So you think female superheroes should be based on female athletes?

There really is no problem with that, if that’s what you actually want. I mean, if you’re drawing a really strong superhero, it makes sense to base her off a really strong real-life athlete. But know that “female athlete” doesn’t always mean thin, doesn’t always mean a tiny, still-within-bounds-of-traditional-female-attractiveness amount of muscle, doesn’t always mean tiny waist. And boobs don’t always “get bigger because they’re pushed outward from muscle gain.” Sometimes the boobs just go away.

If you think female characters should look like athletes, don’t complain when they look like Cheryl Haworth or Dawn Ellerbe, because they are both athletes. But the complaints about female characters who don’t “look” like like athletes very rarely acknowledge this, because it isn’t really the fact that they don’t “look” like athletes that’s the problem. It’s the fact that you don’t want to fuck them.

But for those who really DO want references for different body types of different types of athletes, male and female, here is a really good post where I took the above pictures from, that has TONS more.