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

[cereta.livejournal.com]

When the college president came to my office, we looked at the Hush Heroes poster I have on my wall, comparing Nightwing's stance to Huntress's. For fun, we tried to stand the way she's standing. Neither of us could do it.

I love that poster, but yeah.

[ratcreature]

You probably have to be a contortionist to have any chance at all to achieve some of these...

[thete1.livejournal.com]

Okay. Recently mildredmilton posted a bit of Bruce/Tim kinktasticness which featured Tim tied into a pretty complex bondage position (one of the reasons I liked it is because Mildred did a very good job of both expressing what position Tim was in and *not* getting into the whole "feels more like a list/diagram than porn" thing a lot of BDSM-y fanfic falls into). I decided to compare how easy it was to do *that* to how easy it was to get into some of the positions in the scans Betty posted yesterday --

You know -- the whole "make sure the audience can see boobs, ass, crotch, open mouth, and that at least three points are in contact with the ground" thing -- and... yeah.

Guess which one was *actually* possible for the overweight disabled woman. There's something *wrong* when gratuitous bondage m/m slash porn is more physically realistic than a comic book cover. I'm just saying.

[ratcreature]

What really gets to me is when these bizarro poses are used for everyday activities. I mean, it is one thing to draw the backflip of some flying alien so that both the boobs and ass are shown off nicely, but everybody knows how people look who sit on ther couch drinking coffee or put dishes in their sink or whatever.