Rereading WATCHMEN

I'm about to begin rereading Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' comic WATCHMEN. I'm a little nervous. Scholars and comic fans have frequently called it the best comic ever written, and some literary lists with inclusive aims name it as one of the best books, full stop, of the past century.

I found it cold. Many of the dazzling experiments failed to deliver for me--the chunks of texts at the back of each issue, the 'Black Freighter' comic hidden inside. And I, like many others, hold it responsible for turning superhero comics into atrocity exhibitions--the darker, the better. But even its critics continue to snatch bits and pieces of narrative, dialogue and imagery from its pages.

With the film currently in development (which will once again boost sales), WATCHMEN actually has a better change of longevity than its company from 1986, Maus and The Dark Knight Returns. Maus is getting a bit tired from overpraise these days, and the new wave of literary comics looks to displace it. DKR remains a biting read (much easier to jump into than either of the others) but these days its playful elements stand out much more than its muddied philosophy.

Onward!

Quick wrap-ups

okay, I haven't been blogging, but I have been reading.

Neuromancer--I read this because of a stray remark Geoffrey Winthrop-Young made last semester: if you really want to understand the media theory of Friedrich Kittler, read this book--it's about computers learning to talk to other computers. I found this element of the book to be most fascinating, and I was left wanting more. The humans of the book disappointed. It was hard to appreciate the sheer inventiveness and world-building of the book because many of the ideas have become commonplace, and several elements, like the Rastafarians in space, feel trite.

Men's Style by Russell Brand (i think)--I know nothing about men's fashion, which is exactly why I was reading the book, the only one of that subject available at the public library. It was both informative and amusing. Brand is a good prose stylist who knows how to repeat himself without wearing out his welcome. As I struggle towards a fashion sense, this book has already come in handy several times.

Chiggers by Hope Larson--There are only two things wrong with this book about a teenaged girl at camp. The first is that it abandons the color of Larson's earlier works. The second is the the typography grates. Otherwise this is an outstanding comic about adolescence that felt painfully familiar to me, a boy who has never been to summer camp. The biting dialogue, the casual lies, the quizzical expressions all hit their marks.

Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible

I totally ignored this book when it came out last year, because "that novel about superheroes" did not sound all that appealing. If I want to read about superheroes, I have comics! This is not my attempt to police boundaries--I really like being able to see action and costume design and so on, instead of getting brief descriptions.

Grossman's book is extremely light. It's an easy and pleasurable read, especially for someone like me, who's comfortable with all the superhero tropes and can accurately predict the major plot twists. The dual first-person narratives are attempts to play through some comic book ideas in a new setting. Comics readers are used to the gritty narrative box, but we really don't spend a lot of time in characters' heads. Much more of our comprehension of characterization comes through the body language of the figures. The book makes us ask what it would really be like to be a super-villain or a new team member.

The most enjoyable section involves two perspectives on a fight between the Champions, earth's prime protectors, and Doctor Impossible, a recently escaped evil genius. First we hear about the fight from Impossible's pov. He has respect for the heroes' abilities and fears the encounter. From his perspective, he escapes by the skin of his teeth. When we get the heroic recap of the fight, it's a different picture. Dr. Impossible appears to have easily beaten back the entire team. This example teaches us that Dr. Impossible's high standards and low self-esteem fuel his villainy, which the Champions reinforce by viewing him through a narrow lens. This is not the most insightful observation about the mechanics of hero-villain interaction, but it is a solid foundation that could be built upon. I imagine that similar ideas could be presented by "showing" them in a comic, but it certainly seems like much more of an uphill battle, narratively.

Unfortunately many of the plot points peter out, and throughout the book there is a decided lack of gripping subtext. As many writers on comics have pointed out, superheros supply subtext that is as obvious* as it is durable. Everyone knows Superman is a godly figure, and it will always be fascinating to think about religion through him (even in Superman Returns, which at least stressed that increasing technological sophistication need not produce secularization).

Grossman seems aware of the dangers of stating the open subtext, so his big rhetorical flourishes, buried in his characters' minds, involve resilience towards taking over the world, rather than resilience in general. I'm sympathetic to this decision, but it renders the novel all-surface.

* there's got to be a good term for the kind of subtext that we're completely aware of, that requires no digging, but at the same time couldn't exactly be called text either. I'm going to use "open subtext" for now, kind of a play on "open secret".

Matt Kindt's Superspy

Superspy is a collection of related stories about spies of various European powers during the Second World War. The focus is on character; the missions live in the background. Like others, I'm not quite sure what to think about this comic. One the one hand, it has ambition leaking out its spine. On the other hand, the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

Let's begin with the artwork. The above example demonstrates clearly that this woman's dance is a coded message--the only way her hair is forming the words is through movement. I am fond of the expressionism at the heart of such images. Moreover, this artistic choice sells what is, to me, the main point of the book: being a successful spy is all about being a master storyteller, because a master storyteller creates suspension of disbelief.

I'm not ready to call Kindt a master storyteller, however. As one might imagine, there's a lot of confusion and double crossing in a series of stories about spies. Kindt organizes the stories in not-quite chronological order, and characters who appear in multiple stories often undergo vast cosmetic alterations. I like puzzles, but puzzles need to be compelling--not all puzzles are, by virtue of being puzzles, all that interesting. I'm just not invested. Here's a question: what makes a puzzle interesting? What is the rhetoric of a successful puzzle? Why do some people like some puzzles that other people don't? A lot of folks I know like figuring out all the little things in House of Leaves, for instance, but I can't be bothered.

I plan to have more on spies and spy-dom if I finish Legacy of Ashes.