OK, lets go another round on this. I'm not doing a very good job of convincing anyone here. I'll try it again. Part of my problem is that I'm muddling a number of different arguments, so to try and crystalise these, I'll divide them up:
Argument One: "Won't somebody think of the children?"
1. JLAdventures targets kids who are eleven or twelve or less.
2. The same characters who appear in that title appear in this story.
3. Parents receive no warning from the cover of IC3 that it contains the depiction of a graphic rape.
4. The situation arises that very young kids will read a story depicting a graphic rape.
DC recently came across this with Outsiders. A lot of young kids picked up the book, as a follow on from Titans. Outsiders had a demonic character referring to women as "bitches". A lot of parents were mad about it, and DC was forced to apologise and say that they wuld rein in their editors.
I don't put the burden of censorship on comic book stores. Its not their place to impose an expression of morality on their readers. If DC want to publish something like this using characters that appear in kid's cartoons, then they should put an "adult material" label on the front. Knowing the vagaries of the 14 year old male mind, it'd probably make the damn thing sell better, anyway.
Argument 2: "Rape is cool, dude"
1. DC sells a genre of comics which appeal to adolescent male fantasies.
2. DC depicts a woman getting raped in one of those superhero comics.
3. DC thereby shows rape as suitable subject matter for adolescent fantasy.
Again, take it out of mainstream DC, which is aimed at adolescent fantasy. Put it in Vertigo, aimed at adult readers. I wouldn't care in those circumstances. As a rule, you know what you're getting with a Vertigo title: it is no doubt the case that kids are reading Preacher, Wanted or whatever, but the understanding for these titles is that they are aimed at adult audiences. Adults (generally speaking) should be able to enjoy a comic without thinking that it sets the boundaries of behaviour in relation to treatment of women.
Argument 3: "Fuck Ralph"
1. IC2 depicts a woman getting raped
2. We assume that the rape was essential to the plot.
3. IC2 should have depicted a male character raped instead.
Purely for the purposes of debate on this argument, I assume that a rape should have been depicted to further the plot.
Women get the short sharp end of the stick in comics, and it was stuff like this which caused the Women in Refridgerators school of thought. A lot of violence occurs against women in this fantasy medium. Everything else in comics is a fantasy - it means that violence against women joins in on the fantasy.
The counter-argument here is that the best way of causing pain to a hero is to attack his female loved ones. I don't buy this at all. Of course such conduct angers or causes pain to the relative of a victim of rape. But if a writer wants to anger, humiliate, or cause pain to a hero, then why not have the hero raped, and not the hero's female relative?
Why a woman, when there are men? The intention of the rape is to show Dr Light as a sick and twisted individual. That could have been more easily done with a hero. Sue Dibny's appearance on the satellite was staged. It would have been more likely for one of the heroes to be sitting there on monitor duty.
So why a woman? One of the posters - I think at Newsrama - said that it demostrates a way of thinking that women are property. The analogue he used was that if your boss is picking on you at work, you run your car keys down the side of his BMW. Dr Light was depicted as wanting revenge on the JLA. He scratched their property.
If it had been the silver age Steve Trevor up there on the satellite, and he had been raped, then the same argument would follow. But it wasn't Steve Trevor - it was a woman.
Argument Four: "Its plot driven"
Finally, lets look at Watchmen again. I was thinking about this last night. Working backwards, Dr Manhattan's decision to return to the Earth was based upon his realisation that human life was chaotic terrain and worthy of preservation and study. Silk Spectre's life was chaotic terrain because, amongst other things, she was the daughter of the Comedian and the original Silk Spectre. She works this out when she thinks about the Comedian's comment (amongst others) that he raped her mother "Only once." The comedian did rape the original Silk Spectre, but only once - the second time they had sex, it was by consent, and she conceived her daughter. So was the rape necessary to this plot (other than merely to show Comedian as a bad ass)? I think so. There might have been other ways to reach that point, but this was undeniably clever.
Was Dr Light's rape of Sue clever? Not really. It was simply meant to shock readers, and generate hype. (With Wanted, we expect this - but even then, Wesley is not shown raping people - he just mentions it. We don't expect it in a JLA comic, going again back to my first argument).
Since I've spent some time articulating this, I might actually cut and paste it and send it in a letter to DC. I wouldn't ordinarily do this (as I said, I'm not a fan of censorship, and I feel like a bit of a wanker even suggesting it), but I'm curious to see what the official response might be.
