Girl-Friendly vs. Girly-Show

I'm coming close to exhausting my local library's supply of superhero comic books. Still plenty of good sequential art available, but in the next week or two I'll have read every cape-n-spandex book on the shelf. I just about blew my mind by reading the trade paperbacks for Go Girl! and Gen13 back-to-back. Both feature young female superhero protagonists but the similarities pretty much end there. Go Girl! is light-hearted, even whimsical, and definitely written with the goal of being read by impressionable young girls and making a positive impact upon there lives. The innocence of Go Girl! is refreshing, reminiscent of the best of siler age Superboy, what little I know of it. If Go Girl! were in color, I'd plonk down the cash to buy my daughter a copy.

And then there's Gen13. To be blunt, this stuff is wank material. Now, as a red-blooded het male I like the T-n-A as much as the next guy, but Gen13 seems to be nothing more than the puerile juxtaposing of scantily-clad babes and superheroic fisticuffs. Personally, I either want a good story with eye candy backing it up (sure I'm gawking at Wonder Woman in a copy of JLA, but I'm also enjoying the plot, both are important) or else I want actual porn, none of this coy "we're going to pretend to be writing a comic book while not quite showing you the nipples" stuff. Maybe I'm just getting old and jaded or maybe this Gen13 stuff is marketed to the demographic of horny guys who aren't old enough to legally buy a copy of Playboy. Either way it sits in the middle ground of not being good enough to warrant reading it as a comic book and not being explicit enough to waste my time on, especially in this modern intarweb era in which naked pictures of She-Hulk are only one Google search away.