Well at least she's not doing laundry...

Whew! Just in time! The comics blogosphere had juuuusst about exhausted its last bit of rage over the "Heroes for Hentai" cover, when Marvel released an image from the upcoming fifth printing of the hardcover collection of Marvel Zombies, a rather clever (and phenomenally successful) series which posits a world in which the Marvel heroes have become zombies.

It was Mark Millar's idea originally, in the pages of his brief Ultimate Fantastic Four run, and it was a great one: Marvel Superheroes + Zombies = A License To Print Money.

Part of the fun for fans was that each issue that sold out necessitated another printing, which sent the cover artist Arthur Suydam back to his drawing board, to come up with a zombified version of a classic Marvel cover.

I can't believe they're using this one though.

The fact that it depicts the corpse of a 15-year-old girl, or that it takes its cover image from a series targeted at young girls aside, I find it hard to believe that the cover of Mary Jane #2, from way back when the ongoing Mary Jane was downgraded into a miniseries (and, if I remember correctly, was later upgraded to a series of miniseries, and then relaunched as a new ongoing under the new title of Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane), is a classic Marvel cover. I imagine most of the customers of Marvel's superhero line of comics don't read the Mary Jane books, which occur in thier own little pocket universe, one that's neither "616" nor Ultimate nor Marvel Adventures, nor would they even recognize the source material.

So, why use it at all?

Is Marvel seriously out of classic cover images already? Or is this an attempt to capitalize on what I imagine must be the very, very, very small audience of zombie fetishists out there? Hell, they did a cover just for the tentacle porn fans, so maybe they'd do one for the zombie fetishists as well.

So, anyone want to place bets on what the inevitable next zombified cover image will be? Something from Power Pack or something from Franklin Richards?

If they used a zombified version of the "comiquette" or of the Heroes for Hire #13 cover on the sixth printing, or a future printing of the trade paper back, that would would actually be pretty cool. That would show that Marvel has a sense of humor about its own decadence, and would acknowledge said decadence's existence. "Oh, this image of Mary Jane washing laundry offends you girls? Well, what do you think of this image of a zombified Mary Jane washing laundry? Ha ha, even death is no escape from laundry and pleasuring a man! Ha ha!"

I'd certainly welcome that sort of reaction over another, "Oh, this image of the rotting corpse of a 15-year-old girl we culled from the cover of a series we commissioned specifically to attract young women to our products offends you ladies? What, seriously? Gosh, we never thought of that. You're probably just reading too much into it."