U.S. spies’ real hunt for truth serum inspired Wonder Woman and Batman

In 1941, Wonder Woman burst onto the comic book scene — and into America’s burgeoning war efforts. While the DC Comics pages were filled with the super-powered Amazon, America was testing out its Office of Strategic Services – a newly formed international spy agency. While the OSS would be disbanded mere 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: A mere year after she debuted, the OSS began an earnest search for “truth serum,” a questionable scientific pursuit that became a classic and recurring comic book device.

Established in 1942, the OSS was created to coordinate the U.S. government’s global espionage activities. Wonder Woman was a spy even though she debuted before the OSS. In January 1942 she joined their ranks after she had left Paradise Island. Though she wasn’t American herself, the Amazon royal acted as an American agent thanks to her passion for Steve Trevor, the human who was shot down over the waters of her isolated home.

How was it possible for a foreign princess without any paperwork or alias to join the secretive U.S. federal agency that is the CIA? Adam Karenina Sherif, an academic historian and writer who has written on World War II and American comics, including the earliest Wonder Woman appearances, cheekily calls it “identity theft” when unpacking the career move. In 1942’s Sensation comics #1, Wonder Woman has a chance meeting with an army nurse that leads to her gaining the iconic Diana Prince alter ego, though it’s a less than honest superheroic setup.

“She meets the real Diana Prince on the street in D.C.,” Sherif tells Polygon. “And she says, ‘Oh, if you take off your glasses we look quite similar. Could I buy your identification, please?’ And Diana Prince is like, ‘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.” The new Diana Prince, two issues after the first one, leaves behind her army nursing career to become an OSS secretary. She follows Steve Trevor.

Image: William Moulton Marston and Harry G. Peter/DC Comics

As war consumed the world, Wonder Woman rose up the ranks of the OSS, becoming more powerful and ever more involved with 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 to have her involved in the war that’s in line with where the U.S. was at,” Sherif says. “It’s not front line stuff because at the time isolationism was still one of the prevailing attitudes, so they couldn’t put her directly in the theater of war.” The OSS gave DC, then All-American Comics, a space to center Diana in wartime stories while toeing the political line. This was also to reflect the reality that there were no American women fighting on the front lines, despite the many who participated in the war effort.

It is not a coincidence that Wonder Woman’s early appearances would focus on espionage, spy work, and the danger of truth and lies. William Moulton Marston is a co-creator of Wonder Woman. He was a psychology who invented the systolic test of blood pressure, later used in the polygraph. Much of Marston’s academic work as a psychologist was concerned with lies and truth telling, and as 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 adversaries, the actual OSS was hoping to crack the code on a real life “truth serum.” The organization would try both mescaline and scopolamine — which had been popular as a so-called truth serum in the ’20s — before settling on a marijuana extract. The concept of the “truth serum” was both intoxicating in fiction and in reality. “Because of technology and mass communication, WWII became about intelligence, information, spies, and sabotage,” Sherif says. “It’s an aspect of what they call ‘total war’ where, in every aspect of your life, the war is present. Which is more common in Europe at that point but later becomes a thing everywhere.”

Famous examples of propaganda based on fear include the British propaganda campaign. The movie Careless Talk costs Lives was inspired by the book Next of Kin The American version was released later with J. Edgar Hoover’s voiceover. This is why truth serums are so popular in superhero stories and real-life. In a world where spying and secrets are everything, there’s nothing more powerful or terrifying than something that will allow you to know the enemy’s secrets or for a foe to uncover 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 might accidentally say something and a Nazi operative is behind you.” Those real-life fears quickly carved a path into the world of comics and espionage stories. “In that way, truth serums become the weapon of choice for your fictional enemies.”

The purest fictional heroes are those who live according to the truth in the world of super-heroics. Since his earliest appearances, Superman’s slogan has featured the word “truth” and still does to this day. Wonder Woman has long had her trusty magic lasso by her side, and much of Batman’s loner status comes from the fact that he often keeps secrets from his colleagues and doesn’t pay the truth as much heed as his fellow DC heroes. Truth is given a lot of weight, but the truth is largely ignored in superhero stories, because alter-egos are a big part of them. This makes superheroes with these characters liars. The juxtaposition of these two elements made truth serums a convenient tool for superhero storytellers.

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 have made the trope a regular appearance in the comics and even the company’s blockbuster movies. In Brian Michael Bendis and Mahmud Asrar’s All-New X-MenDoctor Doom gives Beast a Truth Serum, which makes the heroic hero shed his blood. The story takes an unexpected turn when Beast reveals his innermost truths to conceal the plans of the hero team. Marvel has also seen heroes using the real life “truth serum” sodium thiopental, when an early alt-universe version of Reed Richards discovered it in Marvel 1602: Fantastick Four. In a definite homage to Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth, X-Men fan-favorite character Quentin Quire’s power includes the ability to compel people to tell the truth and reveal their innermost and darkest secrets.

Truth serum has also made an impact on Marvel’s cinematic and televisual universe. The Agents of SHIELDThe plot of the show revolved around truth serum and was most notable for its use. Ant-Man and Wasp plays with the truth serum trope when Luis (Michael Peña) is given a mix of drugs that are “definitely not a truth serum” that make him recap all the events of the Ant-Man movies in hilarious and hyper-lucid fashion. This plays into the ultimate fear: that an evil villain might use a serum of truth to force you or your closest confidants to reveal crucial information. It’s a worry that’s at the heart of superhero storytelling from its earliest days.

During the Golden Age, many DC Comics focused on uncovering heroes and their real faces. Superman would often come up against magical objects like the Mirror of Truth — which showed his true identity to anyone who saw his reflection. And in 1955’s Superboy The identity of young Superman was threatened by #41, a powerful fictional fiction called truth serum. Truth serum was a real threat for the Golden Age heroes.

Wonder Woman’s lasso, though, represents a counter to 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,” Sherif says, “but it’s comic book-safe because it’s not her injecting people with barbiturates.”

Image: Brian Azzarello, Cliff Chiang/DC Comics

From its earliest days, it’s been a clear analog for the power of truth serum. First debuting in Sensation comics #6, it was just a lasso — as well as something deeply connected to creator Marston’s own interest in bondage. By the next issue, however, she was using it to get the truth out of criminals, explaining that they were “compelled by Aphrodite” to obey her, including telling her the truth. Despite that thread, it wasn’t until George Perez’s Wonder Woman reboot in the 1980s that it would be dubbed the “Lasso of Truth,” officially taking on the role and powerset that it has 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 analogous and making it literal. It’s one of the more inventive uses of the serum in comics history and one that links directly 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 utilized or been targeted by truth serum throughout the years in stories that have long since strayed from the trope’s espionage roots.

Why do we still enjoy stories centered on the truth serum concept? In Sherif’s mind, truth serums represent “an objective clarity on what has unfolded,” presenting not only a useful narrative device, but one that also offers up something reality can’t. “If there’s a truth serum, you could truly get someone to say what really happened, you could truly know something. It’s a way of giving structure and meaning to a chaotic world.”