how to draw female comic characters (according to Wizard)...

[ratcreature]

brown_betty asked for examples "to illustrate the exactly how and why female comic characters are illustrated differently than the male." And I thought, really, what's better to illustrate these things than the books teaching the style in the first place?

A while ago I posted some scans from Wizard How To Draw series on drawing female superheroes (here and here), and I thought I'd post a bunch more from the first book of the series on "How To Draw: Heroic Anatomy".


As everything, it starts with the basics, i.e. proportions. First the male superhero


The female example is similar, but slightly different, notice how he stands firm and straight, wheras she stands with her hips cocked a little and the leg thrust forward?


Also notice in the direct torso comparison below, how the male one is ramrod straight, but she curves and leans just a little bit in the same pose?


Now onwards to the chapter "Sultry Women". It even cautions you against overposing! Yes, it's not as if Wizard wasn't aware of the problems! (Their definition and mine of which poses are already overposed might differ slightly though, heh.)





Next, Michael Turner explains "Sex Appeal". (Or what he thinks sex appeal is.) Incidentally it also illustrates the meaning of "overposed" that was brought up in the previous chapter very effectively...





Finally for compare and contrast purpuses the chapters on "Superheroic Men" and "Superheroic Women". For the male superhero it is all about more or less ridiculously enlarged muscles as we learn:





Female superheroes don't have it that easy, they need to worry about tilting their shoulder, nipple and pubic lines attractively at all times, not to mention legs, breast size, eye make-up and hair:

Comments

[morbioid.livejournal.com]

I didn’t know comic artists actually thought that way. Maybe I’ve just been encountering the wrong comics, but it’s seemed to me that in the last fifteen years, anger was the default sexy expression for female characters.

I’m not sure whether this article was as sexist as it seems at face value. Obviously, there’s a double standard there; men are drawn to look strong and women are drawn to look sexy. But that’s because there’s a double standard in real life, too. Men and women aren’t the same. There would be a lot less pain in the world if they were the same, but they’re not. They’re built differently. They move differently. They talk differently. They think differently. They learn different behaviours for attracting (or attempting to attract) members of the desired sex. It makes life difficult for those of us who are unable to live up to any desired attributes of either sex.

Maybe I’m over-complicating it. There’s nothing stopping artists from drawing sexy, sulty, pouty men, and there’s nothing stopping artists from drawing strong, stoic, serious women. And there’d be an audience for both. What is morally right is not necessarily what will appeal to the largest majority, though. What if it turned out that normal, mainstream, heretosexual, vanilla-lifestyle women would read more comics if they were written like soap operas and all the men looked like Fabio? It would be sexist to presume that that’s what women want, and that because they’re women and, you know, only interested relationships and emotions ’n’ stuff, they wouldn’t read something like Watchmen or Give Me Liberty.

On a lighter note, I like that one of the rules is “No anime.” :-)