Penny Arcade, the gaming webcomic which has expanded into a multinational brand covering everything from journalism to conventions, yesterday plunged itself back into controversy by re-opening a wound from long ago.
In 2010, the “Sixth Slave” comic ran on the site, with a pretty blunt gag about being “raped to sleep by the dickwolves”. That sparked a small amount of protest, if nothing else showing that 2010 was, in some ways, a surprisingly different time to 2013. Penny Arcade’s response was another comic, a blog post and comments making many of the same arguments that still occur in disputes over rape jokes today: that rape jokes are no different from bestiality jokes, that no-one rapes because of a joke, and that it’s just comedy anyway.
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