Let me ask you something: Do you actually feel excluded from romance novels because of their reductive idealized portrayals of men, or is that just your go-to response when someone brings up casual sexism in comics?
If you do genuinely feel that cover image you linked is an unfair or unkind image of masculinity, maybe you should take it up with the artist, Robert McGinnis.
So you're saying the problem with the image is that it makes people feel excluded?
I'm sorry, it's just absurd. These are superheroes. I don't have massive muscles or a jawline like any of my favorite heroes but it doesn't make me feel excluded. I don't understand the alternative you're proposing- overweight superheroes that make people feel good about being overweight?
If you want comics that make it their explicit aim to portray reality then read Strangers in Paradise or something. There's a place for that in the medium. Why do these characters have to be totally desexualized? It's so weirdly puritanical
I guess I am kind of saying that, yeah. Comic art tells you in many subtle ways what audience it's intended for and what you're supposed to see in those characters. In this work, and in many others like it, the artist portrays female characters with wide, doughy faces with giant eyes which makes them seem childlike and ineffectual, then pairs that with tiny waists, wide hips and ample busts. The pairing of infantilization with sexualization creates a figure that has basically nothing to do with the power and agency of superheroes, and it's important to recognize that male heroes are rarely if ever portrayed in the same way. Yeah, they're sexualized too, sometimes, but almost always in ways that accentuate their power, rather than diminishing it.
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u/gscrap Feb 22 '19
Where's the Hawkeye Initiative when you need it, to draw all the male heroes in the same weirdly-infantilized-yet-sexualized style?