AND

SO

THEY

FOUGHT

A

WAR

It must be said that Moore was in no way prepared for this development, and indeed would be both slow and reluctant to adjust to the reality that he was now engaged in an elaborate magical War. As discussed at length, he reached the end of Watchmen with a sense of entirely understandable exhaustion, given that it was the culmination of a genuinely staggering period of nonstop deadline-based productivity. But even if one were to take Swamp Thing, Marvelman, V for Vendetta, The Ballad of Halo Jones, Captain Britain, and the wealth of other material Moore created in the five years prior to its completion, Watchmen alone would justify a sense of exhaustion.

It is not merely that Watchmen is a complex and difficult work. Rather, it is that Watchmen is a work that attempts to fully reimagine the medium, industry, and its potential. As Kieron Gillen puts it, “Watchmen is a philosophical statement of how you should be able to read comics”—an attempt to force what he called for in “Writing for Comics” when he wrote that “comics have a capacity for effect that they haven’t begun to take advantage of, and are held back by narrow and increasingly obsolete notions of what constitutes a comic story. In order for comics to move forward as a medium, these notions must change.” Watchmen is an effort to force the issue—a naked and unabashed attempt to change the world that faltered only by doing so in a completely different manner than Moore intended.

The heart of Moore’s intended revolution comes in the way in which it creates its sense of scope and magnitude. Some of these things have already been discussed—Moore’s overlapping narrative strands and use of recurring imagery and iconography, for instance, so that the iconic blood splatter on the Comedian’s badge reappears as the final disintegrating wisp of smoke in which the embracing Bernards are incinerated at the end of issue #11. But a more fundamental aspect of the comic’s vastness emerges out of the particular way in which Moore employs the nine panel grid. Watchmen has been described by numerous critics as being “clockwork,” but few actually articulate precisely what this means beyond the straightforward. Nevertheless, it’s apt. The nine panel grid means that the individual units of storytelling within Watchmen are small. More to the point, however, Moore makes the actions within them small. The iconic finger break sequence in issue #1 is a mission statement to this effect—a viscerally impactful demonstration that small actions can portray violence just as well and even better than ostentatious and exaggerated action sequences.

Indeed, there really aren’t any of those in Watchmen. The rape sequence in “Absent Friends,” the alley fight in “The Judge of All the Earth,” Rorschach’s escape in “Fearful Symmetry,” and the failed attempt to stop Ozymandias in “Look Upon My Works Ye Mighty” are the only multipanel fight scenes in the book.…

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And so at last the story returns to where it began. Grant Morrison has, of course, been ever-present. As already discussed at length, his first professional credit predated Moore by five months. But he has been a shadow presence in the narrative, lurking at the edges, occasionally contriving to intersect it, waiting for his moment to take the stage in earnest. And now at last he arrives having always been here, and it becomes necessary to trace the story backwards, figuring out who he has been all this time. 

This is, of course, a strange moment in which to observe Morrison, as he remains resolutely unspectacular. The work through which he will define himself is still ahead, the earliest plausible instances of it not emerging until two months after Watchmen finishes, his American debut still almost a full year away. At this point his greatest accomplishment is Zoids, where he surely acquitted himself well, but where he no more established himself as an impending major talent than Alan Moore established himself as the man about to revolutionize comics with Skizz or Captain Britain. His career at this point has no V for Vendetta or Marvelman, nor even a Ballad of Halo Jones. To read the future out of this moment is to work in implication, finding patterns in the negative space. Getting it right is more about knowing the answer ahead of time than insight. 

As a result, it is easy to overreach—to confuse historical event and inevitability. On a very basic level, whatever larger conclusions and patterns are inferred, the answer to how Grant Morrison achieved what he did and how he took up his role in the War is simple: he put a lot of work into writing comics that changed the world. This work did not exist in a vacuum; plenty of extremely talented people have worked just has hard to have an insignificant fraction of the insight. Nevertheless, to treat Morrison’s career as some historically deterministic phenomenon that extended out of Alan Moore’s actions would be an egregious error. 

So too would it be to suggest, as Morrison repeatedly does, that his career could have happened without Moore. Did Morrison come to writing comics on his own? Yes. Did he have his own interests and influences that, while certainly overlapping with Moore, were nevertheless his, interpreted and responded in ways utterly and necessarily unique to him? Yes. But none of that changes the fact that the career Grant Morrison had existed in a large part because Alan Moore did it first. The wave of Karen Berger edited books that started with Animal Man happened because Alan Moore did Swamp Thing. The genre of literate, politically invested superhero comics for adults that Morrison made his name in originated with Marvelman and V for Vendetta. Morrison admits as much, both in 1985 when he acknowledges that “only the advent of Warrior convinced me that writing comics was a worthwhile occupation for a young man” and much later in Supergods when he describes how he and the rest of his generation hit the American superhero scene in the wake of Moore: “And so we arrived in our teens and twenties, in our leather jackets and Chelsea boots, with our crepesoled brothel creepers and skinhead Ben Shermans, metal tattoos, and infected piercings.…

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In order to understand Moore’s transformation it is necessary to fully understand precisely what Watchmen was and what it did. And to understand this it is necessary to appreciate one of its major thematic concerns, the prospect of nuclear annihilation. This aspect of the War entered the scene approximately one picosecond after the creation of the universe, when the electroweak force, unable to cohere once the universe cooled below 10¹⁵ K, split into the electromagnetic force, which would go on to underpin more or less the entirety of communication, and the weak nuclear force. This latter force was responsible for a phenomenon called beta decay, in which a neutron can transform itself into a proton by expelling an electron, along with other forms of radioactive decay. Together, along with gravity and the strong nuclear force, they create a delicate mathematical balance in which matter and life are possible. And yet within that crucial weak force is a terrifying implication.

This implication (and indeed the weak force itself) went unnoticed for approximately fourteen billion years, until German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman first achieved nuclear fission in 1938. Their work, of course, was simply a momentary endpoint of a larger chain of thought—the revolutions of theoretical physics that swept the scientific community in the early 20th century, upending the classical notions of the world and how it worked. Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and the rest, in a series of dizzying discoveries over the course of decades, unseated the idea of a fixed and knowable universe, finding instead a universe that is fundamentally ordered by human perception, where the act of looking shapes the thing being observed—a quantum revolution that brought, in its wake, the possibility of magic. And then, with Hahn and Strassman, a very different possibility.

Hahn and Strassman conducted an experiment in which they bombarded uranium with neutrons. Observing the result, they discovered to their astonishment that the process had created atoms of barium. Reading a letter about these results, their former colleague Lisse Meitner, a Jewish chemist who had fled Germany earlier in the year, she reasoned that if Niels Bohr’s theory of the atomic nucleus, which held that it worked more or less like a drop of liquid, were correct then a very large nucleus like uranium would be unstable—indeed, unstable enough that the weak force impact of a neutron could lead the nucleus to stretch and eventually snap like a cell dividing into two. Running the calculations further, Meitner realized that the result would have less mass than the original atom, and that the lost mass must be converted into energy—indeed, a tremendous amount of energy, at least for a single atomic reaction, although on its own it was barely enough to move a speck of dust.

Word of the discovery spread quickly, and in early 1939 Niels Bohr brought word across the Atlantic as he traveled to lecture at Princeton. This set off a wave of experimentation and theorization, in which several scientists including Leó Szilárd, Enrico Fermi, and Frédéric Joliot-Curie all came to the same realization: the reaction released more than one neutron.…

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And what of Moore? Where was he as the company he forsook remade itself in what they imagined his image to be? How did the Prophet of Eternity respond to what he had wrought? 

At first, retreat. As he told an interviewer around the time he was finishing the script for Watchmen #12, “I’m going to take a couple of months off and basically not have a single creative thought in my head for that entire period.” This was both unsurprising and necessary. By this point it would have been clear to him that Watchmen was going to leave him in a vastly changed financial situation (he suggested in 1991 that it had” made me hundreds of thousands of  pounds” though noted “that’s not a fraction of what DC made out of it”). On top of that, he was understandably tired. Since his career had taken off in earnest in 1981, he’d been working at a staggering clip across multiple publishers. V for Vendetta, Miracleman, Watchmen, Swamp Thing, The Ballad of Halo Jones, The Killing Joke, and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow had essentially all come in a five year frenzy of productivity with few analogues in the history of British art or literature. 

As he filtered back towards productivity, he began by completing his stray obligations to DC: writing the final book of V for Vendetta, and some UK promotional work for Watchmen, including the UK Comic Arts Convention in September, which would prove to be his last comics convention for decades after he found himself unable to move around for all the people mobbing him. And he closed out the decade working on a series of minor projects, many of them seemingly informed by little more than personal whimsy. In 1989, for instance, he dusted off his old Curt Vile pseudonym to indulge his longstanding love of the underground comix tradition of R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson via a collaboration with Savage Pencil, with whom he’d formerly shared the comics page of Sounds. The result, published in a magazine called Corpsemeat Comix, is an eight-page gross-out epic in which what broadly appears to be a fire-breathing dragon takes up making his own pornography after discovering a new law forbids him from purchasing. The result, which gives the comic its memorable title, is “Driller Penis: Yes… He Does What You Think He Does.” And indeed, he does.

In a similar vein, he wrote a pair of stories for Knockabout Comics, a UK publisher of underground comics for which he’d previously written the autobiographical text piece “Brasso with Rosie,” also with art by Savage Pencil, for their 1984 Knockabout Trial Special, a benefit book for their defense against one of the obscenity trials they were frequently embroiled in. The first of these appeared in Outrageous Tales of the Old Testament, a deliberate provocation intended to show that the Christian morality under which they were prosecuted was full of stuff just as obscene as their usual offerings.…

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The core of the problem was that from DC’s perspective, the lesson of Watchmen could only ever be one thing: things like this sold. And within the post-Crisis reality of the direct market, what DC specifically cared about was what fans said. The simple reality is that what the vocal fans who showed up and bought Watchmen in their specialist comic book stores liked most about the book wasn’t the moving explorations of sexuality in “A Brother To Dragons”; it was Rorschach being a moody badass in “The Abyss Gazes Also.” And so this is what DC imitated.

This, of course, was not unique to Watchmen—the kind of hard-edged and violent antihero represented by Rorschach was, to DC’s mind, part and parcel of a trend of dark and violent superhero comics that also included Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Mike Grell’s Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters. This, in other words, was something they already knew how to imitate, and that Moore was always one of several writers capable of providing. Indeed, in most regards Moore was always an imitator in this regard, putting his own spin on a foundation that had been laid down by Miller.

It’s easy, looking at individual comics and the aesthetic visions they contain, to fall into a sense of thinking of comics as a matter of single vision, where Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and The Longbow Hunters represent an argument that noir-inflected violence for teenage boys is what comics should be in some absolute and total sense. Phrased this way, the fallacy is obvious, but even recognizing that, it’s easy to forget just how many different aesthetics coexist under the overall brand represented by the DC bullet logo. 

Consider January of 1987, the month that Moore finally came to the decision that he would not accept any new work from DC. In addition to Watchmen #8, in which Rorschach breaks out of prison with the help of Dan and Laurie after violently murdering his way through a number of inmates, high profile comics being released included the final issue of Legends, DC’s first attempt to duplicate the success of Crisis on Infinite Earths, two issues of John Byrne’s Superman run, and an issue of George Pérez’s Wonder Woman. In more grim and gritty terms, DC released an issue of Vigilante, with its right-wing fantasy of extrajudicial executions, and The Question, which saw Denny O’Neil putting his own spin on Rorschach’s source material, and the third installment of Frank Miller’s post-Crisis Batman: Year One relaunch. But even within the Batman line, that same month saw the release of Detective Comics #573, a goofball issue featuring the Mad Hatter, albeit one that ends with Robin being shot and gravely wounded. But DC still had at least one eye firmly situated on the past. Other titles included Infinity Inc., co-written by Roy Thomas, a twenty-year veteran of the industry who had succeeded Stan Lee as editor in chief at Marvel Comics.…

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