comickal/elsewhere: strange horizons, "welcome to the real world, part two: crime and punishment"
New one up at SH:
Strange Horizons Columns: Welcome to the Real World, by Iain Jackson:
Don't do the crime if you can't do the time. That's the saying, right? So why is it that so many supervillains never quite seem to get around to doing time at all? And why is it that even when they do time, it winds up being strikingly short. You'd think, you kill ten, twenty, a few hundred people, even in a non-death-penalty state, you serve a few hundred years, right? And yet, that really doesn't quite seem to be the case. Crime, punishment and justice in superhero land somehow don't quite resemble anything out here in the real world, and, it turns out, really can't...
[...] really good villains are, in the immortal words of the Joker from the first Batman movie, "all those wonderful toys" for the writer. But put yourself into the mind of the characters-the residents of Gotham City, for example. How would you like to have all those people running amok in your city again and again and again and again and again? It either makes your hero look incompetent, or your city look terrible, or both. Now, the Joker is clearly insane. Whether Gotham is in New York or New Jersey doesn't matter; neither state would execute someone that far gone. (And Grant Morrison's nifty start to All Star Superman #11 notwithstanding, New York doesn't have an active death penalty at the moment.) And as stated, Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane and its equivalents are clearly no real solution. Even when criminals don't escape, if they regain their sanity, then they've served their sentence and get released-that happened both with Harley Quinn and the Riddler, both of whom seem, rather improbably, to have actually gone straight these days-and from a human point of view, that really doesn't seem like enough of a penalty for someone who may have killed and maimed dozens, hundreds of people. So, given that execution is off the table, and imprisonment seems unfortunately temporary, how do you solve a problem like the Joker? How do you catch the clown and pin him down? ...
Would you believe those last two lines were almost the first things to occur to me about this article? And somehow, I just couldn't resist letting it stay there. (There was, actually, an entire parody song, but it was very very very bad. And also not that far from the original.)
I wonder how many people even caught it, and what their reaction was?
Strange Horizons Columns: Welcome to the Real World, by Iain Jackson:
Don't do the crime if you can't do the time. That's the saying, right? So why is it that so many supervillains never quite seem to get around to doing time at all? And why is it that even when they do time, it winds up being strikingly short. You'd think, you kill ten, twenty, a few hundred people, even in a non-death-penalty state, you serve a few hundred years, right? And yet, that really doesn't quite seem to be the case. Crime, punishment and justice in superhero land somehow don't quite resemble anything out here in the real world, and, it turns out, really can't...
[...] really good villains are, in the immortal words of the Joker from the first Batman movie, "all those wonderful toys" for the writer. But put yourself into the mind of the characters-the residents of Gotham City, for example. How would you like to have all those people running amok in your city again and again and again and again and again? It either makes your hero look incompetent, or your city look terrible, or both. Now, the Joker is clearly insane. Whether Gotham is in New York or New Jersey doesn't matter; neither state would execute someone that far gone. (And Grant Morrison's nifty start to All Star Superman #11 notwithstanding, New York doesn't have an active death penalty at the moment.) And as stated, Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane and its equivalents are clearly no real solution. Even when criminals don't escape, if they regain their sanity, then they've served their sentence and get released-that happened both with Harley Quinn and the Riddler, both of whom seem, rather improbably, to have actually gone straight these days-and from a human point of view, that really doesn't seem like enough of a penalty for someone who may have killed and maimed dozens, hundreds of people. So, given that execution is off the table, and imprisonment seems unfortunately temporary, how do you solve a problem like the Joker? How do you catch the clown and pin him down? ...
Would you believe those last two lines were almost the first things to occur to me about this article? And somehow, I just couldn't resist letting it stay there. (There was, actually, an entire parody song, but it was very very very bad. And also not that far from the original.)
I wonder how many people even caught it, and what their reaction was?