This is the eighth and final installment of a series about sexual assault and comics. You can find the previous posts here:
Introduction
Rape in the Gutters
Writing Sexual Violence, Part 1
Writing Sexual Violence, Part 2
The Widowmaker
Is It Too Much to Ask?
Rape Is Rape Is Rape
Same-Sex Assault
A bit over a week into May, I’m finally posting the final installment of the Sexual Assault (in comics) Awareness Month series. It’s somewhat fitting that this is going up after April has ended, because it’s going to be a brief retrospective of the month, along with some reflections on writing the preceding installments and the responses they’ve gotten. And (because you demandedactually, politely requestedit) I’m also going to talk about secondary survivors in real life, and what to do if you learn that a friend or loved one has been assaulted. If you want to skip straight to that part, click here.
First, some good news: Several people asked if I could post the text to the Conan #39 letter column. I’ve talked to the Official Types, and the answer is ‘yes’but not ‘til Conan #40 hits the stands on the 16th. If you don’t want to wait, you can always shell out the $2.99it’s a one-shot, so you won’t be paying for an issue mid-story.
Speaking of Conan #39, the Dark Horse and Conan.com forums’ responses to the letter column have thus far been really positive. There’s also been a bit of spillover into the Girl-Wonder forum from Conan.com, which makes me really happyI think they’re two communities that could learn a lot from each other.
In general, this series seems to have gotten a lot of press. It’s been linked a lot, and not just at When Fangirls Attack. What I’m hoping that means is that a bunch of people are learningand, more important, askinga lot about sexual assault, in and out of comics. It’s really important that we keep this dialogue open: Sexual Assault Awareness Month is over, but sexual violence continues to happen year-round. Keep talking and keep questioning.
Most of all, talk to comics publishers, creators, and editors. One of the most frequent responses I got to the Conan #39 column was ‘It’s about time someone talked about this stuff.’ Hold the industry accountable. Vote with your dollars, but also make your opinions heard. Want to see more stuff like the Conan #39 letter column? Let editors know. Pissed off that another female hero has had sexual abuse retconned into her backstory? Say so (but do it civilly, please, and bear in mind that the folks you’re writing to are people, too, with their own perspectives, experiences, and reasons. Be willing to listen to their angles, and they’ll listen to yours).
And comics pros, this is a challenge to you, too. Keep the dialogue open from your side, and take responsibility for the stories you write and publish. On that note, I want once again to thank Kurt Busiek, who wrote both Conan #39 and the story that inspired the column in it for taking the time to drop by and lend his voice to the discussion on the Girl-Wonder forum. If (probably ‘when,’ since you’re in the next town over) we eventually meet, remind me to buy you a drink.
I was going to post links to every blog, website, and publication that had mentioned SAAM in relation to comics, but I lost my partial list, and I don’t have the energy to track them all down. So, I’ll make a deal with you: post URLs on the forum, and I’ll add them to this column.
[SPACEHOLDER SO RACHEL REMEMBERS WHERE TO STICK THOSE LINKS WHEN YOU START POSTING THEM]
On the personal sideDamn, that was intense. This has been a really, really difficult series to put together and keep going. Researching and writing two columns a weekespecially columns as long as this month’s have beentakes more than twice the time and energy of researching and writing one, and it’s been a constant struggle to keep updating remotely on time. It’s also been incredibly draining to write 4000-plus words a week about sexual assault. When I was doing crisis advocacy, I was able to keep my rape crisis center work fairly compartmentalized so that there was relatively little bleed into my work and personal lives. That doesn’t work so well with this column: I’m writing it at home, as me, about my work. I haven’t really allowed myself the convenience of a warm-but-detached professional personathis is me, skinned knees, purple hair, and allso there’s very little to keep the material I’m writing about from getting under my skin.
That said, writing the SAAM series has also been an incredible experience. This stuff matters a lot to me, and being able to say something useful about it, start a couple discussions, and maybe encouraging a couple people think about sexual assault in comics feels like a pretty damn worthwhile way to have spent a month.
Still, it’s going to be nice to write about something else for a while. Like kittens. Or writing believable bisexual characters. Or kittens who write believable bisexual characters.
But before that, I’m going to keep my promise and take some time to talk about and to secondary survivors.
A secondary survivor is someone whose life has been affected by a sexual assault she or he wasn’t directly involve in. It’s a broad term, indicating anyone from family members and friends of survivors, to witnesses, to anyone else whose life has been impacted by a specific act of sexual violence.
Even if they haven’t been assaulted themselveswhich isn’t a given, since many secondary survivors are themselves survivors of sexual assaultsecondary survivors can find themselves dealing with a lot of the same emotions as survivorsanger, fear, sorrow, guilt, and so forthwhile trying to support someone they care about. The experience of supporting a friend, loved one, or acquaintance in the aftermath of an assault can also be very difficult and deeply draining. Many secondary survivors struggle to balance their own needs with the demands of supporting a primary survivor.
So, what do you do if someone you love is assaulted?
First and foremost, make sure theyand youare physically safe. If the assault has occurred recently, you may need to help your friend get to a safe place. If they have been injured, you should encourage them to seek medical help. Depending on the circumstances, you may be at risk as well. Your first priority should be physical safety.
Beyond that, there really isn’t a single set of rules. You have a right to experience and express your reactions and emotions, but when you are comforting a friend who has been assaulted, it’s important to remember that the conversation isn’t really about you. Don’t make it about your experiences and reactions: let your friend experience theirs.
No matter how angry you are, avoid acts of vigilante violence or revenge. If you feel that you must act in response to the assault, act constructively: do something that will actively contribute to your friend’s sense of well-being or safety without harming anyone else.
Understandand this is the hard partthat no matter what you say or do, you cannot fix what has happened; you cannot make it right. What you can do is make it easier to face.
Earlier in April, a friend of mine wrote in her blog about her own experiences as a victim of a voyeur. She wrote about the responses she’d heard to her story, and about the very simple responses she wished she’d gottenthe responses she should have gotten:
I believe you.
You did the right thing.
It wasn’t your fault.
Think about those responses, and what they mean. The phrasing doesn’t matter; it’s the ideas behind it.
I believe you.
Don’t question the veracity of your friend’s story or the validity of their experience. You are not a judge or a jury; it is not your responsibility to determine whether that story is true or false. You will not be making arrests or pressing charges.
Skepticism is often one of the first responses assault survivors get. It’s a natural response to haveno one wants to believe that one human being would do something that awful to another, let alone to someone you love. But when someone you love comes to you after being assaultedminutes, months, or yearsthey’re not coming for cross-examination, but for support. Those three wordsI believe youand the idea behind them are an awfully powerfuland awfully importantthing for an assault survivor to hear.
You did the right thing.
Anything that gets you out alive is the right thing to have done. It’s tempting to pick an assault apart, figure out what you or they could have done differently; it’s a way of grasping for control of an out-of-control situation.
But the truth of the matter? If they’re alive, they did the right thing. And that’s all that matters.
It wasn’t your fault.
It’s tempting for victims to grasp for control by trying to take responsibility for what happened to them. The same is true of secondary survivors, who often find themselves playing through scenarios that begin with ‘if only I was there…’
They weren’t raped because of anything you did or didn’t do. They weren’t raped because of anything they did or didn’t do. They were raped because a rapist was there.
But even with this stuff, there is no script. Every situation, every assault, and every person is different, and sometimes you have to rely on your own instincts for the right words.
My finaland perhaps most importantpiece of advice to secondary survivors is Take care of you, too. When someone you care about goes through an experience as traumatic as sexual assault, it’s easy to put your own feelings and needs on the back burner and give until you’re drained.
It’s important to know your limits, both practical and personal: what you can offer without resentment or excessive strain, and what of that will be genuinely useful. Remember that being a good friend or relative doesn’t have to mean being a therapist, doctor, lawyer, chauffeur, and crisis counselor. Sometimes, the best and most helpful thing you can do is help your friend find someone else to meet a need or perform a service with which you’re not able to provide or simply aren’t comfortable with. Letting yourself become your friend’s sole source of support isn’t fair to or healthy for either of you.
At the same time, make sure that you have an adequate support system in place. Supporting a survivor can be really draining, and secondary survivors often have their own sets of assault-related issues to deal with. External support is really important, especially when someone else is already leaning on you. Many rape crisis centers and women’s centers extend their services to secondary survivors as well as immediate victims; don’t be shy about taking advantage of those, or of talking to a therapist, counselor, clergyperson, or other support person while you deal with your friend’s trauma. There are also support groupsonline and in real lifefor the friends and families of assault survivors and victims of other violent crimes. Your local rape crisis center can put you in touch with resources in your area.
Although this is the last of the Sexual Assault Awareness Month series, please don’t hesitate to continue discussing the stuff that’s come upand to ask any questions you still haveon the Girl-Wonder forum. If you need a less public means of contacting me, you can PM me on Girl-Wonder or reach me via email, at rachel(at)girl-wonder(dot)org.
Next week, we’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming. In the meantime, you can discuss this column here.

This is the seventh installment of a series about sexual assault and comics. You can find the previous posts here:
Introduction
Rape in the Gutters
Writing Sexual Violence, Part 1
Writing Sexual Violence, Part 2
The Widowmaker
Is It Too Much to Ask?
Rape Is Rape Is Rape
April is done, but I’m not: there are still a few topics I want to touch before the SAAM series comes to a close. However, this will be the final column dealing directly with sexual violence in comics; the nextand lastSAAM column will be about real-life resources for secondary survivors (in response to several requests) and my general reflections on the series and the responses its received. After that, we’ll return to the regularly-scheduled programming.
Today, though, I’m going to write about same-sex sexual assaultsand their absencein comics.
I struggled a lot with how to handle this topic, because, even more than heterosexual sexual assault, same-sex sexual assault is divided down gender lines. Assaults with male perpetrators and victims are perceived and portrayed very differently from those with female perpetrators and victims, both in and out of comics, reflecting stereotypes based on both gender and sexual orientation.
When I was researching this column, I asked a number of friends and colleagues whether they could think of examples of same-sex rape in mainstream comics. A few tentatively mentioned Apollo’s assault in The Authority. One faintly remembered a teenage Spider-Man being molested by an older boy; another recalled that Bruce Banner had been the victim of an attempted rape at some point. I remembered Starr’s rape from Preacher. Soon, we were stumped. And if we didn’t count Lost Girls (which it hardly seemed fair to), we couldn’t think of any same-sex assaults involving women at all.
Of the assaults we did think ofas well as ones I discovered latermany involved an adult perpetrator and a juvenile victim. In most, the perpetrators, victims, or both were gay. And in a few, I was horrified to see victims become gay or bisexual as a result of their assaults.
I’m going to table the pederasty for nowit’s really a whole other discussionwith the qualifier that its prevalence among same-sex assaults in comics reinforces the harmful and dangerous fallacy that homosexuality and pedophilia go hand-in-hand.
That leaves sexual assaults perpetrated upon and by adult men. Of the three I mentioned aboveApollo, of The Authority; Starr of Preacher; and Bruce Banner of The Incredible Hulkonly one (Apollo’s) was handled in a remotely appropriate manner. The other two were grotesque parodies, one played for laughs (Starr’s) and the other for homophobic shock value (Bruce’s). What we learn is that all gay men are rapists; that being raped by other men can make previously straight men gay or bisexual. If I had to choose one of the two that was more offensive, I honestly don’t know which I’d pick: Starr’s rapeparticularly its long-term effect on his sexual proclivitiesis a horrifically twisted portrayal of rape-as-pleasure, but Bruce’s attempted assault features the most blatant and offensive homosexual stereotypes I’ve ever seen in a superhero book.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Well, for starts, over 50% if men who are victims or perpetrators of same-sex rapes identify as exclusively straight. Being raped is not a transcendent experience that moves victims to reevaluate their sexual preferencesunless by ‘reevaluate their sexual preferences’ one means ‘shy away from sexual encounters or engage in extremely risky activities.’
And not one of the scenarios really deals with the long-term aftermath of sexual assault, which is often much harsher for male victims of same-sex assaults than for any other population. Very few ever report their assaults, and those who do are often subject to the sameor worsetreatment as their female counterparts: in addition to victim blaming, they frequently face homophobiaregardless their sexual orientationsand occasionally even criminal charges for ‘crimes against nature.’
But what about the women?
Woman-to-woman sexual violence is nearly invisible in our society; even more so in our media. Few people are aware that women can sexually assault other women, let alone that they actually do. Unlike same-sex sexual violence between men, same-sex assaults between women are much more likely to take place within preexisting intimate relationships; they’re also more likely to involve verbal and emotional coercion or threats rather than physical violence, although that’s far from a universal rule.
This situation is made more complicated by the fact that until fairly recently, sexual and domestic violence were almost invisible within the lesbian community. Survivors who came forward within that community were often accused of lying, because our cultural concepts of sexual violence require a male perpetrator and are therefore antithetical to a community of women. Like male survivors of same-sex assaults, women who have been raped by other women frequently find themselves the victims of homophobia, profiling, and even criminal charges.
When writers portray same-sex assaults in comics, they are doing so in the context not only of their cultural conditioning and prejudices gender and sexuality, but also of internalized homophobia. Furthermore, they’re writing about survivors who suffer much worse treatment at the hands of law enforcementand often even friends and familythan perhaps an other group of victims of crime; perpetuating and reinforcing that treatment through inaccurate caricatures and serious assaults played for uncomfortable laughs is lazy and irresponsible writing.
CODA: In the discussion of Rape Is Rape Is Rape on the Girl-Wonder forum, a poster mentioned the upcoming comic Satan’s Sodomy Baby, which involves (among other questionable content) same-sex rape. I’m going to copy and paste my response here, because I think it addresses an important issue: that the standards for the portrayal of assault are very differentand very rightly sofor serious and satirical comics:
SSB is very, very clearly satire, and it’s published as such; it’s a spinoff from a very off-color humor comic (The Goon, which I heartily recommend to anyone with a strong stomach and a twisted sense of humor). While I could pick it apart and insist that it was in fact subtle commentary on issues in mainstream comics, I’m much, much more inclined to chalk it up to the fact that Eric Powell’s sense of humor starts where most of ours taper off into confusion and horror.
It’s also being shrink-wrappedwhich means it shouldn’t be sold to minors. Its cover will be black, with a large warning label. This is not a comic being marketed to people who will buy it without knowing exactly what they’re getting into.
Given that context, and given the tone of the story itself, I don’t think the rape that takes place in SSB can really be judged by the same standards as rapes in mainstreamparticularly superherocomics that are fairly serious in tone. No one is going to develop misconceptions about sexual violence in the real world based on its portrayal in SSB.
I am a queer feminist pacifist with very strong feelings about appropriate ways to present sexual assault in comics, and while I found SSB incredibly offensive, I was not offended by it.
Discuss this column here.

This is the sixth installment of a series about sexual assault and comics. You can find the previous posts here:
Introduction
Rape in the Gutters
Writing Sexual Violence, Part 1
Writing Sexual Violence, Part 2
The Widowmaker
Is It Too Much to Ask?
For the last few weeks, I’ve focused on the most commonand most commonly portrayedsort of rape: heterosexual assault, with a male assailant and a female victim. And while the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults do fit that profile, there are still a fair number in both real life and comics that don’t.
The exception I’m going to focus on in this column is one seldom acknowledged in or out of comics: male rape victims. As before, I’m going to start with an overview of some of the cultural assumptions that inform our portrayals of and reactions to men as the victims of sexual assault, then examine a specific trend in comics that I find particularly alarming. I’m also going to discussand contrastthe cases of two specific male survivors in the DCU: Jack Knight (Starman) and Oliver Queen (Green Arrow).
To look in any depth at the issue of men as assault survivors, it’s important to first examine some of our culture’s assumptions regarding the nature of masculinity.
We see men as active rather than passive; this is extended into the assumption that aggressiveness and even violence are inherently masculine traits, and, in turn, that they’re traits inherent to all ‘real’ (often read as ‘heterosexual’) men.
Sexually, this stereotype is magnified even further. Men fuck; they are not fucked. They take the active role; they penetrate; they act upon others. At the same time, women are assumed to take the passive role; they are penetrated; they are acted upon.
Furthermore, men are sexually insatiable. Their sex drives are so powerful that they are nearly entities in their own rights. They are constantly or near-constantly aroused, and only in exceptional circumstances will they turn down an opportunity for intercourse.
So, we’re culturally predisposed to assume that ‘real’ men cannot be victims of sexual assault, just as ‘real’ women cannot perpetrate it. Which is bullshit.
In the United States, one in thirty-three men is a survivor of rape or attempted rape. That’s a very conservative estimate, because it’s based on law enforcement records: only one in five women who is raped reports her assault to the police (and that’s a high estimateothers range as low as one in twenty), and the rate of reporting among male victims is far lower.
Here are some popular myths about male survivors of sexual assault:
Men only get raped in prison.
Actually, 83% of sexual assaults perpetrated against men occur outside of prisons.
The only males who are raped are children or weak adults.
Like female assault survivors, male assault survivors don’t fit into any one profile. They are all ages, all races, and all levels of physical fitness.
If a man is raped by / rapes another man, he must be gay.
50% of male rape survivors identify as exclusively heterosexual, as do an even higher percentage of their attackers.
And as a corollary:
If a man experiences an erection or ejaculates during an assault, it is proof that he wanted / enjoyed it.
Erection and ejaculation are involuntary physiological responses not only to sexual arousal, but also to pain, fear, and anxiety. If a man experiences an erection or ejaculates while he’s being assaulted, it makes the assault no less traumatic or valid.
Women cannot rape men.
While only a slim two percent of sexual assailants are female, women can and do rape men.
This last stereotype tends to be particularly insidious. While we assume the innocence of female assailants, we also deny and invalidate the experiences of men who are assaulted by women, many of whom are themselves so culturally conditioned to believe that men cannot be raped by women that they are reluctant to acknowledge their own experiences as sexual assault, regardless the personal or physical impact those assaults may have had.
Because we tend to perceive the male libido as an overwhelmingly powerful entityone which can be neither stopped nor stemmed, and which is in fact so powerful that it can literally force men to act in ways that they would never otherwise considerwe assume that no situation in which a man is offered sexual release can occur entirely without his implicit consent. For a woman to initiate sexual intercourse with a man who is unconscious, delirious, or otherwise impaired is therefore implicitly ethicalor at least not overtly unethical to the same extent that a man taking the same liberties would be.
That assumption carries over into comics perhaps more forcefully than any other false stereotype of sexual violence. A surprising number of male characters in mainstream comics are survivors of sexual assault; of those, the overwhelming majority have been assaulted by women, and most of those assaults were never acknowledged as more than mildly inappropriate behavior on the parts of the perpetrators.
I find this trend deeply upsetting for several reasons. First of all, it ignores the reality that the vast majority of men who are assaulted are assaulted by other men, which also reinforces the obsessively heteronormative attitudes of most mainstreamand nearly all superherocomics: writers and editors (and readerssee the letter I quoted regarding Conan #12 in ‘Sexual Assault (in comics) Awareness Month: The Widowmaker’) assume that to portray a male superhero as the victim of same-sex sexual assault would undercut his otherwise unimpeachable heterosexuality.
At the same time, the treatment of female perpetrator / male victim assaults in comics is alarming because of the rarity with which the assaults are recognized as such. The comparatively ‘gentle’ nature of most or all of those rapesovert physical force or threats of violence almost never come into playcreates a spurious distinction between non-consensual sex and sexual assault and downplays the violation of the victim and the culpability of the perpetrator in the former.
I chose Jack Knight and Oliver Queen as the two survivors whose cases I wanted to examine because of the ostensible similarities between their situations. Both are second-string DCU superheroes. Both were assaulted by women who functioned primarily as their opponents but with whom they had substantially more complex relationships than the standard hero / villain rivalry. Neither was conscious of capable of either consent or struggle during his assaultJack was unconscious, and Ollie was delirious from a fever. Finally, both were raped by women whose main goal was procreative.
Despite their ostensible similarities, the two rapes were portrayed very, very differently; likewise, both primary and secondary survivors reacted very differently to the assaults and their long-term effects (both men have sons as a result of the assaults).
The first caseand the one that I think was the far better of the twois that of Jack Knight. Early in Starman, Jack was kidnapped and drugged by his self-styled arch-nemesis, the Mist. It was not until over a year later that it was revealed that Mist had raped Jack while he was unconscious and nine months later had given birth to ‘their’ baby. She informs Jack of all of this in a letter (ellipses indicate dialogue outside of the text of the letter):
My Dearest Jackie. My love.
…
I’m sure by now you’ve questioned why I haven’t returned to Opal and struck again. The fact is I won’t. Not for a while longer, anyway. The reason for this? I’ll get straight to the point.
I’ve had a baby boy. Our child. You’re a father, Jack. Doesn’t that make you feel good to know?
…
When I had you at the toy factory. When you were unconscious. I lay with you. We conceived the child then, with you in my arms so peaceful and still. That really was quite a day, all in all, wasn’t it?
I’ve named the boy Kyle. That was my dear brother’s name, as you know, but what you might not know is that it is also my father’s real name.
The boy’s middle name is Theo. I was keen that he have a little of both our fathers in him.
…
I will teach our son to hate you, Jack. He will be my brother and father boy. Does that make you feel good, knowing you’ve sired such venom?
I’m enjoying our son at present. We’ve been traveling through Europe, enjoying the sights and the sun.
But I will return soon. More will die, and you’ll be unable to prevent it.
Love as always, Mist.
P.S. Our son’s eyes are blue.
Although Mist couches the terms of their coupling in language of romance and consent, it’s obviously mocking: both she and Jack are clearly aware of the violation she has perpetrated. Our first glimpse of Jack’s reaction is from his father’s perspective, as Jack sits on the porch of the elder Knight’s observatory, clutching the letter, tears streaming down his face.
The term ‘rape’ is never used to describe Jack’s assault, but it is clearly implied, and the impact that learning of both the assault and its consequencesthe birth of a childhave on Jack are inarguable. Both before and after the rape, Mist goes out of her way to use terms of endearment when talking to Jacki.e. calling him ‘my love’precisely because she knows the insinuation of intimacy upsets him; she is generally characterized as an aggressor and as the perpetrator of both sexual assault and ongoing harassment.
The first person to learn about Jack’s rape and the birth of his son is Ted Knight, Jack’s father. As I mentioned above, we first learn about those events when Ted finds Jack crying on the porch of Ted’s observatory. Jack gives the letter to Ted, who reads it aloud, with occasional comments. He doesn’t question the validity of Jack’s reaction; once the letter is read, Ted simply sits down beside his son and puts an arm around him. The scene ends there.
Like Jack, Oliver Queen was assaulted by a womanostensibly a villain at the timewhile he was delirious. However, neither the comic nor the fan community acknowledged what happened as sexual assault. Dinah Lance, Ollie’s then-partner, blamed Ollie for the rape, treating it as a conscious act of infidelity. ShadoOllie’s rapistattempted to defend him by telling Dinah that he had called Shado by Dinah’s name during the rape, pseudo-exonerating Ollie but still failing to take responsibility for her own actions, which she blames on Dinah’s refusal to ‘give’ Ollie a child. And a few years later, we even get to see Ollie’s son Connor Hawke on the cover of his very own titleas Karen Healy so succinctly put it‘kissing daddy’s rapist.’
The fan community is likewise largely unwilling to accept Shado’s actions as rape. The Wikipedia entry on Green Arrow describes Ollie and Shadow as having become ‘on one occasion when Oliver was injured and delirious, lovers.’ ‘Cause, y’know, it’s so romantic to shoot the guy you like in the chest and then fuck him while he’s delirious from the infected wound. Good God. The DC Database Project isn’t much better, describing the incident as follows: ‘When Ollie was injured and being cared for by Shado, she proceeded to ‘rape’ him while he was unconscious, conceiving a son.’ She didn’t ‘rape’ him, folks. She raped him. It’s. Really. That. Simple. On the Broken Fronteir message board, a poster grudgingly acknowledges, ‘if you want to get technical is [sic] was pretty close to rape.’ Y’know, even if you’re not technical, it’s pretty close to rape, especially if you define ‘pretty close to’ as ‘the same thing as.’
Compare those with the Wikipedia entry on Jack Knight, which plainly states that Mist ‘drugs and rapes Jack’; Jack Knight is also listed in the Wikipedia category ‘Fictional Rape Victims.’ Comics blogger Postmodernbarney comments that ‘the only sexual assault against a male character I can think of that even comes close to being treated seriously as a sexual assault is the Mist’s rape of Jack Knight. She assaults him for the sole purpose of becoming pregnant. It’s a clear incident of an individual being robbed of their consent by another person.’ From what I’ve read, that reaction is fairly typical. Is it because Starman tends to attract a more sensitive and erudite audience than does Green Arrow? Maybe. But it’s also because fans and critics take interpretive cues from the tone of the comics they read. The simple truth of the matter is that Jack’s rape in Starman was presented as rape, and Ollie’s rape in Green Arrow wasn’t.
A final trend in commentary that I want to touch on is the tendency to respond to the rape of a male characteror an actual manby trying to compare it to a similar assault with a female victim. You can’t.
While it’s possible to compare the superficial details of two assaults, it’s both impossible and inappropriate to draw an accurate analogy between them in order to gauge their relative impact or severity. Rapelike any assaultis a deeply personal crime, and to try to place an assault on a linear scale does a grave disservice to the individual experience of each survivor.
Finally, a heads-up: Because it’s nearly the end of April and I got a bit behind last week, the next several posts are going to come in very quick succession. The next one will address with same-sex assaults in comics; I’m hoping to get it up later today, or tomorrow at the latest.
You can discuss this column here.

This is the fifth installment of a series about sexual assault and comics. You can find the previous posts here:
Introduction
Rape in the Gutters
Writing Sexual Violence, Part 1
Writing Sexual Violence, Part 2
The Widowmaker
In case you haven’t noticed, this column is late.
I’ve been thinking about rape, reading about rape, writing about rape, nonstop for the past three-and-a-half weeks. And I am burned the Hell out. Monday night, I was going to write a column about male sexual assault victims. Then, I took a break to watch a movie and couldn’t start back up. I wrote some more tonight, but not a column’s worth.
When I decided to recognize Sexual Assault Awareness Month with semiweekly columns addressing sexual violence in comics, I had no idea how deeply draining it would be. I’ve kept the schedule up for four weeks, but sometime around this past Monday, it just sort of dissolved. Work has been busier than usual. I’m trying to research a paper I have to present at the end of May and sew a costume from scratch in the same time frame. I have leaky pipes in my kitchen wall, and my landlord says they’re going to have to take out all the cabinets to fix them, which leaves us with nowhere for out dishes and a kitchen in disarray. My cat had fleas. I blew a kyu test. My aunt had massive surgery for uterine cancer.
And then I sit down at my computer and write about rape.
I’m tired of writing about rape, but not as tired as I am of having a reason to. I was working on the next column, which will be about male survivors of sexual violence and will involve case-studies of Starman and Green Arrow. So, I was writing this thing, and I was starting out by going over cultural assumptions about masculinity and how they affect male rape survivors and our attitudes towards them. I was going through myths and facts and I just got really fed up.
I shouldn’t have to write this stuff! It should be self-evident! And it blows my fucking mind that it’s not.
That’s uncharitable, I know. Not everyone had the enlightened liberal academic gender-egalitarian upbringing I did, which is another sort of privilege in action. But it still pisses me off.
I want to live in a world where I don’t have to explain that under the overwhelming majority of circumstances, if someone initiates sex with a person who is asleep, delirious, or otherwise impaired, it’s rape. I want to wake up and discover that survivors of same-sex sexual violence are never, ever prosecuted for ‘crimes against nature,’ and that men who are raped by other men are never abandoned by wives who assume that because they were victims of same-sex assaults, they must be gay.
While I’m at it, I also want a Yamaha Silent electric cello.
The column about male survivors of sexual assault will go up sometime in the next few days. But for now, I just need to breathe.
To tide you over, here are the lyrics to one of my very favorite feminist anthems, ‘Passionate Kisses,’ by Mary Chapin Carpenter:
Is it too much to ask
I want a comfortable bed that won’t hurt my back
Food to fill me up
And warm clothes and all that stuff
Shouldn’t I have this
Shouldn’t I have this
Shouldn’t I have all of this, and

Passionate kisses
Passionate kisses, whoa oh oh
Passionate kisses from you

Is it too much to demand
I want a full house and a rock and roll band
Pens that won’t run out of ink
And cool quiet and time to think
Shouldn’t I have this
Shouldn’t I have this
Shouldn’t I have all of this, and

Passionate kisses
Passionate kisses, whoa oh oh
Passionate kisses from you

Do I want too much
Am I going overboard to want that touch
I shout it out to the night
‘Give me what I deserve, ’cause it’s my right’
Shouldn’t I have this (shouldn’t I)
Shouldn’t I have this (shouldn’t I)
Shouldn’t I have all of this, and

Passionate kisses
Passionate kisses, whoa oh oh
Passionate kisses from you
Passionate kisses
Passionate kisses, whoa oh oh
Passionate kisses from you
You can discuss this column here.

This is the third installment of a series about sexual assault and comics. You can find the previous posts here:
Introduction
Rape in the Gutters
Writing Sexual Violence, Part 1
On Monday, I brought up some questions writers should consider if they plan to write a story involving sexual assault. Today, I’m going to give some more specific advice about how to write about sexual assault and sexual assault survivors accurately and respectfully.
An awful lot of the popular beliefs about sexual assault are wildly inaccurate. What you assume might be true of a survivoror a perpetratormay well be a culturally constructed myth.
Let’s take a look at a typical concept of sexual assault:
The victim is an attractive woman in her late teens to mid twenties. She is dressed attractively if not outright provocatively; she is alone in a risky neighborhood / bar, late at night. She may or may not be intoxicated.
The perpetrator is a man in his mid-to-late thirties. He lacks basic social skills and empathy for other people. He is somewhat disheveled and appears disreputable. He may attempt to make overtures at the victim shortly before outright assaulting her, but they have not encountered each other before that unless he has been stalking her. If the victim attempts to struggle, he will physically overpower her, usually without the aid of a weapon.
The assault itself will be violent. The victim’s body will be visibly bruised, and her clothing will be torn. In the aftermath of the assault, the victim will be either hysterical or catatonic.
If it’s a superhero comic, the rape will likely propel the victim into a career as a superhero. At some point, she will be forced to face her assailant, either literally or metaphorically, to come to terms with her previously repressed emotions / memories regarding the assault.
It’s an exaggeration, but not by much. It’s also informed entirely by cultural myths about rape. Let’s pick them apart and see how they work:
The victim is an attractive woman in her late teens to mid twenties.
We assume that the victim must be sexually desirable and physically vulnerable, which translates to a physically attractive and fairly young woman. Actually, people of all ages and genders are survivors of sexual assault, and physical attractiveness has very little to do with whom rapists target.
Rape is a crime of violence, not sexuality.
She is dressed attractively if not outright provocatively
Again, this stems from the assumption that sexual arousal is the driving force behind sexual assault. It also implies that the victim was assaulted at least partially because of her choice of clothing.
The majority of women who are assaulted are dressed normally at the time. Sexual assault has nothing to do with the victim’s behavior or choices.
she is alone in a risky neighborhood / bar, late at night
This implies again that the victim is at least partially responsible for her own assault; it also reinforces socioeconomic stereotypes, since the rape is assumed to have taken place in a badtransl: lower-classneighborhood.
Most perpetrators are of the same socioeconomic class as their victims, and most rapes occur in familiar places, within the victim’s routine.
She may or may not be intoxicated.
And again, we have some implication that the victim’s own irresponsible behavior has put her at risk.
This also implies a correlation between alcohol use and sexual assault. While the two are closely related in some environmentson college campuses, for example, the majority of rapes occur when one or both parties is chemically impaireddrinking neither exonerates perpetrators from responsibility for their actions nor makes victims culpable for what is done to them.
The perpetrator is a man in his mid-to-late thirties.
Most, but not all perpetrators are male. Furthermore, they are all ages. Again, perpetrators tend to fall into the same demographic groups as their victims, so it’s likelyalthough not universalthat the perpetrator and the victim will be relatively close in age (obviously, this doesn’t hold true for child abuse).
He lacks basic social skills and empathy for other people.
Most perpetrators are generally able to function normally in society. Some are married; many are conventionally attractive. Many regularly engage in consensual sex.
He is somewhat disheveled and appears disreputable.
This image of the perpetrator also feeds into socioeconomic assumptions about criminals. Again, perpetrators tend to target victims in their own socioeconomic classes, which cover a wide spectrum.
He may attempt to make overtures at the victim shortly before outright assaulting her
Based on the assumption that rapists are unable to attract consensual sexual partners because they are socially awkward, etc. See above.
but they have not encountered each other before that unless he has been stalking her
The majority of perpetrators are acquainted with their victims before the assault. Many are friends; some are family or intimate partners.
If the victim attempts to struggle, he will physically overpower her, usually without the aid of a weapon.
Okaythat’s actually pretty accurate. The majority of rapes don’t involve weapons.
The assault itself will be violent.
While sexual assault is an inherently violent act, perpetrators also use verbal coercion and target victims who are asleep, intoxicated, or otherwise impaired.
The victim’s body will be visibly bruised, and her clothing will be torn.
Even violent physical assaults can leave very little evidence. Clothing is surprisingly difficult to tear, and any assailant powerful enough to physically force himself or herself on another person can generally do so without causing them visible injuries.
In the aftermath of the assault, the victim will be either hysterical or catatonic.
I’m gonna rant on this one a bit, because it’s one of my favorite pet peeves. THERE IS NO ‘STANDARD’ OR RIGHT REACTION TO TRAUMA. Yeah, I’ve seen the stereotypical catatonic-in-fetal-position scene, but I’ve also seen survivors of really brutal assaults crack jokes in the ER. Different people cope with trauma in different ways, and it pisses me off endlessly when a survivor’s credibility is questioned because she or he didn’t react in the ‘right’ way to being raped.
If it’s a superhero comic, the rape will likely propel the victim into a career as a superhero. At some point, she will be forced to face her assailant, either literally or metaphorically, to come to terms with her previously repressed emotions / memories regarding the assault.
Obviously, this is where statistics cease to apply. This scenario is offensive not because it’s inaccurate, but because it’s so bloody overused.
That’s all for now. Next week, I’m going to look at a specific comicConan #12and the reactions it elicited.
In the meantime, you can discuss this column here.

This is the second installment of a series about sexual assault and comics. You can find the introduction here and the first installment here.
I previously discussed some of the more common trends in the portrayal of sexual assault in comics and came to the conclusion that the most problematic instances stem from a combination of ignorance and laziness: writers who use rape as a shortcut to add depth to characters without concerning themselves with the depth of the stories themselves. As a result, they end up relying on tired tropes and stereotypes, and their stories in turn perpetuate some of the most harmful and misogynistic myths about sexual violence.
What follows is a writers’ guide to portraying sexual assault. I’m going to break this down into two sections. The first will have to do with general story decisions, and the second (which I’lll post later in the week) will address some specifics. This guide is written with comics–particularly superhero comics–in mind, so if you’re not a comics writer, adapt as necessary to your form of choice.
So, without further ado, I present Rachel’s Guide to Writing About Sexual Assault:

1. Don’t.
   Sexual assault, particularly retconned sexual assault, is overused to the point that even the most sensitive and respectful depictions are met with groans of ‘Oh, no, not again.’
   Take a good look at your story. Why do you think a rape is what you need for it to progress? Is there something else that could fill the same function? Unless you have a damn good reason to include rape in a story, you probably shouldn’t. Using sexual assault as a motivation-in-a-box or an equivalent trope will do nothing but steal credibility and respect from a really serious, really important subject. Plus, you’ll look like a twit.
2. Here are some questions to ask yourself if you’re considering including a sexual assault in a story:
   -Why do I want to write a story involving sexual assault? If it’s because you think it’ll raise ratings, make your story more ‘mature,’ or identify you as sensitive to women’s issues, think again. If you are an assault survivor writing to exorcize inner demons, seriously consider whether this particular story is the best context in which to work out your issues. I don’t say this to discourage any survivors from telling their stories–something I think is vitally important–but I do want to stress that a fiction story may not be the most appropriate context for doing so, particularly if it involves other people’s characters or plotlines (as in a shared-universe superhero comic).
   Some of the worst stories out there come from genuinely concerned individuals who want to raise readers’ awareness of sexual assault issues. Remember that something that you care passionately about or that has affected you deeply and personally may not be the best subject for a fictional story, since it’ll be very hard to separate yourself from your work enough to get a decent perspective.
   -How will it affect the development of my characters? Even though sexual assault is a big deal, it’s rarely the single defining experience of a survivor’s life. Using it as a shortcut to character development is a cheap and ultimately ineffective trick, and it’ll come back to haunt you later.
   -How will it affect continuity? Will it matter? Why, or why not? ‘Because rape is a big deal’ is not a good enough reason.
   -How much do you actually know about sexual assault? Are you a sexual assault survivor? Do you have close friends who are? Have you ever sat in on a rape trial? Have you ever spoken with a perpetrator? If not, odds are pretty good that you have a flawed understanding of the factors surrounding sexual assault, and you’re going to need to do some serious research to write about it without falling into stereotypes.
3. If you’re considering writing sexual assault into a character’s backstory, you should ask yourself a few more:
   -What about this character makes me think that she or he is a sexual assault survivor? Why is a history of sexual assault the best explanation for those traits? Not all women who are touch-shy, tough, misandrist, obsessively self-reliant, or paranoid are assault survivors. In fact, most probably aren’t. It goes the other way, too: a confident, caring, and generally well-adjusted individual has as much chance of being a rape survivor as the basket case to her left. Be very wary of less obvious stereotypes, here, too: to assume that a man who is raped or rapes another man is gay, or that a lesbian must have had at least one bad sexual experience with a man is every bit as offensive as–if not more offensive than–making similarly broad assumptions about any other group.
   -Why has the issue not come up before? Why is it coming up now? ‘Because I just thought of it’ is not a good enough reason.
   -What effect will disclosure of the character’s history have on the story? Will it be a major plot event? How will it affect other characters?
   Later this week, I’ll discuss how to handle specific issues and avoid falling into stereotypes when writing about sexual assault. In the meantime, you can discuss this column, ask questions, and make comments here.

This is the first installment of a series on sexual assault and comics. If you haven’t yet read the introduction, you might want to check it out for a little context.
Sexuality is not a black-and-white matter; neither, therefore, is consent. There are infinite shades of gray between consent as defined in the Antioch Policy and the legal and medical definitions of sexual assault. Although we can agree on certain terms and definitions for sexual violence, those definitions are far from universal, and they’re thick with semantic subtleties and qualifiers.
When sexual violence finds its way into comics–when writers choose to portray sexual violence in comics–that ambiguity comes into immediate conflict with the traditionally cut-and-dried morality of mainstream superheroes. In worlds where right is right and wrong is wrong and each is defined by colorful costumes, it’s hard to express the confusing and often conflicting cultural and individual factors that surround and therefore define an assault. Even after the popularization of grim ‘n gritty antiheroes and the introduction of a degree of moral ambiguity to comics, the form remains more likely than most to oversimplify both characters and their actions. Furthermore, they’re only gradually emerging from a long tradition of sexism, if not outright misogyny, and the problematic portrayal of women in comics further complicates the issue of sexual assault within the medium.
Sexual assault is almost impossible to express well or respectfully when the characters concerned are themselves simplified to the point of stereotypes. It’s an intensely personal act and experience whose nature and repercussions are heavily colored by both cultural nuances and the individuals involved. Unfortunately, it’s also become a popular shortcut for ‘developing’ female characters. In this capacity, it tends to fall into one of three plot roles: an attempt to give the character a ‘dark’ history, usually as a context or explanation for neuroses; a female hero’s primary motivation for heroism or her catalyst for becoming a hero; or a means of diminishing a strong female character by emphasizing her vulnerability.*
In the first instance, the sexual assault generally has occurred at some point in the character’s comparatively distant past, usually in conjunction with other adversity: she may have been assaulted by an unsavory parent, guardian, or relative whose behavior was symptomatic of the general moral vacuum in which she was raised; or the assault may have served as implicit punishment for her own moral delinquency (i.e. drug abuse, promiscuity, etc.). In these scenarios, the victim is usually portrayed as a complete innocent–at worst, temporarily misled but basically virtuous–and the perpetrator is totally reprehensible and inhuman, an utter rogue who appears sympathetic only when he is deliberately manipulating his victims. He is also generally in a position of power–a parent or other older relative, a pimp, etc.–and the rape usually happens in connection with other abuse.
In the second instance, the sexual assault is the female character’s motivation for becoming a superhero. In these cases, the victim is either deeply traumatized and relegated to a semi-comatose state; or she is immediately incited to a life of crime-fighting, either as a means to revenge or as a way of preventing other women from suffering a similar fate. In these cases, the assailant is almost always a stranger or, at most, an acquaintance, and the assault is usually anonymous, apparently arbitrary, and particularly brutal.
In the final instance, a female character who is already a hero is assaulted as a means of emphasizing her vulnerability and/or femininity: in effect, ‘cutting her down to size.’ This instance is particularly insidious, as it is most often used as a means of diminishing a previously powerful and confident female character. If the assault is completed, the character is generally deeply traumatized and left either catatonic or violently self-destructive to an extent that affects the character’s ability to function as a hero for an extended period of time; if it is attempted, it is generally prevented by the intercession of a male superhero. Either way, the ultimate result is the disempowerment of the character.
What all three scenarios have in common are gross overgeneralizations, sloppy storytelling which relies on crude stereotypes and clichés, and deeply misogynistic and heterosexist undertones. They buy into–and sell back–the most harmful sort of myths about sexual violence because they are too lazy or too ignorant to look beyond popular disinformation.
It is possible to write a mainstream comics story about sexual assault well and respectfully; it has been done (and in my next column, I’m going to give you some tips on how to do it). But it requires writers to abandon shallow tropes in favor of less superficial–and sometimes less marketable–stories; to reexamine–and often reject–their and the industry’s assumptions about gender, power, and sexuality.
*I’m going to go into more depth about gender and sexuality issues later this month. In this column, however, to accurately reflect the portrayal of sexual violence in comics, all three of these scenarios assume a male assailant and a female victim. This in itself is symptomatic of a tremendous problem in the ways in which many mainstream comics address–or overlook–sexual assault. It is extremely important to be aware that not all sexual violence is heterosexual; that not all aggressors are male and not all victims are female.

Today is April second. It’s the second week of spring. It’s almost Passover; almost Easter; day after April Fools’. It’s also the second day of Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
This month, I’m gonna do something a little different in Inside Out (as opposed to the whopping…er…two months’ worth of precedent that I’ve set). I’m going to write a month’s worth of columns about sexual assault issues in comic books and how they correspond to real life. If you have any doubt that I can fill a month with this topic, here’s something to chew on: in order to cover everything I want to, I’m probably going to be posting semiweekly for the duration of April. Although I already have a fair idea of the topics I want to discuss, if you have any questions, suggestions, or requests, please let me know in the forum.
Here’s my angle: I am a comics professional; I care deeply about the comics industry and about its quality and integrity. I am also a feminist, and sexual assault is a feminist issue (actually, it’s everyone’s issue, but it’s of particular concern from a feminist angle).
My connection to and concern about sexual assault goes back further than my connection to and concern about the comics industry; almost as far back as my involvement in feminism. I’ve been involved in anti-sexual assault activism for almost half my life, from Take Back the Night, to the Clothesline Project, to the victims’ rights lobby. I spent four-plus years working directly with sexual assault survivors as a volunteer crisis advocate. I have created and taught high school, college, and community sexual violence education curricula. I have held survivors’ hands in the emergency room. I have written fact-sheets. I have seen faces and heard stories. I’ve also talked to and worked with perpetrators. This is an issue I care a lot about, and one regarding which I can speak with relative authority.
So, that’s me; now for you.
Sexual violence thrives on silence and complacency. My goal this month is to speak up and be heard, and to encourage you to do the same: I dearly hope that the discussions this series of columns starts will substantially outlive the month of April. One potential venue for that discussion is the Inside Out board on the Girl-Wonder forum. However, before you start, I want to lay down some ground rules:

1. Girl-Wonder strives to be a safe space for survivors. You do not question someone’s story. You do not refute someone’s story. You do not belittle or blame someone who has had the courage to speak about his or her experiences. Victim blaming on my board is grounds for immediate moderator intervention, and I will be moderating these threads very closely.
2. If you aren’t sure what comprises appropriate participation in such a discussion, you are more than welcome to PM me. In the meantime, take a little while to listen. Sometimes, conscious listening can be a more valuable contribution to a discussion than speech.
3. While I am trained and certified as a crisis advocate, I don’t have the time, energy, or support system to act in that capacity right now. While I will be more than happy to listen to anyone with something to share, I cannot be your counselor. If you’re in need of counseling or direct intervention services, I will be happy to refer you to resources in your region.
4. TRIGGER WARNING: Both the columns and their discussion threads will more than likely contain trauma triggers. Please be safe.
   The first content will be posted in the next few days. Stay tuned for updates.
   In the meantime, you can discuss this column here.

This past week at work, I got roped into reading for an essay contest. I know, I know. But the topic looked fun‘How Buffy Changed My Life’and besides, even if there were a few thousand entries, they were all supposed to be 250 or fewer words.
So, I read.
I was expecting pretty cliché responses, with fluffy content. After all, the prize was an appearance in Season Eight: the sort of thing that draws out the scariest corners of fandom. And yeah, there was some fluff. A few ‘I’m not really that into Buffy but I want to be on teevee and I know I’d be a star! Pick me lol k?’ (No. And Season Eight is direct to comics, kiddo. Do your damn homework).
But of the two-hundred-odd entries I read, the vast, vast majority were sincere. We heard from people who had identified strongly enough with characters to overcome major physical and psychological disabilities. Girls who had turned on Buffy and found a strong woman they related to, where they least expected her: in the dead center of the prime-time lineup. We got essays from men who talked about finding the first show and character they were proud to share with their mothers, their sisters, their daughters and wives; people who wrote that Buffy had inspired them to learn martial arts; read fantasy; study filmmaking; connect with their families; return to school; leave abusive partners; come out; stay alive. Those are just a fraction of the responses I read, and I read barely a tenth of the total.
There’s this tendency in the feminist comics community to be a bit prickly about Joss Whedon, because people keep touting him as someone who writes ‘for women,’ and we aren’t fond of being told what to read. But here’s the thing: Joss doesn’t write ‘for women.’ He writes for people. He creates characters and stories that transcend boundaries of gender, of age, of race, of sexual orientation and nationality. And that’s something we could use more of in a field that’s overwhelmingly focused towards young, straight, upper-middle-class white men. This is a guy whose favorite superhero wasand probably still isa gawky, geeky girl. He’s someone who can write stories in which gender isn’t every female character’s defining feature, in which queer characters are more than stereotypes. I may not be Buffy and Joss’s biggest fan, but if more characters and writers would follow their leads, I think comics would be much better for it.
And that’d change my life.
How have women in comics changed yours?

My mom is unbelievably badass. She has a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry and rides a big damn motorcycle. She’s politically active and involved in ecology and sustainable design. But none of that can hold a candle to what she does for a living: she teaches middle school. She doesn’t do this because she lost a bet, or as penance for a life of crime. She does it voluntarily. She’s that hardcore.
When I go to visit my parents, I inevitably end up spending time in my mom’s classroom. Usually, I bring her lunch at some point, and we hang out and talk. She teaches at a fairly small Montessori school, which many of her pupils have attended since they were two. I went there for second through fifth grade (there was no middle school back then). Most of the teachers have known me since I was a little kid, and I’ve known a lot of the students since they were toddlers. Some are younger siblings of the kids I went to school with. Some, I used to babysit. And now, they’re all hulking teenagers with attitudes. They talk about sex. It’s a bit disconcerting.
So, when Mom asked me to come talk to her students about making comics, I was torn between elation and horror. I love talking about comics, and I love the idea of corrupting a younger generation, but I am fucking terrified of adolescents. In my mind, eleven-to-fourteen-year-olds are what you get when you cross the worst aspects of violent mobs and mass media. When I’m around middle-school students, I become an awkward twelve-year-old: the definition of uncool, the flat-chested, frizzy-haired kid who hides behind thick glasses and thicker books, who gets called ‘dyke’ and worse by her peers, who would flay her alive if they knew she still built spaceships out of chairs with her best friend. I start to stammer. I lose my carefully cultivated dry wit.
‘Okay,’ I said.
I spent a lot of time developing content for the presentation, but I spent even longer worrying about how I would come across. Middle school is a time when kids tend to embrace dictated roles—particularly in terms of gender—and actively reject anything that smells of otherness. Montessori kids are often more progressive than most, but they’re still adolescents, and they’re still intensely judgmental.
At the same time, I agonized over how much attention I should devote to social issues related to comics. Should I talk about Women in Refrigerators? Should I mention gender disparity? Should I try to make concessions to diversity at the risk of inaccurately presenting the pervasive homogeny I spend so much time railing against? Should I emphasize the female comics community, or would that further alienate the girls? My mom warned me that the collective attention span of her students was a little under forty-five minutes and asked me not to wear my ‘I am wearing little pants to hide my genitals’ CBLDF t-shirt. I began to worry about age-appropriate content and imagine angry letters from parents.
And then there was the presentation itself. I’ve taught classes and given lectures and workshops before: the critical difference is that they’ve all been to undergraduates, not middle-schoolers. Would they be interested? Did kids today even read comics at all? I panicked some more.
Finally, I showed up at her classroom armed with a box of books, thirty pages of official Dark Horse artboard, two sets of handouts, and my laptop. I had a PowerPoint presentation prepared that went through the definition of comics and the idea of comics as literature, a short history of the medium (especially in terms of social issues and censorship) and a step-by-step guide to the creation of a page. I figured that even if they hated it, they’d have a few cool souvenirs and maybe even learn something.
They were good during the presentation: participated when I asked questions and stayed pretty quiet otherwise. Afterwards, I split them into groups and set them free to make their own comics.
Mandy, the other teacher, pulled me aside. ‘That was incredible,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen them get so into a guest speaker!’ I spent the next few hours wandering through the classroom in a happy daze, answering questions and helping them make their comics (‘I don’t know if you can say ‘crap’ in your comic. You’ll have to ask your teacher.’). Seventh-graders thought I was cool! They thought comics were cool! And, most incredible, they thought the idea of comics as a medium for social commentary was awesome! They thought female superheroes and creators were awesome! They were incredibly excited when I taught them the word ‘metafiction’ and continued to try to slip it into conversations all afternoon!
These kids, these marvelous, strange creatures are growing into the next generation of fans. They’re reading good books—and they’re learning to look at comics and literature from new critical and creative angles. Yeah, they’re into silly teenager stuff, but they’re also into Maus and Hellboy and Little Lulu, and more important, they’re into their own ideas. They’re writing and drawing their own strips and finding their voices, and I suspect that they’ll be harder than most to silence.
And now, the moral of the story: these kids are coming of age at a tremendous turning point in the world of comics. They’re growing up in a world where comics are still deeply flawed, produced by an industry that’s overwhelmingly male-dominated and often hideously sexist if not outright misogynist. But at the same time, they’re growing up in a world that has Girl-Wonder, and Friends of Lulu, where the visible faces of comics—creators and fandom—are gradually growing to reflect more than one race and gender.
And that’s pretty damn cool.
‘I’m sure you know there’s lots to learn
But that’s not your fault, that’s just your turn.’
-Dar Williams, ‘Teenagers, Kick Our Butts’
March 12th, 2007
Categories: Uncategorized . Author: Rachel Edidin