest list that included Lynda Carter herself!) seemed to come away with an appreciation and affection not just for its myriad wonderful items but also for the man who assembled it all.