The Boring Daddy of Astro City

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

In his long essay on Darwyn Cooke’s Before Watchmen work, William Leung convincingly, and even devastatingly, portrayed Cooke as a reactionary tool. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in Watchmen deliberately set out to undermine and deconstruct the assumptions behind superheroic archetypes and narratives. Cooke, Leung argues, set about reconstructing them. Or as Leung puts it:

Whereas Moore was interested in demolishing heroic stereotypes in order to explore the humanity beneath, Cooke is more interested in reinforcing stereotypes in order to prescribe for humanity what is and isn’t heroic. Under Cooke’s revision, a critique of heroic constructs has reverted to a defence of heroic constructs.

I am entirely convinced by Leung’s argument that Cooke’s Before Watchmen is a vile, steaming pile of shit. I’d like to make a brief case, though, that reconstucting heroic sterotypes isn’t necessarily evil or wrong-headed. Even, possibly, the “heroic power fantasy of heterosexual males”, which Leung sneers at, might in some cases be a force for good.

So if we want to discuss the virtues of reactionary nostalgic heterosexual male power fantasies, we should maybe take our eyes off of Before Watchmen (please God) and look instead at Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson’s Astro City.

Astro City came out around 1995, it looks like — and I don’t think there’s much question that it’s in conversation, at least partially, to Watchmen. Its reaction is, moreover, like Cooke’s, reactionary. Where Moore and Gibbons show superheroes as damaged, perverse, violent psychopaths with delusions of grandeur, Busiek and Anderson return deliberately, nostalgically, to a mostly unproblematized vision of superheroes as do-gooding power fantasy. You see that from the very first page of the first issue, which presents us with that ur-super fantasy — the dream of flying.

The twist here is that the infantile power fantasy of flight belongs, not to a powerless adolescent or man/boy, but to a superhero — specifically to the Samaritan, Astro City’s Superman analog. Samaritan can actually fly himself — but he’s so busy he doesn’t have time to enjoy it. The adolescent power fantasy is doubled back and turned into an adult de-responsibility fantasy. Instead of the narrative targeting boys who wish they had the power of men, it targets men who wish they were boys. Comics, once offering the promise of larger than life abilities and adventures for children, here become a nostalgic icon of an essentially smaller than life lack of clutter. It’s not the flight that is exciting (Samaritan can fly, after all) but the space to dream about flight. The comic’s first page, in other words, is a dream of a dream — or a dream of a comic. It deliberately charges, or romanticizes, its own comicness.

On the one hand, you could say that this remythologizes what Watchmen demythologized. And it does in a way. But it’s a particular kind of remythologizing — one which is very aware, even incessantly aware, of its own mythmaking. Traditional superheroes were exciting and noble. Watchmen’s superheroes were exciting and ugly. Astro City’s superheroes are…boring. Deliberately boring. In this first story about the Samaritan, his adventures have all the kinetic oomph of a 9 to 5 desk job. A lot of the action is described in off-hand text boxes without ever being shown (“pyramid assassins in Turkey and a nasty chronal rift in Stuttgart. A lot of mid-air antics….”) Even when we do see the superstunts, it has an air of anticlimax, as in the battle with the Living Nightmare.

I really like that top right panel; Samaritan is supposed to be ducking, but he ends up just looking old and bent; some middle aged guy in a funny suit waiting for the super-villain bus. And then, in the final text block, he’s making mental notes for himself about how he’s going to have to consult a doctor “provided I survive this.”

In fact, in comparison to the low-key narrated super-heroics, it’s only the 9 to 5 desk job which comes alive. The Samaritan’s secret identity, Asa, works as a fact checker, and when he does, he actually gets to talk to people. The office chit chat seems much more real than the weirdly distanced superheroics…except for those moments when the weirdly distanced superheroics start to sound like office chit chat, as in the bottom panel here.

Unsurprisingly, Samaritan is as disconnected from his sexuality as from his dreams of freedom. Busiek and Anderson show him fact checking a story about the city’s most beautiful women, and eating his heart out because he has no time for romance in his life. We’ve gone from the sexlessness of adolescent power fantasies to Watchmen’s twisted sexuality to a sexlessness not of innocence, but of getting older and just not having a whole lot of time.

Samaritan’s heroism, his goodness, starts, then, to look like the heroism, or goodness, of going in to work and doing a job. It’s heroism as middle-aged slog; all responsibility, no fun at all.

So traditional superhero narratives show how cool it is to be a man and save everyone. Watchmen deconstructs that by showing how the desire to be a superman and save everybody is ridiculous, perverse, and dangerous. Busiek and Anderson reject Watchmen’s dour vision, and reconstruct superheroism — but with a twist. The manliness they present is a fantasy in many ways of seflessness and disempowerment. The real superhero is good, because the real superhero has no power. Comics fantasy becomes, not a pattern of dangerously empowered masculinity, but a kind of nostalgic safety valve — the dream of childishness that lets daddy be a good daddy. Superheroes become a strategy, not of validating power, but of subordinating the powerful to the good.

Busiek and Anderson’s vision of masculinity is both traditional and reactionary. Samaritan is man as responsible caretaker; boring father as heroic non-entity. No doubt Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had a point when they suggested via the Comedian/Dr. Manhattan/Ozymandias that these uber-daddy fantasies involve megalomania and other unpleasantness. But, on the other hand, is an unhinged mass murderer really more real or true in some absolute sense than a guy with a day job? Samaritan’s dreams of flying my be unreal and even silly, but on behalf of boring father’s everywhere, I wonder if that really has to be such a bad thing.

Who Whitewashes the Watchmen? Part 2

Posted on May 28, 2013 by William Leung

This is the second part of a two part essay. The first part is here.
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Reconstruction 3: Daddy’s Little Girl

Cooke’s campaign to reconstruct Watchmen into a conventional male-affirming narrative continues in his four-part Silk Spectre series with artist Amanda Conner. A series based on Laurie has the potential to be very interesting, since Moore’s handling of her character has often been cited as a weakness.[i] Yet, while there is validity to the criticism that Laurie tends to be overshadowed by the men around her, there has been too little attention paid to how her characterization functions as a critical commentary on comic conventions.

First, it’s unfair to suggest that Moore’s handling of Laurie is completely unoriginal: nearly three decades after Watchmen, there still aren’t many superheroines who fit the description of a thirty-five-year-old, sexually active, cynical, swearing, hard-drinking, puking, chain-smoking ball-breaker (Figure C1).

Second, too many critics have unjustly assumed that Laurie isn’t important enough to warrant analysis (e.g. Klock 65-66). Critics have been quick to recognize the male characters as displacements of various comic book archetypes. There is no reason why this analysis shouldn’t apply to Laurie as well. Like her male peers, Laurie can be read as a deconstructed version of an iconic superhero: William Moulton Marston’s Wonder Woman.[ii]

Marston offered a feminist empowerment fantasy in which a powerful heroine is moulded from clay by her mother as a symbol of female redemption from male violence.[iii] Moore deconstructed this fantasy by muddying the heroine’s origin and drawing out the physical, emotional and psychological consequences of rape and abuse. But the deconstruction isn’t about whitewashing male violence or disempowering women. Rather, it is about offering a down-to-earth, non-escapist form of empowerment. In the real world, heroism rarely comes from magical power, divine intervention and ass-kicking antics. It’s more likely to come from tolerance, compassion and forgiveness (Figure C2).

Lacking Diana’s lasso of truth, Laurie finds out a devastating truth which fractures her personal identity and challenges her most cherished beliefs. But rather than demanding heroic perfection, Laurie’s greatest strength turns out to be her compassionate acceptance of human imperfection. Laurie claims Dan as her man, not because he is the most powerful hero in the world, but because he is a decent guy who loves and appreciates her.[iv] She reaches out to Sally, not because she condones rape, but because Sally’s sufferings have made Laurie appreciate all the more everything that her less-than-heroic mother has done for her. She forgives Eddie, not because he deserves forgiveness, but because Sally still loves him and love must be stronger than hate. Out of her parents’ messed-up union, Laurie emerges as a strong, mature, compassionate woman, a true “thermodynamic miracle”.

In Silk Spectre, Cooke and Conner attempt to offer a backstory about Laurie’s teenage years. Their story has two main strands: Laurie’s escape from home to join the “summer of love” with her boyfriend, Greg, and her crusade against an evil drug syndicate targeting impressionable youths.[v] Cooke’s decision to frame Laurie’s story as a rebellion against Sally is especially worthy of comment. In the original, Sally’s and Laurie’s relationship gives a rare and important focus to women and rebuts the criticism that the female characters are only relevant in terms of how they relate to the male characters. Moore deconstructed the utopianism of Marston’s all-female Paradise Island by presenting a prosaic scenario in which women might find themselves isolated from men: in the house of a single mother raising an only daughter. In creating this mother-daughter relationship, Moore subjected the comic book assumption that women enjoy fighting crimes in sexy outfits to a much-needed reality-check[vi]—Laurie hates being a superhero and did it mostly to please her mother—but he also used the characters’ motivations and conflicts to offer a humane redefinition of heroism. It is Sally’s sense of weakness and shame that makes her determined to bring Laurie up to be strong and courageous. Sally is able to do this all by herself (in her row with Larry, she tells him: “[D]on’t you worry about [Laurie’s] future. That’s taken care of” (IX.7))—and she did it so well that she dreaded the day when Laurie would find out the truth and expose her as a weakling and hypocrite. That Laurie’s greatest act of heroism should be her compassionate acceptance of Sally’s lack of heroism is one of the touching ironies of their relationship.

In Cooke’s revisionist take on Laurie’s story, this sensitive, observant, psychologically believable focus on a mother and daughter working through their difficult relationship gives way to a chest-thumping, pedantic valorization of men and fathers. Laurie is given two father figures: Hollis and Eddie. After a melodramatic setup of events which involve Sally’s masquerading as an intruder to ambush her daughter (a superhero-in-training trope more befitting of Kick-Ass than Watchmen) and Laurie freaking out and running off with Greg to San Francisco, Sally is made entirely redundant in Laurie’s life. The focus is then shifted to Laurie’s personal growth outside the shadow of Sally and under the covert surveillance of Hollis and Eddie.

As if making a “dear uncle” out of Hollis isn’t already straining the creative license,[vii] Hollis’ role is expanded by Cooke into practically that of a surrogate father, one who dispenses sage parenting advice to Sally and undertakes to track Laurie down for her. This not only marginalizes Sally but also makes a mockery of her parenting ability, as she alternates between being a sentimental sob, a control freak, a mind poisoner, a basket case and an infantile drunk (Figure C3).

In comic book terms, the devolution of the Wonder Woman fantasy is complete. Marston created an anti-patriarchal fantasy in which women founded a paradise without men. Moore brought this fantasy down to earth by depicting the conflicts and reconciliation between a mother and daughter forced by circumstances to fend for themselves. Cooke reconstructs this reality into a patriarchal fantasy in which chivalric men can make everything okay for neurotic, incompetent women.

This paternalistic message is forcefully stated in Hollis’ “be a man” speech to Laurie’s hippie friend, Chappy (Figure C4).

It is one of those moments about which it wouldn’t be exaggerating to claim an author is speaking through his character and articulating his “heroic ideal”: namely, the patriotic value of traditional gender roles (note the American flag next to the Mitch Romney-lookalike Hollis in the last panel). Being a man, according to this ideal, is about being chivalric to women, and the plot validates this by presenting a male-affirmative fantasy in which the hardship of women is articulated by a man and the rift between a mother and daughter is healed by the intervention of a man.

Even more problematic is Cooke’s inclusion of yet another bow-wow cameo for the macho antihero, Eddie. In Moore, Eddie’s failure as a father and human being is one of the book’s cautionary examples of power abuse. The price Eddie has to pay for his addiction to aggressive power-play is the severing of every meaningful human tie, and the bully who has spent his life thrusting the “truth” in people’s faces finds in the end that the joke is on him as he couldn’t even bring himself to own up to his biological daughter.

In Cooke, no wrong exists which isn’t rightable when it comes to good old Eddie. Force and aggression only enhance his worth and efficacy as a father. He is the trump card and secret weapon Sally summons in an emergency to sort out Laurie’s problems. Although big daddy may seem rough and tough, he always has a soft spot in his heart for his little princess. Eddie kidnaps Greg and roughs him up for inadvertently supplying Laurie with drugs. However, Cooke is quick to assure us that Eddie is only being cruel to be kind: he forces Greg to break off his relationship with Laurie and sends him to the army to make a man of him (Figure C5).

Using “enhanced interrogation techniques” as an effective means to an end, Eddie is no longer a borderline psychopath who enjoys domination and destruction for their own sakes. He is now a Batman-like figure who uses violence and intimidation to achieve the noble purpose of teaching soft-hearted boys to become action-ready, responsible men. And Eddie’s caring, paternal side is fully exhibited when he drops by to visit Laurie in the middle of the night (Figure C6).

He steals into his daughter’s bedroom, coddles her pussy cat, gazes fondly at her sleeping face, and smiles approvingly at her collection of Comedian-inspired accessories untainted by human bean juice. He has become literally her “watchman”.

More disturbingly, Cooke’s determination to valorize Eddie’s fatherhood even leads him to re-envision Eddie’s attempted rape of Sally as a positive influence on Laurie. This is demonstrated in Laurie’s first major heroic outing in which she breaks up a drunken orgy, knocks down the seedy drug lord Gurustein, and proudly calls herself “Silk Spectre” to her defeated foes. What is shocking about the sequence isn’t the nudity or pretence of liberal sexuality—compared to the frank, nuanced, mature exploration of sex in Moore’s other writings, Cooke’s and Conner’s try-hard attempt to be daring is almost puerile. The shock comes from Cooke’s and Conner’s gobsmacking decision to depict Laurie’s crowning moment of heroism as a re-enactment of Eddie’s violation of Sally (Figures C7-8).

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. Reading the scene almost made me want to toss a glass of scotch into Cooke’s and Conner’s faces by way of affirming the original Laurie’s rage at the White House cocktail party (Figure C9).

Proving that ignorance is the best excuse, Cooke and Conner see no evil and press on with the rest of the story. Hollis tracks down Laurie; she agrees to go home to mum; tears, hugs and kisses all round, leading to a quick conclusion showing Laurie’s attendance at her first Crimebuster meeting. The story purports to be about a young woman’s search for her freedom and identity, but the tone of condescending paternalism is detectable to the end. In the final image, Cooke and Conner depict Laurie being surrounded by all the important men in her life (Figure C10)—Sally is nowhere to be seen; her influence is reduced to an afterthought.

On Laurie’s left-hand side is Jon, in whom she is interested; on her right-hand side is Dan, with whom she will end up. But the most problematic is once again the presentation of Eddie. True to the original comic’s depiction of the Crimebuster meeting, Eddie is reading a newspaper with his feet propped up on a desk. But going beyond the original, Eddie’s stretched-out legs are visualized in close-up extending across the lower section of the panel, so that Laurie is symbolically sitting on his lap. The corner of his newspaper touches Jon’s crotch, suggesting that daddy is keeping a close eye on the blue man’s interest in his little girl.

In Moore, Sally’s and Laurie’s relationship is the primary focus that saves the story from being mostly about men. In Cooke, Laurie’s relationship with men is reinscribed as a primary focus even in a story that is supposed to be mostly about her.[viii] In an attempt to replicate Moore’s narrative style, Cooke ends the series with an epigrammatic quotation. Yet, possessing neither Moore’s encyclopaedic knowledge of high/pop culture nor discriminating taste for apposite, insightful citation, Cooke settles on a cringe-worthy passage from Edward Madden’s banal pop tune “Daddy’s Little Girl”. The impact of this dumbing-down cannot be overstated. To the provocative philosophical question on which the original Watchmen concludes—“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Who watches the watchmen?”—Cooke seems happy to offer a chauvinistic answer: “Daddy is watching; everything is fine”. The exploration of a mother’s and daughter’s relationship and a young woman’s search for her identity is reduced to a cloying male-affirming fantasy about a sexy young chick being watched over by her powerful daddies.

Not Quite an Extraordinary Freelancer

It should be clear from the above that I’m not a fan of Darwyn Cooke. I say this despite knowing that many well-informed people have embraced his Before Watchmen series. I will even concede that he is a highly accomplished visual artist. But any writer who undertakes to revise another writer’s work should expect to be held to the standard of the original. And when almost everything that makes the original incisive and brilliant has been conventionalized and trivialized in the revision, this isn’t a problem that some neat drawings can make up for. Moreover, Cooke hasn’t been slow to criticize other people’s interpretations of Watchmen: he has likened the experience of watching Zack Snyder’s 2009 film to “being bored to death in slow motion” (Zalben “FanExpo” par.13). While I too have reservations about that film, I would point out that at least Snyder didn’t pander to fanboy prejudice by romanticizing lesbians, villainizing gay men, and whitewashing heterosexist violence. At least rape is still condemned as rape, and a subplot about women dealing with the consequences of male aggression isn’t reconstructed into a chauvinistic tale about “daddy knows best”.[ix] I never thought I would say this, but all things being relative, I’ve even started to find Snyder’s take on Watchmen sensitive and nuanced.

Reading Cooke reminds me of a brilliant Simpsons episode (Season 19, “Husbands and Knives”) featuring Alan Moore in cameo with two other comic book creators he was happy to identify as peers. In the episode, Art Spiegelman, Dan Clowes and Moore appear as animated versions of themselves in a book-signing session at Springfield’s new comic book store. On being approached by Millhouse to sign his “Watchmen Babies” DVD (Figure D1), Moore flies into a mock angry rant about how “those bloody corporations … take your ideas [and] suck them like leeches until they’ve gotten every last drop of the marrow from your bones”.

Yet, when Comic Book Guy later sneaks into the store and tries to sabotage his rival’s business, the three writers activate their League of Extraordinary Freelancers’ superpower, tear off their shirts to reveal their unbelievably ripped torsos (Figure D2), and take turns beating the crap out of Comic Book Guy.

The point of the satire is obvious. Moore, Clowes, Spiegelman—and I would add Harvey Pekar to the list—call themselves “alternative comic book creators” precisely because they aren’t interested in patriarchal fantasies about the “heroic ideal”. Instead of stroking male egos and peddling fanboy clichés, their best works turn the “heroic ideal” on its head and remind us that there are enough pathos, wonders and “thermodynamic miracles” in the lives of ordinary men and women to form the basis of profound, purposeful, original storytelling. They are the visionary deconstructers of the medium, not its reactionary reconstructers.[x] Cooke might think that he is worthy to follow in Moore’s and Gibbons’ footsteps, but on the evidence of his work in Minutemen and Silk Spectre, I suggest that he either: (a) doesn’t truly “get” what Moore and Gibbons were doing, or (b) is so attached to his “heroic ideal” that he has no scruples about hijacking their masterpiece to peddle his own nostalgic heterosexist agenda. If this is the best he can do, perhaps he should consider sticking to The New Frontier-type material in the future. I don’t think it’s safe to leave Watchmen entirely in his hands.

WORKS CITED

Amacker, Kurt. “An Interview with Alan Moore by Kurt Amacker.” Seraphemera Books 13 Mar. 2012. 18 May 2013. <http://www.seraphemera.org/seraphemera_books/AlanMoore_Page4.html>.

“Comic Book Roundup: Before Watchmen.” Comic Book Roundup 13 May 2013. 18 May 2013. <http://www.comicbookroundup.com/search_results.php?f_search=before+watchmen&Find= >.

Cooke, Jon B. “Toasting Absent Heroes: Alan Moore Discusses the Charlton-Watchmen Connection.” TwoMorrows Publishing. Aug. 2000. 18 May 2013. <http://twomorrows.com/comicbookartist/articles/09moore.html>.

Callahan, Timothy. “Somebody Has to Save the World: Captain Metropolis and Role-Playing Watchmen.” In Richard Bensam, ed. Minutes to Midnight: Twelve Essays on Watchmen. Edwardsville, Illinois: Sequart Research and Literacy Organization, 2012. Kindle Edition.

Gaines, Dixon T. “Alan Moore Didn’t Just Make Comics an Art Form, He Made Them Gay, Too.” Queerty 4 Mar. 2009. 18 May 2013. <http://www.queerty.com/alan-moore-didnt-just-make-comics-an-art-form-he-made-them-gay-too-20090304/>.

Gifford, James. “Occulted Watchmen: The True Fate of ‘Hooded Justice’ and ‘Captain Metropolis’.” 2003. 18 May 2013. <http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/pdfs/occulted_watchmen_2003.pdf>.

Hughes, Mark. “Alan Moore is Wrong about Before Watchmen.” Forbes 2 Feb. 2012. 18 May 2013. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2012/02/01/alan-moore-is-wrong-about-before-watchmen/>.

Keating, Erin M. “The Female Link: Citation and Continuity in Watchmen.” Journal of Popular Culture 45.6 (2012): 1266-1288.

Khoury, George. The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. Raleigh, North Carolina: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2003.

Klock, Geoff. How to Read Superhero Comics and Why. New York: Continuum, 2002.

Moore, Alan, “Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies”. The Daredevils #4-#6 (Apr.-Jun.1983), Marvel UK. <http://glycon.livejournal.com/15725.html>.

Pepose, David. “Best Shots Extra Reviews: Before Watchmen: Minutemen, AVX VS”. 29 Aug. 2012. 18 May 2013. <http://www.newsarama.com/10092-best-shots-extra-reviews-before-watchmen-minutemen-avx-vs.html>.

Perry, Spencer. “Comics: Before Watchmen: Minutemen Review.” Superhero Hype. 6 Jun. 2012. 18 May 2013. <http://www.superherohype.com/features/articles/170975-comics-review-before-watchmen-minutemen-1>.

———. “Comics: Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre Review.” Superhero Hype 13 Jun. 2012. 18 May 2013. <http://www.superherohype.com/features/articles/171113-comics-before-watchmen-silk-spectre-review>.

Pindling, Lejorne. “Alan Moore #5 ~ On Super Heroes [Street Law Productions].” YouTube.com 27 Jun. 2008. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=a72aqEwjYOg> [account deleted]

Robinson, Lillian S. Wonder Women. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Sneddon, Laura. “Grant Morrison: Why I’m Stepping away from Superheroes.” New Statesmen 15 Sep. 2012. 18 May 2013. <http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/voices/2012/09/grant-morrison-gay-batman-superheroes-wonder-woman>.

Thomson, Iain. “Deconstructing the Hero.” Comics as Philosophy. Ed. Jeff McLaughlin. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2005. 100-129.

Truitt, Brian. “Before Watchmen: Darwyn Cooke Spends Time with Minutemen.” USA Today 4 Jun. 2012. 18 May 2013. <http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/comics/story/2012-06-04/Before-Watchmen-Minutemen-comic-book-series/55380956/1>.

Yin-Poole, Wesley. “Comics, Games and—of Course—Watchmen: Dave Gibbons Interview.” Eurogamer.net 27 Jul. 2012. 18 May 2013. <http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-27-comics-games-and-of-course-watchmen-dave-gibbon-interview>.

Zalben, Alex. “Before Watchmen: Minutemen 1 is the Very Best Modern Comics Have to Offer”. MTV Geek 12 Jun. 2012. 18 May 2013. <http://geek-news.mtv.com/2012/06/06/before-watchmen-minutemen-1-review/>.

———. “FanExpo Canada: Darwyn Cooke vs. Amanda Conner … to the Death!” MTV Geek 27 Aug. 2012. 18 May 2013. <http://geek-news.mtv.com/2012/08/27/fanexpo-canada-darwyn-cooke-amanda-conner/>.

[i] As far as I know, the fullest argument against Watchmen’s depiction of women is made by E.M. Keating. My problem with Keating’s reading is that her familiarity with Moore and comic book history is emphatically less assured than her familiarity with postmodernist theory. I suggest a lighter dose of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and better research into Moore, Trina Robbins and Mark Madrid would have done her argument a world of good.

[ii] Although Moore has never acknowledged this reference—he only mentions Nightshade, Phantom Lady and Black Canary (J. Cooke par. 25)—I think the Wonder Woman analogy is too apposite to be ignored. Diana defies Hippolyta to become a superhero; Sally pressures Laurie into becoming a superhero. Hippolyta is an ageless Amazonian queen on the throne of Paradise Island; Sally is a “bloated, aging whore dying in a Californian rest resort” (I.19) called “Nepenthe Gardens”.

[iii] In Marston, the Amazons were given Paradise Island as their sanctuary after being freed from male slavery by Aphrodite. Athena taught Hippolyta how to mould a child in clay into which Aphrodite breathed life. The necessity of men for the purpose of procreation is completely bypassed. For a feminist reading of Wonder Woman’s origin, see Robinson 27-63.

[iv] Moore explicitly reverses the traditional “active male/passive female” dichotomy with Dan and Laurie: “Dan’s a romantic and Laurie is hardheaded, practical, slightly embittered” (Khoury 114). He also subverts the expectations of a traditional power fantasy in which “the hero gets the girl” by having the girl leave the most powerful man in the world to be with a weaker man. Laurie explains: “I’m edgy in relationships with strong, forceful guys. I mean, with Dan, it isn’t like that. As a lover he’s more sort of receptive; the type you can pour your troubles out to.” (IX.8)

[v] One wonders what Moore, a well-known user and advocate of recreational drugs (“it’s difficult to overestimate the impact of psychedelic drugs on my life and work” (Khoury 19)), make of Cooke’s pious attempt to introduce a morally “correct” anti-drug message in Laurie’s story. Leaving aside the question of morality and focussing solely on artistic merits, it’s still hard to avoid the conclusion that nothing Cooke and Conner have done in Silk Spectre to represent the state of drug-filled hallucination hasn’t been done with ten times the intelligence and originality in Moore’s and J.H. Williams III’s Promethea.

[vi] As Moore wryly observes in “Invisible Girls”: “If I were a female comic character, I think I’d be inclined to dress up warm, wear three pullovers at once and never go anywhere without a pair of scissors.” (16)

[vii] Cooke’s construction of a close uncle-niece relationship between Hollis and Laurie seems at odds with the original Watchmen. After Laurie has walked out on Jon in Book III, she turns to Dan for help because he is the only person she could turn to. When he suggests that they call on Hollis together, she only agrees to walk over there with him and doesn’t indicate any particular closeness to Hollis. After their violent encounter with the knot-tops in the alley, she declines to visit Hollis altogether: “I’ve had enough super-hero stuff for one day” (III.16). Hardly “dear uncle Hollis” stuff.

[viii] A valid question to ask is how prominently do Laurie and Sally feature in the books of the other male characters. The answer should offer a clue as to where the priority of the Before Watchmen series lies.

[ix] It is arguable that the film has even improved the book at this point. By omitting Sally’s kissing of Eddie’s photo and having Sally tell Laurie: “You asked me why I wasn’t mad at him. Because he gave me you,” the emphasis has shifted from the exoneration of Eddie to the reconciliation of the women.

[x] In the same way that Watchmen can be called a “deconstruction” of a superhero comic, Maus can be called a “deconstruction” of a war propaganda comic and Ghost World a “deconstruction” of a sexy teen girl comic. I always find it sad and amusing that in Empire Magazine’s 2008 “The 50 Greatest Comic Book Character” list, Vladek Spiegelman came in at no.13, behind Superman at no.1, Batman at no.2, Judge Dregg at no.7 and Joker at no.8!

Who Whitewashes the Watchmen? Part 1

Posted on May 27, 2013 by William Leung

This is the first of a two part essay. Part 2 is here.
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Anyone who has heard of Before Watchmen probably knows something about the related controversy even if they haven’t read a single issue of the series. Despite attempts by DC to present the series as the official prequels to Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’ mid-1980s classic Watchmen, many fans of the original have questioned the necessity and legitimacy of the prequels. It didn’t help DC’s credibility much that both Moore and Gibbons have spoken out against the series. Moore fiercely denounced it as a cynical exercise in greed and stupidity (e.g. Amacker), while Gibbons described it as being “really not canon” (Yin-Poole par.17).[i] After ten months, nine titles and 37 issues, the series finally ended in April with the publication of the final issue. However, this probably isn’t the last we have heard of Before Watchmen: DC has scheduled to relaunch the series in a four-volume collector’s edition in June and July.

While the series might not have been the unequivocal success that DC was banking on, one creator seems to have risen above the controversy to receive both popular and critical adulation. The creator’s name is Darwyn Cooke. Cooke is writer and artist of the six-issue Minutemen, and writer of the four-issue Silk Spectre, illustrated by artist Amanda Conner. A survey of the major reviews of Minutemen and Silk Spectre reveals that almost every critic has something positive to say about them.[ii] Grant Morrison has singled them out for praise—“Amanda Conner’s stuff is brilliant … and Darwyn Cooke’s Minutemen is great” (Sneddon par.42)—and a few commentators have even gone so far as to call the books worthy additions to the Watchmen universe.[iii] About this overtly positive consensus I believe something must be said. While I agree with the majority of critics that the quality of the art work in Minutemen and Silk Spectre is beyond reproach, I have deep reservations about the tenor and preoccupations of Cooke’s writing. Given the almost universal acclaim enjoyed by Cooke’s titles and the willingness of so many critics to accept his revision as worthy of Moore and Gibbons, I believe it is important that a clear dissenting case be made.

Watchmen, Deconstruction, Reconstruction

To address the problems of Cooke’s revision, it is useful to reiterate what Watchmen was “about”. Watchmen has been called a “deconstruction” of a traditional superhero comic (e.g. Thomson). While the term is overused, it still aptly summarizes the intent of Moore and Gibbons. In brief, deconstruction refers to a critical strategy aimed at exposing the unquestioned assumptions and internal contradictions in a traditional discourse. The target of Watchmen’s deconstruction is specifically the heroic power fantasy offered by traditional superhero comics. The question “Who watches the watchmen?” not only invites readers to consider the real-world implications of power abuse by “heroes” who have appointed themselves the world’s guardians, it also appeals on a meta-textual level to the same readers—those literal “watchmen” watching the pages of the story unfold—to be self-critical about their consumption of such heroic power fantasy.

And make no mistake about it: traditional superhero comics cater mostly to the heroic power fantasy of heterosexual males. Part of Moore’s and Gibbons’ campaign in Watchmen was thus to disrupt the expectations and prejudices of this dominant demographic. Instead of a linear story supporting a singular heterosexist worldview, Watchmen’s narrative is deliberately ambivalent and multilayered, including subplots, digressions, time shifts, alternate scenarios, allusions, parodies, and addendums. The intent is to challenge the monolithic notion of “heroism” and explore the richness and complexity of ordinary, unheroic lives. In addition, the book explicitly deflates the heterosexual male ego by presenting a catalogue of unheroic males. Rather than aspirational figures such as Superman, Batman, Wolverine, the readers are presented with “heroes” in the shapes of a narcissist, a rapist, a zealot, an impotent and an H-bomb. The fact that so many readers have still read some kind of fantasy antihero into Rorschach has earned an appropriately scornful response from Moore.[iv]

On the surface, Cooke’s projects appear to be attuned to Moore’s and Gibbons’ deconstructive spirits. He mentioned in an interview that Minutemen deal with hard-core topics such as “homosexuality, sadism, opportunism, greed, self-interest” (Truitt par.18). But then he felt the need to add this: “because it has to have it in order for me to be passionate about it, somewhere in the kernel of it is the heroic ideal” (Truitt par.18). And herein lies the problem. Cooke’s interest is not in deconstruction but in reconstruction, i.e. reaffirming the conservative, nostalgic moral paradigm of a traditional heroic power fantasy. Whereas Moore was interested in demolishing heroic stereotypes in order to explore the humanity beneath, Cooke is more interested in reinforcing stereotypes in order to prescribe for humanity what is and isn’t heroic. Under Cooke’s revision, a critique of heroic constructs has reverted to a defence of heroic constructs. This makes Minutemen and Silk Spectre, in my opinion, a diverting misappropriation at best and a grotesque travesty at worst. I have chosen to examine three areas: (i) the stereotyping of sexual minorities in Minutemen, (ii) the whitewashing of heterosexist violence in Minutemen, and (iii) the affirmation of paternal authority in Silk Spectre.

Reconstruction 1: Lesbian Martyrs and Gay Villains

The original Watchmen was ground-breaking in its depiction of sexual minorities. Moore has long been a supporter of gay rights (e.g. Gaines), and his explicit inclusion of gay characters could be seen as an expression of this support. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to expect from Moore any didactic portrayal of gay people as “positive role models”. Moore’s gay men and women are diverse, complex and flawed—just as people are in real life. His characters aren’t one-dimensional caricatures and their individualism, autonomy and rights to exist are taken for granted.

In Book 1 of Watchmen, Moore did something unprecedented in a mainstream superhero comic: he includes a normative image of a gay couple holding hands in public (Figure A1).[v]

The image explicitly normalizes homosexuality and challenges the genre’s tradition of making gay men invisible, risible or abominable. The placement of the gay diners in the midst of the “hero” and “heroine” Dan and Laurie expresses Moore’s egalitarian argument that everyone is a hero in his or her own story, and the lives of non-traditional ordinary folks are just as important as the lives of traditional superheroes.[vi]

Moore took this concern further by including among his minor characters a dysfunctional lesbian couple. The remarkable thing about the couple Joey and Aline (Figure A2) is that they embody everything that traditional comic book readers are likely to find objectionable in women: loud, assertive, opinionated, and so butch-looking that people call them “fella[s]”.

Joey especially is rude, bossy, prone to violent outbursts, and even physically assaults Aline in public. Yet, by taking an interest in these women and depicting them against the “Hiroshima lovers” shadow in the context of Adrian’s alien attack (Figure A3), Moore rewrote the comic book assumption that such people are unimportant and have no rights to exist. Their deaths are a reminder that every life is a “thermodynamic miracle” and an indictment of the type of heroic ego that would justify mass murder as a master plan.

The same conviction applies to Moore’s exploration of superheroes. Rather than perpetuating the myth that superheroes are heroic heterosexuals, he saw that dressing up to fight crimes is more likely to be psychologically appealing to outcasts and minorities. Accordingly, he made three of the eight original members of the Minutemen gay. Silhouette/Ursula Zandt is the lesbian in the group. Although Ursula as a character barely exists in Watchmen, what we saw of her suggests she is the opposite of conventional. As drawn by Gibbons, she has a sharp, angular face, an androgynous haircut, wears a kinky black leotard and smokes a phallic cigarette. That her only line in the book is a sarcastic jibe about Sally’s Polish heritage (Figure A4) suggests that she wasn’t meant to conform to any “nice girl” stereotype.

Cooke said in an interview that Ursula is “the hero” of Minutemen (Truitt par.12). It is possible that his take on Ursula is inspired by the character of Valarie Page in Moore’s other masterpiece, V for Vendetta. Yet, whereas Moore had the good sense to give Valarie an independent voice and make her an inspiration to another woman, Cooke does something far less inspiring with Ursula: he refashions her into a romantic martyr and erotic fetish for straight men. He claimed without a hint of irony in the interview: “[P]eople are really going to dig her” (Truitt par.13). As drawn by Cooke, Ursula has become a petite, chicly dressed and conventionally attractive young woman (Figures A5-6), and her main function in the book is to serve as the “conscience” of Minutemen and an object of unrequited love for the straight male narrator, Hollis Mason.

In other words, Moore’s attempt to shake up the genre by challenging readers to take notice of the kinds of gay characters they wouldn’t expect to see in a superhero comic is sabotaged by Cooke in favour of a hetero-friendly paradigm about hot-looking lesbians and hot-blooded straight men. In Book 2, Ursula finds sanctuary in a Catholic church after being wounded by a stray bullet during her investigation of a paedophile ring. Had Moore written the scene, no doubt he would have recognized the Catholic Church as an institution plagued by its own child abuse problems and developed an argument that calls into question any simplistic dichotomy of “good” and “evil”. Yet, such social, historical and philosophical inquiries seem beyond the scope of the literal-minded Cooke, who piles on the religious sanctimony and romantic clichés instead (Figure A7).

Ursula appeals to a statue of Christ to “love [her]”, and Christ answers her call by sending her an “angel” in the person of Hollis. The writing is mawkish to the point of being embarrassing: “He picked me up and bore my burden, and he told me to be still. He told me he loved me”. If the spectacle of a knight in shining armour rescuing a damsel in distress isn’t clichéd enough, Cooke’s decision to punctuate the sequence with soft-porn images of Ursula being bathed by her lover Gretchen (Figure A8) makes clear his strategy of treating lesbianism as a delectable spectacle for straight men.

Just as lesbianism is treated as a straight romantic fetish, so male homosexuality is treated as an object of abomination. Bizarrely, Cooke appears to think that romanticizing lesbianism has earned him a license to gay bash with impunity. While Moore’s Nelson Gardner/Captain Metropolis and Hooded Justice were hardly paragons of virtue,[vii] nothing in Watchmen prepares one for the hatchet job done on them in Minutemen. Cooke has rehashed almost every negative gay stereotype in his jaundiced revision of these characters. Nelson is a nincompoop, a publicity whore, a drama queen, a pillow biter; Hooded Justice is a sadist, a murderer, a rapist, a suspected serial paedophile. Cooke has no interest in exploring or understanding these men’s history, relationship and psychology. Instead, every book puts forward sensational scenarios to consolidate their corruption, hypocrisy and monstrosity:

In Book 1, Nelson and Hooded Justice mastermind a mission that leads to the wrongful burning of a firecracker factory. They shamelessly present their mistakes to the public as a successful intervention of a firearm smuggling operation.

In Book 2, Nelson is tied up and raped by Hooded Justice (Figure A9). This sinister sequence is intercut with Hollis’ and Ursula’s investigation of a circus where children are known to go missing, which establishes an explicit link between sadism, male homosexuality and paedophilia.

In Book 3, Nelson sends his new toy boy lover to intimidate Hollis into dropping his plans to publish Under the Hood. Cooke legitimizes the straight male disgust at homosexuality by gratuitously turning Dollar Bill into a spokesman for homophobia (Figure A10). Bill tells Hollis: “I’ll be listening to Metropolis, and I’ll suddenly be thinking about him and Justice and it makes me kind of sick to my stomach”—an attitude Cooke pointedly refrains from disavowing or ironizing.[viii]

In Book 4, Nelson and Hooded Justice hypocritically expel Ursula from the Minutemen, and go hustling in “boy’s town” rather than bringing Ursula’s killer to justice. It takes Sally in her kick-ass mode to hunt down and take out the killer. Sally is disgusted by the gay men and tells them contemptuously: “You two should be doubly ashamed. You call yourselves men? Clean up this mess. It’s all you’re good for.”

In Book 5, Nelson and Hooded Justice lead a heroic duo Bluecoat and Scout to their deaths in a mission to foil a Japanese terrorist plot to launch a nuclear attack from the Statute of Liberty. Bluecoat and Scout are revealed to be a father and son team, and their selfless heroism contrasts sharply with the corrupt egotism of the gay duo.[ix]

In Book 6, Nelson wallows in self-pity and betrays Hooded Justice by revealing his hideout to Hollis. After Hollis hunts down and kills Justice, Nelson “screech[es]” like a drama queen and blows up his compound ala Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” (Figure A11) while Hollis helps his injured “best friend” Byron/Mothman away.[x] The insinuation is that Nelson is a self-pitying degenerate destined to spend the rest of his life alone, whereas Hollis can look forward to being a surrogate father to Sally’s daughter and a mentor to the neighbourhood’s kids.

Reversing Watchmen’s subversion of conventional morality and sexual stereotypes, Cooke has reconstructed a good-versus-bad dichotomy in which a fetishized lipstick lesbian represents “good”, two despicable gay men represent “bad”, and a noble straight man represents “normal”. In this way, he has undone much of Moore’s and Gibbons’ progressive depiction of sexual minorities and replaced it with some banal heterosexist clichés.

Reconstruction 2: Macho Antihero and Legitimate Rape

Another revolutionary aspect of the original Watchmen was its deconstruction of the genre’s valorization of aggressive masculinity. Some examples of this type of “macho antihero” are Conan the Barbarian, the Punisher, Wolverine, Deadpool, and just about any male protagonist from a Frank Miller comic. The heroic power fantasy projected by this macho antihero stereotype explicitly pampers the male readers’ ego, so it follows that one of the macho antihero’s essential attributes is his sexual aggression towards women. In the course of the macho antihero’s adventure, he is expected to bed many women and break many female hearts; he is just too much of a stud to tie himself down to one woman.

Even such fantasy tends, however, to draw a line between sexual aggression and actual rape. While the macho antihero’s code of honor usually allows him to rough-handle women (e.g. pinching their butts; shoving them aside in battles; knocking them out “for their own good”), very rarely would the macho antihero be depicted as a rapist: a role reserved for villains.[xi] The underlying assumption is that the macho antihero doesn’t need to rape; he can work his way up the skirt of any attractive female who isn’t already throwing herself at him. Besides being sexually endowed, the macho antihero is a rough diamond, an action man, a warrior, a truth-speaker and a follower of his own inexorable code of macho honor.

In Watchmen, Moore and Gibbons created Eddie Blake in order to completely demolish this stereotype. He is their nightmarish version of a macho antihero turned brutal misogynist/homicidal maniac. The cigar and machine gun associated with him are obvious phallic symbols, yet his phallus is emphatically used to hurt, intimidate and destroy. Moore and Gibbons went out of their way to show Eddie’s brutal misogyny in two overtly confronting scenes: the attempted rape of Sally, and the murder of a pregnant Vietnamese girl. The story is complicated by the fact that, some years later, Sally has a one-night stand with Eddie, which results in the birth of Laurie. However, this development isn’t meant to exonerate Eddie. In Sally, Moore broke new ground by using superhero comics as a medium to explore the psychology of an abused woman.[xii] For this exploration to have any credibility or substance, the following points are crucial:

Eddie tries to rape Sally, and the act is brutal (Figure B1). She clearly says “no”, but he still tries to rape her. As drawn by Gibbons, the violence is unflinching. We see the fear in Sally’s eyes and the blood in her mouth as Eddie punches her face and kicks her gut. Hollis describes being haunted by the memory of “bruises along [her] ribcage” (II.32). Laurie is outraged at Rorschach’s suggestion that the “alleged” rape is a “moral lapse”: “You know he broke her ribs? You know he almost choked her?” (I.21)

Some years later, Sally sleeps with Eddie and becomes pregnant with Laurie. This episode happens off-stage. Her motivation isn’t spelt out, but in her own words: Larry was “[never] there”; she tried to be angry with Eddie but “couldn’t sustain the anger”; and he was “gentle” and “gentleness [in a guy like that] … means you reached some of that magical romance and bullshit that they promise you when you’re a kid” (IX.7).

Their one-night-stand (“it was just an afternoon, in summer. He stopped by” [XII.29]) fills Sally with shame, confusion and self-hatred for the rest of her life. She hides the truth from Laurie because she is afraid that if Laurie finds out, she would resent and despise her.

Despite Sally’s feelings for Eddie, she wouldn’t let him anywhere near Laurie, believing he is the kind of man capable of molesting his own daughter: “I know what you are, Edward Blake. I’ve know what you were for twenty-five years, and don’t you forget that.” (Figure B2)

In short, Moore and Gibbons de-romanticized the macho antihero stereotype by insisting on the actuality and consequences of Eddie’s violence, especially the physical, emotional and psychological damages he inflicted on Sally. This doesn’t mean that they made Eddie completely unsympathetic; they just didn’t make him sympathetic on account of his aggressive masculinity. There is poignancy about a man so conscious of his guilt that he couldn’t even bring himself to confess to a priest and has to pour his heart out instead to a petty ex-criminal: “I did bad things to women. I shot kids in ‘Nam!” (II.23) There is also a touch of poetic justice to the idea that a violent misogynist should find himself yearning for the love and respect of a strong-minded daughter at the end of his life. Yet, while the book makes an effort to humanize Eddie, the last thing it offers is the luxury to admire and celebrate his aggressive masculinity.

In Minutemen, Cooke throws all this out of the window and sets out to retcon Eddie into a conventional macho antihero.[xiii] Interestingly, the whitewashing of Eddie comes in tandem with the blackening of Nelson and Hooded Justice. This is noticeable already in Book 1’s introductory vignettes. Even when Eddie is about to beat someone senseless with a stick, Cooke ensures that maximum sympathy is marshalled for him by putting in his mouth an out-of-character confession that he experiences “moments of uncontrolled rage brought on by traumatic events in my childhood” (Figure B3). In contrast, the vignettes about Hooded Justice and Nelson are limited to revealing the grotesque sadism of the former (killing a man even after he has dropped to his knees begging for mercy) and the pompous vanity of the latter (taking a bath in his penthouse and bossing a manservant around).

The introductory vignettes seem a minor quibble compared to what Cooke does next to exonerate Eddie: retelling the attempted rape of Sally to call into question whether it was an attempted rape. Cooke employs a number of strategies to this ends. First, he writes the victim out of the picture: no image of Sally is shown immediately before, during or after the attempted rape. In the absence of any image showing Sally’s bloody mouth, bruised body, broken ribs, or a scene showing her recuperating in hospital, the incident becomes mere hearsay, a product of Hooded Justice’s biased perception and Nelson’s prissy overreaction. Second, Cooke prefaces the Minutemen’s emergency meeting by a light-hearted image of Hollis reading a comic book (Figure B4).

This alters the tone of the incident and supports Eddie’s claim that he is being trialled by a “kangaroo court”. Whereas Moore repeatedly called the incident “rape”, Cooke plays legal semantics with words such as “apparently” and “attacked” (at common law, Sally’s apprehension of danger is enough to make it an “assault”). Third, Eddie is no longer the cocky, unrepentant scoundrel who taunted Hooded Justice even after committing a serious crime. Instead, he is a vulnerable, confused, contrite “kid” who pleads his case poignantly with his peers: “Let me apologize to Sally. I’ll make it up to her, I promise. This is all I have. Please don’t throw me out” (Figure B5).

By omitting any visual evidence of Sally’s injury, Cooke gives weight to the theory that what happened is as Eddie says: a harmless miscommunication between him and Sally. So the emphatic “ENN OH” that Sally tells Eddie is now re-spelt “maybe”, and rape is something that a rapist can just “make up” to the victim with an apology.

The retconning goes further. When Eddie’s peers refuse to forgive him, Cooke turns the scene around to allow Eddie to become judge and jury of his peers (Figure B6).

The incident set up by Cooke in Book 1 to establish Nelson’s and Hooded Justice’s corruption now allows Eddie to turn the tables on his accusers: “We blew up a goddamn warehouse full of firecrackers and we told the world we’d saved them from Axis terrorists.” Eddie’s righteous indignation is also explicitly sexuality-based: he sees heterosexual rape as no worse than homosexuality: “You want to talk about perverts? You sick fucks are going to judge me?” Then, Cooke reverses Moore’s and Gibbons’ humiliating spectacle of Eddie being caught with his pants down by showing Eddie skilfully defeat Hooded Justice in a scuffle. While holding down Hooded, Eddie reiterates his righteous contempt for the disgusting gay men: “Stop squirming, you pansy”; “Stop right there, missy. I’ll choke your boyfriend to death”. And with a stinging anti-gay taunt: “Bunch of fags. Go fuck yourself”, Eddie exits the scene with his gun cocked and his head held high. In contrast, Nelson is left embarrassed and exposed, the panel cutting off half his face as his metaphorical hair pins fall out. In light of this, the supposedly ironic propaganda cartoon that completes the sequence—“What a man!”—can be read literally as a valorization of Eddie’s gutsy exposure of his teammates’ hypocrisy.

Cooke further consolidates the theory that the rape is “legitimate” in his depiction of Eddie’s reunion with Sally in Book 4. In the original Watchmen, Sally describes their reunion like this: “I shouted at him. He looked surprised, couldn’t image why I’d bear a grudge …. I just couldn’t sustain it, the anger” (IX.7). This suggests among other things that Eddie is a man so morally deficient that he felt no qualms about casually dropping by to woo a woman he has bashed and tried to rape. Instead, Cooke whitewashes their reunion by placing them in a completely honorable setting: at the graveside of the martyred Ursula. Dressed in a nice clean suit to pay his respects to his fallen comrade (those “bunch of fags” Nelson and Hooded are the only ones who didn’t show up), Eddie indeed “ma[kes] it up” to Sally. He taps her gently on the shoulder. She, not he, looks “surprised”. There is no shouting, no attempt to sustain her anger, and her uneasiness is easily quelled by his manly reassurance of his good will. Cooke then treats us to an extended flashback to Eddie’s participation in the Pacific War, which becomes a retcon version of the later Eddie in Vietnam.

In contrast to Moore’s hyper-masculine psychopath who found his true element in the killing fields of wars, Cooke’s Eddie is portrayed as an innocent soldier poignantly losing his innocence in a contrived scenario worthy of any military tearjerkers. Injured on the battlefield, Eddie was rescued by a kind-hearted Solomon woman and her little boy (Figure B7).

Despite their cultural and linguistic differences, he bonded with the pair because this was the first time anyone had treated him with kindness. He was devastated when his nasty commander gave orders to bomb the natives’ village and he could do nothing to save their lives. So, Eddie once again learned that life is a bitch and one must play hard to survive: he killed the nasty commander that killed the woman and boy. Apparently, the war also brought out something of the poet-philosopher in the uncouth Eddie, and he teaches Sal a lesson from the school of hard-knocks: “You have to be able to look it in the face for what it is and forgive yourself.” (Figure B8)

Sally reacts by looking away demurely like a little girl, acknowledging the potency of Eddie’s manly eloquence. So Moore’s and Gibbons’ morally bankrupt aggressor has morphed into a salt-of-the-earth gentle giant spouting pearls of wisdom to purify a woman’s soul. Presumably, the shooting of the pregnant Vietnamese woman thing (Figure B9) is just an isolated incident that happens along with all the other shits that happen by the time Eddie gets to ‘Nam.

And because Eddie is such a rough diamond, macho badass and poet-philosopher, Sally naturally falls in love with him and offers him her body and soul. Their reunion is no longer “just an afternoon, in summer. He stopped by. I tried to be angry …. I just felt ashamed” (XII.29). It is now retconned into a serious relationship which she wholeheartedly embraces and passionately enjoys. In contrast to Dr Manhattan’s epiphany that Sally “loves a man she has reasons to hate” (IX.26), Cooke’s version of Sally really has no reasons to hate Eddie except that their consensual relationship didn’t work out the way she wanted. So, trauma, anger, shame, guilt and emotional dependency which are the complex symptoms of an abuse victim are reduced to stereotypical female neurosis and jealousy that Eddie is just too much of a stud to settle down with her. And what Moore and Gibbons had the good sense to leave out, Cooke exhibits in full chauvinistic detail: he not only depicts Laurie’s conception as the result of a quick shag between Eddie and Sally in the lavatory on Sally’s wedding day, he also depicts it as a facetious homage to the famous Tijuana bible image in the original Watchmen (Figures B10-11).

The contrast in concept and execution is stark. In Moore’s and Gibbons’ depiction, the three panel sequence offers an incisive critique of gender violence in comics:

Panel 1: A confronting image of sexualized violence is presented. Sally is on her hands and knees, spewing blood while exposing her cleavage to the readers. Sally’s “rescuer” Hooded Justice stands over her. He is unsympathetic to her plight and tells her to cover up, insinuating that she is partly to blame for Eddie’s violation of her.

Panel 2: The scene abruptly changes to a page from a Tijuana bible. The crudely drawn porno cartoon reiterates the misogynistic stereotype that women invite rape and enjoy “rough” sex. But the comic-within-a comic device makes the readers self-conscious that they are reading a comic book, and reminds them of the genre’s tendency to eroticize sexual violence. Covering the most explicit part of the porno cartoon and frustrating the (male) readers’ gaze is a woman’s red-varnished fingernail and the libido-dampening caption: “Mother, this is vile!”

Panel 3: The image zooms out and we see that the speaker is Laurie, who tosses the porno comic aside in disgust and scolds Sally for accepting this kind of degrading treatment of women. The comic book tradition of eroticizing sexual violence is undercut by a woman’s angry, accusatory voice.

In Cooke’s depiction, the three panel sequence is all about celebrating male sexual conquests and boosting male ego, and would not be out of place in any seedy frat boy sex comedy:

Panel 1: A tawdry image of frivolous sex is presented. Eddie is seen screwing Sally in the lavatory. Good old Eddie has finally vindicated his manhood by knocking up the girl who thought she could say “no” to him.

Panel 2: Larry Schexnayder, the bumbling beta male, anxiously asks his bride why she is taking so long. He is stupidly imperceptive that he has been cuckolded by a real man.

Panel 3: The image zooms in on Sally’s face. With a dazed expression, she fobs off Larry while enjoying being banged by Eddie. Significantly, the readers’ perspective corresponds to Eddie’s: they are positioned as Eddie giving it to Sally. Her line “Done in a minute” is sexually suggestive and anticipates the come-shot that happens off panel.

Thus a subtle, incisive critique of sexual violence is transformed into a moment of adolescent toilet humor and phallocentric double entendre in complete support of Eddie’s virility. This more or less summarizes the tenor of all six books of Minutemen. Cooke has ensured that just about anything Eddie does is given an explicit or implicit justification. Even the “twist” in Book 6, if one thinks about it, is really all about setting up a big finish to demonstrate what a cool badass Eddie is. In the original, Eddie’s suspected part in the murder of Hooded Justice was part and parcel of his nasty, vicious personality. Hooded Justice was completely right to interrupt the attempted rape, yet Eddie not only wouldn’t admit that rape is wrong but also wouldn’t allow the perceived blemish to his manhood to go unrevenged. And rather than confronting Hooded upfront, he likely resorted to a secret assassination: a bullet to the head, J.F.K.-style.[xiv]

In Cooke’s version, everything comes together to vindicate Eddie. Hooded Justice is a sick bastard who is far sicker than Eddie. Eddie can effortlessly defeat him in head-to-head combat. Eddie’s “attack” on Sally is a harmless misunderstanding rather than a brutal rape attempt. Sally’s reunion with Eddie is a heart-warming romance rather than evidence of her vulnerability, confusion and psychological damage. And Eddie doesn’t even want to kill Hooded—he only wishes to “humiliate” him. The killer turns out to be the unwitting Hollis Mason, who publishes a sanitized version of Under the Hood as a cover to “protect” himself and those dearest to him.[xv] Eddie retains the ability to outsmart and outplay everyone even as his moral culpability is drastically reduced. His sage advice to Hollis: “there are only truths” (Figure B12) becomes the de facto “vision” of the series: it takes a real man to make lesser men see what they don’t want to see.

Eddie is now a macho antihero akin to Frank Miller’s version of Batman, a master tactician who follows his own code of morality and dispenses his own brand of badass justice, a man whose heroism lies in his manly indifference as to whether the world sees him as a hero. Moore and Gibbons’ deconstruction of a macho antihero has been fully reconstructed by Cooke into a traditional macho antihero.

[i] Some critics (e.g. Hughes) have accused Moore of hypocrisy for wanting to stop other people from revisiting Watchmen when so many of his own books are based on other people’s works. While I don’t have any strong objections to the idea of the Watchmen prequels per se, I don’t think the charge of hypocrisy against Moore is really tenable. There is surely a big difference between a writer borrowing elements from public domain classics to create original fictions in a different medium and a large corporation wielding copyright laws to develop a franchise explicitly marketed as being continuous with the most celebrated work of a disenfranchised writer.

[ii] As of 19 May 2013, Minutemen and Silk Spectre are the most favourably reviewed Before Watchmen titles on Comic Book Roundup: Minutemen scores 8.4; Silk Spectre scores 7.9. Scores for the other books are: Dr Manhattan 7.9; Ozymandias 7.0; Rorschach 6.9; Nite Owl 6.1; Moloch 5.7; Comedian 5.4; Dollar Bill 5.3.

[iii] E.g. MTV Geek: [Minutemen] honestly felt like a book I’ll be able to put on my shelf right next to Watchmen. It’s not the original work, but it’s also not, like everyone feared, detracting from Moore and Gibbons’ book… It’s enhancing it” (Zalben); Newsarama: “For the first time since reading the Before Watchmen prequels, I feel like the authors have actually added something to Alan Moore’s seminal work” (Pepose par.1); Superherohype: “Cooke has created back stories that not only don’t negate the original text but make it richer” (Perry, Minutemen par.4); “What [Cooke and Conner] have created is a good story that not only fits well into the Watchmen mythos, but could be removed from the lens of Watchmen and would still hold up” (Perry, Silk Spectre par.2).

[iv] See, e.g. Moore’s interview with Pindling: “I wanted to … make [Rorschach] as like, ‘this is what Batman would be in the real world’. But I have forgotten that actually to a lot of comic fans, ‘smelling’, ‘not having a girlfriend’, these are actually kind of heroic! So Rorschach became the most popular character in Watchmen. I made him to be a bad example. But I have people come up to me in the street and saying: ‘I AM Rorschach. That is MY story’. And I’d be thinking: ‘Yeah, great. Could you just, like, keep away from me, never come anywhere near me again as long as I live?’” (4.42-5.28).

[v] For an essay propounding the ingenious theory that these diners are actually Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis, see Gifford.

[vi] This overarching vision is expressed by Jon in his conversation with Laurie on Mars. At this epiphanic moment, the most powerful being in the universe is humbled by the realization that the existence of human lives is already a “thermodynamic miracle”; a person doesn’t need to be a “hero” to be important. Something of this vision is also expressed by V in V for Vendetta: “Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a loner, a fool, a villain, everybody. Everybody has their story to tell” (Chp 3).

[vii] In Watchmen, Hooded Justice is said to harbor neo-Nazi sympathies (II.30) and has roughed up several of his former boyfriends (IX.31). Nelson has made racist remarks about African and Hispanic Americans (II.30), and his ulterior motive in forming the Minutemen is explored in Dan Greenberg’s and Ray Winniger’s non-canonical role-playing games (see Callahan). Yet, even with these precedents in mind, Cooke’s portrayal still comes across as relentless in its negativity. Cooke isn’t the only Before Watchmen writer to try to hetero-normalize the Watchmen universe. In Len Wein’s Ozymandias, the “possibl[y] homosexual” Adrian Veidt is also “outed” as a heterosexual.

[viii] I suspect Cooke might plead that Bill’s attitude is “historically accurate” here (to make a Mad Men analogy: Don Draper is sexist, but that doesn’t make Matthew Weiner so), but the tenor of Cooke’s writing goes beyond historical accuracy. On Bill’s death, Hollis is unreserved about Bill’s integrity: “Bill was a good man and a good friend. I miss him.” (IV.5) The problem is that Cooke has done nothing in all six books to establish Bill’s goodness and friendliness except through his male-bonding scenes with Eddie and Hollis over their righteous disgust at Nelson and Hooded. This makes it hard not to infer that Bill’s homophobia is presented as being completely consistent with his goodness and friendliness.

[ix] The Bluecoat and Scout sequence is a good example of Cooke’s inability to transcend banal heroic antics even in a moment that is supposed to offer meaningful historical insights. The duo is obviously Cooke‘s attempt to comment on US treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. However, the duo comes across not as real people but as moralistic tools. If we compare Cooke’s cloyingly sanctimonious Scout to Moore’s refreshingly normal African-American boy Bernie, who doesn’t need to do anything heroic to convince us of his humanity and make us think deeply about the cultural construction of heroism—Bernie’s position as reader of the Tales of the Black Freighter makes him an “everyman” reader of Ur-heroic narratives—we have a decisive demonstration of what makes Cooke a mediocre writer and Moore a great one.

[x] Cooke’s moralistic pitting of the “best buddies” Hollis-Byron against the “degenerate lovers” Nelson-Hooded establishes a good-vs-bad dichotomy that the original Watchmen doesn’t support. In the reunion party at Sally’s house in Book IX, Nelson’s words clearly indicate that he has kept in touch with the mentally ill Byron: “I’d better go check outside. He should arrive soon, and I promised I’d meet him ….” (IX.11)

[xi] E.g. in the Sin City story “The Hard Goodbye”, Marv chivalrically knocks Wendy out to spare her witnessing his brutal revenge on Kevin. Rape as an act of honor is probably less common in mainstream US comics than in Japanese manga. E.g. in Kazuo Koike’s and Ryoichi Ikegami’s outrageously compelling The Injured Man (Kizuoibito), the alpha male hero’s violent sexual antics (which include the rape of a young teenage girl) are presented as unambiguously heroic. Moore’s essay “Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies” demonstrates that he is well aware of the problems with the genre’s depiction of women.

[xii] Moore is unequivocal about this point: “He raped her. He raped her and she still had Laurie with him some years later … she had consensual sex with him some years later. And I was trying to think, is this psychologically credible? And I could see that it was—I certainly didn’t want to say: ‘Ah, she secretly enjoyed being raped,’ or something like that. But I wanted to say that it might be more complex than that …. That there might have been, despite his behavior, there might have been some part of her that responded or that she felt guilty about the response…. I’m not saying that it makes it right for him to do those things or that she is right to return to an abusive partner; but I’m saying that it happens, that it’s a real part of how humans fit together” (Khoury 117-118).

[xiii] On the whole, the portrayal of Eddie is so favorable in the franchise that one wonders if DC had given an editorial mandate to redeem his character. The whitewashing is equally evident in Brian Azzarello’s six-issue Comedian, which elevates Eddie almost to a symbol of America’s troubled conscience by charting his Kurtzian descent into the heart of darkness. Significantly, none of the books mentions the rape of Sally or the murder of the Vietnamese woman—surely a glaring omission considering that Eddie’s yearning for Laurie is psychologically explainable as an outcome of his guilt about murdering his unborn child in Vietnam. In the original, Laurie’s throwing a glass of scotch into his face (IX.21) mirrors the Vietnamese girl cutting his face with glass (II.14).

[xiv] This point is offered as a speculation rather than as a fact in Watchmen. It is based on four pieces of information: (i) Eddie warns Hooded before he leaves: “I got your number … [O]ne of these days, the joke’s gonna be on you’ (II.7); (ii) Hollis conjectures that Hooded Justice’s real identity is circus strongman Rolf Müller, whose “badly decomposed body” was found “shot through the head” (III.30); (iii) Adrian asks: “Had Blake found Hooded Justice, killed him, reporting failure? I can prove nothing” (XI.18); (iv) at the white house cocktail party, Eddie jokes: “Just don’t ask where I was when I heard about J.F.K.” (IX.20)

[xv] I have trouble following Cooke’s reasoning in this episode. The facts are simple enough: Eddie wants to get back at Hooded Justice. He disguises himself as Hooded and tricks Hollis into believing that Hooded is the paedophile Ursula was looking for. This leads Hollis to hunt down the real Hooded and kill him in a scuffle. Years later, Hollis prepares to tell all in his book Under the Hood. Before the book’s publication, he receives a midnight visit from Eddie. Eddie shocks him with an account of what really happened, and advises him that “Mr Hoover and other interested parties” would prefer a “light-hearted”, “sunny reminiscence” of the truth. Out of a desire to “protect” his friends, Hollis agrees to rewrite the book, and the version of the book excerpted in Watchmen is a “sanitized” account of the truth. I have at least two problems with this revisionist history: (i) I fail to see how the pages from Under the Hood as they appear in Watchmen would have been acceptable to “Mr Hoover and other interested parties,” given Hollis’ explicit critique of the government’s role in manipulating the phenomenon of the masked avengers; (ii) given that Cooke has already established in Book 5 that Sally is strongly against the publication of Under the Hood (Moore’s Sally also angrily reprimands Hollis for mentioning the book to Laurie at the reunion party in Book IX.12), why doesn’t Hollis “protect” Sally’s privacy by censoring the parts relating to her? If the “truth” was as Cooke had painted them, I suggest the most plausible and sensible action for Hollis would have been to abandon publishing Under the Hood altogether. My impression is that Cooke is so determined to create a cool “gotcha” moment for badass Eddie that he is willing to ride roughshod over realism, plot logic and character consistency in order to achieve this sensational effect.

Read Part 2 here.

Flatland

Posted on April 13, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on comixology.
___________

The above is Reptiles, a lithograph print from 1943 by the famous Dutch artist M.C. Escher. Escher isn’t usually thought of as a comics artist. Yet, as this image shows, he was one — sort of.

So is this print a comic or not? Well, it depends on how you read it. The narrative here determines the form.

Do you see this as the story of a bunch of different reptiles crawling in single file out of an abstract design, over books and other objects, and back into the design? If so, then it’s a static illustration — a drawing of one moment in time.

On the other hand…do you see this as the story of a single reptile, depicted in various stages as it makes its journey from art to life and back again? If so then, despite the lack of panels, this is essentially a comic. It’s not a frozen moment, but a sequence.

Of course, you don’t really need to make a choice for one or the other. The title of the piece may indicate that there are a bunch of reptiles here, but much of the enjoyment of the image — and of Escher’s work in general — is the sense of moving pieces caught in a pleasurably regimented dance. Even if it’s not technically one reptile moving, the individuals are nonetheless interchangeable. You know that the reptile climbing the triangle is going to get to the top of the D & D die and that it’s going to blow smoke out of its nose when it gets there just as its predecessor did. The reptile blowing smoke will climb onto the little cup; the reptile on the cup will crawl back into the abstract pattern. Whether the image is showing a sequence as a comic would or merely implying it, the point is still that time and identity are flattened out across space.

Escher is hardly the only comics artist to use this sort of trick. Here’s a familiar example from Carmine Infantino.

A more sophisticated use of the trope can be found in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen. In that book, the character of Dr. Manhattan (Jon Ostermann) is essentially an Escher lizard who has achieved self-awareness. He knows that time is a pattern, and (like the observer of the print) he can see that pattern all at once, from the moment he crawls up out of the flat drawing to the moment he crawls back into it. His lifetime is a clockwork puzzle, unchangeable and simultaneous. Sequence and stillness fuse, and in doing so call into question both free will and identity.

In the panel above, Moore and Gibbons emphasize Jon’s disjunction in time by giving him two bodies in the same space. Laurie’s shocked reaction points out the weirdness of her big blue boyfriend — but it also comments on the weirdness of the way in which comics depicts sequence. After all, there are many pages of Watchmen in which you see two Manhattans side by side, or one on top of the other.

The difference between the first example and the second is not how many bodies (there’s more than one Manhattan in the second, too) but our perception of those bodies — not how many lizards are drawn, but whether we’ve decided to see them as a group or a sequence. Laurie is horrified when she wakes up in bed with double Jons because she’s suddenly allowed to view the world as Jon sees it — not as one body walking through time, but as multiple bodies in the same space. Her pleasure depends on not seeing the pattern.

Moore and Gibbons use the play of sequence and simultaneity to investigate comics form. But they also use it to look at how time and the perception of time affects human decisions and identity. Reptiles has more limited ambitions. Like most of Escher’s work, it’s clearly a goof, more in play than in earnest, posing frivolous questions (what kind of lizards are those? what’s in the book?) for the fun of it rather than for some profounder understanding.

And yet, the shallowness of Escher’s drawing is surely the point. Time becomes space when you flatten both out, but where can you go that isn’t flat? Laurie’s fright upon seeing the mechanics of narrative laid bare is itself part of the narrative, just as the lizards climbing up out of the page are still on the page. For those small animals, narrative is not a series of events; it has no starting point or ending point. Instead, it’s a cycle of greater and lesser abstraction; of flattening and inflating. Identity is the design of time dividing from itself; the only story is of story pulling itself from pattern and returning to it. Even the blue lizard watching lizards remains only the sketch of a lizard.

What makes Reptiles a comic, then, is the way that it crawls so determinedly betwixt and between the intriguing silence of those books and the flat silence of that pattern. If narrative is time and picture is space, these critters move through both and neither; they’re more amphibian than reptile. If they could talk, they might tell us not what it is to see all of time as a page, but rather what it is to be a surface — a space so thin it cannot tell whether it exists or not.

Imperialism and Pop Culture — Peter Suderman Interviews Me

Posted on March 10, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

I recently had an article in the print edition of Reason on Justin Hart’s Empire of Idea, a book about America’s efforts to influence world opinion. Peter Suderman interview me for a profile to run beside the article…but of course, I was over verbose, so most of my responses got cut. Peter, though, has kindly gave me permission to run the whole thing here instead.

Peter Suderman: What makes America so susceptible to foreign policy blunders?

NB: I think America’s tendency to stumble into foreign policy quagmires probably has a lot to do with the fact that we’re just everywhere. We’ve got a finger in every pie (and/or a foot on every neck, if you want to be more confrontational about it.) I think there’s just a
very strong ideological commitment to leading the world/solving all the world’s problems, which is partially expressed through spending tons and tons and tons of money on weapons — and once you’ve got all those weapons, there’s a huge incentive to use them, which reinforces the ideology, and you buy more weapons, and on and on and on.

PS: Do you think there’s a disconnect between U.S. policy/government elites and less-well-connected citizens when it comes to foreign policy? Or are they basically in sync?

NB: There are obviously a lot of Americans, of all walks of life, who enjoy the image of the United States as a superpower, and who identify with the US projection of power. On the other hand, there’s also a substantial number of folks who want us to be doing less. Obama won the Democratic primary basically as the less-imperialism candidate. But then, of course, in office, he’s projected force as enthusiastically, if thank God less incompetently, than his predecessor. So…I’d say that elites are more unified in their support for imperial adventures. Those adventures draw at least occasional substantial opposition from the public, but that opposition seems difficult to translate into elite action (except in cases of transparent policy failure, like Iraq).

PS: You’ve written an awful lot about pop-culture. Does pop-culture contribute in important ways to how America sees itself in the world? Are there particularly relevant, insightful pop culture portrayals of America’s foreign policy outlook?

NB: I think pop culture both reflects and can contribute to how America sees itself, or what America does. I guess the most obvious recent example of that is 24, which became a touchstone for pro-torture arguments.

I think Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ comic Watchmen is an extremely insightful look at America’s foreign policy. It was written in the 80s, obviously, but it’s still really relevant, I think. It’s about the allure of power and of saving others, about the utilitarian calculus of sacrifice that goes along with it, and about the way that that utilitarian calculus ultimately founders on the fact that no power is ever enough power, and that, however many bombs you have, the future really isn’t under your control. Ozymadnias’ piles and piles of dead bodies are meant to be a sacrifice on the altar of the new future — but the book strongly suggests that they are, really, just piles and piles of dead bodies. The fact that it’s the liberal one-worlder who turns out to be the mass murderer while the right-wing fascist nutball is repulsed by the violence is a nice reminder that imperialism can be centrist as well as extremist .

PS: What do you think America could have done to avoid being linked with
European colonialism? Or was that linkage inevitable?

NB: America has long had an isolationist strain; it seems at least possible that that could have had more of an influence than it did. Counterfactuals are hard to figure, though.

Reason ran a photo of me with the article as well…but looking at it again, I don’t think I can bear to reprint it. It’s just hard to avoid looking willfully smug in author photos, I guess. So if you want to see my shame, you’ll just have to pick up that issue of Reason.

Trial By Fire: Mad Max, Rorschach, and the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Kristian Williams

Three Scenes

In the climactic scene of the Swedish film Män Som Hatar Kvinnor — literally, “Men Who Hate Women”; released in the U.S. as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo[1] — the serial killer, Martin Vanger, fleeing from the heroine Lisbeth Salandar, runs off the road and flips his car. Injured and trapped, he pleads for his life as gas leaks from the tank: “I can’t… I can’t… I can’t move,” he cries piteously. “I can’t move. Help me. Please help me.” Lisbeth, however, can spare no feeling for the rapist and murderer who is suddenly at her mercy. She watches silently as the vehicle catches fire, and walks away while Vanger screams. We see the car explode behind her.

The image is distinctly reminiscent of another, filmed three decades before. In the final scene of 1979’s Mad Max, the cop — or ex-cop — Max Rockatansky finds himself similarly confronted with an enemy at his mercy. Here, too, a vehicle is overturned, leaking gas, and the villain pleads with the hero: “Don’t bring this on me, man. Don’t do this to me, please.” And here, too, the hero is unmoved. Max, in fact, takes a more active role that Lisbeth. He handcuffs the “Johnny the Boy” to the overturned truck, fashions an ad hoc fuse where the gas is leaking, and hands him a hacksaw, saying: “The chain in those handcuffs is high-tensile steel. It will take you ten minutes to hack through it with this. Now, if you’re lucky, you can hack through your ankle in five minutes.” As Max drives away, we see the explosion in the background.

The hacksaw shows up again a few years later in Alan Moore’s graphic novel, Watchmen.[2] In the sixth chapter, Walter Kovacs recounts how he became the masked avenger Rorschach: “1975. Kidnap case. Perhaps you remember. Blaire Roche. Six years old. . . . Thought of little child, abused, frightened. Didn’t like it. Personal reasons. Decided to intervene. Promised parents I’d return her unharmed.” He does, eventually, find the girl — or rather, her remains. Then Rorschach waits, hiding, for the killer to return home. When he does, Rorschach handcuffs him to an old stove, leaves him with a saw, and sets the building on fire. Unlike Lisbeth or Max, Rorschach stays to face what he has done: “Stood in street. Watched it burn. . . . Watched for an hour. Nobody got out.”

The Moment of Truth

In each of these stories, the incident with the fire — triumphant and horrifying — is treated as a revelation. It shows us what kind of person the hero really is.

Yet in all three stories, the hero had already been portrayed as ruthless and vengeful. Lisbeth had previously tortured and then blackmailed a rapist. Max had hunted down and killed other members of a murderous motorcycle gang, sometimes using torture to do so. And Rorschach’s methods are so extreme they even frighten other superheroes. But to kill a person who is helpless is presented as an ultimate transgression, a final forbidden threshold, a border at the outer limits of moral goodness.

All three heroes kill their helpless adversaries, if only by their inaction, but the event signifies different things for each of them. For Rorschach it is a transformation: When he sees that the kidnapper had killed the girl and fed her to his dogs, he recalls, “It was Kovacs who closed his eyes. It was Rorschach who opened them again.” For Max the crisis is the culmination of a process long underway: He had previously worried that “any longer out on that road, and I’m one of them. . . a terminal crazy.” By the end he has lost everything to the forces of barbarism — his friend, his family, his sense of his own goodness — and he does, finally, become a barbarian himself. The representative of law becomes an outlaw.

For Lisbeth, however, the revelation is different. As she watches Vanger burn, she flashes back to a scene of a child deliberately throwing gas on a middle-aged man, and setting him ablaze. In the second film of the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire, we learn that she was the girl; the man, her father; and she was acting to save her mother from his persistent abuse. Lisbeth was institutionalized as a result. Thus her character is revealed at the climax, but with reference to a transformation that occurred much earlier. And yet the two scenes are identified: she is, in some ways, still that little girl. And, watching Vanger burn, it is as though she is not only remembering, but re-living the first attack. In that sense, by the film’s identification of these acts, we again see the heroic transgression as both revelatory and transformative.

It is interesting to compare Lisbeth’s back-story and Rorschach’s. Walter Kovacs, too, saw his mother mistreated by men, and was himself “regularly beaten and exposed to the worst excesses of a prostitutes (sic) lifestyle.” The critic Katherine Wirick has persuasively pointed to textual evidence that he was sexually abused as well.[3] Then in one scene, Kovacs — just a little boy — attacks some older children who are threatening him. Fire is the weapon here, too: he burns one of the bullies, blinding him with a cigarette. After that he is institutionalized.

But Rorschach’s transformation comes later, like Max’s. And in both stories, the critical moment when they put themselves beyond the law comes as a kind of revelation, not only about them, but for them. Max has learned how fragile civilization really is, how easily chaos overtakes order. Rorschach, likewise, opens his eyes. As he watched the kidnapper’s house burn, he

looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone. . . . Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. . . . . Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.

Lisbeth, however, experiences the climactic scene not as a revelation, but as a return to painful memories. She has known for a long time the kind of world she is living in.

So Max abandons civilization for the wasteland, and Rorschach uses violence to impose order where none exists — but Lisbeth’s rejection of order takes the form of resistance. Martin Vanger is not merely a rapist and serial murderer. He is also wealthy and powerful, from a prominent family with a Nazi past. In the context of the story, he is a representative of the social order, and especially its worst aspects — corporate control, lingering fascism, racism, and male dominance. And Lisbeth’s father, too, (we learn in the sequels) is not only a misogynist and a bully, but a human trafficker operating with the protection of ta secret section of the intelligence services. It is not chaos, but the forces of order, that Lisbeth fears; and when she attacks her father, and later, when she lets Vanger die, she does so to protect the people she loves.

Redemption Without Forgiveness

Mad Max ends with Max driving into the desert, the explosion behind him, his transformation from law to lawlessness complete. But the movie’s sequel, The Road Warrior, tells the story of his redemption. After months, or possibly years, surviving as a kind of scavenger, Max helps to defend a small community against a horde of bandits and regains some of his humanity in the process. It is a story of redemption, but redemption without forgiveness: The people he has helped to save leave him stranded on the roadway, in the desert, alone. The future he has fought for, and the community he defended, have no place for him.

Rorschach’s redemption is equally ambivalent. He alone, among all the superheroes, cannot be blackmailed into silence after discovering that one of their own has attacked New York, killing millions but likely averting nuclear war. Ozymandias asks, “Will you expose me, undoing the peace millions died for? Kill me, risking subsequent investigation? Morally, you’re in checkmate.”

Dr. Manhattan, the Silk Specter, and the Nite Owl, all quickly acquiesce: “Exposing this plot, we destroy any chance of peace, dooming earth to worse destruction”; “We’re damned if we stay quiet, Earth’s damned if we don’t.” They soon agree to “say nothing.”

To which Rorschach replies: “Joking, of course.” He then interrupts further argument: “No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise.”

Rorschach’s unwavering position is just what we should have expected — not because he believes in moral absolutes, exactly, but because he believes that we alone are responsible for the world we live in. As he watched the fire that fatal night, years before, Rorschach realized, “This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us.” Later, in his last entry in his journal, he wrote: “For my own part, regret nothing. Have lived life, free from compromise . . . and step into the shadow now without complaint.” The only thing that Rorschach can be certain of is his own integrity, and so that becomes his absolute. He is unbending in his own moral code precisely because he has seen that there are no absolutes.

The other heroes, equally naturally, cannot allow him to reveal what he knows. The only way to stop him is to kill him, and Rorschach accepts this martyrdom. But it is significant, I think, that at the end he takes off his mask. Facing death, he becomes, once again, Walter Kovacks. In death, Rorschach rejoins humanity.[4]

Lisbeth Salandar fares better. She walks away from the burning car and returns to Mikael Blomkvist, her investigative partner and occasional lover. Later, he asks her:

“What happened out there? He didn’t die in an accident, did he? …”

“He burned to death.”

“Could you have saved him?”

“Yes.”

“But you let him burn.”

“Yes.”

Mikael thinks for a long moment, and lies down, exhausted. Lisbeth lies next to him. Struggling to speak, he says: “I would never have done that, Lisbeth. But I understand why you did it. I don’t know what you’ve been through. . . . Whatever it is you’ve been through — you don’t have to tell me. I’m just glad you’re here.”

“Thanks,” she says, and takes his hand.

Mikael’s reaction is complex. He neither idealizes nor judges. He does not justify her action, or forgive it. He wants only to understand, though he will not demand that she explain herself. It is a moment of deep compassion. Sympathetic understanding is a reaction not usually associated with heroism, but one most appropriate to tragedy.

Heroic Sacrifice

Understanding is not without its risks. The title of Watchmen’s sixth chapter, “The Abyss Gazes Also,” is taken from a quote of Nietzsche’s: “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” In the story this epigram refers, first, to Rorschach’s nihilistic epiphany and the change in character that overtakes him, and then, to the attempts of a prison psychologist to comprehend the workings of Rorschach’s mind. But the warning might apply to the reader as well: Our heroic fictions sometimes contain dangerous truths.

It is possible to read these stories — Mad Max, Watchmen, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — as revealing, not only the nature of these heroes, but the dark side of our heroic ideals. (That is, after all, the entire point of Watchmen.) The transformation of victim into avenger is central to revenge stories, of course, but in each of these three cases that transformation is also treated as a kind of loss. There may be some symbolism in the fact that both Rorschach and Max offer their victims an improbable and cruel chance for escape. Are they suggesting, from their own experiences, that the price of survival is severing a part of oneself?

The heroic figure is defined, in large part, by the risks he accepts and the sacrifices he makes. What these stories show is that, among the things he may risk — and sacrifice, if need be — is not merely his life, but his own moral standing. This risk, this sacrifice, cannot be understood only in terms of particular actions, but more broadly as such actions help to shape one’s character. At the end of the ordeal, a hero may well be a worse person.[5] We often hear of the heroic virtues — qualities such as courage, loyalty, and resilience — but less is said of the heroic vices. Prolonged exposure to violence may well leave one bitter, vengeful, suspicious, cruel, callous, even cynical and sadistic. In the revenge fantasy, it is precisely these attributes that motivate the heroic transgression.

Our heroes — Max, Rorschach, Lisbeth — are not just imperfect, they are deeply damaged. And their actions seem to occupy a space outside of our normal moral judgments. The deaths they cause cannot rightly be called justice, but neither are they merely murder. And these killers, whom we may love or admire, are not simply Good Guys, and are not quite villains. In this sense they might be thought of as monstrous. The evil they do is the result of their virtues, and the good that they do depends upon their vices. These two elements cannot be separated, they cannot be reconciled, and they do not cancel each other out. The heroic ideal subsumes, or surpasses, our moral categories; the heroic figure, however, is sometimes destroyed by the contradiction. Hence, the sense of tragedy. Hence, also, the need for redemption — to enter, again, into the moral community, to regain some measure of humanity.

[1] I’m writing specifically of the first film. The American film, and the original novel, on which the films were based, handle this scene quite differently.

[2] Here, I’m specifically discussing the comic. The saw is absent from the film version.

[3] Katherine Wirick, “Heroic Proportions,” The Hooded Utilitarian, April 5, 2012.

[4] This reading gives a double meaning to Dr. Manhattan’s earlier prediction: “I am standing in deep snow. . . I am killing someone. Their identity is uncertain.”

[5] It is interesting how commonly philosophers have forgotten about the effects on one’s character as a relevant moral consideration. Thomas Nagel, for example, has written: “the notion that on might sacrifice one’s moral integrity justifiably, in the service of a sufficiently worthy end, is an incoherent notion. For if one were justified in making such a sacrifice. . . then one would not be sacrificing one’s moral integrity by adopting that course: one would be preserving it.” Thomas Nagel, “War and Massacre,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 63. Notice that Nagel assumes that the person who embarks on the sacrifice and the one who remains when the sacrifice is over are substantially the same. One may tell a lie for decent and even justifiable reasons. If those reasons force one to lie repeatedly over a long enough period, however, it seems at least possible that one will lose the habit of truthfulness, and his estimation of its value may well decline. The notion that one’s integrity is preserved not only during such a shift in values, but through it, would seem to rob the notion of integrity of any content.

Why I Hate Watchmen

Posted on September 30, 2012 by Conseula Francis

When Noah announced this hate-fest, I knew immediately that I’d write about Watchmen. What was less clear to me was why—what is it about this book that irks me so much? Why do I silently roll my eyes every time someone starts waxing poetic about Moore’s genius?

The truth is, I should adore Watchmen.

It’s a comic book-loving English major’s wet dream—multi-genre, intertextual, metafictional. So much of what people identify as masterful in Watchmen matches up nicely with the things that gives me incredible intellectual joy in other books, the kinds of thing I try to get my students excited about in class.

Plus, it has superheroes in it. Despite the entrance fee to the comics scholars club being a complete disdain for all things superhero, I really love a good superhero story well told.

So, Watchmen should be a perfect storm of all things that fill me with geeky, intellectual joy. The only problem? I really, really dislike this book. So much so, that I’ve never managed to read all of it, despite numerous tries.

My husband bought Watchmen for me the first year we were married. Comic books moved into my house along with my new husband. I was hooked, powerless to resist the heady combination of new love and Spidey angst. While I would eventually develop my own comic book preferences (I quickly began to favor alternative, autobiographical, talky, snarky books), my comic reading tastes have been forever shaped by the books my husband loves best — Marvel’s superheroes. He loves Spider-Man; so do I. He adores Avengers; so do I. He thinks Kirby is a genius; so do I. He finds the X-Men insufferable; so do I. So when he, and every fanboy I knew, said I should read Watchmen, I fully expected to love it.

But I didn’t. Not even a little. I figured it was me, that there was some context or history or secret code I just wasn’t getting that prevented me from liking the book. But each time I’ve tried — when students ask about it in class, when the film came out, to write this piece — I have the same reactions.

I find Watchmen dull, flat, and, above all, pretentious. And I say this as a person who regularly tries to get students to see how funny Melville’s “Bartelby, the Scrivener” can be.

First, it is ugly. So ugly. I get that aesthetic and artistic quality are in the eye of the beholder. I love Jeffrey Brown’s and James Kolchaka’s styles, and wouldn’t call them pretty at all. My students and I regularly have arguments about whether or not Charles Schulz could draw well. So, yeah, I get that we can enjoy comics drawn in a bunch of different styles. But, c’mon, people. You can’t really enjoy looking at this book. It’s visually crowded, the people are unattractive, the colors are weird. And yes, the visual style is working actively to help tell the story of the ugliness of the world. I get it. But it doesn’t make this book any more pleasant to look at it.

I could let the ugliness slide, though, if the characters were in any way interesting. I feel no connection to these characters. I don’t care enough about Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl to trudge through his ornithological articles. Laurie Juspeczyk and Dr. Manhattan’s relationship fails to induce any sympathy. Rorschach and Ozymandias are just dicks. I don’t have to like characters to enjoy a story, but I do need to care something about the narrative arc they travel. And in Watchmen, there’s no single character whose life I care enough about to carry me through to the end.

And don’t get me started on that fucking pirate comic. Good god, people!

Most of all, though, I find the books seeming raison d’être, a critique of the superhero concept, to be just plain annoying. I just don’t buy that superhero stories are necessarily fascistic, that enjoying a superhero story makes you necessarily suspect, that we should always be suspicious of do-gooders. The cynicism of the story, and, frankly, the cynicism of many of its fans, is just plain tiresome — not artful, not clever, not profound, just tiresome. Like the hipsters slouching in the corner, smoking American Spirits, harshing on the squares, I find Watchmen guilty of trying way too hard.

So, let’s make a deal: I promise to nod politely whenever you to start to gush about this book, as long as you don’t expect me to join in.
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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