FOR JUSTICE
FOR JUSTICE
Mar 04So, JLA: Cry For Justice #7. What in blue fuck was that!?
In the first act of the Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem, the filmmakers do the inviolate – they kill a kid and his dog. We’re not attached to the kid or the dog – I couldn’t even tell you their names – so the act basically serves as a message to the audience that, for the next hour and thirty minutes, we will not be fucking around here. It is a moment full of declarative force and while it’s shocking, it’s also happening in a monster movie that is a response to a bowdlerized AvP as much as it is a sequel to it. It makes sense. It has an impact because it makes sense.
Did I just defend killing kids? Well, fictional killings and fictional kids, but I’m not going to write the whole idea off with a “NEVER!” There’s always at least one good use for even the worst idea. Angelina Jolie married Billy Bob Thornton.
Why do I bring this up? So that you know where my limits are when I tell you that the cheap and thoughtless killing off of Lian Harper is crass, insulting bullshit storytelling and that whatever member of DC’s Powers That Be who said “Yes, that’s an excellent idea!” should have one final, fleeting moment of humanity as they lie down in a casket filled with the rich and loamy soil of their homeland as the dawn approaches and stake themselves.
I mean, I guess that we should maybe be thankful that Doctor Light wasn’t involved. Right? I guess we should be thankful that Mirror Master didn’t do a line of coke off of her eight year old corpse, or that Superboy Prime didn’t squash her head like a grape or that Deathstroke the Terminator didn’t brainwash her with syringes full of mind control drugs or whatever. At least she didn’t grow up into some hateable melange legacy character called “Red Cheshire” who’d get ignominiously executed during a linewide “Crisis” event. At least it was just a bomb.
Fuck you, DC Comics. I don’t even like Roy Harper – NOBODY likes Roy Fucking Harper, for crying out loud, but you’ve just gotten rid of the one thing that makes him interesting that isn’t a crippling heroin addiction or a severe case of juvenile overcompensation. Congratulations.
I like Roy Harper! *feels the need to stand up for him*
On top of that, they just fridged a female multi-racial character so that some white guys can angst. Which… way to go DC!
(All of those things you listed that could have happened are going to give me nightmares now.)
I just… Lian’s death symbolizes to me everything that is WRONG with DC, and why the company as a whole isn’t making me happy anymore. 🙁
Okay, I’m being a bit too harsh about Roy. There are times when I like him, but I’m not wrong about Lian being one of the best things about his character.
And yes, she was an established multi-racial character, but I don’t think that has anything to do with the *motivation* behind her death (although the ‘invoking white-guy angst’ is true enough).
But yes. I think that this is even more of a misstep for DC than even Sue Dibny was.
Brightest Day, my ass.
Oh, Lian was definitely the best thing about his character – I’m not disagreeing. One of my favorite things about him was that he was such a good dad.
I don’t think that Lian being half-Asian was part of the motivation for killing her, but they’ve now removed both Lian and Connor from the Arrow family, and I have no idea what happened to Mia, so we’re back at the original all-white cast, which is problematic, even if it wasn’t intentional.
When they announced Brightest Day, I was really hoping that it meant that the DCU would be a happier place, and maybe a place that I would want to read about. Guess not.
Mia was actually in Cry For Justice briefly. And Mia and Connor both appeared in the Green Arrow Black Lantern issue a few weeks ago.
So they’re both still around and like you I wish they’d be more prominent. I really liked Mia on the Titans. You know, just before Teen Titans became one of the worst books DC publishes.
The disaster that is Teen Titans (and Titans) is a whole other set of problems. *sighs* I miss Young Justice.
I do, too. But I did like the first half of this volume of Teen Titans. Bart, Tim, Conner, Cassie, Mia, Gar and Raven was a nice mix and Johns, at least in my opinion, managed to be at least respectful of the characters and their histories even if he grimmed it up a bit at times.
Well said.
At one time, Roy was a favorite character of mine. Mostly due to Devin Grayson’s fun ARSENAL mini and the TITANS series that followed it. The highlight of both was the inclusion of Roy’s daughter Lian and her relationship with her father and the Titans themselves.
Lian is what made Roy interesting.
I think you’re right, overall, but as a devil’s advocate argument…
why should we get so upset about the death of one 8-year-old girl when it’s the result of a giant bomb that just went off killing many many more 8-year-old girls, along with many others?
I guess my answer would be that this killing is of a specific character and is so cheaply designed to illicit RAGE (FOR JUSTICE) that it comes off as exploitative. Which is the real problem, as you point out–one thing to kill a kid in genre fiction, another thing to use the killing to motivate another character.
so I answered my own rhetorical. fuck me.
It’s using an established and loved supporting character cheaply to motivate another character to go back to the way he was in the 80s. My major point about the beginning of AvPR is that the killing works there because we don’t know that little kid from shit. He’s a symbol; she’s Lian.
So, I haven’t read a word of Cry for Justice and I don’t ever intend to. I just want to say that the only DC comic I have purchased in recent memory (read: at least 6-8 months) is the issue of Titans that featured Lian. Because it featured Lian. 🙁
I’m a reader/critic who tends to think *nothing* (with very few exceptions) should be completely off limits in storytelling. But to me, that’s more reason to be responsible about how you use it, to think about if the shock really has a reason to be there beyond the shock of it.
I’ve been watching ‘Rome’, and without spoiling specifics, over the course of the show, Very Bad Things happen to women and children, and are used in the context of the story to motivate characters. And of course, it bothers me, but it doesn’t bother me into thinking ‘They shouldn’t have done this’ — because it’s a show about a society at war with itself, and how that leads to civil chaos. It’s also a show that largely revolves around and is driven by the deaths of powerful, privileged male figures. When Caesar dies, he’s just as dead as a poor female slave.
Maybe that’s what makes it different from a comic book.
Reading reviews and news like this makes me wonder why anyone reads DC “mainstream” comics anymore. What is the deal with DC’s obsession with over-the-top, sensationalistic bullshit? Why has it gone on so long? DC Comics used to be fun. They used to be reliable. They used to be readable.
At least Marvel’s pretending to head in a more positive direction with its “Heroic Age.” Maybe it’s time for DC to come out of its own Siege of darkness?
Or, you know, put out more stuff like the recent Morrison/Stewart run on Batman & Robin. 🙂
PJ — to be fair, I’m not sure how representative this is of ‘mainstream DC comics’ and how much it’s just this particular title. I mean, I’m reading most of the Bat titles and reading the Superman titles on and off, which I’d guess are pretty mainstream, and I’m not running across the wholesale slaughter of 8 year old girls. (Though on the other hand I read Flash Rebirth in which a villain goes back in time to murder Barry Allen’s mother — presumably in order to give him a ‘unique’ post-Crisis origin, with ‘unique’ being defined as ‘more like Batman).