Who Watched the Watchmen? The Omega Men – The End is Here

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?

Who Watches the Watchmen?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase attributed to the Roman poet, Juvenal. It’s most commonly translated to “who watches the watchmen?” Historically, there are two ways of understanding this question: First, under what circumstances does a government have any accountability to the citizenry it provides protection and freedom to? Secondly, it could be interpreted as a comedic absurdity; that the very idea that fallible humans could at any time, in any way, impose, teach or carry out infallible moral claims is paradoxical. Philosophically, the idea of “who watches the watchmen” is answered by analyses of power. In economic terms, for example, John Rawls posits that the behavioral incentives to maintain the rights of the population at large is the only way to guarantee those same rights for yourself. Plato’s Republic also answers this question by proposing the Noble Lie which argues that the narratives and myths of a society are what binds people and governments into carrying out their shared responsibilities.

Regardless of how you answer the question, the implication is clear: there is us, and there is them. There are those with too much power, and there are those with too little power. There is savagery, and there is civility. Under what circumstances can we traverse this separation? How do the powerless hold the powerful to account? Why should the powerful acquiesce to the powerless?

Figure 1: The Omega Men #12 by King/Bagenda/Fajardo/Brosseau

Who Omegas the Omega Men?

Watchmen #5 “Fearful Symmetry” is an iconic issue inside of an already iconic series. This is the moment Rorschach is unmasked, the budding romance and impotence of the Laurie/Dan relationship begins to take shape, and Adrian Veidt dramatically arrives on the scene. But most impressively, the issue features entirely symmetrical panels. Page 1 mirrors page 28, page 2 mirrors page 27, etc., until page 14 where the two meet in the middle. Structuring comics is already a difficult task, and much of the emotional weight of a story rests on the creators’ ability to carry a rhythm from panel to panel, page to page. To methodically panel out a whole issue like this, maintaining all the important narrative elements, and create a unique reading experience is a tall order for anyone.

Now imagine if someone did that, except it wasn’t just one issue, it was the whole book.

The Omega Men might be the closest Tom King has ever gotten to reproducing Watchmen. Even Rorschach, a sequel to Watchmen and a chance for King to play with Moore’s toys, is not as devoted to the language, themes and structure of Watchmen as The Omega Men ends up being.

This 12 issue mini-series was initially launched under the June 2015 DCYou initiative, with the team of Tom King (w), Barnaby Bagenda (a), Toby Cypress (a), Ig Guara (a), José Marzan, Jr. (a), Romulo Fajardo, Jr. (c), Tomeu Morey (c), Hi-Fi (c), and Pat Brosseau (l) However, on September 15, 2015, just 2 weeks after issue #4 hit stores, the series was abruptly canceled. 3 days later, the book was announced to continue “at least” to issue #12, citing fan support for the critically acclaimed but low selling series.

Tom King’s prominence as a writer has led to some of the greatest DC comics of the last decade, but equally so it’s resulted in a mixed, messy fan response. The Omega Men often gets lost in the shuffle as audiences at large are, for better or worse, more inclined to discuss The Vision, Batman, or Heroes in Crisis. And yet, could you imagine today a Tom King book not only getting canceled outright, but saved by fan support? A great deal of frustration was expressed when King decided to write Rorschach, some accusing him of siphoning success from Alan Moore’s legacy, but what about that time he did a 12 issue, 9 panel grid, political thriller where the panel layouts are just Watchmen’s “Fearful Symmetry” across a 12 issue scale? Fandoms often joke about Tom King making everyone a war criminal, but what about the time Kyle Rayner threw in with a group of rebels branded terrorists?

Much of who Tom King is as a writer, his legacy, and his style is born and fleshed out in The Omega Men; and yet, there’s often a lack of conversation around this book, maybe because it uses so many characters that no one has either heard of or cares about. In many ways, it’s astounding just how well this book holds up in the face of his more mature contemporary work. It took several years for King to pull himself away from Alan Moore’s shadow and use that toolbox to reflect his own interests, but even I forget just how good he was inside the Alan Moore toolbox.

Trilogy of Best Intentions

Alan Moore is nothing if not a master of form who worked hard to find the upper limits of what form alone was capable of capturing. Watchmen #5 in particular draws on a powerful contrast between the unraveling psychology of Rorschach and the controlled pace of the 9-panel grid. No one panel is bigger than any other, an entire page feels like it exudes complete control. But as you continue to read along, as you feel the loss of control depicted in the art, the grid becomes a lifejacket on a sinking ship.

Figure 2: Watchmen #5 by Moore/Gibbons/Higgins

This speaks to a very old, very elementary dichotomy that both Tom King and Alan Moore share: form vs content. Why are our feelings in contention with the way the story is framed? Events on the page often produce a shock, horror, even disgust, but the degree to which both of these writers work to build an experience and erect a structure that can contain these feelings and necessitates continued momentum in the narrative is something to admire, and takes a lot of work.

Much like “Fearful Symmetry,” The Omega Men is a controlled exercise in learning to accept complete loss of control.

Tom King’s work, until recently, was divided into specific thematic trilogies. Rorschach, Strange Adventures, and Batman/Catwoman comprised a pandemic fueled study of anger (where the former two engaged with the political directly and the latter lost its shape). Heroes in Crisis, Mister Miracle, and Batman was a trilogy of healing from trauma, the highs and lows of recovering and who helps us through it. The Vision, Sheriff of Babylon and The Omega Men is the Trilogy of Best Intentions, a series of works where each protagonist enters a world under the assumption that he can improve something, and progressively learns how misguided this notion was. In each of these cases, the intention is itself the problem; Vision, Chris Henry, and Kyle Rayner all believe themselves to know the world they’re in–what’s right and wrong–and trust in their ability to face the consequences, only to learn very quickly how naive they really are.

The methodical layouts of The Omega Men also service this theme by painting an illusion of control and symmetry that really just doubles down on the inescapable violence of the world we’re in. The series operates primarily on a 9 panel grid where the entire book is symmetrical. Every individual issue mirrors itself internally (page 1 mirrors page 20), but each issue also mirrors each other (issue 1 mirrors issue 12). The result is that the book parallels the symmetry of the Greek Omega symbol, but also embodies a metaphor for the whole theme of the story: the cyclical nature of violence, political change, and the human (alien?) condition that causes us to repeat our own mistakes.

Figure 3: DC Sneak Peek: The Omega Men by King/Bagenda/Marzan/Fajardo/Brosseau

The book poists the cosmology of Alpha–the first cause, the unmoved mover–and Omega– the end, the final cause. On the surface, these sound like a linear progression, a domino effect where Alpha leads into Omega. But ontologically, the nature of Alpha and Omega is the same: cause and effect never do actually end, and so they merely loop back to where they started, it’s all symmetrical. God is not Alpha, God is not Omega. God is the Alpha and the Omega.

Figure 4: The Omega Men #8 by King/Bagenda/Fajardo/Brosseau

From the opening preview pages when Kyle is held hostage and “killed,” we’re playing off the assumption that there is a right and wrong answer. These people are terrorists, Kyle is the hero. But each new element we learn–the introduction of the Viceroy, the various members of the Omega Men, the plan to cause a genocide to expose a genocide–digs us ever further into the hole. We’re always looking for point A to point B, always looking for the right way out of the wrong situation, assuming that this is even possible. And we always end up right back where we started. Kyle enters with the best intentions and learns very quickly those intentions are meaningless.

You can tell from the start, in just a birds eye view of this story, that Tom King is working very hard to plan out every stage, every thematic relationship, every narrative tool. King even did the layouts for this series which, as far as I know, he’s not done with any other book. However, that desire to control the whole narrative experience isn’t perfect, as the symmetry does fall apart in places. Issue #4 does not internally mirror, but it also isn’t reflected in its counterpart, issue #9. The irony here is that Issue #9 might be the single most iconic and strongest case for King’s grasp of how to lay out a comic to create maximum effect using only fundamental principles. It’s individually so well done, that you lose sight of how it actually disrupts the greater whole being achieved. King himself has reflected on this:

“I didn’t quite pull off the mirroring in the end. During the cancellation I got sloppy with a few panels in issue 5, and there are 3-4 other panels I just missed. And then the fill-in issue actually mirrors the countdown issue and I’m not sure that works exactly…But! There are hundreds of panels that work the right way, which is not so bad for this bizarre ambition!”

Tom King, “Omega Men #1: The Script,” Everlasting Productions

The Watchmen of it all, then, is in how King is working to tell a story so internally complicated, with political factions, real world parallels, and existential musings, but trying to ground it all in his ability to maintain and express the limits of form the way Alan Moore did. How does one visually represent structures of power limiting our ability to be who we want to be? How does a 9 panel grid represent both the visual prison of the characters and our own call to action to escape these bars?

Bars on a Cage

Figure 4: The Omega Men #12 by King/Bagenda/Fajardo/Brosseau

The final page of The Omega Men is a 9-panel grid of Kyle Rayner being asked whose side he will be on when war inevitably breaks out again. In response, Kyle talks about comics, how the gutters between panels represent bars on a cage, creating the illusion of separation. This is a series that is defined by the breakdowns of conceptional binaries. Kindness and cruelty, civilized and uncivilized, terrorists and heroes, reader and audience, alpha and omega.

Figure 5: The Omega Men #3 by King/Bagenda/Fajardo/Brosseau

In this final monologue from Kyle, he problematizes the binary between reader and audience, and implores what I believe to be the central theme in all of Tom King’s work: the breakdown of fiction and reality. Every story we tell is a story we tell about ourselves, every story we read is a truth we learn about ourselves. We are the alpha and omega, we blur the lines and imply the connective layer between panels.

I’ve written about this theme in King’s work before, most notably as it appears in Batman #23 when Swamp Thing has to confront his own grief. There, the contrast was between the “merely intellectual approach to life” articulated by Swamp Thing, and neatly packed in 9-panel grids that ultimately needs to be broken down and brought to reality. The panels are a prison cell separating us from feeling the bite of emotions, by presenting a narrative that’s neat, isolated, boxed in. Meanwhile, the emotions and characters drive toward a breaking point, asking us to feel and inject those feelings into something, to resist the sterile, almost clinical formality of the art.

This expresses itself throughout The Omega Men when we look at how Kyle inhabits the narrative. In the opening 8 page preview, he’s been captured by the Omega Men and we’re educated on the foundational principles of Alpha and Omega by Primus. The preview is titled “Between a Good Man and a Bad One,” which encapsulates the entire series as every character is caught in this pendulum. Kyle is placed in the center of the room, and remains there for the entire preview before having his throat slit. Artist Barnaby Bagenda employs a glitch effect to demonstrate the video signal being cut off before anyone sees Kyle’s fate. This same technique is used later by Mitch Gerads in Mister Miracle where King once again asks the audience to blur the lines between fiction and reality.

Figure 6: DC Sneak Peek: The Omega Men by King/Bagenda/Marzan/Fajardo/Brosseau

Here, however, the glitch effect is an interesting element of pageantry. The visuals here are clearly inspired by real world terrorist videos, which were lowtech and glitchy, so to speak. By 2015, this trend was nowhere near as common as it would have been when King was a CIA officer. This series, like Sheriff of Babylon, is perhaps the most directly correlated to those experiences that King has ever written. This element of personal experiences opens a lot of doors, and certainly these two books are not the only time it comes up. Sheriff, Omega Men, Heroes in Crisis, Mister Miracle, Strange Adventures and Batman all open up questions about forces beyond our control, political violence we have no agency in and the trauma this leads to. What King’s place in this conversation is, and how it threads though his work is a question too big for this particular article, aside from simply saying I think there is a genuinely thoughtful meditation here on humanity in the midst of these complicated subjects.

Despite this distance from terrorist videos, we as a western audience know this image, we know the flag and the bearded figure talking at us about religion. The story is counting on us to assume the hero and villain roles implied here by the show put on in front of us before the feed cuts to black. We get to hear all the ideology, but we get to be spared the violence.

Figure 7: The Omega Men #6 by King/Bagenda/Fajardo/Morey/Brosseau

And yet there’s the William James quote:

“We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.”

William James was a late 19th century/early 20th century American philosopher who established both early American Psychology and Pragmatism. James’ work and life contained numerous touchstone arguments for 20th century philosophy, which can be attributed to both the novelty of his ideas and his various interlocketors. Over the course of his life, he engaged with thinkers like Ernst Mach, Bertrand Russell, C.S. Peirce, Carl Jung, Sigmond Freud, John Dewey and many, many more. He also inspired later pragmatist thinkers like Richard Rorty and Cornel West.

As James’ work was gaining notoriety, he can be credited with carving out a new path in philosophy. To this day, most philosophy is divided between Continental and Analytic schools of thought. Pragmatism represents an alternative to both, and arrived on the scene at the same historical moment as the budding Analytic tradition tied to the Vienna Circle, and the established Continental tradition associated with Phenomenology and German Idealism. It is thus strongly disliked by both, for being too mechanical and somehow not mechanical enough, depending on who you ask.

James and Pragmatism is an alternative to binary thinking, it’s a different path that attempts to find what works without enforcing dogma. Thus, he is a fitting philosopher to use at the end of each issue for a series about the breaking down of binary concepts.

The words, the imagery, the act of pretending to kill Kyle is all calling on us to fall into the civilized and savage binary, but what James reminds us of is that all of us, on some base level, are prepared to be savage. Nothing glamorous, nothing heroic can be expected here, much to Kyle’s dismay. This is not a story of heroes and villains, this is immediately a story of who has the greatest cause, who has the best narrative that we are willing to be savages to defend?

King is blurring the lines of right and wrong to get at the real political complexity of the Vega system, but more than that he’s blurring the line between the tragedy of the story and the assumption that it’s neatly separated from our real world. As Kyle’s ending monologue reveals, we all pretend the fiction and the reality is different, that the pageantry of the terrorist video and the real goals of the Omega Men are different. But in the end, the point is to bridge that gap, to call out and ask what exactly are we supposed to do? What are our best intentions worth?

Fellow pragmatist, John Dewey, described art as a “disequilibrium with our environment.” Art denotes some fundamental lacking in our world, and calls out to the reader to address that lack. In that sense, The Omega Men is calling out the disequilibrium that our neat categories put us in. that we could separate ourselves from engaging with the messy emotions of the story, anymore than any character can separate themselves from their own hypocrisy.

The End is Here(?)

In the final few pages, we learn what became of the Omega Men once their cause was completed, when they no longer had to resort to savagery for a cause, but maintained it nevertheless. Tiggor was caught in a Civil War, Scrap disappeared, while Primus and the Princess became their own brand of tyrants. Much like the Omega symbol, everything in the end is roughly identical to where it was in the beginning. Ultimately what the serious posits is that binaries of choice may be an illusion, there may not be a purely good and a bad, a kind and an unkind, a civilized and a savage, but that doesn’t stop us from believing this to be the case.

Figure 8: The Omega Men #2 by King/Bagenda/Fajardo/Brosseau

For us, someone else is always the savage, someone else is always unkind, someone else is always bad. Kyle never forsakes his oath, just like in the face of the atrocities he witnesses, he never forsakes his God, despite holding him at fault.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? can be interpreted to mean it’s ridiculous, hilarious, paradoxical to ask who holds power over the powerful, who guards the guards, who watches the watchmen. That in the end, we are always left fighting some other, some enemy. There will always be a cause, an excuse, we will use to justify savagery. In the end, are we ever left any better than when we started?

There’s no certainty here, no answer that might give us comfort, no god that we might pray to. But that doesn’t stop us from praying, that doesn’t stop us from rebelling, that doesn’t stop us from carrying out our oath.

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