An angry rant about nudity
There is one thing several webcartoonists have done throughout the years which annoys the frak out of me. I may be the only person who feels this way, but I doubt it.
Oops, you were supposed to have a new comic up in a few days, but your buffer is empty, and you can’t come up with an idea for a new comic! You have to put up something, or your fans will be angry. What can you do?
If your answer to this question is “draw a picture of your female protagonist naked / in her underwear / in a real slutty dress”, you have a lot in common with the kind of webcartoonists I’m angrily ranting about today.
Don’t do it. It ruins every hope your webcomic has of ever getting a shed of integrity.
For now, let’s break down your readers to two groups (there are of course readers who fit in both or neither of these groups, but let’s pretend there’s only black and white for now): Those who read your webcomic because they like the story and are fascinated with the lives of your characters, and those who read your comic only because they think you draw pretty hot women and they hope you’ll show these women with less clothes in the future.
Honestly, which one of these groups would you prefer to create your comic for? Every time you publish semi-erotic drawings of your characters, you cater to the second group. Those who don’t really care what your story is about as long as there are females there and your anatomy drawing skills are a wee bit better than Randall Munroe’s (and by “better anatomy drawing skills” I mean “bigger boobs”). Why on Earth would you even want readers like that, let alone encourage them?
And if you don’t care about what kind of readers you attract, think about this: Your characters are the cast of your series. Even though you do all the work, it’s them people want to see, because — if you do it right — they have lives of their own. They have well-defined personalities, and that’s what fascinates your readers about them. By letting your protagonist pose semi-nude to your readers, very often that will be a huge breach in their personalities.
Please don’t. You’re ruining your characters.
A comic I actually like is Andy Weir’s Casey and Andy. What really ruined that comic for me was Weir’s frequent fillers, designed not for intelligent readers, but for readers wanting to see more skin. He called these updates “cheesecakes”, and according to the C&A wiki, he’s had fifteen of them — in a run of 666 strips. Nudity. Legs. Lingerie and S/M. All of the above. Legs and cleavage. Uhm, this one is actually kind of tactful. Cleavage and legs. Cleavage, legs and bisexuality. Non-human cleavage and legs. Slutty cheerleaders. Almost nude. Legs / fetish. More fairy skin. Topless. Even more nudity.
If I told you that this comic had a pretty good plot, and you checked it out when one of these “cheesecakes” were on the frontpage, would you believe me?
Oh, and did you notice that exactly zero of these fifteen scantily clad images featured males? Funny coincidence, eh?
I like the story, but the experience as a whole gets kind of ruined when the cartoonist has to break into the middle of a storyline to say “since the strip’s most popular character is not in this storyline, here’s a picture of her topless to make up for it”. Fortunately I was reading most of that comic strip pretty late in the strip’s run, so I could just skip over these cheesecakes in the archives. I feel sorry for the readers who had to wait several days for the real updates to come because the cartoonist wanted to draw some flesh.
And some cartoonists see no problem in doing this even though their characters are underage. There’s a special kind of hell for cartoonists like that.
Personally I don’t like fan service in comics, either: If your plot is designed especially to be able to show your females with as little clothing as possible, I bet it’s a really bad plot. I’m not criticizing nudity in general, of course, if the situation requires your character to be in an undressed state, that’s okay with me as long as that situation isn’t created solely to undress the character. There’s nothing wrong with nudity as long as it suits the story. For instance, if you have a great storyline idea which involves your characters going to the beach, it is okay to draw them in bikinis. But don’t sit down and struggle to find a way to put your characters on the beach just because you want to show your characters in bikinis. I have no problem at all with strips like this QC page, as it feels like part of the story.
And if your buffer is empty and you have no ideas: Draw a filler, or miss the update (or get a guest comic). But don’t use cheesecakes. They ruin your comic. Even Jeph Jacques’ Indietits fillers are better. Preferrably: Get an idea, and make the comic. A well-done filler can sometimes take just as long as making a comic, so why waste time on fillers?
(Obviously, these rules do not apply to erotic comics. If Menage a 3 started posting fillers with the characters in the nude, it wouldn’t act as an insult to the readers at all, since the comic is all about sex and nudity anyway.)
Having overdosed a bit on xkcdsucks.com, I wouldn’t say Randall Munroe is exactly innocent of the same basic phenomenon, although he prefers not to actually draw the awkward anatomy bits – the frequent references to sex are quite creepy even without the visuals.
Anders loves Maria is an example of a webcomic which has on several occasions displayed main characters quite naked but without being cheesy or plotless because of it. (Of course, it’s basically a soap opera with pretty illustrations, but still.)
1Hi Karina. Note that I never claimed that Munroe is innocent of anything, I just claimed that his artwork is (hopefully) not anatomically correct enough to arouse people.
Does XKCD have extreme doses of unnecessary sex? Yes. But isn’t that kind of what XKCD is about? Yes, the line “Can you do me without a condom?” (yeah, I follow you on Twitter, so I knew about XKCSsucks, too!) is something no normal person would ever say. But that’s the fun of it! Scientists make babies to test computer programs as if it was something they did on a daily basis!
My point is, in my eyes, XKCD is has creepy sex references everywhere, but I can’t really say that they hurt the integrity of the characters or anything. It’s just part of the comic. Just like the beforementioned Menage a 3.
And after all this talk about XKCD and fillers, I remember this one with a smile on my face.
Anders loves Maria is one of the comics I’m seriously promising myself that I will start reading one day.
Another example of comics which uses nudity a lot without being cheesy is our own Arild, of course.
2Hm… Ikke mye overrasker meg for tiden, men jeg var faktisk ikke klar over at det ble brukt slike “cheesecakes”. Litt absurd egentlig.
3Dei brukast. Heldigvis ikkje så ofte som ein kanskje kan få inntrykk av ved å lese dette blogginnlegget.
4Du må ha hatt mye arbeid med å lage i stand bildet til denne saken. Er de hentet fra din private samling?
5Kremt. Står det ikkje klart og tydeleg i artikkelen kvar biletet er henta frå, då?
Jo. Det gjer faktisk det.
6Åja.. kursiv. Hopper ofte over det.
7Det bør du umiddelbart slutte med.
8Heh, eg og Kristoffer burde nok føle oss skuldige med #hemmis “faste” fansservicespalte som tilslutt nesten tok over serien. (Og som no har returnert, siden Kristoffer pumper ut dei bileta han har av hemmiskarakter). Sjølv om vi for det meste hadde utkledning av popkultur da.
9Utkledning av popkultur er på grensa til å vera in-character. Det er ikkje snakk om “sjå så lite eg respekterer figurane mine”.
10How about Frank Cho’s University Sqared (reply box don’t support lifted 2′s) or Tatsuya Ishida’s Sinfest? Both those series reek of sexual innuendo to such an extent that Brandy’s apparant looseness (and the cheesecakes that comes from it) and Monique’s sexuality (often revealed to more extent than just the tube top she’s wearing as default) are major themes within the context. Though they do not contribute to the series progression as such, the cheesecake (love that expression btw) in these series are definitely well within the limits of what should be accepted without compromising it’s integrity.
Also, does this rant apply to females only, taking Mads Eriksen and his elephant tanga off the hook?
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