Body Dimorphism, part 1

A Sensation at the Brooklyn Museum Body Dimorphism, part 2

Body Dimorphism, part 1

digresssml Originally published November 19, 1999, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1357

“Ve gonna pump (whap!) you up!”

–Hans and Franz

There are so many things in the world that females have had to lag behind males in achieving. Males had more privileges in voting, in job choice… you name it, and men have generally had the edge.

But there’s one thing that modern young ladies have had the edge on for quite some time, and that only in recent years are young guys starting to catch up. And that, kids, is body dimorphism.

Striving for an ideal of the human body is nothing new, of course. One need look no further than Greek statues to see ideally sculpted, muscled and fairly ripped men in various poses of sleek flawlessness. Women who were not only supposed to look like goddesses, but genuinely were goddesses. Perfection was presented in three glorious dimensions. However, whether Greeks of the time actually thought they were supposed to look like those statues, and did everything they could—reasonable and unreasonable—to achieve that look for themselves, I really couldn’t say. Perhaps there are expert historians who could provide an answer, but that’s a bit outside of my field.

Of more recent vintage, however, we hand our daughters Barbie dolls, and those wasp waisted, well-bosomed plastic individuals provide the idealized body type for young girls. And if the doll does not drive the message home sufficiently, then certainly a world filled with slim models draped in the latest revealing fashions certainly helps to let young ladies know where they stand, or at least where they should stand.

Boys, however, haven’t had it quite shoved so thoroughly into their faces… at least, not until recently. Now no one is saying that trying to care for one’s body or endeavoring to look good is a bad thing… certainly not at a time when the United States leads the world in obesity. But on the other hand, let’s take a look in our own little industry at the changes in the way that the human body has been represented.

Now there are certain givens, of course. Comic book heroines are hugely busted, equipped with breasts that would probably give the ladies a black eye while they’re running. Comic book heroes wear outfits that are exceptionally tight in the area of the crotch, so much so that one realizes that there can’t really be anything there since no bulge is apparent (which would, when you think about it, explain the hostility that prompts them to go out and beat up on bad guys. Perhaps they’re feeling inadequacy in other aspects of their lives.)

But that’s not what I’m focusing on at the moment. Instead consider the heroes and heroines of the Golden Age of comics.

A pretty slim bunch.

Wonder Woman, considering she was an amazon princess, was rather thin, her bust line nothing especially daunting (although understandable when one recalls that the amazons allegedly whacked off breasts so as not to have any impediment to their bow arms.) The heroes, by the same token, were quite slender. They weren’t 90-pound weaklings, but they weren’t exactly Hercules either. Even artists who were later known for their impossibly muscled characters, such as Jack Kirby, were producing heroes who were thin and wiry. Look at the early Sub-Mariner stories; Bill Everett drew a skinny little guy.

Geez, look at early Spider-Man, for pity’s sake. Thanks to Steve Ditko’s pencils (and, according to Stan Lee, his insistence that a Kirby-esque muscle man wasn’t what he was going for), Spider-Man was the Lieutenant Columbo of the superhero set. People took one look at this skinny guy and thought, “No problem,” right before they got their butts kicked. No less an authority on male physique than Princess Python (who, let’s face it, had “slut” written all over her) commented that she couldn’t believe how someone as small and unassuming as Spider-Man could possibly be such a physical threat, even as he juggled members of the Circus of Crime as if they were Styrofoam packing chips. It was part of what made early Spidey so appealing to geekish readers (no offense intended) who felt that their own less-than-manly physique truly hid the fighting heart of a lion… or, at the very least, an irradiated spider.

When was the last time someone took one look at Spider-Man and sneered that he didn’t look like much of a threat?

Some heroes even had loose fitting shirts or slacks instead of leotards. The early FF uniforms were practically baggy. Heroes of the Golden Age, and even unto the Silver, simply did not impress with their physicality. Instead they impressed us with their deeds, their heroics, and their pureness of heart and sincerity of purpose.

Now look at what we have, though. Heroes are almost uniformly well built, incredibly and hugely and impossibly muscled. Slim or physically unimpressive protagonists seem to be solely the province of the Vertigo line.

It’s a phenomenon hardly limited to comic books. Surveys were done recently of action figures, noting the manner in which their muscles have grown exponentially over the past twenty years. One figure held up as an example was the “Luke Skywalker” action figure. When it was first produced twenty years ago, the body was fairly slim, normal looking—not unlike the fairly slim and normal looking Mark Hamill who played him. The action figure disdained any sort of huge, heroic proportions. Not surprising, considering even Hamill didn’t realize—during auditions with the initial scripts—that his character was the central hero.

“I couldn’t get over the fact that the protagonist wasn’t in the usual mode of the action hero,” said Hamill in a recent phone interview. “I figured Harrison was the lead. That he was Flash Gordon and I’m the sidekick. Who knew?”

As for the action figure of the unusual hero, “The face was kind of generic. It didn’t look anything like me. I remember visiting the toy factory when we were over in Hong Kong, and I was surprised how CIA-like it was. You had to sign confidentiality, non-disclosure agreements. We couldn’t talk about what they’d seen. I asked them why the (doll’s) hair was yellow, since I always thought my hair was light brown. It was mostly based on the fact that since Harrison’s hair was brown (on the Han Solo figure) they wanted a contrast and they didn’t have a lot of choices. The color palette was really limited. It’s probably far more sophisticated now. I don’t think there was any attempt in those days to make it look like me. Now tastes have become so much more sophisticated. I’ve seen the recent 12 inch figures, and they’ve even put the cleft in the chin.”

The other things the recent Luke figures have are rippling muscles and a sculpted torso, totally different from Luke Skywalker’s first toy incarnation. Hamill pointed out that the new Luke Skywalker toys resemble “the redesigned figure with the bodybuilder torso” depicted on the early Hildebrandt poster… a poster which was not, incidentally, in the theaters initially. “People forget that the movie came out with no poster, but only lobby cards,” said Hamill. “At Grauman’s Chinese Theater the day it opened, they put out lobby cards because Lucasfilms was never happy with what Fox came up with. There was great dissension over whether to promote it as science fiction or Little Rascals in outer space.”