A new study finds that the breasts of female comic book characters now take up 300% more of the cover than they did in the 1940s and ’50s, and that characters now show twice as much cleavage.
Comic books have long been criticized for their negative depiction of the female form, with artists often accused of falling back on idealized male fantasies of scantily clad super heroines with massive breasts and unrealistic body types. And while there’s some debate that the industry is becoming more progressive in terms of its approach to outdated sexist imagery, there’s also no doubt that the comic book medium has a long way to go.
Case in point: a new study from the comic book website PriceCharting.com that looks to put some numbers behind the cliches and cleavage.
PriceCharting completed a detailed study on female character comic book covers from the 1940s up to today and found that the average female character is depicted with twice as much cleavage now as they were during the Golden Age of comics; with a character’s breasts in particularly taking up 300% more of the overall cover.
The study is built primarily on a sample of three popular female comic book characters: Wonder Woman, Catwoman and Red Sonja.
The studies creators then randomly selected ten covers from the past forty years, each of which had to feature a full depiction of the character’s body. The team then recorded pixel measurements for breast height and width, cleavage width, waist width, hip width and cover width.
Their findings suggest that over the past few decades superhero breast size has increased dramatically, with the decade beginning in 2010 seeing nearly 30% of each cover width take over by cleavage. Notably the study found that as of 2020, super hero breast size has reduced significantly as more artists seek a more realistic approach to female characters, but it remains to be seen if this will be an ongoing trend.
To see if the data for the three selected characters represented larger trends among female comic book characters, the study also looked at 12 other characters (albeit using a smaller sample size). The team randomly selected two covers across each decade for these additional characters and found the following results.
- In recently published comic books, female characters’ breasts occupy more than triple the cover space than they one did
- The amount of cleavage shown has more than doubled (cleavage of greater than 50% was not observed until the 1970s, at which point it became relatively common)
- The hip-to-waist ratio declined by ~15% (with the pencil-thin waists of the Golden Age being replaced by more realistic figures of today)
- The breast-to-waist ratio has remained relatively the same (as breasts size depiction has grown, so have waists)
Admittedly, the study’s creators point out that the data has not been rigorously tested and could be improved with an expanded statistical set. That being said it does indicate a continuing trend in the depiction of female characters within comic books. The bottom line: comics with cleavage likely aren’t going anywhere.
What do you think? Have female comic book characters changed for the better or worse over the past few decades? Let us know in the comments below.
And for more news and picks, check out latest coverage from the world of comic book covers.