No, that’s not it. I’ll tell you why it is. It’s because a lot of us respect comics and their creators and even (occasionally) the characters, and we’d love for other people to see in our medium what we see in it. We’d like to have comics taken seriously when they deliver complex and mature themes and storytelling that can be counted as fine art and great literature. And having ridiculously-proportioned fantasy females doesn’t help the cause–it further convinces the critics and naysayers that comics are only good as preadolescent power fantasies and “beginners’ strokebooks” for horny teens who can’t legally buy Playboy.
I walk the line where I can totally appreciate the attractive women drawn in comics by “cheesecake” artists like Adam Hughes, Jim Lee, J. Scott Campbell, Art Adams, and Kevin Maguire, but some artists take things to extremes, where women have wasp waists and breasts that are larger than their heads. I’m referring to Jim Balent in particular, who has made the leap from mainstream comics with Catwoman to flat-out porn, so I think he was a poor example for the OP to cite to begin with. Greg Horn is another offender, whose sexploitative cover paintings seem to be traced directly from porno magazine photo shoots, whether or not the provocative poses accurately represent what’s happening inside the issue.
In the mid-'90s, Chaos! Comics published Lady Death and several other horror-themed comics featuring scantily-clad succubi, demons, and other nearly-naked babes with unreal boobs and costumes that made Wonder Woman look like the most conservative nuns. Those comics were, frankly, embarrassments to all the good books out there. I can’t see how anyone bought them except teenage boys, and the mix of obvious sex with extreme violence, death, and gore made for an unsettling juxtaposition.
Furthermore, mostly guys read comics, and we’d love to see more women giving them a chance. This won’t happen when a woman in a comic shop will be bombarded by Barbie-like superheroine cover models, and then skeeved out by the culture they created: comic book nerds hanging around the shop talking about how hot Emma Frost looks, and how much they’d love to fuck Supergirl and Mary Marvel at the same time. (Yes, I have overheard this conversation.) Women will be skeeved out, and rightfully so–and they won’t come back. The objectification of fictional fantasy women can definitely create a female-unfriendly environment at comic shops, when we want to try to do the exact opposite.
So that’s why I’m not a big fan of TOO MUCH sexiness in comic books. I’m the furthest thing you’ll ever meet from a prude. I love porn, and I think it has a place and a necessary function in today’s society, especially now that the industry is so much more legitimate than it was 20 and 30 years ago. I still love comic books at age 27, and I have no problem looking at drawings of beautiful women. The superheroes and superheroines are supposed to represent physical ideals of beauty, and something would be wrong if these characters weren’t presented in an attractive way. But there’s a way to be classy and sexy at the same time… I think Bruce Timm’s style in the Justice League Unlimited cartoon series perfectly encapsulates this. His female characters are all cute and sexy, but it’s a show for all ages and there isn’t anything skeevy or pervy about it. I break it down like “good girl” and “bad girl” art, and the “bad girl” art is embarrassing for people who want comics to be taken seriously and introduced to a wider audience, including women and children. The Greg Horns and Jim Balents go too far into the “bad girl” side of things, and they make me wonder why their fans don’t just look at some “real” porn and cut out the middleman.
