Saturday, March 7, 2015

Comic Book Superheroines

What comic book superheroes do you think are overly-sexualised? The one that's thrown out a lot is Dick Grayson-discounting his costume, which shows less skin than pretty much every female superhero ever, the first covers of latest efforts (by creative team) for Grayson and Wonder Woman are so different.
Source 1: Wonder Woman #36
Source 2: Grayson #1


Look at Grayson's posture in Source 2-he's in frame, but the focus isn't his body, it's what he's doing with it: namely, pointing a gun at you. That's badass. It sets the tone for the book-this is going to be a book where people shoot guns and look cool. He's not doing the curvy thing to show off his butt. He's just standing (confidently, yes. Sexily, no). Hell, his face seems to have been redesigned so the classic prettiness that made him as close to a male sex icon comics ever had is missing.
Now, look at Wonder Woman in Source 1. She's about to get grabbed by what seems to be a centaur (which has definite Rape-with-a-capital-R connotations in the Greek myths), but she doesn't care. She's pushing out her boobs and, to a lesser extent than some examples, doing that curvy thing. She's got her golden lasso in hand but, if you only had a passing familiarity with the Wonder Woman mythos, you'd be forgiven for not knowing it's a weapon. The lasso is just kind of limping there, a prop for her to look sexy while a centaur lusts over her. It's pretty much the exact opposite of Source 2.
Dick Grayson is one of a plethora of male superheroes, even male sidekicks of Batman, DC has. Wonder Woman is the first lady of DC comics. you'd think that would make her bigger priority than Dick Grayson-but she got a writer with three previous writing credits, and he got two writers, one with real life experience of the subject and both with more writing credits (each).
This disparity can't be blamed on different publishing house standards: they're both published by DC! This is pure sexism. God knows I don't want to get rid of sex-I can gush over hot dudes with the best of them, but when the sexualisation is so ridiculously one-sided, you know I'm giving the people who support it the side-eye.

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