Today, on Issue at Hand — much like the comic book industry itself, we are still talking
about Watchmen.
This is Issue at Hand, Polygon’s show about the strange world of comics, I’m your host,
Susana Polo, and today we’re talking about the legacy of Watchmen, one of the most influential
stories in the superhero genre, and how it’s coming back today.
I mean, literally today, in DC Comics’ Doomsday Clock #1.
This is our second episode on Watchmen, so you might want to go back and check out our
last one — where I cover how and why Watchmen was made, what it’s about, and why it’s
so well-regarded and enduring.
Now let’s talk about what happened next.
Watchmen’s initial run, from September 1986 to October 1987, put it in the first wave
of a sea change in how American comics were published and marketed.
Along with The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen was among the first American comics to gain
widespread mainstream success as a collected bookstore edition — under the newly popular
term “graphic novel.”
Marketing comics as graphic novels allowed Marvel and DC to disassociate them with the
mainstream’s idea of frivolous comic book fare, and liken them to more socially acceptable
adult pursuits, like literature.
For the first time, you could go to a bookstore and buy a sturdy, glue-bound reprint of some
comics that had been printed and stapled more than a year before — and reprinting popular
comics was demonstrably profitable.
But Watchmen didn’t just push comics into the mainstream.
It was also at the forefront of a huge change in the tone of superhero comics.
Watchmen is often mischaracterized as Alan Moore’s attempt to destroy the myth of the
superhero.
The truth is that while Moore DID write Watchmen as a deconstruction of the superhero idea,
he’s not a guy who hates superheroes — or at least he wasn’t at the time.
The ’80s was an era in which Moore wrote some of the DC Universe’s darkest stories, yes.
But also some of its most hopeful.
Some of Moore’s most famous DC Comics writing is on Superman, for crissakes.
Moore has talked a lot about how he intended Watchmen to stretch the genre, not devalue
it, and that the last thing on his mind was popularizing gritty superhero stories or creating
a fanbase that demanded them.
But that’s exactly what happened, through the ‘80s and ‘90s, with the rise of the
anti-hero in superhero comics, a trend we’re still paying homage to today.
Watchmen is a violent story, yes, but it is graphic in order to make you uncomfortable
with its violence, not to glorify it.
And it fundamentally questions the core superhero assumption that people who can take the law
into their own hands should.
Moore and Gibbons certainly didn’t intend for their characters’ goals to stand unexamined
or for the characters themselves to be aspirational figures.
The core idea of Watchmen’s two most powerful characters, Ozymandias and Doctor Manhattan,
is that a person can’t wield great power AND retain human connections.
Watchmen is also often called a “realistic” superhero comic, but what’s realistic about
it isn’t that Doctor Manhattan is the only character with superpowers.
It’s the book’s commitment to literary realism, in the way it attempts to depict
human characters and their relationships as complex and not always rational, often emphasizing
the sordidness of the small events of human lives.
But as an artist, Alan Moore doesn’t just have fan misinterpretation of Watchmen to
put a sour taste in his mouth.
There’s also the thirty-year ongoing rights dispute between him and DC Comics.
To explain how this happened, it’s important to remember two things: one — as I covered
last episode, Moore’s initial Watchmen pitch used characters owned by DC Comics, and he
was asked to create original ones instead.
Moore and Gibbons’ contract stated that DC Comics would own the rights to their original
characters until a certain window of time after the company stopped printing Watchmen.
Now here’s the other thing to remember — Up until the year the final issue of Watchmen
was published, there was no book market for reprinted comics.
Moore and Gibbons could reasonably expect to get the rights to Watchmen after a couple
years, once smiley face buttons and the book’s first collected print edition starting gathering
dust on shelves.
Instead, the longevity of Watchmen’s mainstream success was a surprise for everyone involved.
By making Watchmen outrageously good, Moore and Gibbons made it too lucrative to be given
back to its creators.
DC could maintain control of the characters as long as it kept the books in print, and,
in a way no one could have predicted, there was a lot of money to be had in keeping the
books in print.
Disputes over the rights and royalties — and DC’s attempts to convince Moore to create
Watchmen sequels — led to him leaving DC Comics, never to intentionally work for the
company again.
This was after he’d created some of its most profitable books — not just Watchmen,
but The Killing Joke and V for Vendetta.
Moore wound up working at DC again in the late '90s when he agreed to create the America's
Best Comics imprint for Wildstorm Comics — which was almost immediately bought by DC.
After a few different incidents of DC Comics oversight on his books — including one where
a whole print run was pulped for using the word Marvel — Moore left.
Again.
And Moore has never been secretive about how much he doesn’t like this.
In protest, he has refused credit and compensation for many DC film projects based on comics
he doesn’t directly own, including V for Vendetta, Constantine and the Watchmen movie.
DC offered him the rights to Watchmen in 2010, on the provision that he authorize sequels
and prequel comics from other artists.
He refused, which is no wonder, since he’s talked openly about how he doesn’t approve
of artists expanding on Watchmen other than himself and Dave Gibbons.
DC subsequently published Before Watchmen, a series of Watchmen prequels written and
drawn by contemporary comics creators.
Look.
You’ve probably heard some weird shit about Alan Moore, some of it from this very show.
I’m not here to say that he isn’t a cranky private dude and a weirdo artist.
Because he is, and I have some serious critical qualms with a lot of his writing.
I think he’s disturbingly fond of using rape as character development for his female
protagonists.
And, as a critic, I find Watchmen’s text to visuals ratio to sometimes skew so hard
towards text that it hampers the book’s storytelling, even in moments when it most
needs to speak clearly and emotionally to the reader.
But it doesn’t matter if an artist is a cranky weirdo, or if you don’t like their
stuff.
They still deserve to own the work they created.
Especially if it’s successful and famous and profitable.
Also I really just wish we’d stop glorifying things from the ‘80s.
There’s been 30 years of comic book history between then and now.
Maybe pick anything from then.
And that brings me to Doomsday Clock.
Doomsday Clock is a Watchmen sequel from DC Comics written by Geoff Johns and drawn by
Gary Frank.
And I’m … kind of excited for it?
I don’t know who I am anymore.
I’m the biggest Doomsday Clock skeptic you could find, and I wish I could at least say
I was cautiously optimistic about it, but I’m not.
I’m … excited. ...and so confused.
Doomsday Clock’s first issue is out today, and way back in May when it was announced,
we only knew that it was going to be the next installment of the overarching plot of DC’s
Rebirth relaunch.
Rebirth was the 2016 comic that punctuated a new editorial direction for DC Comics — one
that the company has found very successful.
Textually, it made the wild assertion that all the bad things fans didn’t like about
DC’s New 52 Reboot in 2011 were caused by a powerful entity who wanted to weaken the
DC Universe.
And that that powerful entity was Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen.
Rebirth also kicked off with Batman finding the Comedian’s smiley face button in the
Batcave.
It was a premise — Doctor Manhattan messing with the DC Universe’s canonical timeline
— that was comic-booky in exactly the ways that Watchmen super isn’t.
It felt like a bad match.
It felt like a cash grab.
The first time Doomsday Clock really piqued my interest was at San Diego Comic Con this
year, when Geoff Johns said that he’d come up with the whole idea for it — and then
decided not to do it.
Until the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which changed his mind.
Then, he talked about how Doomsday Clock was going to be a finite series of 12 issues,
just like Watchmen.
It was going to focus on Superman.
It wasn’t going to have crossovers or tie-ins.
In fact, it was going to take place a year into the future of current DC canon, so that
the rest of the DCU couldn’t react until its final issue was published.
It would use the 9-panel grid like Watchmen, and have backmatter and even a story within
a story like the Black Freighter.
Now, I don’t know if he can pull it off.
But it seems like what Johns is trying to do isn’t to mash up DC and Watchmen, at
least not for a mashup’s sake.
It seems like he’s trying to make a story that answers Watchmen, that talks back to
Watchmen’s takedown of the superhero ideal — or at least the one that it’s often
mischaracterized as making.
A story that pushes back against the idea that cynicism is more interesting than hope.
I didn’t think that someone could come up with a reason to revisit Watchmen that I would
find compelling.
And I’m mad that someone did.
I don’t know whether or not Johns and Frank can do it.
But despite everything — and it’s a lot of things — I want to watch them try.
Next time, on Issue At Hand: All I know is it’s not going to be about Watchmen.