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DC Reviews

Who Watched the Watchmen? Watchmen’s Legacy on… The Question #17, “A Dream of Rorschach”

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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?

I have a confession: When I was 16, I became a big fan of Ayn Rand. Listen, I know. Now I know! But at 16, my high school assigned The Fountainhead as reading (In retrospect, I could have chosen to read Maus instead, and how my comics fandom might have exploded earlier in life!), and I found the contents deeply meaningful.

Here was a high-minded philosophical tome prescribing a life dedicated to being your true earnest self, not catering to social conformity or the whims of the masses. At 16, my gods were anything teasing intellectualism against the grain, and so I fell for Pitchfork indie rock reviews, Donnie Darko, Kurt Vonnegut, and yes, Ayn Rand.

It wasn’t until college when I interned at a law office that I realized how deeply odd this was for a kid like me. A lawyer there (with copies of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko Doctor Strange on his desk no less!) asked me my favorite writers, and sensing a kindred spirit, I proudly listed Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Dave Eggers, Vladimir Nabokov, and Ayn Rand. The way that lawyer’s face went from proud glee to horrified offense is etched in my memory, as is the way his voice shot up 34 octaves of incredulity shouting Ayn Rand!

I read (and largely hated) Atlas Shrugged that summer, and like I said, now I know.

Whereas I read The Fountainhead as a kind of teenage punk rock built around blazing your own trail, the Atlas Shrugged experience was clearly one of deep, uncomfortable selfishness. And in a grotesquely reduced way (I’ll save you the thousands of pages of Rand’s borderline unedited diatribes), that’s Rand’s main point: Take care of yourself, and only yourself, and the elite intellects and performers among us will thrive. Anyone else is just a roadblock in your way. [Read more…] about Who Watched the Watchmen? Watchmen’s Legacy on… The Question #17, “A Dream of Rorschach”

DC’s 2021 Review Part 6: What’s Coming From DC in 2022?

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2.3.0 What Comes Next?

Shadow of the Bat

With Fear State out of the way, the next chapter of the Batman Family has begun with Shadow of the Bat, a fifteen-part story by Mariko Tamaki. Focused on a Gotham without Batman and the rise of Arkham Tower (the replacement to Arkham Asylum), the story is expected to be a big launching point for the Batman stories over the next year. Told over three separate acts, Tamaki’s story dives into the legacy of the Arkham prison system from many angles. From revealing the status of the Penguin and his Iceberg Lounge, to creating new characters like Dr. Wear and the Party Crashers, to giving Batwoman and Huntress their time in the spotlight, this saga will be a massive story of 2022.

This story also has a really important meta-narrative to pay attention to. Mariko Tamaki has risen in the mainstream as a top comics writer over the last three years . Starting with her critically acclaimed Supergirl: Being Super in 2016, Mariko Tamaki has been on the rise, recently winning the Eisner for best writer for Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass and Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me. This year, Mariko Tamaki finally got to become a more influential voice in the superhero main continuity storytelling thanks to Future State: Dark Detective and her first DC ongoing with Detective Comics.

Previously: Part One – The Road to DC Infinite Frontier [Read more…] about DC’s 2021 Review Part 6: What’s Coming From DC in 2022?

DC’s 2021 Review Part 5: How Can DC Comics Improve?

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2.2.0 4 Places where DC can improve

2.2.1 Superman and Queer Storytelling

DC has had a stellar year in terms of diversifying the line. There were a couple of significant misses this year, however, in their handling of queer relationships. One of the biggest misses occurred during DC’s Round Robin Tournament, where DC created a March Madness-style bracket of potential books that they could publish, including Blue Beetle: Graduation Day, Jesse Quick: Control, Etta Candy: Holliday Hero, Inc., and other books. The primary problem with the event came from the eventual winner, Robins, and the first book it faced, Justice League Queer or JLQ.

The basic idea of the event was that in every round, voters would get more info about the books up until the final face-off. When JLQ and Robins were up for a vote, however, the obvious winner was Robins. Fans have been clamoring for a Robins book for a long time and this was DC saying, “Hey, we’ll give it to you,” in spite of already having released an unrelated Robins webcomic in the form of Wayne Family Adventures. Meanwhile, JLQ was pitched as a queer DC book — the only queer book DC would release that month. It was then placed against the tournament’s easy favorite in the first round, basically being doomed to fail before more information could come out about it. Fans, only knowing the name JLQ, had to choose whether they wanted that or a long-desired Robins book. The answer was relatively obvious. [Read more…] about DC’s 2021 Review Part 5: How Can DC Comics Improve?

DC’s 2021 Review Part 4: Diversity of Characters

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2.1.0 Diversity in Character Inclusion

In part 2, I talked briefly about DC’s lack of diversity during Rebirth and how Infinite Frontier has been a significant improvement. I want to look closer at the data. How many books were given to characters who are BIPOC and/or queer over the last four years? In order to do this, I went through every other solicit since January 2018 and wrote down the number of in-continuity books that had a BIPOC lead character or a BIPOC-majority cast. I did the same for queer representation. I wrote down the number of books each month with a majority-queer cast or a queer lead.

I only included queer characters and books where queerness was a prominent feature in the book. For example, Wonder Woman is canonically bisexual, but the comics consistently don’t showcase that side of her. As such, I did not include her. Similarly, Jonathan Kent is now canonically queer, but in 2018 he wasn’t. As such, Jonathan Kent only contributes to the book being a queer character in the year and era that he came out: March 2021 and after. So Adventures of the Super Sons doesn’t count, while Challenge of the Supersons does, because the latter book was written in late November but released physically during this period of time. [Read more…] about DC’s 2021 Review Part 4: Diversity of Characters

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

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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?

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