Brothers x Witzke: On How We Talk About Watchmen
March 19th, 2012 by david brothers | Tags: alan moore, dave gibbons, frank miller, movies, stan lee, steve ditkoI had some thoughts about how we talk about Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen
David: Alan Moore gave another interview, and that means that we’ve got another chance to think about how DC screwed him and how all modern comics suck and are just suckling at his literary teat even to this day. He’s upped the ante this time to saying that Watchmen, his masterwork with Dave Gibbons, is not only the best superhero comic ever and constantly ripped off, but single-handedly saved the comics industry, too, because the industry was in shambles in the early ’80s and then turned around after Watchmen came out. Which is demonstrably untrue, but whatever. More interesting is his idea that Watchmen is still the best cape comic ever.
You can’t really blame him for holding that position. Watchmen is a crystal of a comic book, self-reflective and reflective of our culture (at a certain point anyway) simultaneously. The writing is on point, the art is on point, and it’s a really good comic in general, no matter how I feel about the plot or whatever. It’s the real deal, and everyone’s said it over and over. So it’s no wonder that Moore looks at that book, and at what people have said about it, and at the current comics industry, and says what he says. Watchmen is the one comic, above all others, that gets the praise it does.
Watchmen is generally treated as Best Comic by the comics industry and its fans. It’s credited with moving cape comics past their genre roots, being a high watermark for cape comics, and the source of the brutality, ennui, and trauma that we think of whenever someone says the phrase “’90s comics.”
I don’t think any of these are strawmen that I’m setting up just to knock them down, either. Watchmen is consistently the one book that everyone (the generic, anecdotal everyone, so maybe this is a strawman, but I sure hope not) recommends to new readers or readers who want a bit of maturity. Watchmen was the only comic on Time’s Top 100 Novels list a few years back. When we look at the ’90s, you often hear that people “learned the wrong lessons from” or “missed the point of” Watchmen. Watchmen is a big deal, deservedly so, but I can’t help but feel like it is a bigger deal than it should be, if only due to received wisdom and a lack of a strong resource for comics history.
The Best Comic thing sticks in my craw the most, I think, because it’s such a fake idea. I can’t think of a Best Movie or Best Song, or even Best Western or Best Rap Song. It’s such a broad brush to paint a work, and therefore a genre, with that it doesn’t even make sense. No one out there is saying that anyone who watches movies absolutely has to watch Carol Reed’s The Third Man or Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. They might recommend those to you, but always as a part of a spectrum of must-watch films. “Oh yeah, watch this, that, this Kurosawa over here, and this De Palma once you finish that.” I like this wikipedia list of films considered the best, because it’s so diverse. The IMDB list is varied, too. I disagree with a lot of them (The Dark Knight is in the top ten?), but it’s still interesting to look at. I think it’s notable that no one film on this list has the same status amongst a broad subsection of movie fans (movie watchers? “people?”) as Watchmen does amongst comics fans. Ask ten people the best movie and you’ll get a variety of answers. Ask ten comics fans and probably at least half of them will say Watchmen. Why does Watchmen get the Best Comic treatment, other than being good?
Part of it is that Watchmen is the result of a conscious effort to make a literary comic. It’s not just about entertainment or ongoing adventures. It’s about competing with Moby Dick, or making a work intended to operate on that same level. Which is admirable, to be sure. The vast majority of cape comics are bent toward direct entertainment, which I think is also pretty admirable. But it has the effect of making Watchmen a stranger in a strange land. It’s got capes, but it’s exotic, too, because of that literary influence.
Conventional wisdom holds that Watchmen represents a watershed moment in comics, is partially at fault for the excesses of the ’90s, and is the peak of cape comics. You won’t find none better. I used to agree with that, more or less, but I don’t think I do any more. Watchmen wasn’t a quantum leap forward into a new context so much as it was another step in a road comics had already begun. It was step six, rather than an all-new step one. The idea of cape comics for adults, or cape comics that deal with heavy themes, had already been broached, most especially by Steve Gerber and several other cats working at Marvel in the ’70s. I feel like there’s this idea that Watchmen is the point when cape comics went from goo-goo ga-ga baby stuff to actual books adults could read — comic books blossomed into *~Graphic Novels~*, essentially. And that isn’t true, either.
You can track what led to Watchmen in cape comics, in pretty concrete terms, too, I’d argue. I’m far from an expert (an understatement), but you can find prior examples of the flawed in Lee & Ditko’s Peter Parker and Lee & Kirby’s Ben Grimm. You could look at several characters in Watchmen as examples of what happens when that flawed hero stops trying to be a hero. Rorshach is the opposite, even–he’s a hero who has no business being a hero, but keeps at it out of sheer hard-headedness.
The bleak miasma that gives Watchmen its tone, the sense of unrest and doom infests the book, feels very ’70s to me. That’s when Marvel was going hard with the idea of uncertainty and unrest, whether it was Luke Cage appropriating superhero iconography in order to escape a return to prison and make a buck or Spider-Man losing when it counts and not being able to do a single solitary thing about it. The Heroes for Hire area of ’70s Marvel, the Luke Cages and Shang Chis and Misty Knights, feels particularly relevant here, as their stories often dealt in moral ambiguity or a distrust of the establishment. Many of Marvel’s heroes were outlaws first, too, at least in the eyes of the public.
What I’m trying to say is that Watchmen is definitely a watershed moment, due mainly to the level of craft and approach that it brought to cape-based material, but it isn’t an unprecedented one, and I think that’s an important factor that we often leave out when we discuss Watchmen and its influence. If Watchmen never happened, I’d bet cash money that the ’90s, the ideal of the ’90s that most of us hold, would’ve still happened more or less as they did. The hallmarks of the ’90s, whether you’re talking pouches or grittiness or realism or whatever, were set in motion long before Watchmen happened.
The moral ambiguity, the physical and emotional trauma, the poison that hammered comics in the ’90s, all of that has its roots in the very beginning of the Marvel universe, when Stan and Jack and Steve and them were revolutionizing comics and making them cool again. They set comics down a road that inevitably leads to clones and crossovers and whatever else. There’s a logical progression from “Spider-Man screwed up, but now he tries harder” to “Spider-Man fails the love of his life and gets her killed” to “Spider-Man is a clone/crazy” to “Spider-Man is hardcore now.” It’s upping the ante on the flawed hero, bit by bit. The fallen hero and anti-hero are just another take on that same basic idea, which is itself another take on an even older idea.
Watchmen is very good, sure. It’s a high watermark for comics, but I don’t buy that it’s Best Comic. It deserves its place in the canon, it earned its place, but the highly elevated status we’ve given it is at least partially in error. It’s warped the conversation about the content of comics, the skill level, and comics history. It’s actually really frustrating to me, because I’m making an effort to go back and learn this stuff so I don’t put my foot in my mouth constantly, and Watchmen has twice the gravity of anything else. It’s hard to get around, and more than that, it’s hard to unlearn. Watchmen‘s GOAT status is a self-fulfilling prophecy, it feels like at this point.
Now that I’m done with this, I sorta feel like I’m saying “Watchmen is overrated.” That’s both not my point (in the sense of snarky dismissals) and my actual point at the same time (in the sense of taking a realistic look at comics history). Strange place to be.
Sean: Well, here’s the thing, though –there is a movie — Citizen Kane. And Watchmen totally is Citizen Kane, it’s the one work of art you have to reckon with, reconcile. Either disregard and burn down despite it’s legendary status (because its so boring, and so processed and its old and everyone who took from it took the wrong thing just like Watchmen) or realize that, yes, it is a masterpiece despite all those things.
I don’t know, you could also say that Pulp Fiction has a lot more similarities to Watchmen, because it spawned a million horrible tics and a million 70s references. So many bad tone deaf movies, but it also helped change the way movies were made and released. I mean, I just saw an interview with Paul Thomas Anderson where he said that Tarantino wasn’t an influence on Boogie Nights, but the reason he got to make it at all is because he was coming after Pulp Fiction.
I always think all the bad 90s grim and gritty hallmarks are so much like that. Because the ninjas and assassins and pouches and teeth, all of those things come from guys honestly making things they were interested in. They all became received wisdom, the way that Neal Adams and Gil Kane did for the previous generation. The 00s are a lot like the 80s, especially in comics, because there was such a rejection of the previous set of what is cool that it’s just knee-jerk “oh god 90s”. Which is kind of right, because there’s so much to be rightfully rejected, but in comics, everything was thrown out. Now the weirdest, worst things are all slipping back in from the 90s because we’ve got a good gap of time. There’s a reason that Dave Gibbons was playing with flat/exaggerated facial expressions, there’s a reason that Frank Miller was writing ninjas, because he wanted to write about honor, there’s a reason Moore wanted to discuss fascism with Steve Ditko’s iconography, there’s a reason Art Adams exaggerated gesture. I don’t think you can blame those guys for anything. All the people that came after them, yeah they fucked up. That’s not their fault. Anymore than it’s Moebius’ fault for Tron Legacy.
And beyond just Watchmen, there’s big works in all sorts of genre and media. There’s Moby Dick, there’s 7 Samurai, there’s Akira, and Pinnocchio, and Metropolis and the Twilight Zone, and The Godfather II, and Die Hard, and David Copperfield, and Illmatic, and Goodfellas, and the Searchers, and Star Wars, and I Robot – there’s all sorts of THE GRAND WORK in all sorts of media/genre, that you have to at least give your time, where if you’re going to take the genre seriously you have to give it your time because even if it isn’t the greatest thing you’ve ever been exposed to. Hopefully it isn’t, because if you have a certain level of tastes you’re going to have more personal preferences/ tastes — but you’ve got to reckon with that shit. If you like comics, you have to have really given Watchmen your time because of where it is in the medium, even if you fucking hate it. I hated Citizen Kane the first 3 times I watched it but I knew that I should keep giving it a chance. I’m not a Metallica guy, but I know that Master of Puppets is the “best” metal album.
Here’s the real thing that Watchmen did though, and I didn’t realize it until Abhay pointed it out for me. Watchmen said that you could take this material (superheroes, alternate reality stories) and tell a finite, complete story with it. There could be intertextuality and generational narratives and have legitimate minor characters, and actual consequences and politics. Stories, stories that matter, they have ends. And Watchmen is the first story that was taken to the real world (whether or not it was the first really doesn’t matter, the revolution starts when people notice fires in the street not when the plans are drafted) and said “oh yeah this stuff can actually work as a novel, it’s not just endless soap opera/pulp/sitcom that you can walk in and out of at any time because its an endless middle”. Making more Watchmen comics, as Abhay said, actually say that people were always right its just a garbage dump of endless dudes punching dudes, there’s no finite quality to anything. (I actually think the way trilogies are now par for the course in mainstream hollywood, and 6 season tv shows are doing the same thing to how people watch film and television). You’re right about Gerber and Stan And Jack – and shit, Miller and Moore both said that American Flagg was the reason they manned up and did Watchmen/Ronin, because it introduced real sophistication in a way that Marvel comics never ever ever did. Of course they’d both done Marvelman and Daredevil at that point, and it becomes all a gray morass of what happened first.
It doesn’t matter, no one outside of comics saw it. Watchmen they saw, and it was undeniable.
We’ve got to keep tearing it down so it can be replaced, because its still too big an icon, which actually paradoxically says a ton about how good the comic is. Comics as a whole needs to be able to say “fuck Watchmen” in a way beyond Grant Morrison’s shitty sniping in JLA: Earth 2, and I don’t know if we’re really at that point yet as a medium. I think the way that people are talking about/reacting to Moore isn’t the same thing, and Watchmen 2 really isn’t the same thing either, it’s wallowing in it rather than surpassing it.
Of course we know that Winter Men
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Also forgot to add, Orc Stain #7 kicks Watchmen’s ass, sorries.
Yeah, Orc Stain 7 was tremendous. It’s dope how Stokoe used real world events to add flavor to his story without being preachy or… I don’t know, terrible about it.
JLA Earth 2 took pot shots at Watchmen?
That was fantastic. Also Sean you may not like the idea of evangelism but your blog is one of the ones that gets me to try and read everything you talk about.
Nicely put. Thinking about it I don’t know if I know anyone personally who claims it’s the best comic, but I can’t deny that it’s discussed in those terms. I can see that if you grew up in the 80’s on mostly superhero comics that this and Dark knight would’ve blown your mind.
http://youtu.be/zk_lgoF8aAo
Or the other side of the fence that throws around Maus in those terms but it’s all too subjective and the options are soooo much wider.
Personally I’d be really disappointed if I thought I’d already read all the best comics–They’re in some half priced bin I just haven’t found them yet.
And yeah, I’m with you guys on Orc stain 7
David: “The idea of cape comics for adults, or cape comics that deal with heavy themes, had already been broached, most especially by Steve Gerber and several other cats working at Marvel in the ’70s.”
Gerber’s OMEGA THE UNKNOWN in particular is, pretty much, the proto-WATCHMEN. It’s the very first attempt at creating a superhero comic with literary merits, a definite end point in mind and an approach that’s more novelistic than any previous cape comic. It was meant to be the last word on superheroes and a comment on the inherent limitations on the genre as Gerber saw them — the title only being the first clue to that.
And though it was marred by having to bow to the conventions and constraints of its time and ultimately failed commercially before Gerber got to the point, you could practically feel it rub against its limitations and pull in the general direction of WATCHMEN in every page. (I did a lengthy dissection of OMEGA a couple of years back: http://comiksdebris.blogspot.de/2009/09/omega-unknown.html .)
Sean: “Of course we know that Winter Men is the same story but better.”
Better than WATCHMEN? (I’d very much disagree.) Or better than BEFORE WATCHMEN? (That, I think, is inevitable.) I wasn’t clear on that.
At any rate, I don’t think WINTER MEN really works as a successor. It’s one of the best superhero comics out there, certainly, but at the end of the day, it’s a variation on WATCHMEN — basically, a more (deliberately) chaotic take from a different perspective.
To me, the one superhero comic that holds a candle to WATCHMEN in terms of craft, execution and literary ambitions is ALL STAR SUPERMAN. Where WATCHMEN cheerfully takes the idea of superheroes, with all its limitations, to its grim logical conclusion by hitting a wall full-speed (as Douglas Wolk points out in READING COMICS, credit where it’s due), ALL STAR SUPERMAN is one of the few serious attempts at breaking through that wall and discovering what’s on the other side. (Arguably, books like Casey’s WILDCATS stuff, Fraction’s IRON MAN or even FINAL CRISIS do the same, but none of them are as well-made or as complete as ALL STAR SUPERMAN.) But, of course, ALL STAR SUPERMAN completely failed to deliver in terms of hitting everyone in quite the same way as WATCHMEN did, so it counts as no more than a step in the right direction, at best.
And, all that said, I’d also submit that MAUS is up there in the CITIZEN KANE position with WATCHMEN, if we really talk about “comics,” rather than “superhero comics.”
At any rate, it’s a good discussion to have, and I’m wondering why more people aren’t having it. “What We Talk About When We Talk About WATCHMEN” is an odd blind spot to have for critics.
Cool article.
I second the point that Watchmen is the Citizen Kane of comics. It’s a pretty common pattern across forms and genres that the first BIG thing to get out there and lay claim to the genre/medium is the thing that most people tend to think of as (ahem) GOAT.
See also: Ulysses, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars etc.
I don’t think there will ever be a book with such an amazing, crystalline structure in which every single verbal/artistic component moves with flawless precision.
Is it particularly fun to read, captures my imagination in flights of fancy, or do I care about the characters? Not really.
Interesting write-up. Comic Book Comics #6 talked about Watchmen’s impact on comic books. They said a lot of people followed it up, according to sturgeon’s law: 90% of it was crap, and 10% were actually good. I have scans here: http://s179.photobucket.com/albums/w284/airhikec001/blog/comics/pages/?action=view¤t=Screenshot2012-03-11at53214PM.png#!oZZ6QQcurrentZZhttp%3A%2F%2Fs179.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fw284%2Fairhikec001%2Fblog%2Fcomics%2Fpages%2F%3Faction%3Dview%26current%3DScreenshot2012-03-11at53315PM.png
They also said that Watchmen led the way for a British invasion, with the likes of Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis. I think it’s a solid story, but because I only started reading comics in the last half of the 00’s, I’d be in the half of the comic book readers for whom it isn’t in my top ten.
Wait, I thought the cool kids were blaming Dark Knight Returns for the ‘bad’ comics of the 90’s? Did I miss the new blame train?
Regardless, as you pointed out in your intro, big 2 comics, especially Marvel, were heading in that direction to begin with. Wanna talk about big shoulder pads, dark storylines and more realistic violence? The X-Men started that in the early-mid 80’s(if not before, that’s just when I started reading them).
Watchmen itself? Great comic, major influence. Also, as Kevin said, we can thank it for starting the British comic invasion of the 80-90’s. Without it, I might never have read American Gods, and that would be a travesty.
That was a really good read until that factually incorrect assessment of Scalped.
First, I love that finally someone acknowledges the greatness that could have been Winter Men. If ever one needs to connect the points between artistic vision and executive meddling, this book’s sordid publication history is it.
With Watchmen, there’s that fine line between being a great comic and being a great gateway comic, one that’s not mired it the trappings of continuity. Certainly there’s more books now that you could say that about, but for that point in time, the height of foil-cover collectionism I doubt it. And it wasn’t until I just read your post that it struck me, for a cape comic, there is a surprisingly little punching in it – the violence is always a gory denouement whose consequence is explored. A core fact that the movie failed to understand.
Meh, It’s a good book, it might even be a great book, but greatest? Fuck the finality of that kind of thinking.
GREAT discussion!
Great conversation. I favor David’s point but enjoyed hearing both sides.
What’s with Sean’s hate for Scalped? That book did start off weak, but by volume 5 it became one of the best crime comics I’ve read.
I need to read Winter Men. It has laid in my stack forever.
[…] Comics | David Brothers and Sean Witzke discuss the unique place of Watchmen in the comics canon—and why we talk about it so much. [4thletter!] […]
I thought the comparison to Citizen Kane by Sean was pretty apt. Watchmen has a similar stature in the medium of comics.
The thing that I think gets left behind a bunch about the book is that it’s very much a comic. Moore and Gibbons do things with their panels and structure that are unique to the medium. That’s where Watchmen gets me as one of the prime examples of storytelling in the medium. Where a lot of comics that are considered great are not, strictly speaking, stories that can only be properly or effectively told in the comic book medium, Watchmen, as a complete work, is a comic book and it could never have the same impact in another medium.
When comics remember that they are telling a visual story is when I’m most impressed by them. Rivera and Martin in Daredevil do a fantastic job of making their onomatopoeia look like it sounds, which is pretty important for a blind hero who hears his surroundings. Paquette on Swamp Thing does some pretty neat things with his gutters that are pretty basic, but I rarely see that much attention to detail in any other comic. Those are pretty incidental examples, of course, but I think they help explain what I’m talking about.
I always thought that Warren Ellis’ Planetary works as the “next Watchmen” if only because it was such a style changer as far as the medium is concerned. Maybe Authority had more impact, but I think Planetary holds up an interesting mirror as to what to do with a finite story that wants to deconstruct generations of popular culture and put it back together into something new. The explicative manner of Planetary’s discussion of popular culture, the deconstruction/reconstruction, and the idea of it being a “pop single” as well as “a long-range story” reminds me of how Watchmen played with how to cast the deconstruction of superheroes as a mystery.
The plot was always ever the least important part of Watchmen. A lot of it was still up in the air come issue 4.
The thing that makes Watchmen the Citizen Kane of comics is that it tried a hundred different, new things that had always been present in the comics medium, but never fully exploited. The insane background detail, the multiple timelines, the fact that time and space are the same thing as you’re moving over the page. He juggles philosophy, excellent characterization, world-building, and literature nearly perfectly.
So when people start to complain about Watchmen, all I can do is slow clap and say I hope they enjoy the finger-full of nits they found; the rest of us are feasting.
And I wouldn’t trust Zach Snyder to remake Citizen Kane either.
“The bleak miasma that gives Watchmen its tone, the sense of unrest and doom infests the book, feels very ’70s to me.”
It was a solidly 80s feeling of doom, actually. Back then the Manhattan whose shadow we were living under was the Project, not the Doctor, and there was a sense of us constantly being moments away from nuclear incineration. Plus we had Reagan in the White House, giving us reason to worry about whether the guy with the USA’s launch codes was entirely, well, sane – the parts of DKR with the half-senile President were how some of us were afraid Reagan actually was back then.
And Brandon Graham, you were dead right: I did grow up in the 80s on mostly superhero comics, and when I read Watchmen and Dark Knight I had the same reaction of “You can DO this in comics!?!” that I had when I first read American Flagg.
Great article. I don’t think Watchmen was inarguably the best comic of all time (I also chafe at the idea of self-imposed dogmatic canon… it hinders peoples willingness to think critically rather than encourage it. This is why I hate that the Beatles, absolutely a great band, are the ONLY band you’re permitted to consider when naming history’s greatest rock group… what could be less rock and roll than uniformity?) and, actually, I don’t even think its the best Alan Moore comic. THAT distinction, Imo, belongs to Promethea which had the best and most forward-thinking artwork ive ever seen in a fantasy comic and was even more high-concept.
I think Watchmen usually gets credit for the wrong thing, which is making superhero comics more “mature” which is a coded way of saying R rated and more complex in terms of narrative. This isn’t particularly impressive but the fact that its the thing that fans and even creators value the most about it explains what’s happened to superhero comics over the last two and a half decades. The thing that makes Watchmen so impressive was that it was a thorough deconstruction of America’s late twentieth century political culture, its cynacism and loss of identity and, I would argue, the path western philosophy in general has taken when burdened with the harsh realities of the modern world. The fact that it used the superhero genre as a vehicle for this deconstruction, and that it worked so well that it also became an examination of superhero fiction, is almost incidental to the bigger achievement.
And yet, in the end, it still feels like nothing but a deconstruction, a harsh and brilliant satire. Promethea scores more points for me because it goes deeper thematically and asks bigger questions, questions about the nature of reality, why we imagine, and what stories are actually made of. Those are questions that cut to the core of human existence itself and the artistry with which they’re presented is astounding. It’s one of the few comics that can make Watchmen feel small and of its time by comparison.
”The bleak miasma that gives Watchmen its tone, the sense of unrest and doom infests the book, feels very ’70s to me. That’s when Marvel was going hard with the idea of uncertainty and unrest, whether it was Luke Cage appropriating superhero iconography in order to escape a return to prison and make a buck or Spider-Man losing when it counts and not being able to do a single solitary thing about it. The Heroes for Hire area of ’70s Marvel, the Luke Cages and Shang Chis and Misty Knights, feels particularly relevant here, as their stories often dealt in moral ambiguity or a distrust of the establishment. Many of Marvel’s heroes were outlaws first, too, at least in the eyes of the public.”
To be honest I think Thatcher’s Britain and the nuclear arms race had more to do with the bleak tone than Luke Cage comics.
I can’t believe I actually have to say this, but yes, I know about Thatcher and Britain and Reagan and nukes andblah blah blah. I’m not an idiot. I was referring to the fact that even the tone of Watchmen wasn’t created out of whole cloth, that there was a progression from A to B to C that led to Watchmen. Obviously it’s rooted in ’80s terror, but that doesn’t preclude it from feeling reminiscent of something else. That’s why I said that ’70s Marvel “feels particularly relevant here,” because it does. Just like the depression and World War I is relevant to World War II, despite not taking place at the exact same time.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to infer that you where ignorant of the entire social-political climate of the 1980s. To me it just seemed like you where citing 70s Luke Cage and Spider-man comics as a direct influences on the nihilistic tone of Watchmen. I know that sounds ludicrous and thats why I choose to respond the way I did. On reflection I should of given you abit more credit. To be honest I think I misread your article and was too quick to respond. Especialy in a way that was so blunt and probably sounded abit snarky.
“To be honest I think Thatcher’s Britain and the nuclear arms race had more to do with the bleak tone than Luke Cage comics.”
There’s a whole issue in Planetary that agrees with that point explicitly. And then the John Constantine stand-in turns into Spider Jerusalem because Warren Ellis is a wanker. (No offense! Nextwave was great. We should all talk about Nextwave more.)
@david brothers: If it looked like I was calling you an idiot, I apologise. That wasn’t my intent, but I still disagree with you about whether the sense of unrest and doom was more of a 70s or an 80s thing. The biggest part of the sense of doom in the book is the nuclear hysteria that didn’t exist in the 70s the way that it did in the 80s.
Who cares why Sean hates Scalped? So what? I hate this sacred cow shit in comics fandom.
@Lugh: especially considering it’s a “Jason Aaron hates Alan Moore” joke more than actual hate, because context is hard I guess.