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Thursday, March 11, 2010
Is It Just Children?
Over at the 4th Letter, David Brothers quotes Tucker Stone on the differing approaches to violence against children in two comics from last week, one from DC (Cry for Justice #7) and one from Marvel (Ultimate Comics Avengers #5). Now, I didn't even pause in UCA #5 when I read it and the Red Skull tossed a baby out of the window. He's a bad guy. That's what bad guys do. But, as I asked in the comments section of David's post: are people just offended by the killing of the baby? After all, prior to that, a man is killed with a pair of old scissors, which, I have to believe, is much worse than being tossed out a window. If the man's death doesn't bother people, why does the baby's? It's far less painful and graphic... if anything, it adds a slightly comic touch to the scene with the baby seemingly safe and then, aw what the fuck, the Red Skull just tosses it out the window. Tim and I touched on this a bit in the podcast this week, but, really, is it just that killing kids is 'wrong' or what?
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3 comments:
I think it depends on context, and how the baby-killing serves the story. Sometimes, in a story, you just gotta kill a baby-- okay, maybe not, but still.
I think the Red Skull scene works, because it's sort of a really horrific punchline that immediately shows the reader how fuckin' evil this Red Skull is.
On the opposite end of that, you've got Cry for Justice, in which the death of a child-- an established child character who hasn't been used much but serves as a relatively unique element for an otherwise dime-a-dozen character-- is just another thing added to an already hefty dogpile of violence, grim grit, and grotesquery. They already ripped the dude's arm off and blew up a city, and then they kill this kid off too, because it's totally hardcore, man.
One thing feels like part of a story, and the other feels like it's a camel-breaking straw.
Yeah. That's why I found it odd that people were so put off by UCA #5... in context, it's effective at accomplishing what it sets out to do without seeming exploitive.
It certainly is a little strange that people would rather snicker at the death of a child in a silly context than take it seriously in a grim, "real life-y" context. It seems to me that people expect Mark Millar (especially in his out-of-mainstream-continuity work) to do juvenile, lowest-common-denominator stuff like that. But to see it in an in-continuity book that the DC editorial and hype machines threw their full weight behind probably threw a few people.
Killing kids definitely isn't "wrong", because it's just a comic book, grow up, et cetera. But people go into a Mark Millar book knowing it's going to be a slightly stupid bit of poor-taste fun, and the Robinson book was at least promoted as being a serious examination of like, heroes and justice and "what do those words mean?". The Millar book has the obvious understanding that nothing inside it should be taken seriously, but the Robinson book pretty much screams for that kind of consideration so it should be no surprise that people are um, taking it seriously.
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