PREVIEW： Comics Corner #17 ｜ How Watchmen Ruined Comics
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
1
sentences flagged
Toxicity
23
sentences flagged
Hate speech
7
sentences flagged
Summary
Join us as we rewatch Alan Moore's Watchmen and discuss the deep-rooted anti-heroism that is Watchmen. Join us in our rewatch of Watchmen, where we discuss the subtextuality of the plot, the lack of character development in the story, and why Alan Moore is a fascist.
Transcript
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Comics Corner.
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I am your host, Connor, joined by my co-host, Harry.
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We were just saying that we're sick to the back teeth of politics,
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so we thought we'd go back and, like we always did with this show,
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Yeah, well, we're mainly doing it because that was
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It was to defile everything virtuous and heroic and aspirational
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and to say that actually all of the costume heroes that you revere
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are weird, degenerates, perverts, and liars.
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at least this is what you think, silly chad,
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is a raving homeless man who may not have won in the end,
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and if you like him, you're literally a fascist.
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That's right, we're talking about Watchmen.
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And I was saying right before we started recording this
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of the views that I gave when I spoke about this
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because this most recent reread and rewatch of the film really opened my eyes to one all of the
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subtextual things that were going on with this book his true intentions with this book and also
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just how hateful this book is not only to the medium of comics and the characters but to the
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audience itself because the in the same way that the Rorschach test is supposed to be what you see
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in it this book is trying to reflect the audience's own desires for a simple friendly
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enjoyable fun comic book story involving a cast of colorful characters it is spitting that desire
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right back at them and hates them for having that desire in the first place and thinks that you are
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a fascist for wanting to have simple costumed fun and I think this may be a reflection of
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Alan Moore's own self-hatred for being a comic book writer in the first place, when clearly he
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has greater ideas of what he should be, a serious novelist of some kind, which he is trying to shift
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into now. But it was really shocking. And also on the mention of Wheatley, I had a fun little
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surprise, which is when I first covered this, Wheatley borrowed this exact copy off of me
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and used this as a bookmark, which I found in here and is a nice little Wheatley jump scare
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that i received that at whatever time this was he was thinking about bringing in thinking fast
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and slow science fictions and reminded himself which floor fours work best for holographic
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display applications how nostalgic god i miss you john so i wanted to start off with a quote
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from grant morrison the sort of um wizard nemesis similar or the same quote because i also looked
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into Grant Morrison's views on this? Yeah, so it's quite famous that Grant Morrison and Alan Moore
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hate each other because one is battling to be the most pretentious comic book writer, and both
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believe in magic. And so if they both believe that comic books are a medium for enforcing an
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interpretation upon the world that can then change how humans perceive things and basically change
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the structure of the world in these sort of hermeneutic practices, they want to claim the
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mantle of being able to do that best through DC Comics. And when Grant Morrison was asked for
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his opinions on Watchmen, he said the following. I was the first person to say Watchmen wasn't very
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good. In fact, the only person ever to say that, and it made Alan so angry, so then I would get
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worse. I said that Watchmen was the 300-page equivalent of a sick form poem. The fact that
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none of the characters were allowed to be smarter than the author, that really drove me nuts. The
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world's smartest man is an idiot. He makes a plan all his life that's undone at the end of the book
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In an instant, the psychiatrist sits with Rorschach for five minutes,
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and Rorschach tells a super banal story of how he became a vigilante,
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And if you're a criminal psychiatrist who deals with men in prison,
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It was all to make a specific point about how the real world isn't like superhero comics.
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but Grant Morrison has said something really sensible for this.
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I do have a similar yet different quote from him,
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which was that if you strip away the cleverness of parts of the plot
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on some of the character stuff. All you're left with is a deeply cynical story written by a man
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overly invested in deconstructing the sex lives of fictional cartoon characters.
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Oh, banger. Right, okay. This is why this episode is titled Why Watchmen Ruined Comics,
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because Watchmen was so successful, the comics industry has become a victim of Watchmen's
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success. Watchmen is one of the reliable, best-selling graphic novels every year since
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publication in 1986 and 7. And ever since, it has set the tone for what superhero comics think
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superhero comics should be. The industry is now in a permanent state of deconstruction.
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There is no higher heroic ideal that any hero can aspire to without being knocked down a peg by the
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writer that wants to make their mark on a given book. And as in Watchmen, all of the heroes are
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sexual reprobates, racists, compromised by working for the government, doing shady deals.
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Yeah, they're cuckolds, they're impotent unless they wear their costume,
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and everything is some sort of grand psychological projection
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and society itself is indicted for letting these weird freaks and reprobates
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play out their sexual and power fantasies and call it heroism.
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And that's why I noted when I first started reading this back again
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and I messaged you and said you know like Alan Moore is completely obsessed with sex and it
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filters through every single page of the comic book and one of the interesting things is Zack
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Snyder say for one or two lines which are considered quite iconic to the comic from some of the iconic
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scenes really does not dwell in the psychosexual aspects of the story in the same way that Moore
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does. What I said before we started was that this book is the Frankfurt School theory of
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authoritarian personality put into comic book form. Now, what do I mean by that? Well,
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Moore himself, as we know, is a form of Marxist, but when I was listening to interviews with him
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in preparation for this, I noted that he was trying to put a Freudian Marxist spin on this.
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Now what were the Frankfurt School? The Frankfurt School were a mix of Freudian psychoanalysis and
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sexual ideas with the old school Marxists trying to come to a synthesis between the two and come
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up with ways through which they can analyze society that way. I noticed this when Alan Moore
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said that he had been thinking, and this was what led to him writing The Lost Girls, that he'd been
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thinking about Peter Pan and then been thinking about how Peter Pan can fly. In literary allusions
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flying typically means freedom in some way. And then he tried to put a Freudian spin on it and
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thought, well, maybe in that case, actually, given that he's a stunted boy in arrested development
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who never wants to grow up, perhaps flying can represent a kind of sexual freedom. And so he
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decided, why don't I try and write a story about a sexualized Peter Pan? At which point my first
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daughters why would that ever cross your mind he's a child he is a child who refuses to grow up and
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you want to sexualize him very strange and it was because that didn't work that he ended up going
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well what if i got wendy from peter pan and then teamed her up with dorothy and um and alice and
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made their sexual adventures but it was interesting and and in that as well he mentioned that he in
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doing research for all this had read through an unnamed book an unnamed book that he said
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was a sexual analysis and history of the great war because lost girls is set around the time
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of the great war now in research for my weimar republic video which is not yet out i know exactly
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which book he is referring to it is the sexual history of the great war by magnus hirschfeld
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oh that magnus hirschfeld yes that magnus hirschfeld so he is overtly referring to
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freud and magnus hirschfeld for inspiration in his work which results in this kind of frankfurt
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school theory put into comics because the frankfurt school's theory was that through a mixture of
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sexual repression and maladaptive childhoods where they children have been subject to overtly
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authoritarian parenting leads to children idolizing authority and developing maladaptive sexual
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repression it's always about sexual repression that they end up idolizing authority and becoming
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fascists that was their theory of the authoritarian personality and fascism which is just this comic
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book and the solution to this of course in post-war germany was to give a bunch of war orphans
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to known pedophiles, because that of course won't result in all sorts of atrocities that would then
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produce a massive political backlash. I hadn't thought about that, but you're right. Which might
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suggest why the one character who is overtly shown to hate sexual degeneracy and actively
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murders a child abuser who potentially sexually abused and then murdered a little girl. It certainly
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is implied, especially in the Snyder adaptation where he finds her underwear in the incinerator.
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Yes, it's heavily implied that she was sexually abused as well before being murdered.
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Alan Moore sees him as the ultimate evil of the story.
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When Rorschach in the comic book confronts Adrian Veidt on the rainy night,
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which is replaced by a scene in the middle of the day with Dan Dryberg
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when Rorschach goes to confront Veidt about the death of the comedian
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and warn him that someone's killing superheroes,
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And what does he wear as his costume in the comics?
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because unlike Alan Moore, he is not completely goon-brained.
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Yes, and he also doesn't think that sexual violence, for example,
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attempting to, you know, rape, silt, speck to one,
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then translates into political authoritarianism it's it just doesn't translate one-to-one but
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it was quite interesting because Moore puts these words in Rorschach's mouth and obviously he thinks
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that Rorschach is beneath contempt because he's based on the question and Mr. A characters created
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by Steve Ditko co-creator of Spider-Man Steve Ditko is an objectivist there's actually a comic
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in uh Denny O'Neill's revived run of the question after post-crisis because O'Neill decided he hated
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objectivism because he was basically a hippie great batman editor not great on politics and
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he decided um to to mock the question uh mock rorschach by having the question read watchman
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and then dress up as rorschach for an issue and then he basically fumbles and gets beaten up and
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tied to a tree and the guy's trying to beat him up and go any last words he goes yeah being rorschach
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sucks so they're trying to constantly pour scorn on the politics that are associated with rorschach
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even though he's the hero. So when Veidt calls the comedian practically a Nazi, Rorschach says
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he stood up for his country, he never let anybody retire him, never cashed in on his reputation,
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never set up a company selling posters and diet books and toy soldiers based on himself,
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never became a prostitute. If that makes him a Nazi, you might as well call me a Nazi too.
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And of course that's Alan Moore saying that if you put forward, you know, sexually oppressive
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standards or you disapprove of welfare queens and prostitutes and communists as Rorschach does in
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his opening monologue, then you are basically a fascist. But Moore doesn't realize, and this is
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why Watchmen is an accidentally celebrated work and made such a good film, Moore doesn't realize
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that the narrative, framing Rorschach as the sole narrator, ending with Rorschach, you know,
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telling the truth and outing Veidt's scheme, refusing to compromise even in the face of
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Armageddon at both the beginning and end, and taking obviously correct actions like, you know,
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killing the unrepentant child murderer. He doesn't realise that he actually sets Rorschach up to be
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the hero, and inadvertently makes all the right-wing politics legitimate, and all of the
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utopian-minded, murderous utilitarianism associated with Veidt equally as impotent and horrible?
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See, the problem is, with Moore, is that for all of his lofty literary pretensions,
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there is still a part of, there's still that version of him that was enticed enough by
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superhero comics when he was younger to still have a little ironically enough when we're talking
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about child childish repression and nostalgia and such to still have a holdover where when you
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see videos of him reading through the narration and how he reads through the Rorschach journals
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and puts on a gritty voice for them and takes them with a really solemn seriousness you can tell
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that one of the things that led to this confusion is he still wanted rorschach to be cool yeah there
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was still a part of him that was and i feel a great conflicted twisting and turning throughout
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the throughout the pages of this book because more still can't help himself throughout it
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and this is why i think as well one of the reasons it's so celebrated is that in the three and a half
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issues worth of actual story that you get from the comic that isn't just one-off issues dedicated
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to the character's backstory or random side characters who die at the end anyway who i would
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say it would be frankly um quite charitable to even call them two-dimensional when it's not
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dedicating time to that alan moore is writing a cool mystery investigation story with superheroes
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who do cool things rorschach can think on his feet fast enough that he's able to almost get
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himself out of a police raid when he's backed into a corner um dan and silk specter do still
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go out of their way to go and help people in this big floating spaceship that can fire uh blasts and
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there is this part of him that's still like this is still cool and i still want these characters
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to be cool which is helped by some of dave gibbon's uh dave gibbon's artwork but at the same time he
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still has this ultimate goal guiding everything that he does that he has to subvert everything
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cool so it's like he's at war with himself he's almost like trying to say yes it's even worse
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that you like this because i'm presenting the most engaging uh visually stunning version of
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the thing that you love and still calling you a fascist and childish for enjoying it it was there
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was an interview a couple of years ago that he gave to the guardian and he said he was worried
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actually that people were watching superhero movies because the last one he watched was
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apparently batman 89 and he's been on a strike ever since he hasn't even seen the snyder adaptation
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he was worried that people were still watching these films because he saw them as juvenile
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because of course he sees that there's no there are no values being transmitted in it there are
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no aspirational heroic ideals that are being conveyed everything is actually just unlike in
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lost girls exactly everything is just a cover for your own perversions and power fantasies and
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and sick and twisted politics and so he is horrified that people are still watching superhero
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movies into their 20s that they haven't grown out of it and he sees this as walking down the path
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to fascism which would then explain how you well frankfurt school interpretation again as we get
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further into the discussion the topic of nostalgia permeates this entire thing because it's an
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indictment on nostalgia itself or the idea of an idealized past and the reason for this is again
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academics have come to the conclusion that one of the hallmarks of fascism is a yearning back to an
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idealized or imagined past and so Alan Moore sees the kind of idealized America of Captain America
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in those original comic books or even Batman helping out the American war effort in the 1940s
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he sees that kind of idealized vision of the past as it existed in the 1980s as another stepping
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stone to fascism. Well that explains why anytime you get one of those edits of how Britain was in
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the 50s, 60s or 70s crossing your timeline it's immediately associated with fascism or there's
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that there's that sort of reddit trope of no one was ever happy, nobody ever had families, nobody
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ever had a white picket fence, the dad was always abusing the mum, the son was always secretly gay,
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the girl was always lobotomized nobody has ever had a normal family life ever you just have to
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accept the current miserable conditions that we have forced you to well if you wonder how that
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mindset managed to permeate so much of the culture that people will just throw that out offhand
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without even thinking about it it is because of the pop culture that people have been consuming
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since probably the 1960s at least that has all been influenced by people like the frankfurt
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school theorists, and that's because Watchmen is presenting you an engaging, thrilling mystery
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story with this colourful cast of interesting and compelling characters on the surface, but the
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subtext, all of this stuff that people may not understand the first time that they go reading
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through, like why in the issue when Doctor Manhattan and Silk Spectre are on Mars is there
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repeated flash-forwards to the nostalgia bottle, flipping around and around and around before
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eventually smashing to lead to the emotional culmination of the issue? Why are there all of
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these things where nostalgia as a perfume is brought up? Why, when Silk Spectre and Dan
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embrace one another in the final part of the story, after Dwight has already succeeded in his
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mission. Do they bring attention to the fact that Dan is wearing nostalgia perfume? Why do they bring
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attention to the fact that Rorschach was wearing nostalgia aftershave when he was arrested?
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Well, it's because in the back of your head you are drawing negative associations with the idea
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of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a false past. Nostalgia is authoritarianism. Nostalgia is retreat into
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sexual perversion and fantasy to escape the reality of right now and today. That may have
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been influenced by the Cold War era in which Moore was writing this, but that kind of attitude does
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leak, red letter media style, your brain recognizes it, into your mind and then you project that
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thought out into the world around you. Hollywood's been doing it for years, they always associate
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authoritarian fascist neo-nazi characters as being secret repressed homosexuals they do it
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in american beauty where the neo-nazi next door neighbor appears crying at the end of the film
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out of nowhere and kisses the main character on the lips before leaving the rest of the film and
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you don't see him again same with american history x the neo-nazi gang decides to prison rape edward
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norton's character yeah meanwhile the black guy takes him in as a friend yeah why do they do all
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of this well because they're implanting these ideas in your mind and that is that is what this
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is doing this is what this is one of the most popular comic books ever written if you're telling
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me it didn't have an effect on culture then you're just wrong yeah this is one of the most influential
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texts of the 20th century i would say and it was essentially poisoning the well of what america
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were using at the time to as a product to export as part of their cultural hegemony because as you
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said. Batman, Superman, the Marvel superheroes, the ones that existed at the time, fought in the
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Second World War. They were part of the war effort. And then when you have Iron Man coming along,
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he's fighting in the Vietnam War. You have superheroes after this involving themselves
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in the War on Terror. There are superhero comics will map onto the political circumstances at the
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time. The year that Watchmen was published, and I think we should get into some of the biographical
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and other such information, because it might provide some background. But the year Watchmen
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was published, Christ on Infinite Earths had just finished. Go see our episode on that and
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legends for more. Superman was a presidential ally of Ronald Reagan. He was an establishment
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figure. The Justice League had official UN sanctioning, or they were endorsed by the UN,
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rather. So superheroes were aligned with America as the unquestionable moral force in the Cold War,
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and they were projecting American hegemony as the righteous power against the evil empire
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out across the world. At the same time, Alan Moore is saying, actually, our superheroes are
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kind of morally bankrupt, and we ourselves are no better than those that we would cast scorn upon,
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and it's actually just authority itself that's the problem. So Moore and Gibbons were brought
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over to DC as part of the British invasion. They both started on 2000 AD. He, Moore, had originally
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submitted a Judge Dredd pitch, and Alan Grant, who was editing 2000 AD at the time, Alan Grant,
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later the celebrated Batman writer who helped out with Nightfall, and I think he produced the
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the comic book Shadow of the Bat, if I remember correctly.
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It was a psychological study of Batman's villains.
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just a load of his old comics from the 80s that he had,
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which is why I've got one of the first printings
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I always did wonder as well if there was enmity
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and instead Alan Moore got the Brian Boland art
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Yeah, I don't think Dave McKean would fit very well
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that Alan Moore loves using in his comic books.
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Dave Gibbons actually drew for the first issue of 2000 AD
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and then left to go be artists on Doctor Who magazine.
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Moore, at the time, was then publishing V for Vendetta in Warrior,
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and his work came to the attention of Swamp Thing creator Len Wein,
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who then hired Moore to revolutionise Swamp Thing in 1983.
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And it's significant because Len Wein was the editor for some of Watchmen.
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And then about issue five, when issue five was being published,
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and Alan Moore had given him the script treatment for the last issues,
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And the reason was, Len Wein recognised that the ending had been plagiarised from an episode of The Outer Limits.
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Where a series of scientists fabricate an alien invasion to try to end the Cold War.
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And in the episode of The Outer Limits, one scientist...
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I had no idea about this because one of the things that I was going to praise him for
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was that the mystery is interesting and that Moore had managed to write a smartest character in the world
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who at least on first glance did actually feel like an intelligent character so the fact that
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you just nicked it that's amazing yeah so it was the episode was called the architects of fear and
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essentially a group of scientists get together and they they do cosmetic surgery on one of the
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scientists to turn him into an alien and he gets fatally shot and the the plan goes wrong and his
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wife finds his body and she weeps alan moore decided to take that and possibly the plot of
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ursula le guin's lave of heaven where the main character is called george or is a homage to
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george orwell yeah he has a superpower he can't control which is that he dreams things and they
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come true and there's a psychiatrist who's trying to manipulate him to try and make the world perfect
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and at one point the world is at war and the psychiatrist goes right dream of an alien invasion
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to stop stop the world going to war and george dreams up an alien invasion to bring all of earth
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together there's an iconic bit where um the aliens are spotted on the moon he goes get rid of the
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aliens from the moon and then suddenly all the glass explodes outside he goes what the hell's
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happened he goes they're not on the moon anymore because they've landed it's such a great book but
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but ween okay i need to give that a read that sounds good it's fantastic ween ween recognized
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that more had plagiarized the outer limits and more confessed it to him though more currently
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denies it to this day and ween said look you need to rewrite the ending otherwise we've got no
00:24:17.760
integrity more refused so ween quit now that this like we'll mention later improves the ending of
00:24:25.020
the film version even more to me in that case but that's that's fascinating at least in those like
00:24:31.720
you say with the out of limits it goes wrong and at least in the Ursula um what's her name Ursula
00:24:37.300
Le Guin book um it's a series of escalating events where the things actually are happening
00:24:42.860
because frankly if you put the a bit of critical thought and scrutiny to the plot to the plan at
00:24:49.160
the end of this it does begin to fall apart just a little bit but no that's actually I would have
00:24:53.940
thought that Len Wein might have quit because he realized that hold up this comic hates the
00:24:58.580
industry that it's part of and everything that I've been working for my entire career never mind
00:25:03.320
because in some of the interviews that I watched with Moore he was saying that it was only around
00:25:08.400
issue three that he realized what he was writing and that at first his initial intention was to
00:25:15.140
write a just slightly cleverer than most superhero comic mystery story limited series and it was only
00:25:22.280
in issue three and he said the editors had been really really happy with the third issue and then
00:25:27.900
it was receiving the fourth issue dr manhattan's backstory issue that they all started to get a bit
00:25:33.720
of cold feet around it so i i wonder if len wean was also thinking like and now he's dedicating an
00:25:40.100
entire issue to this one guy where the plot doesn't move forward at all and then just got a bit sick
00:25:46.200
of him to be fair i don't think uh wean would have been worried about that particular bit because
00:25:50.560
obviously he allowed Moore to change Swamp Thing and most of Moore's Swamp Thing follows the
00:25:55.520
similar tone of the Dr. Manhattan issue. It's a sort of exploration of existential and body horror
00:26:00.140
and it's the relationship between a man and a plant. There's not a whole lot of punching going
00:26:03.860
on but I think that Len Wein just, God rest his soul, had a lot of creative integrity and so...
00:26:10.200
You know what? Respect and fair to him that he refused to stand by while an act of just like
00:26:16.200
massive plagiarism was going on underneath him yeah so we also hired gibbons in for dc and he
00:26:22.720
brought gibbons over to do i think it was green lantern core uh first of all yep starting from
00:26:27.060
issue 161 he was doing the backup issues in green lantern uh for the tales of the green
00:26:31.280
lantern core and both more and gibbons would work on that series they eventually worked together on
00:26:35.400
the issue uh mogo doesn't socialize where they created the living planet that then jeff johns
00:26:40.680
would then incorporate into his green lantern in 2005 and there's a hilarious line where alan
00:26:45.520
Moore was interviewed in, I think it was 2008 or 2009, during the Blackest Night Saga of Green
00:26:52.220
Lantern. And they said, oh, what do you think about Green Lantern? Now that it's undergoing
00:26:55.120
a transformation, it's using some of your ideas and Dave's ideas from the Green Lantern core
00:27:00.580
annuals. What do you think that Geoff Johns is finally making good on the mythology that you did?
00:27:05.500
And he said, I feel like raccoons are going through my trash. Which, to be fair to Geoff
00:27:09.680
Johns. Jeff Johns, in the 90s to 2000s, was trying to reverse the Alan Morrification of
00:27:16.320
the industry with JSA. You can tell. His stories tend to have such a more
00:27:21.480
colourful and upbeat vibe to them. Yeah, they're Silver Age coded. And Infinite Crisis is undoing
00:27:28.020
Crisis on Infinite Earths to a large extent. It's bringing back the multiverse. It's giving
00:27:32.260
the Golden Age Superman a happy ending. It's rebuilding heroes from when they've been torn
00:27:38.080
down by identity crisis, Wonder Woman killing Maxwell Lord, Superman undergoing an existential
00:27:42.800
crisis, thinking, should I even be Superman anymore? It's bringing those people back.
00:27:47.000
And then now Geoff Johns, unfortunately, has been ensnared by the industry itself,
00:27:50.380
where he's just writing Alan Moore tribute acts with Three Jokers and Doomsday Clock.
00:27:54.840
Geoff Johns ended up doing the sequel to Watchmen, which then famously was delayed and woefully
00:28:00.420
performed. And nobody asked for Three Jokers retconning the killing joke either. So it seems
00:28:04.760
that Alan Moore has had a noxious effect on the comics industry where even those who, in the sort
00:28:12.200
of Nietzschean phrase, those who try to fight monsters spend so long fighting Alan Moore's
00:28:17.240
monsters that they become Alan Moore themselves. It's also quite ironic as well because the kind of
00:28:21.860
the characters that Alan Moore says that Geoff John stole from him were actually invented by
00:28:26.220
Ween, Marv Wolfman and Mike W. Barr in 1981. If you would like to see the full version of this
00:28:30.700
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