Watchmen

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!

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”