Aside from analogues, both Miracleman and Watchmen use a few other, major devices that build self-reflexive narratives. In this case, they reflect on the superhero genre itself; they analyse it. Miracleman employs a major retcon that relegates the original Marvelman comics to the status of fiction, and Watchmen uses a comic-book-within-the-comic-book, called "The Voyage of the Black Freighter," as an allegory/parable for superheroism itself.
Self-Reflection
The comic book within the comic book, Tales of the Black Freighter, taken along with its related text, The Treasure Island Treasury is one of the most powerful and prominent self-reflexive gestures in Watchmen . Black Freighter contains within it many of the character arcs and themes of the larger narrative. Issue #3 ends with an excerpt from a fake comic-book encyclopaedia, Treasury, in which an unnamed critic briefly summarises an alternate history of American comics in which pirates became the dominant genre and not superheroes. The explanation for the dominance of pirate stories is entirely consistent with Watchmen's history. Inspired by superhero comics, actual superheroes operate in that world beginning in the 1940s. Thus the anti-comics movement of the 50s does not result in the creation of the Comics Code because "the government of the day [came] down squarely on the side of comic books in an effort to protect the image of certain comic book-inspired agents in their employ" (Tales 59). Therefore, EC continued to dominate American popular comics and their more adult-themed and often quite gory style continued to develop.
There is no explanation of how pirates, in particular, came to dominate American comics, much as there is often no in-depth explanation in real-world criticism of how superheroes came to dominate American comics. Such historical analyses constitute a teleology or even a Barthean myth; they imply that the pre-eminent position of superheroes is the result of a natural progression of some kind. Positing a different genre in that position, pirates instead of superheroes, calls the teleology into question and thus reveals that the superhero story is just as arbitrary a genre as the pirate story might appear to be in Watchmen. Superheroes are thus not an inevitable or natural development of American popular fiction, but instead the genre that survived and happen to be in place during a specific period in American history. Any genre, hypothetically, could have achieved that same dominance.
However, Black Freighter's gory imagery and macabre premise reflect their historical and social context very differently than superheroes would/did because the horror genre is preoccupied with the capacity for darkness that, ostensibly, rests within everyone. The protagonist of Black Freighter goes on a journey akin to Heart of Darkness during which he finds himself committing exactly the acts of violence that he sets out to stop. The protagonist eventually joins the crew of the Black Freighter itself, a pirate ship crewed by condemned souls, a sailor's Hell, as a result of having sacrificing his humanity in order to save his family and his community. Arguably, he does succeed at his superheroic mission, because the Black Freighter does not attack his family but instead takes him on board and sales away, but that victory is at the cost of his soul, quite literally. As the Nietzsche quotation at the end of issue #6 attests, fighting monsters does, indeed, turn one into a monster, and once one gazes into the abyss, the abyss is forever inside them (Nietzsche in Watchmen 6.28.9). This message stands in direct opposition to the superhero genre, in which, as Captain Metropolis puts it, "somebody has to save the world" (2.11.7).
Black Freighter represents something like Stuart Hall's sense of articulation. Superheroes and pirates constitute two possible dominant genres of American comics, one real and one fictitious. A specific historical context produces both (i.e., the presence or absence of the Comics Code makes the difference). Both reflect the social consciousness of their respective cultures. But they reflect differently. They indicate different facets or nuances of their cultures. Black Freighter implies that superheroes, as a genre, could not have articulated the same theme of losing one's soul by engaging with an ostensibly righteous battle. Only a more horror-oriented story could do so.
However, Watchmen itself demonstrates that the superhero genre is fully capable of carrying dark, sophisticated, complex, stories, and even communicating Black Freighter's theme. Indeed, Black Freighter actually reflects and reinterprets Watchmen's theme, that fighting monsters can transform one into a monster. Other Revisionist superhero comics have since re-examined that theme many times over (e.g., Ellis, Hitch, and Neary's The Authority, J. Michael Straczinski and Gary Frank's Supreme Power, Mark Miller and J.G. Jones' Wanted, etcetera). So while a given genre has more or less capacity to reflect a given theme (i.e., pirate horror is oriented towards darkness, and superheroes are oriented towards hopefulness), either one can also be turned towards other themes, other ideas, other articulations of their time and place. Thus genre does not determine thematic content, but it does influence it. It makes some themes harder to articulate, but not impossible.
Black Freighter, once Treasure places it within its fictitious publishing history, does two things simultaneously. First, it contributes to a causally consistent history of both comic books and superheroes within the extended universe of Watchmen. Second, however, the history that it establishes actively comments on real-world comics in America. Black Freighter therefore constitutes one of Waugh's formal metafictions in which no frame breaks or other fantastic elements violate the sanctity of the fictional universe, but the content of the narrative never the less invokes self-reflection, articulates a fully-fleshed commentary on itself. In this case, that commentary pertains to the history of American comic-book publishing and its dominant genre, the superhero story.
Miracleman employs one major, explicitly self-referential retcon, which replaces the character's decidedly generic origin story with a self-reflexive one. Marvelman's origin in the Mick Anglo years was a pseudo-scientific retelling of Captain Marvel's explicitly mystical origin. Moore depicts Marvelman's origin in issue #2, which reminds the audience of how similar it is to Captain Marvel's. Issue #3 then retcons it out of existence. Moore accomplishes the retcon using a device that he returns to often in other Revisionist comics: faulty memory (e.g., Saga of the Swamp Thing and The Killing Joke). Miracleman's memories turn out to be not only faulty, like the Swamp Thing's and the Joker's, but deliberately faked as part of Royal Air Force project to create super-soldiers using reverse-engineered alien technology and virtual-reality training. What Miracleman remembers as nearly a decade of superheroism is actually a programmed dream designed to replicate American comic books.
Miracleman thus justifies the trappings of the generic, comic-book superhero by citing a generic, comic-book superhero, much like Hollis Mason cites Superman comic books as his inspiration to become Nite Owl. In issue #3, Miracleman watches a tape, a representation within the representation, in which one of the RAF scientists explains that they based him on an American comic book, which the scientists explicitly describes as sub-literate and childish. This explanation of course just begs the question; it is circular reason, a causal loop. This kind of logical paradox, citing a literary device to rationalise that same literary device, rests at the heart of metafiction as a practise. Miracleman's retcon is not a terribly subtle example of that paradox, but what it lacks in subtlety, it makes up for with power.
While the tape repeats the phrase "comic book character" (3.21.3-5) on a loop, Miracleman flies into a rage and destroys the laboratory. His physical violence emphasises the conceptual violence of the retcon. On the surface, it removes the character's identity and dismisses it as a childish power fantasy, but from a metacomic point of view, it also ignores logic and creates a causal paradox. Miracleman's rage represents the shock of realising that a comic book can, quite easily, represent something that cannot logically exist in reality. The retcon also shatters suspension of disbelief and all but requires that the audience acknowledge the fabricated nature of the fiction.
The series refers to Miracleman's retconned origin two more times, in issue #5 and later in #24. In both instances, a Captain Marvel comic book, which was the real-world inspiration for Marvelman, appears in the Miracleman comic book. Thus, the publishing history of the character and the character's own life drift towards each other until they are effectively the same thing. Art doesn't just imitate life; it admits that it imitates life. Miracleman is a comic-book character, both for the reader/viewer and for the characters in the fiction. In philosophical terms, his ontology is identical in both the world of the fiction and the world of the audience.
By virtue of being rendered equally fictional in both spaces, the character is also equally real in both spaces; he is a real fiction. Thus, fiction and reality collapse into each other and Miracleman starts to enter the realm of Waugh's radical metafiction in which an artistic construct reveals that it can contain logical paradoxes and therefore cannot be relied upon to accurately render reality, regardless of whether it uses fantastic or realistic narrative devices. And yet, that artistic construct must make an undeniably true claim (i.e., Miracleman is a comic-book character) in order to reveal that paradox, which is of course a paradox in itself.
Posted by orion at July 19, 2008 11:21 PM