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I was watching a movie the other day and towards the end there's this scene where two characters find themselves locked in a life-or-death hand-to-hand struggle. Eventually one of them gains the advantage over the other and manages to slip behind her… then casually dispatches her by twisting her head sideways. We've all seen this a thousand times in movies. The quick jerk of the head, the gruesome sound effect, and then the bad guy goes down instantaneously, lights out. Death by neck massage. Ugh. This probably shouldn't annoy me as much as it does, but I can't help it, especially when they kill off an important character that way. First of all, it's not that easy to snap a person's neck… and even if you could, it probably wouldn't kill them as quickly and cleanly as in the movies.
Believe it or not, your neck is pretty well designed NOT to break, even under extreme stress. When medical students need to remove the head from a cadaver, it often involves several minutes of twisting, wrenching, and pulling, and that's after they've cut between the vertebrae. It's not an easy thing to do. That's not to say it's impossible. People do suffer lethal neck injuries all the time, but it's usually from high velocity impacts like high speed car collisions, and falling off of very tall buildings, that sort of thing. The most common type of lethal neck fracture is what's called a hangman's fracture. As the name suggests, it's the kind of breakage you get when you drop several feet with a noose around your neck. It requires about 1000 ft pounds of force to cause that kind of damage. That's not beyond human capabilities, but it would be pretty difficult to do on somebody while you're both standing up, with no leverage.
So how lethal is a hangman's fracture? Mortality data seems to vary from 3 to 28 percent, depending on which cervical vertebrae are involved and the patient's age. Not a high probability killing technique, and definitely not a quick one. Many sufferers aren't even disabled by the injury; they're able to drive and walk themselves into the hospital for treatment. So if the idea is that this is supposed to be a quick, silent, easy way for your hero to pick off bad guys, then you're sorely mistaken. At best, your hero might succeed in making the bad guy a paraplegic for life… but even then he'll be able to call out for his buddies to come avenge him!
I'm pretty sure the first people to put this in a movie knew good and well that it was ridiculous, but they were probably trying to show off how bad ass their action hero was. Since then, unfortunately, it's become ubiquitous to the point of absurdity. Everyone from teenage ninjas to lithe female assassins are snapping necks left and right in movies and in comic books and video games. So this is my impassioned plea to all comics creators: Please stop using this in your comics! Unless you have a character with super grizzly bear strength, he shouldn't be able to twist people's heads off like he's opening a mayonnaise jar. It's not cool. It's a lazy cliché, and it's stupid. It's time to got rid of this tired trope.
That's my public service announcement for today. I'll probably drop another page on Saturday. Just because. See ya then!
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