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May 30, 2018

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1190: Bloodfire/Hellina #1, August 1995

A bit of nudity (for no reason) on today's cover.
Well, there is a reason. We'll talk about that.




https://www.comics.org/issue/1037447/

Back in the early 90s, a lot of the companies producing "bad girl" books (i.e., comics that featured female protagonists who were brutal, occasionally evil, and always scantily-clad) would produce premium variants that featured nude pictures of their characters. The nudity had nothing to do with what was inside the comic, and they're certainly not adult comics, so there's no sex whatsoever. The covers were produced solely to sell more books, specifically to men, though perhaps not exclusively. What we see on covers like this is an artifact of the male gaze made concrete. This character, who undergoes a lot of trauma in her origin, and whose sole motivation is to seek revenge on the men who destroyed her life, has no reason to be naked on this cover. In fact, objectification set aside momentarily, it's actually quite insulting to the character herself.

(A caveat: when I recently picked up a bunch of comics with variant covers like this, I've kept the naked variants and am getting rid of the regular covers. Two reasons: first, I like pictures of naked people. Not gonna lie. I'd be thrilled to see a nude variant cover of a male character's book, like Supreme, perhaps - I won't hold my breath. Second, honestly, given the regular costume she wears, Hellina may as well be naked. In some ways I feel like the nude cover is just being far more honest about at least some of the reasons the character exists.)

As I noted, these used to sell for a premium. The price on today's comic is $9.95 US, so you were basically paying $5 for a naked lady picture. Of course, this was pre-Internet, so such things were a bit harder to come by (ha!). To put things in perspective 23 years later, I paid 50 cents Canadian for this comic last weekend. Those investments people made in the 90s? Not a great idea.

As for the comic itself, it's actually intriguing. There's some similarity between the characters of Hellina and the current Young Animal brilliance of Mother Panic. Both characters are trying to track down and stop/take revenge upon the insidious groups that created them. Hellina just does it in a really, really ridiculous costume, and is much more brutal in her vengeance. And her co-star, Bloodfire, coming off his own relatively (for an indie publisher) long-running series, is a vigilante whose powers come from a combination of a Super Soldier-esque formula and the AIDS virus. I can't quite tell if he was accidentally infected or if it was intentional, but either way the character gives us an interesting take on HIV/AIDS that we don't often see in comics of this era: he gains power from his infection, to the point that he can literally light his blood on fire for brief moments (it's useful, honest). It's also relatively rare to see an ostensibly heterosexual man with AIDS in comics from this era. As a reminder, for those who may have forgotten, the early 90s, and much of the 80s, were an awful time to be queer, in that the rhetoric that surrounded AIDS at the time was if you were not a heterosexual man you were going to get AIDS and die. It was a queer disease. This kept me scared through much of high school, and was not exactly the best environment for a young man to try to sort out his sexuality. By the time this comic was published, I'd started to sort things out, though it's an ongoing process, as are most things in life. And the rhetoric was also starting to change once we hit the mid-Nineties. Perhaps Bloodfire is a reflection of this.

More to come...


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