Via everybody in the world (but go to Johanna for the roundup), DC is doing a a line of maquettes of their female characters in quote anime-style end-quote (except that it's really ecchi-style).
EWWW.
EWWWWWW.
EWWWWWWWWWW.
OK, seriously, we can argue back and forth about the male gaze and sexualized depictions of woman and issues of empowerment and patriarchal dominance all you want to, but let me just plain make it clear that sexualized infantilization is a cultural pathology we do not want to import from Japan.
Posted by Greg at February 13, 2007 10:26 AM
Yay, lolicon. :/ There's supposed to be a Hawkgirl one as well, I think...I saw design drawings on a friend's blog the other day.
I guess I have a tough time seeing what's so much remarkably worse about these than a lot of the portrayals of women in comics for the last 20 years or so. Sure, it's tacky and undesirable, but...I don't see where folks who regularly buy any significant fraction of what Marvel and DC publish have a whole lot of standing for complaint. It's not like this is a sudden and unexpected departure from an artistically competent and narratively interesting standard for portraying women with super-powers.
Well, mostly I object to the way that Power Girl has the face of a five-year-old on the body of an 18-year-old with implants.
Also, my idea of what superhero comics should look like predates the last 20 years.
In showing these images around, I've had numerous people tell me that it's not actually lolicon, or even sexualized infantilism of any stripe. Just "normal" anime faces and proportions.
1) I don't really want to become enough of an expert on loli to refute these claims.
2) The claims certainly don't make "normal" anime look good (and I've seen enough anime to say these designs are certainly within the range of normal anime, at least the subset that gets shown in the U.S.).
"Sexualized infantilization is a cultural pathology we do not want to import from Japan."
Yeah, it's just a good job that everybody in comics journalism/the comics blogosphere has been so consistent over the past few years in clearly stating that Japan has its own expressions of sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia and other assorted prejudices that all find expression in their popular culture, instead of mindlessly ra-raing everything Japanese and shouting from the rooftop that all manga/anime is wonderful and much better than those horrible bigoted western comics, isn't it?
.........isn't it?
...Hello?
Is this thing on?
I'm confused. Does every discussion of a comic book, movie, TV show, song, or whatever have to come with its own critique of the culture from which it comes? Does a feature story about Extras have to decry hundreds of years of colonialism? Must the latest review of X-Men include a disclaimer about the military industrial complex?
But then again, it would be nice to pick up the lowdown on the latest Japanese economic policy by just browsing a couple of manga blogs.
Okay, let be the the selfish one who makes this point:
A few months back, some friends of mine had their first child, a little girl.
Seeing these, I thank God that I do not have a child (especially a daughter as a girl getting any ideas from these could be much worse than a boy) that will ask awkward questions about these. Taking your kid into a comic store and seeing, some of the product would be bad enough.
By the way, I only made the comment about a daughter being more worrisome than a boy because everybody I know who has kids tells me girls are much more difficult to raise.
But, I (who happily does not have kids) am disturbed by these statures to the point that a *kid* asking me *anything* about them would bother me to no end.