By all means use photo reference but then understand how to make that reference bigger through exaggeration. Stretch it out, elongate bits, increase the dynamism of the character.

One of the best examples to illustrate this was the Flash/Supergirl promo pic from last year that recreated the cover to Flash/Superman race.

The cover had the characters leaning into their runs, while the promo, a photo, had the actors standing up posing as if running, because if their were to lean over, they would have fallen because they are actually standing still.

Super heroes should be drawn in the most dynamic part of an action - which you just won't get from posing an actor because it is most likely that they would fall over and not be able to maintain the pose long enough. What should be done is make the actor move, take loads of photographs and have a crash mat - if you the artist insists in going that route.

Many a good artist is good technically, but poor for super heroes.

As an addendum, they also need to embrace costumes again. I flicked through the latest Hawkeye comic on Marvel Unlimited and he's running around in a T-shirt. There seems to be a character called Red Wolf in there as well, but he's just wearing standard issue clothes. the art looked good (Carlos Pacheco, who I know can do really good super hero art), but it was all so boring.

-C!

So we know who we all like, regardless of if we disagree or not on each specific artist. I place a LOT of this blame at the feet of editors who didn't simply say, "You're not good enough. Practice some more and try again." I suspect part of that might have been the insane hope of finding the next SU-per star, without realizing that, as editors, they controlled the direction of that treatment. Yes, some artists were never going to get there... but some could have. And some shouldn't have too.