That should be carved into Mount Rushmore in hundred-foot high letters.
My objection is not so much about the nature of Hulk as about the nature of She-Hulk. She’s one of the more fully-realized and interesting female characters in comics, and to use her in such a manner is just…gross.
I’ve been thinking about this lately (in connection with complaints on another web forum about Sons of Anarchy), and I find it kind of odd. Why is rape so off limit for stories that are otherwise dark and gritty?
I understand that rape is a serious and devastating subject. But I routinely see shows where people are murdered, brutally tortured, etc. But if a female character gets raped, suddenly the internet is up in arms that it is terrible or tasteless.
Yes, it is terrible and perhaps tasteless. But having a character get his eye gouged out, or ear cut off, being imprisoned and pissed on for eight years, or being murdered doesn’t cross a line that rape does? Why is that?
I sort of understand emotively why that is, but it doesn’t really make a lot of logical sense when I sit back and think about it.
Rape is almost non-existent in the Marvel universe, unlike at DC and smaller publishers/everything Alan Moore where they’ve had some internet-notorious stories. In fact, I can’t think of another story in the Marvel universe dealing with the subject, with the possible exception of the retconned history of Ms Marvel, which for inexplicable reasons decided to turn an already weird love story into one where she was actually psychically manipulated and therefore raped.
I think a lot of it has to do with: a) how it treats the character, and b) how the character reacts to it.
Sons of Anarchy is probably another thing entirely. But in superhero comics, most characters are (for better or worse) largely sex-less. So, being roughed up or imprisoned is sort of within the grammar of comics. Injecting rape into the story is kind of breaking the rules of the medium. But you’re going out of your way to break the world in order to objectify a female character into a) exclusively female and b) a sexual object, in a way that’s beyond the bounds of normal storytelling in your medium. (Note that this isn’t always the case. In League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Mr. Hyde rapes the Invisible Man to death, and, while gross, it fits the world and the character better than most super-hero representations).
As for how the character reacts, getting your ears cut off, etc. are often used to underscore how tough or determined the character is (see, say, Firefly’s War Stories). But, when rape is used, it’s rarely used to any greater purpose. Sue Dibny wasn’t really given the opportunity to flesh out her character, it was just a plot device. The same is probably true of She-Hulk’s role in Old Man Logan (I admit I haven’t read it).
To an extent, you’re getting cheap heat at the expense of the integrity of the character and world. This is where a degree of arbitrary-ness enters into it. We agree as a society that it’s beyond the pale, so you have to make a conscious decision to violate this. (Thus people are relatively less upset about each individual rape in, say Game of Thrones, because the world supports it - they may object to the world, but not as much to the individual incidents within that world). People get upset because we all agree it’s horrible, but also because they have the knowledge that the author did this on purpose.
It’s not just comics, or the medium – even shows renown for otherwise being extremely grounded and gritty, like the Wire, purge rape from storylines or downplay its prevalence because the subject matter is so easy to mishandle, so easy to offend, so easy to offer stimulation to certain people, so easy to be sexist or misogynist and will inevitably be accused of both no matter what the circumstances or intent – that it just derails focus from any other narrative intentions and becomes a lightning rod for misfits. It’s just easier to exclude it altogether.
I don’t disagree, which is what I was hinting towards when I caveat-ed Sons of Anarchy. There’s a lot of cultural reasons that we find sexual violence more distasteful than regular old violence.
There’s an element of avoiding controversy, and also a catch-22 element where we don’t talk about it because it isn’t a thing you talk about. In the U.S. I think it’s intensified by our general puritanical distaste for sexual topics. Of course that isn’t all of it, but healthy sex is portrayed so infrequently that we don’t have anything to contextualize sexual violence with, making it all the more shocking to even bring up.
To this, I’d add that rape is a bit more real to us than murder. Killing is often quite abstract, and sometimes depicted as almost bloodless - one side shoots, and the other side falls down, and we don’t see blown-out exit wounds. Sometimes it’s more graphic, of course, but that is seen as more shocking when it happens.
Killing is sometimes depicted as moral, as in war when it is our side doing the shooting, or when the police shoot a “bad guy.” You can’t depict rape that way.
I understand what you are getting at (and I’m mostly just joking with you in this response), but we are talking about a comic series that apparently involved a graphic depiction of someone having his body torn in half and then having half of it thrown up a mountain, forcing the other half to crawl up after it.
Now admittedly, that is so absolutely batshit ridiculous that you could easily argue it is completely removed from reality and thus not genuinely shocking. But on the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of television series lately that seem to enjoy showing the splash of blood and brains on the wall from people being shot in the head, etc.
And as for the true graphic nature of things, there’s no reason that a rape can’t be just as abstracted as a killing. In fact, whenever a rape does occur in entertainment media, the actual act itself is generally cut-away from (in a way that happens less in less when it comes to graphically showing killings and torture).
The true answer coming from this may be simply that I am watching too much Sons of Anarchy, as most of the descriptions of graphic violence that are immediately coming to mind are from that show.
When we see half a person crawling around, that’s usually pretty damned shocking, even if it is ridiculous. I haven’t actually seen the comic, but I suspect I’d find that over-the-top gross. Half a body still being active is shocking even when it’s a zombie, as in the Walking Dead.
Oh, sure, and it’s still seen as being shocking even when it’s abstracted. But I think that’s because we’re somewhat desensitized to death, for the reasons I outlined: it happens a lot in fiction, and it’s sometimes “moral” if the right people die. Rape is a lot less common, and never condoned. I hope!
There’s an alternate-universe thing called “Deadpool Kills The Marvel Universe.” It includes a fight with the Hulk and the title is totally accurate.
Includes gore, but a bit more cartoonish than the stuff in Old Man Logan.
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Wouldn’t he hulk out before the blades hit? He tried to shoot himself and that didn’t work, right?
There’s a world of difference between canon, movies, and one-off non-canon books like Deadpool.
I don’t think that Hulk even transforms into Banner anymore, ever since the 90’s when Doc Samson gave him psychotherapy or something.
The only thing I know for certain is there’s nothing in comics that hasn’t been changed or reversed at least a dozen time since the 90’s.
For me, that destroys most of the point of the character. It’s like having Peter Parker win the lottery and settle down into a stable relationship.
Not that I read comics these days, so I guess it isn’t for me.
Yeah. In retrospect, it is a pretty 90’s BADASS Death-dark GrimBlood-Badass-power inflation-foil cover kind of move. So maybe they reversed that since then. I haven’t read a Hulk comic in years.
That said, it fell in the middle of Peter David’s incredible run on The Incredible Hulk, which, for me, was the character’s high point.
I agree, but it’s not like there’s much competition. He’s probably had the fewest memorable creative runs of any of the well known Marvel characters. Hulk had the worst runs in the Silver Age of any character, briefly shined a bit when fighting the military in the 70s, went nowhere in the 80s other than a brief John Byrne run, and finally David took over for an extended period. Since then, he’s been a mess as a character under Pak, etc., even though some of his authors (including Pak) have written decent stories - the character has evolved into something ludicrous now though.