Yeah, I’ve been away from here, but I kinda needed to not think about the blog for awhile. Now I’m back, so let’s get caught up on some stuff:

- More ECBACC photos: A bunch from Joe Wheeler, and even more from Mikhaela Reid, including photos and a report on the Black Women in Comics panel!

- The children’s fantasy book Marvelous World by Troy CLE is now available from both Simon & Schuster and Random House. I’m told that the author was on BET’s 106 & Park as well. If that’s available online somewhere, I’ll try and find it.

Tim Russ from Star Trek: Voyager is directing a Trek film of his own with some very familiar names in Trek lore. Just don’t call it a, y’know, a fan film.

- More on the Heroes for Hire controversy. I don’t like the cover either, in case you were wondering. Beyond any anti-feminist rationale (and there’s certainly enough justification for that), simply as a piece of comics art, it’s crappy. Here’s my reasoning as to why:

The Brood (the creatures with the tentacles) impregnate their victims – male and female – with their offspring that eventually take over and destroy the host body, Alien-style. However, if I remember my old X-Men comics properly, there’s never been any indication that they get a sexual thrill from it. So while I realize that sex sells, any sexual connotations in this panel – for example, Colleen’s zipper pulled all the way down to her navel, exposing her massive cleavage – is misleading and doesn’t convey the Brood properly. When the Brood procreate in this manner, they’re not getting their jollies off of it. They’re doing it to further propagate their species and dominate other ones. (If there’s evidence to the contrary, I trust someone will correct me.) So tone down the overt sexualization of the H4H women; this cover should scare people, not turn them on.

The women are drawn as templates and not as individuals. This is skirting the edge of the feminist objections to the cover, but aesthetically speaking, I don’t think it’s asking too much for some distinction in these characters beyond different hairstyles. Maybe Colleen’s chest is smaller than the Black Cat’s or Misty’s. Maybe the Black Cat is taller than Misty and Colleen. Maybe Misty is an African American and should be drawn as one! Oh wait – she is African American! That must mean the shape of her nose and lips is different – my bad.

If the rest of the team is on this cover, surely there are better ways to show them than having random body parts peek out from the background. The way it is now, the image looks somewhat flat and one doesn’t get the sense of a bunch of heroes suspended in a circle. Here’s an idea – why not tilt Colleen and the Black Cat at sharper angles? That way you can get more of Shang-Chi and whoever’s on the right side of the page (preferably in profile shots).

The head-on angle of the group shot is kinda boring too, now that I think about it. Why not make this even scarier by rendering the shot from a worm’s eye perspective, i.e., from the ground looking up? This places the reader in the position of being one of the Brood, looking up at the H4H crew. By tilting the “camera” a few degrees to the left, let’s say, and then angling downward, the extreme jeopardy of the situation is heightened and emphasized much more dramatically than in the eye-level shot. And maybe then all you might need is a single tentacle instead of several, snaking upwards in the foreground. With lighting coming from the bottom as well, shining upwards into H4H’s faces, you further establish the menace that’s rising from below.

So you see, even beyond the hentai allusions, there are other reasons why this cover is not as good as it could be.