As you can tell from my username, I love vintage stuff. I’ve been this way my whole life. I was that dorky little kid who listened to the Beatles and Buddy Holly, and when you came to my house to play Barbies with me, the story had to take place during World War II on the home front. By far, my favorite aspect of vintage culture was always Archie comics. Does anyone remember Archie, the redhead teen from Riverdale? When I was maybe seven or eight, my mom bestowed upon me her huge collection of Archie comics from her 1970s childhood, and about a year later, my aunt sent me an anthology of Archies from the 1940s entitled Archie Americana Series: Best of the Forties. I was obsessed. I was particularly taken with Veronica, Archie’s spoiled, snarky, and bee-you-tiful girlfriend.
animated bodies
“Boobs Don’t Work That Way”…No really, they don’t!!!
Images such as these pervade comic book character art. Women are normally in sexy, revealing outfits; and, their bodies are often doing some pretty impossible things. A blog called Boobs Don’t Work That Way brings awareness to how ridiculously women are portrayed in comic books. The picture of Wonder Woman displayed here is not unique. Attempting to make her sexier, she is drawn into this impossible pose where her breasts and behind are shown at the same time. Also, her breasts are extremely large, and there is no way that her costume could logically support them. The commentary on the blog regarding this picture is as follows:
“It always freaks me out when boobs are drawn as almost a separate entity. This one looks like it’s about to pop off and and start a solo career.”
Other interesting points the blogger makes include the way fabric unrealistically stretches over breasts in some costumes, suctioning itself to each breast individually, the fact that nipples rarely have areolas in comics, and that breasts are not always perky and perfectly spherical.
I find it interesting that beauty for women in comic books is literally impossible for us as humans. The beauty standard is completely unrealistic. Do comic book artists feel that women will not be sexy without their impossible breasts? Or do they enjoy creating a fantasy woman? I’m not personally sure which reason correctly demonstrate how artists feel, or if there are other reasons. The blog is not being updated, but the pictures and commentary are excellent. Check it out!
The Embodiment of Death
The chapter for next week about the embodiment of death – in terms of finding ground between the ‘body’ and the ‘self’ – resonated with me for various reasons. One of the biggest things I noticed was the unwillingness to deny that a person’s identity has left the body after death, which is a theme that has become prominent in various science fiction stories. Iconic characters such as the vampire or zombie relate the idea that after death we do not have to give up our bodies. Reanimated bodies, such as Frankenstein’s monster, also seem to feed into a belief that the remains of a body can be recycled to create new life (or something similar). Furthermore, the father in Pet Sematary who buried his dead son’s body within the grounds that were known to reanimate bodies did so to cling to the fact that his son would return once again after identity and body united.
These representations in literature and media walk a line between trying to beat death and keeping claim over your body, but ultimately there is something in the characters that lacks humanness. Vampires, zombies, Frankenstein’s monster, and the little dead boy from Pet Sematary all lost their identities after death and were changed completely. Something about the mysterious nature of death – one that we cannot completely have knowledge about, yet we all will experience – feeds into these representations of bodies that face the unknown. The characters definitely find an imbalance between the ‘self’ and ‘body’ being continuously connected, but for the most part these characters illuminate a world where bodies are meat and fodder. Identity may change after the cross between life and death, but the body will withstand composition (albeit disfigured and sutured, I suppose).
Unruly Bodies 