Many of us have mused that superheroines in comics tend to look like naked women with lines drawn to make it look like there’s a costume. Some characters have even been exploitative of this fact, like Girl One in “Top 10” and The Engineer of “The Authority.”
Surely, some artists are having us on. And they have a point. If Jim Balent was drawing Catwoman naked there’d be a massive outcry, but so long as he colors the body purple and doesn’t draw in the nipples it’s perfectly OK to have this nude woman with thundering bazooms splayed across every page in exotic poses.
Now, Scott Adams has fun with the same concept in The Case of Asok’s Underpants, in which the underpants are clearly just a waistband line added to a nude drawing that was getting him in hot water.
(And yes, Mr. “Scotland isn’t England”, I know Jim Balent isn’t the colorist. I’m pretty sure you all know what I mean.)
Joking aside, I KNOW (and was planning to make a post about this but I lost the relevent images) that a lot of artists do it but are too lazy to remove all the evidence.
Why do I say lazy?
How many skintight outfits made entirely of opaque material that covers ever inch of the body still shows the wearer’s belly button?
Superheroes have been drawn as basically painted nudes for most of their history. In fact a move towards more realistic and complicated costumes is a relatively recent departure. It is not and never has been an issue specific to the depiction of women.
There are plenty of problems with the way women are portrayed in comics, so it seems pointless to single out an aspect that can be refuted by simply pointing at any picture of Superman from the last 65 years.