“The effect on the reader” is also, of course, subjective, but we have as a starting point the comic itself, aka, objective reality. Reader response criticism gets into all the details of that.

I was also thinking you wouldn’t be looking so much at an individual comic, as the whole series, maybe dividing into things like categories. So, how many of these comics operate on the implied horniness of men? Right, like, I don’t think that’s a crazy thing to intuit in these comics without the mind-reading powers of Mesmer.

Now there IS interesting stuff about the culture–being right after all the political shennanigans, censorship, etc., that I would have to look outside the text for, but it could be an interesting experience.

As for the author’s intent, it is indeed unknowable, or at least you’ll never know if you’ve known it. Science has shown that people’s unconscious will decide for them, and then their conscious will COME UP WITH A REASON regardless of the true motivation. An example is cutting the bridge between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. You can instruct one half of the brain to pick up an object, independent of the verbal half of the brain, and the person will almost always come up with a plausible reason for them having selected that object. The stated intent has as much value as an AI hallucination.