Oh, no! Not another blog!

Are sexy covers an endangered publishing species? It surely looks like it. At least where the majors - DC and Marvel - are concerned. Independent publishers like Dynamite and Zenescope seem to have cornered the market for sexy and risqué comic book covers, the former through its monopoly over potentialy erotic characters like Red Sonja and Dejah Thoris, the latter by the eroticizing of fairy-story characters like Alice in Wonderland, Tinkerbell or Snow White, and the gender-bending of other popular characters like Robin Hood or Van Helsing.

The mainstreamers seem to live in fear. Fear from the least bit of polemic that may arise from, say, an excessively lowered zipper on one of its female superheroes. The social networks are alive with crazy people and rabid feminists, and the CEOs in their plush offices, now that their franchises encompass multi-million-dollars cinematic universes, take their histerically amplified screeches for a legitimately representative voice. Which they aren't. They're just howls from the fringes of insanity, souls lost in the madness of adrift meanings, mere fahtwas issued from comunicational ayatollahs from the Left.

And still, sex sells. Sex attracts. The mere promise of bare flesh titillates the prospective buyer at the newstand or at the comic book retailer. And if the prospective buyer is a teenager still not tainted by the foul tendrils of the videogame industry, someone that still has functioning neurons that allow him to read, such promise, garishly advertised in four-colour ink, is irresistible. Even when one knows, from past experience and daily reiteration, that the content of the book you're about to buy has nothing to do with the promises that so enticed you.

And yet...deep inside your inner self you feel the tingling. You know covers are mere advertisng, but somehow they seem to have a life of their own. Each cover tells a story. A story made of blanks, empty spaces, unseen frames, each one a disconnected moment from an untold narrative. But inside your mind it comes alive. Your fantasy fills all the blanks, retraces the preceding moments, determines what happens next. The story is yours. All of it. Ther's an intimate connection between the still art on the page and the teeming, torrential events unfolding inside your mind, in your own private imaginarium.

So, yes, this is another blog, devoted to the sexy covers that may hit the stands every wednesday. It will be unpretentious (I hope), mainly visual, a virtual gallery of comic book art and artistry. Now, you may legitimately ask: what is a sexy cover? Is it enough that we have a scantly clad powerful maiden? That such maiden strikes a sensual pose? That she has bountiful breasts, thrust directly at the reader? (Or, each to its own, a man with bulging muscles in a heroic pose?) What makes something sexy rests undoubtfully in biology...but also has a large dose of cultural and of subjective. For me, personally, the mere physical attributes are not enough. They demand to be integrated in a context. A dangerous context. A menacing context. A sensual context. One could try to advance a theoretic definition of what makes a comic book cover sexy. But let us try to illustrate it instead. So, for me, these are sexy covers:

Enjoy the gallery and feel free to comment.