mrblakemiller said:
So Kick-Ass 2 is in theatres now, and people (like MovieBob) are using the opportunity to talk about Mark Millar, the writer of the comics that inspired both the Kick-Ass and Wanted films (I haven't seen KA, but the Wanted movie was the most loosely-based "Adaptation" of all ti>ime).
What's funny is that people are talking about Mark Millar as a misogynist and an immature writer who loves violence too much. For example, apparently a girl is raped in Kick-Ass 2, and that makes Millar a misgynist. Take this quote:
Laura Hudson, the former editor-in-chief of the popular blog Comics Alliance and a senior editor at Wired, thought that scene was deplorable, but typical of Millar. ?There's one and only one reason that happens, and it's to piss off the male character,? she said. ?It's using a trauma you don't understand in a way whose implications you can't understand, and then talking about it as though you're doing the same thing as having someone's head explode. You're not. Those two things are not equivalent, and if you don't understand, you shouldn't be writing rape scenes.?
I'm really tired of seeing women write that men can't understand rape, or that a comic with tons of death and estruction is only pushing too far if rape is involed (I'm one of those "death is worse than rape" types).
I've also heard that Millar is pretty carefree in addressing these issues and does so in a way that pisses some people off. Which is also crap in my opinion, because he should be allowed to feel how he wants and you can just vote with your wallet. I can agree with nothing Millar has done in the last few years matches with what he'd done before (His Ultimate Marvel work is one of the high-water marks for straight superhero comics, in my opinion), but I don't understand the hate he gets these days for his ideas of violence.
So, two questions: Can someone point me to anything particularly nasty, by any definition, he's said in an interview regarding this kind of stuff? And also, what do you think of his writing, or depictions of extreme violence in general? Who gets to write those things and who doesn't?
I haven't had a lot of time for message boards recently, but I was checking up on The Escapist and this caught my attention because it blinked up as under discussion on the main page.
As I've said many times on these forums, with the predictable backlash from the usual crowd of backlashers, most issues like this are simply an attempt for someone to get attention and/or a platform without any real substance to the argument. In this case it gets the name of people like Laura Hudson out there in the spotlight, when to be honest most people probably wouldn't have heard of her anyway despite her writing experience.
It's like this: rape happens, for the most part women can't avenge themselves, or at least most can't ( and lets be honest, even in fantasy if they were hero-material it wouldn't have happened to begin with ). It might be easy writing, but some guy heading out to avenge his girlfriend/daughter/wife/whomever is something a lot of people can associate with, and like many plot hooks it continues because it works, there is no real reason to change it or mix it up, how well it works usually involves the events surrounding the story. Incidently there have been stories where women HAVE avenged themselves after being raped (ie training into a combat machine and coming back looking for revenge), some versions of Red Sonja for example feature this as a key element of the character's origin. There have also been cases where super heroines have rescued their boyfriends from the bad guys. The main difference in many case is that people don't tend to take men bring raped by women seriously, no matter how unwilling it's presented as in the storylines (oh well, that's the stuff of male fantasy go the dismissals). Interestingly, while I wouldn't recommend it's take on gender politics for anything other than kinky roleplay, you might notice that even Gor has featured some role reversal with men being raped. It could be argued that the events which cause Tarl Cabot to become a broken shadow of himself for like 10 books, renaming himself "Bosk Of Port Karr" represents a huge treatise of a sort on the effects of a powerful man being raped. For those who actually READ Gor, Tarl was kind of a nice guy to begin with, opposed to a lot of what was going on in Gor, it wasn't until he's betrayed and turned into a slave himself that he winds up really becoming a Gorean bastard. The origins of Jason Marshall and his first experiences on Gor represent another rarely mentioned take on the subject. The point here is that this kind of thing DOES happen even if it's not taken seriouisly, dismissed, or conveniently forgotten about by those who want to be critical. Until such a time as some dude pretty much gets prison raped in a mainstream comic and has his superhero girlfriend go hunting down the people who did it, and the existence of this storyline is pretty much skywritten over every major city in the USA, some people are going to continue to live in denial here in associating any mention of rape in fantasy with Misogyny for the sake of garnering attention.
At any rate it's sort of like people jumping on FRANK Miller years before this and affecting his career for a few headlines. This was the guy who gave us tons of awesome comics, more so than Mark Millar (Frank highlighted to make the difference of who I'm talking about clear due to the similar last names), until people started riding him for no particularly good reason with claims like "Oh gee, why is it that almost every woman in Frank's writing is a prostitute or former prostitute" this accusation being kind of mind blowing since it usually involves talking about Sin City characters (note the name) or the way he redefined Catwoman for a while, by way of making a kind of valid point that the only place you'd likely find something like she wears is in a fetish shop, unless you just happened to be a really experienced leatherworker with a bunch of specialized equipment which would be adding a whole new skill set into a character whose skills already push the limits of disbelief, and whom Frank was trying to make a bit more realistic. To be honest that idea for Catwoman never especially bothered me because lets be honest... think about how she acts, and the fact that she uses seduction to play all sides of the Gotham underworld/vigilante equasion. Oddly enough I've always felt that she had to be doing Oswald Cobblepot once in a while as the only logical explanation for why he keeps letting her play him without putting her in the ground other than some trivial efforts (for him) with whatever thugs he has on hand when she actually cheats him to his face in front of witnesses... but that's a side point that has nothing to do with anything.
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Oh yes as another point. One has to be really careful with comics when you blame the writer and when you blame the artists and the guys putting the comic together. I've read a few things over the years about how writers have commented on what they come up with isn't always what winds up on the pages once management adjusts things, or the artists (who are given huge creative liberties) get their hands on things an decide how to tell the story sequentially. Just because you see a graphic rape scene that goes on for however many panels and includes X dialogue, does not mean that the writer is actually responsible for the specifics of the scene. It could be the artist that really got off on the rape scene, or management that figured focusing on more shocking sexual content would be good for a comic book based on shock.
To be honest the wrestling match between writers and artists is kind of legendary on it's own before you even involve management. How much of a group effort comics can be is something a lot of people don't consider, the guys running "point" and saying it's their work aren't always the ones who are most responsible for the finale product. Indeed these kinds of conflicts were largely what caused Image comics to form back in the 1990s (Moviebob also mentioned this) largely due to wanting to control the rights to their characters and artwork in a business sense, but also to get away from managers and writers. Some of Image's early failures were largely an example of why the guys who do great art and can come up with decent characters aren't always the best choice for writing the stories involving them.
It sounds odd (and is an even odder way to end this post), but it's important to consider that going after Millar as the writer/creator/pointman, if you feel there is an issue here to begin with (which I don't) isn't necessarily the right track to take, even if the guy seems to be claiming responsibility for the entire thing (which could be a contractual obligation). If your going to criticize a comic like this, you should have some idea of who actually did and contributed what.
Of course to be fair I don't follow Mark Millar and didn't pay that much attention to the stuff he's done that I've read, so for all I know he's both the writer and the artist. At which point one has to still question the management.
