§ Many people gave artist Karine Charlebois grief for daring to redraw Milo Manara, but did anyone actually read why she did it?
My point with this tumblr is not to put the men into sexy poses. No. I don’t have a problem with how the men are drawn, usually. What occurred to me is that men get their back up when women try to make the point through illustration that the posing is wrong due to how degrading it is. Instead of putting themselves in the women’s place, they can’t identify with the problem because they’re basically being shown gay men, which they don’t identify with. Attempts like this end up perceived more as a “how do you like THEM apples” by the men.
So I rethought my idea of redrawing a cover changing the women’s poses as kick ass, and the men’s as Harlequin Romance fodder. My attempt at getting sympathy and understanding would fall flat. Besides, I have no problem, as I stated before, with how men are drawn, for the most part. It’s the women I have a problem with. So how do you get the point across? How do you fix that problem? By bringing suggestions and solutions. I want this tumblr to prove that women CAN be posed in ways other than T&A and still be awesome. Better yet, awesomer.
So you see it isn’t a matter of Manara can’t draw, it is just suggesting that there is a less sexualized way. I understand the peril of these redraws, but I believe Charlebois is being accused of something she never claimed.
§ I did not mention previously that Boom! Studios now has a TV First look deal with Fox, as well as a movie one. Good times.
§ Derek McCulluch has a new GN out from Image called Displaced Persons—drawn by Anthony Peruzzo— and it has quite a long back story
CBR News: Derek, how are you explaining this novel to people?
Derek McCulloch: That’s a question I’ve been working on and failing miserably at for fifteen years. The best way I’ve approached it is to summarize each of the three stories individually, to say that it’s a Hammet inflected detective story from the 1930s, a drug-heist story from the 1960s and a domestic drama about real estate from the 1990s. It’s all of those things linked together by the slightest bit of time travel.
McCulluch mentioned that he pitched it to me when I was an editor and I rejected it, but he kindly doesn’t quote what I really said which was “I hate time travel stories.” And I do. Lost aside. Let those who like them edit them! Anyway looking forward to finally reading the finished product.
§ Johanna reviews “Thoughts from Iceland” a cute little travelog comic that I highly recommend reading if you ever go to Iceland.
§ MTV has a gallery of the best butts from the VMAs last night. Big butts definitely in the zeitgeist right now. Above, J-Lo who kicked it off more than a decade ago and remains in scary good shape at age 45.
§ A phony Josh Trank twitter account was set up over the weekend, and fooled many people into thinking the FF reboot director relaly was revealing many things.
That may be what Karine stated she’s doing, but that’s not what she does. Take the Greg Land cover. The only overly sexualized problem was the background figure’s improbably thin waist. By focusing on “pinch and stretch” and “arcs of rotation” on the limbs she’s hidden the main message.
And why did she correct the Spider-Woman figure at all? Did she make Spider-Woman’s pose less sexy or the anatomy less pinup? Not at all. She made anatomical corrections and she made her own anatomy errors on the way.
The complaint she made is that Greg Land can’t draw anatomy. This may be the first time on the Internet ever that someone has said Greg’s work needs to be MORE photographic.
I’m confused. All week we have been reading articles about the sexualization/objectification of women and how horrible it is….
Now we have gone into the other direction linking to the best butts of the Vma’s, showing a pic of J-Lo’s butt, and complimenting her “scary good shape”
If Manera made that comment, would you be writing about how wrong it is..?
I thought the point was just that sexy butts aren’t suitable for absolutely every occasion. I don’t think anyone’s calling for a global bottom ban, which would probably require an act of the Rump Parliament.
Anyways, sorry to keep chiming in, but I’ve been pondering Charlebois’s mission statement since Heidi pointed it out. Like Gene, I feel like she’s not actually doing what she says here – the Spider-Woman redraws are mainly anatomy nitpicking, which works better when the anatomy is genuinely bad (there’s some great examples of this on the Escher Girls tumblr). To the extent that she’s criticizing Manara’s *pose*, the critique is undercut by the fact that Charlebois misunderstood the action; it’s a climbing-onto-rooftop pose, not a crouching-on-flat-surface pose. The main thing that makes it so cheesecakey and inappropriate, I think, is the choice of downward-looking camera angle, which creates the impression that poor Spider-Woman is hoisting her rump into the air like a lady baboon. (Manara’s Medusa pose, on the other hand, seems genuinely daffy.)
Personally, I like Charlebois’s stated goal of critiquing the pose and presentation of female heroes, and I wish she’d focus on that instead of getting distracted by attempting to put other artists on blast about perceived anatomical mistakes. If you were asked to show Spider-Woman climbing up onto a rooftop, what would be a better way to depict it? That’s a game anyone can play without resorting to art-school draw-overs.
Mark Simmons: I’d head the term Rump Parliament but I’d never known what it was till now. Educational!
So what were the Long Parliaments? Apparently there were two of those and only one Rump. Then we have the Barebone Parliament. British history is so much more twisted than US history.
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