Mike's Friend Comments

Hey Mike--

My partner was bemoaning her lack of "more books like Felix Castor" to read last night, when I remembered how active and engaged you've been here on Goodreads, so I thought I'd ask you if you had any recommendations.

More details: she can't stand Butcher's prose, she enjoys Aaronovitch (though we both wish you'd give him a plotting class or two). Most of the other stuff she reads for pleasure is Mundane neo-hardboiled like Rankin or Robert Parker.

Hi Owen. Thanks for the links.

I can't go with Mark on this one, and I think that critique was pretty much on the nose. Insofar as writers use sexual violence against women as a motivating event for male protagonists or an index to male villains' evil, that's lazy and thoughtless writing and hard to defend on any level.

Rape shouldn't be off-limits in comic narratives any more than it should in other fictions, but it needs to be used with caution because of the messages that you can send inadvertently. The use of rape in narrative often seems like a throwback to an earlier age - an age in which the rape of a woman was seen as primarily a loss or damage to her husband, whose exclusive rights had been infringed, or if she was unmarried, to her parents. In story, similarly, it's often the effect of the rape on the men around the raped woman that's given most narrative weight.

This isn't limited to comics, by any means. The Clint Eastwood movie GRAN TORINO provides a pertinent recent example to show how this kind of thing still happens in mainstream films.

There's a counter-argument that says, since murder is treated very lightly and non-seriously in any number of popular fictions, why shouldn't rape (which is a less weighty crime) be treated non-seriously too. I'd always come back to that point about social messages. Murder finds very few champions in most social contexts, whereas there seem to be lots of people who are prepared to step up to the plate and defend rape. Not on principle, obviously, but finding extenuating circumstances, blaming the victim, distinguishing between "real" rape and other things that only look like rape, et cetera.

I've used rape a handful of times in my own stories (the artificial rape of Jayesh in Lucifer, an unnamed woman in Unwritten 31.5, Anna-Elizabeth Rausch in 32.5) but I like to think I've always given it the narrative weight it needed and never used it either to motivate a hero or simply to produce a sensational effect. Having said that, of course, it's really only the reader who can make those determinations.

Best,

Mike

Hey Mike, being a comics writer yourself, I'd be interested in what you thought about this little interview with Millar on his philosophy of comic book writing and a critique of it by a female comic-book reader who took issue with some of the themes he discussed that she took as sexist. Here are the two links if you're interested:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/11...#

http://observationdeck.io9.com/mark-m...

That's really good to hear, Owen. I've been talking about coming back to the X-books for a one-off. I love those characters...

Hey Mike, thanks for the add. I enjoyed the direction you took the X-Men on Messiah Complex. It was one of the things that got me back into comics, and later on, into writing. Great work.