Cringeworthy Comicbook Moments: Dr Light's Time in Green Arrow

[espanolbot]

Trigger Warning for discussion of rape, violence, sexism and bad writing.

I'll be completely honest with you, I'm not that familiar with Dr Light outside of his post-Identity Crisis appearances (though he was fun in the cartoon, mostly because of his interaction with Tara Strong's AWESOME depiction of Raven) so I can't comment on how much his character is derailed here.

A bit of context, as punishment for raping Sue Dibny, several members of the Justice League get Zatanna to rewrite the supervillain Dr Light's mind to make him more harmless. Roughly a decade or so later, the reprogramming wore off and he went back to his old ways...

He starts off his rampage by targetting Kimiyo Hoshi, the female Dr Light, who at this point had retired from superheroines two years ago and was running Ted Kord's company following his death.

Considering she's way, WAY more powerful from the male Dr Light, she's wiped the floors with him numerous times in the past. But since he's meant to be threatening now, things naturally don't go well.











...She was given superpowers by the universe in a move to preserve itself, how are her powers "yours"?

Naturally she ends up in hospital because of this.



Next Issue.
After torturing Killer Frost for information by setting her on fire (yeah, Ollie tortures people a lot in his old solo series, it wasn't just something added in in Cry for Justice) he finds out that Dr Light is in Star City.

Specifically in Star City glowering at Mia Dearsden...




After chasing her around with lasers that somehow bend in midair, he leave her alone just so he could attack Connor instead. Eventually he kidnaps Ollie, injuring Mia in the process.

Then he explains why he went and attacked Kimiyo for seemingly no reason.





So now we have the perspective of Sue Diny's assault from her husband, his male friends and her attacker, even an indignant reaction from Cheetah of all people for Light's behaviour, ... but not from Sue herself. And in addition to that, the (superior) Dr Light is hospitalised JUST to send a message to Ollie and the other JLA members...

Ick.

I'm not going to post Dr Light coming back from the dead as a zombie in Blackest Light (where he eats the saltified body of Firestorm's girlfriend or something) and threatens to rape Kimiyo's children, because I don't have the scans and the character has had enough time already.

Here he is being killed by the Spectre after he attempted to rape some Teen Titans cosplayers, and Crispis decided to go old school and turn him into a living candle. Good Times.



So yeah, in short Kimiyo is awesome and should be the one being brought back into the DCnU, not Arthur Light, who is a tool of the highest order. Also one of the major criticisms of Identity Crisis was that it used women just as plot devices and means of motivating the men in the story, not sure whether the women in this Green Arrow story being reduced to the same level is Winick trying to be clever and establish a theme with Arthur or just an example of how bad some of the writing at DC was at the time.

Comments

[silverhammerman]

Thanks for including the scan of the Spectre taking out Doctor Light, I don't think I'd be able to read the other crap without seeing him get his comeuppance. Just such an awful character who was in such awful stories.

[icon_uk]

I think my feelings of this can be summarised by a long, drawn out, "Ewwwww!"

Kimiyo was a a sadly underused character, so brining her back for the first time in ages to be brutalised is just.... I refer you to my first sentence in this post.

(And yet, my inner nerd wants to point out that you CAN'T torture Killer Frost by using fire, she's not carved out of ice, she's a hyper effective heat-sink who feeds off thermal energy. Her idea of a nice time was french-kissing Firestorm, or having a dip in a volcano.)

[bewareofgeek]

I feel the need to repost this old thing:


Casstoons No. 202 by ~Cass-Cult on deviantART

[icon_uk]

Oh, if only....

[deleonjh]

Like Dr. Light, I also did not read Starman and have no idea who the guy in the top hat is. I'm just going to assume it's Superman on his way to a black-and-white party and the last panel is black because he's raping Dr. Light, in keeping with DC's apparent objective to shoe-horn rape into every character's story.

[icon_uk]

The Shade basically controls an entire dimension of darkness which he can summon, make solid and basically do whatever he wants it to.

He is also NOT a nice person (That doesn't mean he's always a BAD person though, he was a supervillain for a time, but that was more to alleviate the boredom of immortality, and superheroes were FUN to play against), has few people he would count as friends and would not only not take kindly to them being harmed, would have absolutely no scruples about dealing with someone like Light in ways that are, literally and figuratively, darker than you can possibly imagine.

[jaybee3]

Now I'm thinking they could have made Dr. Light an enemy of Obisidian (who had similar powers). Instead they went with making "rape" Light's superpower (wasn't that line actually referenced in a TT comic - spoke volumes what other writers thought of IC even as they used it over and over again).

[philippos42]

Oh, the general research failure is from Winick? What a surprise.

[sadoeuphemist]

Oh man, I remember seeing some scans of that conversation between Dr. Light and Green Arrow. It was just so hilariously terrible because Dr. Light couldn't stop talking about rape. Everything he talked about, he just had to tie in it to rape somehow.

http://livingbetweenwednesdays.blogspot.com/2006/11/can-we-talk-about-something-else.html

Forcing Ollie to watch the video: like rape. Stealing the other Dr. Light's powers: like rape. Green Arrow likes firing arrows? Oh, you better believe that's just like rape!

[icon_uk]

I'm sensing he might have been going for an analogy somewhere in the subtext there, but I just can't quite work out what it might have been,... don't worry, I'll get it eventually...

[mrosa]

I read this blog post a few years ago, laughed myself silly!

I want to believe - I want to believe! - this was just a parody of rapecomics. Like the writer was just taking it to their extreme to show the complete absurdity of the situation, which those panels successfully do.

[jaybee3]

I think this gives the writer too much credit vis-a-vis it being a parody. If it's Winick we're talking about this is a guy who thought of and the proceeded to kill off Donna Troy and Omen using a malfunctioning Superman robot and played it completely straight (and they never did bring back Omen pre-reboot despite such an inane demise). Superman actually felt all of one second of guilt about it too if I remember.

[jaybee3]

This is partly why I think Identity Crisis is the worst DC has put out in the last 20 years (more than Rise of Arsenal even). It pretty much damaged and derailed every single character who appeared in it forever after.
Let's see:
- Dr. Light
- Jean Loring
- Zatanna (the most)
- the rest of the mind-wipers particularly Black Canary who voted to do it to Batman and then moved to Gotham, became BFF's with the former Batgirl, worked with Bruce's sons and never seemed to have a pinge of guilt EV.ER.
- Superman (who insinuated he knew about it thanks to super-hearing but looked the other way)
-Ralph, who must have gone along with not only NOT putting his wife's rapist behind jail but if you think about they must have mind-wiped Sue as well to forget it because she never seemed to have the after-effects of the incident (which was retconned into her story but you know what I mean). Then comes the fridge horror when you think that mind-wiping wore off on Batman and Light it would have worn off on Sue as well and she would have remembered ALL OF IT, including her husband's role in it.

Yeah, and Light, Jean, and Ralph were all killed off within 2 years after the story because there was nowhere left to go with them after IC. So much for Brad Meltzer's self-proclaimed "valentine" to the DCU.

[mrosa]

A valentine? Ha ha, that's great!

For me the truly twisted punchline of this awful mess of a dark joke was Grant "I-love-the-Silver-Age!" Morrison praising the story in Superdupergods.

'Joycean' he called it.

[sadoeuphemist]

Well to be fair it is sort of Joycean

http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=32

[captainbellman]

I found it awfully sad that, after Identity Crisis made an attempt at establishing Dr. Light as a more threatening and capable villain, writers from that point on wrote him as just the same old loser but with the motivation "Everything I do that isn't rape is a METAPHOR for rape!".

Having said that, I still don't like that other Dr Light at all. She was just so...one-note. Her characterisation seemed to be just being aggressive all the goddamn time, and not doing much else.

I think it's generally better if this mantle is picked up by no-one from now on. It seems cursed.

[icon_uk]

They'd already tried to make Light a more threatening and capable villain in "Underworld Unleashed" and that didn't seem to take that well.

[mrstatham]

Which should have been a hint. Some villains are just destined to stay goofballs.

[mrosa]

He started as a serious super-villain in the Silver Age. Then he was reduced to a joke. I don't think it'd take a lot to turn him into a solid villain again, just ignore his stupid fear of the Teen Titans and start telling good stories with him again.

[mrstatham]

I prefer him as the idiot, though. I know it's not his fault because he's just a character, but I think Dr Light just deserves to be a one-note joke forever.

[silicondream]

I recall him being a perfectly legit threat against Hal Jordan in the post-Suicide Squad era. He was a doof, sure, but he was also powerful and murderous, which was kind of all that was necessary.

[mrstatham]

I can't believe Winnick actually tried justifying the bullshit of Identity Crisis with 'it's not rape, it's sending a message', which seems, to me, to be entirely contrary to how the scene is depicted in the actual story. There, he doesn't seem to do it to send a message - because how would he know Sue was there in the first place? Complete bullshit trying to justify a shitty villain's behaviour. I was pretty glad when he got turned into a fucking candle.

It's just.. Ugh. I can't believe there's dialogue like 'I bet he doesn't have the stones to risk an AIDS infection'. It's like.. It's like standard supervillain ham focused through a completely fucking stupid lens. Who WOULD be willing to risk an AIDS infection? Or is it declaring that Light would risk an AIDS infection because he's that much of a badass rapist? Jesus. There's villainy that's actually kinda scary, and there's plain fucking stupidity. Why'd it take so long for Winnick to get booted off Green Arrow?

[jaybee3]

For me Winnick is a lot like James Robinson. Inoffensive or even quite good when playing with his own creations but when working with other people's (i.e. writer's) toys he just does something completely OOC.

Remember that whole storyline with Josh the obnoxious parking lot dude and his one-night stand with Huntress, Gail Simone wrote that just because Winnick had Huntress (who was simply guest-starring in Outsiders) have a one-night stand (off-panel) with Roy/Arsenal...just so he and Dick could later have a joke argument about it. Seriously - that was the whole reason it (Huntress was not even on-panel for it). Gail hated it (enough so that she had Huntress openly mock Roy's "prowess" in front of Black Canary) and decided she needed to do something to prove Huntress wasn't like that (although I don't think it worked).

[bruinsfan]

Am I misremebering the last issue of Crisis on Infinite Earths, where Dr. Light was able to drain so much energy from a nearby star that it prevented the freakin' Anti-Monitor from doing the same, and then hit him hard enough with a zap of the accumulated power that it put him down for a sizeable span of pages (when punches from various Kryptonians and Green Lanterns were bouncing off him like spitballs)? I really don't see Arthur Light being able to outdo her in that respect.

Kimiyo

[capt_satellite]

Kimiyo was one of those star-crossed heroes that came out of COIE. Great idea, but nobody seemed to care enough to define her and really explore her vast potential.

Sad, sad,sad.

Re: Kimiyo

[espanolbot]

She was in Justice League International, I think, and she was in the preboot version of the JLA, she seemed cool in both those series.

Re: Kimiyo

[capt_satellite]

Check it. Her first appearance was in CRISIS #4. Bought it at my local comic shop back in the day.

C

Re: Kimiyo

[espanolbot]

Yeah, I know. I was mentioning some other stuff she was in.