Variant Covers is the only weekly comic book column to feature headlines featuring puke covered boobs! Welcome to all ye enter, and I sure hope you’ve got a good taste for the depraved. Here at Variant Covers I give a run down of the comic books I’m excited for, catch my eye, or seem hilariously rotten in a given week.

Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #2
The second issue of the most ridiculously named X-Title ever is arriving on shelves this week covered in puke, tits, and sociopolitical commentary. While I didn’t dig Warren Ellis’ first run on Astonishing X-Men that much, I really got into the first issue of Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis Fun Pukey Time. The storyline is centered around an African village that is giving birth to particularly mutant-looking children. The whole OMFG stems from the fact that once Scarlett Witch went all fucking insaneo and banished mutants from the Earth, ain’t none been born. Let alone the fact that generally muties manifest around puberty. Because you know, they’re an extended metaphor for adolescent longing as well as commentary on ostracized ethnic and cultural groups.

So shit is going down! What I really enjoy about the title is how Ellis manages to float political commentary rather elegantly into the affairs of a bunch of latex-bound demi-gods. In the middle of the first issue, Wolverine drops some knowledge bombs about Nelson Mandela that even if you disagree with, are pretty interesting to hear coming out of a mainstream comic book.

It’s a fun romp, and features ridiculous postures and absurd ass and tit shots by Kaare Andrews. And while I’m ultimately a horndog who finds himself aroused on occasion by the curve of inanimate objects, the artwork stems the line between ridiculously sexualized and rousing the inner feminist in me. There’s some sort of line that Andrews is straddling for even the most reluctant readers as myself, and definitely sending more engaged feminists into apoplectic aneurysms.

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Meta 4 #1
Meta 4! Metaphor. See what they did there? This comic comes out this week, and I’m particularly intrigued. I hadn’t read about it, but while skimming the release list this week it caught my eye. Even the title is a metaphor! Intriguing. And then I read the plot description which seems trippy enough to at least try out the first issue:

An amnesiac astronaut is helped by Gasolina, a muscular woman who dresses up as Santa all year round. As they travel New York City for one man’s answers of self, it becomes an expedition to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves.

Too bizarre to pass up for me. I have the feeling that the comic book is either going to be a refreshing exploration of metaphors and life through metaphor, or really just a pretentious bunch of hogwash. I’m hoping it is dope as fuck. If you stop and ponder how essential metaphors are to not only understanding and communicating with one another, but also as means to make sense of the world, the idea of the comic books pretty cool. Metaphors layered upon metaphors! I know, I’m a lame-ass literature nerd.

Mea culpa, mea culpa.

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