Agent Agnes
awasteoftimecomic:
“I didn’t plan to stop doing Douchebags of Comics, but I’ll admit I lost some enthusiasm for it right when it was starting to catch on, because as more people started seeing it, I started spending more time fielding people who were...

awasteoftimecomic:

I didn’t plan to stop doing Douchebags of Comics, but I’ll admit I lost some enthusiasm for it right when it was starting to catch on, because as more people started seeing it, I started spending more time fielding people who were outraged and offended by things that I had said.  I don’t regret anything that I said in the blogs attached to the drawings I did, but I started to feel like maybe people weren’t taking the whole thing in the spirit in which it was intended.

I liked using the word “Douchebag” because it has a variety of connotations and I could use it to write about people ranging from hardcore hateful nutjobs like Orson Scott Card to creators who have said or done some douchey things but who aren’t nearly as awful.  Some of the responses I got outraged that I called so-and-so a “douchebag,” though, made me kind of wonder if people knew what I meant by the word.  I had somebody tell me they thought I was verging on libel by calling people that.  Really?  Calling somebody a name isn’t libel.  It’s not accusing them of a crime, and I don’t think I accused anybody of anything that they hadn’t said of their own volition and that wasn’t already a matter of public record.  I’ve had a discussion numerous times about the odd way that people seem to think freedom of speech applies to somebody saying something awful, but does not apply to another person responding to that, and it still confuses me.

But I never planned to stop doing the cards, and then good ol’ Mark Millar came along and said something that made me think, “Well now, if that isn’t the very definition of douche.”

I think the word “douchebag” was invented for people who say things like: “The ultimate [act] that would be the taboo, to show how bad some villain is, was to have somebody being raped, you know?  I don’t really think it matters. It’s the same as, like, a decapitation. It’s just a horrible act to show that somebody’s a bad guy.”

Mark Millar said that recently.

I think anybody who is asked a serious question about rape and replies, “I don’t really think it matters,” is automatically a douchebag.

I had been kind of on the fence about whether or not I would make a Douchebags of Comics card of Mark Millar, because I really did like the Kick-Ass movie.  I liked it, though, without actually having read the book.

The interesting thing that a lot of people I’ve talked to have gone through with Frank Miller is the long process of realizing that he’s not joking, there’s a lot of how he really sees the world in his comics.  I defended Sin City for years because I honestly thought I was reading satire.  I thought he was sending up the most adolescent tropes of crime comics and noir stories.  And then you realize, he wasn’t really in on the joke.

The Kick-Ass movie is hyper violent, has a child saying “cunt,” and so on, but the premise was “real” people taking on superhero roles, so the idea seemed to me to have people who you actually care about- Which you do, thanks to really good performances by Aaron Johnson and Chloe Moretz- and who have real emotional lives, and then to put those people into the ridiculous cartoon tropes of some of the worst superhero comics.  I thought that the movie was *commenting* on those tropes, not *celebrating* them.

I still think the movie actually might have been doing that.  The comics it was based on, however, weren’t nearly smart enough to be operating on those multiple levels.  When I finally read the comics, what had made me smile in the movie left me repulsed and rolling my eyes.  I realized what I had enjoyed in the movie had been almost entirely due to texture that had been added after the fact to the puerile work that Millar had done.

Then I read the second series of comics.  Ugh.

There are a thousand things obviously wrong and stupid about Millar’s comments on rape on any number of levels, but purely on a writing level, it’s just as repulsive.  That’s Hack School 101: If you want to show a guy’s a bad guy and can’t be bothered with giving the reader any complicated portrait of him, have him rape somebody or kill a dog.  You’re doing this because the villain in your hack writing is nothing more than a device, something for the “hero” to react to, so that you know he’s reacting to a bad thing.  This way when you have your hero doing stupid over-the-top violent garbage because that’s all you know how to write, the audience knows they’re supposed to be cheering him because he’s doing these things as a reaction to the guy who did that bad thing.

Thus the rape scene isn’t actually there to discuss rape, it’s there to motivate the male hero to do stuff, in the case of hack Mark Millar, childish action movie violent stuff.  So, in the second Kick-Ass series, we have a girl getting gang raped so that we can get to the ‘spolsions.  If that’s not repulsive to you, there’s something very wrong with you.

Millar wasn’t just going for hack honorable mention, though, he was in a break-neck sprint to be Hack of the Year, so in Kick-Ass 2 there’s also a dog that gets killed.  Because that’s what bad guys do.  The dog gets decapitated while they’re at it.  Because, you know, decapitation is just like rape.

Todd McFarlane also recently went on a little binge of stupid, sexist comics about how the portrayals of women and so on in comics are just part of the superhero genre, and that the genre is inherently for guys, so what’s the problem.  He trotted out the usual logical fallacies and false equivalencies- The men are objectified too!- and generally made a fool of himself.  There’s a good rundown of his comments and also Millar’s here.  Let’s put aside for a moment that idea that comics are just for guys, since that’s obviously dumb and not true, and pretend that comics actually *were* just for guys- What kind of guys like this stuff?  I’m assuming McFarlane considers himself a guy, so what he’s saying is that he likes stupid, narrow, sexist entertainment.

They’re not just saying that comics are for guys, they’re saying that comics are for particularly dim-witted guys in a perpetual arrested adolescence.

The fact that people saying things like this are, to some, the face of an entire art form is pretty infuriating to those of us who try to create comics on a higher level.  Millar and McFarlane both got their start doing work for the big two superhero companies, and their “creator owned” work has mostly just been derivative versions of the same kinds of comics.  You have an amazing art form, a medium that’s able to produce things like Fun Home and Maus, and yet when people look at it they mostly see endless variations on these same ideas, and to do something “new” with his 50th superhero deconstruction, the only think Millar can think of is to add more shock value.

So we have the same story that was used to sell kids cereal and action figures 50 years ago, only now with more rape!

Ask yourself if that’s progress.

The fans are part of the problem, as well.  Many many people who refer to themselves as comic book fans are really only fans of a handful of decades-old licensed characters, and a few creators that pump out endless different versions of them.  It’s like if somebody went around calling themselves a serious cineaste, and the only films they had ever seen in their life were Ninja Turtles movies.  I use that as an example because I actually *like* Ninja Turtles, but I can recognize that there’s a difference between The Secret of the Ooze and Citizen Kane.

What I’m trying to say, people, is if you’re actually a comic book fan, you can do better.  Stop reading sexist garbage churned out by ridiculous man children.  There are actually superhero comics that have been done and that are being done today that are entertaining and worth reading, but there’s also a whole other world of art and culture out there.  Read the stuff that’s worth your time, and quit rewarding the people who are producing abject junk.