The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Comics Corner #17 ｜ How Watchmen Ruined Comics

00:00:00.000 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Comics Corner.

00:00:02.240 I am your host, Connor, joined by my co-host, Harry.

00:00:04.360 Hello, bet you weren't expecting this.

00:00:05.960 We have indeed missed this show.

00:00:07.540 We were just saying that we're sick to the back teeth of politics,

00:00:09.900 and so we thought we'd actually...

00:00:10.880 I think everybody is at this point,

00:00:12.340 so we thought we'd go back and, like we always did with this show,

00:00:15.340 tear down some idols.

00:00:16.800 Yeah, well, we're mainly doing it because that was

00:00:19.140 Alan Moore's express purpose with this work.

00:00:21.380 It was to defile everything virtuous and heroic and aspirational

00:00:25.900 and to say that actually all of the costume heroes that you revere 1.00

00:00:29.660 are weird, degenerates, perverts, and liars. 0.99

00:00:31.920 And the only person that is a hero, 1.00

00:00:33.800 at least this is what you think, silly chad, 0.97

00:00:36.480 is a raving homeless man who may not have won in the end, 1.00

00:00:39.120 and if you like him, you're literally a fascist. 0.96

00:00:40.760 That's right, we're talking about Watchmen. 0.97

00:00:42.740 Yes, we certainly are.

00:00:44.220 And I was saying right before we started recording this

00:00:47.020 that I was surprised at this rewatch

00:00:49.280 because my views in this discussion

00:00:52.680 are probably going to be the polar opposite

00:00:54.320 of the views that I gave when I spoke about this

00:00:56.620 with John Wheatley back in 2022.

00:00:58.860 because this most recent reread and rewatch of the film really opened my eyes to one all of the

00:01:05.780 subtextual things that were going on with this book his true intentions with this book and also

00:01:11.760 just how hateful this book is not only to the medium of comics and the characters but to the

00:01:20.260 audience itself because the in the same way that the Rorschach test is supposed to be what you see

00:01:26.480 in it this book is trying to reflect the audience's own desires for a simple friendly

00:01:34.300 enjoyable fun comic book story involving a cast of colorful characters it is spitting that desire

00:01:42.040 right back at them and hates them for having that desire in the first place and thinks that you are

00:01:48.500 a fascist for wanting to have simple costumed fun and I think this may be a reflection of

00:01:54.960 Alan Moore's own self-hatred for being a comic book writer in the first place, when clearly he

00:02:00.660 has greater ideas of what he should be, a serious novelist of some kind, which he is trying to shift

00:02:06.300 into now. But it was really shocking. And also on the mention of Wheatley, I had a fun little

00:02:12.020 surprise, which is when I first covered this, Wheatley borrowed this exact copy off of me

00:02:17.580 and used this as a bookmark, which I found in here and is a nice little Wheatley jump scare

00:02:24.200 that i received that at whatever time this was he was thinking about bringing in thinking fast

00:02:29.500 and slow science fictions and reminded himself which floor fours work best for holographic

00:02:37.520 display applications how nostalgic god i miss you john so i wanted to start off with a quote

00:02:43.880 from grant morrison the sort of um wizard nemesis similar or the same quote because i also looked

00:02:50.120 into Grant Morrison's views on this? Yeah, so it's quite famous that Grant Morrison and Alan Moore

00:02:54.940 hate each other because one is battling to be the most pretentious comic book writer, and both

00:02:59.140 believe in magic. And so if they both believe that comic books are a medium for enforcing an

00:03:06.280 interpretation upon the world that can then change how humans perceive things and basically change

00:03:11.140 the structure of the world in these sort of hermeneutic practices, they want to claim the

00:03:17.980 mantle of being able to do that best through DC Comics. And when Grant Morrison was asked for

00:03:22.900 his opinions on Watchmen, he said the following. I was the first person to say Watchmen wasn't very

00:03:27.460 good. In fact, the only person ever to say that, and it made Alan so angry, so then I would get

00:03:33.840 worse. I said that Watchmen was the 300-page equivalent of a sick form poem. The fact that

00:03:38.720 none of the characters were allowed to be smarter than the author, that really drove me nuts. The

00:03:43.000 world's smartest man is an idiot. He makes a plan all his life that's undone at the end of the book 1.00

00:03:46.920 In an instant, the psychiatrist sits with Rorschach for five minutes,

00:03:49.900 and Rorschach tells a super banal story of how he became a vigilante,

00:03:53.000 and the psychiatrist cracks.

00:03:54.700 And if you're a criminal psychiatrist who deals with men in prison,

00:03:57.080 you've heard a million of these stories.

00:03:58.660 It was all to make a specific point about how the real world isn't like superhero comics.

00:04:02.280 And I can't believe that I'm saying it,

00:04:04.140 but Grant Morrison has said something really sensible for this.

00:04:06.120 No, Grant Morrison is absolutely right.

00:04:08.200 I do have a similar yet different quote from him,

00:04:11.400 which was that if you strip away the cleverness of parts of the plot

00:04:15.840 on some of the character stuff. All you're left with is a deeply cynical story written by a man

00:04:21.520 overly invested in deconstructing the sex lives of fictional cartoon characters.

00:04:26.440 Oh, banger. Right, okay. This is why this episode is titled Why Watchmen Ruined Comics,

00:04:31.440 because Watchmen was so successful, the comics industry has become a victim of Watchmen's

00:04:36.220 success. Watchmen is one of the reliable, best-selling graphic novels every year since

00:04:40.500 publication in 1986 and 7. And ever since, it has set the tone for what superhero comics think

00:04:47.080 superhero comics should be. The industry is now in a permanent state of deconstruction.

00:04:52.480 There is no higher heroic ideal that any hero can aspire to without being knocked down a peg by the

00:04:58.240 writer that wants to make their mark on a given book. And as in Watchmen, all of the heroes are

00:05:04.340 sexual reprobates, racists, compromised by working for the government, doing shady deals. 1.00

00:05:10.240 just pathetic and cowardly by themselves. 1.00

00:05:14.080 Yeah, they're cuckolds, they're impotent unless they wear their costume, 1.00

00:05:17.000 and everything is some sort of grand psychological projection 0.98

00:05:19.180 about their own inadequacies, 0.84

00:05:21.280 and society itself is indicted for letting these weird freaks and reprobates 0.96

00:05:25.540 play out their sexual and power fantasies and call it heroism. 0.78

00:05:29.100 There is no room for you to be an actual hero.

00:05:32.080 Everything is to be regarded with suspicion.

00:05:34.240 And that's why I noted when I first started reading this back again

00:05:37.700 and I messaged you and said you know like Alan Moore is completely obsessed with sex and it

00:05:42.800 filters through every single page of the comic book and one of the interesting things is Zack

00:05:49.020 Snyder say for one or two lines which are considered quite iconic to the comic from some of the iconic

00:05:54.560 scenes really does not dwell in the psychosexual aspects of the story in the same way that Moore

00:06:02.040 does. What I said before we started was that this book is the Frankfurt School theory of

00:06:08.260 authoritarian personality put into comic book form. Now, what do I mean by that? Well,

00:06:15.900 Moore himself, as we know, is a form of Marxist, but when I was listening to interviews with him

00:06:20.300 in preparation for this, I noted that he was trying to put a Freudian Marxist spin on this.

00:06:28.640 Now what were the Frankfurt School? The Frankfurt School were a mix of Freudian psychoanalysis and

00:06:34.480 sexual ideas with the old school Marxists trying to come to a synthesis between the two and come

00:06:40.340 up with ways through which they can analyze society that way. I noticed this when Alan Moore

00:06:44.480 said that he had been thinking, and this was what led to him writing The Lost Girls, that he'd been

00:06:49.040 thinking about Peter Pan and then been thinking about how Peter Pan can fly. In literary allusions

00:06:55.020 flying typically means freedom in some way. And then he tried to put a Freudian spin on it and

00:07:01.660 thought, well, maybe in that case, actually, given that he's a stunted boy in arrested development

00:07:06.520 who never wants to grow up, perhaps flying can represent a kind of sexual freedom. And so he

00:07:12.420 decided, why don't I try and write a story about a sexualized Peter Pan? At which point my first

00:07:19.900 daughters why would that ever cross your mind he's a child he is a child who refuses to grow up and

00:07:27.260 you want to sexualize him very strange and it was because that didn't work that he ended up going

00:07:32.520 well what if i got wendy from peter pan and then teamed her up with dorothy and um and alice and

00:07:39.160 made their sexual adventures but it was interesting and and in that as well he mentioned that he in

00:07:44.100 doing research for all this had read through an unnamed book an unnamed book that he said

00:07:51.080 was a sexual analysis and history of the great war because lost girls is set around the time

00:07:57.340 of the great war now in research for my weimar republic video which is not yet out i know exactly

00:08:04.900 which book he is referring to it is the sexual history of the great war by magnus hirschfeld

00:08:11.180 oh that magnus hirschfeld yes that magnus hirschfeld so he is overtly referring to

00:08:17.960 freud and magnus hirschfeld for inspiration in his work which results in this kind of frankfurt

00:08:25.000 school theory put into comics because the frankfurt school's theory was that through a mixture of

00:08:30.840 sexual repression and maladaptive childhoods where they children have been subject to overtly

00:08:38.960 authoritarian parenting leads to children idolizing authority and developing maladaptive sexual

00:08:47.360 repression it's always about sexual repression that they end up idolizing authority and becoming

00:08:54.140 fascists that was their theory of the authoritarian personality and fascism which is just this comic

00:09:00.220 book and the solution to this of course in post-war germany was to give a bunch of war orphans

00:09:04.460 to known pedophiles, because that of course won't result in all sorts of atrocities that would then

00:09:09.280 produce a massive political backlash. I hadn't thought about that, but you're right. Which might

00:09:13.780 suggest why the one character who is overtly shown to hate sexual degeneracy and actively

00:09:20.940 murders a child abuser who potentially sexually abused and then murdered a little girl. It certainly

00:09:28.220 is implied, especially in the Snyder adaptation where he finds her underwear in the incinerator.

00:09:32.880 Yes, it's heavily implied that she was sexually abused as well before being murdered.

00:09:37.180 Alan Moore sees him as the ultimate evil of the story.

00:09:40.960 He tries to have...

00:09:43.520 When Rorschach in the comic book confronts Adrian Veidt on the rainy night,

00:09:48.900 which is replaced by a scene in the middle of the day with Dan Dryberg

00:09:51.800 actually going to speak to Veidt in the film,

00:09:54.760 when Rorschach goes to confront Veidt about the death of the comedian

00:09:58.000 and warn him that someone's killing superheroes,

00:10:00.600 Veidt says that Blake is basically a Nazi,

00:10:04.460 and I remember Rorschach actually...

00:10:06.040 And what does he wear as his costume in the comics? 0.52

00:10:08.880 A gimp mask. 0.97

00:10:10.120 Yes, and the American flag. 0.87

00:10:11.580 And the American flag.

00:10:12.720 Which, again, Snyder changes,

00:10:15.700 because unlike Alan Moore, he is not completely goon-brained.

00:10:19.940 Yes, and he also doesn't think that sexual violence, for example,

00:10:24.840 as caused by repression in The Comedian,

00:10:26.720 attempting to, you know, rape, silt, speck to one,

00:10:29.140 then translates into political authoritarianism it's it just doesn't translate one-to-one but

00:10:34.560 it was quite interesting because Moore puts these words in Rorschach's mouth and obviously he thinks

00:10:39.120 that Rorschach is beneath contempt because he's based on the question and Mr. A characters created

00:10:43.480 by Steve Ditko co-creator of Spider-Man Steve Ditko is an objectivist there's actually a comic

00:10:48.560 in uh Denny O'Neill's revived run of the question after post-crisis because O'Neill decided he hated

00:10:54.740 objectivism because he was basically a hippie great batman editor not great on politics and

00:10:59.220 he decided um to to mock the question uh mock rorschach by having the question read watchman

00:11:06.100 and then dress up as rorschach for an issue and then he basically fumbles and gets beaten up and

00:11:14.080 tied to a tree and the guy's trying to beat him up and go any last words he goes yeah being rorschach

00:11:17.920 sucks so they're trying to constantly pour scorn on the politics that are associated with rorschach

00:11:21.800 even though he's the hero. So when Veidt calls the comedian practically a Nazi, Rorschach says 0.98

00:11:25.960 he stood up for his country, he never let anybody retire him, never cashed in on his reputation,

00:11:30.420 never set up a company selling posters and diet books and toy soldiers based on himself,

00:11:34.160 never became a prostitute. If that makes him a Nazi, you might as well call me a Nazi too. 0.79

00:11:37.820 And of course that's Alan Moore saying that if you put forward, you know, sexually oppressive 0.92

00:11:42.760 standards or you disapprove of welfare queens and prostitutes and communists as Rorschach does in 0.98

00:11:47.980 his opening monologue, then you are basically a fascist. But Moore doesn't realize, and this is 0.97

00:11:53.300 why Watchmen is an accidentally celebrated work and made such a good film, Moore doesn't realize

00:11:58.340 that the narrative, framing Rorschach as the sole narrator, ending with Rorschach, you know,

00:12:05.040 telling the truth and outing Veidt's scheme, refusing to compromise even in the face of

00:12:09.260 Armageddon at both the beginning and end, and taking obviously correct actions like, you know,

00:12:14.420 killing the unrepentant child murderer. He doesn't realise that he actually sets Rorschach up to be

00:12:19.140 the hero, and inadvertently makes all the right-wing politics legitimate, and all of the

00:12:23.060 utopian-minded, murderous utilitarianism associated with Veidt equally as impotent and horrible?

00:12:29.640 See, the problem is, with Moore, is that for all of his lofty literary pretensions,

00:12:36.800 there is still a part of, there's still that version of him that was enticed enough by

00:12:42.220 superhero comics when he was younger to still have a little ironically enough when we're talking

00:12:47.760 about child childish repression and nostalgia and such to still have a holdover where when you

00:12:53.760 see videos of him reading through the narration and how he reads through the Rorschach journals

00:13:01.200 and puts on a gritty voice for them and takes them with a really solemn seriousness you can tell

00:13:06.640 that one of the things that led to this confusion is he still wanted rorschach to be cool yeah there

00:13:13.440 was still a part of him that was and i feel a great conflicted twisting and turning throughout

00:13:20.300 the throughout the pages of this book because more still can't help himself throughout it

00:13:25.420 and this is why i think as well one of the reasons it's so celebrated is that in the three and a half

00:13:31.280 issues worth of actual story that you get from the comic that isn't just one-off issues dedicated

00:13:37.580 to the character's backstory or random side characters who die at the end anyway who i would

00:13:44.640 say it would be frankly um quite charitable to even call them two-dimensional when it's not

00:13:51.520 dedicating time to that alan moore is writing a cool mystery investigation story with superheroes

00:13:59.140 who do cool things rorschach can think on his feet fast enough that he's able to almost get

00:14:05.780 himself out of a police raid when he's backed into a corner um dan and silk specter do still

00:14:12.220 go out of their way to go and help people in this big floating spaceship that can fire uh blasts and

00:14:19.500 there is this part of him that's still like this is still cool and i still want these characters

00:14:24.800 to be cool which is helped by some of dave gibbon's uh dave gibbon's artwork but at the same time he

00:14:31.420 still has this ultimate goal guiding everything that he does that he has to subvert everything

00:14:38.120 cool so it's like he's at war with himself he's almost like trying to say yes it's even worse

00:14:43.520 that you like this because i'm presenting the most engaging uh visually stunning version of

00:14:49.400 the thing that you love and still calling you a fascist and childish for enjoying it it was there

00:14:53.760 was an interview a couple of years ago that he gave to the guardian and he said he was worried

00:14:57.780 actually that people were watching superhero movies because the last one he watched was

00:15:01.740 apparently batman 89 and he's been on a strike ever since he hasn't even seen the snyder adaptation

00:15:06.120 he was worried that people were still watching these films because he saw them as juvenile

00:15:10.040 because of course he sees that there's no there are no values being transmitted in it there are

00:15:14.880 no aspirational heroic ideals that are being conveyed everything is actually just unlike in

00:15:20.660 lost girls exactly everything is just a cover for your own perversions and power fantasies and

00:15:27.340 and sick and twisted politics and so he is horrified that people are still watching superhero

00:15:32.500 movies into their 20s that they haven't grown out of it and he sees this as walking down the path

00:15:37.260 to fascism which would then explain how you well frankfurt school interpretation again as we get

00:15:41.640 further into the discussion the topic of nostalgia permeates this entire thing because it's an

00:15:47.120 indictment on nostalgia itself or the idea of an idealized past and the reason for this is again

00:15:53.540 academics have come to the conclusion that one of the hallmarks of fascism is a yearning back to an

00:16:00.720 idealized or imagined past and so Alan Moore sees the kind of idealized America of Captain America

00:16:08.400 in those original comic books or even Batman helping out the American war effort in the 1940s

00:16:15.260 he sees that kind of idealized vision of the past as it existed in the 1980s as another stepping

00:16:22.260 stone to fascism. Well that explains why anytime you get one of those edits of how Britain was in

00:16:27.300 the 50s, 60s or 70s crossing your timeline it's immediately associated with fascism or there's

00:16:32.560 that there's that sort of reddit trope of no one was ever happy, nobody ever had families, nobody

00:16:36.900 ever had a white picket fence, the dad was always abusing the mum, the son was always secretly gay,

00:16:41.240 the girl was always lobotomized nobody has ever had a normal family life ever you just have to 0.61

00:16:45.700 accept the current miserable conditions that we have forced you to well if you wonder how that

00:16:50.760 mindset managed to permeate so much of the culture that people will just throw that out offhand

00:16:56.100 without even thinking about it it is because of the pop culture that people have been consuming

00:17:00.920 since probably the 1960s at least that has all been influenced by people like the frankfurt

00:17:07.500 school theorists, and that's because Watchmen is presenting you an engaging, thrilling mystery

00:17:13.760 story with this colourful cast of interesting and compelling characters on the surface, but the

00:17:19.940 subtext, all of this stuff that people may not understand the first time that they go reading

00:17:25.600 through, like why in the issue when Doctor Manhattan and Silk Spectre are on Mars is there

00:17:31.840 repeated flash-forwards to the nostalgia bottle, flipping around and around and around before

00:17:38.760 eventually smashing to lead to the emotional culmination of the issue? Why are there all of

00:17:44.560 these things where nostalgia as a perfume is brought up? Why, when Silk Spectre and Dan

00:17:49.940 embrace one another in the final part of the story, after Dwight has already succeeded in his

00:17:56.960 mission. Do they bring attention to the fact that Dan is wearing nostalgia perfume? Why do they bring

00:18:03.080 attention to the fact that Rorschach was wearing nostalgia aftershave when he was arrested?

00:18:08.260 Well, it's because in the back of your head you are drawing negative associations with the idea

00:18:15.060 of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a false past. Nostalgia is authoritarianism. Nostalgia is retreat into

00:18:23.540 sexual perversion and fantasy to escape the reality of right now and today. That may have

00:18:29.420 been influenced by the Cold War era in which Moore was writing this, but that kind of attitude does

00:18:35.700 leak, red letter media style, your brain recognizes it, into your mind and then you project that

00:18:42.920 thought out into the world around you. Hollywood's been doing it for years, they always associate

00:18:47.960 authoritarian fascist neo-nazi characters as being secret repressed homosexuals they do it 0.93

00:18:54.740 in american beauty where the neo-nazi next door neighbor appears crying at the end of the film 0.91

00:19:01.160 out of nowhere and kisses the main character on the lips before leaving the rest of the film and

00:19:07.280 you don't see him again same with american history x the neo-nazi gang decides to prison rape edward 0.70

00:19:12.600 norton's character yeah meanwhile the black guy takes him in as a friend yeah why do they do all

00:19:18.080 of this well because they're implanting these ideas in your mind and that is that is what this

00:19:23.640 is doing this is what this is one of the most popular comic books ever written if you're telling

00:19:27.540 me it didn't have an effect on culture then you're just wrong yeah this is one of the most influential

00:19:32.020 texts of the 20th century i would say and it was essentially poisoning the well of what america

00:19:37.180 were using at the time to as a product to export as part of their cultural hegemony because as you

00:19:41.880 said. Batman, Superman, the Marvel superheroes, the ones that existed at the time, fought in the

00:19:46.740 Second World War. They were part of the war effort. And then when you have Iron Man coming along,

00:19:51.040 he's fighting in the Vietnam War. You have superheroes after this involving themselves

00:19:55.460 in the War on Terror. There are superhero comics will map onto the political circumstances at the

00:20:00.580 time. The year that Watchmen was published, and I think we should get into some of the biographical

00:20:04.120 and other such information, because it might provide some background. But the year Watchmen

00:20:07.900 was published, Christ on Infinite Earths had just finished. Go see our episode on that and

00:20:11.820 legends for more. Superman was a presidential ally of Ronald Reagan. He was an establishment

00:20:18.380 figure. The Justice League had official UN sanctioning, or they were endorsed by the UN,

00:20:25.040 rather. So superheroes were aligned with America as the unquestionable moral force in the Cold War,

00:20:31.900 and they were projecting American hegemony as the righteous power against the evil empire

00:20:37.040 out across the world. At the same time, Alan Moore is saying, actually, our superheroes are

00:20:41.000 kind of morally bankrupt, and we ourselves are no better than those that we would cast scorn upon,

00:20:46.800 and it's actually just authority itself that's the problem. So Moore and Gibbons were brought

00:20:51.280 over to DC as part of the British invasion. They both started on 2000 AD. He, Moore, had originally

00:20:57.800 submitted a Judge Dredd pitch, and Alan Grant, who was editing 2000 AD at the time, Alan Grant,

00:21:04.140 later the celebrated Batman writer who helped out with Nightfall, and I think he produced the

00:21:09.720 the comic book Shadow of the Bat, if I remember correctly.

00:21:11.840 He asked him to write...

00:21:12.740 I forgot that, at home somewhere.

00:21:14.180 It was a good series.

00:21:15.320 It was a psychological study of Batman's villains.

00:21:16.960 Yeah, my dad has handed over to me

00:21:19.740 just a load of his old comics from the 80s that he had,

00:21:22.180 which is why I've got one of the first printings

00:21:23.900 of Killing Joke that I brought in that time.

00:21:25.920 Ah, yeah, there you go.

00:21:27.080 I always did wonder as well if there was enmity

00:21:29.660 between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison

00:21:31.840 because Grant Morrison wanted Brian Boland

00:21:35.300 to draw Serious House and Serious Earth,

00:21:37.900 and instead Alan Moore got the Brian Boland art

00:21:40.420 on Killing Joke instead.

00:21:41.320 That would have been...

00:21:43.100 Imagine if those had been flipped.

00:21:44.660 That would have been interesting

00:21:45.580 because I don't think that...

00:21:47.620 What's his name?

00:21:48.440 The painter from Arkham...

00:21:49.520 Dave McKean?

00:21:50.040 Yeah, I don't think Dave McKean would fit very well

00:21:52.700 with the kind of very regimented grid panels

00:21:56.440 that Alan Moore loves using in his comic books.

00:21:58.700 Yes.

00:21:59.200 Dave Gibbons actually drew for the first issue of 2000 AD

00:22:01.900 and contributed to 108 of the first 131 issues

00:22:05.020 and then left to go be artists on Doctor Who magazine.

00:22:08.760 Moore, at the time, was then publishing V for Vendetta in Warrior,

00:22:12.280 and his work came to the attention of Swamp Thing creator Len Wein,

00:22:16.640 who then hired Moore to revolutionise Swamp Thing in 1983.

00:22:20.820 And it's significant because Len Wein was the editor for some of Watchmen.

00:22:25.180 And then about issue five, when issue five was being published,

00:22:28.780 and Alan Moore had given him the script treatment for the last issues,

00:22:32.780 Len Wein quit the book.

00:22:33.900 Yeah, I bet you did.

00:22:35.300 And the reason was, Len Wein recognised that the ending had been plagiarised from an episode of The Outer Limits.

00:22:41.480 Oh, really?

00:22:42.200 Where a series of scientists fabricate an alien invasion to try to end the Cold War.

00:22:47.260 And in the episode of The Outer Limits, one scientist...

00:22:50.240 I had no idea about this because one of the things that I was going to praise him for

00:22:54.820 was that the mystery is interesting and that Moore had managed to write a smartest character in the world

00:23:02.720 who at least on first glance did actually feel like an intelligent character so the fact that

00:23:08.340 you just nicked it that's amazing yeah so it was the episode was called the architects of fear and

00:23:13.360 essentially a group of scientists get together and they they do cosmetic surgery on one of the

00:23:18.620 scientists to turn him into an alien and he gets fatally shot and the the plan goes wrong and his

00:23:23.660 wife finds his body and she weeps alan moore decided to take that and possibly the plot of

00:23:29.640 ursula le guin's lave of heaven where the main character is called george or is a homage to

00:23:34.520 george orwell yeah he has a superpower he can't control which is that he dreams things and they

00:23:38.700 come true and there's a psychiatrist who's trying to manipulate him to try and make the world perfect

00:23:43.080 and at one point the world is at war and the psychiatrist goes right dream of an alien invasion

00:23:47.120 to stop stop the world going to war and george dreams up an alien invasion to bring all of earth

00:23:53.180 together there's an iconic bit where um the aliens are spotted on the moon he goes get rid of the

00:23:57.680 aliens from the moon and then suddenly all the glass explodes outside he goes what the hell's

00:24:00.420 happened he goes they're not on the moon anymore because they've landed it's such a great book but

00:24:04.500 but ween okay i need to give that a read that sounds good it's fantastic ween ween recognized

00:24:09.920 that more had plagiarized the outer limits and more confessed it to him though more currently

00:24:14.420 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 premium video, please head over to lotuseaters.com and subscribe to gain full access to all of our

00:28:36.120 premium content.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - July 22, 2026

PREVIEW： Comics Corner #17 ｜ How Watchmen Ruined Comics

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