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If you are a fan of Kevin Smith, and then you may know that he is a comic book fan. There is a popular tale that he sold his comic book collection to fund his independent movie Clerks. The other thing about Kevin Smith is that if you are a fan of him, you may have noticed he tends to feel the need to work sex into every story in the worst way possible. The most blatant example I can think of is Zack and Miri, which was so graphic that it originally got an NC17 rating. So it should be no surprise that he wrote a story where he has The Black Cat raped and sexually abused.
The story is called The Evil That Men Do. Let me say up front that this comic story offends me in every way possible. Even the title implies that the author (Kevin Smith) created the story to sympathize with the alleged evil aspects of men, when in reality he probably finds the idea of The Black Cat raped and beaten to be his masturbatory fantasy. Why do I say that? Because Felicia Hardy (Black Cat) literally masturbates in the shower while fantasizing on the third page of the story.
Something else Kevin Smith tends to do is have characters act, um, out of character. From what I understand, writing editors usually catch inconsistencies like this, so I don’t know how Smith keeps getting away with it. (J Scott Campbell expresses encountering this issue in his autobiographical interview (Affiliate Link)). In The Evil That Men Do, we see Spider-Man acting like Bugs Bunny. He is acting way over the top wacky, cracking too many jokes to be taken seriously. Yes, Spider-Man has always had a sense of humor. But this was so out of his element, I had to look up who wrote the story. And that’s when I realized that Kevin Smith strikes again. Not just with having the Black Cat raped, but with destroying the dignity of the other main characters as well.
We see these same elements in The Widening Gyre. Batman is shoe-horned into Kevin Smith’s world of dirty jokes and cartoon humor. Batman not only loses his serious demeanor, but was forced to perform oral sex on the villain Poison Ivy. Or in a word: rape.
Kevin Smith has also included heroin usage in the mix, another deeply sensitive and frightening topic. Frankly, Smith should know better than to work this subject into one of his stories. I say this because of his longtime friend Jason Mewes had a dope addiction. He surely witnessed the indescribable frustration and emotional pain from watching a close friend or family member waste their life away, and not being able to do anything about it.
So bottom line, we have Black Cat raped by Kevin Smith both literally (a result of his writing) and metaphorically by having her be seen and do things out of character. Be sure to read it and offer your own opinion in the comments below.