Comicbook Women - Anatomy and the Boobs/Butt Pose

After recently participating in the Hawkeye Initiative, it caused me to look at comics with a more critical eye.  After much study and debate with friends, I came to a few conclusions, so I thought I'd share them here.  

Women in 90s Comics

When searching for exaggerated anatomy and physics-defying poses, most people immediately point to artists like Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee from back in the early 90s Marvel Renaissance.  And boy, is there some crazy stuff out there.  Elongated spines, abdomens that obviously hold no organs, thighs longer than the torso, and massive torpedo breasts that start at the collarbone.  It's pretty bad.  But it doesn't bother me as much as some of the more recent stuff, despite it being much worse, and here's why.

In the 90s, artists were equal opportunity about their unrealistic anatomy.  Men had ginormous pectoral muscles, at least ten abs (although I'm pretty sure I once counted 14 on Sabertooth in the old X-men cartoon), biceps the size of their heads, and thighs that should have made it impossible to walk (maybe that's why so many of them just jumped or flew!).  They're *always* flexing so hard that you can see all the striations in their muscles and their veins are popping out like crazy, and weirdly most of them are missing their nipples.  It makes me think they flexed SO hard that their nipples popped off.

Sure, they had girls in crazy, revealing, skin-tight outfits.  But the guys were also wearing speedos with utility belts and thigh-high boots.  Everybody had impossible anatomy and stupid clothes, across the board.  It was just a superhero *thing*, which I never questioned because superheros are generally mutants or aliens or something anyway, so maybe they just have crazy anatomy because of that.


Women in Recent Comics

When the first X-men movie came out, we saw our comic book heroes in sleek black leather instead of neon spandex.  It set a precedent for superhero re-designs, which really works for the big screen, and which comic book artists started to emulate.

On the men.

Look at most comics today, and the men are no longer in spandex unitards and speedos.  They're in leather and kevlar, wearing trench coats and body armor, with grizzled stubble and sunglasses or cigarettes.  They look like military special ops with a little more color, and weirder guns.  

But the women?

A lot of the women are still in *their* spandex unitards.  Or some of them have been "upgraded", like Harley Quinn, to corsets and booty shorts, with combat boots to make sure you know they can kick your ass even though they can't breathe.  If a woman gets body armor, she gets metal boots and shoulder guards, and maybe they've put her in a leather bodysuit instead of spandex, but really it's more like latex, because it's skin tight and, oh yeah, always unzipped to below her breasts so you can see her cleavage.  

Really, the women's outfits haven't changed that much.  The anatomy's a little better most of the time, so I at least appreciate that.  It wouldn't come across as being so ridiculous if the men hadn't all been re-designed more realistically.  But seeing a girl with an impossibly curved spine and no organs in a corset and a cape standing next to a guy in a kevlar vest, leather pants, and a trench coat really makes the disparity prominent.  Before it was all ridiculous, and all in good fun.  Now, it's insulting.


The Boobs/Butt Pose

This is just my opinion, and it's relatively short.  I just had to do an assignment for my life drawing class doing 50 gesture drawings of the figure in motion, and I chose to draw those from a kung fu movie.  These poses ARE possible, and DO happen naturally during the course of several styles of kung fu, and I saw them displayed by both men and women. So to me there is definitely a place for them in comic art, but I also think it's overused and there are plenty of other poses that need to make it into the rotation.