Go Home Feminists, You’re Drunk

                Last week there was a large outcry over a comic book cover by Milo Manara from the upcoming Spider Woman book from Marvel Comics.  It shows the titular hero in a pose that shows off a great deal of her ass as she is climbing over the roof of a building.  Is it cheesecake?  Absolutely.  Is it unnecessary?  Well I guess that depends on your definition of the word. 

For decades, comic books have sexualized, and often over-sexualized women, be they super-heroines or damsels in distress.  Muscle-bound men and large-breasted women in spandex is comics’ stock in trade.  That being said, there are many strong and strong-willed female characters in comics.  Back in the 1970’s and 1980’s, Chris Claremont created so many strong female characters for the X-Men franchise that not only have they mostly overshadowed their male counterparts (aside from Wolverine, that guy will always be more popular than Jesus) but have become popular enough where a group of only X-Women were given their own book (granted it was only a couple years ago, but still).  Even in the context of “team books” like Avengers, X-Men, Justice League, etc., many of the women characters are written as strong, necessary parts of the team.  Where would the Justice League be without Wonder Woman, or the X-Men without Storm, etc., etc.  Did it take superhero comics a long time to take women seriously?  Absolutely, and the 1990’s did not help that with the over-sexualization of the early Image comics, and comics in general does a downright shitty job appealing to women in general, always has, probably always will.  Mainstream comics also does a shitty job appealing to children, failing to realize that once all of their fanboys move out of their mother’s basements and have to start spending money on rent they won’t have the disposable income for comics that young kids might have (of course if they keep over-inflating the prices of these books they will price their way right out of that as well). 

It's not just the ladies that get posed with their asses in the air. Manara's cover on the left and a J. Scott Campbell cover from the mid 2000's (I believe) on the right.

What I’m trying to say, in my usual long-winded way, is that a picture of Spider Woman’s ass is not an overt attack on women, it’s cheesecake.  And it’s cheesecake from an artist that is known for his erotic comics.  Seriously.  Look him up, but take your safesearch off first or you won’t understand, nor will you find many images I’m assuming.  That’s like being pissed that you went to KFC and got a shitty hamburger.  They specialize in chicken, that’s why you go there.  You don’t commission art from Manara and expect anything but the female form in all its glory.  It’s cheesecake in an industry that was built on cheesecake.  If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.  Plus, it’s a comic cover, it will be on the shelf for three months, tops, then fade into obscurity.  Instead of celebrating the fact that a fan-favorite female character is getting her own series, feminists (many of whom probably do not read comics anyway) attack the fact that one picture, a variant cover no less, is not up to their lofty standards of what women superheroes should look like.  My answer to that is, draw your own superheroine.  Market her, sell her, and profit off of her, instead of inciting anger over something as silly as the fact that too much of a character’s ass is showing.

I will admit, I am not someone that keeps up with pop-culture that much, but why is there such a stink being raised about this while Nikki Minaj shakes anything and everything that she has, shows more skin than any superhero this side of Chaos Comics, and spits right in the face of good taste, without so much as a questioning glance?  Are feminists up in arms about this as well, or is it because she is a woman she gets a pass?  Would that mean that if that cover was drawn by a woman that it would be ok?  That there is a double standard, that a man drawing a woman in a scintillating pose is wrong but a woman doing it is empowering?   This is an honest question, please enlighten me.

There are so many things that we can be raging about as a society…is this really the mountain you want to plant your flag on?  I would much rather question Marvel’s choice of giving Greg Land another comic book to draw than the choice of who draws a variant cover.

Losing Touch

We now have official verbal confirmation that DC Comics has lost touch with their industry.  From the good people over at Bleeding Cool I bring you a recent conversation between Dan DiDio (the head of DC Comics) and Paul Pope:

Paul Pope: “Batman did pretty well, so I sat down with the head of DC Comics. I really wanted to do ‘Kamandi [The Last Boy on Earth]‘, this Jack Kirby character. I had this great pitch… and he said ‘You think this is gonna be for kids? Stop, stop. We don’t publish comics for kids. We publish comics for 45-year olds. If you want to do comics for kids, you can do ‘Scooby-Doo.’ And I thought, ‘I guess we just broke up.’”

For the record, Paul Pope is this guy:

and how awesome would a Kamandi series be if Pope was to create it?  We'll never know now.  Apparently it would need gratuitous sex and violence to appeal to DC's forty-five year old demographic which is obviously not what Pope had in mind when he pitched it.

It actually makes me sick to think that this is an industry that I wanted to work in for so long.  An industry that has become so short-sighted and profit-driven that it can't get out of its own way.  To think that the comic industry (and DC Comics in particular, though I wouldn't be surprised if internally this was Marvel's mantra as well) is going to alienate the kids that will make up its future audience, causing them to turn their attention to television or video games or something else.  There should be a push to get children interested in comic books so that their love of these characters can start at an early age.  

Both Marvel and DC do a good job of bringing in children with their various animated cartoons, however you would think that that would be a vehicle to get children to want to pick up the comic.  If you create a fan and a collector at an early age, you have a cash cow for a long time.  Instead, a kid going to the comic shop looking for the newest Batman comic because they just saw the latest cartoon featuring the Dark Knight, will come across what?  Batman banging Catwoman on a rooftop (Catwoman #1) or Joker's removed face and subsequent torture of the Bat-Family (last year's "Death of the Family" storyline).  If I came across that on a spinner rack as a kid, my parents wouldn't have let me anywhere near comic books.  

Are we, therefore supposed to just pander to kids with comics involving Scooby Doo or Looney Tunes and hope that they like the medium enough to come back to it when they reach an age that is appropriate for the stories being told with the characters they really want to read?  That seems like wishful thinking, and with the average attention span of kids nowadays as short as it is, comics will run out of readers in the next twenty to thirty years as they die off from old age.  Or, they'll alienate the readers that they do have and have no one to replace them with as the children that should be reading comic books are off doing something else.

I don't think I've ever felt so ashamed to be a comic book fan as I do now (and I survived the 90s and early 2000s).  

Thanks DiDio.

Thanks DC.