The Trope
The damsel on a cover is not a mystery about human nature. It is a solution to a specific commercial problem, adopted for legibility, repeated until it became a habit, and then inherited by people who had no idea what problem it solved. These pages follow the paper trail.
Where the peril cover was invented and what it was selling on a newsstand.
The damsel in distress trope hardened into a standard picture on the pulp newsstand, where the cover was the whole advertising budget. How danger plus a recognisable figure became the default way to sell an issue.
Cliffhanger serial history before comics: the weekly film chapter that ended in unresolved danger, why capture became a plot engine, and what comics kept.
Newspaper adventure strips reached a family audience at breakfast, and the format's limits produced a coded, cleaner peril than the pulps sold to adults.
The parts of the story with a paper trail, including the Wonder Woman record.
The weird menace pulps documented: Popular Publications, Dime Mystery from October 1933, Terror Tales, Horror Stories, John Newton Howitt on the fronts, and the dates the whole line began and ended.
Margaret Brundage painted 66 Weird Tales covers between 1932 and 1945 in pastel on illustration board for ninety dollars each. The documented facts, the objections at the time, and what survives.
What the trope does to its subject, and how modern work answers it.
Damsel in distress criticism argued properly: why making one character the occasion for another's heroism is a story problem, and the case for the defence.
Criticism can describe an arrangement between two people. It cannot make one. That negotiation is still happening somewhere other than a comics page.
See where it happens now