Becca Rocks

dcwomenkickingass:

(Trigger warning discussion of rape)

Rolling Stone has an eye-opening interview with Grant Morrison posted and the writer has some very interesting things to say about the treatment of women comics. 

On Sue Dibney’s rape in Brad Metzler’s Identity Crisis:

The first time I read it I was kind of outraged. I thought this was just… why? What the fuck is this, really? It wasn’t even normal. It was outrageous. It was preposterous because of the Elongated Man with his arms wrapped several times around the corpse of his wife. I thought something is broken here. Something has gone so wrong in this image.

That plotline faced a lot of criticism, in part because people saw it as misogynistic.
It’s hard to tell because most men try to avoid misogyny, really they do, in this world we live in today. It’s hard for me to believe that a shy bespectacled college graduate like Brad Meltzer who’s a novelist and a father is a really setting out to be weirdly misogynistic. But unfortunately when you’re looking at this beloved character who’s obviously been ass-raped on the Justice League satellite, even saying it kind of takes you to that dot dot dot where you don’t know what else to say.

Maybe it’s for the best that DC Comics is starting over now.
But I don’t know. There’s been lots of things, the sexism in DC because it’s mostly men who work in these places. Nobody should be trying to say we’re taking up a specifically anti-woman stance. I think it would be ignorance or stupidity or some God knows what. I was reading some Alan Moore Marvelman for some reason today. I found one in the back there and I couldn’t believe. I pick it up and there are fucking two rapes in it and I suddenly think how many times has somebody been raped in an Alan Moore story? And I couldn’t find a single one where someone wasn’t raped except for Tom Strong, which I believe was a pastiche. We know Alan Moore isn’t a misogynist but fuck, he’s obsessed with rape. I managed to do thirty years in comics without any rape!

I’m be interested to hear if Morrison includes The Killing Joke as one of Moore’s books that include rape. I’ve always been of the mind that there wasn’t but I’d love to hear his thoughts.

But it is quite amazing to hear Morrison talking about the misogyny in Identity Crisis. Maybe this will finally shut up the apologists I’ve come across throughout the net.

Okay… but Alan Moore has written some of the finest examples of strong female characters in comics history. When someone is raped in a Moore comic it furthers a storyline it doesn’t feel like he is punishing a character for being female. I WISH there were female characters in the mainstream DC and Marvel universes as well rounded and amazing as most of the Moore characters I’ve read.