November 07, 2004

• Sexual dimorphism much? I found the comparison between the bodies of the actual humans (some of whom were reasonably good-looking) and the "ideal" forms of the COH avatars a tad creepy. I also thought the ideals were creepy enough on their own, but that may just be me. I also notice that the steroids the male super avatars are taking have atrophied their packages. ;) Obdisclaimer: I'm a retired comic book geek and used to work for a comics shop when I was in grad school. This stuff bugged me back in the day too.
• This is fun. Thanks BBF.
• Wow - amazing constume work. Are these just the winners, that they have no duplicate characters?
• While mindful of immlass' comment, I have to say that some of them are amazingly close to their avatars in body shape and proportion. Indra, Jerrica, Spare Parts and Diva 7. Especially Spare Parts. Impressive woman.
• Alnedra, yeah, there were definitely some who were close. I just noticed there were some really good-looking and well-shaped women who couldn't come close to the form. Part of my reaction comes from the height of the female avatar form. I think it's 10 heads tall like a fashion drawing rather than 8 heads tall, which is the average for real people. As a friend of mine noted, a lot of that is in the legs. On the subject of the guys, I thought Big Package (who lived up to his name by comparison of avatars ;) was a really well-muscled guy who couldn't even come close to the body form of his avatar.
• True enough, immlass. Alot of them are pretty well-shaped people, but just not close to the body shapes of their avatars. I doubt that more than 1 in a 1000 (10,000?) women could possible have legs that long. Girls like White Sapphire, Miss Sting and Mistress Betty have wonderful figures, but "fall short" of the avatar form. You should see the Hong Kong comics too. Every single male, including those who are supposed to be svelte and scholarly looking, have hyptertrophied muscles. I've grown inured to it, but occasionally, non-comic-book-reading friends will peek over my shoulder and remind me.
• There is comic art that isn't like that - many of my favorite series (Sandman, Books of Magic) tend towards protraying very average looking people. Is it a style difference between the fantasy/horror comics and the superhero? Of course, Asian comics are another thing altogether. To be honest, we all know that this body dimorphism isn't just comics - I was watching America's Next Top Model, a contest show - and, while you realise that modelling is a very skill oriented profession, there are just so insanely stupid moments. Like when a designer tells a drop dead gorgeous girl that her hips and thighs are too large at 39" (Mindful she is also something like 5'9"). If he had wanted a boy to wear his dresses, he should have hired a boy.
• To testosterone-poisoned male me, it's the men who uniformly fell short of their avatars' hypertrophic, heroic physiques. Many of the women did a pretty fair job of matching their avatars in gross proportions... ectos like Nukular Nikki, mesos like Spare Parts, endos like Mistress Betty all choosing appropriately ecto etc avatars, which once you allow for caricature look close enough. The men, however, were for the most part comic in their mismatch. There just aren't any potbellied avatars available. Nice costume work by Dynamite. Are those welding gloves that he's dyed?
• Me likey Diva 7 and Nuclear Nikki. Yum.
• To me, the body dimorphism is completely extreme: even runway models don't have those kind of proportions. And the male avatars look like strangely difform body builders, not athletes. AFAIK, this body style is a characteristic of American/English superhero comics and some kinds of Asian comics. In, say, franco-belgian or underground comics, the drawings are either realistic or caricatural. Altough even there, outside of the underground/indie, the characters tend to look pretty good, like movie actors. Akin to how even a loser character played by William H. Macy still looks way better than your average man.
• Man, you guys take all the fun out of laughing at geeks in costumes.
• Was thinking the same thing BBF. I love the page title, btw.
• Real people are 6.5-7 heads tall; comic book people are usually 8-8.5; these are at least 10. And it's all in the legs! When this was on MeFi, I was pointing it out to my girlfriend and noting how bizarre and deformed it made people look. And their heads are about half the size they should be, even with their tiny torsos... (The women got the short end of the stick by far).