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