Women and comics

[sawyl]

Today's Guardian featured an interesting piece on the increasing numbers of women interested in comics. There were a few digs at the old school, with its tendency to treat women as victims or sex objects — the former detailed in Gail Simone's Women in Refrigerators list and the latter summed up by Mike Carey's comment about superhero art:

...a good friend of mine who's a comic book artist once told me that when you draw a woman in a superhero book, you basically draw her naked and then put the clothes on.

Which all goes to explain the general appeal of stuff like Sandman, where the hero is kind of nerdy (and when he's not nerdy, he's a cat!) and all the characters, both male and female, have genuine personalities and the women don't spend all their time waiting to die or waiting to indulge in gratuitous nudity.

Comments

[catnik.livejournal.com]

As an artist (costume designer, not comic - but I draw people a lot), you pretty much draw -everybody- naked and add the clothing, male or female. I think the difference is, a lot of superheroes don't get clothing so much as bodypaint.

[sawyl.livejournal.com]

You're right about the body paint: it's not as if all the male superheroes are standing around in three piece suits whilst the women are in their undies. Except, of course, for Spider Jerusalem, who wears both a suit jacket and vast number of tattoos...