Über-hotness

I'm currently plowing through the archives of a webcomic called Sub-Normality. The strip is mostly episodic and frequently focuses on characters that don't return or even have names. To the extent that has central characters at all, its two protagonists are a nameless, ditzy Canadian who's struggling her way through her semi-employed 20s and...an irate, man-eating sphinx who's struggling through her semi-employed 3000s.

For me, the comic's primary draw is its art. Strip creator Winston Rowntree (a pseudonym) renders his blocky figures in bright Saturday-morning colors. He's mastered the cartoonist's art of drawing believable expressions on unbelievable faces--his characters never look uncanny. He's like a cheerier, less disgusting version of R. Crumb.

Rowntree also has a knack for identifying bizarre-but-common social behaviors. He typically uses the sphinx as a means to point out and lampoon such practices, as he does in this strip.

But Sub-Normality has its fair share of flaws too. Many of the strip's episodes involve unapproachable walls of text. Rowntree himself has lampshaded this tendency with Sub-Normality's tagline ("Comix with too many words since 2007"). More annoyingly, he slams readers with heavy-handed liberal talking points and social critiques in every third or fourth strip, as he does here, here, and here. I lean way to the left of center, so I often agree with the thrust of these strips. The problem is that Rowntree drives home the point so forcefully that he insults my intelligence. You don't need a megaphone to preach to a choir that's sitting three feet away from you.

And sometimes he just baffles me, as he does in the strip shown below:

In the first panel here, an impossibly gorgeous woman is sitting in a bar by herself. A thought bubble shows that she's terrified--she thinks nobody is talking to her because she's fat, her makeup doesn't look right, and so on. Meanwhile, a man sitting by himself a few seats down is thinking about how the same woman is so far out of his league that it's not worth it for him to approach her. Rowntree loves this idea—he suggests over and over again that countless romantic possibilities exist if we'd only have the guts to pipe up. Perhaps he and Randall Munroe should form a support group for web cartoonists who are too shy to talk to girls.

The woman in this strip is actually a recurring minor character. She's portrayed as an absurdly attractive person who puts a great deal of time and effort into her appearance, but who somehow remains totally unaware of how hot she is and the effect she has on those around her.

As much as I would like to believe that this sort of person exists, I just can't. I've never once come across someone as beautiful as this character is meant to be who doesn't understand the power of their appearance.

Of course, there are people out there with body dysmorphia, but this character doesn't seem to have that problem—there are other strips in which she jokes about having put on a little weight but doesn't seem upset by it. Somehow, she just doesn't realize that she's a total bombshell, despite the fact that she watches as men literally burst into flames due to her über-hotness.

And the bar sequence in the above strip—has this sort of thing ever happened? Sure, an impossibly-hot babe at a bar will intimidate some men (me, for instance), but she sure as hell won't scare them all off. Guys are geared by evolution and society alike to take sexual swings at whatever woman comes within range, consequences (mostly) be damned. In part, that's why I can't swallow the idea of the reposted strip—this woman would never be so insecure because dudes would be elbowing each other aside in their stampede to hit on her.

Perhaps it's ridiculous of me to level this criticism at a comic that features a monster from Greek mythology bumbling through 21st-century Canada. But the truth of the matter—that physical attractiveness is so prized in our society that it inescapably becomes a major point of identity for those who possess it—is exactly the sort of thing that Rowntree likes to harp on. It's strange to me that he would miss it here.