Sometimes I think Karen Healey is just a ranting madwoman (though it must be said she’s one of the best), and other times I think she’s a genius. This post definitely falls into the latter category: A look at body mass indexes for Marvel superheroes and heroines.
It is, of course, absurd. Taking height and weight measurements for fictional characters can’t possibly mean anything, particularly when those measurements are most likely added after the fact for various handbooks and encyclopedias. I also doubt they were created by any sort of physiological experts; they’re just guesses about characters whose depictions fluctuate wildly – just look at how often Wolverine is actually drawn at his stated height of 5’3″.
But on the other hand, they’re measurements by Marvel employees (in some capacity or another) based on Marvel comics, and while they don’t mean much in any scientific context, they do say a lot about the people making this stuff up. As Karen points out, guys are big and strong, women are slender and sexy.
There are probably great difficulties in figuring out weights for superheroes, since there’s gotta be something going on to enable Spider-Man to list 10 tons. But even disregarding the super guys & gals, some of the differences are staggering: Iron Fist, martial artist extraordinarie, checks in with a BMI of 22.42; Elektra, also a peak-human type, sits at 19.24. Shouldn’t these two be similar? They’re both agile, fast, and strong, and fight similar types of bad guys.
There are a few real absurdities: The Black Cat only weighs 120 pounds? Okay, I’ll show some suspension of disbelief on that one; she’s more of a thief than a fighter. But Ms Marvel, who flies around, lifts cars, and punches out big-time supervillains, only weighs four pounds more? And then Psylocke, who’s the same height as Ms. Marvel, has no superpowered muscles other than her brain, and is somehow 30 pounds heavier.
The real kicker, though, has to be Jessica Jones, who checks in at 5’7″, 124 pounds and a BMI of 19.46 – at the low end of “normal” for Karen’s numbers. This is a woman who, in Alias, at least, was distinctly not in peak physical condition. She smoked, she drank, she couldn’t throw a tin can at a robber from ten feet away, and under Michael Gaydos’ wonderful pen actually looked like a normal person. Even before she got pregnant, this is a woman who probably carried around a few extra pounds. She wasn’t a very good superhero (though Mark Bagley drew her pretty skinny as Jewel), and since she quit she hasn’t wanted to go back. And yet here she is, at the heavier end of the “superheroines” but still pretty slender for a regular human being. Either no one read Alias, or no one cared that it was one of the few Marvel books not about a supermodel superheroine. In the world of absurdly proportioned spandex freaks, Jessica Jones is the one person I’d expect to look normal.
There’s clearly a lot of cluelessness in assigning these measurements – they barely even make sense on their own, let alone when you start comparing them – but the obvious trend is slender, whether it makes any sense for the character or not. At no point did anyone consider that Jessica should be a bit overweight, or Ms. Marvel ought to at least weigh more than Iceman. I could suggest that few of the people who work on these things have ever seen a real woman up close, but I wouldn’t want to be accused of dabbling in stereotypes.
The people who came up with these things may not have put a lot of thought into it, but thoughtless actions are often very good at revealing subconcious feelings. The numbers don’t mean much, but they show quite a bit.
(Also, something I wouldn’t have come across if not for this article: Thor weighs 640 pounds. I know he’s a god and all, but that still seems excessive. Although perhaps it does make sense in an internal logic sort of way – if you’re going to be able to lift 100 tons, fly around, and smash buildings, your anatomy would be pretty fucked up. So why doesn’t that translate to Ms. Marvel et al?)