Sunday, July 02, 2006

Rape of the month: June

This is an ugly little regular feature that I am instituting to highlight just how often sexual abuse appears in comics and to make it clear that it is neither clever nor original to address this issue. In fact so many comic writers have addressed it so often and so badly that it has become a ghastly cliche. It doesn't matter how thought provoking or moving your rape story may be, just don't. There are few enough unmolested women in comics as it is.

This month's featured comics are:
Squadron Supreme #4
The Walking Dead #28

Since Walking Dead ends with a cliffhanger of preparing a character to be raped to death I suspect the next issue may feature in a future instalment unless we get a last second save. Even should that occur, I think it's valid to include it here. Having several pages of preparation for serial rape still falls into the "Just don't do it" category as far as I'm concerned.

I really don't like doing this feature so please, writers, stop abusing our heroines, and I won't have to do this anymore.

I don't read many comics, so if you see an instance of sexual abuse in a new comic please add a comment to this post so it can be included in the next roundup. This is only for newly published comics, Ragnell and Kalinara are focussing on the wider view.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am a little curious about the definition of "raped to death". Rape and murder often go hand in hand on Law and Order:SVU, but actually "raped to death" I've never really heard of. Unless we're talking about the old quandary of how Superman has sex with Lois without killing her, that one's been covered at length by John Byrne and Jason Lee mentions it in Mallrats.

This is why all the comics I buy are pre-1995, the sexual abuse started to creep in circa 1990, but it hadn't been done to death yet. In the silver age I don't think you could even say rape in a comic let alone have storylines revolve around it.

Yail Bloor

Marionette said...

To quote the rapist in Walking Dead:
Tell me girl -- How long do you think it would take for me to ruin yuour life -- shatter your sense of security -- really fuck you up?

I think half an hour could probably do it -- But really, I plan on doing this every day as often as I can, until you figure out some way to kill yourself.


That's my definition of "raped to death" as far as this comic goes. I hope that satisfies your curiosity.

Dahut_la_Blanca said...

Boy, how low can fall JMS in these days? At least the cr*ppy writers of SG-1 are all audiences and politically correct!