Watchmen 2 discussion over on Mindless Ones
I contributed to the Mindless Ones’ post on the Watchmen prequels, or at least my swearier alter ego Andre Whickey did. That post was put together from what started as informal discussions between us, hence the writing style for my bits is very different and swearier than my normal writing.
Eschatology & Escapology 2: Desperate Scientists, Last Hope
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
“Doomed planet
Desperate scientists
Last hope
Kindly couple”
All-Star Superman #1 by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant
One of my favourite comics of all time is Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? by Alan Moore and Curt Swan. Its opening is still one of the most powerful bits of writing Moore has done, in a career with thousands of them, and it as much as anything else inspired this series of essays:
This is an IMAGINARY STORY
(which may never happen, but then again may)
about a perfect man who came from the sky and did only good.
It tells of his twilight, when the great battles were over and the
great miracles long since performed;
of how his enemies conspired against him and of that final war in
the snowblind wastes beneath the Northern Lights;
of the women he loved and of the choice he made between them;
of how he broke his most sacred oath, and how finally all the things
he had were taken from him save one.
It ends with a wink.
It begins in a quiet midwestern town, one
summer afternoon in the quiet midwestern future.
Away from the big city, people still sometimes glance up hopefully from
the sidewalks, glimpsing a distant speck in the sky… but no: it’s only a
bird, only a plane — Superman died ten years ago.This is an IMAGINARY STORY…
Aren’t they all?
But strangely, despite this attempt to turn the Superman story into a universal myth, the story then turns into one that is very, very specifically based in then-current DC continuity. This made perfect sense at the time – it was a ‘goodbye’ to thirty-plus years of stories, characters and situations. But it meant that it was rooted in the specific, rather than the universal.
This had benefits, for example this sequence:
From Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?
The first time I read that, I don’t mind admitting I broke down in tears. It’s an astonishingly beautiful piece of writing, and its force is made more powerful by being drawn by Curt Swan (inked by the great George Perez) – this still looks exactly like the simplistic stories of the 1960s, even though there is a lot more going on. These simple children’s characters are being asked to carry a weight they were never designed to carry, and are only doing so precisely because they remain the characters of our collective childhoods.
But it’s only powerful if you have background knowledge. Depending on your familiarity with the Superman ‘mythos’ of the time, this could be anything from near-incomprehensible (though I think Moore gives enough information to give you some context, because he’s a wonderful craftsman) through to heart-stoppingly beautiful. But ‘heart-stoppingly beautiful’ only comes if you know that, for Superman, this had already happened:
Cover of Crisis On Infinite Earths 7, by George Perez
Supergirl had, in the comics, recently sacrificed herself to help save the universe (and this story was so powerful she stayed dead for twenty years – almost unheard of in superhero comics). But this had only happened in the comics – it had obviously not happened in any of the films, TV series, cartoons or other interpretations of the Superman story.
So while Moore is obviously trying for the mythic and universal, in a myriad ways (I think I’m the only one to have noticed, for example, that he has Superman die ten years to the day after Elvis, so when Superman turns out at the end not to be dead, but just living a normal life without his powers, he ties it to the ‘Elvis working in a Burger King in Des Moines’ tabloid stories of the time, as well as to one of the most potent of what can only be called the 20th century’s ‘real-life myths’), to make this the capstone of ‘the Superman story’, what we have is, by necessity, only the end of a Superman story. There’d be another one along in a minute.
[FOOTNOTE the one that came along in a minute was John Byrne's Man Of Steel reboot. This originally looked more exciting and 'modern', but has badly dated - and Byrne's changes can sometimes look pretty unpleasant in retrospect. The original Siegel and Shuster had Superman sent to Earth as a baby. Byrne had a 'birthing matrix' sent, landing on Earth before Superman was born, thus ensuring that someone who had previously represented the Jewish immigrant experience to the US was now born in the USA - a reflection of Reaganite anti-immigration ideas that is very odd coming from a writer/artist who was himself doubly an immigrant (born in the UK, Byrne moved first to Canada before becoming a US citizen).]
Moore’s story is rooted in specifics of place and time – it takes place in a flashback to 16 August 1987, with a framing sequence on 16 August 1997. Even its future is now fourteen years in the past. That doesn’t remove its power for now – I first read the Crisis issue where Supergirl died when I was eleven, so Moore & Swan’s work still has the power to affect me. But Crisis is ephemera – at best it will last in the same way Sexton Blake or Billy Bunter stories from the turn of the last century have. If it’s read in a hundred years at all, it will be as a footnote to Man Of Tomorrow [FOOTNOTE - or maybe Animal Man], and Man Of Tomorrow will only be read by scholars of Alan Moore’s work.
By contrast, I think Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant’s All Star Superman will (possibly along with the first two Christopher Reeve films, and maybe Siegel & Shuster’s original origin story ) be the Superman story that lasts as long as the human race are interested in stories of superheroes.
Partly, this is because it’s simply a better work. I don’t think Morrison’s quite the writer that Moore is (though I don’t want to get into a Moore-vs-Morrison argument, quite possibly the most tedious discussion it’s possible to have about comics. Both men are superlative writers, and I would rather read even a minor work by either above almost anything by almost anyone else in the medium), but Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? doesn’t play to Moore’s strengths. Moore is Apollonian – he’s a formalist by nature, whose greatest strengths come from rigorous plotting, structural innovation and intellectual bravado. The best example of Moore as writer of a single-issue comic book is probably Promethea #12, which (with the help of J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray, Todd Klein, Jose Villarubia and Jeromy Cox) uses the comic page the way Bach used the keys of the harpsichord, to create stunning contrapuntal effects that no-one else could ever create. Having Moore write a two-issue Superman story to be drawn by Curt Swan and edited by Julie Schwartz is a bit like asking Bach to write a twelve-bar blues. You’d probably get something pretty great, but it would still be a waste of his talents.
By contrast Morrison, while he’s also interested in formal experimentation, is more Dionysiac (for all that All-Star Superman is an Apollonian myth). He works in a more improvisatory way, leaving far more to his collaborators, and seems to be far more interested in emotional effect than in process. If Moore is Bach then Morrison is John Coltrane or Eric Dolphy, improvising wild ideas around the core of a pop song and playing off his collaborators’ work.
And luckily, in All-Star Superman Morrison had the pefect collaborator in penciller Frank Quitely. While I would never hear a word said against Curt Swan’s work, his greatest strength was (as Calamity Jon Morris described later Superman artist Dan Jurgens) “The things he drew sure do look like the things they’re meant to look like”. That’s not quite the damning with faint praise it sounds like – in the comics industry that bespeaks a level of professionalism and craftsmanship that would probably put an artist in the top five percent, sadly. But it’s not a quality that is necessarily suited to making lasting art.
Frank Quitely, on the other hand, is one of the most intelligent, sensitive artists working in ‘mainstream’ comics. While he’s not as innovative as some would have it (many of his innovations come from European or indie comics that many of his readers haven’t read), he is able to use the comics page in a way that few others would be able to. Just consider this panel, for example:
Panel from All-Star Superman #1, pencils by Frank Quitely, digital inks and colours by Jamie Grant
(That image can be clicked through to if it isn’t displayed at full size on your screen)
The interesting thing about this is not just the multiple-images-in-one-frame thing to indicate motion – this had been done before, and was probably invented by Carmine Infantino in Flash stories in the 1950s, though it’s rarely been done so skillfully and gracefully, but the thought that’s been put into it. It’s a cliche to say ‘there’s not a line out of place’ but in Quitely’s case it’s simply true. Quitely uses fewer lines per page than most comic artists will use in a small panel, and as a result philistines accuse him of ‘laziness’ and ‘not drawing backgrounds’. But every line in every Quitely panel is placed to illustrate one of plot, character or environment. And there’s far more detail there than appears at first glance. Take this, for example:
Detail from above panel
That’s Cat Grant’s shoe, poking out under her desk. And precisely the kind of shoe the character would wear. Most readers will never notice that, but tiny details like that add to the impression that this is a real, living world, where things happen ‘offstage’ and characters have lives away from the protagonist. In fact a huge amount of this story only takes place by implication, in the gutters and what is left unsaid.
And this is the reason why All-Star Superman will be read long after Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? is forgotten. Because whereas the latter depends for its (incredible) power on being part of a specific continuity, All-Star Superman only depends on you knowing the outline of the Superman myth – “Doomed planet, desperate scientists, last hope, kindly couple” and we’re into the story. It doesn’t matter what shape the rocket he landed in was, or whether there was an Eradicator in it, or whether Super-Horses live on Krypton, or whether he was born Kal-El or Kal-L. All that matters is that he’s Superman.
And it takes aspects from every version of the Superman story to have been published – ranging from an updated version of Jack Kirby’s version of Jimmy Olsen, to Steve Lombard from the 70s stories, to Cat Grant from the 90s soap-operatic comics, to Qwewq The Infant Universe and Solaris The Tyrant Sun from Morrison’s own JLA stories. The Kent/Superman distinction is pure Christopher Reeve – you can hear Reeve saying the Clark Kent lines – but he’s drawn in pure Wayne Boring style. These are incorporated to precisely the extent that they serve the larger story being told, and no more, but all are given their own remarkable stories (Steve Lombard goes from being a blustering bully early in the story to an almost heroic figure by the end).
The story itself is possibly the most audacious ever told in a superhero comic, and probably only escaped right-wing outrage by being so ludicrously good – Morrison doesn’t just turn Superman into a Jesus-figure, like the awful Superman Returns, but actually makes him the personal God that created humanity on the Earth on which we live, pretty much in passing as part of an even larger story.
And in the end, almost everyone is redeemed. Even Lex Luthor, the only person presented as actually evil, has a moment of enlightenment:
Luthor Einstein failed to unify the gravitational force with the other three but he… he had no experience of this…it’s so obvious. I can actually see and hear and feel and taste it and… the fundamental forces are yoked by a single thought.
Nasthalthia Lexie? How do I get this hat to work?
Luthor It’s thought-controlled! Hmm? Sorry… sorry, these new senses…I can actually see the machinery and wire connecting and separating everything since it all began… this is how he sees all the time, every day. Like it’s all just us, in here, together. And we’re all we’ve got.
Nasthalthia Uncle Lex! You’re literally embarrassing me beyond all therapy with this behavior!
Luthor Nasthalthia!
Superman No, he’s just trying to articulate how gravity warps time and how I forced his metabolism to accelerate to compensate.
How gravity warps time? I think I might just have something to say about that, and so might Grant Morrison…
Panel from All-Star Superman 12, written by Grant Morrison, pencils Frank Quitely, digital inks and colours Jamie Grant
Neonomicon 2: Someone Stage An Intervention For Alan Moore
I’m a little late to writing about Neonomicon 2 – and Jog and the Mindless Ones have said a lot of what needs to be said here. But I felt the need to put my oar in…
Taken as part of a larger work, Neonomicon 2 may turn out to be worthwhile. However, as a single issue of a comic book – which is, after all, how it’s being sold – it is a vile, vile thing.
Alan Moore’s use of rape in his comics is well-known at this point, as are the arguments over it. One side says, with some justification, that having rape be a plot point in every single major work for 30 years suggests a possibly unhealthy fascination with the subject, while the other side argues that in most cases it’s justified and making a point, not just to shock or titilate.
I’ve tended to side with the latter, because Moore is, firstly, the greatest writer the medium of comics has ever seen, and possibly the greatest writer in any medium the English language has produced in the last fifty years, and secondly someone who is a very outspoken feminist. But my patience with this trope in his works has been getting ever thinner.
But what I want to say, and something that unfortunately hasn’t really been said explicitly in the reviews I’ve read of this, is this:
If you are a rape victim/survivor, even if you do not normally mind too much about ‘triggering’, please think very carefully before you read this comic
I say this because there are at least two people I know of who read this blog, read comics, and have been raped. There may very well be more – those are the ones who have chosen to let me know the fact.
The use of rape here is qualititavely different from anything Moore has done before. Even From Hell, for all its explicitness, showed a certain amount of restraint, but while I would never say that anyone should absolutely refrain from reading anything, still less that someone should avoid any subject, I actually think that this comic could seriously upset and possibly mentally harm vulnerable people.
What Moore and Jacen Burrows, the artist, give us here, is an extended, six-page, explicit depiction of someone being brutally gang-raped. I found it disturbing and mildly sickening, and I am both an insensitive clod and someone who’s been fortunate enough never to have experienced sexual violence myself. This is several orders of magnitude nastier than anything Moore has put in any of his previous work – this isn’t just a couple of panels, with a close up of the victim’s face looking anguished, this is something altogether worse.
Now, it may be that the comic as a whole will be so good, so profound, that it justifies this – I suspect not, but it may be. I certainly wouldn’t rule it out – Moore at his worst is a better writer than most writers at their best, and Burrows is a very underrated artist, primarily because he mostly works for Avatar, not a company known for putting out good work. But as a single issue of a horror comic, this feels closer to something like the issue of Tarot with the haunted vagina. The difference is, Tarot is not something that anyone will pick up unless they’re actively looking for sexualised violence. Neonomicon, by virtue of its writer, is.
Someone needs to sit Alan Moore down and talk to him about this, because while for each individual occurence of rape in his work you can make excuses, it is something that makes his work, when taken as a body, have the effect of trivialising rape – when I’m absolutely certain that the whole reason he includes depictions of sexualised violence is because he thinks it’s an important, awful issue.
My bet is that when Neonomicon is completed, it’ll be an important comic – imagine Moore doing The Filth but in a Lovecraftian vein and without the humour – but taking this issue on its face, without giving Moore the benefit of doubt, it reads like something written by the worst kind of nasty misogynist, like the arsehole who once found my blog by googling “supergirl rape stories”.
But I’m becoming increasingly worried that getting Moore to write a story without a rape scene is like getting Frank Miller to write a female character who isn’t a prostitute, and then I start to think about Dave Sim, and then I start to worry if there’s something intrinsic to this medium that I love that does this to people, and then I think about “supergirl rape stories” again, and I wonder if I should get a different hobby…
Last Week’s Comics In Brief
Last week was an incredibly slow week for comics, and I was away for the Fantastic Films Weekend in Bradford over the weekend (about which I may write tomorrow). On top of that, none of the very small number of comics I bought on Thursday allow for very much analysis, so I’m going to pinch the Mindless Ones’ idea and do Tues Reviews To Make You Snooze or something…
Adventure Comics 12 by Paul Levitz, Kevin Sharpe, Marlo Alquiza and Marc Deering.
This is the first issue of this title I’ve read, and I was mildly – but only mildly – impressed. Despite Levitz’ reputation when last working with the Legion Of Superheroes for doing BIG stories, such as The Great Darkness Saga, all universe-spanning epics, this reads like a Silver Age Superboy story.
Or, more precisely, like Kurt Busiek ‘doing’ Silver Age Superboy in Astro City – much like Busiek’s work there’s the slight padding of what feels like an eight-pager into a full story, the cosy Norman Rockwell family scene at the end, and a sense of ‘look, I’m writing a proper Silver Age style story’ rather than just *writing* a proper Silver Age style story.
There are also faults that are common to current DC – in particular, every character having to tell Superman how specially special he is – and ones that are unique to this book (only Brainiac 5 gets even the slightest characterisation, and the line art is slapdash).
Nonetheless, this is competent and pleasant enough. Which given DC’s current standards is a major achievement.
Dodgem Logic 3 by Alan Moore et al
Dear God but this is a heap of shit. I’ve given this three issues because Moore is ALAN MOORE and because there are a number of very talented people involved in this (in this issue, for example, we have Melinda Gebbie, Kevin O’Neill, Steve Moore and Josie Long). But this third issue is exactly like the other two – a couple of half-decent essays (and I do hope Moore publishes a book of the essays he’s done for this or something), a nice free gift (a T-shirt transfer by Melinda Gebbie that would be useful were I the kind of person who went around wearing T-shirts with drawings of naked women on them) and a load of shit.
The shit comes in many varieties – grumpy old man who thinks the world should be like it was when he was a kid shit, pseudo-radical ‘post-civilisation’ shit, sixth-formers who think they’ve discovered something new that the rest of the world knows about shit, and worst of all people who *AREN’T* sixth formers who write like that.
There’s actually an article in here – BY A RECORD SHOP OWNER – that treats Badfinger (except he spells it Bad Finger), Adam And The Ants, The Chocolate Watch Band, Celia & The Mutations and Bobbie Gentry as being somehow obscure musical figures that need bringing to our attention. I mean seriously.
This is just pisspoor, and my huge affection for Alan Moore will only let me indulge him so far.
The Bulletproof Coffin #1 by David Hine and Shaky Kane
THIS is much more like it. This first issue is mostly set-up, but it’s an intriguing set-up – our main character finds a stash of comics that should never have been published.(“Issue 198. The Comic Buyers’ Guide lists the last issue of The Unforgiving Eye as 127. This comic shouldn’t even exist”), created by the classic 1950s comic creation team of Hine and Kane. We get to read one of these – an eight-page EC pastiche, and we get a lot of odd, quite disturbing details (like a TV showing the murder of its previous owner).
It’s very far from being done-in-one, and it’s not the most original thing ever – the mock ads and comic history seem reminiscent of 1963, though I do *LOVE* the ad on the back for a “U-Control Darling Lab Monkey” (which reminds me a lot of Kane’s work in 2000AD in the early 90s, like his Believe It Or Not parodies). But it’s still fascinating.
For those not familiar with Kane’s work, he’s school-of-late-Kirby in much the same way as Tom Scioli, taking his cues far more from Devil Dinosaur than Fantastic Four, but with a wonderfully sleazy line and sense of place. Combined with the story we have something inhabiting a narrative space somewhere between Seaguy and a PG-rated version of The Filth, but formally closer to 1963 (and with a text piece at the end very like those in Watchmen). If ‘Jack Kirby draws Seaguy for EC Comics’ sounds like your kind of thing, then while this doesn’t live up to that description it is almost certainly worth you checking out.
And that was all I picked up last week. But on Thursday we have BATMAN 700, so you can expect a lot of comment from me about that over the weekend…
Linkblogging for 18/11/09
Well, I’m just about well enough to type one of these, after a few days of essentially staring blankly into space (went back to work today, though I probably should have had another day or so off). Proper post tomorrow, I hope:
(BTW for anyone going to the Thought Bubble comic convention in Leeds on Saturday, I’ll be the one with the biggest beard in the place. Feel free to say hello).
Bob Temuka talks about This Is Information, the Moore/Gebbie response to Sept 11, 2001, and compares it with The Invisibles.
Pillock thinks Blackest Night Sucks.
Alix has a modest proposal in regards to road privatisation.
A wonderful post about chavs from The Noughties Were Shit. Read past the first couple of paragraphs…
And Millennium reviews the latest episode of the Welsh Series.
League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Warning – might be triggering and also contains spoilers)
Before I start the review proper, a note about an issue I’ve got with this…
My problem with this comic isn’t so much with the comic itself, as with it being yet another exemplar of a rather worrying trend in Alan Moore’s work – in a large, large proportion of Moore’s work – the overwhelming majority of it, in fact – there is a rape scene or other scene of seualised violence. There are exceptions – his Superman stories, as one obvious example, and I’m pretty sure Tom Strong has nothing like that in it. But From Hell, Watchmen, all four League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen volumes, V For Vendetta, The Killing Joke, Lost Girls… all have rape or attempted rape scenes. If you pick up an Alan Moore comic, you can expect there to be a scene involving someone trying – or succeeding – to rape someone else.
Now, in most cases Moore judges this pretty well – it’s never portrayed as anything other than a hideous, violating act perpetrated by odious individuals (the exception being in the first League volume, where it’s treated as a bit of a joke), it’s almost never used in the way rape is usually used in comics – to give male characters motivation (with the exception of The Killing Joke, which Moore disowns now) and it’s often coupled with an explicitly feminist message, as in From Hell.
And I wouldn’t want to suggest that Moore should avoid the subject altogether – rape does, unfortunately, happen, and to exclude any part of human experience from art is a bad idea. Certainly, something like From Hell – a story about Jack The RIpper – couldn’t possibly have been created under such restrictions. In each individual case it works – after all, Moore is a truly great writer, and very aware of the issues involved – but still, after a while it becomes problematic.
In fact I suspect it’s precisely *because* Moore is aware of the issues that the problem exists. The way rape is used in Moore’s stories strikes me very much as Moore doing something I often do myself – trying to overcompensate for his own privilege. He’s very aware of the misogyny of popular culture, and tries a bit too hard to show he disapproves, shouting “Look! Isn’t this terrible?! Rape is very bad! Treating women as sex objects is bad! Don’t do these bad things! It’s wrong!” to the point where it looks like he protests too much – his own good intentions making the work more problematic than it would be if he just avoided the subject.
It also makes the work more problematic for a reviewer – firstly because it has to be recommended with caveats (an unfortunately high proportion of my friends have been victims of some kind of sexual violence and would rather not be reminded of it, hence the warning in the title here, and I unfortunately suspect my friends aren’t especially anomalous in this) rather than unconditionally, and secondly because it means there are things I can’t do that I want to do. League is meant to be a fun romp, albeit one with dark moments, and I wanted to write this review as pastiche Brecht lyrics (much of the story in this volume is narrated with rewritten versions of Threepenny Opera lyrics), but I got two stanzas through rewriting The Ballad Of Dependency as a complaint about Moore’s over-use of rape in his comics before I realised how utterly offensive that could be…
But other than that, how did you enjoy the play Mrs Lincoln?
It’s actually rather fascinating – Moore and O’Neill seem to be incorporating Moore’s own previous work into the fiction they’re referencing in League – we almost have an ‘Alan Moore greatest hits’ here. The main reference is From Hell – here Jack The Ripper is ‘Jack MacHeath’ (MacHeath – Mack The Knife/Mackie Messer – from The Threepenny Opera), we have Crowley-substitutes and Iain Sinclair’s Mr Norton talking about psychogeography, and O’Neill does a spot-on Walter Sickert pastiche on the back cover. In fact this comes very close to being a sequel to From Hell in terms of subject, theme and mood.
But we also have a text feature in the back featuring a superhero created by Mick Anglo (this one used by permission), and the whole comic is a pirate story based around the Black Freighter (here renamed the Black Raider). The characters bursting into song also echo V For Vendetta (although there Moore was also echoing Brecht of course). It seems as if Moore is ostentatiously trying to say his own work is as much material for him to mine as anyone else’s.
(Incidentally, once again I appear to be talking about the writer to the exclusion of the artist, because I know more about writing than art. However, O’Neill’s surpassing himself here – just look at the cover design, or the back cover painting. And some of the panels of Suki singing directly to the reader are just scary. Also, given that the League members have now taken to wearing question marks all over their clothes, I am going to hereby declare, whether it’s Moore/O’Neill’s intention or not, that The Doctor joined the League between seasons 17 & 18, which would explain the stupid question marks he wears thereafter).
In itself, the story doesn’t give much to talk about other than spot-the-reference, which Jess Nevins already has covered, telling two parallel stories – of Janni the diver becoming Pirate Jennie while Jack Macheath is back in town and killing again, and of Mina, Raffles, Quatermain, Carnacki and Orlando investigating plans by Oliver Haddo to create a Moonchild. While it’s a satisfying issue in itself, this is mostly setup for the next few Century issues.
I may write more on this when I’ve thought about it a little more…
Filming The Watchmen
Before my enforced absence from any form of communication, thanks to the inaptly named TalkTalk (I now have a phone line that crackles so badly I can’t hear the other end of the conversation, I can’t receive incoming calls, and I only have internet access while actually on the ‘phone) I was going to write about why I wasn’t going to watch the Watchmen film. But plenty of people have been doing that, in quite exhaustive detail, and I don’t have much to add to that. Anyone remotely interested will have seen the arguments, and if you’ve read both the book itself and the reviews that have appeared on the net (including phrases like “it’s full of ass-kicking and explosions, and who doesn’t like that?”) you’ll be able to draw your own conclusions about the film, and I genuinely don’t want to spoil the fun of anyone who does go to see it.
Nor do I think Watchmen is inherently unadaptable. I doubt there’s such a thing as an unadaptable work, though sometimes the only way to do the work justice would be to create an entirely different work with only the faintest connection to the original – see for example the Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufmann film Adaptation (and for those who’ve never done this, try watching that film back to back with Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, the Kaufmann-scripted adaptation of Chuck Barris’ ‘autobiography’).
The crucial thing to remember though when making a film adaptation is not to prize fidelity to the source material too highly. Fairly few films that are just straight adaptations of the source material have ever worked (the only one I can think of is One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest). To make an adaptation that actually works you must be ruthless with the source material. You can take a good novel and trim it right down, completely rewriting the plot, as in LA Confidential, or you can take a terrible novel, slice out the few bits that work and build an entirely new film around it, as in The Prestige. You can make a film about the unfilmability of the source material, as in Adaptation or A Cock And Bull Story, or you can transpose the events of the book into a different setting, as in Apocalypse Now. You can even take a terrible Harold Robbins novel and just stick in a load of scenes of Elvis singing Lieber/Stoller songs, as in King Creole, and get something watchable out.
But no matter what you do, the process of adaptation is one of selection and creation – no matter how faithful or otherwise you are to the source, you’re taking the elements that you think will work in the new medium and adding in elements of your own that you think will complement those.
With that in mind, here’s my idea of how you film Watchmen. The first thing to remember is it’s a comic, and it’s a collaboration, and that collaboration made it a success – this is something Snyder actually gets right, to an extent – he looked at the pictures. While you shouldn’t slavishly use the comic as a storyboard, you should at least look at Dave Gibbons’ art, and at the choices he’s made, and figure out why he made those particular choices – because everything’s there for a reason – and know why you’re making changes if you do.
My choice of director, were he alive, would be Robert Altman. Failing him, the Coen brothers would do a good job (as would Kubrick, though his films are probably too misogynist for what I have in mind). The film would be about 90 minutes long – I tend to agree with Hitchcock’s dictum that the length of a film should be proportionate to the size of the average bladder – and would be an ensemble piece. There are several threads going through the film, which never properly connect, but the characters bump into each other.
Our viewpoint character is Dr Malcolm Long, a middle-aged, overweight, friendly psychiatrist, a respectable black man of the kind usually played in films by Morgan Freeman. The film focuses on his relationship with his wife Gloria, and with one of his patients. While his relationship with his wife appears fine on the surface, he grows increasingly distant as he gets more involved in his work.
His patient, Walter Kovacs, is a serial killer who used to dress up in a mask and beat up – and eventually kill – criminals. In a series of conversations between him and Dr Long, we see in flashback the events that led him to be this way – his abusive mother, the Kitty Genovese murder (which in this film is the pivotal moment of the story) and the kidnap and murder of a small child. We also hear Kovacs talking about various other masked adventurers he knew in his past, but it’s never made clear whether these are real or people in his imagination. Kovacs has a nihilistic view of humanity, believing that nobody is truly good and that everyone is immoral – he thinks the Kitty Genovese story proves that humanity cannot be saved.
Every day Dr Long buys his newspaper from Bernard the newsvendor, who provides a sort of Greek chorus to the story, talking to the other Bernard who sits by the hydrant near his newsstand reading a comic. From him we learn that the world is facing nuclear holocaust any day, and that nothing appears able to stop it. Another customer of the newsvendor is Josephine the cabbie, who is having relationship troubles with her girlfriend (who I’ll call Geraldine because she’s unnamed in the source material) (ETA Actually she *is* named, once, in the comic, she’s called Aline), mostly because Geraldine is a very political gay woman while Josephine desperately wants to be ‘normal’.
As the story goes on Dr Long’s relationship with his wife weakens, as we see Kovacs’ history and his own mental deterioration, and this is paralleled by the news from the newsvendor telling us the world is close to an end. The climax of the film brings all these characters, except Kovacs, together – as Dr and Mrs Long are trying to reconcile their differences, Josephine and Geraldine Aline start fighting, very physically, and Malcolm has to choose between saving his marriage (his wife thinks he cares too much about people in general and not enough about her in particular) or helping someone who’s obviously getting hurt. He chooses the latter, thus proving that Kovacs was wrong and humanity *is* worth saving, just before a white light fills the screen and the sound of an explosion’s heard. We, like the characters, never know what killed them or why.
*THAT* would be a Watchmen film I would go to see. It would keep about as much of the material from the comic as Snyder’s version, be a hell of a lot cheaper to make, and almost certainly be a much better film.
What would *your* Watchmen film be?
Beyond Good And Evil Lies… Another Dimension
There are so many things going on in Final Crisis: Superman Beyond 3D 2 that I don’t know where to start talking about it. Even more than the main Final Crisis this is a thematic sequel to Seven Soldiers, and may be the ultimate ‘prismatic age’ comic, as well as being essentially an extra issue of All Star Superman.
Every line in here is packed with meaning upon meaning. Captain Atom, a character created by Steve Ditko, a follower of the crackpot ‘philosopher’ Ayn Rand, is here an embodiment of the thoughts of the German philosophers that Rand dismissed as ‘irrational’ (something she would know a lot about). He’s Nietzsche’s Superman – beyond the duality of good and evil, but he’s also talking like a pulp sci-fi Hegel – “A thought robot activated by the tremendous energies unleashed by collisions of fundamental opposing qualities. A new fission process powered by… dualities?”
We’ll leave aside the fact that he doesn’t understand what fission actually means (matter-antimatter collision is something rather different from nuclear fission, which is caused by small bits of matter colliding with slightly bigger bits) and notice that this is also a rather apt description of the vast majority of superhero comics – the ‘tights and fights’ base of the genre. New ideas being generated almost as an accidental byproduct of opposites clashing with tremendous energy…
His next line “Dualities? No, there are no dualities, only symmetries.” Again, this is a Ditko creation talking!
Except it isn’t, really, because this ‘Captain Allen Adam’ is of course ‘really’ Doctor Manhattan, from a world where the Charlton characters more closely parallel their Watchmen analogues. “I am the endgame of the idea that spawned the likes of you, Ultraman. I am above conflict.”
Here Morrison is taking Moore’s own interpretation of Watchmen – that it was meant to be the capstone of a particular approach to superhero comics, rather than a new way of doing them that everyone should follow. And while Captain Atom destroys both Ultraman and Superman, he uses that energy to move Superman (and not Ultraman) up to a higher plane. Superman takes on a ‘fiction suit’ to move to a ‘higher’ rather than a lower level of reality.
(Doesn’t a lot of the Bleed look like the astral plane in The Invisibles where Jim Crow goes? Been too long since I reread that…)
Superman Beyond 3D is in many ways the anti-Batman RIP. While Batman RIP was the ground-level story taking the place of American Gothic to Final Crisis‘ Crisis On Infinite Earths (except of course that here both stories were written by the same person – and the American Gothic/Crisis relationship is one that Morrison keeps coming back to in his recent superhero work), Superman Beyond 3D is the really big story to Final Crisis‘ merely gargantuan one, a reminder of the even bigger picture in much the same way as Mister Miracle was for Seven Soldiers. And this of course suggests that there are more layers yet – an infinite number of ever grander stories, with ever greater stakes, playing out all at the same time, with pawns in one story moving up the ranks and ending up in the story on the next level.
And it suggests, thankfully, that Final Crisis won’t be Morrison’s last work in the DCU – that, as Didio has been hinting, he’s got some big plans for the Multiverse following this. For all that I love Morrison’s creator-owned stuff, I wouldn’t want to be without his superhero work either. All of these comics have had a grand, Wagnerian feel to them (hardly surprising since this is Morrison’s Götterdämmerung) and so it’s only fitting that Superman’s story here should owe so much to Nietzsche while still repudiating the hatred so associated with his ideas.
And that last page. What a wonderful, inspiring, perfect page that is.
My brain is a little burned out on writing about Final Crisis after the recent comment thread of death, so I won’t go on any more. Suffice to say there’s a ton of stuff in here that relates both to the main story and to the very idea of stories – this is about optimism, and about pessimism, and about fighting the good fight. Those who disliked the last issue of FC as being just one big fight scene should love this, as it’s all idea and metaphor and symbolism – it takes several readings to really get all the subtleties Morrison is putting in here.
To be continued…
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