If you read any comics from DC’s superhero line this week, this is what you saw on the last page:
It’s apparently an image from the troubled James Robinson-written Justice League story, that was originally announced as an ongoing, then downgraded to a miniseries, and has had its title jiggered with slightly here and there. According to this, it’s now called JLA: Cry For Justice.
Sometimes DC’s efforts to sell their comics to their fans and readers are so…how to put this?…well, clueless I guess, that it’s almost charming. Like, I feel bad for even making fun of them, you know? Like, Aw, they don’t even realize how crass and creepy they look doing this do they? The little scamps!
So here’s a preview of Cry For Justice, which appears to be a comic book about four random DC supermen teaming up with Supergirl’s breasts. Not Supergirl herself, thanks, just her breasts. I’m sure this isn’t a full image, and was maybe cropped like it is to avoid a spoiler—Supegirl has been exposed to red kryptonite and is now an ant-headed centaur!—but really, that’s the single best image they could choose? One in which the foreground is devoted exclusively to a teenage girl’s breasts?
I like the fact that the text portion of the tease has Ian Sattler speaking of the wealth of great art he had to choose from too, as if this really was the image they thought would best sell the series over all the others. “I know you wanted to use one with all the crazy gorillas fighting, but there were too many good ones to choose from,” he writes. So he just went with the most inappropriate one.
Also of note is the second-to-last-sentence:
Hmm, what could be redacted? I’ve spent a while—well, five minutes—puzzling over it, and I’m sure it must be a verb followed by a noun and then another noun.
It could be anything, of course: “I still can’t believe that we’re going to let them consume Pop Rocks and cola,” or “kidnap Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar” or “marry Green Arrow and Hal Jordan.” I have the sneaking suspicion that the first blacked-out word is “kill” or “kill off” and the second two are names though.
The only problem with that theory, of course, is who’s left to kill off that hasn’t either just died or just come back from the dead, particularly with these characters involved. When the series was originally announced, the premise was that Hal Jordan and Green Arrow were forming a more pro-active branch of the League in response to a death in the pages of Final Crisis (presumably J’onn J’onnz, as they talked about this after viewing his body). But this tease teases of more deaths.
Maybe Connor “Green Arrow II” Hawke and Ryan “Atom II” Choi? Neither of them are in any books at the moment, and each would seem to motivate some of these characters to want revenge. I mean, justice. To want justice. And to want it badly enough to cry for it.
April 16th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
I was also taken aback by the huge Super-boobs when I got to the last page of my DC books this week.
Between that image and the cover of Oracle #2, DC had a very big week for boobs.
April 16th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Maybe, the issue is that if you’re at an age where being attracted to teenage breasts makes you creepy, you’re probably too old to be still reading superhero comics.
April 16th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Not to give a pass on an dubious choice of imagery, but the context makes it look like it’s part of a 2-page spread that’s been cropped on the right edge and the top edge, cutting off Supergirl’s head. Just a guess. Seems like a lot of unnecessary black at the bottom where the TRINITY image and the caption are.
April 16th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
“Think clean thoughts, chum.” – Batman
April 16th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
“Paul Blart Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Maybe, the issue is that if you’re at an age where being attracted to teenage breasts makes you creepy, you’re probably too old to be still reading superhero comics.”
Wow. And what would that age be? 18? because anything older makes you a pedophile.
MZ
April 16th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Does it make me gay that I noticed the “S” first?
April 16th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Nick said: “DC had a very big week for boobs.”
Or they’re just very weak for big boobs. This might explain Power Girl too.
Honestly though, how the hell did that get actually get published? You can pretty well guess Didio will NOT get asked about that decision in his weekly softball column over on the main ‘Rama page… How Didio keeps his job is beyond me.
Anyhow there might still be hope for this miniseries, but what started off as a great idea has been slowly reduced to… Well, who knows what? Hopefully more than just teenage boobs. I expect so little out of DC at this point, perhaps this mini will pleasantly surprise me. I’d like that.
On another note, what’s with Captain Marvel and the long hair? Is that Freddy and not Billy or something? I’m not a huge Shazam fan, so I have no idea what’s up with the Marvel Family.
April 16th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
pulse768 Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
“Think clean thoughts, chum.” – Batman
LOL.Awesome.
Jacob Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Does it make me gay that I noticed the “S” first?
Yes. Yes it does.
April 16th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
I think they were going for a shot of the S-shield more that anything. There is a close up of Superman’s chest in just about every issue he appears.
April 16th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
This all reminds me…when I was younger, in 5th or 6th grade or so, I would have panicked if this was in my comic…see, my parents were weird on this kind of thing. There was an issue of Uncanny X-Men I bought in like 6th grade, first part of that Phalanx crossover drawn by Joe Mad…White Queen is in it in green skintight spandex (lol yes I remember) spandex, with, well, HUGE breasts looking basically nekkid ‘cept for the green painted on coloring; while reading it my dad and mom happen to peak over my shoulder and asked me, “what kind of pornography is this? Is this what all your comics are like?”
For years after I read my X-Men comics very guardedly…I think I explained at the time, “it was just that one artist,” lol.
April 16th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Now that I think about it, kinda weird, Joe Mad is probably both responsible for pulling me into to comics on a monthly basis and almost single-handedly getting me kicked out of them
April 17th, 2009 at 8:54 am
“I think they were going for a shot of the S-shield more that anything. There is a close up of Superman’s chest in just about every issue he appears.”
Bingo.
I love how people flip out over every shot of a female superhero. The problem at this point isn’t the drawings, it’s you.
April 17th, 2009 at 9:13 am
*Sigh*
Another death-laden superhero comic book series.
Another hero will have “shocking” death that will reverberate throughout the entire “universe” of books.
*yawn*
Whenever I think of either DC or Marvel comics these days, I just think of the “Spam” song from Monty Python and replace spam with death:
Choir (intervening):
Death! Death! Death! Death!
Lovely death! Wonderful death!
Death dea-a-a-a-a-th death dea-a-a-a-a-th death.
Lovely death! Lovely death! Lovely death! Lovely death!
Death death death death!
April 17th, 2009 at 10:25 am
It’s actually Superman, that’s why they are all staring…
April 17th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Wow, American prudes never dissapoint in their ridiculousness!
April 17th, 2009 at 11:09 am
It’s the reliance on soft-core porn to sell comics that’s irritating. The artists could certainly draw half-naked heroines; the writers could have the characters utter actual obscenities, threaten rape and dismemberment, engage in sexual activities on-panel, etc., but then superhero comics would only be sold in the adult-only sections of shops, if printed comics were sold at all. The result is that writers and artists try to appeal to warped and retarded tastes instead of just trying to produce the best stories that they can.
SRS
April 17th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Supergirl’s only purpose is to allow readers to masturbate to Superman without questioning their sexuality.
April 17th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Thank God that we have you and your brilliance showing us the way. Otherwise, we might be subjected to situations where badly cropped imagery is somehow indicative of how an entire company is run.
By the way, the problem with this series is the time that it’s taking to produce the art, not anything to do with Robinson’s script. Put away your bias and move on.
April 17th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Go team boobies!
April 18th, 2009 at 12:52 am
All boobies aside, the real problem with Cry for Justice is that DC’s disaster of an editorial department is already publishing current issues of Justice League of America in a post- CFJ continuity that is confusing, annoying, and if it becomes comprehensible it will make Cry for Justice redundant and pointless.
http://www.groovysuperhero.com/2009/04/jla-31-more-confusing-or-more.html
April 18th, 2009 at 2:27 am
*Dear readers, please ogle this underage girl*
Dont mind If I do!
Hang on that’s supergirl. She’s 17, right? Here in this glorious United Kingdom, that’s legal.
So morally Im safe.
Im not sure how I’m going to deal with the fact that she’s fictional, but if it would have been such an evil thing to ogle fictional illegally young girls, then perhaps it’s not such a bad thing to find a fictional legal girl hot.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Umm… No, I’m no prude. I like beautiful women as much as any straight guy, I just think it’s tasteless to make that the foreground of the ad. I mean, you can’t exactly miss it! Unless there was some other good reason for it, it does seem like it was designed, and chosen to run, for (ahem) titilation’s sake. The fact that it’s a teenage girl (underage, by American standards) just makes it worse. They could’ve at least drawn it differently and given Supergirl her face.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Let me amend that last sentence: “… her face, AND her dignity.”
April 20th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
I like how the people saying this is an overreaction are male and thus not going to understand the length and breadth of offensive sexism ignorance today.
“There is a close up of Superman’s chest in just about every issue he appears.” Really. Well, Sup isn’t in a mid-drift shirt and flying around in a skirt, is he? Nor is the male chest seen in the same context as the female–perhaps you should consider if this was a camera shot involving Sup’s crotch in the foreground. Maybe that would be comparable.
Personally for me this is less about the tits, and more about the fact that she’s GOT NO HEAD. Somehow it’s important to show the boobies, and vaguely have the older male superheroes leering in that direction, than to allow some focus to be on her FACE. HELLO, age-old sexism joke! As for “underage”…eh. That’s stretching it. DC could call her “18″ tomorrow and she’d still look the same. If it was in the context of the story, that would be more creepy.
I get it’s a bad crop, but that’s a poor excuse. I get that there are boobies and (sometimes) penises in comics–that’s not a problem. It’s when the deck’s stacked against female characters and it perpetuates a pathetic and offensive stereotype among comic readers.
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May 13th, 2012 at 5:54 pm
Whereas there’s plenty of instances where I think that the comics artists have pushed the “sexy” aspects in inappropriate moments in a way that is detrimental to the story (and more insulting to men than to women, as it’s as they’re saying, “just let’s fill with T&A and those horny nerds without girlfriends will buy and masturb*te to it”), I commonly catch myself disagreeing with the examples I see on the net. It seems to me more like instead of genuine examples someone stumbled on, it’s the result of someone actively seeking some way to interpret something as offensive and inappropriate somehow. “Let’s write something about sexist comic art… let me look for it… here it is! Boobs! That will do it”.
I’m also with the impression that there would simply be nothing to talk about if it was the same close up on superman’s (or superboy’s) chest.
I haven’t checked the actual story, but Iola’s argument that this is “bad crop” and her other arguments seem to me more like instances of actively trying to interpret it somehow as offensive, perhaps due to conditioning to do so, as some activists train their readers to do, to see offensiveness and ulterior women-hating reasons behind everything.
There are other reasons than “beheading” to leave a face off the panel, one is to create suspense regarding the expression of the person, which seems to me to be the case here, not to emphasize her body in any sexual way, regardless of how she dresses — which, again, is not something that different from how male superheroes dress in terms of sexyness, only if one tries to fool everyone into believing that only actually showing skin that a costume is sexy, and not by being skin-tight revealing of a sexy musculature, looking like painted skin. This is a double standard. That the “male equivalent” would be a close up on the crotch is not only a gross exaggeration, but also seems to trick us into suggesting that the muscular chest of a man isn’t sexy to women, only the genitalia.
And even when such things are done in order to give a sexual/sexy tone to the story (and I’m not saying it always fits the context), it’s simply not true that it implies in some sort of “beheading”, “depersonification”, or whatever. This sort of thing are often simply made-up conjectures starting from the premise that everybody hates women and see them only as sex slaves. Any other interpretation is rejected beforehand, it got to be the worse one, the one that resonates with a victim mentality.