Anonymous asked: What do you think about Black Widow Strikes, do you think there's still a need to make BW fight in her underwear just so it sells?
I can just direct you to my feminist nerdragey review, of which I somewhat regret the vehemence.
But— I think it’s interesting that you’d say “just so it sells”, because I don’t think it will sell very much at all. If superhero books that star women are a niche product, superhero books that don’t take place in the mainline universe(s) are even more of a niche product. And the marketing shows that they’re treating it as such— compare the press this series got with the the new Fraction/Aja Hawkeye book, or even something like Captain Marvel. Black Widow Stirkes is not really being taken seriously by anyone, I’d argue. Certainly my eye-rolls and frustration with the title hasn’t blown up into a Nu52 Starfire Online Controversy Event. And that’s because no one really thinks it matters.
Sex doesn’t sell Marvel comic books. I don’t think it’s ever sold Marvel comic books. Marvel heroes are a brand and that brand is distinctly PG-13. That means there’s room for titillation, for the airbrush stylings of Greg Land, but there’s not room for the kind of frankness you’d need to market the books just based on sexytimes. There are books like that— niche titles like Tarot, or out-and-out sales failures like WorldWatch. I’ve uh, become weirdly fascinated by WorldWatch in the space of the past five hours, which is exactly how long I’ve known about this comic, but here’s how Austen explains why it failed:
To pay people the kind of money I was paying, you needed to have minimum sales of 10-15,000 copies sold and I didn’t think it was all that insurmountable. I pulled high numbers on my bigger Marvel books, but even with “The Eternal” I was pulling in at least 25,000, so I figured 10-15 wasn’t a real stretch, but apparently the Marvel name does mean something even when you’re selling a book about characters that most people don’t care about.
I mean, it might have also struggled because it contained lines like, “let’s just say Jetman’s sausage was tasty but not very filling” just a hunch, but I think Chuck Austen is actually onto something, here! Boobs, basically, aren’t what sell superhero comics. They’ve never been what sold superhero comics. The T&A that characterizes the industry today is largely a relic of the 1990s “Bad Girl” Liefeldian school of art, it’s not written into the DNA of the genre. What sells comic books, what sells Marvel comic books, is attachment to the characters, or failing that, attachment to the shared universe they inhabit. Books, I think, often live or die based on the perception of their importance to the ongoing narrative of the MU. That’s why events go gangbusters, that’s why solicit copy always promises that nothing will be the same.
And here’s the kicker: the xxx-treem male gazifying that superhero comic books can sometimes do distracts from the gravitas of their female characters. It’s hard to take a superhero seriously when they aren’t allowed to put their costume on for their fight scenes. I can’t deny there are some dudes out there who like their superheroines sexy-lamp style, as pretty things to look at in the background and not much more. But even these dudes aren’t buying comics for the sexy lamps, they are buying comics to see Wolverine and Captain America punching each other while wearing very tight clothing. Sexy lamps will never sell comics, because they’re by definition inessential. Part of the problem Marvel has with headlining female characters is that they’ve almost all been treated like sexy lamps, at some point, and that readers have let themselves be convinced that is all that they are, or can be.
So yeah, having Natasha star in a comic originally published in Maxim where she fights only in various states of undress is probably not a super-great way to convince readers of her importance and unique worth to a shared corporate universe.
