A hobbled hobby

So, I was reading my usual suspects when I came across a link to an article entitled: how to draw female comic characters (according to Wizard)...

Starts out simply enough, the author has scanned in some pages from a drawing style guide from the people who publish the industry "standard" Wizard Magazine at the request of one of their friends:

brown_betty asked for examples "to illustrate the exactly how and why female comic characters are illustrated differently than the male." And I thought, really, what's better to illustrate these things than the books teaching the style in the first place?
A while ago I posted some scans from Wizard How To Draw series on drawing female superheroes (here and here), and I thought I'd post a bunch more from the first book of the series on "How To Draw: Heroic Anatomy".


As everything, it starts with the basics, i.e. proportions. First the male superhero [...]

And as you can imagine from that intro, the next section in is on the female superhero. Let's just say that the pages are sad. Most commentators on this livejournal posting are as speechless as I am. But suffice it to say that if this guide is demonstrative of the editorial quality at Wizard, then bankruptcy will be too good for them. As a person who grew up reading comics, and knows for a fact that gender representations (while still leaning towards the adolescent male) are improving, reading these excerpts is like finding a guide to techniques for corporal punishment in an elementary school principal's office: you know people used to think that way, and you can't believe that someone would still be holding on to those old ideas, and you're just kind of embarrassed so you put the guide back, shake your head, and move on.

Wizard has it's share of detractors already in the comic book industry as the Wikipedia article on them states:

For many, Wizard is the most visible face of the American comics industry, and it encounters a fair amount of controversy. Critics charge that Wizard discusses mainstream American superhero comics to the exclusion of other kinds of comics; although such comics are the dominant genre among the majority of American comics buyers.

And to me that's the sad part. With so many other genres of literate comics to choose from, most people still prefer Spiderman to The Sandman. Oh well.