Anonymous asked:
(Spiderwoman cover) It's her ass in the air. No one gets in that position unless they're about to have sex. The material of her suit is so thin it might as well be red skin. Every minor contour of her ass and back are sensually rendered. The reason you're getting shit for this is because she doesn't look like a super hero, she looks like a porn star playing dress up. If your artist has been doing the same thing for 45 years, maybe it's time to tell him to grow as an artist. A lot has changed.
It’s a little gauche of me to quote my own article, but I feel like I have to push back against the disingenuousness of this reply, so here we go:
“Women are sexualized in comics in ways that men are not. The J. Scott Campbell cover that purportedly shows Spider-Man in the same pose as Manara’s Spider-Woman is not equivalent, not only because the compositional focus of the image is dramatically different (though that is difference enough), but because there is neither sexual intention in Campbell’s illustration nor a common precedent for men being sexualized this way. (No-one can plausibly claim there is no sexual intention in Manara’s cover.)”
Tom Brevoort is not a feral message board troll. He shouldn’t be making the same bad faith arguments as those people. Assuming any internal conversations happened around hiring Milo Manara to do this cover, Marvel ought to be better armed to respnd to its critics than this.
If you want to know what an actual equivalent cover would look like, with equivalent composition and equivalent sexualisation, Ricardo Bessa has got your (ahem) back.
