His thighs look pretty scrawny, and he’s missing half his muscles.
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Kimmo, surely you can illustrate your brilliantly salient point – that a child character’s massive augmented breasts were not, technically, the size of her head – without filling this comment thread with photographs of adult porn stars whose breasts are actually the size of their head.
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That’s male bodybuilding. Female Bodybuilding hasn’t really made an impact in the comix world.
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Why is the focus on how crappy the cover is and (STILL) on Wonder Girls crazy Wonder Boobs with no discussion about how messed up it is that a woman (a comics industry professional and academic no less!) is getting rape threat for writing an op-Ed about it?
Why is that okay in geek culture?
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Well, if head-sized but non-porny breasts are that hard to find on fucking google, why can’t we ever get a break from them in comics?
Seriously, people. I came over here all jolly, to make a little ‘in before "but teenaged boys don’t have elf ears!’" joke, and got downright surly after reading these comments. Between this dude and the ones petulantly insisting that face-sized isn’t anything remotely like head sized, the tubes are all clogged up with shit tonight.
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Art Director: “Remember, I want to see every one of Captain America’s muscles flexing at once. Even the ones that should logically be out of view.”
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Oh, we’re doing this argument, are we?
I gather this fictional child is sixteen, right? I also gather that’s around the age girls tend to stop growing. So it’s not unusual for girls of that age to have a figure identical to a young adult’s. So be careful of the basis you employ when accusing someone of conflating a child and an adult.
And haven’t you guys copped enough flack yet for your overblown hyperbole in your headlines? I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve gone, ‘oh, wow’ and clicked through to the comments to find one poster or another pointing out the headline is unjustified bullshit… only now you have a tenuous excuse to censor the refutation.
The pic I posted of a woman with actual head-sized breasts didn’t look like a pic of a porn star, being a grainy amateur shot of a fully-clothed woman. You would have had to either recognise her or perform a reverse image search to find out it was Sheyla Hershey (who by the way might lose her breasts thanks to too many ops and golden staph). I’m still not clear on why this pic in particular should have been removed; the excuse that she was a porn star is pretty ridiculous. I suppose we’re not allowed to post pictures of prostitutes too. I guess nuns are okay.
The deletion other two shots, clearly part of pro photoshoots and thus a tiny bit more understandable, still irks because they were pretty much SFW by almost anyone’s definition. Care to clarify the policy here? I doubt you can. And since my purpose in posting those seems to have eluded you, I’ll restate that they were posted in response to someone who apparently believed slender women with huge breasts don’t naturally occur.
Either you’re pretty dim, or you just fucking straw-manned me again, by conflating my purpose across those two posts.
You may have missed it, but here’s all I would’ve posted if you didn’t insist on bullshit headlines:
People being overly-precise and pedantic in their responses sometimes occurs when others are overly-general and broad/imprecise in their comments. Here’s a good example:
The lead on this thread refers to a comic book character with breast implants. Which is also a reference to Jennelle’s article: she says the same thing, that the comic book character has breast implants. But it’s a comic book character. Unless it’s in the comic story-line that the character in question got breast implants at some point, then they’re not breast implants. They’re just big boobs.
How’s that?
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Actually - there are some women shaped like character that naturally. Some of us CHOOSE to look like that with surgery. If more than half the fans of the old show + the comic book are women then I think that speaks for itself. Clearly, the readers like the story more than the way the characters look OR THEY DO LIKE they way the characters look!
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Furthermore, BB contributors happily take the piss out of journalists being less than professional elsewhere, but are not only blind to it here, they’re also deaf to anyone pointing it out.
But hey, bullshit’s fine when you’re clutching your pearls over sexism, I guess… because it totally won’t backfire, nooo.
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Rob had an art director?! I always assumed he drew for his own prurient release, like Henry Darger.
I was sort of hoping there might be, actually, because the sexy Batman I’ve responded with in the past now has a sexy sequel we can enjoy. Now back to the main issue of whether Asselin was perfectly fair, because of course it’s more important to scrutinize that than the response.
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I’m not sure when exactly it took place, but comics went from semi-realistic muscle men to basically super muscular humans with no skin and their suits painted on. Look at some the 70s stuff by like Neal Adams, where anatomy was exaggerated but still had more believable physiques. Older art actually had heroes that looked like they wore a costume, not had it painted on. It’s sort of just like the style of the genre, these exaggerated, prefect bodies everyone possesses. So part of the problem is that is sort of the “style”.
But I think part of the problem is a lot these guys can not draw. Oh they can make a pretty picture, but when you really break down things like proportion, perspective, and how anatomy moves and changes, they rely on cliched formulas that tend to exaggerate and distort. They also tend to rely on flat, cliched poses that rarely inspire. There is also a same-ness to their art. Take the same image, change the colors/costume and it’s another “hero”. They don’t bother to make changes in body shape to make “unique” people, it’s all cliched archetypes.
It is easy to see when you have a guy who is a decent comic artist, vs an awesome artist who just happens to draw comics. Below is just some thing I quickly found by Neal Adams, who line for line is one of the best artist out there. While yes it is still an idealized physique, the boobs actually have a boob shape that are attached to a body, and not just two blobs sitting on a chest. The body has the right curves and are in proportion, resulting in a much more “real” drawing.
Also - am I the only one who misses the “flat” coloring without all the gradients etc?
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Here’s me thinking I must be perceived as a valued contributor by now, vainly expecting said powers to suspend the kneejerk just long enough to understand I’m making a valid point…
But apparently the agenda is to keep laying it on with a trowel, and just pour scorn on anyone who takes issue, regardless of their standing or intent.
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I’m pretty sure the Art Director/Editor said: “WTF is this shit? Oh, it’s Rob Liefeld. Well, the fans asked for this, they get what they deserve. Print it.”
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I gather this fictional child is sixteen, right? I also gather that’s around the age girls tend to stop growing. So it’s not unusual for girls of that age to have a figure identical to a young adult’s. So be careful of the basis you employ when accusing someone of conflating a child and an adult.
Nope: women’s bodies do not stop developing at 16. 16 is when the vertical skeletal generally tops out, but breast anatomy and physiology continue to develop into the early-mid 20s. You might try spending some time with women, and, oh, I don’t know Our Bodies, Ourselves and learn something. You know, instead of being an apologist and enabler of sexist and misogynist attitudes towards women and young women.
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The problem isn’t that the images were nsfw. The problem is that you were posting pictures of adult “porn stars”–not my term–in pursuit of a tangential point about whether a minor-age character’s grossly inflated breasts could reasonably be described as the size of her head.
In the context of a story about sexualized depictions of minors and rape threats aimed at a critic of same, the photos were sleazy, inappropriate, and posed a grotesque equivalence between sexual depictions of minors and adults.
Consider it censorship or the silencing of dissent, if it makes you feel better–but do put on your big boy pants and accept the fact that higher standards are required of you here.
I know you can do better.
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You might try to RTFA.
Oh FFS. I’m not any sort of misogynist apologist; I’m merely taking issue with bullshit headlines.
If Rob had just said something like, ‘get a load of the overt sexualisation of this 16yo character’ in his headline, this is all I’d have had to say (for the third time):
Hasn’t it just been amply demonstrated that exaggerating here is not only unnecessary, but counterproductive to the aim?
That is, if the aim isn’t tabloid sensationalism. Gee, look at all those page views.
