Amazing Heroes Issue #177- pg. #13

Amazing Heroes Issue #177- pg. #13

Periodical
Comic Strips

Page 13 of Action Comics, Issue 177 is a part of the comic’s “Newsline” section. The page is separated into three columns with who illustrations in the first column and one in the second. The page is comic news and goes through what different publishers are writing about, releasing, running, and charging for their comics. The first story on the page speaks on “4Winds Publishing,” then moves to “Innovation Publications,” “Kitchen Sink,” onto the second column which hosts “Marvel,” “NBM,” and “Onward Comics,” and finally the third column starts with “New England Comics,” “Piranha Press,” “Ray Zone,” “Slave Labor Press,” “Special Studios,” “Trident Comics,” and finally copyright information. The First image is a comic of a man holding a suitcase and an artist's palette with the caption “Have palette, will travel.” This is a satirical piece about comic artists. The second image is the cover of “Bizarre Heroes” which has a woman superhero squatting next to a male superhero seemingly unconscious. The third image is a woman whose shirt is up and underwear is around her thighs. She is apparently masturbating. There is a close-up box of her eyes squinted to block her hand and genitals.

Erotica in comics is published for the viewer, mainly a male gaze, which is then used to objectify and sexualize pictures of women, devaluing the female body and using it for arousal. Erotica became popular because, unlike porn, a still picture or drawing gives the viewer agency to control their thoughts around the picture. The picture is an inference to a sexual encounter. The viewer then has the ability to create an entire sexual fantasy in their head based on that graphic rather than watch a sexual scene already made for them. Erotica lets the audience participate in sexual imagination and take as much or little time as they need to do so. The audience is not confined to the end of a sex clip. Their time with the comic has no boundaries, except the ones they place on themselves. Especially moving from the late 1980s into the 1990s, raunchier, more violent, objectifying, and commercialized depictions of sex were popularized. A turn towards explicit sex was becoming normative.

Erotic magazines became the 90’s modernized Tijuana Bibles, which are small, eight-page erotic magazines that presented homosociality and sexual violence, popular between 1920 and 1960. They contain, and create, aggressive, violence, masculinity that sexualized and abuse women in heterosexual sex. Tijuana Bibles were strictly for the male fantasy of woman submission and male dominance. Sexual power control while simultaneously degrading women were conducted and expected. Consent was rarely present, if at all.

In the 1990s when this comic came out, Amazing Heroes was in major competition with Wizard, another comic publication. Wizard emerged as a major competitor. Arguably, the need to broaden their audience and market share explains why Amazing Heroes moved towards including more content, particularly sexualized imagery.

Executive Editor: Kim Thompson
Managing Editor: Thomas Harrington
Art Director: Mark Thompson
Assistant Editor: Jason Sacks
News Correspondent: George Kaplan
Production Assistance: Roberta Gregory
Typesetting.Proofreading: Graig Maynard & Jasons Sacks
Circulation: Michelle Byrd & Sharon Kingsford
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Printed at: Port Publications, WI

MSU Special Collection Comic Art, PN6725.47

Fantagraphic Books, Inc.

March 1990

Tiffany McIntyre

Rights Restrictions Apply

http://chambl91.msu.domains/CriticalFanscape/items/show/8
http://chambl91.msu.domains/CriticalFanscape/items/show/5

6-5/8 & 10-1/4 in.

English

Periodical

1982-1991