Now, from what I could gather the publishers of this make both porn and mainstream products (apparently they do all the localisations for things like Dungeons and Dragons) and looking at this… I can’t work out which it’s supposed to be.
Apparently they were so concerned with making the generic designs so excitingly generic that they hired artists from across a spectrum of products to design the characters and seem to be pitching the story as sort of fantasy adventure.
Saw this cover from a post by my local comic store. This comes out on May 6th and has the description: “featuring Vampirella, Dejah Thoris, Red Sonja, Kato, Jungle Girl, and many, many more! Villains and heroes from a dozen worlds and eras face off against a legendary evil that threatens all their homelands.”
Funny how not a single woman from this various eras and worlds has ever considered wearing more than lingerie into battle. The one ladies sword has more metal than her entire set of metal “armor”!
Combined, these women almost fulfill the entire bingo card! Wow!
I was really hoping that this cover would not summarize the content of the book, which is the combining of many great heroines from the Golden Age of comics – but sadly the contents of the book do seem to send a clear message from Dynamite Entertainment: Women are only worth putting in comics if they visually coded as sex objects first:
Nostalgia has a massive influence on comics, largely because only a few creative people are involved in making them (compared with video games and movies) and most of them are specialist skill sets. This combined with general risk aversion, means that sadly none of the “big” titles are prone to challenging their old conventions.
I mean you want to know how generic this cover is? Let’s compare it to another heroine based book J Scott Campbell was recruited to do the cover for:
So, while I want to be really excited about having a big story that is a lot of Golden Age heroines getting together, it’s really hard to do that when the art is basically reduces them all down to the same Barbie dolls with the same “How do we dodge the censors?” costume design ideas.
I love nostalgia as much as the next comic book fan – but at some point we have to ask what is the point of continuing the art if we don’t really advance it? And what is the point of doing a girl power comic if the introduction to it could be used as a textbook example of male gaze in comics?
So I saw this lovely ad in the subway while coming home today.
Unfortunately going to the actual website they give just gets me a link to download the game to mobile, and since I don’t have the name in English I can’t look for the game’s actual website. My shitty phone camera photo’s the best I got.
I’m from Brazil so the text’s in Portuguese, but here’s a rough translation. Some parts are bolded for blatant objectification:
“Unbeatable Hunters. The sexiest girl to fight in your cellphone! Create incredible combos. Fast level progression. Save the girls from evil monsters. Customize your girl and become stronger. Download via QR code or access the Playspot website.”
I did the bingo counting all three outfits together since two are cut-off. I marked the thong spot with a question mark because while we can’t see the characters’ backs, one of the tiny screens of the game shows the one with the long ears doing an attack, and it kinda looks like her butt cheeks are showing but it’s hard to tell. The other two squares with question marks are assumptions made based on the fact the game’s being marketed on the whole “sex sells” thing, so it’s likely that these skimpy outfits are gonna be worn in cold climates if these are present and that the player’s reward for gaining levels is more skin showing on the characters.
I like how the girls transform from Unbeatable Hunters to needing to be saved within the same ad. Looking into it, I don’t think there is an English version of this game… though it’s kind hard to confirm since even Google thinks it looks like literally every video game ever made:
