Hey Team GTCB SuperMOOC

If you will be at Heroes Con and want to pick up your preordered shirt there, check out AA-1912 Nerdcenaries and Friends!

Now with actual content!  Hopefully.  Tumblr borked the 'read more' link the first time, and I didn't notice because it was queued.  Again, nothing revolutionary here, just looking at how cropping off the head was used differently in Birds of Prey than Captain Marvel.

EDIT:  Fuck it, the 'read more' option seems to not be working, and I want to go to bed.  Sorry for the long post.

When we're talking about identifying with a character and the composition of a panel, faces are important and are associated with identity.  We look at faces to identify emotions, add faces to non-humanoid characters (and things, like staplers), do make them more identifiable, and obscure faces to obscure identity.  'Faceless' means without a known identity.

Cropping off a face in favor of body is also classic case of objectification:  The body is more important than the identity.

Now, comic book superheroes hide their faces all the time - it's part of having an alter ego - so I won't look at that.  But I will look at times when Benes' composition of the panel has cropped out a woman's face in favor of other parts of her anatomy, excepting close-ups to hands.

This is every panel where Black Canary's face has been cropped out.  There's ten in one issue.  Not really sure what to make of the boots, but here we go.  I'm not going to embed all of them, because I realize some people might be viewing on slow connections and I really don't have much commentary on them individually, but here's an example:

  What's deemed important enough to make this panel?  Black Canary's butt and breasts.  What's not?  Her face.

Is this just normal issues with panel composition?  In contrast, let's look at Captain Marvel.  I checked all of the issues we were assigned for class, to see if she ever had her head cropped off.  The answer?  Yes.  But not as often, and well, look:

I'm still not sure what to make of the focus on feet.  Secret anti-leifeld sentiment?  I feel like I'm missing something here.  Anyway, first thing I found that counted and this is issue 3? 4?  Keep in mind that Birds of Prey was all in one issue

    This one technically doesn't count, but there's something awesome going on here, so I'm going to talk about it anyway.  Carol's face is hidden in this scene, and not because of her own making.  Her identity is also obscured to the other pilots:  they're wondering who she is, what she is.  By hiding her face, it's subtly changing the point of view so that we're not siding with Carol, the main character.  We're wondering who she is, and that's creating a bit of tension.

Here we go:  Everything but Captain Marvel's head is in this scene, and it's not a foot!  Is she being objectified or dehumanized?  I don't think it's sexual - Rios isn't exactly sticking to the stick-thin ideal here, in favor of movement.  But she is mostly being used as a mode of transport for Helen, and she probably does seem pretty inhuman.  There's also movement.  Personally, it seems to me that Carol's got better things to do than stick around this panel.  She's on the move.

I was debating on whether or not to include this one, but there's an impassive mouth and a little bit of body in here, so technically it counts.  This is from the scene where Carol is watching her origin story and is trying to decide whether or not she she stop herself from getting powers.  There were a number of other panels that were close to this but had her nose - but no eyes.  This lasts until she says 'screw that' and decides to fight for the title of Captain Marvel with Helen.  Her identity for the next few pages is in question, and the composition shows that.

Technically there is a boob in here, so I 'm counting it.  Not really sure why this panel is used.

So, in Birds of Prey there are ten in one issue, in Captain Marvel there are five (technically four) in seven.  

For those that are interested, I also looked at Secret Six:  with all the talk about the Gail Simone instituting a female gaze on the male characters, especially catman, I thought it'd be interesting.  I don't have time to comment on them all, but sure enough, there's catman in there.  But there's still fewer images scattered across seven issues than there were in one Birds of Prey.  Also, someone still needs to tell me what's up with the close ups of feet.