Tom Spurgeon has an excellent interview with Valerie D’Orazio of Occasional Superheroine fame and current President of Friends of Lulu that you need to read.
SPURGEON: Is there any issue in the last three years that you think has been underplayed? Overplayed?
D’ORAZIO: I understand a lot of the outrage some readers have about stuff like T&A in comics. But this stuff is never going away. The primal need to look at a pair of breasts is never going away. Now, saying something like “I don’t want this cherished comic book heroine to be a slut” or “kids shouldn’t read that stuff” or “mixing images of women with sexualized violence can be dangerous” makes sense to me. But take the case of Top Cow’s Witchblade. It’s erotica. It’s like our generation’s Vampirella or Barbarella. I can laugh at this or that aspect, but the title isn’t a menace that needs to be stopped. It serves a function for men, the same function Laurell K. Hamilton‘s books serve for women — the blending of horror/fantasy with erotica.
It’s a long read, I just wish Tom would redesign his site so it filled a little more of the page, so I didn’t feel like I was reading a newspaper column.
