More Moore part 21: The Killing Joke

The Killing Joke (1988)

I don't like The Killing Joke.

I figured I'd get that out of the way first thing. Barring a dark horse that I expect to be bad coming out of nowhere as a masterpiece, like if "Violator vs. Badrock" is the true successor to Watchmen, I suspect this will be my most controversial opinion for the duration of this series. Everyone loves The Killing Joke, from Batman fans, to Joker fans, to industry insiders, to people who have never read a single issue of Batman outside of this one. It's dark, it's edgy, and even I have to admit it's stunningly well-drawn. But to this critic, that's all it is, and stripped of Brian Bolland's painstakingly detailed artwork, there's just nothing underneath.

Granted, there is one other person who agrees with this sentiment: Mr. Moore himself. He's been quoted with his dissatisfaction on the work as well, calling it, "[not] a very good book. It's not saying anything very interesting." So where's the problem? Why is The Killing Joke hailed as such a game-changer if it doesn't have anything interesting to say?

The Killing Joke was designed, from its very start, as the quintessential Joker story. Like Watchmen it cuts back and forth between the past and the present through flashbacks, to flesh out the Joker origin story first dreamed up in 1951s "The Man Behind the Red Hood" in which Batman discovers that Red Hood, a criminal from his past that he could never catch, was The Joker, pre-chemical bath. Moore takes the story's thin premise and expands on it, giving Joker his origin as a failing comedian, so desperate to make ends meet that he agrees to put on the red hood and ends up taking a bath after a botched robbery attempt. Now in the present, Joker attempts to make Commissioner Gordon's mind snap like his did, by taking away everything that Gordon holds dear, most notoriously by blasting Barbara 'Batgirl' Gordon through the spine, paralyzing her for the next 23 years until the New 52 reboot. Gordon shows his mettle by not buckling under the pressure of Joker's sick game, and when Joker is cornered by Batman, the police closing in, the worst he can do to the Dark Knight is tell a joke (admittedly, a pretty funny joke) before he's presumably taken away, off-panel, at the end.

And the problem woth the novel is that there's just not much more plot to tell. It's thin before it even gets off the ground, and no amount of violent realism is going to change that, because The Joker's already been done violently before this, most notably in Frank Miller's 1986 The Dark Knight Returns Denny O'Neil's 1973 "The Joker's Five Way Revenge". Brian Bolland's art is better than either of those works, sure, but it's not backing up anything of substance, just cheap violence to shock and titillate readers who could have read gritty, 'realistic' works with more meat on them long before. The Killing Joke actually reads like an Alan Moore wannabe, like some fledgeling author caught up in the majesty of Watchmen who wanted to tell a similar story without knowing how. It feels cheap, gaudy, a swipe for the lowest common denominator that Alan proved on his very first major work he was already above. It's that cynicism that makes The Killing Joke less than The Ballad of Halo Jones, because though Halo was boring, it had a heart that Joke lacks. Halo Jones is just a dull book, whereas The Killing Joke is an offensive one, a too-little-too-late bit of hackwork that gives us almost nothing worth remembering. Almost

And that almost is the one positive from this whole debacle: in shooting out Barbara Gordon's spine, Moore laid the groundwork for the character to become a very positive, sympathetic character that DC most certainly needed: as wheelchair-bound information broker Oracle, Barbara was strong-willed, brilliant, and able to overcome any limitations put on her, a positive role model for girls and the disabled in a medium that often has trouble with both, let alone at the same time. I won't deny it: 20 years after The Killing Joke, when Babs lifted herself out of her chair and beat down Spy Smasher even with two useless limbs in the pages of Birds of Prey, I cheered. And then of course 3 years later the reboot happened and now she walks again. Oh well.

We started off with a Moore quote and we'll end with one too: "...there've been worse Batman books than The Killing Joke." The sentiment is absolutely true of course; for as much as I give the book a hard time, there were worse Batman stories before, and worse after, by droves. Mostly the feeling I get from the Killing Joke is disappointment: Brian Bolland is a brilliant artist and Alan Moore is a brilliant writer, so they should have made something equal to the home runs that Moore had already hit: 1988's Watchmen or Swamp Thing or Marvelman. but instead we got a slight, nasty piece of work that would be repeated over and over for the next 23 years by authors who wanted to be 'dark' and 'edgy' like Alan Moore without recognizing the humanity underneath that made his works so brilliant. Maybe someone can give a really strong, persuasive argument to the merits of The Killing Joke, but as of now it's just something unpleasant.

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Best quote: "All these years and I don't know who he is any more than he knows who I am./How can two people hate each other so much without knowing each other?"

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Up next: The little things. DC short works.

More Moore part 20: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? (1986)

As previously stated, 1986's Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot changed the face of DC forever...for a little while. At the time though, it was a pretty radical direction to take with their 50-year-old property, to dump everything and essentially start over. In September of '86, after the Crisis but before the official reboot, the decision was made by longtime DC editor Julius Schwartz to give Superman a sort of proto-Elseworlds treatment with his last two issues before the reboot hit, a "what if?" closing out the stories of Superman, his friends, and his foes before the post-Crisis world fully began. Schwartz originally wanted Superman creator Jerry Siegel and Curt Swan, who had then been drawing the character since 1948, to take a crack at the 'last issue', but Siegel wasn't able to work on the book due to legal hoops that needed jumping through, so our ol' buddy, our ol' pal Alan Moore, then flush with success from Swamp Thing and about to launch into the stratosphere with Watchmen (chapter one of which came out the same day as chapter one of ...Man of Tomorrow) was given a crack at writing the final chapter in pre-reboot Superman. The result is Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, partly-groundbreaking, partly-safe, a Superman story where nearly everyone ends up dead that still feels innocuous and even a little forgettable. But is it bad? Not really, it's just proof-positive that they can't all be knocked out of the park, even with a character as iconic as Superman.

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? uses a framing story an interview with a middle-aged Lois Lane, with all the main action taking place in Lois' flashbacks about the day that Superman vanished. Lois is now married with a child, as Lois Elliot to her husband's Jordan Elliot, which is about as clever as the Devil in Angel Heart calling himself Louis Cypher, so I don't blame you if you figure out the plot twist in the first couple panels. Her story details all of Superman's enemies suddenly getting more vicious and homicidal, goofy b-listers like Bizarro (and d-listers like the Fearsome Funsters) picking off Superman's pals and even outing Clark Kent as the Man of Steel early on in the plot. While Supes has his hands full of the losers, the real threats in his rogue's gallery start to stir as well; Lex Luthor's brain and body are hijacked by Braniac, who leads an assault on the Fortress of Solitude to eliminate Superman once and for all.

Even early going, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? has a surprisingly high body count for a Superman story, though merely average for an Alan Moore one. Pete Ross, Kryptonite Man, Lana Lang, Jimmy Olsen, even super-dog Krypto (with no tears shed from me) all bite the dust as Braniac-Luthor assaults the Fortress. He seals off the area in an indestructible bubble, which leads to a great scene of the Justice League trying to superpower their way in...Batman and Robin reduced to hitting the thing with clubs. Moments before her own death, Lana actually manages to break Luthor's neck...and in easily the most chilling moment in the novel, Lex rises again, his dead body still manipulated by Braniac until rigor mortis sets in.

With the dust cleared and everyone pretty much dead, it's revealed that the one behind all the death and destruction is none other than Mr. Mxyzptlk, the prankster god of the Superman world  who, like Bizarro, is usually confined to goofing around until Supes gets tired of his annoyances and banishes him back to the Fifth Dimension. Well after 2000 years of being a magical pain in the ass, Mxy has decided to try being evil, so he manipulated minds and events to bring down all the terrible things that have happened so far, which I have to admit I actually kind of enjoy as a motivation. It gives him an arbitrary cruelty somewhat like The Joker, and fits in nicely with my earlier assessment of Superman's trickster god status, like Loki or Susa-no-o. Superman wins in the end, of course, but only by breaking his own rule and killing Mxyzptlk. Grief-stricken, Superman walks into a vault of Gold Kryptonite, stripping himself of his powers, and vanishes. We cut back to modern day, where Lois finishes her interview and her husband Jordan grins like a doofus and winks to the camera. Curtain call, goodnight Superman.

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? is the closest Moore's ever come to doing a kind of Christmas special-type comic like A Christmas Story. Even with the body count, it feels surprisingly safe and corny, with Curt Swan's silver age style artwork not helping to diffuse that feeling (though incidentally I wonder what his thoughts were killing all these characters that he had a hand in making what they eventually became). I used to loathe it, it was possibly the first Alan Moore comic I really didn't like, though looking back at it now I don't know, it's not so bad really. Like those selfsame Christmas specials, it's hokey and will make your eyes roll, but it's not a bad way to close that chapter in Superman's life and is kind of a fun look back at his first 50 years. It's incredibly slight, I had about as much to talk about in the entire novel as I did with a couple chapters of Watchmen, but it never overstays its welcome. Moore was asked to finish off Superman before the reboot, and he did alright. Ten years after this, in the midst of the '90s, this might even look like one of his highlights.

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Best quote: Now, two thousand years later, I'm bored again. I need a change. Starting with your death, I shall spend the next two millennia being evil! After that, who knows? Perhaps I'll try being guilty for a while."

...

Up next: Being mad isn't bad in The Killing Joke

More Moore part 19: Watchmen chapters 10-12

Watchmen chapters 10-12 (1987)

"After so much music, love, and flowers, she felt benumbed/Thunder struck by this psychedelic Götterdämmerung." - M. Torgoff

...

By chapter ten, Watchmen is in a free-fall. The crystal that formed the first half of the book, that began to shatter in the early going of the second, has turned organic, a spectracolored mess of pulp and bone. The shifts and changes are still there, but they're frantic, schizophrenic, slipping from the muddy browns and reds of Rorschach and Nite Owl in Archie to the garish carnival colors of Ozymandias' Antarctic retreat. When Tales of the Black Freighter appears unannounced among the creeping paranoia, it takes a moment to register that we've gone into a different comic; the main character's ragged, hurried stares don't look much different than Rorschach's near-catatonia. Now instead of the meter ticking back and forth between scenes and colors like a metronome, each scene has its own individual palette, saturated in reds and browns, browns and purples, or blues and yellows. Thematically, chapter ten is the journey to finally discover who killed Edward Blake, and put to rest the mystery that had begun in the second panel of the first chapter. And that the reveal is so anti-climactic I have no doubt is part of Ozymandias' game: once Ozy is revealed to be the killer, he starts to talk...and talk...and talk... to anyone who will listen, and I have no doubt that he engineered Rorschach and Nite Owl to find the one thread in his plan just so he had someone to brag to. I'm almost surprised that he didn't leave the password already entered on the computer, just waiting for Daniel to hit enter.

Ozy's biggest speeches come in chapter eleven, 'Look on my Works, Ye Mighty' which mostly functions as his origin issue, and most certainly is the wordiest chapter of the entire novel. Ozymandias tells his story, first to  his beloved pet Bubastis, then to his servants as he drugs their drinks to keep their spirits in his fortress forever, and finally to Rorschach and Nite Owl as they arrive and are quickly pacified by the Smartest Man in the World. Ozymandias' plot is simple: he removed Dr. Manhattan from the equation to ratchet up world tension, and then teleported a fake alien into New York as a sort of organic atomic bomb, as an invasion from outer space to deflate the tension, hopefully permanently. In the world of 'realistic' comic books this strikes one as absurd, but it's also a perfect comic book scheme, something a pulp villain would try to do to take over the world, but instead done by a delusional superhero to try and bully the world powers into peace. And because Ozymandias is a pulp villain planted into the real world, he doesn't blab his plan to the heroes, giving them time to stop it...he already carried it out before they even arrived (I always liked the fact that, if you pay attention, you can see him teleport the creature away at the very beginning of the chapter, no ceremony, not even any dialog...a finger on a button and it's done).

And of course the ridiculous part of all of this is the fact that it works. Rorschach and Nite Owl find themselves completely helpless at the end of chapter eleven, and chapter twelve opens with six beautiful full-page illustrations of New York in utter ruins, the creature's psychic shockwaves having killed millions. Among the wreckage you can see several minor characters we've grown to know, charred and lifeless, and if the pages don't quite reach the level of horror seen at the climax of Marvelman, it's that recognition that sets it apart: Marvelman is a story about gods, and Watchmen is a story about men. While Kid Marvelman's rampage was unspeakably vicious, it was against the faceless population of London. Here we can see the two Bernies, Rorschach's psychiatrist, knot-tops, a Gunga Diner waitress, the fighting lesbian couple...even as Ozymandias claims that killing millions will save billions, we see people we recognize among the throngs of dead, and we know that his methods are unforgivable. However, as news reports flood in, there's no question that Ozy's fix worked, if only temporarily...the nations are laying down their arms to defend against an attack from the unknown.The world was swindled into peace. Rorschach, absolutionist that he is, would never live such a lie of course, and so he's permanently removed from the equation. Everyone else assumes new identities and moves on with their lives.

But is it enough? One of my favorite scenes, and among the biggest disappointments that they cut it from the movie, was Ozymandias' final conversation with Dr. Manhattan. The World's Smartest Man asks the story's one true superhuman if he made the right choice, if the fighting is really over, and Dr. Manhattan, the being that experiences time fractally, intones that 'nothing ever ends'. It humanizes Adrian, strips him of his ego in the very last scene he's featured in, and shows us a man that, underneath the posturing and speeches and grand plans, really does want to help the world. That it was cut from the movie damaged Ozy's character irreparably, because it's the only time we see Adrian Veidt as he truly is. And of course Dr. Manhattan's final words set up the last panels of the novel, with one of the survivors of the attack about to put his hand on Rorschach's journal, which spells Ozy's whole scheme out page by page. But even if he picked it up, would anyone believe it? Or is all of Ozymandias' planning about to crumble before the dust has even settled?

We're nearly 30 years on since Watchmen was published, and countless numbers of clones have sprung up. Yet the story is still visceral and urgent. It still is all sharp edges and teeth. The dialog is still shocking, and the clones that have come since still pale in comparison to the one true king. Watchmen is a reflection of Marvelman, Moore's first foray into the graphic novel realm: each book is a treatise on what happens when the superhuman is out of control among the human, when Gods play sport with men. Marvelman sets its sights loftily, with the Gods in their palaces, looking on the men as playthings, whereas Watchmen is a view from the gutter, the men among the filth trying helplessly to stop the Gods. It may be that all these years later, to look at Watchmen with contempt is in vogue: no king can reign for so long without attracting those who claim he's been naked this entire time. The movie, all sound and fury signifying nothing, didn't help matters either (though there's little more enjoyable than the 3.5 hour long 'Ultimate Cut', a large bottle of something potent, and several friends who love the novel. A night well-had by all). But still to this day, when I crack open Watchmen, I am impressed by, even with all the 80s political caricature, its sense of timelessness. The king isn't dead yet, and may he live long.

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Best quote: "But you'd regained interest in human life..."

"Yes I have. I think perhaps I'll create some."

...

Up next: Alan says good-bye to DC's first 50 years in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?

Happy Birthday Lady Lillian Rose!

An actual photo of the first time the author and the subject met.

Many happy returns for the beautiful and talented Lady Lillian Rose of A Child's Garden of Books.

In the mustardseed sun,
By full tilt river and switchback sea
Where the cormorants scud,
In his house on stilts high among beaks
And palavers of birds
This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave
He celebrates and spurns
His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;
Herons spire and spear.

Under and round him go
Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,
Doing what they are told,
Curlews aloud in the congered waves
Work at their ways to death,
And the rhymer in the long tongued room,
Who tolls his birthday bell,
Toesl towards the ambush of his wounds;
Herons, stepple stemmed, bless.

In the thistledown fall,
He sings towards anguish; finches fly
In the claw tracks of hawks
On a seizing sky; small fishes glide
Through wynds and shells of drowned
Ship towns to pastures of otters. He
In his slant, racking house
And the hewn coils of his trade perceives
Herons walk in their shroud,

The livelong river's robe
Of minnows wreathing around their prayer;
And far at sea he knows,
Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end
Under a serpent cloud,
Dolphins dyive in their turnturtle dust,
The rippled seals streak down
To kill and their own tide daubing blood
Slides good in the sleek mouth.

In a cavernous, swung
Wave's silence, wept white angelus knells.
Thirty-five bells sing struck
On skull and scar where his lovews lie wrecked,
Steered by the falling stars.
And to-morrow weeps in a blind cage
Terror will rage apart
Before chains break to a hammer flame
And love unbolts the dark

And freely he goes lost
In the unknown, famous light of great
And fabulous, dear God.
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is alwas true,
And, in that brambled void,
Plenty as blackberries in the woods
The dead grow for His joy.

There he might wander bare
With the spirits of the horseshoe bay
Or the stars' seashore dead,
Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales
And wishbones of wild geese,
With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,
And every soul His priest,
Gulled and chanter in youg Heaven's fold
Be at cloud quaking peace,

But dark is a long way.
He, on the earth of the night, alone
With all the living, prays,
Who knows the rocketing wind will blow
The bones out of the hills,
And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last
Rage shattered waters kick
Masts and fishes to the still quick stars,
Faithlessly unto Him

Who is the light of old
And air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild
As horses in the foam:
Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined
And druid herons' vows
The voyage to ruin I must run,
Dawn ships clouted aground,
Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
Count my blessings aloud:

Four elements and five
Senses, and man a spirit in love
Thangling through this spun slime
To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
And the lost, moonshine domes,
And the sea that hides his secret selves
Deep in its black, base bones,
Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
And this last blessing most,

That the closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
And every wave of the way
And gale I tackle, the whole world then,
With more triumphant faith
That ever was since the world was said,
Spins its morning of praise,

I hear the bouncing hills
Grow larked and greener at berry brown
Fall and the dew larks sing
Taller this thuderclap spring, and how
More spanned with angles ride
The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
Holier then their eyes,
And my shining men no more alone
As I sail out to die 

-Dylan Thomas

...

Photo lifted from Progressive Ruin

More Moore part 18: Watchmen chapters 7-9

Watchmen chapters 7-9 (1987)

By Watchmen's second half, the structure of plot-centric odd chapters and worldbuilding even chapters runs out of steam. Briefly, Moore reverses the trend and has an odd-numbered flashback chapter or two, but even that doesn't last. I don't know if this is intentional or not, but it fits in well with the breakdown that's going on with the characters as well; things are becoming less structured, more haphazard and chaotic, from the plot down to the chapters themselves. What was once crystalline and structured is becoming more organic, more disheveled. Once we lose the 9-panel grid, that's when you really have to start worrying.

The one character who never gets a flashback chapter is Nite Owl. In a way, that's okay because it's doubtful he needs one; the man now known as Dan Dreiberg has fewer psychological problems than the rest of the cast, and his origin story is equally without flourish: Dan simply comes off as the superhero fan who went a step further, the boy who looked up to the costumed fighters of the '40s, and when they put their mantles down, he used his inheritance money to put his own mantle on. Despite the lack of backstory, chapter seven is Nite Owl's chapter, in which his formerly unrequited feelings for Laurie Juspeczyk, the Silk Spectre, are finally made manifest. Of course, Dreiberg can't escape from even his comparatively tame neuroses, and in chapter seven we see his fetishization for his superhero identity made manifest in his inability to perform sexually until both he and Laurie are be-costumed. Dan is sweet and kind, doughy and uncomfortable, and he has a strong sense of justice and the need to do the right thing, without being as deranged as Rorschach. I don't see many fans extolling the virtues of Nite Owl like they do the man with the ink-blot face, which is too bad because he seems the most relatable; in this cast of lunatic misfits, Dan is the comic book fan in all of us. And after his coupling with Laurie, floating through the clouds in his owl-craft Archie, his decision to spring Rorschach from prison is the first moment worthy of our cheers in the whole story, over halfway through. The band's getting back together after all.

Chapter eight, 'Old Ghosts', is a chaotic, dense mess of a work, most assuredly intentionally so. The plot bounces around between Hollis Mason in his junkyard, Dan and Laurie in Dan's basement, the (still-ineffective) 'Tales of the Black Freighter' comic, the offices of right-wing newspaper The New Frontiersman, a mysterious island art collective, and Rorschach is prison, as a riot foments, boils over, and explodes moments before Dan and Laurie arrive to spring him. The momentum is tangible, with the 9 panel grid ticking down the moments between all the plot threads, cutting back and forth from inmates threatening Rorschach to Nite Owl and Silk Spectre rushing to the scene to save him. Of course, Rorschach hardly needs saving himself, and on the outbreak of the riot he dispatches three of his attackers bloodily. As the novel becomes less about deconstructing superhero themes and more about an exciting superhero comic, a lot of Moore and Gibbons' literary tricks start to fade into the background, and this is the first chapter I really noticed a lack of that poetic meter so strong in the early chapters; the colors don't alternate panel to panel, the scenes don't tick bath and forth. Instead the transitions are haphazard and random, like the nature of the riot itself. If the early chapters were a structured, metered poem like, say, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, then 'Old Ghosts' is The Waste Land, and no weaker because of it. Eventually the power in the prison goes out and the panels are bathed in harsh reds and blacks, which only helps to disguise the blood left in Rorschach's wake.

After the prison break, Laurie is confronted by Dr. Manhattan, who spirits her off to Mars, and then Hollis Mason, the first Nite Owl, is beaten to death by gang members who mistake him for Dreiberg and assume his complicity in the prison riot. Here we do see some of that old poetry again, as the panels alternate between Hollis attacked n the present and sepia-toned flashbacks of Hollis' fights in the '40s and '50s, great pastiches of golden and silver age comics with typical '50s moon men and '40s Nazis, Hollis backed up by a canine companion (Owl Dog?) even as the thugs finally overtake him in the present. If there was only one problem with the movie version of Watchmen, more so than the removal of any psychic squid beings, it's that Hollis' death was left on the cutting-room floor. It's such a sad, touching scene, not to mention an important scene for Dan's character, as Hollis was indirectly killed because of something Dan did, and like any good classical tragedy, Dan never realizes that was the case. The scene is a perfect example of pathos in comic storytelling, and one of those moments that really made me realize for the first time that maybe these books have something more to tell. Finally, the backup is an article from The New Frontiersman, and makes a brief mention of missing artists, including pirate-comic scribe Max Shea. It's just a small thing now, but it will have greater significance in the future.

Lastly we have chapter nine, 'The Darkness of Mere Being'. If chapter seven explored the relationship between Dan Dreiberg and Laurie Juspeczyk, this chapter deals with the relationship between Laurie and Jon Osterman, the man who became Dr. Manhattan, as well as functioning as an origin story for Laurie. Laurie is unique in that, among the main characters, she's the only one who has no precedent in the old Charlton comics, but instead was invented just for the plot. She's the pageant daughter of the superhero community, forced into the life by her overbearing superhero mother, who Laurie now both cares for and resents in equal measure. In the '60s, Laurie, then 16, was swept up in awe for Dr. Manhattan and fell for him hard, causing a rift between Jon and his then-girlfriend Janey Slater, which helped make Slater lash out at him so bitterly in the present when Jon exiled himself to Mars. As always, Moore's pieces fall into place slowly but very, very perfectly.

But this chapter is troubling as well, for reasons I briefly mentioned back in chapter two: Jon and Laurie debate the point of going back to an Earth which Jon sees as not worth his attention anymore, despite his non-standard perception of time telling him that there will be a horrible catastrophe befalling the world soon. In trying to reason with him, Laurie triggers her own memories of her unhappy childhood, her mother and father fighting, and comes to realize that she is not her father's daughter, but in fact the daughter of The Comedian, Eddie Blake. Blake, you may recall, raped Laurie's mother back in chapter two, and apparently their relationship continued afterward and led to Laurie's conception.

I've mentioned it before, but Moore had a bad tendency, especially in the '80s, of using rape as a plot device (just off the top of my head, I think we've had 4 or 5 rapes so far, and we've only read 7 novels), but this is the most uncomfortable of them all because the plot dictates that Sally Juspeczyk fall in love with her rapist, and they have a child together. I still maintain that I don't feel Moore is misogynist, and others have claimed, and he's not just using rape as a cheap shock, as Laurie herself is sickened as much as the reader is by her revelation. That fact is that Sally is a complex character, and like everyone else in Watchmen, there's more to it than black and white, as she stated herself back in chapter two, long before we knew what she meant by it. Thankfully Moore gets all this rape out of his system soon enough, but it certainly does lend 'The Darkness of Mere Being' a more uncomfortable quality than expected. It's this revelation however, that despite all odds Sally Juspeczyk and a man she had every right to hate created life together, that convinced Jon that perhaps there are things worth saving in the land of the living, and the chapter ends with them heading home. But is it enough?

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Best quote: "...And there was this toy, this snowstorm ball, with a tiny castle inside, except it was like a whole world, a world inside the ball/It was like a little glass bubble of somewhere else/I lifted it, starting a blizzard. I knew it wasn't real snow, but I couldn't understand how it fell so slowly/I figured the inside of the ball was some different sort of time/Slow time/...And inside there was only water."

...

Up next: It's not enough, in Watchmen chapters 10-12

More Moore part 17: Watchmen chapters 4-6

Watchmen chapters 4-6 (1986-87)

Even after the excellent first three chapters of Watchmen, chapters 4-6 prove to be a strong point, both in the novel and in Moore's oeuvre in general, with two incredible 'origin' chapters sandwiching a chapter that plays with the musical structure of the novel and provides us with a sudden...and suspicious...action sequence. The writing is top-notch, compelling and philosophical, and the characters waxing about the nature of time and evil will leave you thinking long after you close the pages. Like any novel, some parts of Watchmen are stronger than others, but when the word 'masterpiece' is thrown around like so much confetti, just thinking about chapters 4, 5, and 6 make me think that they're not too far off.

Things start off strong with chapter four, 'Watchmaker', the origin story of the atomic-powered Doctor Manhattan. The Doctor went into Martian self-exile the last chapter, and in 'Watchmaker' we experience his past, present, and future simultaneously, Manhattan's sense of time compressed to a quantum level where everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen occurs at once. From a narrative standpoint this is genius and in Moore's hands it works where a lesser writer might stumble, Dr. Manhattan alone in the Martian wasteland contemplating how it is he came to this point, experiencing the events for the first time even as he remembers them as distant memories, giving us contemplative, eloquent captions:

"The photograph is in my hand/It is the photograph of a man and a woman. They are at the amusement park, 1959./In twelve seconds time, I drop the photograph to the sand at my feet, walking away. It's already lying there, twelve seconds into the future."

To this reader, the main theme of Watchmen is one of powerlessness: all strata of the protagonists, from Rorschach breaking thug's fingers on the street to Ozymandias manipulating the world's events to force peace, are in the end totally unable to alter the flow of events (depending on your interpretation of the ending, at least. And that's mine). By having Doctor Manhattan experience time on a quantum level, Moore, in a very real, simple way completely depowers a seemingly godlike character; if he experiences all time simultaneously, Manhattan, for all his omnipotence, is unable to alter ANY events, as to him everything that will ever happened already has. Manhattan says as much to his girlfriend Janey Slater when confronted about not preventing the Kennedy assassination:

"I can't prevent the future. To me, it's already happening."

Around this time Moore showed his ability in humanizing omnipotent characters, both with Doctor Manhattan here and Superman in his "For the Man Who Has Everything", proving that you don't need to literally depower these characters to make them relatable, you just need to put them in situations where their powers are inconsequential, and that is precisely what Manhattan's situation does to him. When one knows the future to be unalterable, one really is trapped by the prison of fate, and for all of Doctor Manhattan's supreme powers, he's just as helpless as everybody else in Moore's world. The chapter ends with with the blue glowing Manhattan building a crystalline palace from the Martian sand, a scene which should bring waves of nostalgia to anyone who read through Swamp Thing's similar exile in Book V of that series.

After the quantum poetry of 'Watchmaker' comes chapter five, 'Fearful Symmetry', which is our 'plot-centric' chapter today. In it, Rorschach continues his investigation into The Comedian's death, Silk Spectre finds a temporary living situation with Night Owl, and Ozymandias is attacked by an assassin. The beauty of the chapter is in the titular symmetry: it's arranged like an artistic palindrome, with the panel layouts mirroring each other both in style and color, taking the alternatingly colored panels of the first few chapters to their natural, logical conclusion. The plot builds to the center of the chapter, where a gorgeous half-splash page takes up three panels on both pages depicting Ozymandias fighting back against his assailant. The fight scene feels like a release after four and a half chapters of buildup, and afterward it almost feels disconcerting: Watchmen deconstructs superhero tropes, it doesn't reenforce them, and a big flashy battle like this comes out of left field more than anything else so far. Compared to the grime and the grit surrounding it, a rich man beating off a thug in his glittering skyscraper feels so artificial, and in retrospect it's the first sign that something is rotten in the state of Mr. Veidt. The fight feels staged because, as we'll find out later, it is...nothing comes so easily in Moore's beaten-down world.

The other big scene in chapter five is Rorschach's bumbling attempt to flee the police after he's framed for the murder of small-time villain Moloch. Now this is more like a Watchmen action scene...despite his best efforts, Rorschach's attempt to flee the cops are doomed from the start, as unlike Ozy and his planted thug, Rorschach is just a man, and he's outnumbered and outgunned immediately. His fight is sloppy and flailing, the last ditch effort of a man who refuses to give in, a sentiment which will one day be taken up by Gail Simone in the wonderful ending of Secret Six as well. And like the doomed plans of Bane and Scandal Savage, Rorschach is quickly and handily taken into custody, his mask torn from his face, screaming like a madman, the panels mirror-images of the ones that began the chapter.

Rorschach's ordeal continues into the sixth chapter, 'The Abyss Gazes Also', his origin story with a framing story of a psychological examination. Rorschach is easily the most popular character in the series: as a moral absolutionist who refuses to give in, "even in the face of Armageddon", and it helps that his starring chapter is among the best in the whole novel. In it, we see the transformation from generic costumed crimefighter Walter Kovacs into the disturbed Rorschach. This has become a common trope since: The crimefighter witnesses a side of humanity so dark that s/he retreats into the costumed identity, supplanting the 'citizen' identity for the mask itself. I have no idea if Watchmen did it first, but it certainly perfected it; 'The Abyss Gazes Also' is a taut, enthralling chapter, the black heart of Watchmen, the center of the story that beats black blood into the veins of the other chapters. Rorschach's tale of the blackness in the human heart came out of nowhere in 1987, except maybe Marvelman, and even Marvelman dealt more with things beyond the sphere of humankind. 'The Abyss Gazes Also' is entirely about the human condition, and what happens when that condition goes down alleyways of darkness never thought possible, how damaged it comes out on the other side. Rorschach's psychologist doesn't make the trip either, and the chapter ends with him staring at a Rorschach blot in the darkness, unable to shake the black seed Rorshach's tale planted into him. Heavy stuff, indeed.

The backup to chapter six is the psychologist's file on Rorschach, and I bring it up just for a small mention at the end: in a paper entitled 'My Parents' from when Walter Kovacs was eleven, he mentions his respect for President Truman, because, "He dropped the atom bomb on Japan and saved millions of lives because if he hadn't, then there would of been a lot more war than there was and more people would of been killed." Seems that young Walter was more receptive to the idea of a few losses to save many, something that will turn out to not be the case with Rorschach later in the story.

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Best quote: "Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later./Born from oblivion, bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion./There is nothing else./.../This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not god who kills children. Not fate that butchers them, or destiny that feeds them to the dogs./It's us./Only us."

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Up next: "One-nothing. Your move."

More Moore part 16: Watchmen chapters 1-3

Watchmen chapters 1-3 (1986)

About a week ago, when I updated my Goodreads page with this book, I received a dismissive response from  a friend: "It's overrated," he said, "people don't really talk like that." The comment made me think about how we consider art and whether it really is as overrated as he thought, which is something I now can't agree with: for better or for worse, when Watchmen #1 appeared on newsstands in September 1986 it changed the face of comics forever, as radically as The Waste Land did for poetry and Final Fantasy VII did for video games, two other works that I don't think you can accuse of being overrated for the same reasons. Watchmen left an indelible mark on the genre and is now a bar that must be topped; I can think of no comic made after it that isn't indebted to it in some way. Any time there's a new novel or arc that comes out that is destined to be BIG NEWS, it will make a reference to Watchmen in some way, even Moore himself is guilty of this from time to time. I don't think the degree of what Watchmen has accomplished CAN be properly rated, so no, I don't think it's overrated. Overhyped though? That's possibly a more legitimate complaint. Let's see.

The very first thing to notice about chapter 1, before anything that lies within, is how rigidly workmanlike it is: a 9-panel grid, page after page, strictly sticking to its own internal conventions and meter. The grid creates a sense of internal momentum, of movement inexorably drawn to the end, which fits in well with the book's sense of nuclear fatigue and of the (much later) use of predestined fate. The second thing to notice is color: Tatjana Wood's color work in Swamp Thing was muted and earthy, it added to the darkness in the story from Houma to Pandemonium. Here, John Higgins' work is garish and clashing, very much by design. In the first chapter, the panels alternate sickly greens and blues with glaring, piercing yellows and reds, back and forth, from present to flashback like an 80s fever-dream, all shards of neon. With the rigid timing of the panels and the alternating of the color, the work becomes poetic, but only in a martial sense: each panel stomps along like boots on concrete, in perfect time from beginning to end.

The final thing to take in is the work's density: just holding the novel in your hands it feels heavier than usual, as if the clutter in the art is weighing the whole tome down. Every panel has something interesting to look at; photos in the background,  graffiti, newspaper headlines. When the Watchmen movie came out in 2009, a lot was made of it blowing the novel's nuclear scare message out of proportion, but it's still here, just hidden away in the backgrounds of panels, on barely-glimpsed newspapers on The Comedian's apartment floor, or written up in the backup story of Hollis Mason's autobiography. Where the movie offered panic, though, the book gives a crushing sense of fatigue, exacerbated by the hideous carnival colors: the world of 1986 according to Watchmen has been beaten into the ground. Rorschach is usually touted as the novel's 'protagonist' (as much as a story like this can even have one) and I think what sets him apart from everyone else is the minds of readers is that he still maintains a degree of life and movement, whereas everyone else, from Nite Owl to Silk Spectre to Dr. Manhattan to even the background caricatures like Nixon and Kissinger, look ready to lay down and give up.

It's old news by now, but a recap for those who would like it: Moore's original plan for Watchmen was to have lightning strike thrice in acquiring an old property and retooling it for modern audiences, as he did with Marvelman and Swamp Thing. Initially, Watchmen was to be populated by the heroes from silver-age publisher Charlton Comics, bought out by DC in 1985, but management balked at the idea of the characters in their new purchase ending up dead or crazy and convinced Moore to rewrite the characters as archetypes, which I think works much better in the long run. The characters in Watchmen work because they're blank slates, heroic archetypes that don't need huge backstories. Moore took the idea of a Batman character, split him into two parts, and thus we have Nite Owl (the campy techie who has an 'Owl Cave') and Rorschach (the lunatic who hides in the shadows and relies on criminals fear of him to get results), and both of them work because we understand the archetype they're coming from. We don't question that The Comedian is a gun-toting vigilante like The Punisher because we've seen The Punisher and Punisher-types time and time again before this. Watchmen is simply the graphic novel's answer to The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Interestingly, Moore drops his usual propensity for poetic, lugubrious captions and focuses on Watchmen as a story told through dialogue, with Rorschach's journal entries being among a handful of captions used, and then only sparingly. Of course Moore hasn't lost his knack for it, and the journal entries, with their clipped, awkward speech, are some of the best he's done.

At least initially, the novel splits itself from chapter to chapter, another example of it using meter to create that kind of martial poetry. Odd chapters further the story at hand, while even chapters are more concerned with flashbacks and telling the origin stories of the main players. I have heard that this design is a monetary choice first and an artistic choice second: Moore just didn't have enough story to fill up twelve issues, so we added the even chapters to kill time. Either way it's successful, and to this reader at least the even chapters are where the novel really shines, not that the odd chapters are slouches at all. Of course being an Alan Moore story it can't help but subvert itself immediately: chapter 2 flashes back to five events in the life of Edward Blake, The Comedian, a character who died before the story even started. Unlike every other character in the story, we only get a view of Blake through the eyes and thoughts of the rest of the cast, and what we see isn't pretty: to me, Blake is the only character completely incapable of redemption, a violent, misogynist sociopath who is seen murdering a pregnant woman, firing on rioters with glee, and instigating yet another Alan Moore rape scene (and probably the most problematic of them, as we'll see later). The Comedian is Watchmen's 1986 personified: brutal, destructive, and sadistic. He does get a gorgeous speech, blubbering and drunk, confessing his crimes to former nemesis Moloch in a flashback just before he was killed. The whole thing is shown from Moloch's point of view, trapped in his bed while Blake opens up to him, the room alternatingly bathed in harsh oranges and cool blues. And then, like a refrain, we return to the flashback of Blake, his whole world blood-red, being thrown to his death. We saw the scene once in chapter one, and we'll see it again before long, the thread that ties Watchmen together.

A special mention should be made of Ozymandias' memory of The Comedian, because I think that THAT is the exact moment the plot starts, not Blake's death. The Comedian ridicules the other 'costumed crimefighters' for their ineffectiveness, points out that now that the world has nukes, it has bigger problems that men running around in spandex can't solve. Like Delita Heiral in Final Fantasy Tactics being taunted and abused by Argath for his inability to change the world, you can see Ozymandias' plot have its inception at this one moment, the moment that he decides to take the reins on human destiny and do what he can to save the world. Ozy comes across as a villain in the novel (unsurprisingly) but if he is, he's the most realistic kind of villain: the one who is convinced that everything he does is for the greater good. More than anything I think he comes across as a dark mirror of Rorschach: they're both moral absolutionists who refuse to back down in the face of Armageddon. The difference is that Ozymandias is the head of a multinational conglomerate, and Rorschach is a maniac running around in a trench coat breaking thugs fingers. I still condemn Ozy's plan as needlessly vicious (especially since the end seems to hint that it won't work, but we'll get to that later) but one can understand where he's coming from, and to him he is saving the world, which is the epitome of heroism. Slowly but surely, comic villains change from interdimensional dark wizards and Superman-hating industrialists to something more realistic, more accepting. And that makes them more sinister than ever.

Chapter 3 introduces a second set of captions, the story-within-a-story Tales of the Black Freighter. Since Watchmen takes place in a world where superheroes are real, nobody reads superhero comics, and pirate adventure comics seem to be all the rage. Black Freighter tells a condensed version of the plot of Watchmen, with the main character taking the role of Ozymandias and attempting something grand without realizing how twisted it is. Honestly, I rarely read the captions unless I feel I have to, they're cluttered and distracting and don't really add much to the story. In the director's cut of the Watchmen movie, the Black Freighter segments were interspersed between scenes of the actual story instead of being captions within the panels, and that worked much better, letting you see the story without distracting you from the actual plot of the novel. It would have been better as a backup at the end of a few issues, but as-is, it's a failed experiment.

Chapter 3 ends with Dr. Manhattan, the only being with actual superpowers and the USA's tool to keep Russia in check during the Cold War, on a self-imposed exile to Mars. Russia immediately invades Afghanistan, and we see still-president Nixon in a war room meeting discussing how much of the Eastern seaboard they would lose if they launched nukes right now. Things aren't looking good, and they're only going to get worse.

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Best quote: "Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel./Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain./Doctor says "Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up."/Man busts into tears. Says, "But doctor.../"I am Pagliacci."/Good joke. Everybody laugh./Roll on snare drum./Curtains."

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Up Next: "God exists and he's American."