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Eruditorum Press

Sneakily taking the hinges off the doors of perception

Last War in Albion

2. No comics shall explicitly present the unique details and methods of a crime. (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Sixteen: Juxtaposition)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: DC took the somewhat unusual position that the real reason for Watchmen‘s success was their innovation in marketing it, a position embodied by Paul Levitz, who displayed a consistent attitude that what’s good for DC is good for freelancers and vice versa.

What’s perhaps odd is that Moore did not, at least at first, really differ from that belief. Indeed, the way in which Moore describes his falling out with the company is telling: “I was starting to realize that DC weren’t necessarily my friends.” Because it’s crucial to realize, Moore really did think they were. That’s the entire reason he never actually read the Watchmen contract: he trusted the people handing it to him had his best interests at heart. This was, of course, many things; hopelessly naive, for one. An almost inevitable extension of his honor among thieves approach to creating art, for another. But, perhaps most crucially, it was more or less how people like Paul Levitz were encouraging him to think. And so when Levitz subsequently got into a dispute with Moore and Gibbons shortly after Watchmen launched over whether or not they deserved royalties on the replica bloodstained yellow smiley badges that were being widely sold in comic shops (a dispute that was over, at most, a couple thousand dollars) and made a grand show of agreeing to a royalty without conceding the legal point by which DC had originally argued the badges, despite being sold in comic shops, were “promotional items,” Moore was understandably rattled, minor as the issue was. And when, later in 1986, Jeanette Kahn had lunch with Moore and Gibbons and made an off-handed comment about doing some Watchmen prequels and how “of course we wouldn’t do this if you were still working for us,” Moore was once again rattled by what he took as a threat. Indeed, as Moore put it when describing the incident in an interview four years later, “I really, really, really don’t respond well to being threatened. I couldn’t tolerate anyone threatening me on the street; I couldn’t tolerate anyone threatening me in any other situation in my life. I can’t tolerate anyone threatening em about my art and my career and stuff that’s as important to me as that. That was the emotional breaking point. At that point there was no longer any possibility of me working for DC in any way, shape, or form.”

Although it may well have been Moore’s breaking point, this was, as mentioned, still not quite the moment he decided to walk away from DC. But it’s a striking incident all the same, less for what it reveals about Moore (whose response was on the whole what you’d expect from him) but rather what it reveals about DC. The fact that Kahn remarked on how Moore’s willingness to work for them might impact their publishing plans is, after all, fairly compelling evidence that DC was already aware that they might be losing Moore as of 1986, despite the fact that at this point the only actual dispute between the two had been over the Watchmen buttons.…

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“Anybody could have done it.” (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Fourteen: Before Watchmen: Rorschach)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Perhaps surprisingly given his pedigree as a creator, Brian Azzarello’s two contributions to the Before Watchmen line were largely disappointing and unoriginal. The first, Before Watchmen: The Comedian, frames the charater largely in terms of the Kennedies, essentially opening with the assassination of JFK and closing with that of RFK, committed by the Comedian to cover a war crime he committed in Vietnam.

Figure 895: The Comedian assassinates Bobby Kennedy. (Written by Brian Azzarello, art by J.G. Jones, from Before Watchmen: The Comedian #6, 2012)

It would be overstating the case to say that Azzarello simply allies the Comedian with Kennedy-style New Frontier liberalism: the ending makes that a hard sell, after all. Rather, it’s that Azzarello uses the two Kennedy assassinations as the poles in a fairly traditional account of the decline of 1960s leftist idealism, from JFK’s death as a tragedy that stuns the Comedian to RFK’s death as the Comedian’s own doing, with the engine of that transition being the Vietnam War. Azzarello does not do anything so crass as suggest that the Kennedys are some sort of unalloyed good, of course. He portrays them in line with the historical reality of their considerable corruption. But their corruption is ultimately paralleled with the Comedian’s; he even refers to Robert Kennedy as a “way more effective” crime fighter than he is at one point. They’re all of a type; the sort of morally compromised hard men who flooded superhero comics in the wake of The Dark Knight Returns, and that Watchmen is so often misunderstood as being about. This is even echoed in the art; J.G. Jones, doing his first significant interior work since his awkward exit from Final Crisis three years earlier, imbued the series with what Azzarello called a “masculine realism,” framing this sense of masculinity as central to the Comedian’s character.

This is, to say the least, a bizarre take on the Comedian. Over and over again Watchmen stresses that the Comedian is essentially a nihilist; he understood the same existential darkness that Rorschach did, and, as Rorschach puts it, “chose to become a reflection, a parody” of the fundamentally dysfunctional and broken world. Unlike Rorschach’s absolute belief in justice, however, the Comedian was fundamentally amoral, ultimately driven only by a desire to be tougher than the world (hence his ultimate breakdown when he realizes that Ozymandias’s pragmatic nihilism vastly exceeds his own). Simply put, he’s almost fundamentally impossible to use as the symbol of any sort of idealism, even one in terminal decline. Azzarello’s character, who sulks that “the one thing – the abso-fucking-one thing that no one ever got about me is that I am a patriot” is, in this regard, virtually unrecognizable. As for the idea that the Comedian represents some sort of masculine ideal at any point in his career, it’s difficult to see where this comes from within Watchmen, where one of the first things established about the character is the fact that he raped the Silk Spectre.…

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And do you know what she said? Her most famous quotation? (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part 13: Before Watchmen: The Comedian)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore and Grant Morrison’s differences of opinions are numerous, but one of the most fundamental differences comes in their relationship to the atomic bomb. Both were profoundly concerned with nuclear warfare, but for Morrison it was a childhood fear he found respite from in superheroes, whereas for Moore it was an adult concern he worked through using superheroes as a metaphor.

In many ways, this is the heart of the disagreement between Pax Americana and Watchmen. Morrison sees superheroes as creatures of immense possibility whose value is as aspirational figures. For him it is the interminability of superhero narratives that is most interesting – the fact that characters get reinvented over and over again, with new ideas and new takes, and that the stories never have to come to an end. Whereas to Moore, at least in Watchmen, what is interesting are the limitations of superheroes – of what they are incapable of doing and representing. The superheroes of Watchmen are known archetypes that the audience has seen a hundred times before, only taken to logical endpoints. The point isn’t the possibility of the characters, it’s the impotence of them. Put another way, Morrison cares what superheroes let us be, while Moore cares what they let us see.

This division, or at least the underlying division over what the purpose of art is, is one that will persist, in some form or another, throughout the War. But ironically, when it comes to the actual disagreement over the possibility of superheroes as an optimistic genre, it is Morrison’s view that ultimately won the day. Part of Moore’s ultimate revulsion at Watchmen was precisely the way in which, as he put it, it became “a kind of hair shirt that the super-hero had to wear forever after that… they’ve all got to be miserable and doomed. And if they’ve got to be psychopathic as well, then so much the better.” Indeed, Moore was adamant that “imaginative fiction,” and specifically superhero fiction, “is something which is perfectly fine for adults,” a point he attempted to demonstrate in much of his superhero work following his departure from DC.

Arguably, then, this forms one of the few major chinks in Moore’s usually resilient armor of eternity – a point on which Moore can decisively and unambiguously be said to have changed. And yet it is easy to overstate this. Moore’s revulsion towards Watchmen is genuine, and yet it is not really a revulsion at the work itself. Rather, it is a revulsion at the world that Moore used Watchmen to look at – one that he found monstrous and twisted, and wrongly assumed that the rest of the world would see it that way as well. This is not just a matter of the fans who seized onto Rorschach in ways Moore found disturbing, but rather the entire way in which the nightmarish world he constructed, in which superheroes were the embodiment of humanity’s most self-destructive impulses tragically deluding themselves into believing that they were the world’s Watchmen and not its doom, was treated as something desirable.…

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She saw places that aren’t even there any more! (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part 12: Pax Americana)

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Figure 885: The eight panel grid and recurrent figure eight motif in Pax Americana. (Written by Grant Morrison, art by Frank Quitely and Nathan Fairbairn, from The Multiversity: Pax Americana, 2014)

Previously in The Last War in Albion: When it came out, Watchmen was generally hailed, along with Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns as the vanguard for a more “mature” taken on superheroes – one marked by a great degree of cynicism and violence, an approach Moore would later come to repudiate, and that would lead him towards a profound ambivalence about Watchmen as a work.

It would be ridiculous to suggest that Moore did not want Watchmen to succeed, but equally, it’s clear that the terms on which it did succeed were intensely upsetting to him. In a fundamental sense, the book he wrote and the book people read were two very different things. And the gulf between those two versions of Watchmen is a huge and fundamental part of the reaction to the book.

It is also a gulf explored by Grant Morrison in his 2014 comic Pax Americana, part of his larger Multiversity series of semi-connected one-shots exploring alternate Earths in the DC Multiverse he had helped restore in 2007. The comic was explicitly modeled after Watchmen– indeed, Morrison had been hyping it since 2009, describing it as rooted in “that sort of crystalline, self-reflecting storytelling method” and an attempt to capture what would happen “if Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had pitched the Watchmen now, rooted in a contemporary political landscape, but with the actual Charlton characters instead of analogues.” In this regard, what is perhaps most significant about it is that it is not an imitation of Watchmen as such. Where many comics overtly following from Watchmen adopt its nine panel grid, Pax Americana is based around an eight panel grid, albeit significantly more loosely than Watchmen is around its grid. This is in turn reflected within the comic, which uses the figure eight as a recurring visual motif. But Morrison slyly plays on the image, using it not just to represent the number 8, but as an infinity symbol, a figure that tacitly invokes Doctor Manhattan’s line shortly before the end of Watchmen, “nothing ever ends.”

Figure 886: An assassination in reverse. (Written by Grant Morison, art by Frank Quitely and Nathan Fairbairn, from The Multiversity: Pax Americana, 2014)

Indeed, the complex notion of time implied by this iconography manifests throughout Pax Americana. Like Watchmen, it engages in considerable non-linear storytelling, but where Watchmen has a clear forward-moving narrative that runs from the beginning of issue #1 to the end of issue #12, albeit one punctuated by a number of clearly designated flashbacks, Pax Americana is simply told non-chronologically, with the reader left to piece together the actual sequence of events within the narrative. Its opening section, depicting the assassination of the President of the United States by the Peacemaker (shot in an open-topped motorcade, a tacit reference to Watchmen’s suggestion, made explicit in the film, that the Comedian was involved in the Kennedy assassination) in reverse over the course of three pages, a clear sign that this is not a comic with a straightforward relationship to time.…

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And she did it! She went out past Vega, out past Moulquet and Lambard! (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part 11: The Dark Knight Returns)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: After considering various supposed influences that work more on the level of plot and characters, it became apparent that a more helpful theory of influence on Watchmen came in the form of William S. Burroughs, whose theories of language and magic were directly cited by Moore as influences, and actually help explain the book’s strange and vast influence on its world.

This also helps explain how Watchmen relates to what was, by the mid-80s, a significant body of revisionist takes on superheroes. The most obvious point of comparison here is Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, which came out from March to June of 1986, with the final issue coming a week after the first issue of Watchmen. The proximity of the two nuclear paranoia-fueled revisionist tales of aging superheroes, along with a wealth of news articles that cited them, along with Art Spiegelman’s Maus as heralding a new, mature era for comics (usually, as famously noted by Neil Gaiman, carrying titles along the lines of “Zap! Pow! Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore!”), made them obvious bedfellows, an impression heightened by the fact that Moore and Miller were critical darlings among the same crowds.

Moore was also a vocal proponent of Miller’s work, and had been since 1983, when he wrote an essay in The Daredevils praising and analyzing the Miller Daredevil run whose reprints headlined the magazine. (He also, of course, wrote “Grit,” a parody of Miller’s Daredevil work, for the same magazine.) Indeed, he wrote the introduction to the first trade paperback edition of The Dark Knight Returns, calling it “one of the few genuine comic book landmarks worthy of a lavish and more durable presentation.” And indeed, the work is a perennial bestseller and a landmark work, although its status as a classic has, in recent years, found itself endangered by a larger shift in Miller’s critical reception brought on in part by his unfortunate late career turn towards crass Islamophobia in works like Holy Terror and his tendency to do things like call the 2011 Occupy protests “a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists” due to their failure to sufficiently oppose radical Islam. And indeed, More has been a part of that turn, proclaiming in 2011 that “Frank Miller is someone whose work I’ve barely looked at for the past twenty years” before going on to criticize the majority of Miller’s work from that period, and suggesting, of his Occupy criticism, that “if it had been a bunch of young, sociopathic vigilantes with Batman make-up on their faces, he’d be much more in favour of it.” 

Figure 880: The sixteen-panel grid was as fundamental to The Dark Knight Returns as the nine-panel grid was to Watchmen. (Written by Frank Miller, art by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, from Batman: The Dark Knight Returns #1, 1986)

This last crack on Moore’s part highlights the specific way in which these later skirmishes of the War echo back upon The Dark Knight Returns, and it is in a way that both shows why Moore viewed it as such a landmark comic at the time and how it is a profoundly different work than Watchmen.…

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She was just somebody who had to get out. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part 10: Burroughs)

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Figure 876: The revelation of Mr. Mxyzptlk’s villainy is one of several shared plot points between Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow and Superfolks. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger, from Action Comics #583, 1986)

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Among the commonly cited influences on Watchmen is Superfolks, a novel by Robert Mayer that shares several plot beats with it and other superhero stories Moore wrote in the 1980s. Moore has generally resisted this comparison, pointing to other texts that influenced him more.

This gestures towards a larger issue with treating Superfolks as a major antecedent to Watchmen, which is that very little of what Moore allegedly drew from it is actually all that innovative. Indeed, Pádraig Ó Méalóid, in a thorough analysis of Morrison’s claims, found that in almost every case either the similarities were overstated or an earlier antecedent could be found. (The sole exception was the use of Pxyzsyzgy, Mayer’s analogue for Mr. Mxyzptlk, as the ultimate villain behind everything, a plot point shared with the resolution of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow.) But in many ways it’s more helpful to take a step backwards and look at what both Superfolks and Moore’s work are attempting, and situating it in a larger context. Ultimately, both of them are engaging with superheroes in a manner familiar from the New Wave of science fiction spearheaded, in the UK, by J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, and in the US by a broader group of writers including Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delaney, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

The defining aspect of the New Wave was a turn away from pulp adventure and a focus on plausible extrapolation of science and towards using the tropes of science fiction and fantasy to explore human experience, applying the approaches of literary modernism and postmodernism to the genres. One major approach to this, pioneered by Michael Moorcock, was to rework pulp genres into new forms, asking, in various ways, what the subjective experiences of a character in a pulp adventure story might be like. In many regards, it was inevitable that this would eventually be applied to superheroes; that it took until 1977 for the first one to be released is mainly down to the fact that the companies producing the overwhelming majority of superhero stories, Marvel and DC, were fundamentally conservative in their publishing. But with a concept as historically inevitable as this, a priority dispute is almost beside the point.

Indeed, what’s most revealing about the priority dispute is the degree to which Moore’s influences largely leapfrog Mayer and go back to the larger New Wave tradition. The central idea of Superfolks comes from the New Wave, but its scattershot approach of random pop culture namedropping is just the Mad Magazine sight gag approach translated to text. (Indeed, Superfolks, with its focus on a barely disguised Superman and Captain Marvel, owes no small debt to Kurtzman and Wood’s “Superduperman,” which Moore has always cited as the primary inspiration for Miracleman.)…

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She was just somebody who felt cramped by the confines of her life. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Nine: Mr. A and Superfolks)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: In its earliest development at DC, Watchmen was based around a set of fairly generic superheroes DC had acquired from the defunct Charlton Comics, leading many people to suggest that Moore’s claims to the book’s originality are overstated. But this accusation misses the ways in which Moore transformed and commented on the Charlton characters, most obviously the Steve Ditko-created character the Question and, indirectly, Ditko’s Mr. A, whose ruthlessly Manichean worldview is echoed by Rorschach in lines such as “there is good and there is evil, and evil must be punished. Even in the face of armageddon I shall not compromise in this.”

Figure 872: A 1972 color page of Mr. A, with Mr. A himself remaining, inevitably,
in black and white. 
But there is more to this than might be immediately apparent. Mr. A, as a character, reflects Ditko’s larger investment in the work of Ayn Rand; his name, for instance, is a reference to her emphasis on Aristotle’s maxim “A is A.” Rand was a novelist and popular philosopher whose overt and insistent pro-capitalist position (forged when her wealthy Russian family lost their businesses during the October Revolution prior to her emigration to America) gave her considerable success among the political right; a New York Times article the same month that the first collected edition of Watchmen was released, for instance, talked about how the incoming Secretary of Commerce was an admirer of Rand’s work, as was newly installed chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, calling her the “novelist laureate” of the Reagan administration. (Rand, the article notes, was not a fan of Reagan, saying that “since he has no program and no ideology to offer, his likeliest motive for entering a Presidential race is power-lust.”) 
 
Figure 873: Two differing visions of humanity. (By Steve Ditko, from Blue
Beetle #5, 1968; panels not consecutive in original)
Rand’s influence plays a significant part in Ditko’s work on both Mr. A and The Question – the second Mr. A strip, for instance, opens with a monologue about the absoluteness of good and evil before segueing into a lengthy discussion of how “only fools will tell you that money is the root of all evil” because “money is the tool of exchange” and how “for people who can exchange their abilities for an equal value – money and that money is exchanged for an equal value in products and services provided by other men’s abilities,” a viewpoint with clear roots in Rand’s vehement pro-capitalism. And the Question story in Blue Beetle #5 focuses on two paintings one described as representing “man’s inhumanity to man” by showing a man sitting in a gutter next to a used cigarette butt, and the other showing a strapping laborer standing near some jutting rocks. The plot tells of an art critic who hates the second picture for the way it “keeps accusing” him and reminding him of some unpleasant past experience, and of the criminal lengths to which the critic goes to try to destroy the painting (which Vic Sage has bought, in spite of the critic’s denunciation), a plot that has clear roots in Ayn Rand’s sense of aesthetics and the nature of man.
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She wasn’t anyone special. She wasn’t that brave, or that clever, or that strong. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Eight: The Charlton Characters)

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The omnibus version of this chapter will be sent to backers in the next week or two.
Previously in The Last War in Albion:The god of Watchmen was revealed to be comprised of negative space; a tangible lack within it; a gap that demands to be filled in on the map of its psychic territory, to be named and outlined, as though doing so will finally, at last, serve to snap all the pieces into place and explain everything.
This is, perhaps, why so much ink has been spilled within the War on attempts to argue that this gap, in effect, does not exist – that Watchmen can be understood purely, or at least primarily, in terms of its influences, thus allowing those living in its wake to exist as though they are free from its vast and monolithic splendor. It is, after all, the easier option; it does not require staring too long at the cavernous depths within. It gives the comforting illusion that Watchmen is, at its heart, an easily solved mystery – a question with a definite answer. Nothing could be further from the truth, but for those who would otherwise find themselves caught in its blast, reduced to mere shadows cast by its incinerating radiance the idea that the book is simply some inevitable consequence of what came before is a useful delusion.
There are, of course, other factors involved in the particular obsession with Watchmen’s influences, most notably the fact that Moore and Gibbons have both asserted consistently that Watchmen was envisioned as a creator-owned book, a claim that makes the degree to which its ideas originated with Moore and Gibbons relevant. More broadly, the fact that Moore has made a number of provocative statements about the ways in which DC Comics and, more specifically, Grant Morrison have profited off of the recycling of his ideas has led to a small cottage industry in attempting to demonstrate Moore’s hypocrisy. And since Watchmen is both Moore’s most prestigious work and one with several well-documented influences, it has long been Exhibit A for these attempts.
Most attempts to argue that Watchmen can be explained primarily in terms of its influences have focused on its relationship with characters DC acquired from the failing Charlton Comics. As a company, Charlton was formed in 1944, and published comics in a number of genres. But for the purposes of Watchmen, only six of Charlton’s characters are actually relevant: Captain Atom, Thunderbolt, the Blue Beetle, the Question, the Peacemaker, and Nightshade. These characters come from a fairly narrow set of sources. Three of them – the Peacemaker, Nightshade, and Captain Atom were created by the astonishingly prolific Joe Gill, the latter two alongside Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko, who also created the Question. They also generally originated in a fairly narrow band of time – Thunderbolt, Nightshade, and the Peacemaker all debuted in 1966, while the Question debuted in 1967 and Captain Atom in 1960. Only the Blue Beetle forms something of an exception, having existed in two forms – a Golden Age version that predated Charlton, created by Charles Nicholas Wojtkoski in 1939 for Fox Comics, and the Silver Age version created for Charlton in 1966 by Steve Ditko. 
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Be afraid of stories, be afraid of storytellers. They are only trying to lie to you. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Seven: Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Before Watchmen: Minutemen did some mildly interesting technical things with the form, but was frustratingly vapid in its portrayal of race, gender, and sexuality.

As with race, the real problem here is a lack within the book; it is, in the end, pretty much only interested in white men. And, of course, this is a complaint that can readily be leveled at Watchmen as well: essentially all of its non-white characters are supporting characters who are killed in the book’s climax, and women are thoroughly marginalized within its plot, which also focuses almost exclusively on white men. These are well-trod and valid criticisms of Watchmen. What is baffling and disappointing, however, is that Cooke, a writer who got the job largely on the back of his historically-grounded previous take on the time period in which it’s set, repeated the errors. Especially given the extent to which Cooke retcons out large swaths of Under the Hood. To go to great lengths to revise Watchmen only to, in the end, uncritically reiterate its flaws is, to say the least, a disappointment.
 
Figure 860: Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre
also featured the worst of Jim Lee’s generally
execrable variant covers for the series.
At least some of these problems are addressed by Cooke’s other Before Watchmen series, Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre. The book’s racial politics are still deeply imperfect, with the overwhelming majority of non-white characters being villains, as are its gender politics. But there’s at least an evident investment in the latter, and one that came into the book’s conception quite early. Cooke made the presence of artist and co-writer Amanda Conner a precondition for taking on the book, on the grounds that, as he puts it, “I didn’t feel like I could convincingly write a young girl at that point in her life.” The breakdown of work appears to be that Cooke came up with the basic plot, and that Conner did actual page breakdowns (Cooke explicitly credits her with the decision – unique among the Before Watchmen artists – to work entirely within the nine-panel grid) and a lot of the nuance. 
 
Figure 861: The final page of Before
Watchmen: Silk Spectre tacitly positions
Laurie as an object traded among the male
characters. (Written by Darwyn Cooke and
Amanda Conner, art by Amanda Conner, from
Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre #4, 2012)
For the most part, this breakdown of duties favors Conner. The overall plot, after all, is where much of the weakness comes in. The premise – a sixteen year old Laurie Juspeczyk runs away from home in frustration at her mother’s demands on her and lives amongst hippies in 1966 San Francisco for a bit – is a solid idea. But the execution, which ultimately hinges on her two father figures, Eddie Blake and Hollis Mason, going to San Francisco to, in their own ways, rescue her. It’s certainly a story with a female lead character, but it’s a story that’s ultimately about the way in which Laurie is a possession traded among men, focusing heavily on her obsession with boys and closing with the abortive Crimebusters meeting depicted in Watchmen #2 with her giving her (ironic given Watchmen) assessments of the characters, before a final splash page of Laurie sitting between Night Owl and Doctor Manhattan, her two romantic interests in Watchmen, making eyes at Doctor Manhattan and thinking, “get a load of this guy.
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A story is a machine that kills fascists. A story is a machine that kills whatever you want it to. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Six: Before Watchmen: Minutemen)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Darwyn Cooke got the job of writing and drawing Before Watchmen: Minutemen in part on the strength of his previous work on DC: The New Frontier, which, like Watchmen, was a formally thoughtful and heavily historicized look at the history of comics.

Figure 854: The portentous opening monologue
resolves into a gag about writing styles. (By Darwyn
Cooke, from Before Watchmen: Minutemen #1, 2012)
Before Watchmen: Minutemen shares much of that formal thoughtfulness, taking an often playful angle on Watchmen’s style. The comic opens with two pages of four stacked page-width panels that evoke the lush visions of The New Frontier while also utilizing the object-to-object transitions that define Watchmen. The first page, for instance, jumps from a first person perspective of an infant Hollis Mason staring out of his bassinet, defined by an arc traversing the panel, to a skyscape of New York City from within a tunnel, also providing a central arc, to a Kirby Krackle-filled panel of the Solar System, the sun providing a third central arc, and finally to a panel of Doctor Manhattan’s forehead. Over these panels is a portentous monologue, in caption boxes that wind down the page in a backwards S: “You come into this world, and your point of view is narrow. If you’re lucky, it’s a safe and loving place. As you grow, your view of the world broadens and you struggle to find your place within it. If you’re strong, you learn to survive it. Over time you may not decipher the mysteries of the universe, but you can make your peace with that and find strength in what you know to be true. If you’re wise enough to approach this seeming impasse with humility, you may even find a sustained happiness. Then one day you meet a guy, and he throws a wrench in the gears. He takes away your understanding of the world you live in.”  The approach continues on the second page, only with the object-to-object transitions slowly zooming out to represent the whole of the circle until, in the third panel, the entirety of a clockface, the time still hours before midnight, is visible. The text here stutters – the caption box reads “you hope that over time…” while a dialogue box, the speaker off-panel, repeats “over time…” The fourth panel simply zooms out further from this scene, the clock moved to the midground, while in the foreground, at the right of the panel, a typewriter containing the first page of the epilogue to Under the Hood is visible. The off-panel dialogue continues with a punchline rivaling “that’s quite a drop” from the seventh panel of Watchmen: “this is terrible.”
Figure 855: Cooke subverts the nine-panel grid.
(By Darwyn Cooke, from Before Watchmen:
Minutemen #3, 2012)
But Cooke’s moves following this punchline pull in two different ways. On the one hand, the opening panel of the third page features Hollis Mason staring out at the reader as he says (ostensibly to his dog), “I’ll just have to face facts, girl.
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