The Sound and the Fury

[kalenodonnell]

Forewarned is forearmed.  For people who have no interest in my rants, and/or gratuitous female examples of all that is wrong with the comicbook industry, proceed no further.  For people who do....enjoy.

I consider myself to be a fairly enlightened individual.  Err, all things considered.  But there's legitimate grievances against 'the man' and then

Comments

[freneticfloetry]

Okay, beyond the fact that it's anatomically impossible to anything that low-cut without nipples on parade (seriously, does she have nipples? Are they just in the wrong place?), this sparks a wealth of interesting thoughts.

The MJ statue, for one. (Yes, whore, I brought it up. Deal.) I couldn't care less about her attire. Hell, I do laundry in my underwear. And I would like to think that what got double-X chromosomes everywhere flying off the handle in rage was the overall message. You know, the "my husband needs to save the world" - aka, be the big powerful man - "so naturally I must make sure he has a clean Spidey suit to do it in" - aka, time to play the Little Woman.

The pearls didn't help, either.

But I digress, since I found the whole thing kind of tongue-in-cheek after awhile. What I'm trying to say is, I can understand uproar over that one. This? This is... asinine.

It sounds like you're not familiar with hentai. I, unfortunately, cannot say the same. I have an ex who loved it. And, reading the translation you were given, my head automatically corrected - Not 'tentacle porn', K. 'Tentacle rape'. It's one of the most disgusting, shudder-inducing things I have ever subjected to (and best believe that was the beginning of the end for that particular relationship). So the thought that female Japanese artist (who may very well be familiar with hentai) would knowingly and willingly channel that genre, for public consumption no less, is laughable. It'd be career suicide. She'd have to be out of her mind.

Yes, it's a crappy cover. Yes, it's in bad taste (to say the least). But hentai glorification? Rape fantasy? I highly doubt it.

[kalenodonnell]

Well actually I am aware its tentacle rape, unfortunately, as that's what a lot of the arguing is about, and how its 'rape fantasy.' Tentacle porn was me downplaying it a bit because I just can not see that for the life of me. I agree with pretty much everything you say here, because from everything I understand of the subject, I came to the same conclusion about the artist myself. I mean, this is the same woman who did the cover to X-Men Fairy Tales. (An absolutely gorgeous cover, much more worthy of her talents). And hell, its kind of amusing that as much as people are getting up in arms about all the stereotypes this cover brings up, I wanna be all...umm....way to be hypocritical and assume the same thing in thinking the artist was going for a hentai allusion when all you know about her is she's JAPANESE.

And as for the Mary Jane statuette.....grrr, sorry, but that's part of the whole ridiculousness of THAT matter right there. Whatever the end product, Marvel's contribution and Adam Hughes's concept sketches were DEFINITELY not going for the doing her husband's laundry interpretation. Anyone remotely familiar with his work could tell you as much. The original sketches were perverted to create the statuette, and its amazing how so few changes can radically change the intent, because really, the end result wasn't THAT different from the concept art, but it sends a radically different message. In Hughes's sketches, it was clearly a cute, cheeky little 'Aha tiger, I found out your secret!' moment with a triumphant MJ holding up the Spidey suit she found in the laundry, grinning the grin of someone whose just figured out a particularly annoying puzzle. Totally different intent, especially as the conclusion drawn from the original is Spidey did his own damn laundry, else she would have already known about the suit before she found it in the pile of clothes.