This is the only part of Jake’s post rlq read obviously, haha. Oh how I love ignorance. Funny how people pick out the parts of comments they can use against someone. You should be a lawyer rlq.

And for the people who said that the brood don’t appear to be “tentacle raping” the heroes for hire are wrong.
Please check out ms. marvel #3 done by Frank cho. Shes being attacked by the brood but it doesn’t come across as sexual at all.

(type in brood at wikipedia to see pic)

Thanks for making all male comic book readers look like disgusting pervs. I read comics for good stories not for naked chicks.

Ps. Marvel should stay far away from Japanese based things due to their extremely sexist, and disturbing sexually laced themes.

Second, is not the artist of this cover a woman?

Chances are, not every body knows about hentai. Quesada does NOT need to know about hentai. Did Stan Lee, & Kirby know about hentai back in the day?

HOH is a third rate title that no one ever knew about before this. I follow Marvel & DC stories online, on wiki, on 3 different message boards, & I never heard of HOH until I saw people bit ching about this cover. & from the stuff I learned about HOH after that, the comic always had hard nips & T&A poses.

This was done for the target audience who wants a book about hot chicks & T&A, & marvel hoped to get some controversy & therefore maybe some attention to some lousy title that they put people that cant sell their own books.

And you all just fell for it. Good job there.

Don’t think I’m insensitive. I’ve got a younger sister. So a small part of me feels pity for how women are portrayed as just sex objects. But its not going to change much. I mean, I like Power Girl solely for her revealing costume & boobs, & I sure as hell didn’t watch Buffy for all the feminest messages. & I don’t want to see Superman or Batman. I want to see wonder woman or Miss Martian, & them to look good & with plenty of panty shots & if it were animated plenty of bouncing.

The only thing I hate about HOH Cover #13 is that the art inside is probly not as well drawn as the cover. I’d buy this cover as a wall scroll & hang it next to my nude Major from Ghost in the Shell, Rei from Neon Genesis Evangelion in a bikini, Yomiko from Red or Die half undressed, & the main huge-boobed chick from Divergence Eve posing with a half torn off purple uniform. I’d put that MJ statue right below it.

It is known how the brood reproduce. Even Charles Xavier once succumbed to a brood egg implanted in him in one of his many, countless comic book deaths.
How do you think the egg got there? Yeah, I didn’t hear anyone moan back then. And there are lots of brutality in comics, Marvel and otherwise. During Civil War, that kid in prision got threatened to be beatened and raped but I guess that was overlooked.

This only leads me to one conclusion: males getting raped (or just the “premise” of being raped) is funny and just seen as aggression. Females being in a situation where they “might” get raped (because we all know they won’t) by an alien race that everyone knows (it is NOT as if they invented the Brood right NOW and gave them tentacles NOW to go all mangaverse on the girl’s asses), it’s a sin of the highest order.

It’s not that the situation in which fictional characters are placed that worries me, it’s the massive ammount of double-standards.

Everyone knows that there won’t really be tentacle rape. It’s a Marvel comic. That stuff doesn’t just happen off-camera - it happens off-camera in the distant past background of a character that needs a drama-provider and is never spoken of again until there’s a retcon to produce more plot hooks. I’m with Marvel on this one as they stand behind their artists.

>>This raises, in passing, the controversial topic of the cover for issue #13. There seems to a common assumption, both among publishers and among their detractors, that T&A sells comics. I wonder whether that’s really true. HEROES FOR HIRE has been distinguished by prominent cheesecake art from day one, and just look at its sales. The bad girl genre is virtually dead. MIGHTY AVENGERS, with Frank Cho’s art, is doing no better than NEW AVENGERS with Leinil Francis Yu - in fact, it’s actually the lowest selling of the three Avengers titles, although not by much. And when did you ever see Greg Horn’s covers on a high-selling title?

If this sort of thing is genuinely so popular, why doesn’t it sell better? Could it be that in fact, the audience for T&A comics (or at least comics which are quite so blatant about it) is actually quite small, and that chasing them is a waste of time on commercial grounds alone?

This cover isn’t the same-old same-old, what happens to guy heroes too, to anyone but the hardcore fanboys who like their cheesecake with hard sauce, and even some of them are dropping not only this title, but Marvel itself.

Yet the concerns of women who would like to read comics without feeling like trash or men who would like to read comics without feeling like dogs are dismissed by publishers and their core fans alike. Not just dismissed–mocked, trashed, derided, insulted, and reviled. Very few are willing to consider a dialog or the possibility the other side has a point. And this is why superhero comics are bleeding market share like an anemic vampire victim.

Seriously, if you have any experience with anime or manga at all you probably have encountered it. Sexual themes run through most anime, sometimes it’s more subtle than other times, like say the content that pops up in “Dragonball Z”, and other times it sticks right out like say certain scenes in the well-known “Akira” animated movie.

If you’ve done any amount of image searching on Google you’ve probably seen it. If you’ve looked around at various fan art forums online there’s a really good chance you’ve seen some. If your local movie rental store has an anime section I can guarantee there are at least a few that carry hentai themes if not just outright hentai. If you’ve been into a comic shop or book store and given the manga/anime sections more than a fleeting glance, there’s a chance you may have seen some material that contains adult content. If you’ve been to a comic convention there’s bound to been some anime and manga there and if you stopped to look it over whatsover it’s a good chance you saw something that contained adult material. If you’ve been read THIS BLOG, THE BEAT, for any amount of time you’ve most likely seen Heidi discuss hentai and some of it’s more popular sub-sections.

Pretty much if you’ve been paying attention to the anime movement that’s been going on in this country for the last 20 YEARS then you are familiar enough with it to know that there is adult content in it and some reoccurring themes in said content. You would really have had to of been going out of your way to avoid this ever-growing phenomenon in pop culture by having your head in the proverbial hole. This is pretty much what the top man in the American comics mainstream is wanting you to believe about himself. Manga has just snuck right past him and taken over the next generation of the comic reading audience and he hasn’t the slightest clue what this wacky “manga” thing is.

And if that really is true, as sad as it may be considering his station, then I believe it explains a lot about the current state of the comic industry.

Not really a fair comparison I think. Manga has a separate adult category for hentai and Japanese culture itself has differing views and approaches to both sex and comics. When it is imported here it is as such and sold to those who go looking for it.

Putting obvious visual elements of hentai on an American mainstream comic and expecting no one to notice is something else entirely. Add a EIC that plays dumb and balks on responsibility for it and that’s what we have here.

Now if and when parents catch on that their kids are potentially reading smut in the form of manga that will be it’s own separate controversy.

Comics have done this sort of thing for years. Didn’t Legion of Superheroes famously have every character in the book get drawn naked and provocatively posed, and then the costumes were drawn on later? There’s probably hundreds of examples of artists doing worse than this. This sort of thing has been around a long time. I’m not trying to excuse it, but the kind of “damage” created by it seems very minimal, if any.

I used to watch Three’s Company all the time when I was little (I’m 32), and never really got the sexual innuendo until I saw it again years and years later. I think we tend to overreact to the impact such things have. That road leads to things like the CCA.

That goes for everybody!

I don’t ever want to see the above quote anywhere again! It’s unforgivable among comics fans!”

I know, I know. Despite the thousands and thousands of comics I’ve read, there are still some embarrassing gaps in my comics experience.

Heroes For Hire will remain one of those gaps, however.

The cynical side of me thinks if Newsarama did do actual journalism Marvel and DC would stop talking to them. Or at the very least, pick another website to give early information to.

You really need to read some Carl barks comics.

That goes for everybody!

I don’t ever want to see the above quote anywhere again! It’s unforgivable among comics fans!

Yep. Never read Donald Duck comics either, but I recognize Carl Barks influences when I see ‘em. Never read those ’90s-era Liefeld Image comics, but I recognize the style. Don’t listen to country music, but know it when I hear it. And I don’t read manga, but know the manga style when I see it, and I don’t read hentai, but have come across enough images of it on these here internets and in the comic book stores to have an idea of what it’s all about.

“I’m sure this crap is exactly what Stan and Jack had in mind. R.I.P. House of Ideas.”

Wait. Let me get this straight. _This_ is what made you think the House of Ideas — if it ever existed in the first place — is gone? It wasn’t anything else that they’ve published in, oh, the last couple of decades?

Igaf Says:

“Does Marvel not see that this is part of its road to bankruptcy!? Bah!”

Because sex and sexual themes have never, ever made money for anyone, and certainly not in comics.

CBrown Says:

“I don’t read hentai - in fact I’ve hardly read any manga at all - but even I see the hentai influences.”

You’ve never read hentai. But you see the hentai influence. Okay.

This entire thread — and entire discussion — has essentially turned into a “I’m against pedophilia and misogyny, too!” mutual admiration fest. So allow me to state that I, too, am also against pedophilia and misogyny, and yet still own copies of “Lost Girls,” “Tin Drum,” and “Romeo and Juliet.”

I honestly don’t see how anyone could look at that cover and NOT think it’s gross, sexist, and exploitive, but I guess lots of people just don’t see it.

I don’t read hentai - in fact I’ve hardly read any manga at all - but even I see the hentai influences. But all these other people who read and post on comics blogs have apparently never even heard of hentai or “tentacle rape,” so I guess I’m just a perv for seeing it.

I also honestly don’t understand the way Quesada handled this little tempest. Just from a P.R. standpoint, I would think he would have said something like, “We didn’t intend this sort of implication, we’re sorry if we offended anyone,” without the rationalizations or qualifications. Other businesses have done bigger mea culpas over smaller faux pas.

The only thing I still wonder, which I haven’t seen anyone mention, is why a few years ago Marvel ixnayed this cover for being too racy: http://www.comicartcommunity.com/gallery/details.php?image_id=4702 This cover was too much, but not this Heroes 4 Hire cover? Alright …

R.I.P. House of Ideas.

I tried to stay away from this topic, and yet here I am again. In this case I think Joe is not worried about this because there is not a “sizeable” group of people angry about this.

This is a great example of the mega-phone effect of the internet. Some bloggers start going after a topic, it spreads from one like minded blog to another until you have a handful of very vocal people writing about a topic. I mean look at how many posts there are on this thread, twenty four (if you count multiple posts it is even less.) Chances are these are twenty four people who were not reading the book anyway.

It always seems like more when you are reading the blog regularly and getting caught up in the passion folks bring to things. But from a company standpoint this is not a lot of people.

This is not to say that there are not a lot of readers that do not post. Or that blogs are not effective. They can amplify the voices of people that need to be heard, and increasingly the mainstream media is looking to them for stories. I am sure Marvel is listening to this but they are also probably betting that this will not effect sales on the book or any others.

Well, yah know what the road to hell is paved with of course…

This is amazing to see when DC is revamping thier Supergirl character.

I’m just saying..

Is that too slippery a slope to go down, to give in to public protest even when it wasn’t intended to be what they’re protesting?

JQ: That’s a great question.”

Hahaha. No it wasn’t. It was a horrible question! I’m just wondering if it could possibly have been anymore more confusing and overworded. And that’s not even counting the big ol’ “interrupted” typo. Proofread Matt! This is your frakkin’ job man.

And I’m not sure why Quesada went off on some tangent about how people were always complaining about how minorities and gays were being treated poorly and he was Hispanic so he was like feeling their pain. Wha?

It’s a long way to go to not just admit one of your books stepped over the line and you’ll fix it. Had he simply done that instead of trying to Bush his way through it I don’t believe we’d still be talking about it now.