This is all in the first four issues. Four. And it just keeps going!

I get it. It's Superhero Comics. Everyone and their mother has a rockin' bod and rippling muscles, but also... None of them have a body quite like Luke? The way this man is drawn is unabashedly meant to titillate.

Like, compare him to Spider-Man in the same year. Peter Parker sure as hell isn't being drawn like this. Six pack? Sure. Huge arms? Yeah! But it's not the same!

Look at this Werewolf. If it was Luke Cage in this leotard, his ass would be fat and the second he busted out of that glass his chest would be on full display.

And I can hear you saying, "Hey you, friend there! This is just one sample and they obviously don't want to spend as much time on the muscles!" To which I say FINE. BE THAT WAY. I'LL GO FIND SOMETHING ELSE FROM 1972. I'LL GO FIND THE NAKEDEST SUPERHERO THERE EVER WAS!

The Silver Surfer.

Notice the lovingly contoured muscles. The huge pecs. The thicc thighs. If they weren't allergic to putting his ass on full display without hiding it behind the shadows of his crossed arms you could bounce a coin off that thing.

Every single page has a new panel of Norrin posing like some kind of bespoke facsimile of Auguste Rodin's The Thinker whose only purpose is to brood and indoctrinate a generation of young minds into the joys of riding out a couple cosmic anklebiters and surfing on the rays of the sun and it still doesn't hit the same as something like Luke getting shot in the tit.

And sure there's the easy answer. "Hero for Hire and Luke Cage are inextricably linked with the blaxploitation films of the time" and you're right. It is. You'd probably need a calculator to add up all of the "jive talking noble savages" kicking ass on the streets of Harlem stories being pumped out at the time, and it'd take about two seconds to google someone in the exact outfit he's wearing.

(Entirely a side note, but Black Mariah's potential to be Harlem's very own Kingpin could have been beautiful. She's taller than Luke, incredibly strong and fast despite being overweight, and she's clearly! Clearly!!!! Supposed to be intelligent!!!! She's the reason behind an incredibly lucrative corpse robbing organization and a powerhouse to boot. She's got some killer fucking lines in the one issue she's in ("That's your problem Cage: You've got ideals. Only fools die for ideals, and fools die all the time.") and they just decided to use the most fuckass phonetic accent in comics and a costume straight out of a Mammy stereotype and-)

But I don't believe for a second that the way they draw him is just for that.

Was it to attract women to read comics? Maybe! But it was the 70's! That doesn't seem likely!

Both artists on Hero for Hire do this. His shirt almost never survives an issue and I'm just. What was going on in their heads. Was it a mandate from on high? "Luke Cage needs to be the sexiest motherfucker ever put to paper"?