I'm late with my "Pick" again, but this time I've got a great excuse: recently upgraded my computer, allowing me to web surf (as opposed to the dog paddle floundering I was doing before with only 8 MB) for the first time. As a result, I've been spending lotsa time at personal websites.

Most of you are already ahead of me this 'un. Follow the links at Dimensions' "Linkmania" pages, and you'll find a wealth of wonderful personalities in the FA community. Case in point: FA writer and artist Allen Steadham.

To those who haven't ventured there yet, Allen does a home page entitled Big Beautiful World ("Where every size is the right size if you're happy.") Cynic that I am, I was initially thrown by the Stuart Smalley tone of the site's motto, but once I entered BBWorld, I put aside my curmudgeonly instincts. Steadham's site is a blend of self-righteous calls to arm, FA fiction and amateur comics. It's in that last that Allen is probably most unique: a series of superhero(ine) comics that celebrate size and self-esteem.

Web comics can be deadly to anyone with a sludgy hard drive. Just the act of downloading individual pages of a twenty-plus page story can be an experiment in frustration. I'd been wanting to take in Allen's comics for months, but could only easily do so with the upgrade.

I misspent much of my youth in comics fandom, and from a comparison point of view, Steadham's comics (which he co-scripts and draws) are technically on par with most comics fan work. Read several of his stories chronologically, and you can see him developing as an artist, discovering new aspects of visual storytelling. Not all readers are patient with that process - for you, there's the straight FA fiction - but if you're willing to accept it on its own terms, BBWorld's comics can be fun.

Centerpiece of the series is a mid-sized superheroine named Sanity: a good place to start, in fact, is with her first solo adventure. In it, the superheroine transforms two slender girls into plump figures after they make some nasty comments about her size. She does this in a fit of drunken pique - and, in fact, barely remembers doing it the next day (you know the mantra: "With great power, also comes great responsibility!"). But one of the two is so devastated by her change that she's driven to drastic action.

What follows is a side plot inspired by the Pat Mullens case: where thuggish Chi-town cops were openly disrespectful with the body of a recently demised super-sized woman. While I can't fault its sentiments, the subplot is a bit of a stretch as the victim in the story is nowhere near super-sized. (Part of what made the Mullens' story understandable - though not defensible - was the Chicago cops' relative inexperience with the physical reality of a 500-plus-pound body.) More successful is the story's central theme of self-acceptance and responsibility as Sanity comes to grips with the aftereffects of her impulsive act.

Most recently, Allen has been asking FA readers to pick another of his superheroines for some endomorphic expansion. While I'm still not familiar enough with his universe to make any selections, I like the concept. Enough with the steroidal supertypes! We want more costumes that are properly filled out! More Sanities! More Dimensias! And while we're at it, let's really feed Wonder Woman!!!

[Umm, excuse me for a second. . .]

Not many FA writers would attempt to balance a comic full of weight gain elements with a call for tolerance, but Allen manages to pull it off. Perhaps the key to BBWorld's success, in fact, lies in its proprietor's earnestness: an openness that I associate with the earliest superhero comics (and which most modern professional comic book folk would pooh-pooh for fear of losing their hipness quotient.) I'm too pathologically ironic to wanna spend all my time there, but Big Beautiful World really is a nice place to visit.

July, 1997

Copyright 1997 - Oakhaus Designs

---Wilson Barbers