There was a period in the early 1990s when Marvel ran a "Cool-o-meter" as a bit of filler on one of their internal promotional pages every month. It was just a drawing
of a thermometer with a bunch of items of varying degrees of popularity listed along the side. The implication was that stuff at the top of the thermometer was hip and trendy, while stuff at the bottom was played out and passe. I thought it was an interesting look into what was top of mind for Marvel's editors... but I also realized that the publishing process meant it was several months out of date by the time I looked at it, so it always struck me as an odd kind of inclusion.
It also seemed a bit weird in that I understood the high and low ends of the spectrum, but most everything in the middle was in this nebulous grey area.
In any event, the Comics Outta Context account on Mastodon posted this one that you're looking at now and you can see one of the items very much towards the bottom of the list is: "pregnant women on magazine covers." Followed immediately by "parodies of same." I believe this particular Cool-o-meter was published one month after
Sensational She-Hulk #34
which features, as you can see here, a picture of She-Hulk holding a beach ball over her stomach in a way that looks like she's pregnant.
Were the folks who put together this Cool-o-meter specifically taking a jab at creator John Byrne, or were they just sick of the pregnant parodies more generally and it was just happenstance that Byrne had just happened to draw one before this list was published? I actually recall wondering that at the time, as I was reading
She-Hulk then and saw that particular Cool-o-meter in multiple Marvel titles I was also reading.
(In hindsight, I expect they were targeting both Byrne
and Greg Capullo who the same month did a similar cover for
Quasar #29. I wasn't aware of the
Quasar cover until years later though.)
However, if you were not aware -- and you might well not be if you're under, say, forty -- Byrne's cover image is a direct reference to a
Vanity Fair cover from several months earlier in which a very pregnant Demi Moore appeared nude in a photograph by Anne Leibovitz...
This was mid-1991 and it was considered quite the scandal at the time. As you can see, none of Moore's "naughty bits" are visible, so there's nothing to explicitly censor, but she's also pretty clearly totally naked.
There's nothing expressly sexual about the image -- or any of the other photos inside the magazine -- and Leibovitz was already a very well-respected photographer.
This was clearly not intended to be or presented as porn in any way. Yet
many retail outlets refuses to carry that particular issue and many people were up in arms about how offensive the image was.
Not surprisingly, the attention the magazine cover got caused imitations of all sorts, some done seriously to emulate the strength of just presenting the female form unashamedly and some done humorously pointing to the absurdity of the complaints. Since then,
Vanity Fair has replicated that cover -- or at least elements of it -- a number of times themselves. I think there's broad recognition that that was something of a milestone for what was/wasn't considered acceptable in publishing, and there's a strong arguement to be made that it shifted a lot of people's outlook on how we're told to perceive beauty.
That said, I actually had a little difficulty in finding a copy of the cover to use with this piece. Demi Moore has appeared on Vanity Fair plenty of times; indeed, about a year after this cover, she appeared again clothed in nothing but body paint. This caused less of a stir, though, because it wasn't immediately evident that she was, in fact, naked and she was no longer pregnant (and it was therefore acceptable as a beauty standard). Most of the ebay copies of the magazine I saw had them in the original plastic the magazines were shipped in, in which an opaque color block covered virtually everything but the magazine's logo. Most of the articles talking about the cover used a cropped version and/or just unrelated photos of Moore. Of the remaining images that did show the entire cover, most of those seemed to have been digitally color-shifted to emphasize the darker areas and shadows. So it would seem that several decades on, people are still concerned about it being 'offensive.'
All of this I bring up as a simple history lesson. If you're flipping through back issue bins and come across an early '90s comic with a character on the cover posed like this, it's this
Vanity Fair issue that they're referencing. It might not seem like it now, but it was huge scandal back in the day.
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