Leifeld made everything look dorky. His sense of anatomy always made me cringe especially when people would have extra ankles or knees, or whatever.
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New on the shelves this week:
Iron Man #34: Tony faces his greatest threat as IRS agents close in on a Stark Industries subsidiary accused of falsifying profit margins on their annual stockholder statement. Can his attorney broker a deal with the SEC in time?
Detective Stories #875: Bruce Wayne must explain injuries on the lower half of his face to an inquisitive doctor during his annual insurance physical. Does he feel safe at home? Find out in this issue.
Captain 'Murica #15: Cap insists that he has plenty of black friends, but does he really? Special appearance by The Falcon, who needs to sit him down and explain a few things.
Superman #57: Clarkās secret identity is in jeopardy when the Daily Planet institutes mandatory overtime during a crisis. How will he save the world without losing his job?
Justice League #11: Wonder Woman discovers that she earns only 2/3 as much as the other heroes. Adventure ensues!
Incorrigible Spider Man #3: Peter Parker must navigate the new insurance exchange website. Can he argue that freelance photography leaves him eligible for individual coverage under Section 19.6Ā® of the new insurance law? Or will he have to pay the penalty for declining J Jonah Jamisonās offer of 29 hours per week?
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That really depends on the sport.
A runner, female or male, will tend to be very thin unless they do heavy cross training. As are most swimmers, snowboarders, surfers, cycists, etc.
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Can we get away from the idea that itās a case of realism vs unrealism?
The argument should be about the current, overarching paradigm of stylization in US comics where all women must be sexy in ways that men are not expected to be. Leaving aside the ridiculous poses that female figures are typically forced into in every frame they appear, male bodybuilder figures are not typically sexy to straight women in the ways that female hour-glass figures are to straight men (or adolescent boys), so there is no equivalence to the dimorphism between drawings of male and female characters.
Women are depicted as slender and sexually attractive with emphasis on secondary sexual characteristics, and men are depicted as muscular and powerful with no sexual emphasis at all (in fact, despite the bodypaint costumes, their genitals tend to disappear into a featureless bulge or a blank crotch).
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Thereās probably no better place than this to advocate the immeasurable attractions of Ivy Doomkittyā¦
What Iād like to call āright sizedā.
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Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Olympic Wrestler and Heavyweight World Grand Prix Champion Daniel Cormier.
Dan would give Batman fits.
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FTFY. 
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LOL, I think Batman would have some emergency-rehydrated-cake capsules to distract Cormier with. Batman plans ahead to the Nth degree, Cormierā¦ well. That might be his one weak spot.
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Iād be happy if they could just wear some damn clothes or have hair that isnāt so long itāll get caught in their shoes. /sigh
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dunno whats up with the first picture, but keeping mass on as a cyclist is tough.
Hoy is a sprinter with a natural sprinters body & he uses it to great effect. I was a sprinter, but my thighs never ballooned like his, combo of genetics & that I spread myself btwn road/offroad distance & sprinting.
I agree, excepting your last point, cause any male superhero worth his leotards gonna be wearing a cup, I hope, for their sake.
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Thank you. Iām surprised it took this long for someone to point this out. I know nothing about modern superhero comics, so I decided to google ātransgender superheroā andā oh my god, they do exist. Apparently the creative community as a whole is warming up to the idea of LGBT characters. No longer will entire classes of society be excluded from the world of superheroes. At long last, comic artists and writers are now objectifying everybody. Progress!
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Just imagining The Flash doing his gig without a jock strap makes my balls hurt.
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That was really interesting.
Iāve often thought, when looking at CRPGs and FPSs, that I wished theyād model the protagonists who are women on athletes.
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No equivalence to the dimorphism? I disagree that male forms in comics are any less idealized. Holding the idealization to different standards between men and women can be seen itself as a sexist perspective.
This was I thought quite blatant especially with the controversy surrounding Milo Manaraās Spider Woman cover. Spider Man itself is a comic famous for depicting its hero in gymnastic contortions - twisting, squatting, crawling, bending, etc - yet Spider Woman is held to a different standard because she is female.
With the male human form, the muscular build is indeed a secondary sexual characteristic, as is body hair. Womensās hormonal makeup tends towards curvy body fat, while menās hormones are more likely to result in becoming muscular. Depiction of genitals would be primary sexual characteristics. Anyway, the dimorphism itself I think is plainly present, and deciding that it should not be because some people find differences between male and female bodies titillating would be a bit reactionary.
I donāt have any statistics to indicate what most people supposedly like, but I consider realistically athletic physiques more attractive than grotesque caricatures. But I donāt find the idealism surprising. In some ways, there is more of a point artistically to stylized representations rather than realism, which we already have.
Male superheros are the definition of the idealized male - they are depicted as largely stoic, extremely powerful approaching invulnerable, overly muscular, tall, dark, beautiful, scantily clad, a little dangerous and mysterious.
The idea that there is no sexual emphasis on them because we donāt see their penises hang out so we can really outright measure how inferior we are to them or because straight women donāt find them attractive (says who?) is ridiculous.
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The idealism goes two different ways, though: to put it crudely, the women are who the (male, adolescent) readers want to to fuck, and the men are who they want to be. That is a prime example of a double standard; one, moreover, that prevents the market from expanding its female readership.
Imagine, for a moment, if the standards were reversed, and the women were drawn the way female adolescents want to be, and the men drawn as sex objects for women. What are the body types that typical straight women like the most? Is it the slabs of steak represented by Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rock? Or is it the Johnny Depps and Brad Pitts? The Benedict Cumberbatches and the George Clooneys?
Who are the women that women most admire? Is it just the beauty queens and photoshopped faces of various cosmetic products? Iāll let the women of BB answer that, if they care to, but Iāll lay you only long odds that it isnāt the skinny, waistless contortionists of the current US comic market.
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The issue is that the female forms are idealized to fit male sexual fantasies, and the male forms are idealized to fit male power fantasies. Itās not that theyāre less idealized, itās that theyāre rendered from, by, and for, the same people.
Mind you, Iām all for male fantasies- Iām sure Iāve got a couple that would make Caligula himself blush- But be honest about it. Men want to see shapely, bendy females and muscular alpha males. Women want to see something entirely different. Saying that itās not a double standard because everybody is idealized doesnāt hold weight when they all conform to the same personās ideal.
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But desire and identification for only one sex is still single-sided. Why do you assume that there isnāt a corresponding desire/identification going on with female readers?
This is precisely what I would assume to be the case even now, without having any evidence to the contrary.
If I was in my teens/early 20s again when I knew a large cross-section of comic readers to ask, I would do so. One of my best friends owned a comic shop. But in my 40s now, I am in a boring area where there isnāt a lot of comics activity.
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