Bat-Tanks & Flying Owl-Mobiles: On The Canon & The Dark Knight Returns, Watchman, and -eventually - The Sandman (Part 3)

In which the blogger continues his discussion of some the great sacred cows of the superhero sub-genre - begun here and here.  As a result, the "Sunday Miscellany & Thank You" will now become the soon-to-appear "Wednesday Miscellany & Thank You" instead;

     

There are failures of nerve, craft and ambition, and then there’s an industry daring only to sell superhero books to the Rump and to its most recently departed members. For if anything is to be learned from the past quarter-century of both continuous publication and critical acclaim where both Watchman and The Dark Knight Returns are concerned, it’s surely that superheroes can and will sell to a far broader audience than that of the habituated fanboy. And yet somehow the conversation of why Watchman and The Dark Knight Returns should have so very successful tends to be framed in terms of how each text really isn't a traditional superhero story at all. They’re revisionist, they’re ironic, they’re deconstructions, they’re satires, they're even the last closing statements of an ossified dead-end of a sub-genre. In fact, sometimes it can be hard to understand how the duopoly ever sold so many copies and impressed so many readers. Because if the superhero genre was, and remains, that exhausted and perhaps even contemptible, then why would readers from beyond the fan community even bother to turn up and witness the last rites being read to it?

          
And so, perhaps we might start by noting and celebrating the fact that both Watchman and The Dark Knight Returns are in so many ways profoundly typical superhero stories. For to a significant degree, they work exactly as superhero stories always have, and in doing so, they surely illustrate the strength and the lasting appeal of the sub-genre rather than any sclerotic and irradicable weaknesses which make it profoundly unfit-for-purpose. Rather than seeing the duopoly as having been in their day radical breaks with the super-person's past, and seeking something of why they've so appealed in that, I'd like to suggest that it’s the familiar framework of spandex costumes and impossible powers, of world-threatening plots and infeasible super-tech, which lies at the heart of these book's appeal. In short, no matter how an awareness of the failings of the sub-genre's past informs each book's sub-text, the text itself is recognisably and successfully part of a decades-long tradition of storytelling. Indeed, both books enthusiastically eulogise the superhero sub-genre far more than they ever playfully undermine it. After all, how could they do manage to do anything but, given that the pages of each book succeeds in making the whole fantastical business of the super-person so utterly compelling?  

   

Indeed, there’s such a joyful commitment to the traditions of the superhero sub-genre which radiates from each comic’s pages, and that makes it hard to see how time has lent each book the status of an attempt to stake that tradition right through its chest insignia. And so, the belief that each book somehow succeeds despite its superheroic content seems to be a quite indefensible one. These comics may function as critiques of some aspects of the super-person narrative, but they're no assault upon the sub-genre at all. The scenes of the aged Batman’s return to a storm-racked, lawless Gotham, and of the assault upon the Prison from within and without by Rorschach, Nite-Owl and Silk Spectre, are unashamedly gleeful in how they celebrate the business of putting on a costume and challenging the powers that be. 

Regardless of what Messrs Moore and Miller might have said in the years since these books were first published, there's a real sense of love for the superhero which shines through every page of these comics.

        
And although Watchman is undoubtedly also an argument against the conceit that costumed human beings could ever punch out a solution to the world’s labyrinthine and intractable problems, it’s also a narrative that both makes and wins the case for how fascinating it can be to watch them try to do so. After all, the costumes may be gone by the story’s end, but the super-people aren’t. Watchman most certainly doesn't end, as some would have us believe, with the superheroes all vacating the stage forever, although Dr Manhattan himself has retreated to his dressing room for awhile. In fact, there’s a criminal mastermind in charge of a debased America going by the name of Nixon as the events of the book conclude, and an even more nefarious super-villain/anti-superhero manipulating the geo-political affairs of the whole world in the shape of the impossibly gifted Ozymandias. More telling yet, there's that diary of Rorschach's lurking at the margins of the tale and threatening to become its new centre, its contents informed by the same indomitable and blighted qualities which made the vigilante such an impressively pathetic superhero. The influence of the super-person in Watchman has very much not disappeared from the world in which its set.

            

These are facts which touch upon another distracting and misdirecting myth associated with Watchman. Because Messrs Moore and Gibbons's story very much doesn't present its superheroes as ineffective and impotent characters. The less powerful of the once-Watchmen may be entirely unable to control riots or restore constitutions, but they're in no way pathetic or useless. What Watchman skewers isn't the figure of the superhero, but the trope of a noble, united and costumed elite which can always be trusted to behave ethically and effectively.  In that, it's a text which distrusts the myth of institutional power which ennobles and never corrupts, but it's also a book which celebrates the capacity of the individual to improve the lot of others. And so, the less powerful of Messrs Moore and Gibbons's costumed cast are still capable of rescuing folks from burning buildings and flattening even without trying every aspect of resistance which might be found in the prison to which Rorschach has been sent. And it's in these scenes, where the superheroes do what they can within the limits of their strength, that one of the key themes of Watchman is accentuated; we do what we can within the limits of our gifts and the constraints of the powers which we're subject to. In the context of this dose of intellectual if not physical realism, the reader is consistently shown just how thoroughly exciting such super-heroic escapades can be when the strengths of the sub-genre are played to rather than skated over. 

               
For although Watchmen may set limits on what might conceivably be achieved by small groups of only-just super-people, the likes of Nite-Owl and Silk Spectre are still impressively and endearingly powerful and able. Similarly, The Dark Knight Returns closes having in many ways merely replaced one strata of hyper-protagonists for another, with the local super-villains having been eliminated and Batman's army of super-people and costumed street-thugs gathering for an eventual assault upon Washington and Reagan's evil uncaring empire. The superhero narrative hasn't in any way been undermined here, so much as spruced up and mildly retooled for the future. Indeed, by incorporating decades-old criticisms of the superhero book, Watchman and The Dark Knight Returns do little but respond to contradictions discussed in the likes of Seduction Of The Innocent and Superduperman  in the 1950s. As far as radical reworkings of sub-genre forms and conventions are concerned, the duopoly's supposed assault upon the super-person narrative were minor, gentle and familiar. Only in a storytelling form which had remained impossibly resistant to change and self-awareness could such long-standing and essentially unchallenging innovations be viewed as revolutionary. Folks with superpowers couldn't be trusted to respect the rule of law? Superheroes might seek to control rather than serve the state? A mainstream audience would surely take such points as being entirely logical and sensible and necessary, and reject any narrative which ignored such commonsense truths and political engagement. Only a superhero obsessive bound to the least innovative conventions of the sub-genre would expect anything else.

           
It's not that I want to be thought to be ignoring those aspects of Watchman and The Dark Knight Returns which were undoubtedly radical and revitalising. I'll certainly be doubling back to discuss, for example, how the storytelling used in both comics draws upon both writerly and artist traditions which had been largely ignored in the superhero book up until that time. But it is that the duopoly's strength lies firstly, if certainly not entirely, in how the traditional virues of the sub-genre are attended to. This is particularly true where the politics of both comics are concerned. For rather than being a quantum leap forward in the form's maturity, the presence of an explicit and deliberate political sub-text in both books merely marks a reversion to the superhero's original and most appropriate form. For as we've discussed here  before, the superhero comic is by its very nature a discussion about the relationship between state power and individual responsibility. That's simply unavoidable, given that the sub-genre's stories are nearly always framed in the terms of  a debate about when it might be permissible to take power into one's own often-anonymous hands. 

         
And the very first superheroes, and many of their immediate pulp predecessors too, were keenly and explicitly concerned with social and political issues. To have Adrian Veidt attempting to direct international affairs through a fake alien invasion is only an extension of the first version of Superman's attempts to keep America out of over-seas wars by shutting down fiendish arms traders and slapping around foreign dictators. And to show The Batman taking arms against the state is little but a logical if hard-pushed extension of his early habit of throwing criminals off of the top of houses and skyscrapers rather than letting the rule of law attend to them. In this attention to politics, Watchman and The Dark Knight Returns weren't radicalising the sub-genre, although they were making it endlessly far more interesting to audiences from beyond those of the Rump. Rather, they were accepting the inarguable logic and strength of the superhero narrative, enhancing its broad appeal by being true to both its original and its essential nature.

              

It's in the figure of Rorscach that this process of returning the superhero book to its roots, to its essentially appropriate form, is most obvious. Unlike Mr Miller's Batman, who is consistently, and we must hope satirically, associated with the Great Man of History so beloved of fascists and their camp followers, Rorscach is clearly anything but a character who can ever be thought to be glorifying vigilantism and unrestrained violence. It's a mark of how little some of those associated with the Common Comics Culture understood their own sub-genre that the super-person book was immediately clogged with characters which aped Rorscach and yet presented their 'homages' in a largely if not wholly heroic light. In doing so, they once again mistook surface for substance, and lifted the least important aspects of Rorscach's appeal. None of these knock-offs ever succeeded in being as enthralling and as moving a figure as Walter Kovacs remains, and no increase in the degree of violence and angst associated with them can ever make these xeroxed killers any more appealing. For it is - of course - obvious that what makes Rorschach so counter-intuitively captivating and compelling is the politics which informs him as a character rather than the violence and loneliness which marks his everyday existence. Despite what so much of the C.C.C. choose to believe, it wasn't that he threatened elderly cancer victims or unempathetically broke suspect's fingers so deliberately which made most readers want to follow his character's arc. No, what makes him so sympathetic is that he clearly represents what a callous society can do to the most noble aspects of a young child's soul. 

           
That Rorschach is a critique of a depraved society may come as a shock to those members of the C.C.C. who believe that he and his kind exist to shame those superheroes too apparently fastidious not to torture and murder their opponents. Yet Rorschach is a clearly traumatised and mentally disordered victim of a culture which has abandoned its fundamental responsibilities to its own. In Walter Kovacs's blighted attempts to fulfil the most basic responsibilities of protecting his fellow citizens, we're presented with a portrait of an essentially decent human being who's been so damaged that he can only understand the world in the most basic and feral of terms. In standing as an example of the best of humanity debased by the worst of human social conditions, he, of course, utterly captivates us.

   
We associate with him not because we want to beat the scum of the earth into the earth, but because we recognise how the virtue in him has been curdled, and that inevitably raises the question of what it is that we may have suffered and/or participated in ourselves. To see Rorschach attempting to communicate gratitude to Nite-Owl, and barely managing to growl out the words, is to want to see a better world, is to be reminded again that what we are very much isn't simply a question of individual choice operating in a basically fair and nurturing social system. 

For, of course, super-heroes aren't ever the story. Super-heroes are a way of telling stories, and there are particular types of tales to which the superhero is uniquely well-suited. 

          

To be continued, when your blogger will attend to those undeniably radical aspects of both books which it might appear that he's so far chosen to ignore;

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