Comic Book Resources

Rape and murder should not be used in comics. They have become cliches, as stepping stones in building up villains. A story about rape should not be an exercise in raising the Badness of Dr Light to the nth degree, but an examination of the affect the rape has had on the individuals involved.
Rape and murder are real crimes, with real consequences, but they are used by lazy writers to bump up the violence, instead of to explore genuinely dramatic material.

I’m glad Beta Ray included “murder.” For some reason we don’t make a big deal about murder but go berserk over rape. I think there’s an overkill of both. Do we need Joker to kill dozens of people in every single appearance?

I’ve said this several times before, but here goes again. Rape should absolutely be used in comics, as long as it’s used well. And if comics want to be “realistic,” they should acknowledge that men rape other men — maybe almost as often as men rape women. Men who rape other men aren’t necessarily gay, in fact they probably aren’t — it’s a means of degrading and brutalizing someone. So if comics want to be “realistic,” they’ll show Batman getting raped by male supervillains, as well as Sue Dibny. Of course, superhero comics aren’t realistic, and probably shouldn’t be.

I’ve always felt Big Barda was a really well-written character, as she’s depicted as independent, assertive, strong, and tough-as-nails. In addition, she’s incredibly sexy without being made to look tawdry.

Unfortunately, there was one story where Barda was very ill-used, a John Byrne-penned issue where she was mind controlled into filming pornos, including one with Superman. Yes, it sounds like a piece of Internet-posted erotica, but Byrne actually wrote a story where that happened. Jack Kirby was royally cheesed off when he found out about it.

If a woman writer can’t write females “correctly,” what hope do males have?

I don’t think the ability to write women well automatically comes with your second X chromosome. I remember reading that “Birds of Prey” issue and feeling pretty pissed, too. No, it’s not Rape And Kill Sue Dibny pissed, but it’s still a sexist and stereotypical view of female sexuality (“ha, ha, Huntress is a slut!”), and yes, women can have those and perpetuate those, too. This doesn’t negate the fact that in general, women writers are going to probably be more likely to sympathize more with female characters, and thus produce fewer of these atrocities in the first place; nor does it reduce the importance of the fact that the comic industry is a giant boys’ club.

I don’t think anyone’s arguing that rape and sexual assault should be utterly forbidden subjects in comic books. I think the point is that they’re being handled in ways that are deeply and transparently sexist. These stories reduce female characters to objects of male concern, possessions to be fought over by male characters. The point of the lists is to demonstrate how massively and grotesquely overused rape is as a plot device.

Here’s another question: Why is rape such a common plot device (proportionally so–in the past decade or two) in comic books compared to television drama or film? I don’t really know much about TV drama, honestly, and it may be just as commonly used by writers in that medium. Is it? But I can’t think of an overwhelming number of great films that feature rape in any way, never mind senseless rape or rape as a cheap character moment. Can you?

For some reason we don’t make a big deal about murder but go berserk over rape.

The difference between rape and murder from a comic book standpoint is that a dead superhero can always come back. A character who becomes the victim of rape doesn’t get un-raped.

And let’s face it, in comic books a character is as likely to be killed by a purple space ray or glowing rocks from the planet Krypton or “the power cosmic” as much as anything else. We don’t exactly feel the physicality of Barry Allen vanishing into “the speed force,” do we? At least, not as much as we do when we see Sue Dibny with her shredded pants. Dr. Light, you see, is not raping her with a purple space ray or super-ventriloquism or anything else so quaintly comic booky. We know he’s forcing his penis into her body, which adds a graphic physicality that light-speed disintegration really, really doesn’t have. It’s jarring because it’s something we know from the real world, which means it feels more threatening. Compare Wally West’s “death” in Zero Hour to Blue Beetle’s in Countdown. Every rape is going to have the physicality of the Blue Beetle death, because there’s no way to do a “comic booky” rape.

Date rape was used heavily in the first two seasons of Veronica Mars as a character-building exercise for Veronica. It’s part of the trauma that turns her into a tough investigator. And then there are the Cylons on Battlestar Galactica.

I’d imagine women want from comics what men want from comics.

Good stories. Good characters. Good writing. Less sue of shock for shock’s sake.

It’s worth reading the comments on Karen’s post for Gail’s response.

Brian, I agree with you that there’s not enough praise of what’s right about the treatment of women in comics, and I also think there’s not enough suggestions on how to fix what’s wrong. Identifying the problem alone isn’t enough, especially when you make it a schtick to do so. I’m ready to see some constructive discussion on this issue.

“Does everything that happens to a woman in a comic have to be viewed through the lens of “violence against/misunderstanding of women”?”

Of course not. Grafting your own political agenda and perspective onto everything you read is just stupid.

How do you write women well? The same way you write men well: treat them as real people, with real thoughts and emotions.

James is absolutely right from where I’m standing.

At the risk of being unseemly self-promoting, I wrote this to explain what *I* particularly want in my comics.

Other women have higher priorities I’d imagine. We’re no more one demographic than men are after all.

Personally, I don’t mind use of rape when it’s done well. The frequency of it though completely robs it of power. And often, writers go overboard when implication/subtext would suffice in carrying the emotional impact without seeming as overdone.

The difference between rape and murder is pretty simple to me. Comic books are fantasy. Death is very unreal in comics, whether the characters come back or not. It’s not a real threat in my life. I mean, sure, it’s possible that someday I’ll be murdered, but it’s not something I think about often. And statistically, I’m probably not going to be.

But in America, they say one in four women get raped/sexually assauted. Every day, I am aware of the possibility that it could happen to me. Women tend to grow up hearing all those warnings “Don’t talk to strange men at night.” “Always stay in a well lit area.” “Don’t wear a short skirt downtown.” Stuff like that.

With men, while the statistics are appallingly high as well, the threat isn’t as real. Rape to men is I think akin to murder, it happens but always to “someone else”. Where as women are raised to see the possibility of being raped rather like…well, guys probably see the possibility of getting punched in the face. It probably will happen at some point in your life. I don’t mean to be cavalier, but it’s *really* hard to explain what it’s like to be a woman and always have to be subconsciously aware of the possibility.

Which doesn’t mean I’m adverse to seeing it ever in comics, but I’d much prefer to see it being treated seriously and with the emotional/dramatic oomph that it should have. Which means it should be very very rare. I want to be horrified when it comes up, not roll my eyes.

As for well-written female characters, it’s like Michael says. Treat them as people first, gender is only part of the whole.

Characters I tend to think are very well written are Kate Spencer (Manhunter), Jennifer Walters (She-Hulk), Selina Kyle (Catwoman), Courtney Whitmore (JSA), the entire Birds of Prey, Cassie Sandsmark (as written in Young Justice), Soranik Natu (Green Lantern Corps), and of course Power Girl.

I suspect we don’t see rape as a plot device on television because of the way in which prudishness is applied to pretty much all live-action presentations of anything even remotely related to the use or abuse of human genitalia.

Rape bothers more than murder in the context of comics, primarily because it’s almost always used as a motivating gimmick rather than a scale-of-evil trick. How many female characters have been written with a rape in their background which then operates as a major motivational; element in their characterizations? And how many villains, most of them male, are made rapists in order to illustrate that they are motivated by some transcendent, especially vile and inexplicable moral defect?

Murder, by contrast, happens primarily to unnamed background characters, doesn not always speak to some special motivation on the part of the villain committing it, and for obvious reasons can rarely motivate the victim (Deadman and the Spectre being the two most prominent exceptions there). It doesn’t become intrinsic to all later portrayals of a character, either — a villain who murders can become a villain who doesn’t, and a hero who kills on some occasions needn’t kill on others. But a villain who rapes, or a character who has been raped? That plot point will simply never go away; indeed, what tends to happen is that it takes over the history and future of the character entirely.

For God’s sake, real-life rape victims can largely recover psychologically, though that in no way diminishes the severity of the crime or the denial of another’s basic autnonomy that rape must entail. Fictional rape victims, however, never recover — they become bad girl stereotypes, or shaking victims, or, with male rape victims in Garth Ennis stories, sexually deviant figures of fun.

Murder also has the advantage of a long and rich literary tradition behind it; as such, it can bne treated as a literary element at times, in genres like the revenge killing, the vigilante antiheroic saga, or even the “grim necessity” sorts of moral dilemma arcs. Murder in fiction is not, oddly enough, always a brutal dehumanization; sometimes, in fact, it is committed precisely because of who the particular victim is. Literary rape, in contrast, involves relatively simpler motives and as a result has neither the literary tradition nor the occasional litertary or social status of being a sympathetic crime (thank heavens), and as such it has become the last genuine taboo in comics, the illustration of ultimate villainy. Put more simply, a murderer can care about his or her victim; a rapist, to most people’s understanding, by definition cannot and deliberately does not.

To the extent that comics have been blase regarding it, they’ve treated it as some sort of humor — most instances of male-on-male rape in comics that I can think of take this tactic, with the uncomfortable subtext of “feminization” that real prison rape has as its text. The one instance of male-on-female rape as humor I can think of proceeds from a throwaway caption in Millar’s Wanted, and the sentiment animating the idea that the line is a joke goes a long way towards explaining my general antipathy towards that series.

I don’t think we should banish murder from comics, but rather I’d prefer that it regain some sort of intelligent literary presentation. The Joker’s murders in “The Laughing Fish” serve a distinct literary and thematic purpose; his random murders of supporting cast characters and generic Arkham guards, by contrast, are lazy writing meant to make him seem threatening without giving him something genuinely threatening to do.

I do wonder if superhero comics can portray rape well; something about the costumes and the powers make it so much harder to treat well, because, to the extent that rape is a crime of power aimed at dehumanizing its victims, it seems to provoke in most writers some sort of overcompensatory mechanism in which the rape becomes part of someone’s characterization, as if to perversely rehumanize the character by taking them through the trauma. The comedic rapes above, of course, work precisely because they dehumanize and degrade characters who have generally been set up as targets of the story’s comedy in the first place.

Rape can be undone if people really wanted to. Time-travel, retcons, say the raped woman was a skrull…sure it’d be dumb, but most resurrections are dumb too.

AMong other excellent points, Kalinara seems to me to have pointed out the crux of the matter by describing rape as a strategy of absolute othering. It is women, prisoners, and figures of fun who are raped in fiction; and in real life, it is predominantly women and anyone excluded from hegemony who are raped.

In all cases, the rapist violently performs a radical disidentification with the victim. In comics, we are almost always invited to disidentify with the rapist, and sometimes with the victim — Wanted, again, being the exception with its hyperironic stylization. Even in the case where rape is used to “remotivate” a character, it does so by inviting us as readers to disidentify with what the character was before the rape, to presume some essential change as a result of the rape. (This is, of course, the same sort of thinking that leads to reprehensible phrases and concepts like “damaged goods.”)

There are occasions in which rape has been portrayed well by writers; they are very rare because of the disidentification function of rape as an act. Its moral seriousness requires something that I’m not sure most superhero stories are built to do, and that longform continuity invariably makes a mess of.

Rape is usually used (in comics) as writer shorthand for “what is the worst possible thing we can do to a woman” – it’s rarely actually discussed or explored, more mentioned in code as: “that horrible that happened.”

Which is what makes it an annoying plot point. It’s a very bad thing that happens that can’t be dealt with in 22 pages, the way a lot of “major” events are, and writers (and readers) seem to have extremely short attention spans. Do most readers (male or female) want to read 12 issues of talking heads discussing emotional trauma of being attacked and struggling to process it? No. Hence it gets shortened, truncated into an event that’s worth the occasional emo narration sentence and not much else.

For the flip side, look at Hank Pym – once, on panel in the fit of a full-on nervous breakdown, he struck his wife. Ever since then, in the minds of most readers and writers, that is what he is: a wife beater. Because becoming anything else would take a miniseries to explain, and no one wants to write it. So Hank Pym has become an event, just as some rape victims in comics become that event.

I don’t think Joker murdering extras does anything but make Batman look like a tool for not killing him. It’s killing off characters people like (Blue Beetle, etc.) just to show they are serious that bothers me. (“Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters are dead now we’re not kidding!“)

As I see it, once a character is raped, the story must then be about that character and how they deal with it. But in comics, the rape victim is usually a woman and not the main character. So the story becomes about how someone else deals with a rape victims’ pain. This makes rape a kind of hero accessory.
Unless the writer and editors are going to take the time to deal with rape as it happens to real people, they should stay away from it.

As a longtime fan who didn’t even realize the problems superhero comics had with women until adulthood and also as someone who happens to have a hoo-ha, I’ll tell you what I want.

Good writing, good characters, good stories. That’s what I want. I’d also like less gratuitous nudity and cheesecake in my art, but let’s start with the basics first and foremost.

Treat the female characters with as much reverence and admiration and relatibility as you do the male characters and we’re square. If you must go a certain route with a character, make sure it makes sense to the character and not because you want cannon fodder or want to grip the boys in with something visceral. Sue Dibny was a cypher in IDC, but even worse — so were all the other women in the story. Every single one was sidelined somehow. It was horrible.

In contrast — and I know it’s a little unfair because it’s Alan Moore — the attempted rape in Watchmen was shown to have real consequences both personal and cosmic. We may not feel comfortable with some of the conclusions Sally Jupiter comes to, but we at least are aware of the process she goes through to get there. The whole happy Sue Dibny image contrasted with the Dr. Light incident suddenly thrown out there makes it a big ole mystery as to how it affected her at all. In fact, the person whose victimization we spend the most time on is Batman’s and then Dr. Light’s! It’s ridiculous.

Superhero writers who I think get it — Gail Simone, Devin Grayson, Steve Gerber, Greg Rucka, Bendis sometimes (Not anything with Avengers though), Kurt Busiek, Ed Brubaker, Marc Andreyko, Mark Waid, Will Pfeifer, Judd Winick, probably Brian K. Vaughn (though I’m no fan of Y the Last Man), Tom DeFalco, Garth Ennis (Hitman counts!), Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison.

Superhero writers who still aren’t there yet — Geoff Johns, Brad Meltzer, Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, Marv Wolfman, Bruce Jones, Chuck Austen, Mark Millar, Brian Azerrello

People who are harder to figure out their abilties — Walt Simonson, Frank Miller (for the record, I had no problems with Selina’s portrayal in Batman: Year One), Chris Claremont, Christopher Priest, Chuck Dixon, Bill Willingham, Mike Carey and Michael Avon Oeming (I put them on the list because somehow Red Sonja now has a rape in her history too. Oh, PLEASE.) Jeph Loeb, Ron Marz (jury’s still out), John Byrne and Howard Chaykin.

Take from that what you will.

It’s really all about context. It boggles my mind that people give Gail Simone a hard time about her violent fights since she’s the one who compiled the Women in Refrigerators list originally, or give Greg Rucka flak about the violence his characters suffer, but both of them have their protagonists react fully unto themselves about what’s happening them and give back as good as they get. They’re not used to provoke the real drama and reaction from their male counterparts, they are used in their own story and I believe that’s why they have stronger female followings than other writers do.

I want heroines for me just as guys have heroes for them, and I want to be able to fully root for female characters as I can for Batman. I want to be treated like a human being and I want my characters to be treated like that too. Not as a goddess. Not as something other than the norm or apart. Just like everyone else gets.

T said
“Rape can be undone if people really wanted to. Time-travel, retcons, say the raped woman was a skrull…sure it’d be dumb, but most resurrections are dumb too.”

Raping a skrull is an improvement?

I suppose it is if you really need to think that J. Random Marvel Female has never been raped. But admitting to wanting to undo something like rape I think would be even more uncomfortable for most writers than writing it. At least if you undo a murder you can say “well, I just want to use the character again”. But there’s no point to undoing rape other than to restore a character’s “purity”.

Anyway, as a woman who reads comics: honestly, I don’t go to superhero comics for stories about women. I mostly go to novels and movies for that, and if I do read about female characters in comic form, it’ll be in indy stuff or manga. If I am reading superhero comics, chances are I’ll be mostly interested in the male characters. There’s a shortlist of superheroines and female cast members I do like, but it’s… well, short. I’m pleasantly surprised when I find a cool or well-written woman on mainstream comics, but I really don’t expect anything better than broad stereotypes and accidental misogyny.

Mostly I want to see interesting things happen to the characters I like. I don’t really care what the content of those interesting things are. People can write about rape if they want; Alan Moore, for instance, can use it as an element in extremely interesting stories about people of whatever gender. There are plenty of interesting superhero stories about murders, too.

What I want to see go away is the idea that if your villain kills or rapes people, suddenly he’s a serious villain you must take very seriously. I’ll take it seriously if it’s well-written; if it’s not, I’m going to make fun of it like any other piece of ridiculous pot-boiler pulp. You aren’t free of the superhero spectre of frivolousness by virtue of dealing with that sort of subject matter. If you deal with it in a frivolous fashion then you’re still constrained by the genre at its worst.

To be honest, attempts at “detailed” depictions of violence and cruelty in comics often just strike me as stupid because the details of the art and writing tend to be so flagrantly incorrect and exaggerated, almost video game-like. Don’t gesture at reality when you clearly don’t understand, or don’t have the courage, to depict actual reality. For instance, I thought the Blue Beetle death in Countdown was just absurd and laughable. I know what a bullet does to someone’s head at high velocity, and it’s damn sure not the silliness that was depicted on that page. What was on that page was like something out of a terrible FPS.

What Lynxara said about seriousness comes full circle to quantity, I think. It’s used as a way to inject some sort of “False reality” into comic books, make people take you but it just doesn’t work when its not skilled.

But it seemed to work for a while, so people copied. And now, it’s been used so often it seems like I can’t even read a well-written story that includes a rape without getting angry because it’s practically everywhere. It’s like a new toy writers have discovered. Except, it’s not new. It’s actually been used for quite a while to varying degrees of subtlty.

Additionally, it’s strange, compiling a list of male and female victims, that an explicit scene with a female character will be in “All-Ages” books, but a comparable scene with a male character tends to only be in “Mature Readers Only” titles.

Mike Carey and Michael Avon Oeming (I put them on the list because somehow Red Sonja now has a rape in her history too. Oh, PLEASE.)

Red Sonja has had a rape in her backstory since day one, when she was originally created by Roy Thomas. So you can’t blame Carey & Oeming for that.

Anun: “Mike Carey and Michael Avon Oeming (I put them on the list because somehow Red Sonja now has a rape in her history too. Oh, PLEASE.)”

???

Ever since she had an origin in the Marvel books, there was a rape in Red Sonja’s past. Google “Red Sonja Peter David” to see what PAD had to say about how severely messed up her origin is psychologically.

Personally, if I were writing the reboot, I’d eventually dismiss that whole thing as an excuse she tossed off as an excuse to beat the crap out of some drunken oaf so he’d leave her the hell alone, and it just kind of got away from her.

News to me, I have to say. I have her original series and her appearences in Conan way back when and nowhere does it allude to rape. Her fugative status kicks off when she stabs the king rather than sleep with him, in fact. The one in the 80s or 90s, I admit I’ve never read. Just as well, from the sound of it.

Nonetheless, I’m still reading the new series. I just rolled my eyes when I read that part.

It’s funny though that someone asks what women want, one woman answers what she wants personally, and the only responses that earns is correcting continuity. Just because there’s been this whole part to Red Sonja I wasn’t aware of doesn’t invalidate the actual point I was aiming to make.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_sonja

I agree with you, the rape aspect of Sonja’s origin is unnecessary and saddles the character with a lot of baggage. I was just pointing out that Mike Avon Oeming isn’t the guy to blame for it. She’s had that in her backstory since 1975.

One of the thoughts I’ve come to about this is that it’s connected to the increasing reliance on nostalgia in comics. I know that sounds odd, but hear me out.

When a new writer uses an old villain, there’s always an attempt to do something “bigger” than the previous story, a sort of anthem for the current generation of comics readers who want to read the ultimate (insert name here) story. Kurt Busiek, for example, did this several times over the course of his run on the Avengers–he did the ultimate Ultron story (Ultron murders the population of an entire country), the ultimate Kang story (Kang declares war on Earth), even the ultimate Morgan le Fay story. These worked, to no small extent, because there hadn’t been a good Kang, Ultron, or Morgan le Fay story in the Avengers books for years and years. (Note the use of the word “good” there.)

Now imagine that someone just did the ultimate Joker story six months ago, but the new writer wants to do his own ultimate Joker story. So he has to up the body count, up the violence, up the “evilness” of the Joker for it to make it past the previous story…and when all you’re doing is recycling old villains, then you constantly have to up the ante. So robbery becomes murder, murder becomes mass murder, mass murder becomes murder of a loved one, and murder of a loved one becomes rape and murder of a loved one. Which then becomes ‘Infinite Crisis’, and everyone takes a step back because where do you go from there?

As to the question, “Does everything that happens to a woman in a comic have to be viewed through the lens of “violence against/misunderstanding of women”? Isn’t that a narrow viewpoint, or is it necessary because it’s never been done in comics, and only through overemphasizing it can we make people aware of it?”…

I think it does need to be viewed through that lens, but not only through that lens. I think you should ask yourself as a writer, “Is this happening because I’m just not thinking out what the implications of this scene/story are, and could it be that I’m being a sexist/misogynist jerk?”, but that you should also be able to say, “No, no I’m not,” if you’ve done some real soul-searching and feel that your story is artistically valid.

For example, the Huntress sequence everyone’s talking about actually felt grounded in her character to me. She went on the date out of obligation to the guy, she found that underneath his callow exterior there was a decent person, and she wound up going to bed with him. It doesn’t make her a bad person, it doesn’t make her a “slut”, it makes her someone who decided to have a one-night stand with a guy. People do that. Many of them don’t even feel the slightest bit of regret afterward, and nor should they.

On the other hand, there are still lots of sexist stories out there that need to be examined. I’m still astonished that nobody’s leveled charges against X-23…the new, dangerous, butt-kicking female Wolverine leaves the Weapon X project for the first time and what happens? She becomes a hooker under the thumb of an abusive pimp. Can anyone even f***ing connect the plot points between the end of ‘X-23: Innocence Lost’ and the beginning of ‘NYX: Wannabe’ in a sensible way? And NYX was written by Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief.

So what I’m saying here is, yes, it’s good that people are asking these questions, but let’s not break our arms patting ourselves on the back for our sensitivity just yet.

I’ve never read Doom Patrol, but from what you’ve said there, I wouldn’t have an issue with Crazy Jane’s rape – because from what you say, it was dealt with, and it was her that dealt with it, rather than a ‘she has been raped! We must Avenge her! It is My motivation, and what she might be feeling doesn’t matter!’ plotline, as the rape of Sue Dibny was. Because a plot of the second type removes the raped character’s agency. They’re just a plot point, reduced to little more than a robbery, or a monster of the week. They are something for the hero to fix. Like foiling the robbery or defeating the Exawattt Gamma Men from the Planet Zog, it’s how the hero deals with it that matters. It’s one of the things that irritated me most about the gay bashing storyline in Green Lantern a while back – it’s all about Kyle, never about the person it actually happened to, despite their being a longtime supporting character. Not a single panel of their reaction to one of the worst things that could happen to them.

At the top of my list of fantastic female superheroes would have to be Jenny Sparks and the Engineer. Because they’re *damn* talented *people* – they’re fully rounded characters, with their own motivations and personalities, rather than cardboard cutouts. Take Angie, for example – to look at her, you’d think she’s pure cheesecake. She became a hero, in the premier team in that reality, because she was a comic book geek as a kid, and had the intelligence and drive to rise above her underprivileged childhood to create the tech that allowed her to become the Engineer. No horrible trauma, other than the wholesale devouring of silver age Batman and GL comics. When she first became the Engineer, she was nervous and unsure, and has grown the kind of confidence a hero of her capabilities should have. She still has body and self image issues. She’s a well-imagined, -designed and -written character. She’s my power fantasy – that if I just apply myself, I can achieve fantastic things. Were I 12 (and allowed to read Wildstorm comics at that age…) I’d want to be her when I grew up. Hell, I still kinda would.

That’s what I want out of comics – that they should be good. That female characters are just as developed as their male counterparts, that this discussion becomes obsolete. That rape, now used as a shorthand for ‘the worst thing we can think of’, isn’t a goddamn *cliche*, that the reaction to a rape storyline isn’t “what, again?”. I know these issues can be dealt with well – take a look at the arc in Robin where it is revealed that Spoiler was abused as a child – but I’m absolutely sick to the back teeth of them being done badly, as they almost always are. I’m not good at textual analysis, but I’m damn glad there are people capable of truly criticising comics when they screw this stuff up, because sometimes it’s only by shining a really bright torch on something, that you can actually force some of this stuff into the light, and thereby change it.

Anun says: “It’s funny though that someone asks what women want, one woman answers what she wants personally, and the only responses that earns is correcting continuity. Just because there’s been this whole part to Red Sonja I wasn’t aware of doesn’t invalidate the actual point I was aiming to make.”

I’m sorry if that’s how you read my response, but that really wasn’t what I was trying to do. You said yourself that you’re “not sure” about the abilities of Carey and Oeming on whether they “get it,” and I didn’t want them to be criticized for something that they didn’t necessarily have control over. Sonja is a licensed character, after all, so there’s limits to how much they can mess with her. Not that I don’t have issues with the origin, mind you, but I think blame ought to be placed where most appropriate.

As for the lack of comments about the rest of your post, I agree with a lot of what you write, just as I do for lots of other comments on this thread. If my response caused offense because I didn’t say so, I apologize and assure you that was not my intent.

Along these lines, though, you (and lots of other people) include Kurt Busiek in the list of writers who do “get it.” Does this still hold true after his origin for Janissa the Widowmaker in the new Conan comics? She popped up around issue #12, and even sparked tempers in the letter column because her origin story involves an extended period of time where she was thrown to a pit of demons repeatedly to be physically and sexually brutalized until she was strong enough to fight her way through the whole night.

Well, no writer is perfect. I haven’t read any of Kurt’s Conan stuff, so I can’t really say. OTOH, Garth Ennis mentioned something similar happening to Johnny Blaze every night in Hell at the start of his Ghost Rider miniseries — which was MK, IIRC, not MAX — and no one really seemed to say anything about that. Again, I suppose it’s about context and how the character reacts to it and so on. Busiek’s proven himself to be a good enough writer that I’d be willing to at least read it before condemning it.

It’s not that it’s wrong for superheroines to get beat up in a fight, it’s only bad if they can’t give it back just as good and if it’s only for the real hero to stand forth and save the day. I like my heroines to save themselves. I like my heroines to process what’s happening to them and what it means to them personally, not what it actually means to the guy who is actually the reason people should care. I want to care about the female characters out there too.

Also, I wasn’t offended so much as amused that out of everything possibly controversial I might have said, it was my continuity oops on Red Sonja that got responses. Truly, everyone is a nerd first aand foremost.

I believe that it is possible to do a well written and moving rape story. I might not want to read it, but it can be done. But not in comics.

Because the sheer frequency has turned it into a cliche, and a very ugly one. And the worst part is that so many writers don’t seem to have noticed that it’s a story that everyone else has already done to death. Or maybe they think they can do the one that says something important. Well no you can’t. It’s too late. Maybe if they stopped for a while you might be able to but that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen anytime soon.

Re: X-23 and the inability to connect the dots between leaving the WX program and showing as a street walker. I remember hearing that X-23′s creator, who actually has some modicum of control over the character he created, was entirely blindsided by that when she first appeared in NYX, and he called Joe Q to complain – remember how NYX had a huge gap in the middle, right after X-23 appeared? Rumor was that the story was being re-worked from that point forward. Maybe that should be an Urban Legend Revealed?

Moose ‘n squirrel said: “there’s no way to do a ‘comic booky’ rape.” Ah, not entirely true. What about that whole idiotic thing that Ms. Marvel went through with Kang’s son around Avengers 200? That was rape, and it was pretty comic-booky, what with the mind rays and the alternate reality time-travelling (or whatever) that it entailed.

And in Busiek’s defense, he was the one who finally let Carol deal with it, during his big Kang War thing…

“murder should not be used in comics.”

That’s one of the most stunningly naive things I have ever read. Let’s cancel Batman’s entire line of comics, shall we?

There’s barely a story from the entire Golden Age that doesn’t have corpses spilling out of every page. Perhaps you should be reading “Archie”, where murder and rape are less common.

Heroes fight villains. Villains are criminals. Two of the worst crimes are murder and rape. I’m not going to read comics where the world’s worst villains are less threatening then a mugger in an alley.

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