Comic Book WTFkery

Frankly, this wins at the internets.

Incidentally, if it seems as though I’m slacking off on the blogging a bit…yeah, I am. I’ve got things I want to write and say and sometimes it’s about timing. There’s a little bit of me trying to give myself permission to relax and avoid some of the self-induced pressures I tend to fluctuate under – which includes less time on the internet and more time just doing my own thing.

(No thanks to Darchala for sucking me into Orcs Must Die! btw. >_<)

And sometimes it’s about things irritating the living piss out of me to the point where I can’t actually form a cognitive sentence about it.

Like this lovely post today. (ETA – Looks like the original poster deleted his blog post. How ironic.)

Which is specifically about the cover of this new comic book (called Saga).  This is the cover:

Apparently in the world of comics, this is an offensive and disturbing image. Adult content, no less.

And this is the part where my brain just explodes.

I did a small ranty piece on Word Whores a few months ago about the madonna-whore complex in comic books, and here we go. Women CANNOT win. We’re told that the skimpy costumes are part of the deal. That the massive boobs and unrealistic T&A contortions of superheroines are what’s expected. That we’re too sensitive to want something other than glorified excuses of fanservice.

Male gaze pandering everywhere.

And here? An image of a woman using her ta-tas for their original purpose and suddenly it’s tasteless and offensive.

Why the double-standard, folks?

Why is it that Catwoman and Batman can fuck each other senseless on the rooftop of the first reboot issue, but this character, who is nursing her child (and where you can barely see the curve of her breast) is lambasted for NOT BEING MODEST.

For not feeding her child in private.

For being inappropriate.

That somehow this is a shock-value tactic to sell comics.

I just don’t even have words – frankly, the arguments in some of the comments in the link above just hammer home how objectified women in comics really are.

All is well and good if we’re represented as sexy sirens. But mamas need not apply.

And I guess what irritates me more is the sudden backpedaling by the original author of the blog post – that somehow it’s not the act of breastfeeding that’s offensive but using the concept to gratuitously market something.

Like tits aren’t used to market EVERYTHING.

And quite frankly, if this was a gratuitous marketing act, her other boob would have been hanging out. And she’d have a chain mail bikini on. And her ass would somehow be curved to the front of the cover so we could get a nice eyeful of both.

<– Case in point.

You can’t have it both ways. Boobs are sacred…or they’re not, but you don’t get to thrust your suddenly convenient “moral standard” in my face simply because you “paint boobs all day.”

Comics Alliance was nice enough to contact the cover artist for the piece directly to get her opinion on the whole thing, and truly I can’t put it any better than they have, so I’ll just leave it with the link here.

In the meantime, I’ll be buying Saga the moment it hits the shelves.