Watchmen, the Twelve-Part DC Comics Series by Writer Alan
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IN FOCUS: Watchmen Beyond Watchmen by Blair Davis atchmen, the twelve-part DC Comics series by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2016. Watchmen’s underlying reassessment of the morality and politics inherent in superhero storytelling rewrote what was possible in comic books. If comics have gained Wany increasing respectability (academic or otherwise) over the past three decades, then Watchmen is an important part of this shift. It is a breakthrough text, not only for the comic-book industry and comics scholarship but also as a case study of how a comic becomes translated across multiple media forms. This In Focus seeks to examine Watchmen’s creative legacy and its significance as a cross-media franchise and to consider the place of comics studies within film and media studies. Through this story about a group of heroes attempting to solve the murder of one of their own, Moore and Gibbons created a work of both narrative complexity and formal intricacy that had both an immediate and an enduring influence on the comics industry. Comics author Grant Morrison describes the book’s effect upon release as “a devastating ‘follow this’ to American comic-book superheroes” that served in part as a message to publisher DC Comics about the potentials of its characters and of superhero storytelling itself. “Watchmen was a Pop Art extinction-level event,” says Morrison, “a dinosaur killer and wrecker of worlds. By the time it was over—and its reverberations still resound—the equation was stark for superhero stories: Evolve or die.”1 In turn, many superhero comics began 1 Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011), 195. Press © 2017 by the University of Texas 114 Winter 2017 | 56 | No. 2 www.cmstudies.org Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 challenging the genre’s conventions regarding ideology, sexuality, and the very idea of heroism itself. From the first panel’s image of an iconic smiley-face button resting against the blood-soaked gutter, Moore and Gibbons challenged the traditional formal and narrative qualities of superhero comics (Figure 1). The story begins with a journal entry from the antihero Rorschach, one of the book’s main characters: “Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.”2 The bleak nature of these words complements (yet is not directly related to) the grim images of a shopkeeper hosing blood off the sidewalk while an unconcerned pedestrian treads through, bloody footprints trailing behind. Each panel lifts us higher and higher until we reach the broken window above, creating the semblance of a rising crane shot that would have been almost impossible to film before digital cinema. The final panel reveals a detective investigating the murder, which soon leads to the first of the book’s many nonlinear moments. From Gibbons’s innovative compositions to the complexity of Moore’s storytelling, Watchmen thoroughly challenged how comic books represented their heroes. The book’s enduring popularity and critical acclaim led to its canonical status among comics fans and scholars, as well as some literary critics. Time chose the book for its list of “100 Best Novels,” alongside Animal Farm, The Big Sleep, Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, On the Road, and To Kill a Mockingbird. There has been a growing amount of Watchmen scholarship, most notably Andrew Hoberek’s Considering “Watchmen”: Poetics, Property, Politics and Sara J. Van Ness’s “Watchmen” as Literature: A Critical Study of the Graphic Novel.3 Numerous extensions and adaptations emerged across a wide range of media, from live-action cinema and animation to video games and new forms like motion comics. Many of these subsequent texts have been derided, however, by fans who see Watchmen’s legacy as becoming tainted by a series of inferior variations.4 Sequels, prequels, and adaptations can complicate how we interpret an original text in light of the new works, but the notion of Watchmen and authorship is especially complicated. Moore infamously walked away from any future involvement with the book, severing ties with cocreator Gibbons in the process. He declared in 2008 of the following year’s feature film adaptation, “I will be spitting venom all over it.”5 If Watchmen is a canonical text, how are auteurist readings of the franchise complicated by these dynamics in the wake of Moore’s stance (as with DC’s 2012 series of Before 2 Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen, no. 1 (New York: DC Comics, 1986), 1. 3 Andrew Hoberek, Considering “Watchmen”: Poetics, Property, Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014); Sara J. Van Ness, “Watchmen” as Literature: A Critical Study of the Graphic Novel (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010). 4 See, for instance, how Joshua Wille’s Watchmen: Midnight, a 2012 fan-edit version that recuts Snyder’s film to more closely align it with the source material, “attempts to reshape the film Watchmen (2009) to more closely resemble the narrative structure, characterizations, and spirit of the original comic book series” (available at http://wille.tv /watchmen-midnight/). 5 Geoff Boucher, “Alan Moore on Watchmen Movie,” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2008, http://herocomplex .latimes.com/uncategorized/alan-moore-on-w/. 115 Figure 1. The first page of Watchmen, no. 1 (DC Comics, 1986). 116 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 Watchmen comic-book prequels, which explore the early history of the author’s characters but without his involvement)? Watchmen opens up some intriguing questions about the role of canonization in comics studies: What do we do with a comic once it becomes a franchise spanning multiple media? Do we need to account for any of the book’s reimaginings, or can the original text still be studied in total isolation? Unlike how such characters as Superman and Batman are handled in comics, Watchmen was initially a self-contained story, not a multiyear, ongoing narrative. The fact that the book has a definitive ending means that we read it differently than other franchise-fostering comics, whose popularity typically results in multiple titles, reboots, and decades of (often conflicting) continuity. Watchmen served as the antithesis of the franchise superhero comic for years, but if students can now familiarize themselves with the story and its characters via a wide range of extensions, adaptations, and prequels across various media, teaching Watchmen becomes a different prospect from when it remained a solitary text. When a canonical comic becomes a growing franchise, does it threaten that book’s continuing relevance? This idea will be put to the test in the coming years, particularly since DC Comics made Watchmen a part of the same narrative continuity as the rest of the company’s famous heroes with 2016’s DC Universe: Rebirth (Figure 2).6 We can no longer simply examine Superman and Batman as comics characters without ultimately taking into account the myriad ways in which they pervade popular culture across numerous media, and how they are consumed by more people in non- comic-book forms than through the pages of comics and graphic novels. Yet the various media extensions of those superheroes largely use the characters themselves, and not any one particular text, as the basis of the new material. The various extensions of Watchmen have been primarily centered on the original text and its narrative— be they direct adaptations, prequels fleshing out smaller story or character details, or a video game that draws Figure 2. Watchmen becomes part of DC’s regular on the book’s key settings. But as the narrative continuity in DC Universe: Rebirth (DC corporate need for media franchises Comics, 2016). 6 DC Universe: Rebirth, no. 1 (New York: DC Comics, 2016). Doctor Manhattan—Watchmen’s nuclear-powered, godlike hero—is apparently responsible for creating the universe that the DC heroes reside in. This act seems to stem from the ending of the Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan prequel (New York: DC Comics, 2011–2012) by J. Michael Straczyinski and Adam Hughes, further problematizing the question of Watchmen and canonization. 117 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 that embody transmedia storytelling approaches grows ever larger, further extensions of Watchmen may yet follow. Watchmen is one of few comics that have seen widespread adoption as a course text across campuses (often alongside Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis), signifying its status as a canonical work within comics studies.7 But perhaps a single text or author can become too central to a field of study—and to that field’s development. John Belton asked in a 2003 issue of Cineaste whether Alfred Hitchcock can be saved from Hitchcock studies, noting what he calls the “Hitchcock industry” within film studies.8 He argues that “as Hitchcock studies has grown, the nature of the questions posed in pursuit of the object Hitchcock have been shaped by the development of Film Studies as an academic discipline rather than by the qualities inherent in Hitchcock’s films themselves.”9 The same question might be asked of Watchmen, as its critical legacy parallels the advancement of comics studies as an academic discipline over the past few decades. Issues of media form, literary craft, and cultural representation have been at the forefront of the field in recent years, but as further growth occurs through institutions such as SCMS and the newly formed Comics Studies Society, we might also see issues of transmedia impact and industrial context become increasingly important factors in how comics are studied (much as they are applied to Watchmen by some of the contributors herein).