TF Views

Dominic wrote:

I flipped through Uncanny Avengers #1. Opening and closing an issue with a brain-exposed lobotomy isn't the best way to draw me into a book, I have to say. A bit too gory for my tastes. Felt like a Geoff Johns book, especially with Scarlet Witch getting impaled to add to the bloody proceedings.

Whose brain was it?

It was the

Spoiler

recently deceased Professor Xavier's brain, being removed by the Red Skull

.

Dominic wrote:Superman #0 and Supergirl #0:
One thing that has carried over from before "Flashpoint" is the Supergirl being presented in a mildly disturbing light. Putting aside the fact that "comics as fap-fodder" is a hard concept to grasp, it is questionable to see a character that is written as a minor presented so lewdly. Supergirl's new costume is not quite as bad as Power Girl's old "boob window" costume. But, there is one panel that could not have been drawn without lewd intent, or at least the awareness that lewd intention would be assumed. (Disturbingly, Supergirl actually looks younger in this panel than in the rest of the book....and she is drawn in "anime slut" style.) It is not quite the Turner era Supergirl, and she has yet to crawl around on all fours whimpering about how she is "such a bad girl". But, the new series is definitely aiming for that rather creepy mark.

Dom
-"Supergirl, a comic for the creepy ones...."

Okay, this was the one you texted me the pic about, right? Because I'm honestly not seeing the issue here:



Oh man, look at her, just...standing there like a hussy. What a slut.

Seriously, what am I missing on this one? (And really, the only 'issue' with the costume is the amount of leg shown). I dunno Dom, I'm starting to think you might have more issues with women and sexuality than I do, considering the way you overreact to stuff like this.

BWprowl wrote:

Dominic wrote:Superman #0 and Supergirl #0:
One thing that has carried over from before "Flashpoint" is the Supergirl being presented in a mildly disturbing light. Putting aside the fact that "comics as fap-fodder" is a hard concept to grasp, it is questionable to see a character that is written as a minor presented so lewdly. Supergirl's new costume is not quite as bad as Power Girl's old "boob window" costume. But, there is one panel that could not have been drawn without lewd intent, or at least the awareness that lewd intention would be assumed. (Disturbingly, Supergirl actually looks younger in this panel than in the rest of the book....and she is drawn in "anime slut" style.) It is not quite the Turner era Supergirl, and she has yet to crawl around on all fours whimpering about how she is "such a bad girl". But, the new series is definitely aiming for that rather creepy mark.

Dom
-"Supergirl, a comic for the creepy ones...."

Okay, this was the one you texted me the pic about, right? Because I'm honestly not seeing the issue here:



Oh man, look at her, just...standing there like a hussy. What a slut.

Seriously, what am I missing on this one? (And really, the only 'issue' with the costume is the amount of leg shown). I dunno Dom, I'm starting to think you might have more issues with women and sexuality than I do, considering the way you overreact to stuff like this.

I love super girl's new look. she's hot as hell. she looks amazing in that new outfit.

The picture I sent does not fully convey it, if only because a bit of the panel is cut off at the bottom.

But, in short:
They simultaneously drew Supergirl to look *younger* in that panel than in the rest of the book while making the art look like both bisojou (sp?) manga *and* something traced out of a fucking skin rag. (Over-all, she is maybe 15 or so in context.) This takes the title right back to the "creepy older guys in trench coats" run (circa "Infinite Crisis").

Comics and gaming have largely shaken of the "havens for deviants and perverts" image. But, this shit, which arguably sexualizes minors in a medium that is primarily associated with a male market, takes us right back there and objectively makes it harder to argue that "no, we are not a bunch of creepers".

It was the

Spoiler

recently deceased Professor Xavier's brain, being removed by the Red Skull

.

Ah. As soon as I saw him get whacked in AvX, my first thought was "bullshit, this is not going to stick".

And, the X-Men are back to being a civil rights allegory. Yeah, "Marvel Now" is looking very much like "Marvel Then".


Dom
-wonders how many people would be willing to read "Supergirl while waiting for a bus...and what most people would say about the person reading it.

Dominic wrote:The picture I sent does not fully convey it, if only because a bit of the panel is cut off at the bottom.

Yeah, I’m sure if I could see her horrible slutty calves, I’d understand the true lewdness of this evil drawing, right?

But, in short:
They simultaneously drew Supergirl to look *younger* in that panel than in the rest of the book while making the art look like both bisojou (sp?) manga *and* something traced out of a fucking skin rag. (Over-all, she is maybe 15 or so in context.)

Okay, ignoring the utterly insane accusation that an *art style* can somehow in and of itself be improper (more Japanese-inspired art in comics is nothing new, Tim Drake’s whole cast was drawn this way for the first arc of ‘Red Robin’), I’m baffled that you can argue that she’s been drawn to ‘look younger’ yet still appear to be ‘traced out of a skin rag’. Admittedly I’m not familiar with all the skin rags, but if you know of one that publishes images of 14-year-olds, the TFViews forums are probably not the primary government agency you want to concern yourself with informing. I’m just not seeing it. She’s just standing there. What…about it appears to be ‘traced’ from such publications? Does porn own the monopoly on girls standing around now? Is this the hot new fetish that I, getting on in my years, am not privy to the secret world of? What the hell are you seeing here that I’m missing?

It also kinda sounds like you’re trying to argue that any underage character drawn to be at all attractive is improper and wrong, which is…a bit out there.

Comics and gaming have largely shaken of the "havens for deviants and perverts" image. But, this shit, which arguably sexualizes minors in a medium that is primarily associated with a male market, takes us right back there and objectively makes it harder to argue that "no, we are not a bunch of creepers".

I think you’re just paranoid that others are going to see you reading a comic starring a 14-year-old girl and assume the worst, so you’re preemptively jumping to those conclusions yourself. Did you have a bad experience with other people at a bus stop while you were trying to read a Supergirl comic in the 90’s, or something?

Dom
-wonders how many people would be willing to read "Supergirl while waiting for a bus...and what most people would say about the person reading it.

Going way out on a limb here, but they’d probably say ‘Wow, what a nerd.’

Yeah, I’m sure if I could see her horrible slutty calves, I’d understand the true lewdness of this evil drawing, right?

It is a "full pose" question. The way she is holding her cape does not help.

I’m baffled that you can argue that she’s been drawn to ‘look younger’ yet still appear to be ‘traced out of a skin rag’.

The combined the two styles.

think you’re just paranoid that others are going to see you reading a comic starring a 14-year-old girl and assume the worst, so you’re preemptively jumping to those conclusions yourself. Did you have a bad experience with other people at a bus stop while you were trying to read a Supergirl comic in the 90’s, or something?

I have used MLP for my background noise (through headphones) at work and in the campus Forensics lab.

I do not read comics while waiting for the train because I see that as putting my comics at an unacceptable risk.

But, that is a different question.

It also kinda sounds like you’re trying to argue that any underage character drawn to be at all attractive is improper and wrong, which is…a bit out there.

No. I am saying "intentionally drawing a minor (or a character that looks like a minor) with lewd intent is going someplace that one might want to think thrice about".

I say we take an informal vote. Does anybody else see why DC's current standard for drawing Supergirl might be a little.....iffy?


Dom
-read the female centric "Worlds' Finest" for several months without issue..... (no puns intended)

Dominic wrote:It is a "full pose" question. The way she is holding her cape does not help.

The ‘standing there’ pose? Come on, you still haven’t explained *what* exactly is improper about the way she’s positioned. Is ‘cape holding’ some hotly sexualized new thing now? Doesn’t Batman hold his cape all the time?

The combined the two styles.

I’m not sure that ‘tracing’ is a ‘style’, but, um…

So your implication is that the artist traced some girl out of a Penthouse or something, then went in and redrew all of the model’s bodily features to appear slimmer, younger, and less “mid-twenties porn model” proportions, then drew a manga-style face on the thing to complete the picture? Now, I won’t deny that you seem to have more knowledge about the processes comics go through these days, but that still seems like a ridiculously obtuse way to draw a single panel of a girl standing there.

No. I am saying "intentionally drawing a minor (or a character that looks like a minor) with lewd intent is going someplace that one might want to think thrice about".

But what lewd intent? Surely not every picture of a 14-year-old standing around should immediately be labeled as fap fuel?

I say we take an informal vote. Does anybody else see why DC's current standard for drawing Supergirl might be a little.....iffy?

Moreover, can anyone else actually explain ‘why’ it’s ‘iffy’? What about it causes it to be this way? Because you’ve utterly failed at that so far, simply saying “It just IS!” over and over every time I try to clarify just how Supergirl is being exploited in this image.

Crawling around on all fours whimpering, yeah, I get that, I understand what’s wrong with that imagery and why you would take issue with it. A picture of a girl standing there smiling? …not so much.

Dominic wrote:Where is O6 when we need him? Somebody has to say it. Somebody, please, say it.

This is a young Kang the Conqueror we're talking about here with Iron Lad, whose whole evil plots center around changing history. Since he changed his own history in the first Young Avengers story, it makes sense something else would have set him on the path to become Kang. Saving Scott ended up setting up for that as Cassie sacrifices herself fighting against Doom when they return to the present.

Dom asked me what I thought of the situation with Supergirl and how this thread is going. I don't have a lot of free time right now so I just emailed him my response, but then as I was closing the google images window of the character I saw a different panel's full body pose:
http://outcaststudios.com/forums/upload ... 776818.jpg
She's wearing friggin' go-go boots, the thigh tops are straight out of fetishware - suggesting a covering that has been removed. There is no logic to this costume except to suggest nudity and sexuality - Wonder Woman's one-piece is pretty immodest as well but she at least has the argument of coming from an island of female warriors who need to be as unencumbered as possible to fight; Supergirl is wearing sleeves and a constricting cape, so that argument goes right out the window. This outfit is essentially a play on Zatanna's outfit, except without leggings and with a super-chastity-belt-shield at the crotch. Supergirl's body in this design is overly anatomically-defined - not in a sexual way, but it further suggests she's not wearing much in the way of clothes - carried into the bottoms, or rather the lack of bottoms. She's not wearing a skirt, there's no pretense of modesty anymore, and her main outfit is cut at the bottom higher than anything other than a bodysuit, it starts small and rises up until it angles shallow well above the hip crease which they go out of their way to draw, further suggesting she's in a state of undress. Then there's the pelvic shield, which is pretty foul, a suggestion that she's so undressed she's wearing a stick-on bikini bottom the kind you see on pornstars where it's used as an insult to the pretense of even the smallest shred of personal modesty. The only logic to it is to titillate and to portray her as a sex-symbol, a costume to suggest she's second-class, she's in a lower place in society than the men whose costume the outfit sexily plays off of - it's like a trampy halloween costume of something normal like a sexy cop costume, nobody is ever going to take someone wearing that outfit seriously because the outfit and the person who chooses to wear the outfit makes a statement that they are wearing it for titillation only.

The face is fine in that panel, but you can see they are heightening her youth by giving her bigger eyes and smaller lips with a bigger mouth and by giving her a more cutesy hairstyle than any other panel I've seen thus far - it reminds me a bit of Allison Mack from Smallville, but as I told Dom, she played that role with that same look throughout her 20s, so it's not necessarily trying to make her look inappropriately young. She doesn't look traced out of a skin rag, she's got anatomical features showing but they end above the pubic area, this would be more akin to a very fit but low-muscled woman standing there... albeit not wearing any clothing, because in order to be that tight and still show those features it'd have to be thinner than any known cloth, however this conceit is a constant one in comics dating back 40 years on both sides of the gender aisle. (I just noticed that in the inset-right panel next to the main image in the page cited above, her bust has grown considerably and has also fallen, starting much lower and ending down below her ribcage.) So is this the end of the world of comics? No. Is this a new era ushering in soft-porn female characters? Probably not. This is just another instance of DC being incapable of looking beyond the desires of young boys, DC may even want to change but they've created several generations now of this type of thinking and it permeates into writing and illustration alike.

JediTricks wrote:Dom asked me what I thought of the situation with Supergirl and how this thread is going. I don't have a lot of free time right now so I just emailed him my response, but then as I was closing the google images window of the character I saw a different panel's full body pose:
http://outcaststudios.com/forums/upload ... 776818.jpg
She's wearing friggin' go-go boots, the thigh tops are straight out of fetishware - suggesting a covering that has been removed. There is no logic to this costume except to suggest nudity and sexuality - Wonder Woman's one-piece is pretty immodest as well but she at least has the argument of coming from an island of female warriors who need to be as unencumbered as possible to fight; Supergirl is wearing sleeves and a constricting cape, so that argument goes right out the window. This outfit is essentially a play on Zatanna's outfit, except without leggings and with a super-chastity-belt-shield at the crotch. Supergirl's body in this design is overly anatomically-defined - not in a sexual way, but it further suggests she's not wearing much in the way of clothes - carried into the bottoms, or rather the lack of bottoms. She's not wearing a skirt, there's no pretense of modesty anymore, and her main outfit is cut at the bottom higher than anything other than a bodysuit, it starts small and rises up until it angles shallow well above the hip crease which they go out of their way to draw, further suggesting she's in a state of undress. Then there's the pelvic shield, which is pretty foul, a suggestion that she's so undressed she's wearing a stick-on bikini bottom the kind you see on pornstars where it's used as an insult to the pretense of even the smallest shred of personal modesty. The only logic to it is to titillate and to portray her as a sex-symbol, a costume to suggest she's second-class, she's in a lower place in society than the men whose costume the outfit sexily plays off of - it's like a trampy halloween costume of something normal like a sexy cop costume, nobody is ever going to take someone wearing that outfit seriously because the outfit and the person who chooses to wear the outfit makes a statement that they are wearing it for titillation only.

The face is fine in that panel, but you can see they are heightening her youth by giving her bigger eyes and smaller lips with a bigger mouth and by giving her a more cutesy hairstyle than any other panel I've seen thus far - it reminds me a bit of Allison Mack from Smallville, but as I told Dom, she played that role with that same look throughout her 20s, so it's not necessarily trying to make her look inappropriately young. She doesn't look traced out of a skin rag, she's got anatomical features showing but they end above the pubic area, this would be more akin to a very fit but low-muscled woman standing there... albeit not wearing any clothing, because in order to be that tight and still show those features it'd have to be thinner than any known cloth, however this conceit is a constant one in comics dating back 40 years on both sides of the gender aisle. (I just noticed that in the inset-right panel next to the main image in the page cited above, her bust has grown considerably and has also fallen, starting much lower and ending down below her ribcage.) So is this the end of the world of comics? No. Is this a new era ushering in soft-porn female characters? Probably not. This is just another instance of DC being incapable of looking beyond the desires of young boys, DC may even want to change but they've created several generations now of this type of thinking and it permeates into writing and illustration alike.

All this, basically. I’m not denying that Supergirl’s current costume isn’t immodest, but it’s hardly anything new compared to, oh, almost every mainstream comic book published in the last forty years (remember that this is the same DC that was dressing a ‘Teen’ Titans Starfire in her stripperiffic costume back in the 80’s). Yeah, the costume is stupid, impractical, and obvious in its fanservice-y purposes (I’ve seen some photoshops of panels where people have filled in the costume across the full legs and erased the go-go boots and crotch plate, and it becomes rather more acceptable), but it’s hardly offensive in an industry that’s filled with a lot worse. My contention is with Dom’s assertion that this particular panel of Supergirl standing there is somehow this extra-exploitive borderline-pornographic imagery, when it… really isn’t. It’s incredibly tame, and the image by itself could hardly be called ‘iffy’, and I'm wondering what it is exactly about this panel that he seems to take such an issue with.