The current issue of Bitch has a great article on the poor treatment of women in superhero comics. Annoyingly and bewilderingly, Shannon Cochran’s story isn’t online yet, but it’s well worth reading if you can track down a hard copy of the magazine. The general point: A lot of the time, women get treated like shit in superhero comics.

Which leads me to this—the new Mary Jane Watson sculpture from Sideshow Collectibles and Marvel Comics.

Particularly nice touches: The thong, the mega-cleavage, the pearl necklace (!), the tear in the jeans, the bare feet (get back in the kitchen, MJ!), and the fact that she’s, y’know, bending over and gleefully doing Spider-Man’s laundry. I’m not offended by much, but… checking… hmm, yep. Definitely offended. Hooray for the funny books!

I feel obligated to point out a few things: That a good number of comics (including, strangely, The Amazing Spider-Man and Ultimate Spider-Man) treat women as real characters and human beings, and not just sex objects who like to wash spandex costumes, and that a large number of popular superhero comics (Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men and Brian K. Vaughan’s Runaways come to mind) feature intelligent, powerful, and well-written women as some of their main characters. This shit isn’t necessarily the status quo in comics—but it is common, and for some reason, the comic book industry still treats this stuff like it’s totally acceptable. One one hand, they wonder why more women don’t read the comics they publish; on the other, they continue to hypersexualize their female characters whenever there’s money involved. (It’s worth noting that on the Sideshow site, not only are there all sorts of pics of the $125 statue, but it’s also sold out.)

Props to devildoll.livejournal.com and girl-wonder.org.