So I know exactly what you’re thinking — you’re wondering if the most recent issues of She-Hulk trivialize rape. The answer is… yeah. Kinda.

Click here for spoilers!

OK, then. Well, these days Jen Walters aka She-Hulk is working as an attorney with a lawfirm that mostly deals with superhero-related crimes. One of her most recent clients was Starfox, who was a member of the Avengers during one of the eras I never read. Starfox, whose real name is Eros (!?), has “psychic control over the emotions of others.” Here’s the ISB describing what happens when Starfox grapples with the Hulk, way back in Hulk #300:

When the Avengers finally show up, they decide to hang back and let Starfox, The Creepiest Avenger, have a go at stopping the Hulk. His method of choice? “Overwhelming his anger in waves of… pleasure!” Thanks, Eros. Hulkgasms are exactly what we need. He is immediately punched the length of a page and not heard from again.

It’s funny that Chris at the ISB mentions Hulkgasms, because, well… She-Hulk actually slept with Starfox at some point in the past, we find out. And then a woman comes forward and accuses Starfox of using his emotion-control powers to get her into bed. Soon, other women are accusing him too, and he hires She-Hulk to defend him. Only, She-Hulk starts to wonder if she slept with Starfox of her own free will…

As Ragnell wrote way back in May at the start of this drawn-out storyline:

She calls him to deny it, and he hangs up on her. Even though it was years ago, she’s so enraged that she leaves the courtroom and Hulks out on the staircase.

I will give credit where it is due. The story is well-done. It was clever and respectfully handled. Jennifer was not turned into a victim during this, and the retcon wasn’t used to manufacture an audience bond with her. Instead, Slott writes her like a human being.

And it addressed something that’s been bugging me about the Marvel Universe for quite some time now — how it’s got fifty billion telepaths, half of them use their powers to “get laid” (*Ahem* Psylocke and Cyclops) and no one calls it as the rape it is.

(More scans of that issue are here.)

(I’m reminded somewhat of a pretty horrid storyline in Peter David’s Star Trek: New Frontier novels, where in a nutshell a “space elf” uses his emotion-control powers to seduce Lieutenant M’Ress, the cat-woman from the Star Trek animated series. Nobody will believe M’Ress, but then the space-elf is found disembowled and she’s the prime suspect. At least Slott’s storyline is better than that one.)

Apparently Starfox actually has fans (who knew?) and this storyline pissed them off. One of them reminded Slott of something he wrote in GLA #3:

“But recently, what’s bothered me the most is how cavalierly comics have treated subjects like rape and violence towards women.”

And in response, Slott said, in this thread, that that quote actually led to the She-Hulk storyline in question:

Talking with friends, co-workers, and fans about these issues– and watching all the discussions about them both here and on other boards– got me wondering if it was possible to deal with this subject matter in comics– and to treat the issue in a NON-cavalier way. Is this something that could (or, more importantly, should) be covered?

That’s where the germ of this current story started. And (as people who’ve read the issue know) this story isn’t quite over yet.

So anyway, in the latest issue of She-Hulk, out this week, it turns out that Starfox really didn’t use his superpowers to get She-Hulk into bed. We know this because he says so, and Jen believes him. Possibly this is because they’re in some kind of mindscape where he can’t lie, I’m not sure. It also turns out that Starfox was falsely accused of making his brother Thanos fall in love with death, because Thanos framed Starfox by cloning himself and implanting a false memory in both Starfox and the clone. Say what?!? By the time the whole business of clones and implanted memories and stuff is over with, we’ve sort of lost sight of whether Starfox used his powers on any of those other women. Was it ever settled? He skipped out on his trial on Earth, right?

Oh, and it turns out that Starfox did use his powers on She-Hulk once, to make her think she was madly in love with her boyfriend the Man-Wolf (who is now the Star God), when she was about to break up with him. And now thanks to Starfox’s meddling (with an assist from Awesome Andy, an android who mimics superpowers) She-Hulk and Star God are married but not actually in love. Make sense? Okay then.

OK, so here are my thoughts, for what they’re worth. First of all, rape is a legitimate subject for a comic about criminal law to handle. But it might have been smarter for Slott to stick to having other women accuse Starfox, and not She-Hulk herself. It would still have been an interesting storyline, just not as “personal.” And even though we supposedly now know that She-Hulk slept with Starfox of her own free will, it still raises the spectre of Jen-as-rape-victim that has to follow around all comicbook superheroines. Plus the more I think about it, the more I wonder exactly why we’re supposed to take Starfox’s word for it?

It bothers me even more that we never get any closure on the issue of whether Starfox raped his original accuser, or those other women. Unless I missed it somewhere? There’s some vague handwaving about how the false memories implanted by Thanos caused him to act wrongly, but that could just be referring to him making She-Hulk want to marry her boyfriend.

Also, I sort of agree with the commenter here, who says:

Jen seemed… likeably flawed in the original issues that Slott wrote, and now she seems to have fallen into this trap where has very little agency of her own.

So yeah, Slott obviously launched this storyline (according to his quote above) with the intention of showing how rape should be dealt with in superhero comics. But I would say the attempt backfired woefully, and he ended up producing exhibit A for why rape should hardly ever appear in superhero comics. In the midst of a story about clones, mind-trials, robots, infinity gems, psychic powers, yadda yadda yadda, we have to grapple with the idea of psionic roofies. It makes it hard to take seriously.