Bad Character Design: The Many Faces of Alexandra DeWitt
Hah, you thought I was going to start with issue 1, didn't you? Fooled you! We're going to start with something more fundamental - yet still very telling. Comics are a visual media, and therefore we're going to start by looking at the art.
Now, lets take a look at her. Now are these realistic for someone's appearance changing over 6 years? Sure. But remember, these are all from the same short block of time. The first 10 are from the same day. The same day. Now, lets see what's off model:
Hair: Shot #2 clearly establishes she has long, blonde hair that pulls back into a pony tail. So does 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12. In 1,4,5,6,7 she has short bangs. You cannot pull short bangs back into a pony tail. They can both be pony tails, but you can see the difference here:
We can also see straight hair, wavy hair, almost curly hair, big poofy hair, hair of different lengths, and uniform straight length hair.
Is this it? Nope! Go through and count eyebrows. I have 7 black eyebrows, 5 blonde eyebrows, of about 5 different styles. Again, these can change - although dying your eyebrows is a bitch - but they can't change during the course of the same day, not more than once. Lips and facial structure? You can see them. And this isn't the only thing spending time off model:
Same woman. Same beach. Same shirt. How low cut is her shirt? How thick is her camera strap? Did you catch she actually has three different eye colors?
Now art styles change over runs of series, as different artists come in. These are the same artists. Same penciler, same inker, same colorist, and an editor signed off on all of this. Does anyone give a rat's ass what this character looks like? Nope.
If a character spends this long off model, you can bet a good amount you won't be seeing them very often. If either company cares about the character, they've pitched concept art and sketches they work off of for details like this. So for anyone whose read lots of comics, you can tell - Alexandra DeWitt is dead already. She's never been hammered out in concept art.
There's more in there - in addition to hair, eyes, eyebrows, clothing, body build, her height varies, as she gains or loses as much as six inches depending on what scene (using Kyle as reference). Her muscle tone changes, practically everything changes. She's a character fated to die, and the very very lazy art tells us as much.
Oh and bonus, because I had to look at this:
What the fuck you clowns. Who signed off on that splash page? What is Kyle's left hand even doing? What is with their faces? Just... what?
Bonus: Does she ever show up on the covers?
As you may or may not know, covers are drawn by different artists, often in parallel to the issues they're on, and frequently have little to do with the issue. Notoriously Wolverine is on the cover of a comic issue he's not actually in at one point. But errors abound as a rule. Therefore I typically ignore them, but Alexandra DeWitt does show up once, as a dead body:
Where she's got different hair, is wearing different clothing, has bracelets... you know what, yeah. This speaks for itself.
So! Here's our little pre-bullshit ramble: Alexandra DeWitt was fated to die, and you should know it because the artists give not one shit about her. This sort of appearance switching is rancid laziness of the worst sort. This isn't just lazy artists, this is institutional laziness, and shows exactly the quality of storyline we'll be getting here - inconsistent, stupid, off-model, and not really worth looking at.
