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.