Why is it that the only men people can conceive of as being worse than Devin Grayson are actual criminals (who can’t even write)
Whenever somebody makes a post even gently defending her the notes fill up with people saying ‘yes! we should be criticizing X male writer who did YZ heinous thing in real life’ and I mean yeah, maybe so, but the average non-criminal guy writing for DC during the same time period has churned out comics that are at the very least equally if not more problematic. This includes writers I like.
hot take: if judd winick wrote the tarantula arc people would praise it for its sensitive portrayal of a man getting sexually assaulted by a woman and if devin grayson wrote lost days people would be DESPISE it for having jason and talia have sex. and would probably make a ton of gross, unfounded personal allegations about her for daring to write it.
The irony here is that I have seen him praised for his handling of sexual assault themes in his Green Arrow comics, while also having written a truly awful follow up to Identity Crisis where Doctor Light stalks and humiliates Mia and rants at excruciating length at Ollie about how much he loves rape while we're treated to all the guy's riveting inner thoughts such as, for instance, how he thinks the only reason Ollie isn't fucking his sidekick is because he's too afraid of getting AIDS. And while there was some criticism of it at the time nobody was making gross personal allegations at Winick or saying any of the heinous things people have said about Grayson over it.
Not to mention that he had Dr. Rape—sorry, I mean Light—assault and de-power the female Dr. Light, one of DC’s few Asian superheroes, in a scene where she’s degraded, condescended and explicitly victim blamed by the narration itself, or that he wrote Black Canary as a perpetually damsel’d bimbo after she’d been established as one of the best martial artists in the DC universe while simultaneously recasting Ollie as an expert martial artist for what is I’m fairly certain the first time in the character’s history. Can’t have women showing up their boyfriends in a fist fight, can we?
And that’s just his work on the GA franchise. I’m pretty hard pressed to come up with anything written by Winick that treats female characters well, up to and including UtRH, which includes a stock scene where Jason humiliates yet another woman who’s been defined as one of the DC universe’s best martial artists (for fun and profit: compare this with how Onyx is treated over in Batgirl (2000)) and has no retrospection on Steph’s then very recent death in spite of the fact that it should be immediately relevant to the plot.
This is an incredibly consistent issue with Winick’s work, and yet it’s never become synonymous with him as a writer. It’s framed as a one-off oops, or people get vocally upset for a while before letting it fade into the rear-view. I’ve never seen anyone describe him as a ‘terrible person’ for writing this stuff, which is something I see people say about Grayson all the time. By the same token, I can’t actually tell you off the top of my head who was responsible for Identity Crisis or who fridged Sue Dibny because people don’t harp on male writers in anything that even approaches the way they revile writers who aren’t men. My point isn’t that anyone ‘needs’ to hate on male writers more, but that the idea any of this is about the actual content of these comics is laughable. It’s purely about the gender identity of the writer.
