I’m with Andrew Weiss on this; putting out prequels to Watchmen is only slighty less obnoxious than imagining a need for a prequel to Maus, but so much other cultural landmarks, both high and low, have been remade in the past few decades that it was only time before Watchmen got its turn. It’s what happens when “intellectual properties” (ugh) are owned by companies only interested in the next sure thing, the next bestseller, who know full well that whatever internet outrage there is today, many of the same people will end up buying these things anyway, curious as they are to see what a Darwyn Cooke (retro kitsch with little originality) or a J. Michael Straczynski (let’s hope it’s not a long miniseries) will make of it. Few comics fans can tell shit from shinola anyway, not when presented in a $99 Absolute Edition Hardcover.
In the end, what remains impressive is how long it took DC ultimately to throw all their scruples to the wind and do what they’ve been wanting to do ever since Watchmen turned out to be a hit, to do what’s in the company’s DNA, what they always do when they have a hit: exploit the hell out of it and get more like it out there on the stands. It’s what comics publishers have always done, chase the trends, sling shit to the wall and if it sticks, sling more. At the time they barely and only halfhearted recognised that not doing this would be more profitable this time, though not before driving away Moore himself. What DC finally realised was that Watchmen, along with The Dark Knight Returns and Swamp Thing, as well as a handful of lesser titles gave them prestige, a reputation as a the more creator friendly and innovative of the Big Two. They got themselves a boatload of British writers, people like Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison and Pete Milligan et all to repeat the magic that Moore got going with Watchmen, got it with Sandman and ultimately got Vertigo, a whole line of slightly off kilter not quite superhero titles for those who had outgrown the DC universe, the one really smart bit of business DC has gotten together in the past four decades. The rest of the company may have been just as dumb and exploitative as Marvel (who never got as much credit for Epic as DC did for Vertigo) or Image at their worst, but Vertigo made it acceptable.
But the American comics industry still crashed and burned and nobody but Steve Bissette still cares about creators right and self publishing and boycotting Marvel for its treatment of Jack Kirby and its heirs. And Watchmen, which had remained in print and a steady seller for the company all those years turned hot again, what with the movie and everything and the old itch to exploit it better, to get people to not just buy new and more deluxe versions of it popped up again. More than a quarter of a century after its original publication it’s finally safe to give into it, even if it’s pointless. The suits will have their way, the second rate talent making the comics will think they’re making art or doing a homage and that DC will still respect them in the morning, the fans will lap it up anyway.
With bonus appearance of Frank Miller. A surprisingly good Channel Four news item on Moore, V for Vendetta and the way in which V’s Guy Fawkes mask has inspired and informed the Occupy movement. I love Alan Moore because he’s such a sensible, decent chap, no ego whatsoever.
How do you feel when you see a V mask or the V graffito at a protest or on a blog?
DL: Happy that a symbol of resistance to tyranny in fiction is being used as a symbol of resistance to any perceived tyranny in real life. The image of Che Guevara – another bearded guerrilla fighter, though in reality – has been used similarly as a badge of resistance to perceived injustices, and V’s just joined the club. Badges and symbols are useful as instant communication devices, though in the case of V, it seems to me that the communication isn’t quite as instant as with figures such as Che because, despite the movie, V For Vendetta, and its trappings, is not well-known to the general public. But then, any puzzlement shown by anyone in ignorance can always be allayed by their investigations of the source of the images – and then, who knows, they might become beneficially educated by the experience!
Peter Pontiac is the closest thing the Netherlands has to a Robert Crumb or Spain Rodrigez, a cartoonist who started doing underground comix and alternative magazine illustrations in the late sixties and hasn’t stop since, kept working in the underground tradition of self expression yet constantly maturing as a cartoonist. That the Amsterdam library is now honouring him with an exhibition in the main library is no more than his due.
Examples of his work can be seen in the video above, as well as on website. It should be obvious how much he has been inspired by especially American underground cartoonists and also how much he created his own style from it. His most mature work is probably the (auto-)biographical Kraut about his father’s experiences in World War II fighting for the wrong side — Pontiac’s real name being Peter Pollmann, but earlier work like his punk opera Requim Fortissimo is excellent too. For those wanting to sample his work, the recent Oog&Blik collection Rhythm collection most of his comics.
It is a bit harder to read as many of them now than when I started. I find myself less enthusiastic about new material as time has gone on, and while that makes the high points that much better, there’s a wide expanse of tiresome comics that has to be plowed to get to the good stuff. I know I would not have inhaled a lot of the crap that I have over the last year if it wasn’t for the store and the relationships that have sprung up out of that.
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So much of comics — and I’m thinking the whole industry, not just Marvel/DC — is dedicated to hyper-consumers, you know? It’s all about buying this stuff immediately upon release, amassing these tomes and libraries and archives alongside the weekly installments of whatever genre stuff there is. Nobody can keep anything in print, there’s so few people qualified to cleave the wheat from the chaff. It’s just buy-buy-buy, X-9 hardcovers and 26 volumes of Peanuts and another re-release of Prince Valiant and 16 newly-translated softcovers from wherever [D+Q Publisher Chris] Oliveros went on vacation. I get sick of trying to play the democratic catch-all who gives everything a chance, sick of that feeling where I’m constantly staring off into the next few months, waiting to see what comes next. And it doesn’t do service to the work, either. It just becomes an ingestion process, this thing where you’re constantly shoveling comics into your head like an old school meat grinder. Reading years of work in days, binging on the stuff, and just checking it off and moving onto the next thing… it’s gross.
I’ve been there. When I was in my twenties and got my first fulltime, proper job and “earned” a huge salary while still living in a student flat with almost no bills to pay; gas, water and electricity being included in the not very onerous rent. It left me with a lot of disposable income which meant that I could buy a lot of comics and months in which I dropped over a thousand guilders on in retrospect often not very good comics. At the same time I had discovered comics fandom online, both in the rec.arts.comics.* Usenet groups as with mailing lists like the late, lamented @Comix run by iirc Charles Hatfield. This was long before blogs, but the effect was the same: you had a community of likeminded, dedicated comics readers, all of whom were very heavy consumers/readers of comics, always looking for the next big thing. This was both a good thing, as there were finally knowledgable people I could jaw about my hobby with, but it also meant that I was constantly pressured to buy more and more comics, if only to “keep up” with the ongoing discussions. Living in the Netherlands already put me at a disadvantage as most US comics only were available at least a week later than in America, so I had to buy the comics as soon as they appeared.
For years I was more than happy with it, but one Sunny day at the Haarlem stripfestival in 2000 I was just fed up. I went home early, didn’t come back the next day and didn’t stop at my local comic shop that week. Or the next. Or the week after. Or ever. I had gorged myself on comics until I was thoroughly fed up by them, stopped cold turkey and didn’t buy any for years, even going so far as dropping most of them off at my parents. (A few months later I met and fell in love with Sandra, but that’s another story.)
Since then I’ve gone back to comics, but I learned to be wary of going back into Club Comics, of making them my entire waking life, of thinking of them as a cause rather than a form of entertainment or an artform. The dirty little not so secret of American comics is that it thrives on persuading a relatively small group of readers to be hyperconsumers, going on weekly pilgrimages to the comic shop and making this into something like a duty rather than a commercial transaction — viz all those people who keep buying the same old shitty Superman comics they always did even though they don’t enjoy them. This is not something you see in many other entertainment fields… It’s not a healthy relationship and the best thing I ever did was to get out of that, to stop obsessing about comics and learn to enjoy them again.
Nobody’s immune to breast cancer. When we talk about breast cancer, there’s no women or superwomen. Everybody has to do the self-examination monthly. Fight with us against the enemy and, when in doubt, talk with your doctor.
It makes a certain amount of sense to use these comic book icons for this campaign, but I don’t think you’ll see a similar one in America soon. Titillation yes, self examination for breast cancer? Not so much…
