Page two through the Hawkeye Initiative and I’m starting to think that American comics are a Great, Big, Mistake ™
Yeah… I like comics, but I’ve gotten used to periodically being jarred out of the narrative when my brain shrieks, “DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH HER BACK WOULD HURT FROM STANDING LIKE THAT ALL THE TIME. NOBODY’S PELVIS TILTS THAT WAY NATURALLY.”
I don’t think it used to be this bad. For a long time Western comic art was really fairly simple–cheap paper, four color and halftone, everything drawn with fairly simple, even stylized forms. Drawing women in unrealistically sexy poses honestly would’ve taken too much effort for that style or production speed. This is really a problem that’s grown with the increasing sophistication of comics art over the past couple of decades.
And then there’s Greg Land, who traces his women from porn mags and doesn’t see the large number of problems with that.
You mean like the 1940s-50s, or before that? Because all I remember are basically Lichtenstein’s works, and they aren’t representative of western comics, but rather a reproduction of western comics. there’s also betty what’s her face (?) who looked like Tweety Bird, but with a curvier figure, but I’m not familiar with when they are produced. My hunch right now, which is subject to change, of course, is that perhaps stylisation may not necessarily be the problem here, I think.
I’ve tried to reproduce some of the posture from video games as well. It didn’t only hurt my back; it was impossible to reproduce, anatomically speaking. Some, maybe if you stretch and are an athlete, but what makes even less sense is the amount of strength needed to wield a weapon; you had to have some muscles, but muscles just aren’t portrayed at all. The impossibility of the body and its anatomies are a double whammy here. It’s ridiculous how women are expected to simultaneously be strong and weak at the same time, at least visually and physically speaking. Meanwhile, every single male mage is ripped as fuck, even though mages are nerds in canon and have no real reason to lift. Ridiculous.
No, I meant the shift in comics art that began with the rise of digital art in the 1990s. Before that, comics used to be cheap. When I was a kid you could still buy them for a couple of quarters. Part of keeping them cheap was producing them fast and cheap, with art that allowed the creators to get maximum visual communication and interest for minimal time invested–hence, you tended to see stylized, simple forms and simple, quickly-sketchable poses. I’m not trying for a “People were better back then” claim. I just meant that it’s gotten more obvious as the art gets more detailed.
And yeah. This collective gross-out people seem to have over women having visible muscles pisses me the hell off. And just…yeah. All of that.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2da4ynf