Reminds me of a study I read in college about how marketers always used a sexy lady to sell things, but it was women/wives that were doing most of the shopping, and either didn't care or outright disliked the ads. This was because most advertisers were men, and catering to their own interests.
My dad was ranting about a Kotex ad the other day, called it filth and was furious because it was "sexualizing periods." I reminded him of the entirety of the 80s which involved stacked bikini blonds selling everything in existence. And the ad wasn't even explicit. It was like a yoga mom commercial.
Sonething I’ve noticed recently reading some “mainstream” comics: the women often look weird. Sometimes they’re sexualised, yes. But at other times the proportions just look off. The breasts are wrong. As if there hasn’t been much time spent actually thinking about what real women look like.
I'm curious whether covers that actually tell you what's inside the comic affect sales, because most publishers seem to assume they don't. Covers A through K, and most of them are fairly generic pin-ups that might not even accurately reflect the characters appearing much less give any story hint.
Encouraging, however, the realm of Kickstarter comics seems to be an exception to the conclusions here. There's an excellent substack publication called The Comics Crowd that surveys KS every month and the most recent one showed ~50% of all KS comics were of the NSFW subgenre
The question here is if there's as many "titillating", so to speak, comics on the regular market as there were before Kickstarter. Have the 'Zenoscope' and 'Tarot the Black Rose' types just switched to selling to their audience directly, or is there actual growth?
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