Superhero Filmmakers: Where's Our Watchmen?

Best yet:

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hey wait, why didn't Dr Manhattan just magic up enough food for everyone

I'm guessing he couldn't be bothered.

fuckin' guy

those are some weird lookin starving kids

OTOH, if the idea is that rorschach really IS a nerd trying (and failing) to act "dangerous",

thats the impression i always got from the book

FAILING to act dangerous?

What?

with his voice, not with his psychotic killings/maimings

he's the dylan klebold of grim n gritty

Well, yeah he's a maladjusted little pipsqueak without the mask and lift shoes, and maybe he's coasting on his rep when everyone is intimidated by his very presence, but I can't recall anything that suggests people ever failed to take Rorschach seriously as a threat. Eric, or whatever his secret identity is, sure, no one cares about that guy.

Uh he's not exactly shy and retiring when he's unmasked and in prison.

i never read him that way. i always figured that there was no element of pose to rorschach - that he was very "pure" is his creepy, psychotic anti-heroism. that he wasn't trying to impress or scare anyone, rather his basic character was scary by nature in ways he didn't even understand. i took the "spooky" word bubbles as indicative of a pathological lack of affect, a genuinely weird speaking voice, and the muffling effect of his mask. comics give you a lot of room for interpretation tho...

^^^ yeah, this is how i've always understood him.

I didn't really communicated what I meant there: I always felt that as much as Rorshach is definitely a sociopath he's a very theatrical sociopath. His mannerisms seem....mannered.

no, see, that's the thing: i've always felt like he's very un-mannered. there's nothing theatrical about him at all, which is why he's so creepy.

yeah, me too. but now that i'm used to the idea, i could see it working the other way. kind of undercuts the character, though. i mean, part of rorschach's function is to represent an idealistic, almost childish authenticity and purity in a fallen world. not only to represent, but to criticize, to deconstruct the idealistic integrity of the lone wolf here archetype.

to make him part of that fallen world, just another ego-boosing superficial persona, is to undercut the critique in some ways. then again, maybe it opens up other ideas...

"hero archetype"

"ego-boosting"

etc.

> Uh he's not exactly shy and retiring when he's unmasked and in prison.

Yeah, the props aren't the whole thing; he really is a fucking killer nutbag. He's not in his secret identity in those scenes. But as placard guy on the street he just disappears, to the point that the newsie spits out his coffee, because he doesn't even realize he's there.

I think the way he tells his story to the psychiatrist suggest certain (maybe subconscious?) ego-boosting and sense of theatrics. He wants the psychiatrist to understand his mission as Rorschach. If he truly didn't care, he wouldn't have said anything to the guy.

He had, like, a polish accent in the book didn't he?

to make him part of that fallen world, just another ego-boosing superficial persona, is to undercut the critique in some ways. then again, maybe it opens up other ideas...

― They don’t understand. And I eat a lot of matzo brie. (contenderizer), Wednesday, February 25, 2009 10:21 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

exactly i always understood him as a critique of the sociopathic lone wolf

just borrowed the comic from a friend at work. haven't read this is over 10 years, lost my copy somewhere along the line.

anyway excited to read it again, wanted to be able to participate in the post-release "why did they change that" bitchfest.

Also, the fact that he keeps a journal (presumably for someone else to read, at least posthumously) with all those pompous words suggests that he does what he does at leats partially to boost his ego, he's not just a force of nature or something. It's the classic story of a bullied kid becoming the lone, misunderstood hero of a story he writes in his head.

And I think the critique of lone-wolf vigilante works better that way. The idealistic depictions of these kind of "heroes" depict them exactly as pure, child-like forces of nature, whereas Moore shows that they're more likely to be just fucked-up self-centred creeps.

like

ain't shit romantic or noble about the dude even beneath his sociopathic impulses

he's just fuckin nuts

yeah, he's a total egomaniac, no doubt. wouldn't argue that, but i nevertheless always figured him for a very "real" sort of person, for someone who just sort of is. not for a would-be hero putting on a tough-guy act

also agree about the "fucked-up self-centered creeps" bit, but if he's also a phony then it becomes more a critique of pretenses based on the ideal, not of the ideal itself. and i think moore intended to critique the ideal.

and i think that's the point moore was making about a whole swath of costumed types xp

but if he's also a phony then it becomes more a critique of pretenses based on the ideal, not of the ideal itself. and i think moore intended to critique the ideal.

I think what Moore is trying to say is that those sort of ideals are impossible to achieve in practice, that in real world this sort of "heroism" would become antiheroism. Note that the main character in V is also a lone wolf tough guy bent one making a better world, and the only way Moore can make him a hero is by making him a non-person.

"bent on making a better world"

> a lone wolf tough guy bent on making a better world

That sounds more like you're talking about Veidt. Rorschach isn't really interested in that, is he? Only punishing the guilty

"They'll Cry out 'save us' and I'll look down and say 'no.'"

My favorite quote from Moore on Watchmen:
"The gritty, deconstructivist postmodern superhero comic, as exemplified by Watchmen, also became a genre. It was never meant to. It was meant to be one work on its own. I think, to that degree, it may have had a deleterious effect upon the medium since then. I'd have liked to have seen more people trying to do something that was as technically complex as Watchmen, or as ambitious, but which wasn't strumming the same chords that Watchmen had strummed so repetitively. This is not to say that the entire industry became like this, but at least a big enough chunk of it did that it is a noticeable thing. The apocalyptic bleakness of comics over the past 15 years sometimes seems odd to me, because it's like that was a bad mood that I was in 15 years ago. It was the 1980s, we'd got this insane right-wing voter fear running the country, and I was in a bad mood, politically and socially and in most other ways. So that tended to reflect in my work. But it was a genuine bad mood, and it was mine. I tend to think that I've seen a lot of things over the past 15 years that have been a bizarre echo of somebody else's bad mood. It's not even their bad mood, it's mine, but they're still working out the ramifications of me being a bit grumpy 15 years ago."

ya rly

where is Promethea movie lolz

That sounds more like you're talking about Veidt. Rorschach isn't really interested in that, is he? Only punishing the guilty

But punishing the guilty is his way of making a better world, isn't it? In the psychiatrist issue he says something about being free to "carve his mark into the world". It's true though that, even more than Rorschach, Veidt is a critical variation on V (right down to his name), his well-meaning idealism gone horrible wrong.

moore ain't the most humble dude on earth, but YES. the popularity of grim & gritty fin de siècle revisionism bugged the SHIT out of me in the 90s. especially when attached to a smirking kind of "punk rock" nihilist cool. especially when adopted by writers i liked for other reasons (morisson's invisibles, for instance, though he ended up doing interesting things within the approach).

^ nadir of this, so far = sin city (the movie)

Invisibles is amazing. Just on a structural level alone.

yeah, i ended up loving it. but i was very disappointed at first. thought he was working the "young! cool! hip!" angles waaaaaaay to hard. especially after the heart-on-sleeve humanism of doom patrol & animal man, which i LOVED.

especially when adopted by writers i liked for other reasons (morisson's invisibles, for instance, though he ended up doing interesting things within the approach).

Morrison has always been critical of "grim and gritty" though, hasn't he? Even in The Invisibles he had that one issue about the life of the henchman King Mob randomly shot down. And he was probably the first mainstream writer to mourn grittiness replacing old-school sense of wonder, in the final issues of Animal Man.

(xx-post)

^ nadir of this, so far = sin city (the movie)

Yeah, that was pretty awful. Though there wasn't really anything more awful in there than what Miller had already done in the comics.

but prior to the invisibles, i liked the fact that morrisson indulged the freedom offered by "new comics" post miller/moore to tell personal stories without pandering to what eventually became vertigo's house-brand gothpunk cool.

will defend miller's work because he's such a wonderful artist and because his style was HIS. whatever it may have pandered to, it always seemed like the product of a distinct, personal POV.

i've been pronouncing it "Vaydt" all this time btw boy is my face red

Well yeah, the first Sin City story was pretty awesome when it originally came out simply because Miller had managed to distill his whole style into something so pure and striking. But once he started putting out more and more SC stories it was pretty soon a case of diminishing returns. Also, the creative freedom he got after leaving superheroes behind also meant that he was free to explore all the ugly right-wing macho sexist tenets of his personality, which was pretty much what made me stop caring about his work.

(x-post)

hey wait, why didn't Dr Manhattan just magic up enough food for everyone

The biggest problem/plot hole in the comic, even. So you have a dude who can do anything? So what's the trouble?

It's not a plot hole -- it's the plot!! It's precisely because Dr. Manhattan can do anything that Veidt feels he has to neutralize him; not just to get rid of his destabilizing effects on world security, but so human beings (and especially Americans) can rely on themselves and not their new God.

And Manhattan's reluctance to act is among the major moral issues of the book! It's not like it gets ignored.

Also, the creative freedom he got after leaving superheroes behind also meant that he was free to explore all the ugly right-wing macho sexist tenets of his personality, which was pretty much what made me stop caring about his work.

Abstracting the hard-boiled genre to the point of absurdity is definitely no job for a comic book.

you guys need to read one (1) run of miracleman

he's such a wonderful artist

lolz