It seems fitting somehow, on the official launch day of the Howling Curmudgeons blog site, to talk about a book that is one of the most highly regarded works in the field of comic books in the latter portion of the 20th Century, and one that has been the source of no end of discussion among fans and critics alike.
In the years since its original release, Watchmen has been described as everything from the single greatest achievement in the history of sequential art to the most overrated piece of garbage ever produced in four colors. But there are two relatively common points of view on Watchmen that I want to consider today. One is that Watchmen is a (or the) seminal superhero story, an example of the level of story superheroes can rise to, and the other is that it the story that killed superheroes, that proved that they are shallow, insipid, and inherently unrealistic and pointless.
The thing is, I can understand where both points of view come from. How well I remember reading Watchmen the first time, and even as I was swept up in the narrative I felt on some level that my most sacred of cows, the superhero, was being irrevocably skewered. Moore seemed to be proving what critics of superheroes had been saying for years, that the whole idea was stupid, that in real life only people who were seriously fucked up would become superheroes, and that our treasured DC and Marvel universes were simply completely ridiculous. Say it ain�t so!
Looking back at Watchmen now, I find both points of view kind of curious, because�I don�t think Watchmen is really a superhero story. I think it�s actually a very good alternate world science-fiction story that is only secondarily a superhero story.
Let�s say, for the sake of argument, that there is a such thing as a superhero genre of fiction, and that in some fashion it adheres to the values I mentioned in my previous post, The Superhero Breakdown, or that it can, or should, be defined largely by superhero stories as they have been told using the major superhero characters at DC and Marvel over the last sixty years. (Feel free to attack any and all of those statements.) Watchmen features only one super-powered character (in the sense of having truly supernatural powers, not in the Batman �super-smart,� �super-rich,� or �super-competent� sense), Dr. Manhattan, only a tiny number of superheroes, virtually no genuine supervillains, no magic, no aliens, only a smidge of hi-tech gadgetry from the second Nite-Owl, and the only super-science evident is Dr. Manhattan�s accidental creation and Adrian Veidt�s final project. So we�re not exactly talking about the Justice League here. As for values I associated with superhero genre stories last week, nearly every one of them is turned on its head in Watchmen. I think this is a source for much of the story�s impact, particularly with people who were already superhero comic book readers, because working against genre conventions, when done well, is a potent source of dramatic mojo.
So from my point of view, Watchmen is either a science-fiction story that just happens to have superheroes in it, or it�s a deliberate anti-genre piece in that it chooses to work against many of the tropes of the genre for dramatic effect. As such, I don�t think Watchmen is an example of �what superhero stories can be.� Don�t get me wrong � regardless of my interpretation of the work, it�s definitely an example that strong, creative, dramatically challenging stories can be written that have superheroes in them, and that�s no small thing. But what I�m saying is that I wouldn�t want every DC and Marvel superhero comic to read like Watchmen. I�m saying that Watchmen is a great mini-series or Elseworlds story (in the context of mainstream superhero comics � it�s certainly a great graphic novel regardless), but it�s not an example of the best that traditional genre superhero stories have to offer. And part of what I was getting at in my previous post was that one can do creative, dramatic, work with superheroes that still rests firmly within the normal genre bounds.
(As an aside, given how disconnected Watchmen is from the norms of traditional DC or Marvel superhero universe type stuff, I�m not sure how meaningful or true it is to say that Watchmen �deconstructs� superheroes � an interpretation of Watchmen that was all the rage back when it came out. Someone who understands deconstructionist theory better than I will have to address that one. Paging Dr. Singer�)
Given what I�ve argued above, it should come as no great surprise that I also do not feel that Watchmen invalidates conventional superhero stories in the least. I largely addressed this issue in my previous post, so I won�t belabor that point further here. In fact, I don�t really have anything further to add, so fire away. :-)
Posted by Chris M. at May 10, 2004 2:10 PM