Tag Archives: Watchmen

The Flaw in Watchmen

Posted on by

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.

Watchmen Coloring Update

Posted on by

James Romberger argued in this post that the coloring in Watchmen covered up Sally Jupiter’s nudity in this panel. As James puts it, “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.”

My brother Eric suggested in comments that their might have been a coloring change from the original. I have those, so I’ve duly scanned in the panel in question.

Some of the values are slightly different, but I don’t see any significant change…? James, what do you think?

Post to Incestuous Sheets

Posted on by

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

______________________________________________________

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

Posted on by

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)

Some Closing Thoughts on the Poll

Posted on by

We’re going to be taking it easy at The Hooded Utilitarian this week. Apart from this post, we’re just going to be publishing the remainder of the lists. We’ll be back with more to engage, enlighten, and outrage next Monday.

My original goal with this post was to discuss the poll results and the comics canon. However, it seems a rather odd undertaking, largely because the notion that the results are indicative of the canon is a conceit. The top ten and Top 115 lists we compiled are indicative of nothing more than the consensus views of the 211 people who submitted lists, and even that is somewhat filtered (i.e., skewed) at points through the perspective of the poll’s editor (myself). Another thing to remember is that those who submitted lists prepared them with different motives. The question they responded to is, “What are the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant?” A list of “the best” is different than “the most significant,” and both are distinct from “favorites.” Perhaps the best way to proceed is to acknowledge that most of what follows is presumptuous, and if readers want to reject it on that basis, my feeling is they are right to do so. However, I hope they consider the thoughts put forth at least worth considering to a degree.

A few observations about our list:

This project is in some ways a continuation of, and in others a response to, The Comics Journal’s ranked 1999 list of the 100 Best Comics. The Journal list was restricted to English-language material, and relied on opinions from the magazine’s editors and columnists (eight people altogether) rather than on a broader poll. You can see the Journal list here, and a discussion of the thinking behind it here. I’ll talk about some differences between the Journal’s list and ours in the points that follow.

The major newspaper strips are still seen as the most important comics works. We’re supposedly in the graphic-novel era. However, the top three vote getters–Peanuts, Krazy Kat, and Calvin and Hobbes–outpaced the number-four work (and by extension, the rest of the list) by the quite large margin of 14 votes. As far as the poll participants appear concerned, these three strips are the crown jewels of the comics medium. The importance of the great newspaper strips was further reinforced by Little Nemo in Slumberland’s sixth-place ranking, as well as by Pogo coming in eighth. When half the top ten is from a particular mode of comics, I think it’s safe to say the field considers that mode where the most important work has been done.

The two most highly regarded graphic novels are Watchmen and Maus. I haven’t come across anyone questioning Maus’s placement yet, but I’m incredulous that some would be surprised—even shocked—at Watchmen’s high ranking in the poll. When it comes to graphic novels, these two works have by far the largest readership constituency outside of the comics community. Maus has sold at least in the high hundred thousands, andWatchmen has sold in the millions. There is no reason for readers to feel they are slumming with Watchmen; the book’s inclusion in Time’s 100 Best Novels and Entertainment Weekly‘s 100 Best Reads lists are reasonable signs that it enjoys the broader culture’s respect. If the larger world holds the book in high regard, it makes sense that this view would be reflected in the comics world as well. Those taken aback by its placement generally strike me as those who have a prejudice against superhero material, or at least the work done in the genre over the last 40 years. I suppose they are like those who turn their noses up at Ian McEwan’s Atonement because of its similarities to category romance fiction, or at Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go because it is a science-fiction novel. Saying a certain work or genre isn’t to one’s taste is one thing; we all do it, and we’re all entitled to that opinion. Treating a work as inherently inferior because it comes from a particular genre is quite another. Watchmen is not just one of the most important graphic novels; it’s one of the most important contemporary novels, period. To act as though the situation is otherwise is at best myopic. I’m not for a moment saying anyone has to like Watchmen, but it should be acknowledged that the book is far bigger than any one person or group’s opinion of it.

The Fourth World will soon eclipse the reputation of Jack Kirby’s Marvel work, at least in comics circles. This is more of a prediction than an observation, but it has its foundation in the poll results. The Fantastic Four’s better showing in the poll was due to all of one-third of a vote. If just one more participant had voted for The Fourth World, it would have been the Kirby work that made the top ten. The Fourth World’s reputation has been increasing over the years, and I doubt it has peaked now. No slight intended against Andrew Farago, but posting The Fantastic Four piece so soon after the Kirby family’s loss in their lawsuit against Marvel was painful. A list in which The Fourth World outranked The Fantastic Four might have been a consolation of sorts. Well, maybe next time.

R. Crumb’s counterculture material is his most important contribution to comics. Noah Berlatsky has wondered if Crumb’s star is falling given the placements of his work in the poll. Noah has pointed to the fact that while Crumb’s Weirdo work made the top ten in The Comics Journal’s Best 100 a dozen years ago, nothing by him made the top ten this time out. I don’t agree with Noah’s speculation. When the Journal’s editors put together the magazine’s Best 100, it apparently didn’t occur to them to create a counterculture-era umbrella entry to cover his works of that period. If they had, I think it would have made their top ten. (And given the material’s ubiquity in the six of the eight contributor lists that were published, it should have.) Judging from those contributor lists and the Journal’s traditional idolatry of Crumb, the Weirdo material’s high placement didn’t reflect the work’s consensus status so much as it did the desire to get something—anything—by Crumb into the top ten. When it comes to Crumb, our poll results likely reflect two things. The first is that the consensus view of Crumb, while one of high esteem, is more measured than the Journal’s. The second is that we did a much better job of giving the counterculture material its due when interpreting the votes. The counterculture work is where Crumb had by far his biggest impact and influence, and I believe this poll’s rankings reflect that it is asserting its proper place in estimations of his career.

Dave Sim is indeed one of the best cartoonists North America has produced. I’m not a fan, and his gender and religious blarney sets my teeth on edge, but there’s no denying his achievements in Cerebus. He is one of the most technically accomplished cartoonists to ever work in the field, and few have managed, much less surpassed, his expansions of the form’s language. Sim did not make the Journal’s Best 100 list. This was despite the fact he and selections from Cerebus were mentioned on at least three and possibly four of the eight voters’ lists. It is hard not to see Sim’s exclusion from the final one as a deliberate snub. I’m glad to see him get a fairly high level of acknowledgement in this poll.

Yes, good English-language adventure comics have been published since 1970. The Journal’s Top 100 list reflected publisher Gary Groth’s view that virtually all adventure comics of the last 40 years (i.e., every one published since he turned 16) are beneath notice. Watchmen, The Fourth World, and V for Vendetta were the only contemporary adventure works acknowledged, and they were kicked to the bottom of the list. (A look at Groth’s personal Top 100 shows he didn’t vote for any of them. Click here.) I’ve already discussed the first two works, and I note that V for Vendetta made our list as well. However, there’s also Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, The Sandman, Bone, Daredevil: Born Again, The Invisibles, and over a dozen others that received listings in our Top 115. Ignoring these efforts while lionizing similar (and to many eyes less accomplished) material from before 1970 was an injustice, and I’m happy we were able to redress it.

The consensus view of The Hooded Utilitarian’s regular contributors both converges and diverges with the consensus of the field. Here are the top 13 vote-getters among this website’s contributing writers:

  • 1. Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz [8 votes]
  • 2. Krazy Kat, George Herriman [5 votes]
  • (tie) Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons [5 votes]
  • 4. The Alec Stories, including The Fate of the Artist, Eddie Campbell [4 votes]
  • (tie) From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell [4 votes]
  • 6. The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez [3.5 votes]
  • 7. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson [3 votes]
  • (tie) A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, Moto Hagio [3 votes]
  • (tie) The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al. [3 votes]
  • (tie) Hi no Tori [Phoenix], Osamu Tezuka [3 votes]
  • (tie) Die Hure H [W the Whore], Katrin de Vries & Anke Feuchtenberger [3 votes]
  • (tie) Journal, Fabrice Neaud [3 votes]
  • (tie) The Sandman, Neil Gaiman, et al. [3 votes]

On the basis of this, I’d say we agree with the rest of the field at least half the time.

There’s a lot more to be said about this poll, and a lot more to be said about the comics canon in the future. The canon is a synopsis at a given time of a never-ending dialogue, and lists like the one produced by our poll provide an enjoyable snapshot of where that dialogue stands. They also allow us an opportunity to sit back and take stock. I think Sight and Sound magazine is right to do this just once a decade with movies. The time between polls is neither too great nor too little. It allows people to see the shifts in the consensus view without the overall picture getting too expansive or narrow. And by reserving a special time for judgments, it implicitly puts the emphasis on criticism where it belongs, which is with discussion. Criticism isn’t about being right or wrong; it’s about helping people see work in new and more insightful ways. That can and should go on forever.

Best Comics Poll Index

#4: Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

Posted on by

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

Through Space, Through Time: Four Dimensional Perspective and the Comics by Eric Berlatsky

Posted on by

Originally presented: Panel on Frames and Ways of Seeing in Modernist Narrative at The Tenth Annual Modernist Studies Association (MSA) Conference, Nashville, TN, November 2008.

Author’s introduction (“disclaimer”)

This paper was presented at the Modernist Studies Association conference two years ago. As such, the audience for the talk was not comics scholars, or, even, necessarily people who were interesed in comics. The paper is pitched to that audience and therefore says quite a number of things about comics that are fairly obvious to the comics scholar (or even just the perceptive comics reader). In fact, it even says things I know to be debatable, and even incorrect, since those things weren’t my primary concern. So, yes, I know that “The Yellow Kid” isn’t the first comic strip in U.S. newspapers (to say nothing of the world at large), but since splitting those hairs wasn’t the point of the paper, I used that as a generally “known” reference point.

I was invited to participate in a panel on “frames and ways of seeing in modernist narrative” after one of the participants in the original panel dropped out. As I recall, all three of the original panelists were from the University of Toronto, studying under/with noted modernist scholar, Melba Cuddy-Keane. Cuddy-Keane got in touch with my dissertation advisor at University of Maryland, Brian Richardson, and asked if he knew anyone interested in frame narration and modernism. Brian got in touch with me, recalling a paper I had written for him many years previous as a graduate student. That paper, however, was already forthcoming in Narrative, and I wasn’t really interested in recycling the material. So, I took the opportunity to apply some of the research I was doing on time, modernism, and comics and to write some of that out, rather than merely having it bounce around in my head. All of this is the long way of saying that the paper was even more rushed and “tossed off” than the typical conference paper, since I was a late addition to the program. At this point, I feel as if there may be nothing particularly revelatory here, as much of this material feels (to me, anyway) as if it’s fairly obvious and straightforward and covered elsewhere in the literature. Since this is a blog (my brother’s no less), I don’t feel quite so guilty about letting it see the light of day, as long as nobody really feels like it reflects the care I generally take in my scholarship. Things that make me cringe a bit, are… a) sources cited, but no bibliography listed. The sources are mentioned, for the most part, in the paper itself, but obviously, a bibliography should be included. Since I was only reading it out loud at the time, however, and I knew the sources, I never typed them up. (At this point, this note may be taking longer than it would take to type the sources… but let’s not ruin a fairly boring and mediocre story). 2) The paper also includes various notes to myself telling me to elaborate on this point or that orally. Obviously, for written publication, I should turn those into more coherent written claims… but I’m just writing a disclaimer instead. [Many of these were references to the images, so I’ve replaced them with “See Fig. X” reference. -ed.] 3) The quality of the scans is sometimes pretty bad, as well. My scanner is just an 8 x 11 and some of my sources were much bigger. I should have gone to the Artist Formerly Known as Kinko’s and done the scans on a larger printer to get things right… but, again, I reveal the generally slipshod nature of my efforts on this particular piece. All of this is why I told Noah and Derik that they could have this conference paper if they wanted it… but that I was generally unsure of its “ready for prime time” (using the term loosely) status. Derik and Noah decided to run it anyway (making me think that they reall need more submissions for this feature [We do! Send us something -ed.]), so, here it is “warts and all.”

“Through Space, Through Time:” Four Dimensional Perspective and the Comics by Eric Berlatsky

Whether pamphlet-form comic books, cramped newspaper comic strips, or more traditionally codex-form “graphic novels,” comics have only recently started to receive serious critical attention as “art objects,” as opposed to mass culture ephemera. The biggest breakthrough in comics criticism is still undoubtedly Scott McCloud’s 1993 book Understanding Comics, a book that makes a bold play for considering comics as “art,” by bypassing the typical starting date for its history. The standard date, particularly in America, is, of course, 1895, marking the beginning of R. F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley as a newspaper comics page in The New York World. This date, would, of course, place the origins of the newspaper comic strip in close chronological proximity to the “high art” development of modernism. However, McCloud’s choice to define comics as “sequential art,” or, in the longer version, “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence,” allows him to include pre-Columbian picture manuscripts, the Bayeux tapestry, Egyptian painting, Trajan’s column, and Hogarth’s “Harlot’s Progress” as comics, along with other, more likely, suspects, like Rodolphe Topfer’s “picture stories” of the mid-nineteenth century (McCloud 10-17). McCloud discards some of the elements of earlier definitions of comics in order to detach the era of comics’ increasing popularity (the twentieth century) from its definition, suggesting that some of the greatest achievements of older “high art” are, in fact, comics. While this has the potential to raise the culture caché of comics as a medium, it also obscures the ways in which the form reflects and takes part in the modernist project and the advent of modernity.

Continue reading →