And then there’s the deal of just what people seem to think DC is trying to accomplish by not showing PG’s cleavage in every shot of the character. Perhaps artists have since felt the pressure to “normalize” the look of their female characters, as both metrics have begun to recede moving into the 2020s.

Filling in these other characters paints a more complete story of the key trends in how the portrayal of women in comics has evolved over time.I want my wife to enjoy comics with me but it won’t happen while the industry continues to promote outrageously drawn women. I like the way most of them look, and I think women should be curvy but sometimes it can go a little overboard, and if I have to stuff my bra with a whole box of tissue just to cosplay as my favorite comic character I may rethink my costume choice. Of course, there is an exception to every rule, but if you have a body of a gymnast you are going to have the chest of one too!

We then recorded pixel measurements for: breast height and width, cleavage width, waist width, hip width, and cover width. I think what this may reflect is that there are fewer anonymous female figures on covers and that more attention is now paid to who they are, not just their boobs. Like you said early Storm is a great example of a strong female character and she showed way more skin then PG but the thing is people didn’t focus on it with a huge magnifying glass. We randomly selected two covers across each decade for these new characters, and in total added 124 additional covers from our archive (868 data points). The first is that the artist wants to change what they have to draw every panel (like Byrne did with Wolverine).

Personally, I met her just post-Crisis with the awful yellow thing, and then knew her with the diamond cut of under-boob showing The oval number came about when DC began putting effort into getting the character noticed, and they did so by taking notice that the breasts were the really notable feature of her and just putting them in more books. DC has done this many times – underoo-free Superman, Wonder Woman with pants, Power Girl – but Marvel does it too – does anyone remember the Iron-Spider-Man? Modern day covers feature busts that consume more than triple the cover space and show twice the amount of cleavage compared to comics from the mid 20th century. R. pointed out to me a short while ago that in his mysterious and confusing corner of comicdom known as the “DC Universe” Power Girl has recently gotten a wardrobe change and received the fanboy huff that goes with it.

One of the earliest parodies of the comic was uploaded to Reddit by a now-deleted account [2] to /r/196 on June 21st, 2021, fitting the characters of the original comic into Loss. Sure, it brought up some interesting plot points – like feeling abandoned by Kitty Pryde when the young girl decided she needed a boyfriend rather than a motherly figure – but that added to the strength of the character, rather than being the defining feature. After numerous fights and some bad dates, Ice decides she’s had enough of Guy and breaks up with him.Drawing bigger muscles fed the fantasy of who the reader wanted to be, drawing bigger boobs fed the fantasy of who the reader wanted to be with. We use cookies to remember your display preferences for fonts and Day/Night mode, keep you logged into Club PA, and to protect forms from cross site scripting attacks.