So, depending on how cool your work is, this may be NSFW.

Frank Cho has recently been accused of controversy chasing and sexism for his various sketch covers of Spider-Gwen and Mary Jane, which caused many creators to admonish him while a small subset of neck-beards and fedoras stood with his rights.  He then went on to keep doing this with major female DC and Marvel characters, each with text pointing out the “ridiculousness” of the criticism and including Spider-Gwen commenting from the side.  More than anything, it became a rallying point for those who want comics to stand with a little depth instead of depicting women as objects for men to stare at while slobbering.

Well, in the same vein as his previous “Fuck you” to the comics community, he decided to do it again during the Secret Wars 2015 event by creating another semi-graphic sketch cover for A-Force #1.  The cover depicts She-Hulk getting dressed and trying to smuggle her body parts into the unusually skimpy top.  The text shows that she is running late, and then notes that it is because her “giant boobs” don’t fit in the costume.  Spider-Gwen in the corner says “Outrage!”, which is a call back to the first sketch cover where she was the one exploited.

There are a few things going on here, part of which does make the indictment of Cho fair.  He has argued so heavily that it is his “right” to do this, which it is, but what’s the point?  A-Force specifically is an attempt to create female heroes for a growing female and non-male audience, so Cho decides its very important to show that the male dominance of the comic community will never be undermined by pesky feminists.  Instead, he basically “puts them in their place” by focusing on the fact that they are sexual objects for hetero-normative fan culture.  On the other hand, some have pointed out that it is more ironic than sexual, and it may simply be a commentary on the already existing culture of, for example, forcing female bodies into unreasonably small and tight clothing.

So, without Cho’s own commentary, who, in the past was selfish and mansplaining in tone, it is hard to definitely figure out his intention.  So, what do you think?

So we had to make a choice about whether or not to show some of Cho’s other examples, and since many people have not seen them we decided to.  We enclosed a couple of them in an image gallery below.  We have done this mainly to show just how many times he has done this recently, which I think shows a lot of what his intention truly is.