Given that this panel is from a Kevin Smith-scripted comic...

...I suppose it passes for a subtle dick joke.

It's from Batman: The Widening Gyre, by Smith, Walt Flanagan and Art Thibert (although the artists' names read like fine print on the cover of the collection, compared to Smith's above-and-twice-the-size-of-the-title credit).

I haven't read the book yet, despite my interest in a Satanic superhero named Baphomet whose costume includes a goat head (Any advice from readers regarding whether this is a trade to buy vs. one to borrow from a library?), so I saw the panel in a little excerpt on DC's Source blog. The subject of the post, by Dan DiDio, was how Smith's original scripting of the scene called for a couple of dolphins attempting to have sex with Batman. If I'm reading DiDio's post right. Maybe the dolphins attempted to have sex with Batman in the previous scene, and they just had to edit out Batman and Aquaman's conversation about being humped by dolphins...?

Wertham was right.

And I know what you're thinking, but no, context doesn't really help much.


See?

If you're wondering who drew this masterpiece of symbolism though, it was Mike Gustovich, for 1988's Young All-Stars Annual #1.

God bless superhero comics.

So this is apparently the second page of Magog #6, by Keith Giffen, Howard Porter and John Dell. You can see the page, along with three others, as part of a preview on Newsarama.com by clicking here.

On the first page, we see a splash of Power Girl punching Magog in his stupid Magog-y face, while he narrates, "Now I understand the cleavage cutout she sports. Distracting doesn't begin to describe it." And then there's the above page, which features a third panel in which Magog seems to be groping our heroine.

Okay, yes, I know that's not what's actually happening, and that the two-dimensional drawing of a three-dimensional world in which Magog's hand just happens to flail between the reader's eye and Power Girl's breast, but it looks like he's groping her.

So, Howard Porter penciled that image, then John Dell inked it, then someone else lettered it and someone else colored it and, presumably, an editor and/or assistant editor each looked at that page before it went to press (if not between each of those steps), and no one thought that panel might look a little weird?

I fail to see what that Wertham fellow was so worked up about.

This image of Namor the Sub-Mariner pointing his huge gun at the sky to shoot down enemy airplanes, for example, looks perfectly innocent to me.



(That's the cover of 1940's Marvel Mystery Comics #14, which was recently reprinted in Mystic Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1, which you should totally read)

Special homoerotic subtext variant cover for Secret Invasion #3

After having spent the last few years off-panel, Nick Fury is back, baby! And he's holding his giant gun at crotch-level, the tip exploring The Vision's pretty, pretty android mouth.

Hey, it's not gay if the dude's synthetic, right guys?

It's the dialogue that clinches it

It's kind of nice to see Batman and Robin aren't the only superhero/sidekick crimefighting duo with this kind of...subtext in their adventures.

Robin, Agalmatophiliac

When Batman and Batwoman go out of town, leaving their teenage sidekicks alone and unsupervised, Bat-Girl immediately throws herself at Robin.

Despite the fact that he's a red-blooded teenage boy, and the fact that young Betty Kane is a pretty teenage girl, Robin rebuffs her.


Another woman, Robin? Who could it possibly be? You and Bat-Girl have so much in common! You both fight crime in Gotham City in masks, red and green costumes and bare legs, alongside grown-ups dressed like giant bats. Is there really another girl out there more perfect for you than Bat-Girl? Who?


A statue, Robin? Really?



(Above panels from the story "Bat-Mite Meets Bat-Girl" in 1961's Batman #144, by Bill Finger, Sheldon Moldoff and Charles Paris)

Wertham was right

Sometimes a giant underwater monster's claw crushing a submarine that's futiley trying to hit it with torpedoes is just a giant underwater monster's claw crushing a submarine that's futiley trying to hit it with torpedoes.

And sometimes, it looks more like this:








This blog post has been brought to you by:

The things you see while scanning Golden Age superhero comics...

The other day I was scanning some random images from an old Shazam! Archives Edition for my post about Captain Marvel's quest to punch one of each animal species in the face like some kind of sadistic, caped Noah, and part of the scanning process involves blowing the pages up real big and then cropping them to cut out everything that's not Captain Marvel abusing an animal.

One of my favorite images is this one, of Cap wrestling a rhino to save a beautiful damsel in distress:



I like the sheer manliness of putting a wild animal in a headlock, and I like wondering how the hell it is that this random white chick ended up in the predicament of being charged at by a rhinocerous (The story in the comic which once wore that cover didn't involve any rhinos or imperilled young women in jungle settings).

But what I really love about the image is the text, "Captain Marvel On The Job!" Like it's his job to wrestle wild animals. Like Billy Batson's PDA had "Check and see if any pretty ladies need saved from wild animals" between "Meeting with Sterling Morris" and "Six o' clock broadcast."

At least, I thought that was why I liked the image so much. When I went to scan and crop it, however, I happened upon a couple of possible croppings that made me think that, well, that maybe Wertham wasn't such a crackpot. So, presented without any further commentary, are two portions of the image zoomed in on and removed from anything else that might put them in a less salacious context: