Every day I plant my seeds on twitter and see what trees will grow. When discussing the ongoing struggle against Time Warner and their child company DC Entertainment, particularly with regards to their campaign of exploitation against Alan Moore, I was chastised for framing the discussion in terms of black and white morality. Specifically, my argument is that all of the participants in the Watchmen project are in fact immoral.
I don’t see why people who are quick to condemn companies as entities shy away from judgement when talking about the men and women who carry out the offending actions. What DC is doing is wrong and the men and women who are working on these projects are wrong for working on the projects. I’ve heard it all about “they have families/mortgages, it’s not their fault” and blah blah blah. Personally, I make thirty thousand dollars per year. Darwyn Cooke is said to have received nearly half a million dollars for his Watchmen miniseries. So we can stop weeping for these poor starving artists who had no choice. Put your violins away.
Most people who know me flinch when I say: Watchmen is the greatest graphic novel of all time. Everybody protests, but my feeling is that they are protesting not the sentiment but rather that “greatest graphic novel of all time” is an answerable quantity. People want it to be unanswerable. Not coldly, flatly answered with “yes, there is a greatest–you read it already, years ago.”
This isn’t to say that better graphic novels aren’t possible in our medium’s future. Just that this book hasn’t been surpassed. Not surpassed in scope, intelligence, craft or cultural effect. Hasn’t been done yet.
Thimble Theatre is a better comic. It isn’t a graphic novel. Maus is important but it isn’t a graphic novel. No novel in comics form–no graphic novel–is greater than Watchmen. You have to deal with that. It isn’t an argument I am interested in having with people. As the greatest graphic novel yet created, it stands shoulder to shoulder with the other great testaments to the power of comics. Thimble Theatre, King Cat and so on. So then, some executives look at their legal documents and say: “yes. Let us add onto this story. That is a legitimate thing to do with a work of art. We shall commission a group of artists and writers to write so many spin-offs that the original work shall be dwarfed. Furthermore, as legal rights-holders we will insist that these new works are a part of the overall text that comprises Watchmen because we can.”
For actual decades, the devotees of this artform have struggled to see this medium treated as a legitimate field. One of the greatest arguments for graphic novels and comics in general as a legitimate creative artform has now been retrofitted as a hot summer crossover event. If art is to have any meaning to human culture then there should be some basic deference to the undisturbed value of the few works that have moved us forward as a people.
I just realized that in our best of poll, Watchmen was in fact the highest rated graphic novel (the selections ahead of it are all strips.)
Good to see Darryl in HU; I hope he comes back soon.
So I’ve basically been avoiding news about Before Watchmen in general but am sort of curious where the information on the half a million dollars pay package came from.
Also, why isn’t Maus a “graphic novel”? Not that I want to read a Eddie Campbell-style dissertation on the subject but I’m interested in why you feel that way.
Love the Peanuts strip! Very appropriate to this topic.
These Watchmen prequels seem like a terrible idea. (I’m actually curious about just how bad they will be, even though I don’t want to support the effort financially.) But from a moral standpoint, I’m not quite clear on what a “basic deference to the undisturbed value of the few works that have moved us forward as a people” entails. Do you think, Darryl, that the value of Moore’s graphic novel will be lessened by these adaptations? What kind of deference is appropriate for Watchmen? And who should be the ones to determine this? Works that society has recognized as important or “great” are often adapted, remixed, parodied and picked apart, sometimes horribly or in surprisingly innovative ways that speak to the rich possibilities of the original text and affirm its importance. I think the ethics of DC/Time Warner’s business practices are upsetting to say the least. Still I’m not sure that powerful works like Watchman can/should ever be left alone or policed in a particular way. But again, maybe this is not what you mean by deference.
Just leave the garden alone. Don’t pick the flowers, keep off of the grass and for goodness sake, don’t bring your own seeds to plant.
Just let it be.
I’m also curious why MAUS isn’t a graphic novel!
Qiana, to me there’s a difference between a work that is passionately and to some degree (inevitably) oppositionally engaged with a work (like Moore’s Lost Girls) and a blatant cash grab which (as Darryl suggests) purports to be a continuation of the original work.
So it’s somewhat about motivation; somewhat about marketing; somewhat about aesthetic approach and attitude. The lines are somewhat blurry, but I think they matter.
I’m curious as to why Maus isn’t a graphic novel too, Darryl. Is it because it’s (sort of anyway) nonfiction?
I thought Eddie Campbell had taught us that using “graphic novel” to refer to format rather than subjective artistic worth and intention was yesterday’s game.
Novels are fiction. End of.
“Hey, he drew himself as a wee mousie. It’s fiction.”
– Eddie Campbell
Spiegelman also wrote a letter to the New York Times asking them to remove it from the “Fiction” side of their bestseller list and to the Nonfiction. They complied…
The idea that Watchmen, of all things, is the greatest graphic novel ever is so alien to my experience of art that I find it fascinating. I’ve actually read Watchmen a couple of times to figure out why some people love it so. And while I can recognize the craft and intelligence that went into it, I’m still left with a work that lacks any of the humanity, humor, and depth to be found in the works of Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, J. Hernandez, G. Hernandez, etc. etc.
I do agree that “Before Watchmen” is a gross idea — whatever merit the original had is intrinsic to it being a stand-alone project with a specific set of creators.
Yet and still, /Watchmen/ remains unharmed. At this stage in its young life as a classic (twenty-five years), it remains invincible.
Certainly it isn’t challenged by Ghost World which was a short group of vignettes before Clowes decided to tie it in together, or the sprawling non-novelistic works of both Hernandezes.
I refuse to dignify comics’ attempt to genre-snub important works. /Pulp Fiction/ is one of the defining motion pictures of recent history, but people don’t say “yeah but it is a crime movie.” Nobody says that because it would be silly. Watchmen is easily the definitive classic of graphic novels. Like or not, you basically have to deal with that. It’s the Citizen Kane, Godfather, Pulp Fiction and a bunch of other equivilents.
And it deserves a lot better than to have its legacy second-guessed by everybody from you to Wolverinexx666 on Comic Book Resources.
The best graphic novel yet and no competition on the horizon, really.
“Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, J. Hernandez, G. Hernandez”
Do any of these guys actually express in their art a philosophically, psychologically, politically and historically richer perspective of the world than the works of Alan Moore? I’d like to see that argument, because it seems so clearly wrong. What they do have is more realism, but that’s not much more than an aesthetic bias. (I like them all, though.)
“I refuse to dignify comics’ attempt to genre-snub important works.” I wasn’t snubbing it on genre grounds. I think there have been some really great super-hero comics — by Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Jack Cole, Will Eisner and others. I just don’t think Watchmen is on the level of those works — let alone on the level of Jimmy Corrigan, David Boring, Wilson, The Education of Hopey Glass, etc. Just because a work is sprawling, it doesn’t mean it’s “non-novelistic” — the roman fleuve is by definition a sprawling work — a loose, baggy monster to use Henry James’ phrase.
But… Pulp Fiction is just a crime movie.
I have a feeling that once Chris Ware finishes Rusty Brown, it’s going to win the title of Indisputably Greatest Graphic Novel Ever in the hearts of a lot of people. Even taken alone, the last couple of chapters have been way up there.
“Do any of these guys actually express in their art a philosophically, psychologically, politically and historically richer perspective of the world than the works of Alan Moore?” The short answer is yes. The long answer would require a very long essay or even a short book. But in brief, the political critique of modern America to be found in Lint or The Death Ray seems to me much sharper than the politics of Watchmen. Both Lint and Andy are recognizable and plausible personality types whose character traits reflect dark aspects of the national psyche. That’s one example of many.
I know he didn’t just say “Death Ray” was better than “Watchmen.”
We got nothing to talk about, nothing in common, no language or shared cultural value. Hell no, not in our name, and bring me the head of John the Baptist.
That’s silly and destructive to say. That’s like saying “Truth and Consequences, NM” was a better movie than “Rear Window.” What value is there in just saying outrageous nonsense. It’s like you aren’t even taking comics seriously.
We get it: you like Clowes. But he has yet to touch the hem of Alan Moore’s wizard robe.
Okay; so I’m enjoying the comment thread — Darryl’s last made me crack up. But what I really want here is for Jeet to write a post about why Watchmen is mediocre (ideally for HU, but I’ll settle for it just being written), and for Jack Baney to write me a post about why Rusty Brown is great.
I’m probably doomed to disappointment — Jeet and Jack have spurned my advances before. But I keep trying….
Yeah, I’d go with the Comedian over Lint, just because that’s only a part of the Watchmen, but to each his own. Realism is to narrative like melody to music. I don’t mind it, but don’t require it.
Thanks, Noah, but I’m not a critic. To me, it’s just kind of obvious that Rusty Brown is great.
As for Chris Ware vs Alan Moore, I’d say that while they’re both extremely smart and talented, I probably like Ware a little better because his work is more personal. Some of those Jimmy Corrigan and Rusty Brown/Chalky White strips could only have been created by someone who has experienced extreme degrees of loneliness and self-loathing, whereas Moore doesn’t seem to put much of himself into his stuff. That’s probably an idiotic criterion for art that would put Shakespeare and Nabokov below Charles Bukowski, but like I said, I’m not a critic.
You’re a critic, Jack. A very interesting and funny one too.
I think Moore puts a lot of himself in his work…he’s just a very different person than Ware, I’d say. Loneliness and self-loathing aren’t where he’s coming from, for sure.
You’re a critic, Jack! You’re a wizard, Harry! Alan Moore killed Dumbledore.
But yeah, Noah’s right: autobiographically themed work isn’t necessarily more personal than more convenientional fiction.
BUT: speak to me of Charles Bukowski.
What I’ve read of “Rusty Brown” so far is ok, but inevitably Ware’s thematic concerns are a dead end. What comics needs is a higher ambition of emotional landscapes, not narrow-sliced depictions of pathetic super-hero obsessed nerds. That’s been what Ware has depicted throughout most of his career, sad to say. Based on Ware’s output I’d say alt-comics is not as separated from its super-hero roots as some people like to think. There’s still a lot of growing up to do.
And as far as the idea of the “Greatest Graphic Novel Ever,” I’d say there’s no such animal. There isn’t a single comics long-form work at least in this country that qualifies.
And just to piss of Ayo more, let me say it again- Pulp Fiction is not a great movie, not even a good one. Tarantino might not be propagating fascism, but he is responsible for propogating stupidity and that’s bad enough.
I agree with Darryl on Watchmen’s merits as best graphic novel…even if we include nonfiction, like Maus. I admit to being confused by Jeet’s antagonism toward it. The notion that Eisner, Ditko, or Kirby have produced superhero comics as good strikes me as totally off base… but, y’know, different strokes for different folks, I gues..
I heartily concur; Ayo’s right, Watchmen is indeed a towering edifice in whose shadows others work. May produce admirable stuff, great in many ways, better in some facets, but hardly up to the extraordinary combination of factors that makes Moore and Gibbons’ masterpiece so grand.
I’ve never read anyone object to Watcmen’s status as best gn ever on the basis of genre (though I imagine it’s happened). And while I don’t think it’s mediocre, in fact 8 think it’s pretty great, the notion that it is unquestionably the best graphic novel (defined here as a fiction in words & pictures?) and that to even discuss it is silly betrays an intellectual stinginess I can’t get behind. It also doesn’t speak to the dubious morality of DC or the creators working for it. Would it be OK if the shafting of Moore and Gibbons had taken place but the work was only the fifth best graphic novel of all time?
No, Nate: you’re thinking exactly backwards.
The simple idea that I am trying to convey is that this work is a cultural treasure. DC’s terrible actions are an affront against the creators but also to the single most important work of art within the field.
What I am saying is that this constitutes ANOTHER LAYER OF OFFENSE, not to say it wouldn’t be offensive if Watchmen were less good.
And I’m really disappointed that I have to laboriously repeat myself/restate myself when this should have been right in the text?!
Doesn’t speak to the dubious morality???!!!!???? What article did you–
/resigns/
I understand, but you’re overstating the clarity of your piece. It begins with the question of why we aren’t condemning the creators doing the prequels but moves quickly into a series of statements about the singularity of the original. Sure, these are related ideas, but neither is well served by the lack of development, and I stand by the legitimacy of confusion.
Er, the legitimacy of my confusion… Though confusion is probably legitimate in general?
Man, I apologize for cluttering the comments, but I’m using an unfamiliar machine and my process is all out of whack.
So here’s the thing, I read the piece a little closer and I think I was a bit harsh there. I’m not saying I wouldn’t want to read more, or that I wouldn’t want some more justification for the greatness claims, but as a cry of outrage it’s plenty effective. Sorry to get on your case for not writing an article you never set out to write.
I wish Jeet would explain further…but if I were going to make a case against Watchmen, I’d probably start with the mediocrity of the art. I think Gibbons works really well for Watchmen, and the art doesn’t bother me…but it doesn’t send me, and I think that makes it lose some ground with a lot of people.
I think Jack hits something with the note about personal investment too…Moore’s very steeped in genre, and I think it’s sometimes hard for people to see the ways that that’s personal. Kirby and Ditko are sort of forming the genre Moore is using, so I think people sometimes give them more credit for their genre choices being personal or individual.
So I think that’s probably the brief…not-so-great art; using someone else’s genre conventions. Though there could be other things; I love Watchmen, so figuring out exactly why someone wouldn’t like it is a little tricky.
Even if you don’t like it though…it’s obviously a major, groundbreaking work, vitally important for historical reasons at the very least. Moore’s probably as important to DC’s current output as Jack Kirby is to Marvel’s. That DC is willing to shit on its creator just confirms everything awful you ever thought about the company, and that so many “top” creators are willing to sign on speaks for itself.
It could be counted a failure of HU and comics criticism in general that there has been so little negative criticism (detailed, long form) of Watchmen in recent years. There were attacks on its sanctity early on in its career in the pages of The Comics Journal (I think by Carter Scholz) but very little of worth since then. It’s quite possible that even Maus has sustained more quality negativity over the years.
The best graphic novel ever published is Fabrice Neaud’s
Journal (3). Not to mention something likr Frans Masereel’s Passionate Journal or Charlotte Salomon’s Life? Or Theater?…
The best graphic novel of all time is Kingdom Come: I have spoken, and it is so. The hem of Alan Moore’s wizard robe is not fit to shine the boots of Alex Ross’s portly, middle-aged models — and those boots are already really, really shiny.
Alternatively, the best graphic novel of all time is something published in an obscure dialect of Tagalog in the eighteenth century. Domingos is the only one who’s ever heard of it, and nobody else knows if he’s just made it up or what.
and, actually, I’d go From Hell over Watchmen. Yeah, I’m one of *those* readers. Happily, there’s not much chance of From Hell being adulterated with prequels and sequels. Before From Hell: everyone’s guts were still on the inside.
To be accurate, Watchmen isn’t a graphic novel at all. It’s a trade paperback. It was originally printed as individual comics and reprinted as a collective hole (TPB). A graphic novel is printed originally in a larger (typically complete) story and never as individual issues.
SO CHARLES DICKENS WASN’T A NOVELIST, JASON? SURE THAT MAKES SENSE.
Listen up, buttercup: Watchmen was CONCEIVED as a wholistic and self-contained, self-sufficient and insular longform story. Unlike say Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four which was conceived as an adventure pulp serial.
What the hell, comic book nerds?! These are simple, obvious things that REAL novels never ever had to contend against. It’s like being in an argument trying to explain, “no really, the earth is round.”
Have you ever even been to a book store? Then you would know that “trade paper back” isn’t a “fat comic,” it’s a general publishing format between Hardcover new release and Mass Market books at the other end.
Ushfhhdskxkfndlkdndsnx!!!!!!!!!!!
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Ng Suat Tong says:
It could be counted a failure of HU and comics criticism in general that there has been so little negative criticism (detailed, long form) of Watchmen in recent years. There were attacks on its sanctity early on in its career in the pages of The Comics Journal (I think by Carter Scholz) but very little of worth since then…
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Couldn’t it be a case that as time went on, the quality of Watchmen became ever more evident, in the way that painters who were razzed by critics of their era for turning in “unfinished” work were eventually recognized across-the-board as brilliant masters?
The use of “sanctity” gives a hint that Watchmen is thought of in some quarters as a “sacred cow.” (Yes, I know that Hindus don’t actually worship cows, but rather revere them, not only for the beneficial products they give — especially milk, and their dung which when dried in as important fuel for fires — but as a symbolic embodiment of the life-giving nature of the Divine, and strive to protect them from any harm. Which actually amusingly ties in with Ayo’s DC, don’t mess with Watchmen, which has contributed so much to the comics art form; “Not surpassed in scope, intelligence, craft or cultural effect.”)
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Jeet Heer says:
…while I can recognize the craft and intelligence that went into it, I’m still left with a work that lacks any of the humanity, humor, and depth to be found in the works of Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, J. Hernandez, G. Hernandez, etc. etc.
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“Any of the humanity, humor, and depth…”? While Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, J. Hernandez, G. Hernandez (I’ll skip the etc.’s) indeed have those qualities, Watchmen matches and beats them in all quarters.
When the Hernandezes try to be ultra-serious, their limitations become all too evident. Dan Clowes is a remarkable case; that a Cracked humorist and artist/writer of Lloyd Llewellyn would metamorphose into the creator of The Death Ray and Ice Haven makes the transformation of Dr. Don Blake into Thor seem ho-hum. Ware is mighty fine, though the hermetically-sealed emotional quality of his work (as embodied in the visuals of his “serious” work) is to its detriment.
Alas, compared to the massive, wide-encompassing War and Peace-like scope of Watchmen, their works are miniaturist in comparison. For instance, in The Death Ray Clowes makes many brilliant observations about the dubious morality of superheroes/vigilantes, the mindset of comics fandom, yet the book’s scope is fairly limited.
And gee, in Chalky Brown, Ware (“Stop the presses!”) exposes comics fans as petty, immature, sexually-stunted types. Whatta revelation!
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Jack says:
…As for Chris Ware vs Alan Moore, I’d say that while they’re both extremely smart and talented, I probably like Ware a little better because his work is more personal. Some of those Jimmy Corrigan and Rusty Brown/Chalky White strips could only have been created by someone who has experienced extreme degrees of loneliness and self-loathing…
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“Personal” is good; yet taken to extremes (as Ware does) it becomes navel-gazing; allows one’s constricted, dysfunctionally-distorted view of reality to become the lens through which the world is viewed, thus negatively impacting the work.
Am reminded of how in the relatively-recent movie of “Troy,” the main generals were shown as motivated by cynical realpolitik; because to the modern-minded filmmakers, the idea that military leaders would be concerned with honor and its loss seemed absurd…
I’d be curious to read “anti-Watchmen” criticisms, though I’d expect much to be simply knee-jerk contrarianism, pseudo-elitism (“If it’s so popular, it can’t be any good”), or irritation that it deals with “nonserious, immature” stuff like superheroes.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…if I were going to make a case against Watchmen, I’d probably start with the mediocrity of the art. I think Gibbons works really well for Watchmen, and the art doesn’t bother me…but it doesn’t send me, and I think that makes it lose some ground with a lot of people.
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Gibbons is far from one of the greatest comics artists, yet was utterly perfect for Watchmen. Eddie Campbell and Frank Stack are infinitely finer, yet would’ve been completely wrong for the work. On the other extreme, Jack Kirby — though a better “fit” — would’ve been too powerful, broadly sweeping in his approach for the book’s many subtler moments.
Why Gibbons was perfect is shown in one of the book’s motifs: watches and watchmakers. With their status as Watchmen making the characters symbolically akin to the parts of such a timepiece. Gibbons’ precise, rock-solid style would as well suit for rendering an “exploded” drawing of the workings of a watch. (Come to think of it, in one scene Dr. Manhattan is shown having a conversation whilst contemplatively gazing at the workings of a devise he’s mentally disassembled in such a fashion.)
With Gibbons, “diagrammatic” comes to mind: “A plan, sketch, drawing, or outline designed to demonstrate or explain how something works or to clarify the relationship between the parts of a whole.”
Indeed, isn’t interconnectivity, how things are related, from the “thermodynamic miracle” that was Laurie’s very existence, to the possibility at the very end that a pimply doofus in a right-wing magazine might by sheer “chance” explode Ozymandias’ scheme, that a character in a pirate comic book would echo the moral situation of Ozymandias, the main underpinning of the work?
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Jones, one of the Jones boys says:
…Alternatively, the best graphic novel of all time is something published in an obscure dialect of Tagalog in the eighteenth century. Domingos is the only one who’s ever heard of it, and nobody else knows if he’s just made it up or what.
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Hah! A hit, a very palpable hit!
Steven Samuels. “What comics needs is a higher ambition of emotional landscapes, not narrow-sliced depictions of pathetic super-hero obsessed nerds.” You’re describing one character in “Rusty Brown” — the chapters that have been published give us a much wider cast. Have you read the Lint section? In any case, narrowness in art isn’t a problem if it means going deeper into human experience. The late fiction of Samuel Beckett (from the great trilogy onwards) is very, very narrow — all the action takes place inside some quadrant of Beckett’s mind. But these are great novels and stories because they sound depths that have never been heard before.
@Ayo. “Watchmen was CONCEIVED as a wholistic and self-contained, self-sufficient and insular longform story. Unlike say Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four which was conceived as an adventure pulp serial.” Your definition of what constitutes a novel. By your definition many of the great novels aren’t really novels — I’m thinking here of Don Quixote (like Ghost World it was originally just a series of short tales stitched together) and most of the fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth century (often serialized and, as in the case of Thackeray and Trollope featuring recurring characters from fiction to fiction). For that matter John Updike’s Rabbit series weren’t originally conceived of as single work but that’s how they are presented now (in the modern library edition). For that matter Joyce’s stories and novels (including the Wake) feature recurring characters. Any definition of the novel that includes Watchmen but excludes Ulysses is, for me at least, suspect.
@Suat. “There were attacks on its sanctity early on in its career in the pages of The Comics Journal (I think by Carter Scholz) but very little of worth since then. It’s quite possible that even Maus has sustained more quality negativity over the years.”
Yes, Carter Scholz wrote an excellent early critique of Watchmen in TCJ. It’s brief but sums up most of my objections. Which is one reason I don’t feel the need to write my own essay on Watchmen (I might at some point but it’ll be a while before I have enough free time to give the book the attention it deserves for a full-dress critique).
I’ll add that I actually don’t have too much of a problem with Gibbons art. He’s no Kirby or Ditko but his clarity and ability to pack a lot of information into those panels is what the book requires (Moore is very good at choosing his collaborators and tailoring his script to their artistic strengths).
I agree with Jones that “From Hell” is superior to Watchmen — in fact I’d say far superior. Also Moore has done some very interesting short pieces. Moore definately has a place on the comics pantheon but I don’t think Watchmen is the best example of his talents.
Jones: I doubt that many Tagalog graphic novels were published in the 18th century, but you may try the English edition of Elmer by Gerry Alanguilan. I never read it myself, but one never knows. If I understand you correctly you are making fun of me because I have an open mind instead of being provincial like most Americans? How can that be a bad thing?…
Aaaany way, like you I much prefer From Hell to Watchmen.
I was curious, so I started searching to find where that Scholz Watchman review is (#119). I still don’t have my TCJ archive login to see the issue (it is there though), but I found a post where Jeet offers some quotes from it:
http://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/a-watchmen-dissent/
Derik, I just felt something pop in my brain.
It’s clear as day to me that Jeet or whoever he’s quoting simply isn’t willing to engage the work on its own terms. So what good is this analysis. It isn’t any good at all.
To all, especially Jeet: Watchmen is a comic about superheroes like Rear Window is a movie about breaking your leg.
It’s obvious that you’re going to cling to a set of imaginary criteria that exist only to shut out any work that you’re predisposed against. Therefore, there is no talking to you. It’s a novel about human beings. Politics, crime and war. Our foolishness, our attempts at greatness, our rationales for cruelty. Saying that it’s a silly Charlton knock off about sad people is so far afield, you’re not even in the correct stadium.
It is fairly clear to me, a person who really read Watchmen (rather than sort of looking at it) that this book isn’t even trying to be a “superhero comic” and that the theme is not even slightly “superheroes in real life.”
No, “superheroes in real life” is what Daniel Clowes’ ridiculous “The Death Ray” was supposedly about. Which is why THAT remains a minor work while Watchmen in its breadth, scope and mastery of the form remains a timeless classic.
UGH.
Uh oh, are you having an aneurysm?
This whole thing has me wanting to reread Watchmen to see how I feel about it.
Domingos –
“you may try the English edition of Elmer by Gerry Alanguilan. I never read it myself, but one never knows.”
It’s great. You’d hate it.
Unlike you I probably will never know that…
Daryl,
Sure, Watchmen is about a lot more than superheroes, but it’s also a lot about the genre of superhero comics and what it says about about the culture that consumes them (just re-read the newsstand sections and the comics-within-a-comic bits for example). This doesn’t make it a lesser work, but it does make it about superhero comics. Also, and I’m not being disingenuous here, but are you actually mad at us for disagreeing with you? Do you really think we’re dumb nerds? Is there something deeply wrong with me because I too prefer From Hell?
The Scholz quotes are interesting…. I’d say his criticism are ones that Moore intends…the smartest man in the world is meant to be as much a sneer at Adrien as a compliment, and the fact that Adrien is stuck with warmed over sci-fi plots for his masterwork of genius is definitely intentional.
I’d also say that superheroes, and pulp narratives, are a pretty important way in which we think about our geopolitics and our selves. Thinking about the relationship between force and goodness the way Moore does has a lot more breadth and resonance than I think Scholz is giving it credit for.
Still…part of Moore/Gibbon’s point is also that these pulp narratives have serious problems…while at the same time the book is attracted to them. It both rejects and embodies them. I think Scholz’s view is one-sided, but on the book’s own terms I don’t know that it’s unfair. There’s a sense I think in which Moore would have liked Watchmen to end the superhero genre and disappear itself. What’s actually happened — superheroes plodding on, with Watchmen in some ways held up as validating the genre for serious study — is perhaps a more painful outcome than Scholz’s review.
My issue with the reading Scholz and his fellow travelers bring to Watchmen is that they just can’t get past the superhero aspects of it. The deeper theme of Watchmen–and it defines both the form and content–is that one’s experience of life is a Rorschach blot. One doesn’t see things for what they are; one sees what one projects onto them. The book dramatizes how this relates to memory, how people deal with the everyday, the direction people’s lives’ take (including their hold on sanity), and even the course of history. The superhero elements actually enhance the theme because they allow the book to explore it in the more extreme and epic directions. The book is really quite profound, and the resourcefulness and sophistication with which the various story elements are presented and developed is unparalleled in comics.
In terms of reputation, no fiction graphic novel comes close to its stature. Arguing that Watchmen isn’t the preeminent fiction graphic novel in English is like arguing that Kind of Blue isn’t the preeminent jazz album, or that Beloved isn’t the preeminent work of American fiction of the last thirty or so years. One may prefer other efforts more, but these works are the biggest of their fields’ respective big deals.
“I’d go From Hell over Watchmen”
I agree with Jones, as well.
I also love The Death Ray, which is more a snotty dismissal of its genre than Watchmen. In the end, though, it demonstrates that serious themes can be dealt with using superheroes, thereby helping the genre to continue.
@Noah Berlatsky. “I’d also say that superheroes, and pulp narratives, are a pretty important way in which we think about our geopolitics and our selves.”
Yes, that is true and also probably the best argument that can be made on hehalf of the Watchmen. The problem is that politically the book accepts the geopolitical implications of superheroes on their own terms, so the only solution to nuclear Armageddon is the intervention of “the world’s smartest man” and the disappearance of the superhero god. For a professed anarchist, Moore has very little faith in grass-roots political activity. In the real world, the Cold War came to an end because of human agency: Gorbachev and other communists apparatchiks started to see that the regime was untenable, and were pushed for reform by dissidents while in the west Reagan had to start negotiating with the Soviets because of the peace movement. So the real heroes who saved humanity from nuclear war were figures like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Lech Walesa, Gorbachev, E.P.Thompson, Helen Caldicott, etc and the millons of ordinary people on both sides of the Iron curtain who refused to accept the Cold War consensus. There are no counterparts to such figures in Watchmen: humanity’s fate is decided by superheroes (one of whom is willing to sacrifice millions of lives for his political agenda, another of whom is indifferent to humanity’s continued existence). There’s a despair for humanity at the heart of Watchmen which I reject both on political grounds but also because it seems callow and unearned. The darkness of Moore’s vision is ultimately closer to Lovecraft than to Kafka (think of the giant tentacled space monster Ozymandias concocts).
@Ayo. “It’s a novel about human beings.” That’s the core of our disagreement. Despite repeated attempts to enter into it sympathetically, I can’t accept the characters in Watchmen as human beings. Moore has them do all sorts of improbably things (like a woman falling in love with her rapist). They seem like puppets to me. There is also sorts of violence in Watchmen — rapes, murders, and even the killing of millions — but none of effects me as I read the book because none of the characters are able to stake out the emotional claims that are necessary in order for us to care about the fate of fictional creations. Its telling that many readers seem to fantasize about being Rorschach. If the violence Rorschach unleashes had any felt reality, those readers would be terrified of Rorschach and regard him as a psychopath. That’s why I brought up Clowes. He has the ability to create characters that you can both empathize with but also see their flaws and limitations — no one wants to be Andy in The Death Ray, although despite how horrible he is he remains recognizably human. I just don’t see the Moore of Watchmen as being anywhere near the writer Clowes is.
@Robert Stanley Martin. “The book is really quite profound, and the resourcefulness and sophistication with which the various story elements are presented and developed is unparalleled in comics.”
It seems to me that the critique you leveled against Jaime Hernandez applies much more to Watchmen. Watchmen really is a giant Easter egg hunt. Moore is quite clever at packing his narrative with lots of little clues that readers can spend endless hours matching up in order to solve the puzzle. But I find this type of cleverness to be an arid and gimmicky exercise because the story is so utterly devoid of humanity, so utterly contrived and constructed.
And to re-iterate — my objection isn’t that Watchmen is a superhero comic. I have a high regard for the superhero comics of Kirby, Ditko, Eisner, Cole and others. As I noted elsewhere Kirby offers a clue as to what bothers me about Watchemn. In all his comics Kirby created an open universe that could be imaginatively inhabited and colonized. Moore’s genre work, by contrast, seems not just closed by the airtight structures the author has created but even suffocating in the way they don’t allow the characters any freedom from the dictates of the plot and theme. A character like Maggie (in the Locas story) or Andy (in The Death Ray) has the ability to surprise you even as they remain true to their nature. By contrast, Moore’s characters are merely pawns in the service of his agenda.
@Robert Stanley Martin. “In terms of reputation, no fiction graphic novel comes close to its stature.” It really depends on which circles you travel in. I know lots of people that prefer other comics, including other Alan Moore comics.
No one wants to be Andy because he’s treated in a completely condescending manner by the author. I’m not sure anyone wants to be Rorschach, either, but that’s a hard sale to suggest he’s dealt with less humanistically than Andy. Actually, a common criticism of both Ware and Clowes is that they’re completely cold and have nothing but contempt for their characters. I’m not sure I agree, but Moore seems a good deal more sympathetic to the worst of his. Rorschach is a far more emotionally complex character than Andy, who’s not much more than a selfish asshole. And if women can fall in love with Lint, they can fall in love with the Comedian.
@ Charles Reece. “Rorschach is a far more emotionally complex character than Andy, who’s not much more than a selfish asshole.” That’s pretty crude reading of The Death Ray. The middle-aged Andy is pretty much an asshole, albeit one gifted (as many Clowes characters are) in self-justification. But the young Andy was more sympathetically presented — he’s someone in flux, with good traits and bad. The story is about the process where the young Andy starts on the road that turns him into the middle-aged Andy. And Clowes sense of how characters are shaped and formed by their environment seems much more plausible that Moore, who has a crude pop-Freudian understanding of personality formation (i.e. trauma leads to violence). The same applies to Lint — the process by which Lint becomes who he is, the way he’s shaped by his memories and decisions as well as his lifelong traits, is very finely handled. By contrast, Roscharch is just a high-brow version of The Punisher or Wolverine — a psychopath you can root for!
Jeet–
It has that stature with every circle apart from the comics-hipster one that’s centered around TCJ. And that circle’s view of it is so tied up with their Oedipal dramas with Marvel and DC that I don’t take them very seriously about it. Incidentally, I acknowledged that there are people with different preferences. Also, keep in mind that consensus isn’t the same thing as unanimity.
As for Watchmen being more of an Easter-egg experience than Locas, I think it is for you because it’s just more detailed. In general, you seem to have a very hard time distinguishing between the significant and the trivial. An example is your rebuttal of my “Flies on the Ceiling” criticism on the other thread. I think everyone can agree that the Hernandez story is regarded as one of the major highlights of the Locas material. The flies trope is crucial to understanding it. Apart from you, I can’t imagine anyone considers Joyce’s potato motif a major highlight of or crucial to the understanding of Ulysses. To view that detail as anywhere near as significant to Joyce as the flies trope is to Hernandez indicates a total lack of proportion in one’s readings of their works.
I’m not accusing Hugh Kenner of this problem, by the way. He’s making a point about the intricacy of Ulysses, and he deliberately picked a minor detail to make it. He’s not saying or implying that one’s reading of Ulysses is a wash if one doesn’t pick up on it. He calls it “one trivial instance among hundreds of motifs,” after all.
One can treat Watchmen as an Easter egg hunt, but the Easter eggs don’t constitute the armature of the story. They’re parsley, not the steak.
@Robert Stanley Martin. Consensus implies the existence of a coherent comics canon that is widely agreed to (like say the canon of American fiction). I don’t think such a canon exists yet, given the widespread disputes that exist about what is and isn’t a good comics. I don’t dispute that Watchmen is popular and highly regarded by many but I don’t see how that is a convincing argument for its quality. The Transformer movies and the Garfield comic strip are much more popular than Watchmen — are they better than Watchmen?
Since I like some DC and Marvel comics (the works of Ditko, Kirby, etc.) more than I like Watchmen I don’t see how my coldness to Watchmen is a result of an oedipal drama towards DC and Marvel. Where I come from, comics are created by cartoonists, not by corporations.
And to the extent that corporate policies are relevant, I take the side of Moore against DC. In fact, unlike many Watchmen fans, I tend to agree with almost every statement Moore has ever made criticizing corporate comic book companies and the way they mistreat creators.
“Apart from you, I can’t imagine anyone considers Joyce’s potato motif a major highlight of or crucial to the understanding of Ulysses”. This is off topic, but its a characteristic example of your habit of misstating other people’s arguments. I didn’t say the potato motif was important and in fact quoted Kenner as saying it’s a trivial example. My point was that Joyce made even greater demands on readerly attention than Jaime does, but that really isn’t an argument against Joyce (or, by extension, Jaime). For that matter Moore also makes strong demands on his readers attention. The question is, what rewards do you get for such strenuous reading? In the case of Joyce and Jaime, you get a much deeper understanding of human nature and the surface pleasures of life (language, visual forms). In the case of Watchmen, the reward is like the reward for filling out a difficult cross-word puzzle. You feel cleaver and accomplished but are left emotionally unchanged and aesthetically unrewarded. At least that’s my experience.
For the sake of clarity, I should add that I’m not even saying Watchmen is a bad comic. It’s okay — very smart in parts but also flawed. What I object to is the tendency to regard it as the greatest graphic novel of all time. There’s much better work out there and its sad to see people settle for a middle-range work when comics can be so much more.
Too bad because Watchmen still remains untarnished even by your halfhearted prosecution.
It’s interesting that 98% of the discussion pro and con is centered on Moore’s script, and so little on the visual side. Part of the reason I personally prefer From Hell is that I prefer Campbell’s work there to Gibbons’ work on Watchmen, by a considerable margin (although Gibbons is good, too).
But no one gives a shit about John Higgins’ colours, apparently. (Including me — I had to look it up)
Well, as I said before, I think Gibbons’ art is actually good for the story, so the work stands or falls by the writing. One of Moore’s strength is that he does (unlike most comic book scripters) try to match his writing to the art (and it’s hard in a Moore comic to separate story and art because he and the artists spend a lot of time talking together).
I thought the colours were fairly middling as well — not great but suitable to the story.
On the visuals, I should add that one reason I rate Kirby, Ditko etc. so high is that these were very imaginative artists and vivid picture makers. However absurd a superhero story might be, if it’s illustrated by Jack Kirby it at least will keep your eyes very happy.
Also, I should add that Eddie Campbell is, as Jones says, the Moore collaborator who brings the most to the table. So maybe, despite what I wrote above, the visuals are part of the story in my lukewarm response to Watchmen.
Jeet: “However absurd a superhero story might be, if it’s illustrated by Jack Kirby it at least will keep your eyes very happy.”
What a shallow reason to rate anything high.
Jeet–
Oh, we have a canon. The Comics Poll top ten is a pretty good reflection of it. Looking back on the various discussions of comics over the last several years, those comics are pretty much what one would come away with. They’re not fixed, but canons never are. Claiming there isn’t a canon just seems another way of avoiding acknowledgement of Watchmen’s stature, at least in part.
I was being snotty with that Oedipal drama crack, although I do think it’s applicable to a number of people in the TCJ circle. Wanting to kill Marvel in order to marry Jack Kirby is a fairly apt metaphor for some of the attitudes on display. But away from that, it’s pretty much an article of faith that the hegemony of the superhero genre must be destroyed in order for comics to realize itself as an artform. Any work that’s perceived as reinforcing that hegemony is going to be treated very harshly and even unfairly.
With regard to Joyce, if your point is that he makes greater demands on a reader’s attention but towards trivial ends that aren’t central to an understanding of his work, then why are you bringing it up in the first place? I’m not complaining that Jaime features Easter eggs in his work. I’m complaining that he’s building his major effects out of them. Joyce isn’t doing that. Neither are Moore & Gibbons for that matter. The Easter eggs in Ulysses and Watchmen are tertiary; they’re decorative.
In other words, if the potato motif isn’t an example of how Joyce’s demands on the reader provide a “much deeper understanding of human nature and the surface pleasures of life,” give me an example from his work. Argue the point with a relevant example, not an irrelevant one like the potato motif.
@Domingos Isabelinho. “What a shallow reason to rate anything high.” Yeah, God knows when we’re dealing with a visual art form we shouldn’t care if the art is visually pleasing. Perhaps in Domingos’ world art has to punish and hurt. Are you a secret masochist?
Robert –
“It has that stature with every circle apart from the comics-hipster one that’s centered around TCJ.”
Actually, if there’s anything the blowback to Moore’s antagonism toward superhero publishing has revealed, it’s that plenty of devoted superhero readers don’t rank Watchmen much at all. I suppose they ‘recognize’ its stature, but mainly as a millstone, a construct of an outside media prone to simplifications, or as the result of over-enthusiasm by set-in-their-ways readers or dilettantes. You’re frankly more likely to hear All Star Superman named — or yes, good ol’ Kingdom Come — or even something by a newer writer like Jonathan Hickman or Jason Aaron. I don’t think there’s ANY consensus right now in really active superhero circles.
“For a professed anarchist, Moore has very little faith in grass-roots political activity. In the real world, the Cold War came to an end because of human agency: Gorbachev and other communists apparatchiks started to see that the regime was untenable, and were pushed for reform by dissidents while in the west Reagan had to start negotiating with the Soviets because of the peace movement….There’s a despair for humanity at the heart of Watchmen which I reject both on political grounds but also because it seems callow and unearned. The darkness of Moore’s vision is ultimately closer to Lovecraft than to Kafka (think of the giant tentacled space monster Ozymandias concocts). ”
That’s a really great critique of Watchmen. I still think you’re missing some of the distance Moore has on his tropes…Ozymandias doesn’t actually save the world, for example — I think you can read the book pretty easily as coming from the perspective you are (viz. power is not a force for good.) The Lovecraft monster is supposed to be idiotic, as is Ozymandias himself.
At the same time, like I said before…it’s a tension in the work, and I think it’s valid to feel he doesn’t manage to resolve it. It’s certainly given me something to think about in the comic that I hadn’t put in quite those terms before.
Jeet did you read Katherine Wirick’s piece on Rorschach as a rape victim? It’s here. I’d be curious what you think about it.
“if there’s anything the blowback to Moore’s antagonism toward superhero publishing has revealed”
It’s also revealed that lots of superhero fans are total fucking arseholes…but that’s probably only a revelation if you’ve never read any of the comments on any “mainstream” site, ever.
That said, how much of the blowback comes from independent scepticism about Watchmen, rather than general reaction-formation to the implication that you’re a douchebag for wanting to buy Watchmen Babies? You see the same reaction to the Kirby suit, the Shuster suit, etc etc. every time one of the people who make the things gets too uppity. “I like The Avengers/Watchmen/Superman, but their creators can go suck a dick”.
Jeet: Let’s put it this way: If the story is stupid the drawings are stupid, period.
I know where you are coming from though: important philosophical things are the realm of words. The visual arts just need to be pleasing because images can’t be anything else.
“I know where you are coming from though: important philosophical things are the realm of words. The visual arts just need to be pleasing because images can’t be anything else.” No, I don’t think that. I’m actually close to the position that Charles Hatfield articulates in his Kirby book, that comics are a form of narrative drawing. But having said that, there are situations where the story can be fairly conventional or worthless but the drawings have a life of their own — in part because art has its own values that are distinct from articulated verbal ideas.
@Robert Stanley Martin. “Oh, we have a canon. The Comics Poll top ten is a pretty good reflection of it.” I’ll simply echo Jog and say that even among superhero fans there’s no fixed canon that would automatically rank Watchmen high.
The poll you conducted was fun and instructive but an internet poll isn’t a canon. You can find internet polls where “Atlas Shurgged” is ranked as one of the modern works of literature.
@Robert Stanley Martin. “I’m not complaining that Jaime features Easter eggs in his work. I’m complaining that he’s building his major effects out of them. Joyce isn’t doing that.” Look, the major effect that Joyce achieves is the creation of characters like Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom and others. These characters have a substantiality rare in fiction because of thousands of little characterizing motifs that Joyce has embedded in his novel, of which the now-infamous potato is one trivial example of many. Just the same the major effect Jaime achieves is the creation of characters like Maggie, Hope, Penny, etc. These characters are made substantial through thousands of little details, of the kind you complain about. With both Joyce and Jaime, you can appreciate the main features of the characters (such as Leopold’s kindness or Maggie’s indecisiveness) without necessarily catching all or even most of the embedded details. This is not to say that Jaime is as great as Joyce but simply to note that there is a similar procedure at work. So your complaint that Jaime makes extravagant demands on his reader’s attention is not very convincing.
There is a striking difference here, by the way, between Moore’s easter eggs and the easter eggs of Joyce and Jaime. The two J’s use their easter eggs to enrich our sense of place and character. Most of Moore’s easter eggs (i.e. the watch images throughout the book) are merely displays of authorial cleverness.
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Jeet Heer says:
…narrowness in art isn’t a problem if it means going deeper into human experience. The late fiction of Samuel Beckett (from the great trilogy onwards) is very, very narrow — all the action takes place inside some quadrant of Beckett’s mind. But these are great novels and stories because they sound depths that have never been heard before.
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But, are they greater than comparatively-fine novels which encompass a wider range of human experience?
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…I agree with Jones that “From Hell” is superior to Watchmen — in fact I’d say far superior.
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A reasonable argument; I’d rate it as just below Watchmen, m’self.
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
Jones: I doubt that many Tagalog graphic novels were published in the 18th century, but you may try the English edition of Elmer by Gerry Alanguilan. I never read it myself, but one never knows.
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I’ve not finished reading my copy (the last few months have been highly chaotic), but it’s extremely fine so far…
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If I understand you correctly you are making fun of me because I have an open mind instead of being provincial like most Americans? How can that be a bad thing?…
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It’s just such a predictably Domingos-esque reaction to hold up some utterly obscure foreign work as the highest masterpieces out there.
You may very well be right, for all we know. After all, in “Old Wine in New Wineskins: Hisashi Sakaguchi’s Ikkyu” ( https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/04/old-wine-in-new-wineskins-hisashi-sakaguchis-ikkyu/ ) Ng Suat Tong (and the art sample pages) sure make that relatively-obscure work come across as a towering masterpiece…
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Nate says:
Daryl,
Sure, Watchmen is about a lot more than superheroes, but it’s also a lot about the genre of superhero comics and what it says about about the culture that consumes them (just re-read the newsstand sections and the comics-within-a-comic bits for example). This doesn’t make it a lesser work, but it does make it about superhero comics.
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But, not just “about superhero comics.” It uses the genre as a vehicle to comment on far weightier subjects. Life; the human condition; our attempts to wrest the universe into shape and the mental distortions that result; morality; what constitutes heroism; “to create four or five ‘radically opposing ways’ to perceive the world and to give readers of the story the privilege of determining which one was most morally comprehensible” (Alan Moore’s intention, mentioned in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen ).
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…I’d also say that superheroes, and pulp narratives, are a pretty important way in which we think about our geopolitics and our selves.
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Lord, yes. Consider Ronnie Reagan, god of the GOP, referring to the U.S.S.R. as an “evil empire”; calling his utter B.S. anti-missile system “Star Wars”…
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Robert Stanley Martin says:
…The deeper theme of Watchmen–and it defines both the form and content–is that one’s experience of life is a Rorschach blot. One doesn’t see things for what they are; one sees what one projects onto them. The book dramatizes how this relates to memory, how people deal with the everyday, the direction people’s lives’ take (including their hold on sanity), and even the course of history. The superhero elements actually enhance the theme because they allow the book to explore it in the more extreme and epic directions. The book is really quite profound, and the resourcefulness and sophistication with which the various story elements are presented and developed is unparalleled in comics.
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Bravo! Perceptive and superbly put…
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Jeet Heer says:
…So the real heroes who saved humanity from nuclear war were figures like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Lech Walesa, Gorbachev, E.P.Thompson, Helen Caldicott, etc and the millons of ordinary people on both sides of the Iron curtain who refused to accept the Cold War consensus. There are no counterparts to such figures in Watchmen: humanity’s fate is decided by superheroes (one of whom is willing to sacrifice millions of lives for his political agenda, another of whom is indifferent to humanity’s continued existence). There’s a despair for humanity at the heart of Watchmen which I reject both on political grounds but also because it seems callow and unearned.
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But, not just “despair for humanity”; there are plenty of examples of humble, noncostumed humans, who are shown as moral, caring, striving to do the right thing, for all their final fate. The cops and psychiatrist who as their last act moved to stop the fight of the lesbian couple. The way the salt-of-the-earth newsstand vendor, as death moved to overwhelm the city of New York, protectively embraced the black kid who’d been hanging out reading this pirate comic. As their bodies merged and dissolved, tears came to my eyes…
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The darkness of Moore’s vision is ultimately closer to Lovecraft than to Kafka (think of the giant tentacled space monster Ozymandias concocts).
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Hah! Great perception…
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…Despite repeated attempts to enter into it sympathetically, I can’t accept the characters in Watchmen as human beings.
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You’re entitled to; I’ve no trouble seeing them as that.
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Moore has them do all sorts of improbably things (like a woman falling in love with her rapist). They seem like puppets to me.
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Humans routinely do things so utterly insane (let’s dump our industrial toxins in the water we drink, air we breathe; let’s us lower-class folks vote into office the exact people who see us as cattle to be exploited and devoured); that “a woman falling in love with her rapist” is not much of a stretch in comparison.
Re that “puppets” line, Dr. Manhattan says (quoting from memory) “We’re all puppets. I’m just one who can see the strings.”
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Its telling that many readers seem to fantasize about being Rorschach. If the violence Rorschach unleashes had any felt reality, those readers would be terrified of Rorschach and regard him as a psychopath.
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It’s telling that when you want to knock the literary worth of Watchmen, you use the asinine reaction of dimwits to “prove” the book is shallow.
Jones – I’m sure that’s some of it, though there’s also a likely encouragement effect at work, in that superhero readers who didn’t much care for Watchmen see more opportunity for expressing those opinions; I mean, that fucking movie put the book into as much of a spotlight as the current situation.
But anyway, I was just contesting Robert’s point as to the existence of circles that affirm Watchmen’s stature (though obviously I haven’t taken a poll or anything, this is anecdotal; I recall Wizard doing a list of Top 100 Trade Paperbacks years ago that put Watchmen at #2 behind Maus, although I think that was editorially-driven)…
@Noah. “Jeet did you read Katherine Wirick’s piece on Rorschach as a rape victim?” I was just looking at it before you posted. It’s a very smart piece. This is not meant as a knock on Wirick (who makes a convincing case for how Rorschach should be interpreted) but I’m wary of accounts of fascism that start with the victimization of fascists. To the extent that fascists are victims or losers, its because they’ve benefited from systems of privilege (capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, imperialism, racism) which are being challenged.
Jeet: I don’t know why comics must be narrative at all, or why words are excluded from the narration when it exists (which is clearly absurd), but let’s pretend that you and Charles Hatfield are right and comics are “a form of narrative drawing.” In that case, if the story is dead serious and stupid what are the drawings telling it? Genius incarnated?
@ Mike Hunter. “there are plenty of examples of humble, noncostumed humans, who are shown as moral, caring, striving to do the right thing, for all their final fate. The cops and psychiatrist who as their last act moved to stop the fight of the lesbian couple. The way the salt-of-the-earth newsstand vendor, as death moved to overwhelm the city of New York, protectively embraced the black kid who’d been hanging out reading this pirate comic. As their bodies merged and dissolved, tears came to my eyes…”
True, but all of these are defensive and futile gestures in the face of a world controlled by costumed gods. Non-superheroes in Moore’s universe can try (unsuccessfully) to defend themselves but they can’t make their own history or challenge the power that be. In the real world, thankfully, ordinary people can and do stand up to tyranny, even if they are often defeated.
Also, if we take the deaths in Watchmen seriously we should regard Ozymandias as a moral monster, a veritable Eichmann. Yet even after the extent of Ozymandias’ actions are revealed, he’s treated not as a moral monster but rather as a pulp figure, a superhero-who-turns-out-to-be-supervillian. His plot is so outlandish that we can’t treat it seriously and feel the full moral import of his actions.
@Domingos Isabelinho. The comics I love are the ones where the writing and drawing are perfectly integrated. Ideally all comics would be integrated in that way, but we live in a less than ideal world, so there are plenty of examples of bad stories that are well drawn (many of the EC comics stories fall into this camp) or (less frequently) good stories poorly drawn (in the later category I’d mention some of Pekar’s work that was drawn by mediocre artists). I’m not sure why this is so shocking to you. Sometimes art and story don’t align perfectly. It’s regrettable but it happens.
I think Moore makes some effort — which I found effective — to show Adrien as a moral monster. He very carefully has you get to know many of the non super powered people in New York; the lesbian couple, Rorschach’s shrink, the newspaperman and the comic reading kid. Unlike in a regular superhero plot, you know the people who die — which is definitely a critique of the genre.
I think Ozymandias’ plot, in all its stupid genre glory, is also meant to be a comment on the way that such schemes of conquest and saving the world (invading Iraq?) are intrinsically idiotic. To me that doesn’t make their victims less tragic; quite the contrary.
I still think the point that only the superheroes get to act effectively is a really good one. I think I’d respond by saying that part of what Moore’s doing is playing with the notion that superheroes are in fact superior. It’s absolutely not clear that they are…Rorschach’s death, where he goes back to being Kovacs, is of particular interest maybe.
Jeet: nothing of what you say above is shocking to me in the least. What’s shocking is how easily a stupid story is rated high in the comics milieu. I say “comics milieu” because you’re not alone, I am.
Jeet, is this a problem you have with other dystopias? 1984, for example?
One of the worst crimes of the movie is that it removed the mechanicals, so there’s no one left to represent real humanity (although how could they feasibly have included them?). Just one more way to turn it into a boring, normal superhero story about people punching one another.
@Domingos Isabelinho. “What’s shocking is how easily a stupid story is rated high in the comics milieu.” But the story is not being rated high — the story and art are being dissociated from each other, with the story being rejected as stupid while value is found in art. To take this outside of comics — haven’t you ever seen a movie that has a poor script but some good acting or cinematography? Or a good script and generally poor acting? In a collaborative work of art, not every element always works together.
Comics don’t have to be narrative but they are much better when they are. I don’t believe in the validity of non-narrative because we humans are a storytelling kind. Even those “tone poem” comics (whatever that means) tell a story.
Whatever. You are clearly chomping at the bit to talk about some theoretically-possible comic that frankly nobody in the world cares about or believes in except you.
You cannot appreciate art because you are always searching for some imaginary “better.” Like some guy who is talking to a beautiful woman at a bar but keeps glancing over her shoulder just in case a more beautiful woman happens to be around. Meanwhile you are about to get dumped because HELLO, you’re on a date with this one!
You never have a whole lot of affirmative things to say, only theoretical “possible” “better comics.” Show and prove. Put up or shut up. You can’t back up the stuf that you say so you change the topic to your favorite nonsense about “fascism” or whatever. You have no ideas. Your scant writings betray a woeful ignorance and close-minded disregard for anything that another person may have heard of–simply because you are so arrogant that you cannot live with the notion that good art probably isn’t difficult, obscure stuff. Or else probably more people would have heard of it.
LOOK WATCH THE MAN TRY AND INTERPRET THAT LIKE I SAID POPULARITY EQUALS LEGITIMACY. HE WILL TOTALLY TRY THAT.
Face it, if the stuff you liked was any good, you wouldn’t have been the only person to have heard of it. All of us are hungry for comics. All of us. We’d be all over your ideas if they had any merit or connection with reality.
Watchmen forever. Death to Moroccan tone poems.
What the hell, I’ll join in too. I completely disagree with Jeet’s reading of Watchmen. I think he misses several key points (I totally regarded Viedt as a monster, and say the book as a total condemnation of the idea that the world “needs saving” from humanity). The book was a keystone in my comics reading as a young lad, so I have a very nostalgic soft spot for it, and I return to it often.
That being said, I don’t think it would make my person top 10 favorite books right now. And I think “From Hell” is a much better, richer book and Moore’s best work to date.
@Noah. “Jeet, is this a problem you have with other dystopias? 1984, for example?” Well, in 1984 Winston Smith and Julia do resist the totalitarian state. They are ultimately defeated and brainwashed (in a horrifying way) but despite the defeat the book hinges on the idea that there will be some internal resistance. There’s on resistance in the world of the Watchmen, only futile attempts to save a few lives in the fallout from the actions of the superheroes — but no attempt to change the system whereby the superheroes dominate or the geopolitics the superheroes are embedded in and support.
@Noah Berlatsky. “I think Moore makes some effort — which I found effective — to show Adrien as a moral monster. He very carefully has you get to know many of the non super powered people in New York; the lesbian couple, Rorschach’s shrink, the newspaperman and the comic reading kid.” It’s fairly common in movies to spend a few moments with sympathetic figure — say a cop who is about to retire — who is then killed. This is done to establish some moral gravitas or emotional engagement on the cheap. In terms of narrative, these characters are created in order to be killed. That is what Moore is doing — being talented he does it well, but it’s still a relatively cheap effect.
Darryl, man — I love you…but there’s just no need to get that nasty.
Domingos writes positive pieces just about every month here. He talks about tons of specific comics he likes. Different things than you like, and different things again than Jeet likes, but that’s not a disaster.
Also…there are definitely folks who like the kind of comics Domingos does; even some other writers on this blog. He’s certainly in the minority…but Fabrice Neaud, who he mentioned, is held in high regard by a lot of people. He’s not nearly as isolated as you’re making him out to be.
Jeet: I understand your point up to a point, but you’re the one who rated Kirby’s art in a stupid superhero story high because it’s “enjoyable,” not because it has something important to say. Then you associated the art and the story when you characterized comics as “a form of narrative drawing.” The drawings are narrating a stupid story and yet, they’re rated high?
Now you want to dissociate the drawings from the story again because the story is stupid, but you still want to rate Kirby’s art high.
Sorry, but I smell a sacred cow… Maybe I even smell the king of all sacred cows.
@Ayo. I’m sorry for hijacking your post like this, especially since I think that despite my ambivalence about Watchmen we can agree on some major points: 1) Watchmen is a hugely important graphic novel which looms over the field of comics. 2) Watchmen deserves to preserve its status as a stand-alone work. 3) The current “Before Watchmen” project deserves to be condemned as an assault on the integrity of this important work. Can we agree to sign off on this statement?
@Domingos Isabelinho. As so often, I feel like I’m not making myself clear to you. I’m not saying that a stupid story illustrated by Jack Kirby is necessarily a great thing, just that it will at least be visually entertaining, which is no small thing. By describing comics as narrative drawing I meant that at their best the art and storytelling are integrated in comics — as they are in the Jack Kirby work I like best, the 1970s work. (By the way, this is my spin on Hatfield’s concept and Hatfield shouldn’t be held responsible for it). Some of those stories are very well written — which is what deserves to be celebrated. Some of those stories are just silly, but again even in that case Kirby’s art redeems the material to some degree.
I think our misunderstanding comes from the fact that you think about art in a binary way. A work of art is either good or bad, a masterpiece or kitsch. I think there are a few good works of art, and many bad works of art but also a sizable category of mixed works, that have both good and bad qualities. You don’t seem to be able to accept the existence of this category of mixed works — everything to you is either good or bad.
@Robert Stanley Martin. “Wanting to kill Marvel in order to marry Jack Kirby is a fairly apt metaphor for some of the attitudes on display.” This oedipal analogy only makes sense if I thought that Marvel was the co-creator of Kirby’s comics. But as I said before, I don’t think corporations create comics, cartoonists do. Pace the Supreme Court and Mitt Romney, corporations aren’t people. They are legal entities (which sometimes have bad policies which should be challenged, just as legal entities like churches or the courts do). In any case, why would an oedipal complex make me more sympathetic to one creator who was screwed by corporate policy (Kirby) but less sympathetic to another creator screwed by corporate policy (Moore). Actually, I’m sympathetic to both, but just happen to like Kirby’s work more.
Jeet: If you don’t start writing that Watchmen essay soon, someone might steal your comments here and put them up on HU. And I agree with Noah re: your dissection of the politics of Watchmen.
Well I can offer a conditional partial retraction. But I’ll be damned if the man’s entire shtick isn’t:
-walk into a room
-call everything childish
-make vague reference to esoteric obscure something
-????!
-repeat
Sure it’s one person’s opinion, but if he feels that he’s got to tell everyone else what plebes we are in expressing it then my response is (1) don’t believe his opinion can stand on its own and (2) disinclined to take it seriously or devote serious attention to.
All of what i have seen the man write indicates a narrow view on art and “the arts” which offends me to the core. Right now he’s dumping on Kirby, from what I see in my email alert. I’m like–really?
And then there is his nonsense where he doesn’t understand that it’s okay to like a comic in pieces. Again, with his anti-Kirby chatter. Maybe he really genuinely doesn’t understand what everybody else appreciates about Kirby but that doesn’t mean he has a vital perspective, it means he should study more. Like I did. Like many of us did.
He talks a mean one about artistic sophistication but his words betray a man unwilling to do the work.
I mouth off a lot but I study a lot. I know my stuff inside and out. I don’t believe he does.
@Chris Mautner. Your reading of the book is closer to the majority one, so I’ll have to accept the fact that there is just something about it that I’m misreading or misunderstanding (despite repeated efforts to enter into the book sympathetically).
One point. “(I totally regarded Viedt as a monster, and say the book as a total condemnation of the idea that the world “needs saving” from humanity).” The thing is, in the context of the book Viedt is cool in the way that Rorschach is cool. Viedt has a secret hide-away, just like Superman! He’s the smartest man in the world and a gifted inventor, just like Lex Luthor! He’s always one step ahead of the game, just like the Kingpin or Dr. Doom! So as you read about his plot, Viedt doesn’t seem like Eichmann or Beria or Pol Pot. He seems like Dr. Doom or Magneto. So it’s hard to take his crime or moral culpability seriously. Or at least I can’t take it seriously. His murders don’t seem real. (By contrast, the killings in The Death Ray are chillingly believable).
@Suat. Feel free to steal these points!
Jeet: I’ll make a final effort to understand you: you rate high something that’s not necessarily a great thing?
The notion that Moore has no time for “ordinary people” or grassroots politics seems wrongheaded to me. The whole point of the book, or one of its central arms at any rate, is the critique of ordinary people who allow the “super powers” (political in the real world, superheroes as well in the Watchmen world) to think and make their decisions for them. As in V for Vendetta, Moore tries to push all of us to take responsibility for ourselves, to not accept or allow those with “power” (superheroes are just a metaphor for this) to make decisions for us, etc. That’s the whole gist of the “Who Watches the Watchmen” motif. Moore is a self-professed anarchist, which (as he often says) means, simplistically, “no rulers.” As such, Watchmen is an anti-superhero book…but more than this it’s an anti-government, anti-ruling powers, pro-“ordinary person” book. That is, it pushes quite hard for us to take responsibility for our own lives, to care for others (like Bernie/Bernard, Dan/Laurie, Dr. Long at the close of the book) without being paternalistic and condescending (like Veidt), etc. The “ordinary people” on the street are not just some dude humanized for 5 minutes and then wiped out (as in many a movie). They’re human beings we get to know month-by-month over the course of a year (esp. if you read it in its original installments). When they die, you feel it, precisely because they were never that kind of simplistically constructed sidebar. It’s true that they never effectively resist power (except, perhaps, unwittingly, Seymour in the final panel), but part of the way in which the book works is to turn these questions out towards the reader. The world, and its future, is “in our hands” in the final panel…not really in Seymour’s, since his world doesn’t actually exist. As in V for Vendetta, the book is largely about the necessity and possibility of “grass roots” changes by ordinary individuals and the toppling of those in power. The transformation of society into a more egalitarian one is certainly at stake here, though it never actually happens within the pages of the book. The books (both V and Watchmen) do maintain a healthy skepticism about human nature (it’s worth pointing out that things in the ex-Soviet Union and the U.S. are hardly perfect as a result of the end of the Cold War), but they do certainly propose that we take control of our own destinies, instead of abdicating power to our “rulers.”
If there’s a critique in this regard, I would say it’s not in the sense that the superheroes hold all the “real” power in the book (on the contrary…they are just as flawed as the rest of us…and their most dramatic actions are just as susceptible to undoing by dopes like Seymour or by sheer dumb luck). Rather, the preoccupation with 4D temporality and Einsteinian physics suggests agency itself may be a perspective illusion…which would, of course, serve to undercut any notions of grassroots politics and weakens those aspects of the book (though, to me, anyway, it makes it more interesting philosophically)
In terms of Jeet’s critique, though, I would say that the heavily emphasized humanity of the superheroes themselves (their many failings), and esp. the emphasis on Ozy’s hubris and general stupidity, all suggest that the “important doings” are actually NOT undertaken by superheroes any more than by the rest of us…
Finally, I think it’s the height of nonsense to suggest that Moore’s/Gibbons’ characters are somehow less human and accessible than those of Clowes, or the Hernandezes, or whatever. Dreiberg and Laurie are way more accessible,human, complex and ordinary figures than Andy in The Death Ray, just as one example. Veidt is a fairly flat character (we know so little of his origins), but Rorschach, Dreiberg, Laurie, Blake, Sally… These come across as living, breathing folks…as do Dr. Long, Hollis Mason, and (at times) Bernie the newsstand guy, the lesbian taxi driver, etc. Some only have their moments…but most are well-rounded complex characters who we certainly can empathize with.
I think that having Sally forgive her rapist might be seen as a political misstep from a feminist point-of-view, but I don’t think it makes her less believable.
Ayo, have you read Domingos’ blog? It’s over here, and it really is mostly him talking about things he likes.
Domingos really knows his shit. He’s also an elitist (I think he’d wear that label proudly.) As a result, he (mostly) doesn’t rate pop culture works very highly — but he still has read a lot of them, and has also read a ton of high culture works. You probably don’t care much about the later it sounds like, which is cool…but, I don’t know, maybe you all could bond again on hating Crumb?
It seems we’re talking about a bunch of different things here. Is WATCHMEN the most ‘significant’ graphic novel yet? Possibly, if we mean concerns like a common consensus, canon, perception, popularity or influence. I’d say it rates, at the very least, very highly in all of these areas, and there are very few comics that can hold a candle against it. Maybe there’s even just one. (Thinking of MAUS, if I have to say it.)
Is it the ‘best’ one, though? Well, it’s of exceptional quality, depth and ambition compared to most others, certainly, and I’m not aware of any books that are entirely as elaborate, as complex or as delicately crafted as WATCHMEN. I have to say I’ve come to like WATCHMEN a lot, for what it is, and for what it does with superheroes, which, though owing much to Gerber, Skrenes and Mooney’s OMEGA, is still so unique that only one or two other genre books, chiefly Morrison and Quitely’s ALL STAR SUPERMAN, even hit the same ballpark in terms of ambition and execution.
But is all that enough when we’re really talking about the ‘Best’ with a capital B? I don’t think so, not by a long stretch. There are dozens, if not hundreds of grpahic novels that tell you much more, and much more profoundly and effectively, about human beings than WATCHMEN does. For all its complexity and depth and intelligence and whatnot, it strikes me as a terribly shallow and adolescent exercise when viewed in the context of the great prose novelists. Alan Moore may be a king in comics land, but when he has to compete against all of literature, I find him wanting. WATCHMEN doesn’t tell me much about humanity that I didn’t know before. It doesn’t move or affect me like some of the best novels or short stories or films or, well, comics. I’m talking about those great cathartic moments here, those instances when, thanks to the craft and great observational skills of the best storytellers, you hit a point where you feel like some great bloody insight about the world hits you like a ton of bricks in just the right moment, and you’ll never be the same again.
WATCHMEN doesn’t do that. It doesn’t have even one such moment that I recall. It gets close here and there, but it’s not nearly as good or as finely calibrated about it that I would expect the ‘Best’ of anything to be. For me, WATCHMEN is an incredibly fun and entertaining and sometimes breathtaking intellectual exercise, and an awesome puzzle to solve, but it doesn’t have any great truths to plant in my heart or in my guts. It’s stunted by its lack of truth and insight, and its complexity rings hollow if compared to the greatest storytellers from other media that we know.
So, ultimately, I’d agree WATCHMEN is the most elaborately crafted and intellectually intriguing graphic novel with adolescent ambitions. There are many better ones that speak to us more eloquently about concerns that are more mature and human, but none of them that I’m aware of can match it yet in terms of intellectual finesse and complexity.
Will that do?
Jeet, I can see feeling like the emotional set up is manipulated. It is a trope…but I think Moore invests it with a great deal of love and life. The characters aren’t just there to die; he cares about them for themselves, and they’re also representative of the fact that individual lives are precious, and that globalpolitical schemes which ignore that are monstrous.
I think Rorschach’s doctor is actually an example of someone not a superhero who commits to changing the world through nonviolent means and through love. He’s kind of pitiful and kind of ridiculous, and he dies of course — but none of those things make his transformation or his commitment worthless. I think Watchmen is a much more optimistic book in that sense than 1984, and one which leaves significantly more room for political change. It’s not clear that Veidt wins at the end; he’s much less effective of a mastermind than Orwell’s totalitarian all powerful totalitarian state, in which resistance is actually a way to make the oppression more satisfying and total (if I remember the end of that book right.)
“so I’ll have to accept the fact that there is just something about it that I’m misreading or misunderstanding (despite repeated efforts to enter into the book sympathetically).”
No, no, don’t say that! It’s not a math problem; if it doesn’t move you, it doesn’t move you. You’ve totally made me think about aspects of it I hadn’t even considered before. No reason to apologize for that!
In terms of liking From Hell better… I just don’t see that either, to be honest. I like Eddie Campbell’s art and I like From Hell…but Moore’s preoccupation with magic and the notion that art/ideas are somehow more real than reality start to weigh the narrative down…and I would say From Hell’s politics are even more compromised by the fascination with Idea Space and the notion that the Ripper’s killings somehow “had to happen” and were part of the “glorious architecture” of the history of the 20th century. While the prostitutes are “humanized” to some degree, I think it is far less than the ordinary characters in Watchmen…and, in general, it just feels more like plan carried out to its conclusion than Watchmen does. Again…I like From Hell, but I don’t think it approaches Watchmen in the greatest graphic novel sweepstakes.
Noah: as I usually say, I’m a lowsy elitist since my main interest is the social outcast of the artforms’ spectrum.
I should probably apologize to Ayo too…but I have to say, I’d much, much rather talk about how Watchmen works than talk about the morality of Before Watchmen. Not because the later isn’t a worthwhile topic, but because just thinking about those books — like, if I actually start thinking about what the content is going to be like — makes me more than a little ill. I’ve expunged large portions of the movie from my brain as a defense mechanism, I think. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be Alan Moore or Dave Gibbons and see this stuff done to your work.
Meant “…I’m not aware of any COMICS that are entirely as…” in that second paragraph above. In prose novels, those qualities are much more common, partly because the form makes them less of a challenge.
Marc-Oliver: “there are dozens, if not hundreds of grpahic novels that tell you much more, and much more profoundly and effectively, about human beings than WATCHMEN does”
But insights into the human condition or psychology or sociology aren’t the only thing we can value in narrative art! If you like the novel of ideas, there’s an awful lot to like about Watchmen — it presents ideas about determinism, fatalism, chance, complexity and structure in a way like little else. The ideas themselves aren’t even that novel, but the presentation is. Haters be throwing around words like “clever” to damn it with faint praise — but some of us really like formal cleverness!
But, again, this is just to valorise the “writing” over the “art”. From Hell 4eva!!!
@Jones: “But insights into the human condition or psychology or sociology aren’t the only thing we can value in narrative art!”
I agree! Buuut, if WATCHMEN is to be the Best of anything, then it’ll have to compete in the arena of Insights and Truths, delivered with great cathartic force and through unity of content and form. And I don’t see that it ranks first there, or even close to the top, although I agree with you that it’s more convincing in other arenas. I find that the best works tend to be deceptively simple and accessible, and WATCHMEN seems like the opposite. Its complexity is beautiful and admirable on its own terms, but as Jeet has said above, the rewards are slim.
Generally, when I think of the Best that storytelling has to offer, I think of Joyce, or Cheever, or Dos Passos, or SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, or CITIZEN KANE or Kubrick or the Coens, or even THE SOPRANOS or DEADWOOD.
I swear, I’m not trying to be a snob, but I honestly can’t think of a comics work that wouldn’t seem like the odd man out in that selection, and WATCHMEN certainly would. All things considered, I find MAUS, ASTERIOS POLYP, SAFE AREA GORAZDE, JIMMY CORRIGAN, LE COMBAT ORDINAIRE or even ALL STAR SUPERMAN to be better graphic novels than WATCHMEN, to name a few, even though they may not be as impressive structurally or in terms of scope. Those books funnel their narrative force much more effectively, and, more significantly, they funnel it towards a point, rather than — excuse me — a thrill in the shape of a giant squid of doom that’s meant to make you go ‘Whoa!’.
“You’re describing one character in “Rusty Brown” — the chapters that have been published give us a much wider cast. Have you read the Lint section? In any case, narrowness in art isn’t a problem if it means going deeper into human experience. ”
Unfortunately, I haven’t yet read the last few volumes of Acme Novelty. It is true that Ware has been stretching out recently into a wider cast of characters, like in Acme #18. But the majority of his stories in his career have depicted those alienated loser-type of characters. Jimmy Corrigan was super-hero obsessed and so was Rusty Brown. It’s not the alienation themes or the narrow-focus that’s problematic, but the type of characters he’s focused on and the amount of pages he’s devoted to them. There’s only so much one can devote to that brand of pathetic lead character before diminishing returns set in. I hope he’s moved on from that, because characters like Rusty Brown and Jimmy Corrigan are kind of thin, notwithstanding Ware’s awesome draftmanship. Great fiction needs emotionally richer characters than that.
Marc, if you’re calling Slaughterhouse Five or All Star Superman or Asterior Polyp the best of anything, you’re not being a snob. Trust me.
All Star Superman embraces the fannish gush and worship of force as goodness that Watchmen questions and rejects. It’s a profoundly silly comic, and a depressing capstone to Morrison’s once promising but ultimately banal career. (Ben Saunders’ book has a really great reading of it though; you should check it out if you haven’t read it.)
Asterios Polyp is…well, let’s not go there, I guess. The art’s pretty.
The squid of doom really isn’t meant to make you go “whoa.” It’s meant to be a stupid anticlimax. And it is. The fact that the end of Watchmen is a let-down is entirely deliberate.
@ “The Lovecraft monster is supposed to be idiotic, as is Ozymandias himself.” and “The squid of doom really isn’t meant to make you go “whoa.” It’s meant to be a stupid anticlimax.”
But if the squid is supposed to be idiotic and Ozymandias is an idiot and the ending a stupid anticlimax, then doesn’t that undercut the moral horror we should properly feel at the fact that within the narrative Ozymandias has killed millions of people in cold blood? We don’t think of Eichmann as an idiot who came up with an idiotic and anticlimactic scheme. Even Hannah Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann as being “banal” in his evil at least gives a sense of something more complex and baffling than Ozymandias, who really seems like a brother to Lex Luthor and Dr. Doom.
Jeet, I totally missed this:
“@Noah. “Jeet did you read Katherine Wirick’s piece on Rorschach as a rape victim?” I was just looking at it before you posted. It’s a very smart piece. This is not meant as a knock on Wirick (who makes a convincing case for how Rorschach should be interpreted) but I’m wary of accounts of fascism that start with the victimization of fascists. To the extent that fascists are victims or losers, its because they’ve benefited from systems of privilege (capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, imperialism, racism) which are being challenged.”
I think that’s a very smart criticism…but I also think that it’s too simplistic to see Rorschach as a fascist. He certainly flirts with fascist ideas…but in the end, the mass murder that defines fascism sickens him.
Privilege is also complicated. There are a lot of people who don’t have a lot of money or power who find fascist and racist ideas appealing. I would argue that Katherine’s reading actually links Rorschach’s fascism to his anxiety around privilege…specifically, to his anxiety around his male identity, his feeling that he’s not measuring up, his desire to be the strong masculine archetype. I think that that’s fairly insightful about fascism in genera. I also think Rorschach’s final decision to side with the victims rather than with the fascists is both honorable and moving.
@Eric B. “The books (both V and Watchmen) do maintain a healthy skepticism about human nature (it’s worth pointing out that things in the ex-Soviet Union and the U.S. are hardly perfect as a result of the end of the Cold War), but they do certainly propose that we take control of our own destinies, instead of abdicating power to our ‘rulers.'” It’s true that both the United States and post-Soviet Russia have many flaws. But fortunately there are people in both countries who are working to make things better and challenging the authorities. This type of resistance is notably absent in Watchmen. V for Vendetta is an interesting book because it does show resistance to the ruling class, but that resistance takes the form of a superhero. We can take control of our destiny but only if the superhero shows us how (and if we’re a woman, he might have to torture us along the way). There is an interesting tension between Moore’s anarchism, his philosophical determinism, and his use of the superhero genre. In my charitable moods I like to think of this tension as fruitful rather than incoherent. It certainly helps make Watchmen a little bit less programmatic than it would otherwise be.
About the rape of Sally Jupiter. Just in terms of Watchmen itself, it’s a fairly minor lapse but becomes a bit more problematic because of the pervasiveness of sexualized violence towards women in Moore’s work. Again, I think there is a charitable interpretation that can be made: Moore is interested in creating genre-deconstruction and pastiche of genre material. The “damsel in distress” is a key figure in many genres and Moore is simply bringing to the fore the rape subtext that is latent in many narratives. But it’s possible to take a more critical stance towards Moore’s handling of rape as well.
@Noah Berlatsky. “I think that’s a very smart criticism…but I also think that it’s too simplistic to see Rorschach as a fascist. He certainly flirts with fascist ideas…but in the end, the mass murder that defines fascism sickens him.” Rorschach is a vigilante who thinks that society is too soft and decadent to confront the forces that are undermining it. To me, that’s fascism. It’s true that he only beats up and kills people with his own hands while Ozymandias murders millions. So let’s say that Rorschach is a retail fascist while Ozymandias is a wholesale fascist (or, more accurately, a wholesale left authoritarian).
@Eric B. “I like Eddie Campbell’s art and I like From Hell…” This might get us close to the core issue. For me, comics are a visual narrative medium, which means the art and story can’t be separated. So Campbell’s art isn’t just a pleasant add on, its crucial to experience of From Hell. As for Gibbons, as I said before I don’t dislike his art and in many ways it seems ideal for the story that Moore has constructed. But that’s a problem in the sense that Gibbons does a very competent job of working within the DC comics house style as perfected by Curt Swain (and the colorist, letterers, etc also work within that house style). What this means is that Watchmen is a superhero comic not just in story content but more crucially in visual form. The characters move and look like they belong in a superhero narrative, which is appropriate enough but also distancing. It makes it harder, for me at least, to empathize with them in the way that I empathize with the characters in the Locas cycle or the Palomar cycle or Rusty Brown or The Death Ray. All of these are works where the art isn’t a generic house style but integrated and expressive. A Jaime drawing of Maggie is Maggie whereas a Gibbons drawing of Dr. Manhattan is simply a talented artist’s conception of a character. Moore is able to overcome this problem when working with more expressive artists like Campbell, which is one reason to prefer From Hell.
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Jeet Heer says:
@ Mike Hunter. “there are plenty of examples of humble, noncostumed humans, who are shown as moral, caring, striving to do the right thing, for all their final fate…”
True, but all of these are defensive and futile gestures in the face of a world controlled by costumed gods. Non-superheroes in Moore’s universe can try (unsuccessfully) to defend themselves but they can’t make their own history or challenge the power that be.
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Um, the whole reason why Ozymandias considered his scheme necessary was to save the world from the actions on non-superhero politicians on both sides of the Iron Curtain, who were bringing us ever-closer to nuclear annihilation. (A period which I lived through.) And ending up, in the comedian’s blackly-humorous comment, as “The smartest man in the cinder.”
And, those humble folks-on-the-street were as powerless compared to Nixon and the Russian leadership — and as we are to, say, the Koch brothers or Rupert Murdoch — as they were to superheroes.
The only superhero in Watchmen who truly qualified as a “costumed god” was Dr. Manhattan (even if he ended up sans costume, following the dictum that “naked is the best disguise”). Ozymandias, the second most powerful of the bunch, simply uses his intelligence and wealth to do machinations that are (aside from their SF aspects) not much different than other ultrainfluential humans (the aforementioned Kochs and Murdoch; Henry Ford, propagating anti-Semitic propaganda worldwide, financing and publishing a German translation of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”) are capable of.
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Also, if we take the deaths in Watchmen seriously we should regard Ozymandias as a moral monster, a veritable Eichmann.
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Not in the least; was Eichmann only reluctantly causing deaths for the truly, clearly greater good of of saving billions of lives? Aside from “evil must be punished” Rorschach, the rest of the heroes, while appalled at his massacre of New York, agreed that revealing the crime would undo the greater good it had accomplished, make those have perished in vein.
It’s like the old thought experiment, “If you could go back in time and kill Hitler, would you?” Of course I would; even if the only way to do so was to annihilate Berlin and kill countless innocents, that action would save tens of millions of other lives. Therefore, clearly the right thing to do.
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Yet even after the extent of Ozymandias’ actions are revealed, he’s treated not as a moral monster but rather as a pulp figure, a superhero-who-turns-out-to-be-supervillain.
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Good heavens; in your wish to denigrate Watchmen, you keep trying to push its readers into having simplistic reactions to morally-complex/ambiguous characters. You actually criticize the book for not having morally-simplistic characters! Say that Rorschach should have been made so utterly revolting that no one could have found anything sympathetic or admirable about him; see the architect — or “watchmaker” — of a plot that, for all its evil, is a lesser evil that prevents an infinitely greater one from happening as a “moral monster.”
And then, after arguing the book should make the characters morally simplistic, you criticize it for having qualities which are “pulpy,” “comic-book-y.”
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…it’s hard to take [Ozymandias’] crime or moral culpability seriously. Or at least I can’t take it seriously. His murders don’t seem real. (By contrast, the killings in The Death Ray are chillingly believable).
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“Believable” in their utterly low-key banality. Yet, do we give a shit about the Death Ray victims? Know them as relatable, sympathetic human beings in the way we do most of those in Watchmen? (Ah, but you don’t find anyone in the latter book to be human-being-like.)
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Domingos really knows his shit. He’s also an elitist (I think he’d wear that label proudly.) As a result, he (mostly) doesn’t rate pop culture works very highly — but he still has read a lot of them, and has also read a ton of high culture works.
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He is very erudite and knowledgeable. His perspective is limited in that he sweepingly dismisses the worth of, say, any comic where the writing and art are not equally great, or finds nothing of aesthetic worth whatsoever in the works of Kirby or Hergé, because they were “aimed at children.”
But, in other to apprehend 3-dimensional reality — or the art form of comics — better, it’s necessary to put together many different perspectives. Domingos definitely has plenty of wisdom to contribute, and it’s not as if there is a shortage of others who can appreciate comics with so-so scripts and extraordinary art (i.e., the oeuvres of Toth and Krigstein), or Hergé and Kirby, to add their compensatory viewpoints.
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Marc-Oliver Frisch says:
…For all its complexity and depth and intelligence and whatnot, it strikes me as a terribly shallow and adolescent exercise when viewed in the context of the great prose novelists. Alan Moore may be a king in comics land, but when he has to compete against all of literature, I find him wanting…
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Pfft! Do I have to quote that story again?
Am reminded again of that friend of critic John Simon, who upon leaving a performance of “Macbeth,” would loudly announce, “It’s good, but it’s not ‘Oklahoma!'” Then, exiting a performance of the famed musical, would call out, “It’s good, but it’s not ‘Macbeth’!”
And, you found “Morrison and Quitely’s ALL STAR SUPERMAN” to be even better than Watchmen? Sheesh!
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It doesn’t move or affect me like some of the best novels or short stories or films or, well, comics. I’m talking about those great cathartic moments here, those instances when, thanks to the craft and great observational skills of the best storytellers, you hit a point where you feel like some great bloody insight about the world hits you like a ton of bricks in just the right moment, and you’ll never be the same again.
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(????) Examples, please?
Personally, I got those insights from real life, spiritual experiences, or nonfiction reading. Have never found such an experience in all my decades of absorption of various art forms.
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So, ultimately, I’d agree WATCHMEN is the most elaborately crafted and intellectually intriguing graphic novel with adolescent ambitions.
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Hummph! I’d like to see the adolescent who’d have ambitions like what Watchmen actually has, and achieves.
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..if WATCHMEN is to be the Best of anything, then it’ll have to compete in the arena of Insights and Truths, delivered with great cathartic force and through unity of content and form.
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Well, gee, sure seems t’me like it does…
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I find that the best works tend to be deceptively simple and accessible,
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That sure knocks out a huge amount of masterpieces in every art form.
So you’re saying, “It’s not simple in approach, therefore Watchmen isn’t good”? And you’re saying it’s not accessible? (I guess that last explains why it was, for all its positive reviews, only a poor-selling “cult favorite.”)
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Generally, when I think of the Best that storytelling has to offer, I think of Joyce, or Cheever, or Dos Passos, or SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, or CITIZEN KANE or Kubrick or the Coens, or even THE SOPRANOS or DEADWOOD.
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Dang! Just shot yourself in the foot, dude…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Marc, if you’re calling Slaughterhouse Five or All Star Superman or Asterior Polyp the best of anything, you’re not being a snob. Trust me.
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Ouch!
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I also think that it’s too simplistic to see Rorschach as a fascist. He certainly flirts with fascist ideas…but in the end, the mass murder that defines fascism sickens him.
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Yes; he also held up Harry Truman — not Noam Chomsky, but no Joseph McCarthy, either — as a figure of honor. And Ozymandias, who’d turn out to hardly be morally pure, easily dismissed Rorschach as a fascist.
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I also think Rorschach’s final decision to side with the victims rather than with the fascists is both honorable and moving.
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Indeed; his taking off his “face” at the end a gesture indicating his joining them. Though I’d consider Ozymandias (who certainly is liberal-minded) an example of where idealism that fails to properly consider the human consequences of the path to Good Goals can gruesomely lead to, rather than a simple fascist.
BTW, excellent summation of the reasons why From Hell is arguable a lesser work that Watchmen, eric b…
Jeet: “For me, comics are a visual narrative medium, which means the art and story can’t be separated.”
What? And now you say so, after arguing with me that the opposite is possible. Does this mean than that you rate stupid drawings high? I bet that I’m misunderstanding you again though…
Mike: “His perspective is limited in that he sweepingly dismisses the worth of, say, any comic where the writing and art are not equally great, or finds nothing of aesthetic worth whatsoever in the works of Kirby or Hergé, because they were “aimed at children.””
That’s a huge misrepresentation of what I think. I have no problems with the work of Kirby and Hergé in their proper place. My problems are all with people who put Kirby and Hergé above the truly great comics artists like Fabrice Neaud and Guido Buzzelli. You’re right about the “aimed at children” part though. A work of art aimed at children has serious limitations. Even so in his best moments Carl Barks showed that those limitations are not impossible to surpass. Another comics artist (a writer) who did the same thing was Héctor Germán Oesterheld. They both solved the problem differently though: Barks allows for a deeper reading (it’s all in the subtext); Oesterheld (whose reading public was, as he put it on the cover of his mags – he was also the publisher – 14 year olds and older) wrote stories that could be read by everyone, adults included.
Jeet, the point about Rorschach isn’t that what he does isn’t fascist. It’s that he is pulled between wanting to be the fascist/father/ogre and his sympathy for the weak and the victims. I think Moore (as Katherine says) is describing and exploring that tension.
He’s a complicated character, and one who changes over the course of his life and over the course of the comic. He is a fascist at some points, certainly…but not when he dies. Which I think matters (at least to me.)
And I knew we could get you to admit to the art being a barrier eventually!
@Jeet— I don’t think of art in a comic as an “add-on” (and as Domingos says, your argument against me kind of contradicts your argument against him). I just think that the superiority of Campbell’s art in From Hell doesn’t overcome the “inferiority” of Moore’s script (I say “inferiority” in quotes because it really is a very good, even great, book—just “inferior” to Watchmen, imo).
I also think to call Gibbons a Curt Swan-type, “house-style” DC artist isn’t really true or fair. Gibbons draws like Gibbons. His work in 2000 AD, and his independent work look like Watchmen, pretty much…and his Watchmen work was certainly not dictated or directed by DC editorial in any substantive way (at least if you believe all the players involved who are on the record about it).
I’m not that big a fan of Gibbons’ art in general (to me, his figures tend to look kind of waxy, and not particularly fluid), but I do think it works very well for Watchmen.
I would also point out that Watchmen has many visual attributes that are very much unlike DC or Marvel house-style of the time…. almost complete lack of motion lines and sound effects…for one thing…give it a very different (much quieter) effect than most mainstream art. The movie flushed all this in a variety of ways…
Finally, I’ll agree with Jones that Watchmen is most like a “novel of ideas”–and I’ll admit to being a sucker for a good “novel of ideas.” At the same time, the book does have convincing believable characters whom this reader attaches to emotionally.
I mean, To The Lighthouse is a novel of ideas too in many ways…but it also packs considerable emotional wallop.
Marc-Oliver made a fairly convincing case against Watchmen as “best graphic novel”–until he started naming his alternatives.
should be “to whom this reader attaches emotionally”—
“There is an interesting tension between Moore’s anarchism, his philosophical determinism, and his use of the superhero genre.”
This I agree with…and just finished an essay that focuses on this tension–though I had to cut like 10 pages out—so I’ll have to revisit.
Jeet–
The HU Comics Poll wasn’t an “Internet poll,” at least not in the way that term is generally understood. A typical Internet poll is open to all voters, and participants can vote as often as they like as long as they remember to clear the cookies on their computers before each vote. Participants in the HU Comics Poll had to meet certain criteria to participate, and they could only vote once. What we did was much closer to the Sight and Sound film polls or the 2005 New York Times contemporary U. S. fiction poll than, say, the 1998 Modern Library Readers’ Poll on 20th-century English-language novels. I assume that’s what you’re thinking of with the Atlas Shrugged reference. In that instance, there was obvious ballot-box stuffing from Randites and Scientologists, among others.
Getting back that to the HU poll, I think there’s a general consensus that Peanuts and Krazy Kat are the two most important newspaper strips, that Calvin and Hobbes is the preeminent newspaper strip of the last 30 years, and that Maus and Watchmen are the key graphic novels. That’s the discourse the poll results reflected. And I said reflected, not determined. If you disagree with that view of the consensus, that’s your prerogative, of course. Others can make up their own minds.
Getting back to the Oedipal drama crack, I’m not necessarily referring to you. It’s one thing to criticize Marvel and DC, and I agree with the complaints in general. What I’m talking about is the extreme emotional edge with which a lot of the complaints get expressed by people don’t have direct relationships (or current ones) with the companies. Actually, I don’t recall you saying anything that has the sort of sticky, overheated edge that one sees from Spurgeon or Bissette or Alan David Doane or even Gary Groth before he began a business partnership with Disney. (Actually, if one wants to see how over-the-top Oedipal issues with Marvel and Kirby can get, there are no better examples than Gary’s behavior with regard to Jim Shooter or the Kirby art-return situation.) If you say you’re an exception to this, I accept that, and I apologize for identifying you with it, however indirectly.
@ Eric B. “I don’t think of art in a comic as an “add-on” (and as Domingos says, your argument against me kind of contradicts your argument against him).” This would only be the case if I were arguing that a badly written story drawn by Jack Kirby was a great comic. But that’s not what I’m saying. A good comic is one where the art and story work together. But if you have a badly written story drawn by Jack Kirby you’ll at least have a visually pleasing experience despite the fact that its not a good comic. You can enjoy the art by dissociating the art from the story but only at the expense of losing the comics reading experience. And in the case of Watchmen, both the writing and art leave something to be desired in my opinion — although I suppose the woodenness of the art matches the constructed, carpentered nature of the story. So I don’t see a contradiction here.
By the way, it seems to me that Eric, Noah and Mike (among others) all fall into the same habit of reading Watchmen the way Moore intended the book to be read, as an anarchist critique of superheroes and authoritarianism. But it seems to me that like many other works of art Watchmen is latent with contradictory meanings that undermine the authorial intent. It’s a story where the superheroes act and ordinary people re-act (just in Shakespeare the tragic hero acts while the secondary characters and ordinary people re-act). Because characters like the Comedian, Ozymandias, and Rorschach are the agents of change and action, they are the figures that engage the imagination. It’s no accident that DC is doing “Before Watchmen” about the early life of the heroes rather than “The Early Life of the token black and lesbian characters who die in Watchmen.”
According to Mike Hunter, the fans who love Rorschach and identify with him are “dimwits” who have an “asinine” reaction. But in point of fact I think such readers understand the narrative logic of Watchmen better than the defenders on this site (Eric B., Noah and Mike among others) do. These Rorschach loving readers understand that he’s presented as sympathetically as Peter Parker or Bruce Wayne — he’s someone who has been wronged and he’s ready to kick-ass. When you read a superhero story, your natural instinct is to identify with such a character, even if he’s a fascist loser. Moore’s authorial intent can’t overcome the logic of the genre, in part because Moore’s skills as a pastichist makes him do all the right genre moves to win over readers.
As for Rorschach being a complex character, the fact is that he takes the law into his own hands and beats people up. Am I remembering aright in thinking that he also kills people? So he’s a thug — in real life he’d be horrifying but in the context of the book he’s sympathetic — because the book ultimately accepts the logic of the superhero genre.
Also self-pity is a big part of the fascist mindset but Moore does not sufficiently distance us from Rorschach to make us critical of his self-pity — rather we share in it. Again, Clowes handles this better in The Death Ray.
@Robert Stanley Martin. “What I’m talking about is the extreme emotional edge with which a lot of the complaints get expressed by people don’t have direct relationships (or current ones) with the companies. Actually, I don’t recall you saying anything that has the sort of sticky, overheated edge that one sees from Spurgeon or Bissette or Alan David Doane or even Gary Groth before he began a business partnership with Disney. (Actually, if one wants to see how over-the-top Oedipal issues with Marvel and Kirby can get, there are no better examples than Gary’s behavior with regard to Jim Shooter or the Kirby art-return situation.”
Actually, I think the response of people like Groth, Spurgeon etc. is perfectly justified. Artists like Kirby, Siegel and Shuster etc. helped create DC and Marvel and were mistreated. Leaving aside copyright issues, Marvel executives allowed thousands of pages of Kirby art to be stolen — if that art hadn’t been stolen, Kirby’s widow and children would have had a substantial nest egg. Even aside from the economic situation, it’s wrong to keep art from an artist. What is remarkable is not the people like Gary are upset about artists being mistreated and robbed, but that many other fans (including it seems you) aren’t bothered by this history of exploitation.
Being upset at the mistreatment of Kirby is no different than being upset at how the music industry treated many popular musicians or exploitation in other cultural industries. The sort of activist journalism that Groth and Spurgeon are practicing in entirely commendable — unless of course you think that it’s okay for corporations to have build themselves up by exploiting artists.
I actually agree that sometimes Moore’s use of genre troops can end up making for some troubling contradictions. Rorschach does come off as “cool” and “kick ass” at times (though not nearly as much as in the horrible movie)—and that’s something of a problem for some of the message(s) of the book…
At the same time, he is a creepy, disturbing, pitiful, and pitiable figure–which was (and to some degree is) not the case for most superhero narratives.
The book does not “accept the logic” of the superhero genre—though it does use that logic for its own ends…and at times that can lead to problematic mixed messages.
I’d rather the problematic mixed messages of Watchmen, though, than the one-note condescending moralizing of Death Ray.
Also, the Comedian, Ozymandias, and Rorschach are not really the “agents of change”— Maybe Ozy to some degree, though the conclusion of the book suggests that all he has “done” may well be undone. What, exactly, the Comedian, or Rorschach, “accomplish” in terms of fundamental change in the Watchmen world is anybody’s guess… If the “ordinaries” in Watchmen don’t effect much change, neither do the “supers”— or no change that can’t be changed again, or unchanged, by the most ordinary of ordinaries (Seymour, again).
I don’t think any of that implies change can’t occur…but to build an argument on how much “agency” the supers have to change things seems to ignore how little does, or potentially, happens.
Jeet’s arguments for the problematic politics of Watchmen are, at least, arguable…but his claim that it’s not a very good book really doesn’t follow from such claims.
@Eric B. I see the Comedian as an agent of change because he’s the one who is responsible for stopping the Watergate investigation which allows Nixon to politically triumph and be re-elected time and again. (I might be remembering incorrectly here but doesn’t the Comedian take care of Woodward and Bernstein the book — apologies if my memory is wrong). So the major political action in the book that separates it from our world (Nixon’s triumph) is due to a superhero. Which is typical for Moore’s vision in this book.
“It’s no accident that DC is doing “Before Watchmen” about the early life of the heroes rather than “The Early Life of the token black and lesbian characters who die in Watchmen.”
This is true…it is “no accident.” But it also doesn’t tell you much. DC is a superhero company who makes money off brand-name superheroes. BW is an attempt to turn Watchmen into that kind of property, even though it never really was such a thing. I also think it’s wrong to call these “token black and lesbian characters.” I don’t think Moore’s record on race issues is superlative…but he’s perpetually reaching out to the gay community, and is arguably a part of it. While one can argue that these characters are not as well developed as Jeet might like, I don’t think one can argue that the characters, or their homosexuality, is tokenism. The whole link of superheroing to queerness is central to the book…not marginal.
@Eric B. I dont’ find The Death Ray to be condescending at all. Andy and Louie are very rounded characters and even slightly sympathetic when young, even as they go awry. What I like about the book is that you can both empathize with them but also see the problems with their actions. There is none of the vicarious thrill in beating up “the bad guys” that mars Watchmen.
Jeet–
I don’t think it’s OK for corporations to build themselves up by exploiting (i.e., cheating) artists. However, I also don’t think it’s appropriate to advocate for those artists with lies, obfuscations, intentional libel, and taking whatever wishful or paranoid bullshit an artist happens to say as unvarnished, objective fact.
Do I think that Marvel should have returned original art to Kirby without demanding things they weren’t demanding of other artists? Yes.
Do I think that Kirby, Siegel, et al. (or their estates) should be receiving royalties for the exploitation of their material for as long as it is generating income? Yes, with the obvious exceptions of fair-use exploitation and material that is in the public domain.
Do I think DC swindled Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons out of the copyright for Watchmen? And that the Before Watchmen project is the sleazy fruit of that swindle? Yes.
It’s not that I’m not bothered by the history of exploitation. It’s that I don’t think it’s appropriate to advocate for artists through dishonesty, defamation, and fatuous claims.
What’s wrong with admitting that there is a thrill to revenge? Seems honest to me. You certainly aren’t rewarded by the end of Watchmen for sometimes sympathizing with his actions. Jeet, you remind me of the critics who lambasted Starship Troopers for its fascism. I don’t need for a story to “distance” me from its themes. Hapless readers of Watchmen won’t be able to resist the lure of fascism unless Moore makes it really clear to them that fascism is bad. I’m not much of a fan of that approach to art, even if I respect some of its theorists.
@Eric B. Okay, token was a cheap shot. Moore does have a very good record on gay and queer issues. His work from the 1980s holds up really well in this regard — not dated at all.
@Robert Stanley Martin. “It’s not that I’m not bothered by the history of exploitation. It’s that I don’t think it’s appropriate to advocate for artists through dishonesty, defamation, and fatuous claims.” Can you site an example of Groth or Spurgeon making a dishonest, defamatory or fatuous claim?
It’s actually, to my mind, more Manhattan who keeps Nixon in office for innumerable terms, by winning the Viet Nam war for him. But sure…the Comedian plays a role. But is this change? Isn’t the whole point, for a narrative standpoint, of Nixon’s retention as president in the parallels with Reagan. The book can have a Reagan presidency without having it actually be Reagan. The “alternate timeline” is just a version of our timeline (giant squid notwithstanding)…The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Off the top of my head, there’s Gary’s claim that Kirby owned the artwork all along, and that Marvel was illegally keeping his property away from him. All Marvel bought was reproduction rights. Unless Gary’s claiming Kirby, and not Marvel, employed the inkers and letterers who worked on those pages–and he isn’t–Kirby didn’t own the artwork. With Spurgeon, it’s claiming that DC has ever trumpeted or even confirmed Moore’s wishful thinking about the reversion of the Watchmen publishing rights as the company position. DC doesn’t publicly discuss the specifics of contracts as a matter of policy. Dick Giordano described the general contractual scenario for reversion in a 1987 interview with Gary, and if the Watchmen contract reflects it, there’s no way Moore and Gibbons would have gotten the rights back without the contract being amended. DC doesn’t unilaterally revert properties; the creators have to initiate it, and they aren’t eligible to do so until two years after the property stops generating income. Since Watchmen has never stopped generating income, Moore and Gibbons can’t apply for reversion.
There are several other examples, but those are the ones that immediately come to mind.
@Robert Stanley Martin. I find your statements baffling. Since you haven’t seen the contracts and weren’t privy to the negotiations how do you know that Moore is engaging in “wishful thinking” and Giordano told the truth? Do companies normally return artwork to inkers and letterers? Did Marvel argue that some of the art Kirby penciled belongs to the inkers and letterers? The legalities and moralities of this are murky but I do think there is a reasonable moral claim that the artwork belonged to Kirby and Marvel let it be stolen. Almost all that stolen artwork still exits, by the way. It circulates among fans who love tales of good and evil.
With Shooter, if you look at that essay where Gary likened him to Nixon, you’ll find a list of people that Shooter allegedly drove away from the company. Several of those people left the company for reasons that had nothing to do with Shooter. They left before Shooter became editor-in-chief, they didn’t like the contracts Marvel issued after the copyright law changed, DC hired them away, etc. One of the creators was a close friend of Gary’s who was caught defrauding the company on invoices and stealing original art from the offices. A few of the creators, including at least one who did leave because of tension with Shooter, returned to regularly work for Marvel long before Shooter left the company. Gary never notes any of that. He would quote Shooter’s testimony from the Fleisher trial without noting the full context of the statements, such that Shooter was explaining legal authorship in work-for-hire situations, or that he was rebutting Gary and Ellison’s insinuation that Joe Orlando didn’t have any say about the content of the comics Orlando was editing for DC. Gary was also quoting denunications of Shooter from people without giving context. I remember with Marv Wolfman the context Gary omitted made Wolfman look bad, not Shooter. I’m sure Gary had enough perspective to realize that, but it was such a ripe quote that he couldn’t bear to leave it out. There were several other things as well.
Jeet–
I don’t know what the contract specifically says, but I do know DC has never made the claims about the Watchmen contract that Spurgeon says they did. I just added the paraphrase from Giordano to emphasize that the situation is far more ambiguous than the one Spurgeon is presenting.
With DC and Marvel work-for-hire material, the standard page split is 2/3 to the penciller and 1/3 to the inker. The split is a discretionary matter for the publisher; it’s not the law. If the penciller owned the pages as a matter of course, they couldn’t do that.
Kirby’s original pages were the collective work of him, the inker, and the letterer. Now if he employed those people, or even just the inker, one can argue he was selling reproduction rights for the physical art. But if Marvel employed all parties, the page is a collective work put together at Marvel’s behest, and they own it. This is an entirely separate matter from copyright, just so everyone’s clear. I’m only talking about the physical art.
Jeet: “A good comic is one where the art and story work together. But if you have a badly written story drawn by Jack Kirby you’ll at least have a visually pleasing experience despite the fact that its not a good comic. You can enjoy the art by dissociating the art from the story but only at the expense of losing the comics reading experience.”
If such a comic is not a good comic how come you rate it high, then? You may say that you rate the art high, but if one can’t separate the drawings from the story, how are you doing what’s, according to your own words, impossible to do? Again: you rate poor art highly. That’s the only logical explanation.
I don’t think Jeet does rate it highly? He’s saying he finds some enjoyment in anything drawn by Kirby, but the work he rates highly are the comics where the art and the story work together.
I think the disconnect between Domingos and Jeet is in the vague phrasing “rate it highly.” Jeet has stated that he rates Kirby as an artist highly. Domingos is transferring that to rating the hypothetical comic with a bad story but good Kirby art highly, which I don’t think Jeet has ever posited. If I’m reading the sides of the argument correctly (and fuck, is that difficult) Jeet appears to “rate” comics along a looser spectrum than Domingos. For Domingos a work either rates or it doesn’t. For Jeet, elements of a work can rate regardless of whether the work as a whole is one he would consider a great comic. I hope that I have interpreted this correctly enough for Domingos to stop swinging his glove at Jeet’s face and demanding satisfaction.
Really, Noah? How about this?
“On the visuals, I should add that one reason I rate Kirby, Ditko etc. so high is that these were very imaginative artists and vivid picture makers. However absurd a superhero story might be, if it’s illustrated by Jack Kirby it at least will keep your eyes very happy.”
I find the above extremely insulting.
You missed the point completely Jason.
Domingos, don’t you think there’s content in Kirby’s drawings often that makes them interesting or worthwhile even absent much interest in the script? That is, there’s often in his work a visionary enthusiasm or drawing as drawing, or the act of creation. That’s why it’s enjoyable to look at for me. I think it actually fits rather well with some of Stan Lee’s dialogue, with all the alliteration and the explosive overwroughtness. There’s an energetic crassness which is appealing.
Though I’m not a huge Kirby fan or anything; I get bored with him really quickly.
I’m not saying that you’re not right, Noah, but would you rate such a comic high? Doing so shows a complete lack of understanding, at best, and an utter disrespect, at worst, for the visual arts. We can’t control what’s enjoyable and what’s not. What’s enjoyable to me may be a drag to someone else. What’s enjoyable to me at some point may be unreadable a few years later. “Enjoyable” means nothing.
If I did, Domingos, please understand that it’s because you’ve made it completely obscure.
” ‘Enjoyable’ means nothing.”
Well, neither does “Good,” if you want to play that way.
Domingos, canon issues and ranking aren’t superimportant to me necessarily (cultural studies damage, I’m sure you’d say!)
Still…like I said, Kirby doesn’t really send me, for various reasons (some of which I suspect are quite similar to yours). But it’s possible for me to really like a comic primarily for the art (Little Nemo’s an example — in part because I feel like there’s not much pretense that you’re there for anything except the art, what with the repetitive story and the wavering, tiny text…he’s almost asking you not to read it.)
On another note…sort of commenting on some of Robert’s point and the way Darryl structured his piece — I think it’s definitely the case that folks interact with the moral issues viz-a-viz corporate policy in a way which is strongly inflected by their assessment of the quality of the work at hand. I know for myself I have a much more visceral reaction to the desecration of Watchmen than to the desecration of Jack Kirby’s work, because I like the former much more than the later. That’s despite the fact that intellectually I don’t think it’s especially different — both companies have a basically ongoing history of repulsive practices, and I think comics and the world in general would be better off if they both went out of business. But art is in a lot of ways about emotional commitments, and I don’t get the same sick feeling in my gut to see (for example) a lousy Fantastic Four movie, because I’m not all that committed to the source material.
Again; that’s not at all an argument that Before Watchmen is more evil or more consequential than the way Marvel treated (and treats) Kirby. I’m just thinking through the juxtaposition Darryl made between Watchmen’s greatness and the treatment of its creator, and how emotionally those things do really end up getting tied together.
@Noah. I understand why people get more worked up when cartoonists they like are being screwed over but I prefer to think about these issues in systematic way. As the old union saying goes, an injury to one is an injury to all. So even though I don’t care for Watchmen, I oppose the way DC has screwed over Moore on this and other comics.
@Domingos Isabelinho. You quote me as saying “On the visuals, I should add that one reason I rate Kirby, Ditko etc. so high is that these were very imaginative artists and vivid picture makers. However absurd a superhero story might be, if it’s illustrated by Jack Kirby it at least will keep your eyes very happy.” Your comment is: “I find the above extremely insulting.”
I’m not sure who is being insulted here. Be that as it may, since this statement is so upsetting, let me re-word it in away that might clarify that I’m rating Kirby, etc. high for their best work. The reworked statement can read:
“On the visuals, I should add that one reason I rate Kirby, Ditko etc. so high is that these were very imaginative artists and vivid picture makers. The quality of their cartooning is most evident when they were working on good stories, so that the imaginative quality of their art worked hand in hand with the story. Yet these artists were so strong they could partially redeem even the many poorly written comics they worked on. However absurd a superhero story might be, if it’s illustrated by Jack Kirby it at least will keep your eyes very happy. These poorly written stories are of course inferior to Kirby’s best work but even they have a spark of visual inventiveness that makes the work have some value.”
Is this re-worked statement still insulting? And again, can you inform me who I’m insulting?
@Jason Michelitch. I’m grateful for your post because it shows that someone is capable of understanding what I write, even if that someone is not Domingos Isabelinho.
Jason: of course not, why do you think I provided a link to Neaud’s interview with Matthias? Sorry for the laziness, but: 1) I didn’t want to steal the thread (I’m commenting here too much already); 2) I don’t have the time to engage in Journal (3) the way it deserves at this point. I will just add that it’s a complete mystery to me why there’s no English edition already.
Noah: canon formation may not be important to you, but you do discuss aesthetic matters, right? This is precisely my problem with the comics subculture: the shallow way in which the visual arts (drawing if you wish) are valued. Imagine someone saying something like: the characters in novel x are cardboard, the plot is clichéd and melodramatic, but I value it among Dostoevsky and Proust because the writing style is great.
How can you separate such things? If a superhero story drawn by Kirby is childish and manichean the characters’ appearance will be something like: the hero is young and drawn according to conventional notions of masculine handsomeness while the villains will clearly be villains, etc… Drawings drawn that way are not good drawings no matter what. Besides, I agree with Art Spiegelman: Kirby’s art is fascistic.
Likewise, if a character in a novel is a sterotype, how can you say that the writer is a good writer?
@Robert Stanley Martin. “Kirby’s original pages were the collective work of him, the inker, and the letterer. Now if he employed those people, or even just the inker, one can argue he was selling reproduction rights for the physical art. But if Marvel employed all parties, the page is a collective work put together at Marvel’s behest, and they own it.”
Is this the actual law or is this just industry practice? Because if we accept your logic, then Marvel doesn’t ever have to give back any art.
Jeet: I understand that these are just comments in a thread on the www, it’s no big deal if some phrase is not exactly pondered. Thanks for your correction.
I find your first phrase insulting because it belittles the visual arts.
@Robert Stanley Martin. “I don’t know what the contract specifically says, but I do know DC has never made the claims about the Watchmen contract that Spurgeon says they did. I just added the paraphrase from Giordano to emphasize that the situation is far more ambiguous than the one Spurgeon is presenting.” The fact that Tom Spurgeon doesn’t have a 1987 Dick Giordano interview at the tip of his finger is not a sign that Tom Spurgeon is dishonest, defamatory, or fatuous. Rather it’s a sign that Tom Spurgeon has a life.
As for Jim Shooter, I’ve read the interviews Gary quoted in his “Shooter as Nixon” piece as well as other interviews from Marvel people that worked with Shooter and Gary’s account seems entirely acceptable to me, perhaps even a little on the kind side. Gary’s writing a polemic and not a journalistic account so he has the right to pick the quotes he wants to prove his case.
We all have to pick our battles but I find it curious that you are more upset about Gary writing over-heated polemics than you are at the fact that thousands of pages of Jack Kirby’s art were stolen from Marvel and continue to circulate on the black market to this day. Even if we accept the fact that Kirby should only have gotten 2/3 of those pages back and the inkers gotten 1/3 back, we have to contend with the fact that Kirby actually received only 20% of the pages (and as far as I know the inkers nothing). That’s a lot of stolen pages — worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It’s odd to me that someone can get worked up about the supposed moral complexity of books like Watchmen and be so indifferent to actual criminal behavior that effects artists and their families.
@Robert Stanley Martin. “I don’t know what the contract specifically says, but I do know DC has never made the claims about the Watchmen contract that Spurgeon says they did. I just added the paraphrase from Giordano to emphasize that the situation is far more ambiguous than the one Spurgeon is presenting.”
It just occurred to me that in the end it doesn’t matter what Dick Giordano said in 1987 or even what the original contract contained. There is nothing preventing DC from re-negotiating the contract with Moore and Gibbons to make it more equitable. This actually happens fairly frequently in publishing and even the music industry when a work becomes successful. A comics related example would be Charles Schulz. When he first sold Peanuts he gave up the rights and had a standard percentage deal. But when Peanuts became huge, the syndicate wanted to keep him happy and renegotiated, giving him both ownership and a higher percentage. There is nothing preventing DC from acting in a comparable manner, other than the fact that they have a business culture that has historically treated freelancers badly. They also benefit from the fact that many fans have no sense that artists have moral rights and no solidarity with the people who actually create comics.
Come on, Jeet. Robert never said that he was more concerned about Gary’s comments or whatever than about Kirby’s mistreatment. I’m pretty sure everyone on the thread agrees that both Marvel and DC’s business practices in terms of creator’s rights are atrocious.
Domingos:
“if a character in a novel is a stereotype, how can you say that the writer is a good writer?”
I think there are lots of good — even great — writers who use stereotypical characters. George Eliot’s treatment of working class people is consistently crap; Dickens’ treatment of women is consistently crap; Kipling’s treatment of non-whites is crap….I could go on and on and on. Yet I think all of those writers are great writers, sometimes despite their use of stereotypes (Eliot and Dickens); sometimes because their use of stereotypes is linked to insights about their own and other’s prejudices (Kipling, at least sometimes.)
Something like Dickens’ treacly condescension to women does have a major affect on how I respond to his books; I find it really offputting, and definitely rate him lower because of it. But there are also a lot of pleasures in his writing — the language, the characters — just lots of things.
Domingos, I was going to respond but Noah beat me to it and came up with a better reference than I would have. So, what he said.
Also…many branches of comics have been piecemeal, assembly-line, or, if you prefer, “collaborative.” In that context, it’s hard not to say—“I like the writing—but the art is terrible” (as in many a Grant Morrison comics), or “the writing is terrible, but the art transcends its limitations (as with Kirby).”
In most cases, though, I tend to agree, that a really dumb story is hard to transcend… and really bad art is hard to get past. In Watchmen’s case, while I’m not generally a huge Gibbons fan, his work fits the project very well… I’m also not a huge Kirby fan …but I would say there are a few Lee/Kirby collaborations which are greater than the sum of their parts (somehow Lee’s writing, as hackneyed as it tends to be, ends up working pretty well with some of Kirby’s oversized bombast)… I wouldn’t put any of these collaborations in the category of “great art”–but they do end up in the category of “enjoyable pulp with occasional moments of transcendence.” Just don’t read too many 1960’s Fantastic Four stories in a row. In moderation, they bring a smile to the ol’ kisser.
Dickens’ characterizations in general tend to be fairly cartoonish (in the pejorative sense of flat and surface-y) and so the lack of well-rounded female characters isn’t that surprising (it’s the use of stereotypes which is less forgivable)…. but Dickens is great anyway.
The stereotype thing was just an example, but I agree with you, there can be redeeming features (I still don’t see how a racist or misoginistic book can better because it is racist or misoginous, but, anyway…). In Kirby’s case there’s a certain imagination and formal chops at work, no doubt about it. It’s just that, for me, the negative aspects overwhelm the good ones.
Jeet–
Don’t judge people on their writing priorities. There are always more important things to write about. There are certainly things that are a hell of a lot more important than comics. You’re living in a glass house.
This is the statement that Spurgeon made that I especially object to:
The problem is that there is no evidence that DC ever promoted or endorsed the view that the Watchmen rights would eventually return to Moore and Gibbons. As near as I can tell, they didn’t. I’m not faulting Tom for not knowing about Giordano’s statements. I’m faulting Tom because there is no basis for criticizing DC for breaking a promise about the property’s reversion. DC isn’t obligated to do anything because comics-circle scuttlebutt expects them to. I mean, really. Comics-circle scuttlebutt has expected Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly to go bankrupt at various times. I’m not going to fault Gary, Kim Thompson or Chris Oliveros because they haven’t.
Charles Schulz didn’t get his contract renegotiated until he threatened to walk. The syndicate even hired another cartoonist to take over Peanuts in case they couldn’t come to terms with him. Moore refused to play hardball with DC. He just quit.
Kirby’s inkers got shares of those pages from Marvel, by the way. As far as I know, no one has ever challenged Marvel’s (or Disney’s or Topps’) claims of original-art ownership in court.
Let me add that while I believe DC has engaged in ethical breaches with Moore and Gibbons, I don’t feel their not reverting the property thus far is among them. An “after no further income” reversion clause is actually the rule in book publishing outside of comics, and there’s nothing unethical about it. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the sort of reversion clause in Fantagraphics’ contracts for Ghost World or Love and Rockets, either.
@Robert Stanley Martin. I really don’t understand why that Spurgeon statement upsets you so much. It seems like a reasonable summary of what expectations were like in 1986-87. Up until that point there had never been a graphic novel that stayed continuously in print for many years. Most of the graphic novels that had been released — including Eisner’s A Contract With God — went out of print pretty quickly. So both Moore/Gibbons and DC would have expected a reversion on Watchmen. And at the time DC was widely promoting the idea that they were moving beyond the bad old business practices of yore and respecting creators. In a sense Moore’s great mistake was creating something that was too successful.
As for the original art issue — if there is no legal ruling one way or the other, why should our default position be that the art belongs to Marvel? In point of fact, one reason Marvel played hardball with Kirby and other artists — getting them to sign legal statements — was to foreclose this issue. But there is no reason for outsiders to automatically take the corporate side on this. Barring a legal decision, we’re left with the morality of the case. And for me its obvious that, morally obvious that the art should be divided between Kirby and his inkers (or now between the Kirby estate and whichever inkers are still alive and the estates of the dead inkers).
But in point of fact, most of the art Kirby drew for Marvel hasn’t gone to him, his estate or various inkers. Most of that art was stolen while it was under the care of Marvel comics and no effort has been made by Marvel to recover it. That, to me, is a scandal more worth thinking about than parsing various sentences by Tom Spurgeon or Gary Groth.
@Noah: “Marc, if you’re calling Slaughterhouse Five or All Star Superman or Asterior Polyp the best of anything, you’re not being a snob. Trust me.”
Well, if WATCHMEN is to be a great work of literary merit and Rorschach a moving character, one can’t be too sure where the snobbery starts. (Don’t fuck with Vonnegut, though. Be kind.)
@Mike Hunter: “Examples, please?”
Every other page of SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, basically; Alan Moore has yet to write something remotely as affecting and effective as the line “So it goes.” That scene where Asterios picks the cotton out of Hana’s ear. The beautiful, cacophonically staged scene at the composer’s in the same book. When Superman shows up to save that suicidal girl. Most of the last three issues of ALL STAR SUPERMAN, for that matter. (I pick these to tickle Noah some more, really.)
“Have never found such an experience in all my decades of absorption of various art forms.”
Then I have to regretfully inform you that you’ve missed the point of all of art and literature ever. There’s hope, though, if you say that without having seen A SERIOUS MAN.
It might be the cure you need.
I read like eight Vonnegut novels one summer, and that’s it for the rest of my life, I think. Slaughterhouse Five is probably his best, but he’s always really glib. It’s like part of him wants to be Mark Twain and part of him wants to be Isaac Asimov, and the Asimov part wins out a depressing amount of the time.
Asterios Polyp…no, I won’t. You can’t make me.
Oh, lord. You’re taken with “So it goes.” Well, if you think that’s the quintessence of affecting genius, there’s no point in arguing.
@Noah: “Asterios Polyp…no, I won’t. You can’t make me.”
But… it’s even got its own giant squid at the end.
What’s not to like?
Well, it’s more worth thinking and writing about, say, the Obama administration’s complicity with the plague of real-estate fraud in the U.S. than any comics-related subject. Or the self-destructiveness of the austerity policies in Europe. Or God knows how many other things. Come off it, Jeet.
Not reverting a book that’s generating income is not an example of “the bad old business practices.” If it were, you could indict just about every book publisher in North America on that basis.
Any publisher who deserves to stay in business has an eye out for new markets in which to sell material. So I don’t know that DC “would have expected a reversion.” Obviously, they weren’t as complacent as a lot of people seem to have expected they’d be. Also, DC had control of subsidiary rights, and that’s a source of income that most likely would have allowed them to hang on to the property for a good while even if they had let the comics go out of print. As long as, for example, someone was willing to lease the movie rights–and Joel Silver never let go of them after he first got his hands on them in 1986–the property is generating income, and that means the property stays with DC.
Also, graphic-novel collections were clearly a coming wave in 1985 when the contract was negotiated. And things like Ditko’s Spider-Man have been pretty much in continuous print in one format or another since at least the late ’70s. There’s no reason to assume that DC would necessarily have let the comics go out of print, either.
With regard to the art return, I didn’t say Marvel had a moral claim to ownership of the original art. I don’t think they do. I fully agree with Gary if that’s the argument. But that’s not what Gary was saying. Gary was claiming that Marvel had no LEGAL claim to ownership of the art, and that’s not accurate.
Robert Stanley Martin. “Kirby’s original pages were the collective work of him, the inker, and the letterer. Now if he employed those people, or even just the inker, one can argue he was selling reproduction rights for the physical art. But if Marvel employed all parties, the page is a collective work put together at Marvel’s behest, and they own it.”
No. In the state of New York, a separate payment must be made for original art. And if Marvel claims ownership of the originals, then it has to pay sales tax on them.
Marvel has never paid such a tax.It has also never formally claimed ownership of the artwork.
Legally, thus, Marvel is not, and never has been, the owner of Kirby’s artwork.
I’m writing these responses as I scroll down the thread, without skipping ahead, so ‘scuse me if I make arguments that others have made…]
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Robert Stanley Martin says:
It’s one thing to criticize Marvel and DC, and I agree with the complaints in general. What I’m talking about is the extreme emotional edge with which a lot of the complaints get expressed by people don’t have direct relationships (or current ones) with the companies.
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The only people who are allowed to get highly emotional over an injustice are he people who are directly involved, then?
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…Actually, if one wants to see how over-the-top Oedipal issues with Marvel and Kirby can get, there are no better examples than Gary’s behavior with regard to Jim Shooter or the Kirby art-return situation.
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Whatta way to dismiss Groth’s righteous and rightful outrage over the way Jack Kirby was mistreated by the very company that should’ve treated him like a, well, king. “It’s all a Freudian psychodrama!”
The American Revolution? It was all Oedipal issues, too! The Founding Fathers wanted to kill King George and “marry” Britannia…
OK, skipping ahead here:
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With regard to the art return, I didn’t say Marvel had a moral claim to ownership of the original art. I don’t think they do. I fully agree with Gary if that’s the argument. But that’s not what Gary was saying. Gary was claiming that Marvel had no LEGAL claim to ownership of the art, and that’s not accurate.
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How blatantly Oedipal can you get??
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Jeet Heer says:
According to Mike Hunter, the fans who love Rorschach and identify with him are “dimwits” who have an “asinine” reaction. But in point of fact I think such readers understand the narrative logic of Watchmen better than the defenders on this site…do. These Rorschach loving readers understand that he’s presented as sympathetically as Peter Parker or Bruce Wayne — he’s someone who has been wronged and he’s ready to kick-ass.
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Yes, in many ways Rorschach was someone that a percentage of the comics-reading audience could relate to: messed-up childhood, isolated, friendless, awkward about sex, physically puny.
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When you read a superhero story, your natural instinct is to identify with such a character, even if he’s a fascist loser. Moore’s authorial intent can’t overcome the logic of the genre, in part because Moore’s skills as a pastichist makes him do all the right genre moves to win over readers.
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Moore’s skills made him have Rorschach be a sympathetic character, despite his “authorial intent” to do otherwise? (Peter Lorre voice: “It vass the hand that did it!”)
How about considering that he wanted to create a character that was not simplistically one thing or another? (As, indeed, everyone else in Watchmen is.) Whom one could both find “relatable,” courageous and principled, and pitiable, creepy?
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As for Rorschach being a complex character, the fact is that he takes the law into his own hands and beats people up. Am I remembering aright in thinking that he also kills people? So he’s a thug…
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Hah! Mr. A stand-in, meet Mr. A mentality. You insist on oversimplifying the character, then attack him for being simplistic.
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…in real life he’d be horrifying but in the context of the book he’s sympathetic — because the book ultimately accepts the logic of the superhero genre.
Also self-pity is a big part of the fascist mindset but Moore does not sufficiently distance us from Rorschach to make us critical of his self-pity — rather we share in it.
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Oh, an author should distance us from the characters, so we can look down upon them from a safe distance and go, “Tsk! Tsk!”?
Well, that’s certainly one approach. There’s also having us go into the minds of the characters (as we particularly do with Rorschach, with his diary entries, psychiatric analysis) and both relate to them, and recoil from parts of them, especially if we recognize — at least in inchoate form — aspects of our psyche there.)
That he is somewhat sympathetic is not due to “the logic of the superhero genre,” but the way Moore was careful to not have the character be two-dimensional.
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According to Mike Hunter, the fans who love Rorschach and identify with him are “dimwits” who have an “asinine” reaction. But in point of fact I think such readers understand the narrative logic of Watchmen better than the defenders on this site…do. These Rorschach loving readers understand that he’s presented as sympathetically as Peter Parker or Bruce Wayne…
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Rather than understanding “better,” those readers’ limitations were painfully shown by the way they solely focused on the “someone who has been wronged and he’s ready to kick-ass” part of the character and dismissed that, unlike Peter Parker or Bruce Wayne (at least the way the characters are overwhelmingly portrayed), he’s not a messed-up, smelly isolate with severe “issues” with women, among other faults.
That dimwitted asininity similar to the way millions of Americans swooned in admiration as George W. Bush made his aircraft-carrier lading, “mission accomplished!” photo-op; saw him as a hero, never mind that he never put himself at risk in war, and even went AWOL from his cushy, safe, National Guard position.
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eric b says:
Also, the Comedian, Ozymandias, and Rorschach are not really the “agents of change”— Maybe Ozy to some degree, though the conclusion of the book suggests that all he has “done” may well be undone.
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Moreover, as Dr. Manhattan put it, they’re “all puppets”; of the workings of fate, that Great Writer In The Sky…
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Jeet Heer says:
…I see the Comedian as an agent of change because he’s the one who is responsible for stopping the Watergate investigation which allows Nixon to politically triumph and be re-elected time and again. (I might be remembering incorrectly here but doesn’t the Comedian take care of Woodward and Bernstein the book — apologies if my memory is wrong). So the major political action in the book that separates it from our world (Nixon’s triumph) is due to a superhero. Which is typical for Moore’s vision in this book.
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Just to show I’m a fair-minded arguer, here’s some more arrows for your quiver: the Comedian(as I recall) also supposedly (the book didn’t make it explicit that he killed “Woodstein,” either) assassinated JFK. He did rescue the Iran hostages. And Dr. Manhattan made victory in Vietnam possible, plus kept the Soviets in check for all those years; with his ability to synthesize elements, made all manner of technological advances possible.
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…I dont’ find The Death Ray to be condescending at all. Andy and Louie are very rounded characters and even slightly sympathetic when young, even as they go awry. What I like about the book is that you can both empathize with them but also see the problems with their actions. There is none of the vicarious thrill in beating up “the bad guys” that mars Watchmen.
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I have certainly fantasized more about having that “death ray” than being Rorschach (which I never did). Gimme that goofy gun and I’d be like, Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!
Which — sarcasm alert! — shows what an utter literary failure Clowes’ book was.
AB–
Here’s the link to New York State laws with any relevance to the words “art” and “purchase”.
http://public.leginfo.state.ny.us/LAWSSEAF.cgi?+&QUERYDATA=art%20sale+&SEARCH=SEA+&BROWSER=BROWSER+&TOKEN=26392657&TARGET=VIEW
Please indicate which one, or if you can find it elsewhere, another New York law that supports your assertion about separate purchase.
The sales tax issue is a red herring. Even if Marvel owed it at any point, the statute of limitations in New York for tax obligations is three years. Since Kirby did the last of the work in question in 1970, the last of any such obligations would have expired in 1973.
Define “formally claimed.” As far as I know Marvel (or any other publisher) has never had to address the issue with a court or regulatory body, or even faced the prospect of it.
The issue of the right of return of original art produced for work-for-hire publishing is about ethics, not law.
No, it’s a point of law. Neal Adams researched this quite thoroughly.
Whether or not Marvel gets away with a statute of limitations pass isn’t relevant. The fact that they never paid sales tax on the artwork indicates full well that they never claimed ownership of the artwork.
Jeet…I probably should resist…but I can’t help but point out that your argument about the way fans identify with Rorschach is diametrically opposed to arguments you make about comics you prefer. That is, in Rorschach’s case, the stupid, superficial reaction (fans identifying with his coolness) is taken as profound…whereas when it’s Crumb, the fact that folks take his racist caricatures as racist is a sign that they’re stupid.
As I’ve mentioned before, I think superficial readings tell us something — though what exactly seems like it’s something you need to parse individually. I think there’s definitely grounds for saying that Moore is tied to the logic of his genre, just as Crumb is tied to the logic of racism. The difference for me is that Moore puts a lot of effort and thought into figuring out that logic, and so I think is smarter about undermining it. As Katherine shows (and this was my reaction to the character as well) one way to identify with him very strongly is on the basis of his victimization and his compassion, rather than on the basis of his strength and bad-assery. Similarly, Rorschach as bad-ass is somewhat undermined by the fact that he keeps losing — the cops beat him up (in a really unpleasant scene); at the end of the comic, he’s reduced to a stain. If he does win, it’s because of his ridiculous infatuation with that right-wing loony publication — which is portrayed as ridiculous and loony quite explicitly.
None of this says that he completely overcomes the genre conventions. But he pushes against them quite hard, and clearly understands and mistrusts them — much, much moreso than Ditko and Kirby, or than almost any other superhero creator I can think of. William Marston is perhaps an exception — as is Grant Morrison on occasion, though not recently. Even parodies like Chris Ware’s Superman (I haven’t read Death Ray) don’t really escape the logic; Ware still essentially encourages you to enjoy and laugh at and despise the weak, even as he parodies the impulse to do that. (Which isn’t to say those comics are bad; the Jimmy Corrigan story with Superman leaving him on that island is my favorite Ware story, and one of my favorite comics ever.)
On the other hand, as I’ve said before about Crumb; his main means of critiquing racism (to the extent that he’s doing that) is through exaggeration, which is largely ineffectual — and certainly is much less considered and careful than the way in which Moore tries to think through and undermine the tropes of superheroics and fascism.
It’s totally fair to say that you think Moore ultimately fails, though. And the point about victimization not necessarily working to undermine fascism is still a good one (though I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a knock-down argument in this case, since Rorschach ultimately chooses to identify with the victims rather than the fascists, and since he keeps losing — which is not something that usually appeals to fascists.)
Neal Adams has researched geology quite thoroughly, too. I don’t put any stock in his conclusions with that, either.
Getting back to Gary, he and TCJ never, ever quoted a lawyer for support with the assertions he was making about the legal situation with Kirby’s art. They’ve been pretty good about quoting lawyers about legal questions in other news stories, so why didn’t they do it here? One wonders.
I agree with Gary when he said that Marvel’s conduct in this matter was “unjust, unfair, and a breach of human decency.” But it wasn’t illegal.
And with that, I think I’m going to bow out of this.
Noah: I don’t even think that Crumb wants to undermine racism. As I said before on the HU it seemas to me that we can read Crumb’s racist pictures as camp. “When the Niggers Take Over America!” does (not) what you say it does though…
Again, though, it’s a helpful discussion; I hadn’t quite focused on why it’s so important for Rorschach to lose (as for the Comedian to lose.) If you’re not going to validate the tropes, the bad guys have to win (and the superheroes have to be the bad guys.)
@Robert Stanley Martin. “Well, it’s more worth thinking and writing about, say, the Obama administration’s complicity with the plague of real-estate fraud in the U.S. than any comics-related subject. Or the self-destructiveness of the austerity policies in Europe. Or God knows how many other things. Come off it, Jeet.”
This rebuke would have more sting if I didn’t actually also spend most of my working life writing about the very topics you mentioned. If you google my name you’ll see that aside from the esteemed comment section of the Hooded Utilitarian I’ve written for such obscure places as The Boston Globe, The LA Times, the Guardian, the Atlantic Monthly online, Slate.com, the Globe and Mail, the Walrus, the Toronto Star, and the National Post. And that much of my writing is about politics and foreign policy. Oh, yes, I’ve also co-edited a book on racism and Canadian higher education that should be out in the next few weeks: http://www.btlbooks.com/book/too-asian — all of which is to say that I don’t feel like I’m neglecting important real world topics and so feel comfortable for the time I allow myself to write about comics. But you know what, if I spent a huge amount of time writing not just about comics but also obsessing over sentences by Gary Groth and Tom Spurgeon, trying to parse them and pick nits, all the while ignoring or downplaying the mistreatment of cartoonists by big publishers, then I would hope that my partner would hit me over the head with a very heavy rolling pin.
As AB indicates, the legal situation with the ownership of original art is by no means as clear-cut as you think.
And to dismiss Neal Adams’ work on behalf of creator rights because of his silly ideas about geology seems to be a clear cut case of an ad hominem attack. To cite a parallel case, you can find plenty of people who have silly opinions on the Shakespeare authorship question: Harry A. Blackmun, Freud, Chaplin, Henry and William James. Are we to dismiss all their work because of this one idea they entertained? For the record, Neal Adams has done stellar work on behalf of creator rights and tried to form a cartooning guild in the early 1970s. Along with Jerry Robinson, Adams more than anyone is responsible for Siegel and Shuster getting credit from DC for Superman and also a pension. It’s mind boggling to me that Robert Stanley Martin, of all people, thinks he has a right to school Neal Adams on creator rights issues. Maybe next Hooded Utilitarian can hire Ann Coulter to lecture Nelson Mandela on the history of apartheid.
“Maybe next Hooded Utilitarian can hire Ann Coulter to lecture Nelson Mandela on the history of apartheid.”
Again I say, come on. That’s just hyperbolic silliness. (And in addition — I don’t hire anyone. Would that I could, but the site is all volunteer.)
Anyway…I think it’s maybe time to close the thread for now. We’re going to collect Jeet’s comments about watchmen for a post later so they’re all in one place; people can pick things up then if they’d like. Thanks to everyone who commented, and thanks to Darryl for kicking this off.
Okay…well, there’s been some interest in opening this again, so we’ll give it a try. Just nothing below the belt folks.
Thanks to Noah for reopening the thread.
AB–
It just occurred to me how completely specious the sales-tax argument is. The buyer isn’t responsible for collecting the sales tax and paying it to the state; the seller is. If I go to a hardware store and buy a hammer, it’s not my responsibility to make sure the state gets its due from the transaction. The hardware store is obligated to do that. Kirby was the seller and Marvel the buyer, so he would have been responsible for getting the state of New York its sales tax money. He can’t claim the art still belonged to him if the tax wasn’t paid, any more than the hardware store could claim that they still owned the hammer.
Jeet–
I’m not disparaging Neal Adams’ efforts on behalf of Siegel and Shuster. I admire him for it. He’s just not a particularly reliable source of information. A good example is the sales-tax argument I just refuted. He’s the one who first started advancing that.
I refute these tall tales in part because tall tales rub me the wrong way, but in part because they’re dangerous and unhelpful. One does a beginning author no favors by insisting that a “after no further income” reversion clause is unethical. It’s going to get him or her off on an extremely bad foot with ethical publishers. To pick another example, you don’t help commercial artists by perpetuating nonsense that their clients are responsible for collecting sales tax on the states’ behalf and not them. They can get in a lot of trouble that way. You can add to this list ad infinitum.
I realize that Gary and Tom are your friends. But I think you would be doing them a bigger favor by getting after them to cut the nonsense then trying to belittle me into shutting up.
Noah, do you think Rorschach’s actions at the end are meant to show that he’s changed? Maybe Moore intended it that way, since the book begins with the character justifying Hiroshima as a case of the ends justifying the means. But I can see Ayn Rand, Steve Ditko, and their characters saying the same thing while opposing some liberal’s plot to save the world through the mass murder of Americans, and I don’t think they’d see any contradiction there.
It’s pretty clear Rorschach changes. Remember, in the rest of the book, he says that the mask is his face. Taking it off suggests strongly (as Katherine points out in her piece) that he’s no longer Rorschach; he’s become Kovacs again.
Katherine also points out that his early comments about being willing to see the city destroyed are completely contradicted by what he actually does. It’s quite clear that he’s not upset by the liberalism; he’s (rightly) upset by the deaths.
It’s also worth pointing out that the people who die, the ones we identify with, are black and queer for the most part. So you have the “fascist” character basically being willing to die in order to provide justice for a bunch of people fascists are supposed to hate.
I think there’s just a lot about Rorschach that would make actual fascists really uncomfortable. Or to put it another way, if a fascist championed Rorschach, I think you would be in a really good position to argue with said fascist based on the comic itself. Moore really is anti-fascist, and he takes pains to make the comic anti-fascist. That isn’t to say that fascists couldn’t identify with Rorschach, but I think they’d put themselves in a fairly untenable position by doing so.
But he takes his face off regularly…and in prison when he takes it off, he’s clearly still Rorschach.
There are moments, though, which indicate that Kovacs was there all along—and that the notion that he “becomes” Rorschach and kills off Kovacs aren’t really true.
My favorite is the uncomfortable handshake in the owlship…but also there’s the moment when he is tempted to kill/brutalize his landlady, but restrains himself from doing so because of the child present.
I love the removal of the mask at the end, but it’s a pretty ambiguous moment. He is refusing to “compromise” which is very Rorschachian—I mean, Ozy’s “plan” is configured as moral relativism–while R’s objection to it is configured as moral absolutism…and the “black/white” approach to morality is always part of the Rorschach personality type.
At the same time, he removes the mask, after all, and seems to become a more empathetic person (and a more sympathetic figure), which fits the idea of the Kovacs-as-wounded-boy archetype. I would say that, in general, the two types (Rorshach/Kovacs) are always the same person and are always intermingled… I don’t think R’s objections to Ozy’s plan necessarily shows “change” in his character…but that possibility is on offer.
Not change perhaps…more a choosing one of two possibilities that were always there as the one to go out on.
Robert, I think you’re misunderstanding the sales tax argument. The lack of sales tax was put forth as additional circumstantial evidence of Kirby’s legal ownership of the art, not as the causal element behind his ownership. In that context, it’s a perfectly legitimate element to bring up, and if the case had ever gone to court (and Marvel was certainly worried about that in the ’70s) may have been influential. Not trying to say it’s the definite smoking gun, but it’s certainly relevant.
Also, as an aside, there are a number of circumstances where the responsibility of sales tax collection is shifted from the direct seller. If you buy tax free items on Amazon.com but live in New York State, you’re technically obligated to declare and pay sales tax on those items. If a sale takes place through a gallery or other intermediary, they are responsible for the tax collection.
Jason–
I don’t think I’m misunderstanding anything. In fact, I think I clearly understand this situation for the first time. It’s not complicated at all. It’s extremely simple. Believe me, I used to be as marinated in the TCJ version of this as anyone. It was a bunch of flummery that confused the situation.
Here is an original-art transaction between Kirby and Marvel in the 1960s:
Kirby delivers original art to Marvel.
Marvel sends Kirby a check.
Kirby cashes the check. Marvel maintains possession of the art.
This is a sale of the art. Simple as that.
(Just so everyone’s clear, I’m not talking about copyright, just the physical artwork.)
The lack of sales tax being paid isn’t circumstantial or causal evidence of anyone’s ownership. It’s completely irrelevant to the question of ownership. Kirby sold Marvel that art, no ifs, ands, or buts. Marvel owned it.
The sales tax issue is not a legitimate element of the issue at all. It’s a distraction.
As for your other points:
Why do you think Marvel was “worried” about original-art ownership in the 1970s or any other time? I’m not following you here.
A gallery, for all practical purposes, is the vendor in the transactions it conducts. Of course they’re going to be responsible for sales-tax obligations.
With Amazon.com sales, you’re talking about an out-of-state vendor with an in-state purchaser. The state of New York shifts the sales-tax burden in those circumstances. But with an in-state vendor, the obligation belongs to the vendor.
Let me note that my view of Marvel’s ethical obligations in the 1980s is unchanged. The Kirby pages in their possession needed to be returned to Kirby and his inkers. The nonsense Marvel subjected him to was completely out of line.
Robert,
It’s pretty well established that Marvel tried to get Kirby to sign a very comprehensive document in the ’70s giving up all rights to his art, his characters, and his physical artwork. Kirby refused to sign, and there was a long period of lawsuits threatened back and forth that Marvel would never have bothered with if they weren’t worried about Kirby having a leg to stand on should he attempt to legally assert his rights. In the end, Kirby didn’t not sue because he thought he’d lose, but because he was old and didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in court.
In what universe does an artist deliver art for the purposes of publication, receive a check, and give up ownership of that art without expressly signing away that right? The situation is not nearly as simple as you’re trying to make it, and I’m not sure why you’re fixated on doing so.
Jason–
Your understanding of the history is quite mistaken.
Kirby signed an agreement with Marvel in 1973 in which he affirmed that he had no copyright claim on the material. The impetus for the drafting of the agreement is unknown.
Sometime in the early 1980s, Kirby hired an attorney to approach Marvel about negotiating creator credits, equity in the characters, and the return of original art from the 1960s. At some point, the lawyer sent letters to Marvel threatening a lawsuit over the copyrights. Mark Evanier has confirmed this. When Jim Shooter has said Kirby “sued” Marvel, this is what he was talking about. Marvel’s legal department of course responded by pointing to the 1973 agreement, and Kirby promptly backed down. Any discussion of credits or equity was over at that point.
The only issue left was the return of the original art. It was a fairness issue. The ethics of the business had changed in the 1970s so that it had become standard practice to return original art. Other artists had begun getting their ’60s art back–Marvel had warehoused it–and there was no reason why Kirby shouldn’t, too. Now, accounts differ about what happened next. The Marvel people say Kirby refused to sign the standard one-page release form and insisted on a more detailed agreement; Kirby has said that wasn’t the case. Whatever happened, Marvel sent Kirby a four-page release form to sign.
The language of the four-page release was extremely off-putting and frankly demeaning to him. Worse, he would only get 88 pages of the approximately 8,000 pages he drew for Marvel in the ’60s. Kirby refused to sign it. He took the matter public in 1985, with Frank Miller and Gary Groth his key allies in the public-relations offensive. In May of 1987, Kirby signed an amended version of the one-page release and received about 1,900 pages in return.
There were no lawsuits being threatened back and forth. The only party who ever threatened a lawsuit at any point was Kirby. It was specious, and it was not about the original art.
With regard to the language of Marvel’s four-page release, corporate contracts will often include redundancies that have a party affirm things that were agreed to in other agreements. There are several reasons for this. One, lawyers don’t want any room for misunderstanding. Two, they don’t like referring to multiple agreements if something comes up; it’s easier to have it in one place. In this situation, I think Marvel’s legal department wrote it the way they did to retaliate for the way Kirby had already wasted their time with specious legal threats.
There was no reason to be concerned about the legal situation, and they didn’t send the four-page release to Steve Ditko. He signed the one-pager, and there were no hassles. With Ditko, if there was an ambiguous ownership situation, Marvel would have been a lot more exposed, as Spider-Man was worth more than probably everything Kirby had done for the company combined.
Artists have always been able to sell physical artwork without a contract. As far as the underlying copyright goes, U. S. law didn’t require a signed contract to sell it until 1978.
And yes, the situation is very simple. As for why I’m “fixated,” these issues came up above, and I’m straightening out the record. I suppose part of the reason I feel compelled is that Gary sensationalized the issue and played a lot of people for idiots, including me. I don’t like being played for an idiot.
Additionally, other artists have butted heads with publishers over original-art ownership and related issues. A few of them, such as Frank Frazetta, Art Spiegelman, and Frank Miller, have had the resources to fight back. In every instance, they’ve acquiesced. Spiegelman ended a 20-year relationship with Topps when that company auctioned off his and other creators’ original art at Sotheby’s. He’s discussed it publicly a few times. He’s never claimed Topps didn’t have the legal right to do what they did. He didn’t go to the people running Sotheby’s and say that Topps was selling things that didn’t belong to them. (He was at the auction in question.) He didn’t sue Topps afterward. Their behavior was counter to the ethics of the business as it had evolved, but they weren’t doing anything illegal.
Robert, you are confusing possession with ownership. They are very different things in law.
And there is a very substantial body of case law affirming the distinction between the sale of an artwork and the sale of rights to reproduce it.
If I buy a painting, I don’t automatically acquire the right to print it as the cover of a magazine. Conversely, if I commission a cover for said magazine, I don’t automatically own the original art.
I think it’s telling that Marvel has never officially claimed ownership of the artwork.
AB, in order:
Possession is ownership, by and large. Original artwork isn’t property that requires deeding, like real estate or an automobile. Like most things, if one exchanges it for money, and the paying party keeps possession of it, that means the paying party purchased it.
Quote the case law, then.
Ownership of the physical art and ownership of copyright are different things. I indicate that repeatedly above.
Marvel’s public position has always been that they owned the art. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever challenged that claim in court or any other official setting.
Okay…I think I really am going to close this now. The Marvel/Kirby case is only tangentially related to Darryl’s post, and is contentious enough that I’d rather have a discussion start in a post on that topic, if someone wants to write one.
Thanks for being so civil everyone, and for a long and thoughtful discussion.