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Marvel's Female Superheroes Are Gradually Becoming More Super
New submitter RhubarbPye writes: A new study shows an increasing trend in the power and significance of female superhero characters in the Marvel comic book universe. Several criteria were used to examine the trend, including cover art, dialog, and the actual superpowers. Over 200 individual comic books from Marvel's 50+ year history were compared for the study. What's of particular interest is the study's author is a 17-year-old high school student from Ohio.
So your thesis is that males would prefer to look at drawings of men in skin tight costumes over women in skin tight costumes?
Geez. Are you overly sensitive. There wasn't any mention in the article of 'see these results prove women are still oppressed', or calling for 'more female represenation'. In fact the results from the study would suggest that 'see women are represented rather well in Marvel comic books' (or at least 'better than they used to be') but it makes no such conclusions one way or the other. As a good study should it simply states the results without interpretation of 'what they mean for society'. Though the article does indicate that the 'cause' may be because there are more female comic book readers & artists/writers....surprise surprise...someone catering to 1/2 the population with disposible income using people who might understand more about the demographic than the other 1/2....
Look there is SJW 'bullshit' all over the place that can & should be called out, but if every story about women leads you to believe its an 'SJW conspiracy' you need to grow up, pick your battles wisely.
To give some small sliver to credit to comics, their stock-sexyness isn't just a female thing. While it is true that their female superpowered characters generally wear accessorised bikinis, have breasts bigger than their heads and spines made our of rubber, the men fare no better. Just about every male superpowered character gets the torso of a bodybuilder and a face angled like a brick.
Blame the readers. The publishers just make what they know will sell.
"Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence." - C.S. Lewis
Originally Susan Richards' powers were turning invisible and creating a force shield around herself. This wasn't for doing cool things, it was for staying safely out of the way while the boys did the fighting. By the mid 70s when I was buying comic books her purely defensive powers were upgraded to being able to produce a shower of spherical force bubbles, which on the offensive force scale was about one step up the awesomeness scale from telekinetically throwing couch pillows.
I don't think the reason for this change was to throw a sop to feminists, or because fans were demanding strong female characters. In either case she'd have got a more impressive upgrade. I think it was simply upgraded storytelling. A character that can basically hide and shield herself is not as versatile as a character than can do useful things. So this kind of incremental upgrading naturally gave her more of a swiss-army knife skillset.
As for modern superheroines having multiple, I have not much to add, other than an observation. This multiple super-power thing kind of mirrors what we expect women to be like today. We expect them to be able to multitask, to juggle several very different roles on our teams. Versatility has become a cultural expectation for women, so it might not be coincidental that female superheroes get more of toolkit rather than one very big hammer.
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When I was 13, I was reading stories about competent 30 year old war and super heroes. Reed Richards had a decade of experience.
Today, everyone seems to be 19 to 22 yet they are somehow completely experienced and more competent than anyone older than they are. (re: the recent Star Trek films). Rogue especially has deaged tremendously from about 30 to about 20.
For some reason, when i was a kid, you didn't need children to attract an audience but these days you do.
It's so unrealistic that it is really jarring to me. These young children lack the experience and gravitas to be in the parts they are playing.
Wolverine at least still has an appearance of being in his mid 30's but he's basically immortal so it doesn't really apply to him except... it seems like a lot of "tricks" he would have seen a dozen times by now.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Yes, which means that women - 50% or so of the population - aren't a large portion of comic buyers.
Not if you understand math and market segmentation. You can pander to the people who *already* buy your product, in the hope that you'll get them to buy one or two extra comic books a month, or you can get aim at the group of people who have never bought a comic book in their lives, and hope to convert some percentage of them to lifelong customers. Men have PLENTY of "super duper strong" male comic book heroes to choose from. While that may be of interest to some females, it's human nature to enjoy reading stories about people to whom you can relate somehow.
Unfortunately for your point, sales and marketing *is* a real thing, and that explains 100% of the drive to capture more of a female market in comic books.
If you think being smart and being tough are mutually exclusive, then you are neither.