APE IN A CAPE

thehappysorceress:

Birds of Prey: Empty Nest, my latest commission from Mike Kevan
(inspired by Gail Simone)

Dang, actually made me cry a little. WAAAAAAAH!
You should have a warning!

The thing about the Birds at that time was, I think the relationships were almost singular in comics…there just weren’t many female friendships among superheroes, and so many that existed were more about guys. It would be, two women want the same guy, or two women had the same ex-boyfriend or whatever. Two women want to fit in in a group of dudes. I wanted a book where the female relationships had nothing to do with that, so the only real romance element in almost the entire run was Creote and Savant, really. I didn’t want the Birds talking about chocolate or guys’ butts.
And in a way, I think that was a bit of a problem. The people who loved the book, loved it HARD, and there were a lot of imitators, I think. But as is often the case, I felt people, even some people who worked on the book in some capacity, often had no idea what the specific appeal of that era of stories was. They looked and saw sexy women in sexy outfits kicking ass and being smartasses, and they thought that was what made the book successful (and it WAS successful and hopefully will remain so). So we had all these books about those things and they tanked, one after another.
But I think the engine of the book was what you guys have captured on the panels in the original post—it was a female team that was together because they cared about each other, even loved each other. It’s hard to explain how rare something like that is in all media, where the default lead characters in most genre fiction are almost always male. It was about friendship, even friendship at a cost. That’s why I loved writing it.
I sometimes think that the real wish fulfillment in comics isn’t about powers at all, it’s about other things entirely. Who wouldn’t want to have a dad like Bane, who will punch the face off someone who insults you? Who wouldn’t want to have a circle of friends who would die for you without even thinking about it?
That’s something I’m always looking for in comics, the relationships that ought to exist, but all too often do not. That’s what Birds of Prey was about for me.

Birds of Prey: Empty Nest, my latest commission from Mike Kevan

(inspired by Gail Simone)

Dang, actually made me cry a little. WAAAAAAAH!

You should have a warning!

The thing about the Birds at that time was, I think the relationships were almost singular in comics…there just weren’t many female friendships among superheroes, and so many that existed were more about guys. It would be, two women want the same guy, or two women had the same ex-boyfriend or whatever. Two women want to fit in in a group of dudes. I wanted a book where the female relationships had nothing to do with that, so the only real romance element in almost the entire run was Creote and Savant, really. I didn’t want the Birds talking about chocolate or guys’ butts.

And in a way, I think that was a bit of a problem. The people who loved the book, loved it HARD, and there were a lot of imitators, I think. But as is often the case, I felt people, even some people who worked on the book in some capacity, often had no idea what the specific appeal of that era of stories was. They looked and saw sexy women in sexy outfits kicking ass and being smartasses, and they thought that was what made the book successful (and it WAS successful and hopefully will remain so). So we had all these books about those things and they tanked, one after another.

But I think the engine of the book was what you guys have captured on the panels in the original post—it was a female team that was together because they cared about each other, even loved each other. It’s hard to explain how rare something like that is in all media, where the default lead characters in most genre fiction are almost always male. It was about friendship, even friendship at a cost. That’s why I loved writing it.

I sometimes think that the real wish fulfillment in comics isn’t about powers at all, it’s about other things entirely. Who wouldn’t want to have a dad like Bane, who will punch the face off someone who insults you? Who wouldn’t want to have a circle of friends who would die for you without even thinking about it?

That’s something I’m always looking for in comics, the relationships that ought to exist, but all too often do not. That’s what Birds of Prey was about for me.

itswallie:

thehappysorceress:

isaidquirky:

This is a perfect example of what I was talking about with Ed Benes. I could give this scene to a dozen critical darling artists and few of them could deliver the gut-punch that this scene has, as drawn by Ed. Note the darkening of the panel when Huntress appeals to Dinah, as if the darkness is closing in. Note how he barely varies the shot distance through the entire sequence, to not allow the reader to look away as the three women endure this painful moment. I could go on…but this stuff is why I loved working with Ed. Sometimes, we got shots that were sexier than they should have been, but his acting and respect for the script was just dead on. This sequence actually made me angry at Barbara for weeks and we’d been building to it for months. Ed made it heartbreaking…what he can do with emotion is sometimes amazing.

Gets me every time.

This is a perfect page. The writing. The art. Just … amazing. I’m about to cry.

Thank you, we put our hearts in that book.

I always make it through this page okay, but once Dinah and Zinda react to it, I get misty every time. It just felt like the characters had things to say.

deathlyillandalwaysbusy:

thehappysorceress:

isaidquirky:

This is a perfect example of what I was talking about with Ed Benes. I could give this scene to a dozen critical darling artists and few of them could deliver the gut-punch that this scene has, as drawn by Ed. Note the darkening of the panel when Huntress appeals to Dinah, as if the darkness is closing in. Note how he barely varies the shot distance through the entire sequence, to not allow the reader to look away as the three women endure this painful moment. I could go on…but this stuff is why I loved working with Ed. Sometimes, we got shots that were sexier than they should have been, but his acting and respect for the script was just dead on. This sequence actually made me angry at Barbara for weeks and we’d been building to it for months. Ed made it heartbreaking…what he can do with emotion is sometimes amazing.

Gets me every time.

I literally just read this part.
I wanted Babs to be right because she just wanted to help her. But I understnad why Helena felt so betrayed and I just—ieshlrghrgoigrh I WANT THEM ALL TO BE BEST FRIENDS FOREVER AND BE HAPPYYYY
Also Dick and Babs’ telephone tag. This trade is out to break my heart. (I want to hug Barbara. She has it so hard, and she just wants to do what’s right…)

It makes me sad to read it. I miss the Birds like crazy. Sigh.

That telephone tag thing is interesting. I think I’ve told this story before, but maybe not the whole story.

Devin Grayson was writing Nightwing at the time, and Devin came from the worlds of role-play and fanfic. And her connection with Nightwing was bone-deep, like mine to Barbara’s, but maybe with even less separation of author and character. She REALLY took Nightwing seriously.

I hadn’t been writing that long, I looked up to Devin tremendously (I really miss her in comics, working on that, I promise). And she had this scene in Nightwing coming up where they would miss each other on their answering machines. She asked me to write Barbara’s, to put in Nightwing, and she would write Dick’s, for me in Bop.

Devin sometimes so inhabited the characters that in our IMS and emails, she would write AS Dick Grayson, which took me totally by surprise. It sounds a little nutty, but it wasn’t, it was deadly serious, just part of her process. It was an adjustment.

So we wrote these message and they were just supposed to convey a little bit of, “miss you, love you, bye.” But we both ended up writing these very brutal, painful, raw-wound type of missed-love messages and when they are read together back to back, it’s tremendously painful, in that way when two friends are meant for each other and can’t seem to quite face it.

Because Devin took Nightwing so seriously, that scene always reminds me of Devin, who left comics for a good while not long after, so it’s really sad for me on a whole other level. But it was lovely to write the very reserved Barbara laying it out on the line. It’s very moving to me still, and I hear about it from readers a lot, I think they can sense that there was some very honest emotion, simply love of our characters, underneath those word balloons.

thehappysorceress:

isaidquirky:

This is a perfect example of what I was talking about with Ed Benes. I could give this scene to a dozen critical darling artists and few of them could deliver the gut-punch that this scene has, as drawn by Ed. Note the darkening of the panel when Huntress appeals to Dinah, as if the darkness is closing in. Note how he barely varies the shot distance through the entire sequence, to not allow the reader to look away as the three women endure this painful moment. I could go on…but this stuff is why I loved working with Ed. Sometimes, we got shots that were sexier than they should have been, but his acting and respect for the script was just dead on. This sequence actually made me angry at Barbara for weeks and we’d been building to it for months. Ed made it heartbreaking…what he can do with emotion is sometimes amazing.

Gets me every time.

APE IN A CAPE: I just can't even bad art. I just can't even.

deathlyillandalwaysbusy:

deathlyillandalwaysbusy:

So I’ve started reading Gail Simone’s run on Birds of Prey and enjoying it greatly. And you know what, if you want to draw butts in taking up 3/4ths of every panel, okay, I can actually handle that pretty well. But JESUS FUCK, ED BENES. WHAT THE HELL.
I’ll give you…

Oh
oh my gosh.
This really blew up. I think this requires an explanation now (now being now that Gail Simone has seen it and I’m all flustered and don’t know what to say).

I think the first thing is that I actually did not expect anyone to see this. I’m a tumblr nobody and never aspired to anything greater than that. (My blog is made up of reblogs of cats and other cute things.) This is why I pretty much went off without giving an even-stevens argument. It was just a complaint! But now that this seems to have sparked a discussion:

I wasn’t commenting so much on the overt oversexualization of these characters so much as I was commenting on why this particular oversexualizing wasn’t working. (eg, the costumes being stuck up girls’ butts in an impossible way, the sewn-on basketball breasts)
Mostly because to me, that isn’t sexy.
(And I come from a California beach town, so I’m no stranger to booty-shorts. Girls in high school wear them all the time—the difference between ours and Bene’s is that while our beach girls got them high enough to have their fannies hanging out, there was no possible way that they could have comfortably jammed them so far up as to show off over half of their buttcheeks.)

I concede that I was pretty hard on Ed Benes. I can’t imagine how he thought those costumes fit up there, but the art in general is usually pretty solid. And I like how he draws Savant’s face. And I realize the main Black Hole Booty picture I used as an example isn’t from the book. I used that because I put in about 7 minutes to look for a picture that exemplified what I was complaining about, and that one was just perfect. I mean, the focal point was her butt. How could I resist? I wasn’t trying to create a real argument, just a heat-of-the-moment rant that I thought would make my non-comics friends laugh. (It was hasty and hurtful though, and for that I sincerely apologize. A person is a person, no matter how far removed I am from him, and I wasn’t being fair to him in the slightest.)

I’m glad Ms.Simone told Bene’s story though. He’s certainly talented, even if I have problems with his art. And I’m happy that he got an opportunity like this.

And then we (being some other people over the course of the morning who are not me, since I was in math class) got into an argument about oversexualization. I have this to say: ridiculously sexy characters have their place. It is hard to break habits of drawing oversexualized women. And while these are professional artists, they draw the way they draw. It can be good and bad at the same time. (Like Joe Bennet: I showed off his cringe-worthy drawing of the Birds up there, but just the page before, he drew some phenomenal little girls. The were chubby and cute and actually looked like small children playing with chalk. I was impressed.)

It happens. I don’t think that means we should stop pointing it out, but let’s try not to get outraged the way I did. Personally attacking somebody never inspires positive change, and I’m pretty ashamed of myself now that I’ve been called out on it. (But hey, at least it was funny. I’ll wear that as a badge of honor.)

Objectorbit says, “Perhaps that just how some women like to draw their women?” Which I think is nice. (I can’t seem to find where the initial argument about needing more female artists to balance out the fanservice came from.) I really like drawing sexy women. I love drawing pin-up style women. And I actually like looking at them too, and I’m not even a lesbian. I’m sex-positive (which means I HATE it when people demonize sex, because I think it’s a perfectly natural part of life, whether you choose to have it or not)— I’m from a French background too. So sexuality in comics doesn’t offend me. It’s really about the way its portrayed.

So, uh, I don’t think women are the problem or the solution.
I got a little lost in what I was trying to say here, but I just wanted to kinda put my actual thought process out there so that people don’t think that I’m the raging dickwad that my original post kind of makes me out to be.

Also that I am pretty much IN LOVE with Birds of Prey right now, and I can’t wait till November so that I can finally read the rest of the trades that I accidentally shipped to my house instead of my dorm.

No, no, no, really, you DO NOT have to defend yourself or what you wrote, I thought it was really funny and there’s some obvious truth in it. I admit I have a higher tolerance for cheesecake IF it’s done well than a lot of female readers do.

One thing I loved about Ed was, if I asked for a guy to be sexy, or posed in a sexy manner, damn if he didn’t do that with the same kind of intensity and dedication he used with female characters. That made a lot of difference…a lot of people followed the book during Ed’s run primarily for Creote and Savant, for example.

But I seriously only reblogged because I admired the way you threw the words around. I thought it was really funny and well done. NO apologies or defenses necessary at all!

Anime and Comics: I just can't even bad art. I just can't even.

erkhart:

gailsimone:

superheroeskickingass:

gailsimone:

gailsimone:

deathlyillandalwaysbusy:

So I’ve started reading Gail Simone’s run on Birds of Prey and enjoying it greatly. And you know what, if you want to draw butts in taking up 3/4ths of every panel, okay, I can actually handle that pretty well. But JESUS FUCK, ED BENES. WHAT THE…

Oh, we definitely need more female artists, but yeah, a female artist is absolutely no guarantee that you won’t get tons of cheesecake fanservice. I have had female artists who made Ed look like a puritan in comparison, sincerely.

Ms. Simone that may be true. But I have not scene them.

In some cases, it may be because some things get edited before they go to print. The first couple that spring to mind are both great artists, I loved working with them, but the cheesecake was far greater than what Ed does. Adriana Melo in Rose and Thorn, we had to change a LOT of poses that were not supposed to be sexualized. Adriana is a fantastic artist but some of the stuff came to us looking very, very sexualized at inappropriate times.

The other in the front of my mind is Joyce Chin, whom I worked with on Vampirella/Magdelena/Witchblade. GREAT artist, but holy mackerel, even fully clothed, her women carry a parental advisory!

“Need more female artists”? No, for what you’re after you need more female editors.

Believe me, that is no guarantee, either, unfortunately.

Anime and Comics: I just can't even bad art. I just can't even.

superheroeskickingass:

gailsimone:

gailsimone:

deathlyillandalwaysbusy:

So I’ve started reading Gail Simone’s run on Birds of Prey and enjoying it greatly. And you know what, if you want to draw butts in taking up 3/4ths of every panel, okay, I can actually handle that pretty well. But JESUS FUCK, ED BENES. WHAT THE…

Oh, we definitely need more female artists, but yeah, a female artist is absolutely no guarantee that you won’t get tons of cheesecake fanservice. I have had female artists who made Ed look like a puritan in comparison, sincerely.

Ms. Simone that may be true. But I have not scene them.

In some cases, it may be because some things get edited before they go to print. The first couple that spring to mind are both great artists, I loved working with them, but the cheesecake was far greater than what Ed does. Adriana Melo in Rose and Thorn, we had to change a LOT of poses that were not supposed to be sexualized. Adriana is a fantastic artist but some of the stuff came to us looking very, very sexualized at inappropriate times.

The other in the front of my mind is Joyce Chin, whom I worked with on Vampirella/Magdelena/Witchblade. GREAT artist, but holy mackerel, even fully clothed, her women carry a parental advisory!

Anime and Comics: I just can't even bad art. I just can't even.

gailsimone:

deathlyillandalwaysbusy:

So I’ve started reading Gail Simone’s run on Birds of Prey and enjoying it greatly. And you know what, if you want to draw butts in taking up 3/4ths of every panel, okay, I can actually handle that pretty well. But JESUS FUCK, ED BENES. WHAT THE…

Oh, we definitely need more female artists, but yeah, a female artist is absolutely no guarantee that you won’t get tons of cheesecake fanservice. I have had female artists who made Ed look like a puritan in comparison, sincerely.

I just can’t even bad art. I just can’t even.

deathlyillandalwaysbusy:

So I’ve started reading Gail Simone’s run on Birds of Prey and enjoying it greatly. And you know what, if you want to draw butts in taking up 3/4ths of every panel, okay, I can actually handle that pretty well. But JESUS FUCK, ED BENES. WHAT THE HELL.
I’ll give you fair warning: this is a pretty pic-heavy post. It’s also cuss-heavy.

Read More

Reblogging because funny is funny.

I quibble with a couple things, the big shot with the ‘black hole’ booty was never actually in the book, but the line made me laugh so hard I can’t argue with it.

Bop was a joy to write, and most of the artists were pretty respectful but it DID ask them to flex different muscles. A lot of artists just aren’t used to having to draw women when they AREN’T posing sexily and some really struggled with it.

Agreed, the belly window is goofy. I love that outfit without the belly window, though, with the white forming a cross on Huntress’ outfit.

Ack, the bare midriff shirt thing. This is inexplicable to me. For a while, WHENEVER I asked for a woman, no matter what age, to be in casual clothes, they always, always put the women in bare midriff shirts. It just got to be so odd, in one issue, not drawn by Ed, virtually every woman in the book is wearing a bare-midriff shirt. It still drives me nuts. It got to where I literally had to specify in the script that they were NOT wearing bare-midriff shirts, and even then I still got them, sometimes.

Ed Benes…I’ll be honest, I am aware that he could be way excessive (although pin-up art does seem different from interior art), and sometimes it could be annoying. But I loved working with him for the way he drew the characters’ emotions, he’s phenomenal at capturing the mood and tone I wanted. With Ed and with Nicola, I can go way, way more subtle in the script, I can ask for complexities that a lot of critically beloved artists simply cannot deliver. I loved that about working with him.

I did try to poke fun at his excesses in the book a couple times, affectionately, but I think it backfired and just looked like pandering. My miscalculation.

Ed’s story is kind of amazing, I find it really inspiring. Ed doesn’t speak much English, and he hates to fly, so he rarely leaves his very small, very rural Brazilian village. I gather they didn’t have electricity in the homes til fairly recently.

My understanding, as told to me by a friend of his, is that Ed came from a very small town, very remote, in Brazil, and that he was given a single Conan comic when he was a kid. And the only art supplies he had were scrap paper and a ball-point pen. So he taught himself to draw by drawing the figures from Conan over and over and over, all in ball-point pen on whatever paper he could find.

There’s something very amazing to me about that, the dedication of the artist. Ed is quite revered among Brazilian artists, there’s a whole school of people trying to draw like him. And I know that a lot of it is for the action and the sex stuff, but for me, his real value is in the acting.

I got way off the subject. Sorry.

But I thought the post was really funny and well written, thanks for the giggles on a crap morning! And I do feel your pain a bit, and these aren’t even the examples that really got to me. ;)