Elijah and Azuu

Author notes

#977 Girl's Night Out: Facial Pains

Inkmonkey

on March 9, 2006

One of my teachers (Kim DeMulder; who was the inker for Swamp Thing for a number of years, among other things) was showing the class some of the pictures he had painted over the years. Most of them were of scantilly clad and/or nude women, since, at the time he drew them, he figured those would sell better.

Anyway, as the years went by, he started to notice a few things. One was that parents would quickly usher their children away from his booth at cons, and another was that his non-nude women sold better than his nudes.

The audience for naked women is fairly loyal and easy to please; draw a lady with her top torn off fighting a dragon, and they'll consider buying it. The problem is, the non-naked woman market, not only isn't likely to buy anything, but is also likely to outright avoid it.

The thing is, while the smutty stuff is a dedicated niche market, pandering to it also cuts you off from a lot of the rest of the market. He's even started to take old, nude paintings and painting some clothing over the naughty bits so he could do something with them other than offer them in ads in the back of dirty magazines.

I know this is an odd thing to bring up in a comic that relies as heavily on sexuality as I do, but the story really intrigued me, and I think he has a very good point about the whole thing.