I've drawn comics (and 'comix') for over forty years. Comic-book art was a large part of my original art school submission folio in 2016, though my distaste for the more obvious elements of the mainstream comics world has only deepened in recent times.
The image of the powerful, ass-kicking (super)heroine in
mainstream comic-book art may, at first sight, suggest to laypersons viewing
such material that strong, independent, feisty females are a staple of such
material, and therefore encouraging signs of gender equality in popular media.
Whether they truly do or not is largely due to the writers, since the artists
(whether individuals or penciller/inker teams) will likely be the same.
However, the aesthetic ‘phiz/phys’ code, when examined, suggests nothing more
than skimpiest lip-service to the Women's Movement, and nothing less than
patriarchy-as-usual. Shall we break down the aesthetic attributes of all the
so-called 'powerful' female characters in mega-selling, mainstream comics (not,
please note, 'comix' – which by their very nature tend to be radical,
subversive, and challenging)?
l) Age (apparent):
young. Late teens to early, mid-20s at most. Anything older is a mother, a
granny, or a bitchy, probably sexually-frustrated boss-type. Superheroes,
aliens etc. may in reality be much older, but they still don’t look a day over
24 ½ .
2) Vitalstatistics:
Barbie, or one of her numerous sisters, daughters or grand-daughters. Hip:waist
ratio and bust size are vital considerations. Bared or exposed flesh is
virtually a must, whether it's cleavage, thigh, abdomen, or all of the above
(or more besides) as evidenced in, say, Lara Croft. (Speaking of which, I recently came across this BBC broadcast on the subject: Evil Genius with Russell Kane - Lara Croft, Tomb Raider - BBC Sounds )
3) Physiognomy: eyes,
nose and mouth set according to standard principles in line with l) above –
small nose, small babyish chin, big eyes. Individuality, quirkiness, character
and age-lines are deficient/non-existent, unless the bitchy bad boss or
granny-type needs emphasizing just how utterly unattractive she is, and how
redundant to the male viewer's fantasy world as a result.
4) Height: variable. Can be small and petite or tall and
leggy in killer heels without damaging the viewer's feelings: the former more
likely to be the 'cute/good girl' type, the latter the deadly/femme fatale
assassin/hooker-with-a-switchblade/villainess variety.
5) Dress: Skimpy, exposing skin, or if all over, then
spray-on skin-tight (nudity by proxy). Boots and high heels of at least 4”
often in evidence, no matter the circumstances, terrain, weather or location.
Okay, so the above list is neither entirely serious, or free
from stereotypical generalization either. But, as most mainstream comic book artists are male, they not
only draw what they like to see, but what is demanded to be seen: the
scopophilia of their majority readership ensures few variations on the above
coded formulae and sometimes the styles can be almost interchangeable. Some
artists do indeed seem to have a single, specific, female type (or personal
archetype). Here are examples of completely different characters drawn by
Brazilian artist Al Rio, all of whom look not only identical facially, but are
carbon copies down to the very hairstyle and expressions:
We can turn now to an industry manual, written by a leading
professional, for budding comic artists on how to draw awesome women
characters, a title named “Incredible Comic Book Women with Tom Nguyen: TheKick-Ass Guide to Drawing Hot Babes!”
Herein I cite a secondary source rather than the book itself,
as I consider the reviewer’s enthusiastic comments to be as worthy of
discussion as the book under review. Thus
“Lets face it, if you’re going to become a comic book artist,
learning how to draw a hot leggy blond is a must!”
Really? There’s no point then in
asking if the blond in question may be black or Asian – they (well, obviously she)
will be white. From the samples of Nguyen’s art provided, I saw immediate
comparisons with the figure drawing manuals of Andrew Loomis, an artist so
influential now that his name is still spoken of reverently in illustration
circles, and who is frequently cited as a major inspiration for many of today’s
leading professionals. That Loomis had a ‘type’ of woman as much as Rio cited
above is evident – they are all young, beautiful, slim, naked (possibly the
same model) and often drawn in high heels, with the fetishistic undertones now
expected of an artist who understands his intended audience (as does Nguyen,
evidenced later). Studying texts like this in my early illustration career
(early 2000s) left me conflicted – here was a revered expert, giving sage
advice to new artists, yet thoroughly entrenched in its time. In later years, I
found Linda Neade’s survey of traditional artists’ drawing manuals to be very
reminiscent of Loomis (‘The Female Nude’, pp. 46-55), and things have not
changed in the 2lst century when we consider Nguyen’s ‘how-to’
bible, with his bikini-clad babes guaranteed to maintain the youthful (psychologically,
if not physically) male reader’s attention as much as Loomis’ flexible, and
utterly traditional, nudes:
Curiously, Al Rio actually includes a re-draw of one of Loomis' costumed models in what purports to be a 'how to draw' class booklet of is own - though it's unclear if Loomis receives credit, it's very easy to see the influence:
Later in the review, the writer of the review of Nguyen’s
book does cite diversification:
“One of the cooler
sections I enjoyed reading about was how to capture a specific woman’s likeness
for a character, and how to draw ethnic groups that aren’t your own. His number
one rule? Avoid stereotypes! It should go without saying, but it seems harder
to do than it sounds.”
Yet for all that, non-racial stereotypes remain
a continual presence, as is evidenced in a further reviewer comment “on how to
draw younger women and older women, pointing out key attributes for each. For
instance, it’s important to not make your older women look too agile, and
contrarily to not make your younger women look too sexy. Both typically aren’t
good things.”
Sexualising young females is certainly a short-cut to serious
trouble. But seemingly older women must not be allowed to maintain their youth,
whether through intensive tai-chi, dance, aerobics or athletics? Pina Bausch
may have disagreed as, for that matter, may Tina Turner or Madonna. The “avoid
stereotypes” advice is therefore immediately contradicted for the sake of
enforcing cultural expectations, that
grannies must be stiff and useless, and also appear to be so. (From a personal
recollection of a family holiday in l98l, when I was 8, I met my father’s
grandmother – a lady named Margaret Ashby who was born during the reign of
Queen Victoria, and was over 90 at the time. Out on a country walk, she
continually succeeded in outpacing both my parents, then in their late 30s,
admonishing them both to “keep pace!” - a story frequently retold in family
conversations for years afterwards).
A reader, enmeyer_r, may have summed up the entire article
(and the book) with his brief comment:
We may wonder why we might expect great diversification, and
encouragement to go beyond socio-cultural norms, in a text devoted to producing
comic art. I would argue that were any so-called “SJW” to accuse the mainstream
industry of peddling outdated and degrading characterisations, there would be
many fans who would angrily respond with examples of black, queer and other
diversifications in recent Marvel and DC titles, as evidence that such
accusations are unfair, unfounded and outdated. But the operative word here is recent,
and the overwhelming mass of material carries on regardless, suggesting that
the diversity is as much an exercise in tokenistic box-ticking to appease (or
encourage) the non cisgender/het/white/males out there to buy into their
products. We may also recall that the CEO of Marvel comics gave funds to
Trump’s 20l6 presidential election campaign and that comics publishers are
corporations like any other. While some may choose to dismiss all comic-book
material as ‘harmless fun’ and nothing to worry too much about (assuming that
comics are only read by kids, who quickly mature and move on to more serious literature
– nothing could be further from the truth, if one chooses to peruse for even
five minutes some of the comics fandom forums online), the internalization of
such material and the coded forms and representations within are what have led
directly to me pursuing this PhD research course, writing these words, on this
very subject – the publicly-held belief that my drawings were unsuitable
for the general audience (the majority) of comics readers, that my characters
did not fit their stereotyped rules of where the boundaries between ‘man’ and
‘woman’ are supposed to lie, and what features and details of human anatomy are
classifiable as specifically gendered (in my case, it was my female
characters’ jawlines and chins which were problematic for many – being deemed "too masculine" (?), assumptions which reach far beyond comics
aesthetics to the realm of ‘facial feminisation’ treatments for transwomen, or
why certain men may be accused of having a “gay face” - both issues I've posted about previously). The result of these
comments and criticisms soon transferred themselves to my own sense of being,
of genderfluidity, and I saw a correlation between how things are perceived,
how people are pigeonholed, and the outgrowths of a monstrously, Lovecraftian
rhizomatic entity dedicated to enforcing its binary definitions of the world in
every and any area of society, and suppressing or denigrating any attempts to
the contrary.
The artist (and viewer) therefore has no interest in an
individual, as a woman or a distinct person, but as a type: a basic form
which ticks the boxes of how much he would like to have sex with her. Before my
readers laugh aloud at this ultra-Freudian blanket assumption, there are
reasons why comic-book heroines continue to look as they do (differing fashions
and styles through the decades notwithstanding) - they are made to appear to
the male cis/het gaze which demands desirability, non-troubling glamour and can
be 'read' as a female that the viewer can fantasize about, have sex with in
their minds, or even project upon themselves (why do so many male gamers play
female characters? - can the realm of 'forced feminization' pornography shed
some sinister light on this area?). The male viewer desires a woman they
control (or occasionally – desires to become a woman who is controlled,
the ultra-submissive D/s fantasy of forced-fem. To elaborate somewhat on Laura
Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze as an immutable, monolithic tool of repression
– not all men share the same desires and hang-ups; poor gay black men will not
respond to a scene the same as a rich, privileged straight white guy, or even a
Latin or Asian man – but each will bring his own form of masculinity,
whether it is queer, straight, or confused, to bear on the semiotics inherent
in any scene or representation, and encode them and interpret them accordingly:
"Whatever happened to Fay Wray
That delicate satin draped frame
As it clung to her thigh
How I started to cry
Cause I wanted to be dressed just the same..."
-R. O'Brien, 'Fay Wray', 'Rocky Horror Show'
But wait, some will object - aren't there violent,
aggressive, ass-kicking female characters out there? Surely they would
intimidate all but the strongest barbarian bloke, no matter how seductive they
might appear? I would argue that the 'ass-kicking' aspect of such characters is
virtually irrelevant, when compared to the importance of the aesthetic appeal. Lara
Croft gets to be smart, tough and hard because she obligingly exposes the
expected assets to her viewers: bulging breastlines, cleavage, strong thighs
and of course ultra-kissable lips. Her gun, sword, whip or whatever is just
another fetishistic phallic adornment, to draw attention away from her implicit
biology and gratify the male viewer by proudly presenting her phallic response
to his innermost concerns: she's hot, busty, tough and has a dick - hey, she's
perfect! Nguyen’s cover art to his book on drawing ‘hot babes’ shows,
ostensibly, a gendered role-reversal scene of heroic, brave female rescuing an
embarrassed, topless and underwear-clad male from certain doom at the tentacles
of an entity of Lovecraftian proportions, parodying the exploitative lowbrow
‘men’s Adventure’ magazine covers of the l950s and 60s, and more B-movie
posters and pulp fiction titles than my poor mind can even calculate. But the
cis/het/male viewer isn’t interested in the re-gendering of a classic power
fantasy trope – he’ll be too busy gawking at her metric metre of cleavage and
exposed skin beneath the spray-on costume (conveniently angled towards the reader
for the most revealing viewpoint). To me , the underlying message – and the
appeal – of the cover is that once rescued, things will return to
business-as-usual – the rescuer/rescued inevitably engage in some form of
physical romance, and any traditional comic-book nerd would happily endure the
cover character’s peril and humiliation if he got to get it on with such an
awesome babe. After all, the cover man is a bulky, square-jawed, muscled-up
dude of impressive stature – if not a self-parody of Nguyen himself – and still
enforces the power-fantasy macho appeal of traditional comic males, with whom
the reader identifies. To truly reverse the scene, he ought to have been
depicted as a weedy nerd, clearly as incapable of extricating himself from his
predicament as all those helpless stiletto-wearing glamour queens in their
strategically-shredded evening dresses – at least, until the tough, bruising
hero showed up to whisk her away from the clutches of the bloodthirsty aliens,
villainous foreigners (likely one and the same), or savage wild animals. Robert
Crumb was drawing himself into such fem-dom sexual fantasies five decades ago,
playing upon his own geeky, bespectacled real-life persona, but we are a long
way away from that here.
Again and again the reviewer of Nguyen’s book emphasises the
‘sexy’ aspect, as Nguyen himself does – he clearly appreciates young women in
bikinis, and his ‘rules’ on what is right/wrong or ‘unattractive’ only help to
enforce stereotypical attitudes which extend into other areas of art and
representation, and ultimately into other areas of life. As this sort of advice
is standard for the industry, I now understand why I was subjected to the sort
of negative feedback that I received in my past – from other artists who
digested and reproduced such fantasy idealisations of ‘how it needs to be’, as
well as ‘how we want it to be’ - the latter which summarises the Comicsgate backlash
against non-cis/het/white/male characters and creators.
Comicsgate was a reactionary and recent phenomenon, but the
underlying mindset is not. I spent over 9 years as a user of Deviantart.com
(2207 – 20l6) and saw many hundreds of comments posted on images of female
characters, both original (to the creators) and otherwise (fan-art after
copyrighted characters). The strength of emotion behind some of the comments
and discussions on even some quite 'PG-rated' works were obvious - the scent of
sweat and passion almost palpable. Patriarchy-as-usual polices these representations. The
ass-kicking ability, as I've said, is irrelevant - it is a mere sidearm to the
bruising gatekeeper of visual attraction, and the pleasure encoded in that
representation. I know this because I deliberately fashioned my own drawing
style over the years I was on DevArt. The images from Al Rio above are
contained in an anthology of that artist's work which I purchased in 2000, when
I began my comic book drawing career in earnest, and have referred to his
images for specifics (line work specifically in the drawing of eyes) so many
times that the book is literally falling apart. This was in my early, naive
days when I sought popularity and praise, and felt I had to conform – to a
point – to what was “out there”. While I admire his draughtsmanship in specific
details I dislike very much his vapid, interchangeable production-line
mannequins which bring to mind the fetishistic sculptural female objects of Allen
Jones, and the sad, grimy nudes of the later Renoir, utterly devoid of
character, personality, or a thinking brain behind the bovine stare. One can
enjoy and admire the details of a work or an artistic style without being in
any way a fan of that artist or that style (in the same way that one can argue
for the right for pornography, as a form of representation, to exist, without
in any way condoning the actual extremities, attitudes and degradations to which it most usually
stoops).
I refused to change my own ways of phiz/phys representation,
and certainly refused to buy into anyone else's. My female characters were tough, ass-kicking, and frequently
carried lethal weaponry, too. Sometimes they, too, were busty, sometimes not so
- it depended on whether that would suit the character and her background. They
were often tall, leggy, and invariably muscular. The costume may or may not be
tight or revealing, or not (the former the better to show off that hard muscle
tone whilst maintaining dignity - the latter, the better to foster ambiguity).
So far, so typical, more or less. They were also evidently older than High
School age, and had the lines to prove it. The result?
"All your women look like trannies".
So, we come to the pivot point of this writing: the
misreading of my characters by a viewership expecting apples, and complaining
when they were being fed bananas (for those who missed it, this metaphor is a
cheeky nod to a l972 work by Linda Nochlin. I'm not going to spell it out
further.) While I had never any intention of depicting transwomen at the outset
- I simply drew women as I saw them, with character, occasional wrinkles,
strong or stern facial bone structure after the l9th C. and especially the PRB
tendency. The broad frames and heavy musculature came later - when I had become
annoyed enough, by late 20l5, to start having fun with my characterizations and
drawings, and in line with my own developing and radically evolving notions of
gender, both personal, and general – and the fact that I have never enjoyed
‘traditional femininity’ in any form, anyway.
I didn't care by then that people saw them as ugly, as rough, as old.
Get over it, I thought: have you ever walked down the street and actually looked
at the faces of real women (or, have you only looked at the teenaged ones in
the tight skirts)? Do you really expect 50% of the world’s population to confirm
to your infantile notions of what you deem your “type” for your sexual and
aesthetic satisfaction? Are you seriously trying to tell me that a female
character with a defined jawline is inherently therefore, by virtue of that
single arbitrary physiognomical feature, a biological man?
These questions are anything but rhetorical – they resonate
in me now, because they are the questions I ought to have demanded back in the
20l0s when I received those comments on my artworks. Nobody told me I couldn’t
draw. Nobody told me I was rubbish, or should give up art. They did, however,
warn me that I needed to learn how to draw women “better” (i.e., more stereotypical,
more passive, more curvaceous, more bland, less demanding, less troubling, less
biologically indeterminate...more desirable).
I quit DevArt before I gained the socio-political and
aesthetic armoury to be able to shove it back at the critics, in spades:
After creating the deliberate mainstream trans superhero spoof 'Super TransFixItGurl' (with a trans friend of mine), I developed my first serious transfemale character,
Sonya Smirnova, for the epic Russian-based crime series 'Bloodstains'. (To enhance the pointlessness and arbitrary nature of the negativity I'd encountered, she is in fact - facially at least - referenced from a cisgender female model, while many of the body references are from myself. The character is, therefore, a prototype of the definition of this very blog and research project: the sense of incongruity produced by welding one set of gendered attributes to another):
The logic was simple: she looks
like a 'tranny' because she is, and is that a problem, by the way? The question
was coded into the character. She wasn't young, nor beautiful, nor especially busty. She
was a 6'3 ex-athletics champion, and former police officer in contemporary
Russia, who had been kicked out of the force due to her transitioning and
forced into sex work to remain alive. She was blonde and white, though, which
was nonetheless a small chip off a very large chopping block of social
unacceptability (herein I, I later realised, I found myself falling for a
much-maligned trope in popular media, the transwoman-as-hooker: but to me the
logic was clear. Russia's anti-LGBTQIA+ laws are utterly reprehensible, and my
work was informed by much reading of contemporary articles on hate crime in
Russia. That such a character would only be able to survive on the underbelly
of society was taken as read. It remains a difficult work to categorize, and very recent events have left me wondering if I can even continue it at all):
I refused to present Sonya as too much of a victim, though she is
of course a helpless nobody against a brutal and authoritarian state
government, and a society hostile to people like her - and her bodyguard and
benefactor, the main hero of the piece, who is an ethnic Uzbek; a
non-practicing Muslim and hence the other half of a completely anti-mainstream
comic book partnership, with whom the traditional cis/het/white power
fantasists are not expected to identify in any way. Nor did they, and nor did I
want them to, though I gave the series one big final push in 20l8 – just as the
Comicsgate and Howard Chaykin ‘Divided States of Hysteria’ débacles burst over
the internet. I retired 'Bloodstains' and occasionally returned to it, trying to retool
the work to suit my ever-evolving views of intersectionality, trans rights and
such. While the series remains unpublished (and now runs to over 70 pages of
finished work), Sonya found her way into a spin-off for Russian trans rights, a
samizdat which came out as part of my MFAAH in 2020:
We’ve seen these socio-cultural eruptions in the past – cf.
the angry white male burnings of disco records in the US in the 70s. How dare
those queers/blacks/Latinos have their own music, and make it popular! It ain’t
what we call rock ‘n roll, dammit! (because rock ‘n roll was – of course –
invented by blacks, including at least one black queer – Little Richard – who
directly inspired the architect of the noisiest, dirtiest rock and roll ever
recorded: Lemmy, of Motorhead).
