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David Mann

Who Watched the Watchmen? Justice League Unlimited

January 12, 2023 by David Mann 1 Comment

It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen?

The simple version: our topic series has The Question as one of its main characters exposing an apocalyptic conspiracy aimed at the superhero community, prominently features Captain Atom, partially climaxes in a false flag disaster engineered by the world’s smartest man posing as hero, and ends on the question “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (even if the response offers up the fig leaf translation “Who guards the guardians?”). By that metric alone, the widely beloved ‘Cadmus arc’ of Justice League Unlimited is indisputably A Watchmen. Plus Alan Moore liked the one episode. Case closed.

The more significant answer is that to a substantial cross-generational section of the pop culture viewership, the Cadmus arc is Superhero TV Watchmen.

[Read more…] about Who Watched the Watchmen? Justice League Unlimited

Filed Under: DC Reviews, Featured, Opinion Tagged With: Watchmen, watchmen legacy

Severed Limbs and Soiled Capes: The Place of the Super-Macabre in Comics

October 29, 2022 by David Mann Leave a Comment

As anyone who knows me learns sooner or later, my first ever fresh-off-the-stands new comic was 2000’s The Amazing Spider-Man (Vol. 2) #17 by Howard Mackie, John Byrne, Dan Green, Joe Rosas, Richard Starkings, and Troy Peteri when I was 4 or 5 years old. Aside from getting me to think Venom was the coolest supervillain ever (not entirely borne out) and that Mysterio also ruled (ENTIRELY borne out), the issue was mostly notable for Peter Parker getting arrested because unlikely circumstances caused a pair of cops to think he was a cokehead yuppie, and then losing out on a job interview. The centerpiece though was the lingering death by slushification of the Sandman, and a bit involving what I as a small child thought was a bottle of ketchup that lingered in my mind for decades:

Looking back, the actual panel of the booze falling through him isn’t that severe, but in my young mind it was a gut-churning visual metaphor for blood as Flint Marko’s body grotesquely failed him. It didn’t have an immediate impact on me; I didn’t get into slasher films and in fact tend to be a big weenie regarding cinematic horror, I didn’t dig up EC backlogs, and this was soon followed by the far more age-appropriate Superman & Bugs Bunny and the Essential Spider-Man TPBs. Still, it established a trend: my third grade teacher Mrs. Reed got an Amazing trade for the class’s book-nook for me without paging through and realizing this was JMS and Romita Jr.’s initial Morlun arc where Spider-Man’s hunted down and beaten to a semi-sensate lump of gristle and pulp, and I ate it up.

Years later my introduction to weekly comics was Batman R.I.P., a comic featuring an amnesiac heroin-addicted Batman wandering the streets of Gotham in a stupor (despite its triumphant climax), a Joker with carved cheeks and a split tongue, and a threatened lobotomy upon the former Robin the Boy Wonder, rooted in the drug and sex-fueled fetishistic casual cruelities of the untouchable monstrously wealthy. It all took Gotham to a tonal limit I hadn’t previously imagined and made the climax all the more triumphant. Not long after came Irredeemable, a comic that would make me interrogate my love of the Superman archetype in ways that would eventually lead to my future in comics criticism, with its tales of a hero’s desperate need for validation giving way to finding bliss in the unthinkable horrors he can rain down upon the defenseless populace that once loved him.

[Read more…] about Severed Limbs and Soiled Capes: The Place of the Super-Macabre in Comics

Filed Under: Featured, Opinion Tagged With: marvel zombies

“There came a time…” An Obituary of the Justice League

May 21, 2022 by David Mann Leave a Comment

– After Secret Wars (2015) #1 Pg. 39

Call it the gravitational attraction of a primal collection of archetypes, call it a quirk of capitalism realizing you can’t own all the most popular characters in a genre and establish they can meet and then not go all the way with that. It had to happen. They had to be.

So they fought trees and starfish and robots and men from the future out of “the modernistically outfitted headquarters which (was) their secret headquarters” before decamping to a satellite. They swelled their ranks, met their predecessor-twins in a crystal ball, and mapped the multiverse. They performed the labors of folktales while remaining, essentially, a group of affable coworkers gathered around the roundtable talking shop and going over meeting minutes.

With time however the obvious was acknowledged: they were giants living in the sky here to save us. The push and pull would come to define them – between stately grandeur and the individual passions driving the man-gods, the heights of legend and the muck of mortality. Even as they would see-saw between loving reminiscence over old times and teetering on the edge of war over old grudges, they would still scale higher and higher, from battles for Earth to abstract conflicts over the unfathomed reaches of metaverses and multiverses and omniverses beyond. [Read more…] about “There came a time…” An Obituary of the Justice League

Filed Under: DC Reviews, Featured Tagged With: justice league

Hickmania 3.1: On The Matter of “Transhuman”

March 23, 2022 by David Mann Leave a Comment

Trigger warning: Discussion of sexual assault.

2008’s Transhuman is one of the more difficult books in Jonathan Hickman’s backlog to evenhandedly discuss. This isn’t due to enormous storytelling or thematic complexity, or that the premise inherently incites controversy in the same fashion as his inaugural Nightly News. No, it’s simply because the entire story pivots around a gag about bestiality gang rape. There is no downplaying that. It’s three issues of buildup to that punchline and a chunk of the last issue is spent chuckling over the assorted humiliating fates of the victims. One has to hope Hickman’s gained more than an ounce of taste and perspective in the roughly decade-and-a-half since this, but it’s almost surely the vilest thing he’s ever penned. It is, on that basis alone, impossible to recommend.

The difficulty with this is it’s also one of the most significant pieces of his early career, as a massive conceptual antecedent to some of his most prominent and wildly successful later output. For perspective on the man’s work, it’s as indispensable as it is indefensible. [Read more…] about Hickmania 3.1: On The Matter of “Transhuman”

Filed Under: Featured, Reviews Tagged With: hickmania

Who Watched The Watchmen?: Watchmen’s Legacy on… DC’s Legends

March 15, 2022 by David Mann 2 Comments

It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen?

As the first major response text to Watchmen, Legends is a tough book to find a starting point for discussion with, and an even more difficult one not to simply rant unabated on. The easiest may be the title as a statement of intent. In the immediate wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths, not only had endless ‘historical’ details profoundly shifted – the sprawling endless multiverse deleted, reams of stories cast aside, character-informing backgrounds rearranged – but the day-to-day status quos of the major players were palpably shifted. While Batman had a newfound spark of mythic import, Superman had shifted from a starlost godling forever seeking his place in a world not his own to a contented yuppie who was thrashed on the cover of his new #1; Flash and Green Lantern found replacements constantly framed in-text as being of dubious merit; Wonder Woman was a fledgling figure only making her debut to the larger world at the climax of this very miniseries; at the nominal center of the shared universe the Justice League of America was composed of charitably third and fourth-stringer heroes. In the midst of this iconic void, the likes of the Teen Titans, Blue Beetle, and Captain Marvel could now be positioned as tent poles. Following this collective deliberate scaling-down, building the first post-Crisis ‘event’ entirely around reasserting the primacy of these characters and the superhero concept was a reasonable, even inspired mission statement.

Legends is a title with an entirely different charge, however, when said superhero concept had just been turned on its ear. Crisis On Infinite Earths, first and foremost a paradoxical celebration and condemnation of DC’s history from a fan-minded continuity standpoint, had begun formal development in 1982; Frank Miller had only recently taken over writing duties on Daredevil and Alan Moore had yet to make his stateside debut in Swamp Thing. By the time Legends rolled off the presses in 1986, The Dark Knight Returns and, to a lesser extent, Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow? had given definitive capstones to the companies’ two biggest characters, and Watchmen was in the midst of completely rewriting the rules of the game. Legends found itself in the position of defending a traditional interpretation of an idea at the exact moment in the industry’s history when said idea was most comprehensively and popularly uprooted.

Its approach to doing so is, again, right there in the name: ‘Watchmen’ is associated with a phrase evoking skepticism and accountability. ‘Legends’ are distant, misty, ahistorical. Unimpeachable. [Read more…] about Who Watched The Watchmen?: Watchmen’s Legacy on… DC’s Legends

Filed Under: DC Reviews, Featured Tagged With: Watchmen, watchmen legacy

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