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
where Spider-Man’s hunted down and beaten to a semi-sensate lump of gristle and pulp, and I ate it up.
, 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
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.
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?
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