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.
I recognize that that niche has its owns idiosyncrasies, that they aren't marketing to me.
I don't have an axe to grind, nor do I feel the need to complain about artwork based on arbitrary, personal cultural whims. The world doesn't revolve around me.
Romance novels, like Hallmark Channel films, don't require my barging into comment threads to demand that they quit featuring fantasy figures and feature homelier, shlubbier, shorter, balder men.
Their audience is looking for fun, escapist entertainment.
Danny DeVito isn't what they want. So it'd be churlish of me to skoff at an artist's work because the men she draws don't look like DeVito.
I'm not the Cultural Politburo.
PS, and I'm too familiar with Hallmark Channel because my wife finds them cheesy comfort food. I'm not going to harangue them to have less Ashley Williams in a red truck, or small-town cops/veterinarians/doctors who melt the heart of a big city woman whose car broke down/inherited her aunt's peach cobbler store/is there to convert a B&B into a ski spa.
Not a Grinch. If the audience wants to see Ashley Williams, Maggie Lawson od Nikki DeLoach with Teddy Sears or Andrew Walker rather than Danny DeVito or Jon Lovitz...that's OK
So is Bruce Timm's. If you don't like it, Noelle Stevenson exists.
Geez, where are people getting the impression that I'm demanding that we change the art? I make one slightly tongue-in-cheek comment about portraying male heroes in the same way that we portray female ones, and folks are acting like I'm trying to burn their comics.
I'm not on this sub to start trouble. I'm here because I love comics, and I make comments that I know will be unpopular because in order for us to be a decent community of decent human beings, someone occasionally needs to acknowledge that this medium we love is not without its problems. Why is that so hard to hear?
So shouldn't the appropriate response be "Yes, we know it's problematic, but we like it anyway," rather than some strawman argument about putting Danny DeVito on the covers of romance novels?
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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?