Continued Discussion Between LessTitsAndAss and Escher Girls
Continued conversation from This Post
Holy crap, and there I was thinking this was just a bad drawing due to inexperience… Well, I was partly right: it’s due to inexperience at drawing real women.
And thanks Ami! I’m glad you like my (messy) redraw!
Part of me thought I should be looking up WHO drew the image before I decided whether this was a T&A case or not, but then I thought knowing who did the art (and whether they already have a history of liberally bending the rules of anatomy in order to cater to horny straight males) might make me biased against them. That, or it was so late in the evening and I was tired. Or something.
Knowing now what Churchill’s been up to (and recognising the art you’ve linked as things I’ve been shocked by before, eek, ow, and on my list of possible corrections), I’m definitely seeing the pattern here. This illustration above is weak, as I’d stated before, because of its poor construction, and because of the bad habits Churchill’s taken, like putting the belt on Supergirl pretty much at the pubic bone, if not lower, while the hem of the skirt barely covers the buttocks; like making the torso way too skinny and super long; like making the arms and legs unrealistically thin, likely because he has learned drawing from looking at other comics rather than drawing from life. It’s a pattern, it’s bad habits he would need to break.
When I see patterns like that, it makes me wonder if anyone mentions these things (or make similar comments) to artists. I’m of the opinion that unless you are told there’s a problem., chances are you won’t know about it, or that you have to fix it. If no one’s edited Churchill’s work or told him, “Put some flesh on that woman, man, she’s too skinny to look good”, or even mentioned something like, “Are you sure this is right?”, how can he possibly change the way he works? If he’s getting hired to draw books, maybe he doesn’t see that he can up his game and how he can become better. Maybe doing the same old thing keeps him employed, and that’s enough for him.
Too bad it’s not enough for us.
Escher Girls responded:
In Supergirl’s case, it was actually brought up to him.
(The original has since been removed from the DC site)
After a very serious conference call that involved Joe, our amazing penciller Ian Churchill, and my then Assistant Editor Jeanine Schaefer (she was pivotal in giving us a woman’s point of view on the character—like, can Supergirl gain some weight, please?), it was decided to have Kara just try to be a real teenager.
This was from a letter at the back of DC comics begging women to read Supergirl (the shock they had that women were turned off from Churchill and Kelly’s Supergirl has always amused me.) I find the entire letter kinda disingenuous in hindsight (especially since she didn’t get better, at least not until several artist/writer runs later) and one of the things I don’t buy is that nobody noticed she was so thin until they got a “woman’s point of view”. I think it’s kinda annoying to chalk that particular thing up to the editor’s gender, as if men would never have noticed how thin she was being drawn (I doubt that, I know a LOT of male comic reviewers at the time who thought the same thing as I did). I think it says more about the men they hire as editors than it’s just a woman thing to notice her thinness. Though, it also bothers me that they apparently wrote one of the most iconic female characters without ever consulting a woman on the staff until they noticed no women were reading the book. e_e
ANYWAY, that’s water under the bridge (kinda), what you said just twigged me that yes, somebody did tell Churchill about the way he was drawing. She didn’t really improve very much after that either, but her cape got a lot bigger around her shoulders and she started wearing underwear and a bra. (The cape thing is random, it just stuck out to me at the time.)
Edit: That letter also proves that even if they SUCK at it, DC does want women to read their comics. It was apparently such an issue to them that women weren’t reading Supergirl that they had to write a (passive aggressive whiny) letter to us practically begging us to read it. Even if we’re not #1 on their target demo, women NOT reading comics is still an issue for the companies, so our opinions and how we spend our money does matter.