Why even fight if you don't fight dirty?

I always have a hard time convincing students that the violence in Watchmen is categorically different from the chompurfzung violence traditionally featured in comics.  Dave Gibbons draws Watchmen in the same style he used in a previous collaboration with Alan Moore ("For the Man Who Has Everything") to depict Wonder Woman thrutching Mongul:

Although there might be an implied low blow in that panel, the thrust of the violence clearly moves from her fist to his face.  Compare that to what Lori does to a street thug in Watchmen:

Gibbons and Moore let you know that Lori's the sort of hero who castrates men with her bare hands.  There's no incidental knee to the groin here as there was in the Wonder Woman panel: Lori grabs the thug by the balls and yanks.  The creases in the thug's shirt do the work that the speed lines do for Wonder Woman.  (Much like the blood in these panels.)  The absence of speed lines creates the impression of a quiet violence that persists even as the palette shifts from the browns and yellows of the first panel to all shades of pain in second.  Yet because Wonder Woman and Lori are both cartoons, on first read students think these very different violences more similar than not. 

And did I mention Lori enjoys doing this?  Compare her face to Dan's when they each realize what's about to happen:

They know the thugs stand no chance.  They know they could dispatch them with ease.  Yet Lori still fights dirty.  She's the tenth-grader who picks fights with fourth-graders and goes for the eyes.  In this respect, the gratuitous violence in Snyder's film actually corresponds to what we have in the book—and what we have in the book is a portrait of the hero as a sadistic bully.

Comments

[Ahistoricality]

Quibble: who picked the fight?

Quibble 2: Is a groin shot any more cruel than a hard head shot -- which her partner is applying with vigor, and Oz in the linked panels -- which carries the risk of permanent disability or death?

[SEK]

Quibble: who picked the fight?

They did. But that doesn't mean she has to enjoy it as much as she does.

Quibble 2: Is a groin shot any more cruel than a hard head shot -- which her partner is applying with vigor, and Oz in the linked panels -- which carries the risk of permanent disability or death?

A groin shot? No. Grabbing the jewels and pulling them off? It might not be more debilitating, but in terms of the vocabulary of comic violence, it's certainly a more colorful expression, so to speak.

[Ahistoricality]

I think you're overreading the image. Grabbed and pulled, sure: common self-defense technique, at least in '90s anti-rape classes. Pulled off? I think the mugger would be dead shortly -- there's a lot of blood flowing through that part of the body, which is why castration has a high death rate before modern surgical techniques -- instead of lying in pain at her feet (which is what it looks like to me a few frames down).

[Ahistoricality]

p.s. They clearly have no aversion to extreme violence and blood -- the sequence with Oz is vicious and messy -- so if they'd actually performed the orchidectomy, I'd expect there to be explicit evidence of it: bloody hand, a pool of blood, a stray lump on the street....

It would make a good parallel with the rape, too. If they'd done it.

[David Moles]

I think you're making a mistake if you leave Lori's gender out of the analysis. Especially given the period -- arguably still contemporaneous with "I Spit On Your Grave."

[Dr. Psycho]

And if you are going to go into Lori's personal motivations, we can't neglect that "the rape" was not only an important part of the story as we read it, but a very significant part of her own life (even before she found out the Big Secret).