The Four Color Media Monitor

Here's an article on Book Riot from December 2019, by one of their otherwise most pretentious liberal writers, who actually admitted she originally thought the repulsive Identity Crisis miniseries was great when it first debuted, precipitating the collapse of DC's products artistically, and only years later did she suddenly reevaluate:

In 2004 I was working part time at Borders (RIP) and just getting into comics. My manager at the time was also a big comics fan, and one day in the break room he lent me the first issue of DC’s big new event, Identity Crisis.

I read it. I loved it. I walked over to the comic book store on the other side of the mall from the Borders and bought all the issues that were out at that point, and continued to buy them every month until the series ended.

I now believe that Identity Crisis is one of the worst things that ever happened to the comic book industry, and we’re still shaking off its effects. But what made it so captivating—and so bad—and what were those effects?

Now that's a great question there alright. I do recall, when looking through those early message boards at the time, there were people who only admitted after reading the last part that they were disappointed, even though there were quite a few moments before that which were atrocious and offensive, not the least being Sue Dibny's rape at the hands of an out-of-character Dr. Light, who'd never been depicted stooping to sexual violence before in the time leading up to the year 2000. Why, up to that point, did the ostensibly dismayed readers have no issue with the poor taste plaguing the story? Why weren't they willing to admit it was perverse, right down to the left-wing metaphors for September 11, which were very sick too? Making matters worse, I even recall reading a message board or two, where at least a few users who gushed over the miniseries not only embraced it till the very end, they even justified its rancid existence by indicating it represented what they'd like to do to girlfriends who'd rejected them. In other words, for some of the most perverse, seeing the headline in a paper telling Jean Loring had been sexually assaulted in prison represented a rape fantasy they harbored. That was some of the sickest drivel I've ever seen on the internet, and made clear one of the biggest problems with Identity Crisis is that it was appealing to perverts, since nobody at the time was willing to question whether the structure was demeaning to women, nor whether it was a leftist metaphor for Blame America propaganda.

So again, one can only wonder why anybody would want to lionize a story that was attracting people with lenient views on sexual violence? Why did they not take any time back in the day to consider that, and ask whether it's a good idea to go miles out of their way in favor of a story that's offensive to victims of rape and pedophilia? Well unfortunately, this was the liberal norm back in the day, at a time when certain PC advocates were so selfish and entitled, they refused to consider the poor influence of the tale, and villified/shunned anybody who tried to point out how poor the tale actually was, and on far more than just failure to retain a consistent characterization for the cast. If it hadn't been for the Harvey Weinstein scandal, chances are they'd still be lauding this grimy comic even now. And sadly, there still are quite a few moonbats out there fully willing to defend it no matter what. The following description, however, has some parts that are sloppy:

In the first issue, Sue Dibny, the wife of beloved comic relief hero Ralph Dibny, aka the Elongated Man, is murdered. The surviving members of the “Satellite Era” of the Justice League, i.e. the ’70s run—Green Arrow, Black Canary, Zatanna, the Atom, and Hawkman—assume Dr. Light is the killer and try to bring him in. When two younger heroes, Kyle Rayner (Green Lantern) and Wally West (the Flash) question why the JLA is targeting a villain widely perceived to be a hapless joke, the Satellite Era Leaguers reluctantly explain that back in the day, they occasionally used Zatanna’s magic to erase the memories of any villain who discovered their secret identities. One day, Dr. Light managed to sneak aboard the satellite, where he found Sue on monitor duty and raped her. When the League returned, they decided that wiping Light’s memory wouldn’t be enough, and voted to magically lobotomize him, making him incompetent ever since. Also, Batman, who wasn’t part of the initial vote, caught them at it and tried to stop them…so they wiped his mind, too.

If memory serves from the material I'd checked years ago, it told - through GA's narrative - that Sue teleported up to the station because "she was bored." Which was one of the stupidest excuses for setting up the offensive catalyst of the story. It could be the columnist doesn't remember clearly, but all the same, I don't get why she had to be so awkward in giving a synopsis. It continues:

The League fails to apprehend Light, who regains his memory and…full capacity of his brain? Unclear. Meanwhile, an anonymous figure attacks Jean Loring, the Atom’s ex-wife; sends a threatening note to Lois Lane; and hires the villain Captain Boomerang to kill Jack Drake, the father of then-Robin Tim Drake. Boomerang and Jack kill each other, leaving their sons orphaned. Elsewhere, the hero Firestorm is killed while questioning other suspects in Sue’s murder.

An autopsy reveals that Sue died of an aneurysm, and close examination reveals tiny footprints on her brain. Simultaneously, the Atom, who has gotten back together with Jean after rescuing her from her mysterious attacker, realizes she knows more than she should about the various attacks…meaning that she must be the killer. She tearfully confesses that she borrowed his equipment but insists that she only meant to scare Sue, hoping that threats to various Leaguers’ loved ones would send her own Leaguer straight back to her arms. The Atom has her committed to Arkham Asylum, then wanders off to be tiny and sad for a while. Meanwhile, Batman starts to suspect (correctly) that the rest of the League has been playing with his memory, causing an erosion of his trust in them that cause a domino effect of negative consequences in future stories.

Umm, I don't think Jean was depicted confessing "tearfully", so much as she was depicted hatefully, with a nasty look on her face, even going so far as to invite Ray to hit her (curious that's not mentioned here. Although such an act isn't actually shown on-panel, isn't it obscene how the story minimizes the seriousness of a man hitting a woman?). In any case, that any apologist who read the book at the time would actually think the reasoning for Jean causing all that trouble over peanuts, and making her out to be mentally insane in a way that's inconsistent with 2 older stories where she was brainwashed (in the last issue of the Silver Age Atom, it was by an alien race called Jimberen, and the story was completed a few months later in Justice League of America. The other story was in Super-Team Family around 1977) wasn't colossally stupid, clearly was predisposed to liking it no matter how offensive it was to start with. And that's a serious problem with the reception the book had at the time.

There are a lot of minor issues with this story. Like most Crises, it slaughters a number of tangential characters to show you that it means business—like, I don’t care about Firestorm, and he’s back now anyway, but he deserved better than that. Most of the cast is written fairly out of character, and the bulk of the story is narrated by Green Arrow, a baffling choice for a story about secret identities when he hadn’t had one in 20 years. And the pacing is a mess: with the murder in #1, the backstory in #2, and the reveal in #7, that’s four whole issues in the middle of treading water with the heroes coming no closer to the solution while a bunch of people die.

But of course that all pales beside the major issue, which is that this story revolves around a female character being raped and killed.

And it’s a red herring.

The things that happen to Sue in this story—her assault, her death, the mutilation of her corpse—don’t happen because of who she is. They happen because DC wanted to be cool and dark and edgy, like Marvel but better, and the way to do that was to put a rape front and center in a high profile comic.

And this is exactly why it fails: because all involved clearly lacked confidence in their ability to tell a story without resorting to shock value and gross-out ingredients. And is the columnist saying she doesn't care about Firestorm? Well that's exactly the problem here. A whole culture was built up wherein the audience is indoctrinated to believe it's perfectly fine to just turn every two-bit character into a victim of murder/rape, and nobody's interested in a far better alternative like keeping the characters alive for character drama, growth, development and focus. Which only confirms how nobody's really reading these abominations for merit. From what I recall reading across various websites at the time by people who upheld the miniseries, what was most telling was that none of them seemed to care about Sue. They didn't seem even the least disappointed she'd been reduced to a sick laboratory experiment, and never showed any remorse for minimizing serious issues along the way. And these scum had the gall to call themselves fans?

The article also brings up a most eyebrow raising issue that former DC employee Valerie d'Orazio had with one of their editors at the time:

It’s perhaps worth noting at this point that D’Orazio has also discussed her history of being sexually harassed by the editor on Identity Crisis (and many other books), Mike Carlin.

Given how much editorial wanted the rape plot line in there, and given how insensitive their in-house discussion of a sensitive subject was, it’s not surprising that the end product uses rape only for shock value and misdirection. It’s not a book about rape in any meaningful sense, because it’s not a book about Sue, or even about Ralph or Dr. Light. It’s a book that has a rape in it, as envisioned by grown men who think putting rape in your work is something that makes you cool and grown up, even as you giggle over it like naughty children.

Now this is definitely telling quite a bit. If the staff involved see nothing wrong with trivializing sexual assault, you can't be shocked if they run the gauntlet of doing something even remotely similar in real life. One more reason the comic's aged horribly.

And it’s a book that offers up female characters for the slaughter in service of that prurient rubbernecking: not just Sue, but Jean, who had existed for 43 years prior to this book, whose villainous turn is motivated by nothing but out-of-nowhere, unhinged clinginess, and who was permanently ruined as a character for a book that, once again, isn’t actually about her or her actions.

So what is Identity Crisis actually about? It’s about the impossibility of trusting anyone: your wife, your friends, your heroes to do the right thing. It’s about how what you thought was something beautiful and innocent—those Satellite Era comics you loved as a kid, the Dibnys’ sweet and playful marriage—is actually tainted. (Please note that I am describing the comic’s themes here and not suggesting that real rape survivors or their relationships are “tainted” by their experiences.)

If memory serves, the scene where Jean was almost hung indicated somebody else behind her wearing shoes had grabbed her and tied her in a noose, so it's stunning how the finale abandons all logic for the sake of another example in misogyny, leaving something else entirely unexplained. And the apologists didn't give a damn. Amazing how the woman who wrote this acknowledges some of the most disturbing themes its built upon, including the message that nobody's trustworthy, not even your wife/girlfriend, and a claim the Bronze Age JLA was literally a quagmire of darkness, as though this were real life. On which note, there were only so many apologists back in the day who pretended, deliberately or otherwise, that all characters involved were real people, not fictional ones. And they owe an apology they'll surely never offer.

And it's amazing the columnist was willing to acknowledge another alarming issue the book suffers from:

But there’s also historical context for Identity Crisis. In “Terrified Protectors: The Early Twenty-First Century Fear Narrative in Comic Book Superhero Stories,” Jeffrey K. Johnson situates it as a post-9/11 story, heavily influenced by the culture of fear and suspicion that developed in the United States after the 9/11 attacks: [...]

As Johnson points out, Marvel had its own share of dark and cynical post-9/11 stories, like House of M and Civil War. DC and Marvel have been locked in a sort of arms race since the ’60s, after all, of “That worked for the other guys so let’s do it ourselves but even harder.” The spiraling downwards into violence and suspicion happened across the industry, to the detriment of everyone, and not just at DC. And it can’t just be blamed on one comic, given the political context.

But DC’s choice to base their own jumping-off point for this new wave of storytelling on a rape not only spoke to their disdain for women and rape victims, it meant that every subsequent plot development in their greater universe hinged on a throwaway rape plot point. When Batman’s suspicion of his fellow Leaguers caused him to build a spy satellite to surveil them, readers were reminded that this was the point of Identity Crisis, and not Sue Dibny’s rape, murder, and mutilation. What happened to her didn’t matter; how Batman felt about a tangential issue did.

It also made rape more speakable as a plot point and a threat, especially since Dr. Light was restored to the pantheon of competent villains. In an issue of Green Arrow that came out shortly after Identity Crisis, Dr. Light gleefully beats up the other Dr. Light—a heroic Japanese woman—then informs Green Arrow that it was almost as good as raping her would have been. The callous salaciousness of “the rape pages are in!” permeated far beyond that one moment in the DC offices.

It's amazing she's willing to cite this information, since not many leftists are willing to admit the book was built on atrocious political metaphors. However, a drawback here is that she fails to clearly acknowledge the story builds on victim-blaming propaganda, which makes it all the more noxious.

The following, however, is where the columnist begins to falter:

Don’t get me wrong: sexual violence has been a part of comics since the beginning, going back to all those pinup-y covers of tied-up women menaced by sinister figures that EC and Fox Comics did such a brisk trade in. It was a truism before Identity Crisis that it was harder to find a female character who hadn’t been sexually assaulted in some way than one who had. But Identity Crisis’s aggressive handling of such sensitive subject matter paved the way for DC to continue to shout about it, over and over until its efficacy as shock value had completely dried up. (Then they moved on to dismemberment. It was a gruesome decade.)

Oh for heaven's sake. While I realize there were bound to be examples of sexual violence decades before, to put pinup covers themselves in exactly the same boat is going a bit far. It may not be in the best of taste to depict a girl tied up, but back in those days, most mainstream comics with such covers usually never crossed the line into genuine sexual assault inside. If and when a girl was tied up in those days, villains were portrayed doing it for the purpose of ransom, or even threatening to execute the lady if she got in the way of their criminal plans. So as a result, those covers with women tied up and gagged were usually just that, and it was not the intent of all the artists to go overboard. It certainly can't be proven they desired to do so. There was a comic strip in the late 1940s called Sweet Gwendoline by a cartoonist named John Willie in Wink magazine that's certainly controversial by today's standards, since it depicted its leading lady being tied up often. But if it never wallowed in sensationalized depictions of rape, you can't say it's offensive in the same way an actual depiction of rape is. That's why it annoys me when a PC advocate begins likening everything to sexual violence in the literal sense, because it risks making the description meaningless. And doesn't it also run the gauntlet of doing something similar to what the columnist mentioned earlier, making all those older stories out to be darker than they actually are? How didn't that occur to her?

Towards the end, she says:

Some of DC’s “dark and edgy” comics have been so influential that they’ve changed the medium permanently, with books like The Dark Knight Returns and The Killing Joke leading that list. Others cause an immediate trend, but in retrospect turn out to be more of a flash in the pan than a tectonic shift. Looking back at Identity Crisis 15 years later, now that we’re finally out of its blast radius, I think—I hope—that we can safely say it’s the latter. DC has more female creators and staff now than they did back then. They are going back to the sexual assault well far less frequently. They’re letting creators tell the stories they want instead of dictating plot lines to them. Hopefully, these are all trends that will continue.

Well here's the bad news. Employing more female writers doesn't automatically equal talented storytelling. Judging by how poorly a lot of DC/Marvel's books are selling now, there's obviously more out there who can attest to that. And despite what she's saying, creative freedom these days is selective only. Those who have it at the majors only do if their politics align with those of the publishers, who lean left. Let's also consider that conservative-leaning women are blacklisted in today's industry just as much as men, and these SJWs make no effort to question whether that's healthy practice. There's also quite a bit of LGBT propaganda going about in these modern comics that's hurtful to women, and in many cases, no distinctions are made between healthy depictions of sexuality and sexual violence. Also consider where Disney's wound up. So what good does it do to suggest today's output is any better than 2 decades ago?

There's an author named Megan Fox who works at Pajamas Media who told Bounding into Comics that conservatives throughly surrendered Hollywood without a fight, and the issue's obviously not limited to movies. If right-wingers hadn't, maybe they could've seen to it that comicdom wouldn't fall victim to the embarrassments it has over the years. Yet even now, it's clear there's only so many right-wingers who don't give a damn about the Big Two's stable of creations, and won't do anything to improve an already dire situation.

It may be a good thing the columnist at Book Riot was willing to reevaluate Identity Crisis and had Buyer's Remorse, and it's probably better late than never. But questions still remain how anybody could be that naive and ignorant at the time, enabling the book to make an impact for as long as it did, and all the while, they never made any call for the people responsible to resign from positions they weren't qualified for, nor did they urge the audience to save their money and not put it into the profiteers' pockets. No wonder the comics medium is so messed up today.

Labels: Atom, bad editors, Batman, dc comics, golden calf of death, golden calf of villainy, history, Justice League of America, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, politics, violence, women of dc