Shikarii's Naked Variant Covers With Margot Robbie, Scarlett Johansson and Daisy Ridley

Do these "parody" covers go too far in a deepfake world?

A comic book retailer has gotten in touch with me regarding a recent trend in publishing comic books from a certain specialist section of the comics publishing industry. Such as Counterpoint Comics, which publishes a number of parody comic books, You may have seen them, especially at comic book conventions, courtesy of exclusive variant covers provided to specific attending retailers. Their Deadpool/Winnie The Pooh parody comic Do You Pooh comic was their first breakout title, but they also publish comics such as Savage Eve, Blindside, Notti & Nyce, Walking Dead Pooh, Poohnisher, and Hardlee Thinn.

Counterpoint Comics, amongst others, have cottoned on to the fact that, with certain titles, they can keep publishing the same comic book again and again, commission new covers, again and again, and sell more copies to the same customers again and again. It is possible, however, that their title Hardlee Thinn, first published in 2017, may take the parody nature a little too far. The comic book story sees the character Hardlee Thinn challenge DC Comics for cancelling her comic book, because she is too thin and not "thicc", leading Hardlee to kill off all the other women characters in comics, so she gets to keep her own title. But instead, she ends up taking them all out for meals. And that's the comic they have been publishing since 2017, the same comic book with new covers, hundreds of them. Hey, if you have a business model that works, go for it, these days, it's either that or publish manga.

A number of those parody covers for Hardley Thinn were by the digital artist Shikarii Shambu and this "Playtime" variant featured the character looking really rather like Margot Robbie, the actor who plays Harley Quinn in the DC Comics movies.

But there is also another variant of that variant, exclusive to Goblin Comics & Collectibles in which she is presented as above but without any clothes on. There have been similar covers by Shikarii for a number of publishers as well. Such as a Hardlee Thinn version of Margot Robbie for SR Comics, a similar variant of a Scarlett Johansson cover for Totally Rad Halloween Story published by Totally Rad Comic, and another equally clothing-bereft variant of a Daisy Ridley cover for Power Hour published by Black Ops.

Shikarii does all sorts of different kinds of covers for all sorts of publishers, but using actors as the basis of comic characters has a long and storied tradition, with Samuel L Jackson getting the Nick Fury role from Marvel Studios as a result of Bryan Hitch drawing him that way. There are legal issues, and the Big Two have usually shied away from such a thing. Usually. But the bare-all aspect of these covers may draw greater attention, given current concerns over deep fake imagery, A.I. and the invasion of privacy. Might this be a step too far? The kind of thing that could attract undue attention? Or does parody cover it all? It may be down to the publishers to make that decision, or the conventions from which they ply their trade.