If Understanding Comics is the book that showed me I could study comics, Watchmen is the book that made me want to.
Like a lot of Moore's best comics, Watchmen is both an adolescent work and an adult one, more beholden to convention than it lets on and determined to provide generic thrills along with more cerebral pleasures. I was lucky enough to hit adolescence just as Watchmen was coming out, when it could satisfy my dual desires to read a superhero comic and grow into something more challenging. It wasn't alone in filling that niche--Frank Miller was there, too, and Moore's other work, and later Grant Morrison's first American comics. But more than any other single comic book, Watchmen held out the promise that comics could grow up with me. Which, thanks to a couple of accidents of history, they did.
I read Watchmen so many times those first couple of years that I didn't read it cover-to-cover again for close to twenty. After a couple of decades of pulling out the greatest hits (the prison break first, then the Rorschach issue and the Citizen Kane wake for the Comedian and the symmetrical issue, then finally Jon's issue, "Watchmaker") and ruminating on them in isolation I decided it was time to dive back in and read it as it was supposed to be read. Not so much because the movie stirred up old memories but because my 1987 trade paperback, loaned to many friends and consulted countless times, was falling to pieces and the recoloring by John Higgins seemed like a great excuse to buy a new copy.
Watchmen was not well served by 1980s printing techniques and those lurid hues always contradicted its claims to subtlety and maturity. Even Tales of the Black Freighter, which was supposed to be lurid, was fatally compromised by a crude palette that gave the mariner's decomposing shipmates the color scheme of a box of Froot Loops. Comics have finally caught up with Moore and Gibbons, in at least this one technical matter, and we can finally see Watchmen as it was meant to be seen. I'm not a huge fan of ironic Benday dots as a shortcut to instant nostalgia, but Higgins' use of the primitive patterns helps to pop the Black Freighter images and captions out of Gibbons' busy panels and distinguishes the comic-within-a-comic from the world around it.
The change is even more profound in scenes like Dr. Manhattan's march through Vietnam--a scene of special power for me because it was the first glimpse of Watchmen I ever had, in one of those "Pow! Zap!" articles that ran in Newsweek circa 1986. A superhero, because a man of that physique and size and unnatural shade of blue could be nothing else, was striding across a burning landscape, creating mushroom clouds with the same casual gesture that might attend the selection of a photograph or the creation of man. Two terse captions promised that this child's fantasy would be directed toward grown-up subjects with their brazenly false history of the war that we weren't supposed to talk about, that we always kept talking about. This was the image that made me want to read Watchmen before I would have been able to handle it, the image that said it was a teenager's book and an adult's. To see it in the new edition, shorn of its pastel pinks and piss yellows, now wrapped in purples that turn a sunlit moment of triumph into a twilight of the gods: I felt like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken.
That was last April. I had no intentions of rereading the book again for the graphic novel class but by the time I hit "Watchmaker" my judicious skimming had turned into complete immersion. I didn't even hold out until my own primal scene; Jon staring at that photograph was enough, or maybe his departure the chapter before. You had me at "At play amidst the Strangeness and the Charm." Truth to tell, you had me at the dog carcass in the alley, tire tread on burst stomach.
Teaching works you love always runs the risk that your own enthusiasm will impair your judgment of what your students need to know, or worse, that you'll get angry at your students because they don't share your enthusiasm. Neither has been a problem for this class. Whether they're coming to the story for the first time or they've also been reading it since they were teenagers, they've been as eager to discuss Watchmen as I am. If I personally have little interest in some of the things they wanted to talk about--we can only debate whether Veidt was "right" or "wrong" because the circumstances of his ethical dilemma are so utterly contrived to begin with, a late-night dorm-lounge bull session brought to life--I was still happy to let them go there as a way of giving them some responsibility over the discussion and as a way of opening up the areas I did want to cover. And they were equally willing to tackle those areas: the formal techniques, the genre criticisms, the clashing ideologies that animate each of the major characters.
That's more or less the order of how we tackled Watchmen, starting with how to read it and what contexts to read it in before building up to the themes and ideas that make it worth reading in a classroom. The capstone of the lectures was a look at the comic's conflicting ideas about meaning and purpose in the universe--Blake's nihilism, Jon's makerless mechanism, Rorschach's morally blank world ordered by our own arbitrary scrawls, and the thermodynamic miracles that only become visible from a more distant perspective or, paradoxically, a more intimate one. That forced us to bring the comic's form and design back into the discussion, tying the lectures together so neatly you'd almost think they were designed that way. When in fact they had about as much advance planning as the smiley face on Mars.
Not too bad considering I worked them up on the fly while I was busy rereading a comic I have been reading for twenty-two years instead of drawing up lesson plans. This is what expertise is, I suppose: the knowledge that you don't have to draw up in lesson plans because you have been absorbing it and processing it your entire life. The knowledge that you pick up while you're doing something else. It's a little embarrassing to discover that I'm better qualified to teach Watchmen than I am to teach the books I wrote about in my dissertation, but I guess that just means I'm in the right place, the right classroom, at long last.
You're one of the few people to notice or at least comment on the new colouring. I own an old paperback, so I've only experienced the new colours by first, flicking through the recent paperback in Borders, and second, reading Gibbons's Watching the Watchmen. Thus perhaps I haven't got the full impact, but I hate the new colours. Give me the old colours any day. The "ironic Benday dots" are a double disrespect in this case, epitomising everything I think is wrong with modern publishing's attitude to colour reprints. I promise to stare at Manhattan's march through Vietnam next time I have the chance, however, and who knows what alchemy it will perform on me?
I'm glad the class is doing so well. Since this is Genres in American Literature, did you discuss Watchmen in terms of non-comics genre? It's placement in a wider context is something I've been meaning to investigate.
Posted by: David Golding | February 09, 2010 at 05:44 PM
This post should have some illustrations once I can reclaim my new edition from the snows that have shut down campus for a week. (This is absolutely the last semester I would want campus to shut down for a week!)
I never cared for the old colors, but I think the new ones come off particularly well when you compare the editions side by side. Scenes like the one you mentioned, the last page of chapter two, finally take on their true appearance when the red is actually red and not a slightly off-kilter pink. And I've gotten thoroughly sick of ironic Benday dots, but they perform a great service in distinguishing the Black Freighter panels and captions from the world around them (particularly the captions, which used to be identical in color to every other caption and word balloon in the comic). Whatever aesthetic claims about art's ability to represent the world this decision may or may not invalidate, it's a great leap in terms of sheer legibility.
Higgins goes overboard a few times late in the novel, introducing computer-colored explosion or teleportation effects the story always got along just fine without, but for the most part I found it a vast improvement.
The Genres in American Lit tag is just an administrative catchall used to contain a course that didn't fit easily in the catalog. The genre in question is comics and graphic novels, "genre" in this case being used in that confusing old equivalence with "form." We didn't talk much about placing Watchmen outside of comics.
If I were doing so, I wouldn't compare it to the neorealist (or tepidly magical-realist) novels that claimed the prizes in 1987 but to the great postmodernists of the 1970s, especially Thomas Pynchon and Angela Carter. For all Moore's efforts at introducing an older mode of psychological realism to the superhero genre, Watchmen is displays a wide-angle view of the world, an unabashed spirit of formal play, and an overt intellectualism that had no home in the lowered ambitions of the literature of the 1980s. Compared against the literary fiction of its day Watchmen is a decade out of date--entirely to its credit--which also puts it about two decades ahead of its times.
Posted by: Marc | February 09, 2010 at 09:25 PM
Fascinating posts, Marc. Keep it up
Posted by: Zom | February 10, 2010 at 10:56 AM