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Forget Arsenal. Crossed Is The Book That Should Really Offend

Published Wed, 23 Jun 2010 07:00:22 -0500

So Arsenal features a little casual misogyny, physical abuse, dubious sexual politics and a dead cat. Ho hum.

Crossed, now written by David Lapham, features a rapist father as the strong moral guardian of the book and potential saviour of the human race.

In issue 1 of the new series, we find one of his daughters confronting her father over her own history of being raped by him, and that he's now doing it to her younger sister. He strikes her and is about to do worse when the Crossed invasion begins.

And suddenly he's the only man with the will, calm headness and ability to fend off the attack, save his family and colleagues and take them on a cross-country journey to safety, repeatedly outwitting and beating the infected hordes.

And in issue 2 we find not only has he got the younger daughter pregant, but now she's infected too.

The book's lead, the older daughter finds herself having to make pragmatic over idealistic decisions, and ones that will haunt her.

The cold and calculating manner in which she acts relects an emotional dissonance shared with her father, and may well have been a result of the abuse.

So the reader is left with no choice but to support and approve of the very necessary actions taken by someone in any other context would be seen as the lowest of the low. But in this context, his very fucked up attitude to love, family, power and sex, is probably what's needed to survive against a horde or monsters.

In the kingdom of the killer cannibal rapists, the rapist is king, it seems.

Which is a message you'll not get from an issue of Green Arrow. Not yet, anyway.

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