A Perfect Piece of Art...

And if in 12 years someone that no one's ever heard of on a website that no one has cared about in ages DARES to question it's greatness, I will sick a legion of sycophantic fans upon them until that person is harassed off of the internet! You know, like a real pro.

So, yeah, that 12 year old Spider-Man cover with Mary Jane sitting kinda funny is in the news again because someone on Tumblr did a re-draw of it and J Scott Campbell decided to shit himself over it. I think this article from Bleeding Cool sums it up nicely. And, like, okay- I used to really like JSC. He was one of my favorites and I counted him as an early influence. But after a while, I kinda grew out of him when I started to realize that his art was... well, kinda same-y. You could take a drawing he did yesterday and put it next to an almost 30 year old page of Gen13 and there wouldn't really be much of a significant difference. And as for the aforementioned Spider-man cover, it's just... not a very good cover. I don't even consider it sexist per se, and I'm not too big of a stickler when it comes to comic book anatomy, but the composition is pretty boring, nothing really guides the eye, and for the life of me I've never been able to tell what emotion MJ is supposed to be feeling. Is she worried about Peter risking her life? Is she jealous that he's off on an adventure and leaving her behind/ignoring her? Heck, is it supposed to be sexy and she's, like, upset that he hit-it-and-quit-it, leaving her unsatisfied? It could be any of those things, and as a result, none of them!

But, like, who cares, right? Taste change, people and art (should) evolve, and time goes on. But now it's all getting stirred up again because some schmuck on Tumblr (The dog whistle of choice before "SJW" really hit the mainstream) "fixed" it by drawing their own version. Who cares? Well, apparently Campbell does, because he publicly called this person out, leading to a ton of his fans harassing this person. I've seen people argue that the fixer was a jerk in how they went about it and that it was wrong to give unsolicited advice, but all of that completely ignores the imbalance of power at play here. Yeah, the poster talked some shit, and if they had done it at a con to Campbell's face, they'd be a real ass for it. But this was just some no-name amateur artist that probably none of us would have ever known about if not for the 30 year veteran of the industry employed by one of the largest media conglomerates in the world throwing a childish temper tantrum and calling down the all too predictable geek hate mob on them. 

Mediocre art I can make, er, I mean, excuse, but this crosses over into asshole territory. And it got so stuck in my mind, I decided I had to put my own little spin on it, distilling it down to it's purest, most J. Scott Campbell-y form: a skinny, blank faced, big head alien, only identifiable by it's wig and fashion accessories (seriously, if I was EIC of Marvel, my first edict would be no more Spider-Man shirts on MJ) sitting in the """sexiest""" way my horny-12-year-old-boy-stuck-in-the-90's brain could think of.

Oh, and the Spider-Gwen thing.... *sigh* Look, Frank Cho is my favorite artist that I'm embarrassed to admit to liking. Like, his art is some of my all time favorite, but the man himself gets so damn cringe sometimes. He ran -and continues to run!- that "Outrage" joke into the ground so fucking hard that I die a little inside every time I see it. Honestly, I was on his side when it all started, but it's gone on for so long that it's just pathetic now.