DC Comics really gets the brief with its first-ever swimsuit special
polygon.comDC Comics will see out summer 2023 in fine form, with G’nort’s Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, a 48-page book collecting the best of the company’s swimsuit variant covers — alongside brand-new super-beach-bod material.
The superhero swimsuit special is something of an infamous idea, owing to Marvel Comics’ famous run of Sports Illustrated spoofs, which were filled with incredibly horny art of Marvel heroes as only the early 1990s could provide. If you haven’t seen the Punisher in a skull-shaped Speedo… Google it. Or Namor’s already skimpy costume reduced down to a scallop shell and some artfully draped strings of pearls — or Ghost Rider’s flaming skeleton lounging buck-naked in the surf…
For some reason, Marvel has never reprinted the swimsuit specials. They remain a legendary relic of back-issue boxes and nostalgia. The Hellfire Gala has become Marvel’s fancier answer to the swimsuit special: An excuse for artists to go ham while redesigning superhero costumes into high fashion.
Leave it to DC Comics, then, to pick up the campy torch where the distinguished competition has left it to lie for so many years. The company’s first swimsuit variants premiered on comics covers last year, and a new variant series was announced in March, and set to appear in this June’s titles, from Action Comics to Wonder Woman.
G’nort’s Illustrated Swimsuit Edition — named for the hapless, furry Green Lantern whose name rhymes with “sport” — will collect a selection of 2022 and 2023 DC Comics swimsuit variant covers in one volume, along with a Midnighter and Apollo story from the company’s 2020 summer special. But there will also be new material in the Edition: an eight-page story featuring the Penguin “clad in the tightest bathing trunks
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