Wait, What?

Read in 2017, by anyone who’s even the least bit aware of… well, the cultural context of 2017, to put it bluntly — I almost wrote anyone who’s even a little bit woke, but that term feels odd coming from the fingers of a 43-year-old Scot — it’s inescapable how oddly limited Watchmen is, in terms of cultural outlook. Yes, it features everyone from Nice Guys to Omnipotent Men and Smart Men and… well, you get the picture, but it’s unmistakably the work of two straight white men of similar ages — Moore is four years younger than Gibbons, surprisingly, despite permanently seeming the older of the two — and upbringings, which is to say, “mid-20th century English.”

It’s clear, for example, that Watchmen is an especially white book. There are those who’d argue, pointing to Bernie — the kid at the newsstand — or Malcolm and Gloria, Rorschach’s psychiatrist and his wife, as evidence that that’s untrue, because three whole black characters with names is a big deal, right? Except, of course, two are essentially glorified cameos, with only Malcolm getting any kind of inner life of any kind, and even then, it’s one that shows how easily he’s bullied and pushed around emotionally and spiritually by the white man he’s dealing with. Similarly, Bernie’s role is apparently to be lazy, get shouted at by the white guy running the newsstand and say things like “sheee-it!” while calling people “turkey”; he’s literally an uncomfortable stereotype dropped into the book, hilariously, as a framing device for a story about another white guy who is more complex than he is, despite being a comic book character inside a comic book.

(Gloria, at least, gets to be… what, impatient, selfish and difficult to talk to? Yeah, that’s much better. Oh well, there’s also the unnamed mailman and some random thugs when necessary. Yeah, nothing wrong here at all.)

There’s also the story’s treatment of lesbians, which is… “problematic,” I believe the phrase is. Silhouette, one of the Minutemen from the book’s backstory, is the subject of gossip-y discussion in the book’s back matter — where we learn that her and her lover’s murder is deemed less serious than the original Silk Spectre quitting the team (Literally, from the Under The Hood text: “In 1946, the papers revealed that the Silhouette was living with another woman in a lesbian relationship. Schexnayder persuaded us to explore her from the group, and six weeks later she was murdered, along with her lover, by one of her former enemies… in 1947, the group was dealt its most serious blow when Sally quit crimefighting to marry her agent”), and that Sally Jupiter didn’t like her, but her sole line of dialogue in a flashback sequence is her being bitchy to Sally, as if to suggest that Sally was right all along.

Of course, Silhouette is just a ghost in the book’s back pages for the most part; there’s also Joey and her girlfriend, two of the regulars at the newsstand whose relationship is at best dysfunctional, at worse abusive. Unable for either to properly communicate, their storyline dies when Aline is on the ground, being beaten by Joey, whose self-loathing — “And I buh-wanna be straight… and, and I wanna be dead…!” — has erupted outwards.

There’s an argument to be made for the idea that, well, at least Moore and Gibbons tried to be inclusive and therefore should be applauded (Jeff, I think, made it when we talked about Watchmen awhile back, before I wrote this series), but… Really, I don’t buy it. Lesbians are figures of dysfunction and disdain in Watchmen, and black people are there to be harassed and used as props to illustrate the stories and struggle of the white men around them. Is that really inclusion? Is that any different from the only black faces in movies being servants or slaves or comic relief idiots?

Really, though, Watchmen is the story of white men being white men. There’s something prescient about Dan’s throughline at Nite Owl — he’s a nerdy white guy who the girl falls for because he’s nice, laying the groundwork for countless pop cultural takes on this idea in subsequent decades — as well as the book’s strange hero worship of the Comedian (a character that every single character seems in awe of, despite their different viewpoints on almost every single other thing, to the point where even the woman he raped loves him, a character beat that to this day feels beyond creepy and unnecessary) and distrust of the intellectuals Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan. The journey of various white male archetypes across the last 30 years feels visible in Watchmen, and I can’t tell if it’s because Moore and Gibbons were successful in predicting the future, or that they laid out a map in this series that larger culture has learned from and unwittingly accepted given the impact Watchmen had.

And, in the end, that was what Watchmen felt like to me: The ultimate “Toxic Masculinity” comic, the urtext of countless Men’s Rights activists and red-pillers who can look at this and hold two thoughts in their heads: that this is as good as comics get, and that men — white, straight men — have it so much worse than anyone else could ever understand, but only a lone visionary standing against the crowd can save the world. Whether that’s the Comedian, Rorschach or Ozymandias — the first two fail, of course, although that’s arguable given the epilogue scene — is open to question, but it almost doesn’t matter. Watchmen is a book that can appeal to anyone who’s white, straight and believes they know better than everyone else. An attitude that really is, when it comes down to it, quintessentially mid-20th century English.

Read today, however, the politics — social, far more than the purposefully blunt, comedic party politics — look fragile, brittle and unconvincing. As with all important cultural artifacts, it’s not only a product of its time, but something that should be revisited on a regular basis, and re-evaluated. Watchmen is unmistakably an ambitious work, and one that had the kind of impact on the industry and arguably the medium that is almost unimaginable. But it might be time to accept that it’s flawed, dated and ready to be replaced as the be-all and end-all of the superheroic genre.

The only question is, by what, and from where?

So, did reading Before Watchmen change my experience of Watchmen on the most recent read-through? Surprisingly — to me, at least — yes, and for the better, although potentially not in the way that anyone intended with the prequels had intended. (And, no, not in the sense of, “After reading some shitty comics, Watchmen shone even brighter,” either, to those pre-writing the snark in their heads.)

While some of Before Watchmen (Silk Spectre, definitely, and elements of Minutemen and Nite Owl) gave me an emotional “in” to characters who had, until that point, remained little more than cyphers to me, the more interesting contribution was that submerging myself in Before Watchmen had, somehow, stripped Watchmen of the scary prestige that surrounded it in my head; the idea that it is an Important Work Of Art That Should Always Be Approached And Discussed With Respect disappeared after it had been brutalized by 30-odd comics that sought to pay tribute and cash-in in equal respects, and what was left was… a 12-issue series that isn’t what I thought it was.

One of the most obvious things that stood out to me in this re-read was how meandering it is, and also how filled with tropes and elements lifted from everywhere; Moore has never been a writer who’s shied away from, shall we say, artfully repurposing his influences, and on this read-through, Watchmen seemed far more of a patchwork than I had previously noticed, with cops talking in crime novel cliches, while Philip K. Dick and Stephen King and Tom Wolfe peek in from the periphery, waiting for their moments on-stage. This isn’t necessarily meant as a criticism, just an observation; Watchmen is much more of a literary League of Extraordinary Gentlemen than I had noticed on earlier reads.

All of that said, Watchmen remains a book that feels curiously devoid of emotion and warmth, for me; perhaps it’s simply that Alan Moore and I vibrate on different frequencies or whatever, but I can see what he intends and where the emotional beats are supposed to land, but every single one of them feels empty. On this read-through, at least, I could appreciate the idea that the Watchmen I was reading and failing to find feeling in was a story being shared by Dr. Manhattan, and therefore of course it’s emotionally empty.

Another discovery: that, for all that the 14-year-old who read this first time out thought that this was “realistic” superheroing, Watchmen is as artificial as the traditional Marvel or DC universe, just in different directions. That only makes sense, of course; it’s limited by the experiences and imaginations of those responsible, and for all their ambitions, Moore and Gibbons were both Brits of a similar age, and that shows in the work. The politics of the book — personal and party political — are simplified to suit the purposes of Moore’s story, and even there, the story shifts and moves direction as Moore and Gibbons get distracted by what they’re doing and start to poke in new places. (Note how utterly unimportant the murder mystery thread of the first issue eventually becomes; there’s a point, around the third issue or so, where Moore and Gibbons see what they’re doing and start showing off, to each other and themselves, with more and more formal play while the plot falls into the background.)

Gibbons emerged as the most valuable player of the series for me on this read-through, his work grounding the book and also giving life to things that, in other artists’ hands, would have lay flat on the page. There’s something to the simplicity of his line, and also the way in which his artwork speaks directly to the genre Watchmen is examining (parodying, critiquing, bemoaning and expanding, as well, maybe); look at the Minutemen in flashback sequences and there’s something about Gibbons’ art that feels like the natural destination of classic Golden Age and Silver Age artists, which gives an urgency and gravity to the contemporary sequences that wouldn’t have been present had, say, Bill Sienkiewicz or Frank Miller had drawn the book. Gibbons’ clean line gifts Watchmen with a legitimacy that appeals to the subconscious, so that the characters read as superheroes visually even as Moore is writing something else entirely.

(That Gibbons can also make some of the more heavy-handed symbolism of the book work on the page as well as he does, and also bring in visual influences alien to American Superhero Comics like Moebius, who feels a particularly heavy note on the way Dr. Manhattan looks, is just more grist to my mill of, “Why don’t more people talk about what Gibbons brought to the book?)

Shorn of the understanding that Watchmen is inherently important and grandiose because it’s Watchmen — a belief borne as much of my own delusions and misunderstandings of the work and its place as a kid as anything else — I rediscovered Watchmen on this read-through as something far messier, imprecise and imperfect than I remembered, or had maybe even noticed before. It made me appreciate the book more, if not necessarily like it much more than before.

Part of the reason for that was the discovery, this time, of a whole new set of concerns. I’ll tell you about those next. (Yes, a cliffhanger! I did it thirty-five minutes ago!* Or something.)

(* This isn’t true at all; because of how crazy the last week has been with comics news, I haven’t done it at all yet. But there’s still time!)