Maxwell the Magic Cat appeared innocuous enough, and the Northants Post was a provincial local newspaper, not exactly an underground zine in the Crumb tradition. Yet although Maxwell was a little cat, he was also cruel and arrogant, happy to chomp up talking mice and birds.
There may moreover be a more nationalistic cultural difference in play. British comics tend to be black comedies with anti-heroes as their main characters. A male British comics reader has traditionally been weaned on the Beano, moved on to adventure comics like Battle or 2000AD, and then perhaps on to underground comix and fanzines. British comics all share a taste for mayhem and violence, usually gleefully directed against authority figures, suitably tailored for their audience. The most enduring current ‘serious’ British character, 2000AD’s Judge Dredd, is a broad satire on heavy-handed policing. Co-creator of the character Alan Grant was shocked when American convention-goers kept telling him they wished the real police were more like Judge Dredd. The British creators of comics were far more suspicious of ‘supermen’ using violence to lay down their version of justice, prone to see fascist overtones rather than a heroic ideal. As a former editor of 2000AD put it, ‘American comics tend to be much more bright and optimistic. Naïve, even. The British sense of humour is much darker, more ironic. Morally ambiguous. American readers don’t seem to be big on moral ambiguity, they seem to prefer things to be simple and clear-cut. They don’t seem to realise that Dredd isn’t always meant to be taken seriously. Sometimes it’s serious, sure, but sometimes it’s out-and-out parody. Sometimes Dredd’s the hero, sometimes the villain, sometimes he’s barely a supporting character.’
The study Knowing Audiences: Judge Dredd takes the 1995 guidelines for merchandising of the (British) comic and the (American) movie version of Judge Dredd and concludes ‘they have almost nothing in common’. The movie guidelines describe Judge Dredd as ‘a futuristic action thriller about how the toughest, most upright and respected of all the Judges saves Mega-City One from destruction’. Those for the comic are ‘written in a self-reflexive half-mocking style … the implication is that Dredd merchandising should carry some of the comic’s mocking attitude’, and includes a line that’s equally applicable to Rorschach, the mentally disturbed vigilante in Watchmen: ‘Though he is capable of a very black sense of humour, we can never be sure if he thinks his remarks are funny.’
Alan Moore had parodied comics set in a grim and gritty New York before he ever wrote one. In The Daredevils #2, Moore offered the four-page strip Grit! (art: Mike Collins, February 1983). This depicts the hero Dourdevil in a bombastic world not so far from Miller’s, one of casual violence and people with rather inconsistent or sketchy motives. As one character notes:
By the time Moore was writing Watchmen, he and Miller had met and become friends. Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns was published the same year as Watchmen (Dark Knight ran February–June 1986, Watchmen started in May). It had a similar theme, with a middle-aged Batman coming out of retirement into a far more brutal world than was usually depicted in comics. Soon after Watchmen, Moore’s own ‘dark’ take on Batman, The Killing Joke, was released. Articles about ‘serious comics’ invariably roped Miller and Moore together, linking Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.
There are parallels between the two. Moore would write the introduction to the collected The Dark Knight Returns, Miller would contribute to Moore’s anthology AARGH!, and Dave Gibbons’ next major project after Watchmen was as artist on Give Me Liberty, scripted by Miller. Like Moore, in the nineties Miller would write and draw creator-owned comics for an adult audience, such as Sin City and 300. Unlike Moore, though, he happily returned to DC in the early 2000s to produce a sequel to The Dark Knight Returns (The Dark Knight Strikes Again) and work on other Batman projects (All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, and Holy Terror – the last, a Batman v Muslim terrorist book, was dropped by DC and ended up as a non-Batman title at Legendary Comics). And perhaps the major difference is that Miller has embraced the movie versions of his comics, co-directing, producing and even making cameo appearances in them. It’s also fair to say that his work, while ambitious, has a far narrower range than Moore’s, and tends to be violent, masculine and hard-boiled.
While Miller cites Spillane and Chandler as influences, when Moore and Gibbons began putting together Watchmen, they were guided in large part by comedic treatments of the superhero genre. Once again, Moore returned to ‘Superduperman’: ‘We were thinking that probably the best superhero stuff was the Mad parodies of it – that superheroes never looked better than when Wally Wood was parodying them. So we decided to sort of take some of those elements from the Mad parodies – you know, we were having massive amounts of background detail but it wasn’t sight gags: it was sight dramatics, if you like.’
What Moore called ‘sight dramatics’ fill the pages of Watchmen. There are countless examples. One of the more whimsical consequences of a world with real-life superheroes, one close to Moore’s heart, is that there would be no demand for superhero comics. Instead, the market in the world of Watchmen is dominated by pirate adventures. We see excerpts from The Tales of the Black Freighter, and one of the text features lovingly explains the parallel history of this comics industry. Eagle-eyed readers can also see a pirate-themed comics shop, Treasure Island, in the background of the New York street scenes.
The most iconic image of the Watchmen series is that with which it begins: a smiley face with a splash of blood on it, in the position where five to midnight would be on a clock face. The original badge (and blood) belonged to the murdered superhero, the Comedian, but it is wiped clean in the first issue and tossed into the Comedian’s grave in the second. The image continues to echo throughout the story, everywhere from photographs to pareidolia. What in the fictional world is ‘coincidence’ or ‘accident’ is, of course, very carefully placed there by Moore and Gibbons.
The title has a number of meanings and resonances throughout the book. One of the many clocks and watches and countdowns that appear in the story is the Doomsday Clock – ‘like most things in Watchmen, it was a kind of pun that had got two or three different meanings’ – and it appears on the back cover of every issue, ticking closer to the apocalypse – or at least the end of the series. ‘Watchmen’ is also a reference to a quote from Juvenal, one that’s daubed as graffiti across New York, ‘Who Watches the Watchmen?’ – if you have guards, you need to have some way to keep those guards in line, all the more so if they have superpowers and secret identities.
One thing ‘Watchmen’ is not is the name of a team within the story – our heroes never all worked together, let alone called themselves ‘the Watchmen’ (during the Comedian’s lifetime, as far as we know, they were all in the same room only once). However, their predecessors were the Minutemen – a moniker that alludes variously to a mobile militia in the War of Independence, a number of right-wing volunteer groups, including a militant anti-Communist group in the sixties, and (after Watchmen was published) a vocal group of civilians who patrol the border with Mexico. No doubt Moore was also aware of punk band the Minutemen, and it goes without saying that in a book about the threat of nuclear war, the name is a conscious reference to the ICBMs that had been in service since the sixties (Moore possibly even knew that one of his favourite authors, Thomas Pynchon, worked as a technical writer on the Minuteman project) … and so on.
Every name in the comic is a telling, multiple pun – Sally Jupiter’s retirement home is Nepenthe Gardens, a reference from Greek myth, via Poe, via a limerick by Aleister Crowley. There’s a nightclub called the Rumrunner, a restaurant called the Gunga Diner. And character names like Rorschach, Dr Manhattan and Ozymandias are a little more allusive than standard superhero names like Ant Man and Power Girl. One essay on Watchmen dedicates three pages to the significance of the seven-name list of Adrian Veidt’s favourite musicians.
Another comedy was also an influence on Watchmen: Robert Mayer’s 1977 novel Super-Folks. On his website, Mayer notes:
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The novel was supposed to be funny. Reviewers said it was. It was a spoof on all those heroes. But something unexpected was happening out in the universe – well, in America and Great Britain. Adolescent boys were growing up who wanted to write comic books. They read Super-Folks – and they thought, aha, look at all the nasty things you can do with superheroes. They plunged the men in tights into twilight, made a lot of money doing it, and the entire genre was changed forever … Among the spawn, many critics say, were much of Alan Moore’s work, including the ‘classic’ Watchmen. To my knowledge Mr Moore has never publicly acknowledged a debt to Super-Folks.
In fact Moore had done so: ‘Super-Folks was a big influence on Marvelman. By the time I did the last Superman stories [in 1986, at the time he was also writing Watchmen] I’d forgotten the Mayer book, although I may have had it subconsciously in my mind.’ However, readers who track down Super-Folks expecting a ‘serious’ treatment of superheroes, a bleak novel that Moore has shamelessly ripped off, discover it’s more like a prose version of ‘Superduperman’ or National Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings, an exuberant romp full of seventies pop culture references. There are similarities – both Super-Folks and Watchmen feature beaten-down, middle-aged former superheroes and a conspiracy theory – but it’s nothing like Watchmen in terms of tone, technique or intended audience. Nevertheless, Super-Folks became something of a collector’s item following Watchmen’s success and, in one of life’s little ironies, when the book was reprinted in 2003, Dave Gibbons drew the cover.
Mayer does, however, point the way to a criticism that’s consistently been levelled at Watchmen: that, as Carter Scholz’s review of the graphic novel put it, ‘the superhero genre was never made to take the strain he [Moore] puts on it … he has taken an untenable concept absolutely as far as it can go’. Critics who raise objections to Watchmen’s ‘serious tone’ seem to think Moore was oblivious to the idea that superheroes are inherently childish and open to ridicule. This, though, is a misapprehension. When Moore embarked upon the project he did so in the belief that a relatively expensive, direct-sales-only comic had no appeal except for existing comics fans, and deliberately played to that fanbase. But in the introduction to the original hardback edition of Watchmen, he noted that, once the series started receiving wider attention, what ‘started life as merely a more cynical and baroque take upon the Justice League of America and their ilk suddenly found itself standing in the public marketplace of mainstream fiction, dressed in only a cloak and a pair of brightly coloured tights’.
But by 1986, as we’ve seen, comics readers were getting older, and with that came demands for more sophisticated storytelling. Those readers now expected to see stories that tackled social themes, had soap opera-style character development and displayed a keen awareness of comics history and tradition. Readers accepted the ‘brightly coloured tights’ as genre convention, just as fans of detective stories accept the murderer blurting out a confession as soon as he’s identified. But Watchmen acquired a second audience: a more mainstream one of adults familiar with superheroes mainly from television and movies, and who had last read a comic in childhood. Much to the despair (or disdain) of comics aficionados, such people’s view of superheroes was still dominated by the colourful Adam West Batman TV series and Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman (1976–9), which had been in much the same vein. Try as they might, even the Christopher Reeve Superman movies couldn’t avoid camp – indeed Superman III (1983) and Superman IV (1987) all but surrendered to it. It was therefore ironic that – thanks to Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke and the 1989 Batman movie directed by Tim Burton, which took cues from Moore and Frank Miller’s work – the public perception of what made a good Batman story would soon swing hard the other way. Ten years after Watchmen, Joel Schumacher’s Batman movies would be rejected by audiences as being too camp and not gritty enough.
The superhero conventions Watchmen (and The Dark Knight Returns) aimed at were therefore those of the Batman TV series, not anything from comics produced in the early eighties. The story opens with a superhero climbing up a skyscraper on a grappling line, like Batman and Robin, while the Batman-like Nite Owl’s costume parodies Adam West’s TV costume merely by copying it. The heyday of the superheroes in Watchmen, moreover, had been in the swinging sixties. It’s also significant which notes Watchmen doesn’t play – the lack of ‘Ka-pow!’, ‘Splat!’-type sound effects and ‘Meanwhile, in stately Wayne Manor’ style captions.
And Watchmen addresses the most familiar absurdity of the genre head on. The Comedian and Silk Spectre wear fairly standard superhero outfits. Nite Owl does indeed wear his underpants on the outside, while Dr Manhattan fights the Vietnam War in only his underpants – he later disposes even of those, preferring to be naked. In some later attempts to tell more grown-up superhero stories (including the movie version of Watchmen), ‘brightly coloured tights’ give way to more practical solutions like leather and moulded body armour; others, like the television series Smallville and Heroes, would give their superheroes ordinary clothes. Yet, rather than thinking Superman would become plausible if only he wore a jacket, Moore and Gibbons turned the ‘real world logic’ on its head and asked who would pull on a cape and tights: ‘It wouldn’t always be a terribly healthy person. Some people would be doing it purely for the sexual excitement of dressing up, others for the excitement of beating somebody up. Some are doing it for political reasons, many are doing it for altruistic motives, but there would certainly be a percentage who would have rather odd psychological afflictions in their make-up … There’s just something about anybody who would dress up in a mask and costume that’s not quite normal.’
Any adult – every vaguely thoughtful small child – understands that you don’t fight crime by putting on a leotard, and this inevitably short-circuits any attempt to treat superheroes ‘realistically’. Moore and Gibbons understood this. The New York Times may have hailed the series for its ‘staggeringly complex psychological profiles’ but this is not a claim that survives contact with the book. As Grant Morrison noted, it deals in stock action-narrative types:
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 cyphers.
The characters are a series of different punchlines to the same joke. Nite Owl, the equivalent of Batman, is flabby and impotent; the analogues of Captain America and Superman killed civilians in Vietnam; Silk Spectre, the generic superheroine, has gone from being jailbait to being on the government payroll as an escort; Ozymandias has used his great genius to market action figures of himself. These are not keen psychological insights. Watchmen is not an attempt to rehabilitate the concept of the superhero, it’s an effort to test it to destruction. However dirty the city where the superheroes live, however much graffiti it has, however much you psychoanalyse superheroes, however many ‘real world’ problems you saddle them with, the answer to ‘how can you depict superheroes realistically?’ that Watchmen inevitably comes to, from many different perspectives and directions, is ‘you can’t’. As Moore would later say of The Killing Joke, ‘Batman and the Joker are not real characters and they do not resemble anyone you’d ever meet.’
The humour nevertheless runs more deeply than just the observation that superheroes are silly, or a narrative suffused with a mass of incidental details, visual and literary puns. The bigger picture is also underpinned by black comedy and vicious ironies. One way to understand this is to examine the ‘joke’ Dreiberg tells to Laurie Jupiter at the end of the first issue. The former Nite Owl and Silk Spectre are reminiscing about Captain Carnag
e, a minor villain they had both encountered who gained sexual pleasure from being beaten up (there are hints that Dreiberg became Nite Owl at least partly for similar reasons). Captain Carnage’s career came to an abrupt end when ‘he pulled it on Rorschach and Rorschach dropped him down an elevator shaft’. Laurie and Dreiberg start laughing:
LAURIE:
Oh God, I’m sorry, that isn’t funny. Ha ha ha ha ha!
DREIBERG:
Ha ha ha! No, I guess it’s not.
Is it funny? Yes, from certain perspectives; no, from others. As an event it would be a tragedy, as an anecdote it’s amusing.
Or take another example: in Chapter VI of Watchmen, Rorschach kills two dogs with a meat cleaver, then throws their corpses at a paedophile, Grice, who had murdered a young victim and fed her to those dogs. The vigilante then handcuffs the killer, douses him in kerosene and sets fire to him, sticking around to watch him die. From what possible perspective is that funny?
Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore Page 23