Journey Into Mystery

Thor #31 Homage Variant Cover

As part of a series of homages to some classics I was asked to draw one of the all-time greatest comic covers ever made by the great Walter Simonson. So this, with my humblest of apologies to Walter, is what I came up with.

Happy Birthday to Frank Cho who turns 50 today!

The whole #SheRa “debate” has shown that male nerds are gonna try to gatekeep EVERYTHING women do, no matter what. The new She-Ra was made by women for young girls, but men are the ones freaking out.

Make no mistake, this is performative. This is intentional. This is to gatekeep.

EVERY time a new property comes out that isn’t directed at them, they freak out. They always target women because they can’t stand the idea that geek culture isn’t being filtered through their male fantasy nostalgic lenses. I’d wager 99% of them never WATCHED She-Ra originally.

This is just another example of men trying to control the conversation to keep it focused on themselves. Well, let me tell YOU that your “hot takes” about what She-Ra looks like are not welcome here. She’s not being made for YOU. Your opinion does not matter.

Deal with it.

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Firstly, we did watch. We watched He-Man, then when she came along we watched She-Ra too, which I guess nullifies your whole “new property” argument, but my “opinion” doesn’t matter so I can’t point out that fact. 

I also can’t point out the fact that had the author of this post actually bothered to do what they accuse men of not doing and WATCHED the series, they’d see Adam (He-Man, you know, She-Ra’s TWIN brother) celebrate his 18th birthday in the first season of his original show, and then would know that the twins celebrate their birthday together (which just happens to be Christmas) in the Christmas Special. That’s at least 19 and going from memory but there might have been more birthdays specific to the twins along the way, so they weren’t at any point 16 “always meant to be 16 years old, even in the original properties”.

Meanwhile, creators who work on this show say while She-Ra hasn’t been assigned a specific age (people just assign 15-16 based on her design) they state that they think of her more as 19-20. Which is why a lot of us who actually did grow up playing with She-Ra toys (and kept talking about her and making websites and demanding the series on DVD making her relevant enough for this reboot to even happen) wonder why such a drastic redesign is needed for a character that’s supposed to be the same age as the original cartoon.

And for those who claim it’s because she’s “meant for young girls”. Then you’re obviously not aware of the reason She-Ra was created in the first place: To service the large number of young female He-Man fans. And it was for kids, it even had a talking broom. No one freaked out about She-Ra in a skirt then.

Witcher 3, doodles #254