leggomywaffle submitted:
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.
This is particularly disappointing for Dynamite since the company only started in 2005 – but has huge gallery of golden age characters they purchased but have continued to make them generic copies of what made them so unsuccessful they were up for sale.
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?
– wincenworks
More on comic books | More on Red Sonja | more on J. Scott Campbell
