Supergods

by Grant Morrison

  Panel 6 brought us to several hundred feet above the tiny bloodstain, now smaller than a letter o in the accompanying journal entry:

  “nOW THe WHOLe WORLD STanDS On THe BRInK STaRInG DOWn InTO BLOODY HeLL, aLL THOSe LIBeRaLS anD InTeLLeCTUaLS aND SMOOTH-TaLKeRS … aND aLL OF a SUDDeN nOBODY Can THInK OF anYThING TO SaY.”

  As the mad malarkey went on, a man’s hand entered the scene from the top right-hand side. Far below there were more podlike “futuristic” cars. If you’ve been paying proper attention to Rorschach’s rambles—and no one will condemn you if you haven’t—you may have noticed how everything he says has some visual echo: the “TRUe FaCe” and the smiley pin, the gutters and drains, the looking down, footsteps, precipice, the brink of bloody hell.

  The final panel occupied the entire lower tier to punch home its impact and pay off the series’ first blank gag setup:

  “Hmm, that’s quite a drop,” observed a balding man from the vantage point of a broken window high above the busy city street below. (The final page had another seven-panel reverse zoom from a smiley badge and ended the chapter with a joke about Rorschach dropping a criminal down an elevator shaft—another abyss, another fall, another mordant gag.)

  The self-reflecting cross-referral of image and text reached fever pitch as Watchmen unfolded: A drawing of Doctor Manhattan telekinetically looping a tie around his neck for a rare clothed appearance in a TV interview had his estranged lover Laurie Jupiter, the former second-generation Silk Spectre, ask in voiceover, “How did everything get so tangled up?,” while a scene in which she crushed a mugger’s balls in her grip was crosscut with another character’s words to Doctor Manhattan: “Am I starting to make you feel uncomfortable.” The parallel narrative threads of Manhattan and Laurie reflected and commented upon each other in a kind of remote quantum entangled conversation that perfectly suited Manhattan’s nature and dramatized the breakdown of a relationship. This relentless self-awareness gave Watchmen a dense and tangible clarity. Everything connected in a dazzling, elaborate hall of narrative mirrors.

  In 1985 the steady, constant-focus reverse zoom that opened Watchmen (a “camera” move that became possible on-screen only with the advent of computer-manipulated images)—from a microscopically detailed, thematically charged close-up on a single object to a scene-setting overview—was a technical effect that only comics could achieve. From the extreme close-up on the blood-streaked yellow idiot face on the cover to our balding Everyman joking at the splintering edge of the existential chasm, this deft sequence summed up the themes of the entire book and gave warning that its range would extend from the drains of death and disillusion to the holistic heights of cosmic overview awareness.

  The opening daytime scene of slightly slapdash police work was followed by a neat four-page night sequence of vigilante professionalism and investigative efficiency as we met the feared Rorschach himself, scaling the sheer face of a skyscraper with his grappling gun line (in a nod to Adam West, who’d simulated his daring rope climbs by having the camera turned on its side while he inched along a taut rope on a horizontal stage set with windows in the floor). Rorschach wore a fedora and a tightly buttoned and belted trench coat that was stained, grubby, and torn, but he got things done. His trademark was a gimmick mask that covered his whole face like the Question’s synthetic skin or Mr. A’s blank mask. Unlike the featureless heads of Ditko’s objectivist judges, Rorschach’s mask had black liquid trapped between sheets of latex to make ever-changing symmetrical inkblot patterns that reflected the character’s moods or dramatized story beats. The plot of Watchmen no. 1 followed Rorschach’s dogged investigation into the death of the Comedian, which brought him into contact with the book’s cast of retired crime fighters and set them on the road to uncovering a massive international conspiracy.

  Moore became notorious for writing immense scripts filled with pages of detailed panel description in which every stray matchbook or record sleeve would be described, along with the precise angle of its placement in the picture as well as its color, shape, state of wear and tear, and symbolic meaning. In Watchmen there were no comic-book sound effects, no thought balloons or scene-setting captions, although Moore used interior monologues in later chapters. The pace was measured and hypnotic, incorporating flashback, flash-forward, and simultaneous narrative to disconnect time from the clock face and make it cyclical, endless, and all at once.

  The themes of the entire work were contained in Watchmen’s iconic first cover: The childlike cartoon smile of innocence bloodied by real life and experience was a sour glyph that distilled Moore’s whole approach to comic-book fantasy. He would compel the comic-book medium to grow up even if he had to elegantly violate its every precept in front of a cheering crowd of punks and perverts.

  The book’s final image—in the last panel of Watchmen no. 12—was of the same face, seen now on the T-shirt of a young man named Seymour, who stood poised to undo the book’s entire plot. The story became a perfect circle, inviting us to complete its circuit by returning to the first page and “Rorschach’s Journal,” and suddenly we were reading the words again—“DOG CaRCaSS IN aLLeY …”—implicated in a new and terrible understanding: We were Seymour, reading the journal, joining the story right here where, as we’d been reminded the first time, “The end is nigh.” And indeed, the end, which still lay three hundred pages away in the forward time axis of the story, was always a mere two panels “nigh” in the past-time direction of Watchmen! That glance back to page 1 made us all readers of Rorschach’s journal, opening it for the first time. The end was nigh from the very beginning.

  The book’s last words are “I LEAVE IT ENTIRELY IN YOUR HANDS,” and if the reader asks, “What?,” the answer awaits on the first page of the journal. The responsibility for completing the story may seem to be our own, but we are guided to its inevitable end by the ever-present Watchmaker. Moore and Gibbons know that their complex masterpiece will be reread. They have set up their readers to pull the fatal switch, drafted them as executioners to undermine the world’s greatest superhero’s ultimate utopian triumph. We were made complicit in Moore’s final mean joke, with a story that was completed beyond the page—in the reader’s mind—and where the chance discovery of Rorschach’s crazed journal undid the perfect plan of the perfect man.

  I imagined that any story of real-life superheroes in the world where I lived would wind up in a welter of embarrassment and misunderstanding. I liked superhero comics because they weren’t real. For all its pretensions to realism, Watchmen laid bare its own synthetic nature in every cunningly orchestrated line, lacking in any of the chaos, dirt, and non sequitur arbitrariness of real life. This overwhelmingly artificial quality of the narrative, which I found almost revolting at age twenty-five, is what fascinates me most about it now, oddly enough.

  I preferred the sprawl and turbulence of Marvelman, which felt more like the real, messy world than the stifling, self-regarding, perfect yet mean-spirited microcosmos of Watchmen, but I was alone in my negative judgment.

  Dazzled by its technical excellence, Watchmen’s readership was willing to overlook a cast of surprisingly conventional Hollywood stereotypes: the inhibited guy who had to get his mojo back; the boffin losing touch with his humanity; the overbearing showbiz mom who drove her daughter to excel while hiding from her the secret of her dubious parentage; the prison psychiatrist so drawn into the dark inner life of his patient that his own life cracked under the weight. The Watchmen characters were drawn from a repertoire of central casting ciphers to play out their preordained roles in the inside-out clockwork of its bollocks-naked machinery. Moore’s self-awareness was all over every page like fingerprints.

  The God of Watchmen was far from shy. He liked to muscle his way into every panel, every line. He strutted into view with his blue cock on proud display, and everywhere you looked, the Watchmaker was on hand to present his glittering structure for our approval and awe, just as Manhattan erected his own flawless crystal logic machine to lay out
the law to a distraught Laurie in this maddeningly intricate engine of a story. The God of Watchmen could not hide and begged for our attention at every page turn. He was a jealous Maker who refused to allow any of his creations to be smarter than he was, so the pacifist genius became a genocidal idiot; the confident trained psychiatrist was reduced to a gibbering wreck by the darkness in the soul of his patient; the detectives stumbled through the plot to their doom; and even the more or less divine superhuman was shown to be emotionally retarded and ineffectual. It was as if God had little more than contempt for his creations and gave them no opportunity to transcend the limits he’d set for them.

  Moore’s love of obvious structure never left his work, although he tried in the nineties to approximate the looser, funkier style of the young pretenders to his throne. Later work like Promethea was built around the arrangement of the twelve Sephiroth of the Kabbalistic tree of life, but that was found structure. Watchmen built its own splendorous crystal labyrinth, conjuring from the red Martian sands of Moore’s imagination an unending object of wonderful contemplation. (This is not to downplay Gibbons’s hard work, but he was very faithful to Moore’s immensely detailed scripts, and I presume from the depth and detail of Moore’s typewritten art instructions that the writer saw most of Watchmen in his head.) Its bolt-from-the-blue impact meant that from that moment on and no matter what else he did, he would be Alan (Watchmen) Moore.

  The film version of Watchmen as directed by Zack Snyder in 2009 (after several aborted attempts by directors like Terry Gilliam to bring the project to the screen) was a bizarrely accurate reconstruction of the comic’s purely visual dimension, which added to the story flaws of the original some glaring errors of its own devising. Audiences unfamiliar with Roeg, Pynchon, Greenaway—any of the varied precursors to Watchmen’s naked structural and philosophical preoccupations—were confounded.

  Moore had always claimed that it was essentially unfilmable. The film’s very existence proved him wrong to some extent and was a respectful adaptation, but by the time of its release, an angry Moore could afford to sever all ties with Hollywood. He’d been burned by previous poor adaptations of his work and refused to endorse or even attach his name as original creator to the film of Watchmen, giving his share of the buy-out to his artist before returning to his underground roots in high dudgeon. While the filmmakers failed to capture the essence of Moore’s writing, they duplicated Gibbons’s artwork with an almost supernatural fidelity that was made possible by the development of computer-generated imagery (CGI) to a degree where it could render an infinite depth of field in which every tiny holographic shard of background detail was visible in crystal clarity in high definition.

  Ultimately, in order for Watchmen’s plot to ring true, we were required to entertain the belief that the world’s smartest man would do the world’s stupidest thing after thinking about it all his life. It’s there where Watchmen’s rigorous logic runs out, where its irony is drawn so tight that the bowstring gives. Its road ends. As the apotheosis of the relevant, realistic superhero stories, it had to come face-to-face with the bursting walls of its own fictional bubble, its fundamental lack of likelihood. No real world could be as beautifully designed and organized as Watchmen’s 4-D jigsaw puzzle.

  With Moore as comics’ fire-flecked prophet of apocalypse and Miller as its sensitive would-be tough-guy, the medium had made it all the way to college, where some unlikely characters were now rooming together. The audience was still aging along with the books: These were teenagers and twentysomethings who wanted superhero stories that spoke to them about their sense of alienation, their sexuality or anger. The New Wave was eager to oblige.

  The superheroes fed on this new energy, and the strands—US underground and UK art house—diverged, each growing toward a decadent phase that would prove more successful for the American brand of alternative than the androgynous eyeliner Goth of the British Invasion.

  And there was a new audience willing to buy comics in expensive hardback collected editions sold in bookstores. The term “graphic novel” became a buzzword overnight, heralding a new dawn for coffee table editions of The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen made to adorn studio apartments as evidence of serious hipster credentials in the late eighties. In France, comics were accepted as the Ninth Art and sold to adults in expensive hardbound collectors’ editions. In Japan, they were everywhere.

  Perhaps it could happen here.

  CHAPTER 14

  THERE WAS NOTHING else for it: The shyness and diffidence that held me back were ruthlessly expunged in the service of earning a living, and I began to make regular trips to London in search of work in the comic-book business. I was a rock kid now, released like a rat from a trap from the cage of virginity, and beginning what became a nine-year relationship with a fashionable, funny, and attractive nurse. We soon found there was no money in looking gorgeous down at the pub so, skinny, spectral, I hung around the offices of Marvel and Fleetway, publishers of 2000 AD, at that time the official stepping-stone to overseas recognition. I’d never been a 2000 AD fan, but they were always on the lookout for new sci-fi comic writers, and I was happy to read through a few back issues and see if I could simulate the style. I wrote endless letters, including script ideas. I made a point of attending every monthly meeting of the Society of Script Illustrators. I traveled four hundred miles for interminable lunch hours in South Bank bars, watching the editorial staff play pool as I declined rounds and beers.

  I scored some work with Marvel Comics’ UK division, writing a toy tie-in serial entitled Zoids. I took the job seriously and set about transforming the undemanding source material—a group of astronauts stranded on a planet of warring alien robots—into a showcase for my peculiar talents in an action-and-angst-fueled take on East-West politics and how it felt to be part of a group of ordinary people trapped between the titanic struggles of very large opponents who couldn’t care less about your hobbies or your favorite books.

  At twenty-four, well beyond any awkward geek years, I was still convinced my life was ebbing away with nothing much to show for it. As far as I was concerned, heroes like Keats and Rimbaud had already done their best work and left inscriptions on headstones or given up by the time they got to my age. My own achievements seemed to count as nothing by comparison. The Mixers, meanwhile, were spinning in multicolored circles, devolving to nothing more than posters, threats, and endless vague rehearsals with a carousel of drummers who never stuck around, smelling our lack of commitment to actually playing live. I was still on the dole and living at home, a sitcom character disturbing the fragile peace between my mum and my increasingly depressed stepdad, a sea captain.

  Eventually with a recommendation from 2000 AD founder, fellow Scot, and future Batman writer Alan Grant, Fleetway hired me to write a trial Future Shocks twist-ending story with the promise of more. It meant that I could afford to be self-employed and say farewell to the Department of Social Services. My first 2000 AD deadline, the next big step up toward the US superhero universes, coincided with the epochal eruption of the sea captain’s by-now-volcanic inner demons. My stepfather needed a small, soft scapegoat and chose the innocent feral kittens I’d rescued from the garbage bins outside. He lost all patience when he realized that the tiny orphans were behind the infestation of ringworm that explained the stink of disinfectant and why Mum was wearing polo neck sweaters that hid her neck in the hot middle of August. I was told to have those kittens “put down” several times, but I persevered with them, and they got over the ringworm and the diarrhea and vomiting, growing to fine cathood, even appearing on the cover and in the pages of DC Comics’ Animal Man title, thereby securing themselves some little immortality.

  In exile at my dad’s place, I wrote the first of seventeen Future Shocks stories as my apprenticeship with 2000 AD. These were short, done-in-one science fiction stories—anything from a single page to five pages long—with O. Henry twists or shock endings. Like so many others, I honed my skills on these odd little hai
ku-like pieces, for which I’d developed a kind of English middle-class sci-fi twang based on the writing of Douglas Adams of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame, which seemed to fit with 2000 AD’s brand of playground rebellion. After working one’s way through a few years of Future Shocks, it was customary to be offered a series to write, usually one devised by the editors. So I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with the right subject when it was announced that 2000 AD planned to take on the Americans at their own game with a big, revisionist superhero story set in Britain and featuring all new characters. All eyes were back on the superhero. What happened next? What came post-Watchmen?

  I’d waited all my life for this moment, and my offering was Zenith, which used a few characters and concepts I’d created for an earlier and mercifully unpublished strip about glum British superheroes. I rethought the entire concept to bring it into line with a sensibility I hoped could bridge the gap between Watchmen’s Saturnian heaviness and the breezy shallowness of eighties pop culture. I saw it not as art but as a freelance gig, a step up the ladder toward the American superheroes I wanted to get my hands on, so I constructed Zenith quite carefully. I was resolutely straight edge, no drink, no drugs, no caffeine. In the strictest sense of the coinage, my girlfriend Judy and I were Young Upwardly Mobile People, doing uncommonly well under a prime minister who fronted a political party I’d been raised to despise as my class duty, still identifying with roots I’d long ago outgrown. I needed my own new direction away from leaden politics and humorless social realism.

  In 1986 I was invited to the Birmingham Comic Convention. There I met the one-of-a-kind artist Brendan McCarthy, who complimented me on my Brideshead Revisited fringe and floppy cuffs. McCarthy was a styled and prickly genius whose hand had and still has a direct line to his unconscious mind. Imagine that you could take photographs of your dreams, and you will have some idea what McCarthy is able to do with his art. I liked him immediately, recognizing a far-flung überspecimen of my own odd and difficult breed, immediately tracking down the three Day-Glo issues of McCarthy’s Strange Days comic-book series from 1982. In it, he and two other early exports to the United States, Brett Ewins and writer Peter Milligan, had created something that now opened my eyes to the horrible bargain I’d made: I’d been chasing the dollar by aping the styles of popular writers, but Strange Days took me back to the Near Myths days and reminded me of the pride that I took in the madcap, personal comics I still wrote and drew in my free time.