I’ve had Valerie D’Orazio’s blog Occasional Superheroine in my blog folder as a live bookmark for the past few months. Unfortunately, the RSS feed hasn’t worked in ages, so I totally missed the fact that she had erased all the previous blog entries and replaced it with a new, extremely revealing, story of her life in comics. An incredibly difficult life, judging from the account in her blog.
The main shocker in D’Orazio’s online memoir is the fact that the rape, and later murder, of longstanding DC Comics character Sue Dibny in Identity Crisis came not from the needs of a groundbreaking story, but rather from the DC editorial honchos sitting down and saying “we need a rape” to boost sales. There’s a lot of stuff you can excuse on the basis of good storytelling, but the picture changes when it’s clearly just a publicity stunt. On the other hand, D’Orazio’s blog is being discussed in the comics blogosphere as an indictment of the way the male-dominated comics industry treats female employees. Having read the entire thing, from bottom to top, I didn’t really see a clearcut indictment, partly because the details (and order) of events isn’t always very clear. She does, however, offer a pretty grim view of the world of male comic book writers, editors and fans. Definitely worth reading, although it will probably leave you as depressed as it left me.