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.
That illustration looks good to me. The hips are exaggerated, but I'd do that for movement; everything in comics has to be exaggerated. These are dignified women and girls; they don't have hyper-inflated breasts, they aren't in kittenish poses, their gazes are direct and not submissive, their necklines are normal, not plunging, and they're wearing actual pants.
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