An Italian erotica illustrator has spun a tangled web of controversy after drawing an alternative cover for an upcoming Spider-Woman comic that shows the character in a pose that would make Miley Cyrus blush.
Critics have blasted the cover of "Spider-Woman #1" as overly sexual, sexist and in poor taste. But some fans aren't offended by the image, showing the heroine with her derriere in the air.
"I was surprised to see it because of how well Marvel had been doing recently," says Jill Pantozzi, editor in chief of TheMarySue.com, a pop culture news site. "For a variant cover to pop up which is very offensive to many women and men, there seems to be a disconnect there."
Dani Ward, manager of Staten Island's JHU Comic Books, finds the cover unsurprising in an industry that has catered mainly to adolescent males since long before the character was first created in 1977.
"Not many regular comic readers are offended by this," she says. "They get more offended if someone draws lips on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."
Still, it's a particularly surprising KAPOW! for female readers given Marvel's recent track record. The publisher has been praised for adding a number of new titles centered around female characters for a growing segment of its readership.
The company announced a woman would be taking over the hammer as the new Thor, the character played by Chris Hemsworth in the Marvel movies. Other new Marvel titles have focused on veteran heroines Black Widow, She-Hulk, Captain Marvel and Elektra.
Marvel has also introduced a series around a new Ms. Marvel character, whose alter ego is a Muslim-American teenage girl from Jersey City.
"I think that the people who are upset about that cover have a point, at least in how the image relates to them," Brevoort wrote.
He added that Manara's Spider-Woman art seems "far less exploitative to me than other Manara pieces we've run in previous months and years."
For most of his 17-year tenure at the Daily News, Ethan Sacks has covered movies, television, comic books and geek culture. He's profiled a who's who of Hollywood personalities from Affleck to Ziyi Zhang, traveled to New Zealand to be filmed with performance capture technology, “directed” Steven Spielberg and broke the story of Marvel Comics' decision to kill off Captain America, a scoop that was picked up by more than 4,000 outlets around the world. His proudest moment, however, was having Spider-Man co-creator Stan Lee dub his daughter “an official Superheroine, forevermore entitled to wear the colors and insignia of the fabled House of Sacks. So hath it been stated. So shall it be.” A close second was the actual birth of said daughter…