Originally published January 31, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1211
Assorted thoughts…
* * *
My experience on America Online has been less than sterling thus far.
The first time I tried AOL was several years ago. I came on for a live conference. I was on line for about thirty seconds when I was immediately hailed by someone using a fake name. “Are you Peter David the writer?” he asked (one of the hazards of signing on with my own name rather than a nom-de-byte).
I wrote back, “Yes.”
Which garnered the quick response of, “Your writing suuuuuuuucks.”
Oddly, I didn’t feel any compulsion to try my hand at it again until fairly recently. I had just traded in my ancient computer for a new model—a computer which came equipped with this brand new thing I’ve heard everybody raving about called “Windows.” All the rage among the teenagers, I’m told.
By coincidence, I was asked by a DC rep if I wouldn’t mind coming on AOL for another life conference. When I said okay, but made clear that I wasn’t on AOL, I was sent a disk.
I installed it.
The program wouldn’t talk to my modem.
I ran through all the “Help” options. It still wouldn’t talk to my modem.
I tried calling the 800 “Help” number. I got a recording telling me the department I needed was busy and I should try back another time.
I tried again to connect to the modem. The program laughed at me.
I got a new modem (I was looking for an excuse anyway).
I installed the modem and reinstalled the AOL software I’d been sent by DC.
It informed me there was no access number in all of New York state through which I could connect to AOL. This, obviously, didn’t sound right.
The modem came with an AOL disk. The DC version was 2.0. The modem version was 2.5. Obviously that meant the new one was 25% better. So I installed the new one.
It tried to connect to the 800 number which would provide me with a list of access numbers. Busy. It automatically called the back-up number. Busy.
Took half a dozen tries, but it finally connected to the 800 number, and I finally got a list of access numbers. I selected two which were reasonably nearby.
The program dialed the first one. Busy. Dialed the second. Busy.
A dozen futile tries. Twenty-four calls in all to two numbers. Busy.
The program recommended I try reaccessing the 800 numbers. I did so. Busy. Busy again.
A dozen futile tries. Twenty-four calls in all to two numbers. Busy.
There was a customer service number on the cardboard sleeve. I called and got an automatic answering sequence which referred me to the department in charge of access numbers—which was busy. A recording told me to try my call later.
I looked at the cardboard sleeve which asked “Are you ready for…” and it listed all sorts of services AOL offers. Intuitive interface, graphics, magazines, news, chat. And it concluded, “If you’re ready for all that, then you’re ready for America Online!”
Oddly enough, nowhere did it ask, “Are you ready to waste hours trying to connect?”
Because somehow I think the answer would be no, and perhaps AOL would cease to be America’s fastest growing computer service. Which might not be a bad thing, because then maybe I could get onto the bloody thing.
* * *
Superman’s new costume. Three words: Needs ice skates.
* * *
“How do you feel about how women are drawn in comics?” the young woman at the Space City convention in Houston asked me. “Are you offended?”
Naturally, what she was referring to are the insanely endowed women who bump and grind their way through various curious titles.
“Not especially,” I said. “Are you?”
“Well,” she said good-naturedly, looking down at her own modest endowments, “it just makes the rest of us feel so inferior.”
I’ve given some thought to this matter (certainly as much serious thought as the matter warrants) and have come to the conclusion that women have no reason whatsoever to feel inferior when it comes to the way their gender is depicted in comics.
Women’s breasts are something I touched on—let’s rephrase that—this is a subject that I briefly addressed some time ago when Catwoman’s breasts became a cause celebre in the pages of Oh So? After causing some titters, the topic was nipped in the bud.
However, I was so busy making snarky remarks (not unlike those above) that I never really addressed the concept of being offended by said female-esque globes. The fact is that the human form is routinely exaggerated in the pages of comics. Superheroes are idealized versions of the human body, blown up to heroic proportions. The renderings of men are no more accurate than the renderings of women. Men in comics are oftentimes given bloated, exaggerated muscles. Now these sometimes prompt complaints from male fans. But usually they’re complaints that grow from simple aesthetics, because they are muscles so huge, so unwieldy, that the characters would be incapable of raising their arms over their heads (thereby rendering the concept of surrender moot, which is okay, I guess) or bending over and tying their shoes (hence the tendency towards boots). Such obvious ludicrousness invites insulting remarks, but they’re not gender-based. Just bad-art based.
Society, by and large, does not consider huge muscles particularly pleasing on women. So the superheroine can’t be depicted with humongous musculature because that wouldn’t qualify as the “idealized” form.
But if a superheroine is drawn in normal proportions, she will look unimpressive and wimpy next to her male peers. What, therefore, is the artist going to exaggerate in order for the superheroine to have parity? The curves and the bosom, of course.
I’ll grant you, sometimes it can be disconcerting—particularly when one compares the standard exaggeration-oriented artist to those few pencilers who actually stick more with reality. For instance, we changed artists on The Incredible Hulk midway through issue #425. We went from the reality-based Gary Frank to the exaggeration-oriented Liam Sharp. Consequently, Betty Banner went from realistically and modestly endowed to pneumatically enhanced, smack in the middle of the issue. (To say nothing of the Hulk suddenly acquiring so many pronounced veins on his arms that he looked like he’d been shooting up with tungsten.)
Do women have cause to be offended? They can be if they want to, sure, but if you ask me (and since I was asked, I actually have an excuse to say), women can’t reasonably act as if they’re being singled out for insulting depiction. Males are as well, and to my mind, it’s even more insulting than the indignities heaped upon women.
Comic book females, after all, are depicted as being massively endowed north of the equator. It may be juvenile, it may be silly, it may even be intimidating. But at least it’s there. The sexuality of superheroines is an extremely important factor due to the attention drawn to the erotic area of the bosom. Consider, if you will, the words of Jerry Seinfeld who, when asked if he was a leg man, responded, “Of course not! I’m a breast man! Why would I be a leg man? I’ve got legs!”
But consider, if you will, the plight of the male hero: the superhero who wears a leotard or thong that is no less tight, no less revealing than that of his female counterparts. But, whereas the tightness or skimpiness in female costumes accentuates womanly endowments, similar male costuming only draws attention to what’s missing.
In other words, those costumes are awfully tight in the crotch. However, for the most part there seems to be no indication whatsoever that there’s anything at all down there. Superheroines have hyper-accentuated sexuality while the superheroes, in turn, are hyper-diminished.
Superheroines, after all, still have some sort of recognizable sexuality: ludicrous, to be sure, but recognizable.
But the men have all been neutered. Either that or they’ve got endowments on par with the Atom.
I, personally, am offended.
* * *
I should make clear that, when I was discussing hostile and friendly aliens as depicted in televised science fiction, I was pretty much sticking to one-hour dramas and feature films. It has been pointed out to me that aliens come across as friendlier in the half-hour format. Uncle Martin was, in fact, the first friendly TV alien, predating Mr. Spock by several years. For that matter, later years gave us Mork from Ork, Alf, and the Solomon family.
There’s a conclusion to be drawn from that, but dámņëd if I know what it is.
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to a Second Age Inc., P.O. Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. Now, the following AOL update: Six more tries finally got him through to the 800 number, from which he got five more AOL access numbers. He dialed them all. Every single one was busy.)
• 
Things change, Mr. David. Reread “Kingdom Come” and see how Alex Ross drew Captain Marvel. BELIEVE me, men are represented as standard anatomy… and I’m not offended, but tremendously jealous!
PAD, I agree with a lot of what you’ve said about female vs. male proportions in comics. I’ve thought the same thing about how unrealistic the males are drawn. So the proportions are my biggest problem.
The problem I have with how women are drawn is the body positioning. It’s often not just sexualized, but *generically* sexualized. I understand when a character is trying to seduce someone and she’s posing to accent her hips. I especially understand it for certain women like Marvel’s White Queen, who are know to use their sexuality to manipulate people. However, there are some artists who draw women like they’re on the stripper pole for every female character in every situation. At the beginning of a fight scene when the heroes are facing the villains, Batman, Superman, and Green Lantern are all clearly in fighting poses. That enhances the sense impending action. Standing right next to them are Wonder Woman and Black Canary (supposedly some of the best trained fighters in the DC universe) whose battle stances consist of turning their backs on their opponents and twisting around so that both their butts and breasts are on display. To me, that makes them look less competent than the men. I find it silly and distracting.
Then there are the artists who do it right. A few years ago there was a Thunderbolts issue where the team was walking into a fight. The males all looked like badasses. Songbird had a little swing in her hip (just enough to acknowledge that yes, she’s female), and was otherwise square shouldered and ready for action. Moonstone had a *lot* of swing in her hip, which made sense because she’s a born manipulator and has a history of trying to distract male opponents with her looks. However, she was still *facing* him, and still looked ready for battle.
The artists who exaggerate sexual poses with the women aren’t doing the same thing as they are with the men. The men are exaggerated to look more powerful (a good thing in an action story) while the women are exaggerated in a way that, in many situation, makes them look like they’re too stupid to know they’re in a fight.
The problem I have with how women are drawn is the body positioning.
This is being pointed out more and more lately, and it’s not just happening in comic books.
For example, with the posters for The Avengers movie, the ones for each individual has the characters all facing forward behind the “A”… except for Black Widow, who’s pose has her turned so her ášš is highlighted as much as her face.
In fact, while searching for the image, I came across a comparison of that pose against one of Scarlett for GI Joe. The only real difference is that the Scarlett poster gives full view of the T&A, whereas the Black Widow poster had to choose because of the “A”.
You can see what I’m talking about here:
http://kraalo.blogspot.com/2011/11/scarlett-vs-scarlett.html
But in going back to something else PAD had said:
Superheroes are idealized versions of the human body, blown up to heroic proportions.
I guess I never thought of double-D’s (or worse) as particularly heroic, regardless of reasoning behind it.
In the end, it seems more that men decided that Atlas was what was best for women than women decided that. Or maybe I see it that way since my wife is no more a fan of an Atlas body than I am of what has become a typical Playboy model (and comic book super-heroine) body.
As for AOL, well, they made a lot of great coasters. Especially when you’d get those dámņ discs in the mail every month for no good reason. In the end, there was really nothing that AOL had in their little walled off corner of the internet that you couldn’t get on the rest of the web. Not once did I ever think, “Man, if only I had AO-Hëll”.
You’re definitely right about that. Over the years, just drawing women with huge breasts hasn’t been sufficient. All too often you see female characters standing in positions that are far more appropriate (not sure that’s the right word, but it’s the only one I can come up with) to the pages of “Playboy” than to a battle situation. There’s really no excuse for it.
PAD
I thought that this Super Stupor strip (http://www.superstupor.com/sust01252012.shtml) was an exaggeration.
Then later, I found most of the poses, thanks in large part to superheroes.memebase.com. (Panel eight apparently comes from a splash page featuring Psylocke leaping into battle, in a rather anatomically improbable fashion.)
I used to think that the posing problem was bad in the late 90s. Some of what I’ve seen lately… Jeez…
You’d think that the only place that some of these guys have actually seen a woman is in the pages of Playboy and Penthouse.
“Good news everyone! Several years ago I tried to log on to AOL, and it just went through! Wheee! We’re online!”
–Professor Farnsworth, a thousand years from now….
Peter David: For instance, we changed artists on The Incredible Hulk midway through issue #425. We went from the reality-based Gary Frank to the exaggeration-oriented Liam Sharp. Consequently, Betty Banner went from realistically and modestly endowed to pneumatically enhanced, smack in the middle of the issue.
Luigi Novi: And there’s the “cling” issue too. Betty was wearing a white tank top over a loose-fitting gray T-shirt, and when the more-than-competent Gary Frank rendered it, it looked exactly like what such garments should look like. But when rendered in Liam Sharp’s anatomically ignorant, social retarded jerk-off style, the tank (the second of at least two layers of clothing mind you–three if she was wearing a bra) clinged to her breasts like it was paint. It’s why Gary Frank is one of my favorite artists (and he’s only gotten better since then), and artwork like Sharp’s is the bane of the industry. The worst from him was when he drew a female blonde reporter a few issues later who not only had what looked like 40DD breasts, but wore a hot pink leather jacket with a plunging neckline, making her look more like a character from a softcore pørņ flick. I literally thought it was a dream sequence, because there was no way, I figured, that such a visual would pop up in a Peter David-written book unironically. Well, I was wrong, and that was what signified the peak of the art on Peter’s initial Hulk run.
Jason M. Bryant: The artists who exaggerate sexual poses with the women aren’t doing the same thing as they are with the men.
Luigi Novi: I agree, and this is why I disagree with the notion that “Oh, both men and women are drawn that way in book.” Men are drawn as power objects. Women are drawn as sex objects. For this reason, the male characters are envisioned as those the male readers may want to be, but the women are drawn as those that the male readers want to be with, and there’s a difference, especially if the industry is looking to draw in readers of both genders, rather than attract one and alienate large segments of the other.
Yeah, all too often one can clearly see the artist drew a naked body (nothing wrong with that) and then just painted on the clothes. It look like lazy, cheap ‘art’ and the unreality detracts from the character.
AOL was, for a long time, a good example of a corporate plague. Two major reasons for this.
First was those annoying mailings with the AOL startup disc, whether you wanted them or not. A chap in the US advertised a mailing address and invited people to send him their unwanted AOL discs, saying that, when he’d collected a million of them, he’s rent a truck and dump them all on AOL’s coporate front door. As I recall, he never quite got a million, but eventually packed up a few hundred thousand and dumped those at their point of origin. One can only hope it got the message across. Probably not, though.
Second, AOL was designed to make it as easy as possible for any idiot to get on the Internet and wreak havoc wherever they went. Unfortunately they succeeded all too well. I spent over ten years as one of the managers on a ‘chat’ room about Japan and its people/culture and remember vividly when we opted to impose a global ban on AOL members from coming in because we were fed up with the number of trolls and racists from there disrupting things. Was it fair? No, but we were tired of constantly having to assign yet still another ban on a case-by-case basis and things were a lot more pleasant after that. We eventually rescinded the ban and, fortunately, the kiddies had by then lost interest and moved on to other targets. To this day, though, AOL still remains a swear word in many peoples’ language because of it.
Wow, I didn’t know that.
I had friends who loved getting those start-up disks. They never had to buy blank 3.5″ disks. Just some labels. They were annoyed when AOL went to CDs for their mailings.
I wonder how much landfill space is taken up by those discs.
There’s a reason that those of us old enough to remember Usenet as a major mode of communication started using the phrase “Eternal September” when AOLers began contributing … and it wasn’t a prejudice against the service.
AOL-Hëll. What a time waster! I don’t like to think of how many hours or dollars were lost to that junk.
I still shudder to hear that “log on” noise so identified with AOL …
I hate AOL. Tried it twice. Never again.
Wow. 1997. How the internets have evolved. Or deevolved depending on your point of view.
These days it’s rather easy to download new versions and get customer servive at AOL, though you may have difficulty getting someone who can understand what your problem is. Not that you’re having difficulty explaining the problem, but that the tech trying to help you didn’t learn English as a first language. Ah the global marketplace.
My main problem about women in comics is not the bodily proportions per se, it’s that they are often drawn in overly provocative ways. Yea, Superman is painted hovering over Metropolis in is hunky perfection looking over the city in a rather even expression on his face as a mixture of worry and love. He’s not depicted in a sexualized way. But there is Power Girl flying through the air, her head back, chest pointed out, arms flung back with an expresion of exstacy (sic) as though she’s having an orgasim.
THAT is my problem. It’s not one thing. It’s all those things. Does every artist draw women this way? No. Is it even seen in the pages of the issues of comics? No. It’s in the cover art. Poster art. Art books. It’s not just super hero art either. Fantasy art is probably even more prevailant with this kind of thing. The oiled up manly barbarian male while his female counterpart is prone, clutching his ankle. Both are nearly nude, both perfection of the human body but it’s the woman who is shown submissive on the ground. She who needs a protector and savior and obviously is going to give herself to him whenever he wants. THAT problem.
Hierarchical scale. It’s seen in sculpted landmarks and monuments throughout history.
Ah, AO-Hëll. For better or for worse, I was a member for quite a while. Even after getting high speed connection from another provider, I stuck around for a while under their “bring your own access” plan, specifically to continue to follow PAD’s dedicated board. Once all that communication began to migrate here, though, I cancelled. When I called to do so, had a hard time convincing the guy on the phone that I really wanted to cancel. Finally had to say, “Look, I’ve only kept the service for a single message board, hosted by my favorite writer. He doesn’t contribute to the board anymore, because he’s got his own web site. Why would I want to pay you every month for a service I don’t use?” He finally got the point.
–Daryl
Nytwyng: “…When I called to do so, had a hard time convincing the guy on the phone that I really wanted to cancel.”
.
Tony: Microsoft’s xbox live service and Sirius XM are infamous for the same reason. At least with microsoft you can buy prepaid cards and never have do deal with them (no credit card in their database so no automatic charges). Sirius XM does not have that option and it has a bad reputations of putting you on hold as soon as you say the word “cancel” and leaving you there until you hang up and if you do not hang up they’ll hang up on you after a while. I am not saying is imposible to cancel but they make it really difficult on you.
Too many companies pull that sort of crap. Bell Telephone here had taken to offering phone service (the basic, plugged in the wall variety of which is still the best around) along with high speed Internet and satellite TV as a package. When they changed the tech, Internet and TV stopped working and one had to subscribe to a new version of the service to keep going.
I kept the phone service and resigned for the Internet one, but was not interested in resuming broadcast TV reception.
Not once, not twice, but at least FOUR TIMES in the conversation the sales rep tried to sneak TV back into the package, either unable, or unwilling to accept that someone might not be interested in it. I finally yelled at him in the hopes of getting across the concept that pìššìņg øff a customer is NEVER a good idea.
I used AOL for a short time in the mid-90’s. I also used Prodigy and CompuServ. However, my favorite online system was the ImagiNation Network (INN). I actually met my wife online on INN in Feb. of 1995. Met her in person in June of ’95 and married her in May of ’96.
Who needs Match.com?
Anyway, I can totally relate to the constant busy signal, PAD. Thank you for bringing back some cringe-worthy memories!
Well, it’s been 15 years, and we still have plenty of superhero comics with all female characters draw as mášŧûrbáŧìøņ fodder. It’s a shame, and it’s led to some truly schizo situations, like Gail Simone writing a comic with Ed Benes drawing. A writer that is serious about feminism AND a penciller that draws pørņ, basically.
.
It’s my opinion that, if you want to produce softcore superhero comics, go for it. What I don’t understand is utilizing serious writers coupled with pørņø pencillers.
“What I don’t understand is utilizing serious writers coupled with pørņø pencillers.”
Probably a fact of ratios. You likely just don’t have enough comic book artists out there who don’t draw pørņø style to do the art on all of the books that are written by serious or even semi-serious writers and a writer can write more books per month than an artist can pencil and ink on top of that anyhow.
Throw in the Powers That Be likely thinking that the pørņø art style sells well and the medium is screwed.
I used AOL, and was generally happy with it. Near the end, when it was clear that dial up was about to die off, but before DSL was really that reliable, AOL was actually really good with customer service. For a few months, I was actually treated like a valued customer. Verizon took five years to do that for me.
Ugh. Horrible memories. I didn’t manage to finally kill off my AOL account until sometime in 2003. And even that was like the fifth sequel to a Freddy Kruger movie. “The Account that Could Not Be Killed”. I was in a moebuis loop of a conversation with a nice Indian woman who had literally thirty minutes of (badly) scripted sales pitch talking-points that she had to get through before she could hand me off to someone who could hand me off to someone who would, maybe, eventually close the account.
Almost ten years later and I still loathe that company.