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Take it from someone who’s tried: If you want to read the complete history of Batman in comics, and you don’t want to do it digitally, you have your work cut out for you! Take a look at Comic Book Herald’s complete Batman reading order and you’ll see an (expertly curated) list of a wide variety of collected editions, many of which have long since gone out of print and are no longer available at an affordable retail price. The journey through the history of the Bat in print collections hasn’t felt especially achievable – all that may be changing soon.

DC’s 2024 has focused on a number of tangible efforts to make their comics more available and affordable, starting with this year’s earlier Compact Classics, which took all-time great stories like Watchmen and All-Star Superman and packaged them into Manga sized digests (5.51 x 0.75 x 8.46 inches) for $9.99 a pop in the U.S. The collected efforts continue in late 2024 with DC Finest.

DC Finest paperback editions are now available, representing DC’s move into comprehensive collected editions for all their core characters like Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, the Justice League and on and on. The collections launch in 2024 at $39.99 a piece for approximately 600 pages of comics. Unlike more familiar best sellers in DC’s line like Batman: Year One, which collects the four issues that make up one Batman story, or All-Star Superman which collects the must-read twelve issues from creators Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, DC Finest collections represent a continuous collection of comics as they were released in publication order. This means each paperback collects about 1 to 3 years of consecutive Batman or Justice League comics, warts and all!

This is a new wave for DC, and fills a void they weren’t really fulfilling in the book market for the real continuity focused, gotta have it all comics collector. In theory, if the line is supported, it could eventually cover the full DC Comics reading order. The closest comp in DC was the old Showcase Presents line which gave you about 500 pages of black-and-white comics for under $20 from 2005 to 2016, although these were limited to comics from DC’s Silver Age (between 1955 to 1975). DC Finest is more expensive, yes, but it’s more comics, in color, from every era of the publisher’s now near 90 year history. Size-wise, each DC Finest collection is the exact length (10 and 1/4 in) and width (7 in) of a modern single issue floppy comic, with of course a much thicker spine (~1 in) to accommodate its 600 pages.

For the purposes of this review, DC sent me the following launch books. Please note, the five launch books were a gift from DC Comics, but what follows is my honest review.

Batman: Year One & Two

632 pages of comics collecting post Crisis on Infinite Earths Batman comics from November 1986 to October 1987, including of course, Batman Year One by Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli, and Batman Year Two by Mike W. Barr, Alan Davis and Todd McFarlane.

Collects: Batman #401 to #412, Batman Annual #11, and Detective Comics #568 to #579

Wonder Woman: Origins and Omens

580 pages of comics collecting Gail Simone, Terry & Rachel Dodson’s run on Wonder Woman from October 2007 to October 2009

Collects: Wonder Woman #14 to #35, Outsiders: Five of a Kind – Wonder Woman/Grace #1, The Brave and the Bold #7

Superman: The First Superhero

582 pages of comics collecting the original Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster Golden Age Superman comics from June 1938 to June 1940

Collects: Action Comics #1 to #25, Superman #1 to #5, New York World’s Fair Comics #1

Justice League of America: The Bridge Between Earths

614 pages of comics collecting the original Earth-One and Earth-Two Justice League crossovers from June 1966 to June 1969

Collects: Justice League of America #45 to #72

Upcoming DC Finest Collections (2025)Other volumes teased or announced so far include the following. Note that this list includes continuing volumes from some of the launch books, for example the Batman: Killing Joke collection follows directly after Batman: Year One & Two.

Justice Society of America: For America and Democracy

From 1940 to 1942

Plastic Man: The Origin of Plastic Man

Collects: Police Comics #1-36; Plastic Man #1-2

Superboy: The Super-Dog from Krypton

Collects: Adventure Comics #199-216; Superboy #33-43

Aquaman: The King of Atlantis

Comics from 1956 to 1964

Science Fiction: The Gorilla World

Collects: Action Comics #183-196; Strange Adventures #35-48; Mystery in Space #16-22

Supergirl: The Girl of Steel

Collects: Action Comics #252 to #270

The Flash: The Human Thunderbolt

Comics from 1956 to 1961

Green Lantern: The Defeat of Green Lantern

Comics from 1963 to 1965

Superman Family: The Giant Turtle Man

Collects: Action Comics #266, #277; Superman #142-143, #147; Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane #19-28; Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #47-56

Doom Patrol: The World’s Strangest Heroes

Collects: The Brave and the Bold #65; Doom Patrol #86-102; Challengers of the Unknown #48; My Greatest Adventure #80-85; Teen Titans #6

Metamorpho: The Element Man

Collects: Justice League of America #42; The Brave and the Bold #57-58, #66, #68, #88, #101; Metamorpho #1-17

Legion of Super-Heroes: Zap Goes the Legion

Comics from 1968 to 1974

Superman: Kryptonite Nevermore

Collects: Action Comics #393-406; Superman #233-238, #240-246

Team-Ups: Chase to the End of Time

Collects: DC Comics Presents #1-14; The Brave and the Bold #141-155

Wonder Woman: The Legend of Wonder Woman

Collects: Wonder Woman #306-329; DC Comics Presents #76; Blue Devil #10; The Legend of Wonder Woman #1-4

Teen Titans: The Judas Contract

Collects: Action Comics #546; World’s Finest Comics #300; The New Teen Titans #33-40; The New Teen Titans Annual #2; Tales of the Teen Titans #41-47; Tales of the Teen Titans Annual #3; The Vigilante #3

Peacemaker: Kill for Peace

Collects: Fightin’ Five #40-41; Suicide Squad #27-30; Checkmate #16-26, #28, #32-33; Eclipso #11-13; Showcase ’93 #6-11; Peacemaker #1-4; The Vigilante #36-38, #41-43; The Peacemaker #1-5

Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters

Comics from 1987 to 1988

Batman: The Killing Joke and Other Stories

Collects: Batman: The Killing Joke #1; Batman #413-422; Detective Comics #580-589; and Batman: Son of the Demon #1

Suicide Squad: Trial by Fire

Collects: Suicide Squad #1-10; Secret Origins #14; Detective Comics #582; The Fury of Firestorm #62-64; Firestorm: The Nuclear Man Annual #5; Legends #1-6; Millennium #4

Catwoman: Life Lines

Comics from 1988 to 1994

Catwoman: Vengeance and Vindication

Collects: Catwoman #0, #13-32; and Catwoman Annual #2-3

Harley Quinn: Birth of the Mirth

Collects: Action Comics #765; Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #126; The Batman Adventures #12; Azrael: Agent of the Bat #60; Batman #570, #573-574; Batman: Shadow of the Bat #93; Detective Comics #737, #740-741; Catwoman #82-84, #89; The Batman Adventures: Mad Love #1; The Batgirl Adventures #1; Batman: Harley Quinn #1; Batman: Gotham Knights #14; Harley Quinn #1-8

Events: Zero Hour Part One

Comics during 1994’s Zero Hour event

Events: Zero Hour Part Two

Collects: The Flash #0; Green Arrow #90; Adventures of Superman #516; Justice League America #92; Action Comics #703; Justice League International #68; Legion of Super-Heroes #61; Green Lantern #0; Superman: The Man of Steel #0; Guy Gardner: Warrior #24; Justice League Task Force #16; Catwoman #14; Robin #10; Showcase ’94 #10; Damage #0, #6; Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #0-2; Anima #7

Batgirl: Nobody Dies Tonight

Collects: Batgirl #7-27, Superboy #85, and Supergirl #63

DC Finest Reviews: The Launch CollectionsFor the purposes of this review, I’m most interested in the full collections of DC Finest, and how they compares to other collected options. So I’m a little less focused on the merit of the stories themselves – for example, Batman Year One by Miller and Mazzuchelli is among my 50 favorite comics ever, so the question isn’t whether Year One is a worthy read, but whether it’s a good idea to read it in this format.

Speaking of, let’s start with the Batman collection because it’s the oddest of the bunch, and probably the best example of the full scope of DC Finest at its most comprehensive. Throughout 1985, Marv Wolfman and George Perez spearheaded the massive 12 issue Crisis on Infinite Earths event which codified the DC Multiverse and effectively draws a line in the sand for Pre-Crisis and Post-Crisis DC Comics. A lot of Comic Book Herald DC Reading Guides more or less start with Post-Crisis as a point reflective of the “modern” era of DC, and you see this reflected across the publisher’s main characters, where Superman is reset in John Byrne’s Man of Steel, Wonder Woman in George Perez’s run, and Batman in Year One.

What often gets lost in that approach is how many comics are published alongside those more well-known stand-alones, and that’s what Batman: Year One & Two really emphasizes. There are over 160 pages of story – 7 issues – before you even get to Year One in this DC Finest package. Operating under chronological publication order, the DC Finest collection hops between issues of Batman (starting with #401) and Detective Comics (starting with issue #568). This means you’re exposed to a wide variety of creators working on the Dark Knight before the character settles into anything resembling a groove. The book begins with Barbara J. Randall and Trevor Von Eeden, before segueing into a surprise Jim Starlin appearance and eventually the more consistent work of Mike W. Barr with Alan Davis and Paul Neary. If you’re a longtime comics fan, the likes of Starlin and Davis, or latter Dave Cockrum will be instantly recognizable. Likewise, Davis and Neary’s work on Batman is quite fun, revealing a wry smirking protector of Gotham alongside the early days of Jason Todd as a more eager Robin. It’s fascinating to experience the actual in-the-moment progression of Batman comics on the road to the transformative Year One.

Speaking of: Holy Classics, Batman, Year One stands out SO MUCH in contrast to everything in this collection. I already had tremendous respect for Miller and Mazzuchelli’s work, with Richmond Lewis colors and Todd Klein’s dueling journaled letters, but when yo u read it as it would have stood compared to fairly aimless Bat-yarns still echoing the shadows of 60s Batman TV, Year One feels like a damn lightning bolt. I quite appreciate the collection in a historical context because it’s easy to lose sight of how revolutionary a comic may have been in its era, especially if you didn’t live through it (and Year One is before my time). That said, if you’re totally new to Bat-comics, I’d recommend simply starting with the four issue Year One, either through a $9.99 trade or a DC Universe Infinite subscription. The DC Finest approach is really more for the Bat-fanatic who wants every piece of the Dark Knight’s history on their shelf. I’d suspect new readers will be disappointed to learn the Batman comics surrounding Year One are neither tonally nor narratively connected (newer fans will be best served by the new Compact Classics too).

I had never read poor Year Two before, but man, imagine trying to follow in the wake of Miller and Mazzuchelli. Again, as comics history goes, it’s compelling to watch early pre-Spawn, pre-Superstardom Todd McFarlane on Chapters 2 to 4 of Year Two, with several inklings of the artist and Image revolution to follow. You can see McFarlane’s early sense of 90s cool in Batman’s surreal flowing cape, the Reaper’s bloody conquests, and the artist’s fondness for long, thin vertical panels splicing the action.

It’s worth pointing out here too that if you’re the kind of collector who wants Year Two in print, DC Finest is your best, most affordable option unless you luck into a copy at your local comic shop or a garage sale. As for the glue in between Years One and Two, this is your only collected print option. And that’s kind of the point and appeal of DC Finest: You get everything from a certain time period, whether or would curate neatly into a standalone collection or not.

The Simone, Aaron Lopestri, Dodson Wonder Woman run is far more straightforward than the Batman collection – the DC Finest softcover mostly gives you one long run by a consistent creative team, ensuring a story with connective tissue throughout. The only wrinkle in the value here is that this run also got an Omnibus reprint in late 2023, and from what I can tell, is still in stock and often listed at half off it’s retail price of $100. For the uninitiated, a DC Omnibus, is a massive hardcover collection of a huge creative “run” or event, usually over 1,000 pages long (the smallest one I own is Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers at over 760 pages of comics). Omnibus collections are thrilling in their immensity, often eagerly sought out and likely to go out of print, and completely preposterous to actually read (although I’ve always said, if you’re not simultaneously reading comics, weightlifting, and forming a lifelong indent on your chest, are you even reading?). That said, if you can get the Wonder Woman omnibus’s 816 pages of the full run through issue #44 for about $50, or the DC Finest version of the run ending at issue #35 for $39.99, I’d actually recommend the omni. It’s unusual they’d be this close in price though.

For the Justice League of America, some of these comics would be included in DC’s various Crisis on Multiple Earths paperbacks, but only a handful at a time instead of a consecutive run in publication order from ’66 to ’69 like this. Most of these comics were collected in Justice League of America Vol. 2: The Silver Age Omnibus, but those are now out of print and at best running for 3x the price of a DC Finest collection. The issues are available on DC Universe Infinite, but if you want to read and own in print, the DC Finest collection is your best option.

Finally, previous Golden Age Superman collections are out of print and WAY overpriced – the Golden Age Vol. 1 currently lists a $99 paperback on Amazon – making the DC Finest approach a pretty easy recommendation, again, if you want these in print and on your shelf. And really, that’s what it boils down to – If a work has been out of print for a long time, a la The Legend of Wonder Woman by Kurt Busiek and Trina Robbins, the upcoming DC Finest option suggests a (hopefully sustained) opportunity to see it returned to print and not scalped on the used book market for triple the retail price. Same goes for the occasional instance where a work hasn’t been digitized and made available through DC Universe Infinite, a la Police Comics #1 to #36, The Origins of Plastic Man that will be available through DC Finest in early 2025.

This is the aspect of DC Finest that I’m most pleased to see at launch – there’s a surprising, and often exciting variety to the selected comics giving shine to Metamorpho, Plastic Man, Jimmy Olsen’s Giant-Turtle era, and, uh, Gorilla World! This indicates a real commitment to the full breadth and possibilities of DC Comics. It also increases the chances that some lesser known diamonds in the rough can have their day, and that I’ll feel inclined to explore corners of DC’s history that I haven’t touched before. I suspect the number one question serious collectors will have is whether DC plans to see this through – the last thing collector’s want is a shelf with 9 years of Justice League of America before the imprint gets tossed and rebooted under a different style a few years down the line. At least at launch, this feels like the real thing.

At the end of the day, these are the key questions to ask when considering a DC Finest collection.

• Do you want to read in print over digital?
• Would you like to own the full published history of your favorite characters instead of more curated selections of their “best” stories?
• Have you checked if a DC Omnibus already exists at a comparable price point that might give you a similar or expanded value?

If the answers are yes, go ahead and get excited about DC Finest!

The post Collect The Complete DC Comics Reading Order Through DC Finest Collections appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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“The ones who return are the ones who suffer. Live as if you’ve never lived before.” – Niles Caulder receiving a message from his subconscious. Doom Patrol #73. “The Dream Patrol: Return of the Windowmen,” written by Rachel Pollack.

In his introduction to The Vertigo Tarot, Sandman creator Neil Gaiman mentions the surreal experience of accompanying author Rachel Pollack on a visit to an esoteric shop in Camden to pick up a Tarot deck. This resulted in Gaiman, “feeling like I’d just gone into a record show with someone who, to my surprise, turned out to be one of the Beatles, as Rachel modestly admitted her identity to the lady behind the counter, and signed autographs.”

Last month, Gaiman wrote again about Pollack, but this time under heavier circumstances. “I am writing this at the request of her wife Zoe,” he wrote on his Mastodon account, “to let her friends know that the end is soon, and to let the obituarists know too.”

As befitting a woman who broke ground wherever she went, the sad news sent shockwaves in various circles. Pollack’s biggest claim to fame came as a foremost authority on the Tarot, as her books inspired several generations of practitioners. She was also a pioneering LGBTQIA+ activist, coming out as a trans lesbian in the early 1970s at roughly the same time she discovered the Tarot. Gradually, Pollack also found success as an acclaimed science-fiction author. She won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for her debut Unquenchable Fire in 1989 and, in 1997, her Godmother Night won the World Fantasy Award. She also spent a decade teaching creative writing at Goddard College.

Yet one of her most enduring legacies came with an unlikely third career she picked up in the 1990s when she took over the DC superhero franchise Doom Patrol, boldly embracing the thankless task of following Grant Morrison’s franchise-defining run. While she was only on the book for two years before it was canceled due to declining sales, the 24 issues she wrote (plus an annual and a short story for the Vertigo Jam special) eventually developed a cult following and gained delayed recognition for introducing the first trans superhero in mainstream comic book history.

As befitting her work—which often took place in worlds unmoored from the limiting confines of so-called rationality—Pollack landed the gig thanks to a fortuitous coincidence. Knowing that Morrison was about to depart, editor Tom Peyer was struggling to come up with a candidate that could follow up one of the most radical reboots in DC Comics history. “I had no one at all in mind, and was nervous about it,” Peyer explained in an email interview, “until one night my friend and fellow editor Stuart Moore brought me to a Science Fiction Writers of America cocktail party and introduced me to Rachel. By the time we finished our first conversation, I was pretty sure I’d met the one. A miracle.”

While Pollack’s run only lasted two years, it’s hard to imagine any other writer doing more with a title in the time they were given. Most daringly, in the Finnegans Wake-inspired “Dream Patrol: Return of the Windowmen,” Pollack used dense symbolism to condense the Doom Patrol’s entire convoluted history into a metafictional meditation on the cycle of death and rebirth in comic book stories, all within 24 pages. It was truly heady stuff—in fact the entire story is the dream of a character reduced to the state of a disembodied head—that stood out in an era defined by the muscles-and-guns excesses of the Image Comics crowd.

Let’s not pretend that this was all serious stuff, however; Pollack’s Doom Patrol run was also flat-out hilarious. Just a few issues after taking over the title, she moved the team to a new mansion that was haunted by Sexually Remaindered Spirits (S.R.S. for short, a sly joke that certainly slipped past many readers), the ghosts of victims of surreal autoerotic accidents. Maybe her most famous single issue, “The Laughing Game,” is a parody of the then-popular Image Comics cliché of uber-macho caricatures who prove their virility by lugging around comically huge weapons. It tells the story of The Codpiece, a proto-incel who decides to overcompensate for his imagined shortcomings by attaching a rocket launcher to his groin area and going on a destructive crime spree.

The hero of “The Laughing Game” is Kate Godwin whose debut appearance ends with her dissolving The Codpiece’s deadly faux-phallus. Godwin, a trans lesbian who takes on the name Coagula after gaining superpowers, had tried out for the Justice League of America, who rejected her partly because they are uncomfortable. “I suspect they liked my powers but couldn’t handle me,” Kate says and the story never gives you a reason to believe she’s mistaken.

30 years later, Peyer pointed out that the world is still attempting to catch up with Kate: “You want a trans superhero? Well, here’s one from 30 years ago. She was so far ahead, and it’s sad to think that in 2023 we’re lagging further behind.”

Indeed, the world was not ready for Pollack’s Doom Patrol. Readers were able to adjust to Morrison’s incorporation of the androgynous composite spirit Rebis and the genderfluid sentient Danny the Street into the team but Pollack, in Peyer’s words, “took it further.” She explicitly wrote about sex and gender to a level that made some readers uncomfortable. These elements were easier to understand when Morrison deployed them as surreal metaphors, but readers of the time were less comfortable dealing with, for instance, Kate explicitly defending her womanhood against Cliff Steele’s more old-fashioned beliefs about gender. (To Cliff’s credit, he’s a quick learner.)

“People talk a lot about the subtext of what superheroes are, but one of the things they definitely are is queer,” Pollack told The Comics Journal in an interview last year. “Because they have all these powers that don’t come out until they change their clothes and dare to go out in these wild costumes. And not hide. This gives queer kids the fantasy of being able to be who you truly are and be powerful.”

In making the queer subtext of Morrison’s run the body of the text, Pollack almost certainly limited the potential wide appeal of her Doom Patrol. It also didn’t help that a running gag in the letter column led many to assume she got the highly coveted gig by badgering the editor until he relented. “For decades afterward, there were readers who believed that was what happened,” Peyer notes. “And they weren’t too happy about it.”

Given the popularity of her predecessor, her work was always going to be a tough sell. It took Pollack a few issues to find her voice as a comic book writer and early critics wrongly dismissed her first few stories—which were overt homages to Morrison—as attempts to “out-weird Grant.”

Future collaborator Joe Corallo dismisses such criticism. “I think there were people in the past that looked at it as being absurd for the sake of absurdity,” wrote to me in an email interview, “but it’s really not. Rachel could tell you where everything was derived or inspired from, including myths and folklore from all over the world, trans activists she had been friends with, Kabbalah, and some of her favorite comic characters from her childhood like The Fox and The Crow.”

When Ted McKeever hopped aboard in issue #75 to replace Linda Medley as the book’s primary artist, his increasingly abstract cartooning style ushered in a change in the series’ tone. If Pollack’s first year of Doom Patrol felt like a self-conscious attempt to honor the picaresque plotting of the Morrison era, her second year found her more seriously incorporating spiritual and mystical elements into the book. Medley’s work emphasized the (occasionally grotesque) solidness of the characters and their surroundings, while McKeever’s minimalism marked an increased emphasis on the world of ideas.

In “The Teiresias Wars” arc, she had the Doom Patrol join forces with a mythical nonbinary entity named after T.S. Eliot to bring down The Tower of Babel. Yes, the one from the Bible. Also, Bill Clinton is a supporting character in this arc. In her final arc, “Imagine Ari’s Friends,” Pollack incorporated elements from the history of Kabbalism in the same ways that other comic book writers would incorporate Greek and Norse mythology.

The conclusion of “Imagine Ari’s Friends” was published in Doom Patrol #87 in February 1995, after which the title was canceled and then mostly ignored. When John Arcudi revived the title, he killed off the character Kate Godwin in a flashback and put Dorothy Spinner, the arguable protagonist of Pollack’s run, into an irreversible coma. While Morrison’s run was collected and celebrated, the final two years of the comic as written by Pollack went uncollected. For more than two decades afterward, your best bet in being able to read her run involved combing comic book bins for unwanted back issues.

For a while, the industry forgot her, which was a minor tragedy. While Pollack’s time working for DC Comics was relatively brief, she was quite prolific at her peak. For Vertigo, she re-imagined Brother Power, the Geek and Tomahawk. For the short-lived Helix imprint, she wrote Time Breakers, featuring the early work of artist Chris Weston. She even got to follow in the footsteps of the unrivaled Jack Kirby by spearheading a short-lived New Gods revival.

Unsurprisingly, Pollack’s most widely publicized work for DC combined her love for comics with her primary focus in life. Conceived during a time when The Sandman was essentially keeping the entire Vertigo imprint afloat, Gaiman quickly realized the only person who could help create and write the accompanying text for the Dave McKean-designed cards was Pollack. The Vertigo Tarot, containing an explanatory text by Pollack, went through several printings and ended up being the first deck for a whole generation of goths, comic book geeks and angsty drama students.

When the Vertigo wave crested, Pollack returned to her primary role as a world-renowned Tarot teacher. While those of us who mostly knew Pollack for her comics work thought she had disappeared, she continued to write, teach and even create her own jewelry.

Although her creative output slowed in later years due to recurring bouts with cancer, Pollack eventually returned to the comics world. For Comixology, she collaborated with Joe Corallo for the miniseries The Never-Ending Party which will be scheduled to be released as a TPB by Dark Horse Comics this summer. The story, about a group of partiers in the 1990s who strike a disastrous deal with Dionysus to keep a rave going well past its scheduled end, was partly inspired by Pollack’s own experiences.

“This was absolutely an idea meant to be a celebration of Rachel’s return to comics after so many years,” Corallo says. “Obviously, Tarot is a big part of Rachel’s life, which appears prominently throughout this comic. We also tackle some of the changes in attitudes towards LGBTQIA+ people in those 25 years since Rachel had been active in mainstream comics.”

While that world wasn’t quite ready for her comic book work, especially Doom Patrol, it slowly developed a cult following. It didn’t hurt when DC Universe (and then eventually HBO Max) began airing a live-action Doom Patrol series that eventually began incorporating elements of Pollack’s run, including sex ghosts modeled on the S.R.S. and an appearance by The Codpiece himself. Eventually, DC Comics released an omnibus collecting all of her Doom Patrol-related stories last October, belatedly recognizing the importance of her work.

In her introduction to the newly collected omnibus, Pollack talks about how she encounters comic fans that feel guilty about knowing about her thanks to a few dozen comic books she wrote in the mid-90s and not her award-winning science fiction novels, her rockstar status in the tarot world, or her life as a political activist. In response, she mentions receiving a letter from a young trans girl who wrote to the comic that discovering Kate Godwin helped dissuade her from committing suicide. It helped just knowing there were others like her out there.

“This letter is what comes to mind when someone assumes it was some sort of lesser project,” Pollack writes. “Some years ago, at a transgender literary festival, I made an amazing discovery. Those stories, and Kate, were an inspiration to a whole generation of transgender cartoonists. A long time had passed and I’d had no idea that the work was even remembered. This is the real superpower of Doom Patrol, to help people believe in themselves.”

The post Doom Patrol by Rachel Pollack: They Liked My Powers But Couldn’t Handle Me appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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Alan Moore’s relationship with superheroes in the wake of Watchmen has been… contentious, to say the least. This is due in no small part to Alan’s relationship with DC Comics. To be perfectly blunt, DC Comics’ attitude to Alan Moore can be best compared to an abusive ex-boyfriend who has never gotten over being dumped. So he (DC) routinely calls his former girlfriend (Alan) at the dead of night, engineering schemes to get her back, all the while badmouthing the poor woman to anyone he can pull into listening to him ramble like an incoherent drunk at a third rate bar that doesn’t even have any decent rats. All the while the woman is just trying to move on with her life, but everyone from old friends to complete strangers to new co-workers simply won’t stop asking her about the ex.

At one point, she’s working in the same office as her ex (because the son of a bitch bought out the whole building without her knowledge), and she makes it perfectly clear that she wants nothing to do with her ex. And, for a short while, the guy acquiesces. But when she begins to work on something personal and difficult, something that could get the ex into trouble with the sort of people you should make life more miserable for (and one thing that was so arbitrary, you have to assume he knew it’d piss her off but did it anyways), the ex decides to butt in and make it impossible for her to do the gig. So, naturally, she quits.

Then, one day, the son of a bitch sends one of her old friends—a term used loosely given what’s about to happen—to ask her to help with something they did together a few years back. She says that she wants absolutely nothing to do with it, but won’t say anything negative about it. Offhandedly, the friend notes, “that’s good, he said you would be quietly compliant.” At this, she explodes at the world, cuts off most of her friends who stood by the abusive ex while he did unconscionable things to her, and badmouths the sons of bitches who weren’t there but think nothing truly unconscionable happened (or, rather, profit off the unconscionable). In response, the ex decides to hurt her best friend, whose brother is in hospital at the time with something that looks fatal.

So yeah, Alan Moore and DC have a rocky relationship, to say the least.

But in the year I began curating this project, Alan Moore released a short story collection, Illuminations. In it, there was a novella entitled “What We Can Know About Thunderman,” which, if we must continue this strained analogy, is the sort of tell all that comes from decades of bullshit from a complete and utter fuckboy. It is flagrantly a story about the comics industry that Alan Moore fled from. A corrupt, inhospitable place that attracts either the most vicious and cruel members of society or sad, lonely people who are torn apart and transformed into worse monstrosities. It follows a set of writers from throughout the history of comics as they try to deal with the abomination in their own ways.

It is extremely tempting to approach “What We Can Know About Thunderman” as a sort of one-to-one parable about the comics industry. A sort of “take that!” towards all the people who Alan hates and wants to see suffer for their transgressions. And there are certainly points where this becomes unavoidable (One bit in particular comes to mind wherein a character by the name of Satanic Sam—who is, let’s say, not Stan Lee—is approached by an agent of the CIA [who might be a hallucination] to revitalize people’s faith in American Nuclear Power by creating heroic mutants. All things considered, Marvel Comics being a CIA psy-op is more plausible than other things comics fans have claimed to be CIA psy-ops).

However, approaching things from this angle ultimately distracts from the core of the story. Yes, there are some pretty funny inside baseball jokes about how much John Byrne sucks or the very idea of Alan Moore spending an entire month watching all of Smallville and then, for good measure, watching the first season of Riverdale before fleeing for the far more sensible landscape of Northampton decay. But the heart of the story is simply not there.

There are two fronts on which one can note Moore’s critique not being (completely) the case. The first and most obvious one is that I am not hurt when I read this novella. I am a fan of superhero comics who has spent years of my life writing reviews, fan fiction, and books based on or around characters within the superhero sphere. And while I see several aspects of fans I have encountered in the past (especially the inker from Part 3 who murders his girlfriend because he doesn’t want to give up his decades old comic book collection), I am not among the cast of characters.

I should note that I am not asking for a comics reviewer to appear in the novella. Rather, I am thinking about the motion picture, The Banshees of Inisherin. The movie explores the relationship between two Irish men from the beginning of the 20th century and how their relationship falls apart. It is a movie in which I am literally as far away from the two protagonists as I can get. However, I have been both of these men. I have been the cruel son of a gun who has shut out people I was once close to for, frankly, no good reason whatsoever. And I have also been the pathetic dweeb who has made things worse simply out of my desire for closure and reconciliation, if not explanation. I have hurt people and, in watching what is my second favorite film of 2022, I am hurt by this mirror.

By contrast, “What We Can Know About Thunderman” is very much within my wheelhouse. It is a novella that—were its core interest to hurt everyone who ever wanted to be a writer, artist, or what have you over at Marvel/DC—should be blatantly capable of hurting me. It should hurt the people who are trying to say capes comics can be more than the equivalent of a crap wank fantasy or a heroin addiction. And yet, it doesn’t. Instead, it makes me look down upon the sad, lonely, often terrible people with, at best, pity. All of which is to say, if you’re going to damn the whole industry, you might as well damn the people who want their cake and to eat it too.

The second is rather more critical of Alan Moore, and that’s with regards to his claim that Superheroes are responsible for the rise of fascism in early 21st century America.

I should note that Alan is not wrong per se about the nature of superhero fiction having a tie to the rise of fascism in the early 21st century. While many comics fans would love to disclaim the superhero as being by any means tied to fascism—often citing stories about Captain America being the Nazi ideal turned against the fascists or repeating the word hope over and over again until the critic leaves to talk to a human being—the fact of the matter is that fascists love superhero stories. They love the tales of Frank Castle mowing down filth. They cheer as Bruce Wayne fights anarchists. They’re thrilled while Tony Stark declares himself to be Iron Man before committing mass genocide. And, well, a lot of them cosplay as their heroes.

Rather, Moore’s critique of the superhero field is a bit of an overreach. The core of the argument comes towards the end of the book in the form of an essay by a minor character, Milton Finefinger, called “A Spandex Wrapper for the Naked Lunch,” wherein, as the title suggests, Moore compares comic book fans to drug addicts (Though, in practice, not enough space is spent engaging with the implications therein, thus making it a pithy, catchphrase version of a concept Garth Ennis portrayed with a single panel. Indeed, most of the argument hinges on the aesthetics of Superheroes rather than what most fans would be addicted to: serialized storytelling). But more noteworthy is when the chapter takes place: January 2021. More specifically, it takes place during the attempted coup that took place that month.

Moore makes no bones about the implications of the contrast between these two elements. Indeed, in one of the more overreaching sections, Moore has a Reddit user muse that the QAnon conspiracy has its roots in an issue of Thunderman. Moore likewise cites the history of masked avengers, including revisiting a point from his last interview by noting that Klansmen also fit within the Masked Avenger mold.

Perhaps the most biting of these engagements is the nine-panel script explaining the entire history of Thunderman, focusing on the creators of said character who were fucked over by the industry in order to get all the profits. In turn, as Moore notes in the thoughts of that script’s writer, Dan Wheems, “In Thunderman, he had a microcosm of the comics industry, while in the industry he had a microcosm of America.”

The problem, given that Moore has approached the critique outside of the context of “What We Can Know About Thunderman” with little to no change, is that the microcosm is not the whole. The rise of fascism, as with many things in the world, is a complex situation wherein a variety of interrelated, unrelated, and/or counter-related elements combined into a mess. There is no rudder to place the world under and god help those who think they can.

Consider, for example, the riots on January 6, 2021. While it’s certainly true that many of the people following Q and Donald Trump into an attempted coup were fans of superhero comics, it’s also true that many were into video games. Indeed, one could argue that video games—a medium superheroes spent decades infamously ill-equipped to exist within (Superhero games still can’t make Superman work)—are more actively responsible for the rise of fascism in the early 21st century than comic books.

After all, #GamerGate laid the foundation for Steve Bannon to develop a voter base for Donald Trump. Even before then, video games were (and still are) awash with military fantasies wherein the player actively participates in mass slaughters in order to progress through the level. The Call of Duty franchise alone has players drop nuclear weapons, use drones to strike combatants, and murder civilians (Indeed, the Call of Duty franchise was created to tell stories about the nobility of soldiers with a frequent emphasis on Western powers. The antagonist are often characterized as a horde of faceless monsters to the point where an entire campaign makes this literal). And all of it is justified in simplistic tales of good and evil that sometimes—though not often—frame themselves as being morally grey because the characters are more brutal. By having the player control the character, they—more than in any inactive media—identify with the soldier, the CIA agent, the committer of genocide to such a degree that narrative isn’t even necessary.

(It is tempting to engage with the fact that among #GamerGate’s direct to video sequels was the #ComicsGate movement, however #ComicsGate was one of those movements that tried to be a thing so many times that engaging it would be akin to trying to make fetch happen.)

One could note that this is a simplistic framing of the video game medium, that there are games outside of the big budget first-person shooters. The same could be said of Moore’s critique of comics. But, as with Moore’s specific critiques, there’s worth to engaging with what many people think of when they consider video games. For many, the first-person shooters are video games. Just as superheroes are comics. The point is that there’s a larger context to consider. As above, so below. But the below is so much larger than merely comics.

In some regards, the failures of Moore’s critique of the superhero are akin to what ultimately breaks the critiques of Noah Berlatsky. It’s not being wrong that’s the problem (indeed, Berlatsky’s wrongness in claiming things like “Crisis on Infinite Earths is about American homogeny as demonstrated by this inexplicable tangent where Uncle Sam explains freedom” is ultimately what makes him a fascinating and worthwhile critic in contrast to a Bob Chipman, whose wrongness merely highlights what not to do), but rather how he got to that point. Moore is getting it wrong without ever once being wrong about superheroes at any specific moment.

Indeed, the core failing of Moore’s critique is, ultimately, one many a critic (myself included) has fallen into: he emphasized the wrong bit for the sake of a clickbaity headline. While there is an accuracy to arguing the relationship between fascism and superheroes, there’s a degree to which this simplifies the argument by placing it at the core. Moore certainly engages with what should be the crux of the argument (more on that in a bit), but his framing of it in terms of the concept being inherently fascistic misses the ways in which it can avoid being fascistic in works like Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Young Avengers.

(That said, Alan’s deeper look into the industry of developing superhero comics as one of a decaying hellscape from which the only escape is a false one—that there is no exit strategy, no way out, no way forward, by design; where even getting out the way Alan supposedly did is impossible (it will always come back)—is completely apt and on point. If anything, Alan Moore doesn’t go hard enough.)

But as I’ve said, “What We Can Know About Thunderman” isn’t about Superheroes or even the writers, artists, inkers, and editors who work on them.

So then, what is it about?

Stories.

More specifically, it’s about how stories are horrific and monstrous and will kill us all if we’re lucky. How, despite our claims to the contrary, our lives are controlled by stories. In some regards, it’s the dark mirror to Jerusalem. Where Jerusalem, in its 1,266 pages, frames the act of storytelling—of creating art—as a means of preservation, “What We Can Know About Thunderman” views it more critically, more like an addiction or a prison. Something you can never escape, no matter how much you want to. A ship in a bottle may be preserved, but it can never sail the seas without defeating the purpose of putting it into a bottle. And even then, sometimes what’s preserved is a fucking monster that has corroded into something worse and worse.

It’s all over the novella. It’s in Julius Metzenberger claiming to identify with Thunderman before shunning the comic as anything other than “a story” when some unfortunate implications are brought up. It’s in the tragic, self-destructive fall of Dick Duckley, who believed every story everyone told him, right up until it killed him. It’s in the ascension of Worsley Porlock into the upper echelons of comics publishing (with all the grandeur and monstrosity that entails) and the daydreams of Satanic Sam Blatz. And it’s in the most cutting of Moore’s critiques of the superhero:

Popular culture is the only glue that holds America together, and I guess that’s why it all needs stealing from the people who created it, and gifting to some big, trustworthy corporation with capitalism’s best interests at heart, and who’ll guard these valuable properties more closely than some writer or some artist with their crazy ideas and their crazy politics. You wouldn’t want these national assets to be in the hands of radicals, or black people, or women — not unless they were already corporate mutants such as Mimi Drucker or whatever it is that Gene Pullman’s meant to be, where the class and race and gender stuff is no big deal next to the tentacles and Cyclops eye.

Were this the crux of Moore’s argument—the necessity for the superhero to be an agent of the status quo rather than a radical, mask-wearing anarchist—then his argument would be much stronger. Indeed, it is this very reason why the superhero often curdles into fantastical fascist fantasia: because the status quo often hews towards conservativism and, subsequently, fascism. It’s not that Moore isn’t aware of this—he blatantly is—but rather he emphasizes the consequence rather than the cause.

As such, the more apt comparison for the superhero that highlights the rotten core at the heart of its failure isn’t the Neo-Nazi storming the capitol maskless, but rather the manufactured pop idol typically seen on the Disney Channel who has the potential to become something else entirely once freed from the shackles of their corporate masters. But the system — corporate entities comparable to Dr. Luke or Col. Tom Parker — refuses to allow them to be anything more than a cute slab of poison. So, often though not always, they collapse into something that feels wrong.

But perhaps the most vital of the characters to understand this, the one who highlights this theme, is Dan Wheems. Dan, for as relative as this sounds, is a sympathetic character. He’s someone who spends the majority of the book horrified by the various actions going on (though still complicit in some of them), oftentimes unintelligible due to a tendency to bite his lip. By the time he’s uncovered a porn archive bigger than most libraries—complete with collection of jizz rags—and been an active participant in burning said archive so as to avoid controversy, Dan has become disillusioned with the industry. He can’t help but think of the madness and horror people go through and turn into by being a part of the industry. He wants to quit, he wants to get out. And so, he does. He writes a comic script, releases an interview with a beloved and dead editor, and he disappears from the industry entirely.

And, for the first time in decades, he’s happy. He feels as if a great weight has been lifted off his shoulders. He can do anything now. He has ideas—actual ideas, and not someone else’s ideas done shittier (or, as Worsley Porlock demonstrates, somehow less than that [though, sadly, not as effective at demonstrating this as Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths])—that he can use to write a non-graphic novel. Dan can even speak without sounding like a drowning hippo! He moves back to the mid-west, to a small, isolated town in Indiana. Basically only two houses. There’s a man next door, working in his garden. They talk for a bit, and Dan recognizes him.

The man was Frank Giardino, the nephew of a gangster who used the comics industry as a front for bootlegging (The industry hasn’t changed much since then). Supposedly, Frank died some years back, but there are those who claim he’s in Witness Protection. So when Dan notes that the man working the garden looks like Frank, and is just vague enough not to make clear what profession he was in out of embarrassment, Frank thinks for a moment. The two enter Frank’s home and have a nice chat. Then, something that sounds like a cough is heard.

At the end of the day, there is no escape. No chance to become someone better. The world has been consumed by an imaginary story (Which may never happen, but then again may) about a perfect man who came from the sky and did only good. And it’s horrifying to behold. All of our lives revolve around this shitty story and all the stories like it. We are—all of us—consumed by our stories. Be they the ones we tell ourselves, the ones we tell to children, or the ones we wish were true. Or, for that matter, the ones that are.

Even the so-called adult stories turn out to be just as vicious and cruel as the childish ones many of us cling onto. Stories about gangsters who kill people for fun and profit. People who could do whatever they want without having to face the consequences. It’s a game where the rules are just as simplistic as the morality. It should be noted that one of the most famous gangster stories is about the horror of a childhood fantasy coming true.

At the end of the day, the superhero—as we know it now—is just an attempt at repackaging our childhoods with a new coat of paint. The problem is that not everyone had the same childhood. As a result, you end up with all these maladjusted adults pretending at adulthood with no idea what the real thing is. Only the negative space, only the thing that it isn’t. And by the time we find something truly adult, we fail to recognize how childish it all is. Because there are no adults in the room—not anymore. Where they went, who the fuck knows.

The fantasy might be different. For some, it’s superheroes. For others, cowboys. Toy soldiers. Spies in disguise. Cops and robbers. But the result is still the same. We live in a world of children where tantrums are resolved through placation rather than engagement. Where motivations for cruelty are often arbitrary—existing solely to justify the cruelty. Where no one truly has any idea what they’re doing, and they just keep doing it because it’s always worked. Because we can’t imagine anything else.

We are going to be murdered by fucking children because none of us knows what the fuck an adult is.

This is Watchmen’s Legacy.

For more in “Who Watched the Watchmen”…

And yet…I know that’s not true. It’s an easy answer, far too easy to lay at Moore’s feet. To blame the failures of the world on some comic that people misread and treated as if it was either gospel or heresy. To damn Moore to the hell of being the man who must always talk about some stupid comic. And, more than that, if there is one thing that defines adults, one thing that can never be childish, it’s complexity.

Not merely the convolution systems of cruelty desire us to embrace. Those merely force the mind to shut down and simplify things further so as to not have to look at the mind numbing madness of the system. To reject watching entirely in favor of mindless consumption. Rather, complexity is the layers added to a story. The contradictions, the mess, the failures and successes, all of these and so much more make up this stupid, absurd world of ours.

As much as “What We Can Know About Thunderman” rails against the industry as it is today, there’s a complexity to its engagement. Dan Wheems, shortly before leaving the industry for good, decides to read the work he did back in the nineties on The Vindictives.

He found that he still enjoyed them, couldn’t put them down, so it was nearly three o’clock before he got to bed. He remained proud of all his work, which in the early nineties had been so innovative. That scene where he’d had the original Vindictives meeting up again after some years, as older individuals. The atmosphere and the comparative realism of his dialogue, like the famous interchange between Ormazda and the Brute – nobody else had been attempting stuff like that back then. He could be justly satisfied with what he’d done, and yet…

And yet, the work, it wasn’t really his. He’d not created the beloved characters that everybody bought the book for, the established icons that lent all Dan’s knowing modern riffs their resonance. He hadn’t come up with the National Guard, the Brute, the Human Tank, Ormazda, Miniman and Minimaid, or the idea of sticking them together in one book called The Vindictives. That was all Sam Blatz and Joe Gold, which was just the same as saying it was all Joe Gold. A tough kid from the tenements, blessed with a comic book imagination more fertile than anyone had ever seen, who’d had everything taken from him by Sam Blatz and Massive Comics, and who, if you added up the billions that the Massive superhero films had made already out of his creations, was a victim of the single biggest theft from any individual in human history. Was this, then, all that Dan was proud of, his complicity in robbing someone genuinely talented of what was theirs? Was this the best that today’s industry professionals could say about themselves, about their work? He took these thoughts to bed with him, and, in the morning, saw he had no choice: he knew he couldn’t take it any more.

The failure isn’t simply that superhero comics are bad, have always been bad, will always be bad. Rather, it’s in the notion that nothing new is being made. There is a contentedness in the work itself, but the context that it exists within is viewed with nothing but contempt. Of exploitation and horror and cruelty. It’s the same shit being regurgitated over and over again. That’s where the problem lies. As the late Denny Wellworth notes:

The comics business made the same dumbass mistake that all industry made, which was assuming the resource they were exploiting to be infinite and inexhaustible. They figured that they could beat up and rob a Joe Gold with impunity, because there’d be another talent just as good and just as robbable along within a year or two. Now, you and I both know the sun will have grown old and dim and there still won’t have been another Gold, but management are not creative individuals and they have never understood the first thing about how creators work. So, when a new Joe Gold fails to show up, you give his books to artists who can do lame versions of Gold’s style, but can’t invent a single thing that’s new. And when there’s no replacement Sherman Glad, because he tried to form a union so they fired him, then they’re just left with the eager-beaver fans they hired to take the place of Sherman and Heinz Messner and the rest, people like Brandon Chuff. These people, they’re not artists, they’re not writers, they’re just fans of artists and of writers, and the generation that comes after them will be the fans of fans, and so on, to the directionless mess we’re in at present.

By attempting to make things work by force, by treating the world with simplicity, the superhero—an idea built for children—is the fountainhead of something extremely childish. To be an adult, then, is to accept that the world is more complicated than some made up bullshit like if Superman is a cop or how much a bottle of water costs.

And that, ultimately, is what Watchmen did: it complicated things. It had a primary mover who’s a real piece of shit, but whose moralistic perspective belies a number of pathologies and complexities worth diving into. It told a story of a man who desired a better world, who genuinely desired that better world, did monstrous things to achieve it, and (however briefly) won. It focused not just on the giants whose epic battles determined the fate of the world, but also on the little people. The people who, ultimately, were there for one another when things went horribly wrong.

More than anything else, Watchmen wanted to make the superhero complicated. The problem was that many fans—be they readers, writers, or critics—despise complexity. Look at the view counts on video essays with “X Explained” in the titles. How much of the criticism of the modern era is nothing more than someone “explaining” why a movie sucks, a comic is bad and should be burned, why the woke SJWs are ruining cinema, or even something as small as what the plot was about, as if fiction can be sieved down to a Wikipedia article. There’s no room for the ambiguity of something like The Wall or Inland Empire or even more traditional fare like Final Crisis or Watchmen.

Everything has to be packaged neatly into the canon of what was, like a museum of cum rags dated for each moment of ejaculation. Everything has to be explained or else destroyed. Everything must be ideal. Everyone must be good. Any bad must be removed on sight. That’s why Doomsday Clock exists and why many comics fans can see it as ambitious for attempting to “be about reconstructing superheroes and be an influential story about what Watchmen had done to superhero stuff.”

And that’s why, ultimately, Superhero fiction veers towards fascism. At the end of the day, fascism is a childish system built on simplicity. It tells us that all the world’s problems are their fault (whoever they might be) and that the solution is to destroy them totally. It’s a simplistic mindset that many a comics fan embraces. Because we want to hold our fictions with us but refuse to allow them to change with us, and as such refuse to change ourselves.

Consider the end of “Thunderman,” where the last of the protagonists finds himself ascending to the heavens, to the horrible land of his dreams. Where Thunderman stands unchanging from his childhood. And it’s horrifying. It’s monstrous and awful. It’s everything he has ever wanted, and it’s all so horrible. Because nothing was allowed to grow.

What, then, is the ultimate legacy of Watchmen? I truly cannot say. There is heartbreak and horror and cruelty in its legacy just as there is beauty and wonder and joy. But more than that, there are complexities. And, for all my misgivings with the world as it is right now, all my sorrow, all my rage, all my terror, there is also beauty and wonder to be found within it.

All you have to do is see it.

The post Who Watched the Watchmen? Alan Moore’s “What We Can Know About Thunderman” appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen?

Rebirth hadn’t yet happened.

Doomsday Clock was not a thing.

Rorschach and the Watchmen TV show didn’t exist.

Only Before Watchmen did.

DC had only made one serious attempt to milk Watchmen and cash-in on it before. And it had bombed, big time. Nobody liked it or cared for it. It was over. They knew it. Everybody did.

And so there was that brief period of time- the quiet calm, the gap between the first big attempt and the next big attempt-wherein it felt like we could perhaps move forward from Watchmen nostalgia. Wherein we could get past it all. And if we were to engage with it, it wouldn’t be literally, by sequelizing it or using characters from it, but rather through the challenges it offered via its formal daring and political critique.

And so let us journey backwards, into that frozen moment, that small gap of time, where the prospect of creators reckoning with Watchmen held a spark of real intrigue.

Welcome to The Multiversity: Pax Americana #1.

A one-shot story utilizing the original Charlton characters upon whom the Watchmen characters were based, constructed for an all new post-Watchmen, post-9/11 world and climate.

Brought to us by the creative team of Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Nathan Fairbairn, and Rob Leigh. ——————————————————————————————————

I- Imperium—————–The American President is assassinated.

That’s how it starts.

A familiar image. An infamous image. A bullet to the head of the President in his car.

It is meant to evoke the assassination of John F. Kennedy, whilst the slow playback, with time running backwards, feels like the comics equivalent of the Zapruder Film. Something to be played back over and over, backwards and forwards, to ascertain some sense of meaning. An event of immense importance and endless speculation. A cauldron for conspiracy and madness. A sequence to haunt American consciousness and psyche, like a ghost, playing on endless repeat.

That’s how Pax Americana opens.

And if its title wasn’t a dead giveaway as to what it would be about, the opening certainly is.

This is a book about America. This is a book about ‘American Peace,’ that Pax Americana that succeeded the ‘British Peace’ of Pax Britannica, who felt they were succeeding the ‘Roman Peace’ of Pax Romana. This is a book about a symbol of peace on fire. That is its first image, displayed on the cover itself, in the style of Watchmen. It is about the fundamental nature of ‘Peace’ as understood and administer by Imperiums, whose idea of peace is having the biggest stick in the playground by which to say ‘Obey me, or else.‘

Where Watchmen begins with the assassination of The Comedian by Ozymandias, Pax is the reverse. It begins with Peacemaker, the archetypal inspiration for The Comedian, assassinating President Harley of the United States, who came to power in 2008, following the Bush Administration.

Over the course of the issue we see the life-story of President Harley, following the events that led up to his murder, and we see what follows after his death, moving backwards and forwards all at once. And it’s made clear and evident for us all throughout here that Harley is our Ozymandias-figure of the book (particularly given the rights of Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt, the Charlton hero who inspired Ozymandias, reverted back to the Creator’s estate in a rare case, thus DC no longer owning him), with the cold capitalist replaced instead by the plotting politician.

This is only one level of reversal and twisting in relation to Watchmen. Pax Americana is a book doing it on numerous levels. From its name alone, derived from the Roman ‘Pax Romana,’ given Watchmen’s title derives from the Roman satires of Juvenal, via the Latin quote Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (translated as ‘Who watches the Watchmen?’)

And where Watchmen uses its iconic 9-panel grid, Pax utilizes a distinct 8-panel grid. If Watchmen had each issue punctuated by quotes on the final panel, with the cover of each issue being the technical ‘first panel,’ then Pax would have its covers be both the first panel and the last panel at once, with the quote on the cover itself:

It’s a book in dialogue with Watchmen, certainly.

It’s a book that feels like it was birthed after the reading of this notable Alan Moore quote:

I got quite distressed that after Watchmen, nobody had taken up the challenge of Watchmen. I’d seen Watchmen, and I thought ‘This is an important comic because of the storytelling devices that we’ve come up with.’ That is the only thing that is important about it. It’s not that it’s a darker view of superheroes. I’d already done Marvelman by that point. That wasn’t the main point. It was just ‘How to tell the story in a way no one’s done it before.’ But the things the rest of the creative community seemed to take from Watchmen, they didn’t take any of the admittedly difficult storytelling techniques.

Indeed, if one were to sit down with the Director’s Cut of the issue, it is pretty much affirmed by the very first page of the script shown there:

But what the script here also reveals to us how it is not just Watchmen. Indeed, the specific mention and invocation of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley’s The Dark Knight Returns is revealing, with the book’s 8-panel grid often morphing and breaking into its doubled numerical equivalent of the 16-panel grid, which that book is so iconic for. And beyond that, the notion of the American President and the American Superhero together? That goes right back to TDKR‘s popular usage of Superman and Ronald Reagan together.

But at the same time, Morrison/Quitely’s work here isn’t a piece of 1980’s cold war era fiction, which is what those two were. It is instead a 21st century text of the 2010s, made for a Post-9/11 era, the world of The Authority, The Ultimates, and the MCU. And crucially, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely both had a hand in shaping the landscape, as Morrison is the reason why Mark Millar had a career, was hired on to do The Authority with Frank Quitely, and Morrison is also why Millar ended up doing The Ultimates with Bryan Hitch. And Pax is rooted in that, too:

Here you have a proper ‘cinematic’ sequence by iconic ex-Authority artist Frank Quitely, showcasing a post-9/11 attack on America by Foreign Terrorists who hate the American Empire. And, of course, the all-American superhero out and about to stop it all. It feels so utterly fitting as an encapsulation of The Ultimates, especially given you also have George W. Bush right on-page, just like in The Ultimates.

What does this tell us?

That while Pax wants to take up the challenge of Watchmen, that while it borrows its storytelling tools and techniques and is in direct dialogue with it in doing so, particularly given Moore-Morrison’s long history and relationship, it’s not about Watchmen, per se. And neither is it about TDKR or The Authority or The Ultimates, though it is a comic in that long lineage. It is not so much a comic about comics, as it is a comic utilizing what has come before to be about real things we recognize and deal with.

It’s about America. It’s about the American Empire and their dreams and nightmares. It is about American Peace and Violence, and the nature of that very notion- the Pax Americana.

Because if you actually pay attention to Watchmen or TDKR or The Authority or The Ultimates, that’s also what all of those works are about, too. It is what they are rooted in, with the awareness or reckoning with that being varied. They are all, also, if you squint and take note, British comics works on America. They are the British creators, from the land of the Pax Britannica that was superseded by Pax Americana, reckoning with the nature of The American Empire through the ultimate genre expression of American Power- the American Superhero.

II- Aevum————–Time has been a career-long obsession for Grant Morrison and their work. In fact, their very first comics story ever, drawn by Morrison, was titled Time Is A Four Letter Word. Their favorite TV show is Doctor Who, and if you let them, they’ll go off about how universes are grown like larvae in time by mercurial hyper-sprites from a higher dimension where time does not exist. It’s how you get much of The Invisibles, and their obsession with time is all over their body of work, from the pages of Batman and Superman to even the very construction of ‘Hypertime.’ Time and Reality are things Morrison is totally taken with.

Frank Quitely is one of our great modern masters of art and sequential storytelling. He is among the best artists still working, and he’s only gotten better and better with time, which feels absurd. He’s an artist of impeccable technical skill and range, who also has big, bold formal ambitions and the vital capacity to fulfill said lofty ambitions. He’s just the best there is at what he does. And what he does is magnificent.

Morrison and Quitely came on up together, over three decades, and they are one of our great iconic duos in comics. Their collaborations ever more ambitious and interesting, with the two wanting to never do anything less than their best.

Time is a recurring interest for both of them, as they are both obsessive formalists. They’re taken with what the medium can do, and pushing it. And time in comics is a curious thing, because it is a form where Time and Space are one and the same. So the manipulation of space is, in effect, manipulation of time. That’s what leads us to one of their chief works in this regard:

Here’s Morrison/Quitely redefining how the presentation of time on page can work in We3. It’s a simple action sequence in which a cat is mowing through a bunch of soldiers, and you’d normally see it laid flat on page, as one single, flowing and continuous image. You’d expect to see one long cinematic shot of action, which depicts time in a traditional way we are used to seeing. But they do not! Instead, they’re forcing us to view and experience the sequence 8 different times via 8 different panels here which ‘divide’ the space and thus ‘divide’ time here. Time is a physical dimension on the page, malleable via manipulation of space. Quitely and Morrison understand this.

Rather than opt for a typical cinematic ‘observer’ perspective like in film, which would be a ‘frontal’ perspective, Quitely/Morrison tilt the panels and emphasize the dimension of Time, with the natural reality as it exists for us in ‘boxes’ and us getting to see the characters move through the space between that reality, from the side, like some being from a higher dimension. The space and dimension of time beyond that which we experience as regular people and thus cannot see. It’s a fascinating perspective and condensation of time from two remarkable creators clearly taken with the subject of time.

Pax is part of this tradition and is their latest effort to date, and perhaps their finest in a formal sense.

But to get into that, let’s take a look at the classical, influential grids that inform the work. Particularly, the 16-panel grid from which the book draws upon while using its 8-panel grid:

The 9 panel grid of Watchmen is a classical grid. It’s a 3×3. It’s three panels in a row, in three tiers. Each breaks down neatly into three beats. Set-Up/Build-Up/Pay-Off. There’s a nice basic quality to the 3×3 of the 9 panel grid. Three panels are the most simple way to tell a story and it’s why so many classic newspaper comic strips are built on it. Now do 3 rows of such panels to create a singular unit- and you have the grid. It’s an easy, controlled way to tell a story that can be read easily by anyone, even those who’ve never a comic before. The 4×4 of the 16 panel grid is somewhat similar but a totally different beast. It adds an extra 4th panel onto every row, and you have an extra 4th tier added at the bottom. That changes things. It gives you structure and a clean way to read it, but in a much different way. It’s a grid and structure that operates off a very different rhythm, which makes a very different sound, than the 9 panel grid.

The 9 panel grid feels minimalist in comparison to the 16 panel grid, rooted in a simplicity and ease, while the 16 panel grid is actively maximalist. It’s an extra panel, an extra row, it’s the traditional grid that pushes things right to the edge, because 5 panels in a single row? You can’t exactly ask an artist to draw a 5×5 grid and structure every page to do a 25 panel grid. That’s ridiculous and absurd, and any artist would yell at you for doing so. It’s a nigh-impossible headache and one that shrinks the panel size down even impossibly more to accommodate the extra panels. It also seriously limits compositional possibilities and strains the artist and the 1-2-3-4-5 rhythm of it just isn’t as natural. 5×5? That just that feels like too much. 4×4 feels like the edge, the limit, the max.

It’s the grid structure that gives you a fully even, internally consistent steady rhythm that at once maximizes the amount of time you have.

When you have 7 extra panels or ‘windows of time’ in every single page compared to the 9 panel grid? You simply just have more time. That’s almost a whole other page’s worth of time without having to need an extra page. It’s a great, efficient usage of page-real estate. It’s the ultimate bang-for-your-buck device to buy you more time. You can do more, and you can put in even more, and let the reader ruminate and linger in it.

It allows you to both ‘speed up’ time by varying the visuals shown in the smaller panels now you have, as opposed to the 3×3 grid, or ‘slow down’ time by repetition of imagery and emphasis. It’s a tool with a lot of power that allows you to ‘break down’ moments and make them last longer. And it’s how Miller is using it here, not to speed up time, which the 4×4 grid allows, but to slow it down. His emphasis and use of deliberate repetition is the reason we have this effect. A moment passing takes longer within this usage of the grid structure and system. Notice the above scene from TDKR wherein Bruce is flashing back, and how well the 16 panel grid works for this slow-motion flashback. It takes a single beat of the parents being shot and makes it last for an eternity, rather like a film reel you can go over endlessly. It really lets you live in a moment and ‘freeze’ time usefully.

But of course, that’s not the only thing TDKR is known for. If anything, the more famous aspects of the book are visuals such as these:

It was an operatic epic, full of glorious splash pages such as these. It was an action comic of great maximalist power, packed to the brim. And against the enormity of these supreme all-powerful American figures, everyone else looks minuscule, tiny, packed into little boxes of four. Arguing petulantly about them, unable to ever truly grasp them or their enormity as puny human figures. It was pure Frank Miller, showcasing primal figures of power, akin to chiseled Greek statues.

But it is also this approach, alongside Watchmen, that helps inspire much of the way the modern militarized superhero of the American Empire exists and has been molded. And even beyond that, there’s a direct lineage from Frank Miller’s work to the 1990’s Image Revolution of Todd McFarlane (Spawn), Jim Lee (Wild.C.A.T.S.), and Rob Liefeld (Youngblood), as they all created all-new militarized superhumans rooted in the Millerian mold as writer/artists. Miller’s work, especially on TDKR, is all over those early Image books. And it’s there, after all, at Image in Jim Lee’s Wildstorm Studios, that the future would be forged by the likes of Bryan Hitch and Frank Quitely. There’s a strong link from TDKR to the modern militarized superhero figure.

Morrison and Quitely understand this. They get that without this:

We don’t get this:

They draw the straight line from the Frank Miller operatic splashes and TDKR approach to the Bryan Hitch Cinematic Comics of the modern era. Particularly when working with Mark Millar (pronounced Miller, like Frank Miller), the sort of more structured, formal gridded thinking goes out the window for the pure primal expression of cinematic spectacle. And Quitely helped that early 2000s Cinematic school of comics along when he did The Authority with Millar as well, which felt like the test run for their much more successful and superior run of The Ultimates with Hitch. That’s how you get those full War-On-Terror era post-9/11 America Reacts comics full of George Bushes, Cap screaming about how the A on his head doesn’t stand for France and more. It’s a straight line from Miller to Millar and Hitch.

All of which leads us to the apotheosis of Pax Americana visually, wherein it does an incredible two-pager like this:

Take a look at that. Really take that in, and consider the above pages and what they’re doing.

They are fascinating.

Quitely has drawn a single cinematic visual, a grand double page-spread of a room, in the vein of Hitch and Quitely classics. It’s one big gigantic spread. But that larger image has then been segmented into a Miller 16-panel grid here, but through the principles of Watchmen’s 9 panel grid. And it’s all to serve one purpose- Time.

Comics is a medium wherein Time and Space are one and the same. They are indivisible and blend together, and it is through the manipulation and ‘division’ of space that we denote and express time. It is, as critic Harry Kassen termed it, a concept that can simply be expressed as Timespace.

Here, we’re seeing one big cinematic setting and place – a room drawn in exquisite detail, but we’re seeing it across three whole different points in time, all at once. In the brightly sunlit panels of the morning, you have Peacemaker and his partner Nora O’Rourke together before he heads off to kill Harley. In the milder glow of night time lighting, we see Nora alone, as she’s reckoning with an intruder who’s broken in, who eventually bludgeons her to death. In the shady panels lit by only by a flashlight, we then see The Question investigating the crime scene some nights later.

And we’re getting all of this at once.

It takes the idea of how a figure like Manhattan with a ‘higher dimensional perspective’ might experience time and translates that visually for the actual reader. And it does this all the while synthesizing many different texts and artists into a singular whole. It’s Moore/Gibbons (Watchmen), it’s Miller (TDKR), it’s Millar/Hitch (Ultimates), it’s Millar/Quitely (Authority), all at once, all blended together into a potently idiosyncratic unified voice of a modern, evolved Morrison/Quitely. It’s a natural evolution of their work and approach on We3, and it’s a fascinating perspective of time, as we’re experiencing it from a ‘higher’ perspective wherein we’re ‘outside’ time, wherein the past, present, and the future are all occurring and happening all at once, and we can go backwards or forwards, however we like.

Notice the many ways and orders by which that spread can be read and experienced to get vastly different experiences of time and perspective, with every panel being the exact same size, none being ‘bigger’ or more important than another. All moments exist at once, like square boxes.

What have you here is almost akin to a beautifully ambitious polyptych, making wonderful use of the way time operates and can be expressed in a visual form like comics.

There’s an entire story being told across these pages and it’s one we could just sit in the loop of forever.

It’s a crystallization of Symmetrical Time, as Morrison terms it, on page.

It’s a different beast from Watchmen. Consider a similar sequence that opens Watchmen following a crime scene investigation:

Here, we’re moving back and forth between two perspectives and times. The first being the present with the investigators at the scene, as we see things alongside them like a companion to their investigation. The second being the flashes of the past in red, taking us back to the actual crime itself, with us seeing things from the perspective of the murderer. They’re very much done as clean contrasts, and there’s very little ‘shared space’ here. We see the sofa and TV from one low angle, and then in the next we cut to a wholly different angle where they’ve fallen over. These are all ‘quick cuts’ as it were, and it’s rooted in minimalism.

But with Pax here? We’re ‘above’ it all, getting to view and experience the entire event, what precedes it, what follows it, at once like the perspective of a god. And while contrast exists via color to denote time, it’s one big grand, shared tapestry of an image. The ‘camera’ isn’t moving on the whole, it’s staying still, unlike in the case of Watchmen. Only the people are moving. And so rather than a ‘quick cut’ method wherein we switch to numerous angles, it’s an intense focused meditation that does not change. It’s like god’s eye, ever watching, ever observing, all-seeing. It forces us to focus and take it all in, to process it slowly and repeatedly, over and over, again and again. We’re made to feel the flow of time, and the pristine ‘minimalism’ of Watchmen is instead replaced by a heightened existential maximalism.

It reflects the works perfectly, especially given Watchmen is a work that is essentially ticking away like a clock, where while Doctor Manhattan can view time all at once, it’s all building like a ticking time bomb to an explosive conclusion that cannot be seen or prevented. That is the nature of it and it’s what the grid serves in its 9-Panel Grid. A very steady, rhythm, 1-2-3, 1-2-3 pattern that is largely minimalist. It starts small on a murder and ends large on an explosive incident.

Pax is not that at all. Pax is not ‘ticking away’ to anything. In fact, the big ‘explosive’ incident isn’t saved for the end, but happens on the very first page, and instead the inciting murder is the small ‘ending’ of the issue, until it’s essentially looping back to that cover image of the peace symbol on fire with the quote. Pax is a firm reversal that disavows any of that steady minimalist ‘build’ or rhythm for a constant overload of experience with time, as the 8/16 Panel Grid slows us down and eternally drags us through a 1-2-3-4 rhythm on each tier, while the book traps us in a loop, with us knowing the ending from the beginning. The grid here serves both the grand scale storytelling and canvas of the ‘cinematic’ comics school and is perfect for action storytelling while also being wonderfully useful for the sharper, slower work playing with work. The maximalism has purpose here.

And while the 3×3 grid of Watchmen has a singular ‘central’ middle image across each tier, notice how the 4×4 grid does not. Watchmen is focused, and it’s affixing you in a moment of time, there’s always a consistent ‘central image’ at each point to focus on, which draws in your eye. But the 4×4 grid? No. It decenters you and the reading experience, depriving you of such a ‘central’ or focused middle panel or image. Everything is much more neatly in order, and you’re ‘pulled out’ from such focusing on any moment in time, which is to say- you’re pulled out of time. You’re pulled into the pattern and rhythm and structure of it all rather than any given, singular moment in each one. You’re caught in this loop, this rhythm, unable to let go.

It’s a comic that wants us to feel what it would be like to actually experience everything everywhere all at once. It’s overwhelming.

It’s why that Quitely spread is so crucial, and so powerful.

The entirety of Pax Americana, the comic, is sort of a larger expression of that very spread and ideas it captures.

Because what happens when you’re in a loop and the footage runs out?

It all loops around. We hit replay.

III- Atrium—————The tale of Pax Americana is the tale of President Harley, our American leader, our Ozymandias.

It is the tale of his plan to save the world and maintain world peace.

But what is that, really? And is it a viable thing at all? And what compels him to pursue said plan?

That’s what we’re meant to discover and piece together across the story, as the entire issue is a loop centered around his life, from his demise to his origins, with the book beginning on his murder and ending on the incident that led to him pursuing the path that he did.

President Harley is, in effect, a ‘What If?’ playing on the idea of The Good American President, in the vein of JFK, but not for the 1960’s America, but rather the modern, contemporary post-9/11 America of the 21st century. It is why he is elected right after George W. Bush, in the place of Barack Obama. It’s an idea Morrison has historically been taken with, going as far as to create Calvin Ellis, an alternate universe iteration of Superman whose premise was ‘What If Obama was also secretly Superman?’. The American Superhero and The American President as one, the fantasy of both’s decency and goodness and aspirational morality bound together.

What if there were the supposed ‘good’ President to save the world and make it better? It is a clear Liberal fantasy, the kind that believes Joe Biden could really come through for us all and save us, when the reality is he cannot. He will not. But that is the notion that Harley is meant to represent and play into, as crystalized by the very opening evoking the fall of JFK. The book then is about that fantasy, the symbol of The Good American President as codified by a tragic figure like JFK and how it would really play out in our modern world now.

That’s what births President Harley.

But who he is really? And what drives him to his post and purpose?

Harley is the son of a Vietnam veteran-turned comic book artist, who drew a title called Janus The Everyman but died mysteriously. Unknown to all but his son, Harley was secretly the world’s first real superhero- Yellowjacket, operating in the 1970’s until vanishing upon his death. Yellowjacket was ‘special’ in that he was a ‘true’ superhero, unlike all the other ‘super’ figures who worked with the state or were productions of military programs. He was just a guy in his outfit, like the superheroes he wrote about, who went out and night and did his thing. President Harley grew up with his superheroic father, loving him and admiring him. And he’s a dreamer, just like his father before him. But here’s the thing:

President Harley killed his father.

Playing around as a child, taking on his father’s all-too-big gun, he shoots his own father dead out of fear, as an instinctive response. And so falls his own father. So dies America’s first real superhero.

Harley is haunted by his murder of his own beloved father, his own beloved superhero, the man who brought him into this world, gave him life and nourished him. Patricide is an act that plagues his soul endlessly into adulthood, as he can never get over it, for how could you?

He sits at this father’s grave and wonders and wonders- Why? How? Wrecked by guilt and pain, unable to discern a path forward he searches for some semblance of understanding or meaning, trying to make sense of the madness.

And that’s when he has this moment of profound realization, visualized to us like so. It is a grand epiphany about the nature of existence, the universe, and the way of things. It displays the first and only real meaningful deviation and ‘shattering’ of the 8/16 panel grid design throughout the book. While the book has moments wherein panels or rows and tiers of panels are combined to make bigger panels or play with composition, the book mostly follows its design principles and rules of it all being within this 8 system (and its multiple 16). But here, that is deliberately shattered, as panels tilt and twist and rub against each other and the clean design and order is replaced with disastrous chaos. The ‘simplicity’ of ‘ordered life’ and ‘reality’ replaced with a flood of complexity and a multitude of images too much too process in far too much chaos, rather like life itself.

It is this moment that animates Harley, wherein he comes to an understanding, and pursues his plan to save the world.

He has seen ‘the design’ of things, ‘the way of things’, the ‘structure’ of reality that bends it towards the very path it is on. He terms it Algorithm 8.

He means, of course, the 8-panel grid (including its multiple, the 16 panel grid) which governs reality.

One of the lessons of Watchmen is that form should be indivisible from the contents of the work. They must be inseparable, with the form being a visual expression of the work’s identity and whole. And so much like the 9 Panel Grid becomes the avatar of Watchmen’s own vision and perspective of the world, so too does the 8-panel grid become the avatar of Pax Americana’s own vision and perspective of the world.

The 8 isn’t a mere ‘8’ here. Instead it doubles as a symbol for ‘Infinity’, an endless forever loop. Like an ouroboros writ large on a grander, cosmic scale. And with that layer of meaning, they present something very specific:

This isn’t some cheap, lazy parlor trick of ‘being Meta teehee’ or ‘breaking the fourth wall’ or whatever. It is adopting a hyper-realistic approach of using the 8-panel grid as a visualization and crystalization of a real idea.

That is to say, the 8-panel grid in Pax Americana represents the infinite hold and structuring pattern of Western Power and Imperialism. It is The Way Of The Western World that bends all else in relation to it. But most specifically, it is a symbol of Pax Americana as a concept itself on-page. That’s what the 8 panel grid is a visual metaphor and symbol of- American Peace, American Power, and American Empire.

The 8 Panel Grid is the symbol of The Forever War, as waged by the West, by America, as Empires do to maintain their power.

The 8 Panel Grid is the endless infinite loop of imperiums in this book, which is why the book begins and ends with murder. It’s why the first panel of the book is on the cover, but so is the last panel of the book, with the quote firmly placed upon it.

Time is a loop, and so is Empire.

This is where we come to finally realize and truly understand Harley’s plan, you see.

President Harley’s got a plan to save the world, just like Ozymandias did in Watchmen. He has a vision and a way to unite the world and save it in this post-9/11 age, the way Adrian Veidt did for a world of the Cold War period.

And the plan? The murder of The American President at the hands of the Peacemaker, once again returning to that initial reversal of the Comedian/Ozymandias murder. Here, the Ozymandias figure’s murder happens via the super-soldier and the murder is, like in Watchmen, part of a larger conspiracy and plot. And that greater plot? The plot which involves Harley having himself assassinated?

The resurrection of The American President by The American Superhero, a true American Superhero, unlike all the rest.

The murder of The American President by The Ultimate All-American Supersoldier, Peacemaker, will trigger an anti-superhero response, shutting down and shuttering the American Superhero as they exist in their current state, which is agents and champions of the American Military Industrial Complex. And then Captain Atom, that divine true superman, will return and resurrect the fallen American President for all of the world to watch, purging the sin from the superhero, and representing a new heroic ideal. Healing rather than hurting. Resurrection over Death. He will make The Dream Of The Superhero real, and thus will come world peace.

That’s the idea at least. That’s the plan.

It is the ideological opposite of Ozymandias’ plot in Watchmen, wherein Adrian believed that the terror and fear of The Other, the conjured Squid, the alien horror, would unite all of humanity in fear and ensure world peace, thus ‘saving’ it. Harley doesn’t believe in the power of fear, having seen and lived in a Post-9/11 world, wherein fear doesn’t unite, it only divides. It makes monsters of people, ensures hierarchies and leaves us worse than ever. The machinery of fear only makes the world worse. No, the world doesn’t need more fear and paranoia. Instead Harley’s betting on Inspiration over Fear. He’s counting on Wonder over Horror. He wants the American President to be resurrected like Jesus Christ risen from the grave, to boldly usher in a new era and age of golden peace. It is the dream of a world saved by wonder and inspiration.

That’s the idea at least. That’s the plan.

It’s why upon becoming President, Harley organizes the Pax (the peace), a team of American super-soldiers serving its imperial Military Industrial Complex who all dress in colorful outfits and bear classical American Superhero names, in the vein of Harley’s father and the characters he drew.

He wants to make the superhero real, and the superhero must be American. For only the American Superhero and the American President together can save the world. Only together can they redeem the lost potential and possibility of his father and the future he represented, at least in Harley’s eyes.

That’s what animates it all, you see? Guilt. The blood on his hands.

Which is why, of course, Harley opts to become the President Of United States Of America, to get further blood on his hands, empowering its imperialist military industrial complex and giving it a new colorful coat of comic book paint. Giving them the ironic title of the Pax, the peace, though they are crusaders of imperialist violence and murder. And it is, in the end, of course, this very strain of monstrous imperialist American Supersoldier that Harley entrusts his dreams and secrets, asking him to slay him.

Harley believes The Death of The American President will be punishment enough, that it will be absolution enough, that it will be the symbolic act to help exorcise and heal the world and push it onward, with the resurrection and rebirth of the American President and American Superhero to follow bringing about final salvation.

That’s the idea at least. That’s the plan.

It is all, of course, completely ludicrous and utterly insane and stupid.

It is nonsensical and naive and childish. It is the dream of a deluded child who never got over his father, who never got over the American power fantasy of the superhero, and who truly believes that the American President and the American Superhero can save the world.

Grant Morrison in their book Supergods once noted, in analyzing Watchmen:

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.

And that same criticism Morrison levies at Watchmen, frankly, holds just as true, if not more true, in the case of Pax Americana.

Harley’s not the world’s smartest man, but his entire plan is deeply stupid. Arguably far stupider than Ozymandias’ own machinations.

It is a deeply Grant Morrisonian idea, and Harley is very much a Morrisonian figure. He loves superheroes, he idolizes his working class larger-than-life father, and while keenly aware of the superhero’s destructive power, he believes in their transcendent power and possibility all the same. He wants the American superheroes to save us. He believes the American superheroes exist to save us. And his masterplan?

It is to make the entire world go through this:

He wants the entire world to experience a traumatic death, like he did, and then reflect upon that, and then watch in awe at a miracle of transcendence occurs. He wants the entire world to have an awakening the way he did, their minds opened to something greater, something larger and more significant. He wants the ‘shattering’ of Algorithm 8 as he experienced it to happen to the entirety of the world, thus freeing it from the chains of the pattern.

President Harley wants to free the world from the 8 panel grid, which symbolizes this infinite loop of American Power, of American Imperialism. He wants to shatter the loop of the Forever War of his empire. He wants to shatter the realities of Pax Americana to push the world to a utopian future of true peace, a true Pax, beyond the ones of American Empire and its imperial strength.

He sees himself as a martyr, a sacrificial savior with a larger purpose. A villain, the ultimate villain, the father-killer, the perpetrator of patricide, the king of the American War Crime Mountain, the lord of the American Empire, who must die and be reborn and be cleansed by a ritual of exorcism by The Man Of Tomorrow, that superhero, that superman.

But that’s just it, isn’t it? It’s delusional. It’s the dream of a madman who has not grown past the adolescent he once was. He’s a fool who pursues fantasies over any kind of material action for betterment.

Harley is a man naive enough to believe that American Power can be innocent.

After all, it’s how and why he believes the American President, after helping enforce the ruthless Pax and being culpable and complicit in plenty of horrors, can still be redeemed. That The American President can still be good, like when we all just kids and liked to believe so and think so, and everything felt slightly more possible. It’s a man trying desperately to force reality to adhere to his fantasies, which is why he has Captain Atom conjure up three towers in the very same place as the fallen two towers of 9/11:

Reality isn’t good enough. So fantasy and illusion must take its place. Delusions (or dreams if one were being kinder) must win out. And so in the place of those fallen towers, in place of that wound to American strength, American confidence and power, there’s erected 2 new towers and monuments, along with an extra third. It’s overcompensating big time, but that’s what empires do with their marks of weakness and how they lick their wounds, no? Project even greater strength in place of pain, make more empty symbolic gestures and spectacles that do not address any root causes or real issues that plague their times and the people who suffer underneath them.

It is this American Savior fantasy, the fantasy of the imperialist’s redemption, the ‘here’s how the American Empire can still win,’ that finally firmly lays bare the foolishness. It is the idea that the master’s tools could tear down and somehow salvage the master’s house. It is the idea that the only way to resolve the situation of monstrous imperialism and oppression, of American Power as made manifest and material in the flesh and blood in the form of The American Superhero? It’s to further reinvest even harder into said symbol and figure of imperialist horror–the superhero.

It is looking at your super-cops and their horrific cruelties, realizing they aren’t making things better, and somehow deciding they need even more faith and funding and support. It is belief in Supreme Leaders and Super-Champions and the powers and wisdoms of Great Men over any kind of collectivism or shared vision that invites everybody and gives them a seat at the table for a better world. Instead, it is a vision of faux-progressiveness feigning at being forward thinking. It is the delusion of the naive Harley who is privileged enough to live amidst his fantasies, without ever having to reckon with much else. It’s all about him, his guilt, his need and obsession, rather than the people at large.

It is the self-centered ideology of the emperor, much like Ozymandias.

It is the ideology of empires that sit atop the world, seeing themselves as benign emperors.

But that’s just it.

There’s no such thing as a benign emperor.

Much like there is no benign superman of any empire.

They all have blood on their hands, and it’s never going away.

IV- Infinitum——————The dream/delusion of Harley is drawn, of course, from something very tangible and real that pervades the entirety of Pax Americana- JFK. After all, alongside the visual of Robert Redford, John F. Kennedy was the real world basis for Ozymandias in Watchmen:

Thus Pax’s decision to orient itself entirely around a figure also evoking Kennedy makes sense. Even contextually, the title fits into a memorable speech Kennedy gave at the American University’s 1963 Commencement Address, which the issue quotes directly:

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

It is why the issue opens on an evocation of JFK’s assassination and is rooted in the sensibility of a Zapruder Film. It is why it centers upon the notion of The Good American President who hopes to redeem America, rooted in that idea of JFK as ‘The Last Good President’ who is looked upon as a beacon of progressive possibility. JFK haunts the book so strongly that Harley’s plot literally involves a post-9/11 recreation of the JFK assassination, an incident that is traumatic to American memory and bound so tightly to its modern world of conspiracies. It’s the incident Harley doesn’t believe they’ve ever healed from and in recreating it once more and reversing the tragedy and trauma, Harley hopes to mend the wound and replace the pain and horror with joy and wonder of the American people. It’s why that must be the act to bring about true world peace. The whole affair is an echo rooted in that idea that JFK describes in his speech here, the idea of true utopian peace, beyond Pax Americana. A peace achievable by America if it tries hard enough.

And sure enough, it sounds nice, it sounds sweet.

But that’s all it is. It’s a bunch of sweet words.

It’s beautiful words that are easy enough to utter for those sitting atop empires, but feel impossible for so many underneath their boot-heel. It is words given from atop a platform, from a place of power, a place of strength, atop an empire built upon a mountain of countless bodies, for whom true justice and reparations have never been given. It is said in an empire that glorifies its many monsters, and readily equates the necessary violence of the oppressed with the violence of the oppressor.

So peace for who, exactly? It’s nice to say ‘peace for everyone,’ it’s a sweet thing to say, but in context of the American Empire and its numerous horrors, which all of its presidents, including JFK, were complicit in? There’s a bitterness in hearing it for whose who’ve seen the true nature of this empire. These are the platitudes and slogans and pretty speeches of the powerful, who have not suffered the ignominies of the systems they sit upon. They might know them in abstract, from reading about them or hearing about them from others, but they do not truly understand. And thus they have limits, they have blinders, and theirs is a perspective from atop the palace, gazing downward, a far cry from the perspective of those on the streets looking up.

The rhetoric applied now, in a post-9/11 modern American political landscape of an even more broken system wherein the options are Super Right Wing and Somewhat Less Right Wing? It exposes the horror even more clearly. We live in a landscape wherein such pretty speeches are made about trying to attain peace for everyone, justice for all, equality for everyone, with ending racism and bigotry across all lines, even as all the monstrous systems and machinations that enable these horrors are well-maintained and provided ever-increasing funding. All the while the actual valuable, good, and necessary systems are drained dry, understaffed and unsupported, with things barely clinging on.

This is the nature of Empire, and until one is prepared to truly reckon with the nature of empire, the horror of empire, putting aside the narratives of a ‘good’ nation, of nationalistic obsession, to really collectively take stock of the wrongs done? Nothing can happen. An empire and its emperor cannot speak of peace atop a platform and place of strength. They must get down, stand down as equals and must be prepared to apologize, admit wrongdoing, and be ready to compensate and be accountable for it in action, to give back to the people from whom it has taken.

The idea of peace is appealing. But peace on whose terms? That is crucial, isn’t it? Because for all that America and its masters may speak of such pretty, noble higher ideas, they are ever reluctant to let go of the absolute privileges that genocide, murder, theft, and colonial monstrosity has afforded them. It’s why they rewrite the story, alter histories and teach things beyond truth to convey American Exceptionalism and a more noble, heroic story. They say they wish to be beyond Pax Americana, but do they really? They like the power they hold, the might they have inherited, the sway they hold, and they do not want to be any less. They do not want to get down or lower themselves. They want to forever stand on top of the world. They do not want to lose much, but want to attain a whole lot, with others meeting them on their terms.

They want to be heroes of the world, the heroes of history, doing the right thing, with no idea of what that even means. They’ve never had to. It’s easy when you believe in the fantastical image of your own self-righteousness and decency, all because you hold greater power than all others. It is easy to see oneself as the protagonist of all reality and history- America, the savior, the redeemer, the hero of humanity.

It is, of course, why they even make art about how sad they feel about having to do what they have done. About the tragic terrible burden they bear as American Heroes and Soldiers, with books, films, TV shows, games, and yes, even comics, centering them and their pain, their sorrow, their trauma, their guilt, their endless infinite humanity, over those they have forever ruined. Even the very real oppression, pain, horror and remnants of the people they destroy become background wallpaper and an exotic setting like in a video game, full of NPCs, for them to prove the depths of their humanity, their struggle, their hardships. All those people become supporting characters and sidekicks or antagonists in their grand tale, helping along or hurting their own personal progression and arcs. It’s all about them. Their imperialist eyes by which to view the entire world.

And the imperium encourages this. It fuels it, fosters it, fawns over it, with boundless compassion for the burdens of the imperialist, for his sacred American soul, for his sacrificial story, as those he helped oppress fade into the background of his great mythic tale. Imperial culture obsesses over the complexities, the ‘ambiguities’, the vulnerabilities and nuances of this great champion of their imperialist machinery. It valorizes and admires such stories, viewing them with a nigh religious awe- never even thinking to offer a morsel of such dignity or consideration to the countless people such ‘champions’ hurt or helped harm forever. Because all those people out there, all those Brown people? They’re not as real or as humane or as essential like our guy here. They’re not us. They’re not an imperial citizen: an American. They are The Other, The Foreigner, a number and a statistic. Or perhaps not even that.

In the end, America loves a hero- no matter the evils and horrific systems they are actively complicit in. It needs its hero story, no matter the price of it. America first. They matter most, their pain and trauma over all else, all others, the people they’ve stepped upon, who they’ll never center or give a real voice to. All else is subsumed under the vision and protagonism of America and The Great American Hero, who gives his life to serve and protect the world, and thus Pax Americana itself.

This is how they see the world.

For America is the world.

This is what President Harley’s delusion is rooted in.

For why should the world at large see The American President, an imperialist monster, be murdered and then return to life, and commit themselves to world-peace in a general broad-strokes sense? Why must the world over find such transcendent meaning in The American President and The American Superhero? What makes them so special, beyond the American Exceptionalist idea that they just are?

Hell, forget the world over. Take America alone. We live in a world of absurd conspiracies, where people can’t even believe in a goddamn vaccine and its necessity and ability to help us against a deadly Virus. We live in a world of QAnon and Fox News and Alex Jones. Would folks not think the whole thing was some elaborate hoax or doctored footage or conspiracy, with the President having never died in the first place, it all being a fake acted-out set-up? Would not a million conspiracies taking the piss out of the whole thing and dismissing it all just some other nonsensical thing keep going? And even of those who believed, would they be any more than President-worshipping naive children?

And forget saving the world and achieving world peace. What of domestic peace? You’re dealing with a country that denies its own people healthcare, destroys any real chance of financial safety and security, and pushes people into poverty, and then utilizes their poverty to recruit them into its Military Industrial Complex of violence. It’s one that preaches peace, but peace for whom, exactly? The billionaires making money off the wars? The bastards at the top thriving off the sales of guns, even as poor children have to endure the gun violence in schools? It cannot grant peace to its own children, whom it claims to love so much and care for so dearly, even as it does everything in its power to make life hell for them. It’s a monstrous empire dead set on destroying both those within its boundaries and those beyond it. It’s one that spends more money on murder and imperialism than actually feeding children, educating them in schools, or ensuring their health and livelihoods. Who is it saving and bringing peace to here, really? It is a fascist machine dedicated to destabilizing any sense of modicum of ‘peace’ to keep its bloody cycle of violent horror going. Peace? It has no concept of it.

And yet the empire and its masters view themselves as akin to divine emissaries and prophets, chosen by god, to bring about salvation to the universe, like noble philosopher kings performing heroic sacrifices.

It is a touching idea and notion to want to shatter this endless pattern, this symbol of Western Power, of American Empire, of Pax Americana. It is a worthy notion to want to shatter the pattern of imperiums, to destroy the loop of Forever War. But is this it? Is this the best way to do such a thing? Is this idea at all useful?

No. It is an idea that only reinforces the empire’s power, if anything, in a different way. The American Superhero and The American President cannot change the world. Only the people who granted them both the power via their collective belief can. And Pax is a comic that on some level understands this, but Harley’s vision of the public being inspired to rise up and stand for world peace is what it presents. It cannot imagine the people’s ascendance beyond such figures of almighty powers without those very powers inspiring them in some shape or form, for that is the perspective of Harley, its lead. In a way, it’s a fittingly paternalistic and empire-centric mindset befitting Harley. An attempt at breaking through a loop that only exists to seemingly reaffirm it. He is a true Liberal, with deep limitations. A far cry from a real Leftist progressive with any kind of active imagination.

As such, Pax Americana is a tragedy. It operates as a tragedy where nobody wins, where everyone loses, for powerful people and their designs doom everyone. It is Watchmen‘s kin in this regard, though it is also at once thoroughly Morrison/Quitely.

And its deployment of the 8 Panel Grid which divides into Frank Miller’s 16 panel grid as a symbol of The Forever War? It’s endlessly compelling.

“What if Frank Miller’s 16 panel grid, which divides down into an 8 panel grid, was the symbolic device and visual expression of America’s eternal obsession with violence in the name of peace?”

That’s a legitimately striking and loaded idea, particularly given Frank Miller’s deeply troubling politics and evolution Post-9/11, going onto pitch a comic that he himself described as “a piece of propaganda,” [in which] Batman kicks Al-Qaeda’s ass.” DC would reject the project, but it would see print under Legendary Comics.

Thus would emerge Frank Miller’s Holy Terror (2011).

It would be a work wherein Miller would himself follow the lineage of his 16-Panel Grid approach to the American superhero in the 1980’s to its natural contemporary conclusion- the Hitch Cinematic school.

It would be the absolute zenith of the expression of the idea of The American Superhero as a genre symbol and representation of American Power, with Miller doing a deeply, deeply right-wing comic starring Not-Batman taking on the evil Islamic terrorists who dare to disturb the Pax Americana of his beloved empire. Vengeance must be sought, blood for blood, eye for an eye, against those inhumane, exotic, and monstrous brown terrorists threatening the peace of America.

It’s a work of jingoism and vile Islamophobia that is a crystallization of the American response to 9/11 in a certain kind of naked, unfiltered fashion that is telling. There is no veneer of pretense to its racism and hate or bigotry – it’s loud, clear, on-its-sleeve and indulged proudly. It is the empire’s vision shown with the honesty of a man who’s deeply bought into its horrible propaganda, and is thus able to churn out his own propaganda to prop it all up.

It is monstrous, evil work that should’ve never seen print, but it did, and in doing so, it lays bare ugly truths.

It takes the idea of The American Superhero’s ‘neverending battle’, whether against Crime, Criminality, Villainy, just this idea of conflict against an abstract opposition, of enemies and a threat, and reframes it in relation to the Forever War. The American Superhero and their never-ending story and struggle become the endless War On Terror. Miller bridged the American superhero with post-9/11 rhetoric and American imperialism more strongly and more sincerely than anyone else.

It’s revealing work.

And on a formal level, it’s also work wherein Miller himself shows the reader the direct impact of shifting the beat rhythm from 1-2-3 to 1-2-3-4, as he even goes further and adds an extra tier to both the 9 panel grid and a 16 panel grid, to create a 12 panel grid page and a 20 panel grid page. He keeps on adding a panel on a tier and an extra tier each time, displaying the effect of it- it overwhelms the reader. It becomes too much.

Holy Terror uses this effect with the panels as effective ‘photos’ of fallen American citizenry of the empire, to convey a sense of incalculable lives lost, all to justify its vile propaganda. For American lives, the lives of the imperial citizens, matter more than any others. The American lives are more real, more human, than any others.

But that maximalist effect displayed via the initial switch from 1-2-3 to -1-2-3-4? It’s useful. And that maximalist 1-2-3-4 rhythm can be wielded differently. It can be used better, stronger, and smarter, which is what Frank Quitely does with it. In his hands, the tool transforms, as it does in the hands of any brilliant artist.

And so that 8/16 grid as a symbol of Forever War, of the loops of imperiums and the patterns they’re caught in? It makes sense. It works.

As Morrison themselves puts it:

It’s about America and specifically about America’s self-image as the world’s policeman. It tries to make a mind-devouring narrative Mobius strip out of the complicated, contradictory idea of using violence to enforce “peace.”

It’s an inspired usage of the form to make a point, because why not? If the 9 Panel Grid can be used to visually symbolize the colonialist cage under which the oppressed struggle, then why not use the 8/16 grid to symbolize the loop of forever war that plagues the imperial mindset?

It fits.

And the emphasis and focus on a neoliberal figure like President Harley is appropriate, especially given how much of a Morrisonian figure he is. Afterall, here is a figure who loves superheroes deeply and believes in their transformative power, as written by the writer of Flex Mentallo, which is rooted in the divine, transformative power of our superheroes. Here is a person who associates the America with both bloody death and superheroic salvation, which reflects Morrison’s own reality as the child of Glaswegian Anti-Nuclear Activists who spent their youth terrified and fascinated by America. America had The Bomb, but America also had Superheroes. America was the realm of Destroyers and also the realm of Creators. The nervous tension and relationship Morrison has with America is filtered through to Harley here. Harley is someone who believes the idea of the American superhero and a superman can triumph over the idea of the American bomb and thus save America.

But perhaps more tellingly his imperial mindset and limitedness is best reflected via the nature of Morrison themselves. Afterall, Morrison is a Scot and a second-generation Irish writer with intense distaste and critical views of Empire, Imperiums, from America to the British Empire. They’ve written plenty of work with well intention-ed progressive values being critical of such imperiums.
But they also went ahead and accepted an MBE, making them a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. They could have rejected it and taken a real meaningful stance and stood by their beliefs in real life beyond just the page, but they went ahead and went to the palace of those royals, and accepted the ‘honor’ from Prince Charles. It’s the kind of thing you couldn’t imagine Alan Moore even entertaining, but Morrison went ahead and did it. Morrison is a writer smart enough and aware enough to know all the reasons to not take it and refuse it, but in the end they took the Queen and the Empire’s special honor. They accepted the honors and medals of Pax Britannica, which gave way to our current Pax Americana.

Morrison is capable of being critical of imperiums while also accepting imperial honors that bring about intense distaste, which many more principled individuals have rejected. That’s a truth. They’re trying to have their cake and eat it, too. And so Morrison writing President Harley as a figure very aware of the problems of imperium but so thoroughly bound to that very same imperium?

It fits.

In a work so thoroughly about limits, limitations, and confines, Morrison’s own are laid bare in a way that gels with the material.

But do those limits then take away from the work and its own point and purpose? That’s a fair question, and it’s one where the answer will vary depending on the person. Personally, to this reader, the work as a gestalt of Morrison, Quitely, Fairbairn, and Leigh transcends beyond their makers, like any great work of art. The work stands on its own, and can be evaluated and engaged with as such, it’s what it is there for. And as a work so rooted in exploring the mind and faith of a neoliberal? It’s effective, it’s sharp, both intentionally and unintentionally, at once. There’s an honesty here that feels revealing and thus useful. If the work were about endless possibility rather than binding limitations, one might feel differently and the work might likely fail. But it is rooted in the inescapable chains that bind. It’s a tragedy and a loop about a modern ‘progressive’ who is aware and critical of Pax and yet is complicit in and benefits from it all at once. So it works.

The flaws of the creator help underline and enlighten the flaws of character, who is forged from the intimate fears and faiths of their psyche.

At the same time, however, Pax is also rooted in Morrison’s penchant for something else. Morrison loves doing single issues that chart entire lifetimes to tell a story, whether it be the classic ‘Best Man Fall‘ in The Invisibles #12 or ‘The Life and Times Of Joe Christmas‘ in Klaus. And with Frank Quitely, one of the best to ever do it, taking years to craft this life-story? The end result is impressive. It’s a fascinating artistic synthesis of a book, by all counts. But perhaps most interesting in its capture of a whole life lived is the usage of the quote on the cover, which operates at once as the first and last image of the story.

This quote by the American Poet Delmore Schwartz is an enticing and revealing choice. A child of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Delmore burst onto the scene in the 1930’s like a blazing star, full of possibility. He was hailed as brilliant and his poetry, at its best, was full of an aching beauty. The above quote, which Morrison uses for Pax, is taken from his poem Calmly we walk through this April’s day, which takes place in 1937 and is a reflection by Schwartz on the nature of time and memory and life. ‘Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn’ echoes and repeats throughout the poem, punctuating the beats of his various reflections, like the eternal constant of time itself. It is a tribute to many things, like much of Schwartz’s work, from the names of friends and family he knew or held dear to the city life he experienced, but above all it is a tribute to time. It is an ode to time as the eternal, endless flame that subsumes and consumes us all, wherein we are at once people and memory, as the infinite loop.

It’s a fitting choice in the context and contents of the issue, which is so much about loops and time, but at the same time, there’s another layer here. Schwartz’s story is, ultimately, a tragic. Bursting onto scene as a ball of fire, he was a genius who would go onto have a turbulent life that would be snuffed out at the age of 52, a far cry from the figure he was once seen as possibly being. Schwartz’s life was a bundle of possibility that didn’t see true fruition. His is a tale of tragedy, of a bright young man who it feels like could have and should have ended up anywhere except where he did. His life is the great ‘What could have been!’.

If there was ever a quote to sum up Schwartz, the above would be as good as any. But it works in the context of Harley, too.

Notice how the domino mask doubles as an 8 and a symbol of infinity- a loopHere is a boy that was once a bundle of possibility, that had a fire in him, and he could have been anything. Here was a young blazing star of possibility.

And yet he ended up becoming what he did. An American President. The Lord Of The Imperialists. The Imperialist Who Believes In Imperialist Redemption. The Deluded Fool Desperate To Redeem Empire.

A far cry from his working class artistic father. But perhaps that rose-tinted view of his own father doesn’t hold, given the elder Harley was in Vietnam and served there. He too was part of the imperialist machinery, one way or another. We only see him and know him and understand him through Harley’s own idealization of him, Harley’s rose-tinted memory of him. We don’t know the man himself. But the facts we know paint a depressing picture. There is complicity and blood on everyone’s hands here.

Tellingly, the elder Harley dies in 1974, which is the same year President Richard Nixon resigned after his disastrous Watergate mess and got pardoned for by his successor Gerald Ford. It was the symbolic death of American Justice, and the firm public cementing of a lot of pretenses falling away, as bastards like Nixon could do anything and get away with it, no matter what. It exposed the terrible horror of the whole system.

And the date of Nixon’s resignation is pertinent to Pax here, as critic Harry Kassen has frequently noted. Because the date, my friends? It’s August 8th.

The 8th day of the 8th month of the year.

8-8.

Infinite Loops. Forever War. Forever are we trapped in imperial cycles.

It’s sad, really. And that’s what Pax Americana as a comic wants us to take in. How sad this whole business and enterprise really is. How depressing and tiresome this whole damn loop, this goddamn 8 loop of infinity is. That no matter how good a man you put up to sit on that imperialist throne, who believes he’ll ‘break’ the cycle, he inevitably ends up being subsumed by it and becomes part of it.

It’s a book demonstrating a childish fantasy with a deadly consequence. And it is rather fitting, isn’t it?

After all, is this not the perfect encapsulation of America? A little white boy playing pretend with a gun, shooting recklessly with fear, and killing the very things that gave life to him and his world? A sad little boy with blood on his hands who gestures to higher, nobler aspirations, while climbing atop ever growing mountains of bloody bodies. All in the name of his dream. His peace. The cleansing of his soul, his satisfaction, his redemption, and his hero’s journey wherein he returns from the abyss to bring about salvation for mankind.

So what is the Pax Americana? It is a reflection of the world it stems from, much like Watchmen before it. It is the rare exception that understands that Watchmen is a challenge asking you to push forward rather than simply mimic or evoke in order to illuminate truth in bold ways. And so it does.

It lays bare an evident truth about the nature of imperial powers, and the champions it fosters.

It captures the ideology of such places and the people who populate it.

It crystalizes visually the eternal loop they are forever caught in.

God bless America.

God bless American Peace.

And God save those who dare disturb it.

For more in “Who Watched the Watchmen”…

The post Pax Americana and The Infinite Loop Of Imperiums appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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The films of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy – Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – are often cited among some of the most influential films in recent memory, certainly responsible for revitalizing the superhero genre in the public consciousness, but perhaps also changing the landscape of big-budget blockbuster Hollywood filmmaking. Nolan’s grounded approach to superhero films, seeped with realism, has influenced every franchise since, for better or worse.

It is easy to note and cite the influences these films have had since their release, but art is not born out of a vacuum. And while I do think “everything is a remix” can be a rather pessimistic way to look at things – if nothing is truly “original,” what is even the point, right? – it is important to look back, not just to gain a deeper understanding of a work, but also to acquire a new outlook with which to look forward.

So, what are the influences of The Dark Knight Trilogy? It is, of course, a marriage of two mediums, taking a character predominantly associated with comic books and bringing him onto the big screen, so it must have had influences from both films and comic books. What films informed the cinematography of this trilogy? And what stories from the character’s rich publication history were mined to tell the tale Nolan et al. were trying to tell with their films?

Batman BeginsAfter the disastrous Batman & Robin (1997), the Batman film franchise needed a revival. After several attempts to find the right filmmaker to helm the project, the powers that be at Warner Bros. finally settled on Christopher Nolan, who at the time was coming hot off the heels of the commercial and critical success of Memento (2000) and Insomnia (2002). David S. Goyer was hired soon enough, providing Nolan with the insight he needed to stay faithful to the mythos from the comic books.

As Goyer told The Guardian in 2013:

“Chris had never read comic books: he didn’t know the world. So he trusted me on that franchise […] to know what was canon: what could be changed and what couldn’t be changed.”

Together, the duo set out to revitalize both the franchise and the character. It helped that they both saw potential in a certain aspect of the character that previous films had failed to explore: Batman’s origin.

Years ago, in an effort quite similar to the one Nolan and Goyer were undertaking at the turn of the century, DC Comics hired Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli to reforge Batman’s origin, offering a definitive take that could forever be enshrined in their new canon for a new age; something that became necessary following Crisis on Infinite Earths, which did away with decades of continuity with the intention of providing a new starting point to the readers. Miller was a young auteur in the comic book industry at the time, having reinvented Daredevil at Marvel Comics and done something of a final Batman story at DC Comics. As Dennis O’Neil so eloquently put in his introduction to the trade paperback collection of Year One, “Having done Batman’s omega, Miller was willing and anxious to do Batman’s alpha.”

Miller and Mazzucchelli attempted to neither alter nor retell the “who he is and how he came to be” that the character’s creators, Bill Finger and Bob Kane, told in Detective Comics #33, just a few months after his debut in Detective Comics #27. Instead, they focused on what came after, when a young Bruce Wayne returned to Gotham after trekking the world for twelve years, training under the tutelage of various masters, honing his craft and sharpening himself for his fight as the caped crusader. Goyer was fascinated by these “lost years,” so to speak.

“The moment in Year One when Bruce Wayne is returning to Gotham after a multi-year absence. I was captivated by that. I wanted to explore what had happened in those intervening years,” Goyer told SFX in 2004. “And I also wanted to depict the moment when he decides to leave Gotham – what he would say to Alfred, his foster father, and how that would take a terrible toll on his heart… And because we were using Rā’s al Ghūl, we definitely used some of the Denny O’Neil issues as a point of reference.”

One Dennis O’Neil written story in particular – “The Man Who Falls,” illustrated by Dick Giordano and first published as the only original story in the 1989 Secret Origins trade paperback collection – would serve as the structural influence for the film, as cited in Genesis of the Bat, a short documentary featured in the DVD collection for Batman Begins.

Nolan too was captivated by Year One, but perhaps not in the same way as Goyer was. He was coming into the project from a filmmaker’s perspective and was looking for themes he could furnish the film’s world with. He was, however, interested in grounding Batman in contemporary reality and, as he told The Guardian in 2005, “wanted to try to do it in a more realistic fashion than anyone had ever tried to a superhero film before.” So, he traded the “fears, frustrations and hopes […] of 20th-century urban life” that Miller and Mazzucchelli, with colorist Richmond Lewis and letterer Todd Klein, had brought to life in Year One with that of the 21st-century. Nolan and Goyer’s Batman thus became a post-9/11 War on Terror Batman, militaristic in his approach to both crime-fighting and the gadgets that would help him in his war on crime.

Since this was Nolan’s first foray into the superhero genre, he leaned for inspiration on the very first superhero film of the modern age to truly capture the public’s imagination at large: Richard Donner’s Superman (1978). Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in 2015, Nolan elaborated on the impact the film had made on him and how it served as the blueprint for his take on Batman:

“I can remember the trailers for it, I can remember about Superman the movie, all of that. And it was very clear to me that however brilliant – and it was very brilliant – Tim Burton’s take on Batman was in 1989, and it was obviously a worldwide smash, it wasn’t that sort of origin story, it wasn’t that real-world kind of epic movie; it was very Tim Burton, a very idiosyncratic, gothic kind of masterpiece. But it left this interesting gap in pop-culture, which is, you know, you had Superman in 1978, but they never did the sort of 1978 Batman, where you see the origin story, where the world is pretty much the world we live in but there’s this extraordinary figure there, which is what worked so well in Dick Donner’s Superman film. And so I was able to get in the studio and say, ‘Well, that’s what I would do with it.’”

Nolan was insistent in presenting Batman’s world as realistically as possible, so Chicago became Gotham, much like how New York became Metropolis in Donner’s Superman. He did have to compromise to a certain degree, though. Finding himself unable to shoot on location, unlike how much of the subsequent films in the trilogy were shot, Nolan and crew had to “build the streets of Gotham in large part.” This is where Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) came into the picture as another influence, as Nolan told Forbes in 2015:

“I immediately gravitated toward the visual treatment that Ridley Scott had come up with, in terms of how you shoot these massive sets to make them feel real and not like impressive sets. And immediately we started looking at the rain, the handheld cameras, the longer lenses…”

The Dark KnightEscalation is the name of the game by the time Nolan and Goyer get to The Dark Knight. Interested in exploring how Batman’s war on crime would prompt criminals to retaliate with an increase in both intensity and intent, Nolan and Goyer spent months developing the key plot points for the film. As Goyer told Empire in 2012:

“With these three films […] we always said, ‘What kind of story do we wanna tell about our protagonist, what kinda challenges do we want to have them face?’ And then, ‘What character in the rogues’ gallery will be best equipped to put our hero through those?’”

The Joker seemed an obvious pick, having already been teased at the end of Batman Begins, even though Nolan had no plans for a sequel then, as he himself admitted to Empire in 2009:

“I didn’t have any intention of making a sequel to Batman Begins and I was quite surprised to find myself wanting to do it. I just got caught up in the process of imagining how you would see a character like The Joker through the prism of what we did in the first film.”

The Dark Knight’s Joker thus became “pure evil through pure anarchy” to the military might of Batman, tying into the film’s themes of escalation of terrorism, leading to some very real world parallels; to the point that, as The Atlantic reported in 2016, it prompted former US President Barack Obama to cite the film’s portrayal of the Joker as an analogy to explain the growth of the ISIL to his inner circle.

Heath Ledger’s legendary performance as the Joker is revered now, but back when his casting was announced, it was met with quite the backlash, from fans and critics alike. Jack Nicholson’s iconic portrayal of the Joker in Batman (1989) was seeped into the public consciousness and Ledger certainly had big shoes to fill. Nevertheless, Nolan trusted Ledger’s vision and, essentially, gave him free rein to develop the character.

“We talked a lot about Alex in A Clockwork Orange, people like that. He’d come up with the same things independently. I looked into his eyes and I just saw… This guy knows he can do something here, he wants to get in and do this thing. And that was without even a script! I always felt – because people were uncertain about the casting; other people were a little surprised by it, I think – but I always felt very strongly that he was going to really put everything into his performance and really do something extraordinary,” Nolan told Empire in 2009.

Speaking to MTV in 2008, Nolan argued how the films in The Dark Knight Trilogy are “a very large survey of the comic history.” That is particularly true for the books Ledger used to draw inspirations from for his performance. The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brain Bolland became a crucial influence to base the narrative that Ledger’s Joker wants to drive home in the film’s climax; which is, as Nolan told IndieWire in 2008, “pull everybody down to his level and show that he’s not an unusual monster and that everyone else can be debased and corrupted like he is.” In a way, Nolan and Ledger’s Joker is quite similar to the Joker the characters’ creators, Jerry Robinson, Bill Finger, and Bob Kane, envisioned back in Batman #1 – something that Nolan acknowledged while speaking with IndieWire in 2008:

“If you look at the first two appearances of The Joker ever in the Batman comics, we were quite startled to look back at those and realize how close that character is to what Heath’s done and what our story is. I think it’s very close to the original incarnation of the character some sixty-five years ago.”

In the end, “it’s a combination of reading all the comic books I could that were relevant to the script and then just closing my eyes and meditating on it,” Ledger noted while speaking with Empire in 2007:

“I sat around in a hotel room in London for about a month, locked myself away, formed a little diary and experimented with voices – it was important to try to find a somewhat iconic voice and laugh. I ended up landing more in the realm of a psychopath – someone with very little to no conscience towards his acts. He’s just an absolute sociopath, a cold-blooded, mass-murdering clown, and Chris has given me free rein. Which is fun, because there are no real boundaries to what The Joker would say or do. Nothing intimidates him, and everything is a big joke.”

Ledger’s “Joker diary”, “filled with images and thoughts helpful to the Joker backstory,” and his method-acting approach to find his vision for the character came under added scrutiny following his unfortunate demise before the film’s release. Grant Morrison, whose seven-year run on Batman has become somewhat of an ultimate take on the character, noted the inclusion of their stories in that diary, particularly Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth and “The Clown at Midnight.”

“He actually had a whole list – blind babies, doctors, accidents – really horrible stuff,” Morrison told MTV in 2008. “Heath wrote it all down. So yeah, I can see there’s a lot of [Arkham Asylum and “The Clown at Midnight”] in his Joker.”

Interested in grounding the character, as they had done with Batman, Nolan and Goyer went the opposite way of what Tim Burton did with his version of the character in Batman (1989), and what the duo themselves had done with Batman in Batman Begins. That is, they opted to not explore the Joker’s origin, but keep him rather mysterious in that aspect. Instead, the only member from the main cast who goes through something of a character arc in the film is Harvey Dent, who has a triumphant rise as the city’s new District Attorney, an ally to Batman and Gordon, to a tragic fall as Two-Face, forever on the opposite side of the law.

In both its intent – exploring the forces of acceleration that led to the transition of Batman’s rogues gallery from mobsters to supervillains and to tell the origins of Two-Face – the film drew heavily from The Long Halloween, the 13-issue limited series by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. Speaking to MTV in 2008, Nolan went into the details of precisely what pulled him into the book, “The Long Halloween has a great, triangular relationship between Harvey Dent and Gordon and Batman, and that’s something we very much drew from.”

The idea for The Long Halloween, as Loeb reveals in his introduction for the trade paperback collection, germinated when Archie Goodwin, editor extraordinaire, approached Loeb and Sale, who at that time were working for Marvel Comics, with an intriguing hook, “I just was sort of wondering what happened to The Roman and all those other gangsters from Batman: Year One. I don’t think Frank [Miller] is going to revisit that material, and maybe you two should.” Perhaps Nolan and Goyer, and Nolan’s brother, Jonathan, who joined the team to develop the screenplay, were also wondering the same, which is why The Dark Knight feels a lot like a crime drama that has escalated to envelope an entire city than a traditional superhero film focused on the fight between good and evil.

“In the case of The Dark Knight, we’re attempting to tell a very large, city story or the story of a city. In the same way that, I don’t know, Michael Mann’s films, like Heat or something. That was sort of an inspiration,” Nolan told IGN in 2007. “If you want to take on Gotham, you want to give Gotham a kind of weight and breadth and depth in there. So you wind up dealing with the political figures, the media figures. That’s part of the whole fabric of how a city is bound together.”

Nolan credits Heat for not just inspiring the central themes running through The Dark Knight, but also for the visual language of the film. As he explains in the interviews for The Nolan Variations:

“We’re going to shoot in a real city, with real streets and real buildings, because the scale of that can be massive. We are going to use IMAX cameras so we can shoot the full height of the buildings and we’re going to give you an antagonist who’s interfering with the very fabric of the city. Just from the way we shoot it, the Joker walking down the street will be a huge image. Heat was very much an influence, because Mann is a fanatic for architecture, too; he understands the grandeur of a city and how it can become a kind of epic playground.”

The Dark Knight RisesDespite the commercial and critical success of The Dark Knight, and that the film became such a global cultural phenomenon, Nolan was hesitant in making a third film in the series. “How many good third movies in a franchise can people name?” he joked in an interview with the LA Times in 2008. While that may be true, Hollywood logic would tell you otherwise. And so, after much delay, work began on the final entry in the trilogy. Goyer had written a three-film treatment back in 2005, various elements of which had been incorporated into Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Using that as a rough framework, Nolan completed a story outline which was then handed over to his brother to develop a screenplay out of:

“Without getting into specifics, the key thing that makes the third film a great possibility for us is that we want to finish our story,” Nolan told LA Times in 2008. “And in viewing it as the finishing of a story rather than infinitely blowing up the balloon and expanding the story.” Another thing that went contrary to Hollywood logic. But, Nolan, it would seem, had put his foot down. This would be the end of his version of Batman. “Unlike the comics, these things don’t go on forever in film and viewing it as a story with an end is useful. Viewing it as an ending, that sets you very much on the right track about the appropriate conclusion and the essence of what tale we’re telling. And it harkens back to that priority of trying to find the reality in these fantastic stories. That’s what we do,” he told LA Times in 2008.

The question then became who do you pit Batman against for his final story? The question plagued Frank Miller too when, years ago, he fired a “barrage of scenes” at Dick Giordano, who had then been promoted to an editorial position at DC Comics and had asked Miller to develop a Batman story. In Miller’s own words for the introduction to The Dark Knight Returns, a book so revolutionary that it continues to influence the superhero genre to this day, as it certainly did The Dark Knight Rises, he describes how he pitched a “raw, rambling narrative […] not yet a story at all, a mixed bag of cool things Batman will do and say that winds up with an ending that could never work.” Miller’s story would put Batman against the Mutants and their powerhouse of a leader and end with a showdown with Superman. Nolan’s is perhaps less sumptuous in its design, but is equally grand in its ambitions. The Dark Knight Rises gets a lot of its best ideas from The Dark Knight Returns, beginning with the core premise of a retired Batman coming back for one last fight, against an enemy that threatens to destroy his city.

In the case of The Dark Knight Rises, that enemy is Bane. “The fact is that The Joker is an anarchist. He has a plan, but not really, but kinda sorta he does… And the question that energizes The Dark Knight is: does he really wanna kill Batman or not? And the twist is that he doesn’t. He wants to kill everybody else. That opened up the possibility for a third film in which you have a more literal villain,” Jonathan Nolan told Empire in 2012, elaborating on the team’s choice to go with Bane as the villain for the film, a character perhaps far less familiar to the casual moviegoer than Joker:

“This is a much more driven character. Bane is a resourceful, cunning and committed villain who knows exactly what he wants. He wants Batman dead and Gotham in ruins. That’s fitting for a third film.”

Debuting in the “Knightfall” storyline that ran through the Batman line of books at DC Comics in the early 90s, Bane was created, in the words of the character’s co-creator, to be “Batman’s equal both physically and intellectually.” The film stays true to that, but chooses to drop the “fanciful” elements of the character, particularly his addiction to Venom, a highly effective strength-enhancing drug. His luchador-inspired look from the comics was also at odds with Nolan’s insistence to ground the character in contemporary reality. So, Nolan’s version of Bane became a militant leader, a revolutionary, and an Occupy Wall Street protester all rolled into one.

“Chris and David started developing the story in 2008 right after the second film came out. Before the recession. Before Occupy Wall Street or any of that,” Jonathan Nolan told the Washington Examiner in 2012, arguing against the parallels between the film’s pivotal moments and the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City. “Rather than being influenced by that, I was looking to old good books and good movies. Good literature for inspiration… What I always felt like we needed to do in a third film was, for lack of a better term, go there. All of these films have threatened to turn Gotham inside out and to collapse it on itself. None of them have actually achieved that until this film. A Tale of Two Cities was, to me, one of the most harrowing portrait of a relatable, recognizable civilization that completely folded to pieces with the terrors in Paris in France in that period. It’s hard to imagine that things can go that badly wrong.”

A sentiment his brother seemed to agree to. “There’s an attempt to visualize certain things in this film on this large scale that are troubling and genuinely threatening to the idea of an American city. Or, to put it another way: revolutions and the destabilizing of society have happened everywhere in the world, so why not here?” Nolan told Empire in 2012.

Filming a revolution, fictionalized as it may be, is not an easy task, especially on the scale Nolan wanted for his final Batman film. He took inspiration from an extraordinary 1966 film called The Battle of Algiers, a film that “captured the chaos and fear of an uprising” so vividly that its exhibitions in America carried the disclaimer that “not one foot” of newsreel had been used in the film. Chronicling the eponymous Battle of Algiers during the Algerian War (1954–1962), it is a brutal film that does not shy away from highlighting the human cost of war and the atrocities committed under colonial rule. Its documentary-style presentation of organized guerilla resistance was so authentic, and continues to be so, that even though the film was banned in France for several years, state authorities could not help but praise it when it finally released there in 1971.

It is appropriate then that Nolan described The Dark Knight Rises as a “war film.” Elaborating on the influences of The Dark Knight Rises, he told Empire in 2012:

“It’s a revolutionary epic. It’s looking back to the grand-scale epics of the past, really, and for me that goes as far back as silent films. I’ve been watching a lot of silent films with my kids on Blu-Ray. We’ve shot over a third of the movie on the IMAX format and that naturally puts you more in the mode of staging very large events for the camera. It’s my attempt to get as close to making a Fritz Lang film as I could.”

It is easy to see how Lang’s iconic 1927 film, Metropolis, inspired much of the visual language of class warfare that The Dark Knight Rises aims to convey to its audience. “In an era when films had to communicate purely with the visual, the relationship between the themes of the story and the architecture of the setting is clear and expressive,” Nolan told Yahoo! Movies in 2012, listing the films that inspired The Dark Knight Rises.

The Dark Knight Trilogy is certainly not a perfect set of films, but do I admire how every entry into the trilogy is ever so slightly different from the previous, yet stays within the tropes established by its predecessors. Take the superhero elements out of these films and, Batman Begins is very much a hero’s journey film, The Dark Knight is a crime drama, and The Dark Knight Rises is akin to a war epic. In fact, these films only reinforce how you can tell any story you want to with Batman, that the character is that versatile.

Maybe Frank Miller put it best when he compared the character to “kind of like a diamond” while speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2016:

“Batman’s just a terrific character, open to wildly different interpretations. […] he’s astonishingly versatile. He’s kind of like a diamond. You can throw him against the wall and you can pound him with a hammer, but you can’t break him. Every interpretation seems to work. […] You can do it badly, but you can’t really do it wrong.”

And perhaps that is why we keep going back, diving ever deeper into the character’s rich publication history, to mine these disparate interpretations for that spark of inspiration that can thrust us forward to tell an excitingly new Batman story. We pull from other mediums when need be. To experiment, of course, but also, isn’t it human nature itself? To see if it worked for them, can it work for us? It helps to study stories (and the storytelling techniques) of the past – and not look at them with nostalgia-tinted glasses – so that we can tell exhilarating new stories for the future. The Dark Knight Trilogy certainly wears its influences on its sleeves, but it never crumbles under the weight of them or comes across as a cheap knock-off. It took its influences and presented a bold new interpretation off them, thereby becoming the influence for legions of interpretations to come, and thus leaving a towering legacy.

The post The Dark Knight Trilogy 15 Years Later: Film & Comic Influences! appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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There is a great lie about Watchmen.

They repeat the lie over and over again, pretending it says a lot, when it says very little. It is not a lie of malice, but a lie of ignorance. It is a lie predicated on omission of truth. It is a lie that only emerges when one understands history. It is a meaningless statement presented as meaningful to those who don’t know better.

It is the first lie of American comics that every new reader is confronted with, when surveying the scene of the superhero.

And it is a lie that holds, despite everything else.

The lie is this:

Watchmen made the superhero dark and messed-up. It debased the innocent icons of youth, and brought about an age of ruinous darkness- a Dark Age as it’s called. It sapped the color and joy out of the bright and poppy supergods, and it’s the tiresome tome we all have to eternally deal with. It is the anti-christ to the divine ideal of the superhero, and Alan Moore its ultimate symbol; the bitter, distant dad who’ll never be happy, who’ll never be satisfied, and will forever spit venom against all that is holy and good and decent. Moore is the father of darkness, the dread and despair that haunts the superhero like a ghost, a horror, something to be exorcised and ‘purified’ while at the same time tapping into and absorbing his primal power.

None of this is true, but the industry bends over backwards to try and make it true, to make it seem as such. If they believe in it hard enough, it has to be true, right? It is the lie much of modern American superhero comics and the ‘industry’ around it is built upon.

And the lie works, and is predicated upon one simple principle:

The (Imagined) Innocent Past. The Ideal Age Of Purity, Nobility, and All-Ages Decency. The Great Time Before – when things were made up of sugar and spice and everything nice. After all, there must be an era of light for the light to vanish, no? A ‘darkening’ and a ‘dark age’ can only be contextualized and made sense of with the presence of a prior ‘brighter’ and ‘better’ era. It’s what you need to sell the narrative. It’s the period you need to make it work. And that period?

It’s The Silver Age Of Comics.

This is the second lie of American comics that all are presented with, like gospel.

That the ‘Silver Age’ as it is called (a period beginning in the mid 1950’s to the 1970’s) was ever innocent and decent and nice. That it was all beautiful wonders and imaginative delights, and all was as it should be. A time of super-dogs, super-families, and great, big, imaginative ideas. A golden age, beyond the actual era dubbed The Golden Age which preceded it.

People talk of mini-supermen being shot out of Superman’s hands, they talk of Krypto The Super-Dog and Supergirl, but they have no context for them. They do not understand, for instance, that none of these things were particularly novel and were originally done in The Golden Age era comics of Captain Marvel in the 1940s. That before there ever was a Supergirl, there was Mary Marvel, that before Krypto The Super-Dog, there was Hoppy The Marvel Bunny. They don’t realize that the very same man that made Supergirl and Krypto was also the defining Captain Marvel, and they don’t even know to ask why he was even working at DC.

They do not know that Captain Marvel and its publisher Fawcett were deliberately sued into oblivion by National Comics Publications, the company that would become DC Comics, because Captain Marvel was just too damn popular and sold too well and that bothered the IP owners of Superman. If you can’t surpass the competition, destroy it, this was the animating motto. And so Otto Binder, the man who made Mary Marvel, who wrote ‘The Marvel Family’, the first superhero family of comics, who was a key figure in the first proper ‘superhero shared universe’ of comics (that was destroyed and torn down because it was too damn popular in the eyes of DC’s predatory owners), would eventually end up working at DC.

Even Superman, the golden boy and icon of DC, who’d initially started out as a hot-blooded champion of the oppressed changed. The process of ‘softening’ had long begun, as Superman went from a pulpy Doc Savage-inspired figure killing wife-beaters and other bastards without hesitation to the Binder-era version far more akin to Captain Marvel than ever before. Superman’s biggest and brightest ideas would be cover songs of the once-richer Captain Marvel concepts, except most would barely realize it. Fawcett would become something to be stripped for parts to be devoured by DC, for that is what DC is wont to do. Their greatest failure being perhaps that they couldn’t do it to Marvel.

That is comics. For that is how it all began. Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson or The Major as he’s often called, was the man who would bridge the pulps and comic strips that had long existed into the form that had yet to exist. He’d give birth to what we now consider ‘comic books’ through his venture National Allied Publications in 1934-1935. He was the publisher’s founder, but not for long, as he’d be deep in debt to Harry Donnenfeld, another pulp publisher and powerful entrepreneur. By 1937, he’d be forced out and would lose it all to Harry Donnenfeld, who along with his lawyer Jack Liebowitz would become the owner of the now Detective Comics Inc. And then in 1938 the people at this new company would meet with two kids named Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. And they’d trick these two kids into giving up this hot new idea called Superman, which then they would forever own, with the two kids getting little to nothing for decades.

That is comics history. That is DC’s history. Its very founder, the father of the comic book and this entire landscape, expelled out. The very fathers of Superman and the superhero given bare scraps and little else. This is the true darkness that haunts the whole terrain, now and forever, the original sin of comic books and superheroes – exploitation and the mistreatment of the very real people. It is indivisibly linked to the work on page and cannot be separated, for that work has a price, and a cost, and few seem to understand its immensity.

And that is what brings us to The Silver Age, the imagined and constructed ‘golden age’ in cultural consciousness, when it was anything but. People pretend what is on page is ‘as it should have been’, like these stories just magically pour out with no context or material realities informing them. The Silver Age, in truth, was far darker, bleaker, and horrible than any ‘Dark Age’ that followed. For it was the age of the Comics Code Authority, formed in 1954 after the vile conservative fervor built up by Frederick Wertham in the 1950’s about how your child might gasp become gay by reading an issue of Batman. It was an era of intense suppression, born out of catering to blatant right-wing White Supremacist ideology, wherein the conservatives tried to choke the damn life out of comics as an art-form and control it intensely.

The code had something of a precedent and predecessor in the form of the 1948’s ACMP Code (drawing upon the Hays Code of the era), but it was one that was frequently and largely ignored by many and meant little, particularly by 1954, which is why you had the stronger CCA formed and established. Look at the above and see how oppressive it is. What people forget when they naively celebrate the Silver Age as a wonderland of fantasy and imagination is just how much of the material and the ideas and the general landscape had to cater to and fit with the Code. It’s why you get a plethora of Cop Heroes, which just neatly fit into the framework the code likes. It’s why true radical politics or critique of systems also became difficult. It’s a rule system designed for dull propagandist fare. That there were creators who were talented, brilliant and skilled enough to operate within the confines of this hellish system to create powerful work? That’s the magic, that’s the miracle.

Counter to popular presentation, this wasn’t the era where imaginative ideas ran free. It was one where imagination itself was confined and constrained, as American Comics lost its entire future. Every genre except ‘superhero’ was choked to death, and those who dared depict Black people as Astronauts? Why, they had to go.

It was an age of bigoted, regressive values and horrible censorship. People talk about the brilliant ideas and work that got made amidst it. They are in awe of the creators and their incredible talents. But they act as if this history is absolute, that this is how it always would have been, like there were no possibilities. They do not wonder – what if all these brilliant, legendary creators at the absolute height of their powers, in their absolute prime, weren’t constrained and limited and could truly make anything? What if they didn’t have their hands tied? What if we never got them limited to just 40% of 50% of their true potential and locked into a narrow hallway of the kinds of comics they could make in the mainstream space?

They don’t ask:

What could have been?

How much better and different could it all have been?

They don’t ask what we lost. The gravity has not dawned on them to really consider: How much did we lose? All those years, all those possibilities, just stamped out, never even allowed into being. So much damage, at such a crucial point for the medium and form, that can never be undone. They never dream of the world where comics weren’t choked to homogenized white boy superhero fare under Marvel/DC and could’ve been so much more. Diversity was stolen from us, not just racial diversity, but also genre diversity and the diversity of the actual stories possible.

There was a time when Romance Comics were at the top of the world, but that world is now long gone, as everything got flattened out into superhero fare, as everything was rolled into the priorities of crafting together a Superhero Shared Universe in the ’60s. There was a world of weird EC comics, wild war comics, hysterical comedies, all of which did well, but it’s all long gone now. The ways in which those genres could have developed on their own or been effective? We’ll never know, because it all died out to prop up the good ol’ CCA-abiding superhero.

The Silver Age isn’t to be celebrated as a naive wonderland of whimsy and imagination. It is to be celebrated only for the resilience of its creatives who worked under hellish censorship and circumstances and still made worthwhile work that still speaks to us now, despite endless constraints and nonsense eternally limiting them. It is the true dark age of comics, for underneath all the bright colors and big smiles and Americana imagery lies the dark reality of conservative machinations. It’s the image of nuclear family every conservative ad is selling you, which is meant to be happy, but is in truth full of darkness and sinister horrors lurking beneath.

It’s why there is a sinister or disturbing quality to many a silver age story or character or certain moments, even if they aren’t played obviously as such. The glossy censored presentation of America makes some of them, if anything, arguably much more disturbing or distressing at times. That is the truth. As many neuroses and notions were put into the works in more ‘sublimated’ fashion or in a more abstract manner. All that occurred in the periods afterwards was that the creators didn’t have to do resort to that, and could just openly show or do certain things that they previously might have shied away from. It’s what makes all the rose-tinted views of The Silver Age frustrating, given its material realities. It is not a past to mourn the loss and death of nostalgically, as though it were an age of innocence. It is all the union-busting and mistreatment of the ordinary man to fill the pockets of a richer one, whilst publishing books about heroism.

Here’s a sampling of truth:

Mark Evanier: Towards the end of your career at DC, there was an attempt to form a writer’s union…

John Broome: Oh, yeah. I developed a fixed idea that DC should pay us for reprint material. When they reprinted a whole story without paying us, that was a stealing of our abilities. It was stealing something away from us. I knew that, in movies and television and ASCAP [the composers’ union], they paid royalties…so I thought comics should pay royalties and I talked to the other writers. I didn’t talk to the artists…they were above me, anyway.

There were five or six writers — Eddie Herron, Bob Haney, Otto Binder, Gardner Fox, a few others. I think it took six or eight months but one day, I got them all together — all in the same room, ready to do what we had to do, which was to march into Liebowitz’s office. Liebowitz was the millionaire boss. We marched in and demanded reprint rights. And Liebowitz, who I understand is still alive…he’s about 95 or something.

Julius Schwartz: Or more!

Broome: He didn’t waste any time. He said, “Boys, I’ll give you a two dollar raise,” and immediately, my union collapsed! (Audience laughs) That was the end of the first union at DC.

Evanier: Can you give us a year on that? About ’68 or so?

Broome: By ’68, I was already cashing out of the picture. It would be earlier. Maybe ’65 would be about right.

Evanier: Now were there other grievances besides the reprints? Didn’t some of the guys want health insurance?

Broome: Maybe. I think maybe they had other demands, but that’s the only part I recall. Liebowitz was afraid of me. He knew I was a danger to him. I was going to cost him money! (Audience laughs). So he didn’t like me but he really couldn’t get rid of me too easily.

That’s the reality of the Silver Age, where much of the horrific exploitation was, if anything, firmly cemented, while companies collected ideas at an even more rapid pace and built out their super-shared universes, as the darkness only grew, whilst a sinister shiny sheen of innocence and smiles adorned the pages.

Perhaps this is best expressed by the tale of Jim Shooter as a literal child at the age of 14, who was horrifically mistreated in nigh supervillainous fashion by Mort Weisinger, the very man behind overseeing Superman in that period, and who also co-created Aquaman and Green Arrow:

First of all, my family needed the money. Badly. Second, my editor, Mort Weisinger, mean as a snake at his nicest, would have screamed at me more than usual if I was ever late.

Mort would call me every Thursday night, right after the Batman TV show to go over whatever I’d delivered that week. […] The calls mostly consisted of him bellowing at me. “You fucking moron! Learn to spell! What the hell is this character holding? Is that supposed to be a gun? It looks like a carrot! These layouts have to be clear, retard!” When you’re 14 and the big, important man upon whom your family’s survival depends calls you up to tell you you’re an imbecile, it makes an impression…

It got to the point where any time I’d hear a phone ring I’d clench up, white knuckled. Very Pavlovian. Even in school, or some other place that was ostensibly safe, a ringing phone jolted me.

Mort used to tell me I was his “charity case.” He said that the only reason he kept me on was because my family would starve otherwise.

The net effect of Mort’s honking at me was slowing me down. I’d sit there for hours, immobilized, useless, unproductive, because I was sure that anything I put on the paper would be wrong and therefore, Mort would scream at me. My mother would occasionally plead with me. She’d say, “We really need a check.” I started working in my room, sitting on my bed to keep my lack of production more private. Every once in a while she’d come upstairs, look at the blank page on my lap board and start crying. That was tough. She meant no harm. But that was tough.

At some point, my fear of delivering work that Mort would rip me to shreds over was eclipsed by the fear of failing to deliver, or delivering late, which would be worse.

So no, there was no ideal era of wonder and magic, no imagined golden age of the past from which things dilapidated. There was only censorship, union-busting, exploitation, and we’d only manage to escape the shackles of one of those things once the Silver Age was done. The rest? We’re still dealing with them, even to this day.

So no, Watchmen did not make superhero comics darker, much like Harry Osborn or Roy Harper being a junkie didn’t make them ‘darker’. The fact is, these things happened when people in the 1970’s firmly got beyond the shadow of the CCA and said ‘Screw it’. These were people no longer bothering with the Code and just doing as they liked. And that led to the 1970’s wherein you saw some really fun experimentation and weird, interesting comics pop up, and the slow march of progress shirking off the Code began, and it is in that tradition that Watchmen belongs. It is part of that long, hard, difficult march forward. It is part of a specific history.

Comics, freed from the shackles of the CCA, were always going to get ‘darker’ when compared to the era of rigid censorship. That was inevitable. Whatever works managed to successfully leap free from the tendrils of that censory past to truly be bold and worthwhile on a big scale? Folks were always going to try to shallowly imitate them to try and recreate their monumental success. If it wasn’t Watchmen (or Batman: The Dark Knight Returns), it would’ve been something else. That too was inevitable. And besides, what makes Watchmen remarkable isn’t its ‘dark’ or ‘darker’ superheroes, for Alan Moore had already done Miracleman by the time of its publication. No, what made it remarkable was how well-crafted it was, its formal boldness, and how it exploded the cold war zeitgeist and politics of its era for powerful genre fiction that had as much to say on American Imperialism as it did power fantasies of masked vigilantes. It was drawn and lettered impeccably by Dave Gibbons, a master of the ‘British Clean’ school of comics art, his artistic forefathers traceable to the likes of the incredible Don Lawrence, and colored evocatively by John Higgins. It was a tome of masterful ambition and ‘Comics as a Novel’ and it was unlike anything that had been done as a pure display of craft to tell a genre story, and one with that much ambition.

Watchmen didn’t make comics darker.

Watchmen made comics better.

For every million shitty frauds who tried to copy it and made shallow rubbish, it gave us legions of Neil Gaimans, Grant Morrisons, Garth Ennises, Kieron Gillens, Jonathan Hickmans, and many, many more. Moore, Gibbons, and Higgins gave a gift to the form. They made an ultimate showcase for the form and its power and potential, and displayed the allure of comics as an artform to a wider cultural audience. They brought in a plethora of people who may not have otherwise gotten into comics, and showed them the magic. And even those brilliant creators who didn’t care for it had to respond or come up with approaches for themselves in a post-Watchmen world, and that led to a fascinating world. It’s why and how we have Keith Giffen’s plethora of Post-Watchmen comics from JLI to his Five Years Later run on Legion.

But also, on a fundamental material level, it changed things. When Alan Moore fell out with DC on the matter of principle and split with them over the issue of Creator Rights, his strong stance is what led to better contracts and terms for those that would come after him. For if nobody ever makes noise or stands up to the powers that be, how would things get better? Moore happily did the job, for which many benefited, including the likes of Gaimans and Morrisons. Moore’s work and its success is what gave us The British Invasion and led us to Vertigo Comics, and everything since. It is, after all, in Vertigo Comics that we’d see the restoration of so many genres and varied approaches in mainstream comics that had long been buried away. From Sandman to Kill Your Boyfriend to Preacher and plenty more, a whole world of possibilities opened up for people. Moore inspired millions to pick up a pen and get writing and drawing. He inspired both professionals and amateurs. He inspired people, and those that he helped inspire inspired legions more. And ultimately, Moore’s values and his conviction to his principles helped and aided those that followed him.

Moore didn’t unleash darkness upon comics. Moore unleashed a challenge. And like any challenge, legions failed at it, for such is the nature of any challenge. One cannot blame Moore or his work any more than one can blame a classic band whose great original songs have had endless rubbish cover songs and riffs. The failings of the lesser artists are not the failings of the greater artist who asked the legions to rise up to their challenge.

Moore is not the bitter father, but the gentle, humorous giant from Northampton. A guy you could grab a lovely drink with at the pub, a man who reads stories to his grandkids, who puts on elaborate make-up and performs delightful roles, and just loves to chat about art and culture and people. Alan Moore is the man who mentors and teaches Neil Gaiman how to write comics, who has a laugh with Michael Moorcock and Eddie Campbell, and gives lectures at universities and tries to care for his hometown of Northampton with a fierce love.

When people talk of Alan Moore, they hardly talk of Alan Moore The Person or even Alan Moore The Artist, instead they talk of Alan Moore The Idea. And this is not Alan Moore, not in any real material sense. That’s a Ghost of a Dark God that has been conjured up by the collective of comics nerds and companies who wish to not face the real darkness and rot at the root of American comics. They’d rather construct an easy narrative of The Bitter Old Man than accept the realities of the status quo. It’s easy to deride a man as ‘crazy’ for having spirituality or faith in magic, for not bowing down to corporate overlords and being their lapdog, and for speaking bluntly, truthfully, with class consciousness and critical awareness of fan-culture and how that’s exploited in comics. But it’s harder to acknowledge all the realities he’s speaking to, and the difficult truths he’s imparting and symbolizes.

It’s why he matters, it’s why Watchmen matters.

And they always will.

For more in “Who Watched the Watchmen”…

The post Who Watched the Watchmen? Watchmen and The Darkness Within appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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You’ve heard the word. You know the story.

Crisis.

The iconic, defining, definitive word of DC stories.

The word Crisis feels inseparable from the fabric of DC. It holds sway over its past, it informs its present, and it will certainly influence the future. You can’t think of DC and not think of Crisis at some point. The very idea of it has been bound to the very idea of DC that tightly.

And the response to the word and its invocation is intense as well. It comes with a lot of assumptions and baggage. Given that is the case, given it has become ubiquitous, inevitable, and all-pervading with DC itself, it’s worth discussing what has become of it. What has emerged from this focusing and this obsession over Crisis in DC? What has it led to?

The matter of Crisis must be unpacked, and that’s what we’re here to do.

Picking up where we left off…

Endless EscalationBy now, the problems of DC Comics and its Crisis storytelling ought to be evident and obvious. Consider the above page from Death Metal for instance.

Scott Snyder wants it to be a cool, slick, inviting party to rock out at in pure celebration of the past. And that’s cool! The art by Greg Capullo and colorist FCO very much fits that metal party vibe. It looks cool and conveys a sense of the ‘epic,’ depicting a wide tapestry and rich history. It feels like a party invite for the reader into the absurd realms of DC.

But then onto that gorgeous Greg Capullo artwork, on this great Double-Page Spread conveying scope and screaming Cool, you attach a billion droning caption boxes of text that seems to only drown out its impact. On and on the text goes about all these things you need to know, as it becomes a busy exposition overload in needlessly long, tedious fashion. It’s not just that there’s too many words; it’s that they’re all the wrong words here. They detract from the strength of Capullo’s terrific art. They tire you out, and you don’t end the page on the initial ‘Oh, cool, sick visuals,’ you instead end up exhausted. All it paints is a picture of endless, constant, tiresome escalations, as things keep getting Bigger and Badder, to almost parodic degree, and it doesn’t present a thrilling landscape at all that Capullo’s art seems to try to convey. It conveys one lost up its own ass in insular fashion.

If you ever have to write like that and do that much to do a basic sell of your event, you’ve evidently gone wrong somewhere. That absurdly busy page, stacked with text-boxes, is perhaps the best encapsulation of the issue here.

It’s constant escalation that means nothing. It’s an issue so obvious, so blaring, and so glaring, even Grant Morrison themselves pointed it out in a biting piss-take during 2020’s Green Lanterns: Blackstars series:

It’s a truth that feels inevitable and obvious to almost everyone with clarity, as even Morrison’s mockery here is one from a place of self-awareness. Morrison is well aware of their own complicity in this trend, particularly given their JLA was and still is the foundational model for that ‘every arc is massive and earth-shattering like an Event,’ and even their works since have somewhat contributed towards that endless parodic escalation of things.

We have gone from ‘The Anti-Monitor, aka DC’s Galactus but Universes instead of Planets’ as The Big Bad to Alexander Luthor and Superboy Prime. We’ve gone from Darkseid and Mandrakk to Doctor Manhattan. Even Barbatos who was a more minor figure in Peter Milligan and Grant Morrison’s works became The Big Bad in a Crisis. And since then? We’ve kept it going.

We somehow got to ‘The Anti-Monitor’s Mom is The Big Bad’ as a serious idea as opposed to a joke comment. And then we got to The Batman Who Laughs, who in the stories is powered up to supergod status by Doctor Manhattan powers due to a Bruce Wayne/Doctor Manhattan amalgam from the Dark Multiverse. Now, if that sounds like a set of absolutely insane words, it’s because they are. That’s how we’ve been escalating. And now we have The Great Darkness and The Dark Army, collecting all of DC’s big event antagonists into an even more ever-escalating plot of multiversal disaster involving both ‘Pariah’ and Deathstroke.

Consider how we ever got to insane pages like this:

Which, the more you look at it, the more it feels like the comics equivalent and version of the Pepe Silvia meme:

These things have been derailed and lost sight of what matters most, or why people care about any of this. People keep doing stories all built around being Bigger, Badder, and Wilder than the last guy before them. They want to ‘top’ the past, and the only way they seem to be able to conceive of doing that is to try and raise the scope, scale, and bombast even higher, with even bigger nonsensical cosmic threats, as even louder and age old arguments about DC Comics are had.

But they forget none of that noise is why people ever cared or liked these stories. It was purely character. It was compelling character writing. And crucially, character not as representative or vehicle to wage insular fan arguments over nonsensical DC crap no one really cares about. It’s character writing rooted in real things, real feelings, real experiences and emotions, things beyond just the fabrics of DC comics publishing and its universal lore.

And the problem with these ever-escalating stories is they distract from that. The character(s) get lost in all that noise. What’s interesting about characters is watching them make choices, difficult choices, decisions that are hard, which require significant dramatic conflict, which carry a lot of weight and stakes, and have consequences that will be felt. It’s why people love, say, All-Star Superman or Watchmen, despite those being radically different books. They’re not tirades or fan arguments insular to the superhero. No, instead they strip away all that noise and tell really strong character-focused, thematically-driven genre stories with these figures that speak to larger struggles, realities, and universal feelings.

What this mode of endlessly escalating event storytelling that has been so bound up with the word ‘Crisis’ does is present the veneer of character and choice- whilst offering none. The characters get ‘choices’ in these books, sure, but they’re not really choices. They’re obvious, easy, predictable things that need to happen to serve and facilitate the plot. They’re reactions the characters need to have in a reactive manner to make the event ‘work.’ They carry the veneer of ‘challenge’ and ‘dramatic conflict’ but really have none. And neither does the decision/choice, as the consequence is just some other aspect of meaningless plot or ‘set-up’ for the next big event comic that’ll repeat all this.

Everything feeds the next Big Thing, and keeps the machine running, and it’s all Stuff Happens comics that you’ll forget by the time the next one rolls around, because that’s how it works, and that’s how they get you to pay up. It’s cheap, hollow, and it does a disservice to both the characters and the readers who hope to read them.

(The Absence Of) Dramatic Conflict and Real ChoicesIf you’ve read this far, you’ve likely wondered at least once ‘Why no mention of Identity Crisis, which came before Infinite Crisis? And why no Heroes In Crisis?’, and that’s understandable. They’ve been excluded up until this moment because this is precisely where they make the most sense to discuss.

We’ve discussed the importance and necessity of Crisis stories moving away from the ever-increasing escalation featuring ever larger supreme antagonists like That One Alan Moore OC, This Riff On An Alan Moore OC, or Anti-Monitor’s Uncle. There’s gotta be a different approach to ‘Crisis’ comics that takes a break from all that mad mayhem and increasingly bombastic reality-breaking affair with the whole multiverse on the cusp of redefinition every Wednesday.

And that alternative has historically been represented by the mode in which these two Crisis books work and operate. Brad Meltzer and Rags Morales’ Identity Crisis was technically speaking the first real ‘Crisis’ comic of the modern era, and one overseen and approved by Dan Didio himself. It would lay the groundwork that’d be picked up on and become story for Johns’ Infinite Crisis and even 52. It was the beginning of the Didio ‘Crisis’ era of modern DC comics, being among the first things Didio oversaw when he came to the Publisher under the tutelage of Paul Levitz.

And if Identity Crisis was a shock-wave that led to a Geoff Johns event that was all Fan Arguments staged as comics, then Tom King and Clay Mann’s Heroes In Crisis was a different beast. Heroes In Crisis followed on from Johns’ DC Rebirth, and rather than preceding the Fan Argument Comics, it would be a response to some of the ideas in those comics. Both books are quite different, evidently, but at the same time they have more in common than not. For one, Brad Meltzer is a direct inspiration and influence for Tom King, and both Meltzer and King share a desire to take a novelistic approach that feels a bit different from other Crisis attempts. Plus, both are Watchmen-inspired comics to the bone- murder mystery dramas steeped in the troubling secrets, coverups, and failures of the leading heroes and the superhero community. If Identity Crisis merely seemed to try and (in juvenile fashion) mimic the trappings of a ‘mature’ superhero comic like Watchmen, Heroes In Crisis would try to much more actively take from its form as well, deploying King’s love of 9-panel grids, all topped off with a whole blatant ‘I did it 35 minutes ago’ reference.

Both were comics that weren’t about the end of the world, but were human dramas about the community and struggles and pain of these people within them, and how they dealt with that. They both hinged around and focused on choices. Characters made notable, messy choices and decisions that had clear repercussions in the story, and also carried many implications. Both stories actively problematized and brought a discomfort to their superheroic cast of characters and their communities.

But the problem is…both were deeply, deeply poor works. Both comics are, for instance, laced with really poor handling of the female characters. Identity Crisis in particular, given its whole premise is ‘What if the Justice League dealt with a case of horrible sexual assault within their community?’, with the story being the worst possible answer to that question. It’s hard to look at the book and not see the almost raging, bone-deep misogyny in that book, with horrid evocation and shock-value deployment of Sexual Assault. But even beyond that, Identity Crisis is a deeply poor mystery that opts for said misogyny in its revelations and resolution, when doing so actively breaks its mystery completely and totally beyond any sense or believability. It’s a book that has the choice between having a workable mystery or being misogynistic, and it opts for the latter. When it reveals that Jean Loring, the Atom’s Wife, has been The Secret Mystery Bad Guy All Along, it’s baffling. Its a book whose characterizations of its cast operate in shallow caricature, its idea of human drama deeply juvenile and insipid, and generally feeling like the worst kind of attempt by out of touch try-hard guys to say ‘Comics are Mature now, man!’.

It’s a book that understands that character choices, decisions, and agency are interesting, and that human drama is compelling. It’s just that the only way it can seem to do that and manifest that is in awful, rubbish stories involving women’s rape, coverups and mind-wipes that screw with people’s memories. It’s all shock with no real substance. It’s an empty void of a book with no soul. It’s hollow mimicry without any grasp or understanding, and it brings is ruin. For to confuse shock with story is to not know story at all. The end result is something that thinks it is deliberately uncomfortable in the literary sense, but in truth is just repulsive rubbish with little to say. There’s nothing up on offer here, and no humanity to hold onto. It’s an idiot’s idea of Prestige TV and Alan Moore comics.

Heroes In Crisis on the other hand is less of a mess, but still deeply stupid. Its handling of its women in contrast to the men, from Batgirl to the way Mann’s pages at times present Lois Lane in a way that takes away from what the story wants to be about, is poor. King’s work in general has tended to write women in a set of noir archetypes, and nowhere is the limitation and the flaw of that more clear than here. But even beyond that, while trying to make a comic about mental health and mental illness and how ‘just go to therapy’ isn’t a fix, and how the heroes absolutely bungle and mess up this therapy program isn’t inherently bad, the end result here does feel like the worst possible version of it.

Worse is the fact that King had talked about how the story’s inception was rooted in School Shootings of America, and thinking about what happens when spaces meant to be sacred and safe are violated like that and covered in violence. Here’s King himself speaking on that matter for press, as reported by Polygon:

We already knew that Heroes in Crisis would be a murder mystery, but at San Diego Comic-Con King revealed the scale of that mystery. The inciting moment won’t just be a murder, but a mass shooting.

“It starts with something we see everyday in America,” King told reporters in San Diego, “Something I saw when I was overseas and I never thought would come here, but it’s here and it’s fucking everywhere. And it starts with a massacre at Sanctuary — in this space, in this safe place, in this place that Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman dedicated their lives to keeping safe — a dozen heroes are killed and they don’t know who killed them.”

Polygon asked King how the idea of using a mass shooting in the story came about, and his answer was simple. His youngest child was about to enter kindergarten, and he’d realized that among all the usual fears about how his son would fit in with his classmates, was the fear that he’d be harmed by a school shooter.

“And because I have a fucked up job, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a great idea for a story,’” King said. “That’s how I was thinking of Sanctuary. It’s a safe zone; it is someplace that you can’t violate. And that would happen there, there would be a massacre in the one place that that shouldn’t happen. That’s where the idea came from.”

And the end result of that becomes a story that feels like it evokes all the worst parts of those real life School Shootings themselves, wherein the real victims who suffered and died in the tragedy are reduced to small tiny boxes and testimonies to punctuate their tragedy, to serve their role as The Victims and little else, while Wally West who is behind these deaths is given central focus as the leading man and star with all the interiority and complex motivations in the world. Wally West becomes the White School Shooter figure, the monster media covers ad nauseum and tries to paint as a sympathetic figure to ‘understand’ while reducing the actual victims to footnotes.

There are character choices and decisions and human drama, but they’re ill-considered ones that feel carelessly implemented without the meaning and implications really worked though.

Perhaps the only real arena in which Heroes In Crisis works is its response/counter-examination of Wally West’s horrifying existence. Johns in Rebirth makes the pretense that this man who had lost all his history, his entire life and all his achievements, everything he ever did, his wife, the love of his life, his kids, none of that existing…would seemingly be okay. That he could and would be the symbol of Hope and Optimism. A symbol, not a man or a real person with real feelings and emotions. Even in Rebirth books, when Wally eventually meets Superman (who has his family despite the reality shenanigans) he just gets a ‘Well, it’s worked out for me! Hope it does for you man, see ya!’ rather than any measure of real comfort.

What would losing everything you ever were, ever did, ever had do to you? What would your wife, the love of your life not even knowing you or recognizing you do to you? What would losing your kids do to your mental state? How would having everything you ever did undone hurt you? And how would that all hit you even more when people grasped your shoulder and you that you were ‘Hope’ and people admired your ‘Optimism’ and ‘Heroism,’ when you didn’t want that, you just wanted your family, your love, and your life back?

What happens when people prop you up and turn you into a symbol of Hope like that, without caring for or considering your feelings and wrecked emotional state? How would it actually feel to be a legacy hero whose very legacy had been completely erased?

These are the questions Heroes In Crisis delves into with its Wally West, and it tries to be emotionally honest about them, suggesting that the shallow ‘hope’ spiels of Rebirth are emotionally dishonest. And that we should consider the feelings and emotional realities of Wally West as a character, as a person, rather than prop him up as some abstract symbol, because that’s not what made him fun or interesting. Barry was the symbol. Wally was the man. And it’s not wrong on this front. The problem is just that given the inception and nature of the story, and the eventual choices it makes, where it takes Wally become deeply poor decision-making. And not ‘poor decision-making’ in a dramatically compelling, deliberate fashion, but poor decisions as in ‘This does not work and it really needed reconsidering and more thought.’

It’s all the worst and most careless parts of Tom King’s work writ large, particularly with its framing that casts Wally West in a role akin to a White School Shooter. And when you’ve ended up there, with a sentence like that, you know things have gone irrevocably wrong. It’s a problem that tracks with the brand of Whiteness and emphasis on White men of violence that is characteristic of ex-CIA agent Tom King’s work. And its essential failure is perhaps best captured here, in a brutal honesty that may be hard to find elsewhere. It’s a book bound to King’s particular background, with the concept of ‘Sanctuary’ being informed by the mental health/help/therapy situation of American veterans and military men who are dealing with PTSD, and how the whole thing is a disastrous mess. It’s why despite many fans pinning all the failings on Dan Didio or Editorial, the idea that the book isn’t really King’s is deeply dishonest and misled. No, the very concept was bound to Mass Shootings in America, particularly in Safe Spaces like schools. That is the way the book is to be read, for it is its essence, and it is indivisible from King’s own troubling background and baggage.

In the end, these are really poor comics. They focus upon character choices and decisions, they understand that agency is interesting, they understand that you need dramatic conflict, with the choices having to be spiky and ones that surprise and have impact, as opposed to being obvious or ‘easy’. But they have no idea how to conceptualize that beyond tired, poor frameworks that are in their own ways just as obvious and easy. Rather than spotlighting the humanity and complexity of these characters, the works devolve them into a different kind of caricature.

And that’s a shame, that these two are the only big ‘alternative’ Crisis stories. Mystery Dramas and thrillers are great, and set in a superhero universe? Even better. And rooted in strong character choices/decision-making and messiness and complexity of these figures? Even better! The basic building blocks of this approach, rooted in Moore’s Watchmen, are very good. It’s an approach suited to making some very strong character-driven comics. But we haven’t done it yet. We haven’t had a proper slam dunk, a really good one that hits like a home run. We’ve instead been stuck with these poor failures of the mode, with the stink of them putting off anyone from doing something in this mode, and veering even harder into the more commercially saleable and cynical Escalation/Bombast mode.

And because of that, Crisis is a broken story framework and word in DC’s context. It distracts from that which is essentially great about these characters, it reduces them when it need not, and the whole affair tires and exhausts in ways you really wish it did not.

Another WayBut perhaps it need not be like that. Perhaps there are other ways to do Crisis-esque storytelling, and if Crisis began by riffing upon and being inspired by a Marvel classic like The Galactus Saga, then lessons can be learnt from modern Marvel classics, too. There’s other paths to take to pursue a Crisis, and the hint lies very well in what Scott Snyder himself tried to draw upon during his Justice League/Metal tenure- Jonathan Hickman’s Marvel Saga.

Hickman is a self-proclaimed lifelong DC hardcore, with Grant Morrison being his all-time favorite comics writer. And it shows. His entire Avengers Saga is essentially a ‘What If?’ story exploring Crisis stories and Crisis mythology, with Multiversal Collapse and Cosmic Death as grand, operatic character drama, as you follow the various Marvel characters and their big, bold, wild decisions and choices in the face of things. What does Tony Stark do? What does Steve Rogers do? What decision does T’Challa make? What is Namor’s choice? And what of Reed Richards? On and on. Hickman understands that cosmic abstract nonsense and ‘events/plot’ aren’t what’s compelling or interesting. It’s the decisions and choices characters make in those wild frameworks. Particularly the wild, spiky, charged decisions that won’t get claps or fan cheers, and might reveal their flaws and messiness as people.

The questions it was asking weren’t meaningless, empty broad-strokes nothingburgers like ‘Can X Character Or Team Be/Represent Hope/Optimism? Can they be Heroes and Light and Fight The Villains and Darkness?’. It was not just going ‘Heroes! Villain! Punch Explosion!’ with cheap and empty fanservice. It wasn’t coddling, comfortable stuff resistant to challenging characters. Because, to quote the newly appointed co-CEO of DC Studios and his new mission statement:

“You can’t be telling the same ‘good guy, bad guy, giant thing in the sky, good guys win’ story again,” Gunn said. “You need to tell stories that are more morally complex. You need to tell stories that don’t just pretend to be different genres, but actually are different genres.”

Instead it was asking much more specific questions, putting characters in very specific situations or scenarios that pushed them and pulled them apart, wherein characters vested with great power had to make big, sweeping, powerful choices with that power, and each choice made would reveal their essence and true nature, because it all came at a price. And each choice would have its own array of consequences and impact that the characters could not escape and reckon with. It wasn’t easy. It was hard. It was difficult. And that’s what made it rich and interesting drama, something worth following and reading about.

It’s why when the whole Avengers saga built to his grand event Secret Wars, with Alex Ross covers leaning hard on that Crisis-esque imagery and iconography, it all meant something. It was all rooted in character, and was an outgrowth of character, in a way Snyder’s attempt at DC never really was, often losing that for extra bombast and plot distractions.

But given we are trying to move beyond the tales of multiversal death and reality death and Bigger, Badder Cosmic Disasters, there’s an alternative model. One proposed by Hickman himself, moving past his own prior Marvel work, and just as rooted in his DC influences and sensibilities.

House Of X and Powers Of X – each 6 issues but collectively a 12 issue maxi-series- is perhaps the best modern ‘event’ comic since Secret Wars, and also in essence the best ‘Crisis’ story without being one. It’s a tale of endless cosmic rewrites/repeats/reboots of the superhero reality, like a billion Crisis comics- but it’s all rooted in character, in Moira MacTaggert and her choices, her specific decisions in each life, and her motives as informed by her experiences. The cosmic is the personal, the Crisis is the internal, and it’s rooted in a story of people. It’s rooted in Moira’s views and ideology, how it relates to her mutanthood and view of being one, how she relates to marginalization and her kin, and who she wants to be. The creative team of Jonathan Hickman, Pepe Larraz, and R.B Silva understand that people and character, their ideologies, their decisions and choices as informed by them, that’s what is interesting. Moira doesn’t always make the ‘obvious’ or ‘easy’ choices, and she makes poor choices and messes up, and that’s precisely what is compelling. It adds drama and conflict and gives you things to chew on.

Even its central starting point is ‘Charles Xavier and Magneto have made a decision together, and will now change mutantdom forever.’ It’s one that alters and radically shifts the definition and approach of X-Men comics, as they go from a people seeking acceptance from humanity as an Institute to a Nation of super-humans far beyond asking for acceptance. While previously attempted, the way in which it is done and framed, with even mutant languages being made and an actual culture being formed, these are all meaningful ideas. They’re about something, something tangible and real as opposed to insular Crisis nonsense. And it is all firmly rooted in choices. Choices like how Xavier and Magneto keep secrets that will eventually blow up down the road, or how Moira’s plotting and making choices that will lead to explosive turn of events down the road, so on and so forth. Even choices like ‘Apocalypse becomes a mentor figure working on the newly formed Krakoa, working with Xavier and Magneto’ aren’t obvious choices and offer great dramatic conflict and surprise. They give you tons of rich potential character dynamics and interplay by which to mold story. And easy/cheap gimmicks like character deaths are thrown out the window, as the X-Men are effectively made immortal, and death and how people approach death is re-framed to yield wholly fresh new stories, with a well of possibilities opening up.

And more than anything else, HoXPoX was the story of something being built, something created, of mutants pro-actively creating and constructing something from nothing, and the drama, the thrills and conflicts and surprises and fun of that in a big, wild, sci-fi genre fiction context. It was not another ‘Reacting to Cosmic Disaster’ plot. And that feels like a useful model and mode to consider moving forward, as something that could be learnt from. But of course, it’s not the only model or way to tell powerful genre stories with real ideas, meaningful dramatic conflicts, engaging character dynamics and genuinely surprising choices with challenge. It’s just one model or way out of a billion.

Consider, for instance the recent Eternals revival by Kieron Gillen and Esad Ribic. Gillen is working with a roster and super-society of beings on the scale of The Justice League, if not bigger, who are played along the lines of ‘Superheroes as Mythology’ which DC comics and its creators love so much. They are cyclical characters and figures who have numerous ‘reboots’ and ‘restarts’ and that’s built into the story and played with in the context of genuine science-fiction ideas and storytelling. Emphasis is played on dramatic character choices or decisions, as stories can range from a rigged election and the Eternals choosing to vote in Thanos as their President, essentially, to centering on Asimov-esque laws/principles that guide Eternal existence. Numerous past stories or ‘continuity’ messes are re-framed through an explicitly political lens of ideology, granted newly coherent meaning and purpose.

The Eternals are humanized through the understanding that every time they die and return back to life- there is a cost, a price that is paid. Each time they return to life, a human life is gone. One life for another. And this suddenly colors their entire past and history, their every choice or action without a care about death. And it will now forever color their future, and every Eternal reacts to the knowledge in a specific way, as they come to understand who they are, who they’ve been, and who they want to be. And then they make dramatic decisions stemming from that understanding, which opens up a whole world of fresh storytelling possibilities. Again, these are real science-fiction ideas with weight, rooted in character and character choices. It’s what so many big DC stories have lacked so profoundly for ages now. One need not even like or be a fan of HoXPoX or Eternals to be able to tell the difference between works with an actual honest-to-god high concept and real sci-fi ideas as opposed to the regular hollow recycling gimmicks. And it helps that writers like Hickman and Gillen are very deliberate formalists, with a clear eye and ambition for how to vary rhythm in their issues and how controlled Aesthetic Pages (‘Data Pages’ as X-readership calls them) can alter a reading and the experience. There’s a care and consideration combined with ambitious ideas here that is non-existent in most of these DC efforts. A writer like Gillen is able to lean into culture, ritual, and faith in the context of the Eternals and their many tribes, and what you have is something genuinely compelling to read and experience. It’s how and why you can get the culmination of his story in a sensational event like Judgement Day.

But again, this is just one example of many, much like HoXPoX, which should inspire new work rather than plain mimicry, which, as we’ve discussed, is a major problem. People doing poor mimicry is a good part of why we’re in this mess to begin with, whether it’s Watchmen or Crisis. The fact of the matter however is that we don’t need to be where we are. There are a plethora of ways to do this. There really is no limit. All you need are real ideas that challenge and question the characters and their work in dramatically compelling ways, rather than coddle the readership to stagnate. And crucially, you need writers with a clear, standout voice and vision who can actually execute said ideas, who have the craft and skill to back up those ideas and pull them off. You need more than the fanboys who can recite Superman or Flash’s Social Security Number from memory or win trivia nights. You need more than people obsessively blathering on about the sacred sanctity of a character or IP and ‘how they should be’ and continuity nonsense.

You need writers with a real idiosyncratic perspective, who’re allowed to take these big gigantic enterprises and use them for bold, ambitious personal expression that speaks to something real and moves us. It’s what distinguishes the Hickmans and Gillens from the average workman writer. It’s what distinguishes a Morrison from the rest of the pack. The past doesn’t exist to be rehashed endlessly, but learnt from to genuinely surprise us. The point isn’t to do things that make people point and go ‘Hey, I know that easter egg! I got that reference!’ like a Cinemasins viewer, but to make them point and go ‘I don’t think I’ve seen that before. Now that’s interesting! Huh!’. That’s what true writers do, they find ways to surprise you and move you. And even if they fail, perhaps they’ll fail interestingly, in ways that are worth reading and engaging with, as opposed to failing while just recycling. We do not have to settle for these tiresome gimmick books that none of us will remember a few months from now. Crisis doesn’t have be like this or mean what it does. It need not be something that makes people sigh or tires them out or makes them weary. Crisis should open up a well of possibilities, rather than just be an insular hellhole of pointless repetition and recycling. It’s time to make new music rather than just do cover songs.

Perhaps it’s time we did that and actually moved forward to somewhere useful, as opposed to just relying on cheap and easy nostalgic recreations wherein The Anti-Monitor’s Second Cousin and Grandpa both showed up and possessed Psycho Pirate, Lex Luthor, and That Alan Moore Character to wreak havoc or what have you.

It’s time we stopped re-litigating arguments and debates about moving forward in comics that are all too happy to indulge in moving backwards. It’s time we got beyond the Crisises of the past- to go somewhere new, to make something new. If there are to be more Crisis comics in the future, and there will be, that’s just the nature of this business and enterprise, perhaps they could dare to actually move forward, be bold, be daring, and try to imagine something worthwhile. Because folks? We really do deserve that.

We deserve better than all this.

The post DC and The Matter Of Crisis, Part V appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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You’ve heard the word. You know the story.

Crisis.

The iconic, defining, definitive word of DC stories.

The word Crisis feels inseparable from the fabric of DC. It holds sway over its past, it informs its present, and it will certainly influence the future. You can’t think of DC and not think of Crisis at some point. The very idea of it has been bound to the very idea of DC that tightly.

And the response to the word and its invocation is intense as well. It comes with a lot of assumptions and baggage. Given that is the case, given it has become ubiquitous, inevitable, and all-pervading with DC itself, it’s worth discussing what has become of it. What has emerged from this focusing and this obsession over Crisis in DC? What has it led to?

The matter of Crisis must be unpacked, and that’s what we’re here to do.

Picking up where we left off…

Reality Dies At Dawn, Every DawnAt the end of the first Metal, the Justice League would destroy The Source Wall, the edge of all reality, the boundary of existence as established in DC Cosmology. And with that would come a plethora of story, particularly as Scott Snyder and his collaborators tried to weave together a grand, sprawling opera and epic of DC mythology. You had the introduction of The World Forger, the older brother of The Monitor and The Anti-Monitor, and the explainers on how the DC existence was divided across the three forms of matter- Dark Matter, Positive Matter, and Anti-Matter. All fun stuff, to be sure.

But vitally, you had the invention of The Mother Of The Multiverse: Perpetua. She was to now be the big new threat of DC, with The Batman Who Laughs as her Dark Knight agent of chaos. The effects of Metal’s source wall collapse meant that The Multiverse was now dying, this was the story of Everything Ending, a Crisis saga but told over a larger period to stretch out the drama.

And it was all heading to the only thing it ever could, as The Multiverse finally died and was set to be reborn:

Another Crisis story, but dubbed Metal.

Dark Nights: Death Metal by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo would dub itself an ‘Anti-Crisis.’ It would evidently be inspired by the work of Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic’s Secret Wars, much like most of the Snyder era of Justice League had been informed by Hickman’s own tenure of Avengers rooted in a tale of Multiversal Collapse and cosmic death. You even got a special Metalverse map akin to the Battleworld of Secret Wars.

It would follow the ‘fallen’ heroes of DC after they had ‘lost,’ much in the same way the Marvel heroes had ‘lost,’ with Doom recreating reality into Battleworld. Except the victors here were Perpetua, The Mother Of The Multiverse, and the Dark Knight who betrayed her to take power. The Batman Who Laughs would get the pole position as Chief Antagonist the way Doom got over at Marvel.

And The Batman Who Laughs would be beefed up in power by acquiring Doctor Manhattan’s powers. I do not mean ‘powers like Doctor Manhattan’s from Watchmen’, but I mean explicitly the powers of Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen, with even his speech-balloons morphing to be more akin to Doctor Manhattan’s, only Black instead of the Blue. Because that’s what we are doing here.

And the entire story would, like much of the Snyder Justice League run before it, be about ‘explaining’ everything about DC and its mythology and history, creating a sort of Unified Theory of the whole affair. You got explanations on why every single Crisis kept happening, and how Perpetua and her energies had a part in that, and how ‘everything connects’ and is tied into one large connective tissue and story. And the whole enterprise was thus then heading to a rebirth and recreation of the Multiverse in the hands of Wonder Woman. It became a battle about the recreation of DC Comics and what it is, what it has been, and what it should be.

Which is to say, it devolved into the most tiresomely dull and insular Continuity Porn school of comics that it sought to rebel against by dubbing itself an ‘Anti-Crisis.’ It called itself an Anti-Crisis because rather than ‘simplify’ or ‘clean-up’ the mess, it was an event designed to celebrate it, as you had whole issues dedicated to characters revisiting past Crisis events and comics, and entire lands built around riffing on and references to the old. It was the idea of ‘Everything matters and counts’ as wild celebratory Metal story. But the trouble is, even when you’re an ‘Anti-Crisis,’ you’re still just in reaction to Crisis. You’re still a Crisis, just perhaps not the in the way you might think.

Death Metal is written like a comic that hopes to be the end of the whole Fan Argument mode of Crisis comics, the end of all the ‘explainers’ and ‘universe/continuity/fixers’ as it concludes with a recreation of the DC Multiverse that says ‘no, it’s done, it’s over, everything matters, we’re good now.’ It wanted to be the final nail in the coffin, the last lyric in that endless DC song of resets and rewrites. It evidently wanted to go ‘Let’s just stop all this stuff we do with Crisises and move onward from here.’

And that’s well and good.

But the nature of writing such a responsive text, an Anti-text so steeped in the continuity porn, insular history and the DC crisis past? You absolutely do morph into part of the problem. You’re once again staging discussions and debates on page on what DC Comics is and is not and perhaps should be like. You’re just singing the very song you want to see end, inadvertently. Because the thing about writing comics that go ‘Hey we should stop doing that thing, let’s not, let’s just move on?’ instead of just making a comic totally divorced from that insular dialogue and mode that actually has totally moved on? You are that which you criticize. And perhaps there’s something there on a level of Scott Snyder saying the DC Universe needs to move on from him, too, because he’s part of this old guard, and it needs to be in new hands, but that still doesn’t make for a very compelling comic, sadly.

And the multiversal recreation at the end, with the ‘everything matters’? It once again effectively reaffirms the ‘Infinite Earths’ idea with Infinite Multiverses. It’s what The Multiversity had done. It’s what Convergence had done. It’s what Doomsday Clock had done. And now we had to get the new version of that. Another repetition of how there’s an omniverse out there, all charged up and ready to be used.

The Dan Knight Strikes AgainWhile the infinite earths were apparently back under Snyder’s era, it was still not enough. There had to be more rejiggering of the board, more re-alignment of the pieces and the table itself. The DC Universe had to be remolded and reshaped yet again, and Dan Didio’s 5G initiative was under way. Its plans and timeline would radically alter and redefine the DC Universe yet again, despite it just coming off a massive reality re-shaping event. This was just what DC had become, inevitably, irrevocably.

It would cycle out many ‘key’ leading characters, focus on a new generation and alter the nature of ‘time’ in the DC Universe, trying to give a sense of progression to the entire enterprise and connect everything from the beginning of DC’s history to the now. They’d ‘make sense’ of everything yet again, as they felt they had failed to appropriately do with Crisis On Infinite Earths, and this time, they’d get it right, goddamnit. This time! For sure! Or so Dan Didio believed.

And then Dan Didio was unceremoniously let go from DC. And that was that. DC would pivot to its ‘Future State‘ initiative instead in that 5G slot, and the keys would change hands, as Snyder was off and away, and a new DC Architect was to take his seat.

Infinite Ad InfinitumFollowing this, after the Multiverse/Omniverse had been recreated in Death Metal, Joshua Williamson would take over the role of ‘DC Architect’ in the succeeding era of Infinite Frontier. And if you thought the DC heroes had pretty much dealt with enough ‘Crisis’ and continuity porn and Multiverse recreation stories for a hot-minute, well, here was another coming right after the last.

Williamson would attempt to sequelize Grant Morrison’s The Multiversity, as many had previously attempted, to largely messy and lesser results in evoking a superior work. And in it, would reveal the ‘truth’ of Multiverse-Two from the end of Multiversity. Morrison’s work had seemed to suggest Multiverse-Two would be a place for new stories, new standalone works or stories and fresh creations unbound to the ’52’ multiverses they’d explored. But Williamson instead opts to run with the idea that rather than something new, Multiverse-Two is something old, and actually a reference, being the original Infinite Multiverse destroyed in the first Crisis On Infinite Earths. You can see the brain ticking here that leads to this conclusion, going ‘Well Earth-Two was the old classical thing, so Multiverse-Two should be…’

But it’s decidedly a mode of Fan-Brain that opts to be boring and reference-driven when it could choose to do anything new or fresh or interesting.

It’s perhaps why the Eldritch Horror entities of Morrison, beings of Cosmic Horror, like ‘The Empty’ Hand and The Gentry become generic bad guys for superhero punching and beat-em-up comics that no one will really remember years from now. Figures symbolizing Gentrification and representing any kind of meaning are reduced down to just ‘Lore-Important’ people to play out ‘Who Would Win?’ or Power Level wrestling fights and action-figure smashing with zero-thought. No Meaning, only Lore, as they say. It’s why Williamson would also set-up his own version and story that would finally, once again, as though it had never happened before, ‘explain everything’ about DC and its history and universe.

And if Geoff Johns used Doctor Manhattan, Scott Snyder used Anti-Monitor’s Mom and The Batman Who Laughs, then Williamson would resort to the most classically DC move, and a move evocative of very Geoff Johns-inspired sensibilities: recycle from Alan Moore. And so you had ‘The Great Darkness’ from an issue of Swamp Thing tying into Crisis On Infinite Earths being positioned as The Major Big Bad.

And leaning further into very Johns-esque sensibilities, much like Johns brought back Alexander Luthor, Superboy Prime and the Classic Old Man Superman to wage a big Fan Argument/Debate comic about DC Comics and its direction, Williamson would opt to do so with the one COIE character that even Johns couldn’t be bothered with:

He would be positioned as the other big bad, tapped into The Great Darkness, animated by a frustration over what all had happened in DC Comics. He would become representative of The Nostalgic Recreator who believed The Old Things and The Past were simpler, better, and that we should never have gone away from that good ol’ stuff. The irony being, of course, that the writer doing seemed to enjoy indulging in Nostalgic Recreation and referentialism himself. But perhaps that’s to be expected given the Johns influence- Johns is often that which his comics chastize and rail against and attempt to say is bad. More time is spent in indulging in poor choices and work that exist for the creator to say ‘We should move forward!’ rather than actually moving forward and doing the useful alternative without that Fan Argument/Debate. And Williamson, whose DC work often feels like a Xerox of Geoff Johns that’s been photocopied too many times, is part of that trend and lineage.

It’s perhaps why you get a gimmick story by Williamson titled The Death Of The Justice League for Justice League #75, done purely because of nostalgic recreation and obsession with homaging the old- this time the 1990’s, as opposed to Geoff Johns’ preferred 1980’s. If you’d felt that the Justice League had not ‘died’ enough recently given all the Metal madness, this comic may have been for you.

And all of this is exactly why what follows it is an event titled Dark Crisis.

There was to be no escape from the Johnsian school of Fan Argument Comics. You had ‘Pariah’ as The Nostalgic Recreator, and you had Deathstroke as The Old Man Who Is A Legacy Hater. And all of the ‘big bads’ of prior big DC joints would all be joined under the banner of The Great Darkness and be ‘The Dark Army,’ with The Great Darkness and its influence helping ‘explain’ the various cataclysmic Crisis-driven nature of the DC line. Perpetua was not enough, it seems, and neither was Doctor Manhattan. We needed more Continuity Porn, more Secrets Of The Lore to ‘explain’ everything over and over, with every new ‘architect’ having to get their version of that answer.

It’s likely why after the third issue of the book, DC would put out a whole special press release drumming up noise, with Williamson going on about how they had actually kept the ‘real title’ of the event a secret. And that the true title would ‘spoil’ the great story they had been telling, but now in the fourth issue the title would be revealed, as it would be on the covers from hereon out. And that new title, my dear friends?

Dark Crisis On Infinite Earths.

Yes, another nostalgic recreation and reference, in a story supposedly critical of them. Indulging in that very thing that we’re supposedly trying to speak against and say we need to move forward from.

And of course, we’d play the same song of THE INFINITE EARTHS ARE BACK/REBORN! like it was all-new and novel and special and had never been done before. It would be packaged and presented like it was thunderous, ground-breaking and earth-shattering. All, of course, to serve more tiresome and drawn out comics steeped in DC Fan Debates and Arguments, staged across a cosmic scale, steeped in insular Continuity Porn of DC Crisis comics.

Who are these comics for? Only for DC Diehards and Lifers, not any sane reader just seeking a well made, interesting comic.

And so on and on we would go, trapped forever in the same cycle, of the same old problems, failings, just with a different white-passing comics guy at the helm of it instead. Rather than make sleek, slick, smart superhero comics on the cutting edge, works which truly last the test of time, we instead get the same old beats and nostalgia-driven discussions and arguments as published comics.

It’s perhaps why Dark Crisis, which followed Didio’s firing and ousting of the 5G initiative, even casts Deathstroke as a man almost verbatim repeating oft-mocked and argued-about Dan Didio talking points on Nightwing…directly to Nightwing the character in a comic:

He, of course, gets ‘proven wrong’ and beat up, with those Didio talking-points taken down, in a comic affirming how The Titans are Actually The Bestest Characters in the DC Universe. Rather than actually have any kind of meaningful dramatic conflicts that challenge or push the character, we’re given hollow questions of ‘Can Dick Grayson be The Hope and Optimism and Light of the DC Universe and lead it as The Ultimate Legacy Hero?’, which, we all know the answer there. The comic only operates in binaries of Hero/Villain, Light/Darkness, and how Light>>Darkness.

There’s no real weight or meaning or interiority to the work. Can Grayson get off his ass and beat Deathstroke? The answer is never in doubt or in question. And there’s not a single dramatically compelling or interesting choice that Dick Grayson as a character makes or is allowed to make by the book’s creators. He exists to be moved from Point A to Point B and is more so a meaningless symbol gesturing towards DC marketing slogan words like Hope and Optimism, much like Superman in Doomsday Clock, than any kind of interesting character. The comic refuses to at any point challenge its characters or readership, choosing to constantly cater to their fandom and validate their fandom. And the only real ‘choice’ it seems to hinge on for its lead characters is a hollow one involving Black Adam choosing to be a hero and proclaiming that Legacy Is The Best Actually, because there’s a Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson movie coming that must be fed into synergistically. There is no artistic vision or soul here. Only company gimmicks, insular fan-arguments and cheap fan-service validation for stans living on crumbs.

It becomes rather like reading CBR Boards with super-powered punching at a certain point.

It’s a bunch of comics nerds arguing with each other, whilst forgetting why anybody cared about any of this to ever begin with. It’s the comic book equivalent of insular twitter beef and ‘discourse’ that makes no sense to anyone sane, outside these obsessive circles. These are comics completely devoid of any real ideas, which conflate these fandom sessions for actually meaningful stories. Stories are lost and gone, what remains can no longer even be called ‘stories’ really, as dramatic conflict and compelling character choices all vanish.

All that’s left is a bunch of dudes arguing about nerd nonsense.

If you’re wondering ‘how bad could it be?’, well…

The Flashpoint Two: Electric BoogalooWhile all of this was happening, Geoff Johns would once again return to DC comics to do a Flashpoint sequel book, where he would try to enforce and explain his own absolute, ultimate unified theory of DC. He would even explain the ‘D’ and ‘C’ of ‘DC’ as being ‘Divine Continuum,’ his overarching title for the whole affair, in a move that is truly, absolutely Johns to the max.

Try and read that above panel and parse it. See if that makes any goddamn sense to a normal reader who just wants a cool comic. Consider who that is really for. What manner of reader is that written for? It’s not any sane reader who cares about meaningful stories. It’s written for the most insular wiki-head, the most absurd lore-obsessed people, not any reasonable person with discerning comics taste. It’s the DC Universe/Multiverse/Omniverse/takeyourpick equivalent of Hawkman’s history or Donna Troy’s existence. It’s the most ‘who cares’ material written by people desperately out of touch, who’ve forgotten why any of us ever cared about these things to begin with. It wasn’t this convoluted ‘No, let ME explain and FIX DC and tell you how it all ACTUALLY works’ one-upsmanship contests they call ‘comics.’

Perhaps no better example of this disastrous situation exists than the context of the JSA. Let us consider them for a moment.

Across the past decade, DC’s made a lot of noise about ‘bringing back the JSA!’ starting from Geoff Johns’ DC Rebirth, as much of the enterprise was predicated on that. Here is the finale of Doomsday Clock, ‘bringing them back’:The JSA are back!! Yeah, woo!! Will they actually do anything or get a book? Hell no. Otherwise how could they make the noise about them ‘being back.’

Now, cut to their next big event Dark Nights: Death Metal and its ending:

The JSA are back!! Again! Yeah, woo!! Will they actually do anything or get a book? Hell no. Otherwise how could they make the noise about them ‘being back,’ for real this time!

And now cut to Dark Crisis On Infinite Earth*s*:

The JSA are back!! Again! Another time! Yeah, woo!! Will they actually do anything or get a book? Hell yes. But only by Geoff Johns. Nobody else. Because why go forwards when you can swim in nostalgic backwaters, while saying ‘We need to move forward’ a lot? Gesturing towards something endlessly that which we will never do or commit to, which feels perfectly true of Williamson’s work, given its Johnsian influence and ties.

And so that’s where we stand now, with endless repetition, beats being recycled, press-releases declaring ‘The Infinite Earths are back/reborn!’ or ‘The JSA are back/reborn!’ ‘The Titans matter and are good again!’ every single goddamn year, only for it to happen the next, and the next after that. And of course, it’s all accompanied by the press and slogans and marketing on how once again Hope, Optimism, and Heroism have returned to the DC Universe. It’s all sold to the reader like it’s never been done before, as though this were a novel thing happening for the very first time. It’s an endless series of screams emanating from a dungeon of chaos, as you hear shrieks going ‘We’ve done it! We’ve fixed it! We’ve got our shit together! Hahah! It’s all gonna be okay now, guys! We have a plan! Please trust us!’

Which is perhaps why it’s no surprise that DC Comics’ cinematic equivalent are also exactly the same. It’s the same crucial problem top to bottom- which is that it’s become less and less about the stories and storytelling steeped in character, and more ‘meta’ arguments about what the DC enterprise should be, and who gets to be the one to decide that, waged out in public arenas. It’s just not something conducive to good storytelling.

Crisis has become a curse weighing on the soul of DC given the way many have chosen to interpret and understand that term and title. And all Scott Snyder, bless his heart, seemed to have accomplished with an Anti-Crisis is just becoming part of the very tradition he sought to critique.

But where does that leave us? Where do we even go from here?

Next: The Future (and Past) Of CrisisPrevious: Part IIIThe post DC and The Matter Of Crisis, Part IV appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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You’ve heard the word. You know the story.

Crisis.

The iconic, defining, definitive word of DC stories.

The word Crisis feels inseparable from the fabric of DC. It holds sway over its past, it informs its present, and it will certainly influence the future. You can’t think of DC and not think of Crisis at some point. The very idea of it has been bound to the very idea of DC that tightly.

And the response to the word and its invocation is intense as well. It comes with a lot of assumptions and baggage. Given that is the case, given it has become ubiquitous, inevitable, and all-pervading with DC itself, it’s worth discussing what has become of it. What has emerged from this focusing and this obsession over Crisis in DC? What has it led to?

The matter of Crisis must be unpacked, and that’s what we’re here to do.

Picking up where we left off…

The Multiverse + Diversity = The MultiversityWhile Convergence was already being signed into the bin of irrelevance, something else had just recently finished publication.

Grant Morrison had taken ages to work on their successor project to both the seminal 52 weekly series and Final Crisis. It was a much-hyped and long gestating, sprawling work that would structurally draw upon Morrison’s own previous structurally bold epic Seven Soldiers, which preceded Final Crisis. It was the aptheosis of a great deal of their work. And the thing that made it all the more juicier? It was a work that would explore the 52-universes of The Multiverse that had returned in the 52 weekly series, and had been spotlighted in fun ways in their Final Crisis series. The Multiversity was a project long-awaited and postponed for years.

A portmanteau of ‘The Multiverse’ and ‘Diversity’, it would center on a legion of new, varied iterations on familiar classic ideas, like a Black Superman and a Gay Flash, which modernized the ancient 60’s archetypes for a new age. It would boast a whole new multiversal Justice League, allowed to be more varied and interesting than the usual ‘Big 7’ definitive Justice League of the 1960’s and the modern age. It would treat them as the all-important leads, and do something new. It was a book all the different things that could be done with the superhero ideas, all the ways it could be twisted and tweaked to make up something fresh.

There was a long and sustained fan-wait and attention for The Multiversity, the precise opposite of an enterprise like Convergence. This was something planned for literal years, whereas Convergence was just thrown together at the last second without any thought. This was a grand coda of sorts by a legendary creator, and all eyes were on it, waiting patiently. This would be remembered, not forgotten.

The Multiversity would boast a plethora of brilliant artistic talent, from chief designer Rian Hughes to Frank Quitely, Jim Lee, Ivan Reis, Doug Mahnke and plenty more. It would be a 9 issue maxi-series, wherein each would be a one-shot, except for the final issue. The book chronicled the tale of the multiversal assembly of heroes and their conflict against the Cosmic Horrors known simply as The Gentry, who represented Gentrification, but on a celestial scale, which feels all too relevant. The Gentry led on by The Empty Hand (the opposite of ‘The Full Hand’ that in DC lore creates all of existence).

The book was informed by a lot of existentialist and nihilist texts and philosophy Morrison was immersing themselves in at the time (they would also publish the bleak cosmic horror book Nameless around this same period), particularly the work of Thomas Ligotti. It was, of course, deeply personal and deeply Morrison- a work rooted in the obsession with the relationship between creator, creation, critic, and the audience, and the whole mechanism that makes the whole thing go around. It was not about Fan Arguments as it much as it was a natural evolution of Morrison’s obsession with Kirbyian endeavors, as ‘The Oblivion Machine’ became their own personal metaphor and equivalent to Kirby’s Anti-Life Equation, symbolizing pure empty consumption for consumption’s sake, wherein by the end one is left with nothing.

But for all of that, for all its many Morrisonisms, in many ways, it was a return to the classical JLA Silver Age school of Crisis, prior to the Wolfman/Perez event. Perhaps best signaled by the fact that the whole story is really split between The Multiversity #1 and The Multiversity #2, with the one-shots chronicling everything in-between. It was a classic Crisis two-parter, and one rooted hard and deep in that classic Gardner Fox sentiment of ‘every reality is a comic book you can read,’ just taken to a Morrisonian extremity. And if it felt like an alternative and counter-option to the Wolfman/Perez vision of Crisis, it certainly dedicated itself to that ethos with its finale. In the final issue, the book reveals that everything we know is Multiverse-One, and that The Empty Hand and The Gentry are here after wreaking havoc on Multiverse-Two.

It was, in effect, recreating that classic original Crisis story 2-part idea and its Earth-One/Earth-Two notion but on an even wider scale. Applying such designations to not just Earths, but whole Multiverses. And if there’s a Multiverse-One, and a Multiverse-Two, then that means…

Yes.

Grant Morrison had brought back The Infinite Multiverse, and they’d done so without doing another ‘fix-it’ or ‘house-cleaning’ story or another Continuity Porn comic or waging Comics sagas steeped in Fan Arguments. They’d expanded the toy-box for the fun of it, and the expansion now came with explicit structure and a worked out systems for how each of these Multiverses could perhaps work or operate. As Morrison explained:

All the current models of the multiverse from cosmologists and actual physics and science suggest that there are multiple bubble universes and they give birth to one another like how bubbles arise from bubbles. I suggested to Dan if you imagine like a champagne glass and you picture all these bubbles rising and giving form to each other, that’s what the real multiverse looks like. It’s a much bigger scale. It’s infinite. – Grant Morrison

If Wolfman and Perez’s Crisis ended by shrinking DC down to a universe, then The Multiversity would be the opposite- it would end by expanding DC down to a colossal omniverse with infinite multiverses. Fitting, given The Multiversity was a book so built around moving beyond the past that it evokes the iconic Barry Allen Flash scene of heroic sacrifice and death, but with Morrison’s modern update of that archetype in Red Racer – a queer comics nerd in a relationship with his equivalent of Hal Jordan Green Lantern. And if a Flash dies in a crisis, Morrison and Reis as a duo evoke that visual iconography with this queer hero to subvert that expectation and also to shatter the common ‘bury your gays’ trapping of so many genre stories. It fits with both Morrison’s long history with queer characters and themes as well as both an interest in moving forward, as even a scene that would be an ‘homage’ in most hands becomes a brutal rejection and subversion.

And that sort of sensibility is all over the whole story, as it is trying to push onward, to clear space for people to make and do new things unconstrained by the limitations of what had come before. As Morrison described it:

“I’ve always wanted the infinite multiverse of DC to come back. The multiverse we set up in 52 had 52 universes and that didn’t seem like enough so we managed via The Multiversity to sneak an infinite multiverse through the back door,” Morrison joked with reporters earlier. “The idea is we’ve been looking at some of the latest idea of string and particle physics. We wanted to actually reflect that. DC was ahead of the curve and ahead of science when they came up with the multiverse. We kind of want to pay that back and create this beyond infinite multiverse.”

And because it was here, and not in something like Convergence, something useful might come of it. Or so one would hope.

But that…didn’t quite happen.

Ma! Manhattan Messed Up My Multiverse!After the debacle of Convergence, when audiences largely dropped off DC comics and apathy was at its highest, DC took a hit. Its new DCYou initiative wasn’t the success it was hoping it might be, and so immediately they did what these publishers always do – get scared and bank on cynical maneuvers. And that led to DC Rebirth, the Geoff Johns takeover of the entire DC Line and universe, building up to the Doomsday Clock event with his collaborator Gary Frank. Johns would reveal that all the messes and the ‘breaking’ of DC Continuity, history and all the problems and criticisms one had or held towards were actually deliberate things done by Doctor Manhattan as part of a sinister plot. Everything wrong with DC Comics was now directly linked to the influence and impact of Watchmen.

Manhattan was played as the antagonistic force standing philosophically against Hope, Heroism, Optimism, Faith, and all that jazz we like, and by the end of this whole affair, he’d be forced to give up his side and lose in Fan Argument event comics by Geoff Johns. Only this time rather than doing it with Crisis, Johns was doing it with Watchmen, its 1980’s 12-issue maxi-series peer. And by the end? When Manhattan loses? He (and thus Geoff Johns) recreates the DC reality per his vision. Morrison had used The Multiverse to represent Diversity, with the title of The Multiversity literally being a portmanteau of ‘The Multiverse’ and ‘Diversity,’ celebrating the new, the queer, and the future. Johns on the other hand seemed to treat and handle The Multiverse as a box and a bin to store all his back-issues, and be a showcase for the old, a construct that justified his collector’s brain and collection. A mechanism by which to preserve and ossify everything for all time, like a toy in a glass box.

And thus once again under Johns and Frank, the DC omniverse/multiverse, whatever you wish to call it now, would once again be recreated and redefined, with The Infinite Earths system coming back once again. Now, you may be wondering ‘Is that the 3rd time that’s happened, and they’ve presented it like something bold and new and fresh?’

The answer is yes.

Grant Morrison’s The Multiversity was the first to bring back the Infinite Multiverse, when it was still novel and fresh and had not been done. And then the Scott Lobdell/Jeff King Convergence was the second to do it, and because it was an Editorial Vehicle, as opposed to an actual creative artist’s passion project like Multiversity, they made way more noise about it. And then Johns here, ignoring both those cases, just does it all over again. And while he’s at it, he even goes ahead and grants the ‘main’ DC universe we follow (commonly dubbed Earth-Zero) an official title/designation of ‘The Metaverse.’

It seems The Infinite Earths will keep being restored, on and on, until morale improves.

But beyond these shenanigans, there was something else going around too. There was another avenue where this was all being looked at and explored.

Let’s Get MetalDark Nights: Metal by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo is not titled a Crisis. But it very much is one, and certainly reads like it. It returns to that ‘Crisis On Earth-Three’ conceit of ‘Evil Doppelgangers’ but broaches that strictly through a Batman-lens, wherein you get a Batman-ified version of each of the iconic Justice League heroes.

If Morrison and their collaborators had opened up the space for Infinite Multiverses, creating even a detailed map, then Snyder and his collaborators asked ‘Well, what’s beneath all that?’ That led to the creation of The Dark Multiverse and The Dark Knights, and in classic Snyder fashion, it reads like a big bombastic 80’s action blockbuster. It is Snyder leaning to his horror impulses while upping the bombast and campy absurdity, whilst Capullo goes all in on his heavy metal aesthetic and obsession, honed in the pages of Spawn. And building on Morrison’s own Bat-Epic and Final Crisis work, they would recast Barbatos as a gigantic Cosmic Dragon and Big Bad who ruled over his domain of The Dark Multiverse. And Barbatos would look like a sick villain from the cover of a Heavy Metal Album.

And in Barbatos’ employ would be The Dark Knights, Evil Batmen who were all Bruce Wayne if ‘they’d gone bad’ and had acquired the powers/attributes of their Super Friends and Foes. So you had Bat-Flash, Bat-Green Lantern, so forth, and they’d all be led by The Batman Who Laughs, aka ‘What if Batman became The Joker?’. It was Snyder’s modern bombastic horror take on a classic ensemble of enemies like The Crime Syndicate. It was a horror-tinged vision of a warped DC wherein everything was Batman.

If the tradition of Crisis-styled events had become to get caught up in dumb universe/continuity/timeline ‘fixing’ or Fan Arguments as Fiction, with only Final Crisis being an exception and concerned with any kind of real personal vision, then Metal would attempt to be the next exception. Free from the burden of ever bearing the official Crisis title, thus letting Final Crisis be the final one to bear that title and burden, Metal would in effect be a big, silly cartoon. It followed a child-like logic of ‘And then this happened…and then…’ It was an event dedicated to Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Rule Of Cool. If it seemed sick and could make devil horns or conceivably be seen as ‘metal?’ It was going in. It was to be an event opening on the Justice League forming a Voltron, and featuring a Dudebro Starro The Conqueror. It was a big, silly, stupid, dumb action comic drawn by one of the absolute masters of superhero art.

It was akin to a DC Music Video of cartoonish absurdity, mayhem, and violence that the creative team got to produce. And you could tell they were having a blast doing it. Metal worked. It was a hit, and it would lead into the Snyder era of Justice League, with him as the new DC architect leading the line.

And this is where things would get…tricky.

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It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen?

Rebirth had succeeded. It had proved to be a juggernaut that everybody seemed to want more of. DC’s hopes and dreams of winning hearts and minds whilst exploiting the Watchmen IP had never risen higher. While nobody cared for Before Watchmen, they seemed to care about Watchmen crossing over with the DC Universe and its characters. They paid attention to that in which they did not with other attempts to cash in on Watchmen. If DC couldn’t make money off stories about what happened before the events of Watchmen, they were sure as hell going to make it off what happened after the events of Watchmen.

And so the enterprise of Watchmen exploitation had to keep going…for this was what DC had been waiting for. This was the culmination of years of trying. Their predatory impulses had finally borne fruit. The milk they were selling from their cash-cow was a hit. All they had to do was just keep milking it.

Enter: The Button** by Joshua Williamson, Jason Fabok, and Tom King.

After the success of Rebirth, DC leaned into Watchmen teases and ‘hints’ of how reality had been changed. Across everything from Superman books to Green Lantern comics, you had suggestions of a reality manipulator whose trail gleams in glaring blue.

Nobody knew where this was going. The question of ‘Wait, is this actually Manhattan or is this just a red herring and a fakeout?’ was answered by Johns immediately in interviews around Rebirth’s publication. So that wasn’t in doubt. What was in doubt was what that would tangibly mean. Would we get a special one-shot again, like a DC Universe Rebirth #2? Would we get a special event book? Or would it be some special maxi-series or a weekly thing? Or a crossover? What shape would this whole affair end up in? People would debate it a great deal after Rebirth hit. Few seemed to be concerned about the shameless and bankrupt decision to milk and exploit Watchmen again, and those that were seemed to be viewed as killjoys at the time.

But still, there was uncertainty in the air. Nobody quite knew what was to follow Rebirth, beyond vague teasing and hinting gesturing towards something happening. People figured whatever came next would be eventful, but nobody was quite sure.

And then the news came.

All questions would be answered and addressed in the big, seminal crossover of The Flash and Batman books in a 4-part story titled The Button. Overseen by Geoff Johns himself, it would be written by Joshua Williamson and Tom King, the Flash and Batman writers respectively. And it would be drawn by regular Geoff Johns collaborator and DC star artist Jason Fabok. Teasers were unveiled depicting both Batman and The Flash holding onto the Watchmen ‘button,’ and excitement was being drummed up by marketing.

This is it, folks. If you want to know where this is all going, this is your must buy!

Bruce Wayne and Barry Allen were framed as two detectives on a case, solving a mystery. They were presented as kin, which perhaps made all the sense in a Post-Rebirth world. Johns had, after all, reworked Barry Allen significantly for the modern era. The classic selfless Silver Age Science-Hero and romantic figure of John Broome and Carmine Infantino stories had been retconned to have a new marketable Tragic Backstory evocative of Batman’s very own. Eobard Thawne, The Reverse Flash, had taken away Barry’s parents and childhood, with one dead and another in prison.

And now Barry Allen was a man driven to purpose and action by his own tragic childhood and loss of family and parents, which made him a very commercially saleable character in an age where Batman sold like hotcakes and was DC’s premier character. It was a calculated and obvious move to ‘modernize’ the character along the lines of that which would sell and go over well, modeled off the success of figures like Batman. So to put those two together? It was inevitable.

Even more so given the last and final step in that Barry Allen-reworking process is what rebooted all of DC and led to The New 52, as that was being re-litigated. Flashpoint‘s conclusion and impact was not Barry Allen’s fault, the Rebirth special had loudly tried to announce. No, no, it was Doctor Manhattan and Watchmen’s fault.

So Batman and The Flash being central in the Johnsian continuation of these shenanigans? It was inevitable.

But perhaps so was the creative team on-board.

You had Tom King- an Alan Moore devotee. He was a man obsessed with the 9-panel grid and Watchmen, and more broadly the work of Alan Moore. Moore’s influence was all over his work, and he frequently talked about his love of Moore’s work and use of form. Certainly, if you didn’t see it or hear it in his interviews, you saw it on page.

His first solo series The Omega Men with artist Barnaby Bagenda was a book very overtly in the Watchmen school of comics. It was blatant in what tradition it was drawing upon and it marked the loudest depiction of King’s obsession with both Watchmen and Moore’s work in general. And it would only get louder from there, as 9-panel grid book after book took off, gaining praise and prestige. His work made the 9-panel grid and its usage quite fashionable and in-vogue again all of a sudden. The grid’s inherent prestige, due to what it was evoking (Watchmen), was brought to the fore once again by the rising popularity and discussion of his work. And it’s why it’s no surprise that he would end up taking the Rorschach gig to do a Watchmen sequel book.

You had Jason Fabok, who Johns had worked with for a good few years now on Justice League, and had made many plans to work with in the future. Starting off as a David Finch apprentice, Fabok came to embody a sort of ‘clean’ DC house style and aesthetic look that felt like it was the sweet spot between David Finch, Ivan Reis, and Jim Lee. His figures looked like action figures brought to life, and there was a tinged realism to his work that fit with Johns’ preference in artists. He was, like Gary Frank, a ‘definitive’ DC artist to Johns’ mind.

It’s why Johns would end up eventually getting him for his Killing Joke sequel- Three Jokers, to follow in the footsteps of Brian Bolland. He was an artist keen to work on big, important stories, and this was as good a stage as any for him.

But perhaps most notable figure is the last and third key member of the creative team here.

Joshua Williamson is a writer influenced by writers like Mark Waid, James Robinson, and Bendis, amongst others. But above and beyond all of those? Geoff Johns was the biggest and greatest influence on him and his work. Williamson was a massive Johns fanboy. Having had a poor and brief stint at DC during 2009-2012, he’d been away from the company until 2016’s Rebirth relaunch marked him as the new writer of The Flash. He was working with Geoff Johns himself whilst doing the book, as Johns oversaw the whole initiative and discussed and went over each book and its plans with the writers.

It was a dream for him. He’d long been a diehard Flash fan, and he’d been a diehard Geoff Johns fan, and this was the perfect cross-section of both, as Flash was now firmly and fundamentally defined by Johns in the modern era.

And the influence of Johns and his work was obvious and evident on the page. Williamson’s first Flash story was blatantly a cheap cover and lesser version of Johns’ most iconic Wally West Flash story. Johns had woven a tale about Hunter Zolomon, Wally’s friend, who shatters and becomes the monstrous and murderous speedster Zoom. It had been all about Hunter arguing that ‘tragedy makes heroes better’ and that tragedy was necessary, and trying to define The Flash by tragedy. And Wally would be the counter-perspective to that. Of course, Johns would, ironically, cement that Zoom idea with his Barry Allen tragedy origin, recreating all of The Flash mythology and redefining it via tragedy.

That’s the story that Williamson would effectively try to remix, and hell, he wasn’t even the first. Similar attempts at ‘Barry’s Best Friend You Never Heard About…Until Now!’ had been done even in The New 52’s very first Flash storyline by Brian Buccellato and Francis Manapul with the character Mob Rule. Mob Rule would be an antagonist, but at least in doing the Best Friend Who Becomes A Bad Guy, Manapul and Buccellato tried to tweak it a little bit by not having him be just another speedster. Williamson doesn’t even attempt such a thing. So in returning to doing this, Williamson was doubling down on recreation and recycling even more, committing to repetition even harder, with the whole endeavor being framed as fresh and all new.

But he did it, and so we got Godspeed, the murderous speedster bad guy who was Also Barry’s Best Friend. It was an attempt to manufacture a Johnsian Bastard, a rival and antagonistic figure to challenge the hero, like Johns’ Zoom with Wally or Johns’ Sinestro with Hal, so on and so forth. But it lacked both the conviction and commitment of the original it was trying to ape. Williamson was not half the writer Johns was in his prime. The copy lacked the sincerity, emotion, and character writing of the original. It was akin to eating someone preparing a dish off a recipe, except it lacked all the spice, richness or flavor it’s supposed to have. The food wasn’t even cooked right. It’s just a bland mess, as the cook sheepishly says ‘Well, I followed the recipe!’

It was a Geoff Johns Fanboy trying to write Johns cover comics and doing it poorly. It lacked flavor and personality, feeling like the dime store version of an official product you’d find somewhere. And the whole Flash run that would follow after that initial story-arc would only be more of that, with Williamson’s entire run blatantly trying to reproduce and mimic the structure and sensibilities of Geoff Johns’ other big touchstone- the Johns Green Lantern Saga.

Johns had given Hal Jordan, the Silver Age Green Lantern, the Emotional Spectrum to deal with. And so Williamson made up ‘The Forces’ for Barry Allen, Hal’s best pal and Silver Age peer, to deal with. Johns’ GL run had centered strongly on the relationship and dynamic of Hal and Sinestro, his dark opposite, and Williamson tried to echo that sensibility. If Johns had Nekron for GL, then Williamson would make up Paradox. If Johns had done Secret Origin to redo the origin of Hal in his run, then Williamson would do it too, but use the even more evocative iconic name of Year One. So on and so forth, on and on, ad nauseum.

Johns was the model and ‘how to’ and Williamson would follow it to a T, whilst arcs like Year One would also attempt cheap Frank Miller mimicry with no real understanding of why Miller’s comics worked.

Here you had a fanboy creator who was obsessed with recreation, but had no real sense of why what he was trying to recreate even really worked or clicked. It was empty mimicry by a creator who was simply thrilled to be able to get to do what Geoff Johns, one of his inspirations, had done.

It shows even more clearly perhaps in Justice League vs Suicide Squad, the first ‘event’ of the DC Rebirth era. It was one Johns came up with and mandated, given Justice League and Suicide Squad were both cinematic priorities in the 2016-2017 era. Johns merely needed a writer who could do the premise of ‘Justice League vs Suicide Squad.’ Williamson volunteered and got the task, happy to do the job.

It would be here that Williamson would first work with Jason Fabok, before even The Button. And it would here that Williamson would unveil a story centered around the mid 2000’s Geoff Johns reworking of Maxwell Lord from the Infinite Crisis era. Williamson would be the writer to bring that back, under Johns’ supervision, alongside a Johns collaborator, and he’d even throw in another Johns staple in the character of Johnny Sorrow from Johns’ JSA run as a key figure of the whole thing.

The whole affair would, of course, be utterly forgettable rubbish comics that nobody even really remembers now. Even the mention of it evokes ‘Oh? Oh! Right, yeah, that exists. They did that, sure’. But it would establish and be consistent with the pattern of Williamson firmly as The Johns Fanboy all too happy to do Johnsian cover-style comics.

And all of that is important to The Button because that is precisely what it is.

It’s Johnsian Cover Comics.

The Nature Of The ButtonTom King was supposed to write 2 issues. Joshua Williamson was supposed to write 2 issues. That’s how it was supposed to work.

Instead, Tom King ended up departing the whole project after his 1 opening issue, and Williamson wrote the rest, with a special thanks being given to both King and Geoff Johns in the credits for their contributions.

Tom King’s single issue is a very classically King piece of work in that it’s mostly a formal exercise with the 9-panel grid. King sets a timer and paces the comic like a countdown across that 9 panel grid, and it’s very much him trying to do a big superhero comics Action Set-Piece in a stylish, formally smart way. One wherein you feel the time and each ‘beat’ has weight and there’s a tension as time truly is ‘slowed down’ with each panel representing a respective ‘second’. It’s done against the backdrop of a televised Hockey match, of violent entertainment, invoking horror and discomfort.

The emphasis on the hockey match is meant to both foreshadow and parallel the inevitable Eobard vs Batman fight, and the tension established there is mined through the slowed countdown, as the issue seems to want to make you ask ‘How will it go down? Will it go down like what we just saw? What’s the fate here?’ King wants to use the natural way the grid slows down its reader to his advantage here, and there’s a purpose to what he’s doing. It’s nothing mind-blowing, but there’s a level of ‘I’ve thought this through’ and understanding of craft and form that helps.

It’s almost self-contained and could easily be a one-shot that stands alone. It works as just a slick ‘Batman vs Reverse Flash’ action comic that’s paced well and tightly, that’s trying to be more than just generic fluff, and thus works.

But then King leaves and bails on writing any more of this.

And it becomes the Joshua Williamson scripting show.

Immediately any attempt at even a pretense of formal engagement with the works being invoked is gone and shattered. All hints and traces of even mild ambition are gone and replaced with Johnsian school of superhero comics. King is a flawed writer, but his issue seemed to at least make some kind of effort. Here, the only effort seemed to have gone into lore considerations than the use of form. So instead of tightly composed comics that flow well, you have copious amounts of utterly lazy and poor narrative captions and exposition dumping that are a drag. You have a comic with absolutely no sense of meaningful pacing or rhythm at all. It devolves into a generic mess of bland superhero comics with little consideration or thought put in when it comes to the craft.

And as for the contents themselves, it becomes pure Johnsian Fanboy nonsense involving Flashpoint Batman and sequelizing that rings hollow. And once it’s past that, it becomes Eobard Thawne, The Reverse Flash, encountering Doctor Manhattan. And we’re treated to great pieces of writing such as this:

When you’ve gotten to Eobard Thawne talking about power levels and lore importance and how he has enough powers that he can take on Doctor Manhattan, with dialogue this poor, you know things have gone wrong. When this is what Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins’ masterpiece has been reduced down to being used for, you know things are dire.

Watchmen in the hands of Geoff Johns feels like a terrifying proposition already. But Watchmen in the hands of Geoff Johns’ lesser fanboy clones? It’s bleak. You had Eobard Thawne, the ultimate Fanboy figure of comics as molded by Geoff Johns, penned by a Geoff Johns fanboy dealing with Doctor Manhattan and his power, to establish to DC comics nerds just how powerful Manhattan was. And how nothing, and no one, could stop him or his plans, even this last guy who was involved in the big Flashpoint that rebooted DC to create The New 52.

And alongside all of that, you also had the Johns fanboy getting to pen the official sequel moment of Flashpoint, wherein Thomas Wayne Batman and Bruce Wayne Batman would meet and fight together. Father and son get to exchange words, as the comic attempts for cheap sentimentality that reminds you of superior Greg Rucka/Klaus Janson comics about Bruce and his relationship to his father that you’d rather be reading instead. It’s just hollow and vapid fanservice comics that closes out on another ‘Thomas Wayne Batman is so awesome!’ redemptive hero moment for the character that feels like an unintentional parody of Johns’ own comics writing. And so what you’re left with is lots of yammering about Continuity/Timelines and other Geoff Johns insular nonsense that means nothing and is about nothing.

But as all of that happens, you’re hit with another key beat to follow all of that up. A moment that is pure Geoff Johns and yet also pure Joshua Williamson.

Jay Garrick is back, in a move evoking Johns’ Wally West return in DC Universe: Rebirth #1. He’s having trouble finding a ‘lightning rod’ much like Wally in the special but he’s back.

It was a move teased and spoiled outright on numerous covers of the issue themselves, so it was known. Hype was built around it. People cheered and flocked to the store to buy it, going ‘Jay is back!!’.

But what happens in the issue is perhaps the most brutally accurate depiction of not only Johns and Williamson, but modern DC and its approach in general.

This is the very ethos of DC storytelling:

Make a big deal about an Old Thing That People Like being back. Dangle in front of them like bait and tease them. Then take it away, to do it all over again the next time.

That’s how you sell comics.

Pull out a toy from a box, show it off for a hot second, put it back in the box. And each time, promise something really big, meaningful or special is gonna be done with that toy, but it’s not. It’s just bait to sell and market and get more eyes and sales and buzz for whatever new crossover or big event series that needs a boost. It’s a gimmick. Instead of meaningful storytelling, you’re granted these little morsels of bait, with a ‘Hey, we might do it! This time! We promise! We swear! Buy Infinite Button Crisis Omega #1 today and it might just happen!’

There is no joke or satire one could make that would skewer them as hard as they themselves do themselves here.

And Williamson, the Johns fan, penning a beat evoking a beat Johns did to great success and fanfare, and doing it much worse and poorer, feels like a fitting encapsulation of the whole endeavor. Given that’s essentially the the entire story of Watchmen and Watchmen-sequel enterprises, and certainly the story of modern Geoff Johns in relation to Alan Moore, who Johns keeps trying to evoke and mimic and ‘succeed’ by sequelizing, whilst completely failing. Perhaps it’s fitting that Johns would inspire his own version of that.

But if all of this seems foolish, then what follows after is likely even dumber.

Many asked themselves, over and over, for months and months, ever since the announcement:

Where was this all going? What was going to happen next? Where’s all this Watchmen stuff going?

The Button was promised to be the thing to address that.

And so as things wrap up, the book ends like so, with The Button in the hands of Doctor Manhattan, as Dave Gibbons’ iconic letters, and Moore’s dialogue are echoed like voice-over in a film trying to beat you over the head with callbacks. The ‘Remember, guys?’ was strong here.

But for all the teasing, what was really going on wasn’t clear yet. What was to be the future and fate of all this? More of that Tom King single-issue, or more of that disastrous Williamson show? What was in store for us all here? What was the purpose of this whole damn ‘Button’ thing, really? Because it still hadn’t been clear. Why did it exist? What’s this story about even?

Then the epilogue hits.

And you suddenly, slowly understand.

As you look at the big bold yellow letters on all black, and flip over to this:

You begin to get a real sense of the answer. You understand why The Button exists and what it is.

You begin to have a firm grasp on the whole damn thing as you get through these final epilogue pages, to get to:

So, what is The Button?

It’s not a story.

It’s a glorified commercial and ad for a Geoff Johns Watchmen comic.

It’s a goddamn ad and a cheap Previews Magazine with sequential art.

It’s the worst kind of hollow, empty crossover story that exists purely to advertise for another big event story. It’s a comics commercial for poor Johnsian Watchmen comics by a Johns fanboy.

So what is the legacy of The Button?

It’s nothing, because there is nothing here beyond a hollow commercial.

Tom King’s work makes an effort to engage with the formal echoes of Watchmen, but then immediately dips, while Williamson’s work is all that’s left and makes no effort whatsoever. It does nothing of worth or value with a text like Watchmen that it’s so loudly evoking and in dialogue with. It’s just knock off Johns school of comics, which perhaps makes sense and is fittingly inevitable when you’re dealing with ventures that are rooted in a desire to be knock off Moore school of comics, with Johns aiming to be its new Principal.

So, what is The Button?

In the end, it’s a writer who facing the prospect of having to script Geoff Johns fanfiction bails, while a Johns fanboy takes on the job and is all too happy to create an advert for a Geoff Johns Watchmen book.

It’s just sad.

For more in “Who Watched the Watchmen”…

The post Who Watched The Watchmen? The Button appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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You’ve heard the word. You know the story.

Crisis.

The iconic, defining, definitive word of DC stories.

The word Crisis feels inseparable from the fabric of DC. It holds sway over its past, it informs its present, and it will certainly influence the future. You can’t think of DC and not think of Crisis at some point. The very idea of it has been bound to the very idea of DC that tightly.

And the response to the word and its invocation is intense as well. It comes with a lot of assumptions and baggage. Given that is the case, given it has become ubiquitous, inevitable, and all-pervading with DC itself, it’s worth discussing what has become of it. What has emerged from this focusing and this obsession over Crisis in DC? What has it led to?

The matter of Crisis must be unpacked, and that’s what we’re here to do.

Picking up where we left off…

Fan Arguments as ComicsThe subject of Fan Writers and Fan Arguments and ‘fixing’ the DC Universe inevitably brings up one particular writer and subject above all others:

Geoff Johns.

Few have held the sway and control over the modern DC Universe the way Johns has over the years in all his time as Writer, DC Architect, CCO, and President, with much of his work even shaping DC Films, TV Shows, and Video Games. And perhaps it is Johns that best embodies the modern DC, having been its face for a good many years. He feels indicative of this modern ‘Crisis Era’ as Dan Didio once described the modern 21st century era full of events upon events, each bigger than the last.

And Johns is, of course, the writer of the first ‘official’ sequel to Crisis On Infinite Earths. He’s the man behind Infinite Crisis, with gorgeous artwork by George Perez’s greatest apprentice and student Phil Jimenez. And it is Johns and his work, more than anyone else, who firmly cement the very idea of ‘Crisis’ in a modern context beyond a distanced 1980’s context. Johns’ vision of a Crisis sequel and successor, a proper ‘modern’ Crisis would be one that would see the return of the last remaining ‘old’ characters from the ending of the original Crisis On Infinite Earths. And they would return because they were deeply dissatisfied with how the DC Universe had turned out since Crisis.

It was an event wherein the previously innocent and decent Alexander Luthor (the son of the heroic Lex Luthor of Earth-Three) and Superboy Prime from the original Crisis would be revealed as mad monsters standing in for Fan Impulses. Prime was revamped as the prototypical bitter fanboy who hated ‘the new’ and nostalgically held up a rose-tinted idea of the past as a lost beauty. Meanwhile, Luthor would play the mad-god-creator who would keep smashing things together over and over, effectively throwing shit at the wall, until he’d seemingly found The One True Perfect Iteration Of Things as he’d believed things should be in his head. They were The Disillusioned Monstrous Creator and The Disillusioned Broken Fanboy, while the Old Classic Superman was slotted into a different role. The Classic Old Man Superman would be the figure representative of The Old Guard who looked at and judged the current DC Comics landscape harshly, seeing it as lesser, as worse, darker, and broken, but would if given time come to care for it, embrace it and love it. Old Man Superman would be the counterpoint and positive example in contrast to Prime and Luthor.

And the grounds of this whole debate would, of course, involve The Multiverse, Positivity vs Negativity, Hope and Optimism vs Lack Of Hope and Cynicism, ending with a classic Johnsian affirmation of absolute nigh-religious faith expressed in the DC superhero enterprise. But that’s effectively what the whole ordeal was – a long, drawn out, elaborate Comics Fan Argument and DC Debate turned into a big, giant event comic. A comic about what DC is and should be and what DC isn’t and shouldn’t be, with one side being proven wrong and being convinced of the other side’s point by the end, because they finally understood The Correct Perspective.

But the problem with such an approach should be evident here. And it’s a problem that perhaps is best summed up when Johns rehashes this same mindset and approach of comics-making towards Watchmen a decade later in his Watchmen-sequel Doomsday Clock. Watchmen worked because it used superheroes to be about things beyond superhero comics and their insularities. Doomsday Clock on the other hand is entirely steeped in mindless superhero comics insularities, as even Doctor Manhattan gets turned into an Alexander Luthor-esque Disillusioned Monstrous Creator toying with the DC Universe, allowing Johns to turn Watchmen into a document by which to stage out Superhero Fan Arguments in the actual comics. Even its pretense of Cold War themes or geopolitical conflicts are aesthetic gestures in an attempt to evoke Watchmen, while using it squarely to do Comics About DC Comics. And so once again you get The Multiverse, Positivity vs Negativity, Hope and Optimism vs Despair and Cynicism, and the ending with the Johnsian affirmation.

In the end, in its own way, perhaps it is fitting that Infinite Crisis is very much representative of this approach, because like the first Crisis, Infinite Crisis too was designed to ‘address’ the mess and madness of the DC Universe at the time. It would help the ‘house-cleaning’ of things, with Superboy Prime literally shattering reality to make way for whatever madness was required.

But perhaps it’s fitting in another way, too. It’s just another generation of Fan Writer coming to Wolfman’s own fan ideas on DC comics and then continuing the argument, because Johns is the opposite of Wolfman: he is obsessed with Continuity. Or at the very least, his own personal idea of DC continuity and the history of the DC Universe.

Following the events of Infinite Crisis, DC would launch the 52 weekly series, with the all-star creative roster of Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, Mark Waid, Geoff Johns, Keith Giffen, and J.G Jones, with a legion of artists working alongside them. It would be a year long-odyssey of comics, publishing 52 issues by a ‘Creator’s Room’ across 52 weeks. It would explore a year of missing story, as DC books ‘skipped’ a year ahead following Infinite Crisis. And it would be here, finally, that The Multiverse would be back. It would be returned, with just a shiny, sexy number of 52 universes.

What Crisis On Infinite Earths tried to throw out was back on the table again.

And continuity shenanigans, as well as Fan Argument comics, were soon about to run wild.

The Exception(al Crisis) Amidst It allPerhaps the one striking exception in this framework and design is Final Crisis by Grant Morrison, J.G Jones, Doug Mahnke, and others. It is the one Crisis that is less about serving the editorial demands or mandates like the original Crisis, or the run of the mill Zero Hours, or even Johnsian Company Man comics like Infinite Crisis. If anything, it runs counter to that, as the editorial asks were pursued via two separate projects wholly unbound to the event itself. There was the infamous Countdown to Final Crisis weekly series and the Death Of The New Gods mini-series, both of which ran counter to pretty much all of Morrison’s plans. And thus both were books Morrison would largely ignore, because it was a bunch of editorial nonsense.

Final Crisis was a different beast. It was Grant Morrison cut loose and allowed to run amok with Kirby’s creations and the whole DC sandbox for a few months. And the end result? An attempt by Morrison to craft a ‘mythic’ superhero story that has everything, from opening on Metron, The God Of Knowledge, granting the Promethean spark of inspiration to humankind to the murder mystery of a dead superhero. It was Morrison trying to use the DC Universe and its landscape to do a story evocative of all the great big ‘mythic’ apocalypses. If their JLA run had been all about ‘The DC Heroes as Gods’ and doing classic mythic fables as pop sci-fi superhero comics, then this was about doing the ultimate mythic story- the end of days. The Ragnarok.

It was billed as The Day Evil Won, and the story of what happens next, as we saw all of reality fall to the thrall of Darkseid, and on a higher plane of existence, Mandrakk The Dark Monitor. It was the story of Dark Gods finally getting what they wanted, and of what the heroes did next in the face of that. How would they reckon with the all-pervading power of Anti-Life? How would they stop the cosmic manifestation of absolute nihilism and devouring hunger? That was the book.

And so the end result was drawing on Jack Kirby, yes, but also equally as much from Richard Wagner and his Ring Cycle of Operas. If Wagner created his own version of Ragnarok via Götterdämmerung, then Morrison’s Final Crisis would be very much in dialogue with that. Nix Uotan, the Last Of The Monitors, who is the star of the book as the lone survivor of The Twilight Of The Gods, is aptly named. Because ‘Uotan’ is pronounced ‘Wotan,’ and ‘Wotan’ is Wagner’s Odin in the Ring Cycle. If nothing else, Final Crisis was a big break from the existing mode of Crisis stories and comics. It was a decidedly Grant Morrison joint rooted in a post-9/11 obsession with apocalypse stories. It’s perhaps why any and all attempts to read into it as being about Comics Insularities have proven to be weak interpretations, with Morrison openly calling readings of their antagonist Mandrakk as Alan Moore to be nonsensical.

Rather than Fan Arguments about DC Comics, it is simply a pure Grant Morrison joint, doing what they do. Whether it works for one or not, that was the essential nature of it. It was to do Crisis in a way it had never been done before, and it likely never would be done after, the only way a singular voice and creator could do it. It was a Crisis event comic wherein a creator actually got to tell a story that meant something to them rather than being wrapped up in editorial edict-serving or insular fan arguments.

Morrison discusses it here:

Morrison: I took it as an opportunity to tell a modern story of Gods interacting with superhumans in the contemporary setting of the DC Universe. What would an evil God look like? How would it operate? What exactly is a God? Are there Gods of Suspicion? Or Terror? These were questions that seemed worth answering in the context of a sturm und drang ‘doomsday’ scenario for our heroes.

It’s an operatic story about endings and the apocalypse so I decided it ought to mark the close of a long period of daily work with these characters. It’s a farewell to the DC Universe for me in many ways so I was able to work that elegiac tone into the atmosphere of the series in a way that gave it more emotional texture. Final Crisis draws together a lot of the story threads and themes that have run through my work going all the way back to Animal Man, JLA [Justice League of America] in the 90s, and more recently Seven Soldiers and 52 so yes, it’s very much intended as a capstone or culmination of a few familiar themes and ideas.

How did the story develop? What was your thought-process in terms of story development?

Morrison: When I started Final Crisis in 2006, I decided this story about gods, parallel universes and the End of The World should aim to be a myth about Now, about the way the world was feeling five years after 9/11. I was responding to a definite sense that the future had been cancelled, even that evil had ‘won’ during those years, and I think many of us were aware of a kind of sombre, heavy, ‘end of civilization’ mood and a retreat from progressive values into a kind of reactionary witch-hunting Puritanism. I was watching our young soldiers dying in the Middle East while our “emo” kids back home took to cutting and slashing their own flesh with razors as some bizarre, inarticulate response to the whole looming zeitgeist and I saw correspondences there and things worth responding to with this kind of fiction.

For me Final Crisis, is about the type of guilt-ridden, self-loathing stories we insist on telling ourselves and, especially, our children—about the damage those stories do and about the good they could do if we took more responsibility for the power and influence of our words. Narratively, it’s inspired by the big “end of the world” stories from mythology and the Bible—the Norse Ragnarok, Revelations, the Mahabharata etc. It’s about events, ideas and consequences, rather than characters, in that respect but hopefully it encompasses struggles we all understand and tackles some big ideas in a new way.

How does Final Crisis fit within the context of the rest of the DC Universe?

Morrison: Right in the middle, right now, as part of the vast ongoing story that is the DC shared universe continuity. At the same time, I wanted it to be something that could be read on its own—my version of the ultimate superhero battle between good and evil—so it’s quite self-contained.

In writing Final Crisis, to what extent, if any, were you influenced by Crisis on Infinite Earths? To what extent were you influenced by Jack Kirby?

Morrison: I was influenced to the extent that Final Crisis is in some ways a sequel, so they share a cast of characters and certain narrative touchstones. With the Kirby material I was trying to find a way to refresh his concepts—which were created to be relevant to a Post-War, Vietnam 60s baby boomer generation—for a contemporary audience. Kirby was a great mythmaker in the William Blake mould and his big archetypes of the Modern Age, his Gods of Science, Surveillance, Information and Industrialization, lend themselves well to reinterpretation in a War on Terror context.

It didn’t destroy or recreate The Multiverse. It just used it for a story that was personal to Morrison, a story about men and gods, inspiration and imagination, and in the end merely just added to and expanded it by creating a home-world for all of Jack Kirby’s DC creations, like a final parting gift.

But tragically, the titular Final Crisis would not prove to be the final one. There would be more after. And there would be…

The Fake Crisis Of FlashpointWhile not at all an actual Crisis, Geoff Johns and Andy Kubert’s Flashpoint mini-series that would follow a few years after would end up having the same basic impact as the first Crisis – rebooting all of mainline DC comics and its multiverse for the 2nd time in history. It would be the move that would pave the way for the hot and sexy New 52 initiative. Perhaps if anything best demonstrates the impact and effect of Geoff Johns’ work to this modern era of constant Crises, it ought to be this one, as his guiding hand can be found in most of them.

And if nothing else, the book is a useful demonstration of the vital truth that even if a book isn’t titled ‘Crisis,’ it can effectively operate as such. Which will be crucial to understanding things moving forward, because up next is…

The Convergence Car CrashEver since they’d got rid of The Multiverse in Crisis, like with all the things they threw out, DC and its many creators tried to find a way to sneak them back in or undo what was done. And eventually, they’d finally bite the bullet and bring it back in the 52 weekly series that followed Infinite Crisis. But it was still only 52 universes, not the Infinite Earths of before.

And so, as previously mentioned by Wolfman himself, DC had long been on a mission to deal with the impact of Crisis. And Dan Didio, the latest in line of people in charge, was the architect behind most of the modern ‘Crisis’ stories, green-lighting them and overseeing their publishing. So years after Final Crisis, Didio would orchestrate Convergence, which saw all of DC reality and history assembled in chunks smashed together on a single planet called Telos. It was the height of insular fan-service driven comics. They were poor comics about absolutely nothing, devoted to an empty ‘Hey remember…’ referentialism aiming to please fans who pride themselves on catching easter eggs or references. Written by comics newcomer Jeff King and much reviled sex pest Scott Lobell, with art by Steven Segovia and others- Convergence was very much a creatively bankrupt editorial affair whose only real purpose was to fill up the time of 2 months while DC moved offices from New York to Burbank to be close to their corporate parent. But its secondary purpose was to finally press the button that Didio and DC had forever been wanting to press:

Undoing Crisis On Infinite Earths.

At the end of Convergence, the characters go back in time and ‘undo’ Crisis On Infinite Earths and ‘win’ such that the multiverse never died. The infinite earths still exist, and thus all of DC history as we know it and understand it is no longer quite so certain and cemented, as the very event that led to the birth of the modern ‘DC Universe’ post-Crisis…now just never happened. Continuity was broken, it would seem.

As Wolfman had prophecized before, this was inevitable. Crisis itself would get ‘undone’ the way it had ‘undone’ all that had come before it, and the cycle never stops.

Here’s the perspective from Didio and Lee at the time:

“The last thing we want to do [with our new titles] right now,” says DiDio, “is cross over a bunch of books, or remove them from our stands while we’re trying to let them grow, and take form, and shape, and find their audience. We’re giving everybody some running room to really be able to establish themselves, and to build themselves solid series.” Allowing individual titles the time to “build” a sense of direction, a supporting cast and an independent audience is the foundation of this new DC Universe. DiDio and Lee want to get back to a place where crossovers and events are rare enough to feel special.

Lee calls it a focus on “canon” over “continuity,” on creating the best stories about a character without being restricted by a larger continuity to the degree that was attempted with the New 52, noting that being set out of continuity hasn’t kept The Dark Knight Returns or Kingdom Come from captivating creators and fans. In fact, that captivation has driven elements of those stories into the main timeline. Continuity, he says, is something the readership is too concerned about, citing the lead up to the New 52, when DC editors were peppered with questions about what parts of the old universe were still canon.

In a way, this fit perfectly. Wolfman had noted that he hated continuity, and just believed DC should publish individual books anyone could pick up and read. And this was to be the motto of the new DCYou initiative, which launched a plethora of new titles and effectively said ‘forget continuity, just read this one book or two you like.’ Shared Universe Storytelling took a major back seat as Didio’s dream of a less continuity-reliant DC was in play with DCYou.

But at the same time, because of the very fact that continuity broke, the whole ‘the Infinite Earths are back!’ didn’t seem to matter. Nobody cared about Convergence. It was a reviled and mocked event comic even as it was coming out. That it was published right next to Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic’s beloved Secret Wars event really did not help its case. People just ignored it beyond tie-ins by creators they liked or spotlighting old characters they dug, ignoring the actual main-story centered around figures like ‘Deimos’ from the pages of Warlord comic that nobody really had much investment in.

Apathy was in the air.

But the tiresome Crisis re-litigation wasn’t yet finished.

Despite the diminishing returns and apathy, it was a well DC was doomed to revisit.

Next: Repeat On Infinite EarthsThe post DC and The Matter Of Crisis, Part II appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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You’ve heard the word. You know the story.

Crisis.

The iconic, defining, definitive word of DC stories.

The word Crisis feels inseparable from the fabric of DC. It holds sway over its past, it informs its present, and it will certainly influence the future. You can’t think of DC and not think of Crisis at some point. The very idea of it has been bound to the very idea of DC that tightly.

And the response to the word and its invocation is intense as well. It comes with a lot of assumptions and baggage. Given that is the case, given it has become ubiquitous, inevitable, and all-pervading with DC itself, it’s worth discussing what has become of it. What has emerged from this focusing and this obsession over Crisis in DC? What has it led to?

The matter of Crisis must be unpacked, and that’s what we’re here to do.

The Roots Of CrisisCrisis begins in the 1960’s Silver Age of comics, emerging from Justice League Of America #21-22 by Gardner Fox, Mike Sekowsky, Bernard Sachs, and Gaspar Saladino.

In many ways, it was a spiritual successor to something that had just occurred. Under the stewardship of editor Julius Schwartz, something special would be carried out. Gardner Fox, the original writer and co-creator of The Flash (Jay Garrick) from way back in the 1940’s Golden Age era, would reunite the original Flash with the new Flash of the 1960s. And so The Flash Of Two-Worlds was born, creating a classic, and bringing the conceit of ‘The Multiverse‘ into play for DC. A reality divided by vibrational frequencies, designated with terminology like ‘Earth-One’ and ‘Earth-Two’ and granting a generational quality to the DC world and setting.

So it made sense to ‘scale up’ from that and take that idea to a bigger, wider stage. Why stop at just The Flash? Why not do all the rest? Why not all the other heroes meeting one another? And so that meant The Justice League meeting The Justice Society, it meant Earth-One and Earth-Two meeting one another. That gave birth to Crisis On Earth-One and Crisis On Earth-Two. These were the very first Crisis stories. The very roots from which all others would emerge and follow.

And thus began Crisis. A grand, inter-dimensional team-up tale bridging two different realities and generations of DC Comics.

It proved to be a hit, and DC kept doing them. If the very first Crisis had expanded the DC landscape from ‘one world’ to ‘two worlds’, they’d keep it going and expand even further. And so you had the introduction of the new villainous doppelgangers of our heroes- The Crime Syndicate of Earth-Three. And that ‘second’ Crisis would arrive only 6 issues after the very first Crisis in Justice League Of America #29– titled Crisis On Earth-Three!

Thus was a tradition born, as many more ‘Crisis’ stories followed, expanding and trying to add to this ever-growing new toybox that would come to be known as ‘The DC Universe’ or ‘The DC Multiverse’. Many more ‘Earths’ would be introduced, many more team-ups would occur, and ‘Crisis’ would would become almost akin to a DC Superhero Comics equivalent to an annual festival. One wherein all of the heroes would get together and do what they do best.But that is not what Crisis would remain forever. Its meaning would change drastically, as would its place in the context of DC. For when we now say ‘Crisis’ we think of one particular one, above all else, above all the others. It’s not the 1 or 2 issue or perhaps maybe 3 or 4 issues at best story arc of a title. It’s not just a ‘crossover’ or ‘team-up.’ It’s something way bigger than that.

When we say Crisis, we mean…

The End Of EverythingCrisis On Infinite Earths. The one and only, by the iconic duo of Marv Wolfman and George Perez. This is the defining Crisis, but what’s interesting is the way in which it breaks from tradition. It’s not quite like the above stories we’ve discussed. Instead, what it draws on is Marv Wolfman’s love of Marvel and his passion for classic Jack Kirby/Stan Lee stories of The Fantastic Four.

Wolfman, alongside his good friend Len Wein, was a huge comics fan, particularly a Jack Kirby fan. Wolfman and Wein were tight pals who made and published fanzines, and would through good fortune end up often visiting the Kirby household. The two of them would be offered milk and cookies by Roz Kirby, while they just watched Kirby draw. These were fans who succeeded the iconic founders of these worlds, and had the chance to re-shape it. They were the first generation of fans-turned-writers who had the chance to engage directly with their heroes.

And so when the time came, Wolfman would construct a tale evocative of the DC tradition, titled ‘Crisis,’ but would draw upon his fondness for the Marvel mechanism. The lack of emphasis on multiverses and there being little archipelago-esque ‘separation,’ a clean clear single universe and timeline/history in which all of the characters existed and interacted, he wanted to bring all of that over to the DC world. He wanted to ‘clean it up’ and help rebuild it that Marvel way. And what better way to do it than to draw upon the most Marvel story of all?

The Galactus Saga.

Galactus was God as drawn by Jack Kirby. The Anti-Monitor would be the Devil as drawn by George Perez. Galactus was a Devourer of Worlds. The Anti-Monitor would then be the Devourer of Universes. Galactus had The Silver Surfer, the herald of his arrival who was forced to suffer and watch as planets died. The Anti-Monitor had a man (poorly) named ‘Pariah.’ And if there was The Watcher to stand against and speak to Galactus, then there was to be The Anti-Monitor’s opposite…The Monitor.

The Wolfman/Perez Crisis is a tale rooted in the influence and love of those classic Kirby comics, and it would take the basic make-up and ingredients of that material, along with the Crisis label, and ‘scale it up.’ Everything would be escalated. It wouldn’t be planets being devoured and popping out of existence. It would be entire universes. It wasn’t just one Earth at stake. It was all of them. It was the bridge between the multiversal ‘Crisis’ frameworks and the apocalyptic Kirby cosmic fables.

What happens when The Destroyer comes to devour all of existence? Crisis. It was big, it was massive, and unlike anything else at the time.

Firstly, you have the unique format: the 12-issue maxi-series format of a complete story that could be picked up by anyone, with the thunderous work of George Perez on all of them. Across those 12 issues of comics, George Perez would build on the aesthetic powers of predecessors like Jack Kirby and Mike Sekowsky, and would do something spectacular. Perez would construct the very language of event comics storytelling. He would define its vocabulary, its grammar, how it ought to look and play, how it would be laid out, and the scope and scale it might be operating at.

With Perezian spreads boasting legions upon legions of characters, all with meticulous detail, and dynamic perspectives utilized wherever possible, you had an event that felt momentous in a way few others had. And it’s because it was, in collapsing and concluding the way DC comics had been up to that point. It was the end of days. It was the final days of the DC Multiverse, for after this there would be no multiverse. There would only be one universe, with a clear timeline, history, and a clear attempt at ‘continuity’ and soap opera in the way Marvel had by now pioneered. It’d be an all-new, all-different shared universe for a new generation of hip readership emerging in the 1980s.

If one ever doubts the sensibilities of the affair and its bone-deep desire to appeal to a Marvel-savvy audience, here’s Wolfman himself on the matter:

DC’s sales at that point, except for the Teen Titans and the Legion of Super-Heroes, were very bad. Marvel’s sales were huge, as was Titans, but DC’s sales (overall) were very poor because DC sort of still thought they were dealing with a kid audience and most of the people now were at least in their teenage years or early 20s by that point.

So, this would be something that would change the DC Universe, that would make it more interesting to the Marvel fans to come over and I spent a couple years working up the plot in detail to make sure that everything made sense. This was gonna be so large and so difficult to do that you couldn’t just make it up as you went along. Everything had to make sense from Day One and there had to be a reason why everything was there.

After the first issue came out, Alan Moore wrote a fan letter to me — personally so I didn’t publish it — but he’s the only person who ever got why the story begins with the death of the villain Earth DC had with Ultraman and Power Ring and a whole bunch of other characters. But they were the superheroes who were villains. But they were Superman; they were Batman; they were Green Lantern. They were just evil. Got rid of them in four pages and the reason was I had made a decision right from Day One that the real Superman, the real Batman, the real Wonder Woman—they would not appear in the book for five or six issues.

My feeling was that if the Marvel fans did not like DC, it’s probably because they tried Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman at the time and didn’t like the characters and they didn’t know all these other characters that DC had. They just made a decision based on what everybody knew. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman. So, they wouldn’t appear and I wanted to show how powerful the villain was because in four pages he got rid of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman instantly! Without even, really, a struggle! And that was purely psychological because I knew the fans would not piece that together but they’d suddenly realize, “This is a really powerful villain because he just destroyed Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman!” even if that wasn’t quite their names.

And even more crucially, it was a book rooted in one desire- to get rid of and flush away all the baggage of DC comics. To help give it a fresh start, to be free of past continuity.

But the thing is: comics fans like and adore continuity. They are obsessed with it. They are enamored with history. And so that set the stage for something disastrous. Even in the very make-up of Crisis On Infinite Earths was the kernels of disagreement, the push and pull that would go onto define DC comics forever:

Marv: Yeah, the ending…I was not allowed to do the ending that I had wanted. I was overruled on that. The editors overruled me and they were completely wrong.

What was the ending you wanted to do?

Marv: My goal, the original concept as I pitched it, was that the series would simply end with the rebirth of the earth and all the heroes would start the next month and not one of them would ever know that the Crisis had ever happened because the Earth had been reborn and now we’re 10 million years later or however old the Earth is. A hundred and fifty million years. And everyone was being born for the first time so if there was a new Flash, they’d be born with a whole new approach, a new concept, a whole new whatever.

And I was told that the editors didn’t like that because if the heroes didn’t remember all their stories, it would invalidate everything that had existed previously, to which I answered with extreme sarcasm, “Our heroes do not buy our comic books. (Laughter) The fans do and they will still have all those books on their bookshelf and they will remember all those things.”

But all the editors overruled it so that’s why I had the heroes go back in time to before the world is reformed, so that they would be around to have remembered it. They didn’t cease to exist and get reborn. They were there the whole time. Then it was five years of everybody talking about, “What really happened in the Crisis?” which is, I knew, what would happen.

But I moved out of New York at that point so that was their problem. And (DC co-publisher) Dan DiDio has been trying to fix that ever since. So, he’s been really struggling! He agrees with me that that was the way it should have been, where everything starts new. You just get…You keep repeating the same things. Why start over if all you’re gonna do is remember about how bad things were, how awful things were? You need to start clean and create for the new generation a brand-new version, without having them already know the last 30 years of continuity. I hate continuity. You have to understand that Crisis existed to wipe out all continuity and start new.

Crisis was a book that could only be done once and never again. It had a novelty effect, and the power of watching George Perez, a magnificent master at the height of his powers, define the visual language of superhero stories at the grandest of scale and scope.

But its success and precedent meant that it could never just be moved on from. It could never be left behind, not really. As Wolfman describes above – there’s a fundamental tension baked in here, and it’s one that keeps a wheel spinning. And so you got story after story, event after event, all molded by its influence and inspiration, aspiring to its impact, all trying to help further ‘fix’ DC Comics and the DC Universe. To ‘clean up’ and ‘refine’ the sandbox of the shared universe, to help ‘maintain’ the toybox as it were. And so it became the lighting in a bottle DC could never leave behind, it morphed into the dragon they would eternally chase, with a barrage of events designed to forever attempt to recreate it.

Zero Hour: Crisis In Time It’s how you’d end up with Dan Jurgens’ Zero Hour not long after, because DC and its Editorial had even more ‘issues and ‘problems’ to resolve and address. And they would do it through a story involving Hal Jordan trying to rewrite and recreate reality as the supervillain Parallax. That the first real big ‘event’ since Crisis On Infinite Earths and the first ‘Crisis’ since would be about the Silver Age Green Lantern and Best Friend of Barry Allen, The Flash, having a goddamn meltdown and breakdown over all he had lost and the tragedies he’d had to live through and trying to turn back the clock? It was a fun enough notion, albeit not one Dan Jurgens was really capable of doing anything with. And so the end result was not really a character-centric drama of worth that you’d want or expect from such an endeavor, but another cavalcade of ‘then this happened, and then this happened’ comics that was only really editorial-mandates and interest-centric.

As for its impact and rejiggering of the DC reality? You had the Legion Of Super-Heroes rebooted, for the very first time, kicking off a cycle of endless reboots and continuity porn comics that lasts to this day. And even the domino effect of this mess can be traced back to the original Crisis’ impact, with John Byrne’s new Man Of Steel having no connection whatsoever to The Legion as ‘Superboy’ was erased. And then Legion comics in having to ‘make sense’ of that apparent contradiction, trying to square that circle, eventually led to a mess that lasts to this day. Does Superman know the Legion from his childhood or does he not? The DC Writers argue about it via stories like these. It’s how you get Hawkman re-re-rebooted again, and this time into some crazy Hawkgod looking like an actual Hawk. And he’d be rebooted again and again, with his origins rejiggered again and again after Zero Hour. This is the kind of mess and predicament DC threw itself into, and it’s one that would last forever. It’s a mess perhaps best symbolized by the infamous continuity disaster case that is Donna Troy. This is what you get with DC and its disastrous events and endless rewrites and reworkings, and it’s what Zero Hour would feel like the first early herald of, in a Post-Crisis world after the impact of Wolfman/Perez had settled.

And if Crisis On Infinite Earths had been a mid-1980’s reaction and response to over 40-50 years of DC Comics history, ‘canon’, and ‘continuity’, what followed would be different. The rapidity of these things would increase drastically. If Crisis had been a big band-aid story to reshape things after nearly 50 years of DC publishing, you would soon begin to get ‘Crisis’ stories to ‘fix’ things just a few years after the last one. And that pace would only quicken, as things would escalate.

Zero Hour was like a premonition of the future, of what was to come. And as you would expect, it was a largely tiresome affair without much going for it. Unlike Crisis, there was no ground-breakingly thrilling George Perez art or aesthetic power here to make a reader swoon. It was the kind of comic you’d forget not long after you’d read it, with little to really remark upon. And it would be emblematic of a certain kind of comic and Crisis story, one that would rapidly grow and morph into an uncontrollable beast.

No single ‘fix’ would be enough. There would always be more. Always another. And the very idea of an ‘event,’ particularly a ‘DC Event’ was firmly and fundamentally bound to the idea of a ‘fix’ story, of a ‘house-clean up’ enterprise. That is just what an event is and what an event does, it seemed to be understood. And it would begin to haunt DC for all eternity. Because one man’s ‘fix’ is another man’s ‘mess,’ which begets another ‘fix,’ and another, and then another. And that’s what was to be.

Crisis became a symbol of an argument amongst fans about what the DC Universe is and should be. It became a mechanism and means by which they would then address that subject and then proceed to try and make a book all about ‘fixing’ it.

Next: Crisis In CreativityThe post DC and The Matter of Crisis, Part I appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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The DC Universe remains a strange setting and object. A tattered together tapestry that feels more like an archipelago than a unified land mass like the Marvel Universe. It’s a strange beast. It’s an assembly from the various acquisitions and power grabs that united a disparate number of publishers under one banner. The DCU is a place of paper and ink that defies and slips out of any attempts to create a ‘clean’ and contradiction-free tapestry. It’s a setting where ‘continuity’ and ‘canon’ feel like loaded and dangerous words, as the crisis-afflicted setting resists any certainty those imply. It feels like a taped-together mess that barely holds, and yet when it does, it can be magnificent. Astonishing tales can be woven from its tendrils of impossible absurdity. It’s a reality operating on vibrations, wherein Superman sings to save existence.

There’s something broken and yet beautiful about it.

It’s a truth that seems to extend to its cinematic and television worlds as well, which lack the ‘cohesion’ of a Marvel Studios-style clean universe, and feel more like chaotic whirlwinds of clashing worlds and visions that can change on a dime. It’s what we’re seeing once more as Warner Bros, DC’s parent company, has been acquired by Discovery.

As I sat down to read The Hollywood Reporter’s coverage on the whole aftermath of the Discovery acquisition, with CEO David Zaslav having new plans that scuttled the old ones, something struck me.

Reading about these now-uncertain plans of the future, I had a clear thought that focused in on the first line of the last paragraph:

Really? Crisis On Infinite Earths? That’s what they were gearing up for? They had nothing else? No other story to adapt or consider?

It was a thought that seemed to echo even stronger in light of the reveal that the Dark Crisis event title from DC had been ‘hiding’ its actual ‘real’ title: Dark Crisis On Infinite Earths. Once again, at that point, I recall thinking:

Really? Why are we so obsessed with going back to that one story? Don’t we have literally anything else? Come on now!

Both cases were merely an expression of a larger frustration- the idea of a Big DC Story being impossibly chained to the husk of an 80’s Crisis comic. But that also got me thinking about a wider question the whole thing seemed to suggest. The very idea of a Big DC Story itself. What is that? How does such a thing manifest? Particularly now. How do we view and think about Big DC Stories? Those universe-spanning tales that feel like a grand statement, which tackle the totality of this absurd archipelago. They come in many shapes, many forms and formats, and they’re a prospect worth considering. How do various creators seem to try and wrangle together this impossible setting and its inhabitants to say something? What do those attempts tend to look like? Are there patterns to them, across the past? And how do they make up the modern identity and portrait of contemporary DC Comics? That’s what I’d like to consider here, in taking a look at many popular attempts at Big Stories of the DC Universe.

It won’t just be Events we talk about, because (and this is key) while all events are Big Stories, not all Big Stories are Events, which is worth keeping in mind.

In surveying the landscape, in performing accounting of the past, nine notable modes emerge. These nine modes are the primary paths which many seem to be drawn to in our modern era. These are the popular modes in which we seem to have conceptualized our ideas of The Big DC Story.

1. The Crisis ModeThe apocalypse story. It’s a tale of reality-death. It’s the end of the world as the stakes. It’s a tale of grand, sweeping cosmic repercussions. It is the powerful echo of the phrase ‘Worlds will live. Worlds will die. And nothing will ever be the same.’

It is the most popular and recognizable vision of a Big DC Story. In fact, probably the first thing many even think of when the words ‘Big Story’ or ‘Event’ come up in comics contexts, for few exist with the kind of repercussions the original Crisis On Infinite Earths had. Crisis is, of course, not something Marv Wolfman and George Perez invented. There’s a long tradition of DC Crisis stories prior to that, many of them penned by the legendary Gardner Fox, known as The Father Of The Crossover. But while they could be big and multiversal, no Crisis before or after had quite the same impact or visual power. Wolfman had grown up a diehard Marvel kid, alongside best mate Len Wein, and would go up to the home of Jack Kirby and watch him draw, eating snacks. He worked on magazines that expressed his diehard Marvel cred, and he lived and breathed the Marvel Universe, particularly as drawn by Jack Kirby. And so he would pen a comic called Crisis, an event comic designed to re-configure the DC Universe in order to make it more akin to a ‘cleaner’ and more ‘cohesive’ universe like Marvel, in a story that was effectively a cover song of the iconic Galactus Saga from the pages of Fantastic Four. And with the brilliance of artistic pioneer George Perez as his collaborator to pull it off, Crisis would create what would become the visual language of Event Storytelling in superhero comics.

It worked, and from there, whatever ‘Crisis’ had been prior, which was almost akin to a Thanksgiving ritual of neat ‘team-ups,’ was supplanted by the power and potency of the new Perezian epic. Ever since, people have been chasing that high, and trying to recreate it.

So what is a Crisis as we understand it now? It usually involves a mysterious celestial or cosmic threat that is out to devour the world or devastate it beyond recognition, and must be stopped at all costs. It’s the Do Or Die story, the ‘end of days’ tale of superhero worlds. And they’re tales that tend to conclude with the salvation of existence, putting off the end of days until next time. Every event or ‘big story’ staple can usually be found in a Crisis, given how much it informed and influenced our modern ideas of what a big superhero comics story is or ought to be doing. Meaning whether it be grand Character Deaths or ‘House Cleaning’ of the shared universe and its continuity, it’s all demonstrated here.

There’s no shortage of examples when it comes to Big DC Stories that operate in the Crisis Mode and tradition:

• Cosmic Odyssey
• Zero Hour: A Crisis In Time
• Final Night
• Our Worlds At War
• JLA/Avengers
• Infinite Crisis
• Final Crisis
• The Multiversity
• Convergence
• Dark Nights: Metal
• Justice League: No Justice
• Dark Nights: Death Metal
• Infinite Frontier
• Dark Crisis On Infinite Earths

2. The Watchmen ModeThe mystery drama. Something’s just happened, and no one seems to truly understand it. People are on the case and trying to piece things together. There’s a sense of paranoia and uncertainty, and the thrust of the story is less ‘outward’ as in apocalyptic crisis tales. Instead all the scale and spectacle is used to look ‘inward,’ the pieces, the players, how they fit, how they don’t fit, and the sparks that fly from that. If the big apocalyptic spectacle arrives, it’s usually right at the end to help make a point about the actual people themselves. These are dramas less about an attack from the sky or the stars, and more so about the rot that’s been growing amidst everything in the world as it exists.

It’s the other popular alternative to a typical Crisis. It’s less ‘a bomb’s gone off’ and more so ‘we think there might a bomb, and it might be ticking,’ as we follow that ticking until the conclusion, and see how things go down. It’s a mode that lends itself very well to questioning the essential qualities of its setting and casting doubt upon previously held-assumptions or ideas. It’s why it’s the go-to mode for the big DC stories that wish to explore how and where the superhero figure fits in and relates to real history, politics, and major issues people face.

The impact of Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins’ Watchmen ensured this was a mode that would forever be etched into the annals of superhero comics history. It was the dragon that many would chase, the lighting in the bottle many would try to recapture, the thing so many wanted to respond to, including DC themselves.

When done right and well, it can be the most rewarding, thrilling, rich and definitive statement on the setting or at least an era of it. It can speak to realities and use the genre fiction of the superhero as a vehicle to address real concerns and issues. When done poorly, it is probably the most disastrous. It’s a real sink-or-swim mode.

Examples of this mode can be seen in the following:

• The Golden Age
• The New Frontier
• Identity Crisis
• Heroes In Crisis
• Doomsday Clock

3. The Dark Knight Returns ModeThe Future Story. An absolute classic mode which generates a big sweeping statement and vision of a whole new world. If most superhero stories are trapped in a perpetual Act 2 mode, where there can never be a ‘true’ ending, with a final Act 3 being eternally put off, this goes against that. This is the story of what comes after the ‘end’ of the typical superhero story as we know it. It’s the story after that invisible Act 3 of superhero stories, that takes a peek at the future that follows it, and thus uses that mechanism to question the entire enterprise.

It’s Batman as a Retired Old Man, having quit. It’s Superman as a Retired Farmer, having quit. It’s Wonder Woman awakening after the end of the world. It’s the final chapter of the crusade of the superheroes, and what awaits them at the end. These tend to be somber and morose, with the characters reflecting on all that they were, all that they did, and all that they had failed to be and do, and what it all means.

While it wasn’t originated by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley’s tremendous The Dark Knight Returns (1986), as even by 1981 you had prominent stories like Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s Days Of Future Past, it was a mode most certainly cemented and codified for good by it. The impact and power of TDKR was so massive that the very idea of a Future Story, especially in a DC context, became bound to it. You thought ‘old future…’ and you thought of Bruce Wayne in those painted pages by Lynn Varley. You thought of the impossible-to-forget iconography and aesthetic power of The Dark Knight against the backdrop of a dark sky with lightning flashing behind him. The image’s sheer repetition and the endless homages and tributes paid to it alone ought to be a testament to its influence.

The freedom of this approach is that it divorces you from the typical limits, lines, and ‘rules’ of the traditional ‘mainline’ superhero figure and story. The endless list of ‘Well they can’t…you can’t…’ is put aside, as it becomes less about ‘the mainline’ or ‘the universe’ and just ‘the individual story.’ You’re freed from the confines of the typical superhero universe and construct and can just take the characters, their world, and ideas and progress them forward as you wish. And then you get to pose striking questions that examine and interrogate those figures, who they are, and what they mean and represent. It’s how and why even on the Marvel end, you eventually get Old Man Logan, and the film Logan. But it’s also why you get Zack Snyder’s Knightmare Future in the DCEU.

When done well, it’s powerful, evergreen work to last the ages that stands on its own. When done poorly, it’s a hodgepodge of aimless shock-driven choices without purpose or meaning. It’s a mode that seems deceptively easy to do because of its natural freedom, but it’s also one that due to that freedom reveals the mettle of the creators involved. Doing it right and making it work properly requires far more than just sticking to the basics and playing it safe.

Plenty of examples can be found of this type of Future Story enterprise, and they’re all revealing in their approaches:

• Kingdom Come
• DC One Million
• Batman Beyond
• Legion Of Super-Heroes: Millennium
• Batman: Last Knight On Earth
• Old Lady Harley
• Wonder Woman: Dead Earth
• Superman and The Authority
• DC Future State
• Catwoman: Lonely City

4. The Year One ModeThe Origin story. The early days. The beginnings. The roots. Who they are, and how they came to be. The precise opposite mode of The Future Story, it is The Past Story, refreshed over and over again, as each generation comes around to do their own iteration of it for a new contemporary moment. It is why we get both Batman Begins and The Batman, it is the starting point and baseline many work with. As Scott Snyder likes to famously tell people, Grant Morrison’s advice to him at his lowest point was ‘To make the character your own, you have to give them your own Birth and Death’. And that’s what would spawn Zero Year, which is now a key influence on the Matt Reeves/Robert Pattinson Batman in film.

But really, this is a mode that was cemented, like the prior three above, in the 1980’s with the DC Classics. And none more so than Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One. A book of mythic stature and the very definition of ‘perennial classic’, the David Mazzucchelli masterpiece set the table for every ‘origin’ story that would follow. It had peers alongside it back in the day, like John Byrne’s Man Of Steel, but none codified the very idea of ‘Origin Story Done Right’ the way Year One did. It’s the reason why the name has been reused so much, and it’s why that name still holds some grandeur. It feels important and special, and that’s only because of the classic it evokes.

It’s perhaps the definitive and most popular mode by which A Big DC Story is constructed, for it is the beginning, the foundation and roots where it all started. Tellingly, the very idea of The New 52 was to reset the whole damn DC lineup and universe closer to this mode. When done well, it takes that which feels and seems familiar and drastically alters our understanding and view of it in ways we didn’t expect, like a great cover song that totally changes the way you thought the song played, and could play. When done poorly, it’s trite boring fare that can feel redundant and will immediately be lost in the shuffle, as 10 more new attempts step all over it on the way forward.

Plenty of examples of the mode exist, like so:

• Batman: Year One
• Man Of Steel
• Emerald Dawn
• Justice League: Year One
• Superman: Birthright
• Green Arrow: Year One
• Green Lantern: Secret Origin
• Superman: Secret Origin
• The Earth One Imprint
• Justice League: Origin
• Batman: Zero Year
• Wonder Woman: Year One
• Superman: Year One

5. The Versus/War ModeThe most essential and basic superhero story there is. A versus story. And when writ-large, it becomes a war story. Two big sides clashing against one-another. Armies assembling to take on one another. These can be simple straight-forward stories like ‘Everybody teams up against The One Big Bad Army,’ a tale of survival and unity, or it can be a conflict that splits sides and forces people to choose. It can be ‘Punch the zombies!’ or a civil war that pits brother against brother. It’s the simplest kind of ‘big’ superhero story, which makes it an ideal mode of event story.

Perhaps best codified for a modern DC in the 2000s by Geoff Johns’ brand of bombastic action comics full of armies beating the hell out of each other, this is an incredibly popular mode, particularly given Johns has gone onto define so much of DC since then. And it makes sense, given Johns’ sensibilities veer towards serving very basic impulses, which is is looking at two powerful figures and going ‘Well, who would win? How would it go down if they fought?’ It’s the idea of the ultimate spectacle, and this expands out into the biggest possible tapestry and canvas possible. Going beyond DC, there is a reason so many Marvel events use the title of ‘War’, with perhaps Civil War being the biggest expression of the sensibility. But even works like Secret Invasion are of this mold, despite lacking ‘War’ in the title.

When done well, it can be awe-inspiring and special, but done poorly, the whole affair can devolve into pointless and mindless violence that happens just for the sake of it, to turn the wheels of ‘plot,’ and little else.

Plenty of examples exist of the mode in various ways:

• Invasion!
• Millennium
• Amazons Attack!
• Sinestro Corps War
• Blackest Night
• Injustice
• Darkseid War
• Justice League vs Suicide Squad
• Justice/Doom War
• DCeased
• DC vs Vampires
• Justice League vs Legion Of Super-Heroes
• War For Earth-3
• Batman vs Robin

6. The Death/Fall Of ModeThe Fall. The Death. It’s a classic. It’s the story immediately suggested for any and all stories, especially when you hear the words ‘eventful’ or ‘momentous.’ What is bigger than death? Every superhero has an origin–a birth. That means they also have an end–a death. Even if it is a temporary ‘fall’ or a temporary ‘death,’ the very notion feels Big and suggests a scope and scale that disrupts the natural status quo of the figure and their world.

Putting the words ‘Death Of’ or ‘Fall Of’ in the title is now an automatic way to signal a major event or initiative being launched, and for DC, it was perhaps best codified by the classic 1990’s Death Of Superman, which sold gangbusters and was covered even on National Television, gathering wider cultural interest. And it proved so successful that DC tried to mimic that sensibility and place other icons of theirs at the time in ‘Fall’ or ‘Death’ stories of sorts.

But the ‘fall of’ or ‘death of’ doesn’t necessarily have to just be that of an individual–it can be that of an institution, a team, or a place or a setting, which would radically alter the shape and nature of the superhero figures and their status quos. So it can have that broader sensibility. And when done well, a Fall/Death story-line can be a really affecting meditation on life, legacy, memory, and meaning. When done poorly, it feels like a waste of a character and potential, taking them off the board like that.

It’s the difference between a stellar classic like All-Star Superman which, despite being an ‘out of continuity’ standalone work, is a perennial classic about a dying Superman, and your average nothing-burger gimmick comics like Death Of The Justice League.

A number of examples of the mode can be seen here:

• A Death In The Family
• Death Of Superman
• Knightfall
• Emerald Twilight
• Countdown To Infinite Crisis
• Titans/Young Justice: Graduation Day
• All-Star Superman
• Death of the New Gods
• Death Of The Justice League

7. The Rewritten Rules ModeThe hierarchy of power in the DC Universe has changed. Forget the world you thought you knew, forget the rules you thought were rules. Now things work differently. This can be a general hierarchical change, wherein there are new powers-that-be overseeing things, or it can be even more literal, with all of reality itself being warped and rewritten, to suit new rules and powers. It’s a mode that allows you to shake up the entire board of the superhero universe, as the pieces now suddenly go into all kinds of unexpected places they never would have otherwise.

It was perhaps best codified for DC during the era of Azrael as Batman, taking over for Batman and proving to be a monster operating with very different rules, but even more crucially and clearly, it was perhaps expressed via No Man’s Land. Another good instance is, of course, Lex Luthor as President in the 2000s. But perhaps more than anything else, it’s Flashpoint that best embodies it, right down to the conclusion, wherein all ‘rewritten rules’ stories tend to go to eventually. In the end, some semblance of the old ways and the rules of the past must be restored, as the hierarchy of power shifts right back. Some semblance of how things were prior is reached, even if not completely. It’s why in the end of Forever Evil, The Crime Syndicate must fall, and it’s why Checkmate must reform to counter Leviathan in the pages of Bendis’ stories, as Leviathan changes the hierarchy of power by destroying and dismantling the DCU world of espionage.

Some easy comparisons over on the Marvel end just for a sense would be the Brian Michael Bendis events House Of M, and the larger Dark Reign era, which finally gets undone in the Siege event.

A Rewritten Rules story often tends to follow a Fall/Death mode story-line, for obvious reasons, as things change after. Done well, this can be a thrilling breath of fresh air, showcasing dark reigns or wild alternate reality rewrites that can be quite fun and offer a fresh perspective. Done poorly, they’re a drag that you want to escape from and can’t wait to see finish.

Examples of the mode are obvious and plenty:

• Underworld Unleashed
• Knightquest
• No Man’s Land
• Lex 2000 (President Lex)
• Flashpoint
• Forever Evil
• Year Of The Villain: Hell Arisen
• Event Leviathan
• Checkmate
• Milk Wars
• Green Lantern: Blackstars
• Lazarus Planet

8. The Rebirth ModeThe Revival. The Return. The Resurrection. The Restart. The Rebirth. So long as a superhero exists, they will be published. But in that publishing history, they will have slumps, low-points, they go out-of-favor, die or morph into something radically different than what they started as. And that means, inevitably, there will be a return, a ‘restoration’ of the old ways, particularly after any and all ‘fall’ or ‘death’ stories and tales of ‘rewritten rules’ that go on for a while. Someone will do a big, grand, celebratory ‘return’ comic that is eventful.

That is Rebirth, and it has been best codified for a modern DC by Geoff Johns’ own works bearing that very title. It grew to be so crucial that eventually the entire DC Universe went through a Rebirth, with an attempt at a ‘restoration’ for it across the board. But there’s other revivals and returns of note. There’s the 1990’s works of Revival/Return following the many ‘Death/Fall’ storylines that echo the sentiment just as well. And there’s other alternative exceptions in the modern era like Grant Morrison’s sprawling Return Of Bruce Wayne epic, which use the idea of a ‘Return’ to do gloriously weird and ambitious thesis statements .

Done well, the mode can be an effective way to get back to ‘the roots’ or ‘the basics’ and the central, fundamental appeal of an idea, a character or title. I can yield strikingly memorable thesis statements on the whole enterprise. Done poorly, it becomes dull-as-dish water and tastes like the blandest meat and potatoes that put you to sleep. It’s quite easy to do cheap nostalgia porn in this mode.

Examples of this mode, to name a few:

• The Return Of Superman
• Knight’s End
• Green Lantern: Rebirth
• Flash: Rebirth
• The Return Of Bruce Wayne
• DC Universe: Rebirth

9. The 52 Effect
The weekly series has been a staple of comics for years, but perhaps no weekly series proved to be quite so eventful, successful and critically beloved as 52. And that’s meant that ever since, superhero comics have been chasing that dragon to capture that lightning in the bottle once again. They all want to have the 52 effect. And the end result is stories that feel different from their other peers, in that they can’t just be ‘quick bursts’ of eventful story that can be wrapped up in under 13 issues. No, this requires story material that’s bigger, larger, and lasts longer, like multiple seasons of TV. And that means this is a mode defined mostly by format, with the actual stories being hybrids of all of the aforementioned modes above.

The above modes naturally contain hybrids. Just look at Identity Crisis and Heroes In Crisis not being in the Crisis section, or how some of Johns’ Wars or Rewritten Rules stories could just as well be considered Crisises. But The 52 Effect as a mode unto its own, one defined by format, felt worth including and outlining, as it is very much a loud expression of a Big DC Story. But you’ll also find iterations of it over at Marvel, as 52-veterans like Waid would also participate in big shared-universe weekly series there like Avengers: No Surrender and Avengers: No Road Home.

Given its nature as so bound to the long-running serialized format though, this is the mode most unadaptable to movies, but deeply well suited to TV seasons. Particularly classical Network TV with 24 episodes, wherein a great deal of ground can be covered. But given the rise of Prestige TV, an emphasis on move to streaming, and shorter season orders, it is something even TV struggles with deeply. Though an attempt at this sort of Big Picture long-form season long storytelling aiming to be a Big DC Epic can be seen in Young Justice, and was a hallmark of the best of the Justice League Unlimited animated series. But given the scarcity of this, and this being done well, which is a hugely impossible difficulty even for the comics, this mode thrives best and is still most suited to serialized comics.

When done well, it can be awe-inspiring and the best of shared universe superhero comics have to offer. When done poorly, it reminds you why exactly you wanted to quit these damn things all those times.

Examples of this mode are works such as:

• Countdown to Final Crisis
• Trinity
• Brightest Day
• Justice League: Generation Lost
• Batman Eternal
• Batman and Robin Eternal
• The New 52: Future’s End
• Earth 2: World’s End

Evidently numerous stories here can (and do) fit multiple modes (for instance, Cooke’s New Frontier is of the Watchmen Mode but is also a clean fit for The Year One mode), though they’ve been listed under only one mode here based on their most standout quality. And when it concerns ‘out of continuity’ works, evergreen or otherwise, the ‘alternate reality’ stories (whether it be All-Star Superman, New Frontier, Catwoman: Lonely City, etc) they fit into the modes they most clearly draw upon. All-Star being an explicit Death story, New Frontier being in clear dialogue with Watchmen, and Lonely City very much approaching the TDKR mode in a fresh way.

In the end, while DC continually obsesses over Crisis disaster stories, even in its filmic iteration and media- it need not necessarily do that. There are plenty of other options, with the Watchmen TV show and its success being a blatant display of how well and successfully drawing upon Watchmen’s lessons as a mystery drama and thriller translates naturally to Prestige Television. But it could just as easily make for compelling films as well. If there’s anything Darwyn Cooke tried to prove via New Frontier, it’s how you can tell compelling, visually thrilling character-driven stories that satisfyingly sprawl across a whole universe. There are other ways to broach Big DC Stories, as even a story like 52 is merely extending that New Frontier sensibility onto an even bigger canvas that sprawls across a larger web of story.

Across decades now, these are the modes and frameworks by which we seem to have historically conceptualized and framed our ideas of ‘The Big DC Story’. And that’s something to think about, the limitations, as the modes we have outlined help us consider all the ways in which we have not thought to imagine Big DC Stories to date. What has been done helps us realize what has not been done. Where we’ve been is how we realize- where we must go next.

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It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen?

The simple version: our topic series has The Question as one of its main characters exposing an apocalyptic conspiracy aimed at the superhero community, prominently features Captain Atom, partially climaxes in a false flag disaster engineered by the world’s smartest man posing as hero, and ends on the question “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (even if the response offers up the fig leaf translation “Who guards the guardians?”). By that metric alone, the widely beloved ‘Cadmus arc’ of Justice League Unlimited is indisputably A Watchmen. Plus Alan Moore liked the one episode. Case closed.

The more significant answer is that to a substantial cross-generational section of the pop culture viewership, the Cadmus arc is Superhero TV Watchmen.

To call something ‘A Watchmen’ as I did is basically reductive to all involved, but reflects a certain truth. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the singular best of its form. It doesn’t even mean it’s the first of its kind; there were brilliant, groundbreaking cape comic texts before Moore and Gibbons were told they couldn’t use the Charlton characters. But A Watchmen is the right material at the right place and time to represent a shift in the popular consensus, the way that for instance The Dark Knight did for superhero films; a single leap bigger than can ever likely be made again. This subject matter is no longer shlock, or even well-constructed shlock that delivers the goods. This is grown-up business now. This is too self-evidently smart for you to be a rube for continuing to buy in in your teens, 30s, 60s. This is the unrepeatable threshold everything afterwards will be judged against, and on some level inevitably fall short of because that moment can never happen again.

It helps that Cadmus has 30 years of benchmarks for ‘DC superheroes are SERIOUS now’ to draw from. While wrapped around a nucleus of a concern for the social and moral limitations of the caped set previously unseen in mass-media adaptations starring major IPs (but endemic to A Watchmen), the arc pulls imagery and conceptual nuggets from everything from Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, Kingdom Come, and The Authority – even having an episode penned by the now-disgraced creator Warren Ellis – to President Lex and Legends; an old-school, pre-Infinite Earths style Crisis even turns out to be the impetus for the entire affair. Beginning on a team-up between Green Lantern and Green Arrow and ending on a potential dark future for Batman, it would be a slightly facetious but still telling summation to describe the arc of these two seasons as “Remember Superfriends, which you should since we do a Superfriends riff episode to remind you? This is everything DC’s done since then.”

That’s not to suggest the show’s success rests on the laurels of references to what came before. Its strengths are its own, bolstered by a soap operatically sincere conviction in its narrative, a seemingly endless raft of all-time one liners (albeit mainly portioned out to a few particular favored leads, such as Jeffrey Combs’ sardonically zealous Question, CCH Pounder’s uncompromising, immediately iconic Amanda Waller, and Kevin Conroy’s imperial depiction of Batman), and an admirably feverish adoration for the grim and macabre within the boundaries of children’s television. Moreover, it knows how to present the material at its disposal to be understandable without historical context. You don’t need any background on Fawcett to understand the thematic contrast presented by Captain Marvel in his episode, have be up on the Triangle Era to realize this Doomsday guy’s laying into Superman a lot harder than most baddies can pull off, or know anything about the Speed Force except that they’ve gotta get Flash back from it.

What it does is give the show a tried and tested toolkit for the characters at hand for escalating a set of broad superheroic archetypes into a scale of drama that hadn’t been seen in this format before, and indeed couldn’t have been prior to a show built on a shared superheroic universe. There’s a roadmap for personal reckonings, monsters that feel as if they could actually finish off our childhood heroes, physical and ideological challenges that the creators know will rock the basic notion of the superhero because they’ve done it before. Wrap those benchmarks up in the context of a broader conflict against an army of designer-made anti-Justice League threats that still leaves as much room for hero vs. villain brawls as self-recrimination, and get there before seeing classic storylines adapted has lost an ounce of luster? Those are the makings of a generational slam dunk success.

Admittedly, that it has those advantages gives it a little slack; while mostly engrossing as serialized drama, it’s not exactly in the upper echelon of genre texts when it comes to picking at the underpinnings and ramifications of the superheroic construct. Not to suggest it lacks a solid storytelling foundation; alongside a talent base cultivated across the previous decade-plus of the ‘DCAU,’ and the work of the now-legendary Dwayne McDuffie, the series additionally brought in notable comics writers such as J.M. DeMatteis, Jim Steranko, Darwyn Cooke, and Gail Simone to work on episodes. Emotionally rooted in the casual camaraderie and furtive backroom confrontations of the JL Watchtower as the team ‘workplace,’ the series is able to flip artfully between rollicking adventures across space and time, absurdist magical hijinks, cataclysmic blowout super-throwdowns, and genuinely unnerving action-thrillers, while working as both satisfactory standalone episodes and the foundation stones of a multi-season plot. Nor is the base concept a shallow or timid one, set against a backdrop of clandestine genetic experimentation, layers of black-ops deniability, and shifts in public and personal sentiment. The core notion of the Justice League confronting the assorted logical government measures developed against them and the arguments justifying them is a perfectly potent one, dredging up questions regarding accountability, contextual morality, and the moral certitude of those in power earned or otherwise. In practice however, it’s still a show limited by its audience and the material at hand.

It can’t conclude the superheroes are ultimately wrong or in need of truly radical change, even as it – arguably necessarily to give arguments against their heroes any weight to a young audience inclined to trust them – pushes their figurehead in Superman into the shockingly unflattering light of a bull-headedly arrogant potential autocrat defined by naivete and simmering fury (perhaps doing at least as much in the long run to turn viewers off the character as any of Zack Snyder’s more infamous reinterpretations). The League’s further extralegal actions and capacity for abuse of power as essentially an orbital nuclear state, a capacity that’s in fact misappropriated and used on a civilian population, are thematically resolved with a simple ‘well, we’ll have to hold ourselves to higher standards and try harder but at the end of the day we’re needed’ after being absolved by the nominal voice of the common man. The confines of its status as a Justice League cartoon needing to hold to a recognizable shape cannot allow an out from the trap of ‘the Justice League is necessary, acting pretty much as the Justice League has always acted, because otherwise who will save the world from Justice League villains?’ despite its incisive pretensions. Insomuch as there’s a clean real-world message there to draw some nuance there, the concluding metaphor of on-the-ground accountability in the form of human heroes fizzles out a bit once you start to ask how the likes of Green Arrow are meant to keep several dozen godlings in check should the time come. If there’s more than a kernel of truth in the suggestion that the fate of the world belongs to the fluctuating moods and allegiances of a handful of self-righteous jerks and self-justifying ideologues in positions of authority, there’s no room for it to fully grasp the immensity of that horror.

At the end of the day though is the fact that both damns and justifies it: for any aspirations it lived up to or in hindsight fell short of, it was a superhero cartoon for children introducing this genre framework to its medium for the first time. For the purposes at hand, it didn’t need the dazzling formal ambition or searingly unflinching eye of Noah Hawley’s Legion, or the relatively watertight narrative structure and rigorous scab-picking of Damon Lindelof’s later actual Watchmen sequel series. Nearly everything the show’s done has been done better somewhere else since, but the fact of the matter is regardless of any after the fact measure of its successes versus its failings, it was the self-evidently thoughtful splashy populist success that got where it was trying to go first, and that isn’t a bar that can be cleared by quality alone. Justice League Unlimited was good in a way nothing of its kind had been before, such that all subsequent accomplishments in the field will inescapably be defined in relation to it; you don’t get The Boys, Invincible, or Daredevil without the conceptual ground it broke or the iconography its success established. The superhero TV landscape remains to a greater or lesser degree Justice League Unlimited-shaped, with Cadmus its stained but shining crown jewel.

It was no Watchmen. But it was, indisputably, A Watchmen.

For more in “Who Watched the Watchmen”…

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For many, Christmas time is a season that’s equally comforting and cold, both a time of giving and togetherness, and a constant reminder that someone, somewhere, is going without. There have been countless stories that explore the tragedies and triumphs of the holiday season, but lately, there is only one story I keep coming back to for comfort and guidance: the story of a man giving everything to achieve the impossible, and trying to make the world a little brighter…if only for a day.

In 1998, legendary creators Alex Ross and Paul Dini released Superman: Peace On Earth, a story that set the boundless optimism of the Man of Steel against the ever-present struggles of the real world. Published to mark the character’s 60th anniversary, Peace On Earth was the first step in a grander collaboration between Ross and Dini, as the two creators used each graphic novel to explore the real-life power of DC’s greatest heroes.

“The genesis of the books was something I was building up to doing from coming off of Kingdom Come,” recounts Ross. “I put together this pitch that was based around what I felt were the four icons of DC: Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman. I had this burning desire to return to Superman above all.”

Casting the hopeful image of Superman against the more somber backdrop of Christmas, Peace On Earth serves as Ross and Dini’s ultimate critique on the character as both nuanced man and inspiring myth; exploring humankind’s capacity for compassion and evil, and whether we can use that potential to truly find peace on Earth.

Like any great myth that’s told and retold over the years, the larger continuity of DC Comics and its characters has had new additions with every creator, era, and decade. Superman in particular has had a unique role in DC’s continuity, with writers like Grant Morrison making the hero’s history the bedrock for stories like All-Star Superman and their run on Action Comics (which you can learn more about in my video on it). This would become the de facto approach for the character, with subsequent creators using Superman’s continuity to frame him as a transcendent monomyth, connecting every iteration of DC’s history.

Both Ross and Dini had experience with the Superman mythos, with Dini iterating on it through Superman: The Animated Series and Ross using DC’s fiction as prelude to Kingdom Come. But instead of adding on to an increasingly complex mythology, the duo began reducing the character to his core elements, crafting a timeless version of Superman that could exist at any point in his career (a fitting choice to mark his 60th anniversary).

“There’s a lot of emotions I’m trying to connect with the reader; the way I want you to feel about my version of Superman,” reflects Ross. “This is my first version of Superman that I did after Kingdom Come. I wanted to keep a lot of that sensibility alive while making it grounded in the here and now. This is the eternal Superman, the classic that will always be. You can almost refine the icon down to this alone.”

In place of previous designs, which added or interpreted details in forced attempts to make him more “trendy” (looking at you, Electric Blue Superman), Ross’s art took Superman’s archetypal design and literalized it, with his lifelike style rendering the Man of Steel’s costume in cloth and spandex. While Ross’s unique style helps Peace On Earth stand out against its contemporaries, it’s also the key to understanding the story and the message it’s trying to tell. Superman might be at his most iconic, but he’s also beset by a world where truth and justice are scrutinized and debated by powerful people with their own agendas. By placing this eternal version of the man of steel in the here and now, Ross and Dini ask a question that’s hounded the character since his origins: does Superman have what it takes to solve the problems of our world?

Opening on a quiet December night, Peace On Earth follows Superman as he tries to bring joy to the people of Metropolis, decorating a massive Christmas tree for the city and reflecting on the inherent goodwill of the season. While the character’s sincerity has always framed him as a beacon of relentless, almost naive positivity, Ross and Dini use the story to highlight a wistfulness in Superman, with the hero’s genuine desire to help set against the shinier, shallow trappings of the holiday season.

From Superman: Peace On Earth by Paul Dini and Alex RossResponding to a cry for help, Superman is finally brought face-to-face with a darker truth of the holiday, finding a young woman nearly dead from hunger at the heart of a busy crowd. It’s a pretty pointed metaphor, one that Dini and Ross use to catalyze a new mission for the Man of Steel: to use his gifts to fight hunger, not just in Metropolis, but across the globe.

Since his creation at the hands of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Superman has always been a kind of aspirational figure; a fantastical solution to the problems of the real world. This isn’t the first social issue the Man of Steel has had to face, but it’s Ross’s attention to realism and Dini’s deliberate pacing and monologue that make Superman’s mission in Peace on Earth feel more tangible than ever before.

Through Ross’s intricately-detailed paintings, the story transforms into a series of double-page vignettes, lingering on the hero as he petitions Congress, gathers the resources, and treks across the globe distributing food to those in need. While Ross makes sure to depict plenty of skeptics on this mission of goodwill, they are ultimately dwarfed in the presence of the hero, who dominates every frame and is bathed in a bright, saintly light. If you’re starting to see parallels to another mythic figure, you’d be right. Across his history, Superman has been compared to countless religious figures, with varying degrees of depth. But instead of simply transplanting the character into another figure’s story, the creators use Superman’s inherent goodness to make the Christian message of goodwill toward all into something more universal: a call to action to use our collective gifts to help those around us. It’s this message that elevates Superman into a near-omnipotent figure, growing more mythic as he continues his mission.

From Superman: Peace On Earth by Paul Dini and Alex RossHowever, if the first half of the story builds Superman up as a higher power we can look to for salvation, Dini and Ross spend the latter half of the book deconstructing that figure, laying the groundwork for a more nuanced message. As Superman continues his trek across the planet, innumerable forces start to threaten his mission. Mass gatherings lead to brush fires and stampedes, warlords threaten against Superman’s actions with violence on their own people, and countless others are too afraid to accept the gifts of a stranger.

In sharp contrast to the godly figure seen before, each step of the journey ends up humbling and isolating the hero. Warm golden tones give way to a colder, harsher palette, as the idealistic image of Superman begins to clash against the murky realities of the world around him. By the book’s midpoint, Ross and Dini’s message finally comes into focus: Superman isn’t just fighting hunger, but a larger sense of hopelessness and greed, one so deeply rooted that it dwarfs even the strongest heroes.

This battle between hope and hopelessness culminates in the book’s lowest point, as a military convoy standing against Superman’s intervention destroys the last of the supply, halting the hero’s mission. But while Ross and Dini use this moment to wholly deconstruct Superman as a godly figure, they also use it to impart a more hopeful, humanistic message. We can’t rely on fantasies or ideas to save us, but we can let them inspire us into action. The power to save the world has always been in our hands.

From Superman: Peace On Earth by Paul Dini and Alex RossActing as the culmination of 60 years of storytelling, Peace on Earth is much more than a celebration of the Superman’ history. It’s an examination of the character’s impact as a real-world icon, and how that icon can be used to enact positive change in the world. In the end, Ross and Dini frame Superman’s ability to inspire as his greatest strength, looking back on Pa Kent’s words and using his human identity to spread his message of doing what you can to help those in need.

The book itself would ultimately inspire action, namely through donating the proceeds from Ross’s art to charities like UNICEF and Harper House in Chicago, but also by using Superman’s appeal to impart its message to readers of every age, something that Ross was adamant about when developing the story with Dini.

“Several people I talked to over the years asked why I formatted it toward that direction…I just wanted to create something that felt sort of like it was something that would appeal to a kid as well as to an adult,” recounts Ross. “The feeling that most comics take with the real world is such an extreme that it never feels that real. I wanted to ground it to where the problems are much more human-based. The superhero solution isn’t necessarily for solving that problem in a way that we can’t, but through using their colorful representations or iconic status, we show how difficult that problem is to confront, and maybe at least the intentions of how they would handle these things.”

Revisiting Peace On Earth in this day and age, I can’t help but feel a powerful sense of hope for the future. The last few years have tested us in ways we never could have imagined, but they have also brought many of us together as friends and communities, each trying to better our own little corners of the world. And those bonds are built to last. In the end, a better world isn’t built with one grand gesture, but countless small examples of compassion. By giving our neighbors the chance to grow, to learn, and help others to do the same.

From Superman: Peace On Earth by Paul Dini and Alex RossSources:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTiJqF-VnsI

https://www.nerdteam30.com/creator-conversations-retro/an-interview-with-alex-ross-martian-manhunter-and-other-influences

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It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen?

After running Comic Book Herald for over a decade, I tend to have a decent pulse on how fans, critics, and creators feel about various comics. Or at least I thought I did, until Steve Morris with Shelfdust conducted a critics poll of the best 50 comic book events of all time, and I learned that Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Dark Nights: Metal was at one point barely hanging on to the #50 spot. This was astonishing to me because Metal was a major reason why I started collecting print comics again in 2017 after a year-long hiatus (Mister Miracle was the other), and I quite earnestly consider it one of my five favorite comic book events of all time!

It feels essential to highlight my (apparently somewhat unusual) affections for Metal because its sequel, Death Metal, disappointed me on nearly every level. Given my past experience, and an adoration for Snyder/Capullo’s Batman (not to mention Last Knight on Earth!) hopes were extraordinarily high, and all for naught. Death Metal #1 opens with a soliloquy by Sgt. Rock about Turd Burgers, and well, Death Metal fits the bill:

“It’s like you’re at a drive-through and out comes your juicy half-pounder on one of them niiice french buns, curly fries too, and you take a bite and wham! Turd. And your fries? Kablam! Curly turds.”

Speaking of turds, let’s talk about Doctor Manhattan.

Where “Metal” featured a gratuitous Neil Gaiman’s Sandman cameo (I’ve yet to see a compelling reason why this happened!), Death Metal upped the ante with not one but TWO riffs on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Doctor Manhattan. And in the context of DC’s post-2016 Geoff Johns spearheaded “Universe Rebirth,” Manhattan projects like this made a semblance of sense. Following Johns’ Rebirth and Doomsday Clock, DC Comics had declared open season on Watchmen crossovers.

Death Metal (and the preposterous Flash Forward) is the first to engage.

Death Metal #1 released as one of the first post-pandemic shutdown comics in June 16, 2020, about 6 months after Doomsday Clock (a series that took 26 months to get 12 issues terribly wrong) finally concluded. Whereas Batman finding “The Button” in 2016’s DC Universe: Rebirth #1 was about possibility and the promise of a better future, by 2020 the Watchmen integrations into Death Metal were part of an exit strategy. The promise of Rebirth was reneged, delayed, and broken, leaving it to Snyder and Capullo to find a way out (to new Infinite Frontiers!). Because of its status as the first major DC Universe event released after Doomsday Clock, Death Metal has the opportunity and burden to respond, or to correct any failings.

Scott Snyder opts for frankly the more challenging third option, a staple of DC Comics history, which is to try and make it all make sense.

“Not long ago, a being from another reality, brimming with connective energy, Dr. Manhattan, tried to mend the fractures in our multiverse to heal the scars of former crisis… but his attempt did not have the intended effect.”

On one hand, I empathize with Snyder’s challenges, trying to mesh a minimum of 4 distinct and incompatible creator visions across DC into one narrative where “it all matters.” Heading into Death Metal, DC had a Snyder-verse (Scott Cut), a Bendis-verse (In Superman), a Tom King verse (Heroes in Crisis most impacting the continuity), and most difficult, the Johns-verse of exhuming Watchmen and dancing on the grave. Snyder makes an impressive effort to somehow link his Justice League run to Dr. Manhattan’s role in Doomsday Clock, and pretend like those stories had any connective tissue. It’s seriously intriguing continuity surgery, but in the Frankensteined sutures you can see the hidden truth: Nobody planned ANY of this.

Statistically speaking, continuity “Fixes” are where approximately 98.9% of DC events fall apart, and when you also factor in Snyder’s use of Sandman in the pages of 2017’s Metal, there’s a cynical (and completely non-additive!) grasping at DC’s past cultural cache in this saga. You might as well slap a yellow smiley face button and the text “Hey Kids, do ya like Watchmen!” on every cover of Death Metal. Oddly, despite the enormity of Watchmen’s legacy, and its canonical value to DC, and the fact that there are TWO Doctor Manhattans slinging dong here, Death Metal does not actually want to engage with Watchmen. Like… at all.

The two Manhattans here are

1. Wally West (Who became a new Doctor Manhattan by sitting in Metron’s Mobius Chair in Flash Forward)
2. The Batman Who Laughs (Who evolves here into a godlike Manhattan Who Laughs, aka The Darkest Knight, by preparing a Doctor Manhattan body of the final Bruce Wayne. The button is a yellow frowny face.).

Apart from their visual motifs, you could transpose either character with basically any godlike DC player (Spectre! Anti-Monitor! That time Joker tricked Mister Mxyzptlk! Grant Morrison!), and see the exact same story.

What Death Metal makes clear is that for all its desperate posturing, the only consequence of Geoff Johns and Gary Frank’s Doomsday Clock is to allow ham-fisted Watchmen crossovers in the DC Universe, reducing the beloved graphic novel to, well, everything else in the shared universe. If you ever wondered why the Alan Moore purists clutch their pearls so tightly when DC talks about Batman meeting Rorschach, Death Metal has an answer.

It’s because Doctor Manhattan didn’t build palaces on Mars so continuity nerds could count Multiverses.

In Death Metal, virtually nothing is done with Doctor Manhattan, beyond the bare bones, superhero encyclopedia understanding of his power. For a book that has two key players brandishing Jon’s atomic head-tattoo, you’d think maybe it would do something with his ability to perceive all time at once, or engage with philosophies of determinism, or fraying belief in humanity (this Earth, these people)… something! Nope! It’s all “hey remember this Crisis?” and “remember that time we had a Crisis?”, and it’s devoid of reason to integrate absolutely anything from the Watchmen Universe.

Truly, it’s challenging to really consider the use of Watchmen in Death Metal because it’s all so surface level. It’s Watchmen‘s legacy from the perspective of a child who saw the smiley face on a cover and liked that one of the characters was blue.

And honestly, I don’t really even blame Snyder and Capullo. This is the hand they were dealt, and it’s a bad one! Sure, they could have walked away and taken a principled stand, but if not that, better to recognize the truth: It’s better to phone in all this Watchmen baggage than actually try and inevitably fail.

Death Metal is playing with second (maybe third, maybe fourth) generation derivations of Watchmen, and in the process its Metal core is less parts Slayer, and more parts Limp Bizkit. If the aim of this series is to understand the legacy and impact of Watchmen on the comics industry that followed, Death Metal makes it known that for the in-continuity side of DC, that legacy can also now be evaluated as “Who Watched the Doomsday Clock.” And let me tell you, so far the challenges and impact on the medium are falling atrociously short.

For more in “Who Watched the Watchmen”…

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It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen?

Let us assume that Rorschach is exactly as good as Watchmen. Not simply that it is a good comic or even a great comic, but that it is as good as what many consider to be the definitive comic. The final statement on all things comics related. There are a number of absurdities with that statement, both with regards to Rorschach and Watchmen. But, for now, let us ignore this aspect and engage with the assumption.

Many of the conversations surrounding DC Comics’ follow-ups to Watchmen that are… critical of the works tend to frame the narrative of the follow ups as nothing more than shallow knock offs that didn’t need to exist. Indeed, even the best of these can be said to have been nothing more than a waste of the creator’s time. While the worst has destroyed any faith in comics ever being good. And Rorschach is good enough that claiming it’s exactly as good as Watchmen doesn’t feel like a cruel joke as it is the best of the direct follow ups to Watchmen DC has made by a country mile.

(There is another reason why I’m taking this approach with Rorschach. But that is perhaps best saved for subtext rather than text.)

By having a text that not only lives up to, but matches the original work, this narrative can be questioned. The implications of Watchmen as a text and its subsequent legacy can be engaged with on a level more akin to works like The Wicked + The Divine or From Hell. One as a work of fiction rather than as a metaphor for everything wrong with this wicked world of ours. As such, I can write a piece that won’t end with a horrific revelation about the nature of Watchmen’s Legacy.

As such, let us begin with a common criticism of Rorschach: It didn’t actually need to be a Watchmen follow up. A common narrative when speaking about Rorschach is that, bar the character signifiers, it has absolutely nothing to do with Watchmen. There are no appearances from familiar characters, no reveals about the world that we didn’t already know.

Before getting into the reason why that is inaccurate, let us consider the role Watchmen plays within Rorschach. Rorschach, unlike its brethren, seems quite disinterested in Watchmen. Not in the sense that there is no interest, but rather in the sense that it doesn’t feel the need to one-up the comic and everything it believes in. There are no scenes where a character snarks at Moore’s prose or sneers at the stupidity of Ozymandias’ plan to save the world. Rather, it is a comic that is content with simply living in that world.

This is perhaps best highlighted in the first moment in Rorschach that directly harkens back to explicit moments within the text of Watchmen. In the fifth issue, our lead has a one on one conversation with the target of assassination that is the heart of the narrative, Governor Gavin Turley.

The book makes no bones about its feelings towards Turley as an unlikable, grotesque man who fetishizes historical monsters. Prior to getting into politics, Turley served in the Vietnam War and met Edward Blake (alias, The Comedian) on two occasions. The first—which is given three pages of space split over the course of four—was of a rescue operation. The main focus of the conversation between Turley and Blake is about how many people they brutally killed. The answer they come to is “Not enough, my son.” The joke makes both men laugh.

But it’s the second one—the one that ties directly into the events of Watchmen—that’s the more interesting. It is contained only within two panels, only one of them showing the events while the other verbalizes the context. The scene is, rather straightforwardly, of a man walking in the background while two important people are talking.

The interesting thing about this moment, and demonstrative of Rorschach’s relationship to Watchmen, is that it never draws attention to the fact that this scene was in Watchmen. The closest is the usage of the nine panel grid within the page. If it were the first instance of the grid being used within Rorschach, the nod would be clear. However, Rorschach’s usage of the grid—a sparing usage I might add—has a specific effect. In its appearances in the four issues that predate the nod to Watchmen (once in issue two, four times in issue three, twice in issue four, and never in issue one), the grid appears in moments when people experience death. Be it directly at the hands of characters or implicitly through conversation and location. This would continue throughout the book, leading to the climactic moment of the book, wherein the Detective kills Turley and the man who hired him—Turley’s campaign manager, Alan.

As such, this moment would be read by an attentive reader through the lens of the recurring implication: that someone died in that moment. Within the pages of Rorschach, we never learn what exactly happened here. We know what happened because of Watchmen. (i.e. Blake murders a woman pregnant with his child while Dr. Manhattan does nothing.) Watchmen, then, is the underlying subtext that haunts the world of Rorschach. The ghost in the machine that allow us to see their presence as we try to uncover what is happening. Rorschach—like many Tom King comics—is haunted by ghosts.

If one is to engage properly with the legacy of Watchmen, one must first admit that it’s dead. The story reached its ending, the threads tied neatly together, and all the arcs resolved in its clockwork majesty. The legacy in all forms—be it sympathetic, critical, or cynical—is inherently an autopsy. We are looking at a crater inflicted upon the world. In all its grandeur and monstrosity.

So then, what does Rorschach take from Watchmen. Or, rather, what does Rorschach take from Rorschach. Prior attempts at engaging with the character outside his core text opted to go for a rather Mike Hammer approach of the man as nothing more than a blunt instrument punching his way through the world. And, in fairness, that’s not an inaccurate approach to the character. However, it is one that’s limited in the desire not to engage with any of the political ramifications of Watchmen—as basically all but two of DC’s attempts at a direct follow up to Watchmen do, and even most of the indirect attempts if I’m being honest—and instead decides to be a rather drab noir story where women get murdered on the side while the real action is about black thugs. (And don’t get me started about “Bitch to be you right now.”)

Rorschach—being one of DC’s two attempts at engaging with Watchmen politically—decides to go down a different path. And it can be seen through the main focus at the heart of Rorschach: conspiracy theorists. It is, of course, no surprise that Rorschach would take this approach. Watchmen is a conspiracy thriller about how the world is going to be drastically changed by a billionaire through horrific means. Rorschach himself reads the right wing newspaper The New Frontiersman, which feels at home with the work of David Ickie and Gary Allen. And, of course, Rorschach’s first instinct upon discovering the Comedian’s dead is to assume it’s a conspiracy against superheroes.

The nature of the conspiracy at the heart of Rorschach is one of the many wry jokes with teeth within the book. The story goes like this: In 1986, New York City was attacked by an alien race commonly referred to as Squids. They had psychic powers that could traumatize people who weren’t even in the direct vicinity of the attack. These Squids are planning another attack. Their plan involves hijacking the brains of humanity to let them prepare the world to accept Squid control. Their initial attack also involved discrediting the superheroes, most notably in giving all of Dr. Manhattan’s close relations cancer. Luckily, the superheroes were able to uncover this deadly Squid plot. Not quick enough to prevent the attack, but quick enough to prevent it from getting worse. So they plot to escape the Squids via having Dr. Manhattan send the souls of Nite-Owl, The Comedian, Silk Spectre, and Rorschach into other people’s bodies (Ozymandias refused, thinking he was smart enough to fight off the psychic attacks. He was not). The superheroes are out there, waiting to rise up and save the world.

There are two angles to this that destroy the conspiracy to anyone who is paying attention. The first, and easiest to grasp, is that this does not follow from the events in Watchmen. Obviously, The Comedian was dead long before the Squid attack happened, which itself was a hoax brought about by an explicitly leftist billionaire who aspires to conquer the world (A bleaker version of this project published by The Comics Journal would no doubt have an entry on Qanon). Dr. Manhattan cannot, in fact, transfer the souls of the dead into other people’s bodies. And even if the Comedian was alive at the time, his costume had a gimp mask in its latest incarnation.

The second is that it’s an extremely nerdy approach to how the world operates. Not in the sense that there’s a lot of technical jargon involved in the explanation. But rather… it’s basically approaching the world as one would a work of fiction. This is vital to the mindset of a conspiracy theorist. Conspiracy theories are frequently based on simplistic narratives that, rather than engage with the world, merely flatten it so that things can be easier to understand.

There is something to be said about the relationship between modern fandom and conspiracy theories, how many approaches to what constitutes modern media criticism merely confine themselves to solving a work of fiction or, god forbid, winning a review. Analysis not only requires one to dive deep into a work, but also to play on its level. To empathize with what a work is doing rather than impose an order to it that might not necessarily fit with the work. Fiction, much like life, isn’t something that can be solved. It can only be experienced (Curiously, this is a minor theme within King’s larger body of work, not only appearing in Rorschach, but also Mister Miracle, Love Everlasting, and Dreadful Reigns).

For the conspiracy minded, the complex machinations of a series of systems that constitute existence can be simplified into an ARG style narrative or a game of “Who’s the next Rorschach?”

It’s a game that fans constantly play all the time with legacy media that art has engaged with in a number of ways from the chronic phallus sucking of Ghostbusters: Afterlife to Scre4m’s deconstructive approach wherein the killer aspires towards being the next Sidney Prescott. Conspiratorial thinking, in other words, relies upon approaching the world from a simplistic vantage point where everything wrong with the world can be blamed on a smaller number of people. Otherwise, one would have to think about the sheer horror of the world.

Which brings us, at last, to the work of Hannah Arendt. In interviews leading up to the release of Rorschach, King talked at length about the influence Arendt’s work had on his approach to the titular character. In particular, how he wanted to use her as a contrast to Moore’s usage of Ayn Rand for his Rorschach. In practice, one can see the influence upon the work. But as other articles have engaged with this already, let us stick with one of the more misunderstood concepts Arendt brought to the table: The Banality of Evil.

When most people discuss the Banality of Evil, it is often boiled down to the phrase, “But I was only following orders” or “Men like Eichmann were motivated more by personal success than by personal ideology and that the Nazi party was to blame for the evils committed during the war, rather than the individuals who committed them.” Not only are these extremely off base with what Arendt is exploring, she rejects them entirely within the first installment of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Indeed, she spends a lot more of the time questioning the ethics of making genocide into a show trial to demonstrate how great Israel is, and how it deserves the land it stole from Palestine (One cutting bit involves Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion noting that comparing the Nazis to some Arab rulers was absurd because there are decent Germans. Arendt then notes that he made no mention of decent Arabs).

As such, it’s worth looking at the exact moment Arendt says the words “The Banality of Evil.” In the final main chapter of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt reports on the execution of her titular figure. The thing that stood out to her more than his unwillingness to engage with his guilt under the pretense of only following orders, was that he was speaking in cliches. Eichmann went to the gallows without any sense of personality, personhood, or interesting detail.

In other words, Hannah Arendt’s conclusions about the fascist mind are essentially what every single worthwhile analysis of fascism from Eco to Sandifer inevitably comes to: they’re idiots who will kill us all through their sheer stupidity. For Arendt, the key is that Eichmann couldn’t think of the world outside of the limitations of the society he lived in. That he could imagine the end of the world, but he could not imagine the end of Nazism.

As Arendt notes in her condemnatory final analysis of Eichmann:

You also said that your role in the Final Solution was an accident and that almost anybody could have taken your place, so that potentially almost all Germans are equally guilty. What you meant to say was that where all, or almost all, are guilty, nobody is. This is an indeed quite common conclusion, but one we are not willing to grant you. And if you don’t understand our objection, we would recommend to your attention the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, two neighboring cities in the Bible, which were destroyed by fire from Heaven because all the people in them had become equally guilty. This, incidentally, has nothing to do with the newfangled notion of ‘collective guilt,’ according to which people supposedly are guilty of, or feel guilty about, things done in their name but not by them— things in which they did not participate and from which they did not profit. In other words, guilt and innocence before the law are of an objective nature, and even if eighty million Germans had done as you did, this would not have been an excuse for you.

Rorschach, interestingly enough, opts to use this as justification for committing an assassination. And it is here where we must return to the loudly unspoken subtext of Watchmen. In Watchmen, the superhero was either an agent of the US Government or someone working outside of the system (but still, ultimately, in support of that larger system). Regardless of the path, both demonstrated monstrosity and horror. Be they sadistic bastards who rape and kill indiscriminately, moralistic Republicans who see nothing wrong in breaking a few thumbs if it means the world makes sense, or sad complicit men who can do nothing in the face of the cruelties of the world.

But this is the perspective one has from seeing things from a Super Heroic perspective. We see the grime and bone and misery of these sad, lonely people. Rorschach, by contrast, opts to focus on the people Who Watched the Watchmen. The people who were inspired by, influenced by, horrified by, and ultimately misunderstood the heroes that came before. It’s about all the reactions to Watchmen in its various forms.

And so, for many, all they could see were the aspirational aspects of the characters. Rorschach, the detective who revealed the truth. Dr. Manhattan, the God who could do anything. Nite-Owl, the genius. The Comedian, the badass. Silk Spectre, the girl who feared nothing. Most people don’t see the day to day lives of caped figures like Superman or Spider-Man. Ask a person on the street of New York, and they’d say Spider-Man was the funny one. They never even heard of Gwen Stacy or Ben Parker.

As a result, people looking fondly upon the masked heroes—away from the tumultuous 70s and 80s—want to know where they all went. What happened to the American hero? And they come to some interesting conclusions:

One: They abandoned us. The bad of the world was just too mighty for the good they represented. They lost and they ran and they hid and they died and hope is nothing next to power.

Two: They planned. They passed on their legacy to us. We are the superheroes. There is a chance. A chance for the good to overcome. For the righteous to triumph. They didn’t retreat. They sacrificed to give us this chance.

As a text outside the context of Watchmen, Rorschach still makes a compelling case for the latter. One need only look at the actions and attitudes of the people in the world, especially the people who think the Squids will kill us all any day now. These are people driven by fear and desperation, a belief that the world can only make sense if there are barbarians at the gate. Their hope is for the barbarians and their quisling allies to be exterminated.

This is especially notable in the way Jorge Fornés draws violence. Where Dave Gibbons opted for static moments to demonstrate the tightly controlled nature of Rorschach’s movements, Fornés opts to highlight the quickness of the moment. When violence appears in Rorschach, it never lingers on the moment. There’s no sequence of a character breaking numerous fingers or an onslaught of brutality. What is lingered on, however, are the bodies left behind.

To pick one example, in the third issue, Laura Cummings—alias The Kid—shoots her father in the head. The act itself is depicted at a distance and very quickly. One panel, the father doesn’t have a bullet to the brain, the next he does. The next two pages linger on his corpse, also from a distance. Despite traveling forwards through time, the corpse still lingers.

This recurs throughout the book from the Vietnamese soldier being dragged out of the water by his child to the victims of the death of Carl Thompson. Even the climactic moment of the series opts to instead focus most of the brutality of its moment on the silent tape recorder as it’s happening and on the dripping hand of Governor Turley as it’s wrapping up. Fornés keeps us at a distance as the events occur.

This is the recurring trend at the heart of Rorschach: distance. It’s a comic about people—about the world and our connections within it. But it is one that constantly keeps us at a distance from the world. We do not see the inner machinations at the hearts of people’s minds. We do not read journal entries that reveal how they feel about other people and the world at large. All we have are people’s perceptions of one another.

The unreliable narrator is a common reoccurring element within King’s work. From the lies that surround the characters in The Sheriff of Babylon to the subjective third person perspective used in Mister Miracle all the way to Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow’s usage of first person to demonstrate alternative character interpretations and hint at other characterizations. Perspective, ultimately, drives the worlds. One could look at Lightray as a beacon of hope and homoerotic fantasies or see him as a rather smug—but still well meaning—guy who’s out of his element.

As a result, the perspective of someone who has read Watchmen, has understood Watchmen, is different from those who do not know the full extent of the conspiracy at the heart of Watchmen. The detective’s interpretation of Laura offers two possibilities for how the world works: Hope or Power. What it assumes is that the Squids attacked New York City. Never once does the binary consider the awful truth: A Superhero planned this. A superhero—working optimistically and with pure, unbridled hope in the better angels of humanity—dropped a squid on New York City as a hoax. To pull humanity back from the brink and help it ascend to the heavens.

The ghost of Watchmen, then, is that Rorschach, ultimately, agrees with its thesis. That when placed in a world outside childish fantasies and into one of geopolitical actions, one is forced to admit that they become absurd and horrific. And while we do live in an extremely absurd world where there’s probably no point bar (arguably) existing in it, attempting to act as if this whole thing isn’t absurd–even with something as small as a snarky remark about how silly it could have been–only results in horrors.

More than anything else, this is why I can assume Rorschach is as good as Watchmen. Because, as with Watchmen, reading it and thinking about it makes me want to engage with it further. It’s an extremely worthwhile comic that I find something new every time I read it. I’ve barely scratched the surface with what’s going on here. I’ve not talked about Dave Stewart’s colors, the paneling, the Otto Binder stuff, how Tom King’s Hauntological nature impacts Rorschach’s engagement with the weird, how King’s fascination with mirrors ties into things, the use of Western imagery and the superhero’s relationship with the genre, King’s career long conflicted relationship with nerd culture, the full political context of the book and what its ending signifies, or who the Detective is (Spoilers: He’s not the new Rorschach).

It’s a fantastic, fascinating book that I want people to engage with on a higher level. To dive deep into the implications and find things I couldn’t see, things I missed. I want to see the full extent of its failings, its limitations, its strengths, its beauty. Because that’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? That’s why we watch the Watchmen. To see something bigger, something stranger than we could have possibly imagined. To find out more about this world of ours.

This brings us to what might be the single most important question in this entire project: Just how good is Watchmen, exactly? Well… it’s pretty damn good. The art is stellar, highlighting both the small moments of intimacy alongside the larger moments of brutality and horror. Alan Moore paints a rich, fascinating world full of implications and ideas that are still being picked at to this day. The characters who wander its world are intriguing and highlight a wide potential for the superhero field. The use of paneling in particular is brilliant, oftentimes reorienting the reader over the course of a single page. Each issue, even the ones that don’t work as single issues, comes with a new idea.

At the same time though, there’s a degree of hermeticism to it. A sense that everything is packed within the confines of the book and, as a result, you can’t really go any further with what is being done here. It’s not, as often mentioned, the death of superheroes. But rather the death of a specific approach to superheroes. Less a destruction of the field and more a desire to grow something other than potatoes. Equally, the book has several failings ranging from its treatment of people of color (and especially women of color), its tendency towards giving all the best moments to one of its more loathsome characters, and the prose parts can get interminable (Look me dead in the eye and tell me you didn’t skip the Owl Essay). But most importantly, its reputation as the greatest comic ever written often harms actually reading it. Because, ultimately, there have been comics following Watchmen that are better than Watchmen.

The most obvious place to start is with Moore himself. To my various colleagues and friends, I have often touted that—within the confines of Moore’s bibliography—Watchmen is a middling text. And nowhere is this more apparent than in Moore’s climactic comics text, Providence. In many regards, Rorschach is a closer cousin to Providence than Watchmen. Both are cross country explorations of the American subconscious through the lens of 20th century genre fiction as a means of uncovering the rise of fascism in the 21st century (Indeed, both are engagements with the Weird through the lens of the Hauntological). Both feature a major appearance from a reactionary author reeling from horror. Both utilize some rather problematic decisions regarding real life minor tragedies. And both ultimately end with the way things are being completely upended.

Where Providence outshines both Moore’s prior work and King’s current work is in its disinterest in impressing the reader with its cleverness. Yes, the book does extremely clever things with panel layouts and thematic twists, but rarely does it feel the urge to declare its cleverness. It simply gets on with it. Moore (alongside artist Jacen Burrows, colorist Juan Rodriguez, and letterer Kurt Hathaway) is able to draw upon the full breadth of the failings of the 20th century in a way Watchmen’s limited gaze simply couldn’t. Its focus is on the people on the streets more so than those of the skies. The horror lies not simply in the fact that the absurd collides with the real (A New England town of Sea-People is surely as absurd as a New England band of Superheroes). But in the intent of the absurd.

More than that, in stark contrast to Watchmen and Rorschach, Providence is extremely engaged in the world it explores. While the former explores the main roads and the latter the street corners of their respective world, Providence explores everything from the queer scientists hiding from a world that would see them dead to the small towns with secrets and love all the way to the more realistic horrors of men and women killing each other on the streets. Watchmen and Rorschach are content with keeping their gaze on merely superheroes and how they relate to the world. It engages with the world outside of them, but only through them.

Indeed, Providence is heavily invested in something that both Watchmen and Rorschach leave to the side and never fully engage with: the people fascists frequently target. While Rorschach has its Turley supporters talk about how America is for Americans and Watchmen’s Crimebusters list Black Unrest as among the “Modern” issues Superheroes need to deal with, neither text fully engages with these aspects of the concept. More often than not, it’s left to the reader to put the pieces together, often resulting in them deciding not to. The reader can choose not to see because it’s buried in a text piece or in the background.

By contrast, Providence engages directly in the fact that, well, fascists often target marginalized communities. Be they people of color, queer people, or people of the “wrong” religion. The fascists will do unspeakable, horrific things to them for the sake of power and control. They will kill us all. This is demonstrated throughout the book from protagonist Robert Black’s dream of gas chambers killing the kind, if somewhat suspicious, people of Salem, the connections between the cult at the heart of the book and the KKK, and the queer and Jewish shame at the heart of Black. Moore, in his growth as a writer, uncovers the horrors lurking within the works of Lovecraft.

(Which, ultimately, is why the Hauntological is useful. As the name suggests, the Hauntological is a form of horror that engages with the uncovering of unspeakable things. A ghost that lingers. It ultimately comes from within. It questions the present and shows we can never escape the past. Often, this results in creators like Moore, King, and Jackson. By contrast, the Weird comes from without. Something older than man, something alien to how we understand the world. It is an infection, one without a cure. In turn, it breaks the present and makes us doubt the future. This results in creators like Morrison, V, and Barker. The monstrous side of both is clear. One need only look at the Hauntological desire of the Golden Age’s return [THE SOUTH SHALL RISE AGAIN and so forth] or the Weird tendency towards fearing the Other to see that [fascists love to use the metaphor of an infected arm to justify genocide].)

But perhaps its biggest triumph lies within the text portion. Where Watchmen utilized the prose sections to demonstrate the world we are experiencing, the prose sections of Providence are themselves a novelette exploring the events of the story directly from our protagonist’s perspective. As a result, we can see the dramatic irony of him completely missing what’s happening in the story. We see the full implications more than he does. But more than that, we see a rich inner life of a queer Jewish writer living in an age where being both often got you killed. It’s one of the best comics of the 21st century and highly recommended.

Stepping away from the United States, we have Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki’s Pluto. Much like Watchmen, Pluto is a murder mystery that slowly reveals itself to be a larger conspiracy narrative built around a fascination with superhero fiction. Yes, it’s riffing on the Japanese approach to superhero stories rather than the American one, but Astro Boy remains a work of Superhero Fiction. It engages with the mundane lives of its superpowered characters as well as the mystery they’re investigating. Specifically, one based around the assassination of superpowered beings and their allies. And the main baddy’s apocalyptic plan involves the world being united under his leadership.

Where it surpasses Watchmen lies in how it approaches balancing the politics and the super heroics. While Watchmen is capable of engaging with the political implications of its characters, its ultimate engagement with the political is through the lens of how it impacts superhero fiction. It’s the kind of book where one can easily ignore the political aspects of the text, even while it bluntly states them. Whereas Pluto is capable of keeping the political within the narrative by making its story about the political.

At its heart, Pluto is a condemnation of war in general and the imperialistic actions of the United States during the War on Terror. It’s about broken people who want a better world and will do what they can to build it. But it’s also about the reason they’re broken being tied to the racist systems they live in. The monstrous, pointless war they fought bringing nothing more than more pointless violence and cruelty. Nothing comes out from hatred.

In this light, comparing it to Rorschach becomes absurd. For Rorschach, its gaze is limited by its desire for distance. It cannot bring itself to dive headlong fully into the inner lives and tragedies of its focus, even as it presents them to us. It can only glance at these people and their lives. It has empathy, even as it doesn’t fully align with those it looks at. But it doesn’t engage with them as fully as Pluto does. Yes, one could argue that might be because Pluto was a 65 chapter narrative while Rorschach was only 12. But even many of Pluto’s more minor characters have a depth and implication to them that Rorschach sorely lacks.

Among the many, many sections that highlight this is the three act detour into the post-war life of North No. 2. Here we see one of the robots who fought in the war that precipitated the events of the series working as a butler for a blind composer, Paul Duncan. Duncan is long past his hey-day when his genius was utilized for a number of films. The years have made him bitter and resentful, often lashing out at North for being fake.

Throughout the three acts, we see the pair get to know each other better, with Duncan softening to the robot while North contemplates his life as a killing machine, desiring to do something different—something better. North has killed tens of thousands of his brothers and he never wants to see war again. He wants to make music. And through their shared love of music, the pair grow closer together. Until, tragically, the monster appears. Pluto, ultimately kills North.

But even the monster who gives the series its name wants more out of life. He wants to paint a field of flowers. Everyone wants more out of their lives than mere violence. Be it the family man who cares for his children, the orphanage worker who helps war orphans, or the detective who [MEMORY DELETED]. The story is about these characters, about the lives they live and how the horrors shape them. It’s a plea for a better life for us all.

Rorschach’s failures, ultimately, lie in its attempt at being a follow up to Watchmen. One that eschews all the surface level trappings and obvious routes in favor of finding the deeper narrative through-line. And, in some respects, it does. It engages with the world of Watchmen in a way that no other direct follow up has. But that’s all it does. That’s its main intent. As a result, much like the text it’s engaging with, it feels a bit hermetic. You can see all the clever ideas, but nothing could follow from this.

Perhaps the most damnable thing about all of this is that Tom King himself has written a text that is better than Watchmen: Mister Miracle. Much like Watchmen, Mister Miracle is a comic that utilizes the nine panel grid to explore the inner lives of its characters. It contrasts the political realities of the world with the absurd horror of the super heroic. It engages in the sexual lives of its characters as well as being funny in a wry sort of way.

But what makes it better than Watchmen is how it utilizes the nine panel grid. On the surface, it seems rather straight forward: every page is on the grid and every page uses nine panels. However, actually writing for the nine panel grid is like playing the guitar: it’s harder than it looks. While structurally, the grid is simple, actually doing it well is a whole other matter. Other comics can lose focus and end up being confused and distracted by the grid. A true great can pull something new out of the familiar.

And King does so in his usage of the grid. Where Watchmen utilized the grid to highlight the clockwork nature of the world—to demonstrate the dreadful control of what is occurring—Mister Miracle uses it to further highlight the titular character’s mental landscape. Specifically, the feeling that even though everything is moving forward, that new things are happening, everything feels the same. Day in, day out. One panel to the next to the next, all the same size. Nothing changes, save the paint.

It highlights what it feels like to be depressed in a way that doesn’t explicitly say it’s about being depressed, but still allows the reader to grasp the implication. Further cementing this is the lack of borders on Mitch Gerads’ part. Rather than keeping the characters trapped within its walls as The Omega Men did, the lack of borders implies that this is an illusion, a vision of being created by the mind. Some have read this to mean that Scott is in a fantasy world or seeing a dying vision (indeed, the book cannily plays with this in its final issue), but it can also be read as being part of Scott’s perception of the world.

Because perception, ultimately, is within the mind. It is the pattern of the world that we create, that allows us to see other people as people. We can fall victim to narratives, stories that tell us to not see people—even monsters—as people. The trick, as Mister Miracle demonstrates, is that people are always, always, more important than spectacle. If you have people, you have enough.

By contrast, Rorschach is about isolation. It’s about people stuck in their heads and the imagined heads of other people and, in turn, trying to make sense of the things not inside their heads. About trying to prevent bad ideas—for what is the squid/q/conspiracy if not a bad idea—from taking root and how one can fall prey to them. How ideas can shift with time and with interaction in the outside, even if it’s just one person.

Consider the conspiracy at Rorschach’s heart. It begins as your typical right wing gun nut conspiracy where barbarians are at the gates of Rome infiltrating our systems of government to make us weak and passive. Indeed, the idea first shifts when it goes from Laura’s father to Laura herself with the simple question: “Where are the Superheroes?” In turn, the idea shifts again when Wil Myerson gets directly involved, adding in Otto Binder’s tape and his left leaning politics. The story is now about killing Turley. As with any conspiracy, the more people added, the more shifts come through.

But, as you might have noticed, this is about the function. Yes, we see the people and their lives, but the story isn’t fully about them. They are cogs in the watch, not people on the street. By contrast, Mister Miracle is all about people. It’s about two people who love each other very dearly having a massive fight. It’s about an adopted son who tries way too hard to fit in and comes off as a bastard to the black sheep of the family as a result. It’s about a woman who had to keep things together after her husband tried to kill himself. It’s about a son whose father sold him to the devil without giving him a name. It’s about abuse survivors healing from hell. It’s about falling apart in the shower for no reason. It’s about people who want to be better and the number of times they fuck up time and time again.

What all these works have in common—to say nothing of the works I didn’t mention—is that they all try to do something new. They aren’t simply doing the same old superhero punch ups where all the world’s problems are resolved by some dork in fetish gear. They have higher aspirations than merely fixing some continuity errors. They speak to raw emotional truths in ways most superhero fiction—before or after Watchmen—simply doesn’t. And in doing so, they surpass Watchmen.

Even Rorschach, a text that merely matches Watchmen, aspires to be more. It wants to talk about conspiracy theories and sad, lonely people. It wants to try new things with the comic book medium, even if those new things are simply new within the context of Superheroes. It wants the reader to be engaged with the text on more than a surface level. To put pieces together instead of having everything told to them.

And yet, it still remains that Watchmen is the greatest comic of all time. And there’s a simple reason for that. And that reason is that Watchmen did something that none of the other texts I’ve talked about have ever done: Watchmen changed the world. Simply put, Watchmen was the death nail on a particular form of Superhero fiction. One where heroes are inherently good because they’re heroes, where might makes right.

As we have seen throughout this series, the attempts to follow up Watchmen have mostly been by regurgitating its approach. Doing what it critiqued the superhero of being and doing nothing more with it. At best, there are some new techniques, new lessons to be learned. But more often than not, all that was done was more violence. More bloodshed. The same old thing—a rotting corpse of its former self—but given a new paint job.

And try as they might, none of the successors to Watchmen could hope to be better than Watchmen. A line was drawn and it was declared, “This far and no farther.” For once the world was changed, the circumstances that allowed it to be changed were removed. The comic book medium quickly moved insular, towards a speculator market, one where the IP mattered more than anything else. The wider culture quickly followed suit. We now live in an age of cinematic universes brimming with the same three stories and, occasionally, an actual movie.

A comic can still save a life, inspire a work of beauty, even be fucking brilliant. But the fact is a comic will never be allowed to change the world again. There’s simply too much money to be made in keeping things the way they are. Because it’s impossible to imagine doing anything else other than make more follow-ups to Watchmen.

This is Watchmen’s Legacy.

For more in “Who Watched the Watchmen”…

The post Who Watched the Watchmen? Tom King & Jorge Fornes’ Rorschach appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen?

“I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.” ~ Alan Moore

“I’ve got a nose for white supremacy and he smells like bleach.” ~ Angela Abar

Watchmen, the 1986 twelve issue DC miniseries, as written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons, and colored by John Higgins, is a comic self-consciously about comic books. The comic explores and challenges the implications and consequences that accompany the existence of superheroes – stars of the most dominant genre of comics in the Anglosphere then and now – and uses them to explore contemporary concerns about the cold war, Reaganism, and nuclear annihilation. Its grid based layouts, mirrored chapters, and non-linear character perspectives calls attention not just to the comic book’s constructed nature, but the ways in which it was constructed and how we engage with and read them.

Likewise, Watchmen – the 2019 nine episode HBO miniseries created by Damon Lindelof as a stand-alone sequel to the comic – is preoccupied with the ways in which television functions and uses superheroes to tell a story about more contemporary concerns; structural racism, generational trauma, political polarization, and extremism. The concerns of either Watchmen are not too specific as to only resonate with a contemporary audience, but the comic is very much a product of the eighties. Lindelof took the spirit of the comic and remixed it – to borrow his own phrasing – creating something that reflected the issues that would strongly resonate with a 2019 audience, as well as addressing some of the comic’s shortcomings regarding race and gender.

But the comic is hardly the only text Lindelof’s show is responding to. Throughout interviews preceding the series’ debut, Lindelof repeatedly cited Ta-Nehisi Coates’ seminal essay ‘The Case for Reparations.’ In the essay, Coates (an acclaimed author, journalist, and comic book writer) posits that Black Americans are entitled to reparations not just as a restitution for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery, but because of historical redlining, housing discrimination and America’s horrific legacy of racial violence. As example, Coates twice briefly mentions the oft-forgotten 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, where white Americans, including members of the Ku Klux Klan, destroyed the affluent Black neighborhood of Greenwood and slaughtered an unknown, but significant number of its citizens and displaced approximately ten thousand Black residents. Lindelof, who admits to having first learned about the massacre from the essay, made these events central to this interpretation of Watchmen and recruited a diverse creative team, including Black creatives, such as writers Chord Jefferson and Stacy Osei-Kuffour and director Stephen Williams, to realize this racialized adaptation.

The 2019 miniseries imagines a version of Tulsa, Oklahoma where the ancestors of the massacre are afforded reparations in the form of a permanent tax exemption, and a strong white supremacist contingent have emerged out of the racist backlash. The Seventh Cavalry – named for the regiment led by Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer in the expansionist/genocidal Indian Wars, including the Battle of Little Big Horn – wear inkblot masks as a homage to the fascistic Rorschach of the original comic, and share his explicitly racist point of view. Following a series of home invasion-murders by the Seventh Cavalry targeting Tulsa’s police force, the city’s cops don masks similar to the superhero vigilantes that the comic’s 1977 Keene Act outlawed, allowing them to maintain a secret identity.

Ostensibly, this is to protect them and their loved ones from being targeted – the same justification for the secret identities usually maintained by characters such as Superman and Spider-Man – but it also means they face little-to-no public accountability for their actions. It also creates an interesting thematic conflation between capes and cops, both roles that are often characterized by a fascistic protection of the status quo. However, the scenario Lindelof and his writer’s room have concocted is one where the police terrorize white neighborhoods, allegedly in the name of preventing further terror attacks. On the surface, the show seems to have created a reverse-racism scenario where the police are the authoritarian soldiers in the crusade against white supremacy, rather than the perpetrators of it. If the show lost anybody here, I can’t blame them.

But I had faith in Damon Lindelof as he had accumulated a life-time of personal good-will from his previous television work. Prior to creating Watchmen, Lindelof co-created Lost with J. J. Abrams and Jeffery Lieber, showrunning it alongside Carlton Cuse, before adapting The Leftovers with the novel’s author Tom Perrotta. Both shows are personal favorites of mine. Lost, with its pulpy propulsive narrative and comic book characters, builds every episode around a single conceit: everyone has a trauma and a history that helps make you who you are. These histories manifested themselves in flashbacks that would spotlight a different member of the show’s expansive cast each episode. Adapted by Lindelof in a period of depression following the end of Lost, The Leftovers became one of the most poignant explorations of grief and collective trauma to air on television. One which has only taken on even more levels of resonance in the years since its ending. Personally, Lindelof’s television credentials are absolutely unimpeachable (although the less said about his movie career and the unfortunate echoes of Into Darkness in Watchmen’s delayed Ozymandias reveal, the better).

Television’s greatest strength lies in the episode and works best when each episode is a distinct unit, regardless of whether that story is serialized or not. This is what makes the medium distinct from film. In an age filled with insecure showrunners pitching ‘ten hour movies’ and dumping formless blobs of content onto streaming services, Lindelof remains a stalwart of the episode. What makes Lindelof’s episodic approach unique however, is how frequently it is tied to a character’s point of view. Lost was structured around the aforementioned flashbacks, but The Leftovers similarly would dedicate its hours to following a specific character or grouping. The biggest influence to this approach? Watchmen.

When asked in an interview how much the comic influenced his work, Lindelof responded:

“A lot? That’s the short answer. The idea that it’s psychological realism. It’s really interested in asking why people behave the way that they behave. Obviously, the idea that every issue switched point of view for characters. Traditionally, we can identify who the hero of the story is. […] [In Watchmen], whose story is it? I’m inclined to say Rorschach, because his journal is what kicks it off. But I can make impassioned arguments for all the characters. Watchmen is the first one to go, “This one’s the Nite Owl one. This one’s the Adrian Veidt one.” Clearly, a model that very much was used in Lost. And most significantly, nonlinear storytelling. Not just in terms of the usage of extended flashback, but when you look at the Dr. Manhattan issue, the idea of telling a story out of time is something that I’ve been trying to replicate in my own way ever since Watchmen.”

Comics are often compared to literature, however they really have more in common with television. They’re both serialized mass-market visual mediums that lack the cultural prestige of their respective sister mediums. When a work in one medium tries to imitate another, it often neglects what makes that form so exciting. Watchmen is often called literary on account of its density, however, it is anything but. It tells a story that can only function in a comic. Not only does its immaculately constructed nine-panel grid dictate an unreplicable pace and tone, but it is also intimately interested in how comics are engaged with. So much so that the omniscient Dr. Manhattan – Jon Osterman, a Jewish refugee and nuclear physicist who gains godlike powers in an unfortunate lab accident – perceives time in a way that resembles how a reader reads a comic. Dr. Manhattan perceives all of his life simultaneously, similar to how a reader sees the whole layout of a comic page and then arranges the panels in their head, before reading them individually and piecing them together to tell a story via juxtaposition.

To adapt Watchmen to another medium successfully, you can’t take the language and images of the comic and expect it to still resonate. You have to construct a story and a style that suits the medium you’re working in. One of the best decisions made in Lindelof’s adaptation was to tell an original story. One that uses its episodic structure to bounce from the points of view of different characters. One that utilizes the specific strengths of television and engages with television history, in the way the comic used the eternally prevalent superheroes of the American comic industry to comment on comics themselves. And if there’s one genre with an outsized television presence, it’s the cop show.

Procedurals & HeroesIn the 2019/20 television season in which Watchmen aired, almost a fifth of scripted shows that aired on U.S. network television starred law enforcement. The juggernaut successes of police procedurals like those of the Law and Order and NCIS franchises helped dominate a media landscape that is as preoccupied with badges and guns as comic books are with capes and cowls. If the question is ‘who watches the watchmen?’ the answer is us. At primetime. Any given night of the week.

And yet, all these eyes on your Chris Melonis and Mark Harmons has not resulted in an increase in real-life accountability for the police. In fact, the opposite has occurred. Ever since the LAPD’s involvement in the propagandistic Dragnet, the cop show has been designed to normalize, explain and excuse the personal, professional and institutional wrongdoings of the police. For Rolling Stone, Alan Sepinwall wrote “these fictional stories have rewired many of us to assume cops are always acting in good faith, and to ignore or wave away those moments when they’re clearly not.”

Despite the apparent societal role-reversal of Black and white Americans, most of the early episodes of Watchmen function more closely to a typical – if outlandish – police procedural than a superhero show. There are thrilling interrogations, police raids, vehicular chases, criminal organizations and nighttime shoot outs. Everyone speaks as if they’re imitating characters in noir films that couldn’t possibly have passed the Hays Code. The conflation of superheroes and cops in Watchmen is an implicit comment on the similar worldview at the heart of these narratives. “At their most conventional, cop shows and superhero stories both run off the assumption that crime is a persistent threat to society, and an equally persistent force is needed to punish criminals and maintain order,” wrote JM Mutore. They also characterize the narrative formulas used by police procedurals and cape movies as similar: “A subversive element threatens a peaceful, ordered society. A trustworthy force arrives to eliminate the subversive element, through carceral or lethal means. Finally, order is re-asserted without the status quo needing to be changed.” Thus the asserted function of the police and superheroes is “to punish people, often without any oversight or accountability, in the name of order.”

When Alan Moore incites controversy by referring to the prevalence of superhero movies as a “precursor to fascism,” he’s being deliberately provocative, but it’s hard to deny that the genre often presents an extremely conservative perspective that is as preoccupied with the maintenance of status quo via force as police shows. Watchmen wants us to engage with the implicit fascism of both genres. The impotent, thuggish, racist cops of the show invite us to be critical of the police on our television screens as the impotent, thuggish, racist superheroes of the comic do for our four colour heroes.

Lindelof’s show is interested in the way in which media shapes our understanding of the world. This is most plainly visible in the show’s film and television parodies, such as the propagandistic Ken Burns riff that opens the episode ‘An Almost Religious Awe’ that recounts how the United States conquered and colonized Vietnam with the help of the omnipotent Dr. Manhattan. Or the recurring Ryan Murphy-referencing ‘American Hero Story,’ that violently sensationalizes the story of the anonymous, but allegedly queer and presumably white, Hooded Justice; the noose-wearing first masked vigilante in the world of the comic. In this world, Steven Spielberg made a three-hour black and white historical drama about 11/2 – the apparent interdimensional cephalopod invasion that decimated Manhattan and closes the comic – instead of Schindler’s List (although given the comic’s prescient 9/11 parallels, I would suggest Munich or War of the Worlds might have been more appropriate examples).

These embedded narratives echo the ‘Tales of the Black Freighter’ comic-within-the-comic and both function as critique and suggest a self-reflexivity when it comes to the show’s own role in the media landscape. The show even winks at the way in which media can affect the public discourse in the episode ‘This Extraordinary Being,’ wherein a precursor the Seventh Cavalry (and an independent faction of the Ku Klux Klan) are revealed to have spent the 30s and 40s brainwashing members of the Black community into rioting and civil unrest via hypnotic messages hidden in films played in Black neighborhoods. It also functions as a metaphor for how interracial violence is contrived by external, systemic forces. In the previous episode ‘Little Fear of Lightning’, the present-day Seventh Cavalry film their manifesto videos in a church set, both a symbol of the type of performative Christianity often used to justify white supremacy and a metafictional nod to the role of the media in proliferating racist thought.

Sexuality in WatchmenThe show makes race, racism and white supremacy core themes, even though they’re largely incidental in the comic. And though that may seem baffling to Moore, it makes a lot of sense to series star Tim Blake Nelson: “if nuclear holocaust was what was most impacting our daily lives in the 1980’s […] what’s that now in America? [Lindelof] decided it was race. And really, culturally it was either going to be race, or gender, or economic disparity. Those are the real three choices.” Lindelof and company chose race as a topic because it spoke to our current anxieties in the way Moore and Gibbons and company settled on the Cold War and mutually assured destruction.

However, speaking frankly, one of the biggest shortcomings of the comic is it’s handling of race, along with it’s clumsy depiction of sexual violence. Both are unfortunately common shortcomings amongst works by British Invasion creators, which is baffling as Britain is not a county bereft of either sexual violence or people of color. Moore is content filling Rorschach’s journal with far-right dog whistles or the New Frontiersman newspaper with racist stereotypes, but he never meaningfully addresses how racist bigotry affects people of color. Rorschach’s Black psychiatrist is shaken hearing Rorschach recount his brutal original story, but is seemingly unaffected by his casual racism. At best, the ethnicity of the comic’s people of color is incidental. At worst, it reduces characters into merely symbolic props, such as the Vietnamese refugees who genius supervillain Ozymandias (a.k.a Adrian Veidt, played in the show by Jeremy Irons) employs. Their presence may nod to the inherent Orientalism present in the origins of figures such as Doctor Strange or Peter Cannon and their mononymous manservants, Wong and Tabu, but they’re not fully realized characters or afforded any of the psychological depth Watchmen is renowned for.

The television adaptation isn’t addressing race just because it’s a prescient issue, it’s also rectifying the book’s failings. The comic’s shortcomings are the result of it being the work of two creators and their limited point of view resulting from their cultural background. Stories are always richer for considering a wider range of perspectives, but television is a medium that requires them to function. Most Western stories are driven by dialectical arguments, rooting them in character and synthesizing them via narrative. To fill up the real estate of a television season, there needs to be a sufficient number of realized character viewpoints to facilitate enough conflict. This is how 200 episodes of a sitcom can ostensibly be about nothing more than friends hanging out. If their point of views are fairly considered, there are an infinite number of permutations of roommates arguing that can still be engaging.

When a show doesn’t adequately consider the worldview of its supporting characters, there’s a limit to the stories that can be told with them and the show’s world will always end up feeling small. Even the most empathetic individual’s point of view is limited and this is why, in my opinion, it is exceedingly rare that a great television show will be written by a lone writer as their shortsightedness will almost-always betray them. Lindelof’s usual style is dependent on perspective, bouncing from differing points of view episode-to-episode. Watchmen ensures its wide perspective with its diverse creative team, who, presumably, were able to allow their lived experiences to inform the show. This is no guarantee of quality however, and likewise, the comic is still great in spite of its inability to address race.

The original work is also limited by its androcentric focus, a pitfall the show avoids not just by casting Regina King as the series’ lead Angela Abar/Sister Night, a Black masked police officer, but also casting more women in significant roles such Hong Chau’s nefarious businesswoman Lady Trieu, or Jean Smart as an older version of the comic’s Laurie Jupiter/Silk Spectre II, who now uses her father’s surname, Blake. Most of the female cast consists of women older than forty, which is notable when ageism is still a prevalent issue when casting women in television. More unusual still is their sexual agency and desirability. Laurie, a woman in her late sixties, is allowed to have one-night stands with her much younger co-workers and carry around ginormous blue dildos (although it’s a ginormous blue dildo that is symbolically connected to a relationship she had in her youth). When Angela and her husband Cal (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) have sex in the first episode, their bodies are attentively eroticised in a way uncommon for Black bodies on screen.

Sister Night’s police uniform/superhero costume is based on a nun’s habit. In universe, she borrows the name and iconography from a fictitious Blaxploitation movie she saw as a child in mostly South East Asian Vietnam. Another sly commentary on the way in which the media can shape our identities. The outfit is kinky and subject to multiple suit-up sequences filled with extreme close ups of her arming herself and zipping up her knee-high boots as Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s industrial dance-inspired score thumps along. It’s every bit as knowingly camp and erotic as the much maligned suit-up sequence that opens Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin.

Sequences such as this reveal a completely different attitude to sex and the inherently fetishistic aspects of superheroes to the comic. In the comic, when Laurie and her superhero partner first try to have sex, he’s impotent. They put their masks on, go out, beat on some crooks and when they return he has no issue performing. The comic makes the pleasures of sex in the genre, explicitly tied to the sadistic pleasures of violence. It condemns superhero sexuality, whereas the show takes a much more positive attitude. The show never truly addresses the connection to violence that comes with superhero sex, but it has fun with it and revels in the (some-what minor) subversiveness of seeing different types of bodies in fetish gear.

Wade TillmanBut it would be dishonest for the show to exclusively depict positive sexual experiences. Enter the focal character of ‘Little Fear of Lightning,’ Wade Tillman (Tim Blake Nelson). Wade, a former Jehovah’s Witness turned masked police officer Looking Glass. Wade was visiting a funfair in Hoboken, New Jersey as the alien squid monster materialized in Manhattan and was caught in the radius of the accompanying fatal psychic blast. More specifically, he was naked in a hall of mirrors, having been led and seduced there by a local girl, only for her to run off with his clothes (all to a backdrop of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper”). He’s knocked out by the blast and when he emerges, he sees a funfair wrecked by death and destruction. The ground, littered with bodies and the naked Wade discovers himself to be one of the few survivors. Wade, the virginal final girl survivor of an interdimensional terror attack.

Present day Wade experiences symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Most notably, he’s constantly in a state of hyperarousal. People suffering with hyperarousal may find themselves “very anxious and find it difficult to relax” and “may be constantly aware of threats and easily startled.” Hyperarousal often leads to survivors feeling irritable, a proneness to angry outbursts, insomnia and difficulty concentrating. Wade is paranoid; anxious about the potential of another squid attack. He has an extensive security system supposedly warning him of ‘interdimensional activity’ that he tests every day, against the recommended advice of the manufacturer. “People who wear masks are driven by trauma… it hides the pain,” Laurie proclaims in the third episode ‘She Was Killed by Space Junk.’ His police uniform includes a silver reflective mask made out of ‘reflectatine,’ a material resembling tin foil that supposedly prevents psychic attacks like the one that accompanied 11/2. His mask makes this earlier proclamation literal, protecting Wade from any further pain from psychic attacks, the cause of his initial trauma. When out of his uniform, he hides reflectatine in the lining of the baseball cap he refuses to take off. He’s irritable: when someone mentions to him that people in the radius of 11/2’s psychic attack “wake up screaming,” he curtly says “I sleep great.” This is untrue; we see him put on his reflectatine mask before trying and failing to fall asleep, suggesting he suffers from insomnia. Wade’s reflectatine mask and hat evokes the tin foil hats real life conspiracy theorists wear that have become a cultural shorthand for paranoia. These elements of his life all suggest he’s living with post-traumatic stress disorder and hyperarousal in the aftermath of surviving 11/2.

Being a traumatic attack that destroyed part of Manhattan, 11/2 is analogous to 9/11. Therefore Wade’s suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder can be seen as analogous to those 9/11 survivors who similarly suffered with the disorder. His career in law enforcement even parallels the ethical conversations surrounding 9/11’s subsequent War on Terror, working as an interrogator (read: torturer). The song that soundtracks a police raid on a shanty town, allegedly harboring members of the Seventh Calvary, is even titled ‘GHRAIB ME A TERRORIST.’ In imaging a world following 11/2, the show has explored an aftermath to an incomprehensible amount of death. Something that might have felt impossible had the United States not spent the last twenty years doing so. As a cover for his police work, Wade works in advertising. He consults on an advert trying to convince tourists its safe to visit New York after 11/2, which, in keeping with the show’s media critique, reflects the ways our perception of the world after a tragedy is constructed. However, any assumptions that Wade’s fictional experiences are the same as the survivors of the real-life tragedy are flawed, as 11/2 diverges from 9/11 in one significant way: it was a hoax.

In the climax of the comic, 11/2 is orchestrated by Veidt in order to end the escalating Cold War by uniting the world’s superpowers against a common threat: squid monsters from another dimension. He admits as much in a video given to newly-elected President Robert Redford – yes, that one – on the day of his inauguration: “The end is nigh. Nuclear holocaust between the United States and Russia is imminent. Fortunately, I’ve planned for this too and the only way to stave off man-kind’s extinction is with a weapon more powerful than any atomic bomb. That weapon is fear and I, Mr. President, am its architect.” He even arranges minor ‘incursions’ in the form of random small squids raining from the sky that disintegrate on impact. In Wade’s words, they’re “alive for thirty seconds and they spend all of it dying.” Simply put, 11/2 was the result of a conspiracy. There is no evidence to support 9/11 conspiracies involving the U.S. government, however these theories are still widely disseminated.

What makes Wade’s trauma relatively unique compared to other 11/2 survivors, is how tied it is to Wade’s sexual humiliation. As Lindelof explains: “He’s literally saying to her, ‘I don’t want to do this,’ but he’s powerless to stop her. Then she runs off with his clothes and he’s there literally naked and exposed, and you know, aroused. And in the midst of this, he’s calling himself a sinner because he’s got all this sort of Jehovah’s Witness religious mania swirling around it, too. And then the squid drops.” In a departure from the comic, Lindelof and co. mostly avoid female sexual trauma, and only focuses on Wade’s. “I think shame is a part of a lot of the origin stories in the ur-Text, and I felt like shame is not a part of Angela [Abar]’s backstory, but it should be a part of Looking Glass’s.” The women of the show are sexually liberated and nothing punitive arises from their sexual pleasure. Meanwhile, Wade’s story of shame and social isolation is a much more meaningful exploration of sexual trauma than the events the women of the comic – or any of its cheap imitators – endured.

Mirrors and reflections, often a literary motif in stories about identity, recur throughout the show. Both, most obviously, on Wade’s mask and in the hall of mirrors in which Wade suffers his initial trauma. The sheer quantity of reflections must have been a logistical nightmare whilst filming this show, so it’s clear how much the production valued these symbols. (It also leads to perhaps my favourite shot in the show in ‘Martial Feats of Comanche Horsemanship,’ when Sister Night notices she’s being attacked from behind as she’s talking to a masked Looking Glass.) For Wade, his trauma has come to define him. Reflectatine, a symbol of the prolonged anxiety he deals with, covers his face and obscures his identity. Perhaps more than anyone else on the show, Wade’s story is about the struggle to define his identities with his persona. A familiar story in the superhero genre, but Wade’s storyline is the extreme. His persona is the manifestation of trauma. For him to find a self outside of his persona, he must resolve his trauma, something he is unable to do.

So he remains alienated and lonely. And like so many alienated men today, he flirts with white supremacy. Literally, in the form of Renee (Paula Malcolmson), a member of the Seventh Cavalry. After meeting him in a support group for survivors of 11/2, Renee seduces him and leads him to the Seventh Calvarly’s base. There, Wade discovers the truth about 11/2 and it shatters his worldview. All the protective measures he’s been taking – the reflectatine, the security system – are useless. At the episode’s end, he throws out his new alarm, but immediately goes back to retrieve it. He can’t take the reflectatine mask off because his identity has become impossible to divorce from his trauma. He can’t expose the pain.

Dr. ManhattanWade is not the only person hiding their face; Dr. Manhattan has a new one in the show. The seventh episode ‘An Almost Religious Awe’ reveals that he had disguised himself as the amnesiac Cal, unbeknownst to anybody but Angela, including himself. The first forty minutes of the following episode ‘A God Walks into Abar,’ tracks their courtship non-linearly. Fitting for an episode about Dr. Manhattan. Unable to recreate the temporally diffuse page layouts of the comic, director Nicole Kassel and editor Henk Van Eeghen cut from different conversations as Manhattan describes them to Angela in a bar during their initial meeting. This creates a Russian doll nesting structure where each scene is contained within the parent conversation, cutting back and forth as the Angela of the past learns about future events from her future husband.

It’s not as effective as the comic’s nonlinear chapter ‘Watchmaker,’ as it is functionally transplanting a metaphor about comic books to a different medium. However, this structure still allows the show to juxtapose scenes and shots similarly to the way the comic can juxtapose panels. For example, when Dr. Manhattan says he has no knowledge of his upcoming time disguised as Cal, Angela compares the experience to a tunnel, only to cut back to the parent conversation as the Doris Day song ‘Tunnel of Love’ plays on the jukebox. The Russian doll structure may not be as immediately impactful as the comic’s, but I’d argue it is more suited to television. ‘A God Walks into Abar’ may predominantly be about Dr. Manhattan, but it’s from Angela’s perspective. The events that she isn’t present for, including Dr. Manhattan’s past and future, are all recounted to her. This is perhaps more befitting for a television viewer who receives a story passively, as opposed to a comic reader who has to actively construct the story by reading panel-to-panel.

Regarding his atemporal perspective, Watchmen has created a compelling adaptation of Dr. Manhattan, but what is to be made of the show’s decision to disguise a white Jewish man in a Black body? His former colleague, Ozymandias, notes that racial appropriation is often considered ‘problematic’ and it can’t help but feel like a provocative commentary on Blackface. One might also take it as a metatextual swing; a Jewish creator embodying a Black narrative could refer to both Manhattan and Damon Lindelof. Maybe it’s a (reductive) conflation of the struggles of African and Jewish Americans. Or perhaps it was just an attempt to obfuscate the twist that Cal and Manhattan are one and the same. The textual reason Manhattan takes a Black form is because Angela selects a body she finds attractive for him. Whatever the reason, Manhattan’s appropriative Blackness feels like the show missed an opportunity to say something specific. When it’s revealed the Seventh Cavalry, in conspiracy with members of the Tulsa Police Department and the GOP, were plotting to kidnap Dr. Manhattan and steal his powers, that the target of their envy is (technically) a Black man goes completely unremarked upon.

The comic’s Dr. Manhattan is often seen as analogous to Superman (despite his origin’s similarities to the Hulk’s and officially being based on Captain Atom). The show revisits this analogy repeatedly, not just with Manhattan – whose human identity Cal Abar is named after Kal-El and the blaxploitation film Abar, the First Black Superman – but with several other characters as well. His arrival on Earth is paid homage in the opening of the fourth episode ‘If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own,’ as a rocket crashes on a farm belonging to a childless couple. However, the, ahem, Kents don’t find a baby in that rocket, instead Lady Trieu swoops in beforehand and offers to buy their land in exchange for giving them a child that she would otherwise incinerate. The rocket’s passenger is later revealed to be Ozymandias, Lady Trieu’s father, who has been living in exile on Europa, exerting a godlike status ruling over a race of clones Dr. Manhattan created. Both his return and his exile echo Superman’s origin. As does Lady Trieu, who is the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee who worked for Ozymandias.

Superman is often characterized as an immigrant or a refugee, even if the amount of Superman stories that truly reflect that are limited to the works of a handful of Asian-American writers like Greg Pak and Gene Luen Yang. The horrors of American imperialism destroyed Vietnam in Watchmen, not unlike how Kryptonian greed destroyed Krypton. Lady Trieu preserves the memory of her late mother’s Vietnam literally. Using a drug called Nostalgia – an aptly-named pill designed for people suffering with Dementia, which enables them to remember experiences they may have forgotten – Trieu doses a young clone of her mother with her old memories. Trieu is dedicated to preserving pre-war Vietnam with these memories, akin to how Kal-El protects the Bottle City of Kandor, one of the last symbols of the dead Krypton.

Like Trieu, Jon also grew up in forced exile from his home as Nazis forced his family to flee Germany. Moore and Gibbons conceived this origin to parallel Superman’s creators Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, whose families fled Eastern Europe to escape anti-Semitism. One of the ironies of the superhero is the genre’s distinctly marginalized Jewish roots and the implicit fascism Moore observed that developed as the genre progressed (and the politically radical ideas contained in the early issues of Superman and Action Comics disappeared with the arrival of McCarthyism and the implementation of the Comics Code).

In many ways, the show feels like it’s trying to reconcile this contradiction by addressing the genre’s authoritarian undertones connection to white supremacy, head on. The show takes the comic’s Krypton analogy and extends it to include other forms of white supremacy, like the Vietnam War. Repurposing Superman’s origin for its characters, purporting their actions as a response to bigotry, even as their behavior becomes more authoritarian, completely leaning into this contradiction. Nowhere is this clearer than when the show is following Will Reeves, a survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, the first in-universe superhero and Angela Abar’s grandfather.

Will & The Minute MenThe series’s opening episode ‘It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice,’ opens on Will as a child, sitting in the cinema, watching ‘Trust in the Law,’ a fictitious movie about the real-life Black Oklahoma Marshal Bass Reeves as the massacre occurs outside. He’s eventually sent away in a neighbor’s car by his parents as Tulsa burns all around him. As he’s being driven away, a biplane drops dynamite on the building Will’s parents are sheltered in as he watches. He later awakens in a field outside Tulsa and finds a baby in the grass. The burnt Tulsa is his Krypton.

In the sixth episode, ‘This Extraordinary Being,’ circumstances have led to Angela overdosing on Nostalgia pills containing Will’s memories. The consequence of her overdose means her consciousness is trapped, reliving Will’s memories as a form of psychosis, which we then witness as she relives them. The episode is functionally a flashback episode, however it is given an immediacy as Angela discovers revelations about her grandfather (played by Jovan Adepo in the 30s). The biggest of these revelations is that Will was the real Hooded Justice. The hood and noose wearing original superhero was a queer Black man and a survivor of Klan-violence. For such a marginalized individual to be the impetus for the wave of superheroes in the world of Watchmen seems to be an acknowledgement of the influence of minority groups on popular media. To paraphrase an actual Ryan Murphy show, ‘he’s black; he’s gay; he makes culture.’

The episode is a stylistic departure for the show: it’s shot in black and white and is mostly comprised of long takes that float around the scene. Match cuts transition from different memories and a propulsive jazz score distinguishes itself from Ross and Reznor’s established, industrial style. There’s a dream-logic to the construction of the episode, from the way the scenes seem to bleed into one another across space and time, to Adepo and King regularly swapping places whilst out of shot, giving the impression that both characters are simultaneously experiencing the same events. Whilst the visual trickery does mean that the actor’s faces are often obscured, hindering the emotional effectiveness of some of the performances, the effect is empathetic, trapping the audience, if not entirely in Angela’s perspective/Will’s memory, at least always adjacent to it.

Nostalgia gives Lindelof a diegetic excuse for his beloved flashbacks – the logical conclusion of his affinity for them – but it also functions as a symbol for the lingering effects of generational trauma. The show alludes to this in ‘Little Fear of Lightning,’ when a young Black man discusses his mother surviving 11/2: “when something really bad happens to your parents it gets locked in your DNA […] It’s like I inherited her pain.” Angela’s experience literalizes generational trauma. It’s fitting that the episode is a flashback too, as involuntary flashbacks are associated with sufferers of PTSD.

Nostalgia also allows the show to revisit (and effectively retcon) the continuity of the original Watchmen. That Nostalgia was considered a market failure feels like one of the few winking, implicit criticisms of revisiting Watchmen built into the show. Along with a couple choice lines that feel like they’re more closely directed at DC than any actual characters (“It’s a rerun. You had a genius idea 20 years ago, but you’re still doing the same thing, just smaller.”).

By the 1930s, Will was living in New York City and was inspired to become a cop by ‘Trust in the Law’ and borrowed Bass Reeves’s last name. Again, it’s a comment on the ways in which media can shape our worldview and ideology, but also in conversation with the real life legacy of Reeves. In an interview, Louis Gosset Jr. (who portrays the older Will Reeves in the present) described the influence of the real Bass Reeves: “A lot of the cowboys were based on Bass Reeves’ adventures, including all kinds of the marshals. […] Events from his life were taken and used to create other Western heroes.” Reeves is an alleged inspiration for a number of pulp heroes such as the Lone Ranger, but in an act of cultural erasure most of the characters he inspired were white. The show’s acknowledgement of Reeves’ influence is an act of racial reclamation.

However, as Hooded Justice, Will disguises himself as white at the recommendation of his wife, June (played by Danielle Deadwyler). He paints the skin around his eyes pale, so no one can see that he’s Black through his mask. His African heritage is hidden, as it is in the legacy of characters inspired by Bass Reeves. Whereas Dr. Manhattan assumes Blackness, Will assumes whiteness and uses it as a cover to combat crime. His white makeup mirrors Sister Night’s black face paint, symbolically connecting the two and their respective fights against racist organizations. Passing may grant Will more mobility, however there are still accompanying burdens. His war on crime leaves him estranged from his wife and son. Their relationship reaches its breaking point when Will catches his son painting his face white, imitating his father. A shrewd image representing the way in which parents pass on their pains.

When he joins the superhero team, the Minutemen, the team’s leader (and Will’s lover), Captain Metropolis, discourages him from disclosing his identity to them as they wouldn’t be as ‘accepting’ as he is. Metropolis fetishizes his Blackness and only uses him for sex and image, dismissing his concerns about white supremacist activity in New York. At a press event for the Minutemen, Hooded Justice is interrupted by Metropolis as he tries to inform the public of such. Metropolis instead redirects the press’s attention towards an advertisement for a bank that the Minutemen have endorsed. It’s a telling comment on the superhero genre’s priorities; they are supposedly crusaders of social justice, but they prioritize commerce over meaningful action and change (especially for Black people). Even more telling is the content of the ad itself: a racist caricature of a bank robber being stopped by a member of the Minutemen.

Working as a police officer, it is Will who uncovers the Klan’s plan to use mesmerism to incite violence in the Black community, but in doing so, he alienates the rest of the police force – some members of whom are in league with the Klan. In an early attempt to deter him, they kidnap Will and lynch him, cutting him down before he is completely asphyxiated. The scene is portrayed from a first person point of view, watching Will’s limbs flail as he chokes. When he’s cut down, the ~~racist~~ cop looks right down the lens and calls him the N-word. Because of the Nostalgia, Angela experiences what Will experienced at that moment – as emphasized by a cut to Regina King in Will’s place, on the ground with the noose around her neck. This is the origin of Hooded Justice. Will dons the symbol of his oppression, the noose, and uses it to fight back. And via Nostalgia, Angela does too.

But as Angela can appropriate Will’s experiences, so too can the audience. Lynchings on film often can be little more than an exploitative use of Black pain, and the first person creates such a strong degree of empathy, it is almost as if the audience is experiencing it too. As a Black man who was once choked and almost killed, this scene definitely played very differently for me than it ever could for a white person who could never experience that in reality. Depending on the spectator, it’s arguably appropriative of Black suffering.

In an article on Black trauma in Chinonye Chukwu’s Till, Robert Daniels writes about the trend of “narratives [that] thrust the viciousness rendered upon Black folks as their primary reason for existing; [that] take cover behind the importance of enacting destruction and witnessing its aftermath as a teaching tool without considering the toll taken upon the witnesser.” Watching the lynching in Watchmen is tolling, but it doesn’t feel as exploitative as the depictions of racist violence in other works. He later describes “the problem in film arises when the camera only asks for an audience to witness. In that scenario, the entire purpose of the image is catered to white audiences who want to relieve their guilt by witnessing Black trauma rather than through Black viewers who want humanizing stories.”

Episode writer Cord Jefferson understands that to have to use Black pain to assert Black humanity to a white audience is demeaning. Describing his time working as a freelance journalist covering racist incidents: “I used to […] let my anger serve as an engine. But I’ve since discovered that my anger over each new racist incident is now rivaled and augmented by the anger I feel when asked to explain, once more, why black people shouldn’t be brutalized, insulted, and killed.” Watchmen lets that be self-evident. No racist white person learns the error of their ways and didactically monologues about how they’re outgrown racism. Watchmen refuses to relieve white audiences of their guilt. The experience of the show’s lynching is too damning and too real and Will’s story is too detailed and humanizing to merely work as a teaching tool. And unlike a lot of media about racism set in the past, ‘This Extraordinary Being’ takes care to connect its story to racism in the present. White supremacist organizations are still alive in 2019 and even in an apparently liberal utopia, they’re still connected to the police. Chief Judd Crawford (Don Johnson) may wear a white hat, but the robe in his closet is also white. Chickens come home to roost, when an elderly Will brainwashes Crawford into hanging himself. This is Hooded Justice’s justice. Will Reeves, one hundred years old, is still alone fighting racist cops today. Nothing ends, reader. Nothing ever ends.

“One” Bad AppleOften, institutional racism is blamed on individuals. The ‘bad apple’ analogy. Watchmen understands and demonstrates that systemic racism isn’t the professional failings of a few bad actors, but rather by design. It might be a touch literal for the police, the Klan and politicians to all be in league, but I appreciate the bluntness of it all. The show is unambiguous in its linking of the state to white supremacy. Senator Joe Keene Jr (James Wolk) can say he’s not racist, but it’s telling what he says afterwards sounds a lot like replacement theory (“We’re about restoring balance in those times in which our country forgets the principles upon which it was founded. Because the scales have tipped way too far and it is extremely difficult to be a white man in America right now.”) Racism isn’t just enacted by individuals, but by the state itself. This is why Will’s fight is still ongoing eighty years after he started it: he may have killed every Klansman in New York, but the police and other racist institutions persisted. In the finale, ‘See How They Fly,’ Lady Trieu kills the entirety of the Seventh Cavalry along with members of the police force and US senate. She’s symbolically doing to white supremacy what Will didn’t: eradicating it wholly.

On the surface, Watchmen seems to be a story about a town where Black/white racial dynamics are reversed, but by showing racism to still be a persistent danger for Black people, it underlines the ways in which systemic racism is enacted and inextricable from the systems of power. President Redford can enact reparations for the ancestors of the victims of Tulsa, but without tearing down the institutions that initiated, excused, or obfuscated the massacre, the circumstances that enabled it will continue to recur. It doesn’t matter if there are Black cops like Sister Night, if the system of policing is functionally identical (it’s notable how much of Angela’s work as a police officer in the early episodes involves terrorizing a white working class community).

This is also why the show kills Dr. Manhattan. In ‘Look How They Fly,’ after preventing the Seventh Cavalry from doing the same thing, Lady Trieu uses a device to kill Dr. Manhattan and try to steal his powers. There’s a fitting poetic justice in a Vietnamese woman killing the conqueror of Vietnam. It’s the arc of the universe bending towards justice. In fact, the show’s ending is a lot more moralistic than the comic, which lets its main evil-doer, Ozymandias, get away with his greatest crime, 11/2. His final scene in the show is Laurie arresting him in his lair, the setting of the climax of the comic. Lady Trieu herself is killed by her father before achieving her apotheosis (again with a squid incursion – he really was just playing reruns).

Ozymandias justifies his filicide by saying “anyone who seeks to obtain the power of a god must be prevented at all costs from obtaining it.” Veidt is likely motivated by his inferiority complex not allowing someone else to gain that power, but his argument seems compelling on the surface. Although, the show doesn’t get a chance to explore the idea as it kills Trieu before we can see what the world with her as a god looks like. And whilst Trieu comes across as quite nefarious – and has admittedly killed a lot of people at this point – the show never convincingly argues that the world would be just as bad whoever took the Blue. Whether you choose to believe her intentions are altruistic, wouldn’t the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee have a much different approach to divinity than a white supremacist like Keene?

The show ends on the implication that Dr. Manhattan has passed his powers onto Angela. Which is frustrating for many reasons, not least because she’s a cop. Her character arc throughout the show is coming to understand the forms white supremacy takes and reckoning with her complicity in it. But she isn’t necessarily a ‘good’ person, any more than Trieu is. The suggestion that she’s more worthy of it than Trieu flattens the show into a simple moral binary, creating a much more black and white ending than the comic’s (although, perhaps that’s fitting for a show about a woman dressed as a nun).

As mentioned, the show seem to suggest a great understanding of how the media shapes our perception of the police (amongst other things). It is in conversation with the police procedural and critical of the ways the genre encourage unregulated power for the police. And yet, the show ends with a police officer potentially achieving absolute power. To not explore the consequences of that, and to not condemn the very idea (let alone present it as preferable), implicitly advocates for it. To me, that seems at odds with the messaging of the rest of the show.

The ending feels like the show is swinging for one last twist, but it has the unfortunate side-effect of undermining the show’s actual climax: Angela reuniting with Will and her children. ‘An Almost Religious Awe’ shows us that Angela became a cop after seeing Vietnamese police officers execute a terrorist who murdered her parents. She sees police work as a vehicle for vengeance, a desire for which was born out of trauma. Perhaps this desire would have been curbed by June, had she not passed away before she could take custody of Angela. It’s fitting that Will, who separated from June because he was unable to relinquish his desire for vengeance, tells her “masks, hide the pain. […] You can’t heal under a mask Angela. Wounds need air.” For a show that so effectively explored the consequences of trauma, it makes sense it would conclude with a suggestion of how to move past it. Not coincidentally, an impactful reunion that allows the main characters to move forward also describes the endings of Damon Lindelof’s two prior shows.

So the unfortunately simplistic ending means that perhaps the show doesn’t fully live up the legacy of the comic, but it improves on it in many other ways. Not least, by being one of the most thoughtful explorations of race and trauma ever put to television. Despite its shortcomings, Lindelof and company truly succeeded at remixing Watchmen and telling a story that was as pertinent to our issues today as the comic was to those of the eighties. And perhaps more surprisingly, they were able to translate a comic that functioned as implicit criticism of the comic book industry into a television show that critiques and (mostly) condemns our badge-and-gun obsessed media landscape.

For more in “Who Watched the Watchmen”…

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The post Who Watched the Watchmen? DC Universe Rebirth appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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In Gothic: A Romance, a 1990 Batman story from the pages of Legends of the Dark Knight, Batman finds himself battling a satanic monk who attempts to kill everyone in Gotham City, and offer their souls to the devil in exchange for immortality. His plan rests on Gotham’s specific architecture, utilizing a series of cathedrals […]

The post Gotham City is Hell: Why We Deserve Batman appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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Picking up where we left off, we now come to the one and only time Geoff Johns ever wrote a proper Shazam/Fawcett solo ongoing, the work that would reshape Black Adam once again. It would prove to be his final farewell to the character and the mythology he’d worked with for so long. Or…would it? […]

The post Black Adam and Geoff Johns’ Bastards- Part IV appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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Picking up where we left off, we now come to one of the most important initiatives of modern DC comics, and the work that would reshape Black Adam for good once more. The initiative that still informs what DC is, and which it has never truly been able to escape. We come to The New […]

The post Black Adam and Geoff Johns’ Bastards- Part III appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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Picking up where we left off, we now come to one of the most important books of modern DC comics, and the book that would reshape Black Adam for good. The book that continues to inform and define much of the identity of DC even now. We come, of course, to 52. [Content/Trigger Warning: Sexual […]

The post Black Adam and Geoff Johns’ Bastards- Part II appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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Often, Geoff Johns is associated with Silver Age figures. Classic heroes of the 1960s revivals like Hal Jordan and Barry Allen. He’s often identified with triggering the revival or ‘rebirths’ of such figures and re-centering them in mythologies and re-positioning them as pivotal leads of the modern era. Johns is often framed as the figure […]

The post Black Adam and Geoff Johns’ Bastards- Part I appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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There is a darkness growing in the world, an evil rooted in the past that has risen up as a blight on the present. To stem this corruption, Levi Kamei must reconnect with his own forgotten past, and embrace a strange new destiny as the next guardian of the Green. Since his first appearance in […]

The post THE SWAMP THING by Ram V & Mike Perkins | Horror, Hope, and Identity appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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I love video games. I suppose I always have. Growing up in the early years of economic liberalisation in India, you took your first steps into the world of gaming on bootlegged consoles, manufactured by local companies that had cropped up all over the country to meet the demands of a large population with growing […]

The post The Inmates Run the Asylum in Rocksteady’s Arkham Trilogy appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy […]

The post Who Watched the Watchmen? What Doomsday Clock Gets Wrong appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy […]

The post Who Watched the Watchmen? The Omega Men – The End is Here appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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The recent adaptation illustrates how crucial the Sandman’s connections to DC continuity are to Morpheus’ Story. Throughout the press tour in anticipation of Netflix’s adaptation of The Sandman, there’s been focus on a particular diversion from the source material — its lack of connective tissue to a grander universe. This is usually spun as a […]

The post Merely a Monument; Always a Seamark – Sandman and DC Universe Connections appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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On September 5, 1992, Batman: The Animated Series premiered on Fox Kids, introducing the world to a vision of The Dark Knight that appealed to all age groups. Created by Eric Radomski and Bruce Timm, with writers including Paul Dini and a voice cast centered on Kevin Conroy, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Loren Lester, Bob Hastings, […]

The post BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES – The 30 Greatest Episodes For 30 Years appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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The DC Animated Universe (DCAU) was a big part of my childhood; I know I’m not alone in that. Watching Batman: The Animated Series, Static Shock, and all the other shows always was a good time. That universe gave us what – at the time – we didn’t have with Marvel or any cinematic experience. […]

The post Justice League Infinity Review! appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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[Variant cover by Dan Mora] Crush is a new character in the DC Universe. Even though she was part of the Teen Titans for a bit, she still needs a writer with a vision to reach her full potential. Crush & Lobo shows that’s what Mariko Tamaki can and hopefully will be for her. The […]

The post Crush & Lobo: Not Taking Up The Mantle appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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One of my silly little “reading goals” for 2022 was revisiting all things Darwyn Cooke – from his early work on Catwoman to the Parker novels late into his career. Cooke is, in my opinion, a giant of the medium. Compared to his peers, he ventured into comics quite late, after spending years as a […]

The post Darwyn Cooke and the Art of Genre Storytelling appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy […]

The post Who Watched the Watchmen? Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy […]

The post Who Watched the Watchmen? Before Watchmen: Rorschach appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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Created by Kelley Pucket and Damion Scott, Cassandra Cain, one of the Batgirls, has been through a lot in the DC Universe, she even disappeared for a while after the “New 52,” but the recent years have been fantastic for her. Introduced in the “Mark of Cain” story-line, Cassandra suffered years of abuse and was […]

The post Cassandra Cain Reading Order! appeared first on Comic Book Herald.

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It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy […]

The post Who Watched the Watchmen? Before Watchmen: Ozymandias appeared first on Comic Book Herald.