Violence In Rainbow Arc of Fire

Where do I stand on violence in my own stories and series?

If a story required violence of some sort, I did not shirk from going there and writing that. Not to give away too much, but in the second book, AUTUMN SAGA, there was plenty of violence. A beheading, a strangulation, several vicious attacks are defined in detail. But the reader has to decide what ultimately happened. One reader/reviewer on amazon got it all wrong, unfortunately.

In the Legion story when Lightning Lad was killed by the freeze ray, he did blow up Zaryan's Earth-invasion ship in space. Since he was dying and Saturn Girl then attempted to get him back down to Earth before he died, I don't really see how Zaryan and his minions in the destroyed ship managed to escape being killed when their ship blew up in space. The vacuum and the cold would have killed any human being in about a minute or less. (I guess the fluids in your body turn to gas. You also suffocate and freeze.)

However, even with the Legion code of not killing, this incident was glossed over by the writer, editor, and artist. All we know is that the invasion of Earth was stopped by LL's actions. No word was mentioned about what happened to the vast invasion force (in the single invasion ship?--even that part was not handled very well).

In a later Legion tale, when every single Legionnaire but one is killed by the Doll Man, no Legionnaire kills him even though they all die. I am afraid that my own characters would not allow themselves to be killed off without punishing their attackers. And, of course, the Rainbow Arc of Fire heroes do face a deadly invasion fleet in space, and they do know that if any of these invaders lands on Earth, humans will be killed. So, what do you think would be their response?

Realistically, I don't believe you can have stories, and invasions, on this scale and *not* have anyone in the invasion fleet not be killed. It would be far, far too difficult in the dangerous and even deadly realm of space to destroy invading ships and not kill the invaders within those ships.

The Rainbow Arc of Fire heroes certainly would not take a life needlessly or unnecessarily, but I never felt I would ever saddle them with a no-kill code. This isn't like a Death Penalty provision in the legal code. When an individual hero, or a team of heroes, is fighting powerful enemies to the death, I don't think it would be realistic to expect them not to kill those who are trying to kill them. And how many more Earthlings would die when you restrictively attempt to stop invaders from landing and killing the human inhabitants of the planet?

---

Violence In Comics, Part Two

The first super-hero comic story I ever read was "Lex Luthor, Hero." But it will always be known to me by the title of the third part, "The Death of Superman". The story appeared in SUPERMAN #149 in November of 1961. The copy I read was missing its cover, and I don't even know how my step-brother managed to acquire a copy of the comic.

Yes, it was deemed an "imaginary tale", and I have it as part of a trade paperback, DC's GREATEST IMAGINARY STORIES. But that does not matter. Imaginary or not, it read like a real story. It felt like a real story, despite the disclaimer at the end, "The chances are a million to one that it will never happen." Later, of course, as part of a really BIG EVENT, Superman was killed off--for the time being back in the 80's.

When a significant comic book character is killed off, even if temporarily, it's an important event. And the comic book companies take full advantage of that event to publicize it and especially to sell more comics. Marvel took advantage not that long ago by killing off Captain America (Steve Rogers). But nobody believed it was for good, especially not with another Captain America feature film in the offing.

In the imaginary death of Superman, Lex uses green Kryptonite rays to kill him. There's certainly no blood and there's no gore, but Superman does turn green and eventually dies. And to this pre-teen at the time, it was a violent death and it was a prolonged death, even if it was imaginary. (Perhaps the cover made it clear that the tale was imaginary from the start, but remember that the copy I read did not have a cover, so I took it as real up until the very end and the disclaimer.) And the creators took full advantage by killing off Superman and then showing a huge funeral event after his death, with famous and not-so-famous characters walking past his glass coffin from all over the universe as well as from the future (the first Legionnaires Lightning Lad, Cosmic Boy, and Saturn Girl, my initial exposure to these fabulous teens from the future).

Not long after Superman was killed this way, Lightning Lad was killed off by a freeze ray from Zaryan the Conqueror in ADVENTURE COMICS#304. Of course, in AC #312, he was brought back to life, even if another had to sacrifice his life to revive him. The revolving door between life and death was now in full swing.

So, very early on in my own comic book reading, key characters were violently killed, even if the blood and gore were not depicted, and even if their deaths were eventually undone in one way or another. And, I might also add, President Kennedy was assassinated not long after the imaginary death of Superman, though his untimely death could not be undone. Real violence would become a significant part of rest of the decade with civil rights murders, civil mass murders, violent reactions to protests, violent protests, the war in Vietnam, and further political assassinations. One could not easily avoid the inherent blood and gore in real life.

Because comic books were still primarily the entertainment of choice of pre-teens and teenagers, blood and gore would stay banished for some years to come. Bloody violence might wash across the movie screens after BONNIE & CLYDE, but comic books would remain relatively blood and gore free for a few years anyway.

So, what to make of the violent, bloody death of Ares in SIEGE #2?

Frankly, I didn't much give a damn. It may have been quite visceral. But it is on the printed page, and all I could think of was that it reminded me of that plastic model kit that used to be available, also back in the 60's, The Visible Man. His body was clear, but his insides, if you painted them correctly, were quite colorful and realistic. Which is all to say that I have seen the insides of people before (even the faked guts spilling out that was depicted in the movie CATCH 22).

And the problem is that, no matter how graphic, the comic book companies have hedged their bets from almost the very beginning by either not REALLY killing off the character, or bringing back, no matter how impossibly, any famously "dead" character.

If Bendis and Company wanted to kill off Ares graphically, to prove that he was really, truly, totally dead, it doesn't actually work. Any future writer can resurrect Ares and it won't have mattered how graphically his death was once depicted. Hippolyta was killed off very graphically in the OUR WORLDS AT WAR series from DC several years ago. But like the Barry Allen Flash and Supergirl being killed in CRISIS, everyone can eventually make it back to life. So any depiction of comic book character deaths, no matter how violent or graphic, is simply an exercise and little more. (Wolverine gets hacked up and burned off and he still has the ability to reconstitute himself--and that has been shown more graphically than was Ares dismemberment.)

As I have implied, of all the deaths of all the heroes over all the years, none impacted me as much as my first, The Death of Superman, or the senseless killing of the little kitten, tossed against a wall in BAST. Everything else may be interesting in its own way, but it does not impact me at all. The deaths may be realistic, but those killed off can be, and are, resurrected almost all the time. As others have proclaimed, it's a turnstile or revolving door to the underworld and, therefore, has no real or lasting impact. Unfortunately.

---

Violence in Comics

Welcome! All of the previous posts about the RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE series are still available along the column on the left. But I have decided to write posts as often as I am able about various subjects that may be reflected in the series itself or relate to topics that I have addressed in the series in one way or another, primarily or tangentially..

The following is my take on an on-going issue that comic books, which influenced my writing, have always faced since they were viewed, more so in the past than now, as a medium primarily for children and young people, Violence in Comics:

.

I must admit that I am currently way, way behind in my comics reading. Not just weeks, perhaps, but months. It may be one of those temporary periods of personal malaise. Between Marvel Comics' DARK REIGN and DC Comics' BLACKEST NIGHT, was it all becoming too bleak, too unremittingly morose for me to take at this stage of my life? It may also have become one of those situations where, once I got behind, the task of catching up has become, in and of itself, a chore that has taxed my desire to read so many comics all at once. (BTW, I still keep buying my weekly comics, to the delight of my comic store guy, Ray. It's just that I buy them and leave them in the bag I brought them home in. Thereafter, the bags of comics pile up around my already snug condo.).

Now, the one advantage of reading these many series of comics titles in order is that I have a better chance of understanding what is happening with the titles I still do read (from Marvel: NEW AVENGERS, X-FACTOR, MIGHTY AVENGERS, and a few others now and then; from DC: GREEN LANTERN, FLASH, SUPERGIRL, JSA, JLA, and a few others now and then). And now Marvel has begun the special event SIEGE, and I am not even caught up with the preceding DARK REIGN--though the two events are related and SIEGE directly follows events in DARK REIGN..

I am much the same way with TV series I follow: I wait until the series seasons appear on DVD (and now, more than before, on beautiful Blu-ray), and I watch the entire new season episodes all at once: HEROES, SMALLVILLE, THE SIMPSONS, TORCHWOOD, FRINGE. I am a member of a gay online comic discussion group, the gayleague.com, and it was during an early issue of SEIGE that the group discussed at length the issue of violence in comics had come up yet again. One character, already unbalanced to say the least, has violently, and I have learned, graphically, killed another character (an inherently violent individual himself)..

How much violence is too much violence? How graphic is too graphic? Decades ago, when I first began reading comics widely and pleasurably, even subscribing to a number of titles, especially the Legion of Super-Heroes in ADVENTURE COMICS, where a character killing another character began the focal point of the specific issue. Star Boy, when faced with his own murder, kills his would-be assassin before he himself is killed. For the Legion, killing was against their carefully crafted code. Star Boy was tried, found guilty, and expelled from the Legion. Most fans were upset that Star Boy had been expelled, me among them. Around that same time, an episode of the E.G. Marshall TV show, the Defenders, found an abused housewife on trial for murdering her husband, a mean, nasty monster. I stopped watching the series when she was found guilty of murder rather than being let off for having acted in self-defense. College came along and my record album collection began to take precedence, and I stopped collecting and reading comics, except for the occasional Legion comic now and then..

Flash forward to 2000 or so, and after I found the GLA once again, having lost the Web site before that, and I began to contemplate two more RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE volumes that would definitely require that I read comic books once more to catch up. I was advisted to read CRISIS and SANDMAN and STARMAN and PROMETHEA and several other titles to catch up then. But even though, throughout the decade, I was reading many titles and trade paperbacks, I still never felt that I had caught up or ever would catch up. I had missed almost the entire 70's, 80's, and 90's; and that would leave me with a serious handicap I might never overcome..

By the end of the decade of the 2000's, comics had become more and more dominated by these BIG EVENTS such as AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED and INFINITE CRISIS and SECRET INVASION and then these newest, DARK REIGN and BLACKEST NIGHT. One BIG EVENT after another began to wear on me and eventually caused me to find myself with stacks of comics piling up, and I was where I currently am now. But in one minor comic, BAST, I saw something that made me stop reading that title and even returning that issue to the comic store in protest. A violent character took a little kitten and through it against a wall. The kitten's death was graphically depicted, and I was thoroughly repulsed. The writer and artist and editor had crossed the line as far as I was concerned. But how would I respond to this latest, violent event in comics, the death depicted in SIEGE? Tune in tomorrow, because I promise that I will have caught up with all the current issues of Marvel's latest event, SIEGE, and I will relate my thoughts.

---