I've thought for a while that scanty female clothing in comics isn't nearly as much of a problem as the porntastic posing. There are male superheroes who wear scanty clothing, but the way they're posed is athletic or dynamic or casual, whereas the women are invariably lightboxed out of Maxim or some such. (Also, as I've mentioned in a post I can't find now, it's interesting to note that the male characters who go about scantily dressed are monstrous (Hulk, Thing), or they look weirdly alien (Hawkman, Martian Manhunter), or they're from Somewhere Else Where They Dress Funny (Namor, Hawkman sometimes, Thor). I figure that this ties into the cultural issue that women can show more skin in everyday life without getting laughed at than can men, so the "here and now" male characters show little skin compared to the freaky dudes or the dudes from Somewhere Else. Meanwhile, male artists who like hot women amp that up to eleven. It's amazing how much better women were drawn before the sexual revolution.)
I've mentioned on Twitter that if I were a superhero comic artist in search of reference, I would *screencap the shit* out of female athletes at the Olympics. Not just for the different body types and emphasis on athletic over hot, but for the action poses. Case in point: I just ran across this 1988 Steve Landis picture of Florence Griffith Joyner, and I've seen a lot of "women crouched over" drawings in comics, but they invariably tend toward the sexy and FloJo is in a pure action pose. It's a seriously great picture; somebody should photoshop it so she's wearing a Wonder Woman costume.
(This is me passively-aggressively linking it so somebody can do that.)
