On Shabogan Graffiti
I am often asked about Shabogans. People want to know whether this or that person they’ve seen could be a Shabogan, or whether this or that group they’ve seen could be Shabogans. I generally reply that if you’ve seen them, they’re not Shabogans. As with elves (at least of the household chore performing variety) the quintessential trait of the Shabogan is that one does not see them. Castellans will sometimes speak of arresting, detaining, charging, and imprisoning Shabogans… but this is simply how Castellans talk. They certainly spend a great deal of their time doing all these things to other gradations of the plebeian masses on Gallifrey, but Shabogans are never caught. At least as far as we know.
There are, supposedly, Shabogan legends about one of their number being caught drawing a moustache on a portrait of Chancellor Tavia, and subsequently being exhibited in chains in the Panopticon for the Time Lords to gaze upon with excited curiosity and thrilled loathing… but as with all accounts of what Shabogans think or say, we must treat it with suspicion, as it comes to us via the Time Lords and their genteel curation of facts. The story goes that the exhibited Shabogan starved himself to death out of sheer fanatic perversity, despite the best efforts of his captors to save him. In the accounts of ruling classes, the bravery and principled resistance of lesser mortals is always recounted as fanatic perversity.
It has often been observed that history is, by definition, written by those with the leisure time to sit around writing it. It is thus, almost exclusively, the history of gentlemen, written by and for gentlemen. Moreover, it is written by gentlemen who take it as read that, were they retroactively reincarnated in the past, they would be reincarnated as members of whichever patrician class they happen to be writing about. Of course, when it comes to Time Lord historians, such assumptions have an extra edge of plausibility about them, which only makes them more toxic.
The great difficulty with relating the history of the Shabogans is that there are very few primary sources. Generally, most historians think that most Shabogans themselves were, and presumably still are, far too busy working and/or rebelling against work, to leave time for writing things down. Of course, it is equally possible that Shabogans spend a great deal of their time writing, reading, sharing manuscripts, debating theoretical and philosophical positions, etc, and that they simply guard their privacy so closely that no outsider has ever rumbled them at it. It is, needless to say, illegal on Gallifrey for Shabogans to even learn to read and write, much less to actually do it. Literacy with intent is a crime for which a Shabogan might – theoretically – be punished with dispersal. Which is why, for Shabogans, graffiti is such a big deal. It is not simply the things they might say when they scrawl on one of the green glimmering corrugated walls of the Ministry of Euphemisms or the Permanent Conclave of Obscurantism, it is the very fact that they write anything at all which is so incendiary. …
Not sure how we failed to post this yesterday morning. Sorry. -Phil
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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._p00_(comichost-dcp).jpg)
This should be read as, in some ways, a continuation of the previous instalment.