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Yes, vampires are often used as a metaphor for rape. This is not a metaphor and it’s not seduction. Nocturna didn’t talk Batwoman into bed with charm. This wasn’t a character having a moment of weakness or a lapse in judgment because they felt vulnerable. Kate had her will and senses disabled by someone who then had sex with her and erased memory of the incident. Issue #36 also mentions that Kate’s been has had repeated blackouts recently, which means she’s likely been raped repeatedly.
Why is Rape in Batwoman More Interesting Than Marriage to DC Comics? | The Mary Sue
Our weekly Comics-You-Should-Know post is EXTRA BIG this week!
There are a whole slew of trade paperbacks (that is, novel-length comics or novel-length collections of previously released monthly comics) coming out this week, which means it’s an excellent time to catch up on a new series. There are also some single issues this week that are great points to jump into an ongoing title! Let’s get started.
BATMAN ETERNAL #15
Written by Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Ray Fawkes, John Layman, and Tim Seeley
Art by Dustin Nguyen and Derek Fridolfs
Cover by Dustin Nguyen
"Who is behind the hell beneath Arkham Asylum? Can Batwing and Jim Corrigan hope to stop it before it breaks out and consumes all of Gotham City?"
Dustin Nguyen. On all Batman titles. Forever.
However, an action doesn’t have to be intentionally insensitive to be insensitive, and I would argue that’s what has happened here. Gay characters in most other mediums, have long, long operated under widespread stereotypical themes that denied them long lasting presences in stories, much less long lasting relationships. There’s a trope named after it, Kill Your Gays, and it’s a deadly drinking game to start listing gay characters who never dated or who couldn’t be with a willing partner because they lived in a place in which that would not have been acceptable, who died prematurely due to events that were coded “gay” (i.e., AIDS or violent hate crimes), or whose partners died in the sorts of deaths that are still very closely associated with gay characters. Now, we all know that inside of comics, almost nobody gets a stable relationship, but given the context of the kinds of stories that are told about gay characters, and that have been told about gay characters for years, it is insensitive to simply view “postponing, denying or destroying a marriage between gay characters” to have precisely the same narrative weight as “postponing, denying or destroying a marriage between straight characters.” And that’s without even considering the real life struggle of real people to have their right to marry recognized by the society around them. A college classics professor one told me something that’s stuck with me for a very long time as a lover of superheroes: the point of heroes, narratively, is to break boundaries, so that we normal people will know where the boundaries are. He was talking primarily about tragic heroes like Achilles, but this applies as well to comedic heroes (in the old sense of comedic, i.e., heroes who get to win) in a slightly different way. Superheroes break boundaries so that we know what boundaries are possible to break. For many years now, merely getting equal legal recognition for their relationships has been a boundary that the gay community has been fighting to break. Now imagine that I am saying this very slowly: If you are a person who has ever had your life touched by a fictional hero, you should be able to understand how very important it is to allow gay heroes to break that boundary.
