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

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.