Why I’ve Been in a Bad Mood All Day

Last night before going to bed, I stopped by comicsworthreading.com, a blog I visit now and then. And I read this post by Johanna, which led me to another blog, Occasional Superheroine. In it, the writer (anonymous, but apparently a former assistant editor at DC Comics) talks about a horrifying physical experience she had, interspersed with incidences of sexism she’s experienced in the comics industry.

What she describes, it’s horrible stuff: Some of it cruel, some of it repulsive, some of it just thoughtless, but really cumulatively gut-wrenching. And I realize it’s just one side of the story, but it’s a pretty compelling side.

I don’t know how to write about this, so bear with me. I’m trying to be honest. Which is hard, because I know I’m going to come off as a heel.

I don’t know the writer. I feel, naturally, normal human compassion for her. She’s obviously going through a very tough time right now, as is her friend, and I hope she gets a handle on some new possibilities in life.

But she’s distant, several times removed from me, and you can only care about a stranger so much. Or maybe I can only care about a stranger so much. Or… I don’t know. I’m not writing about her, really. I hope she’s okay, but I can’t dwell on her any more. I need to move this essay forward.

Her story rattled me on a personal level, in very much the same way that one of the incidents she mentions (which I’d heard before from another perspective) rattled me. This is a company I’ve wanted to work for my entire life. It may not be the pinnacle, but it’s the peak I can see from here. And the people there act like this?

It’s ugly, and nothing I wanted to know. But at the same time, part of me says that some of it’s understandably human. She writes about an incident in which an artist sent in his most recent pages, in which a character is raped:

It started with my associate editor running gleefully into our boss’s office, several boards of art in his hand.

“The rape pages are in!”

I don’t know how to react to this. There’s a callousness to it that’s hard to take. But at the same time, no one real was harmed. It’s fiction. And what else was he supposed to call the pages, anyway? I imagine they called the rape scene in The Burning Bed “the rape scene,” too. What else could they call it? If you’re going to work with the story element, you can’t be afraid of the word.

So really, it’s the word “gleefully” that’s the most disturbing part of that passage. And that’s a characterization of his behavior, not the behavior itself. It all gets subjective, and subjective is messy. And again, no rape took place. Fiction is fiction.

But while that’s undeniably true, it still feels like I’m being selfish, like I should be more concerned, that I should give up my hobby and my hopes of being involved with it professionally one day and just chuck it all in the sewer.

All because of something that happened to someone else? How far does compassion go? How far does outrage go? Far enough to shoot myself in the foot?

I don’t know. I don’t know how to feel about any of this.

But I’ve been dreaming this dream since I was 8 years old, and I don’t want to give it up when I’m finally making some headway. Particularly for incidents that have more (but not everything, a little voice nags) to do with people than the medium itself. But when I do think about it, it can be paralyzing.

Everything is flawed. Everything.

It’s a lot harder to face in the ivory towers you build when you’re a kid.

Rob