The Four Color Media Monitor

When Dr. Light was killed in Final Crisis at least a year ago, I thought DC might've had that done because they realized he'd been rendered too embarrassing to use, at least for a while, because of how badly he'd been tarnished with the portrayal as a rapist in Identity Crisis, made worse by the appearance he made in Green Arrow a year later.

Well, as the latest tie-in to Blackest Night shows, it was a little premature to think they'd gotten rid of him just because he'd become too embarrassing to use now. In Justice League of America #39, he's shown enjoying the salt the new Firestorm's girlfriend was turned into (via The Weekly Crisis). So now, James Robinson, as the current writer of the League's ongoing series, is taking the tarnishing and making it worse by turning it into a sick joke. He clearly is going downhill. Will Inertia be next to appear as a zombie, even after the murder he was depicted committing, and will that be just as awful?

Update: while we're on the subject, I just found this very naive - well, stupid - article about the Silver Age villains of DC, that apparently sees nothing wrong with turning Dr. Light into a rapist:

Doctor Light, “that luminous wizard”, has experienced his ups and downs as a credible super-villain. By the early 1980’s, under the handling of later writers, Dr. Light had been transformed into a pompous incompetent, only a real threat if he accidentally did something right. To a whole generation of comics fans, he was a running joke. Then, in 2004, mystery novelist Brad Meltzer wrote Identity Crisis, a mini-series which not only provided an in-continuity explanation for Dr. Light’s slide into ineptitude, but restored him as a villain whose enormity of crime was genuinely calculated.

Meltzer’s plot returned the character to his roots because ruthless was certainly the way Dr. Light was depicted the first time he tried to destroy the Justice League, in a tale forebodingly titled “The Last Case of the Justice League”, from JLA # 12 (Jun., 1962).

[...]

It was quite a comedown for Dr. Light, from formidable master villain to impotent underling. Now that I think about it, this is probably when his image started slipping. As the Silver Age passed into the Bronze Age, Dr.Light would take more stabs at killing the Justice Leaguers, both individually and as a group. But he never had the same aura of menace and readers no longer looked upon him as an "A-list" villain, and by the 1980's, he was about as threatening as a "Special Guest Villain" on Batman. It would take twenty years, and Brad Meltzer, before Dr. Light became a true figure of evil, again.

Boy, what kind of leftist wrote this weakling of a "history article"? It didn't so much as return Arthur Light to his roots as it did make him otherwise unbearable and leave readers with a bad aftertaste. After all, it's hard to accept a villain like Light when you're under the impression that he's willing to stoop to rape again, and hard to believe that he wouldn't do so again either. And an "in-continuity explanation"? My foot. The moonbat who wrote that fluff-coated, defeatist monstrosity should be ashamed of himself. What a piece of knee-jerk crap.

Labels: dc comics, dreadful writers, Justice League of America, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, violence