Should Cheesecake Have Meat In It?

Devil's Due announced back in April that they were teaming up with Joe Hvorka and Andy Eaton, current owners of Chaos! Comics, to make new comics about Brian Pulido's old characters. Today, the companies announced that Evil Ernie #1 will debut in September.

The new version will be created by a couple of guys whose work I've enjoyed in the past, Alan Grant and Tommy Castillo. This seems to be in keeping with Chaos!'s promise that with this relaunch "there will be an emphasis on telling original and entertaining stories." But my question is this: Is there anything to Evil Ernie other than gore and crude humor?

Top Cow recently hired Ron Marz to breathe new life into Witchblade, a one-dimensional character with nothing going for her but a skimpy costume. Witchblade, like most of Chaos!'s original output, was created in the heyday of the Bad Girl Craze during the '90s, when all a character needed to be popular was clothing that was inversely proportionate to the size of her breasts. Evil Ernie, while obviously not a Bad Girl comic, was sort of a cousin to that concept, but focused on violence to exclusion of story rather than sex.

I'm wondering if Chaos! and Top Cow's attempts to change the perception of these comics represent a trend. The Bad Girl Craze has been over for years and comics readers seem to be looking for more intelligent stories, so it makes sense that publishers try to accomodate that. What doesn't make sense though is that they use T&A and Shock Horror characters to do it.

Marz's effort with Witchblade has been valiant, but eighty-plus issues establishing the character as being nothing more than sexily bland mean that there's not much there for him to work with. Not without completely reimagining the character. Which maybe he's going to do. I gave up trying to find out after several issues.

Pulido himself tried to class up the one property he escaped Chaos! with when he took Lady Death to CrossGen. It was fairly well-received too. But I notice that she's now gone back to her roots and I don't know how to read that. Was it CrossGen's suggestion to focus more on the storyline than Lady Death's underwear? Did Pulido give up on that take on her because he just prefers the half-naked, Anna Nicole Smith version? Or is the move back the result of serious market analysis and a hard look at sales numbers?

Probably, Pulido just knows what makes his fans happy. I mean, if you look at his other Avatar books, all starring buxom gals in very little clothing, there's definite harmony going on there. Which begs the question, who's on the right track?

Should comics that started out as T&A or Shock Horror concepts even try to be anything more than that? Or should they just stick to doing what they do best: titillating the easily amused? Will readers allow them to rise above their roots or dismiss them?

A lot of critics have dismissed Frank Cho's take on Shanna the She Devil as simple T&A. I'm actually enjoying it and not just for the cheesecake. It's not a perfectly executed story, but there is a story there and it's engaging me, so I know that what Chaos! is trying to do is sort of possible. I say "sort of" because Cho felt he had to make his Shanna completely different from the established Marvel version to do it. He took the character concept, but created a whole new character from it.

This is a question that interests me, but I don't have any answers for it yet. I'm curious to see if it's going to work for real, keeping the same low-brow characters and creating intelligent stories for them. And I'm really curious to see how Chaos! is going to emphasize story on characters like Purgatori and Chastity.