http://girl-wonder.org/girlsreadcomics/?p=66

i really don’t understand the whole feminist thing where they insist on ragging on male past times. if men behaved in the same manner we’d have to complain that not enough romance novels were being aimed at the male audience. not enough beauty and fashion mags cater to the men! sexist sexist sexist!!

if comic books about normally proportioned ugly people aren’t being sold or bought by so called progressive politically correct types, then well..theres probably a good reason for it. its a fantasy medium. science fiction, magic, hyper reality. hyper sexuality and hyper masculinity catering to the male fantasy world of youth. ugly reality is what they have to deal with in every day life, why would they want it to be in their comics as well. if this is wrong and women are clamoring for comics as well, then go draw some and you will be rich!! but perhaps there just is a different level of interest in such things between the sexes. yes i know, theres anime comix, but those are hardly realistically drawn and are pretty much sold along gender lines as well.

and if you think comics are warping peoples minds about sex, what about the rest of the content? that means men think they can shoot spiderwebs out of their wrists and fly? give me a break, sometimes fantasy is just that. the whole outrage thing is just not giving people credit for knowing the difference. its a rather insulting view of people used by those who want to control others, it was the church in the past, now its the pc crowd and feminists and such.

as for porn face. any reasonably attractive womans expression in a freeze frame tends to look porny

Oh, and then there’s the French Maid Barbie, which “celebrates the working woman”.

The “pornface” thing is aimed to a specific artist: Greg Land. He’s praised for “photorealistic” artwork and always delivering on time (apparently the only sensible reason he still has a job), but the “photorealism” really is tracing, and very transparently so. A character will have several different faces throughout the same volume, because photos of different actors or models were traced. Facial expressions will always look a bit off, because they were “borrowed”, not tailored to the situation. And poses will look awkward, when not completely inappropriate. He’s not above recycling his own artwork, naturally. Online communities of comic book enthusiats have dug up dozens of examples, but Land and his employers somehow keep denying it. The most blatant example is the first hit in a Google Images search for “Greg Land”. He’s been called “the new Rob Liefeld”, but I find it a bit too flattering to Land. Liefeld is a legend in the field, having single-handedly defined the aesthetics of superhero comics of the ’90s – a rather dubious achievement: impossibly huge guns, impossibly muscled heros, impossibly thin heroines, impossibly numerous pouch belts, constipated looks, painstakingly rendered muscles that the human anatomy doesn’t actually have, tiny or completely hidden feet. Liefeld is now pretty much universally hated.

About “How to draw: heroic anatomy” by Wizard, let me direct you to a hilarious and thought-provoking reimagining. At a minimum, it shows that superhero aesthetics go both ways perfectly, so the industry has pretty much no excuse outside of pandering/reinforcing bigotry.

About the marginalization of women in mainstream American comics in general, see Girl-Wonder.org.