What's So Bad About Mark Millar?

[Raikas]

I don't really know anything about him other than what I've heard secondhand, but honestly, it's kind of nice to see an artist say "so what?" instead of trying to backpedal or apologize or revise their work because it's offensive.

I think there are plenty of artists who can response to "that's offensive!" with an explanation of meaning and intent without any need to backpedal/apologize/revise. And there are plenty of comic book writers who can and do write works that play with people's sensitivities and can easily defend themselves because what they wrote meant something. The issue with Millar isn't that he uses offensive symbols, it's that he uses them for no reason. And ultimately that's less about his stuff being offensive as it is about it being rather empty (especially in comparison with writers within the same genre who push similar limits in terms of content).

I honestly think that consumers of media care way too much about the creators of content as people. If you like the actual thing that they produce why the hell does it matter who it came from?

If you're a fan of an author (or other content creator), aren't you more likely to read interviews with them? Follow their blogs? Read a variety of their work? If they constantly talk about (or avoid) certain topics in their interviews, or constantly revisit certain themes in their writing, why wouldn't that colour the way you see their work as a whole?

 

[nogitsune]

If he's allowed to have his opinions and express his work, then I'm allowed to criticize his work and opinions. I can't change them, and I won't try, but his flippancy alone does not substantiate a defense.

His use of rape as a story device is despicable, especially in Kick Ass 2, and he's never really defended it aside from making the very argument that the OP does. It's not so much that there are a large number of women writers and fan who are saying that men can't understand rape. What's actually going on is that women writers and fans are saying that many male writers do not treat it with the sort of tact or regard as they should. In our society there is what you might call a rape culture, wherein the issues, terminology, legal precedents and media perception of rape is often times skewed against women. Millar does nothing to fight against this, and many find that to be hideously irresponsible. It doesn't necessarily mean that he's a misogynist, just that his work needs to be questioned. A notion that he frequently hides from.

It's same the problem with his use of violence and racial stereotypes. He never defends himself and justifies the use of these tropes. He just hand waves it by telling people to "not be so PC", and goes about his merry way. Never really standing behind his work, outside of dismissing serious analysis of the sexist tropes and idioms that appear in his work.

Frankly, it's frustrating.

I find to call our society a rape culture to be gross hyperbole. If this was India, The Peoples Republic of Congo, one of the middle eastern counties that would arrest the rape victim for charges of adultery, then calling it a rape culture would be fair. But not the US, The US is very anti rape. The US considers Rape as bad as murder if not worse, sentencing is harsh on rapists and they are forced to go onto a sex offender list if they're convicted and really a person could have their life ruined by a mere accusation even if found not guilty. Rape is seen as something you cannot joke about and you can joke about murder or even torture but Rape would harm an entertainers career.

Not to say that our Society is perfect, Equality still needs to be chased but really calling our culture a rape culture is just a bit much. There are many things that need to be done, the law could be better. Rape with male victims only recently are acknowledged as possible and women perpetrators are still not(unless there's a bit of news that I missed). Too many rapes do happen and too many rapists can get away but the culture isn't a rape culture. I guess it could be subjective but I think trying to put western society on the level of the horrors of the congo or India (it took a massive protest to get one rape/murder to trial) I think is just a little too much.

 

[Launcelot111]

All I've read of Mark Millar is the first run of Kickass, where the violence is nowhere near Garth Ennis in terms of shock value. Except for a couple Hitgirl scenes, most of the violence was at least connected to the story and wasn't particularly gratuitous.

According to Wikipedia, in the second volume of Kickass, Katie (Kickass's girlfriend) is brutally gang-raped by ************ and friends, and skimming the plot summary, the whole plot of the comic is far more violent and in line with a psychotic villain than the movie. The movie's rape scene (whose target wasn't Katie) was definitely uncomfortable, but a portion of that for me was that ************ wavered between awkward kid and violent criminal pretty often, which made the decision of rape seem out of character and more creepy for it.

And also, Mark Millar isn't even credited with writing the screenplay (he's only given credit for the source work), so we can't point fingers at him for the movie's weird rape scene unless he had some sort of veto power I'm unaware of.

 

[Vausch]

Considering Millar did write one of my favourite comics, Superman: Red Son, I have to say he is more than capable of writing some well thought-out stories with great alternatives to the current ones.

That said, I don't have much to compare it to. I don't honestly have any of his other books nor have I read others he's written because often I don't actively look, I just take recommendations or find something that looks interesting.

 

[chinangel]

well...how do I put this.

This is a delicate topic and i guess I have some slight insight. I haven't been raped, but i have been molested, and it makes you feel..vulnerable, scared, angry.

THis said I am still goign to see kickass 2, because I enjoyed kickass 1 and I know what i'mg etting when i go in there. This said Mark Millar isn't unique in his use of rape as a motivator. The comic industry in general has used rape purely for motivational reasons and without really addressing the issue,the same way that making a character a pedophile is the lazy way to make a character evil.

It's tiring, annoying and really now that I think about it, something that has been a problem in all forms of media regardless of the gender behind the pen.

Simply put, it's a subject that people want to tackle or use for their own purpose but everyone seems to lack the proper toolset to discuss it, even rape victims them selves.

So, really I don't see why anyone would blast Mark Millar about this, if the scene makes someone uncomfortable? Then GOOD! It's supposed to make you uncomfortable, and if it motivates the main character to do something,then at least it has served it's purpose.

It's not good, but it's no worse than basically every other depiction in media.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

My only issue with Millar is that he's a bit of a hack who puts shock value well above context. Essentially he tries to Out-Ennis Garth Ennis, except that Ennis has more talent and is much, much, MUCH less of a pretentious fuckhead about it all.

 

[Hoplon]

My only issue with Millar is that he's a bit of a hack who puts shock value well above context. Essentially he tries to Out-Ennis Garth Ennis, except that Ennis has more talent and is much, much, MUCH less of a pretentious fuckhead about it all.

And to put this in context Garth Ennis is a pretentious fuck wit with delusions of being Alan Moore who is himself a wizard... no really, worships a "pagan" goddess and everything.

Comic writers are not the most stable bunch to begin with and Mark Millar is well on his way to Frank Miller-dom.

 

[Winnosh]

Oh yeah Millar is crazy but the rape thing is only part of it, and part of it is that he Loooves to use it in his stories.

There are two rape scenes in Kickass 2 one of an underage girl, and the other of the main character's father.

 

[Puzzlenaut]

I had no idea Mark Millar wrote Kick Ass. I loved a lot of his work on the Ultimates and thought that when he dealt with serious issues there (I primarily refer to Hank Pym beating his wife Janet and their torturous relationship thereafter) it was done well despite the goofiness of the superhero-comic background.

Although I've never read Kick Ass, I know a lot about it from wiki and talking to people who have, and what I will say is that, insofar as I can tell, a large part of the premise is the juxtaposition of the light-hearted whimsy of becoming a superhero compared to the ultra-violent reality of getting the crap beaten out of you by drug lords. It is all about the shock value. Horrific violence and murder is a terrible thing, just as terrible as rape, and the use of it in Kick Ass is exploitative, sure, but it isn't something to get angry about.

It is an ultraviolent parody of the sickening things the comic book market crave. You can tell just from the cover.

What I'm saying is that people are taking fiction too seriously.

 

[Tanis]

It's not that MEN can't write about rape, and have it something other than a plot device to make the male more heroic while treating the women as nothing more but a plot device (like a piece of the tri-force)....

But, well, MARK MILLAR can't because he seems to lack the ability to.

 

[SonicWaffle]

The rape scene you talk about in the comic was, for all intents and purposes, only there to be there. There were numerous ways he could have handled it that would have been more acceptable than how it turned out.

Not really. I see the purpose as twofold, one within the narrative and one meta;

Firstly, within the story the purpose of the rape scene is to strike deliberately at Kick-Ass. It plays right into the idea of the book, as characters follow common comic book tropes because they're common comic book tropes [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge]. It's done because it's a more graphic version of what a comic book supervillain might do, and ************ is actively trying to be a comic book supervillain. That isn't to say it's a great artistic decision, but from a character perspective it does make sense.

Secondly, it reinforces to the audience that ************ isn't the goofy kid playing at being a bad guy that he was in the first book. He's deliberately turning himself into a horrible ****. The first Kick-Ass, hyperviolence aside, was basically a tale of kids playing at being heroes and villains. ************'s rampage is the signal that he's not playing anymore, even if Kick-Ass is.

Please note that this is not a defense of Millar or Kick-Ass 2, as I didn't really enjoy the book, and I found the rape scene in particular extremely disturbing. I'm just saying that the scene was hardly thrown in just for the sake of having a rape scene; it's included as part of a character arc for the villain. Whether or not there were better ways for it to be done is up for debate, but to call the scene gratuitous isn't really accurate.

 

[Terminal Blue]

I'm going to start using this every time it's appropriate, and it's appropriate now.

Showing rape in media at all is always going to be controversial, for several reasons.

1) It's basically giving the middle finger to a surprisingly large section of the female population (and a small but statistically significant proportion of the male population). You can bleat on about how murder is so much worse, but there aren't going to be murder victims in your audience.

2) A large proportion of the population is demonstrable incapable of reacting to rape with any kind of empathy, because they have no experience and no genuine understanding of it. For most men and a few women, rape is something which happens to other people and will never significantly affect them. People do not react to rape like they react to murder, they are not capable of understanding its effect on the victim because they have never imagined themselves as victims and will never have to.

3) Depictions of rape which are overly graphic and violent to try and appeal to or provoke reaction from a male audience also misrepresent the crime and thus function to spread a mythology about it which makes it harder to prevent and harder to detect. The vast majority of people who are raped are not raped by strangers who have broken into their houses with guns, they are raped by people they know, usually current or former sexual partners, many of whom don't see what they do as rape because it doesn't fit the mythology perpetuated in popular culture. You know, like this popular culture.

This notion that rape is about other guys trying to steal yo' bitches is a pure fantasy concocted to absolve male audiences of responsibility. In reality you are more likely to rape your girlfriend than anyone else is, and that should something that informs your actions.

4) This is not a debate about "censorship" or free speech. There are plenty of movies and media with horrific rape scenes. Boys Don't Cry, Irreversible, even Showgirls. All these depictions were controversial, because that's just how it is, but in these cases the creators were prepared to stand up and explain their decisions in terms other than "lol, edgy". In this case, that hasn't happened.

When a film as godawful as Showgirls can genuinely treat a serious subject with more humanity than you can, you need to give up.

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?

Well, there's this.

In the comic ... in the comic they are not real people so you can put a rape in there and you?re not like feeling emotion towards it it?s just people on a piece of paper.

This is not the kind of person who is fit to write about rape. If you are writing it and find you have no emotional response to it, put the pen down. Noone else, particularly the people who actually understand what you're talking about, wants to have to deal with your low-empathy bullshit.

 

[Lieju]

The rape scene you talk about in the comic was, for all intents and purposes, only there to be there. There were numerous ways he could have handled it that would have been more acceptable than how it turned out.

Not really. I see the purpose as twofold, one within the narrative and one meta;

Firstly, within the story the purpose of the rape scene is to strike deliberately at Kick-Ass. It plays right into the idea of the book, as characters follow common comic book tropes because they're common comic book tropes [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge]. It's done because it's a more graphic version of what a comic book supervillain might do, and ************ is actively trying to be a comic book supervillain. That isn't to say it's a great artistic decision, but from a character perspective it does make sense.

Secondly, it reinforces to the audience that ************ isn't the goofy kid playing at being a bad guy that he was in the first book. He's deliberately turning himself into a horrible ****. The first Kick-Ass, hyperviolence aside, was basically a tale of kids playing at being heroes and villains. ************'s rampage is the signal that he's not playing anymore, even if Kick-Ass is.

Please note that this is not a defense of Millar or Kick-Ass 2, as I didn't really enjoy the book, and I found the rape scene in particular extremely disturbing. I'm just saying that the scene was hardly thrown in just for the sake of having a rape scene; it's included as part of a character arc for the villain. Whether or not there were better ways for it to be done is up for debate, but to call the scene gratuitous isn't really accurate.

I haven't read the book in question, so tell me, how is the victim's point of view handled? Because wouldn't showing what being rape is like for the victim realistically and focusing on her point of view taking the common trope and bringing it to the real world, showing the real consequences?

Because wasn't the point of the comic to show what superheroes and those tropes would be in real life? Handling the rape like that is not commenting on the trope, it's just using it.

 

[Abomination]

I'm glad he put rape in his comics and I'm glad he told people to stop being so knee-jerky about it.

Girl gets raped, it's not nice, the comic doesn't portray it as a "good" thing... why is this an issue? Is rape not allowed to happen in any work of fiction? Or is there some certified rape author accreditation someone must achieve before they can write about it?

************ is an evil bastard, how evil? He rapes people. Yeah, it's not Shakespeare, it's a bit ham-fisted but it's still valid.

 

[Lieju]

I'm glad he put rape in his comics and I'm glad he told people to stop being so knee-jerky about it.

Girl gets raped, it's not nice, the comic doesn't portray it as a "good" thing... why is this an issue? Is rape not allowed to happen in any work of fiction? Or is there some certified rape author accreditation someone must achieve before they can write about it?

************ is an evil bastard, how evil? He rapes people. Yeah, it's not Shakespeare, it's a bit ham-fisted but it's still valid.

It's not that rape shouldn't be portrayed, but we can criticise it when it's done badly.

To give you an example of a woman raped in a comic, that helps male character's development, and is written by a man, that I have no problem with;

Neil Gaiman's Sandman.
There is a part where the muse Calliope is imprisoned by an author who keeps her for decades locked in a room and rapes her to get inspiration. Eventually Dream shows up to free her.

But it's her story, and it's not sexualised. Also it's more than cheap shock, the rapist is more nuanced that 'lol, evil', and it takes the concept of a muse and turns it horror.

Millar, on the other hand, has stated that rape is the same as death in a narrative, and this is wrong. I'm going to repeat myself here; death is about those left behind, rape is about the victim.

When death happens in real life, the people it touches are the friends, and the family, and the enemies etc. Rape leaves a living victim. So it's disturbing how common it's to put that in a story and then make it about the victim's boyfriend/dad/etc like that's the person most affected by it.

 

[rob_simple]

This is not the kind of person who is fit to write about rape. If you are writing it and find you have no emotional response to it, put the pen down. Noone else, particularly the people who actually understand what you're talking about, wants to have to deal with your low-empathy bullshit.

Which is why no one is forcing anyone to read it. Honestly, I'd never heard about any of this Millar controversy before, but now that I have, and if I had a problem with rape fiction, I would stay away from his work because it wouldn't appeal to me. You can say he is not fit to write about it all you want, but if he's still getting paid to do it, that means that someone thinks it's profitable for him to do so, which means that a lot of people either disagree with you, or just don't care.

Also:

It's basically giving the middle finger to a surprisingly large section of the female population (and a small but statistically significant proportion of the male population). You can bleat on about how murder is so much worse, but there aren't going to be murder victims in your audience.

Okay, how about getting stabbed/assaulted? I'm willing to bet that there are just as many victims of GBH in the world as there are victims of rape --possibly more, seeing as that Venn diagram probably overlaps a lot-- so how is it okay to give the middle finger to a gigantic portion of the population who have been affected by regular violence and make incredibly brutal scenes of regular assault?

And I know you're going to say something along the lines of 'getting beaten isn't as bad as getting raped because of the violation part' but, personally speaking, if it's a knife in my stomach (which funnily enough Kickass also has) or a cock up my arse, I'm not going to be in a rush to re-live either experience.

 

[Boris Goodenough]

Having just read through it, they don't show the rape in the comic and when you see her again she's most likely in a coma from the assault (and not seen again after that).
Mother Fucker even gets flack from his own men for doing it.
This happens right after he slaughtered several kids and a fair few grown-ups in a suburban neighbourhood.

 

[Abomination]

I'm glad he put rape in his comics and I'm glad he told people to stop being so knee-jerky about it.

Girl gets raped, it's not nice, the comic doesn't portray it as a "good" thing... why is this an issue? Is rape not allowed to happen in any work of fiction? Or is there some certified rape author accreditation someone must achieve before they can write about it?

************ is an evil bastard, how evil? He rapes people. Yeah, it's not Shakespeare, it's a bit ham-fisted but it's still valid.

I don't think you're seeing the point here. The issue with the Kick-Ass 2 scene in particular is that it portrays the rape as entirely from the point of view of the rapist, who shows almost no remorse. If a point was to be made about how horrible and awful rape is, then there needs to be some communication about how the rape affects the actual victim or the people who care about them. Your whole argument is hyperbolic. Of course people can write about rape. It's a real world issue that affects people and affects them long after the time. But it needs to be treated with at least some gravitas, and at least some poignancy. Rape being used as a shorthand for 'This guy is a bad guy' is cheap and pretty disgusting.

You could argue 'Well, why is murder not treated the same way?' Because it's a lot easier for most people to understand the consequences and even rationalise murder then it is rape. Unless you've been raped or know someone very close to you who's been raped, I don't know if most people 'get' why it's so atrocious, or what it does to someone mentally and physically for years after. It's much more complex and puts much more emphasis on victimization, and that's why it fails as simply a tool to show that the bad guy is bad.

You mean what it CAN do to someone mentally and physically...

It's a piece of fiction, it's viewing a scenario through the lens none of us are (I hope) ever going to see. It's a horrible act, just as horrible as writing about a villain doing any other horrible thing like bombing a school, or a hospital, or forcing people to kill each other... or any number of horrible things.

Yet for some arbitrary reason rape is off the table. You can write about someone dropping nukes on people, you can play a person who nukes an entire town just for shits and giggles... but rape is supposedly "worse".

It's all bad, which one is greater or lesser is entirely subjective. His methods of writing might be ham-fisted or "cheap" way of establishing how disgusting a character is... but that doesn't make him sexist, a misogynist or possessing of any other negative moral character flaw.

Where has he ever hinted at the idea that raping something isn't a horrible thing to do to someone?

 

[Terminal Blue]

Which is why no one is forcing anyone to read it. Honestly, I'd never heard about any of this Millar controversy before, but now that I have, and if I had a problem with rape fiction, I would stay away from his work because it wouldn't appeal to me. You can say he is not fit to write about it all you want, but if he's still getting paid to do it, that means that someone thinks it's profitable for him to do so, which means that a lot of people either disagree with you, or just don't care.

I'm just going to repeat myself.

2) A large proportion of the population is demonstrable incapable of reacting to rape with any kind of empathy, because they have no experience and no genuine understanding of it. For most men and a few women, rape is something which happens to other people and will never significantly affect them. People do not react to rape like they react to murder, they are not capable of understanding its effect on the victim because they have never imagined themselves as victims and will never have to.

Hint: This now includes you.

 

[Raikas]

Which is why no one is forcing anyone to read it. Honestly, I'd never heard about any of this Millar controversy before, but now that I have, and if I had a problem with rape fiction, I would stay away from his work because it wouldn't appeal to me. You can say he is not fit to write about it all you want, but if he's still getting paid to do it, that means that someone thinks it's profitable for him to do so, which means that a lot of people either disagree with you, or just don't care.

I think that's misrepresenting the issue though, because it's not about having "a problem with rape fiction". Plenty of people have written rape scenes in comics (Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis have all been mentioned in this thread) that aren't problematic in the same way because it's not about rape in-and-of itself.

I don't think there are many people out there who keep buying the work of people whose writing style they despise, so it's absurd to say that they should just stay away - they probably are, but they had to read something and recognize that it had issues in order to make that decision. And if you end up in a discussion of his work (because a movie based on it just came out, or because someone else is recommending something) then it makes sense to talk about what those issues are.

Like I said, I was a fan (years ago, so way before the KA2 scene we're talking about) until I realized that he was all show/no substance - but it took a while because you don't necessarily notice that there's no point right away. And that's precisely because plenty of other writers use the same kind of scene as build up to something that actually has meaning.