Journey Into Awesome

I’ve already voiced my displeasure about the Marvel and Komen team-up that caused the pinkwashing of various Marvel comics this month.

What I failed to mention in my previous post was that Komen is also running a full page advertisement in each and every Marvel comic out this month. While there’s not much that Komen could have said to make me like them at this point, I found this ad in particularly poor taste.

In light of our current political climate (specifically one in which women’s health decisions are made by men) this ad is particularly problematic. Essentially what we have here is two men discussing what is predominantly a women’s health issue and how it relates to them.

I understand that traditional comic book audiences are largely male and this ad is aimed at “promoting awareness” about breast cancer in men. However, the fact remains that the vast majority of people diagnosed with breast cancer are female. In fact, according to the American Cancer Society “breast cancer is about 100 times less common among men than among women.”

It would have been nice if Komen’s ad didn’t ignore the many female comic fans who are all much more likely to get breast cancer than their male counterparts.

Is it really too much to ask that Komen include at least one female Marvel character in an ad about breast cancer? Did they really need to invent a ridiculous pink hologram named Holly to give Iron Man and Captain America the facts? Substituting  Storm, Captain Marvel, Invisible Woman, Black Widow, or any one of Marvel’s many bad ass superheroines in place of Holly would have helped to make this a little less offensive. But I guess that’s just too much to expect from an organization like Komen.