Tag: comics Page 4 of 5

As always, citizen, I warn you that Watchmen spoilers are ahead. There’s also some stuff about 30 years of CIA activity, but I think the point of that (at least for Alan Moore) is to not keep it a secret.

Today’s excursion into The Annotated Watchmen v2.0 finds Dan Dreiberg speculating about The Comedian’s shady political operations and how they might provide a motive for his murder.

The annotators are reminded of a (roughly) contemporaneous Moore work:

The CIA is widely suspected to have been responsible (in the real world) for helping the military coup in Chile in the early 1970s that deposed and killed the left-wing President, Dr. Salvador Allende, and brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power. Moore explores some of these issues in his comic “Shadowplay”, illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz, one of the two parts of the book Brought to Light. In Watchmen, it is Blake who is suspected of doing similar things.

Brought To Light came out in 1988, a year or so after the final issue of Watchmen emerged. It’s a peculiar artifact, in several ways. First of all, it’s one of those kooky reversible tête-bêche books, in which two texts are held in a single binding, rotated 180 degrees to each other. When you hit the upside-down pages, you flip the book over and start from the other end. “TWO BOOKS IN ONE,” as the cover proclaims. (Moore only worked on one of the included texts: Shadowplay: The Secret Team.) Second, it rather grandly announces itself as genre-defining: “Brought To Light fuses the intrigue of investigative reporting and the sophistication of the graphic novel package and invents a new form — the graphic docudrama.” It certainly owns the term — google “graphic docudrama” and every hit will be about Brought To Light. But is it really valid to claim that in 1988, nobody had ever dramatized nonfiction reporting in comic form? I wouldn’t say so.

Finally, there’s the fact that both sections of Brought To Light are based on Avirgan v. Hull, a lawsuit brought against the CIA under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. This lawsuit alleged that since the early Sixties, a “Secret Team” of CIA officials, U.S. military, and various associates had been conducting its own private wars in the name of anti-Communism: toppling governments, smuggling and selling drugs and weapons, arming terrorists, and doing it all behind the back of (or occasionally with the tacit approval of) the U.S. Congress. The suit used as its basis a bomb attack that occurred in the Nicaraguan town of La Penca, at a press conference with Contra leader Edén Pastora. Pastora was seriously wounded by the blast, and seven people were killed, including three journalists. A cameraman named Tony Avirgan was among the wounded, and with his wife Martha Honey, he investigated the bombing.

Avirgan and Honey became convinced that the CIA (and various associates, including businessman John Floyd Hull) was behind the attack. They joined forces with the Christic Institute, a public interest law firm which had also famously represented Karen Silkwood, to sue the Secret Team. The lawsuit named a wide variety of people, including several key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal. Going far, far beyond La Penca, the lawsuit attempted to establish the CIA’s guilt for a long history of alleged covert illegal activities.

Judge James L. King was not convinced. He not only dismissed the suit, he ordered Christic to pay over a million dollars in fees to the defendants, which essentially spelled the end of the firm. In the wake of this debacle, the various parties fell to arguing about what went wrong. Avirgan had apparently been inveighing against Christic founder and lead counsel Daniel Sheehan for years, protesting Sheehan’s indulgence in “wild allegations” about a 30-year conspiracy at the cost of paying attention to the legal fundamentals of the La Penca case. (Nowadays, Sheehan and his Open Skies Ministry would like to have a sincere conversation about how to spiritually, philosophically, and socially prepare for our first contact with extraterrestrials.)

What seems apparent now is that Christic and Avirgan did have some fairly damning evidence about some CIA activities, but the case overreached, trying to draw those activites into a larger and more complex web, some branches of which they simply could not substantiate. This overreach allowed an already hostile judge to not only torpedo the case, but to ensure that Christic was left a smoking hole in the ground.

Of course, a “graphic docudrama” needn’t concern itself with the niceties of evidence, and Shadowplay certainly doesn’t much bother. In it, Moore sets out to describe the breadth of Christic’s case, and he does so with gusto, employing devices like recurring images of red swimming pools representing deaths caused by CIA machinations. Each pool represents 20,000 dead — one gallon of blood per dead body.

These insanites are rendered brilliantly by the amazing Bill Sienkiewicz. I’ve been a huge Sienkiewicz fan ever since New Mutants #18 arrived in my mailbox and blew my 14-year-old mind. His run on New Mutants is still one of my all-time favorite runs of any comic. In this setting, he lets loose completely with some of his most grotesquely bonkers work ever.

The comic is written in the second person voice (e.g. “You don’t remember how you came to be here, putting in to this foul harbor where the dead cats bob upon the greycap waves amongst the oil drums and the excrement.”) Also, in case you can’t tell, it’s kinda dark. The second-person frame story quickly gives way to an extended monologue by an anthropomorphized bald eagle, who embodies the CIA. He sits alone at a bar until the narrator comes in, then starts declaiming the history of the Secret Team according to Christic. He gleefully describes all kinds of nefarious actions undertaken in the name of fighting communism: powermongering in Iran and Syria, organized crime collusion in Cuba, drug dealing in Laos, assassinating civilians in Vietnam, assassinating Allende in Chile, and so on and so forth.

After this narrative, he finally presents the narrator with a deal: “All we’re askin’ is your indifference. Just turn away. Pretend it ain’t happenin’. Ain’t like ya gotta give up part o’ y’self. No important part, anyway…” And he opens a suitcase, overflowing with gore.

The whole thing feels like a 30-page editorial cartoon, except the cartoonist has been listening to talk radio and scarfing powerful hallucinogens for a couple of decades. Readers of From Hell know that Moore loves a good conspiracy theory — in fact, the freemasons even get a shout-out at the beginning of Shadowplay. How much of it does he actually believe? How much of it is actually true? It’s hard to tell. I have no trouble believing that at least some of it is accurate, but it seems now like something from a long time ago. With its Iran-Contra references and its anti-Communist hysteria, this comic feels like just as much of a period piece as Watchmen. The difference, of course, is that Shadowplay lays claim to fact, with the narrator’s repeated phrase, bookending the eagle’s speech: “This is not a dream.”

It’s a stretch to call this comic “nonfiction,” but let’s just say it’s the first “graphic docudrama” Moore ever wrote. It is explicitly about the real world, and seems a natural next step from Watchmen, which was metaphorically about the real world. Both books are drenched in conspiracy, and both examine how immensely powerful entities affect the lives of ordinary people.

For Watchmen to explore “superheroes in the real world,” it must address how superheroes would interact with the most powerful entities in our world: governments and corporations. Corporations are represented by Ozymandias — in effect a super-capitalist, he has taken over commerce to such an extent that nearly all the advertising and branding we see throughout the story comes back to his holdings in some way. Governments, on the other hand have Dr. Manhattan and The Comedian as their superheroes.

Or rather, one government does. We never see evidence in Watchmen of non-American superheroes, and certainly the only truly superpowered being in the story’s universe is famously American. So the question is: what kind of government are they working for? Does the existence of superheroes obviate the need for anti-communist secret wars, or would it simply be another weapon in them? We don’t get a lot of direct evidence, but there’s plenty of suggestion that the U.S. government of Watchmen is no better than the government of Brought to Light. In the few pages we get of Nixon, Kissinger, Ford, and Liddy, we get a mention of Liddy’s CIA connections linked with anti-communist first-strike aggression. Then, of course, there’s the simple fact that this same cadre is still in power as of 1985 — surely a sign that some democratic fundamentals have slipped away. Not to mention the panel that started this discussion — suggesting that one of this world’s superheroes helps the U.S. government with “knocking over Marxist republics in South America.”

What does it do to a person, working for such an organization, carrying out its darkest urges? I think you would have to be blackhearted, naive, or utterly indifferent to last long in such an employ. Doctor Manhattan certainly has the latter covered, what with “life and death are unquantifiable abstracts,” and so forth. Blackheartedness, on the other hand, is the Comedian’s beat, or so it would seem. He is, as Manhattan describes him, “deliberately amoral” — a rapist, and a killer of women and children. I have no trouble imagining him neck-deep in any of the atrocities described in Brought To Light.

And yet, in the end he finds that there is still naïveté left in him after all. Weeping in Moloch’s apartment, he reaches the end of deliberate amorality: “I mean, this joke, I mean, I thought I was the Comedian, y’know? Oh, god, I can’t believe it. I can’t believe anybody would do that… I can’t… I can’t believe…” Confronted with the utter horror of Ozymandias’ plan, he learns that the corporation in his universe is capable of far worse than the government would ever dream. He learns that he has a moral center after all — it’s just a matter of how many swimming pools must be filled before he reaches it.

Next Entry: The Comedians Of Tragedy
Previous Entry: Fifteen Men On A Dead Man’s Chest

Yarrr! It be time for another voyage upon the seas of Watchmen analysis, and ’tis no place for a lubber who’s never clapped eyes on the book, for it’s spoilers ahoy, just off the port bow! Fairly warned be thee, says I.

Okay, enough pirate talk. It fits today’s discussion, for we’ve arrived at a piratey classic, a mere 1 panel past our last excursion. Take it away, Annotated Watchmen v2.0:

Also appearing for the first time is Treasure Island, a comics shop which reappears a few times. “Treasure Island” is named that probably because of the kinds of comics it stocks (the pirate comics popular in the Watchmen world). Its name is taken from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel of the same name about pirate treasure.

So I read Treasure Island. (And I’ll be spoiling it below, too.) I’d never read it before, and I quite enjoyed it. As expected, it suffers a bit from Raymond Chandler Syndrome, which is to say that its genre inventions were so successful and so widely imitated that now the original sounds like a cliche. For page after page of Treasure Island, you can watch Stevenson inventing our pirate iconography right before your eyes — wooden legs, talking parrots, buried treasure, and all.

In fact, on the very first page, an old salt named Billy Bones, with a “tarry pigtail” and a “livid white” scar breaks out in an “old sea-song” that’s very familiar to us now: “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest — / Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!” It’s not at all clear in the story what the lyric means, but it’s certainly evocative. Those words are original to Stevenson in 1883, but thanks to a host of adapters, including the likes of Broadway and Disney, they sound to us as if they’ve been around since the 16th century, and they are synonymous with the concept of pirates, as is much of Treasure Island.

Watchmen memorably leverages this familiarity with its inversion of the “fifteen men” image, as is made explicit in the supplemental material to Chapter 5 — an excerpt from (what else?) the “Treasure Island Treasury Of Comics.” As that text explains, instead of “fifteen men on the dead man’s chest”, the “Marooned” story from Tales Of The Black Freighter gives us a man on fifteen dead men’s chests — the sailor who lashes together a raft and uses the corpses of his former shipmates as floats for it.

This is a grim, gruesome image, and it only gets worse. The Tales material interspersed through the book performs many functions, a minor one of which is to do some meta-commentary on the medium of comics itself. In Watchmen‘s world, superhero comics faded in popularity as “real” superheroes appeared on the scene (and themselves became unpopular.) However, where there were no superheroes, there was also apparently no Fredric Wertham, and no subsequent Comics Code Authority. Consequently, EC Comics was never knocked from its perch, and became the ascendant comic book company. DC was the scrappy upstart, and there was no sign of Marvel at all. This may have been a bit of… I dunno, is there a publisher equivalent of fanservice? Bosservice? Whatever. Putting DC in Marvel’s 1960s position was no doubt partly driven by the fact that DC published Watchmen.

Anyway, no comics code also means that stories can be just as gory and disturbing as they want to be, and Tales Of The Black Freighter wanted plenty. Even aside from the horrifying twist of the story, and its allegorical relationship to the plot of Watchmen, just the details of “Marooned” are awful: a gull eating a dead man’s brains, a man eating a live gull raw, a man’s skull bashed open with a rock, and so on.

Treasure Island, on the other hand, is essentially a boy’s adventure story. Its hero, Jim Hawkins, is a lad in his early teens — clearly young, though his exact age isn’t specified. While Jim certainly sees his fair share of mayhem, Stevenson keeps the gore to a minimum. Most of the narrative conflicts play out either as intrigues or as long-distance violence like cannons or musket shots. Jim even kills a man late in the story, but it’s very clearly in self-defense, and again, is done from a distance and almost by accident. There is nothing of the eeriness of “Marooned”, nor certainly its horror. Everything is bright and burnished, a proper Victorian page-turner in which the virtuous emerge triumphant, and scoundrels pay for their crimes either with their lives or their exile.

In fact, its sensibility differs little from that of Golden Age superhero comics, which were also stories for young boys, featuring adventures that were colorful and exciting, but very rarely disturbing or upsetting. As I read through the novel, it occurred to me that Treasure Island is to Tales Of The Black Freighter what Golden Age superhero stories are to Watchmen itself. The anonymous “Treasure Island Treasury” commenter could have just as easily been talking about Watchmen with comments like this one:

Readers who came to the series expecting a good rousing tale of swashbuckling were either repulsed or fascinated by what were often perverse and blackly lingering comments upon the human condition.

Moore has said several times that part of his aim with Watchmen was to showcase the strengths of comics, and one of these is juxtaposition. I swear, if it hadn’t been called Watchmen, the book might as well be called Juxtaposition. From the very first pages, we get cop dialogue over fight flashback, set next to pictures of the cops investigating the scene of the crime. We get ironic overlays like the elevator operator’s dialogue “Ground floor, coming up”, pasted onto a shot of The Comedian being thrown through his window. Pretty much every scene transition involves some sort of ironic or thematically connected overlap, and as the book goes on we get panels reprised in new contexts, such as in Dr. Manhattan’s time-jumbled narrative of Chapter 4.

With the pirate story, this juxtaposition is relentless. Nearly every panel of it intersects with the main story world in some way, with either pirate narration laid over story-world panels or story-world dialogue over pirate panels. It becomes almost musical, a harmony and counterpoint to the main melody of the story. The juxtaposition happens within each panel, as well as from one panel to the next.

Thus do Bernie’s comic books inform “real life,” and vice versa. To Bernie (the younger), the stories “don’t make sense”, but we can see exactly how much sense they make, and know from the commentary that they are in fact reprints of comics from the early 1960s. In our world, the Comics Code Authority had long since banished such stories by then. The CCA loosened up a bit in the 1970s, and thanks to the rise of the direct market in the 1980s, Watchmen itself could forgo the CCA seal altogether. (Indeed, if it had had to submit to the Comics Code, Watchmen as we know it today wouldn’t exist.)

Even then, the fear that had engendered the CCA drove out transgression, homogenizing artistic expression in the name of protecting children. (Also, every loosening of the Code prompted an artificial spurt of production, such as the glut of monster comics that appeared when the Code decided that vampires and werewolves were okay again.) Decades of mainstream comics went by under this oppressive curtain, until it was finally cast aside in the early 21st century.

Watchmen‘s world is bleak indeed, but it has no Comics Code, and the unfettered stories that resulted are its buried gold:

…like so many of the fascinating sunken treasures lurking just beneath the surface of this fabulous and compelling genre.

Their existence is a clear rebuke to the Comics Code Authority and all it wrought in our own world. And all it took to get there was to eradicate superheroes from comic books.

Next Entry: The Secret Team
Previous Entry: There’s Nothing To Get

You know that thing where you pursue every lead from the Watchmen annotations? This is that thing. So we’re once again entering spoiler-town for Watchmen. That’s my only alert this time, because I don’t believe in spoiler warnings for anything written over 1800 years ago.

We only get two panels further on page 9 past our last dive when the annotations throw another reference our way:

Panel 7: “Who Watches the Watchmen” was popular graffiti around the time of the Keene act. It comes from the Latin phrase “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes” from Juvenal’s Satires and, of course, is the source of the title of the series. The phrase never appears in its entirety in the series; it is always cut off somehow.

I’d never heard of Juvenal or his Satires, so I had to start from scratch on this one. Turns out that there was a guy in late 1st/early 2nd century Rome by the name of Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, but because we give all the cool writers of antiquity just one name, we call him Juvenal. He wrote 16 satires, back when the term had a little different definition — not so much about comedy, but certainly still about social critique.

So I read these satires. This isn’t necessarily a straightforward task. Because I don’t read Latin, I had to read the Satires in translation, but there are boatloads of translations out there. I’m no classicist, so I know nothing about the relative merits of Juvenal’s translators, and researching them was beyond the scope of this project. So I picked the Peter Green translation because, hey, Fleetwood Mac! (Not the same guy, I hasten to add. I may not be a classicist, but I am a Macist.)

Lucky for me, I thought the translation was fabulous. I mean, I’m in no position to judge its accuracy (or else I wouldn’t need it), but Green’s introduction is wonderful, and his notes both erudite and entertaining. He explains the choices he’s made, like introducing modern diction in spots, and replacing Juvenal’s references to specific people with references to types, when it appears that Juvenal was naming the person to invoke the type anyway. The satires read very smoothly — his approach worked for me.

As for the Satires themselves, they change a bit as you go through them. The first several are just venomous, a torrent of shrill invective whose closest Watchmen analogue is Rorschach’s opening page jeremiad about the immoral dregs populating the city. They mellow out a bit after that, but still remain at heart a lamentation of how crappy things are now. (“Now” being around 110-130 CE.) Overall they resonate remarkably with the overriding sense of disappointment and degradation in Watchmen. Just as Nite Owl plaintively asks, “What happened to the American dream?”, Juvenal’s entire oeuvre seems to be asking the same question about Rome.

By the way, before we get much further I should address the fact that unlike many of the references in Watchmen, Moore claims to have made this one accidentally. Apparently he’d heard “Who watches the watchmen?” as an aphorism, and used it in the book, but was only later informed (by Harlan Ellison, so the story goes) of the phrase’s classical provenance. Still, there are some interesting connections between the two works.

For instance, there’s a social parallel between Watchmen‘s superheroes and Juvenal’s persona in the Satires. Green spends a large part of the introduction arguing that Juvenal was socially conservative to the point of being reactionary:

His most violent invective… is reserved for those who, in one way or another, threaten to disrupt the existing pattern of society, to inject some mobility and dynamism into the class structure. […] His particular dilemma, like that of many another laudator temporis acti yearning for some mythical Golden Age, is that he is living by a set of moral and social assumptions that were obsolete before he was born.

Green makes a very convincing argument that Juvenal is all about preserving the status quo. The poet’s anger is towards forces of change, like the merchant classes, or aristocrats who cross class lines to have liaisons “beneath” them. (He’s also not fond of patrons who fail to support poets properly — the idea of doing something useful to earn his living never seems to occur to him.)

Superheroes, too, are reactive, and seek to preserve the current order. They patrol the city, looking for forces of disruption, and then neutralize those forces. Or perhaps they get wind of a person or group of people in distress, and they leap to the rescue. Before long, their stories come to be dominated by entities they’ve thwarted in the past, always back to seek revenge or plot a new disruption.

Rarely does a superhero take the initiative to try to prevent disruptions before they happen, or to reshape society into something different and better. In fact, when superheroes become proactive forces of change, they generally stop being superheroes and turn into supervillains, as Watchmen indelibly demonstrates. (This problem may map to superpower countries in our world — Moore says in the New Comics interview that part of his aim with Watchmen was to “try and scare a little bit so that people would just stop and think about their country and their politics.”)

Another connection is through the concept of lineage. Satire VIII tears into Romans who ride on the coattails of their noble forbears to claim superiority to others, even though they themselves are degenerates. Lineage takes on its own significance in superhero stories, especially in the DC Universe, as identities are passed from mentor to student, father to son, mother to daughter, and so forth. We see plenty of this in Watchmen, with both Nite Owl and Silk Spectre passing the baton to a younger generation, who inevitably embody the identities differently than their predecessors.

Juvenal’s point in Satire VIII is that deeds outshine names, and while the point applies to Watchmen, the more salient aspect is the notion of degeneration, which is one of Juvenal’s constant themes throughout all the satires. Nite Owl II isn’t the hero that Nite Owl I was, though he certainly marshals more power — he’s a more ambiguous figure with more dubious achievements, befitting his time. Similarly, Silk Spectre II doesn’t even like being a superhero, and has trouble living up to her mother’s expectations.

Even within one incarnation, degeneration can occur — Rorschach goes through a clear change to become a much darker figure than he once was. We see it on the larger scale as well — the disgust that Nite Owl I (representative of the earlier generation) expresses for The Comedian (the link to the next generation) illuminates the decline from the Minutemen to the Watchmen (or the Crimebusters, or the loosely associated main characters, or whoever they are.) As Juvenal writes:

But if ambition and lust dictate your headlong progress,
if you splinter the rods in blood across provincial backs, if
blunt axes and weary headsmen are your prime delight,
then you will find your noble background itself beginning
to turn against you, to hold a bright torch to your shamelessness.

Yet another tie worth noting is the portrayals of Alexander The Great in each work. The satires don’t dwell on him, but where they do mention him, Juvenal provides a great counter to Ozymandias’ fascination with Alexander and with antiquity in general. For instance, in Satire X, Juvenal holds forth on how our human desires often go horribly awry. He cites example after example of this, Alexander being one:

One globe seemed all too small for the youthful Alexander:
unhappily he chafed at this world’s narrow confines,
as though caged on some bare rocky Aegean islet. Yet
when he entered the city of brick-walled Babylon,
a coffin was to suffice him. Death alone reveals
our puny human dimensions.

Similarly, in Satire XIV, Juvenal depicts the meeting between Alexander and Diogenes, noting “how much happier was the man who desired / nothing than he whose ambitions encompassed the whole world, / yet would suffer perils as great as all he’d achieved.” As Green notes, for Juvenal it is Diogenes, not Alexander, who is “great.” Contrast this with Ozymandias’ rapturous description of Alexander in Chapter 11 of Watchmen. For Adrian, Alexander is one of the few role models history offers, though he eventually sees that “he’d not united all the world, nor built a unity that would survive him.” It’s an ironic echo of Dr. Manhattan’s words in chapter 12 — “Nothing ever ends.” Juvenal sees this too — Alexander’s quest for the wide world finally arrives in a narrow coffin, and while he takes over much land, he is not made happier for it.

All these connections are worth examining, but what really got me thinking was Satire VI. This satire, the longest and most complex in Juvenal’s quiver, is an epic diatribe against women. For 662 lines (almost 300 lines longer than its nearest competitor), Juvenal alleges one feminine flaw after another. Women are controlling, quarrelsome, conniving, superstitious, greedy, profligate, cruel to slaves and neighbors, consumed with lust, and prone to running off with gladiators and poisoning stepsons and husbands. On and on it goes. In fact, it is the source of the “who watches the watchmen” line, the context being a lamentation about the futility of controlling feminine lust. Here, Green’s translation:

Oh, I know
the advice my old friends would give, on every occasion —
“Lock her up and bar the doors.” But who is to stand guard
over the guards themselves? They get paid in common coin
to forget their mistress’s sex life: both hide the same offence.
Any shrewd wife, planning ahead, will first turn the heat on them.

This is one frightened man. We get glimpses of that same fear of women in Watchmen — Rorschach’s mother is horribly abusive, and leaves him so gynophobic that he’s repulsed by even handling “female clothing.” Also, the monster that Hira Manish designs for Ozymandias is pretty clearly a nightmare version of female genitalia, as underscored by some rather strong hints in Chapter 8.

There aren’t very many women in Watchmen, full stop. (In fact, the title Watchmen rather begs the question “What about women?”) What women we do see are not a tour of flaws a la Satire VI, but neither are they fully realized characters in themselves. For the most part, women in this book exist to demonstrate or change the way men feel about things.

We see this in small examples, such as the nameless pregnant Vietnamese woman gunned down by The Comedian in Chapter 2. She exists to show us what a despicable man he is, and to slash his face in a way that echoes Sally Jupiter’s fingernails and will later be echoed by Laurie Juspeczyk’s drink. Later in the story, Malcolm Long’s wife operates as a token to show us how his life is falling apart. She could just as easily be an unfed goldfish, or an unpaid electric bill, but making her a woman gives his descent a greater emotional impact. Chapter 11 gives us a scenario that almost seems like it might pass the Bechdel Test: two women talk to each other about their own relationship. However, only one of the women has a name, and as it turns out, the reason for their interaction, within the dazzlingly intricate structure of that chapter, is still to make a point about Malcolm: that he cannot turn away from the suffering in the world, even when it costs him his own marriage.

To a certain extent, Janey Slater is a token to demonstrate Dr. Manhattan’s feelings, or lack thereof. (The unnamed pregnant Vietnamese women also operates on this level, as The Comedian explicitly points out.) More than that, though, she is a token to manipulate his feelings. She’s used as a pawn by Nova Express (and a pawn in a far larger game by Ozymandias) to drive Dr. Manhattan off the planet. It will take another woman to change his feelings back.

Which brings us to Laurie. For a supposed superhero, she does very little heroing of any kind, with the exception of playing Robin to Nite Owl II’s Batman in the burning building. No, her main function is to change the state of male characters. It starts when she leaves Dr. Manhattan. As he tells us later, this severs his only link to Earth and humanity, and (simultaneously influenced by an embittered and cancerous Janey) he leaves the planet. Then she moves in with Dan Dreiberg, and transforms him from schlub to hero by spending some quality time with him, beating up thugs and then patrolling in full superhero gear. Each time, there is a clear (sometimes hilariously clear) sexual undercurrent. Finally, she has a long dialogue with Dr. Manhattan on Mars, which ends with him convinced to return to Earth.

In none of these cases does she form an intention and succeed with a plan. When she leaves Dr. Manhattan, she is driven purely by rage and frustration, reacting to his freakishly distant demeanor and his disconcertingly supernatural actions. Then her sexuality drives the story with Dreiberg, while her family tragedy causes Dr. Manhattan’s later reversal. (The locus of that tragedy is, unsurprisingly, a man.) Perhaps her best moment is when she shoots Adrian in chapter 12 — too bad she fails.

So what about the elder Silk Spectre, Sally Jupiter? She’d certainly give Juvenal plenty of ammunition — she’s adulterous, controlling, passive-aggressive, and sometimes cruel. She also trades off her sexuality, and defines herself in sexual terms, as when Laurie overhears her joke from a room away, “As for me… what I achieved… sitting in it… and as… what I achieved it with… I’m sitting on it!” Early in the story, she occupies a typical marker function, like Watchmen‘s other women — her rape by The Comedian is the first in a series of Chapter 2 episodes designed to demonstrate his aggression, violence, and depravity.

However, the revelations of Chapter 9 put her in a different category. As Dr. Manhattan observes, she loves a man she has every reason to hate, and though that still defines her in terms of her relationship to a man, that encounter gives her a daughter — the “thermodynamic miracle” that brings Jon back to Earth.

I keep circling back to some effect on a male character, but I can’t help thinking that Sally at least comes the closest to breaking through the limits around Watchmen‘s other female characters. The fact that years after the rape, she had a willing liaison with Blake isn’t designed to show us something about him. It shows us something about her. In the book’s penultimate scene, it is her emotions on display. For that moment at least, we feel like we’re reading her story rather than some man’s story in which she plays a part. Her tear-stained face is more real, more human, than any of Juvenal’s caricatures, and the mysteries of her heart deeper by far than any other woman in Watchmen.

Next Entry: There’s Nothing To Get
Previous Entry: The Gods Now Walk Amongst Us

Won’t you return with me once again to an exploration of the many works referenced by Watchmen, at least according to version 2.0 of The Annotated Watchmen? I warn you, though: only come with me if you’re okay with spoilers for both Watchmen itself and Philip Wylie’s 1930 novel Gladiator, because there are spoilers aplenty ahead.

So now that we’re done with “Gunga Din“, we’re finally able to leave page 5 of Chapter 1 behind, rocketing ahead all the way to… page 9! On this page, we get a glimpse of Hollis Mason’s home, and panel 4 brings us this note:

The statuette was presented to Mason upon his retirement. The books are: Two copies of his autobiography, Under the Hood; Automobile Maintenance; and Gladiator by Philip Wylie (one of the first novels about a superhero, and partial inspiration for Superman). Note the owl items.

So I read Gladiator. Wylie apparently wrote a lot of nutty apocalyptic stuff later on, but I found this book quite enjoyable, even verging on poetic in parts. More to the point, it was remarkably prescient. Not only is much of the modern superhero narrative prefigured in this novel, much of its subsequent deconstruction is as well. And it came out 8 years prior to Action Comics #1, the debut of Superman. So for those of you who haven’t read Gladiator and don’t plan to, here’s a plot summary:

Abednego Danner is an ineffectual but brilliant scientist in a small Colorado town, who discovers a formula for greatly enhancing the density and strength of living tissue. He injects a kitten with the formula, and it subsequently becomes a holy terror that hunts and kills a full-grown cow before Danner decides it’s too dangerous to live, and poisons it. Consumed with curiosity about how the formula would manifest in a human subject, he injects his unborn son without his wife’s knowledge.

From the time the boy, Hugo, is born, he is superhumanly strong and nearly invulnerable. However, he experiences this power as more of a curse than a blessing. His freakish strength sets him apart from other kids, and his refusal to use it (for fear of injuring someone) brands him a coward. He is only able to fully test his strength while deep in the mountains, far away from humanity. He builds himself a fortress there.

Finally, Hugo leaves his hometown and heads to college, where he becomes a football star. In a momentary loss of control, he accidentally kills an opposing player during the final game of the season. Overwhelmed with guilt, he decides he can never return to college, and sets out to find his place in the world. He never quite finds it, though he does go through a long series of varied roles, including circus strongman, fisherman, steelworker, farmhand, and bank teller. He tends to be forced out of each role in one way or another when his superhuman nature manifests. He tries to do good deeds and save lives, to atone for his earlier manslaughter. He also amasses a fortune along the way by diving for pearls far more effectively than any normal human could.

He experiences various relationships with women, sometimes as a dewy-eyed innocent, sometimes as a generous benefactor, sometimes as forbidden fruit to a neglected wife. He makes friends, and tries to act normal around them, concealing his powers. He meets the occasional mentor, who understands his plight but must be left behind for one reason or another.

He also goes to war — World War I. He avoids using his abilities at first, but eventually makes himself known as a dynamo of the battlefield, shrugging off bullets and shredding enemy lines like tissue. When his best friend is killed, he goes berserk, massacring every enemy soldier in every nearby trench barehanded before dropping unconscious from fatigue. He is sent to the hospital, and shortly afterward, the war ends.

Upon hearing the news that his father is dying, Hugo returns to Colorado. When Abednego eagerly inquires as to what impact his boy has made on the world, Hugo cannot bear to tell him the truth, that he never found a way to make his abilities benefit humanity. So he says instead that he stopped the war, and that he’s now going to “right the wrongs of politics and government.” His father is thrilled with this news, and gives Hugo his notebooks with the secret formula. After his father dies, Hugo tries to live up to the lie he told, but his earnest efforts in Washington are soon swallowed by the all-too-human venality, tribalism, and power struggles of those around him.

Finally, Hugo exiles himself again, this time by joining an archaeological expedition, hoping to serve pure science rather than any corrupt human. His powers once again emerge, but this time under the friendly eyes of the expedition’s chief scientist, who exhorts Hugo to undertake a eugenic campaign to make more supermen like himself. Wracked with doubt in the night, Hugo climbs a mountain in a torrential rain and shouts out a challenge to God: “Can I defy You? Can I defy Your world? Is this Your will? Or are You, like all mankind, impotent?” Finally, a bolt of lightning stabs out from the sky, incinerating both Hugo and the notebooks he carries.

For anyone who reads superhero comics, a lot of this should sound very familiar. The alienated childhood and adolescence recalls many a mutant, and the power concealment, while not a secret identity per se, plays out as one for the most part. The power of science and the uneasy tension of science against nature threads through the genre, manifesting prominently in characters like The Hulk and The Thing. Doing good deeds as atonement for a deadly mistake echoes Spider-Man, though Hugo’s samaritan fervor was much more short-lived. And then, of course, there are the clear parallels to Superman — the Fortress Of Solitude, the loneliness, and the powers that match almost identically what Siegel & Shuster initially gave their creation. (In fact, Wylie threatened to sue Siegel for plagiarism in 1940, but never followed through on the threat.)

Hugo does just about everything but put on a cape and fight crime. It’s hardly surprising that he avoids becoming a professional do-gooder, though — almost every time Hugo uses his powers for good, he suffers bad consequences. As Marvel would explore thirty-odd years later, humanity does not react well to an unknown power in its presence. For example, during Hugo’s tenure as a bank teller, a crisis arises: a man is trapped in the vault! The lock is jammed, and the air is running out! It’s an utterly familiar scenario in superhero comics, and what Clark Kent would do is slip away, suit up, show up as Superman, and save the day. Hugo, having no such alter ego, must rely on clumsier methods. He arrives on the scene and tells the bank president that he can save the trapped man, but only if everybody leaves the room for five minutes. In desperation, the bank employees agree, and Hugo rips open the vault. The freed man thanks him, and the bank president demands to know how Hugo opened the safe. When Hugo refuses to tell, the president has him arrested.

After all, a man who can open the bank’s vault by mysterious means constitutes a threat to its security, and therefore to the security of the nation itself! “Society,” the bank president explains, “cannot afford to permit a man like you to go at large until it has a thoroughly effective defense against you. Society must disregard your momentary sacrifice, momentary nobleness. Your process, unknown by us, constitutes a great social danger.” The bank president and his cronies lock Hugo up and torture him. They can’t hurt him physically, but they can starve him, strip him, scream at him, and feed him castor oil. He allows it, for fear of hurting them in an attempt to fight back or break free. Such is his reward for altruism.

In the New Comics interview, Dave Gibbons speaks of drawing “a world deformed by super-heroes.” One of the themes Watchmen explores is just how the world feels about being deformed in such a way. We see it in the graffiti, the Keene Act, and most keenly in the ending text to Chapter 4, “Dr. Manhattan: Super-powers And The Superpowers.” In speaking of the emergence of Dr. Manhattan, the author writes, “The Gods now walk amongst us, affecting the lives of every man, woman and child on the planet in a direct way rather than through mythology and the reassurances of faith. The safety of a whole world rests in the hands of a being far beyond what we understand to be human.”

Like Hugo, Dr. Manhattan exists alongside humanity, but apart from it. Manhattan’s difference is more obvious, and his power more godlike, but each of them are aware of the incredible destruction they could wreak, should they so choose. Also like Hugo, Dr. Manhattan is made into a weapon of war, with his uneasy consent, and the result is a wholesale human slaughter. And like Hugo, Dr. Manhattan finally removes himself from the whole nasty human mess.

So Wylie’s work was prescient, foreshadowing not only the metahuman, but his struggle against the ordinary world, a struggle which the early DC tales conveniently elided. The difference makes me wonder whether one of Superman’s less-noticed powers was his super-branding. When the guy standing next to you suddenly demonstrates otherworldly abilities, you might be justified in freaking out a little, feeling your sudden vulnerability and inferiority. However, when those otherworldly abilities arrive in a bright shiny package of reassuring primary colors, complete with a friendly name and symbol, perhaps you might not feel the threat so directly. Superman’s welcome was altogether different from Hugo Danner’s, in part because the early stories chose to ignore reflexive human fear and ignorance, but also because Superman harnessed the tricks of marketing to create a safe and appealing image, one easily swallowed by the masses.

Once that image succeeded, the floodgates were opened, and the brightly colored heroes came pouring in. In Watchmen‘s world, those heroes inspired real-life counterparts, albeit ones lacking in metahuman abilities. Indeed, though we see Gladiator on Nite Owl’s shelf, it’s Action Comics #1 that truly inspires him, as he writes in Under The Hood. The Superman story within “presented the basic morality of [pulp adventure fiction stories] without all their darkness and ambiguity.” And from that inspiration, Nite Owl is born.

Darkness and ambiguity, however, are never held at bay for long, the darkness arriving in the form of The Comedian, and the ambiguity coming with Dr. Manhattan. True superpowers, as Mason writes, “would make the terms ‘masked hero’ and ‘costumed adventurer’ as obsolete as the persons they described.” Dr. Manhattan didn’t need to create an image, and in fact rejects the world’s attempts to give him one. He does not market himself, but rather lets the world react to him.

Hugo Danner lacks Dr. Manhattan’s omniscient qualities, and was so lost and desperate in his attempts to fit in that perhaps he might have become a superhero, had the idea occurred to him. But it would likely not have reassured any bank presidents, and it certainly wouldn’t have answered the questions Hugo shouts to God atop a Yucatan mountain. Gladiator never comes right out and says so, but it strongly suggests that God strikes down this aberration at last. In Watchmen, we see no evidence of a Christian God to do any such thing. Instead, the closest thing there is to God decides instead to leave this galaxy, for one less complicated.

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Welcome back to this series in which we look at the works referenced by Watchmen, at least according to version 2.0 of The Annotated Watchmen. As always, proceed at your own risk of spoilage.

The references come fast and thick in the first part of these annotations, and in fact today’s episode takes us no further than one sentence past our previous exploration. That one ended with a mention of “the popular Gunga Diners”, a ubiquitious chain of Indian food restaurants in the Watchmen universe. The next sentence goes on to explain the reference:

(The name is a rather tasteless reference to Kipling’s poem “Gunga Din”, in which a faithful Indian servant brings water to British soldiers fighting in India, at the cost of his own life.)

Tasteless? Hmm, I’m not sure. “Gunga Din” portrays its Indian title character quite heroically, in contrast to the white British soldiers that surround him — its famous last line (“You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!”) makes this point explicitly. Perhaps it’s in poor taste to name a chain of restaurants after a somewhat stereotyped Indian character, but it doesn’t strike me as particularly bothersome. Maybe it trivializes Din’s nobility to make him into a mascot, though it seems to me he’s already rather a mascot, even in the poem. In fact, you could argue (and many have) that parts of the poem are pretty tasteless to begin with. Why not read the whole poem and decide for yourself? It’s only 85 lines.

Let’s return to Din’s heroism, since that topic is highly relevant to Watchmen. In fact, I would suggest that an important goal of both works is to explore the nature of heroism. In the poem, Din is subaltern as a native of the colonized India, and subordinate to the white army men, serving as lowly water carrier for them. His clothing marks him as alien, and he endures constant abuse from the men whom he serves. And yet, the narrator names him “the finest man I knew” (albeit among the “blackfaced crew” — he’s not on the same scale with the white soldiers, though more about this later) and praises his speed, his bravery, and his endurance. When Din sacrifices his own life bringing the narrator to safety and medical attention, he incontrovertibly cements his place as the hero of the story.

Does any character in Watchmen match this level of heroism? Certainly not the Comedian, whom we never catch in anything remotely resembling a selfless act. In fact, if anything the Comedian is more like the white soldiers, undertaking the work of slaughter on behalf of a swaggering government. Dr. Manhattan is similarly employed, though quite differently motivated. Nevertheless, he’s still quite removed from any concept of heroism. He’s not interested in saving lives, what with life and death being unquantifiable abstracts and all. As for self-sacrifice, the concept hardly has any meaning in relation to him — as far as I can see, he can’t die or be killed, and he has infinte resources, give or take a few tachyons. How could he sacrifice himself for anything, even if he wanted to?

Nite Owl II’s heart is in the right place, at least compared to the last two, but he’s far from the tireless servant who “didn’t seem to know the use of fear.” I suspect that with him, it’s mostly about those wonderful toys. (Well, that and his personal feeling of power when he’s “under the hood.”) Silk Spectre I was mainly into superheroing for the attention and publicity, while Silk Spectre II was just trying to please her mother. Silk Spectre II does indeed “tend the wounded under fire” (albeit a different kind of fire), and her actions are brave and heroic, but not self-sacrificing. Nite Owl I is even more noble, writing that he “feels bad unless he’s doing good,” and as far as we can see, he does plenty of genuine good in the world, both as a cop and as a masked hero.

But when it comes to the extremities Kipling describes, to making the ultimate sacrifice and never surrendering, there’s only one character worth considering: Rorschach. It is Rorschach, from the beginning, who is trying to save his companions, despite his rather offputting approach to doing so. It is Rorschach who exemplifies the tireless drive of the bhisti, with his frequent repetitions of “Never despair. Never surrender,” and variations on that theme. And it is Rorschach whom the book most closely identifies with the Gunga Diner. His name is superimposed over the diner’s first appearance, and he makes one his headquarters, after a fashion anyway. He sits and watches from its window for the action at his trash can “mail drop”, as New York opens its heart to him.

Like Din, Rorschach comes from a despised class and chooses to rise from it as a protector, and even a public servant of sorts. Like Din, Rorschach endures endless abuse in the course of fulfilling his role, but soldiers on nevertheless. And like Din, Rorschach is killed in the pursuit of that role, by nearly as impersonal a force.

Kipling’s narrator writes of Din, “An’ for all ‘is dirty ‘ide / ‘E was white, clear white, inside / When ‘e went to tend the wounded under fire!” Racism permeates the poem, as it did colonial culture, but in Din we find one in whom the black and white existed side by side, a soul of “white” purity and faithfulness inside a skin that triggered instant abhorrence in his English masters. For Rorschach, it’s not about race, but that union of opposites is very much present. He’s literally dirty — the story makes reference to his body odor numerous times — but he wages a tireless battle against the darkness, at least as he perceives it. “Black and white. Moving. Changing shape… but not mixing. No gray. Very, very beautiful.”

There are a couple of irony-drenched differences though. While Din is drilled by an unexpected battlefield bullet, Rorschach meets his doom head on, tears streaming down his face. Moreover, according to the poem, Gunga Din’s fate ends in fire, as the heathen is consigned to Hell upon his death: “‘E’ll be squattin’ on the coals / Givin’ drink to poor damned souls.” Rorschach, though, meets his end in the coldest place on earth. His afterlife is the last thought the story invites us to consider.

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