The other kind of theory application, probably even worse than Duck Theory, is the theory of Absent Ducks. In this method, a critics selects a theoretical structure and then checks to see if a text conforms to it. The flaw in this methodology ought to be obvious, and yet it's maddeningly common for critics to simply check if this movie correctly reflects Lacan or if that comic book accurately depicts Nietzsche, as Zizeck does in Enjoy Your Symptom! and Matthew Wolf-Meyer does in "The World Ozymandias Made," respectively. I call this the theory of Absent Ducks because often, such critiques merely report that they are shocked, shocked!, to discover that the particular text in question "fails" to construct a narrative that reflects the critic's interpretation of how theory indicates that the world works. Which is to say that these pieces of art don't happen to conform to the theory in question.
There are a couple of truly baffling assumptions behind this method. The first assumption is that art has any responsibility whatsoever to reflect a given critic's little pet theory. Unless a piece of art indicates that it allies itself with a politics, a philosophy, an ideology, or a theory, there's just no point in reporting that it doesn't ally itself to one that you like. Even if it references one of those theories, it still has no responsibility to conform (and by the by: critics who happen to use a wee piece of a theory aren't on the hook for using the whole theory either!). The second is that the theory just is an accurate portrayal of the world, and therefore we can blame a text for portraying the world "wrong." Some of the less sophisticated Marxist critiques are guilty of Absent Duck theory, for example. They simply report that yet another piece of art fails to point out that capitalism is "bad." This second assumption is by no means limited to Marxism, of course. It happens in Feminist critiques as well, and it's all too easy to use psychoanalytic criticism to point out Absent Ducks.
Now, to be clear, the theory that a critic might happen to use when applying Absent Duck might be brilliant or it might be dim, but that's beside the point. Using a theory to apply Absent Duck does not imply that there's anything at all wrong with the theory. It's just an empty statement. It's the equivalent of seeing a fire hydrant and yelling "Not a duck!" Which, if you think about it, is an utterly useless thing to say. It gives me only slightly more information than I started with and it's probably not information of any value.
The dictatorship entry on Miracleman got kinda long, so I'm doing Watchmen in a separate post. (Fear not, though. I will be cutting down that post when I put it into my diss.) Although not a would-be dictator as such, Ozymandias in Watchmen takes it upon himself to make a horrifying moral choice on behalf of humanity: kill half the residents of New York City at a stroke in order to unite the world against a (fictitious) extra-terrestrial threat. Like Miracleman's choice to rule the world, Watchmen presents Ozymandias' choice to manipulate the global, political landscape in very ambiguous terms and refuses to resolve the ambiguity.
This may seem like a half-measure. If the goal is to fully dismantle the superhero, then presenting them as unequivocally morally corrupt would seem to be the most expedient route. However, ambiguity is the opposite of the moral certainty that most superhero comics were required to portray by the Comics Code. Instead of merely inverting the moral hierarchy, and condemning superheroes, Revisionist comics tend to deconstruct the hierarchy itself, but allow the superhero to remain at the centre of the story.
Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias is the benevolent dictator of Watchmen. He is less self-assured, and decidedly less superhuman, than Miracleman, but he's also a lot less of a dictator. Nevertheless, concocts a sweeping plan to sacrifice several millions lives in a gamble to scare the world into united against a fictitious alien threat. Veidt is both superhero and supervillain in Watchmen, and thus exposes the workings of the genre by showing that the respective ideologies of heroism and villainy are actually just two positions on one scale. However, he is still locked into the superhero genre as a whole. He does not transcend it; he just occupies a more complex position within it.
Jason Dittmer's "The Tyranny of the Serial" argues that superheroes are defined by "their support for the status quo [...], and any attempt to fundamentally alter the social system [...] marks a character as a villain" (253). Of course, the irony of this dichotomy, which Dittmer doesn't expand on, is that the fundamental superheroic goal is to "save the world," as Captain Metropolis puts it, and it is logically consistent to want to save the world from such threats as poverty, violence (between states and within them), sickness, environmental destruction, etc. The supervillainous desire to change the world is, by that reasoning, just an extension of the superhero's more conservative desire to save the world from only a specific set of threats. By this logic, Adrien Veidt/Ozymandias plays the role of both the ultimate superhero and an arch-villain.
He explains that he started to conceive of his master plan at the aborted meeting of the Crimebusters, where he realised that one or two, even a whole team, of so-called "superheros" couldn't possibly fix all of the world's problems. A grander scheme was necessary. He identifies his plan, to scare the nations of the world into united against a fictitious alien threat, as consistent with the motives that originally made him decide to become a superhero. He also acknowledges his role as a villain of sorts, though, when he tells Dan that he is "not a Republic serial villain." Instead of claiming that he's not a villain at all, he defines himself a different kind of villain, one who breaks from his generic constraints and makes sure to execute his master plan a half-hour before the heroes even have a chance to stop him (i.e., "I did it 35 minutes ago.").
However, there is a flaw in his plan. Critics and reader/viewers have a tendency to assume that it would have worked if not for Rorschach's journal potentially ruining the illusion. Even if they acknowledge that The Frontiersman might or might not publish the journal--the series ends with the assistant about to make that decision--critics agree with the character in the series when they assume that only exposing Veidt's plan can possibly ruin it. Thus, the moral conundrum of the ending of the series, which implicitly asks: is it moral to expose the lies and mass-murder behind an already-executed state of world peace? However James Hughes points out in "Ideology and 'Real World' Superheroes," that when Veidt asks Manhattan, "I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end," Manhattan points out the folly in assuming a closed narrative: "In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends." (Watchmen 12.27.X; Hughes 556). The world has to live with the kind of peace that Veidt forces upon it.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer argues, in "The World Ozymandias Made," that superhero comics maintain political and economic status quo by perpetually seeking utopia but never achieving it (Wolf-Meyer 501). He offers Veidt's master plan as a counter-example, to show how unusual Watchmen is compared to the standard superhero story. Like many, critics and fans alike, he takes for granted that Veidt's peace is, indeed, the utopia that the superhero genre in effect avoids, but I argue that although Veidt might achieve a kind of peace, he does not achieve a utopia. Even if it works according to plan, the precarious, hypothetical non-aggression that he engineers is the peace of mutual fear, of astronomical military budgets, of consuming massive amounts of natural resource to feed a global war machine, of a military-industrial complex on a scale unheard of in human history, of a society in which nothing is more important than defending the home soil.
In essence, Veidt's version of peace is, in its own way, slavishly devoted to the superhero genre. It puts the world on a fictitious path to utopia but actually creates never-ending fear of an outside threat. Thus the commentary that Moore and Gibbons offer in Watchmen is that the superhero story is a closed system out of which there is no utopian escape. Ozymandias seems to break out of the genre by assuming the position of both hero and villain, ultimately he merely relocates it slightly, from never-ending battle against crime and terrorism, to never-ending state of military readiness against alien invasion. Metacomics that bridge the fictional world and the audience's world offer a way out of the fiction; Watchmen models how there is not outside of this fiction because the genre has been fashioned quite specifically to be close and perpetual.
Benevolent Dictators
The last of my parallel discussions of Miracleman and Watchmen has to do with a less obvious form of self-reflexivity that is wider than the superhero genre, but to which the superhero is especially suited as a vector of social commentary. Put simply, superheroes make great cautionary tales against supposedly benevolent dictatorship, and Moore's twin "last word on superheroes" comics of the early 80s are especially good examples of that.
Miracleman, the character, takes over the world in issue #16, which was Moore's last. This issue, titled "Olympus," effectively closes the story thus far, even though Gaiman then extrapolated other themes for #17 through #24, before the title was cancelled. What's remarkable about Miracleman's rise to the status of god-king is the lack of a substantial discussion of the morality. The narrative strategy, here, is to provide an almost unequivocally utopian world, complete with the appropriate amount of flaws to make it seem real, but leave gaps where an articulate objection to the dictatorial nature of the utopia would be.
Miracleman and his cohorts exhibit little hand-wringing over their decision. They do not praise democracy or lament its passing. They simply assume control of the world because they can and because humanity is, by their reckoning, far less sophisticated than they are. Miraclewoman, who acts as the voice of enlightened reason throughout the series, compares humanity to cows and fish, adding "We're taking nothing from them. We'll give them more free will than they ever dreamed of or wanted. / We're going to love them [...] / We're going to make them perfect" (16.9.5). They plan to pull the human race up to their superhuman level, like parents raising children, or farmers breeding animals.
The new "Age of Miracles" appears to be a functioning utopia. Solutions to social ills, everything from shop-lifting to war, are generally systemic and socialist. Thanks to superhuman intervention, material needs (energy, food, etc.) are in enough supply that everyone can have anything they want for free, and thus money becomes unnecessary. By the same token, when everything's free, the majority of criminal behaviour disappears. They legalise all narcotics as well, and thus the economic base for organised criminal syndicates falls away. What criminal behaviour remains is thus conveniently attributed to personal defects, most of which can ostensibly be cured through medical technology or therapy, which allows the superhumans to rationalise resistance to their utopia as either the product of insanity or the free choice of unenlightened minds.
They also create a eugenics policy whereby Miracleman's sperm is shipped all over the world so that any woman can give birth to a veritable god. Each of those new gods in theory receives the genes of a blond, blue-eyed, white man, in which case, the new class of god-like superhumans would also be decidedly Caucasian in appearance. The one panel that depicts these "miracle babies" in Moore's run depicts one as brown skinned and all the others as white. In Gaiman's issues, they are mostly white, but also can be black or Asian. The series never directly addresses Miracleman's whiteness with regard to the eugenics policy, but a UK government assassin, a black man named Mr. Cream, does repeatedly refer to him as the "white miralce" and the "pale god" (12.11.3), but associates whiteness not with technology, "hot steel," or religious virtue, "sanctity" (12.11.5), but instead with death, "the whiteness of bone" (12.11.5). When he comes across the dead body of a would-be superhero whom Miracleman has already killed, Cream calls it "white man's magic" (13.12.7). Unfortunately, Mr. Cream dies before the series can fully explore the problem of Miracleman's race, and the whiteness of his thousands of miracle babies is never addressed directly.
In a similar vein, Miracleman and his cohorts create a technology whereby anyone can be transformed into a superhuman, which leads to one of the more telling scenes in the series in which Miracleman offers to transform Liz, his estranged wife, into, in her words, "Mrs. Miracle" (16.25.1). He offers it as a solution to their failed marriage: "this solves everything. You could have a superhuman body too" (16.25.1). She refuses, however, and cites his extremely public sexual relationship with Miraclewoman; in that same issue, the two superhumans have sex while flying through central London, explode in a veritable fireworks display, signifying orgasm (16.17-18.5), (much like Dan's flame-thrower in Watchmen, and when they finally dive into the Thames to cuddle, a crowd of on-lookers claps and cheers (16.18.6). Instead of attempting to see Liz' perspective or even really listen to her complaint, he instead claims that "there's no need to be jealous [...]. We've gone beyond possessiveness [...]. When you're like us you'll understand" (16.25.4). He sees his choices as by definition superior, and anyone else's as the product of a limited nature. Which is to say that he cannot understand the logic behind any choices but his own.
Finally, Miracleman sees himself as quite literally a god, if not the god. He names his London palace "Olympus," he entertains pilgrimages who journey up hundreds of stories to the top of that palace to ask for boons (issue #17), and he explicitly refers to himself and his fellows superhumans as gods, even if, in his own description, they "smile and mingle; spill their wine; [and] mis-time their jokes" (16.29.1). There is a kind of ironic authentication, here. Miracleman explicitly argues that his utopia is "Not without its problems, I'll confess; but then, without them, could perfection be?" (16.28.3). Admitting that the utopia isn't perfect rhetorically makes it more believable. By the same token, admitting that he and his fellow would-be gods spill their drinks and tell badly timed jokes makes them, ironically, less god-like, more attainable, but also more perfect because of it. They and their utopia are not merely perfect. They are even better, perfectly flawed.
Miracleman, the character, also acknowledges and comments on various theological interpretations of his battle with Johnny Bates/Kid Miracleman, calling them legends, apocrypha, myths, gospels, and even heresies (15.9-12). In a fascinating moment of narrative fluidity, he refuses to say which one is real, calling them all "as valid, if not more so, [than] the truth" (15.9.4), which leaves a gap of interpretation in the middle of a major, climactic moment in the narrative. Anything could have happened in that missing scene of the fight and the narrative explicitly abandons the notion that it has to indicate which one is real or true.
Miracleman's multiple versions of his battle with Bates establishes a major technique within the Revisionist comic-book style, in which narratives admit that they are consistent, logical, and fixed only by virtue of the storytellers deliberately constructing them that way. They can just as easily be constructed without any heed to the laws of logic or causality. Thus continuity, as understood in the SA-style, becomes an unnecessary intervention, rather than an implicitly natural requirement. In the SA style, a comics creator who ignores continuity is simply unskilled. In the Revisionist style, ignoring continuity is one of many narrative choices. Fluid narrative style is also highly self-referential--it implies that stories are inherently fluid instead of pretending that they're fixed--and it is extremely common in Revisionist comics.
However, the Warrior Summer Special 1982 attempts to fix this moment in the narrative by depicting exactly the gap in the story that Miracleman #17 leaves out. However, as luck would have it, Eclipse never reprinted that story, so the American audience largely has access only to the version that does not contain an explanation. Even if only by accident, this lack of a fixed explanation breaks from the Silver-Age style, in which narrative inconsistencies are almost always followed by attempts to retcon them into a fixed form.
This moment of narrative fluidity for the first time transforms the character, Miracleman, from a superhero who thinks he's a god, into a figure who is consistent with how gods are depicted in scriptures and myths (i.e., he is a point of contention and interpretation, not simply a character with one, reliable narrative). As mythic figures, Miracleman and his god-like cohorts have the freedom to ignore everything from sexual jealousy, to traditional morality, and even the basic rules of narrative causality. Their domination of humanity thus feels natural. They rule because they can and because they have a mind to; they do not see a need for any further explanation or justification for their actions.
However, issue #16 ends with a gap in the superhumans' seemingly perfect understanding of humanity. Miracleman wonders why Liz refused to be transformed into a superhuman, why anyone "should not wish to be perfect in a perfect world" (16.33-34.2). His inability to conceive of her reasoning, which would not require that he agree with it, indicates a lack of empathy, a total disconnect from average humanity, but the question remains: if one had the option of living in an ostensibly functional utopia, ruled by a theoretically benevolent dictator who possesses, by definition, superior reasoning and judgement, why wouldn't one choose to do so? The closest Liz comes too explaining her refusal is to tell Miracleman that he has "forgotten what you're asking me to give up" (16.25.5), which is presumably some ephemeral quality called "humanity." Here, Liz occupies the common, pop-culture literary position of "female voice of common sense." She repeats something akin to a Barthean myth, that there simply is something special about being human, and arguing the point only shows that one doesn't understand humanity. Miraclewoman, who occupies a parallel position, "female voice of enlightenment" (as I said above), implies exactly the opposite: "I don't know why you [Miracleman] persist in seeing the state of being human as something special" (16.9.4). Ultimately, the series does not provide answers to these questions, and instead provides only the conundrum and dis-ease that they invoke. Thus it portrays the superhero, which is ostensibly morally perfect and physically superior, as something to distrust, not as a straight-forward saviour.
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.
Well, here it is, the first real look at the new Watchmen movie. It looks promising, but I have my doubts.
The visual design is very much "cool superhero movie." It looks good, don't get me wrong, but part of the costume and visual design of the piece was that the superhero paraphernalia looks a bit out of place next to the "real" world. Nite Owl, Rorschach, and Ozymandias' costumes look a bit too "bad-ass" in the movie. Ozy is supposed to gleam, Nite Owl should be a bit silly, and Rorschach, so far, doesn't look dirty and gross enough. I'm semi-happy with Silk Spectre's costume, though, because it implies sexiness without just showing off a bunch of skin. I don't know if the kinkster angle was really a good choice, but we'll see how it plays out. If she's reduced to "the woman," I'll be miffed. The Comedian and Manhattan look right, but more on that in a moment.
My real fear is that Ozy will be rendered "villain" while Dan, Laurie, and Rorschach will be "heroes." The thing is, there are no "heroes" in this story. There are just a lot of fucked up people, some of whom have too much power for their (and our) own good. If they make the characters look and act too "bad-ass" then it'll be just another superhero movie, and the point of Watchmen is that it questions the fundamental ideology of superheroics, of the arrogance it takes to think that you, personally, have the responsibility to "save" the world. Rorschach is a misogynist pscyho, Dan is a lovable nerd (with a pot-belly, god damnit!), and Laurie, who does get short-changed as a character even in the original, is an aimless former child-star.
It looks like they've made a very interesting choice with Manhattan, though. The transformation looked perfect. I'd imagine they were working directly with Gibbons' panels for that shot because his dematerialisation is bang on. But they've also got him not just blue, but luminescent and physically perfect. That's a great choice. It clearly sets him apart from all the mere mortals. By the same token, Ozymandias' little action sequence, with the metal pole, makes him look like he's from a Yeun Wo Ping movie, which is also perfect. He's supposed to be the smartest man in the world and the best athlete/fighter who ever lived. He should stand head-and-shoulders above everyone else in those respects.
Which is why it's worrying to see Nite Owl doing the Batman thing with this cape, or executing a big, crazy kung-fu kick. I want him and Laurie to be skilled and effective, but not cinematically slick. I think I'm most worried about Rorschach, though. His voice was entirely too bad-ass, and in that trailer, he's been given pride-of-place, standing above the crowd, commenting on them. I hope that's a reflection of how he sees himself, rather than how the movie portrays him. I mean, yes, he's a central character, but if they make him "the hero," then they've seriously misunderstood this story. Like I said, he's a psychotic, brutal, misogynist killer. He might appeal to a certain blood-lust, but he should ultimately scare the shit out of you, not inspire you to punch the air.
The trailer looks very good. My expectations have leapt up a lot, but I'm still very concerned. Please, please, please, Hollywood, do not fuck up one of the best comics every drawn.
These two series use a lot of the same self-referential devices, and the biggest one is the analogue hero. Most of the cast of both series are based on original characters, but altered slightly to create a commentary on them and the superhero genre, and the balance of the self-referentiality is part of a push for a certain kind of pseudo-realism, or partial realism, that arises in superhero comics in the 80s.
Analogues
Watchmen's cast is all analogues of the Charlton Comics characters, but altered so that they don't just refer to their direct originals but instead out to the whole superhero genre. Moore and Gibbons originally intended to use the Charlton heroes, but DC refused and so they had to strategically alter the Charlton characters.
Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl II, for example, is a direct analogue of Ted Kord/Blue Beetle II. They are both inventor heroes who took on the name of an earlier hero from the so-called Golden Age of American comics. However, Night Owl also wears a costume that's highly reminiscent of Batman's (i.e., yellow belt, grey tights, animal-themed cowl and cape), and Dan is reminiscent of Clark Kent (i.e., an everyman secret identity who is more than a bit nerdy). The rest of the cast contains similar squinting analogies. Laurie Juspeczyk/Silk Spectre II is a pastiche of Charlton's Nightshade, Quality's Phantom Lady, and DC's Black Canary. Rorschach is a combination of The Question and Mister A, both of whom wear fedoras and trench coats, but where those heroes are merely unrelenting, Rorschach is genuinely obsessive, as well as being homicidal and rampantly misogynistic. Doctor Manhattan is based on Captain Atom, both of whom wield atomic-based powers, but Moore expands his character out so that he becomes a god-like nuclear guru.
The dedicated comics reader/viewer recognises these references, if not consciously then at the very least intuitively. In a discussion at the Newsarama website, StevenClubb (a pseudonym, most likely) sums up the informed fan's perspective well:
they [the Watchmen cast] really are just common characters in super-hero comics... both real and psychoanalysized [sic]. You have the guy pursuing justice/revenge, you have the adventurer, you have the sadist, you have the publicity hound, you have the legacy, etc. Pretty much every reason to become a super-hero (either from comics or from comic criticism) is on display in Watchmen [...] ("Watchmen/Charlton Analogues??" post 17).
The analogues in this series thus direct the audience's thoughts and attention towards the superhero genre as a whole, as well as, to a more limited degree, their awareness of the publishing history of American comics, a history that includes DC having run many other publishers out of business and then buying up their by then effectively worthless characters.
Miracleman does almost the same thing with its analogues, which should come as no surprise given that Moore wrote them both at the same time. The cast of the series, the "Miracleman Family," is based on a British superhero from the 1950s that has a very convoluted publishing history. That history starts with Superman, who was so popular that other publishers immediately started to copy him, including Fawcett Comics, who created Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel outsold Superman for several years in the 40s and 50s, and a British publisher called L. Miller and Sons reprinted his adventures, in black and white.
However, DC had launched a copyright suit against Fawcett, and won it in 1953, which left L. Miller and Sons with nothing to reprint. They then got Mick Anglo, a British comics artist, to invent a replacement, so he created Marvelman and the Marvelman family, an almost direct copy of Captain Marvel. Marvelman was then published, by L. Miller and Sons, for several years before it was finally cancelled. In 1982, Warrior, a British comics publisher, hired Alan Moore to write Marvelman again, but Moore based the series on a vision he had of a middle-aged Marvelman who could no longer remember the magic word he used to change into a superhero, which puts this series solidly in the Revisionist camp.
Moore subsequently broke into American comics, starting with The Saga of the Swamp Thing, and so American publishers started reprinting his British work. Eclipse Comics, based in California, reprinted Marvelman's collected adventures under the title Miracleman due to pressure from Marvel Comics, who contended that the title "Marvelman" infringed on their trademark. Marvel also pressured Warrior to stop publishing Marvelman's comics entirely, so Moore began writing issues directly for American publication.
Non-British audiences would not necessarily have known Miracleman's history at Warrior and L. Miller and Sons, but the references to Captain Marvel are quite clear. Mick Moran even retells his own origin story in issue #2. As a child, Mick met an astro-physicist who had gained cosmic powers and bestowed a portion of them onto Mick. Using the trigger word "kimota" (which is "atomic" read backwards), Mick turned into a super-powered adult called "Miracleman." This story parallels Captain Marvel's perfectly, in which Billy Batson, also a child, journeys into subway system and finds a cave in which an ancient wizard gives him a magic word, "shazam" (the wizard's name), which turns Billy into a super-powered adult.
The difference that constitutes the analogue function, however, is that is that in Moore's version, Mick's wife laughs at the story and calls it stupid, and Mick reluctantly agrees: "I suppose you're right. Actually saying it out loud like that. It does sound... well... pretty unlikely." Thus the analogue leads directly into the first, prominent self-reflexive gesture, which I discuss in the next entry on Miracleman. Moore later complicates this relationship between Miracleman and Captain Marvel, of course, but the analogue function by itself is highly self-referential.
As if this were not enough, the afterword to Miracleman #3 comprises Moore's explanation of the entire publishing history of the character, including DC's law suit with Fawcett and L. Miller's quite deliberate copying of Captain Marvel. This afterword is ostensibly Moore's insistence that the character is not really called 'Miracleman' at all, but it is also effectively informs the audience that Miracleman is an analogue character with a multistable identity.
The character that audiences outside of Britain know as "Miracleman" is thus arguably a fifth-generation copy of Superman (from Superman, to Captain Marvel, to Mick Anglo's Marvelman, to Alan Moore's Marvelman, and finally to Eclipse's Miracleman). He is a self-conscious analogue of Captain Marvel, but he is also ostensibly the same character, with the same name and costume, as Anglo's Marvelman. Moore simply retcons most of his old adventures out of existence.
Miracleman does not just have a multistable presence, then, as both a copy of Captain Marvel and a character unto himself, but a many-faceted presence that belies a series of connections to the whole publishing history of superhero comics, from the invention of the superhero, to a frenzy of lookalikes, to their influence in Britain, and finally to the Revisionist impulse to re-examine characters that the creators and/or the audience originally read as children. Thus, just as in Watchmen, the analogues in Miracleman serve to remind the audience of the generic construction of the superhero and its publishing history.
A lot of people use theory the way that a small child learns new words. It's probably the least interesting or thought-provoking method, but it's common. You learn a theory (a pattern, a process, a narrative, whatever), and then you go out into the world looking for examples of it, much like a child learns what a duck is and then yells "duck!" every time she sees one. In a small child, this behaviour is cute and charming and part of a very important learning process.
I expect more from adults, though. I expect them to start thinking about all the different kinds of ducks, about where the ducks seem to appear, about the difference between real ducks and fake ones, about how humans appropriate duck imagery, et cetera. These more complex questions are the kind of thing that lit crit theory should make a person aware of. Theory is a way of looking so that you see things you didn't see before, but it doesn't end there. It has to carry over to a more involved analytical process.
Otherwise, you're just yelling at ducks.