Why do you guys like spandex so much?

I think are cultural differences too. A lot of my friends are comic fans but none of them read superhero comics, because they never really made a big impact on Finland, and are mostly read by adolescents. I assume the same would apply to, say, France or Japan. So superheroes seem to be a specifically American genre.

I don't think it's even a matter of Liking Spandex more than other sorts of comics. It's more Like Talking About Spandex more than liking talking about other sorts of comics.

Why is this, then?

Well that's the thing with genres; I couldn't give a fuck for anything related to sword and sorcery, for example, but I will always be interested in most of the things involving superheroes.

I wouldn't dismiss the fact that I've been reading this characters since I was a kid; it is kind of a way of remembering there's still a place in me where I am that kid.

I also happen to love many of these characters and when I find a creator who has the same love for those characters I have...well, I can't help empathising with him and feeling happy; it's not just that someone's doing what I wanted to be doing when I was 11 years old, but also the fact that this someone's doing it the way I would have wanted to do it. All Star Superman, LOSH... that's what keeps me reading superhero comics nowadays, I suppose.

Frederick Wertham?

In a way, it's Popism. You'll find a larger pool of people willing to knock around what's awesome about the new issue of Batman than you will for, say, a Julie Doucet comic, just as you might for a new Kelly Clarkson single versus, um, a new Deadly Snakes song.
Second, I think (I hope) (and this is maybe more true of ILC than other comics boards), it's easy to be at once dismissively irreverent about superhero comics AND fannishly obsessed. Like, I'm irrationally driven to read Green Lantern and Infinite Crisis, yet I'm willing to openly mock them and enjoy seeing others mock them.

I have no idea about market shares and stuff, and I don't even live in the USA, but, from the outside, it doesn't seem that "the comics scene in the US is dominated by one genre" as much as "the direct sales are dominated by superheroes".

A point that's totally lost by people like Alex Ross, that's why I have always felt he's the spirit of sword and sorcery invading the comics scene.

(x-post)

Are you kidding?

Are you kidding?

No, I guess I should've been clearer on that. Of course somethíng similar thing is done in short stories, but the difference is that in comics they can follow the same character for years, decades even. Ditto for the comic strip, or long-running album series like Tintin or Asterix or Corto Maltese. I don't know too many novelists who would've done this. So I think it is something that only comics do, slowly build characters and worlds surrounding them. Superheroes differ in this because the writers change so often, so they are more like mythological icons with different writers having different takes on them. Long-running TV series can do a similar thing, but I think they're much more bound by the narrative logic of television. This isn't really a genre, but it is one thing comics can do in a interesting and captivating way that no other medium can.

I guess one thing more thing, something we've discussed before too, is availability. Even if the American indie scene is solipsistic, there are tons of great comics released in other countries but, except for mass-produced manga, they don't seem to get translated that much, or they're poorly available.

Public radio in USA and Canada is rife with this, G. Keillor and Stuart McLean.

Tuomas, aren't you just saying "comics are the last serialized art form"? It's nothing that Dickens did do with the Pickwick Papers, for example.

Also Tintin & Asterix aren't exactly Slice of Life (also nothing changes)

Comics occupy a sweet spot in the both the delivery of imagination (movies are too expensive, text isn't immediate enough) and it's delivery (TV is at it's schedule instead of yours).

Well, for the latter point, there's tivo and dvd now, so that changes things a lot for television. Anyway, I think you're more or less on the money with this, but the major downside of comics is that they are generally very time consuming and the people who draw them are forced into this weird hermetic lifestyle that tends to warp the work considerably, especially when the comics are made my a single author and deal with personal issues.

Japan has plenty of stuff that is more or less equivalent to superheroes - and these days, a growing amount that is entirely superhero.

I've read a lot of comics since I started on them in the early '60s, and it's still the case that a large proportion of the best I've ever read starred superheroes. I love and revere Pratt and Crumb and so on, but no more than I love and revere Kirby. Why should anyone have to justify (time and time and time afuckinggain) loving comics by him, Grant Morrison, Steve Ditko, Alex Toth, Joe Kubert, Alan Moore, Steve Gerber, Carmine Infantino and so on, any more than we have to justify loving films by Hawks, Ford, Kurosawa, Wilder and so on?

Disney is big in Europe, true, but I don't think it's big in the US when it comes to comics. At one point in the eighties or early nineties I read that "Walt Disney's Comics and Stories" sells less in the US than it's equivalent in Finland, and I'm not talking about percentages here, but the actual number of issues sold. Besides, I think Disney has sold a lot of it's publishing rights to Gladstone, which seems to be a rather small publisher.

Why should anyone have to justify (time and time and time afuckinggain) loving comics by him, Grant Morrison, Steve Ditko, Alex Toth, Joe Kubert, Alan Moore, Steve Gerber, Carmine Infantino and so on, any more than we have to justify loving films by Hawks, Ford, Kurosawa, Wilder and so on?

There's no need to justify anything, I was just wondering about the one-sidedness of the comics industry in the US. Hawks, Ford, Kurosawa and Wilder worked in many different genres, but in American comics there seems to be only one that's dominant. I guess it's fair to say that superhero comics are a wide genre, because it can encompass a lot of different stories, but there are still many things it can't do, which is why I find it's dominance kinda curious.

- superheroics is dominant in so far as the two largest American comic publishers make their $$$ selling superhero books
- superheroics have more leverage WITHIN THE INDUSTRY than outside of it
- apart the multi-media possibilities & iconic power of some of these characters generated via lasting power
- which isn't to say that other comic publishers eschewing spandex aren't making $$$
- some "indie" stuff has seen love from the New York Times Bestseller list, if you want to use that metric as a measure of popularity
- also, superheroics are primarily a comic-based thing
- and every genre has limitations

ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, carry on, this is an interesting discussion.

Also, "A History Of Violence" and "The Road To Perdition" were both non-superhero comix that got made into successful American movies; a large part of their success came from the fact that no one knew they were based on comic books.

* as opposed to the exciting carnage of mangas, obviously

This would have put me off the whole thing too. Almost did.

The other large part is: I am a geek.

That may only accurately describe women I happen to know, though, and I know a few of the "I'm sooo nerdy, I read a book OUTSIDE OF CLASS once!" type who certainly prove it's not true of all women. But the guys I know are more likely to worry what their reading habits and frickin record collections say about them.

Cosmetically at least I'd say superhero comics are a great deal more absurd than the majority of pop cultural fiction that isn't explicitly going for high camp - most superhero movies tone down the outward ridiculousness of their protagonists to some extent (look at the the X-Men's comparitively sensible apperance in the films, for example). I'm not saying that the content is any less universal or resonant in comics than in any other popular medium.

I'm not trying to come up with a sort of image of the superhero reader as some sort of countercultural misfit who defies the regular rules of society or something, I just believe that the fact that some people don't like (or don't understand) superhero comics comes from decades of them being misunderstood and looked down on, when there's real talent in there.

The X-Men, especially under Claremont's influence, hit a lot of the same notes as the manga that becomes popular here (I have no idea how representative manga translations are of the manga market in Japan) -- the blend of soap opera, unrequited/problematic love stories, exotic locations, angst, the way so many of the villains become personal menaces as much as they are threats to the world ... when my ex introduced me to Ranma 1/2, my first thought was it was like funny kung fu X-Men.

Likewise there are the superhero mysteries, the superhero comedies ... I'm not saying you can take the superhero out of X-Men or Animal Man and not leave a wound, only that those are stories which -- much like the alien costume from Secret Wars!! -- took on characteristics of their host body and adapted accordingly, but could have survived in some other environment.

If you don't "get" why people on ILC like spandex, why not trying reading ILC for a few minutes? Every reason people gave on this thread is readily and quickly apparent.

(I don't like spandex so much; my tastes derive from comic strips instead.)

For me, 25 years ago, it was really fun to try to figure out the history of the Marvel and DC universes. I rilly liked continuity, altho' its clear now (and maybe then) that its now a huge obstacle.

... you know?

It doesn't have anything to do with the discussion of the genre really, but that rarity of information was a major factor in how I felt about the shared universe concept, backstory, and continuity in the comics I read as a kid. Maybe it does tie in somewhat, in that my experience with superhero comics from age 8 to 12 or so was very much a communal thing, with comics being shared and traded and talked about, and maybe the sense of community -- fandom, once those 8 year olds grow up and get weird about it -- which attaches to "genre" more than "story" is relevant.

Yeah, it's kinda urgent and key to watch it in order from the beginning. It's a lot of fun, I recommend it.

Matthew is talking nonsense here! Apart from the assumption that Ware and Seth should be doing work of any kind, Ware has ALWAYS been packed with superheroics. His first international (also first national) exposure was with I Guess! Superman is a character in Jimmy Corrigan! And the long Superman story in the new book doesn't even carry any childhood-reading baggage like the one(s) in Corrigan, it's working more on the God archetype that he's done in the past, but in a completely detached manner.

The long-form Rusty & Chalky novel also seems to be using the childhood associations as a trait to indicate Rusty's emotional state, rather than being the focus of the entire plot as the old one-pagers were. And FFS he's doing Building Stories at the same time, which has no nerd content whatsoever and is entirely accessible to non-superhero readers, as its venues of publication ought to back up. (Although I wonder how many NYT readers are as attuned to his pacing as lifelong comics readers - the bit with the woman saying "I love you" to her cat last week fucking broke me, but is the average reader just going to take in the square four panels at once and miss the emotional impact?)

And Seth's Wimbledon Green is a fucking romp, a frippery, and as far as I know set in a completely fantasy world as far as the scenarios of comics collectors that it presents go. The milieu actualy seems more likely matched to rare book collectors, but in any case the mansions with temperature-controlled vaults are out of a Matt Flint movie, rather than out of Overstreet. In terms of what his books are "supposed to be", you can hardly put any expectations on it, it's a collection of strips out of his sketchbook. And (although I don't know that D&Q/Chronicle have actually gone for any major mass-market publicity like they undoubedly will for Clyde Fans) for inaccessibility: I'd think it's as inaccessible to a non-superhero reader (and superheroes are hardly the only comics that the characters in WG collect so) or non-comics reader as the average Woody Allen movie is to me, not being a wealthy, neurotic American struggling with the mores of marriage in upper Manhattan. I still manage to follow and often enjoy them, despite thinking "who on earth would live like this?"

There are a lot of stories which wind up as superhero stories simply because that's the dominant and most available genre -- Morrison's Animal Man is probably a good example, in that I'd bet in the Watchmenverse, Watchmorrison wrote a very similar story about pirates.

Nah: not only would pirate comics have had to have developed in the ever-more-fractured factory system that sees a dozen people credited on each story and serving an ongoing narrative that creates its own internal inconsistencies due to a) the many hands, b) the placement within a larger fictional "universe" created by exponentially more hands, c) sheer attrition of creative (inc editorial) personnel over DECADES, but also it would have to be inherent in pirate stories that pirates don't get created by little boys running away to sea, but by mystical/magical forces from outside an ostensibly rational world-bubble the character lives in.

i didn't read superhero comics much as a kid; i bought some issues of batman and superman and whatnot but i could never really follow what was going on - i probably would've preferred the old '60s stuff where every story stood on its own a la archie. i went through a big early marvel phase last year and still dig a lot of that stuff but in general superheroes don't interest me too much.

I blame one of my friends from Sixth Form College for getting me into american comix, and I kinda discovered manga on my own.

i guess i was down on superhero comics for a while 'cos I totally fell under the high culture/elitist spell of the journal and gary groth - the biggest influence on the critical discourse pre-interweb - until someone (Scott McCloud? Dave Sim?) rightly pointed out that the ppl who read Eightball etc. are also the ppl who read the Invisibles etc, and i came to accept that this division between spandex + non-spandex is totally in the mind of the critic, not the reader

my question to ILC wld be - why do you guys like DC so fucken much?

I was a DC kid, so that's where I'm most emotionally invested (though I've managed to let go of a lot of other crap I liked as a kid, so go figure). I'm not even sure how much I *like* DC right now. It's only lately that I've come to realize just what a Bat-Phreak I am (if you were to ask me who my favo superheroes were, Batman would probably not make the top five, but I just can't friggin' get enough of the guy!), though I think that has more to do with his larger pop culture profile, or at least as much (Will Brooker is my hero!) as anything else.

But as far as actually liking DC Comics, I'm having my own multipart summer (in winter) crossover Crisis. That N'rama thread thing, the guy asks what's yer fav'rit DC comic being published right now, and, frankly, with Gotham Central closed down, nothing comes to mind. I might (pending approval) have to go with Solo!

That's a good question! Outside of the Teen Titans and certain of the iconic characters, I've always had the sneaking suspicion that DC was a gigantic wall of douche. (This is in no way related to me being a Marvel mutant zombie.)

Even when I read more DC comics than Marvel comics -- which in the past has happened for years at a time, and I'm not including Vertigo or other non-DCU titles in "DC comics" -- I don't think of myself as a DC fan. I like a lot of the characters, either in potential or actuality -- the Flash(es), Batman, Superman, and when I was a kid I always wanted to be Green Lantern (and would run around wearing my mother's emerald class ring) -- but for most of my comics-reading life they've suffered from the classic Big Two problem of letting the familiarity of the character be the selling point, rather than an interesting story or a good writer/artist. (The "everything changes! Superman dies! Batman breaks!" shit is just a headline-grabbing variant on selling familiarity.)

And particularly in the 80s, when my tastes -- or at least what I think my tastes are -- were formed, DC was still the bastion of "wrap everything up in 22 pages, back to the status quo," with stories that were interchangeable and therefore provided no real motivation to come back the next month -- I'm not contrasting this with giant crossover events or Everything Changes! arcs, but with things like the ongoing "golden notebook" subplot in Spidey, or the relationship drama in the Avengers.

But I grew up on the DC comics I still like for their what-the-fuckness, the Lois Lane imaginary stories, red kryptonite, Bizarro No. 1, Mxyztplk, Superman Is A Dick stuff -- it was old when I was a kid, but our neighbors had stacks and stacks of them they were happy to lend me (over and over again), so those were the majority of the comic books I'd read until I was maybe 10. That pure ridiculous shit, I still love that, although I don't know if I'd love it if DC tried doing it again -- po-faced is one thing, pomo-faced another.

Now there is an obvious and massive gulf of quality and talent separating the likes of Chris Ware from Geoff Johns, but the hang up on the comics of their childhood and relentless sadfacery does seem to come from more or less the same impulses.

Kit - Can you talk more about Seth? What's the draw? Is the new Chris Ware thing the romance story that was in kramer's ergot and mcswnys(?)?

But even when it comes to silver age stuff (where you could subtract the social group-inducingness of events), the ILC sensibility seems way more like silver age Superman/Showcase/Flash than, say, Kirby FF or Dark Phoenix.

I still can't believe I used to buy Aquaman--I totally forgot that fact about myself for about 15 years.

But I do sometimes sit here thinking JESUS there are abt 30 Marvel Essentials that I wld reach for rather than Showcase Presents Green Arrow, which does indeed look like a gigantic wall of...dull

Obv. I'm posting as a total Marvel Zomb, and I won't deny that there are loads of stone classic DC comic bks, but somehow DC has always equalled DULL comics, in my mind. The Lee/Kirby formula (pencils first, dialogue second) is the epitome of THRILLPOWER, whereas DC strips seem more buttoned-up/respectable/considered. Now obv. a lot of this has to do w/ marketing and Marvel hype, but New Gods/Forever People/Jimmy Olsen etc. STILL feel like a complete rupture in the DC fabric, an outbreak of passion and intensity set against the editor-led, tightly-plotted professionalism of the classic DC superheroes - Marvel heroes are rebels, freethinkers, sexed-up freaks, DC heroes are square-jawed do-gooders, company men and women.

I've only got back into comics in the last year or two, so haven't read enough DCs to know if the line-up is or isn't a 'total trainwreck' but Infinite Crisis is UNREADABLE unless you have been bathing in back issues, and as someone here pointed is 'tackling' a problem that doesn't really exist. In contrast, Marvel's Ultimates line seems like quite an elegant solution to the dead weight of continuity, and has produced two of the best Marvel series I've ever ever read (and I've read a LOT!) - Millar and Hitch's Ultimates, and Spiderman by Bendis and Bagley. Plus you've got Brian K. Vaughan on Ultimate X-Men, Brubaker on Captain America and Daredevil, Bendis doing New Avengers, Wheedon and Cassaday's X-Men, Dan Slott on She-Hulk - Make Mine Marvel!

sorry for any derailing...

But the comics I've been Borrowing Off My Friend are almost all DC-regular: Gotham Central, Legion, Batgirl, JLA Classified, Infinite Crisiii

I also buy Polly & The Pirates for, uh, my niece.

One of the sad -- not sadface -- effects of the mock/not-so-mock Marvel/DC rivalry is each company's refusal to show neck and "rip off" the other even when the concept isn't a story idea or especially proprietary. It's one thing for DC to willingly limit their character base with their reluctance to include mutants or people who get their powers from radiation/chemical accidents, but there's a real loss when they don't jump on the Ultimate bandwagon, and when Marvel limits its "imaginary stories" to Mutant X, The Exiles, and one-shot pamphlets that can fit into the Mad Lib of "What If..."

All-Star is nice in theory but doesn't have the potential of the Ultimate line, and barring "All-Star Crisis," it doesn't seem to leave room for something like Ultimate Extinction, which has been at least better than expected.

(Now, I don't like either All-Star title, but I don't think it's just my bias speaking when I compare the line to the Ultimate line.)

Is there going to be any other All-Star titles?

A lot of this could be because it is incredibly obvious that the Decimation will be reversed within a couple years - I mean, they've built the story so that the reversal is the thing we're all waiting for while the characters deal with the fall out. Infinite Crisis and its related stories are designed to be major turning points that create a status quo that will almost certainly be permanent for the forseeable future, so there's a lot more at stake. I definitely prefer Marvel's way of handling this stuff, but it totally makes sense why Infinite Crisis is more chat-worthy.

I also believe that the fact that Marvel (in its origin) was more tightly united by the fact that only one man was writing most of their books has something to do with it: I always believed the DCU has more room for growth and experiment with minor characters, and that's the way we got things like Suicide Squad and Morrison's Animal Man.
For me Marvel is a neat and tightly plotted universe, whereas DC is open for much more lunacy and contradictions and somehow I like that best.

I'm not sure either outweirds or outloons the other, in the long run, it's just a matter of which surface you're scratching.

Some of us really want more EXTREMELY SERIOUS SADFACE UPTIGHT superhero stuff?

About Seth in general, or about Wimbledon Green? The draw generally is his line and the fact that all his work is about a certain kind of thoughtfulness, which if you like it is always pleasant to see being played out, regardless of what he's talking about. His work is pretty much always about nostalgia, of a kind, but actually about it rather than just being immersed in it. His one long-form work, It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, is emblematic of this in that he faked it as being an autobiographical work about him trying to track the work of a particular New Yorker cartoonist that he loved. The book was, in fact, complete fiction, and he used the premise to examine the nature of this kind of obsession with artefacts of the past.

Chris Ware's new book is called something like The Acme Novelty Report To Shareholders, and is a huge collection of one-page gag strips and fake ads and so forth, largely from the two oversized issues of Acme Novelty Library (#s 7 and 15?), but there's stuff in those that isn't in the book, and vice versa. The long story I mentioned hasn't been seen outside of newspapers. Plenty of Big Tex and Rocket Sam and Rusty Brown strips. A glow-in-the-dark double-page spread. Stuff like that.

I find it rather worrying that people are so eager to rationalize the comics-about-comics thing as something other than one of the leading factors making comics increasingly myopic and irrelevant to the majority of people on the planet.

Matthew, this is still close to nonsense. Just because some people are doimg comics about comics, doesn't mean that there aren't thousands of other comics by other people, and the same people, that AREN'T about comics. Who gives one-tenth of a shit whether the majority of people on the planet aren't going to pick up Coober Skeeber #2 because it's inaccessible? They're also not going to pick up Locas, even though it is completely mainstream-lit accessible.

Seth is ten years and halfway into a graphic novel about a salesman looking back on his life. Why should he feel obliged NOT to put out a goofy side-project that he's compiled from his sketchbooks? Would it be okay if he waited another ten years and released it after the Clyde Fans collection?

http://www.boldoutlaw.com/images/junkie1.jpg

http://www.nealadams.com/DC/GreenLantern/GLGA06.JPG

(can't find a scan of the Ant Man issue where his ant companion dies, the poem at the end of it is really something tho)

(or maybe not, I'm drunk :))

Totally OTM. It's not like one of them is wild and the other one's boring, it seems both of them are in the same level of dullness, with the exception of two or three really great titles, four or five ok and maybe two or three more barely readable.

I suspect the reason ILC likes spandex so much is because most of us are geeks.

You can start out with the impossible bodies of superheroes. I'd say some girls are turned away from superhero comics by the mere fact that they seem to be full of pinup pics of C and D cup superheroines for boys to drool at. Of course male superheroes are impossibly muscular too, but since (to my knowledge) few girls are turned on by the bodybuilder type, they mostly seem to be emblems of male power fantasies. To be fair, there are some male superheroes that are more clearly designed to appeal to girls (Gambit and Longshot are the first to spring to mind), but they're still in the minority, and male superheroes are rarely drawn in the same kind of eroticized positions as the female ones.

It certainly can't be the deep seriousness of the texts; after all, these are guys and girls running around in spray-on costumes saving the world by either beating up or blowing up large portions of it. And then there's their sub-soap opera lives.

Anyway. I'm going to hold some other points back until the next time this gets asked.

There we go. Back on script.

I didn't claim anything about the actual texts, I was just trying to explain why'd many people (including me) not that familiar with the genre would find superhero comics rather unappealing and not want to read them more. I have to say though that the big boobs are kinda in-your-face rather than a mere subtext.

I think the fact that they are bigger (right down to being physically impossible) is important, because that tells something of mindset of supehero comics' creators. But sure, women are objectified in other media too, and I'm just as critical of that.

Note: obviously this doesn't mean I can't or haven't enjoyed a superhero comic. But the fact that this is such a pervasive feature in them certainly makes me more critical of spandex comics.

Er, I wouldn't say so. At least most of the superhero comics I've read favour relatively realist style, except for certain parts of human anatomy. Human faces aren't exaggerated in them, for example. Besides, exaggerating tits is never the same thing as, say, exaggerating a nose.

Blount surprisingly OTM here. Indie comix feature far more LOOK AT THESE TITTAYS, albeit with 'ironic' detachment, than mainstream comics ever do.

Also, "I think the fact that they are bigger (right down to being physically impossible) is important" - Get one education in fantasy novel covers. Far more outlandish representaion of female form than in most comics works (excepting the likes of Rob L who, as we keep pointing out, can't draw men correctly either).

Also, are you guys seriously saying that superhero comics aren't often ridiculously sexist in their representations of women? My girlfriend refuses to even step foot in the store and I can see why. Male superheros are muscular, but they aren't really eroticized. (Imagine reading JLA with the phallic exageration that gets applied to women characters.) Or to switch mediums, picture every commercial film out right now, but imagine all the female characters played by Pamela Anderson with different colored hair. A lot of these justifications seem kind of silly: sure, Sean Phillips doesn't draw Power Girl, but the "Hey look--boobs!" style is basically the status quo of comics drawing. When you read fantasy novels, you don't stare at the cover the whole way through. Sure, Dan Clowes, etc., show sex, but it's not quite as fantasized and pornographic as, say, Jim Lee; the sex is there as a deflationary experience.

(x-post)

And the indie comics point is valid. I was thinking about this lately w/r/t Charles Burns (just read Black Hole) and Paul Heatley--amazing comics, but they seem to require you to be a guy, think of the girl as the object, be interested in the plot on a sort of biological, semi-reptilian "must... get... hot girl" sort of way.

I won't get into the sexism argument, and Blount's complaints sound like they're about ILE stuff (?). My complaint is just that this is at least the third thread on ILC, in addition to one on ILE, in which Tuomas alternated between expressing (and demonstrating) his lack of exposure to superhero comics and making broad, often (attempted) explanatory, statements about the genre. The first few times I expressed frustration that this so often meant Tuomas asking questions which had already been answered for him previously, as though he didn't accept those answers, didn't retain them, or simply didn't consider them important.

At this point I'm not frustrated anymore; he must like those broad statements, and having opinions about superhero comics is clearly very important to him. But I'm not about to engage.

You've obviously never read any of the Gor series.

picture every commercial film out right now

Have you seen the trailer for Basic Instinct II?

I genuinely don't believe that superhero art is deliberately eroticised - part of the problem is that the life models they use generally come from the sort of environments where models normally exist in such a way as they are unclothed allowing easy spandex painting-on. Equivalent male models usually aren't in the same positions.

Interestingly, for somebody claiming that sexualisation of the subjects is an issue saying "there are some male superheroes that are more clearly designed to appeal to girls (Gambit and Longshot are the first to spring to mind), but they're still in the minority" seems a very odd stance to take. It clearly infers one of the primary motivations for women reading comics is sexual attraction - if you start from that basis, wouldn't it be understandable if a comics producer assumed everybody reading bought it on that basis and slanted product accordingly? Even by his logic, T&A is understandable. (Unless you're suggesting he only took that approach for the purpose of the argument, which is called trolling elsewhere, isn't it?)

Or, as Blount says, "one's sexist and one's racist". Unless anyone is suggesting that in Hate George (black), Connie(? the chick Buddy gets offered U2 tickets by) or Jay (Hispanic) don't have eggagerated facial characteristics that emphasise their race?

(multiple x-posts)

What makes Frank Cho's New Avengers T&A and Liberty Meadows not?

(xxx-post)

(Could you goofballs save the drama for when I'm NOT at work, please?)

Oh, and less muscular men - Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Flash, Aquaman... most of the DC second string actually.

(suggestions from my gf, btw, who sees portrayal of women in spandex comics as EXACTLY the same as portrayal of men - a representation of a perceived image of 'extra-human'- but doesn't let her agenda affect her enjoyment)

So you're saying most superhero artists base their characters on life models, and all their models have C or D cup breasts, and they just reproduce them faithfully in the comics? If this is really the case, one might ask why they choose such models instead of other types?

Interestingly, for somebody claiming that sexualisation of the subjects is an issue saying "there are some male superheroes that are more clearly designed to appeal to girls (Gambit and Longshot are the first to spring to mind), but they're still in the minority" seems a very odd stance to take. It clearly infers one of the primary motivations for women reading comics is sexual attraction - if you start from that basis, wouldn't it be understandable if a comics producer assumed everybody reading bought it on that basis and slanted product accordingly?

I didn't claim sexualization was the central thing in superhero comics, it seems to be more on the surface/pictorial level than in the stories themselves (on the text level female characters are usually treated fairly equally, which I think is an interesting contradiction). But since objectification women does clearly exist in them, in order for them to be equal they'd have to either bring in the obejticified men too, or get rid of the objectification altogether. Obviously I think latter would be a better option.

Just because there are less muscular characters doesn't mean they're treated the same way as the women in are.

(suggestions from my gf, btw, who sees portrayal of women in spandex comics as EXACTLY the same as portrayal of men - a representation of a perceived image of 'extra-human'- but doesn't let her agenda affect her enjoyment)

Poor ol' me for letting my awful feminist agenda affect how I view the world!

Also, feel free to make it seem like you're engaging w/ the discourse by doing point-by-point rebuttals that merely serve to dig your hole deeper.

Umm... unless you're being deliberately naive here, porn is cheap. And I don't see much in the way of small breasts in American porn. I'm saying most artists period use photo-reference of some type, and they'll normally use the most sensible available to them. Perhaps if you'd read more superhero comics you would have recognised the multitude of actor facial lifts, picture copies or stolen scenes that frequently appear. And not all of them are as rich as Alex Ross, to get models built for them to copy.

I didn't claim sexualization was the central thing in superhero comics, it seems to be more on the surface/pictorial level than in the stories themselves (on the text level female characters are usually treated fairly equally, which I think is an interesting contradiction). But since objectification women does clearly exist in them, in order for them to be equal they'd have to either bring in the obejticified men too, or get rid of the objectification altogether. Obviously I think latter would be a better option.

I disagree with this on so many levels, but I'll deal with the main two. Firstly, we haven't concluded objectification does exist of women, so I'll ignore that you attribute it, but doesn't your acknowledgement that this sexism only exists on a pictoial level imply that a significant proportion of the comics readership does so JUST FOR THE TITTAYS? Going by what you've said previously, there are three broad categories of superheros and since you (in justifying earlier statements) seem to think these work at least in direct correlation to titles/sales/readership WHAT THIRD OF THE READERSHIP OF ILC ARE YOU ACCUSING OF ONLY READING COMICS FOR THE TITTAYS?

Just because there are less muscular characters doesn't mean they're treated the same way as the women in are.

I agree in principle (although I don't really, because I don't think female characters are treated in the way you imply) unless you specifically mean wrt the art, in which case this is exactly the sort of example you relied on when you were talking about Gambit and Longshot.

Poor ol' me for letting my awful feminist agenda affect how I view the world!

Admitting you have an agenda is the first step. Although why you automatically assume you are a 'better' feminist THAN AN ACTUAL WOMAN continues to amaze me.

People get defensive over the boob issue because PEOPLE WHO DON'T READ MANY HERO COMICS make sweeping accusations. I don't think there's anyone who would try and defend some of the Avatar GGA material (Lady Death, say, or a pile of the Marat Michaels stuff) against sexism, but that doesn't mean it's rife.

Yeah, big boobs aren't sexist, but the way they're presented can be. Also, there is a rather big distinction between real women with breasts and artist-drawn women with them. If an artist keeps on drawing D cup women in a world where B is the most common size, isn't that a sign of something? Unless it really actually is the truth that comic artists only draw from real-life models, D cup models are the only ones they can pick, and they want their art to reflect the truth accurately, in which case, mea culpa.

in order for them to be equal they'd have to either bring in the obejticified men too, or get rid of the objectification altogether. Obviously I think latter would be a better option

CRISIS ON INFINITE TITTAYS? Exactly what sort of retconning would you expect of characters to undo the way they've been drawn for FORTY FUCKING YEARS (in several individual cases)?

Er, can't they draw still the breasts smaller? Or find some other models than those in porn? If you work for one the world's biggest comic publishers, if not real models you'd think they can at provide you with some pictures of nude women. Art books don't cost that much.

Although why you automatically assume you are a 'better' feminist THAN AN ACTUAL WOMAN continues to amaze me.

I wasn't saying I was better in anything, but just because someone is an actual woman doesn't make her better either. I know actual women who are against feminism too.

Where we stand:

A. Comics, by dint of their portrayals of women, have problematic sexist dimensions, in this case, as manifested by unrealistically large breasts.
B. (A) is a generalization not unique to the comics medium and furthermore overly reductive, not taking into account the pure context of the superhero comics genre.

1) I honestly don't think there are sexist/unrealistic depictions of women in a majority of comics that I read.

2) Admittedly, when it does come up it's become kind of transparent for me. You can only see Emma Frost so many times before you stop thinking about the ridiculous outfit and it just becomes a story trope.

-- Jordan

***

Jay (Hispanic)

is he?! I s'pose he totally could be but the pink/unshaded skin, not-obviously-non-Anglo name and wealthy middle-class upbringing never stood as signifiers to me. Bagge's racist stereotyping of Hispanics usually means shading or brown skin and a bumfluff moustache...

What makes Frank Cho's New Avengers T&A and Liberty Meadows not?

All of Cho's work is T&A, simple.

(bad cliched) Superhero art isn't eroticised, it's infantilised. How many artists draw big tits that look hot versus how many artists draw big tits that look like globes embedded in barrels? The Hernandez brothers draw attractive women with a whole range of body types, and they aren't objectifying them inna T&A stylee - the reader's attraction to the character is going to be based on the character, not just the isolated "hey how does my ass look in this jeans roommate?" panel. Luba has always been a massive strawwoman on this front, for eg, yes she has massive breasts, but they aren't meant to be attractive or perv material, by the time she's thirty her face is haggard and the tits are hanging to her stomach.

-- kit brash

Leaving aside extra-ILC feuds and rhetorical methodologies, yes, there are sexist dimensions in superhero comics, but they are neither defined by or wholly contained by large breasts. (One example off the top of my head that illustrates fetishized women is Kabuki, which for those who don't know is set in Japan and whose characters are primarily (almost exclusively) female. The author/artist uses actual Asian models to reference the artwork, which is realistic -- which is to say, they have small breasts. But reading the comic, the depictions of the women evoke an element of the Asian fetish (see also kit's post), mostly because they are flat characters (pun unavoidable). Realistically drawn, yes; realistically characterized, not so much.) In an essentialist, abstract way, comics have an element of sexism, but it doesn't define the genre. In short, the charge of sexism exists beyond the art, and can exist in more subtle areas -- conversely, excellent writing can "redeem" superficially sexist art.

Possibly there are analogous arguments to questions about whether Shakespeare was a misogynist and/or racist, given the stereotypes he has his characters inhabit -- but the prevailing opinion towards this particular issue is that Shakespeare has to embody these types in order to undermine them.

As for the way ILC engages these issues, I can't speak for everyone, but it seems that most people treat it in a simultaneously distanced yet fully-engaged way, because most of us who post here are nerdy, and the whole "Who care's? It's a girl!" meme illustrates the general atmosphere.

As for explicity pointing to tits and crying foul: artists might err on the side of "super" when doling out breastmeat, sure, but those artists tend to err to the extreme on ALL proportions when they super-size - tell me how many people, male or female, look anything like what any artist, spandex or otherwise, draws.

But, yeah, comics have a history of sexism, spandex or otherwise. Tho I'm guessing more feminists would shit a brick reading a "woe is me, I need to find a man" romance book from the 50s than some Jim Balent booby book from now.

yeah I meant to follow this up in my point about the art being non-eroticised: the anatomy on the men is as ludicrous and/or bad as on the women, mostly.

(then again I do think lots of superhero comics are totally sexist, I just don't give a shit! not least because I don't read those comics)

But, yeah, comics have a history of sexism, spandex or otherwise. Tho I'm guessing more feminists would shit a brick reading a "woe is me, I need to find a man" romance book from the 50s than some Jim Balent booby book from now.

I was making these points in the post that got eaten by the threadlock (and thought it the better part of valour not to post them in the two immediate aftermath threads).

But I guess this thread shows I shouldn't post when drunk.

Besides, now I'm starting to see what the fuss was all about (I must admit that I didn't see what made you all guys soooooo mad at the time, since Tuomas wasn't all off the point before...I'm closer to kenchen's point of view).

Having said that...I must admit I haven't got anything interesting to say. I'll go back to lurk. =)

I am very comfortable with reading superhero comics.

Exactly... I get enough of all that in real life.