Last War in Albion

April 8, 2016

Promises of Lace That Rend Us in Shadows After Lust Evaporates (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Thirty: The Turning Point)

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^{Figure 950: Ozymandias rejoices at saving the world. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, from Watchmen #12, 1987)}

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Part of what made Watchmen so successful was that its sense of apocalyptic grandeur was a good fit for the mid-80s. And speaking of apocalyptic grandeur, there seems to be this weird sense that the chapter is progressing towards some sudden and decisive turning point. Wonder what that’s about.

But the most chilling part of Moore’s labyrinth is not the sense of doom that hangs over it. Rather, it is his exploration of what, at first glance, would seem to be an innocuous, even optimistic line of thought. A core element of superhero stories, after all, is that superheroes save people. So how might that apply to the nuclear eschaton looming over Watchmen? To pinch a framing from Grant Morrison, if the bomb is an idea, what better idea could superheroes possibly offer to counter them? But far from offering any sort of hopeful, utopian vision of superheroes averting atomic crisis (that hardly being an original notion, after all), Moore, thinking about this question, came up with a genuinely chilling answer. He did not take the obvious route that he would eventually explore in Miracleman of simply having the superheroes destroy all the nuclear stockpiles by force. Instead he comes up with a far more cracked and strange idea – Ozymandias’s mad scheme to slaughter the population of New York.

^{Figure 951: Ozymandias’s television viewing is explicitly presented as using the same nine-panel grid as the comic itself. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, from Watchmen #11, 1987)}

It is, famously, an absolutelybonkers plot involving faking an alien invasion with a giant squid monster designed by a committee
of artists and scientists that would be teleported to New York with a
malfunctioning teleporter that
would kill it on arrival, releasing a massive psychic shockwave that would kill everyone. But beneath the basic ridiculousness is a dark and ominous vision in the form of Ozymandias’s animating obsession. There is something fundamentally unsettling about the image of a man who can intuit the pulse of the world deciding to take action to change it. Especially in the context of Watchmen, where Ozymandias’s Burroughs-inspired television watching is naturally allied with the way the world works. And Ozymandias’s plan, ridiculous as it is, hinges on a grim structural joke. The world of Watchmen consists largely of superheroes – Moloch is the only corresponding supervillain to appear, and the discussions of “costumed criminals” in the Under the Hood excerpts make it clear that these are fairly generic criminals who dress up in the same way that Hooded Justice or Captain Metropolis did. There’s no villainous equivalent to the sort of high-tech adventuring of Nite Owl, little yet anyone who displays actual or even quasi-superhuman powers like Doctor Manhattan or Ozymandias. Except, of course, for Ozymandias himself, whose plan is a dead ringer for the sorts of elaborate world-spanning schemes of super-villains like Doctor Doom, Lex Luthor, or Ra’s al Ghul might come up with.…

April 1, 2016

The Wreckage of Love, Our Regard Lies White and Broken (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty-Nine: Apocalypse)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Watchmen seemed not born so much as ground like pigment from its time; something that could only possibly have been created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in 1986, at that point in their career, out of the specific interests they had at the time.

^{Figure 947: Eroticized war in Watchmen. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, from Watchmen #7, 1986)}

Moore has often made the joke that Watchmen was the result of a “bad mood” that he was in during the period. This is by and large understating things. In interviews from the time, Moore seems genuinely convinced that the world is going to end, certainly during his children’s lifetime, if not during his, and probably in some sort of nuclear explosion. In one interview, for instance, he notes that “in forty years the rain forests will be gone. If the rain forests are gone, we can’t breathe. Simple as that. There’s nothing that’s more simple than that: no trees, no air. One of my children is eight. She said to me the other day, “I’ll only be forty-eight, won’t I?’ and I said. ‘Yeah’. It’s a pretty depressing thought. What a horrible thing to have to think about. I mean, we brought these children into the world and it might not have that much longer left. Nuclear reactors, for another thing. They can’t be decommissioned because nobody knows how to do it. But they keep building them. We are going to have a Chernobyl every four or five years from now on. And more, because those reactors weren’t built to last for twenty-five years in the first place; and they were built thirty years ago. One of those reactors is going to go up every few years.” Obviously this proved unduly pessimistic, although to be fair Leah’s still only thirty-eight. But nevertheless, it was the world Moore saw in 1986, and with no surprise. It was the peak of the Reagan/Thatcher years, disarmament talks were failing, Chernobyl happened. A wealth of immediate threats to human survival loomed, and the political situation looked actively disinclined to even acknowledge them; indeed, the US government seemed at times to almost eroticize the notion of nuclear war. Apocalypse felt just around the corner.

^{Figure 948: The June, 1947 issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, introduciing the Doomsday Clock.}

It is impossible to fully understand the density of Watchmen absent this context. The point is not simply to be a comic that rewards reading and rereading at great length; the point is to be a comic with such density as to generate an inescapable gravity. Through its massively layered resonances and nonstop foreshadowing it conveys a constant sense of inevitability. This is, of course, flagged in one of the book’s most basic structural metaphors, the advancing clock on the back of every issue. This, in turn, alludes to the Doomsday Clock, a periodic feature of the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences that declares the Bulletin’s assessment of the current danger of global disaster in the form of a clockface approaching midnight.…

March 25, 2016

Asmodeus is That Light Throbbing of Temple and Pulse Warning That Approaching Thunder Heads Our Way. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Twenty-Eight: Fearful Symmetry)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore simultaneously experienced the whole of his existence and also finished Watchmen. The experience left him a bit drained.

Moore’s disorientation and confusion in the wake of Watchmen is wholly understandable. Even reading Watchmen is, at times, enough to generate a sense of dazed exhaustion. And this is very much the point – an effect consciously generated by Moore’s use of the dense uniformity of the nine-panel grid. As Kieron Gillen puts it in Kieron Gillen Talks Watchmen, “if we’re talking about the many icons of Watchmen, [the nine-panel grid] is the invisible one. It underlies everything. We’re to watch these little boxes – hundreds of them – and make sense by combining them all into a larger piece of meaning. Watch,” he says, and snaps his fingers to cue his projectionist to advance his PowerPoint to a shot of Ozymandias watching his wall of television screens. Gillen talks about the comic as a “clockwork machine” in which “everything is predetermined. The forces that are put into motion mean this… the clock will carry on ticking, and if you read Watchmen enough you’ll know what the next tick is.” Gillen, here, is talking about the comic’s famously ambiguous ending, making a strong case that in fact there is only one possible “next step” for the book to take, and that the inevitable momentum of that step hangs impermeably over the entire work, which is in turn what Morrison speaks of when he talks about how the god of Watchmen is always shoving his cock in the reader’s face.

^{Figure 944: Watchmen #5 (Written by Alan Moore, Art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins)}

Nowhere is this sense clearer, perhaps, than Watchmen #5, the famed “Fearful Symmetry” chapter. It has been noted by many that Moore’s focus and enthusiasm for a project often wanes over the course of it. If so, it is hard not to see “Fearful Symmetry” as a crucial turning point in the comic. Moore has spoken in interviews of how the third issue marked the point where he and Gibbons really mastered the technique of juxtaposition that would serve as one of the major engines of the book. Similarly, issue #4, “Watchmaker,” is a virtuosic and experimental piece playing with the nature of time, in which Moore, channeling Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, depicts the life of Dr. Manhattan as a simultaneously occurring eternity. And with “Fearful Symmetry” Moore reaches the formal zenith of the work, if not of his entire career. In a real sense it is impossible to imagine that Moore could devote the focus and attention that “Fearful Symmetry” required to any subsequent issue. In terms of Watchmen as a set of storytelling techniques – the grounds on which Moore, at least, has long been inclined to judge it – “Fearful Symmetry” marks the tale’s end. On top of that, its release in October of 1986 marks the last issue of Watchmen to come out prior to the explosion of the ratings controversy that would result in Moore’s acrimonious departure from DC.…

February 19, 2016

Hey, Did You Hear The One About The Nuns? (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty-Seven: Nemesis)

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^{Figure 938: Miracleman throws a car full of people at Kid Miracleman. (Written by Alan Moore, art by John Totleben, from Miracleman #15, 1988)}

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Coming to the end of his run on Miracleman, Moore decided to grapple with as brutally realistic a portrayal of a superhero fight as he could imagine – to actually show what such a battle would mean for the world in which it took place.

Moore had grappled with some of this in the first Miracleman/Kid Miracleman fight when, for instance, Kid Miracleman hurls a baby through the air in the middle of the fight, distracting Miracleman by throwing a baby at a nearby building, which Miracleman of course saves, but with the note that he’s broken a couple of the baby’s ribs because of the speed he was traveling, a grimly funny note of realism in a standard superhero trope. There’s a not entirely dissimilar moment in Miracleman #15 when Miracleman, in another fairly standard superhero punch-up moment, picks up a car and throws it at Kid Miracleman. “My apologists have claimed the car that I first hurled at Bates was empty, those who’d been inside having all previously escaped,” he narrates. “I’m sorry, but that isn’t true,” the final caption box changing color to be yellow on black – Bates’s colors. The shift in tone – from a winking subversion of the “superheroes save everybody” to a stark-faced refusal to offer any sort of salvation at all – is stunning.

And this is hardly the only such moment in Miracleman #15, an issue that returns over and over again to images of stark brutality. Kid Miracleman, under Moore, had always been portrayed as a brutally sadistic figure, whether in his mocking murder of his secretary in his first appearance “just to show you that I don’t mind doing that sort of thing. In fact, I quite enjoy it” or in his dispatching of the nurse in Miracleman #14. But what is striking – especially for Moore – is that the issue contains almost no textual descriptions of what Kid Miracleman does to London. Early on the narration establishes that Bates spends hours in London before Miracleman and company realize he’s back, and talks about “those hours that he had crammed with centuries of human suffering; those narrow side-streets filled with miles of pain. Having exhausted all the humdrum cruelties known to man quite early in the afternoon he had progressed to innovations unmistakably his own,” and the end narration makes a fleeting and bleak mention of “coral reefs of baby skulls, and worse,” but this is the extent to which Moore uses the written word to frame these depravities into the sort of classic and endlessly quotable lines that had characterized, for instance, Rorschach’s famously bleak narration in Watchmen. There are neither “abattoirs of retarded children” nor “gutters full of blood” to drown the vermin in.

^{Figure 939: John Totleben’s double page spread of utter carnage.}

…

February 12, 2016

I Asked Him What Record It Was, But He Didn’t Know (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty-Six: Olympus)

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^{Figure 930: Winter is worth it. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Rick Veitch and Rick Bryant, from Miracleman #9, 1986)}

Previously in The Last War in Albion: After a convoluted series of events, Alan Moore’s Marvelman, now renamed Miracleman, was published in the US by Eclipse, and Moore was writing new material for it, starting with a controversial issue including detailed images of Liz Moran giving birth.

As the sequence reaches its most famous page, it switches structure, the sepia-toned panels becoming insets on the full-color ones instead of the other way around as the baby’s head emerges. “Did it feel like this, when you took the first cell scrapings,” Miracleman asks the absent Gargunza. “Did it feel like this as you watched it divide and replicate; as you hauled me dripping from the tank? The head emerges; a face drawn on a fist. My eyes cannot grasp the fact of it: a head protruding from inside her. It looks so hideous, beautiful, absurd, awesome. But of course. Of course.” And finally, as Miracleman grasps his daughter’s head to finish delivering her, he asks, “was it worth it? Worth the risk of loosing gods and monsters on the world? Worth all the blood and violence? Yes. It was worth it. For here is blood. Here is violence. Redeemed by love, by this pure act of creation.”

^{Figure 931: Winter, delivered at last. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Rick Veitch and Rick Bryant, from Miracleman #9, 1986)}

It is, of course, a standard technique for Moore, right down to the heavily iambic flow of the narration. But the content is remarkable. It’s not that Moore hasn’t blended imagery of sex and death before, most obviously in “Rite of Spring,” where the orgasmic unity of all things includes a description of how “my enemy’s blood erupts to fill my mouth with molten copper,” but notes that “there is no contradiction” between this and sexual passion. Or, for that matter, in the description of the “almost sexual hatred” between Miracleman and Kid Miracleman in their early confrontation. But, of course, “Scenes from the Nativity” is not about sex, even though it contains the most detailed depiction of female genitalia to grace Moore’s work prior to Lost Girls. “Rite of Spring” stretched the definition of sex to its widest point, but stayed firmly within the realm of the erotic; “Scenes from the Nativity,” on the other hand, retains all the sense of taboo and sacredness, but strips it down to the most elemental binary, proclaiming that “in the careless and foggy continuum of our lives, these precious moments burn like suns: birth, death… these are the moments when we are real,” the final phrase coinciding with a 2/3 page panel of Miracleman and Liz crying as they hold the just-delivered Winter up to the gleaming sun. And in turn all of this is presented as the true and inevitable teleology of superheroes, with all of the ornately rewritten mythology of Miracleman being framed explicitly as something existing only to lead to this moment.…

February 5, 2016

Neat Little Analogy, Huh? (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty-Five: Scenes from The Nativity)

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^{Figure 923: The signatures upon the contract that led Dez Skinn to go to a seedy bar to pick up a couple thousand dollars in cash.}

This installment of The Last War in Albion contains graphic images of childbirth below the cut.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: In a comedy of errors, Alan Moore’s Marvelman series, originally published in Warrior, was republished under the title Miracleman by Eclipse Comics in the US. But with the reprints running out, Eclipse had to clear the way to commission new material from Moore, which required appeasing Dez Skinn.

Eclipse’s solution, ratified in a new contract dated February 1986 (the same month that Miracleman #6 is dated), was to buy the right to produce new Miracleman material from Skinn for a further $8000, payable in three installments, one of which Skinn recounts was given to him at a meeting “with Jan Mullaney – Dean’s brother – in New York, in some really seedy bar. He turned up looking like a real hippie with a couple thousand dollars in cash in a brown envelope. And I’m sitting there, this sort of funny Englishman in this really scary place and he comes in and this is like some dodgy transaction taking place as he slides the envelope over to me with a couple thousand dollars or more in cash and he says, ‘you will count it, won’t you?’” This contract also seemingly marks the point where Skinn abandoned his support for Alan Davis’s objections to having his work reprinted, noting simply that “Eclipse also assumes the sole responsibility of payment to and for the creative talent on all issues of Miracleman or any such other titles featuring “Miracleman” and the Characters, including payment of artistic royalties to Alan Moore and Gary Leach representing Alan Davis on the stories reprinted from Warrior Magazine,” and transferring all of the design copyrights Skinn had previously asserted that Davis held to Eclipse.

This is perhaps unsurprising – the fact that Skinn had chosen to direct his letter regarding Davis’s objections to Moore suggests that the position was more about trying to force Moore back into playing ball with Dez Skinn than about concern for Alan Davis. Whereas the entire point of this agreement was to clear the way for Eclipse to hire Moore directly (as opposed to the obviously unworkable plan of having Skinn/Quality employ him). For the purposes of filling out Miracleman #6 and publishing #7, Moore’s involvement was minimal – he’d been ahead in scripting for Warrior, and had three installments written but not drawn. But the problem of getting them drawn was more substantial, since it’s not as though Alan Davis was going to be returning to the gig. Unfortunately, Eclipse’s stable of available artists did not come close to matching that of the major companies. They presented Moore with a few options, and of them he picked an neophyte named Chuck Austen, though he was at the time still going by his birth name of Chuck Beckum on the grounds, as Austen put it, that he “didn’t draw everybody so that they looked like they were superheroes in street clothes.”…

January 29, 2016

While The Past and Future Exist Simultaneously (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty-Four: Miracleman at Eclipse)

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{Impressively, Alan Moore’s second publisher for Marvelman/Miracleman was an even bigger trainwreck than his first. It is perhaps unsurprising, given this, to find out that Dez Skinn negotiated the bulk of the deal. The financial plan for Warrior had always involved selling the strips to foreign markets, and Skinn was determined to sell them as a package, reasoning that “strips like Spiral Path – which I put into an anthology alongside Shandor and Bojeffries Saga – were not the stars of the show,” but that Warrior would never have happened without them and that they deserved the same shot at foreign publication as the heavy-hitters like V for Vendetta and Laser Eraser and Pressbutton. But ironically, it wasn’t the lesser Warrior material that made selling the strips abroad a challenge, but the nominal crown jewel, Marvelman, as neither of the two biggest comics publishers would touch it. DC was the obvious first choice, since they were already having considerable success publishing Alan Moore in the US market, and were indeed interested, but Dick Giordano pointed out that there was simply no way that they could publish a comic called Marvelman, citing the number of problems they were already having with Captain Marvel, which they’d bought from the smoldering ruins of Fawcett and started publishing under the name Shazam! But the obvious second choice proved no better; Marvel wouldn’t touch it either, pointing out that if they were to publish a strip called Marvelman it would be read as representing the entire company, which was perhaps not quite what they wanted Moore’s psychologically damaged take on superheroes to do.

^{Figure 920: An advertisement for the never-published Challenger #1 from Pacific Comics.}

That left smaller companies. Initially the plan was a company called Pacific Comics, but after contracts were signed and the first issue of Challenger, headlined by V for Vendetta, advertised Pacific abruptly went belly up in August of 1984, leaving all of the Warrior properties homeless once again. Ultimately they were acquired, alongside some other remnants of Pacific, by Eclipse Comics, created by siblings Jan and Dean Mullaney, but edited by cat yronwode (lack of capitalization per her wishes), a small publisher originally out of New York, but by this point run out of Guerneville California. But there were still other problems. Not only was Marvel uninterested in publishing Marvelman, they were uninterested in the idea of anyone else publishing him. This started with Marvel UK’s dispute with Skinn over the latter’s decision to break the informal truce they had by actually publishing a comic called Marvelman on the cover instead of featuring him inside Warrior, but rapidly spread to the US branch of the company.

In Moore’s telling, the figure at the heart of the dispute was Jim Shooter, who he characterizes as “one of these comic book industry führers,” which doesn’t actually rate very highly in the list of awful things Jim Shooter has been called by his fellow professionals.…

January 15, 2016

Marcos Told Me to Think of Time as a Record Player, with the Stylus Tracing the Present (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty-Three: Alan Moore)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Yeah, you should probably just go read that one again if you don’t remember.

It is October 1987. Moore is sitting down to dinner after a Glasgow signing to promote Watchmen. At the table is Grant Morrison, a neophyte comics writer. It is the only meeting between them that Moore recalls, although he had given Morrison advice at a 1983 Glasgow comic mart when Morrison was on the cusp of transitioning from a failed rock star to a successful comics writer. Moore will eventually, to Morrison’s chagrin, describe him as an “aspiring” comics writer at the time of this meeting, one of many swipes he will take at Morrison over the years. They talk about vegetarianism. (“Sometimes you can’t live with the contradictions, Grant,” Morrison recalls him saying.)

It’s Christmas 2013. Alan Moore, in the course of an interview, offers the stunning transition, “this, I think, leaves us only with the herpes-like persistence of Grant Morrison” before launching into a four-thousand word account of his history with Morrison and concluding that he would prefer if “admirers of Grant Morrison’s work would please stop reading mine, as I don’t think it fair that my respect and affection for my own readership should be compromised in any way by people that I largely believe to be shallow and undiscriminating.”

It’s summer, 1992. Alan Moore is thirty-eight. Just a few years out from the twin smoldering wreckages of Big Numbers and his first marriage, he takes a call from Jim Valentino at Image Comics. Moore is unimpressed with the Image output, thinking, “I’ve been away for five years, and comics have turned into some bizarre super-steroid-mutant hybrid that I’ve got no familiarity with at all,” but the business model of Image appeals to him, and the failure of Big Numbers along with a relatively fallow period in Moore’s output means he needs the money, and so he throws himself into “teaching myself this new language and trying to understand this new audience.” He ends up creating 1963 with Steve Bissette and Rick Veitch, a colorful pastiche of vintage Marvel comics written in explicit contrast to the post-Watchmen style (largely embodied by Image itself) of violent and cynical comics.

It’s 1996, and Alan Moore is calling Steve Bissette to end their friendship over comments Bissette made in an interview with The Comics Journal, including some suggesting Moore had lost interest in 1963.

It’s 2010, and the last hope that the final installment of the project, an intended crossover between the 1963 characters and the rest of the Image line will ever come out finally sputters out.

It’s January 7^th, 1994. Alan Moore is forty, not two months past impulsively declaring himself to be a magician. He is in London, on Shooter’s Hill, visiting Steve Moore. A psilocybin-infused conversation about the Burroughs/Glysin cut-up method as alchemical process gives way abruptly to spiritual vision. The room itself opens and unfolds into some higher space, the chain of conversation – “an idea that turns out to be connected to another, then another, and the discourse makes its labouring progress upward from one concept to the next” until it reaches some divinity that reveals itself in spite of its unknowability.…

January 8, 2016

I Can’t Fight, For God’s Sake. I Can’t Fight Anymore (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty-Two: Alan Moore)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Having decided to leave DC over their (ultimately failed) attempt to impose a ratings system on their comics, Moore found himself with an unparalleled level of financial security and creative freedom.

It is January, 1988. Alan Moore is thirty-three, and writing the introduction to the collected edition of Watchmen. His relationship with the publisher is in tatters, a fact he alludes to only vaguely when he notes that it is “the very last work that I expect to be doing upon Watchmen for the foreseeable future.” He looks back to 1984, when the idea originated, and the giddy enthusiasm of it all. And yet there is something he cannot quite locate in this. He notes that at the start “we wanted to do a novel and unusual super-hero comic that allowed us the opportunity to try out a few new storytelling ideas along the way. What we ended up with was substantially more than that.” But he cannot pin down the transition. Instead he describes a growing realization of the story’s complexity and scale, but without a sense that the realization had an end point. Instead, “there was the mounting suspicion (at least on my part) that we might have bitten off more than we could chew, that we might not be able to resolve all these momentous strands of narrative and meaning that seemed to be springing up wherever we looked, that we might be left at the end of the day with a big, messy, steaming bowl of semiotic spaghetti.” But even when the project ended. But even now, in 1988, Moore is lost in the process, saying that it is only now, in writing the introduction, that he realizes “how dazed a state I’d spent that year in, as if I’d been slam dancing with a bunch of rhinos and the concussion was only just starting to clear up,” a claim that oddly undercuts itself; the daze clearly extending beyond the year, simultaneously located “now, twelve months after” he finished the final script and in the past, as indicated by the past tense in the concussion metaphor.

A similar temporal ambivalence exists in the previously discussed description of how his “nostalgia for the [superhero] genre cracked and shattered somewhere along the way and all the sweet old musk inside just leaked out and evaporated,” a statement in which Moore is clearly lying, albeit as much to himself as the reader, the description of the “sweet old musk” evoking precisely what he says he has lost, so that the sentence offers the very experience it exists to reject. Moore casts superheroes away, but in doing so only draws them back in, a tension implicit in the very idea of nostalgia, which is of course an intense feeling for a thing that one is not actually experiencing at the time. He is nostalgic for his nostalgia, relishing in the scent of its memory even as he pushes the genre away, grimly certain in the necessity of all his burnt bridges.…

December 4, 2015

6. In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds. (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty: J. Michael Straczynski and Before Watchmen)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: J. Michael Straczynski wrote Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan. Badly.

^{Figure 911: Adam Hughes likes drawing breasts. (Written by J. Michael Straczynski, from Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan #2, 2012)}

This sort of sloppiness is a tough pill to swallow in the context of a high profile prestige project like Before Watchmen that seeks to pair allegedly superstar creative teams like Straczynski and Adam Hughes (who, though good, is a somewhat odd choice for Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan, given that he’s generally best known for so-called good girl art, although he manages to find plenty of occasions to frame panels so as to focus on women’s breasts anyway). But it would be one thing if Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan were a sloppily written and incoherently plotted comic that at least gave some interesting insights into Dr. Manhattan’s character. But it doesn’t. The most significant and weighty character moment Dr. Manhattan gets is a revelation that he was a childhood immigrant from World War II whose Jewish mother was killed during their escape. As with most of Straczysnki’s additions to Watchmen, this is first of all just difficult to square away with the original text – Straczynski has this be the reason Osterman’s father became a watchmaker, which requires compressing the family’s settling in America, his father’s mastery of watch repair, Jon’s following suit, and his father’s ultimate rejection of it in favor of nuclear science into a five year period. But it’s also just boring. It’s a cliche cribbed clumsily from Holocaust literature, with the Holocaust serving mostly as a shorthand to let Straczynski sketch a major tragedy in just eight pages instead of having to do the work of generating emotional resonance himself, made all the crasser by the fact that there are already a wealth of historical connections between the German persecution of the Jews and both superheroes and atomic science, none of which Straczynski draws on while treating the Holocaust as a handy plot device.

^{Figure 912: Unsubtle Christ imagery. (Written by J. Michael Straczysnski, art by Eduardo Risso, from Before Watchmen: Moloch #2, 2012)}

Perhaps the more illustrative example of the particular pointlessness of Straczynski’s additions to Watchmen, however, comes with Before Watchmen: Moloch, which was hastily added to the Before Watchmen schedule after launch but before DC realized the project was a boondoggle and scrapped the Before Watchmen: Epilogue one-shot. The two issues for a life history of Moloch, with the first issue going from his birth to his release from jail and the second issue being the events around his death. But the overall effect is to tie almost everything into the teleology of Watchmen and specifically Ozymandias’s plan. The first issue’s cliffhanger is Ozymandias waiting for Moloch on his release; the second deals with Moloch’s involvement in Ozymandias’s plans, which mostly consists of Ozymandias heavily manipulating Moloch’s Christian faith (that faith having been largely inspired by meeting Dr. Manhattan in the first issue).…

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