Banzai Deconstruction

egypturnash submitted:

Really, I think a lot of the problem with that sort of thing is that people are doing cartoon poses with realistic levels of detail. I mean, I’ve perpetrated the occasional “look, Rita has tits AND an ass!” pose in my own comic. But I can get away with it because it’s showing some sort of crazy twisting leap or something, and the fact that I have rubbery limbs and a few bits smeared out into motion trails makes it pretty obvious that I’m trying to show a second or so of fast motion in one drawing.

But the “mainstream comics” crowd? They wanna put little marks all over everything. So everything looks like it’s in sharp focus. Which nails it down into one particular instant - when stuff’s moving fast, you just can’t see more than the overall shapes, if you can see things in high detail then it must be static.

So as an experiment I grabbed the first picture on this tumblr when I ran into it - the cover to “Banzai Girls” #2. (2008)



Broken spine, check. Action pose, check. Placing a red-headed character in front of a book exactly the same hue as her hair, check. Gratuitous Catholic schoolgirl outfits, check.



So I threw it into Illustrator and did a very very quick cartoonifying. I ignored the second schoolgirl, the tentacles coming out of the book grabbing another girl, and the ninjas and the plush coming out of the top because, well, I have more important things to be doing than this. I cartooned the girl up a little bit - her expression is a lot bigger, her arms are rubberhosed, and most importantly, I changed the curve of her dress’s waistline - making it curve the other way really gives a lot more sense of motion, for me. (I also lifted her skirt a bit because she’s MOVING).

I also added a bit more shadow under the skirt because, man, how about SOME hint of mystery on the cover instead of giving away all the goods?

(Also I moved the logo from “graf” to “cartoony” and echoed the shuriken-dotted I with a shuriken-dotted exclamation point, because I really feel like a silly title like “BANZAI GIRLS” needs an EXCLAMATION! POINT! to tell you that you are about to be reading broad comedy with titties in it.)

Unsurprisingly, this still looks pretty sexist. I mean, why is this girl wearing stripper heels? Maybe this is a comic about two stripper buddies, and they’re doing a schoolgirl routine this issue that goes horribly awry or something, though somehow I doubt that. Actually that’d kinda be a fun premise for a oneshot that parodied the awful objectification of women in comics, I could have a lot of fun exaggerating some of my friends’ burlesque identities BUT I DIGRESS



So I did one tiny change: I lifted one of her legs. And now she's off-balance, now she actually has a reason to be in a crazy motion pose. We’re still doing a sleazy upskirt angle on this but it's almost justified. And it doesn’t feel like her back’s broken - because this is starting to feel like a crazy amalgamation of several moments, instead of one instant frozen in time like the original drawing!

There’s still a lot of problems with this as a good cartoon drawing, of course - the fact that her hair is coming out in three long-ass pigtails that swirl decoratively all over really obscures the action; I’d make it all go in the same direction to emphasize ONE motion, maybe have a few loose hairs swirling around to lend some chaos But, you know, it’s actually starting to look like a tacky selection of costume and angle to choose instead of a horrible distortion of the poor girl’s spine just so you can see tits and ass all at once! Hell, cast the shadow of the skirt over most of the butt and make it deeper, and it’s almost acceptable IMHO.

All this from dropping the detail way down to make it more kinetic, and lifting one leg to make her actually off-balance. And looking through these kinds of drawings I really think these two problems are a lot of it - too much detail given to action shots that should be blurred, coupled with a tendency to plant legs wiiiiide apart as if the woman being drawn was bending over and inviting some doggie-style humping.

(Parenthetically… these poses are not as far outside the range of human motion. I’m a forty-year-old lady who’s been doing burlesque for a year, and I can turn my torso about 93º to the side while keeping my butt stable. The average person, with a spine janked up from tons of slouching in a chair and never exercising, can’t do this. That said, while they’re possible, they aren’t exactly comfortable, and they’re sure as heck not going to be very useful for actually fighting except in the case of maybe winding up for a whole-body roundhouse punch. And you’re sure not gonna be presenting your butt for humping while doing that.)

Thanks for submitting this!  I was going to link to your LJ and excerpt it but this is much easier :)

Some of these poses are in indeed possible, but they’re still ridiculous (my tumblr sub-title says “impossible or ridiculous”), but in this case, her shoulder is almost touching her butt, it looks like half her rib cage just collapsed. 

You bring up a lot of great points though. :)  A huge issue is that the images are so static, there’s nothing to show that they’re in motion, and a lot of the need to make these pin up poses, and not fighting poses, adds to that.  The legs being splayed like that, for instance, or her pony tail.  In other pictures, it’s other parts of their body that add to the idea that this isn’t in the middle of action, often, even hair and clothing seem to be drawn with pin-up posters in mind rather than “she’s in the middle of moving!"  

Your redo looks way more interesting and also more sensical since it’s more of a cartoony style and changing the leg does a lot for how the scene feels.