Women of Marvel Poster Book

Background

Marvel recently declared that it was "Women of Marvel" season. Nobody should have been surprised when a Poster Book came along.

These "books" are actually a 36 page magazine format. Remove the staples and you have one cover, plus 17 double-sided center-stapled posters to grace your wall.

Story Details

Spider-Man himself appears on the back cover, and also as a bit of background art in a couple of places, e.g. the "Villain Variant" cover of Amazing Spider-Man #634.

But the women are naturally the real stars. Spider-Fans will note Black Cat from Black Cat (Vol. 2) #2, Mary Jane from the regular cover of Amazing Spider-Man #603, plus a couple of Spider-Woman appearances, e.g. from New Avengers Annual #3 and Girl Comics #3.

Of course, with Mary Jane and Spider-BFF's having recently gotten an outing in the Mary Jane & Friends Poster Book, it's probably fair enough that the rest of the ladies get to enjoy this night out for a change.

As with the aforementioned Mary Jane & Friends Poster Book, this collection also manages to avoid going overboard with the T&A shots. Sure, there are a couple of excess cleavage shots, and one or two "lycra catsuit pinched between impossibly toned buttocks" that we could point to if we were so include. There's also Emma Frost's ever present white panties, naturally. Where would we be without those?

But those are definitely the exception rather than the rule, and generally speaking this once again is a mostly-tasteful collection which works hard to belie the teen-geek horn-dog nature of its likely target market.

General Comments

Given that these posters are double sided and you have to pick one or the other, that's still 17 posters for $5.99, or somewhere less than 40c a poster. I call that good value, given that every image is a luscious pleasure to behold.

Oh, hang on a sec. Hold the phone. I should mention the one disappointment in the entire bunch. The cover image! What a ghastly, overworked and underachieving picture to select as the cover shot. Almost any of the other posters inside would have been far superior to this stilted, poorly composed and poorly executed example.

Overall Rating

As a whole, this is (as are most of the other "poster book" magazines) a value-for-money compendium of some of Marvel's finest graphic works. The cover photo brings down the whole thing, but even so I can't give it less than a solid three webs.