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

[brownbetty]

Man. "I just woke up and I'm happy to see you?" More like, "I just woke up, put on my jewelry, eyeliner, and combed out my hair, and my expression of happy-to-see-you."

[brownbetty]

Michael Turner keeps on saying "subtle." I don't think that word means what he thinks it means.

[brownbetty]

I love that the the chapter on "Super-heroic" women includes how to draw hair.

[ratcreature]

Yes, there's that. But that just shows that female superheroes have to worry aout more than just the muscles, like for example maintaining that backbreaking S-line with the torso while displaying their pubic line attractively...

[katarik.livejournal.com]

... Y'know, all this stuff he's saying about keeping it subtle and unforced?

Yeah. Right. Which is why the bodies are all twisty and 'look at me!' Because he's subtle.

[ratcreature]

Well, especially since it is even less useful than the extra chapter on hair earlier in the book (which sadly also only includes long hair on female examples, which quite frankly I find easier to draw with its strands and such than short haircuts).

[ratcreature]

Yeah, he probably believes they're not "overposed" as well...

[lord-dingsi.livejournal.com]

Okay, I tried twice now to write a comment, but my internet connection isn't working properly and keeps logging me off in the middle of a sentence. So I'll make this very, very short.

1. RAGE.
2. "Sexy" is a relative term.
3. Thinky thoughts. Note to self: Write meta about comic art and the interconnection of sex, art, and homophobia a.k.a. "finding art beautiful is directly related to your sexual preference, so we can't draw pretty men because we don't want to appeal to TEH GAY".
4. Did I mention RAGE?

Also, what went wrong that they show us three men ranging from very muscular to RIDICULOUSLY MUSCLED and add "yet all appear correct and believable"?!

Emphasis mine, but.

[thete1.livejournal.com]

When a reader feels that the lady on the comic is looking at him and no one else in the shop...

Girls don't have to look overly aggressive or angry to be sexy. Cute can be very sexy, too...

When drawing the female character in action, be sure to keep her feminine looking...

I think I need to puke. I really, really do.

[lord-dingsi.livejournal.com]

I also wonder why the text says that you shouldn't feel like having to add a butt shot on every page, while the drawing shows... a butt shot?

I used to like Michael Turner's style. During the early Witchblade. I was a teenager and totally amazed by the use of computer-coloured art and effects. It was all so shiny! Everybody looked so pretty!

Nowadays I look at it and... cringe. The legs. The collagen lips. The big boobs. The blandness of their faces. It's practically the opposite of what I consider to be sexy.

[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]

Well, I guess he meant "believable" in the way that mosters and dragons can be drawn believably, not that they were all believable *humans*. Just that he thought they all still looked kind of cool and not ridiculous. These ideas get further explained in the next book, where in the chapter on "Super Men" you get the sections on increasing proportions of the body mass, strike poses, muscle layers and heroic faces, whereas the chapter on "Super Women" has such riveting subtitles as "rack'em up"...

Re: Emphasis mine, but.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I get the puking impulse. But I think these are really useful to show that the sexism doesn't just happen sometimes or accidentally, but it is intentional and taught as part of the "style". Also it for me more transparent here, because it is highlighted rather than just one part of a larger panel.

Book four of this series has a whole bunch of people talking about covers and you can read Frank Cho explain all about finding the best porn pose...

[ratcreature]

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

[lord-dingsi.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess he meant "believable" in the way that mosters and dragons can be drawn believably, not that they were all believable *humans*. Just that he thought they all still looked kind of cool and not ridiculous.
Yeah, I guess I can see where he's coming from. Just... in my subjective opinion, the SUPERDUPERMUSCLE types are ridiculous. (And fugly.) So in this case, I... well. I'll probably never "get it". (I'm also one of those weird children who never thought He-Man was cool because of his muscles, but because his friends had all these gadgets and there were all kinds of alien or magical creatures...)

whereas the chapter on "Super Women" has such riveting subtitles as "rack'em up"...

I'm intrigued... not. *sighs*
Yeah. When she's a superheroine, of course she has SUPERtits. Especially when she's also "more muscular" and possibly working out and stuff.

Re: Emphasis mine, but.

[thete1.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I get the puking impulse. But I think these are really useful to show that the sexism doesn't just happen sometimes or accidentally, but it is intentional and taught as part of the "style". Also it for me more transparent here, because it is highlighted rather than just one part of a larger panel.

Yeah, it's totally necessary. I mean -- damn. If there are people who can still argue that there's no fundamental problem here, I'd like to... well, set fire to them.

[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.

[ratcreature]

The most depressing thing for me was that those examples just looked kind of deformed to me, so it didn't even work to make them look sexier, not even in the most coneventional and mainstream interpretation of "sexy".

[miriam-heddy.livejournal.com]

Victoria's Secret has just come out with some new commercials, and, as always, I was stunned by the truly odd poses they place the models in.

Most of them resemble those drawings.

VS models seem to have uniformly very thin bodies, large chests, and very long torsos, with the lack of natural curves being obscured by exaggerated twists and turns of the pose (so that, rather than having hips that curve out, they jut their bones outward to make that S shape).

Right now, I'm in the middle of watching Season 2 of Queer as Folk, and it's funny to see that and read the advice on drawing, particularly watching Justin's drawings and QaF's discussion of the queer aesthetic in comics.

[ratcreature]

Maybe the comic artists use VS models as reference? I mean, in the chapter on photo reference in book two swimsuit magazine are mentioned as useful, and I guess those might not be too different from underwear ads?

[sophia-helix.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen QAF, but the bit about needing to spend a lot of time on a superhero's muscles and show how cut he is? Definitely pinged my gaydar. *g*

[glockgal.livejournal.com]

Turner: Full lips are very sexy and that's probably why people get collagen implants

People? PEOPLE???? Because there are soooo many guys out there wandering around with giant tumorous collagen lips, right Mike Turner?

ARRRRGGGG.

And just the mere fact that they got Jim Balent to apparently be their expert on drawing women makes their point stupid and moot. I know once Wizard actually got Terry Moore to do one of these "How to Draw..." It pretty much is exactly the opposite of what these people are saying. Except Kevin Maguire; the stuff he says isn't as bad as the rest.

But thanks for posting this, LUV! It's always fun to rant. *hee*

Pushing my own agendas

[jarodrussell.livejournal.com]

Cute can be very sexy, too...

And bubbly! Don't forget bubbly!

[ratcreature]

They reprinted Terry Moore's article too, I just had already scanned and linked part of that in a previous entry. Seriously, some of the chapters in the series are really interesting, in particular I liked quite a lot of the third volume on storytelling that has really neat stuff about dramatic tension and pacing (I shared those chapters here and here in case you're interested), and I gleaned some cool things from various chapters about inking... so it's not like it's only rant worthy. It's just there's some really awful stuff too.