Clocking The Watchmen!

Now having defended DC's efforts to develop the Watchmen universe, I must say that Doomsday Clock by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank is an uneven effort. Frank's artwork is outstanding as usual and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with writing by Johns. Both do a remarkable job of echoing the classic Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, but the final effort feels watered down. It's a clever trick to have some of the Watchmen characters (or revised versions at least) enter a more familiar DC universe, but adding Superman and Batman to the mix is well done but falls short of expectations. Frankly, we only get Dr. Manhattan, Ozymandias and Rorscach. No Comedian, no Nite Owl, and no Silk Spectre. That's a mistake, particularly in regard to the final two. The story reads quickly, perhaps faster than I expected. Instead of the pirate tale traveling alongside the main plot, we get references to obscure DC character Nathaniel Dusk. This is a rocking good story, but put up against the classic original, it lacks the gravity and heft. Still a good read though. 

Here are the covers. 

 

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Debating The Watchmen!

What exactly is the controversy with DC Comics using The Watchmen as an element of a reborn-rebooted-revised-rehashed DC Universe. If you don't appreciate the "purity" of The Watchmen franchise being sullied by association with mere superheroes, then okay. Get mad, don't buy any of those issues and re-read the original story yet again and savor an excellent bit of storytelling. But why the outrage?

Many seem to suggest it's immoral for DC to use these characters as they desire. I'm not aware they need the permission of the creators to do with these characters as they desire, they own them, but they have been gracious in the past and asked both Moore and Gibbons to weigh in on any future plans. The characters have proven to be successful, so it's obvious why DC wants to market them, it's the nature of business. From what I can gather DC has lived up to their side of the bargain struck many decades ago with Moore and Gibbons. That the deal didn't work out exactly like Moore anticipated is not DC's fault. The flaw in Moore's reasoning is that The Watchmen proved to be more successful than anticipated. Shucks what a problem to have since Moore gets a cut of all sales.

Let me be clear. Comic book creators in the past have been royally screwed by comic book companies and famously so. Characters worth millions if not billions have been harvested and their creators have gotten little if any recompense for their dutiful and diligent effort. Companies screw people all the damn time, it's one of the more repulsive aspects to the celebrated capitalism everyone gets giddy about when the stock market tickers start buzzing. Winners and losers, part of the great game, and at least part of the target of the story told by Moore and Gibbons in their remarkable adventure.

But that said, Moore and Gibbons are not among those creators who have been screwed. They were lucky enough to come along when contracts were more fair if not ideal and they have reaped significant profit from their efforts, and Moore could've have gotten much more if he'd been more agreeable to what plans the publisher might've had. He's entitled to believe what he wants, but no one can say he's been screwed out of any money. And it's rich that folks suggest Moore of all creators is a victim of this kind of pilfering since he's made a sizeable portion of his post-Watchmen career scraping out the enormous bins of the public domain and using characters and situations originally developed by such giants as Verne, Rohmer, Baum, Stevenson, Dickens, Wells, Haggard, among countless others. I don't condemn him for these borrowings, I just find it rich that he is put up as a victim when he's a pilferer just like so many of us can be.

Now DC has incorporated The Watchmen into the broader DCU. So what? Why is everyone outraged? God, people get over it already. DC wants to sell comics and they've been rather poor at it in recent years despite making every effort to entice folks to drop five bucks for a slender slick and quickly consumed comic (could that be the problem). If they want to forestall their inevitable doom by using all the tools they have then so be it. There's nothing in the arrangement with Moore and Gibbons that suggests they cannot do it that I'm aware of.

So folks might think it's a bankrupt move creatively, but I cannot for the life of me get why folks think it's immoral. The Watchmen were hatched on the bones of characters from Charlton and elsewhere. Steve Ditko, Pete Morisi, Pat Boyette, Jim Aparo, and Joe Gill get no cut of the profits when characters clearly inspired by their stories featuring Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, Nightshade, Thunderbolt, and the Question. Gibbons and Moore cobbled "new" heroes on the heap of the classics and made a damn fine comic. Great! They cut a dandy deal with DC for a piece of the action. Fantastic! Where's the particular and distinctive immorality on DC's part here?

Help me to understand.

More Watchmen tomorrow. 

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Reading The Watchmen!

There is no question that Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons is among the finest comic series of all time. The story was a blockbuster when it was first published forty years ago and has remained in print ever since. Moore and Gibbons created an alternate dark universe in which it was always 1985 and Richard Nixon was still president of the United States, victorious in Vietnam, but still in a grisly world over which loomed the threat of nuclear war. It was almost as if time had stopped. 

(Ozymandias, Silk Spectre, Dr. Manhattan, Nite Owl, Rorschach and The Comedian)

In this alternate universe there were superheroes. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were not to be seen, but instead this world had heroes such as Nite Owl, Rorschach, Ozymandias, Silk Spectre, The Comedian and the supremely powerful Dr. Manattan. There had been another generation of heroes in years past, but these five are the ones who we focus on in this story and it is these five who will decide the fate of the planet. But who are these heroes? 

It seems that at first Moore and Gibbons had been given the Charlton Action-Heroes which had been recently acquired by DC as a present for Dick Giordano who had once edited the heroes in the late 60's. But then DC smartly decided to keep the Charlton heroes aside for future exploitation and so Moore and Gibbons had to create new heroes using the Charlton heroes as templates. The first among these, and in many ways the most crucial was The Comedian, a hero based on The Peacemaker. People have long thought Peacemaker by Jim Boyette and Joe Gill to be an absurd hero, a hero who fights for peace. I don't share this opinion but nonetheless The Comedian is presented as a somewhat foul fighter for justice, a man who sees the joke behind the way the world works. He is closely allied with the U.S. government and one of only two superheroes who are allowed to work in the country since the passing of a law forbidding masked vigilantes. It is the Comedian's murder which triggers the story. 

The threat of nuclear destruction loomed large in the 1980's. I felt it myself as a young man as we fretted who might push the almighty button first, us or the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed the threat seemed lifted though the weapons still exist. 

A symbol of nuclear power was Dr Manhattan, the other legal superhero. Manhattan was based on Captain Atom created by Joe Gill and Steve Ditko. Atom was caught in a nuclear explosion and reconstituted his demolished body which was infused with radioactive might. Dr. Manhattan was also victim of a nuclear accident and the was "gifted" with a wide range of atomic powers, not the least of which was a strange ability to live in all moments of his life simultaneously. Part of a deadly scheme which started with the murder of Comedian demanded that Dr. Manhattan be driven from Earth, thus setting in motion events which would result in nuclear holocaust. 

The hero who is looking into the murder of The Comedian is the enigmatic Rorschach. When everyone else is content that it was a simple crime, he searches for the story beneath the obvious. His mission is what drives the story and gives it a sense of coherence. 

Rorschach is based on Steve Ditko's The Question. (Mr. A is another more extreme version of the Ditko character and seems also a clear influence on Rorschach.) The Question was Ditko's mainstream creation which most vividly evoked his Objectivist attitudes. In Rorschach there are conspiracies everywhere and even in his unmasked identity the search for the dark secrets is evident. 

The hero most closely linked to Rorschach is Nite Owl, the second hero who bears that name. Both Nite Owl and Rorschach have been banned by law from being vigilantes. Rorschach continues as a criminal while Nite Owl retired. Nite Owl is based on Blue Beetle, most vividly Steve Ditko's revised version of the character who is very much dependent on technology to pursue his methods of crime prevention. 

There are two Nite Owls in this saga, one the ally of Rorschach, the other a retired hero who runs a garage and who famously wrote a tell-all book which uncovered some of the darker aspects of the heroes who preceded the Watchmen. This first Nite Owl is based on the classic Blue Beetle from the Golden Age. 

Silk Spectre is the singular female hero in this bunch, and the youngest of the lot. She's a second-generation hero, following in the footsteps of her mother who groomed her to replace her. She is the paramour of Dr. Manhattan as the story opens and together they form a key chapter of the story, but her relationship with the second Nite Owl is really at the center of the Watchmen saga. Silk Spectre is based on Nightshade, another creation of Steve Ditko who debuted in the pages of Captain Atom. 

The final member of the Watchmen is Ozymandias, the smartest man on the planet. He is based on  Thunderbolt created by Pete Morisi. Ozymandias is a man who started as a hero but finds that fighting crime is a limited effort and so focuses on his many business interests and philanthropy. He has a base in the Antarctic which plays a key role in the story as it unfolds. 

Of the five key Watchmen characters three were created or co-created by Steve Ditko. His fingerprints are all over his story. It's a grim look at a scary time in human history when we all thought doom was just around the corner. 

I've intentionally been vague about key details of the story as not to spoil the story for anyone who might not have yet enjoyed it. It took me some years to realize its greatness as I was away from DC when it first rolled out. But there's no denying it's a classic and deserves a close reading by all comic book fans, especially those who love the Charlton heroes as I do. The story itself takes place mostly during the month of October and the climax is on November 2nd, the birthday of Steve Ditko. Whether that's intentional or a fluke it's still remarkable. Personally given Moore's attention to detail I doubt it's a coincidence. 

The story has been reprinted many times now and can be found in both expensive tomes and cheap versions. I own it three times. More on the Watchmen tomorrow. 

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Blogging The Watchmen!

Just a quick note to the regular visitors that due to problems with Blogger, I have been forced to switch links and other key features to the bottom of the blog. For links and other details about what's happening here, check down below. On the upside, it's motivated me to give the blog a fresh look. Hopefully things will settle down. 

Tomorrow we will begin to wrap up a stormy month with some Watchmen reviews. The more I dig into this classic comic by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, the more I appreciate it, especially in these dark days. 

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The Multiverse Of Charlton!

I picked up Multiversity- Pax Americana for the very simple reason that I love the old Charlton Action-Heroes and this is as close as we're ever going to get to seeing new adventures featuring those awesome characters.

These characters, created largely under the aegis of editor Dick Giordano were a brief but brilliant attempt to mine the superhero market which blossomed briefly during the Silver Age. Captain Atom and Blue Beetle were dusted off and revamped with new heroes such as Peacemaker, Nightshade, The Question and Judomaster brought along to fill in the ranks.

These characters of course these days are mostly remembered as the inspirations for Alan Moore's iconic Watchmen series and many dismiss them beyond that point. Alas, in this story Grant Morrison, a storyteller with stones, tries to revisit these heroes but clearly through the goggles of the Watchmen variations.

We are invited into a complex story, told by Morrison and artist Frank Quitely, which travels back and forth through time and space with all sorts of visual hijinks, all serving to create some larger mystery and make some larger point. The heroes are not as developed as individuals but merely used as elements of the one-shot story which explores the nature of heroes and justice and how the society can best make use of them.

We get good looks at Captain Atom, a man removed from his fellows by the dint of awesome power and who seems lost inside himself and the universe he sees differently from everyone else. The lovely Nightshade is a very young government agent who seeks to find the right way, but seems out of her depth most of the time. Peacemaker is a man on a mission which makes little sense for most of the story. The Question as always seeks answers regardless, while the Blue Beetle is a loyal government man.

We get glimpses of Sarge Steel and while Rip Jagger the Judomaster doesn't make the cut, his sidekick Tiger is around for a few pages as a member of a superhero unit which has a lot of vintage fun picking out a sobriquet.

The story even has a reference to Charlton's first superhero, the Golden Age Yellowjacket.

(Frank Quitely)

This is a complicated yarn, a mystery which has an answer, but which demands mighty attention from the reader and frankly more than one pass through the material. 

At five bucks for a copy, I guess I should thank Morrison and Quitely for giving me a comic which demands to be read more than once, since the density makes the entertainment value rise.

This is a book any Charlton Action-Hero fan should read, if only to see some vintage imagery and old rather obscure Charlton references hanging around in various panels. It has been collected up a few times. 

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