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watchmen legacy

Who Watched the Watchmen? How “Heroes Reborn” Brought Watchmen to the Marvel Universe

April 14, 2022 by Austin Gorton Leave a 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?

Marvel Comics certainly didn’t seem to be watching the Watchmen. Despite the massive critical and commercial success of DC Comics’ twelve issue Watchmen, creators at Marvel largely let the series go by without comment, at least in terms of trying to imitate it directly. While the tradition of the two companies riffing on a successful idea started by the other (such as DC launching the maxi-series Crisis on Infinite Earths in the wake of the success of Marvel’s Secret Wars) is a longstanding one, no “Watchmen-esque” series appeared at Marvel in the late 80s or early 90s. Some of that is likely due to the different way the companies are structured. Watchmen was born at least in part out of DC’s acquisition of the Charlton Comics characters, continuing another longstanding DC Comics tradition.

However, Marvel had never really engaged in that practice. All of its biggest characters were homegrown. And while Marvel had its Epic imprint as a place to tell out-of-continuity stories free of the restraints of the comics code limitations on content, those series tended to be like Jim Starlin’s Dreadstar or English-language reprints of Akira: driven by specific creators and/or focused on something other than superheroes. Yet despite the lack of a specific story-arc or series that can be pointed to as “Marvel’s Watchmen”, the outsized influence of that series would still find a way to be reflected in Marvel Comics, albeit in a roundabout way. [Read more…] about Who Watched the Watchmen? How “Heroes Reborn” Brought Watchmen to the Marvel Universe

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

Who Watched the Watchmen? Kingdom Come by Waid, Ross, Klein!

April 7, 2022 by Steve Baxi 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?

In the second issue of Kingdom Come⁠ — Mark Waid, Alex Ross, and Todd Klein’s DC elseworld magnum opus ⁠— Superman makes his grand return from self-imposed exile in order to respond to a new generation of brutal, erratic “heroes” who do more harm than good. He travels to a seedy dive bar filled with punk rock aesthetics, disrespectful youths, and 90s armor clad brawlers, where we see a cameo of none other than Rorschach, from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen. The implication is quite clear: Waid, Ross and Klein are responding to the influence Watchmen has on superhero comics, by taking Rorschach on his face as a violent, morally gray, and compromised hero that represents a new normal. Rorschach in the same room as these characters, where our point-of-view, Norman McKay, calls them “kids,” “monsters,” and “beasts” all before Superman, very paternalistically declares “Party’s over” has the same weight as father coming home to set the children right, crashing their fun and wondering “What happened to the world? Things were better in my day!” [Read more…] about Who Watched the Watchmen? Kingdom Come by Waid, Ross, Klein!

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

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

March 22, 2022 by Dave Leave a 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?

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”

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

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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