During Watchmen: Some Thoughts on DC's Latest Venture

First published in 1985 and 1986, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' twelve issue limited series (or twelve chapters long graphic novel, if you will) Watchmen (see my review) has established itself as one of the greatest graphic novels of all time. Drawing upon existing characters from the Charlton comics universe that DC had appropriated the rights to, but modifying them into closely resembling yet different characters in their own right (primarily because of editorial demands, but to the benefit of the finished product, I would postulate), the series presented a bleak vision of masked vigilantes and superpowers in an alternate history where the US won the Vietnam war, but where the threat of nuclear annihilation echoes that of the comic's own historical context. Many have labelled Moore's approach a realistic take on superheroes, other have disagreed. Personally, I agree with the former, although I would simultaneously stress its cynical and pessimistic undertones that are certainly not in and of themselves signs of realism.

Ever since its initial success there has been talk about sequels, or rather the possibility of prequels and the like. Yet over the years, none have materialised, and the relationship between Moore and DC (as well as most of comicdom) has obviously soured to a point where any involvement from Moore has been a long dead dream for most fans who may have wished for this to materialise.

Still, money is obviously money in the world of business, and on February 1, DC Comics officially announced their plans for Before Watchmen, which can only be described as a major attempt to cash in on this particular cash cow. The idea is setting up no less than seven titles with esteemed comics writers and artists at the helm:

Rorschach (4 issues) written by Brian Azzarello and drawn by Lee Bermejo.
Minutemen (6 issues) written and drawn by Darwyn Cooke.
Comedian (6 issues) also written by Azzarello and drawn by J.G. Jones.
Dr. Manhattan (4 issues) written by J. Michael Straczynski and drawn by Adam Hughes.
Nite Owl (4 issues) also written by Straczynski and drawn by Andy and Joe Kubert.
Ozymandias (6 issues) written by Len Wein and drawn by Jae Lee.
Silk Spectre (4 issues) also written by Cooke but drawn by Amanda Conner.

Not unexpectedly, the internet awakened at this particular piece of news, with The Beat covering both the announcement and the industry reaction quite well: including Moore's opinions on the matter.

On the whole, there seem to be two major camps: those in favour of this project and those in opposition to it.

My own response would situate itself in the latter category. Why? Well, certainly not because of Moore's inalienable rights as creator extraordinaire. Following Moore's response to the announcement many have rightly pointed out that he might not be the person to talk about what others choose to do with "your" character, given how not only the heroes in Watchmen are derivatives from Charlton Comics characters, but in fact most of Moore's substantial ouevre has been about reinventing existing characters one way or another (from Marvel Man/Miracle Man via Swamp Thing to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Lost Girls). If anything, Moore's outrage shows a certain kind of hypocrisy, which incidentally is made worse when seen in the light of how he has treated some of his past co-creators, like Stephen Bissette (who provides some interesting commentary on the idea that creator-owned work by default beats working on company-owned property in terms of money).

However, the fact that Moore's response comes across as hypocritical, does not negate the possibility that the project is a bad idea. I can honestly say that I do not grieve the fact that Moore and Gibbons never made any se-, pre-, or other-quels for that matter. On the contrary, I think it is a bad idea regardless of who is at the helm. Why? Because Watchmen as a narrative unit is very precise in its details, each component carrying meaning for the overall story, and as such, the expanded universe is by default, at least to a very large degree, the universe of that specific story. What we need to know is all there. Anything else is superfluous, and in my humble opinion not particularly interesting.

The fact that DC has opted to call the project Before Watchmen to my mind only proves the point that the company has not understood the property particularly well. Watchmen is not merely a few days in the early '80s of that particular universe; it is a web woven through years upon years of history. We already know the history of it all.

We know the story of Rorschach and Walter Joseph Kovacs' development from a somewhat naive vigilante to a full-blown psychotic.

We know the story of the Minutemen and how their glory days ended.

We know the story of the Comedian and Edward Blake's flawed cynical nature, which eventually did not allow him to live with the concept of utopia actualised.

We know the story of Dr. Manhattan and Dr. Jon Osterman's transformation from human into the truly superhuman.

We know the story of Nite Owl and Daniel Dreiberg following in the masked footsteps of Hollis Mason, in order to do something meaningful and adventurous with his life.

We know the story of Ozymandias and Adrian Veidt's uncanny journey to discover the greatest secret of all time.

We know the story of Silk Spectre and the interwoven layers of raped Sally Jupiter and her daughter Laurie Juspeczyk.

We know all these stories already. In detail.

In fact, DC's project does not constitute a prequel so much as an interquel (to coin a term). This is not the story, or even a set of stories, before Watchmen. It will be a set of stories filling out gaps in the story. There is a fundamental difference.

Furthermore, Straczynski's saying that it's all "about the points and shadings between what we think we know about these characters, and the truth — what that says about them, and what it says about us," to me seems utterly uninteresting. Sure, there are good stories to be told on the idea of showing the reader how everything they knew was not what they thought it was. And sure enough, it is an approach that Moore cannot fault anyone for using per se. But, and that is an important but, the devil, as they say, is always in the details, and Moore and Gibbons' narrative is nothing if not detailed. To assume that we can be shown a different truth would require undermining enough of the original to render it more or less unrecognisable. And is that really what the fans of the series are yearning for, I wonder? It is certainly no yearning of mine.

Some have voiced opinions online to the effect that there is top level artists and writers attached to this, and I do not contest this. I would love seeing a collaboration between Andy and his father Joe Kubert, and I would love reading more qualitative stories written and drawn by Darwyn Cooke. Only, I would love for it to be comics I would actually want to read. Top level artists and writers doing stuff that does not interest me just does not interest me (if you'll pardon the obvious tautology there).

Still, I do not doubt that DC will make a bundle of cash on the whole project. They just won't make any of it from my pocket.

The Graphic Novel: A Brief History and Some Thoughts on a Useful Genre Term

Okay, so following speeches on the state of today's comics industry in my last two posts, "Komiks for Kids" and "Mature, Adult or Merely Sophomoric," I figured I'd spend this post looking at terminology. More specifically, I want us to turn our attention to that ever so fanciful term "graphic novel."

Since sometime in the 90s sometime this term has been running rampant in the field. It has come to pass itself off as a fancier substitute term for "comics" (which, of course, to many carry that stigma of being the domain of children). In Hy Bender's The Sandman Companion, Neil Gaiman relates the following brief yet telling anecdote:

"Once, while at a party in London, the editor of the literary reviews page of a major newspaper struck up a conversation with me, and we chatted pleasantly until he asked what I did for a living. ‘I write comics,’ I said; and watched the editor’s interest instantly drain away, as if he suddenly realized he was speaking to someone beneath his nose.
Just to be polite, he followed up by inquiring, ‘Oh, yes? Which comics have you written?’ So I mentioned a few titles, which he nodded at perfunctorily; and I concluded, ‘I also did this thing called Sandman.’ At that point he became excited and said, ‘Hang on, I know who you are. You’re Neil Gaiman!’ I admitted that I was. ‘My God, man, you don’t write comics,’ he said. ‘You write graphic novels!’
He meant it as a compliment, I suppose. But all of a sudden I felt like someone who’d been informed that she wasn’t actually a hooker; that in fact she was a lady of the evening.
This editor had obviously heard positive things about Sandman; but he was so stuck on the idea that comics are juvenile he couldn’t deal with something good being done as a comic book. He needed to put Sandman it a box to make it respectable."

While Gaiman's anecdote touches upon this apparent need in certain to put some comics in more respectable boxes, there is also a tendency, both among publishers and fans, to overuse the term and apply the more respectable box to more or less the entire medium of comics per default. In the case of the publishers, presumably to reach the more sophisticated non-comics reading audiences. In the case of the overeager fans, more likely to present themselves as slightly more sophisticated and attempt to wash out the nerd/geek stigma (don't get me wrong here, I am a life long comics reader and an advocate of the medium to be sure, but "a rose / By any other name"... and all that).

So, where did the term come from then?

The term first seems to have appeared in print on Richard Corben and John Jakes' Bloodstar (an adaptation of the Robert E. Howard short story "Valley of the Worm"), which was published in 1976 as an original large format volume as opposed to a trade paperback of reprinted material (see "Richard Corben's Bloodstar: A Look Back at the First Graphic Novel"). It is, of course, worth considering that the phenomenon of TPB reprints itself was not as common at the time as it is today, where TPB reprints are commonplace.

However, the term is more oftenly traced back to Will Eisner. As Denis Kitchen puts it, "Eisner created the very first successful graphic novel ---and popularizing the term--- with the publication of his seminal A Contract with God, (1978). The semi-autobiographical 'graphic novel' revolutionized the art form, inspiring countless fellow professionals worldwide to follow" (Denis Kitchen's Eisner biography; see also Andrew D. Arnold's "The Graphic Novel Silver Anniversary"). The key point here being the fact that Eisner's success and use popularised the term in a way that Corben and Jakes' effort obviously did not (at least not in historical hindsight).

During the 1980s Marvel Comics made use of the term by starting a publication line entitled Marvel Graphic Novel, which was, to borrow a phrase from John Wells, an "attempt at emulating European-style graphic novels, with big-name creators, complete-in-one-volume stories, 8.5 x 11 dimensions and fancy paper and printing" (see The Definitive Graphic Novels List). The first book in this publication series was the somewhat famous Jim Starlin piece The Death of Captain Marvel (1982), and it was followed by a number of releases up until 1993 (although more and more sporadically towards the end). DC also followed suit, though to a lesser extent, and it could be argued that Marvel managed to work up the imprint of the Marvel Graphic Novel better than DC did with their equivalent.

Following that, of course, what had originally been reserved for the publication of original comics material directly in book format (though I think some of the Marvel material is debatable in terms of length and ought more aptly be called "graphic novellas") started to cover first all kinds of TPBs (whether reprints of diverse story arcs and limited series or actual original publications) and then further on to cover the entire medium itself. Somewhat erroneously, I would argue, since that merely makes it more fanciful term for "comics."

And the term graphic novel is useful. Make no mistake about that. It is useful as a genre denomination, just as the "novel" it not so subtly leans upon is useful genre terminology in the field of literature. But for the term to be useful, it cannot be the entire medium. It cannot function as the more respectable box used to dress up the old comics for the general public. It needs to be thought of as a genre, and as a genre, it reasonably needs to be novelistic in some sense. Eisner's usage certainly applies to this category, as does quite a bit (if not all) of the Marvel Graphic Novel material, although some of that (due to its length, as mentioned above) might benefit from borrowing the term novella from literature (after all, if there are graphic novels, it would only be logical that there are also graphic novellas, as it were). Each and every TPB reprint, however, does not warrant the use of the terminology.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that the old "publication of original comics material directly in book format" rule need apply. Not at all. The novel itself had its humble beginnings in serial publication, and even rose to prominence in that area in the course of two centuries or so. Let's remember that Dickens, held up by many as one of the greatest novelists of all times, did not write novels as full books in the sense we tend to think of them today, but as serial installments on a weekly basis. That is, something very much comparable to the history of comicbook publication.

However, I would like to reiterate, there does need to be something novelistic about it. There needs to be a single story, albeit perchance multifaceted, in there. Limited series naturally quite easily fall into this slot, and I do consequently not have any problem talking about Camelot 3000, The Dark Knight Returns or Watchmen as graphic novels. The same goes for clear novelistic story arcs reprinted in TPB. Most of Neil Gaiman's Sandman amply exemplify this, and is more over an extraordinarily good examples as two of the ten TPBs, Dream Country and Fables & Reflections, so clearly aren't novelistic, but rather serve as the comics equivalent of a short story collection (as many regular TPBs, of course, are wont to be). And yes, the concluding Sandman volume, The Wake, does reside on the borderlines, what with it containing a shorter "long" story (if published as a separate TPB, perhaps more of a graphic novella) and some short stories.

In all cases, however, we are talking about comics. Because if we look at it sanely, consider the term graphic novel useful and wish to keep it as such, we simply must realise that all graphic novels are comics, while far from all comics are graphic novels. The distinction has absolutely nothing to do with quality, it is not a matter of which comics are prestigious enough to go into the "respectable" box. It is simple a matter of genre.

And genre is never in and of itself about quality.