Last month, Marvel presented the variant cover for Spider-Woman #1 which featured the superhero in an overtly-sexualized, anatomically silly pose that had her presenting her lady bits to the city below. On Tuesday, the company announced that it had canceled two covers that Milo Manara, the artist responsible for the sexualized Spider-Woman, was slated to draw.
No one liked Marvel’s porny Spider-Woman. And the company listened.
Alex Abad-Santos is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic.
Avengers & X-Men: Axis #1 and Thor #2 were both supposed to have Manara variant covers — collector’s items that are rarer than standard covers — which will now be created by other artists, Newsrama reported.
Manara is known for his erotic comics. And the argument here isn’t whether or not Manara should be allowed to draw his erotic art. The question is why Marvel, a colossal comic company that has started to position itself as a diversity and gender equality leader in the industry, commissioned Manara to create the Spider-Woman cover if what it was touting was gender equality.
Thor #2 is significant, because that's the second issue featuring the history-making female Thor, which Marvel has been touting since this past summer. If the female Thor was drawn in a similar, overtly-sexualized fashion to how Spider-Woman was drawn, the company would have likely faced the same backlash — if not an even greater one.
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