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SIX KEYS TO A LITERARY GENETIC CODE

In essays on the subject of centricity, I've most often used the image of a geometrical circle, which, as I explained here,  owes someth...

Friday, July 2, 2010

INSIDE THE COVER STORIES

Well, as I pretty much predicted w/o looking in advance, the majority of the covers do indeed deal largely with "disempowerment" from the threat of getting killed, and with very little sexual-humiliation content. Only a couple in each category show the hero in either a triumphant situation or one that's fairly neutral in terms of peril (the 1975 WONDER WOMAN cover is one of those "what's going on now?" type covers.) Few are particularly sexy, which might indicate that (a) the overall sexualization of WONDER WOMAN may have been less statistically prevalent than the common wisdom asserts, and (b) something in the water at DC Comics seems to have made for a lot of Dull Covers with these two titles.

As I said before, I'm not denying that there have been *more* sexy-disempowerment-- or even sexy-empowerment!-- covers for WONDER WOMAN than there have been for FLASH. But I think that even a more rigorous study than this random sampling would still find against the common wisdom in some respects-- to say nothing of an examination of the actual stories which the covers were selling.

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