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

[ratcreature]

The Wizard books actually do have some good tutorials on drawing comics, even if you don't want to draw superheroes or "busty babies", like stuff on pacing, on narrative tension and so on (I scanned some other excerpts and posted them in other LJ post). I mean, I didn't buy all four volumes of this to complain about their sexism on the internet...

Frankly, I have yet to find a drawing book on drawing humans (from imagination rather than books on drawing nudes or whatever) that is not highly problematic. The "classics" that get mentioned a lot in later books (Bridgeman, Hogarth, Loomis etc) are all fairly old and completely lack any ethnic diversity, and either look at male bodies as the default or are sexist in other ways, and even newer books that do have some variety have massive problems in their ideological framework, like "Figure Drawing Without a Model" by Ron Tiner is decent about body types, but uses for this racist "scientific" classification systems from the 19th/early 20th century and turns them into artistic tools without any reflection, for example the craniometry with its cephalic index (he talks about this as if it was "science" or a "neutral" anthropological measuring and classification tools to describe bodies, not invented to be central for a multitude of more or less racist theories). I mean, I actually like Tiner's book and found the tips on drawing less "perfect" bodies useful (he points out how fat is distributed for example), but it did come as an unpleasant shock to see body descriptors from 19th century racist theories pushed in my face in a book from the 1990s with no mention of their highly problematic origin.