What Is It With Wonder Woman?

I was going through the airport a little while back, and spotted a woman carrying an adorable Wonder Woman tote bag. Right after my first thought of, "Hunh, cool!" came another less positive thought - "I bet she's never read any of the comics." Two seconds after that, I realised *I* hadn't really read many of the comics either. And yet, I would still consider myself a Wonder Woman fan. And it’s not just me – a quick google for Wonder Woman merchandise reveals a market of fans MUCH larger than I imagine the actual comics readership to be. Hell, if everyone who bought a Wonder Woman t-shirt actually bought the comic as well, DC could discontinue all their titles and just live off that. I see at least three Wonder Woman cosplayers at every comic convention I go to, usually more. The only character I see cosplayed more frequently is Batman, but hell, who DOESN'T want to be Batman? All these people can't be reading the current Wonder Woman - the trade would have been all over the bestseller lists for months if that were the case.

So why aren’t these fans of Wonder Woman, who are happy to shell out for a branded tote or a shirt, or a whole cosplay outfit not interested in reading the comic? Maybe they simply don't like reading comics, and that's a fair enough reason - but I don't think that's the case for all. I think there is a pool of potential readers, that are avoiding the comics.

Part of the problem is pretty easy to spot from a cursory glance across the shelves in any comic book store. There seems to be a prevailing perception within the comics industry at the moment that what readers really want from superheroines is T and A. If you're not a dedicated comics reader, the overall impression of female super heroes in comics is probably this sort of thing.

This is a relatively restrained example.

This kind of art makes me feel like I need a shower just from looking at it. Is it any wonder that women only make up 25% of people who self identify as comic book fans? Imagine if men were portrayed the same way! Oh wait, you don't have to, The HawkeyeInitiative has already done it for you. 

The Hawkeye Initiative is an entire tumblr of people posing
Hawkeye the way that female super heroes are posed.
You're welcome.

Print a few of those out and show them to the men in your life, see how icky it makes them feel, and ask them how interested THEY would be in comics if the male characters were portrayed this way. Happily, not ALL comics portray women this way, and there seems to be a growing demand from fans to move away from this sort of dreck. There are artists and writers out there doing an awesome job of making female super heroes look…well, super. Maybe this is thinphobic or whatever, but I find it easier to believe in a female superhero lifting a car if she has at least some muscle definition. I mean, seriously, look at this costume shot from the recent failed Wonder Woman pilot. The actress is very pretty, but her physique is just too slight to be convincing when playing an Amazon.

A nitpicky point, but it also looks like her boobs are
too far apart in this costume. Like, uncomfortably so.

To my mind if you want me to believe this character is cracking skulls and taking names then you have to portray her as having at least some proportion of the muscle mass required to do so. Here are some examples of what I consider to be convincing super heroine art, from my two favourite superheroine books at the moment.

This is from the first trade of Brian Azarello's New 52 Wonder Woman.
If you want to see something interesting being done with the
Wonder Woman character, I highly recommend it.

J.H William's art in Batwoman is breathtaking overall, but I particularly
love his insistence on putting Batwoman in flat shoes. GENIUS.

These characters are still relatively slender, with a decent rack. But they also have actual visible muscle mass, and are posed in ways that it is actually possible for the human body to pose. The people who read these comics LOVE them passionately, with good reason. Sadly, however outside the comic fan bubble, these comics aren’t very widely known. 

I was happy to note that in the recent superhero themed XBox game, Injustice:Gods Among Us, the designers did bother to give Wonder Woman a relatively imposing physique. It seems particularly important that Wonder Woman have a convincing physique in Injustice considering it’s a straight up fighting game, and I’m really glad they stayed away from the Soulcalibur technique of “More jiggle = Better”
 

I also dig that they gave her pants. Sort of.
Image courtesy of Warner Bros

I don’t think untapped Wonder Woman fans are only looking for more realistic visuals though. As part of the launch of Injustice: Gods Among Us, Warner Brothers did a poll of 1000 Australians featuring various questions on who their favourite superheroes were, and why. Participants were only able to choose from the characters featured in the game, and considering there are only two female superheroes in the game (Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl), the results are pretty skewed towards the male characters. 

What really stood out for me about the results of this poll, in between fluffy questions like “Who is the classiest superhero?” is what super powers people nominated as the ones they would most like to have. Number one was of course, flight, because that would be undeniably awesome. However, super intelligence was second. You would think, given the way that superheroes are marketed, the audience would be all in favour of the biggest, the strongest, the most powerful. But they're not. Superhuman strength came in fourth, behind moving as fast as The Flash. These results seem to indicate to me that superhero fans as a whole are kind of over the Superman school of superheroes – all powers, no personality. It’s dull, and people have plenty of other ways to get their geek on that don’t involve reading about someone being punched to the moon AGAIN.

Intruiged, I put the question "Who is your favourite superheroine, and why?" to my Twitter feed. I speak to a bunch of super serious comic fans on Twitter, so I was really surprised by the number of people who nominated superheroines from TV, rather than comics. Buffy came up repeatedly, as did Xena. (You could argue these aren't really female superheroes in the strictest of terms, but I was interested to see what characters people associated with the term) In terms of comics, by far the most nominated character was Batwoman, who has only been around for a relatively short time. Ms. Marvel was a close second – another character that is almost invisible outside the comic fan bubble. Someone else mentioned Wonder Woman, but only in the stories written by Brian Azarello. One person nominated Power Girl, but again, only when portrayed by a particular creative team. This is where an interesting theory clicked into place for me. 

I think that what women want in a female superhero is a simply a character who is a woman, and also a hero.

They want a hero- someone with not only physical strength but also strength of character: courage, compassion, intelligence. But they also want a woman: a fully fleshed character, written consistently, complete with character flaws. One of the characteristics most mentioned by my Twitter respondents was “human weakness”, closely followed by "passion"'. Superhero fans don't just want a shallow caricature that can punch real good - they want a depth that simply isn't there most of the time in the way comics traditionally write women. 

TV writers seem to have figured out this is what fans are looking for. The depiction of women on TV is far from perfect, but I feel like there are more bad ass women on TV right now than there have been in a long time. Xena and Buffy have paved the way for more gritty, real life (non superpowered) heroines like Olivia from Fringe. While there is still a lot of jiggly jiggly nonsense in video games, the tide is starting to turn there too. Being able to play a female Commander Shepherd in Mass Effect drew a LOT of new female players into the gaming world, and the new Tomb Raider reboot seems set to try and capture and retain these people looking for a tough female character to play now Mass Effect is done.

FemShep is my jam

I'm not convinced by Tomb Raider yet.

Comics need to catch up with this demand from fans for interesting female superheroes in a big way. Thanks in part to recent changes in the way women are portrayed, women now constitute 42% of all people who play video games. But comics? DC did a poll recently to gauge how well their New 52 reboot was going, and only 5% of respondents were women. FIVE PER CENT. This is totally ridiculous. 

The most recent run of Wonder Woman and Batwoman are a fantastic start, but it's still a tiny fraction of what is being produced. The fanbase is obviously there, ready made, holding out for someone to write the heroine they need. 

Thanks to Warner Bros for supplying survey results and Injustice:Gods Among Us images