No, not the Coldplay song. Bill Sherman’s doing quite a good job at cataloguing the abuse of that particular band’s music. (With a little help from yours truly, of course….)
A bit of background for the non-fanboys (hint: If you don’t know what “fanboy” means, then this part of this entry is for you): A while back there was something of a shitstorm over the cover for Marvel’s upcoming teen romance comic, Trouble. Written by the clever (if occasionally insufferable) Mark Millar, the book’s cover features an actual photograph of two bikini-clad teenage girls. But as Dirk Deppey points out and Jim Henley backs up (they’re both long entries, so you’re welcome to take my word for it), the controversy, such as it was, stemmed solely from the fact that the comics fanboy community automatically associates “bikinis” with “Vampirella,” which is to say with “comics that give me a big boner.” Underage girls in bikinis, then and therefore, equals child pornography. But had these human caricatures ever browsed through the young adult section at their local Barnes & Noble, they’d have seen dozens of similarly themed and targeted books with precisely the same sort of covers. Marvel’s intent, believe it or not, wasn’t to titilate–it was to fit into a preexisting market, one that fanboys and the retailers/enablers didn’t recognize or understand.
But then there’s this. It’s the cover for the proposed second printing of the first issue of Trouble, in case the first print run sells out in comics shops due to unanticipated demand. It features an illustration of the book’s teenage female protagonists (by fanboy fave Frank Cho) that can only–and only too aptly–be described as “titilating.”
I don’t necessarily have much of a problem with Cho’s art: Unlike many comics cognoscenti who think he’s an uninspired rip-off-artist hack, I actually the pin-up girls that are his artistic bread and butter are kinda sexy. But personally he seems unsavory, having teamed up on several occasions with the unfunny Scott Kurtz to let their collective “we’re deliberately ignorant of art- and alt-comix!” flag fly in a series of appalling message-board flame wars and inside-joke-ridden gag strips. (We’ve all experienced the occasional snobbish excesses of alternative, indie, and underground comics, but to assert, as they did, that all altcomix are pretentious unreadable garbage is to be so self-evidently stupid as to nearly preclude a rejoinder. It’s reminscent of those conservatives who, in response to an admittedly annoying diatribe from the Left, proudly flaunt the fact that they waste a lot of gasoline in their SUVs, or that they just ate a really great piece of veal, or that they love smoking cigarettes, or that they find the Diceman funny. Folks, the Left may be annoying at times, but two wrongs don’t make a right, and all that stuff is still hella stupid.)
Sorry for the digression–the point is that Cho’s art is all about the tease, and using it as the cover for a teenage-girl romance in an effort to appeal to precisely the same fanboy and retailer demographic that’s the target for his wank-fodder cheesecake is all kinds of inappropriate. Marvel has to prove that it knows the difference between using mature themes appropriately to tell good stories and using them inappropriately to sell good stories (or worse, bad ones).