Something is Rotten in the Land of Comics

I have been a comic aficionado for a long time. I read Courtney Crumrin, The Far Side, The Walking Dead, Captain America and everything in between. I guess it started in my early teens when I started reading manga, especially Masamune Shirow (Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed, Black Magic) and Rumiko Takahashi (Ranma ½, Urusei Yatsura, Maison Ikkoku) but also artists like Buichi Terasawa and of course I read Kozure Okami by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima. I sort of drifted away from the manga somewhere around the time when Quake, booze, ladies and rock 'n' roll became more interesting, although I did read Sandman and a few other comics an adolescent goth kid is expected to like. However, I rediscovered comics as a pastime a few years into the new millennium, when a large screen and a fast Internet connection led to the possibility of downloading or reading online before buying. Since then I have found quite a lot of fabulous comics on the net which I wish I had discovered sooner, such as Bone, Hellblazer and Preacher, or the ones published online, such as Sluggy Freelance, Dinosaur Comics, Buttercup Festival (RIP), Death to the Extremist (RIP) and many others.

Anyway, my point is, I read a lot of comics nowadays, even though the fact that my happy days as a student are over means I have had to cut down a bit on my reading. However, I have some major issues. The following pertains to US comics in particular, and the reason that I get so irritated by it is that these comics are generally the best ones in other respects. What I am so damn tired of is that most comics geared towards people older than ten years share a few very sucky traits which I will be going to whine about to a greater extent in future posts; extreme emphasis on the female body and T&A in particular (granted, there is quite a high level of exploitation of the male body too, but not to the same extent), blatant and often overtly stupid political references and world-changing events in every damn issue.

I thought I would start my whining about the extreme sexification of comics. A good example (as in an otherwise pretty good comic) would be the 18 issue Emma Frost series released by Marvel, starting in 2003. It is about a young woman coming to terms with her superhuman powers, her dysfunctional family and bits about boys and betrayal, too. It is rated PG+, yet the cover of the first issue (drawn by the very talented Greg Horn) still portrays somebody who, for lack of better words, sort of looks like a sad and expensive prostitute. This is despite the fact that the protagonist in the same issue looks quite different. Let us take a look (for review purposes only, of course, I am not trying to infringe on somebody's copyright here).


Another funny thing is how the Emma Frost in the comic is called "flat-chested" by one of her peers. As you can see in the picture above, she is the girl in the foreground, this is sort of... weird. It further shows a detachment from reality which is even worse than that of the fashion industry, even though its effects are probably much smaller.


In this particular series, the covers, like the one above, suddenly become dramatically better after issue seven, or perhaps I should say more fitting, even though the same artist is drawing them. Not that they all lose their sexual innuendo, but they give some sort of a glimpse of what the comic is about, rather than being nothing more than bait to make people pick up the comic (I could say the same thing about c.

Most comics are also rife with pretty stupid things that show that the authors are not entirely in touch with reality or do not care. Granted, they usually portray vividly imaginative scenarios, but in those cases where they are supposed to show another version of the "real world" as we know it, they often miss such obvious things like how a man's suit or shirt is buttoned (that is, the button is sewn onto the right side, not the left) or how a certain group of people generally behave. For instance, here is a very good example:


Who the hell wants something sewn by starving Cambodians in sweatshops if they are as rich as this family is portrayed to be? They could, and would, know good tailors.

The list of stuff that irritates me goes on and on and on, but then I am quite the whiny type. However, the sexualisation of almost all females except the "extreme nerd" and similar characters sort of bothers me, for real. Even though I do not call myself "feminist" (though I have heard that one has to, on threat of being labeled a fascist misogynist). Because I think that comics can play an important role in the shaping of a young person's (generally male in this case) mind, just like parents, computer games and literature. Of course, I am not advocating censorship here, and I suppose that hot and sexy comics have their place in the world - I just wonder why such a large amount of the mainstream comics have to be like that (I suppose the answer is that they sell much better). I sort of think that the artist should spend at least a few minutes to consider how they would like it if their daughter got silicone implants the size of her head, wore a thong and did sexy posing on the street all the time. Probably not att all, but you never know with comic artists.