So that explains it! or, No, we're not really "mysterious creatures"--

-we have bones, muscles, organs and nerves just like the m. of the s., really!

By way of leading in, you might already have seen this mindblowing quote from Rob Liefeld which has been making the fannish rounds the last couple days - "Doing a book full of naked girls doesn’t interest me—never has. But guys shooting heads off, putting knives through each other? I’m all for it." - which is in the context of him doing a Bible-based story, btw, and which may go far to explaining why Liefeld's female figures are drawn with such horrifying distortion that his name has become a byword for it, and a cry of outrage a la Kirk's "Khaaaaaan!!!!!" scream in some forums. (It doesn't explain why he has made a habit of putting nigh-naked girls in his pictures even when the script didn't expressly call for them, though...or why his males are so often grotesquely deformed in the opposite direction.) (He's also a huge fan of Mad Mel's Passion, which just figures.)

Regardless of Liefeld's distate for the human female form (one imagines him drawing with face averted, chair pushed back as far from his desk as possible, sketching his women's bodies with eyes squeezed nearly shut, like a hapless reader of the Necronomicon trying to escape the madness) or the truth, or falsehood, of his declaration, we can probably safely assume that most male artists drawing "cheesecake" (however dry, lumpy, oversweetened or soggy) aren't doing so with such reluctance and aversion to their subject matter.

So why are their figures' supposedly-glorified bodies so inaccurate, and even grotesquely deformed? I've posited one theory, which seems to be gaining some support around the net, and really if it isn't alien brain-eaters, then what? Can't be explained by ev bio/evo psyche, because females too skinny to ovulate, let alone sustain visible breasts (or their own heads!), with limbs too attenuated to support their own weight let alone that additional of pregnancy, and torsos with no space for internal organs, including lungs, can hardly be triggering some subconscious recognition of fertility markers. The Venus of Willendorf is exaggerated/stylized to the extreme - but has more-or-less the BMI to support those mammaries.

For instance, if you were to see just this drawing, and were asked to guess if it were supposed to be an unfortunate shapeshifter stuck between forms, an artist's rendering of a human by a member of an alien species that had never seen one, a satirical post-modern commentary on fashion illustration, or a completely sincere attempt by a professional human illustrator to draw a canonically-stunningly-beautiful human female, which would you pick?


The heartbreak of black-market cosmetic surgery

Now, granted, this artist has a great deal of trouble with the human form - his Superman is nightmarish, like a semi-deflated Macy's Parade balloon lurching into the viewframe - but that leaves the question of why did Marvel's PTB pick him to do the cover? Charity gig? Or did they look at his pencils and go "Oooooh! Boobies!!!" and not notice that, among other serious anatomical issues, one of her breasts is attempting to engulf and consume the other?!?

This is also an example of one of my biggest peeves with the exploitative artists - bared breasts without nipples, a very common phenomena which has also drawn the notice of Occasional Superheroine, which annoys me for artistic and ideological reasons about equally. If you're going to be "daring" enough to draw a woman in low-cut garb or otherwise revealing pose, such that her nipples would be showing, then dammit, DRAW THEM IN! Don't play at being bold and daring by drawing some monstrous mutation, or don't you guys know what mammaries are for? (Or don't realize that Barbie isn't a realistic sculpture, maybe.) If you're not willing, or not allowed, to draw an aureola, then maybe you'd better rethink your design concept. It's as if I drew a naked guy like this - it's one thing to ellide, and another thing to make it impossible to ignore the omission. It smacks of a contrary prudery if nothing else; although given the blobby and waxen build of the rest of the figure in this drawing of Emma Frost it could just be ignorance of anatomy on Quitely's part.

I sketched up an overlay showing my attempt at figuring out where the bones and muscles are supposed to be, and correcting the proportions as far as possible, but it's hopeless - her body's made of Silly Putty, and don't even TALK about the clothes, this is one of those costumes designed by people who apparently are nudists when they're at home because there's no way that any of these bits would stay on, without double-sided tape, or possibly superglue. You can see that the boob-cups are positioned they would show some aureola, and the left-side boob-cup is glued on too low, and so would reveal a bit of nipple, like an 18th-century fashionista's stomacher with peekaboo lace frill (we have one such family portrait in our local museum, from those staid stayed Colonial days) - if you're gonna take the figleaf off, you have to have something there!

It's the mirror inverse of the always-erect teat syndrome that afflicts so many artists (probably with some ironic overlap, but I haven't been keeping track so far) - no, fellas, ours don't stand at attention any more, or less, than yours do! That's not one of the places our biology differs, so if yours don't stick out like sore thumbs, don't draw your hard-hitting heroine's that way!

I do find it fascinating that, even while her arms are different lengths as well as too short and spindly, her shoulders lopsided, her head oversize for her body and much too heavy for that skinny neck, her face bizarrely melted-looking, her ribcage squashed and bulging like a wad of half-chewed gum with bubbles trapped in it, and her breasts not only of unequal size but also askew, her mons is carefully delineated through the fabric of her shorts AND you can see the curve of her buttocks between her legs, lovingly defined, though Quitely couldn't be arsed to figure out what spatial plane her hands exist in, heigh-ho.

What gets me is, I like cheesecake. All different types, strawberry, chocolate, with almonds on top, even pumpkin spice, I'm not a purist when it comes to cheesecakes - except, you know, that they not taste like cardboard, or be moldy, or have so much sugar you can't taste the cream cheese, or be burnt, or have all kinds of flour and heavy/crunchy stuff in them, or - you know. They have to be cheesecake, and they have to be good. I like other kinds of cakes, I like pound cakes and tortes and death-by-chocolate and angel's food, and those ambiguous is-it-a-bread-or-is-it-a-cake? things with spices and shredded zucchini and stuff, but not when I've been promised cheesecake. Not when that's what I've paid for. So it bemuses me that so many avowed male admirers of quote-enquote-cheesecake are so willing to be fobbed off with stuff that, for all intents and appearances, came out of a box, was thrown together without reading the directions, and then was tossed in the fridge and forgotten for weeks. I mean, for the Cyprian's sake, people, uniboobs? Dislocated spines, femurs, elbows, everything? Shoulderblades that look like they were piped out of a frosting tube by someone who only had ever glimpsed a human back?

-My original title, before hitting that laughable Liefeld line yesterday, was going to be "Dear God, what is that thing?, btw. That really is how I felt when I followed david_wisdom's link to that New X-Men cover - I thought she was supposed to be, you know, mutating some more, in a really bad way.

Part II - Yes, boys, women's faces really do have more than one expression!

Then there's the better-quality cheesecake, the stuff that people justify, even Angry Fangirls, as "not so bad" or "good" and point to as examples of okay/tolerable objectification. Only, you know what the other big sin of cheesecake is? When it's bland. Bland cheesecake, which doesn't fail by being too dry or too gooey or too sweet or too sharp or having mold on it or burnt edges, the bland cheesecake which is a mockery of the proper Platonic ideal of cheesecake by having nothing wrong with it, and nothing right either, resembling a mass of cakey paste that you can only choke down with mouthfuls of coffee to wash away the non-taste of it--

(If this has never happened to you, count yourself very lucky. There is a reason that successful cheesecake recipes are valued and traded between friends like rare cards.)

I turned to look at some of the so-called high-quality cheesecake out there, by the names mentioned most frequently, like Adam Hughes and Frank Cho, and also Greg Horn who is popular among male viewers for his women, (unlike Liefield, who doesn't seem to have any fans of his :cough: cheesecake, where even Quitely has a couple I saw), and not afaik known as a tracer-of-porn like Greg Land, and I noticed something in common.

1. They can all draw well, from several technical points of view.

2. They cannot draw women's faces.

Or rather, they can draw a face. A standardly-pretty, doll-like (Her eyes open and close!), immobile, botox'd female mask, with a fixed smile, whether or not it's appropriate to the situation; a face that seems to have come unedited from mid-1970s advertising clipart, the stuff that came on shiny paper to be pasted down as fellow oldsters may remember, that blank bright plastic gaze of suburban white insipidity, used to sell things in little boxes to the housewives living in the little boxes--

I wish I was exaggerating, but I'm not by much. It's really bad when you compare/contrast in a scene where you have both male and female characters, like in this one by Cho: all the boys are scowling, looking intent, or determined, all with different physiognomy - and both the gals are wearing the same vapid "archaic" smile. No wonder their cleavage gets more attention - it has more personality than either of their faces do!

Witchblade, in this take of a Mucha icon, is wearing the same '70s ad art face (and same Farrah Fawcett Majors hair, too.) Dejah Thoris? Same insipid look, she's a Hollywood starlet from the '50s, playing a foreign aristocrat with no attempts to inhabit the part at all. Go through the rest of his page here, it's a pretty enough face (in the sense of regular features of a certain generic white Middle-American type) but there's no soul behind it, no individual personality - no response to the situation, either, which for me is a killer when it comes to narrative art. Someone setting forth on the Power Walk (or aerial equivalent) to face down a Big Bad or three, weight of the world and all that, should NOT be wearing the same blissed/blitzed simper of Aurora waiting for her Prince to come.

When they do need to emote, we have one alternate, swappable head that tends to get used in most scenes - the open-mouthed "seductive" look, used in both porn and all kinds of advertising any more to indicate availability for irrumation (yes, that's a technical term) which manages not to disturb at all the blank facade otherwise, puts no wrinkles or character lines in brow or cheek or about the dental orbit, and so is perfect - from one point of view - for doing double- or triple-duty whenever a female character must look angry, afraid, excited, happy or shouty.

From the POV of someone wanting to see human beings with personalities behaving like real human beings (even melodramatized ones) despite the handicap of a double-X in their helix, it's not really ideal. But hey! at least all the women in the pictures still look pretty, if you fancy that brainless, vacuous type--

Greg Horn's women are particularly bad in this regard: All-purpose pornface! And who can tell the difference between pouty fashion-model face and true badassery? Not he!

But just look at the faces on Adam Hughes' Wonder Woman. And his Lara Croft, although here we also get to see an example of the kind of problem that results (check out Tomb Raider #34 particularly) when someone who isn't used to drawing women with intense expressions, tries to.

These guys are very good artists. They know their proportions, they know their composition, they can handle line and shading and all that, better than I. That's why it's a shame that they draw pouting mannequins instead of action heroines, and I do mean that literally.

Male characters are allowed to bare their teeth, snarl, grin, roar, frown, glare, boggle, smirk, sneer - and they get different expressions for each, they don't have to make do with the same two standard faces for all of them. Partly, I think this is a matter of artistic competence - but I think the incompetence partly comes out of opposed attitudes to what men and women "are", by nature. Men act, women are acted upon; men are characters, women are precious objects; male = doer, female = done to, and the doing revolves around desirability, which is only understood in terms both passive and conventionalized, and this is reflected in visual representations of beauty as well.

"Don't frown, it'll give you wrinkles" was old advice to girls, because of course no man would want a wrinkly girlfriend - or a discontent one who thought too much and critiqued the world. It becomes a feedback circle - women are shown in the visual media (both high culture and low) as blank-faced masks and still voluptuous statuary in ideal, and this is internalized by artists both male and female, and then we don't know how to draw women out of the treasury of our minds as if they were just people, just personalities in varied bodies the same as the guys.

And this affects both how they we are drawn and how we get written, in fiction, and also how we get treated in RL, too.

Here's another one, by George Perez, that was just held up as an example of good drawing of women on G-W.org - but lo! pornface is used to stand in for a glare, over and over again. Yo, guys! I'll tell you a deep dark secret: When we scowl, when we glare, when we grin, our eyes crinkle up, too, just like yours!

And also? We have noses. I realize that advertising art, Cosmo covers, and fashion plates treat noses as a no-no, but I assure you we do have them. Some of us are stuck with snub ones, but many of us have lovely arched or aquiline ones, and they are visible in 3/4 profile.

Not only that, but here's the deepest, darkest secret of them all: those colors on our faces? Those aren't natural. We aren't really born with shiny green, blue, purple, or goldish eyelids. If you look closely, sometimes you'll find the pigmentation changes from day to day. That's because it's artificial. Same thing with our mouths: our lips are not really glossy, solid red masses like those candy-wax lips you got as a kid. [whisper] It's paint. It washes off. [/whisper] Somebody really needs to clue Mr. Horn in about this, but he's by no means the only artist to make this mistake.

The webbed breast is the most immediately horrifying thing in this picture, but the solid burgundy plastic mouth unit is to my mind just as bad, particularly when combined with the helpless screaming expression of supposedly-bad-ass armored heroine...

"And Naked Shines The Goddess II" - An Object/ification Lesson


The Naked Storm Cover (that's what the man calls it, sorry! I call it "Pretty Princess Sparkle Storm," myself--)aka Black Panther #8.

Aside from the big white lightning swash dividing the background, the brightest area in the picture is the side of her breast, and the second is her hip (it's really obvious if you grayscale it, a handy tactic if you're unsure whether a pic is about the T&A first and foremost.) That's what the artist chose to highlight, and although it's good that he drew her with muscles, it's not good that he drew her with a completely blank, brain-eaten expression and not doing anything except stand there to be gazed at, and lusted after, with her right leg hooked so as to cock her hip a little more prominently.

The fact that her feet are hidden is possibly problematic: it does convey further immobility/passivity and implicit trappedness to have the "sheet" visually tangled around them, but it could just be that he didn't want to draw bare feet, which are hard, and also tend to add an unsexaaay quirkiness to a portrait, if you draw them accurately (and they're harder to stylize/shrink to sexayy teeny-tinyness than boots.) Is she smiting? Blessing? Posing for one of those cheesy "romantic" photographs of you in your lingerie you're supposed to give as an "extra-special present" to your husband or boyfriend? Who knows? Who cares? Why ask? She's naaaaaked, dude! Okay, you can't see anything off-limits, and what there is of her is pretty obscured, but hey, she's NAKED! On the cover! Which sold out, so obviously quasi-visible sorta-rotica works, from Marvel's POV. So what if it expresses nothing of the story or the character depicted? (And if I were completely without conscience, I could...no, better not go there.)

It's not really that bad, mind you - she isn't horribly deformed like Emma was, or the Liefeld ladies, and she isn't cringing in terror, twisted so as to show off max T and max A at the same time whilst being menaced by another woman who's both suffering from spinal injury and popping out of her too-short t-shirt, either. But it could be better - even, I would go so far as to say, a better "Naked Storm Cover."

So, taking up the challenge that is the claim that the problem lies in depicting female bodies per se (aka "killjoy feminists want to take away all our eye candy!") I decided to rework it, under the assumption that there is some good in-story dramatic reason for Ororo to be out riding the winds at night in nothing but some strategically-drifting drapery borrowed from a Baroque fresco painter, some reason that isn't the PTB going "Oh, the poor fanboys, don't you think they need some more fanservice to brighten up their sad, lonely basements?" or Mr. Cho going "I wanna draw Storm NAKED!" and indulging himself - I gather Storm's lost her power to magic her uniform on, or has that been retconned out? At any rate, here's my take on the theme:



I was going to call this "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Goddess"...

There are a lot of things that I'm not happy with, which is an occupational hazard - the forced perspective is off a bit, I should have drawn every fold in the gauze and lock of hair separately instead of just letting the scribbles fall as they would, I keep thinking maybe I should have made the background lighter or darker - but it's the best I could do in a day with no references and without stripping down and spending a few hours with mirrors and marker (too cold now, I've done that though) and it does overall what I intended it to do: it has the same basic elements as the original (Storm, a scarf, a sky, lightning) but the composition is radically different and succeeds in directing the viewer's gaze so that your eyes start, move, and finish where they should, with a deliberate, controlled sense of action and motion, and implicit story - somebody or something's getting smitten but good, because whatever dragged her out of bed in too much of a hurry to grab more than a curtain has her both upset and furious. (I changed the color of the gauze to a shimmering gold because green isn't historically one of Storm's colors and gold is, plus I thought it looked better against the dark blue sky as well as against her skin.)

Is it exploitative? Leaving aside the fact that there's no equity in comics nudity, and working off the assumption that there's a legitimate dramatic reason for portraying her thus on the front of a book, I would argue that it's like the pictures of Durga I wrote about before, no more intrinsically exploitative than this (which was one of my inspirations for the scene). The problem isn't that female characters are drawn in skin-tight clothes, or unclothed, it's why and how they're drawn that way.

To put it simply, is the point of the picture itself (or of putting a female character into the scene) to have the opportunity to shove some tits front-and-center, is that the only reason that a heroine's been slapped on the page? or is there narrative integrity, or is it lacking? Could the pose, the outfit, the situation equally easily be found - or even imagined - with a male lead? Is there a special "butt spot" turned on even when the point of the picture is supposed to be some other body part, as with one old X-Men cover I saw browsing the galleries where the ostensible point was the tattoo on the chara's upper back - but this was lost with the special up-skirt spot pointed to highlight WOMANWOMANWOMANLOOKHEREBOYSWOMANPARTS!!!1!

Male charas don't get their pelvic girdles painted with spotslights. In fact, even if a male character is depicted completely naked, or in his skivvies, the highlights will be on his face, hands, and arms, and occasionally, if engaged in a vigorous movement, on his legs from the mid-thighs down. --In other words, all and only those bits that say Personality and Action. When someone dares to even reveal that a male character has a bit that says "Sex" too, as Ross did with Citizen Steel, the fanboy uproar makes the PTB shout "Kill that spot!", never mind that it wasn't even a spot, just a bit of ambient light bouncing around, never mind that light magically appears out of nowhere to highlight T&A all the time. No "C&A" allowed, where the Noble Sex is concerned!

Check for yourself. Turn them to grayscale. Try to find equivalents*. Men solo on covers to show how badass & rugged of loners they are, women get solo covers to show how big the artist can draw their cans. The pictures where superheros are just hanging out naked or in their briefs are few and far between (and mostly not on the covers) and the ones where they're not just underdressed, but also doing nothing and in a sexually-provocative pose, with their passive, objectified bodies' display being the main point of the illo, with no distracting expressions on their blankly-pretty faces except perhaps open-mouthed dread, are nonexistent these days.

They're fighting for their lives, straining against their chains and bonds if prisoners, glaring, grinning, scowling indomitably but always active, always creating motion and carrying forth some narrative energy. Not not standing with legs too far apart to move, one buttock thrust coyly outward, not stretching in front of a mirror in their undies admiring their own callipygian grace (another real X-Men cover I saw out there in one of these galleries) - and still less cowering, displaying their vulnerability, whimpering with parted lips in a look copied straight from Girls Gone Wild at best. (On the rare occasions when a heroine gets the spotlight front and center, and isn't put in a stripperific pose, her costume has to be cut down nearly to her mons, so that you don't forget she's Sex, Sex, Sex made flesh, dammit!)

Marvel, DC, you want to claim "realism" as your justification for raping and brutalizing your female characters? Then don't use RealDolls as your models for women, superheroic or otherwise. It isn't rocket science - you just need to get out more.

And don't think it's just a problem in genre illustration, either (or advertising illustration, for that matter.)

Example 1 for further reference:
Woman half-naked, depicted surprised and vulnerable, in the act of getting undressed, covering her breast in embarrassed reaction BUT doing so in a totally-ineffective way - exploitative.

Example 2:
Man depicted completely naked, stepping forward with his hand raised in greeting or ritual gesture (missing oblation bowl?) - not exploitative.

Example 3:
Woman depicted completely naked, striding forward and shooting an arrow from her bow - not exploitative, because female bodies aren't intrinsically obscene.

Compare/Contrast - what is the visual point-of-interest of each?
Figurine 1
Figurine 2
All of these.

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_{* Mine don't count.}