Without a doubt the most critically
acclaimed piece of comic book literature is Alan Moore's and Dave
Gibbon's nihilistic masterpiece Watchmen. What originally
started as a slanted take on the Charlton Comics characters (e.g.
Captain Atom = Dr. Manhattan) became a phenomenon that gets
rediscovered by every generation of comic book readers who find out
how excellent comics can be.
DC has been trying to capitalize on
this for years with movies and action figures. But their latest
experiment has been to round up a bunch of top notch writers like
Brian Azzarello and Darwyn Cooke, as well as hot artists like Amanda
Connors to create a number of miniseries prequels to the original
titled Before Watchmen. It was a grand experiment.
The experiment failed.
I don't mean that it failed in terms of
sales. In fact, the opposite is true and sales are through the roof
from what I understand. And I don't mean all of it is bad. Some of
the writing is sharp and some of the art is beautiful to look at.
But for the life of me, the stories cannot hold my interest.
Prequels are notoriously difficult to
do, because we know not only the ending of the story, but the major
arch that brings the main characters to that place. This is
especially true with Moore's story because one of its central themes
is the futility of the costumed hero. And yet all of these books are
about the life of a costumed hero, doomed to end not with a bang but
with a whimper (to paraphrase TS Eliot).
For example, the Silk Spectre comic is
charming enough. But the main story is about how Laurie fights
against her destiny to become a crime fighter. Not only do we know
that she will, which takes a a lot of the dramatic tension out of the
air, but we know because of Watchmen that she won't accomplish
anything from it.
The most interesting of the
mini-series, The Minutemen, brings with it Moore's satiric
tone, but that's part of the problem. This book is about the
original Golden Age heroes. I want to care about the old guard, but
writer/artist Cook keeps most of them at bay. They are interesting,
but distant. For example, Silhouette is smart, savage, and is
interested in smashing a human smuggling ring. But the Minutemen are
basically a publicity exercise I feel her frustration, but I can't
hope that things get better, because I know that they do not. And I
know that in the end most of them die pointlessly.
The most overblown is the Ozymandias
book. Jae Lee's art is grandiose, but I was bored by the story that
seemed to not tell me much of anything I did not already know from
the original. The Rorschach book would be much more
interesting if I thought it would go anywhere. In this book, comic's
favorite sociopath runs afoul of some bad guys and gets beaten pretty
badly. Somehow this will relate to a serial killer, but I couldn't
hold on.
And the Nite Owl book took a
turn in the second issue towards outright pornography.
The “prequel problem” is something
that everyone involved with this book I'm sure took very seriously.
But whatever steps they took to overcome it failed. There is no
dramatic tension and not enough good will to propel the story. The
original Watchmen had the advantage of being new and daring,
while also making us care what happened to Rorschach, Nite Owl, and
Silk Spectre, while also drawing us in with a good mystery.
Subsequent re-reads are enjoyable because of the multi-layered
symbolism folded into all the parts of the narrative. For example, I
never knew until a few years ago that the chapter “Fearful
Symmetry” was a palindromic story where the pages mirror each other
from the middle outward.
There is nothing that poetic in Before
Watchmen.
Something to remember is that the
Watchmen universe is not a fun place to be. There are no
“adventures” to be had here, just dark tales of despair. And
unless you have the genius hand of Alan Moore guiding those tales
like the Black Freighter to shore, you will run aground on the jagged
rocks of depression (sorry, the metaphor got away from me a little).
Before Watchmen is not an
exercise in nostalgia but in futility.
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