Around the time that Watchmen was released, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns also debuted– a seminal work that had a similarly profound impact on comic books and popular perceptions of them. Some comic industry context about why this is a critical point to make is necessary. Moore had us spend so long in the heads of Manhattan and Rorschach that eventually their world-views became compelling. And yet fans-like me-loved them both for decades.
Rorschach a proto-incel, is an Alex Jonesian conspiracy-fabulist. Manhattan is a mass murderer indifferent to human suffering. Moore, to his credit, created dynamic three-dimensional characters, but in doing so sewed the seeds for the collapse of his critical frame.
Regardless of his intentions, however, Moore built a thematic framework that bolsters many awful superhero tropes-and these have outlived the subversive qualities of the text (2).
And he did it beautifully- Watchmen transcended the form with its intricate plot and a reverberating flow of prose and art. But Moore went a few steps further here because he was able to sully the intellectual property and express his own politics about the concept. Moore’s work has always been about taking apart superhero tropes and putting them back together in situations atypical of the genre (1). The birthplace of superheroing is the “Minutemen” a WW2 era group of morally-confused and easily-corrupted narcissists working under a white supremacist, capitalist definition of right and wrong who donned capes for uninspiring reasons. Moore built an ugly super-hero landscape, mired in imperialist politics, narcissism, cultural chauvinism and white supremacist zeitgeists, true. I loved Moore’s Watchmen and have re-read it half a dozen times over the years, and that’s why I’m confident that the original text is a really unfortunate platform to launch these critiques from.
#Blue watchme t tv#
Lee characterizes the print Watchmen as a brilliant, subversive anti-racist and anti-fascist text that Lindelof’s TV show fails to live up to. It’s been an unfortunate take that I’ve seen in several critiques, with this one in Truth-Dig by Leslie Lee being the most popular.
#Blue watchme t serial#
A common critical refrain about the show, for example, has been that its a poor cousin of a more radical and subversive source-text, Alan Moore’s original 12-issue serial comic book. I think instead of focusing solely on what HBO’s Watchmen got wrong, an examination of the source material may put the success and failure of the show in better context. The replacement of the Klan with Cyclops the sudden onset of villainy in Lady Trieu the disappearance of Will’s gayness and too many other disappointments to list in a short piece.Īll of these are worthwhile criticisms and deserving of their own essay, but not what I’d like to focus on here. The show dropped the ball on Vietnam, horribly. Recasting the African American struggle against white supremacy as a superhero origin story was a show-stopper, but Damon Lindelof’s production had very obvious failures elsewhere that are by now well-noted. Like many, I’m still struggling with the disappointments of the HBO Watchmen series, mostly because of how good it was at the start.
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