I’ve mentioned this in conversation a few times, often to the horror of those listening in. You may be familiar with the star wipe, immortalized by The Simpsons. The Star Wipe serves well whenever you want to transition from one scene to another, and do it with style. George Lucas uses a number of different wipes in Star Wars, though none so fancy as the Star Wipe. Generally, if you use one at all, you use a wipe when transitioning between scenes that take place in different locations, like from a scene on the Death Star to one on Tatooine. But what if you wanted to represent a transition between one reality and another? What wipe would you use to represent that the world is being re-made? To show that the current world fades out, and the new one fades in?
I give you the Vagina Wipe. What says rebirth better than the birth canal? In House of M, Scarlet Witch uses her powers to remake the entire world. Here’s how it’s represented visually:
Doesn’t get much clearer than that, does it?
While we’re on the topic of sexual imagery in comic books, I spent a big part of the weekend re-reading all 40 issues of Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men. Issue 118 causes a stir when it came out a few years ago when people realized that almost every page has the word “sex” on it somewhere. The artist denies it, but that doesn’t always mean much. Some of the alleged appearances of the word are a bit of a stretch, but others are fairly clear, like this one:
This site has them all, so you can judge for yourself. As the author of that page says, the issue is full of sexual imagery, and the Morrison spent a lot of time building up his depiction of Cyclops and Jean Grey-Summers’ marriage as one that had lost its fire, with Emma Frost stepping in to fill that void. More on that in The Unofficial Guide to Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, and in Tom Coates’ great piece, “On Cyclops and the Male Gaze”