Article 10: Cover Story

Marvel's recent photocovers have caused a few raised eyebrows, and not without cause - but they're neither as provocative nor as inappropriate as the work of one of Marvel's favourite cover artists.
18 August 2003

Nobody should ever underestimate the power of a good cover. Or, for that matter, a cover that's at least vaguely different from everything else out there.

So in principle, I'm all in favour of Marvel's recent rediscovery of the photo cover. After all, nobody else is doing it. It seems an eminently good idea. Something to make the books stand out.

But at the same time, those covers have been accused of being, well, a bit tacky. When it came to TROUBLE, I couldn't really see the point. This was, after all, a series about teenagers on holiday. The covers, which show photos of girls in bikinis, didn't really have any sexual elements beyond the mere fact of showing girls in bikinis - the poses weren't provocative, the costumes weren't unusually revealing. It was just a couple of girls wearing bikinis. Hardly a stretch, given the subject matter. It didn't bear the faintest resemblance to the characters inside, but then hunting for models who resemble characters drawn by Terry and Rachel Dodson might have stretched Marvel's budget to breaking point.

Marvel's next attempt, on the other hand, immediately leaped out at me as decidedly suspect. It's the cover to 15 LOVE, a relaunch of Millie the Model as a tennis player. I have to admit to wondering what on earth the reasoning behind this series is in the first place - the basic premise of a romance comic about a teenage tennis player is perfectly sound, but why in the name of god tie it to a musty old property like Millie the Model? Are there still any teenage girls in the USA called Millicent? Why not just create a new character from scratch? Then you have two completely separate properties you can sell off independently. Strikes me as a much better idea.

But I digress. Returning to the cover: my initial reaction was that this was really quite dodgy. Underage girl in microscopic skirt, in pose apparently designed specifically to demonstrate the microscopic nature of said skirt. Hmm.

There is, however, a counter-argument. The defence usually advanced for TROUBLE, and equally applicable to 15 LOVE, is that these covers are not supposed to be titillating male audiences. On the contrary, they're primarily trying to mimic the style of novels aimed at teenage girls. And this is a good argument. The covers of those novels are indeed broadly similar in style. Flick through a few of them and it becomes readily obvious what Marvel is aiming for.

Yet a sense remains of Marvel intangibly missing the mark and landing somewhere it doesn't really want to be. Why is that? In large part, I suspect it's a matter of how we choose to read the cover. Comics readers, both male and female, are largely used to assuming that mainstream direct market publishers aim their direct market comics at the direct market audience, which is overwhelmingly male. And reading it in that light, it's easy to see photocovers as slightly queasy exercises in presenting girls for the entertainment of male viewers.

But if Marvel is really aiming for the teenage girls, then that's not how the intended audience would read the covers; as with the novels that Marvel is mimicking, they'd presumably take them as characters being presented as objects for identification. A reading of the cover that depends on taking for granted the perspective of a 15-year-old boy is of dubious validity.

And yet... Marvel is trying to have its cake and eat it, at least with TROUBLE. That book has been given the usual direct market publicity drive, not to mention an utterly pointless tie-in to the history of Spider-Man. (Which, by the way, seems to be premised on the entirely unlikely proposition that Aunt May is less than 20 years older than Spider-Man. I know we're not meant to let continuity stand in the way of "a good story", but come on. This involves a ground-up rewrite of the generational gap between the characters.) Regardless, thus far, that book has been given plenty of publicity aimed at the traditional audience and not a great deal aimed at the supposed new audience it's theoretically meant to be attracting.

Realistically, who is actually expected to buy TROUBLE? The existing core direct market audience, or teenage girls who are led to comic stores by virtue of their psychic powers? Matters may be different when we get to the stage of the trade paperback, but that still doesn't really address the question of covers for the serialised version. And it's not unreasonable to infer a similar position for 15 LOVE. Marvel does seem reluctant to accept that if it really wants to produce a teenage romance book for girls, that involves appealing to an audience altogether separate from the existing one - and trying to appeal to both will probably just produce a hybrid appealing to nobody.

Even so, let's be honest - these are chaste covers. As with so many things, the covers to TROUBLE and 15 LOVE only appear remotely provocative when viewed in the highly insular context of direct market covers. Spend fifteen minutes watching MTV and you'll see plenty of young women dressed far more provocatively than on either cover. In fact, look around the rest of the comics store and you'll find plenty of material far worse. There is, let's be honest, something decidedly warped about a perspective that finds 15 LOVE covers questionable, and yet considers Greg Horn covers to be par for the course.

Horn is an artist whose work I have always found intensely annoying. It's not that he's technically bad. Far from it. Rather, it's the painfully unsubtle obsession with cheesecake and the total disregard for whether it has anything whatsoever to do with the content of the comic. And, perhaps more to the point, it's the underlying philosophy disclosed by Marvel in commissioning quite so much stuff from him.

As a quick browse around his website should confirm, Horn is an artist with a speciality: semi-naked girls with big tits. Would that we could all get such job satisfaction. In fairness, however, Horn is entirely capable of doing other illustrations if he wants to. Here's a cover for an upcoming issue of NAMOR. Here's one from ELEKTRA Neither are really to my taste, but they're perfectly okay.

But really, most of Horn's work does fit into a fairly clear category of heavily-sexualised versions of the female lead character. On ELEKTRA, in fairness, he did make a reasonable attempt to keep in touch with the content of the story. But that still resulted in >this and >this. Quite how a story about Elektra waiting patiently outside a temple for 22 pages translates into a cover where she's arching her back in the rain and wearing spray paint clothing, I'm not entirely sure, but that's what we ended up with.

It's not that Horn is bad at what he does, so much that he can generally be regarded to work it in regardless of its appropriateness to the story. EMMA FROST, for example, is a series about an awkward teenage girl in a boarding school - years prior to getting her breast implants, and likely to remain that way for quite some issues to come. And yet the first two issues ended up with this and this - both, as far as I can tell, entirely unrelated to the actual content of the comics.

Marvel presently publishes five ongoing series with female leads - which, in fairness, is higher than it's been in a long time. The five in question are ALIAS, ELEKTRA, EMMA FROST, MYSTIQUE and SPIDER-GIRL. The latter is a comic about an underage girl and therefore automatically disqualified from cheesecake covers. The former is a mature readers book with David Mack as its regular cover artist. Of the other three, Greg Horn has already provided covers for ELEKTRA, is presently providing covers for EMMA FROST, and is about to provide covers for MYSTIQUE. It is difficult to avoid feeling that Marvel has him on speed dial for any comic starring a female character, with blithe indifference to what the character in question might actually be doing.

In the loose sense, these three might all be regarded as "bad girl" comics - and eyebrows might well be raised that 60% of Marvel's comics with female lead characters happen to star questionably reformed villains. Even so, their creative teams don't seem to regard them as such, and the discrepancy between cover and content is often embarrassing. Frankly, I wouldn't be seen in public with an issue of EMMA FROST. Call me middle class if you will, but seriously, I'd be painfully embarrassed to admit to owning a copy of it, at least outside circles where I can justify it for review purposes.

Something is rather warped about a view of the industry where a couple of girls in bikinis on the cover of a comic about girls on holiday is regarded as questionable, whereas a ludicrous airbrushed cover of a bimbo bearing a tenuous resemblance to the title character is shrugged off as par for the course. Doesn't it suggest a certain inversion of priorities?

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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