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The Watchmen Bestiary 12, part 1 – Ditko Fever

Greetings, fellow Watchmenites. I have not been derailed, merely distracted. It’s crazy how fast six months can go by. Doesn’t seem like it ever used to happen that way twenty years ago, but then again, it’s crazy how fast twenty years can go by. In any case, it’s been a while. Sorry about that, but I did have a lot of reading to do. Let me tell you why, and as usual, I warn that Watchmen spoilers are ahead.

For the first time since this project began, I’m jumping a considerable (well, comparatively so) gap in the Annotated Watchmen v2.0 While the last couple of references, which turned out to be more or less red herrings, were on pages 12 and 15 of Chapter 1, we now jump all the way to page 23, having completed Rorschach’s tour through the main cast:

Now that we have met the main characters, it’s useful to look at the characters that they are loosely based on.

Moore’s original plan for Watchmen was that it would involve the Charlton Comics heroes, whom DC had purchased from the defunct Charlton in the early 1980’s. DC eventually decided to insert these characters into its own super-hero universe, leaving Moore to rework the characters in Watchmen. The Charlton characters and their Watchmen analogues are as follows:

  • The Question: Rorschach
  • The Comedian: The Peacemaker, though the Comedian shares some attributes with Sarge Steel as well
  • Nite Owls I and II: Blue Beetles I and II
  • Silk Spectre: Nightshade
  • Dr. Manhattan: Captain Atom
  • Ozymandias: Pete Cannon, Thunderbolt

The annotations then go on to briefly describe each Charlton character, but I’m not quoting that part, because I’m going to cover the same ground, albeit with trademark superverbosity. But first, a little history.

Once upon a time, in a town called Derby, Connecticut, there was a publishing company. Founded by Italian immigrant John Santangelo in 1931, the company’s first business was publishing lyric books for current popular songs. Unfortunately for Santangelo, this business model was illegal, and he ended up with a year-long jail term in 1934 for copyright violations. In the pokey, he met an attorney named Ed Levy, and the two went into business together after paying their debt to society. They both had sons named Charles, which is how the name “Charlton” came to be. They got hold of an old cereal box printing press, and made it part of a publishing venture. Where other companies contracted out for printing and distribution, Charlton put everything under one roof. They published (legal) music magazines (including the long-lived Hit Parader), fiction magazines, crossword puzzles, and, yes, comics. They published all kinds of comics — science fiction, funny animals, licensed properties (e.g. The Flintstones), crime, romance, war, horror, and when the circumstances dictated, superheroes too.

They were never a prestigious comics company, and they paid some of the lowest page rates in the business. In fact, the main reason that they published comics at all was that it was cheaper to do so than to shut the presses down, or so the story goes. Consequently, they were never known for their quality — writers and artists pounded out work quickly in order to make a living at such low wages. Nevertheless, for a time Charlton was a place where talented creators could hone their craft at the beginnings of their careers. Because the audience was small and the work high-volume, beginners could acquire a great deal of practice with a low public profile, and earn a few bucks in the process.

One of these beginners was a gifted, serious artist named Steve Ditko. Ditko did his first Charlton story in 1954, and continued working for the company throughout the 1950s, illustrating eerie tales and science fiction stories with an unusual flair and distinctiveness. However, after enduring a bout of tuberculosis in the mid-50’s, Ditko began taking side work at another company: Atlas Comics, which was soon to become Marvel. Ditko turned out the same kind of stories for Atlas as he did for Charlton, though at the former he was partnered with a veteran comics writer named Stan Lee.

As the 1960s dawned, superheroes were starting to gather a bit of steam again, so Ditko collaborated with Charlton writer Joe Gill to create a new superhero for the atomic age: Captain Atom! More about him later. Over at the company now known as Marvel, Ditko and Lee also got together to create a quirky superhero, whose debut was exiled to the final issue of an ailing anthology series called Amazing Adult Fantasy.

This was the birth of Spider-Man, one of the most famous and successful superheroes of all time. Month after month, Ditko and Lee turned out compelling, surprising Spider-Man stories, in the process generating an enduring supporting cast and rogues gallery for the instantly popular hero. They also collaborated on an even weirder creation: Doctor Strange, Master of The Mystic Arts, whose journeys through surreal extradimensional landscapes had college kids convinced that Ditko must have been on drugs.

The joke was on them, though, because not only was Ditko sober, he was straight and rigid as a steel arrow, and an arch-conservative Ayn Rand follower to boot. Lee, on the other hand, was a classic New York liberal, and not only that, he adhered to the notion that credit for a character’s creation should go solely to the writer. So as Spider-Man’s popularity skyrocketed (along with the rest of the Marvel line), the die was cast for these two guys to come into conflict. In fact, they weren’t even on speaking terms for the last year or so of their Spider-Man run, meaning that Lee would provide a line or two of plot summary, then Ditko would turn in full pages of art, into which Lee had to figure out how to slot his captions and dialogue.

When Ditko finally left, after Spider-Man #38, he never publicly said why. Onlookers have speculated about political conflict, character ownership claims, royalty disputes, and even a disagreement over the true identity of the Green Goblin. We will likely never know, as Ditko became more or less a media recluse, refusing most interviews and most questions.

charlton crimebuster letterWhat we do know is that after leaving Marvel in 1966, he returned to Charlton. By this time, he’d secured his place in the pantheon of legendary superhero artists, and a new Charlton executive editor named Dick Giordano wanted to capitalize on the opportunity. Thus was born the Charlton “Action Hero” line, including four Ditko-drawn heroes: Captain Atom, The Blue Beetle, The Question, and (briefly) Nightshade. To these, Giordano added other creators’ characters, such as Joe Gill & Pat Boyette’s Peacemaker, Peter A. Morisi’s Thunderbolt, Gill & Frank McLaughlin’s Judomaster, and Pat Masulli’s Sarge Steel. Sadly, while the Action Heroes line had its fans, it couldn’t sustain itself, and by the end of 1967 the whole thing had been scrapped.

Fast forward to 1983. By this time, Giordano had left Charlton, and had in fact become editor-in-chief at DC Comics. Charlton itself had fallen on hard times, publishing only reprints of its old material year after year. DC Executive Vice President Paul Levitz bought the rights to the entire Action Hero line from Charlton, as a gift to Giordano, who was encouraged to use the characters however he pleased.

Meanwhile, Alan Moore was contemplating a superhero murder mystery with established characters, and mapped out a pitch based around the recently acquired Charlton heroes. Giordano, wanting to use the characters as a part of the mainstream DC universe, balked at the changes that Moore’s storyline would force upon them, and encouraged Moore to create new characters for his project. And so here we are, with a book full of characters who share DNA with their Charlton ancestors, but who have also mutated in important and interesting ways.

Let’s look at each Charlton action hero in turn, along with how they map to their Watchmen analogues. In this entry I’ll focus on the Ditko characters, and then next time around I’ll pick up the rest.

Captain Atom

Captain Atom premiered in March of 1960, as the heroic alter ego of… Captain Adam, an eye-roller of a “secret” identity name if there ever was one. Captain Allen Adam, at least as he’s described on the first page of his origin story, is pretty superlative even before he gets his powers: “the Air Force career man who knew more about rocketry, missiles, and the universe than any man alive… a specialist of the missile age, a trained, dedicated soldier who was a physics prodigy at eight, a chemist, a ballistics genius!” For some reason, this invaluable genius is inside an Atlas missile, making final adjustments with just three minutes until blast-off. Wouldn’t you know it, he drops the screwdriver and can’t extricate himself in time, so he is launched into the stratosphere alongside an atomic warhead, preset to explode in space.

And explode it does! Captain Adam is disintegrated, but… “at the instant of fission, Captain Adam was not flesh, bone and blood at all… the desiccated molecular skeleton was intact but a change, never known to man, had taken place!” In point of fact, he mysteriously reintegrates, but as a (literally) radioactive man. His first task is to find himself a suit that will protect others from his radioactivity, and so his military buddies fetch him something called “dilustel”, which “converts the escaping rays to another frequency in the light spectrum.”

charlton capt atom reintegrated

Captain Atom possesses a wide variety of powers, some of which seem to fluctuate at the writer’s whim. There are a few constants. He can fly and survive outer space like Superman. He can disintegrate and reintegrate to phase through solid matter. He can project heat from his body, and is strong and invulnerable. Otherwise, he can do whatever the plot needs him to do.

The main theme to Captain Atom stories is American superiority. Early on, these tended to take the form of short, fantastical red-baiters like “The Second Man In Space,” in which Captain Atom rescues a Russian astronaut who is dying in his capsule but ignored by Russian leaders on the ground, desperate to score a propaganda victory over the USA. (The astronaut lands safely and proclaims that an American saved him, meaning that the Russian was not the first man in space, hence the title.)

Later, the Captain turned his attention to marauding aliens, and finally, in the 1966 revival, to supervillains like Doctor Spectro, Thirteen, and The Ghost. Throughout all his stories, he remains a military officer whose loyalty is to the United States government. Even the supervillainy of his supervillains tended to be along the lines of “I stole some of the Air Force’s valuable equipment!” (In fact, his most frequent nemesis The Ghost was that worst of all blackguards, a former military adviser turned traitor.) All of CA’s victories, whether over Communists, aliens, supervillains, or rogue asteroids, were assertions of American invincibility1, and when they were complete he always returned to his life as Captain Adam, USAF.

Like Allen Adam, Jon Osterman has considerable scientific knowledge, and like Adam, he finds himself locked in an inescapable chamber upon which the power of Big Science is unleashed. Osterman is similarly disintegrated, and then reassembles himself again, albeit rather more gradually and gruesomely than does his predecessor. Finally, like Captain Atom, Dr. Manhattan can do pretty much anything he wants to, and for a time he even does it in the service of the United States government, lending it the same air of total indomitability.

Such are the similarities. But the differences mean more. Where Captain Atom is a military captain, representing armed aggression and might, Doctor Manhattan is an academic Doctor of Philosophy, representing intellectual inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Consequently, the Doctor soon loses interest in the kinds of hegemonic operations that occupy the Captain, moving his sphere of exploration to another sphere altogether. In any case, the Doctor’s government is a far cry from the unquestioned source of good that government represents in the Captain’s world.

Moreover, Dr. Manhattan’s persona takes Captain Atom’s godlike powers to their logical conclusion of godhood. For someone who travels among the stars and witnesses the wonders of the universe, the Captain seems content to keep his energies focused on the rather small beer of supervillain battles and national defense. The Doctor, on the other hand, comes to view such topics with utter indifference, finding fervency only in quantum miracles and the spontaneous creation of life. Reflecting this schism, the American people love the Captain2 but are utterly terrified of the Doctor, and perhaps rightly so. They realize that his loyalty is not to the United States nor even to humanity, and that therefore their own safety hangs always by the thread of his whims.

Nightshade

In issue #823 of the rebooted Captain Atom, the Captain picks up a partner. This is a heroine named Nightshade, “The Darling Of Darkness.” Nightshade is basically the punching kicking type, but she does have the superpower to change into a shadow (although she hates to do it), and also carries an arsenal of stuff like “ebony bombs” and a “black light gun.”

Of all the Charlton heroes, she bears the least resemblance to her Watchmen counterpart, and for good reason: Moore has said that he found her the least interesting, and that he patterned Silk Spectre II more after heroines like the Phantom Lady and the Black Canary. Stay with me though, because it’s still worth looking at how Nightshade herself made her way into the character of Laurie Juspeczyk.

Nightshade didn’t have too many Charlton appearances. She was created by Ditko and Joe Gill for Captain Atom, but she only showed up in a handful of issues before that series was canceled. However, she did have three solo stories as a CA backup feature, written by Dave Kaler and drawn by future Batman artist Jim Aparo. The predominant theme of these stories was childhood trauma, specifically centered around the character’s mother. Eve Eden is a senator’s daughter and jet-setting party girl, but this is merely a front for her deadly serious vigilante activities as Nightshade. She trains relentlessly on different fighting styles under the tutelage of Tanaka, also known as Tiger, the former sidekick of Judomaster4. (More on Judomaster next time.)

Why is she so driven, and why the deception? Well, it turns out that Nightshade has a nightmare in her past. One day when her father was away, her mother Magda brought Eve and her brother Larry into a room, drew the curtains and turned out the light. She explained that “once I was a princess in the land of the nightshades! And you’ve inherited the power of the royal nightshades from me!” She had fled this fairy/fantasy world because of a monster called The Incubus. So, for some reason, she decides to take her kids back to that land, and who should immediately show up but minions of The Incubus himself? They seize Magda, who yells at the children to run away and turn into shadows. Eve successfully does so, for the first time in her life, while the demons kill Magda in front of Larry.

charlton nightshade

Eve runs toward Magda, who grabs her hand and uses the last of her power to bring Eve back to our world, then dies, but not before extracting a promise from Eve that she will never tell her father, and will go back for Larry. Unfortunately for Nightshade, the Action Heroes line was cancelled before she could ever fulfill this promise. It wasn’t until years later, after the character had been well-integrated into the DC universe, that the story continued, albeit with slightly altered post-Crisis continuity.

So it’s true that Silk Spectre II does not have the power to turn into a shadow, or do anything supernatural at all. She is no princess from the land of the Nightshades. But what she does have is a mother who, recklessly and unwisely, drew her into a mysterious and shadowy world at a very young age. Sally Jupiter doesn’t bind her daughter with a dying wish, but she certainly makes it clear what she intends for Laurel to do, and the obedient girl tries her best to live up to that demand. Thus begins her life as an adjunct, first to an atomic-powered superhero and then to a millionaire gadget freak. Her powers and her look may have been based more on the Black Canaries of the world, but the legacy of Nightshade lives on in Silk Spectre II.

Blue Beetle

“Millionaire gadget freak” is a nice transition to Ditko’s Blue Beetle, but first we must once again hop into the wayback machine. Further back, I mean.

The Blue Beetle didn’t start out at Charlton. No, he was created in 1939 at a company called Fox Comics. Here, let’s ask Jim Steranko to slip into comic book historian mode and tell us about it:

Fox Publications was the poverty row of comic books and their superheroes were completely derivative. Their most important hero was the Blue Beetle. I remember one day I talked to Charlie Nicholas, the creator of the Blue Beetle, and I asked him what was it that inspired him to create this rather unusual character named after a bug. And he explained everything about the Fox mentality to me in two words: Green Hornet.

So Blue Beetle began as a pulpy masked detective, but very quickly morphed into an extremely generic Superman clone. His civilian identity was Dan Garret, rookie cop, who made sure to bumble through his job so that nobody would suspect his secret. He got pestered by a girl reporter, who was suspicious about all his disappearances. Sometimes he took something called “Vitamin 2X” to turn into the Blue Beetle, and sometimes he just changed without any help at all, with perhaps a handwave to radioactivity maybe being the source of his powers somehow. His stories were almost incoherent, at least to my modern eye — very stylized and elliptical. He’d acquire new superpowers every issue, whatever happened to fit the plot, but he was always your basic flying, invulnerable, super-strong guy with eye powers like x-ray and heat vision.

By 1950, Fox had crumbled, and its assets were put up for sale. Charlton picked up the rights to the Blue Beetle, and reprinted stories from Fox’s inventory. These didn’t catch on, though, and it wasn’t until 1964 that Blue Beetle saw the light of day again, this time in a reboot from Joe Gill and Tony Tallarico. In this second incarnation, Dan Garrett (who had somehow picked up an extra “t”) was no longer a rookie cop, but was instead one of those comic book science types who knows everything about everything. He’s ostensibly an archaeologist, but can produce knowledge of physics, chemistry, linguistics, or whatever as the plot demands it.

This time around there’s at least a clear explanation for his powers, which he acquires when investigating a pyramid. He opens a casket, which releases the kind of great evil for which pyramid caskets are famous worldwide. However, he also finds a scarab nearby. When he picks up the scarab, he has a vision of a mighty ancient pharaoh, who tells him it is now his duty to fight evil as the Blue Beetle.

He’s still no less derivative — his base powerset is flight, x-ray vision, strength, invulnerability, and heat vision. And again, he displays random new powers on cue from problems in the story: he can “transmit electrical energy” past a broken wire or use his “micro-vision” to analyze broken machinery. However, he’s not just derivative of Superman — he also gets a Captain Marvel code word (“Kaji Dha!”) to say whenever he wants to switch back and forth between identities. Or sometimes clasping the scarab itself gives him his powers. It varies.

This Blue Beetle ran out of steam in early 1966, and so the character was shelved for a while. But a few months later, in the back pages of Captain Atom #83, an entirely new Blue Beetle took the stage, created and drawn by Steve Ditko. This one wasn’t Dan Garret(t) at all, but was instead a (you guessed it) millionaire gadget freak by the name of Ted Kord. Kord had a more interesting costume than the previous Blue Beetles, and his fighting style was dynamic and acrobatic, in the vein of Spider-Man. However, Kord had no superpowers, relying instead on a bug-shaped airship which ferried him from one crime scene to the next, entering and exiting his secret lab via an underwater entrance. Along with his fists, he used a variety of high-tech gimmicks designed to protect himself and beat up the bad guys.

So where did this new Blue Beetle come from, and what happened to Dan Garret? That’s just what the police would like to know, in an ongoing subplot depicting dogged Irish cops from Central Casting, who hassle Kord and his lab assistant/paramour Tracey about Garret’s disappearance. Readers are kept in the dark too, at least until the new Blue Beetle gets his own series in the summer of 1967. Issue #2 of this series reveals all. It seems that back when Kord was a junior scientist, he fell in with his Uncle Jarvis, working as a lab assistant and doing mysterious tests. Jarvis is mum about the purpose of his work, but Kord’s genius helps him solve all his operational problems. Finally, the lab explodes, with Jarvis apparently inside, and Kord uncovers the true purpose of his work: to create unstoppable super-strong androids. He also finds a map, to the mysterious Pago Island.

Kord, conflicted and confused, turns to his mentor, a college professor by the name of… Dan Garret. (Who once again seems to have lost his extra “t”.) Kord strongly suspects that his uncle faked his death, and is completing his scheme on Pago Island. He and Garret agree to investigate, and indeed they find an army of androids on the island. Garret becomes the Blue Beetle to fight them, but is killed when Jarvis makes his robots self-destruct. As Garret is dying, he makes Kord promise to keep his secret and carry on the legacy of the Blue Beetle. Legacy is, in fact, the overriding theme of the Ditko Blue Beetle stories. Kord decides to use his genius to whip up a fancy ship and an arsenal of crimefighting tools, and a new superhero is born.

charlton blue beetle legacy

Moore mashes up various parts of this story to make Nite Owl. Like the early Blue Beetle, the first Nite Owl is also a cop, though there’s no mention of the incompetence ruse. Such a tactic probably wouldn’t last long in Watchmen‘s more realistic milieu anyway. And like the latest Blue Beetle, Dan Dreiberg is a brilliant tinkerer whose closets are bursting with suits and gizmos for crimefighting. Archie the owl-ship is pretty much a copy-and-paste of Blue Beetle’s bug-ship, right down to their propensity for dramatically emerging from beneath the waves.

As with the Blue Beetle stories, the idea of legacy permeates the Nite Owl stories. The first time we see Dreiberg, he’s reverently absorbing hero anecdotes from the first Nite Owl, Hollis Mason. There’s clearly a warmth to the relationship, and Dreiberg later tells Laurie Juspeczyk that he idolized Mason. As he says, “I guess that’s pretty obvious.” There’s no Pago Island and no heroic sacrifice — in fact, Dreiberg just approached him as a fan and asked for the use of the name Nite Owl. However, the elder Nite Owl does end up dying violently, and as with Ted Kord and Dan Garret, the mentor’s death is an indirect result of the protege’s actions, in this case freeing Rorschach from prison.

It’s not just Mason, though. Dan Dreiberg is a throwback in all kinds of ways. He doesn’t listen to Devo — he listens to Billie Holiday and Louis Jordan. He wishes the Crimebusters meeting would have worked out, because he wants to belong to a “fellowship of legendary beings” like the Minutemen, or the Knights of the Round Table. He wonders aloud what’s happened to the American Dream. He’s trying not only to carry on the name and legacy of Nite Owl, but to carry on the Golden Age ethos as a whole. Like Blue Beetle, he wants to extend a tradition, and as with Blue Beetle, it doesn’t always work out so well.

The Question

Just as the newest Blue Beetle began as a backup feature for Captain Atom, The Question began as a backup feature for Blue Beetle. The cover of Blue Beetle #1 (volume 4, that is) dramatically asks: “WHO IS THE QUESTION?” I’ll tell you: The Question is the most Ditko-esque Charlton hero of them all. Vic Sage is a “hard-hitting TV newscaster.” (Gosh, that sounds awfully dated now, doesn’t it?) He’s not afraid to ask the tough questions, not afraid to hold people strictly accountable for their actions. He alienates many of his co-workers by being so unflinchingly dedicated to the Truth, so unwilling to compromise his principles one iota. Moral weaklings are constantly trying to get him to avoid controversy, which he nobly refuses to do. Consequently, his enemies at the TV station (who fear the loss of revenue that controversy could bring) keep trying to get him fired, but his friends are completely loyal, as is the station owner. And yet, his excellence is all too often unfairly ignored by a docile and apathetic public.

When it appears that the relentless broadcast Honesty of Vic Sage isn’t enough to bring down the forces of corruption and venality, Sage slips into a secluded place and applies a latex mask to his face, which obscures his features. He then releases a special gas invented by a Professor Rodor. The gas binds the mask to his face and changes the appearance of his clothes to a pale blue. He beats up the bad guys, and freaks them out as the eerie gas flows from his hands, revealing hitherto unseen question marks on innocent objects. A precursor to clench-jawed vigilantes like The Punisher, he gleefully sends criminals to the electric chair, or kicks them into the sewer and lets them drown.

charlton question sewage

In case it’s not clear, the overriding theme of all The Question’s stories is Objectivism. Like Ayn Rand, Vic Sage (whose 3-letter/4-letter naming pattern is surely no accident) holds that morality is not relative but absolute. He adheres to a black-and-white set of principles that leaves no room for compassion (or as he would view it, coddling.) He ensures that his version of justice is always done, meaning that the criminals he has judged pay the maximum consequences for their actions. He also frequently asserts his right to control his own behavior, and of others to control theirs, as when he narrowly escapes an assassination attempt via bombing at the office. The station owner says, “I can’t expect anyone to face violence for me!”, to which Sage replies, “No one can force me to face violence! But neither can they stop me from facing it! That is my decision! What’s up to you is whether or not I’m allowed to continue broadcasting!”

Everybody talks like this in Question stories. It’s page after page of polemic, with Sage boldly declaiming Objectivist views on TV (“I repeat, rights can only belong to individuals! Groups, by themselves, have no rights! The rights belong to the individual within the group!”) while his enemies at the station say things like, “Why does he have to stir up so much trouble? With this many people against him, he must be wrong!” The criminals in his stories cry, “He deserves everything he gets! He didn’t have to pry into my affairs!”, and The Question laughs in their faces when they try to offer him a cut of their loot. Seriously, if he’d lasted long enough to establish an archenemy, it would totally have to be Strawman.

In Blue Beetle #5, the last published issue before the Action Heroes line was cancelled, Ditko lets loose completely. The villain of the Blue Beetle story is an art critic, Boris Ebar, who praises a depressing sculpture on the opening splash page, in a long speech peppered with references to “man’s inevitable weaknesses” and “man’s inability to solve or control the illusion we call existence.” Ted Kord (who, as the hero of the story, has suddenly become an Objectivist) is disgusted at this rejection of objective reality, and couldn’t be more pleased when Vic Sage (in a rare crossover appearance) tells the critic, “That thing and your views belong on a junk heap!” A depressed janitor adopts a costume to resemble the depressing statue, and goes around town trying to destroy more valiant-looking art, cheered on by a bunch of moral relativist hippies. Luckily, the Blue Beetle stops his downer rampage while an admiring Vic Sage looks on.

Panels from Blue Beetle #5 showing Ted Kord admiring Vic Sage.

Then, in The Question backup story, that same Ebar tries to bring a depressing painting into Sage’s TV station (“It represents… the refusal of man to help his fellow man get out of the gutter!”), and as recompense for his gift asks for Sage’s termination. Then Sage’s loyal assistant Nora confronts the critic with a more noble and uplifting painting, which gets him so upset that he hires thugs to go into Nora’s apartment and destroy the painting. Luckily The Question is there to fight them off. In a final climactic scene, Nora again confronts Ebar with the bold painting, and he breaks down in tears, addressing the figure on the canvas: “Why won’t you let me lie to myself? Why do you keep making me see what I let myself become… stop it! I must destroy you… to destroy the proof of what I once wanted to be!” It’s the only superhero comic I’ve ever seen where heroic art defeats the villain, and it is just about as uptight and didactic as you could possibly imagine.

With Rorschach, Moore copies The Question’s absolutism and fierce sense of purpose, as well as his tendency to moralize, albeit to himself in a diary rather than to a city at large. (Well, perhaps that changes after the story’s final panel.) Like The Question, Rorschach sees the world in black and white (“…but not mixing. No gray. Very, very beautiful.”) Like The Question, Rorschach does not hesitate to maim or murder those he sees as scum — he’d just as soon drop a criminal down an elevator shaft as listen to him. And like The Question, he sees himself as a warrior for The Truth in a degraded and corrupt world.

The crucial difference is that Rorschach exists in a world of human beings rather than cardboard cutouts designed to represent caricatured worldviews. Those humans tend to view Rorschach as, well, insane. And with good reason. But Moore does not even let us off that easily.

Yes, Rorschach’s civilian “profession” of carrying a doomsday sign seems like a clear parody of Vic Sage’s televised proclamations. And yes, his tendency towards violence can seem extremely misplaced when applied to harmless cranks like Captain Carnage. And yes, his casual contempt for the majority of humanity is quite obviously at odds with his self-professed heroism. And yet.

And yet in the end Rorschach becomes arguably the most admirable figure in the story, as his refusal to sacrifice his principles in the face of Veidt’s monstrous deception gives him a level of heroism which none of the others can claim. Forget about the Keene Act — even in the face of Armageddon, Rorschach will never compromise.

Not only that, Chapter 6 lets us in on Rorschach’s own humanity, the horrors he has seen which make him the horror that he is. We see him as a child, weeping as abuse rains down upon him, furious as he strikes back at the cruelty around him. We see him shaped by a real incident (it’s vital that the incident be real) in which a docile and apathetic public is accessory to murder. We see the utter blackness of sadism and violent crime which brings out his absolute opposition.

In short, we see enough to understand Rorschach, and to have compassion for him. That compassion is the key to such a character is, perhaps, the final satirical twist on Ditko’s own stiff brand of storytelling, and on the Randian disdain for emotions.

There are more action heroes and more Watchmen counterparts to discuss, but this entry has certainly gone on long enough. Next time: Peacemaker, Thunderbolt, Judomaster, and Sarge Steel! I’ll try to take less than six months to write it this time.

Next Entry: Who’s Down With O.P.C.?
Previous Entry: No Voice Is Eternal

Endnotes

1 The one exception to this is the couple of stories where Captain Atom takes a paternalistic role to a young boy in trouble. In particular, a story called “The Boy And The Stars”, originally from Space Adventures #40, has Captain Atom taking a sick child “to a star which does not appear on maps of the solar system… a lovely star which emanates a ray that I have found useful.” There’s a particularly touching panel in which CA holds the boy’s hand as they stand in a fantastic landscape of swirling Ditko smoke.

charlton capt atom boy
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2 Though in one issue of the 1966-67 revival, Captain Atom suffers a public backlash highly reminiscent of Spider-Man. [Back to post]

3Charlton’s issue numbering is notoriously weird, presumably from their attempts to skirt postal fees for new publications by changing the names of existing ones instead. So issue #83 of the rebooted Captain Atom is really the 6th issue of the relaunch, since Strange Suspense Stories was renamed to Captain Atom with issue #78. [Back to post]

4Crossovers between the Charlton heroes are rare, and their letter columns at the time explained this policy as intentional, saying that they wanted to focus on establishing their line of heroes before they started mixing them up. However, Nightshade seems to have been the exception to this — between the fact that she’s partnered with Captain Atom and the fact that she trained with Judomaster’s sidekick, her stories probably have the most connective tissue of all the Charlton stable. The uncharitable interpretation of this might be that writers believed there would be no interest in a girl character unless there was an already popular man in her stories. Or, to put another spin on it, she’s a minor character who just coincidentally happens to be the only female of all the “Action Heroes.” [Back to post]

The Watchmen Bestiary 11 – No Voice Is Eternal

Avertissement! As always, spoilers are ahead for Watchmen, and this time I’ll also be spoiling the 1981 Jean-Jacques Beineix movie Diva.

For you see, The Annotated Watchmen suggests that there is a connection between these two works. In their analysis of page 15, panel 1 of chapter 1, the annotations assert:

The character with a shaven head and dark glasses is a dead ringer for one of the villains in the popular French movie Diva, which came out in 1981, a few years before Moore and Gibbons were creating Watchmen. The character in the movie (played by Dominique Pinon) had an earphone, which he was constantly pressing to his ear, attached to a cord; the character here has a similar cord attached to his glasses (see page 16, panel 5).

Watchmen chapter 1, page 15, panel 1. A silent panel in which Rorschach walks past a table of people at Happy Harry's, including a bald man in sunglasses, with a cord trailing from them.

So I watched Diva, and I enjoyed it very much. I was particularly looking out for Pinon’s character, who is credited as “Le curé” (which the captions translated as “Priest”, and Roger Ebert glossed as “the treatment.”) Having seen quite a lot of him, I must take issue with the claim that the nameless Watchmen extra (let’s call him Fred) is somehow a “dead ringer” for Le curé. Here they are side by side:

side-by-side

Yes, there are certainly some similiarites. They’re both wearing sunglasses, albeit of a noticeably different style. They both have a somewhat broad nose. And they both have a trailing cord near their right ear. However, there are quite a number of key differences as well. Fred is entirely bald, while Le curé has a buzz cut. Pinon has a very distinctive look, with horizontally compressed features and a high forehead that seems to take up as much space as the rest of his face put together. Gibbons could easily have portrayed (or even caricatured) that, but Fred’s features are much more generic.

Importantly, Fred looks frightened in both panels in which he appears. He’s visibly sweating (an excessive amount, really) in the second panel. Le curé never looks nervous. He’s always grim, and most of his lines are just him expressing dislike for things. (“I don’t like parking garages.”, “I don’t like Beethoven.”, “I don’t like elevators.”, etc.) Even when he dies, it happens suddenly, with no time for him to get scared.

Finally, Le curé’s earpiece is a weird and specific character trait. The entire movie, we wonder what he’s listening to, and once he dies we get the payoff, which is that it seems to be jolly accordion music, as might have come from the comical street busker who appears midway through the film. Fred’s not listening to anything, and given that he only appears in two panels of the book, he isn’t enough of a character to be specific. Yes, his croakies are somewhat improbably emphasized in his second panel, but they barely appear at all in his first. It’s quite a slender thread upon which to hang an annotation.

So once again, I think we have a blind alley here. But since I went to the trouble of screening Diva, let’s just suppose for a moment that there indeed is a connection between these two works. Upon what would such a connection hinge?

Well, they do both have a plot trope in common: the villain disguised as a hero. The villain behind the villains in Diva (and the employer of Le curé) is Saporta, the leader of a drug and prostitution ring. The twist is that Saporta also happens to be the chief of police. In fact, when we first see him, he’s directing the Paris police’s investigation into his own gang. Watchmen, of course, has a similar betrayal in that Ozymandias, one of the book’s fraternity of superheroes, is in fact the menace which they all face, and whose murder of a fellow superhero sets the plot in motion.

However, I believe this film’s connection to Ozymandias can be traced even deeper, to a theme that drives them both: questions of permanence. In order to illuminate that further, let’s review part of Diva‘s plot:

The movie’s main character is Jules, a young postman who’s also an opera buff. In particular, he’s a fan of American opera singer Cynthia Hawkins, who is the film’s titular diva. Hawkins has a phenomenal voice, but has idiosyncratically refused ever to release an album, or indeed to be recorded at all. She insists that a concert is a sacred moment between performer and audience, and that this unique moment should not be subject to repetition. Her manager argues with her about this, pointing out that her career cannot continue for many more years on this path. He reminds her that she is thirty-two years old, and even now is exhausted by the effort of giving two concerts a month. “No voice is eternal,” he chides, “except through recordings.” Nevertheless, the diva remains insistent.

Diva-small

Jules, however, has secretly recorded Hawkins’ Paris concert, simply for his own love of the music. His recording expertise is considerable, and the resulting tape is of such high quality that it catches the attention of Taiwanese gangsters, who wish to use it to blackmail Hawkins into signing a record deal with them. The gansters’ pursuit of Jules provides half of the movie’s narrative propulsion.

The other half arrives when Jules’ life becomes complicated by a different tape. A prostitute named Nadia, who was Saporta’s mistress and knows of his secret criminal identity, has decided to reveal Saporta’s perfidy. She knows she will be killed for this, possibly before she can testify, so she records her testimony onto a cassette. As she heads towards her meeting with the police, she realizes she is being tailed by Le curé and his partner (who is called L’ Antillais.) Eventually, it becomes clear that she will not make it to her rendezvous, so she surreptitously slips the cassette into the saddlebag of Jules’ moped, which is parked nearby while he makes a delivery. Almost immediately afterward, Le curé kills her with an icepick to the back. When Saporta finally realizes that Jules has the tape that could bring him down, he sends Le curé and L’ Antillais after the harried postman.

So the two MacGuffins that drive the plot are both markers of a struggle with permanence. Hawkins resists having her vocal performances preserved, insisting that her gifts must only be shared within an ephemeral moment. When she is confronted with the fact that a recording has been created without her permission, she is thrown into crisis.

Nadia, on the other hand, relies upon a recording to resolve her crisis. She’s been forced not into permanence but into transience, and hopes that even though she won’t survive her decision to testify, the cassette she created will succeed in destroying Saporta.

Of course, neither story is so simple. Jules (with considerable help) eventually retrieves the concert tape, and plays it for Hawkins. She seems entranced, saying, “But… I’ve never heard myself sing!”, and they dance slowly to the music. There seems to be an implication that she will reconcile with the concept of recording. As for Nadia’s tape, it turns out that she wasn’t as completely reliant on it as it appeared. At one point Saporta is able to get his hands on the cassette, but pulls the truly incriminating evidence out of its case: photos of himself and Nadia together. So in neither situation was the recording an end-all, but in both situations its immutability had a lasting effect on the main characters.

As I touched upon earlier, Ozymandias also wrestles with the nature of permanence. In his soliloquy to the dead men in chapter 11, Veidt frames Alexander’s failure as his inability to build “a unity that would survive him,” and extols the Egyptian pharaohs for “their wisdom, truly immortal.” With his mad alien squid plot, he sees himself as having transcended Alexander’s failure and assumed “the aspect of kingly Rameses, leaving Alexander the adventurer and his trappings to gather dust.” Ironically, he sees his slaughter as a way to preserve humanity. For him, the worst part of nuclear war would be its eradication of the human past, present, and future:

Save for Richard Nixon, whose name adorns a plaque on the moon, no human vestige would remain. Ruins become sand, sand blows away… all our richness and color and beauty would be lost… as if it had never been.

He calls the outcome of his scheme “an end to war… an end to fighting.” Somehow the world’s smartest man fails to see some obvious facts. He seeks to preserve humanity but end fighting? Humanity without fighting would have to be classified as a whole new species, something even the biggest scare couldn’t bring about. Fright may change behavior, but the change won’t be permanent, especially when you’re talking about an entire species over an eternity of time. As Jon must point out to Adrian, “nothing ever ends.”

Thus Ozymandias wrought amazing and monstrous works, but those works will never last forever, though their ruins may retain the power to terrify. Someone wrote a good poem along those lines, but that’s an article for another time.

Next Entry: Ditko Fever
Previous Entry: The Comedians Of Tragedy

The Watchmen Bestiary 10 – The Comedians Of Tragedy

Obligatory spoiler warning in 3… 2… 1…

There are spoilers below for: Watchmen, both the graphic novel and the movie, and The Comedians, both the novel and the movie. End spoiler warning.

In the last installment, we were looking at chapter 1, page 11, panel 3 of Watchmen, in which Dan Dreiberg recounts a rumor about The Comedian’s covert government activities in South America. That in turn led the annotators to cite Alan Moore’s Shadowplay as another angle he’s taken on such activities.

However, what I didn’t mention in the last essay is that they don’t stop there. No, the annotations for that very panel continue with this speculation:

Moore may have named the Comedian in homage to Graham Greene. Greene’s novel The Comedians was about foreign interference in Haiti, and was made into a 1960’s movie with Richard Burton.

comediansSo I read the novel and saw the movie, and I have to say: annotators, this one’s a stretch. I mean, yes, I suppose you could assert that The Comedians is about “foreign interference” in Haiti, but it’s not the kind of interference that Eddie Blake or Shadowplay‘s eagle would recognize. The narrator, a Mr. Brown, is a cynical hotelier, originally hailing from Monaco, and much is made of how his Monaco origin is “almost the same as being a citizen of nowhere.” He’s inherited the hotel from his distant, adventurous, globe-trotting mother, and was hoping to make a go of it in Haiti. Unfortunately, his dream of a tourist paradise was shattered by the ascension of brutal dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. So he’s foreign (to Haiti), but not American, and I wouldn’t really call his presence “interference.”

There are a couple of Americans who do intend to interfere, but they’re far more innocent than sinister. Mr. and Mrs. Smith are evangelistic vegetarians, so much so that Mr. Smith ran for President against Harry Truman on “the vegetarian ticket.” (His status as an American Presidential Candidate gives him a comically disproportionate amount of political clout in the rather ignorant Duvalier regime.) They dream of building a grand “vegetarian center” in Haiti, complete with meals, speakers, movies, literature, and so forth, and they’ve got the financial backing to make it happen. They have no ulterior motive and represent no government. They just believe that meat causes acidity in the body, which leads to bad behavior. In the end, they become disillusioned with the Haitian government and leave the country, taking their money with them. Brown sees them as rather noble in their naivete, but Eddie Blake would find them ridiculous.

Finally, there’s a Brit, a Mr. Jones, who pretends through most of the story to be “Major Jones”, a hero of World War II. He’s got secrets, but they’re secrets of chicanery, not espionage, and the only “interference” he’s up to is a con of Duvalier’s government, a fake arms deal which falls through quite spectacularly. So there’s no CIA, no secret team, no assassins, no coup, no government-toppling agents, and certainly no “knocking over Marxist republics.” Greene has written plenty of books about secret agents, but The Comedians isn’t one of them. In fact, the thrust of the story is an indictment of America’s reluctance to interfere with Haiti — despite the barbarism of Papa Doc and his Tontons Macoutes, he is seen as “a bulwark against communism,” and therefore the United States is no threat to his government.

So as far as parallels to Watchmen, I don’t think there’s much to see here. I’m highly skeptical of the claim that Eddie Blake’s codename is somehow a reference to this story. [Although! In a bit of late-breaking news, I’ve come across an interview in which Moore says, “I believe I took the name from Graham Greene’s book, The Comedians.” So that’s confirmation, but I still think the connection is weak.] That said, the experience of reading the book and then watching the movie brought to mind some Watchmen comparisons from a more unexpected angle.

Greene’s novel was commercially successful and well-regarded by the critics. The movie, on the other hand, was a vehicle for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor to clutch meaningfully at each other against a tragic backdrop. Its supporting actors saw some award nominations, but the film itself has a 27% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Several critics chided it for its overly faithful approach to Greene’s book, which led it to notch a whopping 156-minute running time. (Greene himself wrote the screenplay.) However, despite its dutiful recreation of many scenes from the book, its ending takes a radical, sudden turn away from the novel’s plot, altering the fate of its main characters and removing an entire layer of story.

Does this sound a little bit familiar? Watchmen the comic is widely regarded as one of the greatest works by one of the greatest comics writers. Its movie, on the other hand, was a bit more of a mixed bag. It has a 64% rating at Rotten Tomatoes — fresh, but just barely — and it is frequently criticized for its overly faithful approach to the graphic novel. It clocks in even longer than The Comedians, at 163 minutes, with the DVD director’s cut running 185 minutes, and an “ultimate cut” that lasts no less than 215 minutes. That’s over three and a half hours, for those of you playing at home. Some of the acting (particularly that of Malin Akerman and Matthew Goode, who look their parts but don’t seem to embody them) falls flat, and the movie sometimes feels like a vehicle for Zack Snyder to stage long fight sequences and film loving close-ups of compound fractures. Also, its ending strips out the whole “space squid” angle from the book, making Ozymandias’ plan center instead on fooling the superpowers into thinking that Dr. Manhattan has turned against humanity.

Watchmenmovie

There are good reasons and not-so-good reasons to depart from source material when making a film adaptation, and both of these films have their share of each. With any work of significant length (novels and graphic novels included), so much detail is present that filmmakers find it impractical to present all of it on screen. Consequently, they employ a number of tricks to compress the work while retaining its essence. Both movies employ some of the big ones:

Technique Comedians film Watchmen film
Removing story/plot sections Excised the first thirty or so pages of the book, in which Brown, Jones, and the Smiths are on a ship together, traveling to Haiti, and sizing each other up. Consequently, it also removes a later section in which Brown and Jones return to the ship. (Also, this isn’t story, but the book is entirely self-aware of its characters’ oddly common names, while the film displays no such awareness.) Most famously, deleted all the Tales Of The Black Freighter stuff, and the attendant recurring newsstand scenes.
Eliminating minor characters Among others, removed Fernandez, a rather mysterious character who shows up initially on the boat, then plays a crucial part in the book’s ending. Pretty much got rid of Captain Metropolis (aside from some very glancing references), which alters the reason why the Crimebusters were brought together. In the movie, it’s Ozymandias as the driving force in that meeting.
Streamlining context The visual elements help make the Tontons Macoutes and the Port-Au-Prince beggars actually more powerful than they are in the book, but the film elides the hotel’s history, and greatly downplays the fact that Brown’s recent absence is from a desperate attempt to dump it. There are so many background elements crammed into the comic, and you can give them all the time and attention you want to. The film can’t hope to match that, though it tries nobly. It also removes scenes like the one with Nixon and his cabinet in the command bunker.
Reducing character development The book has a lot of backstory on Brown’s mother and his education. The movie, not so much. It also leaves out some details about the frauds he’s pulled in his past, which are a key part of his character. Again, give the movie credit for trying, and it does follow the book’s template of going in-depth on one character at a time. However, some significant things are still missing, like Rorschach’s Kitty Genovese story.

All of these changes are fair enough. Compromises must be made, even when you’re making a 163-minute movie. However, some things do get injected that substantially change the artistic statement, often as a result of egos and market forces. For instance, The Comedians movie starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in 1967, a time when public interest in their marriage was very high, and when they were in the midst of making a string of movies together. This was their seventh co-starring picture in 5 years. Thus, Brown’s affair with Martha Pineda, wife of the Uruguayan ambassador, gets a magnified role in the movie. Not that it was insignificant in the book, but as Roger Ebert said at the time, “in the movie he (Burton, that is) sees a lot more of her because, baby, when you’re paying Liz Taylor’s salary you really use her in your movie.”

Watchmen, on the other hand, was a comic book superhero movie at a time when comic book superhero movies had become golden tickets for movie studios. Certainly it was a very different sort of superhero story, and its R rating meant that its audience was much more limited than that of, say, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Nevertheless, it was sure to rake in some cash, and thus Warner Brothers (the eventual owners of the rights after the project spent 2 decades in development hell) approached Zack Snyder, who had proven with 300 that he could adapt a comic book into a hit movie. Snyder brought several kinds of fetishism to the table. His fetishistic adoration of the source material mostly served the movie well. His fetishistic adoration of slow-motion fights, broken bones, and hyper-stylized violence, not so much. I remarked on this when I wrote about the movie for the first time, and in my research for this article I was gratified to find this excellent analysis by Tasha Robinson, who totally gets that point, and explains it much better than I did. Great minds, Tasha, great minds.

Finally, each movie significantly alters the ending of its source material. For Watchmen, this change also serves some of the simplification functions I mentioned above — no space squid means no Max Shea, no Robert Deschaines, no island of artists, no “psychic shockwave” that can somehow kill three million people. I think these changes are actually a win for the movie version — it’s always better when you can achieve the same effect without bringing in extraneous plot and characters. On the other hand, while the book’s carnage is focused solely in New York, the movie gets to blow up Moscow, Tokyo, Paris, etc. This is purely gratuitous. Not to mention, it reintroduces the economy of energy scarcity that Dr. Manhattan had banished, which to my mind would be more likely to cause international tension, not less.

The Comedians, too, achieves some simplification with its changes. In the book, Jones finally lives up to the lies he’s always told about himself, joining a disorganized Haitian rebel militia that is as just as ragtag as it can be. His brand of bullshit actually finds a noble use, inspiring this group in their attacks on Duvalier. Of course, they still fail spectacularly, and Jones dies in the mountains, distracting the enemy while the rest of the squad struggles across the border into the Dominican Republic. Brown, having brought Jones to his rendezvous with the militia, also escapes across the border. There he is confronted with the remains of the militia, and the body of his sole remaining employee, Joseph, who had joined the rebels. He scrounges for work in Santo Domingo, finally becoming an undertaker, apprenticed to Fernandez, that character who got streamlined away in the movie.

burton-taylor

The film still has Brown driving Jones to the rendezvous point, and as in the book, they are discovered by the hostile Tonton named Concasseur. However, in the movie, Concasseur kills Jones before himself being killed by Philipot, head of the rebels. Then, in a complete left turn, Brown decides to assume Jones’ identity and, as Jones, joins and leads the rebels. This gives Burton the chance to look heroic in a way that the novel character never really does, including a rousing speech he gives to the 17 completely uncomprehending French speakers who make up the “militia.”

The movie ends on (who else?) Elizabeth Taylor, getting the news that the rebels attacked a Tonton outpost, resulting in two deaths, Joseph and “one other.” We never know for sure who that other one is, but Taylor, gazing moodily out the airplane window on her flight back to Uruguay, seems to fear the worst. This ending tidies up the plot into a neater, more ironic bundle, and allows the film to continue forgetting Fernandez, but it also keeps the focus relentlessly on the Burton/Taylor romance. In the book, Martha arranges to meet Brown for a last tryst before she leaves for Peru, but she doesn’t show, and Brown is glad — he’s completely emotionally detached from her. The film gives the ending of their romance a noble and tragic note. Thus, if the Watchmen movie was warped to fit its director’s obsessions, so was the Comedians movie warped to stroke the egos of its stars, pulled by the gravity of their fascination with themselves and the public’s fascination with them.

And that’s as connected as Watchmen and The Comedians get. However, there were a few lines in the book that did help shed some light on the meaning of the Comedian’s name, which has been a recurring source of mystery to me. This book is called The Comedians, but it too lacks humor, and its main character is deeply cynical. The explanation for the title comes in a scene at the Uruguayan embassy, in which Brown, a former con man, wonders if Jones is one too. But the words he uses are, “I remember looking at him one night… and wondering, are you and I both comedians?” Then Philipot, a former poet, joins in, saying “Wasn’t I a comedian with my verses smelling of Les Fleurs Du Mal, published on handmade paper at my own expense?” The ambassador cops to being a bad comedian himself, and says, “Perhaps even Papa Doc is a comedian.” To which Philipot replies, “Oh, no. He is real. Horror is always real.” Then Brown and Martha, a page later and away from the party, call themselves comedians for the affair they’re carrying on.

In other words, the comedians of this book are not funnymen. They are comedians as the opposite of tragedians. They adopt personas, acting in their own private commedia dell’arte, to trick and beguile their audiences. They are charlatans. Liars. Only behind the curtain do they acknowledge the difference between the show they perform and the real truth. In a way, Eddie Blake might fit this mold, with his leather mask and his brave face. And yet, if horror is always real, then The Comedian is no comedian, for horror seems to be his stock in trade.

Brown is the jealous type, and he envies the easy rapport that Jones seems to have with others. Jones’ secret? Making people laugh. Brown calls himself a comedian, but he’s far from funny. When his favorite concubine says she liked Jones, Brown has to ask:

“What did you like so much?”
“He made me laugh,” she said. It was a sentence which was to be repeated to me disquietingly in other circumstances. I had learnt in a disorganized life many tricks, but not the trick of laughter.

In that, at least, Brown and Blake have something in common.

Next Entry: No Voice Is Eternal
Previous Entry: The Secret Team

The Watchmen Bestiary 9 – The Secret Team

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.

Watchmen chapter 1, page 12, panel 4. Rorschach stares at the camera as Dreiberg talks behind him. Dreiberg: Hmm. I gues it doesn't seem very likely. I heard he'd been working for the government since '77, knocking over Marxist republics in South America... maybe this was a political killing?

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.

shadowplay laos

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.

shadowplay suitcaseAfter 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

The Watchmen Bestiary 8 – 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.

Watchmen chapter 1, page 10, panel 2. High-angle shot of Dreiberg walking home, past the Treasure Island comic shop.

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-Scribner's-1911Treasure 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.

Watchmen chapter 8, page 25, panels 1-3. Panel one: a rotting corpse underwater, holding up the raft. Caption: Our damnation: it obsessed the sodden dead, dominating their bubbling dialogues. Off-panel word balloons from several speakers. Speaker 1: Fuh-first, there'll be this big flash... Speaker 2: Yeah! An' it's his fault, Dr. blue-ass Manhattan! Speaker 3: Ay! Derf! Panel Two: Some knot-tops talking to each other and hassling Bernie the newsstand vendor. Caption: They spoke of a heaven, where once we all lived and died, sentenced for our sins to this pandemonium we call the world. Knot-top 1: ...and then there's this terrible noise... Knot-top 2: Ay, Derf, on the radio, you hear what went down? Panel Three: The rider of the raft grips one of the dead hands. More off-panel word balloons. Speaker 1: I heard about the riot... Speaker 2: Old news. Some super dupers sprung that blot-face guy. Speaker 3: ...and, oh, the fastest wind... Caption: Truly, life is hell and death's rough hand our only deliverance.

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

The Watchmen Bestiary 7 – There’s Nothing To Get

It’s Watchmen analysis time again, which means it’s Watchmen spoiler time again. You’ve been warned.

Gosh, there are a lot of references in this first issue, at least according to The Annotated Watchmen v2.0. Just two panels past the mention of Juvenal, the book pulls from a whole different corner of culture:

Watchmen chapter 1, page 10, panel 1. While Dreiberg walks in the background, the foreground shows two knot-tops, one with a boom box hoisted onto his shoulder. The boom box is blaring lyrics: ...look down your back stairs, buddy, somebody's living there an' they don't really feel the weather.

Quoth the annotations:

The lyrics on page [sic] are from the song “Neighborhood Threat”, written by Iggy Pop and David Bowie. The original appears on “Lust for Life” by Iggy, and is sung by Iggy. A weaker cover is available on Tonight by David Bowie. Iggy Pop and the Stooges are a band who would fit well into the apparent anarchy and nihilism of the “Pale Horse” rock band.

Here’s the song, at least as long as YouTube lets it stay posted:

I won’t bother with the Bowie cover — the annotations are quite right that it’s weaker — but they do include a bit of interesting free-association about the Bowie/Iggy connection:

“I can think of no other link or importance, save that Pop and Bowie are far more important in the UK in terms of cultural credibility, and thus would be natural icons for Moore to draw inspiration from. Interestingly, the relationship between Pop and Bowie seems to be similar to the one between Rorschach and Dreiberg… where Rorschach is a mask, and Dreiberg pretends to be a mask. In the lates [sic] 70s Bowie and Pop hung out a lot together, but Pop was always far more ‘on the edge, and possibly over it’ than Bowie, who could always tell that his Rock and Roll persona was just that, a persona (mask).” (Steven Pirie-Shepherd, pirie@auriga.rose.brandeis.edu)

Unlike Mr. Pirie-Shepherd, I can think of some other links and importance for the song, but I agree that there’s an interesting biographical parallel to Watchmen. The Bowie part may be a bit of a reach, but maybe not. Tonight came out in September 1984, so could conceivably have been current as Watchmen was being drafted. In any case, Lust For Life was very much a joint Bowie/Pop production, so one could argue that the relationship is present as a subtext on any of its songs. The lyrics appear in the foreground of a panel with Dreiberg in the background, and by the end of the page, Rorschach has made his way up Dreiberg’s back stairs to break into his apartment.

Having recently read Paul Trynka’s Pop biography Open Up And Bleed, I learned that at first, Iggy Stooge was just as much of a put-on as Ziggy Stardust. He grew up in Michigan as Jim Osterberg, the boy Most Likely To Succeed, and gradually drifted into music, until it became his passion. He was a singing drummer in an Ann Arbor band called the Iguanas, and was derided by later bandmates as “Iggy.” Gradually, he pieced together a persona and a musical style, choosing his iconography quite deliberately. For instance, he decided to always perform shirtless after reading that the Egyptian pharaohs never wore shirts. (Shades of Ozymandias!)

In short, Osterberg crafted a new identity, into which he would disappear on stage. While Jim Osterberg was, well, mild-mannered, Iggy Pop was superhuman — lean, muscular, commanding, and impervious to harm, as he proved by rolling in broken glass or otherwise self-mutilating. The superhero parallels are obvious, so much so that Trynka explicitly refers to Iggy as a superhero and his stage outfit (or lack thereof) as a costume. He also points out that for a long time, Iggy and Jim coexisted peacefully, but as drug abuse and general 1970’s rock and roll craziness set in, the alter ego began driving more and more, until he virtually took over for long stretches. It’s a bit reminiscent of Rorschach, except that the personality shift wasn’t so sudden or so final. It’s even more reminiscent of a certain Green Goliath, and in fact the book acknowledges that too, in a story about photographer Art Gruen. Gruen was backstage at a 1996 show (after Osterberg had gotten his demons more in control):

…a couple of minutes before Jim was due to go onstage, Gruen saw him walk over to a quiet corner. The photographer was about to go up and offer some encouragement when [manager] Art Collins motioned him aside and warned him, “I wouldn’t do that now.” As Gruen looked on, he saw Jim immersed in some kind of deep-breathing exercise, “and then, suddenly, it was like watching the Hulk, when some normal person, the secret identity, turns into this incredible creature.” Gruen watched wave after wave of an almost inhuman energy surge through him: “You could almost see him become larger and more powerful; Jim had become Iggy and taken on all this mass, this power. And you just knew it was time to stay out of the way and not get anywhere near where he’d be.”

Quite the appropriate artist to select for a quick reference in the definitive superhero deconstruction, eh?

As for the lyrics themselves, on the most obvious level they’re a gloss on the source of the sound. Tattooed, smoking, leather-clad punks blasting loud rock and roll from a boom box hoisted on one shoulder — it’s a rather quaintly 80s image of menace now, but there’s no doubt these hoodlums are indeed a threat in Hollis Mason’s neighborhood. The one with the radio is Derf, who later ends up bludgeoning Mason to death. The panel with the lyrics foreshadows their deadly approach up his back stairs, wired on Katies and feeling no pain.

There’s another reading available, though, because certain lyrics in that song are quite directly applicable to Rorschach. Have a look:

Down where your paint is cracking
Look down your back stairs, buddy
Somebody’s living there and
He don’t really feel the weather
Watchmen chapter 10, page 27, panel 4. Nite Owl and Rorschach prepare to exit Archie into the Antarctic landscape. Nite Owl: You break out the bikes while I get into my snow suit. Uh... youre sure I can't fit you out in something a little warmer? Rorschach: Fine like this.
And he don’t share your pleasures
No, he don’t share your pleasures
Did you see his eyes?
Did you see his crazy eyes?
Watchmen chapter 5, page 28, panel 7. Rorschach without his mask, looking up in crazed fury at his attackers. Rorschach: No! My face! Give it back! Cop 1: Well? Who is he? Cop 2: Who is he? This ugly little zero is the terror of the underworld... and we're gonna lock him up with them. It's karma, man. Everything evens out eventually.
And you’re so surprised he doesn’t run to catch your ash
Everybody always wants to kiss your trash
And you can’t help him, no one can
And now that he knows
There’s nothing to get
Will you still place your bet
Against the neighborhood threat?
Somewhere a baby’s feeding
Somewhere a mother’s needing
Outside her boy is trying
But mostly he is crying
Watchmen chapter 6, page 4, panel 7. Young Kovacs' mother is shaking him as tears stream down his face. Mother: You know what you just cost me, you ugly little bastard? I shoulda listened to everybody else! I shoulda had the abortion! Kovacs: AAAAAH! Mommeeee...
Did you see his eyes?
Did you see his crazy eyes?
Watchmen chapter 6, page 7, panel 1. Young Kovacs' face is contorted with murderous fury, smeared with the food that his bullies have smashed into it. Bullies, their word balloons overlapping: Ehhahaha! Look at 'im... / ook at 'im nuthin! ju smell hi / Whoreson / Probably got cooties, probably got diseases / Ehhahahahaha! / You got any diseases, whoreson?
And you’re so surprised he doesn’t run to catch your ash
Everybody always wants to kiss your trash
But you can’t help him, no one can
And now that he knows
There’s nothing to get
Not in this place
Not in your face
Will you still place your bet
Against the neighborhood threat?

One more thought about this song. From the first few pages of chapter 1, Rorschach perceives a danger to the superhero community. Various theories come up as to the nature of this danger. Political assassins? An old enemy on a revenge spree? A serial murderer targeting “masks”? In the end, it turns out that the danger comes from within the community itself — a neighborhood threat of an altogether different sort.

Next Entry: Fifteen Men On A Dead Man’s Chest
Previous Entry: Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

The Watchmen Bestiary 6 – Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

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.

Watchmen chapter 1, page 9, panel 7. Dreiberg descends the stairs from Mason's apartment. Alongside him is a garage upon which we can see part of a graffiti message: "ho tches e tchmen?" Mason: You too, Danny. God bless.

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.”)

Drawing of Juvenal crownedAnother 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.

Watchmen chapter 8, page 11, panels 5 and 6. Manish is putting the finishing touches on her drawing, then she and Shea walk away, revealing a drawing that shows the space squid as a clear horror parody of a female vulva and anus. Manish: More pleasant than your current one, I hope. Illustrating that sequence where the young chew their way out of their mother's womb was quite an experience. There. Finished. Shall we go and wave our baby goodbye, Mr. Shea? Shea: Baby? Ha! If that's any baby of mine there's just gotta be a more enjoyable way of making 'em! Okay, c'mon... we'll go check for a family resemblance. Let's give the tyke a final once-over.

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

The Watchmen Bestiary 5 – 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.

Watchmen chapter 1, page 9, panel 4. Foreground shows Hollis Mason's bookshelf, including his "Gratitude" statuette, owl tchotchkes, and books such as his own autobiography, Automobile Maintenance, and Philip Wylie's Gladiator. Background shows Mason and Dreiberg. Dreiberg: You know better than that. These Saturday night beer sessions are what keeps me going. Mason: Yeah, well, us old retired guys gotta stick together. Lemme put this out and I'll be right with ya.

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.

Cover of GladiatorFor 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.

Watchmen chapter 4, page 12, panels 4-5. Dr Manhattan rejects his costume's helmet, and burns the hydrogen symbol in his forehead. Manhattan: It's meaningless. A hydrogen atom would be more appropriate. I don't think I shall be wearing this. Photographer: B-but thats the only place hwere your symbol shows. The marketing boys say you need a symbol... Manhattan: They don't know what I need. You don't know what I need. If I'm to have a symbol, it shall be one that I respect.

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.

Next Entry: Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
Previous Entry: You’re A Better Man Than I Am, Walter K

The Watchmen Bestiary 4: You’re A Better Man Than I Am, Walter K

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.

Watchmen chapter 1, page 4, panel 5. Detective Fine and his partner walk in front of a Gunga Diner. Partner: I dunno. I think you take this vigilante stuff too seriously. Since the Keene Act was passed in '77, only the government-sponsored weirdos are active. They don't interfere. Fine: Screw them. What about Rorschach?

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.

Watchmen chapter 5, page 11, panel 9. Rorschach's hands holding a Gunga Diner napkin, unfolded to reveal an impromptu Rorschach blot he has made on it. Caption: I sat watching the trashcan, and New York opened its heart to me.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.

Watchmen chapter 12, page 32, panel 7. Seymour's hand reaching for Rorschach's diary. The smiley face on his shirt has a ketchup stain in the usual spot of the blood stain. Godfrey (off-panel): I leave it entirely in your hands.

Next Entry: The Gods Now Walk Amongst Us
Previous Entry: The Old New Comics

The Watchmen Bestiary 3: The Old New Comics

[Note: As usual, here be Watchmen spoilers.]

Today’s task is another investigation of the references embedded in The Annotated Watchmen. In a note about panel 5 on page 4 of issue 1, we find this:

Moore, in the New Comics interview, says that in the Watchmen universe, there was some conflict in Asia that resulted in famine in India and a lot of Indian refugees coming to the US. Hence, Indian food has caught on in the US, including the popular Gunga Diners.

The “New Comics interview” referenced rather casually here is from Gary Groth and Robert Fiore’s book The New Comics, an anthology of interviews from Groth’s magazine The Comics Journal. Even when the book was published in 1988, calling some of the comics discussed “new” was quite a stretch — large swaths are devoted to underground comics of the late ’60s and early ’70s, as well as to architects of the form like Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman. Still, many of the subjects were at least newish at the time, like a pre-Hate Peter Bagge and a pre-Simpsons Matt Groening, as well as Bill Watterson and Harvey Pekar towards the beginnings of their arcs. Not to mention Watchmen itself, which was just a couple years old when the book came out.

In fact, the interview (conducted by a pre-Sandman Neil Gaiman at a comics convention, with lots of questions from the audience) took place right after the release of issue #5, so rather than discussing the book’s whole story, it focuses mostly on how the book came to be, as well as its overall intent and various details with in it. Nevertheless, it’s full of great tidbits, like the worldbuilding insight above. Gibbons describes the serendipity he’s encountered in making the comic, and talks about how he imagined the technological state of a world “deformed by super-heroes”, but most important to me is the revelation that Moore didn’t necessarily have all the resonant themes of the book worked out in advance:

There’s the plot there, but it’s what happened since then that’s the real surprise because there’s all this other stuff that’s crept into it, all this deep stuff, the intellectual stuff. [laughs] That wasn’t planned.

That’s significant, because it suggests that Moore didn’t have all the details worked out in advance, but rather filled many things in as he went along, which goes quite a ways towards explaining the logical discrepancies in various aspects of the story, such as Dr. Manhattan’s vacillation between timeless awareness and his occasional surprise and changes of mind.

Still, as valuable as it is, the interview is rather short. The book as a whole, on the other hand, does a wonderful job of painting a portrait, depicting a crucial era in comics, when possibilities were expanding, and concepts were being pursued that fed Moore and Gibbons’ vision in Watchmen. For instance:

Realism

Over and over again in this book, creators (and the editors) exalt realism as a powerful and underused technique in comics. Harvey Kurtzman’s war stories in Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat are hailed for being “tough-minded, deglamorized, and painstakingly researched.” A loving description of Harvey Pekar’s work says that it portrays “the minute details of life that even serious fiction ignores.” The interview with Los Bros. Hernandez celebrates the way that Jaime’s realistic subplot in “Mechanics” grew to take over the comic itself, pushing the science fiction element to the fringes.

Watchmen, too, is concerned with realism, picking up where Marvel left off in trying to answer the question, “What would happen if there really were super heroes in our world?” The reason that the Fantastic Four bicker and argue, and struggle with self-loathing, and don’t have secret identities, and didn’t even have costumes at first, is because Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created them as a reaction to the bland, beaming, formulaic DC heroes who dominated the market at that time. Lee injected more humanness into his characters, and the audience loved it. Or, as Moore once put it:

The DC comics were always a lot more true blue. Very enjoyable, but they were big, brave uncles and aunties who probably insisted on a high standard of you know mental and physical hygiene. Whereas the Stan Lee stuff, the Marvel comics, he went from one dimensional characters whose only characteristic was they dressed up in costumes and did good. Whereas Stan Lee had this huge breakthrough of two-dimensional characters.

Moore goes one better in Watchmen, delivering a slate of characters who, despite their costumes, are neither heroes nor villains, but rather complex and broken people, each trying to enact (or retreat from) the concept of heroism in their own ways. Just like real people.

Nuclear Anxiety

I was a teenager in the 80s, when these comics were coming out, and the overriding existential angst of the time was about nuclear war. Knowing that your country had the technological capability to destroy the world many times over was bad enough, but when there was another country that could do it too, and those two countries happened to hate each other… well, it could make you pretty nervous if you thought about it too much. Artists were thinking about it, and the topic pops up throughout these interviews. Justin Green describes the grim potential of atomic holocaust on his way to expressing a faith that human consciousness will squelch the possibility. Gary Panter talks about “releasing a nightmare on paper” in his comic about the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.

Moore and Gibbons were working out nuclear anxiety in Watchmen, but in the beautiful mode of the superhero genre, they did it mostly on a metaphorical level. Instead of just America vs. Russia in a game of Bombs And Bunkers, they personify the bomb itself in the form of Dr. Manhattan, a being almost (but not quite) completely indifferent to the human race, but who profoundly changes the human condition simply by existing. Of all the costumed heroes in the story, he is the only one who is truly superhuman, and his elevation beyond the human scale makes him ultimately alien and terrifying. He embodies our new planet-shattering capabilities, and when Laurie Juspeczyk tugs on the thread of his humanity in Chapter 9, she embodies that consciousness that Green hoped would be our salvation.

Then there’s Ozymandias’s plan, which he explains as his own Alexandrian solution to the Gordian knot of mutually assured destruction. It’s shortsighted lunacy, of course, but in the context of the story, we have to take it seriously for a moment. As Dreiberg says, who’s qualified to judge whether the smartest man in the world has gone crazy? Peter Bagge writes about being the editor of the underground comic anthology Weirdo with Robert Crumb, saying that he was never comfortable running sincere “issue” pieces like antinuke comics, because he always found them obvious: “I don’t want to just keep all these antinuke people happy by telling them things they already know.” I don’t think Watchmen is seriously arguing that the destruction of a major city and the slaughter of millions of people is a viable plan in the face of looming nuclear destruction, but it makes us think about it for at least a few minutes, and that’s far from obvious.

Subverting Superheroes

If Gary Groth had a superpower, it would be the Power Of Disdain. In his introduction and the interstitial material of the book, Groth is overflowing with contempt for all aspects of the mainstream comics industry, including newspaper comics, but he saves his deepest derision for superheroes and their creators. You can practically see both Groth and Fiore holding their noses anytime they must refer to Marvel or DC, or to costumed crusaders. Interestingly, Groth seems unaware that he places himself and his magazine firmly within an utterly stock heroic narrative, as the plucky underdog outsider taking on a corrupt establishment. Check out this sentence from this introduction:

The comics profession, represented at the time predominantly by Marvel and DC Comics, and therefore composed overwhelmingly of hacks, was outraged and appalled by the Journal‘s nervy challenge to the artistic and ethical status quo of an industry with which they had grown comfortable.

Ow, my eyes, how they hurt from all the rolling. It goes on like that, paragraph after paragraph of self-congratulation, mixed in with the suggestion that perhaps he deserves the credit for the 1980s blossoming of alternative comics. (No doubt if he’d been publishing in the 60s, he’d have taken credit for underground comics too.) As I read it, I kept feeling the nagging hint of familiarity, and then realized where I’d heard it all before: trolls. Groth’s position is essentially that of the internet troll, poking his head up in a community in order to heap abuse upon its members, all the while attempting to claim a moral and intellectual high ground by dismissing the vast majority of their work as “puerile junk, shoddily produced.”

This isn’t to say that he’s completely wrong. Like all areas of human endeavor, superhero comics contain plenty of crap. There’s nothing wrong with a reasoned critique of any artistic production. I’m actually a huge fan of criticism, as I suppose I ought to be, given the number of reviews I’ve written. I think a critic can be an invaluable teacher for audiences and creators, and that criticism can be quite salutary both for artists and art forms. However, I’m much more skeptical about the value of smugness and condescension, with which criticism is sometimes confused. When these traits infect criticism, or substitute for it, nobody wins.

There’s a section of The New Comics devoted to writers and artists of superhero comics (sneeringly titled “Men In Tights.”) Besides Moore and Gibbons, it features Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Howard Chaykin. These men are mainly celebrated for how they’ve subverted the superhero premise or undercut its artistic tropes. With mild astonishment, Groth reports that Moore’s approach is instead to “examine a genre and try to bring the best out of it, while staying, for the most part, within its conventions.” Still, Watchmen wouldn’t be included in this book if it didn’t shake up the superhero genre, and Groth grudgingly allows that it “is likely to be as close as costumed character comics will ever get to literature, and it comes closer than anyone might have expected.”

I doubt that Moore wrote Watchmen in order to impress Gary Groth. However, the book is definitely interested in interrogating the basic superhero concept. From the genre’s beginnings, one of its unquestioned foundations was that if somebody set out to “fight crime” or “save the world”, they were doing the right thing. Even when they encountered failures or setbacks, their moral authority was never in question. An even more deeply held assumption of the genre is that superheroes really do make a difference, that the world really can be saved by a handful of extraordinary beings.

In Watchmen, that notion goes up in flames as the Comedian’s lighter incinerates Captain Metropolis’ fussy display of “social evils” (like “black unrest” and “anti-war demos”.) His point in doing so is about the futility of action in the face of an inevitable atomic holocaust, but what he says a few panels earlier cuts even deeper:

Watchmen, Chapter 2, page 10, panels 6 and 7. The Comedian confronts Ozymandias. Comedian: Got any ideas, Ozzy? I mean, you are the smartest guy in the world, right? Ozymandias: It doesn't require genius to see that America has problems that need tackling... Comedian: Damn straight. An' it takes a moron to think that they're small enough for clowns like you guys to handle. What's going down in this world, you got no idea. Believe me.

Since the Marvel Age began, heroes had been struggling with “ordinary problems”, like paying rent or having to do stuff when you have the flu. Spider-Man had even wondered whether his desire to dress up and punch bad guys was a form of psychosis. But I don’t know of a pre-Watchmen comic in which a superhero consciously encounters the most fundamental flaw in the entire superhero premise: the fact that the world’s problems are deep and complex, and that no amount of punching is ever going to solve them. In Watchmen, the Comedian’s eloquence changes Ozymandias, setting into motion the plot of the book. In the comics world, Watchmen‘s eloquence changed the superhero genre, setting into motion a wave of books that questioned whether superheroes were even the good guys at all, or whether there was even such a thing as good guys and bad guys. We’re still watching the fallout today.

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