‘Spider-Woman’ Butts Into Gender Debate With ‘Porn Pose’ Cover (Image)

Good: New female superhero comic. Bad: It’s all about her butt

The brand-new “Spider-Woman #1” is earning cheers for giving a female superhero a prominent place in the Marvel Universe, and jeers for the prominence of her butt.

A variant cover of the first issue — an alternate cover designed to encourage collectors to buy multiple copies — finds our hero, Jessica Drew, sticking her posterior in the air like she’s auditioning for Nicki Minaj‘s “Anaconda” video. Her costume appears painted on.

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Artist Karine Charlebois wrote on her blog Less Tits N’ Ass, More Kickin’ Ass, that the cover by Milo Manara wasn’t just anatomically improbable, but porny. She was one of many critics disappointed that even when a female hero was given a prominent role, it was an overly sexualized one.

“The variant cover by Manara looks like a pose right out of porn, pelvis up and cheeks spread, costume looking like body paint, and it makes me very uncomfortable. She doesn’t look like a superhero about to strike, she looks like she’s about to get… well, it’s a porn pose,” Charlebois wrote.

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She said the original cover wasn’t great either, because Spider-Woman and her fellow heroine, Silk, are posed in ways that are nearly impossible.

Manara is an Italian artist known for his erotic approach to comics art. So Marvel knew what it was getting into.

Here’s the variant cover:

Spider Woman

And the original:

Spider-Woman-2_612x931

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