I’ve known Dave personally for about a year now, but I’ve been a fan of his stuff since Super Patriot back in the 90s. When I met him for the first time a year ago, it was hard not to geek outespecially when we were wearing the same style hat. All night I was fighting the urge to make an ass out of myself and say something like “we got the same hat! That makes us brothers! HAT brothers!” We exchanged numbers and now I’d say he’s one of my few comic book friends.
So my phone starts ringing and I see that it’s Dave. He rarely calls so he’s nowhere near my “this person calls too much and without a good reason for interrupting me AKA the straight-to-voicemail” listso I pick up. The reason he was calling was because he had a few questions about DA that I don’t really remember.
So we’re chatting for a while talking about the usual stuff, when finally we start talking about drawing women.
I’ve always struggled with drawing women because I refuse to draw the normal “big tits/small-waist/cookie-cutter” types that you see in some mainstream comics. And if I have to draw one, I’ll struggle to make it look more like an actual life drawing of a REAL female body rather than a rip-off of a million poorly drawn women in comics. I’m not always successful, to I feel like I do try. In my opinion, drawing cookie-cutter bodies of anatomically impossible proportions does three things:
1. It makes our industry look juvenilelike a bunch of giggly kids doodling big tits in our notebooks during 3rd period.
2. It’s an insult to the female reader. Which is probably one of many reasons why they usually don’t read mainstream books.
3. It makes the artist look like an uncreative dumb-fuck who doesn’t take pride in noticing how different female bodies types are. Usually because he doesn’t know or understand women (nor does he care to try). And he’ll usually get away with it because most of the women he meets are at cons where he doesn’t have to make any effort.
So I told Dave that I really liked his women because I could feel by his approach that he respected women and isn’t interested in drawing simple T&A. Even when I look at his nudes now, they don’t have the “please rape me” look or that “I’m only 18 and puberty hit me overnight! Please be gentle when you plow me across the carpet because I’m not used to it!” look. But Dave summed it up better.
“I draw women like I get laid.”
So simple yet so true. Maybe the reason women are so poorly represented in some (not all) mainstream comics is because most artists haven’t been laid a whole lot. Come to think of it, most of the artists I like are also the ones who draw women WELLmeaning they’ve probably been with enough women that they understand them, aren’t afraid of them, and know how to draw different body types because they’ve seen a few naked ones in person. And when I’ve met my favorite artists in personsure enoughthey usually look like the kinds of artists who get laid.
So if you’re an artist and you’re reading thisand you see me at a show and I’m giving you a strange judging look (like I’m struggling with some complex algebra)I’m probably deciding, between you and your art, whether or not you get laid enough.
And you have Dave Johnson to thank.