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POPPREVIEW: How to Read Superhero Comics and Why  Contents Introduction 0. Melancholy and the Infinite Earths Crisis on Infinite Earths, Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, and JLA: Earth-2 The Bat and the Watchmen: Introducing the Revisionary Superhero Narrative Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, Batman: the Killing Joke, and Watchmen "It is with considerable difficulty..." The Revisionary Superhero Narrative Phase Two Marvels, Astro City, and Kingdom Come 3. America's Best Comics: Tracing the (Re)visionary Company The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Tom Strong, Promethea, Top Ten, and Tomorrow Stories 4. Pumping Up the Volume: The Revisionary Superhero Narrative Approaches the New Age Grant Morrison's Justice League of America, and Warren Ellis's Stormwatch, The Authority, and the WildC.A.T.s/Aliens crossover. 5. The Superhero as Critic: The Birth of the Modern Age Planetary, Mark Millar and Frank Quitely's Authority, and Joe Casey and Sean Phillips's Wildcats Epilogue: Pop Comics, Harold Bloom at Harvard, and the Oedipal Fallacy. Marvel Boy, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's New X-Men, Peter Milligan and Mike Allred's X-Force. A Frequently Asked Question: Unbreakable Annotated Bibliography Index Endnotes Sample The following is an excerpt from Geoff's book. An analysis of Alan Moore's Watchmen, from chapter 1 Alan Moore's revisionary superhero narrative Watchmen expresses its anxieties about the recurrence of the fictional repressed in terms of the return of the dead. Before looking closely at this trope however, we must understand Watchmen's rather different stance on the superhero: its criticism. It begins questioning the assumptions of the superhero with its title, which lures the comic-savvy reader into assuming that it is the eponym of a superhero team around which the book revolves - not in fact the case. The last page of the work reveals that the title is actually taken from the Juvinal epigraph "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" ("Who watches the watchmen?"), a phrase that occurs throughout the work in the form of graffiti. The statement contains a kind of a priori destabilization of the assumptions that make superhero comics work: that heroes can simply look after a population without complications. The understanding that the police require policemen ad infinitum questions whether the very foundations of superhero literature can in fact be maintained. Watchmen declares that they cannot. Moore takes on a more complex job than Miller. Watchmen is an attempt to make sense of superhero history in all its varied aspects rather than synthesize the history of a single character. A sprawling work much longer than The Dark Knight Returns, it engages comic book history through a number of devices including epigraphs for all twelve issues culled from sources as disparate as Jung, Blake, Shelley, Nietzsche, Einstein, Bob Dylan, John Cale, and the Bible. Each issue, with the exception of the last, is also accompanied by a prose piece from the fictional world of Watchmen: excerpts from the autobiography of a retired hero, right and left wing newspapers articles, Sally Jupiter's scrapbook, a psychological profile on one of the heroes, a scientific article on Dr. Manhattan's powers, and an essay on bird watching by the alter ego of Night Owl, Dan Dreiberg. An analysis of Watchmen cannot simply reiterate points made about The Dark Knight Returns. We will look at a few key strains in Watchmen, paying attention to where it differs from Miller's work. Observations on The Dark Knight Returns placed alongside an analysis of Watchmen, will give a complete picture of the first phase of the revisionary superhero narrative. The first thing to note is the difference between Miller's realism and Alan Moore's. As noted above Miller's realism revises by intensifying the superhero narrative, insisting on its perspective as the answer to the "multiple choice" comic book history in which it participates. Miller's is a movement, in Bloom's terminology, of tessera: "A poet antithetically 'completes' his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough."i Alan Moore's realism, on the other hand, performs a kenosis toward comic book history, Moore's realism does not ennoble and empower his characters as Miller's realism does for Batman. Rather it sends a wave of disruption back through superhero history by asking, for example, What would make a person dress up in a costume and fight crime? Dan Dreiberg sees his own adoption of the Night Owl persona as a childish fantasy: "Being a crimefighter ... was just this adolescent, romantic thing ... That's why I sort of regretted the Crimebusters falling through back in sixty-whenever-it-was. It would have been like joining the Knights of the Round Table."iii He names his airship after Merlin's Owl from The Sword and the Stone. While endearing, there is something distinctly sad for the comic book reader confronting Dan's realization that "it's all crap dressed up with a lot of flash and thunder. I mean, who needs all this hardware to catch hookers and purse-snatchers?"iv Here, Moore de-values one of the basic superhero convention by placing his masked crimefighters in a realistic world where flashy masked villains - albeit with a few pathetic exceptions - simply don't exist. Superheroes only make sense in a world where masked opponents support their fantasy, and masked opponents only exist to fight superheroes. The fictionality of a genre which might appear to have some elements of social relevance because its setting is contemporary urban America rather than medieval times or outer space, is exposed in a particularly tragic way. Moore's kenosis is a powerful strategy: to defeat comic book history with superheroes is to take your place at the head of the tradition. Moore connects the decision to dress up as a masked crimefighter, not only with childhood fantasies and mid-life crises of the idle rich, but also with the more disturbing and interesting issue of sexual fetish. Dan Dreiberg (Night Owl) keeps a picture of an old costumed villain, The Twilight Lady - posed on a bed, dressed in leather, and sporting a riding crop. He fails to perform sexually with Laurie Juspeczyk (the second Silk Specter) until they embrace in costume after a night adventuring. Laurie asks, "Did the costumes make it good? Dan...?"v To which he replies "Yeah. Yeah, I guess the costumes had something to do with it. It just feels strange, you know? To come out and admit that to somebody. To come out of the closet."vi The public is fully aware of the sexual dimension of these self-styled heroes. An interview with Sally Jupiter (the first Silk Specter), asks "how much would you say that it's a sex thing, putting on a costume?"vii This only makes for all the more disturbing a setting in which to take up crimefighting. Another prose piece, the autobiography of Hollis Mason, the original Night Owl, includes his observation that "[s]ome of us [became costumed crimefighters] out of a sense of childish excitement and some of us, I think, did it for a kind of excitement that was altogether more adult if perhaps less healthy."viii We are told one villain dressed up because he took sexual/masochistic enjoyment in being assaultedix; Hooded Justice and The Silhouette are revealed as homosexuals, and Rorschach's interaction with Night Owlx suggests homoerotic tendencies. Clearly the suggestion of sexual fetish and homosexuality has a strong reverberation with the accusations of Frederic Wertham, discussed above. Moore's exploration of the motives for costumed crimefighting sheds a disturbing light on past superhero stories, and forces the reader to re-evaluate - to re-vision - her understanding of every superhero in terms of Moore's kenosis - his emptying out of the tradition. Miller's Batman is a powerful but realistic figure in his costume. Dan Dreiberg's informing Laurie that the first time he used his prototype exoskeleton suit it broke his arm summarizes Moore's position. "That sounds like the sort of costume that could really mess you up," she says. "Is there any other sort,"xi he replies. Dave Gibbons's illustration is an underrated part of this project of demystification, but Watchmen cannot be appreciated without taking it into account. Miller's moody shadows, reminiscent of noir, are very romantic and invoke a world as tough and gritty as it is operatic. Gibbons's characters, on the other hand, all have a distinct sadness, and his frumpy characters stand in stark contrast to Miller's very "cool" Batman. Moore's realism does not empower, as Miller's does, but empties out the power of previous superhero narratives to ensure the primacy of Watchmen in the tradition. The price he pays for this success, however, is accounted for in Watchmen's anxiety over the return of the dead, the return of the past he has stolen inspiration from, in a sense almost literally deflating. In order to understand this, the reader must be made aware of exactly where comic book history, though submerged, breaks through. Unlike Miller, who comes to a Batman already written by many authors, Moore's characters appear, at first glance, to have a clean slate and in this respect should be able to offer little, outside of marginal commentary, on established heroes. As noted in most academic discussions of Watchmen, however,xii Moore's characters resonate certain comic book archetypes in such a way as to suggest other established superheroes. Adrian Veidt's (Ozymandias's) optimism, confidence, and Antarctic headquarters invoke Superman and his Fortress of Solitude. His wealth, intelligence, birthday (1939) and perfected human physical prowess recall Batman. His role in his corporation suggests Bruce Wayne and Wayne-corp. Night Owl's wealth, gadgets, costume, mode of transportation, and basement equipment room - and the fact that his predecessor, Hollis Mason, began fighting crime in 1939 - also suggest Batman and the Batcave, but equally invoke the Blue Beetle. The second Night Owl's alter ego, Dan Dreiberg, visually suggests an impotent, middle-aged Clark Kent. The Comedian, in one of Moore's more powerful tropes, is a kind of Captain America if Captain America had gone to Vietnam. Rorschach's reactionary, violent, obsessive-loner personality and refusal to compromise suggests the same Batman picked up on by Frank Miller, or Marvel Comics' Wolverine, or the Punisher. Dr. Manhattan, as the only super-powered being, aloof, almost alien, and never aging, suggests Superman. The reference to "Wally Weaver ... Dr. Manhattan's Buddy"xiii reminds the reader of "Jimmy Olson, Superman's Pal" and indeed, in the graphic for the military complex in which Dr. Manhattan lives is embedded the Superman shield.xiv This move of referencing in order to shed light on established heroes by invoking certain archetypal comic book signifiers is common to the revisionary superhero narrative's investigation of its own history. The current character, though obviously in debt to her source, can often act as a powerful misprision of that original character, while the fact that it is not actually the original frees the writer from the constraints of copyright and continuity. This is the superhero narrative's revisionary referencing, an idea central to understanding this emerging literature. Watchmen's revisionary referencing is used to ask questions about the history it absorbs. Is Adrian Veidt a hero? Is his massive hoax, which killed three million people but prevented a nuclear world war, where Batman's foresight and intelligence must lead? Or, is Batman more accurately reflected in Rorschach, a violent psychopath whose refusal to compromise will be his downfall? To what degree are Wertham's observations of homoeroticism actually reflected in comic books themselves? How can Superman retain his humanity in light of his power? How can readers accept that Marvel Comic's Captain America still retains his optimism after Vietnam and Watergate? Is the cynical Comedian what he should look like? These last two questions are a perfect example of the strategy employed in the revisionary reference. Alan Moore's Comedian performs in relation to Captain America Bloom's clinamatic swerve: "a corrective movement in [the latter] poem, which implies that the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem moves."xv The Comedian is this swerve. This strategy of revisionary referencing must be kept in mind throughout this exploration of the revisionary superhero narrative, as it is one of its most common and interesting moves. In this context of intertextuality Watchmen's scene juxtaposition is crucial. Again and again two seemingly unrelated scenes are juxtaposed and the dialogue from one is a running commentary on the other. In one exchange for example (to select one from scores) Dr. Manhattan is being interviewed while, elsewhere, Dan and Laurie battle a street gang. The host selects an audience member to ask a question and says "Now how about you over there. Yes, you, sir. And please [cut to Dan and Laurie attacking] lets try and keep it snappy."xvi A reporter claims Dr. Manhattan's friend died of cancer in 1971 and, as the next panel shows Dan striking a thug in the face, says "I believe it was quite sudden and quite painful."xvii The reporter goes on the mention a villain Dr. Manhattan encountered "during the Sixties in battles, conflicts [cut back to Dan and Laurie's brawl] whatever it is you super-people do."xviii Throughout Watchmen it can be seen that meaning is elsewhere, deferred, and very often unaware of its relevancy. Within the text this takes the form of spatial juxtaposition, but this method also illustrates Watchmen's place among the texts that inform it, and which it informs. It is entirely appropriate in this context that Rorschach's psychological report shows that he has witnessed at a young age his mother engaging in a sexual act; only later could he understand what it was he was seeing. This structure of deferred action, as it is known in psychology, powerfully informs the reader's understanding of Watchmen. The superhero stories read as a child must be entirely re-evaluated in light of such later knowledge as the revisionary superhero narrative provides. Like The Killing Joke, Watchmen also has many moments of reflexivity, not concerned with the contradictory history of any one character but rather with the difficulty of absorbing such a dense tradition as superhero comic book literature. Watchmen betrays an intense anxiety over the return of the dead, the return of the comic book history Moore's kenosis disabled, rising for revenge. To situate our thought around the return of the dead and the status of tradition I would like to quote theorist Slavoj Žižek, from Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. He writes, ... It is precisely for this reason that the funeral rite exemplifies symbolization at its purest: through it, the dead are inscribed in the text of symbolic tradition. ... The "return of the living dead" is, on the other hand, the reverse of the proper funeral rite. While the later implies a simple reconciliation, an acceptance of loss, the return of the dead signifies that they cannot find their proper place in the text of tradition.xix One recalls, when reading Watchmen, that the gravestone marker Rest In Peace (R.I.P.) does not mean "sleep well" but "do not return to disturb us." Žižek captures Watchmen's anxieties exactly. To a large degree Watchmen is an attempt to provide the dead a proper burial, making sure its predecessors find their proper place in the text of tradition, and ensuring that Watchmen incurs, in spite of its obvious poetic inheritance, no unpaid symbolic debt which the dead will return to collect. The horror comic, the broken tradition of comic book history within Watchmen, allows the reader to see the anxiety of influence in operation. Watchmen invokes its own history as a superhero narrative, but also makes reference to a host of apocryphal comic book literature: the horror comic books shut down by Wertham,xx Sally Jupiter's "Tijuana Bible,"xxi and Adrian Veidt's "Veidt Method [for body building]" for which appears in the back of Watchmen as a prose insert, and recalls the Charles Atlas self-improvement advertising featured in the backs of early comic books. The most noticeable item of comic book apocrypha, however, is the horror/pirate comic book. Throughout issues 3 to 11 the reader continually returns to a boy reading "Tales of the Black Freighter," a story within a story that we read along with him. As a warning for heroes, the plot of "The Black Freighter" clearly juxtaposes itself against the plot of Watchmen as a whole - a man attempting to save his family and home from destruction, becomes, in his obsession, the very instrument for the force he was trying to stop. It is the story's imagery, however, which betrays a different reading, in terms of Watchmen's interaction with its own history. In "The Black Freighter" the dead become an emblem of Watchmen's submerged past which informs, supports, and threatens Moore's narrative. A weighted summary is necessary to gather key images from the various issues throughout which this mini-narrative is spread: our nameless protagonist buries his fallen shipmates after "several of the beached corpses had become inflated by gas,"xxii attempts "matching odd limbs as best [he] could"xxiii and finally sleeps upon the grave; when he wakes he "conceived of building a raft, although inwardly [he] doubted it would float."xxiv The trees are not buoyant enough for a raft so he exhumes the gas bloated corpses he has buried and dreamt upon - pausing in his work, "entranced by the startling beauty of a tattoo or the enigma of an old scar,"xxv - and makes a craft of their bodies. "By afternoon, I'd felled enough young palms to build the deck of my conveyance, affixing it to the human float beneath."xxvi The craft is a disturbing and powerful emblem of Watchmen, sailing on the gas filled - literally "inspired" - dead history of old comic book literature ("in-spired," from the Latin "to fill with wind"). After dreaming upon their bodies, Watchmen (and our narrator as an emblem of the revisionist) finds a way to utilize, to hijack, their inspiration, rather than toss another body, its own, on the heap - and cobbles together their ruins, stopping to appreciate unique moments of beauty or question old markings. The utilization of tradition and influence is not an idle game of tongue-in-cheek allusions but is actually necessary for the narrative's survival. Music critic Perry Meisel's remark on a "tradition sufficiently dense with precedent to cause the kinds of self consciousness and anxiety with which we are familiar," (quoted above) takes on a particularly literal twist here. If our "revisionary narrator" or "revisionary (anti-) hero" of "The Black Freighter" is not supported by a certain number of "inspired," gas-bloated bodies his craft - the revisionary narrative - will sink. Watchmen does not stop there if this allegory is to be understood as such. Absorbing more dead, our protagonist consumes a seagull he plucks out of the air and eats raw, but cannot contain it, and vomits.xxvii (Note the bird as an especially poignant symbol of poetic inspiration, e.g. Keats's Nightingale, Hardy's Darkling Thrush.) The absorption of the dead, of tradition, requires a certain process or methodology (in this case gastrointestinal) in order for the corpses of tradition to be properly "incorporated." This failure to incorporate is juxtaposed against the false confidence of the news vendor whose voice often breaks over the kid during his reading of "The Black Freighter": "I absorb information. I miss nothing. ... The weight o' the world's on [the newsvendor], but does he quit? Nah! He's like Atlas! He can take it!"xxviii Watchmen is very concerned with being able to handle all of the dead it attempts to ingest and fears being a regurgitation, rather than an organization, of superhero tradition. It fears that the dead it attempts to handle will overwhelm it, and failing control it will perish, sinking down among them to be judged by a stronger vision above the waves, above Miller's "endless spring right beneath," above chaotic comic book tradition. The eighth issue of Watchmen takes place on Halloween and aligns masked crimefighters with the children in costume on the street. The epigraph, "On Hallowe'en the old ghosts come about us, and they speak to some; to others they are dumb,"xxix emphasizes that Halloween is the day when the dead tread closest to the living, and that Watchmen is a text trying to contain a mass of dead souls. Our Black Freighter narrator is disturbingly close to the dead who literally keep him afloat: "it seemed I conversed with my perished shipmates. Their voices spoke from beneath the raft; thick; bubbling"xxx Rorschach's past comes to claim him in the prison riot: "You're alone in the valley of the shadow, Rorschach," says one of his antagonists - referring both to the Biblical shadow of death and meta-textually to Bloom's shadow of influence - "where your past has a long reach and between you and it there's only one crummy lock. Think about it... Halloween, when the dead things return."xxxi Watchmen is the "one crummy lock" which can hold back and organize the past, keeping the dead from rising while floating on their inspiration. References to the dead abound in Watchmen. Rorschach remarks of the Egyptian decor in Veidt's office, "Whole culture death-fixated, obsessively securing their tombs against intruders ... Didn't like the thought of corpses interfered with. [Superheroes/Watchmen] can't afford to be so squeamish. Disturbing dead our job."xxxii He continues to note that the Pharaohs "believed cadavers would rise ... Understand now why always mistrusted fascination with relics and dead kings. In final analysis, it's us or them,"xxxiii a very revealing remark in terms of literature's interaction with its own tradition. Adrian Veidt modeled his life on Alexander the Great and reminds us that "He entered Egypt through Memphis, where they proclaimed him son of Amon, Judge of the Dead."xxxiv In a drug-induced vision the resurrected dead inspire him. Veidt's perfume, Nostalgia, and its advertisements ("Oh, how the ghost of you clings,") reinforces the connection between the dead and the resurrected influence of the past. The image of the Nostalgia bottle shattering, its contents spilling, takes on heightened relevance in this context: nostalgia, clinging ghosts unable to be contained. Watchmen exposes again and again its position as a receptacle for the dead, as being supported on a raft of the dead, and as judging the dead that it receives. As Harold Bloom notes one powerful defense against the return of the dead is the rhetorical trope of metalepsis or transumption. It should only be mentioned here, as Watchmen only hints at it, and held in mind in case it is of interest in the context of other superhero narratives. Two moments are of primary interest. The first is Adrian Veidt's drug trip in which he communes with the dead while following his pilgrimage in honor of Alexander the Great. He notes: Here Veidt finds his way through the trope of Alexander to an early-ness, a freshness when no ghost or anxiety could have been, to a fantastic fiction of a period before influence. Secondly he adopts Ramses the Second's Greek name, Ozymandias, resolving to apply antiquity's teachings to today's world. Like Joyce's titling his great novel Ulysses rather than Odysseus, Veidt tropes on a trope, and as Bloom argues "Transumption murders time, for by troping on a trope, you enforce a state of retoricity or word-consciousness, and you negate fallen history."xxxvi Thus, as in his drug trip, Veidt is "remarkably freed of the burden of anteriority," because he "himself is already one with the future, which he introjects,"xxxvii in the form of his utopia to be. This is why his Nostalgia perfume advertisement becomes Millennium perfume after his master plan succeeds. As The Killing Joke suggests, there is often a connection to be made between the metaphysics espoused in philosophical speeches in a superhero narrative and the construction of the revisionary superhero narrative itself. Alan Moore's use of the revisionary ratio kenosis, discussed above, reaches its height in Dr. Manhattan's musings on the universe and its depths in Rorschach's understanding of the world. Rorschach takes his name from the psychological "ink blot" test because it reflects his personal metaphysical views, which a reader may find familiar after our discussion of The Dark Knight Returns. It is an example of what Bloom would refer to as a moment of negative transcendence: Jon's (Dr. Manhattan's) aloof consciousness of the universe as a giant clockwork machine affords him a similar point of view. Indeed, the issue featuring the bulk of his metaphysical musings ends with a powerful epigraph from Jung, which reiterates Rorschach's observations, though in a friendlier tone. "As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being."xxxix This is Moore's most powerful act of kenosis, his most thorough emptying out of the precursor by insisting on total meaninglessness, total malleability. Moore protects Watchmen from the return of the dead which threaten to break their bonds by viewing all reality - past and present - as violently empty for interpretation, subjugation and misprision (though again, Moore's metaphors, as opposed to Miller's, are textual rather than violent: "free to scrawl design on morally blank world"). Bloom writes "The poet has, in regard to the precursor's heterocosm, a shuddering sense of the arbitrary - of the equality, or equal haphazardness, of all objects."xl There can be nothing wrong with looking at human bodies and seeing a raft, or putting the entire history of superhero comic book literature into Watchmen's broad misprision. Moore's "inspiration" is preceded by his kenosis-exhalation which "breathes hard ... turning illusions to ice, shattering them." (This study will conclude with the birth of superhero comic books that will be the successor to the Silver Age. Here we can see the stirrings of a ubiquitous aspect of those narratives, their high level of horrific (sometimes almost comic) violence, and use of horror tropes: the severing of Voodoo's legs by a super-powered serial killer in Joe Casey's "Serial Boxes" (Wildcats 14-19), the grotesque medical experiments of City Zero in Ellis's "The Day the Earth Turned Slower" (Planetary 8), and the almost ridiculous slaughter of Stormwatch by Ridley Scott's Aliens - the transition to The Authority - in the WildC.A.T.s/Aliens crossover. As a genre, horror is the superhero narrative's diametric opposite: the former portrays the terror of helplessness while the latter describes a power fantasy, par excellence. Moore revives the horror comic book, excised from its production alongside the superhero narrative by Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, within the superhero comic book. Its appearance in Watchmen is merely the "face-hugger" from Ridley Scott's Alien. By the time the revisionary superhero narrative outgrows the Silver Age and finds itself heralding a whole new generation of superheroes the Alien's monstrous birth will have taken place and the horror comic will be running around as an integral part of the superhero landscapexli (literally in one instance: see chapter 4). As horror teaches us - and Freud and Derrida emphasize - the repressed and excised find ways of making its presence felt and nothing is ever fully or simply erased.) It is important now to look at Moore's metaphors for the unification of this shattering, his metaphors of misprision. The reader is familiar with Rorschach's metaphor of unification from our discussion of Batman: violence and fascism. Adrian Veidt's understanding is perhaps the most interesting. Like Commissioner Gordon's anecdote about Rosevelt, meant to invoke Batman, Veidt will not unite the world through violence but through trickery. As in The Killing Joke's flashlight joke, this unification will be a trick of the light. Facing his wall of television screens Veidt gives a glimpse of the chaos of the superhero narrative: "Meanings coalesce from semiotic chaos before reverting to incoherence."xlii Like Alan Moore's kenosis he must destroy and then reconstruct in order to build "a unity which would survive him."xliii He succeeds but - like the unity created by The Dark Knight Returns which is disrupted by Year One, "revert[ing] to incoherence," - Jon must ultimately remind him when he asks, "I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end?" that "Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends."xliv Bloom's definition of kenosis understands that "the latter poem of deflation is not as absolute as it seems." Here Veidt the revisionist confronts the man who has seen the machinery of the universe exposed to him as his father had looked at the inside of watches, and faces the realization of comic book continuity: the chain of revision can never end. One misprision will follow upon another, each as arbitrary an organization as the one that came before. At this point the reader may find the continual pointing out of narrative microcosms as a whole tedious, but should bear in mind the superhero narrative's high level of interaction with psychoanalysis and the common psychoanalytic theory that every element of the dream represents the dreamer. An entry from Rorschach's journal makes up the opening lines of Watchmen, and the journal is thus a synecdoche for it; the journal is ultimately delivered to the New Frontiersman, "delivered at last into the hands of a higher judgment."xlv In an example of the textual juxtaposition discussed above, this line is intended to refer back to our Black Freighter narrator, to Rorschach's Journal as an emblem of Watchmen, and to its judgment by the tradition and the reader. "I leave it entirely in your hands,"xlvi is the final line of Watchmen, as Seymour ("see more") reaches toward a pile of articles for publication on top of which Rorschach's journal sits. (Once again Watchmen is supported by a stack of texts.) As the first phase of the revisionary superhero narrative Watchmen will be judged; later phases of superhero narratives - the watchers of the Watchmen - will be this judgment. In Hollis Mason's fictional autobiography he says he enjoyed the move from the pulps to Superman because "Here was something that presented the basic morality of the pulps without all their darkness and ambiguity."xlvii As in The Dark Knight Returns, poetic tradition is grasped through allusions: like Bruce Wayne and Zorro, Hollis Mason (the first Night Owl) admits to being inspired to be a crimefighter by reading The Shadow and Doc Savage -- the literature out of which the superhero narrative emerged. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen return superheroes to their pulp roots, to darkness and ambiguity; and while the second phase of the revisionary superhero narrative will find this atmosphere too dark, never again will the superhero narrative be able to return to the simplicity from which it came without coming to terms with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. i Bloom, Anxiety, p. 14. ii Ibid., pp. 14-15. iii Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen. New York: DC Comics (1986-1987), #7, p. 7-8 (my ellipses). iv Ibid., p. 8. v Ibid., p. 28. vi Ibid. vii Ibid., #9, prose. viii Ibid., #2, prose. ix Ibid., #1, p. 26. x Ibid., #10, p. 11. xi Ibid., #7, p. 8. xii See McCue, Dark Knights, p. 73; Jeffery A. Brown, Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics and their Fans, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi (2001), p. 153; Matthew J. Pustz, Comic Book Culture, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi (1999), p. 147; and Richard Reynolds, Superheroes, p. 107. xiii Moore, Watchmen, #3, p. 13 (my ellipsis). xiv Ibid., #1, p.19, panel 1. xv Bloom, Anxiety, p. 14. xvi Moore, Watchmen, #3, p. 13. xvii Ibid. xviii Ibid. xix Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, Massachusetts: MIT press (1992), p. 23. xx It should be noted in this context that in the fictional world of Watchmen Wertham did not succeed in harming the comics industry (Moore, Watchmen, #5, prose), and superhero comic books died on their own after the emergence of real life masked adventurers. In a world where superheroes really exist, superhero comic books are not necessary, and horror/pirate comics filled the gap they left. xxi A Tijuana Bible is a subversive form of pornography from the 30s and 40s, an illegal pulp comic book featuring established, often copyrighted, comic book characters, along with celebrities and film characters, in sexually explicit situations. Sally Jupiter's copy features her own persona, the Silk Specter. xxii Moore, Watchmen, #3, p. 22. xxiii Ibid. xxiv Ibid., #5, p. 8. xxv Ibid., p. 9. xxvi Ibid. xxvii Ibid., #5, p. 12. xxviii Ibid., #3, p. 2 (my ellipsis). xxix Ibid., #8, p. 28. xxx Ibid., p. 13. xxxi Ibid., pp. 7, 14 (my ellipsis). xxxii Ibid., #10, p. 20 (Moore's ellipsis). xxxiii Ibid. (my ellipsis). xxxiv Ibid., #11, p. 10. xxxv Ibid. xxxvi Bloom, Map, 138. xxxvii Ibid. xxxviii Moore, Watchmen, #6, p. 26. xxxix Ibid., #9, p. 28. It dawned on me as I read this epigraph that must inform the Wallace Stevens poem that shares a title with the ninth issue of Watchmen, "Of Mere Being." But as Bernard says to the newsvendor upon learning they have the same name, "So? Ain't no big deal. ... Don't signify for nothin'" (Ibid., #11, p. 23, my ellipses). xl Bloom, Anxiety, p. 42. xli Todd McFarlane's Spawn is of course a perfect example of blending superhero and horror elements; the rest of the narrative, however, lacks interest as far as this study is concerned. xlii Moore, Watchmen, #11, p. 1. xliii Ibid., p. 10. xliv Ibid., #12, p. 27. xlv Ibid., #10, p. 23. xlvi Ibid., #12, p. 32. xlvii Ibid., #1, prose.
 A former Ph.D. student, Geoff Klock received his Masters in English Literature from New York University. He now studies literature as a night watchman in downtown Manhattan. This is his first book.  PopImage Forum - Discuss this message at the PopImage forum. Industrial Archive - Read past Industrial articles |
