Crisis at the World Trade Center

Perhaps the problem with these superheroic interventions is not just that the tasks are too great (even if they are); perhaps the insertion of these costume-clad figures of fantasy into an event that is actually happening is either simply in too poor taste, or too jarring to take seriously. When Dr. Doom stood at Ground Zero in the J. Michael Straczynski and John Romita Jr. special issue of Spider-Man that came out immediately after 9/11 (Issue 36), the tears welling in his eyes were not only ludicrous, but led to ludicrous fan discussions.  Putting a crying supervillain in this situation is, at minimum, tacky, but it also breaks the frame in an unproductive manner.  Fans and critics online repeatedly pointed out the absurdity of this moment; why would Dr. Doom, who has killed countless people and destroyed his fair share of major cities, care at all about this?  This is a sensible objection, but it is also symptomatic: with a single panel, the creative team got people to expend their mental energy on the possible reactions of a comic book supervillain to a real-life tragedy that had just happened. It is only a short step from "Would Dr. Doom cry over 9/11?" back to, "Who would win in a fight, the Hulk or Thor?"

Dr. Doom’s heart grew two sizes on 9/11

Even more than the Ethiopian famine, 9/11 is a case study in the incompatibility of superhero comics with real-world disasters; in Marvel comics, at least, 9/11 would have happened in the city that is home to nearly all the company's heroes. By "incompatibility," I do not mean to suggest that superhero comics cannot be serious or weighty, or legitimate works of politically-inflected art.  It is a question of genre, tone, and believability.  This is not exclusively a problem of superhero comics; when HBO's Sex and the City returned after September 11, the iconic shot of the Twin Towers was removed from the opening credits, but the producers wisely declined to make a "very special episode" about the event.  Executive producer Michael Patrick King was adamant that "the series should provide escapist pleasures, not debates about bin Laden over brunch." Even though the series took place in "the City," it did not have a way to address 9/11 adequately without becoming an entirely different show. 

Of course, no one expected Carrie Bradshaw and her friends to actually do something about bin Laden, or to provide disaster relief at Ground Zero.  Superheroes, on the other hand, should be expected to do precisely that. Which was the problem with Amazing Spider-Man 36 in particular and superhero comics involving 9/11 in general.  Just how many times have superheroes foiled terrorists and stopped airplanes from crashing?  How many buildings have they saved from total destruction? The only reason Marvel or DC superheroes would be unable to save the Twin Towers is that, in our world, they were not saved. Even setting aside the heroes' inexplicable failure, there is the question of continuity and tone. Entire cities have been destroyed in mainstream superhero comics, but with limited consequences.  When Green Lantern Hal Jordan's home town of Coast City is erased from the map, it sets him down the path of villainy, leading him to commit mass murder and try to reboot the timeline, but the rest of the country moves on rather quickly.  Coast City's destruction is only referenced when it is useful for the plot. Even worse, nearly everything about this tragedy is undone by later events; Hal was possessed by a fear entity called Parallax (don't ask), and Coast City is eventually rebuilt (although the original population remains dead). There is too much casual destruction and megadeaths in superhero comics for 9/11 to resonate properly.

Or at least as a current event and a recent trauma.  With the passage of time, 9/11 can become one of many horrible historic events that is assumed to have happened in the superhero comic's past, making it available as a referent.  Brian Vaughn and Tony Harris strike a delicate balance by making 9/11 a central part of the backstory to their WIldStorm comic Ex Machina (2004-2010), and it works because of the total control they have over their particular storyworld. Ex Machina takes  place in a New York that has always had the same superhero comics we have, but no actual superheroes.  The protagonist, Mitchell Hundred, is the newly-elected mayor of New York City who had a brief period as his world's only superhero, the Great Machine. Three years before the comic beings, Hundred used his ability to communicate with technology in order to prevent one of the planes from hitting the World Trade Center. As a result, one of the towers still stands, many lives were saved, and Hundred is able to capitalize on his newfound celebrity to successfully run for office.  But Ex Machina is set in an alternate universe, where Hundred, the forces behind the events that gave him his powers, and the partial prevention of 9/11 are the only crucial differences from our own world.[5] In the absence of the daily superhero attacks and mass destruction that menace cities in DC and Marvel comics, Vaughn and Harris have created a space in which a superhero comic can reasonably address the 9/11 attacks.

From World War II to the Ethiopian famine to 9/11, the common element of all these representational failures is literalism.  Literalism has never been the superhero genre's strong point; on the contrary, literalism is (figuratively) superhero kryptonite.  It is the thematic equivalent of one of the many useful formal observations made by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics.  McCloud shows the broad range of representational styles available to the comics artist, from the extremely cartoonish on one end to the photorealistic on the other.  The cartoonish figure is stripped down and iconic, with only a few lines needed in order to create a recognizable, and even unique face (like Charlie Brown).  The photorealist tries to represent the human figure as accurately as possible, something few comics artists actually attempt (the 70s art of Neal Adams, while still relying on a great deal of caricature, comes close, as does the art of Alex Ross).  McCloud argues that the cartoonish representation takes advantage of what he calls the masking effect: by avoiding excessive realism, it allows readers to project themselves onto the characters, to "be" them while reading.  Realistic drawing, instead of encouraging identification, turns characters into objects to be looked at.   [1]

By the same token, superhero comics that are explicitly about a recent, consequential event run the risk of either getting bogged down in extraneous detail, or getting the details wrong. Superhero comics successfully comment on current events by doing what superhero comics do best: operating in the realm of metaphor.  Steve Englehart and Sal Buscema's classic Secret Empire storyline in Captain America 169-175 (January-July 1974) was transparently about Watergate, but without pitting Steve Rogers against G. Gordon Liddy, or meeting with Deep Throat in a garage. [2]  At both Marvel and DC, there is a long tradition of publishing stories that comment on current events and hot-button political issues by transposing them into the superhero universe.  In some cases, it is a matter of the themes that are embedded into the books themselves: the X-Men franchise has always been a useful vehicle for examining xenophobia, racism, homophobia, and generalized intolerance thanks to the flexibility of the mutant metaphor. Tellingly, it is when the basis for the metaphor is made more explicit that it starts to fail: assertions that Magneto is the Malcolm X to Professor Xavier's Martin Luther King practically beg to be refuted.   It does not take a deep knowledge of history or even a highly developed racial sensitivity to realize that comparing Malcolm X to a (sometimes reformed) terrorist and mass murderer is problematic.   But the flaw in the comparison is not a problem with the X-Men's storytelling; there is no reason why a fantasy scenario cannot involve a leader who makes compelling separatist arguments while also committing murder.  The problem is equating him with a real-life historical figure who committed no such crimes.

Marvel has doubled down on its politically-inflected storyline in the twenty-first century. Civil War can be read as a response to the Patriot Act, Civil War II as an (overly) extended interrogation of profiling, and (the second) Secret Empire as a reflection of anxieties about the rise of fascism over the past decade.  But again, they work because their approach to these questions is not literal. As cathartic as it might be to see Captain America punch Donald Trump in the face, it would make little sense as a comic and be of minimal political value.  Moreover, the vagaries of comicbook time mean that every instance that fixes a hero or an event in a particular historical moment will cause continuity troubles down the line, from Batwoman being discharged from the military under the "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" policy to the Fantastic Four trying to beat the "commies" to the moon.  Curiously, even the solutions to these continuity problems end up serving as comments on American politics at the same time that the move the comics away from actual political events.  A number of Marvel characters had the Vietnam was as an important part of their backstories, from Tony Stark's capture by the Viet Cong to the Punisher's time fighting in the war. Marvel's solution has been to move all Vietnam-related personal histories to the fictional country of Sin-Cong. Sin-Cong itself has Marvel roots  that are long, but not deep; it was introduced in an issue of The Avengers in 1965, and mostly forgotten for decades. Now the assumption is that at any point in the recent past, Marvel's America was involved in a foreign adventure in Sin-Cong, which can account for all the previous Vietnam- and Korea-related origins (and, in a pinch for World War II).  Is there a better summation of American foreign policy than blithely assuming that at any given point, the U.S. can be assumed to be bogged down in an ill-advised foreign adventure?

Notes

[1] Overly realistic comics art can be so distracting as to make the comic seem less real, something most obvious in comics based on movies or television series; the Gold Key Star Trek comics (1967-1979) try so hard to render the actors recognizable that the result feels stiff and posed. By contrast, Georges Jeanty's art on Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight works brilliantly because he manages to distill the characters' look without working too hard to draw the actors.  The star of his comic was identifiably Buffy, but she was not Sarah Michele Gellar.

[2] The metaphor almost breaks when the leader of the Secret Empire turns out to be Richard Nixon, but, critically, he is never actually shown or named.

Next: This Is a Job for....Procedural Democracy?

We Are the World (of DC and Marvel)

Occasionally, both DC and Marvel would bring out a special, out-of-continuity comic in which the heroes addressed a contemporary disaster, with sales going towards disaster relief. The goals were noble, but the aesthetic results were, well, disastrous.  Particularly egregious were two comics put out by Marvel and DC in response to the mid-1980s famine in Ethiopia: Heroes for Hope (Marvel, 1985) Heroes against Hunger (1986).  It feels somewhat churlish to lambast comics created by the combined efforts of over forty different writers and artist (for each) on aesthetic grounds; this was hardly the recipe for creating the comics equivalent of Citizen Kane.  And did anyone really think that USA for Africa's 1985 charity single "We Are the World," which somehow had to accommodate everyone from Dionne Warwick to Bob Dylan (while leaving room for Dan Ackroyd and Willie Nelson) was God's gift to music?  This is the sort of creation-by-committee that, when combined with a tight deadline and a seriousness of purpose that lends to stultifying piety, can at best aspire for mediocrity.  It was as a mediocrity that "We Are the World" succeeded--it is an inoffensive, vaguely catchy pop tune that did the job it set out to do (raising more than $63 million in humanitarian aid).   Unfortunately, neither DC's nor Marvel's efforts in this regard managed to rise above the level of the awful.

On his late, lamented web site The Middle Spaces, Osvaldo Oyola posted a scathing (and hilarious) indictment of both companies' charity comics.  In particular, he takes each of them to task for their unadulterated Orientalism, beginning with the reduction of an entire continent to an "Africa" consisting exclusively of arid, famine-stricken deserts (the Marvel comic doesn't even specify Ethiopia), continuing through a level of casual racism and sexism that led Oxfam to refuse to work with Marvel on the project, and ending with the way in which each book reinforces a sense of fatalism and hopelessness about "Africa" even as they call for monetary assistance..  Oyola's article stands perfectly well on its own; for our purposes, though, it is worth looking specifically at the question of superhero involvement in "real-world" problems, and in that regard, I would only add that Oyola's criticism of the comics applies so well to Eighties rhetoric of African relief that these comics are actually an accurate representation of an important aspect of the world that produced them.  This would then be the only thing about their combination of superheroes and the real world that really holds together. 

Well, that, and the useful reminder that while teamwork is admirable among superheroes, writing and drawing by committee can bring on a crisis of infinite pedestrianism. DC's Heroes against Hunger was plotted by Jim Starlin (with an assist from Bernie Wrightson), and features an unlikely team-up of (pre-Crisis) Superman, Batman and Lex Luthor as they try to save "Africa" from starvation.  As Oyola notes, there are some gestures in the direction of real-world politics, mostly put in the mouth of a foreign aid worker, but the comics fails both as a superhero story and as a real-world inspiration.  Early on, Superman has to admit that he can't refresh the entire continent's topsoil by himself, acre by acre; soon, he and Batman discover that an alien called "The Master" has secreted himself underground to feed on the "entropy" resulting from African suffering.  They can defeat him (not that much in the story would make us care about him), but they remain helpless in the face of famine. Even visually, the comics reminds us of the book's shaky underpinnings:  Superman's and Batman's full-body spandex outfits, and Luthor's purple-green armor, have no place in panels surrounded by admittedly stereotypical images of starving Africans.

Marvel's Heroes for Hope had one thing going for it: rather than spend time explaining why a particular set of individual characters was involved (as DC did), it focused on their biggest hit, the X-Men, and was co-written and co-edited by the two people most embedded in the franchise at the time: writer Chris Claremont and writer and editor Ann Nocenti. [1] The X-Men were better suited for this sort of thing than most characters, since their remit usually included the exploration of xenophobia, guilt, and redemption. One of its leads, Ororo (Storm) spent years living as a "goddess" in Kenya; another, Magneto, is both a Holocaust survivor and reformed terrorist/freedom fighter/mass murder; and a third, Rachel Summers, grew up in a dystopian timeline in which the mutants who survived genocide were enslaved, and in which she had been brainwashed to hunt down fellow mutants who tried to escape.  Suffering, high death rates, and tragedy were baked in to the franchise.

Don’t worry, Africa! We’re here to save you!

And yet it could never work. Even if we set aside the tone-deafness, misery porn, and casual racism Oyola rightfully condemns, the problem remains that this is a superhero comic, and superhero comics need villains and fight scenes. Even for the most praiseworthy of causes, no one wants to read 48 pages of superheroes distributing food and medicine or lobbying congress.  So instead they face the allegorical embodiment of famine, at times referred to as "Hungry," who arranges psychodrama set pieces for each of the individual X-Men before taking over Rogue's body and become a grotesque, tentacled monster for the X-Men to physically fight and temporarily defeat. Along the way, many stirring speeches are given, lessons are learned, and nothing really changes.

Note

[1] Bernie Wrightson, Jim Starlin and Jim Shooter are also given a "story by" credit at the top of the page, along with Claremont and Nocenti. Sixteen other writers are credited with specific pages.

 Next: Crisis at the World Trade Center

Drugs Are Bad, m'kay?

"Relevant" superhero comics also tried to address the question of illegal drugs.  This proved to be a problem, because the Comics Code would not allow any depiction of drug use, even for the purposes of condemning it.  Stan Lee and Gil Kane insisted on publishing a Spider-Man story involving a pill-popping Harry Osborne (Amazing Spider-Man 96-98, May-July 1971), while O'Neil and Adams revealed that Roy Harper who fought at Green Arrow's side as Speedy (!), was a heroin addict in two Very Special Issues called "Snowbirds Don't Fly!" (Green Lantern/Green Arrow 85-86, August-November 1971).   These issues are celebrated for forcing the Comics Code Authority to relax a number of its policies (thereby ushering in an era of innovation in the 1970s), but as stories, they are more instructive in their failings.  Both drug abuse and racism make for poor super-villains.  What is a superhero supposed to do about heroin addiction--punch it in the face and throw it in jail? 

You will believe a man can fly

The moralizing of superhero anti-drug stories is intense, but it is par the course:  mass media messages about the dangers of drugs in the 1960s and 1970s rarely left room for nuance.  But the problem goes deeper than that.  When it comes to drugs, the entire superhero genre is on very shaky grounds, since so many superheroes got their powers from...drugs. Ralph Dibney drinks an exotic fruit extract called Gingold to gain the flexibility of the Elastic Man. The final part of Steve Rogers' transformation into Captain America involved drinking a super-soldier serum, and another drug in the 1970s inadvertently enhances his super strength.  With the benefit of hindsight, the most egregious example is DC's Hourman. Created in 1943 by Ken Fitch and Bernard Baily, Hourman was the secret identity of chemist Rex Tyler, who invented a pill called "Miraclo" that gave him super strength and speed for exactly one hour. Decades later, it was revealed that both he and his son, Rick (the second Hourman) struggled with Miraclo addition. The superhero junkie would receive his apotheosis when The Sentry, created by Paul Jenkins, Jae Lee, and Rick Veitch in 2000, was revealed not to be just a naive boy who used a scientist's secret formula, but a drug-seeking schizophrenic who wanted to get "higher than a thousand kites" (Sentry 8, 2006). 

By the time the Sentry's origin was revealed, the superhero comics industry had reached a point where engaging in this kind of parodic deconstruction of the genre's tropes was already old hat.  For the most part, drugs and addiction were simply woven into characters' narrative arcs as an ordinary fact of people's lives rather than an example of a metaphysical threat:  Carol Danvers' and Tony Stark's alcoholism, for example, may have initially been depicted in a melodramatic fashion, but they ultimately became familiar character traits (at least in Stark's case; Danvers' personal history is too complicated to go into).  Roy Haper's struggles with addiction were treated with more subtlety once they were an element of his past history rather than his present struggle. [1]

 Note

[1] At least if we exclude J.T. Krul's and Geraldo Borge's 2010 miniseries Justice League: The Rise of Arsenal, which most readers are only too happy to do.

Next: We Are the World (of DC and Marvel) 

Why Superheroes Didn't End World War II

 Could this be a job for Superman? Marvel answered the equivalent question in the affirmative, introducing Captain America with a cover of him punching Hitler in the face, months before Pearl Harbor.  Captain America could be involved in World War II because, even though he was a super soldier, there was no expectation that he could turn the tide alone. Instead, Captain America was an aspirational figure, a useful symbol in a mobilization campaign.  Superman is another matter. Even at his 1940s power levels, the Man of Steel could have been a game-changer. Throw in the Green Lantern, the Flash, Doctor Fate, and the Spectre, and the war could have been won in days rather than years.

Good people on both sides, I’m sure

At the time, the future DC characters tended to restrict their adventures to the home front. Decades later, in the 1980s, writers explained that the Justice Society (the Golden Age DC superheroes on what was then Earth-Two) was kept out of the war in Europe by the magic Spear of Destiny, which was in Hitler's hands. This is an obvious deviation from actual history, but it was made in the service of keeping the overall shape of World War II consistent with its development in the real world.  [1] 

 The very fact that it took forty years for someone to bother to explain why DC superheroes didn't liberate Europe and prevent the Holocaust is a testament to just how much the culture and expectations around superhero comics had changed in the interim. [2] It is unlikely that contemporary readers (including a significant portion of the armed services) were wondering why Superman wasn't singlehandedly ending the war, or, for that matter, why Wonder Woman, one the few DC heroes whose origins were linked to the war, met such limited success in her fight against the Nazis.  It would only be with the rise of tighter continuity, the development of fan culture, the participation of former fans as writers and artists, and the changes in Americans' social consciousness that superheroes could reasonably by imagined having the capability to change the world, not to mention the obligation to try.

 This is also why modern Marvel comics were in a better position than their competitors to begin incorporating real-world social issues in their heroic fantasy adventures.  Marvel as we know it begins in 1961, with the Civil Right Movement well underway, the counterculture only a few years off, and The Feminine Mystique published just two years later.  Stan Lee and John Romita Sr. gave the Daily Bugle a Black editor (and foil for J. Jonah Jameson) in The Amazing Spider-Man 51 (August 1967), just a year after Lee and Kirby introduced the Black Panther in Fantastic Four 52.  Marvel's women would only start expressing feminist views after Lee stopped writing (his female characters had a tendency to simper), while the counterculture would be depicted with varying degrees of cringe throughout the decade.  A few years later, at DC, Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams run on Green Lantern/Green Arrow would kick off a movement for "relevance" in comics, with the "hard-traveling heroes" confronting environmental pollution, racism, overpopulation, and addiction.  This run introduced John Stewart, the first Black Green Lantern, who later went on to star in DC's animated Justice League series.

 Half a century later, most of these stories read like Exhibit A in the case against having superheroes confront social issues. Perhaps the nadir was the now-infamous "I Am Curious (Black)," Robert Kanigher and Werner Roth's story of Lois Lane's attempts to report from Metropolis's  "Little Africa" (a ghetto never seen before or since).  Shocked that the residents don't trust a well-intentioned white lady, Lois uses Kryptonian technology to transform herself into a Black woman for the day.  She is immediately accepted, and learns more about the struggle of African Americans.  The episode ends in one of the great liberal clichés of the 1970s:  when a Black activist is shot, only Lois has the rare blood type that can save his life. Even when he discovers that she is white, he still accepts her.  The anxiety here is a common one for white liberal race stories of this era: why won't Black people realize that I'm one of the good ones? And why do they have to be so angry?  

Yes, someone actually thought this was a great idea

Notes

[1] An issue of Marvel's What If? revealed that Hitler was incinerated in his bunker by the original Human Torch, an event that became part of Marvel canon.  Again, though, this was only a detail: Hitler still died on the date he did in our world.

[2] It was also a testament to writer Roy Thomas's lifelong commitment to the heroes of his very early childhood. Born in 1940, Thomas resurrected nearly all the major superhero properties at both Marvel and DC over the course of his career, retroactively creating World War II-era superteams for each (the Invaders and the All-Star Squadron, respectively).

Next: Drugs Are Bad, m’kay?

The Real World Problem

The failure, inability, or refusal of superhero characters to address systemic injustice can be (and has been) interpreted as a political bias.  On the whole, revolutionary firebrands do not find jobs at Marvel and DC, two publishers that, in addition to the usual financial self-interest one expects from any company in a capitalist system, have become firmly implanted in the corporate world over the course of their existence.  Though colloquially known as DC Comics since the 1940s, National Comics Publications only officially adopted the name in 1977, a decade after its parent company was purchased by Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. The March 1989 Warner merger with Time Inc. meant that DC became a subsidiary of Time-Warner, and for a a brief and perplexing period, AOL (2001-2003).  But throughout all its parent company's permutations, the reality is that DC has been under the Warner umbrella since 1967.

When Marvel publisher Bill Jemas ham-handedly attempted to revive the storied DC/Marvel rivalry in 2001, he called DC "AOL Comics." The slur never took off, no matter how much of his own corporate might Jemas put behind it (in 2002, he wrote Marville, widely considered one of the worst comics ever made; it began as a Superman parody with Ted Turner and Jane Fonda in the 51 century sending their son Kal-AOL back in time). But Jemas was living in a glass house. Marvel had gone through a series of corporate owners during the same period (the Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation, Cadence Industries, New World Entertainment, and, most disastrously, Ron Perleman's company MacAndrews and Forbes).  That last takeover ended in bankruptcy and the eventual purchase by Toy Biz, which formed Marvel Enterprises and hired...Bill Jemas. Since 2009, Marvel has been owned by the Walt Disney Company. 

I, for one, welcome our new corporate overlords

Clearly, then, neither DC nor Marvel are likely to become the comics publishing equivalent of the Weather Underground or Occupy Wall Street.  They are Wall Street, as well as Hollywood; Stan Lee was always desperate for Marvel to become a film powerhouse (which, as part of Disney, it now is), although it is DC that moved its headquarters to Burbank in 2015. But corporate self-interest is not the only (or even, I believe, the primary) reason for the inherent conservatism of Marvel and DC. The real problem is the rest of the world.

Even before Stan Lee insisted that Marvel superheroes live in New York rather than a made up analogue (such as Metropolis or Gotham), superhero comics had a complicated relationship with the world that produced them.  Obviously, New York has never been home to wall-crawling vigilantes, thunder gods, and mutants; and even if there were a city named Metropolis, it would not have been protected by a super-powered Kryptonian. But for the most part, the world of the comic book superhero had to resemble our world; indeed, one of the thrills of the superhero genre is imagining these powerful men and women coexisting with ordinary mortals like the readers.  In his first adventure, Superman stops a man from beating his wife and barges into the governor's mansion to prevent the execution of an innocent man.  The crimes and situations are familiar; the only truly fantastic element is Superman himself.

Superman was created in 1938, inaugurating a vogue for superheroes just one year before the Nazi invasion of Poland and three years before the United States entered World War II.  Now the real world itself looked different, dangerous, and incomprehensible.  Could this be a job for Superman?

Next: Why Superheroes Didn't End World War II

Life on the Assembly Line

Comics do funny things with time. Certainly, we saw this in the last chapter,  where Doctor Manhattan's four-dimensional vision turns out to be a metaphor for the reader's interaction with a printed comic book, There, the time bending involved the layout of each page and the collection of the pages in one easily-thumbed pamphlet.  But serialized comics (as opposed to original graphic novels (OGNs))  have their own, very specific relationship with real time, due to their status as periodicals.   As I mentioned in the introduction, such comics might best be conceived of as a flow, beginning at a point of origin and always flowing in one direction (the future), even though the reader's experience of  a comics series can recapitulate the possible experience of an individual comics:  the reader can hop around freely from one point on the line to another, doubling back to the past and skipping ahead to the future at will.  Writers can insert retroactive continuities in their current comics, thereby all but demanding a re-reading of past comics in a different light.  There are pleasures to be found, both in reading in sequence and in re-reading based on new (retroactive) information.  For longtime readers of the Big Two, this is Comics 101.

That is only one side of the story, however.  Sequence, seriality, and mass production are the mainstays of modern and postmodern life, but they are also fraught. Hence the first half of the twentieth century's multiple cautionary tales about industrialized flows, as both disturbing dystopias (Brave New World, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr's Player Piano) and delightful farces: Charlie Chaplin failing to master the assembly line in Modern Times (1936), and Lucy and Ethel's hapless and hilarious attempts to adapt themselves to the inhuman pace of a chocolate factory assembly line in a 1952 episode of I Love Lucy called "Job Switching." When Lucy and Ethel prove unable to maintain the conveyer belt's breakneck pace,  not only do they throw chocolates into their mouths and down their blouses, they pick up chocolates that are moving past them and put them further back on the belt. 

Those were the days

Life may not be like Forrest Gump's proverbial box of chocolates, but comics continuity works like the chocolates' conveyer belt.  Like the people who buy and eat the finished products once they have been wrapped and shipped, casual readers of superhero comics are unconcerned with the process that led to the stories that they consume.  Hardcore fans, however,  are much more bothered by the sequence of the comics that they buy, while editors, like poor Lucy and Ethel, end up frantically moving their wares up and down the line.  They try to put everything back in order, even when any possibility of coherence is vanishingly small.

Where readers find themselves metaphorically encoded into comics as watchers, editors enter their fictional worlds as meddlers, bureaucrats, and outright villains. When continuity itself is at stake, the threat faced by the heroes usually ends up encoded as some variation of the editorial function: wiping everything out and restoring a blank slate, reaching into the world as a giant hand ready to (re)start everything, deciding that a character's marriage or revelation of their secret identity must be undone, demanding a return to simpler days, insisting on a clear and orderly taxonomy of all multiversal variations, erasing alternative timelines and variant characters, and even breaking reality through brute force. With great editorial power comes great storyworld mutability.

Though meddler figures (the umbrella term I propose for the entire category) confront the ethical questions surrounding intervention from a vantage point that could not be farther apart from that of the Watchers, they end up in some of the same moral gray areas as their noninterventionist counterparts.  As part of the same system of corporate superhero comics, watchers and meddlers are required to reinforce, if not the status quo of continuity itself, then the ethical status quo in which most of these comics are suspended.  Vigilantism is a net positive within the framework of crime, villainy, and disaster, but willful intervention into larger structures is more complicated, whether those structures be the  sociopolitical system that sets the laws and classifies certain acts as crime, or the possibly unjust or unstable cosmos that provides a backdrop for crime and heroism.  The impulses behind such interventions may be noble or craven, and the results might be what the actual editors require, but the meddler figures themselves are almost always in the wrong.

Like Marvel's "What If?" scenarios, which are usually so bleak as to confirm that mainstream continuity is on the right path, superhero interventions into law, government and broad social problems must almost always lead to terrible results; if they are within mainstream continuity, they have to be reversed, and if they are not, they lay the foundation for yet another dystopian parallel world. Interventions into the nature of the cosmos (crises, reboots, etc.) must be defined as wrong, but their results are allowed to remain in place (at least until the next crisis).  Meddlers in law and politics are reminders of the impossibility of change, while meddlers in continuity affirm change's necessity.  Each case demands that the readers assent to the world order presented to them, no matter how flawed. Yes, our laws and criminal justice system aren't perfect, but the alternatives are totalitarianism, fascism, or chaos.  Yes, the new continuity is the after-effect of villainy (and has probably erased some of our favorite characters or storylines), but the in-universe alternative is annihilation, and the editorial alternative is stagnation, falling sales, and the oblivion that could be brought on by the collapse of a given company or even the entire industry. 

Next: The Real World Problem

With Great Power?

It is no surprise that Alan Moore would interrogate the problematic role of the super-powered vigilante, calling the very impulse to intervene into question. Nor is it a shock that Moore refrains from providing an unequivocal assessment of intervention as such.  This is the kind of sophisticated reevaluation on which Moore built his early career.  It also makes sense to see these questions raised by the man who inadvertently spearheaded the "British Invasion" of DC Comics:  from a geographic and cultural distance, it is easier to see just how American this question of intervention, responsibility, and unintended consequences actually is (not for nothing is Doctor Manhattan's conquest of the Viet Cong a turning point in Watchmen's alternate history).

That must hurt worse than being bitten by a radioactive spider

It is far more noteworthy, however, to see just how long the question of intervention has haunted superhero comics: Stan Lee and his collaborators built this problem into the Marvel universe, even if most of Marvel's Silver Age fare seems comfortable with the ethics of vigilantism.  The narrative caption's declaration about "great power and great responsibility" in Amazing Fantasy 15 was a localized phenomenon, and one that could have been forgotten. It is only retrospectively that this becomes a mission statement for Spider-Man, and, by extension, most of the Marvel heroes (especially in the versions developed for the Marvel Cinematic Universe).  This is far from the end of the story, however, for both Marvel and DC. In the next chapter, we will see what happens when the heroes are allowed to ask the question that readers had been asking for years: why don't these all-powerful beings actually change the world?  This is a different kind of "What if?" from the premises explored by Uatu: what if the superheroes actually intervened in real-world crises? What if, in order to make the world a better place, they decided to take it over?

Next: Chapter 2: Meddlers and Editors

The Last Word in Comics?

Many of the scenes in Watchmen are clearly cinematic (particularly the opening pages), and comics defenders have traditionally invoked the cinema as a model for an audiovisual art form that is taken seriously, even as comics scholars have more recently explored the limitations of the model. [1]  But Moore has stated repeatedly that his primary interest in comics creation is do something that cannot be done in any other medium.  In this light, Watchmen serves as Moore's manifesto. 

Two elements of Watchmen defy a facile comparison of comics and film.  The first is the narration itself.  The book has multiple narrators, each of whom take a turn providing the rough equivalent of a voiceover in captions at the top of the panels.  Rather than comment explicitly on the action, these narrative streams more often run parallel to it, creating an aesthetic effect based precisely not the juxtaposition or counterpoint between the captions and the pictures. The sheer density of information would overwhelm film, but is manageable in comics, where the reader controls the passage of time.  

Nowhere is this more jarring than in the Tales of the Black Freighter, the pirate comic whose narration has no direct connection to the overall plot, serving instead as a thematic or allegorical double to the outer story.  By the end of Black Freighter, the careful reader will have seen that the story could be a critical commentary on Adrian's actions, and on the very idea of intervention and heroic rescue. 

Multitasking is a narrative superpower

More spectacular are the chapters that feature the second element that defies the power of cinema:  Jon's fourth-dimensional perspective on reality.  Chapter IV is devoted entirely to the life and times of Jon Osterman, but the times are far more intriguing than the life.  A physicist accidentally transformed into a god-like superbeing, Jon experiences life roughly the same way as the hero of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.  But where Billy Pilgrim is "unstuck in time," bouncing back and forth through his life seemingly at random, Dr. Manhattan is perfectly at ease with his fourth-dimensional perspective.  

Note that the photograph, which is like a comic book panel, becomes a comics panel in the middle

To Jon, time is not linear or sequential, but (in echoes of the physics problem at stake in  Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed) simultaneous.  All moments happen at the same time, and can be viewed or experienced in any order. Certainly, the comics page, with its sequences of juxtaposed panels organized on a plane, serves as the perfect vehicle for conveying Jon's experience of time; while it is possible to skip back and forth among the pages of a prose novel, it is far more disorienting.  But far more intriguing is the possibility that Jon essentially views all time as does a reader reading a comic book. Jon's defining superpower turns out to be "comic book vision.”

Even Photographs show the future. Jon protests that they’re not lovers; later in the page, they’re lovers. When Jon is “dead',” it becomes a picture of a dead lover.

Next Watchmen and the Superhero Genre

Vigilantes and Bystanders

[SPOILER WARNING for a thirty-nine year old story]

Watchmen was not the first comic to call into question the vigilantism at the heart of the superhero, nor was it the first to imagine a world in which superheroes are outlawed. Where Watchmen stands out is in placing superhero vigilantism on a continuum of citizens' action and inaction. Four figures are crucial here: Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, Adran Veidt, and a group of ordinary people on a New York city street corner.

As the most violent and unrepentant masked hero, Rorschach embodies a particularly harsh vigilante justice.  But as he tells his life story to the prison psychiatrist, he locates the familiar comics trope of the "secret origin" in the story of Kitty Genovese, whose murder in a New York City courtyard was allegedly witnessed by dozens of bystanders who did nothing to stop it. [1] 

Yes, ladies, he’s single!

This incident, which became emblematic of urban breakdown in the 1960s, is personally linked to Rorschach (his face mask was made from the dress Genovese had left at the cleaner's before her death).  Rorschach will not be a bystander; he will take action.  His transformation into a quasi-sociopathic crusader for justice is complete when he subsequently discovers that a kidnapped little girl has been butchered and fed to guard dogs. Setting the girl's murderer on fire, he realizes that there is no meaning in the universe, no God, and no justice.  And this means it is imperative for individual humans to provide justice where they can.

By contrast, the most powerful character in the book, Dr. Manhattan, has become so distant from humanity that, as he says regarding his earlier exploits, "The morality of my actions escapes me."  Theoretically, he could prevent World War III with the blink of an eye, but he has to be convinced to that it's worth the bother.

The architect of Watchmen's apocalyptic scenario is Adrian Veidt, whose eyes had long ago been opened to the world's impending doom by the Comedian.  The Comedian, ridiculing a proposal by aging has-been heroes to band together to combat such "crimes" as "anti-war demos," "promiscuity," and "black unrest," warns Veidt that, when the missiles fly, he'll be "the smartest man on the cinder." Veidt wants to replace the futile, never-ending street-level intervention of vigilantes such as Rorschach with a global strategy to ensure world peace. Inspired by his personal hero, Alexander the Great, who "solved" the Gordian Knot by slicing through it rather than unraveling it, Veidt concocts a rather baroque plan to bring the world's warring parties together in the face of a presumed extradimensional threat (in actuality created by Veidt himself), at the cost of the lives of a mere few thousand New Yorkers. 

For Veidt to take his murderous action, he needs merely press a button.  But the readers, who do not initially understand what that button signifies, are forced by the narrative to experience this human sacrifice as a very real loss.  Throughout most of the book, we have been following the interactions of several ordinary New Yorkers at a midtown street corner.  The payoff comes when they are all killed by Veidt's scheme to bring about a worldwide utopia.  Moreover, the precise moment at which these men and women are killed occurs when nearly every ordinary character we have been following is attempting to stop a woman from beating up her ex-lover.  This is Watchmen's anti-Kitty Genovese moment:  a group of New Yorkers refusing to stand by while a crime is being committed.  And this is when Veidt kills them. 

Next: The Last Word in Comics?

Note

[1] The original reporting on the Kitty Genovese murder, as well as the conclusions drawn about the “bystander effect,” have been called into question in recent years.  See Marcia M. Gallo “No One Helped: Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. 

Watching the Doomsday Clock

August 16, 2019

Moore makes his grandest statement about intervention, superheroes, and the comics form in the graphic novel  that (despite his best efforts) will always be the first work associated with his name: Watchmen. Originally serialized in 12 issues between September 1986 and October 1987,  Watchmen was one of the three 1986 publications that made the non-comics world finally sit up and take notice of the artistic and literary value of then-contemporary comics. Unlike the other two (Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Maus), it was not the product of a single writer/artist; Moore's script was beautiful rendered by his collaborator, Dave Gibbons. Watchmen’s plot and premise could easily be dismissed as the comics equivalent of inside baseball.  If Art Spiegelman’s  Maus draws attention due to subject matter that seemed atypical for American comics, Watchmen demands to be taken seriously while reveling in precisely the aspect of American comics that defined its ghetto existence: the superhero. Indeed, though Watchmen stands out from the crowd thanks to its formal sophistication, psychological complexity, and philosophical heft, its centrality to the graphic novel canon rests on its status as a uniquely elegant, self-reflexive meditation on both comics as a medium and the superhero story as a genre.

The Story So Far

With its large cast of characters (many of whom have multiple identities), parallel plot lines, and convoluted time frame, Watchmen does not lend itself it easy summary.   It does, however, provide multiple opportunities for spoilers, so readers who do not want to know the twists and turns of the plot should skip to the last paragraph of this section.

The book is ostensibly a murder mystery: decades after costumed heroes were outlawed, Eddie Blake, better known as the costumed adventurer The Comedian, has been found dead outside his apartment building. His former colleague Rorschach, a brutal vigilante whose uncompromising absolutist moral code and dubious personal hygiene have long since alienated him from the rest of the masked adventurer set, concludes that "someone is gunning for masks."  His investigation takes him to all his surviving former associates: Dan Dreiberg, the amateur ornithologist and gadget developer formerly known as Nite-Owl; Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias), the "smartest man on earth"; Jon Osterman (Doctor Manhattan), a blue-skinned posthuman with godlike powers; and Sally Juspecyk (The Silk Spectre), Jon's increasingly disaffected live-in girlfriend. Soon Rorschach is arrested, and his interactions with the prison psychiatrist lead to a recounting of his origins.  

DOCTOR MANHATTAN: HOW COME I ALWAYS HAVE TO STAND AT THE BACK OF THE PHOTO?

Meanwhile, a left-wing newspaper has accused Jon of causing cancer in his closest associates, spurring him to abandon earth and retreat to Mars.  While he is on Mars, we learn the story of his life, recounted in a manner that reflects Jon's non-linear experience of time.  Dan and Laurie grow closer, eventually resuming their costumed identities and starting a relationship.  Together, they break Rorschach out of prison, whereupon Laurie is spirited to Mars by Jon.  On Mars, Laurie comes to the realization that the Comedian is her father, an improbable turn of events that reminds Jon of the precious randomness of life.  Jon resolves to return to Earth with Laurie and save the world.  Meanwhile,  Rorschach and Dan have learned that the man behind the Comedian's murder and Jon's exile is none other than Adrian Veidt.  Veidt has concocted a plan to save the earth from impending nuclear war by teleporting an artificially-created "alien" into midtown Manhattan and killing thousands of people, thereby uniting the world against a perceived common threat.  

By the time Dan, Rorschach, and, eventually, Jon and Laurie confront him, Veidt has already implemented his plan, and the governments of the world's most powerful nations have stepped back from the brink of war, resolving to work together.  Reluctantly, Dan, Laurie, and Jon decide not to expose Veidt in order not to undo his plan's positive results, but Rorschach refuses to compromise.  Jon kills Rorschach, and a new age of utopian optimism appears to have begun.  But on the last page, the editorial assistant at the right-wing newspaper favored by Rorschach has his hand poised over the slush pile, where he may well discover Rorschach's diary and reveal Veidt's secrets.  Here the book ends. 

 The inadequacy of this plot summary leads to the very reason that Watchmen, which had been optioned by Hollywood for years before Zach Snyder's 2009 adaptation, was widely considered to be unfilmable (an assertion that Synder's critically panned blockbuster does little to refute).  The story's artistry resides not with what the Russian Formalists called "fabula" (story), but rather in the "siuzhet' (arrangement of the story as plot). The main plotline unfolds through frequent flashbacks and digressions, with each issue (or chapter) of the story accompanied by ancillary prose pieces that develop the themes and deepen Moore's and Gibbon's fictional world.  Most vexing to would-be adapters (along with many readers) is the parallel narrative line constituted by Tales of the Black Freighter, a pirate comic read by one of the book's many minor characters.  The Black Freighter details the attempts of a desperate man to save his island home from predatory pirates, only to lose his mind, kill those closest to him, and join the pirates he once detested.  The prose portions of The Black Freighter are juxtaposed with images from Watchmen's primary plot, while the pictures from the Black Freighter comic are often accompanied by text belonging to Watchmen.  As we shall see, the thematic payoffs are huge, but the in-story connections between the two plots are virtually nil. 

Grounding the Superhero

Perhaps the most obvious theme in Watchmen is Moore's and Gibbon's deconstruction of the superhero archetype.  Originally conceived as a revamp of half-forgotten characters from the defunct Charlton Comics line, Watchmen cast a harsh light on the more absurd aspects of the superhero while never descending into mere parody.  Surrounded by adult men and women in garish garb, Jon Osterman methodically rejects the trappings of the superhero body: his history as a public figure sees him moving from a full-body suit (the proverbial "long underwear") to a speedo and tank-top, a thong, and finally nothing but bare blue skin.  Jon's constant nudity before a largely male readership points to the possible homoerotic undercurrent of a genre that continually offers up an idealized male body for display, while also literally embodying Michael Chabon's subsequent definition of the superhero costume (color painted on a naked form).  In turn, Dan Drieberg's already outré Nite-Owl uniform becomes laughable when stretched over his flabby, middle-aged frame.  Moreover, Dreiberg's initial impotence with Laurie and subsequent successful encounter with her when both are in costume are framed explicitly in terms of kink:  when Laurie gets him to admit that the costumes made it better, he agrees that it is a relief to "come out of the closet.” 

PREVIOUSLY, ON “WHAT NOT TO WEAR”…

More than simply humanizing the superhero or finishing Stan Lee's project of turning heroes into neurotics, Watchmen refracts multiple world views through its main characters.  The Comedian's role is to embody and project corrosive irony.  Rorschach, partly in order to comment on Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, stands for moral absolutism. Doctor Manhattan is the detached omniscient observer who has to be reminded of the value of individual human life, while Adrian Veidt is the utopian visionary who, in his desire to see the world on a grand scale, loses sight of individuals.  Dan and Laurie each inhabit a distinctly mundane, human point of view that turns out to be crucial.  Together, they all call into question both the morality and the sanity of those who choose to act as vigilantes.  Indeed, in a book that includes references to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and Doctor Manhattan's successful conduct of the war in Vietnam, the very idea of intervention is crucial. 

Next: Vigilantes and Bystanders

Note

[1] This post marks the third appearance of a version of this material. The first was part of my blog, The Watchman Watch, on July 29, 2020. It was then reworked as “Watchmen, Medium, and Genre.” The Oxford History of the Novel in English. Volume 8: American Fiction Since 1940” (2024), edited by Cyrus R. K. Patell and Deborah Lindsay Williams.  When the book version of Reading the Superhero comes out (if it ever does), that will be this text’s final home. The same holds true for the next couple of entries about Watchmen.

Alan Moore and Superhero Ethics

To the best of my knowledge, comics legend Alan Moore has never written a story featuring Uatu.  What little work he did for Marvel came early in his career,  and his relationship with the company has never been good.  Moore's superhero work often includes deliberate pastiche, with multiple riffs on established corporate characters, but the Watcher was not among them. Nevertheless, his involvement in superhero stories tended to interrogate the basic ethical premises of the genre.  Why should great power confer great responsibility?  Why should power be the precondition to doing good?  Like Peter Parker in his first appearance, and like Uatu throughout Marvel history, Moore's superhero characters confront the basic question of becoming involved. Could standing back and watching make more sense?

In V for Vendetta, Moore's take on the familiar plot of "one righteous man against an oppressive state," the ethics of intervention are less central that in his subsequent work.  Fascist Britain clearly must be resisted; V's crusade against the state appears to be an unambigious good.  As is his first action in the series:  what is more familiar and obviously proper than saving the proverbial damsel in distress (Evey, who becomes a central character).  But where should his intervention stop? When Evey wants to strike out on her own, V appears to let her, but then she is apprehended by the security forces, thrown into a cell, and tortured.  After reading the testament of a dead prisoner named Valerie, Evey realizes that she would rather die than betray her principles.  Instead of being taken out for execution, she learns that the entire scenario had been stage by V in order to help her escape the limits of her unexamined, conventional life.  Initially furious, Evey is transformed by the experience, taking on V's perspective. It is a horrifying and beautiful scene, a turning point in Evey's development as a hero (and as V's replacement). But it is also a terrible betrayal:  in the name of Evey's eventual existential freedom, V has deprived her of choices, brutalized her, and, arguably, brainwashed her (or perhaps "deprogrammed" her).  All of this is a prerogative V has taken on himself, without asking her. Perhaps the only way that this works without rendering V a monster in the reader's eyes is that V always remains an enigma. We never see under his mask and, despite the charming quirkiness of his persona, he is never a person in the same way that Evey is.  V gets away with his horrible actions because, even as we watch him, we never truly see him. Always wearing the mask of comedy, V is more of a function than a character (which allows Evey, eventually, to become him by donning his mask).

So, uh…no hard feelings, then, Evey?

In Miracleman (Marvelman), Moore and his collaborators being their deconstruction of the superhero archetype initially by transforming this legacy character into a hapless victim. A middle-aged Mike Moran had forgotten that, when he says the magic word "Kimota," he turns into Miracleman, but he remembers in the first chapter of the story. Eventually, he discovers that all the adventures Miracleman remembers were nothing more than a virtual reality program that kept him and his fellow "heroes" preoccupied while their bodies were being developed and studied. None of his adventures was consequential, for the same reason that, from a distance, no superhero stories are consequential: they were all fiction. But for Miracleman, this revelation is a huge betrayal, since he did not know that he had been essentially living in a comic book for most of his life.  When Jonny Bates, the former Kid Miracleman, kills forty thousand people and wreck London, he forces Miracleman to act. In the wake of this horrific crime, Miracleman (now accompanied by MIraclewoman) has to accept that his very presence on Earth is a harbinger of change. This literal power couple does what virtually no superheroes had done before them: they set out to transform the world and create a utopia.  Their success has huge ramifications, which are explored by Neil Gaiman and Mike Buckingham in subsequent volumes, with one result going almost unnoticed:  Miracleman stops being a superhero comic. Following through on the logical implications of a superhero's desire for a better world threatens to be antithetical to the very genre itself.

Even Moore's run on DC's Swamp Thing (1984-1987) rethinks the question of action and involvement at a key moment.  Essentially a horror book, Swamp Thing always existed on the outskirts of DC's superhero universe, so one might not expect the character to assume the default heroic role that often.   Moore redefined Swamp Thing as a plant elemental: not only was he never actually human, but he was an avatar of the Green, the network that brought together all planet life.  This change immediately gave the character an intriguing potential for constructive passivity:  immediately after his discover of his true nature, Swamp Thing stops the plant supremacist Jason Woodrue from destroying all humanity by reminding him that such violence is the way of the beings Woodrue dismisses as "meat" rather than the Green.  However, even in Moore's hands, Swamp Thing tended to fight evil, protect the innocent, and save the day.   Sometimes it is a matter of defending those he loves, but in the year-long "American Gothic" sequence, Swamp Thing plays the role of action hero each issue due to the manipulation of the newly-introduced magician John Constantine.  The parade of horrors he encounters presage the return of the "Original Darkness," a primordial evil that could destroy reality as we know it. In the final confrontation, all the heroes who try to fight the Darkness fail; Swamp Thing, by contrast, surrenders himself to the Darkness, and bestows upon it the wisdom of the Green:  darkness and evil are an integral part of the world,  just as the aphid that eats a plant's leaves is part of an ecological network. Swamp Thing saves the day by reframing conflict as a system.

Next: Watching the Doomsday Clock

What If the Watcher Were the Narrator?

If a Watcher watches, but doesn't make a sound, has he really watched at all?  In the years since "The Trial of the Watcher," Uatu has frequently born silent witness to Important Events, yet his presence has given the heroes something to talk about.  At other times, he has spoken with fellow observers, such as the Rigelian Recorder on the occasion of the death of Phoenix (to be fair, since it happened in the Blue Area of the moon, it was in Uatu's back yard).

But most of Uatu's words have been addressed to the reader. A year and a half after his rededication to noninterference in Captain Marvel 39, Uatu became the only continuing character in a series called What If? The first series ran for 47 issues, running on a bimonthly schedule until 1984. When the series was revived in 1989, Uatu came along, staying for more than half of the new volume's 113 issues.  As in the two iterations of "Tales of the Watcher in the 1960s, Uatu played the role of narrator. There was nothing new about comics having a narrator; EC Comics' Tales of the Cryptwould not be nearly so memorable with the Cryptkeeper, while most of the DC Comics various horror books from the 1960s and 1970s had supernatural narrators (many of whom were subsumed into Neil Gaiman's Sandman mythos).  Closer to home, Stan Lee pioneered a comics storytelling style that resembles what the Russian Formalists called skaz:  telling a story from the stylized point of view of a persona that is neither the author nor one of the characters. The typical Stan Lee story was told through Lee's avuncular, corny hipster persona, who addressed the readers with a knowing wink and called on them to gather round and pay attention.

As narrator, Uatu is different from both the hosts of the horror comics and the impresario behind early Marvel, in that his voice is only minimally stylized.  When Lee writes him, Uatu's words are pompous and high-flown, but such a style was already a familiar feature of Lee's limited repertoire of voices. By the time Uatu became the host of What If?, his function was simply to introduce the story, get out of the way, and then wrap it up.  Too much focus on the Watcher and his words would have been a distraction.

Choosing Uatu as the narrator of What If?  after his trial makes a perverse kind of sense:  the Watcher who so often violated his oath by choosing to intervene is now obliged to tell story after story about the results of the choices made by alternate versions of the heroes in whom he is so invested.  After all, the worlds of What If? are not like the DC Multiverse, whose various worlds diverge in multiple, and often extreme fashions. What If? features what might best be considered parallel timelines:  every earth is the same until a single event changes history.  Which means that every story narrated by Uatu is yet another contrast with Uatu's self-imposed impotence.

More often than not, however, the worlds that Uatu presents are object lessons in the peril of making the wrong choice.  The death toll in the first volume of What If? is staggering.  Both "What If Phoenix Hadn't Died?" (issue 27)  and "What If the Avengers Had Become the Pawns of Korvac? (issue 32) end in total annihilation:  in the first, Phoenix once again becomes evil, and destroys the universe in a fit of rage and grief; in the other, Korvac uses the Ultimate Nullifier to wipe out all of existence. Many of the stories that take place on a smaller scale content themselves with merely killing off major characters (Tony Stark in "What If the Avengers Had Never Been?" in issue 3, both title characters  in "What if Wolverine Had Killed the Hulk?  in issue 31).  A surprising outlier here is the two Daredevil stories written and drawn by Frank Miller: "What if Daredevil Became an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.?" (issue 28) and "What If Elektra Had Lived?" (issue 35). In the first one, Matt Murdock's life takes a different course from his canonical adventures, but not a worse one, while the story of Elektra's survival culminates in something Daredevil never gets: an actual happy ending.  There is a logic at work here: Miller's Daredevil stories are so dark and depressing that the only real alternative to them is something shockingly upbeat.

What If Marvel ran out of ideas?

Otherwise, Uatu's stories of alternate Marvel timelines serve clear and useful functions. They let the readers indulge in a kind of pleasure unavailable in the mainstream Marvel universe, killing off characters who otherwise would never stay dead, radically changing a series' basic premise in a way that would be unsustainable, and, in general, providing a sense of consequence (serious and terrible things have happened) and inconsequence (they happened somewhere else).  Indirectly, these adventures also tend to do what superheroes and superhero comics have long been accused of: maintaining the status quo at all cost. Most of these nightmare scenarios implicitly confirm the rightness of mainstream Marvel continuity: look how bad it would have been if things had gone differently!

At the same time, the existence of these alternate timelines opens up the possibility that they might be used for further adventures.  The very first issue of What If?, in which Spider-Man joins the Fantastic Four, got a sequel three years later ("What If Sub-Mariner Had Married the Invisible Girl?", issue 21).  A 1997 story imagining Spider-Man's teenage daughter, May Parker, taking on the mantle of Spider-Girl led not just to a Spider-Girl series, but an entire line of titles in the alternate "MC2" future. When we factor in the numerous returns to the Age of Apocalypse, the Days of Future Past, 1602, and other popular alternate scenarios, the "What If?" approach lets creators and readers have their cake and eat it, too.  

A skeptic might complain that the proliferation of alternate realities renders all stories and all choices equally unimportant and inconsequential, but another skeptic might remind us that all these stories (both alternate and mainstream) are, in fact, unimportant and inconsequential, because by their nature as fiction, none of them actually happened. This sort of antifictional nihilism is not what the genre wants to encourage, of course (except when it does, as we will see below), but it is also represented within the comics themselves by figures such as Uatu.  At some point, the readers just have to content themselves to sit back and watch.

Next: Alan Moore and Superhero Ethics

The Virtues of Doing Nothing

The attack by the mutated beast Mad-Eye takes Mar-Vell by surprise, but it is not the only shock to the collected Watchers. Aron goes from simple observation to encouragement, explaining how Mad-Eye's horns work and urging him: "Strike back swiftly!" Emnu is outraged, but Aron explains, "I followed the man in red. [...] He is good to watch...perhaps unique." But Captain Marvel is only unique on the Watchers' world; Earth is full of heroes, as Uatu well knows. Still, Uatu refuses Rick's request to help Mar-Vell, leaving Aron to volunteer: "But this man does not deserve to die!" Emnu: "Who are you to know!"  Fed up, Rick decides to enter the fray.  When Mad-Eye is finally defeated, Mar-Vell turns to the assembled Watchers:  "I think it proves my case! / Unless you consider my life a bad think---/ Rick's action--his interference--has accomplished a good thing, in prolonging it!"   If the Watchers would only emulate Rick and Uatu, they could save lives, turn deserts fertile, and provide clean energy.  Emnu points out Mar-Vell's lack of foresight about the consequences:

But action breeds reaction, which breeds reaction, which breeds reaction---and no action is worth a mote of dusty to infinity.

Too much is happening for any one thing to matter, Mar-Vell! Your life, to my mind, is neither good nor bad, but merely true!.  Everything that happens is true!

Truth is all that concerns me.

If I take action, allying myself with one position, I must lose sight of the truths that oppose my position in reaction. I cannot then know all the truth--eh, Uatu?

It's a long speech, but an important one: here Emnu gives comics' most sustained rationale for observation and non-interference until Doctor Manhattan makes his case in Watchmen.   Not only that, it's a speech that carries the day.  Uatu agrees with Emnu, explaining his transgressions in language that would not be out of place at a twelve-step program:

I came to a point where the continuous kaleidoscope of action and emotion spread before me became intoxicating!There were billions and billions of stories, and I yearned to become involved!

I did. I aided my heroes, and marked their important events. [...] It made me feel a hero, and I enjoyed that.

But it bothered me that I dared to no more--so when Mar-Vell became Protector of the Universe, taking the life I longed for, I allowed those who joined me in opposing him to enter my house...and each succeeding action bred, indeed, another. This led me to disgrace.

I have learned my lesson, for the second time. I shall not do wrong again.

And from this point on, Uatu mostly keeps to his word. He still appears when important events are happening, but he rarely interacts with the heroes and even more rarely actually does anything.  What is fascinating here is that the essence of Uatu's crimes are not "doing wrong," but simply doing, and that his motivations are those of a frustrated, envious fanboy.  He was tired of watching the heroes have all the fun, envious of their adventures, and each small action led him to even more extreme transgressions.  As slippery slopes go, Uatu's is certainly unusual:  rarely has helping a friend's wedding go off as planned be a step on the road to conspiracy and unwarranted physical assault.

Mar-Vell mic drop

And is it just a coincidence that in the years between his first appearance and "The Trial of the Watcher," Uatu's original appearance as a skinny, huge-headed, toga-clad giant would give way to the depiction featured in Captain Marvel,where he is less alien and awe-inspiring and more "fat, middle-aged bald guy in a revealing, skin-tight costume that isn't doing him any favors?"  The artist John Byrne, who never missed an opportunity for retro stylings, would return him to his original design just a few years later, but in the mean-time, his less imposing, friendlier form was a good fit with his personality and actions during these years.  In any case, Englehart's story rests Uatu back into his original role while both supporting and rebuking the standard morality of the superhero story.

Because, let there be no mistake:  "The Trial of the Watcher" may result in Uatu's repentance and rehabilitation, but it is not an unambiguous rejection of the superhero ethic of intervention.  Rick, too, has a history of being a reader surrogate: as the sidekick first to the Hulk, then to Captain America, and finally to Captain Marvel, he is the boy reader who gets to join the action--a Marvel equivalent to Robin. In fact, his comic book-nourished imagination was the key to ending the war between Mar-Vell's people and the Skrulls just a few years before this issue. The Kree Supreme Intelligence tapped into the mental powers latent in all humans to let Rick summon versions of the superheroes he read during his childhood--the superheroes published by Marvel's earlier incarnation, Atlas. Rick's arc in Englehart's Captain Marvel is going to involve his increased strength and even access to Mar-Vell's powers, but here he simply has an exoskeleton (a prosthetic rather than a power).  Rick's particular talents have always involved both his imagination and his moral compass: appalled that Uatu won't help Mar-Vell, he leaps into the fray without hesitation. Emnu complains that Mar-Vell's example has led Aron ("this youth") to "admire [action] as well." Perhaps, but it is Rick's example that is more relevant: Mar-Vell is supposed to take action by dint of his costumed identity, but Rick is the one who lets inspiration overcome him.  Aron is not trying to be Mar-Vell; he is trying to be Rick. 

In a roundabout fashion, one that surely involves reading this comic against the grain, "The Trial of the Watcher" is an allegorical representation of the anxieties that animated Frederic Wertham's notorious Seduction of the Innocent: the argument that impressionable children (primarily boys) are influenced by comics to engage in harmful and antisocial behavior. Granted, within the context of a superhero comic, Rick's actions are decidedly prosocial. But there is another context here: that of the Watchers.  Seen from their cultural vantage point, Uatu is superhero fan who has taken it too far.

The comic leaves the influence on the impressionable Aron an open question; there is no indication that Englehart had any plans for him at that point, and his departure from Marvel Comics the next year rendered the question moot. But upon his return to the company, he brought Aron back for a series of issues of Fantastic Four in 1988 and 1989.  Now Aron has been completely corrupted by his enthusiasm for intervention and superhero action, eventually becoming a full-on villain. If there is a moral in the story of Uatu and Aron (at least in the stories written by Engelhart), it is about knowing one's lane.  Some are born to action, while others really should content themselves with watching.

Next What If the Watcher Were the Narrator?

The Trial of the Watcher

It would fall to Steve Englehart to make sense of Uatu's long history of aberrant behavior in a storyline that ran in the first volume of Captain Marvel (35-39, 1974-1975).  The former Kree soldier Mar-Vell and Rick Jones (who have been stuck in a complicated time-share arrangement allowing Captain Marvel to exist in our cosmos for three hours at a time) have been targeted by a radical racist Kree faction called the Lunatic Legion.  Curiously, the Legion has been permitted by Uatu to use his Blue Area of Earth's moon as a home base.  Far more shocking were the actions this Watcher took, including a violent attack on Captain Marvel.  When the battle against the Lunatic Legion is over (Mar-Vell wins, obviously), Uatu contacts his people, declares himself unworthy, and prepares to enter a teleportation beam that will bring him home for trial:

Uatu: Yet before I depart, Captain, I must beg your pardon for my actions toward you. / Please forgive me.

Mar-Vell: But I don't even know--

Uatu: It does not matter. I know what I have done--and why. / Farewell... forever.

Rick: Well, don't just stand there, cosmic brain. Help 'im!

Mar-Vell: You're certain, Rick? What about your concert in Denver?

Rick: That's four days off! Just get into that beam! (Captain Marvel 38, "--No Way Out by Englehart, Al Milgrom and Klaus Janson)

This brief dialogue fails to reveal Uatu's motivations, but nonetheless encapsulates the dilemma posed by the Watcher's inclusion in a corporate superhero comic story.  Uatu admits his "actions" were wrong, not only because of their consequence for Mar-Vell, but because they were actions, pure and simple.  Rick, whose role has always been to spur the more passive, contemplative Mar-Vell into action (Borenstein,  Marvel in the 1970s xx),  insists that Mar-Vell help the man who had attacked them earlier, while Mar-Vell is equally confused by both Uatu's apology and Rick's call to action.  A Watcher should observe and do nothing; Rick, whose status at this point in the story is that of a floating head literally capable only of observing events from the Negative Zone, insists that Mar-Vell leap into a conflict situation without knowing where he is going or why.

Upon their arrival on the Watcher homeworld, Uatu's colleagues are outraged that a "mortal" has hitched a ride and demanded to speak at Earth's Watcher's trial. Imprisoning him in a force field, Ingu the Watcher inadvertently applies his people's creed to Mar-Vell himself:  "He must not interfere!" (Captain Marvel 39, "The Trial of the Watcher," by Englehart, Milgrom, and Janson).  Mar-Vell breaks free with Rick's help; together they exert the mental effort that allows them to coexist in the positive cosmos for the first time, destroying the force field in the process. This would be a mere plot point (albeit one with significant consequences' for the series' two leads), were it not for the way in which Englehart and his artistic collaborator Al Milgrom have set the scene:  when the readers witness this event, they are also watching other observers of Mar-Vell's escape: Aron, a young Watcher with insatiable curiosity, and Mad-Eye, a "seasoned Rackcat.[a tiger-like creature with antlers that emit energy blasts]]  Here on the world of the Watchers, all life is peaceful. So Mad-Eye is merely interested...."   The appearance of two "small and hairy men" out of a burst of light upsets Mad-Eye: 

for the first time since he was a tiny cub Mad-Eye is angry---/and Mad-Eye Attacks!

Captain Marvel protects! [punching Mad-Eye in the snout]

and Aron watches!

This is not the end of either Mad-Eye or Aron.  Mad-Eye stalks Mar-Vell in search of revenge, while Aron follows him. 

False advertising, but thematically interesting

Most of the issue is devoted to Uatu's trial, and the inclusion of Mad-Eye (who, unsurprisingly, is never seen again after this issue's last pages), is simultaneously a concession to the rules of the superhero genre, a comment on these rules, and the means for reframing the philosophical conflict that is at the heart of the story (as well as the key to Uatu's character).  Without Mad-Eye, there would be virtually no action in the entire issue; comics need a fight scene, and Mad-Eye facilitates one. Otherwise, this comic is nothing but dialogue (Englehart's forte, true, but still). Three entire pages are filled up by Emnu, Uatu's accuser (and the main opponent of intervention back in the Watchers' early days), retelling the history of his race along with nearly all the stories featuring Uatu to date.  This is extremely helpful to the reader (not to mention the researcher), but it's potential for drama is limited. [1] Mar-Vell refutes Emnu, emphasizing Uatu's benevolence ("except in my case"), but there is little reason to expect his plea on Uatu's behalf to win the day. Fortunately for everyone concerned, Mad-Eye returns, with Aron in tow.  

Next: The Virtues of Doing Nothing

Note

[1] In an unusual move, the credits for the issue include Tony Isabella as "Researcher." In these pre-Internet days, Isabella must have been the one who assembled the list of Uatu's appearances.

A Watcher Is Born

Uatu the Watcher returns repeatedly, primarily to the pages of the Fantastic Four, but eventually to a wide range of Marvel comics over the next six decades.  Soon we even learn why his people came to a conclusion about intervention that is antithetical to the Marvel superhero ethos in general, and to the code of Spider-Man in particular. Just 9 months after his first appearance in the Fantastic Four, Uatu debuted as the narrator of a feature called "Tales of the Watcher" in Tales of Suspense 49 (January 1964). Written by Stan Lee with art by his brother, Larry Lieber, most of these are standalone short stories about Earth's future or alien planets; the only difference between them and the many forgettable science fiction short stories published by Marvel in the 1950s and 1960s is the role of the Watcher himself, who addresses the reader directly and appears on the first and last pages. The fifth installment in the series, "The Way it Began..." gave the "origin" story for the Watchers.  Curiously, this same story is told again when "Tales of the Watcher" is revived in the first issue of The Silver Surfer (August 1968) as a "Marvel Cameo-Classic Recreated by Stan Lee and Gene Colan."  It is this version that has achieved canonical status, and is reprinted more often. A comparison of the two makes the case for preferring the second.  Though only four years have passed, the first looks far more old-fashioned, following the conventions of the early Marvel throw-away sci-fi story.  It runs five pages, as opposed to the newer versions thirteen. The page count, along with the larger and roomier panels of Gene Colan, gives the story room to breathe.  So it is this version we will discuss here.

Like the original, "The Wonder of the Watcher" (as the retelling is called) introduces its story with a smaller-scale ethical dilemma:  Uatu observes an unsuccessful operation on a dying patient: "With but a single gesture, I could savethe fading life below!/ But I dare not intrude! I am forbidden to act!" Uatu must face this problem thousands of times a day, but its presentation here renders it the Watcher equivalent of Spider-Man's refusal to stop the burglar who goes on to kill Uncle Ben.  Salvation, or simply doing good, is presented as an individual choice. Even the surgeon seems to sense his abandonment by a higher power:  "I cannot shake the feeling that--we were not alone here!" and laments "How many might be saved --if more of the secrets of the universe --might be revealed to use?/ But man must struggle on alone--slowly gaining scraps of knowledge--bit by bit!"

Worst. Medical Drama. Ever.

But this story will serve to justify the decision to leave humanity to its ignorance (despite that fact that the Watcher asserts that "within their souls lie the seeds of greatness!").  Where Peter Parker resolves never to stand by while bad things are happening, Uatu's people learn the opposite lesson:  they are letting countless Uncle Bens die every day.  Lee and Colan devote a full page to a resolute Uatu explaining his code, this time in terms of "defeats" and "folly," before introducing us to the race that would eventually take the name "Watchers." [1] These nearly-identically, toga clad bald men were virtually immortal thanks to their "life-giving delta rays," yet even while bathing in the Watcher equivalent of a solarium, they could not stop talking about how much better the could make things: "We could be like gods, bringing the gifts of health and wealth to other races!" says one of the naked bald men. Another replies: "And thruout <sic> the universe, all who live will pay homage to our names!"

Uatu and his father each argue for intervention, opposed by a man named Emnu, who does not see the point.  Emnu loses the vote, and the Watchers travel to the "primitive planet of Prosilicus."  The lizard-like natives are suspicious at first, but when the Watchers give them the gift of atomic power, they are intrigued.  Eventually, the Watchers leave the Prosilicans to their own devices; unfortunately, those devices are now nuclear.  The result is total warfare with a nearby world, ending in the destruction of not one, but two planets.  When the Watchers return, they find only one survivor, who berates them: 

You are to blame! You did this to us!

We would still be living in peace--had you not brought us your deadly secret of atomic energy--before we were readyfor it!

May you and your race be cursed--till the end of all your days!

Uatu's faction is chastened, and resolves "so long as memory endures--we do solemnly vow--it will never occur again!"

So now the readers know why the Watchers will only watch.  It's a maximalist story typical of 1960s comics--was there really no middle ground between bumbling interference and complete nonintervention?  But, like the Prime Directive on Star Trek (the prohibition on interfering with civilizations that have yet to develop warp drive technology), it is also particularly poignant within the context of Sixties politics:  when the United States is still bogged down in a war in Vietnam that has no end in sight, noninterference looks like a firm moral stand. But both the Watchers and the Prime Directive consider intervention through a framework that is based not only on "morality"; for them, getting involved in the affairs of others must be considered in terms of anthropology and local politics. 

This is one of the reasons the Watchers can so easily co-exist in a comic book universe that more prominently features Spider-Man:  Peter Parker's choices are made in a much simpler context, one that has no room for considerations of cultural relativism,  structural inequality, or systemic injustice.  If someone is pointing a gun, it does not matter why they are doing so, or what external forces have conditioned their actions: superhero morality demands that the gunman be disarmed and apprehended.

Uatu's problem is different.  He has learned the lessons of the Prosilican debacle (revisited decades later in a Fantastic Four storyline called "The Reckoning War"), but his spectatorship is not dispassionate. In fact, we might say that he is an excellent Watcher precisely because his sympathies are aligned with the genre in which the action so often unfolds: he watches like a superhero reader.   But this is also his downfall.  Sometimes, he cannot simply stand aside and watch.  

Again and again, the Watcher declares that, just this one time, he must make an exception to his vow of non-interference.  Sometimes it is a matter of stopping cosmic threats, like that of Galactus (Fantastic Four 48-50), when he warns the Earth with signs and portents, gives the Fantastic Four Galactus's backstory, engages in futile debate with the giant world-eater, and transports the Human Torch to Galactus's ship in order to obtain the one weapon that can force Galactus to retreat.  Uatu's violation of his code in this single storyline are multiple, but at least no one can doubt that the stakes are high. But helping Reed ensure that his wedding to Sue will take place despite attacks by most of the supervillains he has ever encountered? Uatu has gone from saving the world to acting as an amateur wedding planner. But why?

Next: The Trial of the Watcher

Note

[1] Though they are not Watchers yet, I will use this term for the sake of consistency.

Those Who Can

At Marvel during the Silver Age, Uatu embodies the philosophical dilemma of the superhero, but at a remove.  His mandated distance from the actual action allows for the basic superhero question of involvement and intervention to play out longer than typically budgeted for in Silver Age comics. Uatu first appeared in Fantastic Four 13 in January 1963, eight months after the introduction of Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy 15. In the architecture of the Marvel Universe, Uatu and Peter Parker are about as far from each other as they can be: Uatu arrives on the scene for precisely the sort of stories that have little room for Spider-Man. [1]  Yet they are worth thinking about together, because each is the philosophical antithesis of the other

The Buddy Cop Movie nobody asked for

As we will discuss shortly, the original sin of the Watcher's race is hubristic intervention:  thinking they could uplift an underdeveloped culture, they inadvertently provided the tools for its self-destruction.  Spider-Man's original sin, on the other hand, is the failure to act.  When a police officer chases a criminal who is running right towards him, Peter Parker (in Spider-Man costume) ignores his call to block the man's path.  The criminal escapes into an elevator ("Lucky that goon in a costume didn't stop me!"), leaving the cop to remonstrate with the apathetic Spider-Man:

Cop: What's with you, Mister? All you hadda do was trip him, or hold him just for a minute!

Spider-Man: Sorry, pal. That's your job! I'm thru being pushed around—by anyone! From now on I just look out for number one --that means--me!

Cop: I oughtta run you in--

Spider-Man: Save your breath, buddy! I've got things to do!

At this point, is there anyone left on Earth who does not know just how much Peter Parker is going to regret this?  Just a few days later, a burglar shoots and kills Peter's Uncle Ben.  Spider-Man catches him, only to discover that the burglar is the criminal he let get away: "My fault--all my fault! If only I had stopped him when I could have! But I didn't--and now --Uncle Ben --is dead..." As a devastated Spider-Man walks off into the distance, the narrative caption tells us that Peter is "aware at last that in this world, with great power there must also come--great responsibility!"

Rarely has a superhero's raison d'etre been summed up so precisely in an origin story; it took years for Superman to be fighting for "truth, justice, and the American way." Batman, whose traumatic past is an obvious antecedent for Spider-Man's, has an origin story that  lends itself more to a psychological diagnosis than to a pithy statement of purpose.  Spider-Man will always be motivated by his intense guilt over his role in his uncle's death, never sparing himself even when offered the chance (when J. Michael Straczynski has Aunt May find out Peter's secret identity, she reveals that she has always blamed herself for Ben's death, because they had just had a fight before he left the house and got shot).  After J Jonah Jameson's wife Marla dies, Spider-Man's unrealistic  reaction is to declare that "as long as [I'm] around no one dies" (Amazing Spider-Man 655-656).  Of course Peter can't possibly make good on his promise, but the sheer neurotic obsession that motivates it points back to Peter's motivation for being a super-hero.  After failing to act during one crucial moment, Peter will always choose to intervene. [2]

The superhero genre's predilection for intervention, as exemplified by Spider-Man's tragic origin, makes the appearance of Uatu the Watcher just a few months later seem almost perverse.  I do not mean to suggest that this was part of a grand plan on the part of Stan Lee (co-creator of both Spider-Man and The Watcher, with Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby, respectively); one of the charms of early Marvel comics is the speed  with which new story ideas and characters appeared, as well as their variety.  Marvel in the 1960s maintained a thrilling sense of improvisation. Anything could happen from month to month, since the Marvel creators were reacting to the unrelenting imperatives of a backbreaking publishing schedule (which Lee handled by shifting more and more of the responsibility for plotting onto the artists while retaining most of the credit for himself).  Uatu's first appearance was bracketed by the Fantastic Four's first encounter with the Hulk and fourth with Namor the Sub-Mariner.  Moreover, Uatu was not even the main attraction; he was a wild card element in a story that happened to involve a race to the moon between the Fantastic Four and a Soviet scientist accompanied by evolved super-apes dedicated to their master's communist cause. Nothing about this looks like the product of deliberate, careful planning. 

Yet Uatu plays a pivotal role in "The Fantastic Four versus the Red Ghost and His Indescribable Super-Apes!" (yes, this is the actual title of the issue).  Though Marvel comics had yet to take significant steps away from it's postwar tradition of commie-bashing, Fantastic Four 13 is a gesture in the direction of the anti-war humanism that would come to prominence at Marvel just a few years later.  The choice of the moon as the site of the story's conflict is doubly, if not triply, significant. First, it is a reminder of the heroes' own Cold War origins (they stole Reed Richard's prototype spaceship to fly to the moon "unless we want the commies to beat us to it!")  Second, at this point in history, the moon had yet to be reached by humanity, making the trip particularly exciting and relevant, and third, the fight between the Fantastic Four and the Red Ghost on the moon is a small-scale recapitulation of the superpower conflict that shaped the postwar era.

Thus when Uatu first appears, he commands both the Fantastic Four and the Red Ghost to "cease this useless conflict!"  Not only is this conflict useless, it is familiar:  "And, worst of all, we have seen once-noble races turn savage and warlike with the passing of time!  A fate which your own foolish breed seems headed for!"  He laments having to break "the silence of centuries, in order to save your people from savagery":  Sooner or later, both your nations may engage in a way which might devastate your entire planet. That is not my concern!"

In his first appearance, Uatu manages to achieve two apparently contradictory goals at the same time. On the one hand, his brief involvement (which he admits is a break with his people's custom) helps move the story along and resolve the fight between the Red Ghost and the Fantastic Four.  On the other hand, through both his words and his overall aloofness, he tells both the characters and the reader that the conflict itself should not be happening in the first place. If the Watcher had his way (at least, the Watcher as we know him in Fantastic Four 13), there would be no Fantastic Four comic at all.

Next: A Watcher Is Born

Notes

[1] Spider-Man's incongruity in "cosmic" storylines is played up to great effect by Jim Starlin in the climax of his original Adam Warlock Saga, Marvel Two-in-One Annual 2 (released in September 1977).   The reader knows that Spider-Man has a crucial role to play, but only because two watcher figures (Chaos and Order) are shown repeatedly nattering at each other about his importance.  So out of his depth is Spider-Man that he uncharacteristically flees the scene, before finally taking the step that releases the spirit of Adam Warlock and thereby ensuring Thanos's defeat.  

[2] J.M. DeMatteis cleverly exploits the contrast between the two characters in "Small Miracles" (Marvel Team-Up127, March 1983, with art by Kerry Gammill and Mike Esposito). A mawkish Very Special Christmas Episode, "Small Miracles" has Uatu guide Spider-Man to help save the life of a young woman. Since he is, at this point, following the Watcher's code to the letter (if not in spirit), he does not speak a word; Spider-Man, of course, cannot stop talking. The issue ends with the familiar trop of a Watch monologue from the Blue Area of the moon, this time cementing Uatu's status as cosmic fanboy: not only does he love humanity from afar, but he has used Spider-Man in his own little Christmas fan-fiction of heroism and salvation.

Watching the Detectives

Chapter One:

Watchers and Watchmen

"I am the Watcher! For countless eons I have observed your world and recorded its significant events."--

What If?

volume 1, 26

"The morality of my actions escapes me." --

Dr. Manhattan,

Watchmen 

Chapter 4

Watching the Detectives

"Watching" is an unlikely metaphor for the avid consumer of superhero comics, since it suggests action that unfolds before the eyes of passive viewers; once the action starts, it will continue regardless of the audience.  This is not a case of the proverbial tree falling.  If the viewers walk away or close their eyes and ears, the show will definitely go on.

Not so for comics.  Reading comics, like reading prose, requires that the reader pay attention.  Though it neither burns calories nor advances step counts, reading is active. All the more so for comics. As Scott McCloud's influential Understanding Comics (1993) argues, comics can only function as a narrative experience though an operation that takes place in the mind of the reader: closure.  The gaps between comics panel are not just literal (the "gutters" or blank spaces found in most North American comics); they are a foundational part of the reading experience. The reader unconsciously fills in the gaps between the actions represented in sequential panels, inferring a relationship among them that is not usually explicit.  We take this process for granted, but it is easy to imagine a particular form of neurdivergence that could make this process impossible. If a ball is thrown towards home plate in one panel and a batter hits it in another,  we take for granted that a reader will connect the two actions, but that is only because we automatically make such connections ourselves. 

Watchers  would probably make more sense for film and television, and Marvel's Uatu has successfully made the transition from comics to video on more than one occasion, most famously as the narrator of the 2021 television series What If.  Yet watchers and watching in superhero comics persist. Uatu and DC's Monitor(s) were more recently joined by Tempus Fuginaut, a member of a race of godlike beings who protect the DC multiverse from incursions by the Dark Multiverse.   Before joining the Legion of Superheroes, Mon-el (Lar Gand) spent a thousand years trapped in the Phantom Zone, observing the DC universe but (mostly) unable to interact with it. The robotic Recorders of Marvel's Rigellian Empire do exactly what their name implies, though in a particularly annoying fashion (preceding every utterance with  headwords such as"Statement:" or "Query:"). In the alternate Marvel Universe of the Earth X stories, Uatu has forced the robot designated "X-51" (and also "Machine Man" and "Aaron Stack") both to watch for him now that Uatu is blind, and to take over Uatu's frequent narrative function by telling him (and the reader) what he sees. All of these characters are joined by other godlike figures who are more likely to supplement their watching with action (at Marvel: Eon, Epoch, Eternity, and at DC: the Phantom Stranger, the Guardians of the Universe, Pandora, the Quintessence).  There are also the occasional reader figures, such as Destiny of the Endless,  who, originally introduced as the host of one of DC's horror books, spends his entire existence reading from the book that tells all the events of the past, present and future. But the visual medium of comics seems to encourage representations of watching over reading.  

Nope, nöthing creepy about this at all

Watching, then, is what happens to reading when it is transposed into the medium of (superhero) comics.  It is a way to represent the role of the reader while only partially maintaining a readerly distance. Going back to Morrison's "fiction suit" metaphor,  the movement from reader to watcher involves donning a suit that is not quite a superhero costume.  This is not a matter of pure fantasy wish fulfillment, since the reader does not become the hero; rather, the reader is put into a different vantage point from which the view the action, while also weakening the boundaries between observer and hero.

These reduced boundaries are no small matter.  Because the watcher figures are located inside the fictional world, they have an option that the actual reader does not: they can decide to intervene. This, in fact, is at the heart of nearly all the classic stories about Uatu:  in the early days, Uatu deserves the title "Watcher" only in the breach.  But what is it that Uatu is actually watching?  Technically, everything, but we only see Uatu playing observer during events deemed significant. Indeed, Uatu's very appearance on the scene has become a kind of shorthand alerting not just the reader, but even the characters who are familiar with his function, to the import of the story in progress.  

Watchers want to watch what superhero readers want to read:  stories in which something bad happens (a crime, a disaster, a cosmic crisis) and superheroes choose to act.  If superhero readers are indulging in a fantasy of extraordinary powers and concomitant extraordinary adventures, watchers are satisfying a kink of their own:  sworn only to watch, they cannot get enough of watching people do.

Next: Those Who Can

What Comes Next

At this point, it looks like this book will consist of five chapters. The first, "Watchers and Watchmen," continues and fleshes out some of the ideas elaborated in the previous post.  Why are Marvel superhero comics so preoccupied with watching, as most obviously exemplified in the figure of Uatu the Watcher?  A genre so committed to the taking up the fight against evil nonetheless repeatedly pauses to consider the ethics of intervention, during a decade characterized by America's own foolhardy international interventionism and pop culture responses to the questions of transcultural responsibility (most notably in the original Star Trek). The chapter than jumps ahead to Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' monumental deconstruction of the superhero genre, which also turns out to be an extended meditation on the advisability of standing back or getting involved.  

Chapter Two, "Meddlers and Editors," turns to the comics that appear to advocate a more forceful activism, whether through figures such as the Monitor, the "relevant" comics of the 1970s (Green Lantern/Green Arrow), ham-handed attempts at addressing contemporary tragedies such as the unbelievably awful 1980s DC and Marvel one-shots about the Ethiopian famine, and stories about superheroes taking over the world for its own good (such as Squadron Supreme).

We’re all about good writing and quality control here at “Reading the Superhero”

Chapter Three ("The Law vs Justice") examines the ramifications of vigilantism over many years of comics about Daredevil, a superhero whose day job is working as an attorney, the fascist ramifications of The Dark Knight Returns, and problematic, murderous antiheroes such as the Punisher and the Foolkiller.

Chapter Four returns to the cosmic scale of Monitors and Watchers.  "Crisis and Event, or, Punching Reality in the Face"  is an extended analysis of the reality changing crossover event, a regular feature of modern DC that has occasionally been used by DC and repeatedly satirized and deconstructed in a number of independent comics.  The Event raises the stakes of the conflict considerably, but also inevitably makes the nature of comic book reality the most important part of the story. And, yes, I end up bringing in Alain Badiou.

 Chapter Five will either be about the "Revolving Door of Death" (the ubiquitous trope of death and resurrection) or my attempt at a Grand Theory of the Corporate Comics Chronotope. Or maybe those will be Chapters Five and Six.  All my plans are subject to the whims of Monitors, Anti-Monitors, and my own internal Editor. 

Next: Chapter One: Watchers and Watchmen

This Looks Like a Job for...the Editor!

The ordinary superhero story usually invites reader identification; the hero acts out the intended reader's fantasy of power, intervention, and success.  This, however, is just one end of the spectrum.  In the middle is the superhero story that is more self-consciously mediated, whether through a focus on the media coverage of the hero (Spider-Man and The Daily Bugle, Superman and The Daily Planet), the point of view of the bystander (Marvels, Astro City, the "behind-the-scenes" series accompanying events such as Civil War and Secret Wars), or the introduction of elements of a moral panic, with experts, legislators, and grassroots movements criticizing superhero vigilantism (Steve Englehart's Secret Empire storyline, Legends, Civil War, Watchmen, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns).

I use the term "moral panic" not to delegitimize any critique of superhero vigilantes, but because most superhero stories cannot afford to feature a critique that the reader must take seriously. Not only does the genre depends on vigilantism being an overall positive phenomenon, but moral panics haunt the history of the industry every since Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent and the subsequent congressional hearings put most publishers out of business.

On the far end of the spectrum is the continuity-altering event, which often encodes the roles of reader, creator, and editor within the narrative itself.  Even without such events, corporate comics have, since the 1960s, managed to encode a reader figure into the story, whether as passive spectator or obsessive fan. In Marvel Comics, the bad reader is represented by The Collector, an Elder of the Universe whose obsession with his collection is monomaniacal. The act of collection can make him an antagonist within the story, but one with a limited range.  He is most significant as an obstacle to storytelling:  when he encounters a remarkable being (like, say, a superhero), his impulses is to capture them and put them on display under glass.  He is the comics collector who immediately puts his new acquisition in mylar bags rather than reading them.

Obsessive comics collecting is a bad look

The archetypal good reader figure is Uatu, Marvel Comics' the Watcher.  Introduced in Fantastic Four 15 (January, 1963), the Watcher lives on the mysterious "blue area," the only spot on Earth's moon that sustains an atmosphere.  One of a race of toga-garbed bald giants who have sworn only to watch, never interfere, the Watcher typically appears on the scene to observe an important event. Indeed, his appearance itself is a signal that the event is important.  Over time, his resolve to stay above the fray has wavered, and he has also taken on the role of narrator for a range of alternate history stories (more on the Watcher in Chapter One).  For the most part, however, his status as an observer renders him a model of the intent reader: the Watcher knows never to miss the next issue.

For the first few decades of its existence, the DC multiverse lacked a godlike reader figure of its own.  That lack (and its subsequent remedy) point to some of the very qualities of DC continuity that led to the decision to consciously revise it for the very first time. The DC multiverse was charmingly un-curated; new earths could be added when the corporation bought out a stable of characters from a defunct competitor (Earth X for the Quality characters, Earth-S for Fawcett, and, briefly, Earth-4 for Charlton), or simply at the writers' or editors' whim (Earth-3, run by villainous analogs of the Justice League).  The event in question, Crisis on Infinite Earths, not only rebooted the DCU, it set the pattern for all subsequent continuity-altering events and functioned as the gateway drug that got DC hooked on periodically fiddling with its continuity.  As I will argue later in the book, Crisis started a process that made continuity itself the star of DC comics.

In the run-up to Crisis, all the DC books featured cameos of a new character called The Monitor, who, together with his assistant, Lyla the Harbinger, had inserted himself into all aspects of DC life.  Initially, it appeared as though he might be an arms dealer or a supervillain, but the beginning of the 12-issue series revealed that he was a cosmic being as old as the multiverse, whose goal was to preserve it against the threat of his counterpart, the awkwardly named Anti-Monitor.  The Monitor cared for all the matter-based worlds of the multiverse, while the Anti-Monitor was connected to the Anti-Matter universe (long established in DC lore as a realm called Qward). 

The Monitor's role, like the Watcher's, is preservational, curatorial,  and, at least initially, reader-like.  Though neither monomaniacal nor malevolent like Marvel's Collector, the Monitor evinces pathos by serving as the in-story stand-in for readers who have amassed a large comics collection.  Though he tries in vain to protect the various Earths (i.e., comics) from destruction, they nonetheless fall, one after the other.  In the years since Crisis, one of the complaints about reality-altering events and reboots is that the earlier stories in the now-dead continuities no longer "matter."  For the Monitor, this is literally the case:  each world is part of a matter-based universe destroyed by a wave of anti-matter.   To drive the emotional loss home, each world is visited right before its destruction by Pariah, whose own universe was annihilated as part of an experiment he conducted that inadvertently set the Monitor's antagonist free and began the process of multiversal erasure. We are supposed to cathect with each new world, mourn, and move on. The Monitor himself is only able to save the last surviving worlds by sacrificing himself in order to keep them in a bizarre state of crossover and semi-stasis.

As the Anti-Monitor's name makes all too apparent, he is the antithesis of his "brother," the Monitor.  A force for destruction rather than preservation, he implicitly rejects any value that preexisting stories might have.  He could just as easily been called "Anti-Continuity," especially since his eventual defeat turns his overall success (the destruction of literally infinite Earths) into failure (their replacement with one Earth conveniently based on the ones with the most potentially marketable elements).  Within Crisis itself, the Anti-Monitor could be identified with the stories' creators, Marv Wolfman and George Perez, since they are the ones crafting an entire storyline devoted to the destruction of the DC Multiverse.  But the scope of their epic storyline is such that it derives from an authority that exceeds their own:  only the DC editors had the power to sign off on such sweeping changes.  In all the various followups to Crisis on Infinite Earths, the antagonist (usually bent on destroying/changing the DC Universe or Multiverse) represents a thoroughly editorial function, the in-story equivalent of the person or persons who impose their vision on an entire corporate storyworld thanks to their superhuman powers.

As a publication phenomenon, comics exist as flow:  when everything is working just right, one new comic follows another with predictable regularity. Or, if we switch metaphors a bit and borrow from E. A. Abbot's classic novel Flatland, comics are an every-growing ray, with a point of origin (usually a first issue) and a series of installments moving along the line in the direction of the arrow that conventionally marks its trajectory (possibly to be substituted by another point if the series ends and the ray turns into a line segment).   Any given issue is a point on that ray, in a fixed position between other points.  Living in three dimensions, the reader can see beyond the one-dimensionality of the comics ray, however, and therefore can jump back and forth along the timeline.  The ability to do so, combined with the awareness of the proper order of the given points, constitutes continuity in the consciousness of the reader.  The reader is also able to see multiple rays and segments that run parallel to each other, intersect with one another, or zigzag back and forth to interact with their fellows. Now continuity functions in two dimensions, but the three-dimensional reader can still see both. The creators and editors have an advantage over readers. They can add new points at the end of the line segment or ray that also occupy an earlier space: the retcon.

Continuity-altering epics and reboots such as Crisis on Infinite Earth introduce figures who, like the reader, creator, and editor, stand outside the two dimensions, but interact with them.  They are like the Sphere in Flatland, which intersects with the two dimensional world in a manner that the inhabitants cannot entirely comprehend.   Grant Morrison likes to talk about readers donning "fiction suits" to enter the secondary worlds of comics, and, in their continuity-preoccupied storylines at DC, combines the idea behind their "fiction suit" metaphor with more familiar metafiction in order to show authorial and editorial intervention. The reality-altering antagonist is the two-dimensional protrusion of the editorial function into comics continuity, taking the shape of a villain in order to accomplish its metafictional, catastrophic task.  How appropriate that Crisis reinforced a preexisting DC image of the creation of its universe as a giant hand with galaxies spinning in its palm; we are watching someone from outside the story reaching in to being it or change it.  When they watch from above, making suggestions only when needed, editors are monitors.  When they reach into the story to rearrange it, they have forfeited their role of engaged observers; they are anti-monitors.

Next: What Comes Next

Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

Why does the form taken by a universe-altering crossover event matter? From a distance, of course, this does not matter at all.  We are talking about the periodic reshuffling of the worlds of corporate superhero comics.  But if we want to consider the workings of the corporate superhero comic as a set of texts at the intersection of art, commerce, and ethics, the signal failure of Flashpoint to meet the minimal threshold of a line-wide rebooting story reveals the underlying structure of such events, as well as providing important clues to the way the genre works as a whole.

The heroes' active, conscious involvement in the line-wide reboot demonstrates the fractal nature of the corporate superhero universe, transposing the fundamental ethical concern of the superhero genre--who should intervene in a crisis, and when--to the levels of continuity, fictional self-referentiality, and the roles of creators, readers, and editors. 

The superhero genre's built-in bias for action and intervention is so obvious that, most of the time, it hardly seems worth mentioning.  So many of the catchphrases developed by both Marvel and DC are precisely about the need to act:  "This looks like a job for Superman!";  "It's clobberin' time!" . This is not even counting the numerous calls to arms associated with so many heroes and teams, the less-than-edifying "Hulk smash!" and the oath recited by members of the Green Lantern Corps [1].  While these catchphrases are not the exclusive property of the Big Two superheroes (as attested by anyone humming the Mighty Mouse theme song, "Here I come to save the day"), they are nearly all declarations of intended actions. Again, this is no surprise: there is a reason DC's longest-running title is not called "Inaction Comics."

The emphasis on intervention is given a moral foundation by comics' most explicitly philosophical motto: "With great power comes great responsibility." Originally the closing line in Stan Lee's narrative captions to Spider-Man's first appearance in Amazing Fantasy 15, this adage about power and responsibility migrated throughout Spider-Man-related media until it eventually became retconned as a nugget of wisdom imparted to Peter Parker by his Uncle Ben. Once it was included as part of Uncle Ben's dialogue in the 2002 Spider-Man film, the phrase became a part of pop cultural history.  It is also the most explicit corporate superhero mission statement ever to achieve such indisputable memetic success.  The very existence of superpowers compels their bearer to put on a costume and either fight crime or commit crime.

You and me both, Doc

Only occasionally do the ethics of choosing to be a superhero become part of the story before the 1980s, when comics such as Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns call the very idea of vigilantism into question at the same time that they (along with Art Spiegelman's Maus, whose origins and status are far from the industry of mainstream comics) manage to draw sustained public attention to comics as a mature art form for the first time in American history. That same decade is, not entirely coincidentally, when crises and reboots become a standard part of the corporate comics repertoire. 

If, as I have argued elsewhere, Marvel Comics in the 1960s was dominated by the ethos of pop science fictional humanism (exploring the nonhuman or superhuman in order to extoll the virtues of humanity), and in the 1970s, by both an emphasis on subjectivity (the characters' inner lives) and transcendence (the superhero story as the vehicle for spiritual growth), in the 1980s, both Marvel and DC move in a direction that combines continuity-obsessed solipsism with an interrogation of the ethics of intervention.

Both superhero vigilantism and continuity revisionism take a functional or utilitarian approach to the problems they pose.  Vigilantism flaunts its impatience with social and legal institutions that are inadequate in the face of crime and corruption; what on the surface is mere escapism and wish-fulfillment ("Let's beat up the bad guys!") is implicated in a politics that readers might not as readily accept in the "real world."  Continuity revisionism implicitly declares the current narrative status quo irreparable within the existing framework: Something Must Be Done. The incompatibility of superhero vigilantism with the niceties of liberal, procedural democracy shares with continuity revisionism a frustration with the temporality of the world as it exists.  Both are predicated on the wish to cut to the chase and get a desire result.

They also share a complicated attitude towards agency and consequence. The superhero vigilante lays claim to an agency that has no clear external source, while the downstream ramifications of the vigilante's unilateral actions are only occasional explored, and usually within the context of a "mature" reexamination of the superhero idea. At the same time, superheroes have long been subject to the leftist critique that, even as they undermine institutions by acting outside of them, ultimately the entire point of all their efforts is to maintain the liberal capitalist status quo.  Why, after all, should we really care if a bank is robbed?

Continuity revisionism makes the superhero's dedication to maintaining the existing order both literal and metaphysical.  They are trying to stop something or someone from rewriting the rules and history of the world in which they live.  There is, however, a crucial distinction:  the ordinary superhero story nearly always ends in success, but the whole point of a continuity-revising event is to have the superhero fail.  Yes, they defeat the villain, and yes, they ensure that there is a universe (or multiverse) to protect once the adventure is done, but the cosmos they have known has been fundamentally altered.

Who is responsible for this alteration?  Here we come back to the multiple roles of readers, creators, and editors.  In most cases, the creators and editors began their relationship with comics as readers; this is one of the factors that helps maintain fandom.  The industry is filled with former fans, who, if they might no longer speak exactly the same language as current fans, are proficient enough to code switch.  Yet despite their common roots, readers, creators, and editors do not form a harmonious triad; if anything, their relationship is inherently antagonistic.  Some of this is an inevitable consequence of serialized narrative in any medium. For the story to continue to be viable, the storyteller has to succeed in intriguing the reader while failing to completely satisfy. The readers' frustration is not just a by-product; it is built-in part of the product they have chosen to consume.

Note

[1] "Avengers, Assemble!" "Titans Together!" "Teen Titans, Go!" "To me, my X-Men!" "Long Live the Legion!"  When Green Lanterns charge their rings, they recite the oath "In brightest day/In blackest night/ No evil shall escape my sight/Let those who worship evil's might/ Beware my power/Green Lantern's Light!"

Next: This Looks Like a Job for...the Editor!