I just had to share...

[ratcreature]

This is a scan from Wizard How To Draw: Character Creation, from the chapter Super Women




WTF? That woman on the left looks freakishly disproportionate, not attractive, not even if you like larger breasts. And that thing with the ashamed body language of the normal woman left me speechless. To be fair to the book as a whole a few chapters onward in another section on female archetypes titled appropriately "Vixens" (sic!) the same approach to drawing breasts is actually mocked, so strangely enough the example "vixen" drawings have thus smaller breasts than usual for superhero comics. Go figure. Anyway, so it's not consistently advocating freakish balloon boobs.

However that in the archetype section the chapters are Super Men, Super Women, Acrobats, Costumed Vigilantes, Brutes, Vixens, Armored Villains and Sidekicks, and the only chapter with examples from both genders is the one about acrobats (by Adrian Alphona, who draws Runaways), is quite telling. I mean, talking about archetypes I kind of get why they wouldn't think of women as typical examples for brutes or even armored villains, but no sidekicks and costumed vigilantes either? *grumble*

Comments

[quivo.livejournal.com]

*because she's reading a book on it* I tell ya, it all comes down to self-hate. Because why else would people actually draw this and circulate it as a good set of guidelines? It doesn't just affect the average woman's self-perception (grr, the posture of the last figure on the right makes me so mad), it also affects the self-perception of guys who don't like bigger boobs, taller women, longer legs or what have you - they feel odd, abnormal, when there's no real need to do so. Everyone sort of collectively looks to a higher standard that's not possible for everyone without surgical intervention. It's a sort of useless downward spiral - the so-called 'average woman' feels bad because she's average, the 'not-so-average woman' feels bad either because she's not special or not average enough, and the 'super woman' feels bad because she's too super and has to live up to some sort of super image.

Okay, /rant for now, but this just makes me mad. Superheroes are all very well, but it's like people get too invested in them nowadays, and start secretly thinking they have to classify to the boundaries the behaviour of superheroes and supervillains set, whether in the creative arena (no women as brutes/armored villains/sidekicks etc) or in real life.

[ratcreature]

Though with "beauty" ideal you see in models and such currently they often seem too skeletal to even have regular breasts.

I mean, if you look at the classic, widely recced drawing books for human anatomy, many of which are reprints from stuff first published in the 1920s and 30s (which has its own problems, such as that are no black people in them), all the idealized women look fat to our eyes...

[quivo.livejournal.com]

I know - there are horrible extremes in both directions. Being somewhat interested in fashion as a whole, I understand that clothes do tend to look better on people of a certain size and body type. However, it's not a reason to despise whatever shape you have, be it thin, large-breasted or large-bottomed or whatnot. We've somehow been conditioned to such a point that we aspire to unnatural things - extreme skinniness AND shapely breasts, one of the greatest non-sequitors for average women ever. The conditioning changes over time, of course, so though the human anatomy books of yore have shapely women idealised, they exclude black people and people with colored skin. Nowadays, the ideal woman would probably be thin, fairly large-breasted, and have tanned skin.

Or, tl;dr version: ideals suck as a whole. Discard if possible :P