Reporting live from the scene…
September 19th, 2009 by david brothers | Tags: amazing spider-man, Batman, esther, io9Esther Inglis-Arkell is on the ground with io9.com with an article about unexplored rapes in comics. You should go give it a read and then digg it in when you’re done, I think!
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You know, I know hermanos hates the scene with a passion, but I’d love to see how Esther would respond to the Wolverine “STOP RAPING ME!” rant from the Pulse.
@Gavok: Prediction: Herheadasplode.
I don’t know. It’s an interesting contrast.
The gist of her article is, “Batman, Nightwing and Green Arrow were all, by definition, raped. None of them seemed to care or do anything about it.”
With Wolverine, he wasn’t raped in the literal context, but insists that what’s been done to him (the forced adamantium injections, brainwashing, constant mindwipes over mindwipes over mindwipes) on a regular basis boils down to rape. And he, despite being more rugged than those three, has an expressive emotional reaction to it.
I assume Esther’s never read Starman… Jack Knight’s a similar case to Batman and GA, as a kid resulted from his rape, but his relationship with the Mist wasn’t as amiable as Bruce and Talia or Ollie and Shado were on occasion. Jack also seemed pretty devastated by the discovery, though that may have been more from learning he had a son than from the rape itself.
don’t forget Vril Dox (who? the guy from REBELS, yes the book that only me and Tucker Stone read)
@Gavok: Hmmm. The word ‘rape’ originally had quite a few connotations, including plundering or despoiling (The Rape of Nanking) and even ‘to take away or kidnap’. There’s a song in The Fantasticks that is called The Rape Song. It’s about a group who will kidnap people in a theatrical manner for pay. The lyrics go, and I am not kidding you:
Why
Invite regret,
When you can get the sort of rape
You’ll never ever forget.
It’s usually stricken from modern versions, for obvious reason.
Under the ‘despoil, kidnap and plunder by force’ definitions, Wolverine is correct. However, people generally use it in only one sense these days, and when they’re using it metaphorically it’s to get people to pay attention. I think the way obscenities are used to signify anger, the word ‘rape’ is used to convey a sense of violation that people can’t manage to communicate without invoking sexual force.