The always readable Sequart.com comes at Identity Crisis from two different directions in articles by Julian Darius (Sequential Culture) and Jeff Chon (Arbiter of Good Taste).
Chon comes out swinging on the “con” side:
“Remember when I said superhero comics shouldn’t lose their sense of wonder, because bad things happen? Well, um… yeah. Anyway, as you now know, Sue Dibny was brutally raped and murdered in a cheap shock tactic so manipulative it made me pine for the simple subtlety of The Passion of the Christ.”
He’s looking at sex and the modern super-hero, and, unsurprisingly, the picture isn’t pretty:
“I understand how desperately superhero comics want to grow up, but the way they do reminds one of those child beauty pageants: it doesn’t look quite right, it makes you a little angry at times, and it’s sufficiently creepy.”
Darius is more charitably inclined towards the comic, and he makes some fervent arguments on its behalf. First, he looks at whether or not murder and rape, as they’re presented in IC, are used to crassly manipulative effect:
“Few would be so crass as to condemn a drama about a woman who was raped coming to terms with that abuse and learning to relate again to men. Although, it is worth pointing out, such a drama would more than likely be staged in the vein of Lifetime’s original movies, which notoriously play with the line of crass manipulation in order to advance emotionally a particularly fact-starved version of feminism.”
Now, I’ll line up and bash Lifetime any time you like. But, as much violence and despair as Lifetime’s dramas heap on women, the dramas are generally about the women. They’re routinely victimized, frequently in sensationalistic and vulgar fashions, but they just as frequently work to achieve closure and healing and seek redress for the wrongs done to them. Overwhelmingly more often than not, they’re the protagonists in the stories, not the damaged accessories to the protagonists. Darius reinforces this difference for me when he says:
“As always, the focus is upon the heroes’ actions to prevent this danger to their loved ones — except that, in Identity Crisis, this leads the heroes to take greater, more disturbing steps.”
I think Darius simplifies things a bit when he summarizes what he perceives to be the bulk of the objections to That Comic:
“But the attack against Identity Crisis has not been the relatively minor argument that DC neglected to place two words [a “mature readers” warning] on the cover. In fact, the attack has been distinctly retrogressive: that this [rape] has no place in super-hero comics. That, in essence, we ought to go back twenty or so years.”
Again, I don’t think that’s a comprehensive statement on the objections people have raised about the title. Certainly some people don’t think rape has a place in a comic with Superman in it, but just as many find its narrative flawed, don’t think it works as a mystery, find it sensationalistic or cynical… the list goes on. As Darius himself says:
“Those of us who appreciate comics as art are more inclined to ask how smart the story is, how clever the execution. Rather than, you know, condemning outright.”
And I think that’s precisely what a number of people have done, from a variety of perspectives. I think it’s much more complex and varied a response than a knee-jerk resistance to a depiction of rape in comics.
Darius concludes:
“Identity Crisis, like it or not, is teaching us about the super-hero genre — and it’s doing this both within the text, in terms of extending the old generic threat to the hero’s loved ones, and without, as we observe the retrogressive, didactic, and vitriolic responses to the series.”
What about the didactic and vitriolic defenses of it? 😉