The Four Color Media Monitor

Stanley Lau is a talented artist. But the following coverscan he drew is being published on a story where it doesn't belong:

Here is the full reveal of my variant cover for X-Men: The Trial of Magneto #1 featuring the wanderful Scarlet Witch. #scarletwitch #xmen pic.twitter.com/LG99NGJqmr

— Stanley Artgerm™ Lau (@Artgerm) July 2, 2021

It's a pretty cool illustration of Scarlet Witch, if I do say so myself. But much like with the case involving a Supergirl cover Lau drew a few years back, employed as it was for a political agenda, this too is an unsuitable story to wrap it around, one where Wanda Maximoff is turned into a sacrifice for an overblown event. And I think it's a terrible shame when various artists who are more talented lend their skills unquestioned to these terrible crossovers and other such stories that don't do justice to the characters by stuffing them into the afterlife, rather than putting them front and center as a living focus. Why, if Wanda's going to be put to death in this X-Men event, that actually takes away impact from Lau's illustration, making it most extremely tasteless, and running the gauntlet of fetishizing a corpse, regardless of fictional character deaths being a revolving door in science fiction. Even J. Scott Campbell's drawn covers like these for the wrong material.

And as Lau himself mentions, these are also variant covers, and too much money is already being spent on their non-stop production for the sake of the speculator market. All for the sake of pointless cliches that make a joke out of a collapsing medium. We could even add that, if the cover alone is the good part, but the interior art doesn't match the quality and is poor by comparison, it only makes this all the more a cheat.

Labels: Avengers, crossoverloading, golden calf of death, marvel comics, women of marvel, X-Men