Feels like I've been taking it on the chin in the last 18 hours or so, though in perspective, I suppose, it all balances out. All the more strange given that Seattle was a terrific trip. Great people, great events, lots of books signed, and even managed to drop in on Zanadu Comics in downtown, which was bonus. Was driven around town by a lovely lady named Gail who -- unlike handlers in the past -- could not only carry on an intelligent conversation, but was personable, funny, and eager to chase down bookstores, booksellers, and *gasp!* copies of my book. So all in all, not bad. Interesting to note that in almost every store I dropped-in on, there was at least one person on staff who was a comics fan and knew my work from that, if not from the novels.
Got home around midnight and got to catch up with Jen, who all-but blurted out that the Willamette Weekly had panned the novel, and then advised people to not attend my event at Powell's in Beaverton on the 10th. This may be hearsay, as I haven't read the review (and I'm not going to), but when Jen blurts, it's because she's been carrying something around and building up steam with it, so I'm inclined to believe what I'm told. Apparently, the review is so off base, there's some question as to whether or not the woman who wrote it actually could be bothered to read the book in the first place.
Nice to get respect in one's own town.
Seems there's a tirade over my treatment of Sasha on scans_daily coming out of the "CheckOut" storyline, and including her behavior in Checkmate 16. Apparently I've turned into a sexist bastard and didn't get the memo. "This would never happen to Batman." No shit. Batman isn't infested by nanobots and being examined by a madman vivisectionist. Doctor Mid-Nite asks if she was sexually assaulted, and that's a problem? Why, because it acknowledges that rape is a crime that happens? Would it have been more honest to simply pretend it wasn't a possibility, rather than treat the scene with maturity, and have Sasha answer and confirm that, no, she wasn't? Or is the problem that I dared broach it at all, that "there's no room in comics for that kind of thing"? Or is it because the fact that women are the victims of rape far more often than men are is something that we'd rather just all ignore? People read for what they want to read, I guess, rather than reading what was written.
The one thing I can remotely agree with is the "don't look at me" line. It is supposed to be a "weak" line; she's been through hell, and no one particularly likes to look weak in front of their peers, especially one you've been romantically involved with.
I am a feminist. Part of what that means to me is that I'm going to be as mean and brutal to my female characters as I am to my male characters. That's parity. The women can take the hits just as hard as the men. The implication that I'm harder on Sasha because she's female is bullshit; further, it implies that I shouldn't be hard on her because she's female, which, in my book, would be sexist. That's the same as saying that I took Carrie's fingers in Whiteout because I'm sexist, rather than, say, because she's the hero of the story and her fingers were terminally frost-bitten.
I've yet to encounter anyone ever call me sexist because -- Spoiler Warning for those who may not have read the following:
The list of the vile deeds I've perpetrated on male characters in fiction is legion, certainly much longer than the list of like cruelty I've rained down upon female characters. But no one has ever told me to lay off the guys. No one, at least not to my face, as accused me of "hating the men-folk." (Though I'm sure there's at least a half-dozen out there.)
I am reminded of an editor at Marvel telling me that a certain well-regarded (and outspokenly conservative, and, in my opinion, reactionary and sexist) writer/artist felt I was a chauvinist who hated women because of my treatment of Elektra. It's the same thing here again -- this double-standard that says female characters should be allowed only highs, and not lows; that they should be spared harm, and treated with kid gloves. When we say that we have to treat women differently than we treat men, when we ignore the social realities of what it means to be female versus what it means to be male, that's sexism, kids. We live in a world where women are treated worse than men -- where they are abused and attacked and degraded on the basis of their gender alone. It's wrong, and it's vile, and it's evil, but it's the truth, and refusing to recognize the same in fiction leads to dishonest fiction, and that's bad writing.
The extension of such thinking leads to stories with black characters that never acknowledge racism, to stories with Jewish characters that never acknowledge Antisemitism, to gay characters that never deal with homophobia. Think that through. These are elements that comprise character; they are not character alone. Saying Renee Montoya is gay is true, but hardly the point -- it's simply part of who she is. Saying John Henry Irons is black is true, but again, part of who he is. But for both of those characters, it influences their identity, it is part of who they are. It cannot be ignored; when it is relevant to their stories, it must be acknowledged -- otherwise, the fantasy that is their fiction(s) becomes, in my eyes, hollow and irrelevant.
I'm sure I'm rising to the bait here, so to speak, and I should leave well-enough alone. Too late for that, I guess.
Now take all of that, and add to it that I just spent nearly two and a half hours on the phone with Andrew Farago doing an interview for the Comics Journal that pretty much covered everything I've ever done. Very fine time, and he was a great interviewer. I'm looking forward to meeting him in person when he comes up to Portland for Stumptown Comics Fest. No idea when -- or even if -- the interview will run, but it'll be interesting to read it when it does come out.
Like I said, strange day thus far. We'll see where the afternoon leads. Working on Checkmate 21 with Trautmann at the moment. Let's see if I can't piss somebody else off, shall we? ;)
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Greg, I have to admit a mere passing familiarity with your work in my overall comics oeuvre, but I really couldn't agree with this more.
As for Scans_Daily, that's hardly a representative sample, and reading for a length of time, the minute anything bad happens to a loved character it suddenly becomes the end of the world. They also seem to forget that a lot of it is fictional.
I was impressed that Sasha was asked the question. Maybe someday, a male character who'd been in her situation would be asked it, too. ;)
One of the things I've enjoyed consistently across all of your media is the even-handed treatment of your characters. Which, for the purposes of suspense, means anything could happen to any of them--male or female--at any time, and that is exciting to read. Better yet, the options you present are followed through logically and intelligently.
Both Sasha and Boomer are tortured in that sequence. Yet Sasha (who is more powerful) has to be carried out by Batman. Boomerang walks out under his own power, looking fine. I haven't looked at the issues in awhile, so this end part may have been in the Outsiders part. Meaning any ire people have should be directed more at Winnick than you. But still its telling that the female character has to be carried, while the male character doesn't. Both were tortured by Egg Fu (or whatever he calls himself now, I forget). Both are metahumans. But the less powerful male character seemed fine at the end. While the female needed help getting away from her ex-boyfriend...
Beyond that the only other issues I've had with any of your DC work is that you went with the super-human being used as a power source. And yes you acknowledge in the story that Simone had already used the idea. But it just bugs me that ANYONE would bother. I mean you have the Chinese using alien tech to make their super-humans. And it bugs me that NO ONE is picking up the Ted Knight gives the world his energy collection technology stuff from the end of Starman. Why bother torturing some kid when you can build a reactor using the same tech that powers Star Girl/Starman's Cosmic Rod?
Still, love you stuff for DC and Marvel, hope to check out your novels at some point in the future...
If Owen had been more tortured, if Owen had been the main character, the focus would have been on his recovery. He postured. That's what alpha males in military positions tend to do. Note that he had to be caught by Nightwing.
Did he have his eye torn out? Did he have his arm ripped off? Is he part of a sex that is regularly subject to threat of rape?
Owen indicates that he's going to the rescue to get a metal. He's obviously a posturing, hurt jackass. That says more about male machismo than it does for female weakness, in my book.
If Greg were being sexist, he'd have just thrown Sasha into a corner for four months, betraying her character, and shown her receding into herself and becoming a "fridge victim." Quite to the contrary, Sasha recovers relatively quickly from a major trauma. Owen got a beating, she got body parts removed.
It's REALLY stretching to go for sexism here.
As for the Starman point...
...that's, uh...
...that's a very good point....
*slinks off, pondering the end of the energy crisis in the DCU and the difficulties in trying to execute such a storyline, let alone selling it editorial*
Local book reviewers have little time/interest in local authors because we aren't cool enough for them. I had an editor that was so bitter about how little space books got, she would openly disparage wasting it on things like comic books, saying, "It's kind of dumb to review them, because they are comic books." Huh? So, they want to give their precious space to whatever famous person they want to stroke. Hence, for instance, when Joelle and I had the 12 Reasons release party, one local paper didn't even blurb us despite my having a conversation with the editor in chief in person twice about it. Because Stephen King was reading the same night and he needed blurbs in three separate sections of the rag.
By the way, I am pretty sure Gail is who shuttled Sarah Grace around when I accompanied her to Seattle, She is, indeed, fantastic. She even started asking people at the stores if they had my books, and I was just a tagalong.
I haven't read a lot of your recent stuff (time constraints, etc) but I've never walked away with that impression at all. Like you say, everyone is going to take something different from what you write. Unfortunately, there are people who won't take what you meant to give.
(Seriously, SD is CRAZY.)
I'm a guy who's received death threats for trying to acknowledge the fact that women need to be humanized without restraint and treated as co-equals in my college press.
I trace it back to the unending backlash that will reverberate through time of all the oppressive shit that DID happen to women, blacks, bears, etcetera. People look at that, and instead of looking at it rationally, they carry it around for the rest of their life and suddenly anyone caring to address it is a racist/sexist/anti-bear.
But that's not even the issue with Checkmate. You want to see rape treated like a plot device that works against a rational, realistic view of the subject matter, try Identity Crisis, much as I liked the story ultimately.
You had a character who had her fucking arm ripped off by a sadistic, torturing asshat. The first question is, yes, is your arm still on there, but what do sadistic bastards who like to probe do to vulnerable women? It's a natural follow-through, don't take people reading too much into things to heart.
Why, oh why, do you dare focus more pages on Sasha's torture, Greg? It's not because SHE'S THE MAIN CHARACTER, is it? I mean, nah. That's too simple. You must have a diabolical agenda to show women more vulnerable than men by subtly and deviously acknowledging the fact that she was tortured longer than Owen was and using that to imply that she, logically, is inferior (ah-cough), particularly given how most of your memorable protagonists are strong women who don't take shit from anyone.
And hey, the reason why Owen parades around and acts macho after being tortured while Sasha is vulnerable isn't because Owen's an egotistical kind of alpha male (nah, that'd be too simple and rational), it's because you wanted to show that guys can take it and girls can't, right? Sigh.
And Mr. Terrific showing concern for his girl? Couldn't just be a logical character concern, the need for one lover to watch after another. Nah, it's much deeper, much more sinister than that. You're trying to say that Sasha is a blushing flower who needs taking care of, which is why you had her punch the living hell out of August General. Because, you know, she can't take care of herself. Uh....
Greg, I'm a pain in the ass critic. I will find fault in anything. I look for sexism in the most STRAW-grasping of ways. I'm pretty well known for it. It gets me called a sexist quite often, because apparently men know nothing of sexism and have no right to critique or care about it, because we're not women (and no, that's not sexist right in return?)
But anyway, the point I'm driving at is to not let someone with an obvious agenda who is making a false conclusion derived from failing logic ruin your day.
The book review, I can't help you with. I know critics are dicks, I'm one of them. But I can say that I did enjoy the book. I popped my review on Amazon yesterday, but it's still "clearing" or whatever they do to vette them.
From my own admittedly biased opinion, the interview went really well, and there's a lot of in-depth coverage of Greg and his work in it. According the the Comics Journal's editor, the interview will run in issue #286, which will probably hit stores in early-to-mid November. My wife's got an interview with Gail Simone which will be running in the same issue, and I hope that some of you reading this blog will check it out.
I had a blast doing the interview, for the record. I've been a fan of Greg's stuff since the No Man's Land storyline in the Batman titles in the late 90s, plowed through all of the Atticus Kodiak books earlier this decade, and did a speed-read/cramming session of Patriot Acts and a giant stack of DC and Oni comics this past week in preparation for the interview--anyway, there was a lot of homework that went into the whole project, and I hope that it comes through in the interview.
If I may make a humble suggestion? Sometimes creators do comment when their work is critiqued on
Keep in mind that the Rucka Rant on S_D is also in the context of a few other events that have transpired at DC of late, and that we at the comm had JUST been having a huge discussion on S_D about how Knockout died in BoP #109, meaning, with someone humiliating her before killing her. Frankly, even as someone resigned to the fact that Starlin & Didio are about to wholesale destroy Jack Kirby's legacy in the DC verse, which means that a whole lotta New Gods are going to die, the way Bedard handled Knockout's death seemed...how can I put this tactfully...horribly fraught and unfitting and wrong, because he had her beg. Watching her beg had a voice in my mind screaming "WIR WIR WIR WIR AUGH!"
So, I think the post about Sasha is part of a larger, sprawling and ongoing convo that people are having right now about the way women in comics are treated, and that's no new theme to S_D, but it ebbs and flows. I hope it doesn't alienate you from the comm; after all, if you search your tag on S_D, you'll see people going apeshit over your earlier issues of Checkmate, not to mention Wonder Woman.
It's been remarked that privileged people oft do not understand why people on the flip side of privilege get angry and upset, because they simply do not have the contextual experience to understand what it is to lack privilege. Disclaimer: this is NOT directed at you. But I mention it because by the time fangirls start to rant, it's sometimes not just the proximal event in a given issue that is informing the rant, but years and years of accumulated anger and sadness that Some People Just Do Not Get It. And then that anger is sometimes directed at writers that don't deserve it, like you.
So...cookie?
Respectfully, I disagree.
Having just read the scans_daily post and the accompanying comments, it's clear that Greg injecting facts and perspective into the discussion won't be of much value -- the vast majority seemed to think the source of the post was misjudging Greg, and the posted interpretation of the issue, and the rest simply possess what I call "fan certainty," which in my experience in other pop culture arenas, is impervious to reason.
I am particularly irritated/frustrated by responses to reasonable discourse that claim a knowledge of exactly what the writing process consisted of (because of course that person was THERE, in the ROOM. Pardon me while I roll me eyes) and who know, absolutely KNOW, better than the character's creator, how that character would and would not react in EVERY situation.
It's a bullshit stance, and it's utterly impervious to facts, rational discourse, or logic.
There's nothing to be gained by dignifying it.
This poster's response, as far as I'm concerned, is extremely on target and sums up the issue well enough, I suspect:
"Wow. After reading your post carefully and thinking about it for a day, I'm going to say what I initially thought and still do think: I utterly disagree. I think Rucka in general is a shining example of a writer that writes female characters well, very, very well, stupendously well. I'll always love him for his work on Elektra and Wonder Woman, and given his past work with Renee Montoya, a character that normally bores and irritates me, it's obvious to me that somehow lumping him in with the Great DC Conspiracy of Writer Insensitivity and Ineptitude is a disservice.
My apologies.
-E
Heh.
-E
Okay, okay, this is probably the very first time that this has ever happened to you on LJ, so note it, because it means that you're totally awash in El Jay culture now, but...can I gack that Sasha icon?
She so visually reminds me of Domino there, and I love Domino (thus, the icon). If you ever come back to Marvel, she's a character that I'd LOVE see your take on. I'm just sayin', man.
Better yet, I'll make YOU some icons.
(If you haven't joined/friended
I'll check out exclusion_lair, by all means!
:D
I meant to type "Guess" instead of "Guest."
Seems whenever I'm under the weather I tend to mispell more than normal.
Gosh, I am clueless then. I'm not aware of any Conservatives working over at Marvel, especially mouthy ones. I guess, most Conservatives working in comics keep their politics to themselves since, I'd say, they're the minority. And the only reason I named Jemas was because of a comment I once read where he stated something like Captain America, in the past, was written by a bunch of Liberals.
"Well-regarded"? Well, now you can toss one of those two out.
Actually, depends on what Miller's doing this week.
It's nice to see those Journalism 101 courses put to good use, huh?
\snark
I was actually enraged and quite pissy about that posting... Mainly because if they had a balanced argument, they would not have had to delete all the scenes where Sasha was brutalized and still defiant.
These things happen to people...every day. Men and women.
And I don't want to be patronized by not having credit given to my ability to get through it and keep my spirit. To being able to get the shit kicked out of me, and still stand tall.
Every movie about the triumph of the spirit starts with bad, painful stuff happening, and the person getting through. We go to those movies, we read those books, and comics, because we believe in the indomitable spirit of people.
Why should it be limited to a man's ability to get through and consequently triumph?
"This would never happen to Batman." No shit. Batman isn't infested by nanobots and being examined by a madman vivisectionist. Doctor Mid-Nite asks if she was sexually assaulted, and that's a problem? Why, because it acknowledges that rape is a crime that happens?
Male on male rape does happen, and it happens especially in the type of situation you're writing about. Do you really think a spy captured and tortured by the enemy won't be subjected to sexual assault if he's male? And it's nothing to do with the villains being gay, it's because it's a really effective way to torture someone. The issue is not that women don't get raped by the enemy, it's that yes, men do, although nobody likes to acknowledge it. They may not get raped as much as women on the street or in everyday life, but in counter-espionage torture chambers? Pretty equal.
And why wouldn't it ever happen to Batman? The level of depravity that Batman villains like the Joker and Black Mask have been written with in recent years, you can't really say that they wouldn't go there. Except that sexual assault on women is considered, while horrible, to be an everyday subject for mainstream thrillers while sexual assault on men (unkless done humorously by a woman in a "boy, I wish some hot chick would rape me" way) is so hideous that it can only be done very occasionally in Wildstorm titles, and then only by vague implication.
So no, I don't think sexual assault should be cleansed from superhero comics, but if you want to be really brave why not write a story where a male hero gets rescued, mauled and exhausted, from a torture chamber and quietly asked "Did they...".
More to the point, I wasn't writing Batman; I was writing Checkmate, specifically a story focusing on the series' arguably main character, and, more to the point, she wasn't sexually assaulted; what I wrote was an acknowledgment that it was a possibility.
Yes, and Mid-Nite's question is a pretty standard one from a doctor or other medical professional.
I don't read scans_daily any longer, or any DC book besides Checkmate (and now Infinity, Inc.); your work, particularly with Sasha and Renee, remains the one bright light for me.
However, I do know how a bad review will rattle around in your brain, no matter how many good ones you get. They never seem to even out. Even when the review seems so off-base that you wonder if the reviewer was even reading the same book that the others read. I admire your restraint in not even reading it. I'm too morbidly curious for my own good.
Don't forget you also kacked Jonah McCarthy! :) I find it surprising an Eisner, Harvey, Eagle, and Prism Award winner can be accused of this, but that's just me. Anyway, Collected Editions thinks your Wonder Woman run was tops. Best wishes!
Particularly when they're writing for local news, magazines, etc., they're not trained book reviewers, and they aren't reviewers in a specialization--they're generalists, which means a lot of times they've been told to review a book they wouldn't ordinarily read for themselves. It tends to skew the review. Many times the just don't get it. They have no clue as to what you were trying to do, and it shows.
As to telling folks to stay away from your appearance, that's plain irresponsible. People get to judge for themselves. Intelligent readers will know that--and I have yet to meet anyone in that area who will stay away from a Powell's for any reason, including Apocalypse.
Stay strong. And tell yourself, All bad reviews are wrong. All good reviews are right. One of these days I'm gonna do that one on a sampler and hang it over my desk.
Tammy Pierce
Moreover, I'm very flattered you stopped by and dropped a comment -- and, ironically enough, I'm off to the LCS to grab my long-anticipated sixth issue of White Tiger. Looking forward to reading it!
Oh good lord -- I'm coming a little late into this discussion, but please, PLEASE, PLEASE don't take ANYthing you see on Scans_Daily seriously.
It's a bunch of children who like to play feminist yet get their ideas from bitter fourth-wavers who've taught them to have a knee-jerk response to anything in which bad things happen to a female. They basically run around from title to title, doing everything they can to apply a "women in refrigerators" stamp to anything containing a female hero in peril. As you said, this basically boils down to them actually being more sexist than whatever they're railing against, since they treat the female characters like porcelain dolls which must remain inviolate and sheltered.
There are a fair number of scattered adults here and there on S_D, but they generally get shouted down in fake controversies like that and eventually learn to keep their mouths shut and just skip those posts.
Just as in the national public political discourse, the loudest group screaming their displeasure or offense is usually the one with the least thought put into their position.
Ignore them.
And keep up the great work.