Jay Edidin on portrayal of women characters in comics

postcardsfromspace:

“There’s this thing in superhero comics that makes me absolutely nuts— not just superhero comics, actually, visual media in general—which is the idea that women have to be sexy all the time. … “And the thing is—I object to this stuff as, y’know, a human being and a feminist; but not as much as I object to it as an editor. It’s incredibly poor storytelling. If people are sexy all the time, then sexiness and sexuality and objectification don’t mean anything. “Barry Windsor-Smith doesn’t do that. So, in Lifedeath I, when Storm does stand like a pin-up, when she does stand in ways that are supposed to be accentuating her body, that’s part of the story; and [Windsor-Smith has] this range of storytelling tools he would not have access to if he just defaulted to that.”

Jay Edidin on the narrative impact of default sexualization in comics (Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, #45 - A Woman Who Could Fly)

(Or: Things I wish I could sit down and tell every single current and aspiring comics artist and editor.)

This is my very smart friend Jay pointing out why “sexualized women as default” in comic books (or video games, etc) isn’t just problematic from a portrayal of women standpoint but also can really hurt storytelling.  It’s what I’ve written about a lot on this blog too.  If every female character has to be sexualized (and has to look and be posed a certain way for that), then you’re really limited about what you can actually convey about that, including when you actually want a scene to be sexy or a character to be sexual.  It can also lead to not actually conveying certain aspects of a scene (action, tension, etc for instance) if there’s always a need to always show boobs and butt or make sure those are the focal points (plus sometimes the art can end up looking really odd when trying to make all of that happen at once.)

As I’ve said before, if everything is sexy, then nothing is.

(By the way if you love X-men, or just people talking about comics who are super smart and knowledgeable, you should check out him and his partner’s podcast (Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men) because they are awesome (and he is awesome :D )