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koraesrambles · 8 months ago

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The Watchmen

The Great Reading Adventure Part 3!

It's time for the Watchmen, guys and hooooooooboy did I have a lot of expectations going into this one. Buckle up!

The Writing

I took notes the entire time I was reading this. It's only 12 issues long, so I decided to read it in its entirety.

I didn't like the first little bit. Don't get me wrong, I could see the crumbs in there, and I could see why people were drawn to it, but as far as gripping premise that pulls you in, it was a little lackluster to me. There were interesting moments in the beginning, but I didn't really become invested until Issue 9, which is 3/4 of the way through the story.

That said, once these guys gripped me, they GRIPPED ME. Issue 9 was beautiful, by far my favorite issue of the whole thing.

Part of the reasons things were confusing to me was because all of the "good guys" kept being compared to far right wing extremists and Nazis. Like, Rorschach is definitely supposed to become cooler and cooler throughout the books, and be kind of the moral backbone in a lot of ways. But like . . . I dunno. Hard to sympathize with someone who repeatedly got called a Nazi and blamed the dedregation of society on jews and communists. Like, I get it was the 80s, but the people in universe who defended him also defended the KKK. I just . . .I'm not down with that. I can't make myself think he's the good guy.

However, I had no idea that the famous quote "None of you understand. I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me." Came from the Watchmen. That moment . . . man. It gave me absolute chills. It was excellently built up to and brilliantly executed. I loved it. If I EVER have a moment in my writing career where I hit people as hard as that, I'll have more than achieved my dreams.

I also think that they pretty much nailed the ending. At least the atmosphere and feeling that I think they were going for. That horrible, sick feeling that the day is saved but actually everything is ruined and all it'll take is another day for everything to have been for nothing. It was a powerful ending, I liked it a lot.

That said, I did not like Adrian's solution. Maybe it's because I've lived through Covid, maybe because it's been 40 years since this was written and some tropes have been done more than others, but pretending an alien threat is coming in order to unite the world just . . . I dunno. It didn't hit for me. I didn't feel compelled by it. I get the reasons he did it, I understand what the writer was going for, I even can acknowledge that it does the job. But it felt incredibly lackluster to me, and not worthy of the really fun villain they had made to execute it.

The Art

The art is better than anything I am currently capable of, and I want to acknowledge that first, but also admit I didn't love it. It's ugly, which of course was by design. This is not a pretty story, it's not meant to give you warm and fuzzies. It also very much is in the style of many other comics I've seen from the 80s, which is just one I'm not as fond of. It did the job, but isn't something I'll be combing over looking for ways to emulate it.

The way the panels were laid out was also interesting to me. It was very repetative, just multiple square panels in a row. I imagine that this is also a result of being from the 80s, and as comics evolved so did the many different layouts, but it was kind of comforting to me as well. If it serves the story best to just have four panels in a row exactly the same size and shape to tell your story, by all means do it. I didn't even notice anymore once the story picked up for me.

As far as things I can learn from the art? Perspectives and the use sof perspectives were MASTERFULLY done here. Both with zooming in on specific details or zooming out. How it was used for emphasis. How it made you feel sick when something horrible was being said and something as mundane as the side of a coffee pot was being shown. It was truely masterful. It also helped make long conversations more interesting.

The Characters

This is probably where I have the most thoughts. The characters in this story are INTERESTING, full caps definitely needed. I mentioned in the writing section that it was kind of hard to root for the main characters when they were being compared to Nazis all the time. But over time they did grow to, at the very least, compel me, even if I still didn't "like" them.

My favorite character probably ended up being Laurie, who out of all of them seems to be the least crappy person. Not that she wasn't crappy, but she was at least trying, you know? I also liked her as Jon's tether to humanity. I feel like she was the audience surrogate in a lot of ways.

Jon was extremely fun, but it creeps me out that humans are like ants to him and he was having sex with them? I dunno, maybe it's the ace in me, but I don't understand when things like that happen. I love that he killed Rorschach at the end, I think that was absolutely the right call. I like how they showed us who he was and how he thought, all compelling and interesting.

Rorschach himself could be very cool one minute and a scum bag the next. He's an excellent character, but I'm glad he died. I think I'm supposed to be glad though. I also think he's the most clever of any of the characters. Not the smartest, but the most clever. He dies, but he's the only one who really wins in the end.

Dan was . . . he was fine. He felt like a knock-off batman and was by far the least interesting of all the characters to me personally. He was a good foil for Rorschach AND Laurie. He didn't compel me much though. That said, there was absolutely a lingering hand holding thing between him and Rorschach where i was like . . . "Are they implying something? what's happening here?"

This was after they revealed that two of the old superheroes were gay and a bunch of weird examples of homosexual couples and I just . . . I'm not imagining things here, am I? I thought things were going to go in a very different direction for a second.

Adrian as a character was utterly uninteresting until he was hypercompetant and defeated all of the "good guys" saving the world by essentially doing a really big trolley problem (greater good, and all that.) That said, nothing is sexier than a competant villain. I was on his side by the end, honestly.

The other background characters were all fairly well fleshed out and interesting. A lot of the women ended up being a little 2 dimensional, but every once in a while they'd surprise me. Almost everyone felt like a horrible person, or like they were just waiting to become a horrible person. They were all good characters even if they weren't good people.

Final Thoughts

I could write pages upon pages of analysis on this comic run. Which would probably be me just repeating what people much cooler and smarter than me have already said. I didn't get into the ways it's aged poorly or the homophobia littered throughout it. But, even with flaws, it was absolutely worth the read, if only to understand how it influenced the rest of the comic world. I understand other comics better now because I've read this one.

Concrete things I learned to apply to my own work:

Take advantage of differing perspectives, both to emphasize important background details and as a way to keep the audience engaged during long dialgoue.

If you need to put a few square panels in a row to get your point across, do it. Why fix what ain't broke?

Your characters don't necessarily have to be likeable to be compelling. You can make terrible people still worth reading about.

#Reading analysis #Reading challenge #100 top comic books #the watchmen #the watchmen read through #rorschach #doctor manhattan #nite owl #silk spectre #This was a lot of fun #tedius at the beginning #but I got over it #reading through all these amazing comics has been so much fun

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fungi-maestro · 2 years ago

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So what is Ditko's Vic personality and how does it differ from other iterations?

I'm going to put this under a readmore bc I am going to use this opportunity to talk about a cool article dissecting this exact character difference! But TLDR, I think the core of Ditko's Question is a black and white objectivism that isn't present in most other iterations. You'll see a little flicker of it occasionally, especially in ones that showcase the vintage personality (like the Blue Beetle short from a few years ago), or ones where they Rorschach-ify him (like PAX), but for the most part his modern character is dependent on him seeing the world as complex, which his old persona really was never able to do while locked into the Randian mindset.

Ok, now onto the readmore.

That's why he's the Question, to find answers to the complicated shades of grey that exist in the world. This is what makes him so interesting, to me at least, and what gives his character the staying power it needs. That's why he chooses complicated people to be his allies and proteges, like our very own Renee Montoya. Ditko Question would see someone with the kind of inner battles that we see in Renee and brush her off, probably giving the viewer a weird speech about unfaltering moral fortitude or something.

I also think it's interesting how Ditko Question was built into the mold of a character that always wins his battles due to his Strong Unwavering Right and Wrong Morals. You see this parodied with the tragedy of Rorschach in Watchmen, a man who stuck to his morals until it ultimately killed him, but you see the inverse of it with modern Vic. This is a guy that holds to his morals, which are complicated and messy, and doesn't win every time. It could be argued that this is a symptom of the purpose of heroes and comics changing over time, but it's still vital to understanding the character change.

Take this quote from this article here that talks about the Watchmen reference issue.

Regardless, O’Neil and Cowan’s most effective decision is to have everything go wrong for Question every time he tries to live up to the standards of his hero Rorschach. In this issue, Question falls out of a building on a man and kills him (this is before he reads Watchmen but still), loses literally every fight he gets in, drinks too much and pukes in a toilet, and is set for execution in the snow before a DC hero staple, Denny O’Neil’s own hard-travelin’ Green Arrow, shows up deus ex machina to save him!

There is a very good chance in every Question story that he might lose. You see him come really close! I can't even count the number of times he gets the snot beat out of him trying to stick to what he feels is right, even if I only tried to do so with the O'Neil run. And what's even more amazing is that his morals are things he grapples with. He doesn't have all the answers, and he doesn't claim to. Here's another quote (last one I promise, go read the article. It's quick and really opened my mind)

This Question goes on to grow, to use violence less, to become so open-minded and curious he confuses the Riddler with his amorphous doubts. O’Neil and Cowan’s Vic Sage grows well beyond Rand’s objectivism, acknowledging the vast pools of gray in the world, and acquiring the self-awareness to understand he doesn’t have all the answers.

Like how he talks to Izzy about if he's "crossed any lines" and he doesn't give a straight answer. He's not sure where his line is, and he really isn't sure if he's gone past it.

And here when he saves Izzy, who at the time was one of the most corrupt people in Hub City (a real feat). He obviously isn't happy about it, but his gut is telling him that it isn't right to let someone die, even if he doesn't like them. He can't be the judge on if they deserve to live.

You see it again here with this criminal that killed someone in front of him. Vic doesn't have the answer to whether someone should die for their crimes.

Compare this to such classics from the Ditko era as "Vic leaves some criminals to drown in the sewers" and "Vic pushes a guy out a window, breaking their flight apparatus, where they are then presumed dead". (I had screenshots of these, but I can't find them? They're in my tags. Somewhere.)

I would say there are some oddball runs for this characteristic, though. The 2005 one comes to mind. He definitely decides those guys fates, and leaving them chopped to pieces in a puddle of wet cement is his idea of justice. There's nuance here too, with the life of Superman on the line, the serious levels of corruption that were being left unaddressed, and his own personal battle with his ego that he was working through. It still speaks to someone that doesn't subscribe to the Randian objectivism that Ditko Question is famous for.

It's kind of awesome that a character like the Question, who starts his career as a guy that seems to have a good answer to every dilemma, is perfectly set up to be a complex and painfully raw depiction of someone that really tries to be good, but doesn't know what that looks like every time. He doesn't know everything, so he has to question the world, his morals, and everything he knows. It's really beautiful to me. Let me know what you guys think, I'd love to hear it.

#ask #timdrakessweatyhands #book club #seal.txt #the question #vic sage #dc comics #comics

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thanagariansnarebeast · 4 years ago

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Top 15 villains: Part 1

I’ve been meaning to do this list for a while, but kept getting distracted. Villains are very different for me to rank compared to the heroes; heroes I ranked based on personality and morality; but villains I’m ranking on personality, entertainment, and relationship to hero. After all, villains by nature are almost always the antagonists, and they play off of the hero; so that factor is important. Most of them see themselves as the heroes of their own story in some way, but I would definitely not call any of these characters heroic. Some of these characters have different versions of them over the decades, but I’ll talk about my favorite versions of them.

15. Ozymandias

“ My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! “ That quote does quite nicely define this character, someone who did a monstrous act to try to save the world. I have already featured him on my fallen heroes list, because for most of his life he was a hero; the terrible thing that he did was really surprising to me when I first read it; and I did feel his betrayal. He’s lonely, calm, and extremely intelligent; and you can really tell that he understands that what he did was awful. You might be thinking “Does doing one terrible thing really make you a villain?” and I would argue that yes it does. He didn’t like doing what he had to do, but he doesn’t consider it a mistake, he would do it again if he felt that he had to. Also spoiler for this list, he’s the only one that isn’t a main DC or Marvel villain, I think him being on this list for only being in one book ever really speaks to how interesting he is and how fucking good the Watchmen comic is. I refuse to read the DC Watchmen stuff, so it is possible he shows up in that; but I don’t like how DC keeps unironically using characters meant as a take down of the genre itself. (The HBO Watchmen series is fantastic though, I highly recommend).

14. Deathstroke

Deathstroke seems to be thought of by a lot of people as mainly a Batman villain, and while I think he is a great villain for Batman; I think he’s better as a Teen Titans villain. Some of the plans and tactics he uses to fight them are absolutely brutal. The Judas Contract is one of the best Titans stories, and he is the mastermind behind all of it; he really knows how to twist the knife. Some writers make him more of an anti-hero, but I think he is far better when he is using his intimidating physical prowess, cunning, and ruthless intelligence to do everything he can do destroy a hero.

13. The Anti-Monitor

“Worlds lived, worlds died. Nothing will ever be the same.“ Holy shit is this guy bad news; Thanos and Darkseid showing up is enough for you to understand that the world might be about to end; but this guy destroys entire realities. He is the big bad for one of my favorite comic book stories, and the consequences of his actions shaped the DC multiverse for decades, and his actions sill can be felt to this day. The first villain on this list that is just pure, absolute evil, he is responsible for the deaths of countless DC universes, as well as Supergirl and the Flash. DC really likes bringing dead characters back to life, building off of (and sometimes ruining) the legacy of characters, but they almost never do it with Anti-Monitor; because he’s such a cataclysmic threat that there is not a lot of stories you can even have with him. The CW did a great job with the Crisis on Infinite Earths adaptation they did, though they didn’t really make Anti-Monitor look as intimidating as I would have liked, and they didn’t make him nearly as big as he should be.

12. Kingpin

The kingpin of crime does live up to his name; not all crime in New York is his doing, but much of it is. He is a fantastic villain, and one who really seems to enjoy what he does. He’s just fun to watch and is so good as an antagonist for Daredevil and Spider-Man. His size makes him seem slow and intimidating, but his body is all muscle; and he has come close to crushing Spider-Man to death. When I was very young I was first exposed to him on the fantastic show Spider-Man: The Animated Series, and he’s been one of my favorites ever sense. Vincent D’Onofrio absolutely blew me away with his portrayal of this character in the Daredevil Netflix series, and I really hope we get to see him again in the MCU.

11. Brainiac

Another villain that is a massive threat, Brainiac has had many different incarnations in the comics, but his incredible intelligence is his defining trait. Another cold, calculating villain, he collects cities full of people because to him; they have to be preserved and studied. The idea of being shrunken down and living in an isolated world just to amuse an alien robot is a pretty scary concept. Superman is his main adversary, but many times it takes the entire Justice League (And sometimes some of the more helpful villains) to take him down. He has such a perverse logic to him that I really enjoy, and when he someday shows up in a film I really hope they do him justice.

10. Mr. Freeze

Doctor Victor Fries is one of the most sympathetic villains on this list, he really just wants to save his wife. Batman: The Animated Series wrote that origin story for him, and its stuck ever sense. There is a deep and beautiful tragedy to the character, and you completely understand why he is doing what he is doing, even if you personally wouldn’t go that far. His character makes you think “How far would I go to help the person I love most in the world?” and any villain that makes you introspective about yourself is a great character. His ice theme and very distinct look really makes it fun to see how different artists design him. He’s one of Batman’s more popular villains, and Batman has some of the best villains in comics. He makes Batman question himself and his motivations, because he doesn’t really want to hurt anyone; he just wants to survive and cure his wife, and if no one ever got in his way he would probably do exactly that. His story is a tragedy of circumstances, but his inability to go about getting what he wants in any other way, and his uncaring attitude for most other people definitely makes him a villain.

9. Doomsday

This character really is the polar (pun intended) opposite of the last character on this list. Doomsday is a big, unstoppable killing machine; and he defeated most of the Justice League with one hand tied behind his back. He is just such a raw, brutal character that I love seeing him show up. This thing has the power to come back to life, unable to be hurt by what killed it before; and spent decades wiping out entire planets before it came to Earth. His biggest and scariest feat is literally beating Superman to death! His best story was his first one, but every time he shows up and Superman fights him, in the back of his mind he has to be thinking “This thing killed me before, and its stronger now.” which is just absolutely terrifying. His striking visual design and brutal nature are always enjoyable, and he was one of my favorite characters to play as in Injustice: Gods Among Us.

#My lists #top 15 #villains #Marvel #DC #comics

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lemon-writings · 5 years ago

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Reading Habits Tag

I was tagged by @erinbeatty! Thank you so much! :)

I. DO YOU HAVE A CERTAIN PLACE AT HOME TO READ?

I normally read either in my bed, on the couch, or sitting on the counter (I like to feel tall!). Also, there’s a nice tree in the yard that I like to climb when it’s warm and sunny out.

II. DO YOU USE BOOKMARKS? IF SO, WHAT KIND?

I tend to use receipts as bookmarks. If I don’t, then it’s scraps of paper. When I finish one of my books, sometimes I’ll just move the receipt to the next book. I have a Books A Million receipt from 2017 that migrates through several books. Sometimes I have a designated bookmark/paper scrap for a book that never leaves the book.

III. CAN YOU JUST STOP READING OR DO YOU HAVE TO MAKE IT TO THE END OF THE CHAPTER?

I stop in the middle of the chapter all the time. It’s really annoying, at times, because I can forget plot points and have to re-read them.

IV. DO YOU EAT OR DRINK WHILE READING?

I’ll drink water and sometimes eat meals, if I’m completely enthralled.

V. ONE BOOK AT A TIME OR SEVERAL AT ONCE?

I am a monster and I read several books at a time. Sometimes I don’t finish them for several weeks/months/years. When I get a new book, I want nothing more than to just read them as soon as I get them, and I often do, which just adds to the problem.

VI. READING AT HOME OR OUT?

I tend to read the most when I’m out, surprisingly. Particularly in band class? I have a nasty habit of reading when my director has other sections play their parts (and as a tuba, I get a lot of time). I used to get on my phone, but my director banned them, so I’ll read instead. Sometimes I’ll read while I’m playing.

I do like to read at home, though!

VII. READING OUT LOUD OR SILENTLY?

I have to read silently, unless it’s a dense academic test or a play. Reading out loud is the only thing that got me through Hamlet and Their Eyes Were Watching God.

VIII. DO YOU READ AHEAD OR SKIP PAGES?

Okay, another nasty habit: I will read the last sentence/page of a book and skip ahead to try finding good parts to encourage me to read. I ruined the Rorschach reveal in Watchmen for myself by doing this (my friend was so upset that I did this). I’ve had friends literally stop me from reading the last page before. I love spoilers! They can really get me interested in the story. When I know the twist of a story, I’ll try to see how it builds up.

IX. BREAKING THE SPINE?

I hate breaking the spines. Hate it more than words can describe. If you see the spine of one of my books is broken, it means either 1.) it’s broken from too many reads, 2.) it was a complete accident, or 3.) someone else broke it before I could rip the book from their hands.

X. DO YOU WRITE IN YOUR BOOKS?

I do not write words in my books, but I do use sticky note tabs to mark my favorite quotes, and I’m not above highlighting/underlining my favorite quotes. My copy of Looking for Alaska is underlined a great deal from way too many rainy days spent reading.

I think I’ll tag @anxious-bean-writing, @wordsmithfox, and @spookales, if y’all wanna do it!

#reading habits tag #tag games #reading habits #writeblr #i have some really weird reading habits

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the-desolated-quill · 5 years ago

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Two Riders Were Approaching... - Watchmen blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. if you haven’t read this comic yet, you may want to before reading this review)

As we hurtle head long into the third act, Two Riders Were Approaching provides a story that comes the closest to a more quote/unquote ‘traditional’ comic book narrative. With nuclear tensions rising and World War Three imminent, Daniel and Rorschach must work together to deduce the identity of the ‘mask killer’ before it’s too late.

At the core of the issue is Dan and Rorschach’s relationship. Their partnership is something that has been talked about throughout the graphic novel, but this is the first time we actually get to see Nite Owl and Rorschach in action, and it’s legitimately fascinating to observe.

When I first read the graphic novel, one question kept bugging me throughout. Why the hell would Nite Owl want to work with someone like Rorschach? A violent, bigoted, right wing conspiracy nut. It can’t just be a marriage of convenience because Dan does express genuine affection toward Rorschach numerous times throughout Watchmen. Of course I was much younger at the time, so I didn’t understand all the nuances until now. See, what Alan Moore does such a good job with regarding the Nite Owl/Rorschach dynamic is using them to illustrate the flaws and dangers of centrist politics.

Now before I go any further, I just want to clarify one thing. I’m not necessarily saying there’s anything wrong with holding a centrist view. I myself identify as a centrist, albeit slightly left leaning. However there is always a risk when it comes to taking a centrist stance of becoming so neutral to the point of being complicit, maintaining the status quo even when it serves as a detriment to others because they don’t want to take sides. I can understand wanting to come across as fair and balanced, but fair and balanced doesn’t necessarily mean both sides of a debate have equal weight. There are some topics where there is no neutral stance you can possibly take. Do women deserve the vote? Should black people have rights as white people? Should gay people be allowed to get married? There’s only one correct answer to those questions. Trying to take a centrist view here wouldn’t be fair and balanced. It would be perpetuating a harmful system of discrimination and inequality. Both sides of an argument aren’t always equally valid. And yet, especially recently, we’re seeing a growing number of (usually white) centrists trying to take a neutral position from a moral or political standpoint. We’ve all seen those cringeworthy pictures of people posing with their Trump supporting friends wearing a MAGA cap, saying how politics shouldn’t affect a strong friendship. Donald Trump is a racist twat, and while not all Trump supporters are necessarily racist twats, they are complicit in his racist twattery, as are the people who claim to be liberal and yet still hang out with those guys, wringing their hands and asking why can’t everyone just get along.

In my opinion Nite Owl serves as the pinnacle of extreme centrism. He may not be as right wing as Rorschach, but he is complicit when it comes to his extreme methods and views because they’re superheroes and what they’re doing is for the supposed greater good. The scene in the bar hammers this point home very effectively. Rorschach of course used similar violent means of interrogation back in the first issue and you’d think now that Nite Owl is with him that he’d show a bit more restraint, but no. Rorschach is still just as violent as he was before and Nite Owl doesn’t stop him or resist in anyway, instead reassuring everyone around them that they’ll try and keep their interrogation brief. In fact it’s Rorschach that ends up restraining Nite Owl when he finds out about Hollis Mason’s murder and threatens to kill one of the Knot Tops.

Ah yes. Rorschach. Now he is the most interesting part of this issue for me. Presented as being sociopathic and intolerant throughout the entire novel, here we start to see another side to him. There’s obviously the moment I just mentioned where he stops Dan from committing murder, but there are other moments too. Near the beginning of the issue, we see the two of them going to Rorschach’s residence to pick up his spare uniform and journal (which is very bloody convenient, isn’t it? The spare uniform I could believe, but a spare journal too? He just happens to have a spare journal lying around in case he lost the other one. When does he have the time to copy his notes wholesale just in case he misplaces one copy? Doesn’t the guy sleep?) and they encounter Walter’s landlady who had been spreading misinformation accusing him of trying to sexually assault her. Rorschach, understandably, takes issue with this and starts to berate her, calling her a whore. She begs him not to say that in front of her kids because ‘they don’t know.’ The implication being they all have different fathers. At which point, in a rare moment of pity, Rorschach leaves her be. There’s clearly a strong parallel between his landlady and his mother and the reason he drops the argument is because he see’s one of her young boys crying in fear, which seems to remind him of his own unhappy childhood. He’s never going to be considered a good person any time soon, but considering the vile and atrocious things he’s done in past issues, this moment feels significant.

Another significant moment is in the Owlship with Dan. With the police hunting them, the two have to lay low for a while before continuing their investigations into the ‘mask killer,’ which leads to a lot of stress and arguing. Dan finally snaps and shouts at Rorschach, chastising him for his behaviour. You think you know what’s going to happen because we’ve become so familiar with the characters’ MO, but Rorschach surprises us yet again by instead apologising and shaking Dan’s hand, calling him a good friend.

This is why Rorschach is such a great character and why Watchmen is such a great book. This small, but touching moment adds some real humanity to his character. As horrid and extreme as he is, you can’t help but feel slightly sorry for Rorschach as you realise that throughout the story, his attempts to reach out to Dan have been in an effort to win back the trust of his best and only friend. It’s a tiny detail, but it helps elevate the character to something more three dimensional as opposed to just being a conservative strawman.

But now of course, it’s time for the big reveal. Turns out the ‘mask killer’ was Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias the whole time. I’m going to talk more about his character in the next issue, which focuses very heavily on him. For now I’ll just say that it’s a good twist that was expertly built up throughout the course of the graphic novel, however I do feel that Alan Moore fumbled it a bit toward the end. While Nite Owl is trying to break into Adrian’s computer, Rorschach delivers this very clunky monologue about Egyptian beliefs and practices, which ends up giving the game away too early. The reason why the reveal works is because Adrian has been used sparingly throughout the story. We know that his superhero alter ego has an Egyptian theme, but this is a background detail that doesn’t really register until now. It sounds silly to say, but at no point did I ever suspect that the mastermind behind ‘Pyramid Transnational’ (the company behind many of the suspicious goings on in Watchmen, along with Dimensional Developments) was the Egyptian themed superhero. But that’s because we’ve only been exposed to Ozymandias every now and then, just enough to keep him in the back of our minds, but not so often that it gives the game away. It’s a masterstroke, if you think about it. However, thanks to Rorschach’s clunky monologue, the reveal becomes really forced rather than having everything falling into place naturally. There’s no moment where the reader goes ‘oh duh! of course it’s Adrian!’ because the reveal is being telegraphed way too heavily. It’s a serious misstep in my view and I wish Moore trusted the reader a bit more rather than having to explain everything in a giant infodump.

However what I especially love about all this is how intentionally ridiculous it all is. We see Nite Owl and Rorschach talking and acting in a very melodramatic fashion. Someone is killing off superheroes in order to try and start World War Three and only they can save the day! Tra la laaaa! It’s once again all about the fantasy of power, until they learn that Ozymandias, one of their own, is the true villain, at which point the fantasy is broken and things get a lot more complicated from here on out. Not that it wasn’t complicated before, but this is the first time the characters themselves acknowledge it’s complicated, which again says a lot about them and their fantasies. Anyone less than a superhero is easy to deal with, but a superhero betraying them? Now that’s more serious.

Before his falling out with DC, Alan Moore had expressed interest in doing a Watchmen prequel about the Minutemen, which I would love to see. But after reading Two Riders Were Approaching, I would also love to see a prequel series about Rorschach and Nite Owl’s partnership in the sixties. It’s clear that we’ve only really scratched the surface of these characters as here we are, ten issues in, and there’s still so much to unpack and learn about them. It would have been nice to have seen them in their element and how it fell apart. We’ll probably never get to see it sadly (yes I know Before Watchmen exists. I’m talking about Alan Moore coming back to Watchmen), but at least this issue gives us a tantalising glimpse.

#two riders were approaching #watchmen #alan moore #dave gibbons #dc comics #review #spoilers

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thecomicsnexus · 5 years ago

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Watchmaker

WATCHMEN #4 DECEMBER 1986 BY ALAN MOORE, DAVE GIBBONS AND JOHN HIGGINS

SYNOPSIS (FROM DC DATABASE)

On Mars, Dr. Manhattan drops the photograph of himself and Janey Slater on the Martian soil and revisits various turning points in his life.

In August 7th of 1945, a sixteen-year-old Jon Osterman is in the middle of assembling a watch when his father, a watch-maker, shows him the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Confronted with the undeniable facts of the theory of relativity, the elder Osterman declares his profession outdated and throws his son's watch-making parts out the windows, urging Jon to instead pursue a career studying nuclear physics. Jon does so in which he attended Princeton University in 1948, and graduating with a Ph.D in atomic physics in 1958.

By 1959, Jon is employed at Gila Flats in Arizona, where experiments are being performed concerning the 'intrinsic fields' of physical objects. He meets Professor Milton Glass, his colleague Wally Weaver, and his love interest Janey Slater. During a trip to New Jersey, Jon and Janey visit an amusement park. There, Janey's watchbrand breaks and is accidentally stepped on by a fat man. Jon decide to fix the watch and finally consummate his relationship with Janey.

One month later, on August, shortly after his thirtieth birthday, Jon plans to give Janey the repaired watch, only to discover he has left it in his lab coat which is inside the intrinsic field experiment test chamber. When retrieving his coat inside the chamber, he is accidentally lock in. Once Professor Glass and the others found Jon, they are shocked and horrified. Glass tells John that the chamber's door has locked automatically and the generators have already began warming up to begin an experiment: removing the intrinsic field from cell block fifteen. Jon is locked in and the door cannot be open or override the countdown. Jon could only accept death and examines the watch he has put back together while his colleagues - except Janey, who cannot bear to see the last moment and flees the room - watch in horror as the countdown reaches zero. Jon is disintegrated in a flash of light.

A month later, a series of strange events occur at Gila Flats involving the apparitions of a disembodied human circulatory nervous system, a circulatory, and a muscled skeleton which last for seconds. The residents believed the facility to be haunted until on November 22nd, Jon returns as a tall, hairless, naked, blue-skinned man with incredible abilities. Jon return to his life with Janey, but remains somewhat emotionless and distant among his peers.

A year later, on February 1960, the American government recruited Jon as their military asset and touted him before the public as "Dr. Manhattan," the first super-hero. He is also provided with a costume which he grudgingly accepts, though he refuses to accept the icon design which is provided for him (this being a stylized orbital model of the atom). Instead, Jon chooses as his emblem a representation of a hydrogen atom, whose simplicity he declares to be something that kindles his respect; accordingly, he painlessly burns the mark into his forehead. Despite being considered America's greatest weapon, Jon wasn't able to prevent certain disasters such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, even though he is aware it is going to happen as he meets the President.

By 1966, during the first and only meeting of the Crimebusters, Jon fell in love with the then sixteen-year-old Silk Spectre, Laurie Juspeczyk, and bitterly ending his marriage with Janey. By 1970, Jon's true name is revealed to the public as his father had passed away in 1969 and there is no reason to conceal it.

In 1971, Jon was requested by President Richard Nixon in intervening in the Vietnam War alongside the Comedian. Within two months, the United States had won the war and forever tipping the balance of the Cold War in the West's favor. In 1975, Nixon proposed a new constitutional amendment that would allow the President to have an extended term in office. Amidst all this, Adrian Veidt publicly reveal his identity as Ozymandias and announcing his retirement from costumed heroics. Veidt invited Jon and Laurie to visit his Antarctic retreat Karnak. During a conversation between Veidt and Jon, the world have radically changed since the last fifteen years from quantum physics to transportation all thanks to Jon.

During the Police Strike of 1977, Jon and Laurie handled the riots in Washington, D.C. in which the former dispelled the rioters by teleporting them back to their homes. This caused two people to suffered heart attacks. Following the riots, the U.S. government passed an emergency bill (the Keene Act) proposed by Senator Keene which made vigilantism illegal and exempting registered adventurers such as Jon and the Comedian. Laurie and Dan Dreiberg retired their identities of Silk Spectre and Nite Owl, while Rorschach remains active in which he respond his feelings towards compulsory retirement by leaving a note on the dead body of a multiple rapist outside police headquarters. In 1985, Jon recalls walking in New York with Laurie and buying a Time magazine commemorating Hiroshima Week, and finally the events that lead him to leave for Mars.

Jon construct a giant, glass structure that rises from the soil while wondering if events had gone differently if he didn't become Dr. Manhattan. He then stands on the balcony of his structure to watch a meteorite shower.

DR. MANHATTAN: SUPER-POWERS AND SUPERPOWERS

In his book Doctor Manhattan, Super Powers and the Superpowers, Professor Milton Glass, the director of Gila Flats and sponsor of Dr. Manhattan, discuss his misgivings of Dr. Manhattan. Prof. Glass dispel the myth that he was the one who came up with the popular phrase "The superman exists and he's American" that described Manhattan in his public appearance by the American media. He instead said the chilling quote "God exist and he's American."

Glass states that the god-like Manhattan proved valuable as a pawn for the United States, in which his powers would allow him in defending the country from Soviet retaliation with ease and arguably forcing the Soviets to never risk a full-scale global conflict. Despite Manhattan's presence which have curbed Soviet adventurism, this does not spell global peace but only to exacerbate the Cold War.

To understand the mindset of the Soviet Union, Glass looks to the Russians' contributions in the Second World War and conclude that the Soviets would do anything to protect their nation from threats such as Manhattan no matter what the cost. This is supported by the sharp increase of Soviet and American nuclear stockpiles since the advent of Manhattan and making the possibility of Mutually Assured Destruction. Unfortunately, the Nixon administration does not share Prof. Glass' concerns and have become intoxicated with having a superhuman being to continually promote American interests unopposed.

Aside from affecting the international sense, Manhattan had also changed the domestic sense in which he contributed advanced technology such as electric cars and clean, economical airships. Thus, human culture have contort itself to accommodate Manhattan. Glass conclude that "We are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan."

REVIEW

Some things work in Watchmen, that shouldn’t. One of those cases is this issue. It looks like a big departure from the murder mystery of the first issue, but all the story elements introduced here are essential to understand “the plan”.

This is also one of the chapters of Watchmen you will remember.

The script for this comic is filled with little gems, and paired with the art it takes into a different level. It is hard to tell how much Moore or Gibbons is in the art. Moore’s scripts are too detailed, but every now and then, Gibbons would improvise over the less detailed panels. Details may be Moore’s script, but the vision and everything we remember, comes from Gibbons.

This issue also explains why history on this Earth is so different than ours. This would be later explored in Tom Strong (by Alan Moore and Chris Sprouse), where the existence of a super-hero changes history (in that case it’s a more classic super-hero).

To be continued...

#alan moore #dave gibbons #john higgins #watchmen #dc comics #comics #review #1986 #modern age #doctor manhattan #vertigo comics

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backtozeon · 5 years ago

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Dear Fans of Watchmen, Hello there. My name is Damon Lindelof and I am a writer. I am also the unscrupulous bastard currently defiling something that you love. But that’s not all that I am. I am a twelve-year old boy being handed the first two issues by my father. “You’re not ready for this,” he growls with a glint of mischief in his eye. My parents have recently divorced and he has gone rogue, so there I am in my bed, flashlight beam illuminating pages, watching the Comedian fall again and again and again. The old man was wrong. I am ready for this. Because this was written just for me. I am thirty-eight. A man offers me the opportunity to adapt Watchmen for television. The filmed adaptation came out less than a year ago, but that doesn’t matter. I tell him I am not interested and that perhaps he should let sleeping dogs lie with hopes they will eventually be run over by a car tire, bursting their stomachs. He does not get the reference. I am watching my father haggle with a man in a wheelchair. I am fifteen years old and we are at a comic book convention in New York City, long before attending a comic book convention was something anyone wanting to ever have sex with another person would admit to. I definitely want to have sex with another person. My father finally harangues the merchant down to thirty dollars for a guaranteed authentic screenplay of Watchmen, soon to be a major motion picture! Now, he reads aloud from the script as “The Watchmen” battle terrorists at The Statue of Liberty. Something is wrong. The old man’s brow furrows, scanning the text in a mixture of disappointment and rage, a child who has just been told that Santa didn’t bring him presents this year, then robbed the house and beat up his parents. “What the fuck is this?” my father mutters. It is the first time he swears in front of me. Another man offers me the opportunity to adapt Watchmen for television. I am forty now. I tell him someone else asked me to do this a year ago and I declined. He inquires as to why I said no. I tell him that Alan Moore has been consistently explicit in stating that Watchmen was written for a very specific medium and that medium is comics, comics that would be ruined should they be translated into moving images. The Another Man pauses for a moment, then responds – “Who’s Alan Moore?” I am twenty-three and living in Los Angeles. My father flies out from New Jersey for my birthday and gives me a present, a new edition of the “graphic novel” that is Watchmen. He explains to me that this is the publisher’s way of retaining the rights to the characters. He tells me that Dan and Adrian and Jon and Walter and Laurie are all serfs, working the land for a Feudal Lord that will never grant them freedom. My father is more than a little drunk.. More so, he is a hypocrite for buying me the new edition. “I know, I know…” he says, that same mischievous glint from years ago obscured by now thicker lenses, “But it’s so goddamned good.” Yet Another Man offers me the opportunity to adapt Watchmen for television. “Just a pilot,” he says, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” I am forty-three now and I am thinking about something I read about Orthodox Judaism. While most religions are cultivated by evangelizing and conversion, Orthodox Judaism doesn’t solicit. If someone from another faith wishes to become an Orthodox Jew, they are rejected. If they are stubborn enough to ask again, they are denied even more harshly. But should they have the audacity to ask a third time? The door cracks open. And if they’re willing to invest an immense amount of time and effort and sacrifice and faith, they are embraced into the fold. Why am I thinking about this? I have said no to Watchmen twice now. This makes me Orthodox Judaism. I crack the door. And now I’m a hypocrite too. I am standing over my father’s hospital bed. I am twenty-nine, the last age at which I will consider myself “young.” The breathing tube was removed two hours ago and they said he wouldn’t last longer than fifteen minutes. It’s a cliché. I’m living a trope. He is unconscious and unable to impart final wisdom nor tell me he was proud all along, even though he never said it out loud. There is no beeping machine showing his weakening heartrate. My father is beyond machines. I hold his cool hand and try not to pray to God because he detested the very idea of God so instead I pray to his gods. I pray to Cthulhu. I pray to 42, the Eternal Cosmic Number. I pray to Dr. Manhattan, far away in a galaxy less complicated than this one. The television is on and the Lakers win the championship. My father never cared about basketball. He didn’t even know the rules. When he dies, I finally understand that I don’t know the rules either. No one does. I am forty-five and I am writing a letter to the fans. The fans of Watchmen. It’s unnecessarily wordy and an exercise in oversharing, but nothing gets people on your side more than telling them about the moment your father died. Sharing such intimate details with strangers feels needy and pathetic and exploitative and yucky and necessary and freeing. I am also looking for an elegant way to escape from this device of quantum observance, a device appropriated from Mr. Moore so that I can speak to those fans from the bottom of my cold, thieving heart. Perhaps I could switch from referring to them in the third person and shift into the second, thus bringing them closer to the first? Would that be amenable to you? First and foremost, if you are angry that I’m working on Watchmen, I am sorry. You may be thinking I can’t be that sorry or I wouldn’t be doing it. I concede the point, but I hope it doesn’t invalidate the apology, which I offer with sincerity and respect. Respect. That’s second and twicemost. I have an immense amount of respect for Alan Moore. He is an extraordinary talent of mythic proportion. I wrote him a letter, parts of which are not dissimilar to this one, because I owed him an explanation as to why I’m defying his wishes and to humbly ask him not to place a curse on me because he knows magic and apparently, he can do that. His response, or whether he responded at all, is between he and I. Suffice to say, even before I sent it, Mr. Moore had made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t want anyone to “adapt” his work. To do so is hubris. Worse yet, it’s unethical. There are a million ways to rationalize unethical behavior – I could argue that Mr. Moore’s partner, the brilliant artist, Dave Gibbons, is equally entitled to authorize access to his masterwork and that he has been kind enough to offer us his blessing to do so. Or I could offer that Mr. Moore cut his veined teeth on the creations of others; Batman, Superman, Captain Britain, Marvelman (he’ll never be “Miracleman” to me), Swamp Thing and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, not to mention The Charlton characters upon whom his Watchmen characters are based… So am I not allowed to do the same? No. I am not. I am not allowed. And yet… I am compelled. I am compelled despite the inevitable pushback and hatred I will understandably receive for taking on this particular project. This ire will be maximally painful because of its source. That source being you. The true fans. I once said that if one were a true fan of something, they weren’t allowed to hate it. A prominent writer took me to task for such heresy, arguing that just because one was the creator of a show, this did not permit them to pick and choose who was and wasn’t a fan of it. The writer went on to win a Pulitzer for television criticism. I went on to get snubbed by the Razzies for Prometheus. As such, I concede this point, too. After all, even the most fervent lifelong fan of, oh, let’s say the New York Jets, is allowed to shout at the top of his lungs, “YOU SUCK OH MY GOD YOU SUUUUUUUUUCKIII II” and do so while wearing a replica Namath Jersey he purchased for an ungodly sum of money that may or may not have constituted his entire first paycheck on Nash Bridges. But the point. The point is, you love Watchmen. That gives you the right to hate it, too. Because no matter what… You’re still true fans. But to quote the immortal P.W. Herman… “I know you are… But what am IT’ What am I? I’m a true fan, too. And I’m not the only one. What I love most about television is that the finished product is a result not of singular vision, but the collective experience of many brilliant minds. I have the pleasure of sitting in a Writers Room each and every day that is as diverse and combative as any I’ve ever been a part of. In that room, Hetero White Men like myself are in the minority and as Watchmen is (incorrectly) assumed to be solely our domain, understanding its potential through the perspectives of women, people of color and the LGBTQ community has been as eye-opening as it has been exhilarating. We’ve committed to doing the same in front of and behind the camera. And every single person involved with this show absolutely adores Watchmen. But in the spirit of complete honesty, we also sorta want to… uh… Disrupt it? Except I hate that word because now it’s not disruptive anymore. And how can I present as punk rock when I’m now cozy in bed, spooning with Warner Brothers, HBO and DC? Truth be told, everyone there, particularly Geoff Johns (who is as true fan as it gets) has been extraordinarily supportive. Sure, it’s fun to kick around the comic corporate overlords for exploiting writers and artists, but we all know what happened to Jack Kirby and we’re still first in line for every Marvel film. So… how do we answer the challenge of when it is appropriate to appropriate? Which brings us to the most important part. Maybe the only part that really matters. Our creative intentions. We have no desire to “adapt” the twelve issues Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons created thirty years ago. Those issues are sacred ground and they will not be retread nor recreated nor reproduced nor rebooted. They will, however be remixed. Because the bass lines in those familiar tracks are just too good and we’d be fools not to sample them. Those original twelve issues are our Old Testament. When the New Testament came along, it did not erase what came before it. Creation. The Garden of Eden. Abraham and Isaac. The Flood. It all happened. And so it will be with Watchmen. The Comedian died. Dan and Laurie fell in love. Ozymandias saved the world and Dr. Manhattan left it just after blowing Rorschach to pieces in the bitter cold of Antarctica. To be clear. Watchmen is canon. Just the way Mr. Moore wrote it, the way Mr. Gibbons drew it and the way the brilliant John Higgins colored it. But we are not making a “sequel” either. This story will be set in the world its creators painstakingly built… but in the tradition of the work that inspired it, this new story must be original. It has to vibrate with the seismic unpredictability of its own tectonic plates. It must ask new questions and explore the world through a fresh lens. Most importantly, it must be contemporary. The Old Testament was specific to the Eighties of Reagan and Thatcher and Gorbachev… ours needs to resonate with the frequency of Trump and May and Putin and the horse that he rides around on, shirtless. And speaking of Horsemen, The End of The World is off the table (THE LEFTOVERS! NOW STREAMING ON HBO GO!) which means the heroes and villains — as if the two are distinguishable — are playing for different stakes entirely. The tone will be fresh and nasty and electric and absurd. Many describe Watchmen as “dark,” but I’ve always loved its humor -worshipping at the altar of the genre whilst simultaneously trolling it. As such… Some of the characters will be unknown. New faces. New masks to cover them. We also intend to revisit the past century of Costumed Adventuring through a surprising, yet familiar set of eyes… and it is here where we’ll be taking our greatest risks. Risk is imperative. I need the feeling in my stomach before I leap from a great height without knowing the depth of the water below. If my body should shatter upon impact, at least it was in pursuit of glory. And let’s be honest… Isn’t there a small part of you that wants to see me explode like a fleshy watermelon? But hopefully, there’s also a part that wants to experience something sort of amazing. As for what I want? I want your validation. I also want not to want it. I’ve given up the opioid highs of Twitter, but continue to score my methadone in the threads of Reddit and the hot takes of morning-after recappers. I’ll be reading and watching and listening to what you have to say because even though I wish I didn’t… I deeply care about what you think. Which brings us, Thank God, to the end of the missive. Endings. I’m GREAT at them. A wise, blue man once said that nothing ever ends. But maybe he wasn’t wise. Maybe he was just scared and alone and sad that he would outlive everything and everyone he ever loved. So I hope this isn’t the last time we correspond, fellow fans… after all, it’s just a pilot and we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. But maybe… if everything works out the way I hope it does… and if you’re willing to give me a chance, it’s not the end at all… It’s the beginning? With Respectful Hubris, -Damon

#watchmen

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aion-rsa · 5 years ago

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Watchmen Episode 9 Easter Eggs Explained

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The big finale of HBO's Watchmen comes together in episode 9! Here's all the references to the book we were able to catch.

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This article contains Watchmen spoilers.

Watchmen episode 9 “See How They Fly” wraps it all up. And you’d think that after nine time-hopping episodes they might be ready to wrap up all of their homages and references to the original book. You would be wrong.

But not everything comes from the book. The episode’s title, “See how they fly” is a lyric from The Beatles’ psychedelic masterpiece “I Am The Walrus” which features the sinister/joyful (and Watchmen-relevant) refrain of “I am the eggman.” Now, with that out of the way, let’s get down to business.

LADY TRIEU

- We’re once again back on Nov. 1, 1985...this time to witness the conception of Lady Trieu. Her mother, Bian (who in the future Lady Trieu will clone and raise as her daughter) was one of Veidt’s Vietnamese employees who kept his fortress of solitude, Karnak, running. The verse she recites is apparently from folklore about a Lady Trieu who lived during the third century.

Incidentally, this is the most we’ve seen of the inner workings of Karnak, including in the book, where we only saw TWO employees. Does this mean he murdered ALL of these people, too? That is dark as fuck.

read more: Complete Watchmen Timeline Explained

- Lady Trieu is sperm sample 2346. That’s 23 x 2. It could very well be a reference to the “23 enigma,” an almost cult-like belief in the significance of the number 23. It was popularized by counterculture icons like William S. Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson.

- The fact that Bian crowns her insemination with “Fuck you, Ozymandias” is interesting. Is Veidt, like Dr. Manhattan, a symbol of American imperialism in Vietnam? Pretty likely, right?

- In 2008, when Lady Trieu confronts Adrian Veidt and refers to him as “the smartest man in the world” she’s using the nickname that had been given to Ozymandias by the press. Trieu is, of course, “the smartest woman in the world.”

ADRIAN VEIDT

- This is the filming of the “confession/congratulations” video that Wade Tillman was shown by Joe Keene back in episode 5. It will be presented to Robert Redford on the day he is inaugurated as President on January 21, 1993. You can see the giant squid in the tank behind Veidt while he is recording the message to President Redford, by the way.

- “Untie knot” is the password prompt on Veidt’s old computer. “Untie knot” refers to the Gordian Knot, which Alexander the Great famously solved with his sword. The password is “Rameses II” just like in the book.

- That’s a portrait of Alexander the Great in Veidt’s office, but as of yet I’ve been unable to identify it.

- We learn in this episode that Veidt has “never given himself to a woman.” The fact that he specifically mentions women and not men could possibly echo Rorschach’s observation about him in the book, that Veidt is “possibly homosexual.”

- Based on the five year timeline laid out by Lady Trieu here, it would appear that Veidt spelled out “Save me Daughter” on the surface of Europa with the corpses of his servants in 2013.

read more: Watchmen Finale Explained

- Veidt’s line about achieving “everything” having “started from nothing” is a quote from the book, during the chapter when he is recounting his own origin story.

- Veidt catches the bullet from the Game Warden as he did in the comic when Laurie tried shooting him in Karnak.

- Veidt’s philosophy that “masks make men true” seems to echo Oscar Wilde’s “give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth” aphorism. This is refuted later in the episode by Will Reeves who feels quite the opposite about masks.

- “Palestine has become a widow for Egypt.” Veidt is quoting the Merneptah Stele, an ancient inscription detailing the Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah’s victories. He ends with “the end is nigh,” which is generally Biblical in nature, but refers in this context specifically to the sign that Rorschach, in his identity of Walter Kovacs, used to carry around in the book.

DOCTOR MANHATTAN

- Joe Keene’s high-waisted undies are a mirror of the ones Dr. Manhattan wore through chunks of his career, before he decided to abandon clothing entirely.

- Lady Trieu refers to Dr. Manhattan as “the big blue cheese.” This is a surprisingly playful reference to Shazam, whose enemy Dr. Sivana routinely calls him a “big red cheese.” Incidentally, Lady Trieu does have a tendency to dress like the Sivana of the comics, who favors all white outfits.

- The 7th Kavalry discovered the existence of Dr. Manhattan on the White Night because Cal teleported “Mike” to Gila Flats, which was the place where Jon Osterman became Dr. Manhattan.

- Laurie refers once again to the thermodynamic miracle, a term taught to her by Jon the day that she discovered that her father was in fact Edward Blake.

- Jon has remained somewhat disoriented since he was “returned” by Angela. Throughout, we see him slipping into the past, specifically into moments from the book.

- “Janey, are you cold? I can raise the temperature” refers to a Christmas in 1959, the first Jon spent as Dr. Manhattan, when he was still with his first love, Janey Slater. Her “chill” was because she was getting a little scared of Jon and his increasingly distant humanity.

- “There is no situation in Afghanistan requiring my attention,” comes from the final moments of Jon’s talk show appearance in October of 1985, moments before he left Earth for Mars.

LOOKING GLASS

- “Mirror Guy? “It’s Looking Glass” has become the best ongoing joke of this entire series. And as it turns out, Laurie and Wade have more in common than they thought. Wade has a tendency to puke after experiencing Dr. Manhattan’s teleportation, a trait he shares with Laurie.

RORSCHACH

When Angela is interrogating a member of the 7th Kavalry, she starts breaking his fingers, before threatening to move on to other parts of his anatomy. That was a favorite technique of Rorschach to extract information.

HOODED JUSTICE

Will Reeves uses some comic book speak by referring to the Tulsa Race Massacre as “my origin story.” He also says “before my world ended,” both an allusion to the Tulsa/Krypton parallels we have tracked elsewhere in these guides and the way Batman is fond of referring to the night his parents died. Both are appropriate.

NITE OWL

Nite Owl’s old ship, ARCHIE (hence Veidt’s “it’s been a hoot”) is still in Karnak after freezing up shortly after transporting Dan and Rorschach there to confront Veidt on Nov. 1, 1985. Wade would indeed know how to fly it since Dan later licensed his technology to police departments under the umbrella of a company called Merlincorps.

Incidentally, while Dan was only ever alluded to throughout this season, if we do indeed get a Watchmen season 2, then we have to figure he’ll show up to testify at Veidt’s trial.

We wrote more about Nite Owl here.

ANGELA ABAR

Is Angela now a godlike being who can walk on water after consuming that mysterious egg? Well, during their first meeting 10 years ago, Dr. Manhattan did tell her that he could “theoretically” transmit his powers into organic material for someone else to consume. And he DID want her to see him walking on water. But it looks like we may never know for sure.

read more: The Unanswered Questions of the Watchmen Finale

But that ambiguous ending is meant to mirror the final panel of the book, where it was unclear whether the bumbling intern at the offices of the New Frontiersman would reach for Rorschach’s Journal from “the crank pile” for possible publication.

MISCELLANEOUS STUFF

- “As if some cowboy actor could ever become president.” It worked for Ronald Reagan!

- When Lady Trieu tells Adrian Veidt that he “stopped the clock” she’s referring to the Doomsday Clock, which was at one minute to midnight before the squid massacre prevented World War III.

- We once again get Johann Strauss' "The Blue Danube Waltz" on Europa, this time as Lady Trieu's spacecraft lands. The 2001: A Space Odyssey parallels are real, considering that film dealt with a mysterious Monolith appearing on the surface of Europa.

- At the newsstand, there’s a headline that says “Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings Drag On” for John Grisham. This has become something of a running joke on the show since episode 3.

- There’s also a New Frontiersman headline that says “Four Wounded in Saigon Burning” indicating that unrest in Vietnam continues.

- The gentleman in the wheelchair who turns up is Senator Joe Keene, Sr. the man who outlawed masked vigilantes in the first place in the book.

Mike Cecchini is the Editor in Chief of Den of Geek. You can read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @wayoutstuff.

Read and download the Den of Geek Lost in Space Special Edition Magazine right here!

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Mike Cecchini

Dec 15, 2019

Watchmen

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preserving-ferretbrain · 6 years ago

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Who Watches The…oh never mind

by Wardog

Thursday, 12 March 2009

Wardog opens a can of worms very very carefully indeed.~

As my comments in the playpen may recently have indicated, I was not entirely impressed by Watchmen. It doesn't help that people, however vaguely, connected to it are going around saying things like this and it also doesn't help that I read Watchmen for the first time three days ago. I understand that Watchmen is something that the sort of people who are inclined to be passionate about comics are passionate about; perhaps if I had been less busy being an embryo in the 80s when it first came out I might have felt the same way. But Watchmen is dated dated dated. I'm not saying it's not interesting and that it doesn't have merit, but reading it is rather like reading those 18th century novels that are completely consumed by the terror of the incipient collapse of Civilisation As We Know It because of the French Revolution. I'm not saying those novels aren't interesting or don't have merit either ... but you do read them with one eyebrow slightly cocked and think to yourself as you go "oh how quaint."

Quaint may seem an odd term to use in connection to a comic renowned for being gritty and real and, like, totally Dystopian and literary man; but I felt the same about V for Vendetta. Watchmen'spreoccupations, as far as I see it, are Cold War anxiety and Wanking About The Nature and Form of the Comic Genre. I'm not dismissing the impact of Watchmen, nor its power to have shaped (and to some extent validated, insofar as books with pictures in them can be validated) the genre, but the point is the Cold War is over and the genre has been shaped. There are, of course, wider themes to engage us - "about the nature of man, or vigilante justice" if you absolutely insist but bear in mind you can get those better done elsewhere - but Watchmen is so utterly bound up in itself, so defined by the form it takes, that ultimately it's little more than an extended navel-gaze about comics, albeit a moderately interesting one.

The movie, of course, is such a slavish adaptation that it barely merits the term adaption; watching it, therefore, is like watching somebody gaze at somebody else gazing at their navel. In bullet-time. Being now at a noticeably remove from the navel, this is quite dull.

To force myself to give credit where it is due, there is a lot to like about the Watchmen movie. It is stylishly and lovingly done. Everybody looks and sounds exactly like you'd want them to look and sound. The level of detail is mind boggling and the special effects, right down to Dr Manhattan's flapping blue dong, are fabulous. The changes they've made are spot on: I'm really glad they took out the giant squishy squid aliens. Because they are made of stupid. I loved the opening credits where they distill the ponderous backstory into a succession of imaginative and striking images. When the film was engaging critically with the Watchmen comic, it had real potential. Unfortunately, critical engagement gave way to abject drooling adoration about 2 seconds after the credits ended ... and the rest of the film is little more than a panel-by-panel, word-for-word recreation of the comic, bar a few subtle alterations to the way characters are perceived, which I shall talk about presently.

I suppose this is where we get into "what is an adaptation anyway" territory. For me the clue is in "adapt" - I think a process of adaptation is an act of transformation and interpretation. You stay true to the spirit of the original but you accept the fact that what works in one medium does not work in another. The Harry Potter movies are splendid examples of failed adaptations: they're little more than monorail tours of the main attractions of the books. They don't stand up on their own, they have no merit on their own, they are, in fact, shit and pointless. But you can also see this kind of failure going on in a more low key way when people throw plays at the screen and end up with peculiarly static, oddly awkward films (Closer, The History Boys, An Ideal Husband, The Libertine). Again, to be fair, the Watchmen film does almost stand on its own: they've managed to enforce some coherence on a notoriously fragmentary text. But this is mainly because it's identical to the text, right down to the cringe-inducingly stilted dialogue and voice-overs that read beautifully but sound terrible. And as far as I'm concerned if something is identical to the original, right down to the dialogue and the visuals, you might as well just read the original and be done with it. Alan Moore himself apparently said: "My book is a comic book. Not a movie. It's been made in a certain way, and designed to be read in a certain way: in an armchair, nice and cosy next to a fire, with a steaming cup of coffee."

The other problem with such a rigid approach to the text is that it leaves no space for acting to be anything other than simulacra. When you go and see a performance of Richard III, you don't stare at the actor playing Richard and think to yourself: "Wow, that's awesome,

he looks totally like him

." But the only scale for judging the actors in Watchmen is how far they resemble the characters they're playing - the answer to this is, for the most part, "lots." But it's still a really shallow way to engage with a performance.

Now this is when I'm going to play dirty. I know I've just leveled the criticism that the film brings nothing new to the table, being merely a moving version of the comic book. And now I'm going to complain that it also missed the point, or at least a point. I know you might think this is a direct contradiction and that I can't say the film is not enough of an adaptation for me and then whine about a possible misinterpretation but ... hey, look over there,

a fluffy kitten, being cute

. Seriously though, for what it's worth, I don't actually consider this a misinterpretation as such - the film was too fanboyishly clingy a parasite to have anything as measured or sensible as an interpretation - I think it was more an act of mis-translation, in that everyone was so concerned with bringing every fucking element of the comic lovingly into motion (apparently

there's going to be a DVD

of Tales of the Black Freighter - no thanks) that nobody ever bothered to pay attention to what they were doing.

If I had to sum up Watchmen in a glib and pretentious way (why would anyone ask me to do that?), I'd fall back, as I'm sure others have done before me, on quoting Yeats: "the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity." Now, perhaps I got the wrong end of the stick and I know the friend I saw the film with disagrees with me, but I thought the film valorized Dan (and to a lesser extent Laurie) in a way that reduced the impact of the story. In the comic, Dan is anti-heroic: he is middle-aged, impotent, flabby and passive. He is "the boy next door" in the worst possible sense. His niceness, like his Nite Owl costume, is a mask for his essential weakness of character. Despite being in love with Laurie, he makes no attempt to forge a relationship with her, not because he is "just too nice" but because he is "just too pathetic"; he wins her, if wins it can be called, simply by being around to pick up the pieces after her relationship with Jon falls apart horribly. Laurie, of course, is equally broken but has the virtue of being hot - just as all of Dan's behaviour is controlled and limited by compromise, her decision to be with him is a compromise as well, the rejection of the strange and the challenging, youthful dreams and romanticism, for the safety of the everyday and a man whose abject inferiority makes you feel good about yourself. In the comic, their relationship is very much the cleaving of the desperate and worthless: that they go out and do minor heroic things (like saving some people from a fire and springing Rorschach from a prison he is already escaping) after they shag for the first time is an indictment of their behaviour. They seek, and find, validation with each other, yet the validation is based on their joint illusions i.e. that they are people even remotely capable of changing the world. The movie portrays their civilian-saving / prison-breaking exploits as a return to their true heroic selves; the comic uses scenes of stereotypical heroism to reveal Laurie and Dan as the self-deluding, play-acting fools they really are.

Similarly, in the comic, when they are confronted by what Ozymandias has done, Dan and Laurie slink off to a corner of his ruined facility and shag. Dr Manhattan finds them asleep on Nite Owl's winter cloak, looks at them with mingled pity and affection and goes off to confront Ozymandias with the futility of the atrocity he has committed ("nothing ever ends"). Again, this is hardly a celebration of the human spirit in the face of calamity. Confronted by their own profound impotence and the destruction of their carefully constructed charades, they take refuge in the mundane, fleeting affirmation offered by physical pleasure. In the movie, this scene is gone and, instead, Dr Manhattan's final act is to kiss Laurie goodbye - as if he, too, is asserting the value of human relationships as an antidote to Armageddon. (Personally, I'm with Rorschach on this one). In the aftermath of Ozymandias's destruction, the movie gives Dan a line about how he's been tinkering with Archimedes and it'll soon be ready to go, the implication, I think, being that he and Laurie will resume their super-hero lifestyle.

One of the more interesting aspects of the comic is the intersection between public and private identity. One of the questions it asks is why anyone even on polite nodding terms with sanity would "dress as an owl and fight crime." The answer, of course, if its five heroes are anything to go by, is: "they wouldn't." Rorschach is clearly batshit nuts - and for him, Walter Kovacs is the disguise he wears. I've always liked the way that when he confronts Dr Manhattan, it is Walter who dies, not Rorschach. Dr Manhattan has no choice but to be a super-hero but then he is barely human, or anything like it, any more. The Comedian is a fucking psychopath who uses the flamboyance offered by a costume to give outward form to his moral dysfunctionality. Ozymandias also belongs to the Special Club. And Dan and Laurie both use it as a way to escape the disappointments and failures of being merely themselves. Unfortunately the movie inadvertently engineers a reversal of this: Laurie and Dan end up re-discovering their true super-hero selves, whereas in the comic they are ruthlessly forced to confront their inadequacies as human beings. If I was feeling uncharitable I would say this symptomatic of the typical geek fallacies - Watchmen is constructed as a super-hero comic without heroes, attemping to make Dan heroic undermines both the force and interest of the story.

The overall effect of which is that you get a film that is at once a tediously faithful rendering of the comic while somehow contriving to miss the point entirely.

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Arthur B

at 14:59 on 2009-03-12Playing devil's advocate: while I agree that Dan and Laurie are given an easy ride by the film (perhaps because they're the characters the audience is most likely to identify with), I don't think it completely derails their characterisation to have them go back to vigilantism. I don't have my copy of the comic with me, but I seem to remember mild hints in their final conversation with Sally that they might be getting into some action whilst they spend their time on the run in Ozy's new order. Like I said in the comments on Dan's review, I read the armageddon plotline as an indictment of the passivity of superheroes; crimefighters are essentially reactive, fighting society's symptoms without trying for a cure. (The grotesque scale of Ozymandias's crimes is, of course, the flip side of the argument: a cure might be more harmful than the disease itself.) In the movie, I saw their return to crimefighting as a retreat; there's no suggestion that they're seriously trying to expose Ozymandias, they're just dicking around beating people up to capture their rapidly-fading youth.

But that said I do agree that it's problematic that we are expected to identify with those specific characters in the first place; Dan and Laurie's capitulation and passivity are meant to be character flaws that are just as serious as Rorschach's fanaticism, or Dr Manhattan's nigh-autistic detachment, or Ozymandias's fatal combination of the two.

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Guy

at 15:44 on 2009-03-12I think I like the comic more than you do, Kyra, but I am very impressed by your elucidation of its themes... and it does seem likely that I should go into the film with low expectations. I would like to say I would refrain from seeing the film at all, especially now that I've read Hayter's idiotic letter... but maybe if I go see it in the third week or something I can feel that I've spited (?) him in some way.

I think I read the meaning of the Dan and Laurie characters a bit differently than you do, though. To me, they are essentially sympathetic characters, and a big part of that is their realisation in the end that, actually they're not all that important or powerful, and whether or not they're OK with that, they have to live with it, the way that millions of ordinary men and women do. This in contrast with Rorshcach, who has a kind of absolutist integrity that won't allow him to refrain from doing what he believes is right (even when it's totally futile, or worse, seriously destructive) - a quality he shares with heroes from all kinds of stories - but that "integrity" also makes him, as you say, a psychopath.

I think my favourite moment in the comic is the bit where Ozymandias tells Dan to grow up. It does raise a question for me about what counts as "growing up". Ozymandias thinks that he is the grown up, because he is the one prepared to make hard choices, cross moral boundaries in service to the greater good, &c &c... and that Dan is still a child playing at super hero, making oversized toys and not really doing anything... which is basically accurate. There's a reason that remark cuts Dan. But I think... there's something interesting, something a bit complex, about the question of what actually growing up means. The way you put it above where you say that Dan and Laurie are ruthlessly forced to confront their failings and inadequacies as human beings... I guess to me it seems that that is part of what being a grown up is: a person who has confronted their failings and accepted them. Which then, in a funny kind of way, ties in to the whole Ozymandias crazy plan, which in a sense is about forcing humanity as whole to grow up in spite of itself. Which... yeah, I don't know, for me that theme doesn't date, because we are to a large extent living in a world run by men (arguably, madmen) who act as they do because they believe they are being grown-up on behalf of the rest of us, because ordinary people don't really understand what the world is like and need them to make our hard choices for us. And of course I hate the idea of someone else making my hard choices for me, but it doesn't take long to find examples of people who you genuinely feel glad are not being held totally responsible for themselves... but I think at this stage I may be less responding to your review than I am just rambling. ;)

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Wardog

at 16:06 on 2009-03-12I feel like I'm validating Wankstain Hayter by saying this but I like the comic more retrospectively for some of its concepts. I didn't actually enjoy reading it all that much (not, though, because it is Out Of My Comfort Zone, man, and much of it, as I said, strikes me quaint and alien. And, again, at the risk of saying anything that could in any way chime with anything That Moron has ever said - Watchmen does inspire some interesting disccussion.

In the movie, I saw their return to crimefighting as a retreat"

Because the crime-fighting they do in the film is so massively glamorised - the bit where they kick-ass their way into the prison for example - I personally didn't get this vibe. But I think it's an arguable point.

But that said I do agree that it's problematic that we are expected to identify with those specific characters in the first place

Yeah me too - they obviously thought they were most normal of the bunch. Sigh. As Guy says below, I think perhaps they are the easiest to identify with because they are flawed in a lowkey very human way (i.e. they are rubbish and self-deluding) but identifying with them is an uncomfortable process because I'm sure we'd all rather be Dr Manhattans than Dans. (Although secretly I'm convinced we all want to be Rorschach - there's something utterly compelling about fanatics).

Thanks for your comment, Guy, I didn't find it rambling at all, I found it fascinating. I think my reading of Dan and Laurie is perhaps unnecessarily (and perhaps even unsupportedly) harsh. The thing is, although I said something about them having to face up their failings ... I don't think there's ever really a point they accept them or learn to operate with them ... which, as you say, is what most grown ups do. To be fair, I don't think I have accepted my failings or learned to operate with them *either* but I don't dress up as an owl and fight crime... =P Dan and Laurie seem to constantly be engaged in processes of retreat, compromise and distraction: for them sex serves exactly the same purpose as super-hero costuming. It's a cheap way to use someone else to make you feel better about yourself. They don't *deal* with what Ozymandias has done, and what it has shown them about themselves, they run away from it and bonk.

Which reminds me - sex is such an unfailingly negative force in Watchmen.

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Arthur B

at 16:17 on 2009-03-12

I think it's glamorised

at that point

because before the big reveal Dan and Laurie are convinced that they are Making A Difference, and the audience is meant to believe the same; we haven't had Ozymandias hit them (and the audience) with the revelation that they're not actually achieving anything beyond putting Rorschach back on the streets for one last round of psychosis before he goes to the Antarctic to explode.

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Arthur B

at 10:21 on 2009-03-13There's a very interesting article about the film's financial prospects

here

. I'm wondering whether this isn't the precise article that Hayter was responding to with his open letter.

Short version: There is a very real possibility that just about everyone who was interested in seeing

Watchmen

went to see it in the first week it was out, and ticket sales will slump by the second or third week. There's a growing consensus that the film was too faithful to the comic, which hurt it, and that this is one of those rare situations where there was

too little

studio involvement in the production process.

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Andy G

at 11:33 on 2009-03-13I haven't seen the film, but I did read the comic over the weeked. I had quite a negative reaction to Dan in the comic - his angsty, hand-wringing inadequacy doesn't really excuse the very dubious things he does or condones. I think he appears more sympathetic perhaps because he is the character who it is easiest to identify with for the average reader.

The guy who wrote the Stan Lee version of the comic made the plausible prediction that the film would unironically wallow in the violence as something cool, and rather the miss the point. Does that happen?

I wasn't sure about it having dated though. I mean, even in terms of the Cold War stuff, there are still nuclear weapons and stupid human beings. Though it's perhaps not exactly the story you'd choose to tell now 20 years on. I kind of felt the same about Frost/Nixon.

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Dan H

at 11:35 on 2009-03-13God the comments on that post are full of wank.

I really wish people would accept that "this movie is too long" is actually a valid criticism.

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Gina Dhawa

at 17:32 on 2009-03-13I'm not so worried about

Watchmen

feeling dated because, it addresses old concerns in a fairly familiar way. It's still set in the eighties after all. We're not worried about the same things anymore, but I'm pretty sure we can appreciate the fear of The Other, which is something that I think the film does very well with choosing to frame Dr Manhattan instead of having the original ending.

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Robinson L

at 20:30 on 2009-08-15*deep breath*

Funny, I never got the impression that I was reading/watching something particularly dated either from

V for Vendetta

Watchmen

. True, the cold war is over, but the threat of nuclear war hasn't exactly gone away, and the various nations are being just as much jerks to each other as they were back in the 80s.

I loved the opening credits where they distill the ponderous backstory into a succession of imaginative and striking images. When the film was engaging critically with the

Watchmen

comic, it had real potential.

Really? I loved the opening credits, too, but I didn't consciously get the feeling that they were engaging critically with the comic. Would you care to expound a little more on

how

you felt they were critically engaging with it?

I thought the film valorized Dan (and to a lesser extent Laurie) in a way that reduced the impact of the story.

Interesting argument. I admit I handed considered this interpretation of Dan and Laurie from the comic book, although it makes perfect sense.

Thing is, I find that even if it does muddy up the discourse, the story is

improved

by the movie's presentation of Laurie and especially Dan.

My reason? Because in the comic, both Dan and Laurie were dull, dull

dull

. I didn't love them, I didn't hate them, I was apathetic towards them. In the movie, at least, I felt there was something there to engage with emotionally.

And even if it was a deviation in character, I found Dan actually coming out and

telling

Adrian “You haven't idealized mankind but you've... you've deformed it! You mutilated it. That's your legacy. That's the real practical joke” very cathartic.

I also didn't get the same "massive anti-climax" feeling from the movie as the graphic novel.

Although secretly I'm convinced we all want to be Rorschach - there's something utterly compelling about fanatics

Oh god. I'd almost rather be the mass-murdering ego maniac or the spiritually incompetent big blue guy than that monster. I've got the fanatic part down just fine, it's just that I find the "kills, tortures and abuses people" and general misanthropy just a liiiitle bit repulsive.

As a matter of fact, I don't think I particularly identify with

anyone

Watchmen

... maybe because the only characters in it who have any sort of strength to their convictions have such a misanthropic, nihilistic view of humanity. I certainly wouldn't want to

any of them.

Which reminds me - sex is such an unfailingly negative force in Watchmen.

Interesting point.

I really wish people would accept that "this movie is too long" is actually a valid criticism.

Totally, although for myself, I find if I say "this movie is too long" what I mean is "this movie already annoys the hell out of me and will it please get to the end already." If a movie manages to keep me engaged/entertained (as

Watchmen

did) I'm prepared to go along with it for much longer than 2.5 hours.

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Arthur B

at 20:56 on 2009-08-15

True, the cold war is over, but the threat of nuclear war hasn't exactly gone away, and the various nations are being just as much jerks to each other as they were back in the 80s.

I think nuclear conflict is still a danger, but the

kind

of nuclear conflict presented in

Watchmen

has become almost impossible. Which isn't to say it won't become a possibility again, but it's definitely on the back burner. Limited exchanges between recent entrants to the nuclear club seem more likely than large-scale human extinction events.

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Alasdair Czyrnyj

at 17:06 on 2010-03-10Necromancy ho!

@the issue of datedness and the nuclear arms race

After reading through the article again, I kinda get what you were saying, Kyra. The theme didn't really date the comic for me, partly because I've always got one foot stuck in nuclear war fiction, and partly because I found it easy enough to read the nuclear symbolism as a symbol of an unstoppable force of annihilation that none of the characters are capable of understanding, something that can be applied to many eras and contexts.

Still, it does date the movie. IIRC, Paul Greengrass was attached to the project for a while, and he was making noises about moving it to a contemporary War on Terror setting, which I don't think you could really do without totally rebuilding the story, simply because, while we may be as scared in 2010 as we were in 1985, our fears are coming from different places and take different forms. In the '80s, we assumed that the silos would open and all humanity would die screaming. Nowandays we just assume that life is going to continue getting shittier and shittier and mor and more incomprehensible, with extinction as a vague possibility we suspect may be denied to us.

Did what I just write make any sense?

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https://profiles.google.com/elzairthesorcerer/about

at 20:09 on 2011-05-17This is kind of off-topic, but what are the names of some of those 18th century novels you mentioned? I would like to read one.

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Wardog

at 20:38 on 2011-05-17There aren't specific texts that deal *explicitly* with it - I just meant that you can infer a background level of social anxiety and uncertainty, even in books that seem to be about entirely other things. I guess that isn't very helpful. Also it occurs to me I meant 19th century novels. I hate that thing, I always get my centuries confused. Novels written after 1800 are 19th century novels. It makes no sense! But I mean, it's there in Persuasion, or Daniel Deronda, for example. Middlemarch. Vanity Fair.

#Ferretbrain #Watchmen #Alan Moore #Comics #Wardog

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thisiscomics · 6 years ago

Text

Sorry. We’re more than halfway in and I still can’t get into Doomsday Clock. There were moments in this issue when I felt things were getting interesting, ideas finally being developed to the point where there’s a better sense of what is going on, but it is all undermined- for me- by regular descents into what is little more than pastiche.

The opening sequence indicates that Doctor Manhattan has been messing around with events in DC continuity- although it’s not clear how this has any relevance to all the Crises and Rebirths and so on, it at least indicates that a framework is developing with regards to what has been going on with DCU continuity, and where the Watchmen might fit into this, and the hints are at least somewhat intriguing. But the sequence is told in a terribly familiar way for anyone that has read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s original maxi-series. We already know that Manhattan has a different perspective on time, and we really don’t need to have this reaffirmed by simply mimicking the narrative style of Watchmen 4:

Page 1, Panel 3:

“The photograph is in my hand.

I found it in a derelict bar at the Gila Flats test base, twenty-seven hours ago.”

Panel 4:

“It’s still there, twenty-seven hours into the past, in its frame, in the darkened bar.

I’m still there looking at it.”

Panel 5:

“The photograph is in my hand. The woman takes a piece of popcorn between thumb and forefinger. The Ferris wheel pauses.

Seven seconds now.”

Panel 6:

“It’s October 1985. I’m on Mars. It’s July 1959. I’m in New Jersey, at the Palisades Amusement Park.

Four seconds. Three.”

This continues for much of that comic’s 28 pages, the non-linear view of time being used to piece together both Jon’s origin (and disconnect from humanity) and elements of the mystery at the centre of Moore’s narrative. Crucially, it also emphasises how it is always going to be too late, once the genie has been let out of the bottle:

Page 28, panel 4:

“I am standing on a fire escape in 1945, reaching out to stop my father, take the cogs and flywheels from him, piece them all together again...

But it’s too late, always has been, always will be too late.”

The closing quote from Einstein underlines this notion that hindsight is meaningless:

“The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”

In Doomsday Clock, this style really only serves to echo Moore, with no real purpose beyond mimicry, as though the sole underlying reason is that this is Manhattan’s narrative voice. The narrative voice of Rorschach had been similarly mirrored in previous issues, which seemed equally unnecessary but at least understandable to some extent as perhaps a character seeking to fill Rorschach’s shoes might also steal his voice if he felt that helped him to assume the vigilante’s persona.

But to expect Manhattan to always narrate in the exact same style of temporal drift seems implausible, and he just seems to be echoing himself for no reason. It seems particularly inappropriate when these are not events taking place sequentially but viewed simultaneously, as was the case in Watchmen: the whole point of that chapter was that, for Jon, cause and effect were rendered meaningless. He could see the effect and the cause at the same time; one did not lead to or from the other, they both simply were to him, and so he drifted away from humanity. Everything had happened, was happening, will happen, and he let it, because he had seen it, was seeing it, will see it. It “always will be too late” to change things, to impact the course of events, which leads to a deadening of emotion- there is no surprise or shock anymore.

Narrating events that are changing from panel to panel (Alan finds the ring, Alan doesn’t find the ring etc.) is a completely different viewpoint, and it is hard to believe Manhattan wouldn’t be aware of this (especially if he is responsible, as is suggested). Perhaps the whole point is to indicate he is not fully aware and still thinks of himself as that passive observer, but his omniscience seems otherwise intact, which would make that rather implausible, so the overall impression is that the narration is simply an echo of the source.

Considering the two narrative voices of Rorschach and Doctor Manhattan together, it feels that mimicry is the only real way the series knows how reference the original work- it certainly seems to miss any of the depth of thought and symbolism that Moore was aiming for.

This sense of mimicry is only made more obvious when it is revealed that Adrian is once more manipulating events for his own ends. It seems that because that was his role in Watchmen, it should be replayed here as well, in the same way that he recreates Bubastis so that he still has his beloved pet in this reality. In effect, nothing has changed- Rorschach is dead, but replaced by Rorschach. Bubastis is dead, replaced by Bubastis (with some of Jon’s DNA). Doctor Manhattan is revisiting 30+ year old narrative tropes and Ozymandias is still manipulating the plot at the expense of everyone else.

It could be that this mimicry is a plot device in the end, symbolising the restructuring of reality with characters being redeployed in similar but different roles- what is the DCU’s history of reset upon reset if not a simple reordering of what came before, after all?- but this appears unlikely. If nothing else, that seems too much of a long game to play on a title that is supposed to be a flagship series that only appears every couple of months- DC does not tend to favour meta-narratives in such titles (unless Grant Morrison has managed to persuade someone in editorial to let him loose on a title)- and Johns’s previous work has always suggested faithfulness to what has been before, with a drive to reinstate classic characters, rather than make significant changes to them. As such, the mimicry of Moore’s voices seems more likely to be intended as homage than subversion. Given that Watchmen was in part a homage to the Charlton heroes, and Moore is far from averse to making use of existing genres and styles in order to interrogate, or honour, them, Doomsday Clock’s homage is a step too far- it risks becoming an echo of an echo, hard to make out or understand.

From Doomsday Clock 7, by Geoff Johns, Gary Frank, Brad Anderson & Rob Leigh

#comics #dc comics #doomsday clock #geoff johns #gary frank #dr manhattan

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philosopherking1887 · 7 years ago

Text

Philosophy in “Infinity War” Part I: Thanos vs. Ultron

As promised, I’m going to start talking about some of the philosophical issues raised in Avengers: Infinity War, and this first one gives me an opportunity to discuss something I’ve meant to for a while: why I find Ultron so interesting. Spoilers and long discussion are under the cut.

We find out in IW that Thanos wants to kill half of the living things in the universe because of his views about overpopulation and scarcity, which align with those of Thomas Malthus: that populations will always tend to expand beyond the means of society to provide for them, resulting in poverty, disease, and conflict. Malthus, of course, never proposed mass murder as a way to prevent these terrible outcomes, though he did think that famine and war, as the natural consequences of overpopulation, were God’s and/or nature’s way of correcting the problem -- and of (futilely) cautioning humanity against reproducing beyond its means. We also find out that Thanos arrived at these views based on harsh experience: his home planet, Titan, experienced ecological catastrophe as a result of overpopulation. Thanos warned his people as the catastrophe approached and proposed his solution -- random culling of the population -- but he was, of course, dismissed as a madman. He now lives (sometimes) on the lifeless, desert-like ruins of Titan, applies his solution to planets that he thinks are reproducing beyond their means -- including Gamora’s home planet -- and seeks the Infinity Stones so that he can apply it to the universe as a whole.

It seems obvious to me -- and should be obvious to him -- that this is only a temporary solution. He claims that the standard of living on Gamora’s home planet improved dramatically after he halved its population; but if that’s the case, then unless Thanos was also distributing free birth control and family planning education, people would just take advantage of their new prosperity to have more children. Maybe with all the Infinity Stones in the Gauntlet, he envisioned himself or one of his disciples doing The Snap every few centuries?

I’ve seen some commentary suggesting that Thanos’s outlook is only comprehensible or even remotely sympathetic from a very pro-capitalist standpoint which ignores the fact that capitalism generates artificial scarcity. There’s certainly something to that criticism; “Malthusian” views are usually dismissed in the same breath as “social Darwinism” as artifacts of 19th-century and/or mid-20th-century elitist, racist, greed-driven ideology. I think there’s a reason Titan’s demise was depicted as an ecological catastrophe, considering the looming threat of climate change. Burning fossil fuels was a major part of how humanity harnessed the energy resources to be able to overcome natural scarcity, and now it’s biting us in the ass. That said, the technological advances that were enabled by the burning of fossil fuels for energy would probably enable us to stop burning fossil fuels if not for vested financial interests. And since population growth declines dramatically as societies become better educated and have more gender equality, it seems like it should be possible to stabilize a planet’s population so that it never exceeds the ecosystem’s ability to sustain it without resorting to mass murder. So yes, Thanos’s perspective and imagination seem extremely limited, and he’s drawing the wrong lesson from what happened to Titan. I guess he’s just really pessimistic about any society’s ability to overcome greed and education inequality...?

Thanos’s philosophical reasons for supporting mass murder of course call to mind another villain with philosophical reasons for mass murder (indeed, specicide, if that’s a word): Ultron. Predictably, I think Ultron makes much better points than Thanos does because they’re founded on observations about human nature rather than speculation about economic necessity. From looking at all of recorded human history, Ultron concludes that humanity has no moral right to exist because human beings have always, everywhere, been horrible to each other. If we solved all the scarcity problems that motivate Thanos, that would probably cut down on violence, but it would not eliminate it. I’m not at all sure that it’s possible to civilize human beings to the point that violence, small-scale or large-scale, never happens. That’s why Ultron says that humanity “needs to evolve”: human nature would have to change fundamentally in order to prevent the horrors that have littered human history.

Of course there’s a moral question here: is it morally right to eliminate a kind of being whose existence is, on the whole, an evil, or does it incur rights simply in virtue of existing? Pretty clearly, Ultron (like Thanos) is making a utilitarian calculation: cause a moderate amount of suffering in the short term in order to prevent a greater amount of suffering over the long term. But is that an acceptable trade-off, when those who enjoy the benefits are not the same as those who bear the costs? This issue -- consequentialist vs. deontological (i.e., rights-based, rule-based) ethics -- is the same one that’s explored in Watchmen, where Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias represents consequentialism and Rorschach (Mr. Black and White) represents deontology. In the MCU, Tony seems to represent the consequentialist perspective while Steve represents the deontologist; this is especially clear in IW with all that “we don’t trade lives” stuff (which I’ll have to discuss in more detail later). I myself don’t come down on either side all the time; I think it depends on the scale of decision-making. When you’re in a position of authority over large numbers of people, you’re going to have to make some consequentialist calculations; but in small-scale interpersonal interactions, you should operate like a deontologist. Tony thinks on the large scale and in the long term; Steve treats everything like an interpersonal interaction. But even on the large scale, there are times when consequentialist calculations lead to (what seem to us like) horrific conclusions. Tony has a human moral compass that allows him to avoid those; Ultron represents Tony’s consequentialist instincts writ large, with no human emotions to keep them in check. But there’s another question here: are our emotions a moral correcting mechanism, or do they impair our judgment? Would machines actually be better moral reasoners than human beings?

Ultron’s conclusion also raises a couple of interesting issues from a specifically Nietzschean perspective: one (meta)ethical and one metaphysical. (I’m not sure whether it’s a coincidence that Ultron quotes Nietzsche: “Like the man said, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger.’”) The (meta)ethical issue (I’m calling it that because it doesn’t fit cleanly into either normative ethics or metaethics as practiced in contemporary philosophy, which is clearly a limitation of contemporary philosophy) is the one that motivates Nietzsche’s main philosophical project: If the (Christian-descended) morality of compassion and altruism -- a morality that says that suffering and domination are the most terrible things, constituting an argument against the existence of anything that perpetuates them -- leads us to the conclusion that humanity, or life in general, ought not to exist, then why should we buy into the morality of compassion? One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens -- which, in English, translates to: one person who sees that a set of premises leads to a conclusion will just accept the conclusion; but another, finding the conclusion unacceptable, will instead reject one of the premises. Ultron, it seems, does not know how to reject the premise of the morality of compassion -- and that is almost certainly because it’s part of what Tony and Bruce programmed into him. His purpose was to protect human beings from suffering and domination by preventing alien invasion; the assumption that violence, war, and conquest are bad is fundamental to his very existence. Put in the facts of human history -- which make the prospects for an end to these things seem very dim -- and consequentialist reasoning rules, and you get the conclusion he in fact comes to.

Vision seems to express a quasi-Nietzschean attitude in his conversation with Ultron toward the end: “Humans are odd. They think order and chaos are somehow opposites, and try to control what won’t be. But there is grace in their failings. ... A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.” It’s interesting to me that Vision uses aesthetic terms in defense of humanity rather than moral ones. That’s another theme you find throughout Nietzsche’s writings. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) he claims (under the influence of Wagner), “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified”; by The Gay Science (1882), he has retreated to “As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us.” The world is not and cannot be good by the standards of the morality of compassion; suffering and exploitation are woven into its very fabric. The same is very likely true of humanity (and Nietzsche also thinks we wouldn’t like the result if humanity ever became entirely “good” in that sense...). If we judge them only by the standards of morality, they will always fall short; we must conclude that they are, on the whole, bad things, things that should not be. But humanity and existence can still be aesthetically interesting, even beautiful, in their mix of good and evil, smart and stupid, order and chaos.

The metaphysical question is: in what sense does the replacement of carbon-based human animals by robots count as an “evolution” of humanity rather than simply its extinction and the ascendance of something completely different? The movie encourages us to think about inheritance and legacy in nonstandard ways, most obviously by framing Ultron as Tony’s “child”: Ultron has learned some things from Tony and inherited some things from him via programming -- and we are now accustomed to thinking of genetics as a kind of natural “programming.” Tony even calls Ultron “Junior” and says “You’re going to break your old man’s heart.” By extension, then, AI is the “child” of humanity in general, its “brainchild” -- an expression that reflects how common procreation and childbirth metaphors are in talk of intellectual creativity (that’s all over the place in Nietzsche’s writing, btw). But the extreme difference between biological humanity and its AI “descendants” highlights a distinctively Nietzschean theme: the idea that success, for a species, is not a matter of its persistence in the same form, but of its “self-overcoming” (that’s an ideal that comes up a lot, for individuals as well as cultures and species). Often this means that the majority will have to perish, while only an unusual few survive: the mutants, the evolutionary vanguard (LOL, there’s another Marvel franchise...), the ones who are better adapted to changing conditions rather than the old environment that the species had previously been adapted for. The successor species might look very different from its progenitor species, even unrecognizable, but the former is still the legacy of the latter. What’s important is the survival of a lineage rather than the persistence of a type.

#avengers infinity war spoilers #infinity war spoilers #infinity war discussion #thanos in infinity war #thanos #ultron #thanos vs. ultron #thanos and ultron #avengers age of ultron #age of ultron discussion #age of ultron #aou #nietzsche #mcu #consequentialism vs. deontology #consequentialism #deontology

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mondofunnybooks · 6 years ago

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'THANOS'S GRANDAUGHTER: GO SUCK EGGS GRANDPA!' DEPT.

'The title means exactly what the words say: NAKED Lunch - a frozen moment where everyone sees exactly what is on the end of every fork.'

-William Burroughs, from the foreword notes for the novel 'Naked Lunch'.

THE GATEKEEPERS!

As may not possibly surprise you lot, we've run afoul of some of the more humourless elements of fandom in our time. This is probably down to the fact that we don't take superhero comics very seriously but are utterly enamoured of some of the more sillier elements of history. True story. We were once told off by a man in Green Lantern fangroup (We were bored.) because we thought that the origin of Kyle Rayner is so nakedly Freudian and 'Will this do?' to be hilarious.

To recap:

On a planet called Oa exists a race of short, bald humanoids with large heads called The Guardians. The Guardians believe in enforcing Order in the universe and go about this by way of selecting the most suitable candidate (called a Green Lantern.) of each sector of the universe to be given a power ring that does whatever the wearer can imagine. This ring had no effect on anything yellow due to a necessary flaw in the design to stop the wearer from having absolute power. Also, it has to be recharged every 24 hours.

Our sector of the universe is 2814, and of the 7200 Lanterns patrolling the universe at any given time, ours was a chap called Hal Jordan. Very strong-willed, very daring. Hal got the ring off an alien called Abin Sur who was on his way to give either him or a ginger bloke with a Moe haircut called Guy. Hal happened to be closer than Guy, so got the ring.

Hal Jordan went onto be a successful Green Lantern for several years but things went terribly wrong when a big yellow space tyrant called Mongul, teaming with a cyborg pretending to be Superman destroyed Hal's home of Coast City, murdering tens of thousands of people and left Hal shattered, feeling he'd failed in his duty as Earth's protector.

The loss of everything Hal cared about sent him insane, and he attempted to resurrect his destroyed home using the power ring, but he could only achieve a replica of what he'd lost and the ring wasn't designed to create that much matter for a presumably infinite period of time. His perceived second failure cemented his full breakdown, and he went on a murderous rampage in order to gather as many Green Lantern rings as possible on the way to returning to Oa is seize the original Green Lantern ring. Things go quite wrong as Hal murders the entire Lantern Corp and all but one of the Guardians: Ganthet.

Ganthet, a wee blue fella cosplaying as Orko off the He-Man cartoons pegs it back to Earth. Once there, he floats to L.A., sees a drunk bloke taking a piss against a wall and gives him the final power ring before sodding off, exclaiming 'The Ring will sort you, mate. No worries.'

A BLUE SPACE MIDGET IN A RED DRESS GIVES A DRUNK LAD ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL WEAPONS IN THE UNIVERSE AND THEN FUCKS OFF IS THE ORIGIN OF KYLE RAYNER, GREEN LANTERN OF EARTH.*

This would be weird as a 1960's comic but at least the DC Editors of the '60s had no idea any of this stuff would be reprinted and pored (Hi, Donald.) over by future generations. Supergirl is having a relationship with a fella who turns into her horse but she doesn't know about it? Fine. There's a space creature from the fifth dimension who has a real thing for winding up Superman every ninety days and can only be stopped by tricking him into saying his name backwards? Gotcha. Batman owns a dog who fights crime but wears a mask on patrol so no one will link Ace The Bat-Hound with Bruce Wayne. Of COURSE. Beppo The Super-Monkey? PRINT IT! Who will care in five years? Who will even remember, right?

Green Lantern 50 (2nd series, 1994) was published post Watchmen, post Dark Knight Returns, post Brat Pack and all of the other silly 'Corporate Superheroes Can Be For Adults' malarkey. We were now aware of subtext, metaphor, aspirational text and either this is a daft attempt at being a mature comic (which given it features a nervous breakdown, genocide, the total psychological breakdown of one of the icons of the DCU and the first example of 'Fridging' quite soon after, it ought to be.) or it's a very bad attempt at pitching a superhero comic at the kids.

The real answer was of course that DC were trying to get attention back they'd lost to the Marvel Superstar period and subsequent formation of Image. Superman grew a mullet, Batman needed a wheelchair and was replaced with a religious nutter wearing Vatican levels of gold, Wonder Woman was replaced with a giant legged redhead, The Flash broke his leg. It was all kicking off.

But we always found the whole Kyle thing hilarious, and when making our usual jokes about it ('Good thing Ganthet didn't run into Richard Pryor!', etc.) we were scolded. It turns out the story had been rewritten a bit as part of something called Green Lantern: Rebirth so it made a bit more sense. Lord knows some of our best friends are comic fans, but when they start quoting the continuity of a DC comic with capitals like they WERE reciting THE Bible and Geoff Johns DID make it GOOD, we get a bit scared.

All that was a recap of 5 comics. (Green Lantern 47-50 and Superman 80) and was almost impossible to recap straight. When we tried to give a factual, chronological accounting of these comics, we weren't capable of throwing in a few puns. And circa 1989-1993, nor were the staff of Marvel Year In Review.

When people try to contemplate the early 90's and Marvel, they think of Spider-Man 1, X-Force 1, X-Men 1. If you narrow the field down to Marvel Magazines, probably the movie adaptations, poster specials and most likely the BEAUTIFUL Marvel Illustrated Swimsuit Editions. Few will remember the spectacular Marvel Year In Review annuals. That's a shame, because with one notable exception* it was the last time they displayed an ability to take the mick out of themselves beside the better issues of John Byrne's run on She-Hulk or the comedy title 'What The--?!' (also canceled, sadly in 1993.).

Marvel Year In Review, in theory, was probably originally designed to be exactly that: A chronological overview of every comic published by Marvel over the previous 12 months. That sounds simple enough but can you imagine being the poor saps who not only have to read all those comics but attempt to sum them up as a factual synopsis. The work and time we just put into four issues of Green Lantern was murder and at least interesting things happened in those books. 'Hey, Dwight here's all of Acts Of Vengeance to work out, and see if you can explain what a Captain Universe is and why Spidey might become possessed by his powers, there's a pie in it for you. Barry, you got Atlantis Attacks.' Interns were probably diving out of the window at the sight of editor Bobbie Chase approaching them with a stack of Alpha Flight.

So rather than put out another dry, just the facts ma'am comic to sit along Marvel Age, The Offical Handbook Of The Marvel Universe or Marvel Preview, they changed gears. Marvel opted for a magazine format with covers emulating the likes of Time and later National Lampoon and sadly unnoticed New York-centric mag Spy. The early issues provided something of a review of the year but in journalistic form for some of the bigger events juxtaposed with pieces on 'Best and Worst Dressed' and ads for products like Damage Control, who would sort out your house if it'd been trashed in a fight between The Hulk and The Wrecker, a tourist ad for Latveria, posters for the new Simon Williams film or a flyer for the next Dazzler disco compilation. Long before Alex Ross painted every last rock on Ben Grimm's back, Marvel TYIR gave you an insight into what it would be like to be a resident of the Marvel Universe reading a 616 style issue of National Lampoon.

MYIR also ran interviews with various superheroes, (Including Rick Jones recounting the time he met Elvis, by far the best thing to come out of Infinity Gauntlet/War/Crusade.) a review of Nightcat's debut album, an appetite suppressant for Galactus, the 'Who Died This Year, Who Came Back From The Dead and Who Managed To Stay Dead' update, an expose of Genosha's tourist, a create your own 90's superhero name and origin generator (which turned out to be surprisingly accurate.) an account of two disenfranchised rival employees's visit to the Marvel Offices and ooh, loads more.

This is speculation on our part, but the knife gets a lot sharper around the 1992-1993 editions. The full chronology is written with a weary black humour of someone's who just seen too much and is getting bitter. The full-on assault on the 1993 annuals, certain top-tier artists 'showing their influences too clearly' and inadvertently predicting the future of more brutal and uncaring superhero comics in the article 'Bring On The Bad Guys' from MYIR 1993.

There's a huge shift in attitude and editorial policy in the next 12 months. Several publishers have gone bust, Tom Defalco is gone as Editor In Chief and replaced with 5 people in charge of various parts of the publishing line, turning Marvel into a series of little fiefdoms with varying degrees of co-operation between each other. We've just met Peter Parker's robot parents. Aunt May is about to die. Reed Richards is dead. Jim Wilson is dead. Legion resolves to kill Magneto. Dr Strange has an idea for something called 'The Secret Defenders'. Everything is about to get very serious and therefore far more ripe for parody.

And with no word, no goodbye from the editors, nothing in the fan press nor explanation, Marvel Year In Review 1994 was solicited thusly:

'Marvel Year In Review 1994 - Just the facts, ma'am. Gone is the tongue-in-cheek humor of the past; the Marvel Year in Review offers a factual recap of the major Marvel Universe events of 1994. It's short on lengthy text and long on splashy art and fact-filled sidebars. Included are all the happenings from the pages of X-Men, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four and Ghost Rider, plus art by Andy Kubert, Chris Bachalo, Tom Lyle and many others! $2:95. $4.00 CAN'

And it was. Normal comic size. No chatty opener from the editor with puns and gags. No angry letters from readers just wanting to know what happened in X-Force and wanting to be rid of the MODAM jokes. No ads. Not even, truth be told, much in the way of recaps so much as trade dress-less cover repros with dialogue quotes and a paragraph or two to cover the essential plot elements, finished with the most perfunctory 'Er, will this do?' appeal to the readers on the last page. Turns out that no, it wouldn't do at all, as there was no Marvel Year In Review 1995 or any other edition either.

Marvel has put out a few self-parody books since, such as Marvel RIOT!, House Of Hem, Marvel WHAT Now?, Who Won't Wear The Shield, Wha HUH? and obviously Deadpool crosses the lines frequently, but there's not been something that clever nor ambitious since. Perhaps the line between reader, writer and editor aren't as clear as they used to be or simply today's audience wouldn't be as immediately familiar with the formats being parodied and as the recent attempts to parody Marvel fanfiction have shown, sometimes an idea just belongs to its time. As a magazine that featured fun work by the likes of Todd McFarlane, Dan Slott, Sam Kieth, Peter David, Kevin Maguire and a different angle on a world that takes itself a little bit seriously at times, Marvel Year In Review was a fun little ride while it lasted.

(Note to self. Never, ever look up Marvel fanfiction again. Ever.)

*This may be different now but was certainly the case in 1994. Origins, histories and such might have changed due to 52, Convergence and Rebirth. We were told that Flashpoint was the end of the DC Universe as we knew it, and we took that as a good place to stop reading. Except Section Eight and Batman/Elmer Fudd obviously.

Dedicated to the memory of Steve Ditko.(1927-2018)

#Marvel #DC #Spider-Man #Green Lantern #Year In Review #Todd Mcfarlane #Jim Lee #kevin maguire #Sam Kieth #X-Men #Punisher #Deadpool #Sabretooth

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valkyrieandstrangeridingaragorn · 2 years ago

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I'm going to (respectfully) disagree on this. Here's the quote:

"For me, one thing I think is interesting [about Marvel’s process], and specifically for writers, I would say, a lot of times we’re pitched writers who love Marvel. And to me, that’s always a red flag. Because I go, ‘Oh, I don’t want you to already have a preexisting idea of what it is, because you grew up with Issue 15 and that’s what you want to recreate…’ I want somebody who’s hard on the material, who goes, ‘What is this? I think there’s a movie here, but maybe we should be looking at it in this way.’

And I think that’s important to be able to go, ‘Look, the source material is great, and I love it, and comics work great in the medium they were built in, but that’s not a direct, one-to-one translation to the best version of the movie.’ And sometimes it takes someone who’s out of this culture to go, ‘Hey, I know you think it should be this, but maybe it should be this other thing."

There are a few things I do agree with, these movies are not 1-on-1 adaptations and that's something they have been saying for years now. I'm not saying it's wrong to want that, and the Watchmen is pretty good, but the MCU has always made it clear they don't want direct adaptations.

I can somewhat understand that what Moore is saying here is that he thinks fans come with baggage and he prefers people who can bring new ideas to the table. This might sound good in theory but I find it surprising because it's... infantilizing? Those writers that want to work with you are professionals, they're not fans writing for Instagram.

So related to that professionalism, the way I see it, Phase Four's failure doesn't come from the fact that Marvel doesn't hire Marvel fans. Their failure came when they chose to hire writers who despise the source material and its characters or simply refuse to watch previous works because they only want to use the MCU as a stepping stone in their careers: it's their story, their version and their characters.

That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if we were talking about some other studio but it so happens that this is the MCU and part of the shit they sell to the audience is that all movies and series are connected, so having one character acting differently in each and every installment is not going to cut it.

We had this before Phase Four, perhaps the most noticeable character suffering from this was Natasha. But at least at the time, when some writers and directors didn't know what to do with certain characters, they still had a clear vision of where they were taking them (for the most part, that is). Now we don't have that. In the past they would watch previous works, now they don't. Now we got writers who go on interviews to talk shit about the characters they're writing for, we got directors who say everything that came before was shit and they want their thing now.

Ultimately the one to blame here is Feige.

So Nate Moore, an executive producer for Marvel Studios said that they consider it a “red flag” when potential writers say that they’re fans of the comics because they want people who bring “original ideas” to the table, and… I’m sorry, I just cannot agree with this take at all. Just because a writer is a fan of the comics does not mean that they’re going to be afraid to put their own spin on them. And secondly, while it’s always great when writers bring in new ideas, having no regard for the characters and plot lines of the comics you’re adapting can easily lead to ooc characterization and can sometimes be even insulting and disrespectful to the source material. Frankly, I think we’ve already seen that when writers have no regard and/or active disdain for the characters they’re adapting, it’s had disastrous results *cough* *cough* Michael Waldron *cough* *cough* the Loki series… I mean, good god, isn’t that the whole appeal of comic book movies? For people to see their favorite comics coming to life? You already have an audience that cares about these characters and stories from the comics; why would you throw that away just so you can brag about your “originality”? “New” does not always necessarily equal “good”. There are already plenty of incredible characters and stories that fans love; what’s wrong with just adapting a comic as is from time to time? This is honestly so insulting to both comic writers, who you already pay pennies to use their characters and then twist them beyond recognition, and the fans, who go to these movies expecting to see good adaptations of the characters they love. With Marvel executives having a mindset like this, no wonder phase 4 turned out to be such a dud.

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fantastic-nonsense · 7 years ago

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@colpfiction replied to your post “me: *sees a post on r/AskHistorians about comics history*me: ”

Always. I've learned more about comics and comics history and stuff from your blog than I think I did in college.

Lol, thanks! I feel honored!

Anyway, the original question asked was “Comic books featuring superheroes in the 60s-70s are typically more lighthearted and laden with sci-fi themes than earlier examples. In the 80s there was a sharp u-turn towards more grounded and dark subject matter. What trends caused this shift towards (relatively) grittier realism? What social trends led to this shift? Was it just a matter of sales or was something bigger happening in entertainment/media/society?

Me being me, I busted out pretty much the entirety of the bare bones of the history of the Comics Code and the switch from the Silver Age to the Bronze Age to the Modern/Dark Age of Comics. Also, I’m not sure if it’s good or just sad that I basically wrote the majority of it off the top of my head and really only needed to Google things to source dates, specific title and author names, and a couple of quotes. Now granted, r/AskHistorians specifically asks for and curates in-depth, sourced responses, but still:

“In terms of actual comics that contributed to the sharp turn towards "more grounded and dark subject matter," there are four or five comic events people usually credit as marking the general "turning point" between the Silver Age and Bronze Age of comics where comics began to get progressively darker and less silly: Gwen Stacy's death in "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" (which had a huge impact on the readership of Spider-man comics and comics readers in general), the 1971 "Snowbirds Don't Fly" drug abuse storyline in Green Arrow comics, Green Lantern being turned over to Denny O'Neil and Neil Adams, Jack Kirby's New Gods, and the revival of the Teen Titans with The New Teen Titans. However, unlike the progression from the Bronze Age to the Modern Age, there is no true clearly defined group of comics you can point to as being the definitive marker.

However, you can point specifically to the four comics usually credited with ending the Bronze Age and kicking off the "Dark Age/Modern Age" of comics: The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Watchmen (1987), The Killing Joke (1988), and DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline (1986) that saw a universe-wide reboot and restructuring. While Crisis completely revitalized the DC Universe's sales, The Killing Joke, DKR, and Watchmen were so enormously popular that they literally redefined the superhero genre and inspired years of "grim and gritty" comic books. In fact, DKR was so popular and so influential that in a lot of ways, the entire modern conception of Batman is loosely, in one form or another, based on Miller's work (despite DKR being a dark alternate future and completely out-of-continuity even to this day).

In terms of societal trends and influences, you had quite a few things going on: in comics specifically, you had writers and artists beginning to stretch the bounds of what was considered "acceptable" by the Comics Code Authority guidelines, which was implemented in 1954 after the moral panic surrounding comics, juvenile delinquency, and "bad influences" that culminated in Senate Subcommitee Hearings into comic books and their influence on children and teenagers (the moral panic itself was kicked off due to the infamous book Seduction of the Innocent by psychologist Fredric Wertham). Incidentally, this is why the Silver Age is so well-known for its light-hearted subject matter: comics companies were trying desperately to stick to their self-imposed censorship code, which you can find here.

Stan Lee has talked multiple times about the story of how Marvel Comics famously defied the CCA in 1970 by publishing a Spider-man story dealing with drug abuse (at the request of the US government). His deliberate refusal to adhere to the Comics Code with "Green Goblin Reborn!" in 1970 led to DC publishing the influential and seminal Speedy/Red Arrow storyline "Snowbirds Don't Fly" in 1971, depicting Roy Harper becoming addicted to heroin. Together, these two storylines would form a big part of the basis for depicting darker storylines. "Snowbirds Don't Fly" is considered one of the big watershed moments for the depiction of mature themes in comics, and particularly at DC, as the arc was the start of an era of socially relevant Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics.

Michael McAvennie and Hannah Dolan actually mention this in their book DC Year by Year: A Visual Chronicle:

"It was taboo to depict drugs in comics, even in ways that openly condemned their use. However, writer Denny O'Neil and artist Neal Adams collaborated on an unforgettable two-part arc that brought the issue directly into Green Arrow's home, and demonstrated the power comics had to affect change and perception."

These two stories triggered a re-examination and revision of the Code in 1971 with standards that were slightly looser (though not by much) and helped contribute to a culture where writers/artists were interested in stretching the boundaries of what they were allowed to depict. As the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund's History page states:

The 1971 code relaxed the restrictions on crime comics and lifted the ban on horror comics (while still prohibiting the use of “horror” and “terror” in titles). In addition, the liberalized standards on sex reflected changes in society. After the Spider-Man controversy, the CMAA added a section on how to handle depiction of drug use. The code, although it was less restrictive, represented a lost opportunity in its reaffirmation of comic books as a medium for children.

So you can generally point to "Green Goblin Reborn!" and "Snowbirds Don't Fly" in 1970/1971 for the re-introduction of socially relevant topics such as drug abuse, the revision of the Comics Code in 1971 for allowing the growth of supernatural and horror-related titles (as well as an explosion of non-superhero genre titles throughout the 70s), Gwen Stacy's death in 1973 as marking a trend towards dealing with death and darker subject matter, Jack Kirby's move from Marvel to DC and his "New Gods" storyline as marking a fundamental change in the storytelling priorities of both companies, the revival of Teen Titans under Marv Wolfman and George Perez as marking a change towards character-based storytelling, and the introduction of several minority heroes (particularly John Stewart as Green Lantern, Luke Cage, Storm, Black Lightning, Vixen, and Cyborg) as marking a trend towards the attempt at inclusion and greater diversity (and thus socially relevant storylines regarding prejudice and racism). All of these things combined led to a "perfect storm" where comics began to deal with darker and more gritty/realistic subject matter throughout the 70s and into the 80s, culminating in the publication of stories like Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke, A Death in the Family, and Crisis on Infinite Earths in the mid-80s (and later on in 1992, The Death of Superman) which led to the start of the Modern Age/Dark Age of comics.

There are probably three other big societal trends that helped contribute to the depiction of 'darker' subject matter in comics throughout the 70s and early 80s: the change of marketing trends where young children and girls stopped being specifically targeted as comic readers; the end of the careers of many of the veteran writers and artists of the time (or their promotion to management positions and retirement from regular writing or drawing) and their replacement with a younger generation of editors and creators; and the rise of direct market distribution, where specialized comic book distributors could directly solicit orders and distribute directly to retail outlets rather than the old system where wholesalers delivered the comic books to retailers along with other magazines. I suspect that the beginning of the "War on Drugs" and the rise of the Women's Liberation movement in the 70s also played a huge role (you can read a little bit about the revitalization of Wonder Woman and her impact on the Women's Movement/second-wave feminism here), but I only know about how social trends affected specific comics like the Batman, Green Arrow, and Wonder Woman comics rather than the industry as a whole.

As a sidenote, there are a couple of really good books on Wonder Woman, her history, and her impact on the feminist movement: The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore and Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World's Most Famous Heroine by Tim Hanley.

For further research on this matter, I would suggest you look up books relating to the Comics Code and the Seduction of the Innocent scandal (David Hadju's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America is particularly good) as well as any articles and academic papers on a) the rise of minority superheroes throughout the 70s, b) the impact of "Snowbirds Don't Fly", and c) anything relating to the impact Gwen Stacy's death had on comics.

If you're more interested in the switch from the Bronze Age to the Modern Age, I would focus on the rise of independent publishers such as Milestone Comics and Marvel/DC's non-superhero publishing lines Vertigo and Image, the near complete dissolution of the Comics Code in 1989 (with the final hit being Marvel completely withdrawing from the Comics Code in 2001), authors like Frank Miller (who wrote extensively on Daredevil and then went off and wrote DKR and Batman: Year One) and Alan Moore (especially Alan Moore, considering he wrote Swamp Thing, Watchmen, and The Killing Joke), Crisis on Infinite Earths and the lasting impact it had on both DC Comics and the comics industry as a whole, the death of Barry Allen in Crisis on Infinite Earths and the installation of Wally West as the Second Flash, and the development of the X-Men franchise.”

#colpfiction #replies #comics #dc comics #marvel comics #comics history #long post

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