Millar you dumb, dumb, dumb motherfucker

Alright so I was supposed to do a short review on Kick Ass 2 and be about my business but Mark Millar opened his fat stupid, stupid-stupid fat mouth and it looks like I’m in for a long article and the movie review comes next week.

(I swear someday these will get down to the five hundred word limit I set for myself.)

Here’s what he said, “The ultimate [act] that would be the taboo, to show how bad some villain is, was to have somebody being raped, you know? I don’t really think it matters. It’s the same as, like, a decapitation. It’s just a horrible act to show that somebody’s a bad guy”

Yeah.

But if that wasn’t bad enough when people criticized this admittedly tone deaf statement his response was to kindly listen, he asked some questions because he knew that he was engaging in a conversation about something he had never nor will never experience, and then rationally engaged the criticism. Wait that came out wrong, what I meant to say is he acted like a total dickhead and said, “I think it’s meaningless. A tiny storm in a tea-cup. And in ten years time I’ll copy and paste this again when the argument raises it’s head like it did a decade ago. The fact is that more women are reading comics right now than at any point in my life and they’re not picking them up because they feel they’re demeaning in any way.”

Editors note: I am being informed that he actually said those words years earlier. I am too lazy to change them and I think the point is still somewhat valid even if it wasn’t in direct response to the first statement.

Additional editors note: I don’t actually have an editor I’m just supes lazy and I thought the joke before the quote was too funny to cut.  

Alright, so I figured the best thing we could do is instead of hashing out how exactly to go about engaging in a conversation like this between feminists and Mark Millar.

First things first, Mark Millar is a conservative. I don’t know by what degree and I’ve never heard him say so but lets look at Kickass 1 for evidence. It’s not exactly the most culturally sensitive body of work. I mean let’s just call it what it is. It’s a white conservative power fantasy. It name checks prominent republican politicians like Rudy Giuliani in a way that praises him. It’s about a white male beating up people of color and receiving fame for his individualistic hard work. And features panels like this…

 Not that the views of your characters are your views they can indicate an ideological leaning.

So yeah pretty conservative, at least if his work is any indication.

So am I saying that conservatives are pro-rape? Hell no. But the fact is that if you subscribe to a political ideology that emphasizes personal responsibility then you are going to look at the world in a specific way. You are more likely to look at women and wonder how they are responsible for their hardships then look towards society. Ditto for people of color. So conservatives are probably going to be less empathetic to the idea that comic books affect a “rape culture”. And if we hope to engage with this kind of artists who think this way, starting with statistics about the number of raped women probably isn’t going to hold a lot of water because again, these people emphasize individuals affecting culture, not so much vice versa.

So where do we start then if “rape-culture” is off the table for artists like Frank Millar.

Well we can talk about capitalism. Sales, that kind of thing.  

One statement that caught less flak but bothered me more his line, “The fact is that more women are reading comics right now than at any point in my life and they’re not picking them up because they feel they’re demeaning in any way.”

The fact is when prominent women are telling you that basically they buy comics “despite” the current trends of women's depiction, you should probably listen to what they are saying. I mean the idea of, 'More women are buying comics thus that somehow shows comics shouldn't change to embrace the new audience,' isn't just offensive, its bad business.

No one is saying you can’t feature rape in comics. That’s just silly. There is nothing inherently wrong with the medium that it can’t support the weight of any one issue. The problem arises when we don’t treat women with respect in comics.

Who does this make a more developed character?

I mean when you disrespect anything in a story it can flatten the work so we should especially be careful with how we touch events that are supposed to be important in the story line.

My problem with the rape scene in Kick Ass 2 is less, “You showed rape and that's bad because we can’t show rape in comics without influencing men to become rapists.” I don’t believe that and I don’t think you do either. The question is, “How is the rape functioning in this work?” Is it comparable to a decapitation as Millar asserts?

(spoilers coming)

Let me compare the rape of the girl to the death of the father in Kick Ass 2.

So the death of the father is shown to be the end of a character arc. The dad starts off in a certain place (more or less a slub; dead wife, can’t keep a girlfriend, etc..), grows (fights with his son after learning he’s KickAss), and eventually has a finishing climax of his story (Gives himself over to the police, pretending to be KickAss so his son can get away but is tragically killed in prison). After his story he is remembered and affects the main character in psychological ways that have implications for how the main character continues on his journey. 

In this case it’s fine that the dad died basically to support the growth of the main character because he had his own character arc. He was respected, developed and thus not “refrigerated.”

The girl doesn’t. She basically pops in, gets raped and is never mentioned again. Really go ahead and check if you don’t believe me. Sure, her rape is mentioned, but her as a person is never mentioned again.  That’s fucked up. She’s not a developed character and the experience that women have to deal with is brought in as a cheap stunt exclusively to affect Kick Ass and not to express anything about the girl. She makes no choices and disappears into the background. This kind of representation, a version of reality which dispossess of women as victims without a real “face” or “background” or “emotions” is scary and dangerous because it is exactly how a rapist looks at a woman; without background emotions or a face.

Now you might be thinking that that is kind of the point. She didn’t really have a relationship with the character which makes the scene that more tragic that essentially a random woman is brought into this tragedy through no fault of her own. And I get where that might make sense but you know who else had that character arc?

The dog.

The dog was innocent, had nothing to do with the situation and died. So basically in Millarworld a woman and pet are on the same level of emotional importance.

Brings new meaning to the term “Bitch,” eh?

 Lastly my main problem with Millar’s statement, my personal beef is that, as a writer, I would have defended Millar if not for his own words. If, previous to his comments, someone had told me that they found the rape scene unnecessary and pointless I would have argued in favor of the scene. I would have said that while demeaning to women, the rape itself revealed a lot about the villain. It revealed his goal was to shame KickAss because killing the girl, (say by decapitation) would have been fundamentally different. The MotherFucker wanted to bring KickAss low by shaming him and stealing what “belonged to him.” And most importantly it would have shown us that the Mother Fucker was had the mental equivalent of an idiot pre-pubescent 14 year old and what they think is “bad-ass” or “hardcore”.

But now I don’t know. I think the above comments apply more to Millar than his character after what he said.

Because if you are going to say rape doesn’t matter, it just to show he’s bad, it creates such a lazy image of your writing style. I conjures images of Millar throwing darts at a dartboard, “Bad guy is created by (tragic past/aliens/its just fun) and he wants to fight the good guy at (the park/in space/ at his home) so he goes to his girlfriends house and (rapes/murders/holds her hostage) and the good guy solves the problem with (violence/violence/ultra gory violence).

You’re a writer everything you write should be important to you and to what you want to convey to your audience. You wrote Kick Ass, don't write half assed.