DC: Harley Quinn Discussion

After reading the article from Jezebel on DC comics' recent artist competition to illustrate 
a scene of Harley Quinn (from the Batman series), committing suicide and in the nudewhat are your thoughts on the controversy?

After reading over the 4 different suicide panels for Harley Quinn, I can understand why people would be upset.  The second panel being that Harley Quinn wears a bikini made out of chicken in hope of being eaten by alligators and the fourth panel where Harley Quinn is naked in a tub with electrical appliances above her ready to drop.  These two panels are defiantly sexualizing suicide but in a way I don't think that was the intent of the contest.  But I also recall in old comics of DC, Green Lantern's girlfriend was killed and stuffed into a refrigerator, didn't see to much of a backlash with that but still this contest wasn't a good move on DC.  I think they were trying to make it comical.  Here is an example of an artist named JollyJack:

As you can see Jolly didn't sexualize Harley to much especially the fourth panel you only see Harley bare naked arm.  Also these panels seem quite humorous to me even though I don't agree with the suicide aspect.  So as you can see submissioners don't have to follow the contest's request to the tee they can still get the point across without sexualizing anything.


Why is the objectification of women in comics and visual culture in general problematic? 
How can it be avoided or addressed in our own comics? 


In today's comics women usually look skinny, big chested, and beautiful.  We all know not all woman look like that, but it seems all heros and villains who are female have these qualities.  While male characters come in all shapes and sizes.  Women who may read comics can see this as this is the ideal figure for all women heros which can upset them.  If we want to avoid this problem we need to make a variety of characters man and women with different body types, faces, and personalities.  These characters need to be main characters not background characters, because big comic companies usually do that to these types of characters.