Watchmen – Wis[s]e Words

DC called this a “fun Easter egg”

Published on February 26, 2014Leave a comment

this is what dc calls a fun little easter egg

Before Watchmen was of course a moral and artistic travesty, amply documented in William Leung’s Who whitewashes the Watchmen review at Hooded Utilitarian, but what really struck me were the “homages” or “fun Easter eggs” as DC comics called them in their promotional material.

Even on their own merits these easter eggs are tone deaf, considering how much Alan Moore loathes and despises DC and Before Watchmen, so you must be pretty clueless as artist or writer working on it to think, “hey, I know, I’ll show my respect by putting in a little wink to the original series”. Worse though, when, as Darwyn Cooke and/or Amanda Connor did, the “homage” is to the rape scene where the original Silk Spectre was attacked by the Comedian in the first issue of Watchmen, here reimagined as her daughter beating up a pimp. That he’s a huge, fat black man (with all that implies, considering all those racial fears about what black men want to do to white women and how that worked out in real life) is just the racist icing on this particular sexist shitcake.

I do hope it was Darwyn Cooke who thought of this, because it’s exactly the sort of half-clever idea he tends to come up with and I think more highly of Amanda Connor, though you do wonder what she thought when drawing it. Cooke on the other hand is the epitome of the conservative fanboy turned professional, with no ideas of his own, spreading his bland nostalgia over everything he works on, in that sickening cutesy style of his.

As Leung calls it:

Wearing smiley earrings and a cute pout on her face, Laurie is a badass chick delivering rough justice to a mean black dude. Like father, like daughter. It is blatantly obvious what effect Cooke and Conner are aiming for here. But the question they apparently didn’t have the wits to ask themselves is what on earth led them to think it’s okay to use Moore’s serious critique of misogynistic violence as a vehicle for their shallow indulgence in kick-ass theatrics. Cooke may do all the talking he wants about respecting female characters and Conner may present herself as a champion of her gender in a male-dominated industry (e.g. Zalben, “FanExpo” pars. 4-7); but to take the most well-known rape scene in mainstream comics and turn it into a celebration of the rapist’s progeny bespeaks gross insensitivity and moral blindness, not to mention being deeply offensive to the spirit and intelligence of the original Watchmen.

Then again, the whole idea of the Comedian as unseen father figure watching over Laurie goes so against the spirit of the original series that it’s not that surprising DC, Cooke and Connor see nothing wrong with paying homage to a rape.

What the eighties really felt like

Published on June 7, 20121 Comment

Is nailed by Alan Moore in this 1986 interview talking about Watchmen and part of what he was attempting to do with it:

I know it’s only a tiny little comic book that goes over there every month and gets seen by a relatively small number of people, many of whom perhaps agree with us anyway, so it’s difficult to see what it’s doing, but I was consciously trying to do something that would make people feel uneasy. In issue #3 I wanted to communicate that feeling of “When’s it going to happen?” Everyone felt it. You hear a plane going overhead really loudly, and just for a second before you realize it’s a plane you look up. I’m sure that everybody in this room’s done that at least once. It’s something over everybody’s head, but nobody talks about it. At the risk of doing a depressing comic book we thought that it would be nice to try and … yeah, try and scare a little bit so that people would just stop and think about their country and their politics.

That was what growing up in the eighties felt to me, too young to pay much conscious attention to politics, but old enough to pick up on the fear, on the almost certainty that the bombs would drop sooner rather than later conveyed not so much through the news and such as through pop culture where the nuclear holocaust was present one way or another, as well as through the huge demonstrations against cruise missiles, the largest demonstrations ever held in the Netherlands and about as useful in the end as the later demos against the War on Iraq would be. Throughout everything, up to at least 1987 and Gorbachov, that dread was there and seeped into everything.

Watchmen was one of the best attempts in any artform to make this inchoate fear visible and I immediately recognised it when I first read the series back in 1989 or 1990, when we’d just passed out from under it. It’s the inevitability of it, the idea that if certain things happened, some unclear threshold was crossed, quite ordinary men and women would have no choice but to order the end of the world, more in sorrow than anger, believing to the end that “better dead than red” made sense.

Because of our baby boomer dominated media we tend to think as the fifties and early sixties as the time when we were most obsessed by our coming atomic doom, but the reality of it was that throughout that time the US could’ve easily destroyed the USSR without the latter being able to do much about it, while by the early eighties the weaponry had advanced enough, was ubiquitous enough, was complex enough that a nuclear war would no longer just be devastating, but fatal to the human race as a whole, could really end our world and looked increasingly likely to do so by accident or paranoia.

DC Comics still clueless

Published on July 22, 2010

Proof that DC Comics still does not get Alan Moore, even twentyfive years after Watchmen:

However, DC Comics co-publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee said, “Watchmen is the most celebrated graphic novel of all time. Rest assured, DC Comics would only revisit these iconic characters if the creative vision of any proposed new stories matched the quality set by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons nearly 25 years ago, and our first discussion on any of this would naturally be with the creators themselves.”

It also shows the essential inability of DC to sell comics any other way but by constant regurgitation of characters, concepts and series, on the monthly superhero pamphlet model. That Alan Moore would want to stay far away from this, that his approval cannot be bought even with the rights to the original series, is both unsurprising and understandable. Watchmen needs no sequls, prequels or side projects: everything Moore and Gibbons had to say about it was said in the original series, which was a product of the time and place it was produced and anything else that will be done in its name will only lessen the original.

Can you imagine a Jim Lee or Dan Didio greenlighted Watchmen project, written perhaps by Darwyn Cooke or a Garth Ennis or Mark Millar (and I don’t honestly know what would be worse: Cooke’s fauxstalgia let loose on Watchmen or the inevitablity of Ennis or Millar going for a Rorschach prison rape “joke”), drawn by whoever is the to-go guy for dark, moody serious superheroics. It would be awful, but still sell on the scale of what DC did to Milestone, with what was a great attempt to create modern superheroes for a properly multiracial America has been folded into the DC mainstream to function as spear carriers and capeholders for old, white supermen.

DC will use up the Watchmen characters because that’s the only thing DC knows how to do, though often they don’t even know how to make effective use of them. As Tim O’Neill points out, this is the main failing of both Marvel and DC, because that’s what their business models are build on. With their comics mean selling points now being their ability to be turned into succesful summer blockbusters (and the continuing sale of pamphlets and deluxe hardcovers to aging fanboys a nice sideline) this has only gotten worse. DC doesn’t just want Watchmen 2: the comic, it wants Watchmen: the Saturday morning cartoon.

Who watches the Watchmen? I will

Published on November 14, 2008

I’m way too excited about this. To be honest I never believed this could be filmed and keep even ten percent of what was in the book, but after seeing V for Vendetta a few years back, which managed to work as a movie while keeping the important parts of Moore’s story intact (even if Moore didn’t like it himself), I have good hopes for Watchmen.

And you?