cover for Supergirl vol. 5 #0 a.k.a. "DC Comics Presents: Superman/Supergirl #1" showing Supergirl drawn by Ian Churchill in an extremely thin pose with no underwear under her clothes and her top hugging her breasts and skirt being very tiny and short flying upward toward the audience viewpoint with Batman filling the bottom half of the cover and SUperman flying in the opposite direction above her
screenshot snippet of Tumblr ask from eldritch48 that reads: "Have you seen the cover for DC Comics Presents: Superman/Supergirl #1 I would love to see your take on it"
Cover of Supergirl #0 showing Supergirl drawn extremely thin and rubbery flying at the audience bent backwards being redlined with the commentary: ""The main error (aside from the way too long torso) is in the vanishing point in the wrong direction, i.e. on her forward right rather than behind her on the left.  If that were the correct pose, there should be creases in the flesh to reflect her bending sideways."
Cover of Supergirl #0 showing Supergirl drawn extremely thin and rubbery flying at the audience bent backwards being lined in blue to show her figure with lines pointing back at "Vanishing point" to show where it should be according to her pose, but the vanishing point is in the opposite direction in the actual cover
Cover of Supergirl #0 showing Supergirl drawn extremely thin and rubbery flying at the audience bent backwards being redrawn in blue outlines to show what she should look like, with a thicker body and a face that faces the correct direction and a different pose to make the vanishing point make more sense
A comparison of the original Supergirl #0 cover showing Supergirl flying at the audience viewpoint and the redraw to show the difference in perspective and pose corrected for the vanishing point

Supergirl Discussion Between LessTitsAndAss and Escher Girls

lesstitsnass:

Supergirl #1, huh?

So I received this question, and I went to look up the picture. And for the first time, I’m actually conflicted. 

And by conflicted, I mean that I couldn’t decide whether I should or shouldn’t be editing this drawing. Because as odd as it seems anatomically, it’s not due to the desire of the artist to show as much T&A as possible. In this case… it’s just a weak drawing, done by someone who’s not used to drawing women. 

If I just focus on the line quality, the muscular definition is way too detailed on Supergirl. I can understand that she’s Super Strong and all that, but she’s still a teenager (especially in the reboot) and women naturally have more body fat between muscle and skin, so unless Supergirl has been on a major fat burning diet in order to compete in a body building competition, she shouldn’t be showing every single bump in the abs and arms and legs. 

The movement should show that she’s flying up and tilting back as she’s doing it. That’s what her body’s telling me; however, her hair, skirt and cape are going all over the place, no direction to their action, which makes the actual action really hard to determine. And yes, anatomy-wise, there are things wrong, like the ribs being way too far apart from the pelvis. Also it’s pretty skewed, which you can see when you flip the image like a mirror. But again… I can’t see this drawing as being a candidate for this blog. 

However… Well, I’d worked on it, so I decided to just keep going. 

One of the problems is detailed in the caption here: 

I suspect, however, that the artist wasn’t thinking of a sideways bend as much as a backwards bend, like she flew up and is about to curve back and maybe do a flip. That made me go and fix the perspective to what it should have been, with the horizon line higher above her (as opposed to the one on the city below, but this cover is a composite rather than an ensemble). So what makes the previous perspective wrong? Simply that parallel lines, when seen in perspective, are farther apart from each other when they’re close, and closer together when they’re far. The points on the side of her body that’s closest to the viewer should be further apart than the ones on the opposite side: shoulder to hip to knee to ankle. 

So I now get this: 

Please note that the pose is different a bit, because trying to redraw it on top of the existing pose meant that I was following the old drawing as a template and making the same mistakes. Plus it gave me a really stiff drawing. Anyways, please forgive how messy this is, I realized I needed it because it shows the perspective lines. 

With the sketch tightened, we get this: 

Note as well the placement of the cape and hair. I’m following the flow of the action by having the cape drag behind her, her hair pulled back a bit like the cape; Superman in the BG has a similarly weirdly posed cape, simply for the pinup aspect of the piece rather than following a narrative flow. Basically, capes don’t move that way.

So there you go, eldritch48, my thoughts on Supergirl #1. 

EscherGirls:

That’s Ian Churchill… and unfortunately he has much experience drawing women (whether he draws them well however, is another question).  Also, that’s actually issue #0 not #1.  I was a HUGE HUGE HUGE Supergirl fan at the time and so psyched that they had brought Kara back to the DCU, and Ian Churchill (and the terrible writing by Loeb and Kelly) just ruined the entire thing for me.  If you look at my Supergirl comic reviews at the time you can read all about it

Churchill drew her REALLY thin (especially her arms and calves/ankles), and within the comic book, she was bra-less and underwear-less and her costume was vacuum sealed onto her breasts.  It was really annoying.  I avoid posting just every singe picture Churchill ever did of that series simply because a lot of the times the complaint would just be “Supergirl’s too thin and has muscles so therefore her bones must be pipe cleaners”.  He also can only draw one female face.

Ian Churchill’s art on Supergirl really is what started my realization about the ways artists were drawing women in comic books, and who they were drawing them for, that Supergirl, who, to me, is the heroic, female avatar representation of the Superman S symbol and all it represents, her reboot was not for me.  Having Turner and Churchill on the art and how they drew her made it pretty clear, it was meant for something else, and she wasn’t there to be heroic (and during the Turner/Loeb/Churchill/Kelly run, she wasn’t) she was there to be somebody’s blonde 16 year old fantasy girl. 

In many ways, you can thank Ian Churchill, more than any other artist (even Rob Liefeld) for starting the thought process which eventually led to me creating this blog. xD

 Anyway, sorry for the tangent, I just wanted to fill you in on the artist that you were re-drawing.  I agree with you that there’s nothing really “wrong” to redraw, but what you did made me smile huge because it’s Supergirl and I think you made her look awesome, so I wanted to reblog it and tell you. :)