I always love posts about the original Wonder Woman and the great commentary on same, and this is a choice one, but there is one little thing niggling at me. Please understand the following is not directed at this post in particular, but a general tendency I see a lot of.
There seems to be an assumption by modern readers looking at Golden Age crack that the creators responsible were entirely naive and oblivious to the connotations of their work and had no concept of double meanings or suggestive innuendo, and were blindly displaying their private obsessions and hangups for the world to see. (Much like Mr. Garrison writing the unintentionally homoerotic romance novel in that episode of South Park.) And in a lot of cases, that's probably true. But William Marston was arguably one of the smartest people ever to write comics, and he had a pretty thorough classical education. And, yeah, he was into serious kink -- and was totally comfortable with his unconventional lifestyle, not someone in denial or repressing impulses in such a way that they'd sneak into his work unbidden.
There's a good chance Marston was a little more hip and clued-in than we sometimes give him credit for being. I expect at least some of these cracky bits are him saying "comic books work best when they're totally lurid and outrageous, so I'll crank it up to 11!" Some may even be him privately thinking "I can't believe I got away with that, next script I'll go even wilder to see how far I can go before they stop me." Every quote I've ever read from the guy suggests that he loved the idea of comics and was having fun writing them. I'd like to think he'd get a good laugh out of us still looking back at these stories and finding them delightfully mad.
Quick pedantic note: the symbol on the sails of the Mars convict ship aren't "go up strips" but the broad arrow worn by British prisoners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Which makes sense for a ship of prisoners, no? Well, as much sense as an ancient Greco-Roman deity employing an 18th century double-masted ship design, anyway...