The Four Color Media Monitor

Artist Campbell agrees with those who find the new "armored" design for Wonder Woman ridiculous and uncalled for:

I rarely comment about comic book industry matters on my personal FB page, but I gotta say, shoulder pads, especially big bulky metal ones NEVER look good on women. Everything about them is unfeminine and lacks style. No grace to this approach at all.
And on a side note, I find the continued knee-jerk reaction to internet message board critics demands to keep female heroines covered from head to toe in fabric an overreaction. She’s an Amazon Warrior, she’s NOT in the *Taliban! unsure emoticon

He also notes:

(*Well, apparently the Twitterverse is flipping out over my comparison of her coverage to being in the Taliban. It was a flippant and off the cuff exaggeration. Figured that was obvious, but I suppose you can’t be surprised these days. Also, my issue wasn’t with “women wearing armor”, it was with the bulky clunky shoulder pads. Again, a detail lost over there on Twitter I guess.)

I don't think he intended any harm. He's correct that all these demands for modest costume designs are ultimately overreactions, and I'm betting the PC advocates making these demands aren't even asking for better storytelling. That's something totally lost in this whole affair. Another is that the new costume design for WW is dull and unimaginative.

Here's a drawing of WW by Campbell where he draws her truer to her origins.

Since we're on the subject, Erik Larsen voiced dislike for some of these PC costume designs. However, in contrast to Campbell, it turns out he wouldn't stand by his arguments and erased a lot of the tweets where he panned the new ones. His criticism, interestingly enough, included the Muslim Ms. Marvel's:

Larsen’s twitter conversations spanned overnight, also mentioning his dislike of the costume redesigns for Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan (a costume which is incredibly important to both her backstory and character development); Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers (a direct reference to the outfit worn by the male Captain Mar-Vell); and decrying Spider-Woman’s new fitted motorcycle jacket as a “potato sack.” Even after I posed the question, however, Larsen never responded to how he felt more practical superhero outfits harmed comic buyers at large. Specifically, as he mentioned, the only ones really speaking up were the smaller number of fans he feels use the internet.

But again, he hasn't stood by any of his arguments, judging by how many tweets were obliterated. But Jill Pantozzi, the writer who brought this up, and one of the same people who defended Identity Crisis a number of years ago, has just confirmed the problem with the Muslim Ms. Marvel: the backstory is supposed to be a big deal, despite all the claims initially made that it wasn't.

Pantozzi also fails to explain how this is such a big deal, but not the lack of compelling scriptwriting, or how that doesn't affect buyers at large. All these trivial complaints over costume designs, as I've long come to realize, just take attention away from the most vital issues of character interaction and development.

And since we're on the subject of Larsen, lo and behold, it would seem he terminated his whole Twitter account, since, when I looked for and clicked the link...it was no longer there. Now, maybe he just froze his account and will revive it later. But for now, it sure looks like one big leftist couldn't stand his own fellow fools' flak, and took off. No matter. He was capable of being pretty snide when he wanted to be. More about his exit from Twitter on The Outhousers.

Update: it looks like Larsen is back on Twitter. I suppose he realized he'd look like a coward if he just quit.

Labels: censorship issues, dc comics, dreadful artists, dreadful writers, good artists, islam and jihad, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, Wonder Woman