Lady Death: Uncanned

By Press Oblivion July 14, 2011 9 Comments

                          
 
I was looking at the New Comics for this week and noticed that Lady Death has a new series out (7 months deep, I realize that I'm a little late to the party here.) While the images on these covers are very nice and well illustrated, I can't help but notice that her chest has been greatly reduced since her inception in the early 90's. I remember the Steven Hughes version of the character being of outrageous proportions. 
 
If it seems like I'm complaining, I am! I like a woman with a heavy chest and it seemed like Chaos Comics of the era was the only publisher wiling to provide the shock value and buck the system with this character.  Attributes like this with unique proportions are the staple of the character, practically a trademark of their original design. Lady Death without the overabundance is like drawing The Thing without his rock tiles or Batman running abound in pink, it's just not done. 
 

I think that I started noticing her more average build when the Moore Action Collectables were being produced, in the later part of the 90's. I remember thinking then that these figures were awesome but they didn't have the killer instinct of the Hughes drawings that made the character so popular in those early years of her incarnation.
 
As I'm typing this, I had another recollection of J. Scott Campbell, having been asked to do some character designs of her ( link here) and while I love his art, this was a total miss with these samples I thought.  

So here's the question. . . . With Brian Pulido still at the helm of the character (He and Steven Hughes are co-creators fo the character), I have to wonder what the impetus was to change the character in this way? I always figured that for the action figure route, they wanted to make a more socially acceptable female form to attract potential customers that may not know anything about the character,would like the figure but might be turned off by her outrageous proportions. Is this the line of thinking that has Boundless Comics publishing a a bikini model as opposed to a character with a buxom presence.  Perhaps it's something that they're ashamed of?
 
I'm not sure that anyone cares about this sort of thing. It's certainly not everyone's cup of tea but I can't help but feel that this character was created for shock value and attention grabbing aesthetic and for more than a decade she's been lesser of a presence. Would Steve Hughes have approved of this look? Maybe he's the one who started it?

9 Comments