"The Winesburg, Ohio of of comics"? That'd make a great pull-quote, for the right target audience. I'll admit, I have a copy of Winesburg, waiting in my paperback shelves for me to get around to reading it, but I haven't got there yet. But Winesburg was an influence on The Martian Chronicles, which was one of the many shaping influences on Astro City, along with lots of other stuff, from Discworld to Superfolks to every superhero comic ever published and then some. I'll have to make time for Winesburg soon.

I hope what's coming up will similarly delight you.

I think that limiting your portrayals of anyone, male or female, is a problem. It sometimes seems as if most guys in comics are studly, trim guys who'd make great male models if only more artists knew how to draw clothes as well as they did muscles, and I think that's a problem. Not as great a problem as so many of the women looking as if they've just stepped out of a racy photo shoot and haven't gotten their hips adjusted back to normal yet, but a problem.

For my part, I've never been pressured to depict any character in an objectionable way, so whatever errors of taste I've made are my own. But I'm a writer, and I work with artists, which means that the visualization of the characters is largely (though not entirely) out of my hands. I can ask for a character to be carrying around a few extra pounds, or be scrawny, or beaky, or whatever else, and if I'm working with someone like Brent Anderson, that's what I'll get, because Brent has fun drawing a variety of people. In another situation, though, the characters may feel samey if the artist doesn't have Brent's range.

Or then again, there's the homogenizing effect of a shared universe, where characters drawn by multiple artists tend to become more generic over time. Women or men introduced as fat, skinny, ugly or even drop-dead gorgeous will become more and more like the others around them, as artists simplify, or focus on costume details more than body details. Crystal lost her exotically-tilted eyes early on, the Wingless Wizard lost his gnarled, horsey face. "Slim" Summers became a brawny guy who could easily play fullback. And on and on.

When I've worked on some books, I've tried to bring some of these elements back—in Avengers #1, George Pérez brought back Crystal's weird eyes at my request, and in Untold Tales of Spider-Man, Pat Olliffe brought back the Wizard's delightfully-ugly face. But this sort of change-back rarely lasts.

And in some cases, even artists seeking to make characters more distinctive lose elements that were important to them. One of Marvel's mutant characters, Tabitha Smith, was reworked by an artist to be very slim and small-breasted, which is a rarity among superheroines. But when introduced, it had been a part of her character that she'd matured early, had unusually large breasts, which got her unwelcome attention and led her to run away. Her first code-name, "Boom Boom," was a taunt she'd suffered because of her breasts, and she'd become defensive and hostile as a result of what she'd been through. So here was a character for whom large breasts weren't just a standard comics visual cliché but a key part of her origin, her psychological make-up, even her superhero codename. And so one of the few characters for whom it was important lost that bit of backstory (though not the attitude born of it) in the service of making her distinctive in a different way. [And since then, as far as I've noticed, she's become a generic female figure by superhero comics standards, neither unusually large- or small-breasted.

This gets to be a problem for portraying characters—what if you've got a character who is a bodybuilder? Or a sexbomb? How do you make them stand out? Make them even moreso, to the point that they look grossly-exaggerated? How do you do "brawny" or "alluring" when everyone in the case is either brawny or curvaceous? How do you do a character with chiseled features, like a Greek sculpture (if you need to) when everyone looks like that already?

This doesn't answer your question, I expect. I'm just rambling here. I haven't been pressured by editors or publishers to represent anyone in a particular way, at least beyond the general, "make 'em come across like their established selves" factor, but I do think comics tends to generify characters in a way that does create limits. That said, artists would probably be better people to ask than writers, because if anyone's being told to make the men studlier and the women sultrier, it'd be artists.

For writers, it's probably little more than the occasional frustration of seeing Wonder Woman pose like a sexy pinup rather than like a powerful Amazon, or writing characters who may be described as a 98-pound weakling, but whose chest muscles and biceps strain at their snug T-shirts anyway.

With the right artist and the right amount of control, you can address it, but there's no saying that however you address it will last. Or that the buying audience won't flock to a book full of studs and sirens in preference to realistic variety. But in the end, I think my frustrations are craft-based, while your questions are essentially sociological. Sorry.