We are the ones who want to choose

[zdashamber]

You should all go vote in the Best Comic-Book Writer poll at ign.com. It's Neil Gaiman versus Alan Moore, and Gaiman needs help.

I don't read comics much, so I can't suggest ways to vote in the concurrent poll, but I'd like to see Alan Moore go down. Go! Vote! http://comics.ign.com/articles/646/646667p12.html

I'd feel a lot better about Alan Moore if he had some other way of relating to female characters than Where does the rape come in. Evey? Is introduced by threatened rape. Mina? Is threatened with rape in the first and second issues, and then in the third we meet one of Our Heros raping a schoolful of girls. Whatsername the child of rape in Watchmen, the only female character? I didn't even bother to read From Hell. I can only imagine what he did with Victorian prostitutes.

I mean, leaving aside the creepy-ass WTF-ness, doesn't it show a certain lack of writing ability? Vote Neil!

(I read "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and for a year or two after I was asking people, Is there some other book? Was there some really excellent book that everyone was praising, and I'd accidentally bought the knockoff?)

Comments

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Ah, but the distinction I'm drawing is that Moore's female characters all exist in relation to rape. I can't think of a single female character in his books who isn't defined at some point by rape--and it's almost always not even how she's reacting, but how the males around her react to rape of women.

Gaiman has many female characters who are just as good as male characters, and his male characters suffer just about as much as his female characters (the kids in the boarding school when hell opens up? Eesh). Being female in Gaiman's worlds is not the same as being rapebait. I agree with your wife that rape can be a part of a story, demonstrating character. I insist that females are more than that, though.

[cochese.livejournal.com]

[D'oh. Somehow I wasn't logged in. Could you delete my previous post.]

I can see the distinction, but I'm not sure if I necessarily see it in Moore. I'll try to keep it in mind next time I give a read through. I can think of characters that Moore has written that have been male and suffered. V is arguably male. (As much as you can say anything certain about V.) He spent time in a concentration camp and had medical experiments done on him. Did he suffer less than Evey? In the second League series, Hyde rapes, maims and (if I remember correctly) eats the Invisible Man. Did he suffer more or less than Mina?

Or you can go to one of his other works. Supreme? No main female characters raped or affected by rape. (Though there are several jokes about the role of women in Silver Age comics.) I think the only rape that is mentioned in Supreme is when they go to the place where past incarnations of Supreme and his affiliated characters go when the world is "revised." There they meet the "tragic 80s" version of Supreme's love interest, who I think was raped. The whole thing intended as a jab at the 80s and how they tried to make things edgier. Promethea? It's been a while since I've read it, but again I'm not coming up with any characters defined by rape. Some lurid and bizarre sexual situations? Some unreasonable power balances between characters sexually involved? Yeah. But I'm not remembering any sexual assault. (Someone may pop up and prove me wrong. I don't remember Promethea particularly well, and all sorts of weird stuff happened.)

I will agree that I think there's a fine line between tasteful use of sexual situations (consensual or otherwise), and Moore's taste is sometimes a bit more questionable. Moore clearly goes for challenging and the gritty more while Gaiman plays much more in the realm of the mythic. But Moore's been writing comics for 30 years and it's hard to broadly classify all his women as being nothing more than "rapebait."

I know from experience that my wife is not callous to rape (I won't go into partciulars here), so I'm wondering how much of this is just difference of interpretation.