Female fans rejoiced that major characters in the Marvel universe would finally look like them. In the picture, the superheroine is in a…ahem…compromising position. As The Mary Sue notes , the physically impossible? And what kind of material clings to a posterior like that? When asked to comment, Marvel declined. I get it: superheroes wear Spandex and a lot of excitable teenage boys read these comic books.
Thank you!
Related Stories
Just when we were getting excited about potential new female-focused superhero stories Female Thor, the upcoming female centred Spiderman movies , Marvel went ahead and brought us crashing down again by releasing a BEYOND ridiculous image of Spider-Woman. Which should be great, super exciting news. But nope. The image is unnecessarily sexualised, featuring Spider-Woman sticking out her butt, face down, ass up style. The art was created by Milo Manara, who is actually widely known for his super sexual work. Which begs the question - why exactly did Marvel hire him? Considering how excited everyone was about an empowered, multi-dimensional, more-than-just-sexy female superhero, was it reeeeeally a good idea to ask the guy, who's famous for the oversexed comicbook characters of the back in the day Marvel universe, to design the cover art for said superhero? To be fair, this is only the alternative cover. The main cover is considerably less disappointing, although it's still very much big hair, spandex covered curves ish. ALSO, just for comparison, here's the newly released alternative cover of Spiderman
Tropes for Jessica
The cover, illustrated by award-winning Italian graphic artist Milo Manara , depicts Spider-Woman clambering over the roof of a skyscraper with her hindquarters stuck up in the air. The horror! And what kind of material clings to a posterior like that? A male hero would never be placed in the same physical position. Rob Bricken of io9 wrote :. The only problem with all this moral posturing: It turns out that a male Marvel Comics superhero — namely Spider-Man himself — had appeared on the cover of one of his comic books in the exact same pose : clambering atop a building with his hindquarters stuck up in the air. Jill Pantozzi of The Mary Sue argued that Manara, whose art is famous for veering toward the soft-core pornographic, had deliberately modeled his Spider-Woman figure on a spicy illustration for one of his erotic graphic novels. But the more salient lesson is this: Feminists, before you go shooting from the hip about sexism and double standards in superhero comic books, find out something about superhero comic books first. They have legions of fans, many of them on the Internet, and their fans tend to be obsessive-compulsive about acquiring an almost pathological depth of encyclopedic and fine-grained knowledge about the comics themselves, their characters, their plots, their writers and their illustrators as James Sturm explained in Slate. One of those fans probably remembered that Spider-Man cover of a decade ago and tipped off Maddox.
It's hard out there for a female superhero. When Wonder Woman finally ended up in a movie, the Hollywood powers that be made her look like Xena , cutting out all her campy fun. And when Spider-Woman gets a rare comic book series, she ends up looking like a porn star. Comic Book Resources released Marvel's art for the highly anticipated first issue of a new Spider-Woman comic series, and it's, well, rather offensive.
