Same as last week, I’m the one chiming in too late on points others have talked about in depth (and in internet terms, for ages); too late to make any difference in the fast moving, run-and-gun world of comic fansite debate, at any rate. And I prefer to post in my own column, rather than range far and wide across message boards, forums, and blog commentaries, so my points will more often than not be missed except for the regular readership and the occasional link from MangaBlog. (Thanks, Brigid!)

And my points this week have surely been made by someone else already — but if so I haven’t read ‘em anywhere else yet, and besides few can match my inimitable, classless style. So there.

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First up: Heroes for Hire #13

It’s Marvel, not manga, and was nowhere near my radar until folks started arguing over the cover. I might not comment at all, except the cover was done by Sana Takeda and as such, terms like “Japanese artistic sensibilities” and “tentacle porn” get tossed about…

Let’s look at just one part — and no, it’s not the cheesecake, or the tentacles.

It’s the eyes.

One of the things often glossed over is the cover’s POV: this illustration (with the position of the tentacles in regards to bound superheroes, etc.) puts us in the role of The Brood, presumably a lead interrogator or fan of Toshio Maeda’s or some such. With this placement, it is the reader who is meant to be staring down these three heroines. If the camera were moved 90° to either side and pulled back six feet, from that perspective this would still be a bad scene and rightly condemned as mysogynist, out of character for our heroes, and far too tentaclely for most tastes — but the shift in POV would be an improvement. By forcing the reader into the point of view of the unseen antagonist, we are made not witnesses but accomplices to the act — or perhaps implicitly, the instigator of this whole mess.

These are heroes? We have, what? Apprehension mixed with disgust and fear, denial, and exhaustion? Lea Hernadez, in her remixed cover, fixes these expressions but needed to go one step further, in my opinion: Given the artist’s (or editor’s) choice to draw the tableau as seen from the viewpoint of the evil Brood, these women should be facing down the enemy. We should see their steely eyes seething with hate for the indignities thrust upon them. Each of them should just ignore the tentacles, and stare the reader defiantly right in the eye.

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Check out Takeda’s website: Her art (when she’s not just tossing something off for an American funny book publisher) is beautiful. I particularly like the one that I’m calling (without bothering to translate the actual page) “Sir Jack on the Eve of Battle”. H4H13 wasn’t her first Marvel cover either: she also illustrated the front of X-men Fairy Tales #1. (a nod to PW’s The Beat for the link to Sana Takeda’s site)

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Next up: Nymphet.

Now, as a young man introduced to the dictates of libertarianism at a very tender age by the Grand Old Master of SciFi I should of course be riled by any attempt to abridge free speech or any movement toward censorship. Except… Well, my personal philosophy ranges quite a bit further afield these days from a slavish adherance to Heinlein’s one-note arguments of self-reliance, and more importantly:

an aesthetic (and business) decision made by a publisher isn’t the same as a government-sponsored ban

and maybe instead of jumping both to conclusions and down Jason DeAngelis’s throat over the decision to cancel Nymphet, we should be commending Seven Seas for even considering the property in the first place.

And the process went pretty far: the title was licensed and presumably translated, and published copies may in fact be sitting in a forgotten corner of some warehouse even now — the decision to cancel came late. If published, I would have bought Nymphet; I would have read it and attempted to judge it on the the skill of the translation and adaptation and on the quality of the original artwork and story; in other words, outside of any controversy and on the title’s own merits.

I have a suspicion that it may have garnered a 0 out of 5 rating, like Welcome to the NHK, but I won’t have the opportunity to write that review now.

This isn’t about censorship. It’s not about a publisher caving in to pressure from the internet, either. I’m sure it was a simple cost-benefit analysis, and in the end, the hourly rate charged by lawyers ended up being much more than the projected profit to be made on each volume. After all, it only takes one Soccer Mom from Peoria to tie things up in court for years, while the assumed fan base for Nymphet will have moved on to the next rated-16-plus-and-wrapped-in-plastic title in just a few months.

Once again: full marks to Seven Seas for even thinking about bringing this title to the American market. It may be just as well for everyone that we won’t be seeing it on these shores, but I hope that publishers aren’t dissuaded from looking at other edgy titles that stop just short of crossing the line.

Hell, two years ago I would have said that we’d never see yaoi or BL comics in the States, and boy would that have been wrong…