I suppose there’s a degree to which we must give superheroes beating criminals for information a pass just by the nature of the genre, the same way we give their vigilantism a pass but probably wouldn’t approve of anyone in real life kidnapping a criminal, pounding the shit out of them, and hanging them unconscious from a lamppost outside One Police Plaza. But I think that a good writer, on some level or other, owns up to the ickiness of this behavior. After all, superheroes routinely do things to criminals in their power that we would classify as war crimes if the Bush Administration did them. Far be it from me to impose a political litmus test on fiction regarding this or any issue, but I like to assume that thinking people who make up stories for a living have given this topic some thought (hopefully even before America started routinely doing this), and thus if a writer doesn’t comment in some way on how profoundly fucked-up this aspect of superheroic behavior is, it’s on them.
A case in point is Justice League: Cry for Justice #1. For real, there was a major, major disconnect between how awesome Ryan Choi kept saying Ray Palmer was in the comic, and how awesome writer James Robinson kept saying Ray Palmer was in the supplemental material, and the fact that his main action beat in this issue was torturing Killer Moth. That’s not awesome!
I often think of the scene in The Dark Knight Returns where Batman throws a guy through a window, informs him that he’s bleeding out, and the only way Batman will bring him to a hospital is if he coughs up info. Miller’s writing is such that even though we’re obviously supposed to see Batman as a hero, we are also to understand that he is a dangerous, disturbed man, and that this conduct is not particularly honorable–it’s something his demons have driven him to do.
Another case: recently Ed Brubaker had a scene where Daredevil tortured some nigh-invulnerable supervillain by lighting him on fire or something like that. Now it turned out that he wasn’t actually doing this–I forget how it worked, but I think it was one of those “power of suggestion” deals, like how you read about in frat initiations when they tell the initiate that they’re going to be branded but then touch them with an ice cube, the burn mark appears anyway. But still, Brubaker wrote the scene in such a way that there was no doubt that what Daredevil was doing was a seriously messed-up act by a seriously messed-up man.
And of course there are any number of similar examples, from Rorschach even to that horrible, horrible JMS Spider-Man storyline after Aunt May got shot where he was like “no more Mr. Nice Spidey, I’m going to break fingers and make deals with devils and abandon my marriage every day until I get my octogenarian aunt back.”
The Atom’s conduct in this issue, on the other hand, was just gross–extra gross, given his torture technique’s resonance with his and his wife’s own history, as a friend of mine pointed out.
At any rate, isn’t torture what bad guys do?
Then there’s the whole issue of the unreliability of information extracted through torture, which no one seems to want to address in comics or anywhere else. But that’s another story, I suppose.
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