Sean Dillon

Alan Moore’s relationship with superheroes in the wake of Watchmen has been… contentious, to say the least. This is due in no small part to Alan’s relationship with DC Comics. To be perfectly blunt, DC Comics’ attitude to Alan Moore can be best compared to an abusive ex-boyfriend who has never gotten over being dumped. So he (DC) routinely calls his former girlfriend (Alan) at the dead of night, engineering schemes to get her back, all the while badmouthing the poor woman to anyone he can pull into listening to him ramble like an incoherent drunk at a third rate bar that doesn’t even have any decent rats. All the while the woman is just trying to move on with her life, but everyone from old friends to complete strangers to new co-workers simply won’t stop asking her about the ex.

At one point, she’s working in the same office as her ex (because the son of a bitch bought out the whole building without her knowledge), and she makes it perfectly clear that she wants nothing to do with her ex. And, for a short while, the guy acquiesces. But when she begins to work on something personal and difficult, something that could get the ex into trouble with the sort of people you should make life more miserable for (and one thing that was so arbitrary, you have to assume he knew it’d piss her off but did it anyways), the ex decides to butt in and make it impossible for her to do the gig. So, naturally, she quits.

Then, one day, the son of a bitch sends one of her old friends—a term used loosely given what’s about to happen—to ask her to help with something they did together a few years back. She says that she wants absolutely nothing to do with it, but won’t say anything negative about it. Offhandedly, the friend notes, “that’s good, he said you would be quietly compliant.” At this, she explodes at the world, cuts off most of her friends who stood by the abusive ex while he did unconscionable things to her, and badmouths the sons of bitches who weren’t there but think nothing truly unconscionable happened (or, rather, profit off the unconscionable). In response, the ex decides to hurt her best friend, whose brother is in hospital at the time with something that looks fatal.

So yeah, Alan Moore and DC have a rocky relationship, to say the least.

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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?

Let us assume that Rorschach is exactly as good as Watchmen. Not simply that it is a good comic or even a great comic, but that it is as good as what many consider to be the definitive comic. The final statement on all things comics related. There are a number of absurdities with that statement, both with regards to Rorschach and Watchmen. But, for now, let us ignore this aspect and engage with the assumption.

Many of the conversations surrounding DC Comics’ follow-ups to Watchmen that are… critical of the works tend to frame the narrative of the follow ups as nothing more than shallow knock offs that didn’t need to exist. Indeed, even the best of these can be said to have been nothing more than a waste of the creator’s time. While the worst has destroyed any faith in comics ever being good. And Rorschach is good enough that claiming it’s exactly as good as Watchmen doesn’t feel like a cruel joke as it is the best of the direct follow ups to Watchmen DC has made by a country mile.

(There is another reason why I’m taking this approach with Rorschach. But that is perhaps best saved for subtext rather than text.)

By having a text that not only lives up to, but matches the original work, this narrative can be questioned. The implications of Watchmen as a text and its subsequent legacy can be engaged with on a level more akin to works like The Wicked + The Divine or From Hell. One as a work of fiction rather than as a metaphor for everything wrong with this wicked world of ours. As such, I can write a piece that won’t end with a horrific revelation about the nature of Watchmen’s Legacy.

[Read more…] about Who Watched the Watchmen? Tom King & Jorge Fornes’ Rorschach

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?

In the wake of Watchmen, there have been many stories influenced by its style. There have been stories that riffed on what it was doing and ones that reacted against it. There have even been prequels to the narrative spun by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. But there had never been a direct sequel to Watchmen, let alone one that pushed the ultimate button: crossing over Watchmen with the DC Universe.

There had been attempts in the past, certainly. A cameo from Rorschach here. A thematic test image where Rorschach fights Frank Miller’s Batman there. And maybe one or two riffs to make things look spicy. But never anything as concrete as a complete sequel to Watchmen. That was… until Doomsday Clock.

Written by Geoff Johns with art by Gary Frank, Doomsday Clock is the big sequel to Watchmen. As part of the DC Rebirth initiative, a twelve issue miniseries was announced to pay off the big reveal at the end of the story: the DC Universe had been attacked by Dr. Manhattan.

A cursory glance at that sentence might make one… unsure. For all that the Before Watchmen comics weren’t uniformly good, there was a degree of draftsmanship to them. Not so much trying to one-up Watchmen as make a cheap cash-in without any sense of taste. But something like Doomsday Clock is… different.

[Read more…] about Who Watched the Watchmen? What Doomsday Clock Gets Wrong