Archive for August, 2012

Superhero Body Diversity: Female Artists Offer Their Take

Friday, August 24th, 2012

24 August 2012
A couple of weeks ago, Comics Alliance ran an article that asked artists – all male – to compare heroes’ physiques with those of Olympic competitors.

CA has now posed the same question to a group of female artists:

Two weeks ago we ran an article on ComicsAlliance. We asked four artists to rank male and female superheroes by size and describe which athletic types they resembled. The aim was to see if an unspoken consensus exists about what superheroes should look like or if they all belonged to the same generic model.

All four of the artists we spoke to were men. If you’re looking to represent the demographic diversity of the superhero industry that’s sadly a pretty accurate sample. But it didn’t allow us to see if there was a difference in the way male and female artists perceive superhero body shapes, and we thought that was an interesting question. So we reached out to some of the best female artists working in superhero comics today to see how they ranked the heroes.

To read the new article, click here: Superhero Body Diversity: Female Artists Offer Their Take

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Gail Simone, Geekery, and (Power of the Force) Girls

Monday, August 20th, 2012

20 August 2012
Gail Simone (Batgirl, Birds of Prey, Secret Six, Wonder Woman) wrote today’s strip for The Gutters. It’s funny and good (duh) and worth a minute of your time:

(click image for larger version)

And, by way of Big Shiny Robot‘s Bryan Young comes a link to the opening sequence of The Power of the Force Girls. If you like Star Wars and The Powerpuff Girls, it should put a smile on your face:

Posted in animation, comics, illustration | No Comments »

Olympians: Superhero Bodies and What Real Athletes Look Like

Thursday, August 9th, 2012

09 August 2012
Comics Alliance posted an article that compared the physiques of your typical superhero to those of Olympic athletes:

There are certain phrases that have a special resonance for a Marvel kid like me. “Pocket dimension.” “Lift (press).” “Marital status: unrevealed.” This is the language of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, and I used to pore over the pages of those little encyclopedias like I thought there was an exam coming. (I would have aced the Alien Races paper.) One phrase that came up a lot was “Olympic class athlete,” used to describe characters with peak human abilities. For example, Nightcrawler is an Olympic-class acrobat, even though that’s not a real thing unless you count opening ceremonies.

Thanks to the current games in London we’re all getting a refresher on what Olympic athletes actually look like – and they look like a lot of very different people. They look like wrestlers, sprinters, fencers, weightlifters, boxers, shot-putters, rowers, marathon runners, judokas, pentathletes, swimmers, beach volleyball players, cyclists and a lot more besides. In fact, they seem a lot more varied than the characters in the pages of most super-books. So are superhero comics getting it wrong?

In the article, they asked four artists to attempt to classify heroes and heroines body with respect to their closest Olympic analogues. The results were a little varied, but interesting.

To read the full article, click here: Superhero Bodies and What Real Athletes Look Like.

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