Tag Archives: Dave Gibbons

Jeet Heer vs. The Watchmen

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We’ve had a lengthy thread about the relative merits of Watchmen here. Lots of interesting contributions from Eric Berlatsky (my brother and an Alan Moore scholar); Marc-Oliver Frisch; Darryl Ayo Brathwaite (who wrote the original post); Chris Mautner, and just a ton of other people. For me personally, though, the highlight has been Jeet Heer’s negative take. As Ng Suat Tong said recently, Watchmen hasn’t attracted a lot of skeptical criticism. Anyway, I thought I’d reprint his thoughts here. (Noah B.)

Heer’s comments have been extensively rearranged and edited so that they can be read through with a minimum of difficulty. Please see the numbered links for the original comments. (Ng ST)

(1)  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, Jaime Hernandez, [and] Gilbert Hernandez.

(2)  [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.

(3) [The] best argument that can be made on behalf of Watchmen [“is that superheroes and pulp narratives are a pretty important way in which we think about our geopolitics and our selves.” (Noah Berlatsky)]

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).

(4)  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.

(5)   [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. (6)  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).  (7)  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.

(8)  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 [as] 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 [correct] 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.

(9)  [I was just looking at Katherine Wirick’s piece on Rorschach as a rape victim.] 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.

 

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…”

(10)  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. (11) 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.

In the real world, thankfully, ordinary people can and do stand up to tyranny, even if they are often defeated. (12)  [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 no 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.

(13)  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 [this] 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. It’s 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.

(14)  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. 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!….I just don’t see the Moore of Watchmen as being anywhere near the writer Clowes is.

(15)  [As for] 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.

(16)  [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 Watchmen. 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 stories) 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.

It seems to me that the critique [recently] 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.

 

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Okay, I think that’s it. Thanks to Jeet and all who participated. It was a fun discussion. (Noah B.)

Heroic Proportions

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I can’t quite summon the kind of tooth-grinding indignation over the very concept of DC’s Watchmen prequels that I think I probably should, because, when I was a sixteen-year-old reading Watchmen for the first time, I remember wishing earnestly that American comics had a doujinshi subculture. (It would be more than a decade before Tumblr came along.) Setting aside—not that we should do so for long—corporate exploitation of artists, the difference, it seems to me, between doujinshi and DC’s prequels lies mostly in the profit margin. Watchmen doujinshi, had they existed, would’ve almost certainly been unsanctioned by Alan Moore, and I would’ve bought them anyway.

So it would feel a bit hypocritical for me to dismiss the prequels out of hand. I’m more troubled by the idea that they might be lousy than by the sheer fact that they exist. Recently released images, however, do not fill me with optimism.

For one thing, Lee Bermejo seems not to have realized that Rorschach is short.

He has, according to the script, the physique of Buster Keaton. Of course, Dave Gibbons didn’t draw Rorschach short either; I have immense respect for Gibbons’ achievement on Watchmen, but when asked to deviate from heroic proportions, he just couldn’t manage. All his adults are tall and broad. On the other hand, Zack Snyder, who for all his flaws showed an impressive grasp of the granular details that comprise Watchmen’s world, cast a 5’6″ actor, and—even more remarkable—framed him next to taller actors and let him look short.

If Snyder, whose films indicate that he has the moral and aesthetic intelligence of an eleven-year-old, could get Rorschach’s body right, what’s holding DC back?

I’m not very familiar with Bermejo’s work and I don’t mean to trash him; taken on its own merits, the Rorschach cover is a clever conceit gracefully executed. But a comic book illustrator’s job is to build a world, and the story’s world starts at the protagonist’s body.

Rorschach’s height is important. It sets him apart from the others. I’m 5’6″, and I am not a physically intimidating presence in most situations. Unlike the other male crimefighters in Watchmen, and most male superheroes in general, Rorschach doesn’t have overpowering physical size as an automatic advantage. His defining characteristic in battle is resourcefulness; we see him fight with improvised weapons over and over again—a cigarette, a rag, a can of hairspray. He needs them; he has to be faster and smarter.

I’m afraid that this looming, broad-shouldered Rorschach is the canary in the coal mine.

The differences between Watchmen and other superhero books are much greater than a little nudity and a little moral ambivalence. It is a delicate, subtle story whose spirit is easily betrayed. For an example, let’s look at Zack Snyder’s version of a pivotal scene from chapter 6.

FLASH OF: Rorschach as a little boy looking up at TWO OLDER BOYS, teasing him. Calling him “son of a whore.” Rorschach just wants to be left alone when one of the Boys SPITS in his face. Suddenly, Rorschach’s face changes. He attacks the Boy like a wild animal–biting, clawing.

This is a formative moment for Walter, in both film and book: it’s the first act of violence we ever see him commit. In the film, he’s motivated by an insult to his pride. In the book, it’s quite different:
 

 
As a teenage girl reading Watchmen I was stunned by this scene. Never before in my travels through fiction had I seen a male character—a male protagonist—have to fear and defend himself against sexual assault. And that’s what it is; the threat the boy is making just before Walter burns out his eye is an unmistakably sexual one: “Get ya pants down.”

I wonder why Snyder and his team changed that scene. Did the generic, truncated version really seem like an improvement to them? Was it merely a cut for time? Or is attempted rape a trauma that heroes do not suffer?

Like Rorschach’s height, this is more than a minor point of characterization to me. The book puts a lot of emphasis on Rorschach’s hatred of his mother, and his associated disgust and fear of female sexuality, but if his mother were the beginning and end of the problem, one would expect him to attack prostitutes. That’s not what he does. He uses violent and misogynistic language, and as a result, many readers see him as willing and able to physically hurt women—but we never actually see that happen, nor are there any references to off-panel incidents. Except in the flashback scene in which his mother hits him, Rorschach never has any physical contact with a woman at all. Who does he target when he’s under the mask?

Of the two murders he admits to after he’s arrested, one is Gerald Grice, the man who butchered Blaire Roche. Take note of the sexual connotations of that episode: it’s not a little girl’s shirt or shoe Rorschach finds in the wood stove—it’s a fragment of underwear. The other is Harvey Charles Furniss, a serial rapist. And one of the few moments of satisfaction, or even something approaching happiness, Rorschach gets in the book happens on page 18 of chapter 5, where he interrupts a rape attempt in an alley: The man turned and there was something rewarding in his eyes. Sometimes, the night is generous to me.

He’s disgusted by women who are sexually active, but his targets, the people he attacks with the most unrestrained violence, are sexually-abusive men. I think Rorschach can actually be read as a rape victim.

Think about his history: he spent his early childhood in a home to which adult male strangers had frequent access, then was placed in an institution. And there are strong overtones of gang rape in the final page of chapter 5:

He’s beaten and held down by a group of men who strip him forcibly, insult his body and sexuality, and suggest that he’s enjoying it—note the cop’s line in panel 5: “You like that? You like that, you goddamned queer?”

But, one might ask, what about his apparent lack of sympathy for Sally as Edward Blake’s victim, which made Laurie so angry in chapter 1 (“I’m not here to speculate on the moral lapses of men who died in their country’s service. I came to warn…” “Moral lapses? Rape is a moral lapse?”), and which would appear to contradict my interpretation of the character? I have three ways of looking at this:

1) Alan Moore was flying by the seat of his pants to a certain extent. Half the series was drawn, lettered, printed and on the stands before the last chapter was even written. He’s said in interviews that it was when he was writing chapter 3 that he realized how Rorschach’s story would end; it wasn’t until that point that he really saw inside the character. His initial intention was for Rorschach to be completely unsympathetic, which end is furthered by the scene in chapter 1 with Laurie and Dr. Manhattan; when he wrote that, he probably didn’t have Rorschach’s backstory worked out.

The disorganized, intuitive fashion in which Moore developed his characters is demonstrated by this interview in which he’s asked why Rorschach takes his mask off in chapter 12:

I’m not sure, it just seemed right. I mean, a lot of these things you just—I kind of felt that’s what he’d do. I don’t know, I don’t know why. I couldn’t logically say why the character should do that but it just felt right… I couldn’t really explain why I did it, it just seemed like what I’d do if I was Rorschach, which is the only way that I can really justify the actions of any of the characters.

So, some disconnect between earlier and later chapters can, in theory, be explained by the serial nature of the book’s publication and the impossibility of late-stage rewrites, although this isn’t my preferred explanation.

2) As I mentioned above, Rorschach fears and loathes women who express their sexuality openly. He refers to Sally in his journal as a “whore”; in his perception, she falls into the category of Bad Women—whether there really are any Good Women in his world is an unanswerable question, although his attitude toward Laurie is less negative—and he is unable to acknowledge her as an innocent victim, like Blaire Roche or the woman in the alley. Or Walter Kovacs.

Also, he liked the Comedian, when they met at the Crimebusters meeting in 1965, and seems inclined to believe the best about him. It’s hard to prove, but I think Rorschach conflates Edward Blake with his father—”men who died in their country’s service”—similar to, although less explicit than, his conflation of his father and Harry Truman. His support of Blake despite abundant evidence that Blake doesn’t deserve it is one of his defensive illusions.

3) The things that Rorschach says do not line up with the things he does.

Throughout the book, though most noticeably in chapters 1 and 6, Rorschach talks in his journal about the hideousness of humanity in general and New York in specific, how much it disgusts him, and how eagerly he’s looking forward to some kind of apocalypse that would wipe the slate clean. In chapter 12, he gets his wish, and he breaks down in tears.

In my opinion, his reaction to Veidt’s catastrophe proves that everything he says on the first page is self-deception. He wouldn’t whisper No. What he says about humanity in his journal and to Dr. Long is part of his attempt, ongoing since at least 1975, to kill the vulnerable part of himself, the part that loved and felt pain, the part that was helpless and afraid. In the end, he fails, and walks forward, weeping, into his own death.

Let’s talk for a minute about 1975.

Here’s another change Snyder made: the removal of the line, “Mother.” In the book, this is the last word Walter Kovacs ever speaks—at least until page 24 of chapter 12. It’s a strange, loaded, exposed moment, and in the movie it’s not there.

Violence against children and rape are Rorschach’s triggers. The former is made explicit by the dialogue on page 18 of chapter 6, as Rorschach sets up the scene for Dr. Long: “Days dragged by, no word from kidnappers. Thought of little child, abused, frightened. Didn’t like it. Personal reasons.” I think we can infer the latter from the argument I made above. The murder and implied sexual abuse of Blaire Roche combines both triggers in a particularly horrific way, and drags Rorschach back into the childhood he put on the mask to escape.

Blaire Roche has become Walter Kovacs in that moment when he closes his eyes. He is the child who was abused and frightened, butchered and consumed, and “Mother” is a plea for help and an accusation: “Why didn’t you protect me? How could you let these things happen?”

The foundation of Rorschach is in powerlessness, and those are the parts of his story that Snyder chose to excise. I don’t want to see that happen again.

Rorschach matters a lot to me. I have never felt any comparable level of emotional connection to a character in a superhero comic. I’m not anti-cape; there are some superhero books I like, for a variety of reasons—but my emotional investment remains minimal. Whatever need lives in the heart of the superhero fantasy is, apparently, a need I do not share.

But to be knocked down and get up again, to demand the humanity you’ve been denied—I can understand that. Rorschach is a portrait of the body under threat, and, even more crucially, a portrait of resistance to which I can directly relate. I am a pacifist; I do not condone violence; but I also have some understanding of trauma: the feeling of helplessness, the shame, the rage.

Of course, my reading of Rorschach is only my reading. I make no claim to be objectively correct in every point; I have not read Alan Moore’s mind; I don’t expect or demand that every Watchmen reader will agree with me. But I think we can agree that Rorschach is, for better or worse, not just another comic book crimefighter, and I dread DC reducing him to that: just another brawny beast of a man with heroic proportions and nothing to fear.

The Flaw in Watchmen

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In his post last week, James Romberger argued that the “offensive flaw” of Watchmen is its suggestion that a woman could forgive, and even love, her rapist.

Sally kissing the photo of the late Blake amplifies the flat note in what is otherwise one of the most carefully and sensitively composed comics ever done. In a medium predominantly directed to males, an often overtly misogynistic form oblivious to the consequences of sexual violence, this rare realistic depiction of rape in comics comes to represent a offense a woman could forgive, that she even might even come to love her rapist.

James is certainly correct that the trope of woman-falling-for-her-rapist — the conversion rape — is a standard of misogyny. As I’ve noted before, the ur-conversion rape is probably the notorious scene in Goldfinger where James Bond overpowers Pussy Galore and fucks her. Afterwards, Pussy Galore abandons her lesbianism and betrays her boss, risking her life and the lives of her whole lesbian posse for the love of Bond’s magic penis.

what’s especially offensive about this whole scenario is the extent to which Ms. Galore is so completely beside the point. The rape and transformation is never about her; in fact, we don’t ever get a sense of her as a character except that she’s tough and independent, and then, suddenly, not so much. She falls for Bond because he’s just so darn overwhelmingly attractive, and she abandons her (never quite stated) lesbianism as if she were doffing a hat. There’s no actual psychological progression attempted; it’s just, insert phallus, hello enlightenment. The whole point of the encounter is, in fact, to annihilate her as a character; in entering her, Bond replaces her will with his own, and she becomes simply his catspaw. It’s the crudest kind of male power fantasy, and one which is more than a little pitiable, suggesting as it does a desire to fuck a mannequin, rather than a real person.

The Bond/Pussy Galore conversion rape is undoubtedly misogynist — but it’s also really, really different from the rape in Watchmen. In the first place, there’s nothing romantic or pleasurable about the sexual violence that Sally experiences. On the contrary, Blake’s assault is bloody and miserable. He himself is anything but cool; Gibbons portrays him pathetically pulling his pants up afterward, and then getting beaten to a pulp by the Hooded Justice.

Moreover, Sally is not converted by the rape. On the contrary, she never forgives Blake.

She hasn’t forgotten, she hasn’t decided what he did was okay. He’s a monster, she knows it, and she’s never going to let him have anything to do with her daughter.

Of course, the part that gets James, and that he feels is misogynist, is that Laurie is Blake’s daughter too. Sally did not forgive him, but she did love him.

James feels that that is problematic. In part, he seems to feel that it is problematic because it is unrealistic (“this rare realistic depiction of rape in comics comes to represent a offense a woman could forgive, that she even might even come to love her rapist.”)

But is Sally’s reaction unrealistic? Women do often love, or are intimately attached, to the people who abuse them, whether husbands or boyfriends. This is an uncomfortable truth, especially for a feminist vision that puts a premium on empowerment and autonomy. Sally Jupiter is certainly not perfectly self-actualized; there’s no question about that. But because she’s not perfectly self-actualized, does that mean she and her choices are necessarily wrong or misogynist?

In James’ reading, Sally’s love becomes the misogynist smoking-gun; the love is wrong. I don’t accept that. It’s not Sally who’s wrong. It’s Blake. It’s not the love that’s at fault; it’s the violence.

James says that:

Even more offensively, Snyder in his film made the fact of Laurie’s very existence through Sally’s forgiveness be the salvation of the world. This concept unfortunately lurks in the book…

I’m relieved to discover that I’ve almost completely forgotten Snyder’s crappy film. In the book, though, Laurie’s existence is indeed seen as a miracle (though not necessarily as the salvation of the world, as my brother points out). As Dr. Manhattan puts it:

So yes, Sally’s love (though not, as I said, her forgiveness) is seen as transformative, and even beautiful. And it is seen as transformative and beautiful in large part because it produced Laurie, who Sally loves, and who Jon loves.

I think James in part sees Sally’s love as a flaw because he sees it as mitigating, or validating the rape. But I don’t think that’s the case. Just because something good comes from evil doesn’t make evil good. Paul Celan’s poetry is wonderful, but it doesn’t validate or recuperate the Holocaust. Or, as C.S. Lewis says in Voyage to Venus, talking about the fall from Eden:

“Of course good came of it. Is Maleldil a beast that we can stop his path, or a leaf that we can twist His shape? Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed Him. That is lost for ever. The first King and first Mother of our world did the forbidden thing; and He brought good of it in the end. But what they did was not good; and what they lost we have not seen. And there were some to whom no good came nor ever will come.” He turned to the body of Weston. “You,” he said, “tell her all. What good came to you? Do you rejoice that Maleldil became a man? Tell her of your joys, and of what profit you had when you made Maleldil and death acquainted”…

The body that had been Weston’s threw up its head and opened its mouth and gave a long melancholy howl like a dog….”

That could be Blake at the end giving that howl, almost. Certainly, he dies ignominiously and alone, having lost even the comfort of his amorality. Laurie, as a living manifestation of her mother’s love, is a standing rebuke to Blake and his life. If Laurie is a miracle, then the Comedian’s cynicism and nihilism truly mean nothing. This is not to say that Moore and Gibbons, or even Laurie herself, entirely reject the Comedian’s evil or his violence. But it is to say that, to the extent that Watchmen does reject it, it’s because of, not despite, Sally and her choices.

I don’t mean to say that those choices are ideal. Sally herself doesn’t think her choices are ideal. But just because a woman fails to make ideal choices, and just because she does not respond to violence with hate (or at least not only with hate), doesn’t make her a failure. If feminism requires perfect women, there won’t be any feminism. Sally may be a flaw, but humans aren’t gems. Flaws don’t make them less precious.

Post to Incestuous Sheets

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The Rub at Magic Futurebox

This last weekend I traveled into the depths of Brooklyn to witness The Rub, a re-envisioning of Shakespeare’s Hamlet done by a small troupe, the Tremor Theatre Collective, which includes my wife and fellow Hooded Utilitarian Marguerite Van Cook in the role of the young prince’s mother, Queen Gertrude. After Marguerite’s many late rehearsals, she’d tell me of the unusual methods of director Nessa Norich, an innovative theatrical force emerging from France’s Jacques Lecoq International School of Theatre. Norich’s actors formed the production from improvisation, from physically interacting with each other and with the deep columned space of the host theatre Magic Futurebox. From weeks of coaxing and collating the freely invented dynamic interpersonal movement and gestural variations of her cast and imposing a anachronistic montage of verbal and visual references, Norich finally introduced a script in the last week of rehearsals. As I was trying to help Marguerite run her lines, they seemed almost peripheral to the source text with only scattered bursts of Shakespearian diction, but Norich’s presskit describes a “surreal and playful investigation of the frustration, anxiety, passion, complacency, selfdoubt, delusion, isolation and desire that come with being heirs to a state rotting from the inside out.” That’s basically what our Will was on about, as well as where we Americans seem to be at. When I actually saw the results of Norich’s intriguing construct, I found that Shakepeare’s narrative is well represented even as it is made part of something contemporaneous and electrifyingly involving.


The Rub: Gerson, Van Cook and Stinson. Photo by Nessa Norich

The character of Hamlet is effectively played by several actors: one (Micah Stinson) sulks and simmers while another (David Gerson) adopts a keenly fearsome, sinuous aspect of outrage held barely in check. Three more Hamlet alters argue by turns and interweave at breakneck speed through the cavernous room (Colin Summers, Daniel Wilcox and Steven Hershey, who also flow seamlessly into a mellow-voiced Laertes, a loquacious Polonius and an opportunistic King Claudius, respectively). Queen Gertrude’s role is here expanded to be a fiercely comedic whirlwind of Freudian complication. I can’t claim objectivity, but it’s awesome to see Marguerite use some of her many performative skills. As Gertrude she works the stage like a vaudevillian; she stalks with limber, cartoony malevolence, she flummoxes a game reporter (Chas Carey) like a Danish Ghaddafy, she purrs, cajoles and overtly schemes with her new husband against Caitlin Harrity’s earnestly vulnerable Ophelia. Site-specifically mapped projections cunningly use the architecture of the theatre to add ominous, surreal narrative elements. The audience is brought out of their seats to follow the scenes into the depths of the room, making them complicit in the action as it boils to its inevitable final conflagration. While it certainly adheres to the spirit of Shakespeare’s intent, The Rub also shows a freedom of conception that to me is the essence of Art. I love it and so does Magic Futurebox, who have extended the production through next Friday and Saturday.

The Rub @ Magic Futurebox: 55 33rd Street, 4th Floor, Brooklyn, NY (D, N, R trains to 36th St) on Friday Feb. 17th at 8pm and Saturday Feb. 18th at 8pm

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Before Watchmen: Too Sullied Flesh

Shakespeare’s plays are in the public domain; he left no heirs but he is always credited as the source of any use of his works because his efforts are of undisputed quality and value. I suppose it is possible that the more extreme liberties taken by the Tremor Collective might put some Shakespeare purists’ noses out of joint, but theatre is by its nature an act of interpretation. It is a given that a source play is subject to adaptation.  Plays are meant to be reimagined through the efforts of the director, actors, set designers and other members of the ensemble putting up the production.  This is not the case with the current news cycle bummer about DC Comics’ reworking of co-authors Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, a book that was not conceived with the intent that it should be re-interpreted by other creative talents, on the contrary: Watchmen could not be a more deliberately complete work than it is.

As it has stood for 26 years, Watchmen has gone through many editions and enriched DC Comics financially and in terms of credibility. In fact, this multifaceted work is virtually the jewel of their crown. It is one of the key books that began to give comics a degree of critical acceptance, and it is one that deserved such attention—it gave the company a cache to build on, which they have sometimes tried to do with their more ambitious efforts such as the Vertigo line and their similarly convoluted graphic novels, story arcs and miniseries. They could have continued to profit from Moore and Gibbons’ book and striven to emulate their example of excellence, without violating the bounds of decency. But that was not to be. First, Moore disowned the adaptation of Watchmen to a film by Zack Snyder and for a good reason: the comic stands as a finished and hermetic work of Art in the form of a comic. I doubt that he could anticipate how bad the movie would be, though; it reglamorized the violence which Moore and Gibbons had taken pains to deglamorize, changed the ending entirely and amplified what I see as the flaw of the book.


Watchmen: Sally Jupiter is sodomized offpanel; and the “cover-up.”

Make no mistake, what Edward Blake does to Sally Jupiter is not attempted rape, it is rape. He assaults and beats her, then sodomizes her. This is a DC comic and so we are not shown explicit penetration. Instead, the rape happens in a space of indeterminate timing between the first two panels shown above and outside the cropped image of the second panel, where the two characters’ relative positions, Sally’s choked scream of pain and the symbolic bestiality represented by the ape’s head in the case make abundantly clear what is happening. In panel 3, Blake isn’t removing his pants, he’s pulling them up. The colorist has obscured where Gibbons drew Sally’s shorts and stockings pulled down in panel 4, which represents a typical male reaction to rape, at the time and often still. Hooded Justice’s harsh direction to Jupiter to cover herself can be seen as an indicator of why both her daughter Laurie and Hollis Mason (in his book excerpt within the book) are unaware that the rape was actually perpetrated in full: the truth had been suppressed.


Laurie is given clue #1 that Blake is her father.

Jupiter’s previous flirtations with Blake are used as justifications for her contemporaries to think that she had somehow “brought it on herself” and Jupiter’s own feelings of shame and what can be seen as typical victim psychology cause her to diminish the crime, to the extreme that a decade later she has an affair with Blake, which produces a child: Laurie.


In Laurie’s childhood memory, Sally tries to explain to her husband why she has a tryst with Blake, the rapist; confronted by Sally, Blake gives out with clue #2; and their daughter’s epiphany on the moon.

 


Hammering the offensive flaw: Sally loves her rapist.

Sally kissing the photo of the late Blake amplifies the flat note in what is otherwise one of the most carefully and sensitively composed comics ever done. In a medium predominantly directed to males, an often overtly misogynistic form oblivious to the consequences of sexual violence, this rare realistic depiction of rape in comics comes to represent a offense a woman could forgive, that she even might even come to love her rapist. Even more offensively, Snyder in his film made the fact of Laurie’s very existence through Sally’s forgiveness be the salvation of the world. This concept unfortunately lurks in the book, but shorn of the larger rationale of Moore and Gibbon’s ending which involves the human race uniting in the face of a manufactured outside threat, in the film the forgiveness of the unforgivable, the purpose of conception superceding a woman’s rational sensibilities, the “miracle” of the existence of even the product of a rape, all become the primary lynchpins of a narrative seemingly altered to pander to Christian Americans.

For his part, Moore removed his name and refused to profit from this adulterated mess, while he ensured that his collaborator and co-author Gibbons was the sole beneficiary of any royalties. Moore and Gibbons always steadfastly declined to do any more comics with the characters of the book and for 26 years DC respected their contribution to DC’s standing enough to let it go. It should be noted that a production of new comics like Before Watchmen did not happen under the watches of the more sensitive Jenette Kahn or Paul Levitz. No, it takes a corporate pitbull like Dan Didio to make such a decision. With the recent announcement, Moore immediately registered his protest and Dave Gibbons—well, unlike Moore, he still works for DC on occasion, so I’d guess that he couldn’t risk anything but a vague “good luck with that” statement. DC’s behavior, along with Marvel’s recent anti-creative legal victories, should send a cold chill through comics professionals.

And that brings one to question the involvement of all participants. Now, I shudder to imagine that I was more of a “team player,” that I hadn’t bitterly complained about such things as inequities of cover credit, that I drew in a still gritty but somewhat prettier style and had somehow “moved up the foodchain” of artists who draw for DC, or that Brian Azzarello in a generous mood had decided to throw me a bone for drawing his very first professional script, the results of which pleased Axel Alonso so much that he made his new writer a star, and Azzarello had actually recommended me for a gig. Okay, that’s a little poke at Brian, but let’s pretend that for any of these reasons I had been actually offered the Rorschach title. Then I would have been faced with the painful prospect of turning down such a very high-paying, high profile job for reasons of ethics. It’s hard to come down on people who need work. “Tough economic times” can be a powerful incentive to ethical compromise. But one wonders whether people as successful as Azzarello, Darwyn Cooke and J. Michael Straczynski need the work. Rather, they seem to all believe that they are entitled to presume on Moore and Gibbon’s masterpiece, because they are bursting with their own “stories to tell” about the characters. One wonders how they would feel if the shoe is on the other foot and it was their brainchildren at stake. Regardless, their presumption shows a disregard for comics as an art form of any significance and disrespect for the accomplishments of their contemporaries.

It gets worse: given that the actuality of the rape has been debated, one wonders how the re-interpreters will further mangle Moore and Gibbons’ intent. One might dread Cooke’s version of the adolescent Laurie in Silk Spectre, even if it will be drawn by Amanda Conner, because Cooke, known mainly for his reinterpretions of others’ creations, in his first adaptation of the appallingly misogynistic Parker books invalidated any claims of sensitivity or irony in his approach by having the lack of taste to render all the female characters with his typical cute Batman Beyond template. What one gets is interchangeable, expendable girls dying cutely for no reason at all, while the main character could care less. It doesn’t bode well and the covers of the new comics released so far carry out a theme of disempowerment, some directed deliberately at women, as Noah showed in his HU post yesterday. A general theme of uncaring seems to blanket Before Watchmen; as Azzarello stated in The New York Times what seems to represent mainstream comics’ overall regard for their audience’s intelligence: “a lot of comic readers don’t like new things.” Jack Kirby must surely be spinning in his grave. Perhaps Azzarello in his case was being ironic, but he couldn’t be more clear that one won’t be seeing anything new in Before Watchmen.

Probably the most fatuous thing you will read about Before Watchmen, at least for today

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Part I.

Captain Marvel 1939. C. C. Beck, Bill Parker

Marvelman 1954. Mick Anglo

Swamp Thing 1971. Bernie Wrightson, Len Wein

Jack the Ripper, his poor victims, William Gull, Inspector Abberline et al. 1800s. God or Jah-Bul-On or whatever

The basic premise 1976. Stephen Knight

Thor Ye olden days. Some Viking dudes with ZZ Top beards, presumably

The Avengers 1963. Jack Kirby, Stan Lee

Spider-Man 1962. Steve Ditko, Stan Lee

Doctor Strange 1963. Steve Ditko, Stan Lee

The Hulk 1962. Jack Kirby, Stan Lee

The Fantastic Four 1961. Jack Kirby, Stan Lee

Captain America 1941. Joe Simon, Jack Kirby

Assorted other Marvel characters 1961-1970. Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Stan Lee et al.

 

Superman 1938. Joe Shuster, Jerry Siegel

Assorted other DC characters 1938-1970(ish). A whole heap of people but particularly (for Moore’s purposes) Mort Weisinger and Curt Swan

seriously? okay [deep breath]

Mina Murray 1897. Bram Stoker

Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde 1886. Robert  Louis Stevenson

Allan Quatermain 1885. H. Rider Haggard

The Invisible Man 1897. H.G. Wells

Captain Nemo 1870. Jules Verne

Sherlock Holmes 1887. Arthur Conan Doyle

Professor Moriarty 1893. Arthur Conan Doyle

Fu Manchu 1913. Sax Rohmer

The martians from the War of the Worlds 1898. H.G. Wells

Dr Moreau 1896. H.G. Wells

Orlando 1928. Virginia Woolf

Prospero c.1610, according to wikipedia. Francis Bacon

James Bond 1953. Ian Fleming

Bulldog Drummond 1920. “Sapper”

Emma Peel 1965. The writers of The Avengers, Diana Rigg

The cast of the Threepenny Opera 1728. John Gay

Everyone else in the history of fiction c. 10,000BCE-present Every artist ever

…and, while we’re at it:

Wold Newton 1972. Philip Jose Farmer

Wonder Woman 1941. William Moulton Marston, H. G. Peter

The Spirit 1940. Will Eisner, plus a bunch of ghosts who still aren’t properly acknowledged in the goddamn Spirit Archives

Plastic Man 1941. Jack Cole

Various Standard characters 1940s. various creators

Assorted Lovecraft nonsense 1928. H.P. Lovecraft

Wendy Darling 1904. J.M. Barrie

Alice 1865. Lewis Carroll.

Dorothy Gale 1900. L. Frank Baum

Part II.

I’m not sure but I think I might have forgotten something?

Part III.

Let there be no doubt: DC has treated, and continues to treat, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons unjustly. They’ve exploited unforeseen changes in the market to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of their contract with the artists. And it should go without saying that Watchmen 2: The Watchmening will be wretched.

Still, again, creators like J.M. Barrie, L. Frank Baum and Lewis Carroll might have been just a little bit unhappy with having their own work turned into hardcore pornography featuring rape, incest, bestiality, miscegenation, self-abuse, sex outside marriage, and vigorous hand-holding.

Part IV.

Well, Baum might have been, anyway.

(All images ripped off comics.org)

#4: Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

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Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is certainly no stranger to “best of” lists. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly looked across the entire landscape of book publishing—fiction and non-fiction, prose efforts and comics works—and put together a ranked list of the “100 Best Reads from 1983 to 2008.” (Click here.) Watchmen was listed at #13, which included it among the top ten works of fiction of the period. And a few years earlier, in 2005, Time magazine included Watchmen in its list of the 100 best English-language novels between 1923 and 2005. (Click here.) Time is an establishment publication, and it is certainly not prone to any radical pronouncement. The magazine put Watchmen in the company of such classics as The Great Gatsby, To the Lighthouse, and The Sound and the Fury. The book’s more contemporary peers included Beloved, American Pastoral, and Never Let Me Go. No other comics work was given this distinction.

When one reads Watchmen, whatever skepticism one has about such acclaim quickly falls away. It is a superb work that triumphs on multiple levels. Watchmen is simultaneously a first-rate adventure story, an incisive analysis of the superhero genre, and a brilliant meditation on how one’s sense of reality is defined by one’s perspective—knowledge and ignorance, hopes and fears, predispositions and agendas.

The book’s starting point is a mystery plot. The Comedian, a former costumed hero and now a covert government operative, is brutally murdered. It gradually becomes clear his murder is part of a larger conspiracy. Dr. Manhattan, the only one of the heroes with superpowers—and he is nearly omnipotent—is driven away from society by an elaborate smear. Rorschach, the last of the heroes to operate without government sanction, is framed for murder, captured, and imprisoned. Ozymandias, who retired from adventuring years earlier, foils a gunman’s attempt on his life. Someone is out to eliminate the heroes, but who, and why?

The answer turns out to be horribly ironic, with the reasons a black joke on the puny, naively idealistic desire to make a better world by putting on a costume and beating up criminals. The conspiracy to eliminate the costumed heroes is revealed as a tangent in a greater plot that changes the world. Along the way, Moore and Gibbons treat the reader to one terrific suspense setpiece after another. And in marked contrast to Zack Snyder, the director of the horrid film adaptation, they understand that violence is made all the more effective by restraint.

One of the most common observations about Watchmen is that it is both a superhero adventure story and a critique of the genre. In the appreciation of the book he sent with his top-ten list, Francis DiMenno identifies this with critic Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence.” In DiMenno’s view, Alan Moore, the book’s scriptwriter and acknowledged mastermind, has such a relationship with the superhero genre. One can see his point, but I’m more inclined to identify Watchmen’s anxiety of influence with Harvey Kurtzman’s “Superduperman” and other superhero parodies in MAD. The theory argues that a younger artist feels belated relative to older ones whose work is admired. The only way to compete with the older work—and assert one’s own artistic identity—is to beat the earlier artist at his or her own game, which is accomplished by changing the rules. In works like “Superduperman,” Harvey Kurtzman exposed the fallacies of the genre with derision and exaggeration. In contrast, Moore, who acknowledges a large debt to Kurtzman, examines his own superhero characters with the acute eye of a first-rate prose novelist. He doesn’t mock them; he plays things entirely straight, and he presents the fanciful characters in as ruthlessly realistic a manner as possible. He reveals the grotesquely maladjusted attitudes that motivate the various superheroes, turning them into figures of pathos and horror. Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, and the others are among the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction.

Watchmen is an extraordinarily compelling read, but what makes it an extraordinarily compelling reread is its meditation on perspective and how it shapes one’s understanding. On its most profound level, the book is about interpretation and the act of reading itself. The work’s defining metaphor is the Rorschach blot—a psychiatric tool for teasing out a person’s attitudes and preoccupations. One is asked to look at a blob of ink and elaborate the associations and thoughts one projects onto it. One sees permutations of this throughout the book, such as when Dr. Manhattan, Ozymandias, and a third hero, Nite Owl, attend the Comedian’s funeral. They think back on him during the service, and it’s clear none had any significant relationship with him; they only see him as a metonymy for their own anxieties. Moore and Gibbons also dramatize the most extreme perspectives; in one chapter we are shown experience through the eyes of a psychopath, and in other we see things through the eyes of eternity, and understand what it can mean to be aware of all times at once. The book almost always presents knowledge as incomplete. And when it is complete, it is skewed by other factors, so people fail to reach the correct conclusions. In one of the book’s subplots, the main female character knows everything necessary to recognize a certain man is her real father, but her dysfunctional relationship with her mother so distorts her view that she can’t see it. And misunderstandings not only affect one’s personal life, they direct the tide of history. At the end of the book, the world has changed because everyone misinterprets a catastrophe. Will they accept the truth once they are told it? The book ends on that question, and one is inclined to answer no.

Moore and Gibbons extend their treatment of interpretation and misinterpretation to the reader’s experience of the book. If one has read Watchmen before, go back and reread the first chapter. Details that seemed extraneous the first time around jump out at one. Others, such as the recurring image of the spattered smiley face, recede into the background. Dialogues take on a different meaning, such as the conversation between the two detectives in the opening scene. Is one sincere when he says a certain crime was probably random and not worth much investigation? Or consider this panel:

How was this image interpreted—i.e. what meaning was projected onto it—the first time around? Was the emotional resonance from an earlier scene with the Nite Owl character brought over to it? Did one see it as a pensive moment of doubt on Ozymandias’ part about how he has spent his life? Were the dolls in the foreground seen as a trope for this doubt? And how is it interpreted on the second reading, with knowledge of the entire book? Does one now see Ozymandias contemplating an unexpected problem, with the toys a trope for his distraction? This panel, like all of them, is a Rorschach blot for the reader; one sees what one projects onto it. The differing interpretations also bring to mind a quote Alan Moore was fond of in a later work, “Everything must be considered with its context, words, or facts.”

Illustrator Dave Gibbons does a magnificent job of realizing his collaborator’s vision. Moore may be the mind behind Watchmen, but Gibbons is its extraordinarily deft hands. He was a seasoned adventure cartoonist when he began the project, and one sees his assurance in every panel. He handles the quiet scenes as effectively as the violent ones. There’s also an understated, almost laconic quality to his dramatization of the characters. He shows the reader what is happening; one is never told what to think about it. And the remarkable literalness of his style—clear compositions, fully realized deep-space perspectives, copious detail—is perfect for a work that at its core is about the unreliability of perception. Gibbons shows the reader everything, and it remains ambiguous anyway.

I could go on and on about the book. It does what the most impressive ones do; it makes you want to talk about its achievements forever. That’s why it deserves to be considered one of the finest novels of our era. Not to mention one of the best comics.

Robert Stanley Martin is the organizer and editor of the International Best Comics Poll. He writes for his own website, Pol Culture, and is a contributing writer to The Hooded Utilitarian. He has previously written on comics for the Detroit Metro Times and The Comics Journal.

NOTES

Watchmen, by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, received 31 votes.

The poll participants who included it in their top ten are: J.T. Barbarese, Piet Beerends, Eric Berlatsky, Noah Berlatsky, Alex Boney, Scott Chantler, Tom Crippen, Marco D’Angelo, Francis DiMenno, Anja Flower, Jason Green, Patrick Grzanka, Paul Gulacy, Alex Hoffman, Mike Hunter, John MacLeod, Scott Marshall, Robert Stanley Martin, Todd Munson, Jim Ottaviani, Marco Pellitteri, Michael Pemberton, Charles Reece, Giorgio Salati, M. Sauter, Matthew J. Smith, Nick Sousanis, Joshua Ray Stephens, Ty Templeton, Matt Thorn, and Qiana J. Whitted.

Watchmen was originally published as a 12-issue serial in comic-book pamphlet form in 1986 and 1987. The serial was collected and published as a graphic novel in 1987, and has been a mainstay of book retailers ever since. It should also be available at most public libraries.

–Robert Stanley Martin

Best Comics Poll Index

Strange Windows: I Was A Teenage Cartoonist

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Bliss was it to be alive in that dawn,

But to be young was very heaven!

—Wordsworth

A house in Launceston Place, Kensington, London; we were a couple of doors down.

In 1969, my family moved to London; in December of that year, I turned 15.

London– 1969– 15 years old?

Yesss!!!!

“Swinging London” was still very much roaring along. Behold Carnaby Street, luv:

I’d come from a deeply repressive Swiss all-boy Jesuit school the year before, where tracts against masturbation were solemnly handed out, and attending a party featuring ‘impure’ pop music was grounds for expulsion.

And here– just in time for my puberty– was I introduced to this carnival, this opportunity to blossom!

Soon I’d ditched my staid flannel tartans and chino trousers for paisley scarves, ruffled pink shirts, and bell-bottom pants…

That’s me, age sixteen, literally rising above my peers at school.

The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix (who died in the hospital next door to our first house — for some reason that spooked me at the time), The Mothers of Invention, The Rolling Stones…they furnished the soundtrack to my life.

Ah, but this is a column about comics, is it not? So what was the scene like at the dawn of the ’70s?

It was glorious.

Current wisdom holds that comics of the ’70’s were in a particularly dire patch of their history; but this sad state of affairs came about essentially after 1973, and there were bright spots even so until the end of the decade.

The  comics Underground was at the apex of its short history; Crumb, Shelton, Deitch and co. Their comics were hard, but not impossible, to find in London; generally in the funkier record shops like Cheapo Cheapo Records off  Picadilly, or in the patchouli-scented head shops.

Mostly, though, they were reprinted in underground newspapers like the International Times (IT):

click image to enlarge

The British Underground comics scene was pretty underdeveloped, though there were promising exceptions. Here, from IT, is Michael Moorcock‘s Jerry Cornelius, as rendered by Mal Dean:

click image to enlarge

An all-comics offshoot of IT was Nasty Tales, edited by the musician Mick Farren. More Crumb than you can shake a stick at:

… and it was a Crumb spread of an orgy that caused the publisher to be prosecuted in the sensationalised trial that set a precedent for freedom of the press. A benefit comic was published, with early work by Dave Gibbon:

Meanwhile, across the Channel, French comics were enjoying something of a golden age; magazines such as Pilote and Charlie were moving to more adult content.

That 1969 Christmas, my father gave me a book that was a touchstone for an entire generation of fans: The Penguin Book of Comics, by George Perry and Alan Aldridge:

My collecting centered mostly on the American mainstream: Marvel, DC, Warren.

At first, American comics were distributed in the UK in a very haphazard manner.

They were mostly unsold copies from the USA that were shipped across the Atlantic as ballast. You never knew what you’d find: that ensured the thrill of the hunt all collectors know.

It was a rich period in the mainstream. The old-guard cartoonists– Kirby, Adams,Wood, Severin, Kubert, Heath, Kane and so on– were at the top of their powers, and were joined by a crew of young Turks of remarkable talent– Barry Smith, Mike Kaluta, Berni Wrightson, Frank Brunner, Ralph Reese, Howard Chaykin.

Popular genres other than the super-hero were still flourishing: war, mystery/horror, romance, fantasy. There was still a plethora of humor books.

And an innovation that foretold the future of comics as we know it was coming into being: the comics shop.

click image to enlarge

When I first opened the door of ‘Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed’, Britain’s first comics store, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. A shop given over entirely to comics? Was it possible? Was it even legal? It was indeed.

Derek ‘Bram’ Stokes and Diane Lister…for ten years the priests of London’s comics temple

And for the first time, I was meeting other comics lovers there: I had discovered fandom. And with fandom, fan publishing.

In those pre-Internet days the main medium of communication for comics lovers was the fanzine. Britain had its fair share of ‘zines, such as Rich Burton’s Comic Media News or Frank Dobson’s and Dez Skinn’s Fantasy Advertiser.

Yes, breathes there a fan with soul so dead that to himself has never said, ‘I think I’ll start a little fanzine’?

And indeed that was my thinking when, aged sixteen, I started drawing a comic strip with the alliterative title ‘King Krag.’

Now, printing options were fairly limited in those days. Mimeograph was still widespread; photocopies were becoming available, but they couldn’t reproduce solid blacks and needed a special paper. Offset printing was expensive.

This last limitation, though, was swept away by a new business model.  The Instantprint chain offered printing in small runs at a reasonable price. Not free, though, and I struggled to get together the twenty-five pounds needed for a print run of 200 fifteen-page pamphlets.

I took a decision that I regretted deeply at the time: I sold most of my comics collection.

In retrospect, I’m very glad I did. It broke the anally-retentive hold collecting had on me: thenceforth I would buy to read only. I would no longer obsess about completing runs of series and throw away money on stuff I didn’t even like to close gaps in my collection.

I teamed up with my friend Ahmed Sehrawry, who took the impressive title of Managing Editor; really, I just wanted someone to talk to– I did all the actual work. Another friend, Chris Lomax, provided the strange back-up strip ‘Milkman.’

I drew the strip same-sized (A5). Never again. You don’t save any time. In fact, the six pages took me over a year to finish.

I remember bringing the package of printed pages back to my school — the French Lycée in London — to the art department, where my art teacher gave me a room and a bunch of tables: yes, we were collating and stapling by hand– we couldn’t afford machine collation or binding. No worries, my friends and I had a good time; a collation party is much like a corn-shucking bee, an undemanding communal activity, interrupted by the odd tea break.

(Tea is one addiction I picked up in England.)

By God, the first time you see your work in mass reproduction is a trip and a half! And the first copy of a finished work…does that feel good in your hands.

I was seventeen and a publisher.

Now, I will beg your indulgence for the artwork shown. It was produced by an immature young fellow who wore his influences all too prominently; I’m harder on that boy than you could ever be. Still, as an artifact of a past 38 years gone, it repays arm-length study. Here is the cover of Bizarro #1:

What strikes the 55-year-old me about the seventeen-year-old me’s drawing above is the level of violence. True, the culture was moving that way; this was the age of films like The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange. But looking at that cover, I can only ask in dismay: was I that full of incoherent rage? More than another typical teenager? Apparently, yes.

Influences are embarrassingly obvious: Frank Frazetta, Barry Smith. A less obvious influence is Géricault‘s Le Radeau de la Méduse:

…which explains why so many of the figures therein rudely turn their back on the reader.

Also irritating are the visual tics picked up from Berni Wrightson: the ‘saliva ropes’ in the shouting character’s mouth, the ‘twisty hair’ on his forearms.

Note the patterned background: I had just discovered Letratone, and like so many neophytes was inclined to abuse it, as the luckless readers of this blog shall soon confirm.

On the plus side, the composition holds together fairly well (you can’t go far wrong with triangles) and there’s a real sense of depth.

But that sloppy logo is unforgiveable.

On to the strip. It’s a nightmare of incompetence.

Note on this splash page how I avoided heavy blacks: at that time, I was intending to produce this via photocopy.

Apparently, in the year 2025, for some reason they revived flintlock muskets…

It’s the standard post-apocalyptic fun future, inspired by Roger Zelazney‘s novel Damnation Alley and, oddly, Jack Kirby’s early Jimmy Olson comics. A bit over-tidy for after the apocalypse

I’m surprised to see how competent the perspective is: I don’t recall having studied perspective at that age (16), but I guess I had.

 

I’m afraid lousy dialogue and worse lettering are the hallmarks of my writing here. I was a nice white middle-class boy, so of course I tried to talk tough. Guns are by definition cool at that age.

Not the fishbowl-lens perspective on the guy’s hand in panel two. I was probably imitating Neal Adams.

The fussy, unnecessarily confusing odd panel shape was a disease of the time. I guess I was following in the footsteps of Jim Steranko and of Neal Adams. Note the last panel: you won’t see another woman in this macho world for macho men.

More weird layouts, odd angles, arbitrary cropping. The guy walking downstairs looks like he’s about to fall on his hairy face. I learnt that the real challenge in drawing isn’t in detailing giant space armadas– it’s in showing someone walking downstairs or opening a door.

So endeth chapter one.

There followed a mimeographed page of messages from the editor. I’m relieved to note that neither Ahmed nor I took himself very seriously. It was typewritten: word processors didn’t exist, and typesetting was expensive.

 

Rounding out the book was Chris Lomax’s ‘Milkman’. Its primitivism and absurdity have stood the test of time better than my overblown strip. Chris went on to be a successful stage and set designer in Paris, working on films such as Betty Blue.

 

 

We return to the horrors of mimeograph. Bram at ‘Dark they Were and Golden-Eyed’ let us drop off some copies on consignment if we’d run a free ad for his shop.

Well, Bram, you get what you pay for. And this is what ‘free’ pays for:

 

Ahmed took fifty copies to sell at his school; I took the remaining hundred and fifty to sell in mine. I recruited my brothers Philippe and Gérard, as well as friends like fellow comics- fan Sanjit, to spread out through the school and tout my inky baby.

We sold out within 24 hours.

It seems that publishing a comic in high school is like giving a rock concert in the gym or acting in the school play. The kids’ll support you just because you’re one of them. (Our principal was something of an arsehole about it, as I hadn’t asked for his permission; fuggim, I was out of there anyway.)

Issue 2 came out over a year and a half later. Now I’m a terribly slow artist, but this was ridiculous.

I had gone to Paris to study art at the Faculté des Arts Plastiques et des Sciences de l’Art of the Sorbonne. I was studying electro-acoustic music under Yannis Xenakis, screenwriting under Eric Rohmer, conceptual art under Journiac, comics under Jean-Claude Mézières.

I had outgrown my adolescent strip. It frankly embarrassed me.

Why didn’t I just give it up, then? A misplaced puritanism– I had vowed to break my bad habit of starting projects and not ending them; and I didn’t want to let Ahmed down.

The second issue boasted another odd cover, replete with clichés taken from Frazetta, Ploog, and Gustave Doré. I like the poor sap in the foreground’s expression. “I gotta turn around…but I really don’t wanna turn around…but I gotta…”:

 

 

Page one– more arbitrary panel noodling, fatuous captions, and peasants dutifully giving us an “infodump”: a massive exposition of stuff they already know and shouldn’t be repeating.

 

God, the inflation of those speech balloons.

More gratuitous violence follows. (I give myself some credit for actually researching hot-air balloons.)

From here to the end, you’ll note that the panel-per-page ratio goes up, to as much as fifteen. Was this innovative structuring for more intense beats? No, it was bad planning. I leave the rest of the story to the masochistic blogreader. It depresses me to read it myself.

 

 

For the second issue I had simply mailed the pages to Ahmed in London and let him do it all himself. A bit cowardly of me.

Ahmed found a 15-year-old artist named Marcelo Anciano to fill out the rest of the book:

 

When I finally met Marcelo the next summer, I remarked how his characters’ weapons were such blatant phallic symbols (see above). He nearly died laughing.

(Marcelo is now a film director and producer, working with Quentin Tarantino and other luminaries.)

 

Note in Marcelo’s back cover how he spells ‘Bizzaro’ for ‘Bizarro’. We were all over quality control, weren’t we?

The second issue was a sales disaster, as it probably deserved to be. I didn’t care; I’d purposefully disengaged myself from it, which was unfair and a betrayal to Ahmed and to Marcelo.

Today, Ahmed is known as Ahmed Shawki, the editor of the International Socialist Review. I wonder if our failed little business venture soured him on capitalism? He’s certainly grown since this first foray in the publishing business.

(One 13-year-old fan, an architect’s son, who used to come to Ahmed’s place where we’d discuss comics, was definitely not a business failure. He went on to found the Forbidden Planet chain of bookstores, the dominant direct-market distributor in Britain, and Titan Books. His name was Nick Landau.)

For years after, though, I’d take copies of issue 2 to the comics marts off Tottenham Court Road and vainly try to flog’em. This led to an embarrassing incident (and a good lesson.)

After one mart in 1975 I was hanging around while the organisers dismantled the set-up. A fellow dropped by the table where I sat and asked to see some of my purchases; we got to talking. It was Dave Gibbons, then known to me as a very prolific fan artist. He said he was working on superhero comics for an African publisher and was about to do ‘Dan Dare’ for an upcoming IPC mag called 2000 AD.

I passed him a copy of my issue 2 and awaited his opinion.

Now, Mr Gibbons is a gentleman, and I’m sure he didn’t wish to hurt my feelings. He pointed to one panel and said: “I like this one”:

As it happens, that panel is the only swipe I’ve ever done– stolen from Swamp Thing # 4.

” God sees the truth, but waits” goes the old Russian proverb.

So does Dave Gibbons! I’ve never swiped a drawing since. Never.

(“What, never?”

“No, never!”

“What, neverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr….?”

“Well…

…hardly everrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…!!!

W.S.Gilbert, ‘HMS Pinafore’)

1973 was a watershed year for comics. And not in a good way.

The Underground smashed into a brick wall: anti-obscenity Supreme Court decisions, anti-paraphernalia laws that destroyed headshops, a general change in the culture away from perceived ‘hippie dippie’ values, all nearly killed this once-vibrant sector.

The great paper shortage of 1973 and the oil embargo of that same year put crippling pressure on the mainstream comics companies.

They also were losing quickly their traditional retail outlets, and the nascent direct market wasn’t yet strong enough to take up the slack.

Britain headed into a decade-long economic slump, putting paid to ‘swinging London’ (and birthing Punk.) ‘Dark they Were and Golden-Eyed’ went out of business in 1981.

promotional button by Hunt Emerson

Still, in those old crude fanzines of Britain’s early seventies are the seeds of future accomplishment. It was here that the young Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Kevin O’Neill and so many others took their first stumbling steps.

Bram, Diane, Rob, Des– I just want you to know that the whiny, loud, obnoxious fanboy 15-year-old you knew as Alex is now a whiny, loud, obnoxious fanboy 56-year-old, and he’d like to buy you all a jar so we can lament how comics have gone to the dogs since our day. ‘When I were a lad…”

As for me, I never published again, and remain a dilettante in comics. Looking back, I regret that I didn’t pursue an entirely different talent I had for caricature; it would’ve borne more interesting fruit.

Ah, nostalgia just ain’t what it used to be…mais où sont les neiges d’antan? Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Below is a recent bit of foolery, done for an online ‘exquisite corpse’ jam comic:

That’s about the limit for me nowadays.

Yet, hard as I’ve been on my adolescent self — still I’d give up everything I have to relive those days, those golden years gone forever, when I was teenage cartoonist.

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For a good overview of the British fanzine movement, check out
Dez Skinn’s entertaining take.
An incredible resource:
the International Times archive.
Lastly, that jam I contributed to:
Good fun, check it out