Actual Women?

As fans of Buffy probably already know, from March next year 'Season 8' will run monthly in comic book form. Joss will write the first four, last four and some in between. I'm excited, really I am, I love Buffy beyond the telling of it.

But I'm just not sure I can be persuaded to love superhero comic books. I enjoyed Fray, it had Joss dialogue and great twists and turns. But the drawings of Fray and her sister depressed me - croptops, tiny wasits, and breasts of steel.

Joss says the right things:

TVGuide.com: Does she get comic-book superheroine breast implants?

Whedon: She really doesn't. I've been fortunate that I've never worked with a T&A artist. I'm very specific about that.

TVGuide.com: Isn't that the raison d'etre of lots of comics?

Whedon: That's part of why I stopped reading comics for a while. All the people I work with draw actual women.

But this is one of the sample pages from the Buffy comic provided with that very article:


I suppose there are possibly women who have a waist hip ratio of .66 (or whatever that figure has), but Buffy sure wasn't one of them.

It seems a bit stupid to be complaining about the images of women in a comic book based on a TV series where Amber Benson was 'the big one'. But at least with TV you are looking at an acutal women. When a TV actress loses weight she does lose weight all over. Comic book women are fantasies - and they're male fantasies. I don't want to look at images of women created to fulfil the desires of men. The endless images of women with exagerated hour-glass figures make it clear that women readers are peripheral to superhero comics. That the stories are not supposed to be for or about us.

I'm just not sure I could handle Buffy stories that said that to me.