It's an okay comic, set in an animal rescue facility (demented, anthropomorphized animals; coupla nebbish guys; babelicious, athletic women). I checked it out of the library because somewhere, a while ago, I ran across an annoyed comment by Frank Cho that he had gotten a complaint from someone about how oppressively beautiful the main female character is. IIRC - I probably don't - his defense, aside from 'get over it already', was an engaged puzzlement that a competent, pleasant, central female character should be so annoying.
I think I know why his representation of her is annoying. The female characters (Brandy, some unnamed ag students in the bar - none of the animals, why not? ) - are drawn in as realist a style as he uses. Some of this is that the humans are more realistic than the animals; but the men are less detailed than the women, and Brandy is most 'posed' of the lot. 's Understanding Comics, pp. 28-37, has a convincingly illustrated argument that realist drawing reduces the amount of reader identification with a character. Something I don't see in Understanding..., but think is at least as important, is that distortions of a drawn character to express emotion are a strong appeal to identification, because they're much closer to how we feel when we have the emotion than to how we see other people who we deduce have the emotion. Brandy, when emotional, is still drawn realistically. All the other series characters are distorted at least sometimes when strongly emotional.
So the oddity about Brandy, heroic female character, is that she's drawn as the one character in the book we couldn't possibly be. Or possibly she's the character who has no subjective existence to express, which is even creepier.
There is a excellent book by on a related thought: Monuments & Maidens: The allegory of the female form. If I recall correctly - and alas, it's been a while since I read it - this combines lots of evidence that Beaux Arts Paris usually represented all the strengths and virtues by realistic female images, with lots of evidence that the same people had no such expectations or allowances for actual women; and she may have an argument that these habits are mutually reinforcing.
Liberty Meadows, ISBN: 1-58240-260-4
Understanding Comics, ISBN: 0-87816-243-7
Monuments & Maidens, ISBN: 0520227336
So wrote clew in
Art.
, Book comparisons.
, Graphic novel.
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