Jim Lee’s artwork on UXM represented a watershed moment in comics history, helping to spur an aesthetic transition from individualized character bodies to mythic but homogenized bodies, a tradition in comics that persists to this day. #xmen 1/8

Drawing heavily on Jack Kirby, the chief architect of the original Marvel aesthetic, Lee (with the help of Scott Williams on inks) rendered all male characters with the bodies of Arnold Schwarzenegger and all female characters with the body of a Barbie Doll. 2/8

To get this look, Lee relies on all manner of anatomical distortion (which is kind of fun, considering that he was very nearly a medical doctor). Men have muscles that don’t exist, women have proportions that cannot be, and everyone has really long abdomens. 3/8

The result is exhilarating representations in which most every panel looks like a wall poster and every moment becomes charged with a mythic energy. 4/8

This aesthetic is not as unprecedented as some have argued, however. We saw a very similar homogenized body tradition in Grecco-Roman sculpture and (relatedly) in Renaissance painting. Lee’s figure-drawing may be different, but the approaches underlying it are ancient. 5/8

Furthermore, the epic bodies we see need not be realistic at all, but metaphorical – what Scott McCloud terms “non-iconic abstraction” – thereby adding a mythic connotation to the superhero story, one that, quite frankly, works very well with the genre’s roots. 6/8

On the negative side, homogenized bodies reduce character distinction and relatability, while the stark contrast between a male body and a female body can be seen to normalize essentialist views of sex and gender (all factors at odds with C’s messaging). 7/8

All this boils down to the notion that art (and aesthetics in particular) is subjective. Lee’s artwork is very much love it or hate it, but we can’t deny it’s impact both on the tail end of the Claremont Run and on the enduring tradition of representation in comics at large. 8/8