It's an oldie and a goodie and I just wrote a paper on it, so here goes.
The condensed version of the eleven-page seminar piece I wrote is this: Watchmen constantly reminds the reader of the history of comics by using characters that imply other characters (the Charlton Comics line, on which they were all based, and the archetypes of Superman, Batman, etc.). Making readers aware of the construct of the character ruins suspension of disbelief, and forces them to think of the book itself as a constructed thing, an artefact of human creation rather than a "real" story.
Once it dispels the ideological content of the basic superhero genre, Watchmen's plot is then free to question, challenge, and even destroy the assumptions of that genre, which it does by presenting readers with a cast of characters who are murderers, rapists, or (and this isn't really a bad thing, just unexpected in a comic-book... or, hmm, maybe expected but also expected to never be explicitly stated) fetishists. Ozymandias, who is as crazy as the rest of them, is only different in his desire to remove superheroes from the world and focus his "new world order" on regular old humans... who could probably benefit from The Viedt Plan!
The full essay is in the extended entry. It's a little rough, but it'll make a good conference paper. Enjoy!
A World with Contradictions:
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen and the Revisionist Superhero Story
In Comic Book Culture, Matthew J. Pustz refers to Alan Moore's Watchmen as a "revisionist superhero" (137) story. In Comic Book Nation, Bradford W. Wright, describes it as a comic which depicts "what superheroes might be like if they really existed" (271). Pustz names the sub-genre to which Watchmen belongs; Wright describes that sub-genre, although it is more accurate to say that Watchmen depicts what the world would be like if superheroes existed. Revisionist superhero comics, then, seek to add realism to the characters and the setting of the superhero story. Watchmen, though not the first and not the most widely known,[1] is probably the best example of this genre. It is the book to which all other revisionist comic books compare themselves. Moore's superhero comics are almost all revisionist and have been since he started writing Miracleman in 1981. In Watchmen, Moore uses two literary devices to draw attention to the constructed nature of the superhero, and then constructs a plot that utterly destroys the supposedly heroic nature of the figure.
Before we discuss Watchmen's use of the revisionist superhero story, we have to define the genre from which it originates. The easiest way to do that is to define the superhero. Peter Coogan's The Secret Origin of the Superhero defines the figure as, "A heroic character with a selfless, prosocial mission; who possesses superpowers, [...] and/or mental skills; [and] who has a superidentity and iconic costume and [...] can be distinguished [...] by a preponderance of generic conventions" (346). By "prosocial" Coogan means, quite simply, the opposite of antisocial. The "prosocial mission" is, then, whatever the character, the artists, and the general public agree is "good" for society. What qualifies as "prosocial" and "antisocial" is different for every community of readers, whether they are defined by era, class, gender, or other factors. Therefore, the actions and ideology of the superhero depend entirely on the attitudes of that community of readers. For example, when Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster produced Action Comics in the 1930s and 40s, Superman was anti-authoritarian and consistently chose violence as the first solution to any problem. Siegal and Shuster's street-level view of the function of a superhero (defend the common person against the forces of oppressive authority) is prosocial if one lives at street-level. However, the prosocial mission of most superheroes was reified in the Silver Age,[2] mostly due to the generically restrictive requirements of the Comics Code. For our purposes that standard, Silver Aged, prosocial mission is most succinctly stated by Captain Metropolis: "SOMEBODY HAS TO SAVE THE WORLD" (2.11.7).[3] It is worth noting that even at this early stage in the narrative, the second issue, the story has already started challenging this all-too simple mission statement through the "SOCIAL EVILS" (2.10.2) that Metropolis names. He mentions "PROMISCUITY, DRUGS, [and] CAMPUS SUBVERSION" (2.10.2), and we read "ANTI-WAR DEMOS," and "BLACK UNREST" (2.11.4)[4] on his display. These examples refer to the counter-cultural, civil rights, and feminist movements of the 1960s, all of which we can reasonably assume professional writers and artists would not consider to be "evil."
Moore has two consistent literary devices he uses to create revisionist superheroes. The first device is play with memory as it constitutes identity. Characters in Moore's stories typically discover that their memories are false or inaccurate. For example, in Batman: The Killing Joke, Moore weaves the origin story of the Joker, a supervillain,[5] into the narrative, but in the final pages of the book the Joker reveals, "I'M NOT EXACTLY SURE WHAT IT WAS. SOMETIMES I REMEMBER IT ONE WAY, SOMETIMES ANOTHER..." (1.39.2). Forcing characters to rediscover or redefine who they are puts the psychology of those characters on display for the sake of the reader, which facilitates a discussion, within the narrative, of the morality and ideology of that psychology. This memory play appears in Watchmen through Dr. Manhattan's ability to "remember" the future, and through the various recollections that we witness, such as the excerpts from Hollis Mason's novel Under the Hood (1.27-32, 2.29-32, 3.29-32), the interview with Sally Jupiter (9.32), and the different versions of the meeting of the Crimebusters. However, memory play does not figure as prominently in Watchmen as Moore's second device.
Moore's other revisionist device is the revitalisation of old, defunct characters. He does this in Miracleman, the title character of which was a British superhero in the 50s and early 60s. He is doing it right now in the ongoing series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which features a group of anti-heroes, all of whom Moore took from works of Victorian literature.[6] Moore grants human fallibility's and realistic details to characters who might not have had them before, or who are so old that no one remembers what they were. For example, in League, his Alan Quartermain, formerly a treasure-hunting, English adventurer, is a desiccated opium addict. Though the heroes in Watchmen seem to be original characters, Moore and Dave Gibbons, who was the penciller on the project,[7] originally intended to use the Charlton Comics heroes, to which DC had purchased the rights in the early 1980s (Pustz 146). Internal executive decisions at DC forced Moore and Gibbons to create new heroes based on the Charlton roster.
In an interview with Blather.net, Moore explains the characters' origins. Dr. Manhattan is based on Captain Atom, an atomic-powered hero who had most of the same abilities but lacked Manhattan's "quantum consciousness" (Blather.net 2). He also strongly resembles the largely unknown hero Martian Manhunter, who is bald, mostly naked, and green. He is also wise, gentle, and, being Martian, always a little alienated from humanity. Ozymandias is based on the Thunderbolt, a hero who could use "the full ten-tenths of his brain capacity" (Blather.net 2). Rorschach is based on The Question, a paranoid conspiracy theorist who wears a fedora and a flat, skin-coloured mask, and Mister A, a trench-coat wearing, fascist psychopath. The Nite Owl is based the Blue Beetle, a wealthy inventor who uses a hover ship that he constructed from the guts of a Volkswagen bug.[8] Pustz tells us that the Comedian is based on Peacemaker, "a pacifistic diplomat who would take arms only as an absolute last resort" (147). Finally, though no source confirms this connection, the Silk Spectre bares a striking resemblance to a superheroine called Phantom Lady whose signature gimmick was that she wore a costume so revealing that it would distract her would-be attackers. Moore describes the process of recreating these characters as "just taking them a step to the left or right, just twisting them a little bit" (Blather.net 2). Where Captain Atom was awe-inspiring, Dr. Manhattan would be "CASUALLY MIRACULOUS" (11.1.7). Where the Thunderbolt was clever, Ozymandias would be calculating and brilliant. Where The Question was a bit paranoid, Rorschach would be brutal and insane. Where Peacemaker was a hero of last resort, the Comedian would constantly itch for a fight. Where Phantom Lady used her sexuality to her advantage, Silk Spectre would be embarrassed, perhaps even ashamed, of doing so at all.
During the 40s and 50s, recycling characters the way that Moore and Gibbons do in Watchmen could be the beginning of a law suit. After Watchmen, it is just another literary device. J. Michael Straczynski's Supreme Power and Warren Ellis' Planetary both currently feature characters who are clearly based on Superman, Batman, and a few others. Moore's Promethea is an extended reference to Wonder Woman. Even the parody comic The Tick includes a womanising coward in a bat costume named Die Fledermaus. Mainstream comics' readers, who are notoriously knowledgeable about the minutia of the medium, recognise these heroes as different versions of characters they already know, and therefore have an immediate emotional bond to them. Watchmen requires that readers fill in the back stories of the characters, that the death of the Comedian in the first issue, for example, has shock value. If this were not a priority, the series would not feature the prose sections that primarily function to provide character back story. The interview with Sally Jupiter, for example, grants the reader the clearest description of her feelings regarding the Comedian's attempt to rape her and the fact that she bore a child with him several years later.
Both Pustz's book and Matthew Wolf-Meyer's "The World Ozymandias Made" point out, though, that even without specific knowledge of the original versions of the characters in Watchmen, readers recognise the archetypes of the genre, most of which, I would add, are embodied in DC's classic characters, Superman and Batman.[9] For example, in Night Owl/Dan Dreiburg we see the trappings of Batman, a non-powered superhero who uses technology to fight crime, and the emotional make-up of, not Superman, but Clark Kent, who is often portrayed as sexually naïve and weak-willed. In Rorschach we see the obsessiveness of Batman, but stripped of the appeal of wealth and technology. Comics consisted of types rather than characters for at least forty years, so long that flatness, as opposed to character depth, became a part of the generic formula. Watchmen is a collection of types, of bits and pieces of classic superheroes stitched into a cast of characters. Moore and Gibbons do an admirable job of mixing and matching elements of those character types, but this does not create depth. Instead, what we have is flatness in complex combinations. By the end of the series we do not actually know all that much about Dan Dreiburg, who is as close to a singular protagonist as any hero in the story. His character is so blank that when asked why he became a superhero, all he can answer is, "WELL, I WAS RICH, BORED, AND THERE WERE ENOUGH OTHER GUYS DOING IT SO I DIDN'T FEEL RIDICULOUS..." (7.8.1).10 The effect of all of these layers of reference-direct pastiche of the Charlton comics heroes, use of archetypal elements-serves to imply juxtaposition with characters already known to readers and thus inspire conscious comparison and active analysis of the genre, the generic figure of the superhero, and of the morality of what that figure performs.
Roland Barthes' defines myth as "depoliticized speech" (117). It "transforms history into nature" (116) so that "everything happens as if the picture [the myth] naturally conjured up the concept" (116) and "is read as a factual system whereas it is but a semiological system" (116). Barthes argues that myth functions in the same manner as the Saussurean sign. Where the sign is made up of the signifier and the signified, myth is made up of form and the concept (113). The major difference between the two systems, is that myth's signifier (form) started as a fully formed sign in and of itself. The structure of the myth then links this signifier (form) to a new signified (concept). Like symbols and metaphors, in myth, both the thing that represents and the thing that is represented have their own individual meaning, as opposed to abstract pieces of language in which the signifier is arbitrary. Myth is, then, a collection of signifiers which already have a sign system built into them. This is why mythology as a genre is full of symbols and metaphors. The result of this process is that myth turns contextual images and concepts into signs, and thereby removes their context. It naturalises that which is, in fact, historical.
There are many popular mythical discourses, such as advertising, journalism, and the genre we call realism, that are mythological in Barthes' sense. Superhero comics are particularly mythic. After all, somebody has to save the world. Superhero stories present the appropriateness of protecting other human beings from physical harm as simply the right thing to do. However, Barthes clearly demonstrates that that representation is, in fact, born out of a particular moral stand-point, and morality is always ideological. This is not to say that pulling the baby carriage out of way of the on-coming train is a bad idea. It is to say that the moment we start to read that narrative as self-evident, we read it as Barthean myth, as a narrative with no context. In fact, Barthes describes three different ways to perceive myth. The first is the mode of the myth maker-the advertiser, the journalist, the novelist-who does not question the process of creating myth, he or she simply seeks a form in which to place a concept. The second is the decipherer of myth-the literary critic, the sociologist, the historian-who deliberately seeks to expose exactly that which the myth hides: the context of its message. The third is, as I have already implied, the consumer of myth-the watcher of television, the reader of magazines and novels-who experiences it as self-evident. Readers tend to consume comics this way, as myth. The Comics Code limited the content of superhero stories, forcing comics themselves to render only simplistic worlds. These worlds are, in Barthes' terms, literally "without contradiction" (117). There are no moral canundra. The simplicity enforced by censorship becomes an element of the genre of superheroism. Because of when this happened, the post-war period, the standard setting of superhero adventures becomes made into a "neverwhen" 11 of the Pax Americana, a version of the 1950s divorced from actual historical details, like the rise of beat poetry or the Korean war. The genre evolves into a form that dispels its own historicity.
In response to the ahistorical version of superheroes that dominated comics until the 1970s, Watchmen disrupts its own mythological signification. It recycles its cast but makes no move to hide that fact. The characters are playfully similar to their originals, complete with easily recognisable visual elements: Blue Beetle and Nite Owl's airship, The Question and Rorschach's "face," and Phantom Lady and Silk Spectre's revealing costume. Furthermore, the individual characters are not deep and rich, but wide and flat. They are collections and recombinations of personality types with which comics readers are already familiar. Rorschach invokes the obsessiveness of Batman and the sheer violence of the Punished. Nite Owl reminds us both of the trappings of Batman and the naïveté of Clark Kent. Dr. Manhattan's attitudes resembles those of the Martian Manhunter. The game that comics readers play with this book is to find the "traces," in Greenblatt's sense of the word, between the cast of Watchmen and the entire history of superhero comics. As Barthes has explained, awareness of history is antithetical to the function of myth. That is why Watchmen feels distinctly different than the comics that came before it; it actively struggles against readers' suspension of disbelief, reminds them of the constructed nature of the narrative, and therefore of the ideology behind it. Watchmen gives its readers leave to question, to challenge, to even dismantle the basic concept of the superhero and the allegedly self-evident idea that "somebody has to save the world." Moore himself said that he felt that effect of the book would be that mainstream comics artist would "all just have to stop producing superhero comics and do something more rewarding with their lives" (Blather.net 1), or as his interviewer remarked, "Yeah, at the time I was thinking 'Well, this is the end of the genre,'" (Blather.net 1). We can see, then, how Watchmen dismantles its own mythological qualities by invoking history, and inspires the reader to address disbelief, rather than suspend it, but these are just structural strategies. A text need not be mythological to still be ideologically convincing. The content of the story could still, quite conceivably, propagate the Silver Age superhero mission statement.
Wolf-Meyer's "The World Ozymandias Made" argues that Watchmen is a fantastic representation of Neitszche's ubermensch. The superhero genre, according to Wolf-Meyer, "reveals the inability to achieve utopia [...]. [... T]the vast majority of superheroes are intent on retaining the status quo, subservient to the popular politics and the will of the people they endeavour to protect. These heroes fail to uphold the philosophical responsibility that Friedrich Neitzsche thought so vital to the position of the ubermensch, whose purpose was to [...] bring to humanity the lessons learned, [...] as post-humans, in an attempt to affect utopia" (501).
On a regular basis, superheroes take the mission statement literally and try to "save the world" by aggressively seizing power. Wolf-Meyer refers to extended storylines in Marvel's Avengers series, one involving the Vision (503), one of the Avengers, and the other involving a hero team called the Squadron Supreme (504). These superheroes are not successful, of course, because allowing them to succeed would be antithetical to the genre itself, but, more to the point, according to Wolf-Meyers, doing so would fail to preserve the socio-economic status quo. These two examples easily stand in for the many instances in which stories just like this one have occurred in comics. However, in Watchmen, Ozymandias comes very close to successfully bringing about world peace. Only Rorschach's diary has the potential to undo the plan. Wolf-Meyer argues that Ozymandias is a perfect representation of Neitszhe's ubermensch. Not only is he obviously superhuman, mentally and physically, but he offers to share his superhumanity with normal humans through "The Veidt Method" (10.32). Watchmen is neither the first nor the last time this happens, though. In Moore's Miracleman, the title character takes charge of all humanity. Instead of an aggressive conquest, or even an Ozymandian scheme, the world simply gives itself to him. Warren Ellis' The Authority begins with the titular superhero team declaring that it will contravene national and international law, if it sees fit, in the name of the "sav[ing] humanity from itself!" (Stern in Wolf-Meyer 503) as the Vision claims he must do in The Avengers.
Wolf-Meyer's argument is muddled at best, however. His tone consistently implies that superhero comics have an obligation to follow a particular interpretation of Neitszchean philosophy. Other than the use of the world "superman" in comics, which is an only semi-accurate English translation of ubermensch (it is more accurately translated to "overman"), he never makes the case that comics owe anything to Neitzsche directly. He also fails to represent a real difference between the tyranny of one superhero and the next. The paper simply assumes that the rule of the superhero-as-ubermensch will be better than the status quo of that the generic superhero upholds. His argument even slips into alarmingly eugenic rhetoric. "Humanity exists to be surpassed," he says, "much like any other product of evolution-it is the responsibility, and evolutionary necessity, of the new race that follows to show the way for those who remain lesser" (506). Wolf-Meyer criticises mainstream heroes for the "lower, selfish humanity" (506) that keeps them from being genuine ubermensch, and applauds the "contempt for the genetically inferior" (506) that he identifies in Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan. This is a factually inaccurate claim, though, since Ozymandias concocts his scheme, Machiavellian though it may be, for the sake of world peace, and the last word that Dr. Manhattan says on the subject of the value of human beings is that every single one of them is miraculous (9.26.5, 9.27.1-3).
As misguided as it is, though, Wolf-Meyer's argument points to the real ideological argument of Watchmen. The story does not call for the supplanting of the underman by the overman. In fact, Wolf-Meyer is exactly wrong. Watchmen clearly represents a group of heroes who, though often well-intentioned, are dysfunctional. The former Dr. Jonathon Osterman is totally disconnected from humanity. Dan Dreiburg can only have enjoyable sex when he is in or near his superhero costume. Charles Vincent Kovacs is a psychopath, at the very least. Edward Blake is a rapist. Adrian Veidt is a mass murderer. In the words of Hollis Mason, "we were crazy, we were kinky, we were Nazis, all those things that people say" (2.30). Ozymandias, in his moment of triumph, claims that his "NEW WORLD DEMANDS LESS OBVIOUS HEROISM, MAKING [...] SCHOOLBOY HEROICS REDUNANT" (12.17.1). As unbalanced as morally reprehensible as he is, Andrian Veidt is fully on the side of the humans. Watchmen is, then, not about superman, or overmen, or ubermensch "saving" the human race. It is about eliminating the need for such people at all. By recycling old superheroes, and stitching them together from old generic types, the story plays a game with readers that veritably forces them to acknowledge the history of the medium, which, according to Barthes, destroys the rhetorical effectiveness of myth. Once it dispels the ideology of its genre, the book then constructs a plot in which the only way to save the world is to remove the so-called superheroes from it.
Orion Ussner Kidder
FOOTNOTES
1 Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, published in the same year as Watchmen, is arguably more recognisable to the non-comics reader, and Moore's own Marvelman (renamed Miracleman in the US for legal reasons) was published in 1981, though it is genuinely obscure, even to the dedicated fan of comics.
2 The Silver Age was approximately 1955 to the 1970s.
3 My comicbook citations will consist of issue, page, and panel numbers. Single volumes have no issue, many comics are not paginated, and panels can be a matter of interpretation, so citations may not always be complete.
4 These last two are partially burned by the Comedian's lighter, but still clearly readable in context.
5 Generically, supervillains are the same as a superheroes except that their mission is antisocial and/or greed-driven.
6 The group consists of Alan Quartermain (H. Rider Harrard, King Solomon's Mines, Alan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold, etc.), Willimina Harker (Bram Stoker, Dracula), The Invisible Man (H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and Captain Nemo (Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea).
7 There are several visual artists on a comic book. The penciller draws the lines, the inker defines those lines and add shading, the colourist fills in the colours, and, before digital lettering, the letterer hand drew the dialogue.
8 The Hollis Mason version of Nite Owl was based on the earlier incarnation of the Blue Beetle, who wore shined cap and a shirt of chain-mail that made him look like he had a carapace, hence the name of the character.
9 These are two of the three superheroes who have been continuously in print since the Golden Age of comics. Noticeably absent from Watchmen is an analogue of the third, Wonder Woman.
10 To preserve the all-capitols lettering of comics without creating text that is distracting to the eye, I have placed all quotations from Watchmen in a font that resembles that of comics.
11 I have coined this term based on the Neil Gaiman book title Neverwhere.
Posted by orion at October 8, 2004 2:03 AM