The Comic Book Enthusiast
reading & writing about
comics
I apologize for not posting about Considering Watchmen back in time. I tried my best to read during my trip for a conference in Illinois, but so many things occurred that I didn't have time to finish. Please find the posts that were supposed to be after this one here, here, and here. Thank you! Andrew Hoberek’s Considering Watchmen discusses a lot about the creation of the Watchmen characters themselves as well as their transformation or alterations to become the Watchmen. Further, he focuses on multiple issues with retaining rights to Watchmen as well as the reality that the Watchmen universe embodies. I really enjoyed his discussion on how Moore was the one who shifted art to the importance of storytelling and how that carries the art to a more profound state. Further, the focus on how the superpowers are one thing but also the effects that come with those powers. I think that says a lot about comic books that do not really have a “real” focus. This is not to say that I don’t like fantasy worlds but Watchmen shows readers that the world is messed up. Further, it is important to note the success of graphic narratives as “Watchmen and Dark Knight [that] are jointly famous for bringing a darker, putatively more realistic tone to the superhero genre: unlike previous superheroes the protagonists of these series age, have sex, and commit morally questionable acts” (23). Since comic books can be educational, people who read them are more likely to learn something even if it’s minimal. I think Allan Moore gives hope to writers who want to enter the comic book industry who are not likely to be hired for their art or who do not have artistic skills. Therefore his stories can offer a sense of collaboration that is more likely to be successful rather than just art for art’s sake.I think Moore is so prevalent in the comic book industry because he combined the now with the possible, which to means that things that happen in his stories are likely to be real. For instance, he has America all figured out with the character The Comedian who is acts the way America really is and does not even try to be better but instead takes himself for who he is. For instance, Hoberek mentions that “Earlier, at the start of the sixties, superheroes had not felt stress at balancing their crime- fighting activities with their everyday lives or angst about their ethical responsibilities, so when Stan Lee and his collaborators represented such stress and angst, their stories appeared more realistic— even as their realism primarily consisted of the importation of tropes from other genres, the soap opera and the romance comic, into the superheroic universe and even as it eventually became, as Moore recognized, its own sort of unrealistic conventional gesture” (50). Here, reminds me of even poets who went against convention because they are resisting authority and in some ways the characters within Watchmen are doing just that because Rorschach still feels incline to be a masked adventurer despite the act that deems superheroes as illegal. Therefore, when Mason mentioned the Beat Generation in the graphic novel, shows that Moore does look at other writers as a source of inspiration. I admire that because he can appreciate others as wells as create his own. Other parts in this book that focuses on the comic book industry as mentioned before is so crazy. For example, Hoberek states that: Ozymandias, the head of a corporate empire based partly on licensing his own and other superheroes’ images, plays the part of the big publisher like DC. As if to make the point even clearer, Rorschach dies not in a physical struggle of the sort we would expect with a costumed vigilante but because he insists on telling his version of the events engineered by Veidt: ‘People must be told’ (96). This shows that people below the hierarchy of companies are more than likely to be victims to creative content being stolen without the chance to reclaim. I think that is problematic in an industry where art is at the forefront. I completely understand why Moore doesn’t want anything to do with the remakes of Watchmen. I find it so disgusting that artists and writers are always prone to such things. Thank you very much for reading!
-Nguyen, Alina
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