cheesecake

The Myth of Sexy Superman and the Search for Superhero Beefcake
The Myth of Sexy Superman and the Search for Superhero Beefcake
The Myth of Sexy Superman and the Search for Superhero Beefcake
2011 was a good year for superhero beefcake. Not in comics, of course, but at the movies. And not in terms of quantity, but in terms of quality. What I'm saying is that Chris Hemsworth took his shirt off in Thor, and it was great. All right, Chris Evans took his shirt off as well for his Charles-Atlas-ification in Captain America, and I understand Ryan Reynolds was briefly featured in his scanties before having his body replaced with a cantaloupe-skinned wire-frame in Green Lantern. That was it, though. The bar for superhero beefcake is set pretty low. And the bar is set low because the source material -- actual superhero comics -- has never been fertile ground for the shameless sexual objectification of men.
‘Marvel Divas': The Women’s Comic That Marketed Itself as Cheesecake
‘Marvel Divas': The Women’s Comic That Marketed Itself as Cheesecake
‘Marvel Divas': The Women’s Comic That Marketed Itself as Cheesecake
Our water-is-wet obvious fact of the day: Mainstream comic books love their cheesecake. As anyone with eyes knows, hyper-sexualized images of women are practically a pillar of the superhero comics institution, which NPR calls "a genre in which the terms unexpected and unmarketable are, alas, all too often virtual synonyms...