The Graphic Novel

In class this semester we have focused a lot on various film adaptations. Of the adaptation we actually watched, Watchmen and Ghost World, it became clear to me that much of the graphic novel is lost in translation. This is not to say that I did not enjoy them or that they did not have any value. I just feel that some of the most interesting things about the comics were lost or edited out in the movies. In my opinion the form and use of symmetry was by far the most fascinating and meaningful element within Watchmen. These elements were not really included or stressed in the movie the way they were in the novel. In Ghost World the random cast of characters and the apparent lack of a storyline – the series of random conversations and events, as well as the idea of nostalgia are all kind of muted in the movie. There is much more of a focus on outside characters, less nostalgia, and a much more distinct storyline.

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In class Professor Whalen asked , “How Asterios Polyp has been influenced by the other comic books” Well as I flip around the comic, I notice many similarities, now I don’t know how much of it is influence, coincidence or comic norm.

First I have to say that Asterios Polyp, like Contract with God has a heavy sense of some greater divine power, that seems to influence the character’s life choices. For instance, the lightening scene at the end of a Contract with God, were God smites Fremme for defying him and turning against him, well Asterios has similar random attack by some otherworldly element. In the beginning of this comic, his house sets on fire as if it was an act of God. Then at the end when everything seems to be going well, in his and Hana’s relationship, huge comet is seconds from destroying them. It’s as if Asterios is stuck in a giant Greek tragedy, no matter his journey, he is meant by fate to die. Not only that both comics seem to be heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian religions, Contract with God has aspects of the Torah and Asterios quotes or references St. Francis of Assisi frequently.

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When I look at the world around me I am generally hard pressed to find purple. Not that it isn't there - my toes nails are currently purple, there are purple flowers on the skirt of a girl sitting across the room, and the grapes I am eating are purple. There just seems to be a lot less purple than other colors, especially natural purple. In our class the last couple comics we are looked at (Watchmen, Moonshadow, Asterios Polyp) have been very partial to purple. Why is it that purple is arguably rare in the real world but seemingly abundant in the world of comics? What is it about purple and comics?

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I will admit it, I bought Watchmen over the winter break, and quickly devoured the pages....it was a fantastic read and I really enjoyed it. Unfortunately it was then put aside for a few months while school kicked back in, and we all got started working our way through many other graphic novels. Over time, exact specifics began to slip from my mind, and I was left with only the rough storyline Alan Moore's brilliant work in my head.

This is by no means a problem, and it actually made reading it for a second time that much more enjoyable as I rediscovered characters and plot lines. There was....one....small....problem that developed over that time however, mostly dealing with the reading of Sandman. The character of Morpheus seemed frighteningly human for all of his great powers, so it was very easy to overlook the incredible feats that he was accomplishing. His emotions were what told the story, so I was easily able to accept the fact that he was flying about through the airspace over Hell.

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As readers, we are supposed to look deeper into the subject matter at hand. By doing so, we often notice minor details that at first seem meaningless, but with careful consideration and creative thought often take on a life of their own. These thoughts become speculation and theories that fans will debate until the end of time or until the author finally comes out and announces who is right and wrong. One such theory can be found in Watchmen chapter one and has even been the subject of a paper by James Gifford entitled Occulted Watchmen: The True Fate of 'Hooded Justice' & 'Captain Metropolis.' From this paper is born the theory of what really happened to Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis.

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Harvey Ball designed the first smiley face circa 1963, this is confirmed both here and here. It wasn't until the 1970s, however, that the smiley face "hit it big," so to speak. And now 50+ years after its invention, in our Graphic Novel class at UMW in the year 2010, we are presented with not one, but two texts that employ the smiley face as specific symbolism. What are the odds?

Watchmen uses the smiley for its original purpose: an icon.

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In Watchmen, it is obvious that everyone thinks of Rorschach as the crazy extremest. even in the superhero clan he is involved in, they find him to be excessive and have borderline villainous actions. The reality, however, is Rorschach is not crazy. Rorschach is rational, but works as a superhero in a harsh manner.

Rorschach has no mercy when it comes to immoral people. he believes that murderers, rapists, and such should get their just deserves. It is reasonable to say that everyone believes this. The difference is that when Rorschach comes, it's like Judgment Day. Rorschach atones people of their sins by taking "an eye for an eye". While on small scale, revenge and justice are reasonable devices, on the large scale, they are frowned upon. This is why everyone hates and fears Rorschach, along with the other Watchmen. Rorschach achieves justice in the same way many lawmen, justice servers, or any other wronged person would see fit. When comparing Rorschach to someone like the Punisher, Rorschach seems more normal and acceptable.

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After viewing Watchmen the movie, I knew it had to happen. In fact, I’m sure everyone knew it was going to happen. Never, except for maybe the Harry Potter movies, has a movie kept true to its book form. So surprise, surprise, director Zack Snyder left out some key things and also tweaked parts here and there, in particular the ending. Yet I’m sure those with a keen eye noticed Snyder wasn’t nearly that bad of a hatchet man, as he did in fact include several important facets of the book inside the movie, although they just weren’t as visible.

Now, to his credit and mainly to be fair, all that changing likely had to be done. After all, America’s attention span is less than an inch long and it’s tough for action movies to be successful while dragging on for three-plus hours. And hey, the movie adaptation could have been a lot worse (think Catwoman on this one).

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So, reading Watchmen over the past few weeks reminded me of a different graphic novel: Ex Machina. While they are mostly completely and utterly different, they do have one similarity: they both cover a masked vigilante retiring (be it forced or otherwise), and their success--or failure--at doing so.

In a nutshell, Ex Machina is about a masked vigilante (and superhero) named Mitchell Hundred who, one day, decides that he could do more good for his city (New York City) by joining the political system instead of "helping" the police force fight crime. Thus, he drops his identity as "The Great Machine" (he can talk to machines) and joins the political machine as the mayor of New York City. Unfortunately, not every is happy with his decision to stop being a super hero; Mayor Hundred's old friend, Kremlin, thusly tries to get Mayor Hundred to reconsider his retirement.

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So apparently, in the world of Watchmen, if you're not a heterosexual female running around in revealing outfits (either getting raped or being semi-stupid), you either have to be an angry, butch lesbian (Josephine) or dead (Silhouette). What angers me about this most is that the character Josephine has potential to be something better, something more positive, and could feasibly redeem my judgment of Alan Moore as vaguely sexist.

At first, Josephine, though stereotypically "butch," did not bother me. In fact, I thought her introduction to the story was kind of random. I thought of here merely as a tool for a political message, and who is politically active and kind of irritating: LESBIANS, OF COURSE! (side note: there should really be an html code for sarcasm).

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"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" translated from Latin means "Who watches the watchmen?" Think about this idea and how it manifests itself throughout the entire graphic novel. Moore's deconstruction of the superhero model we are all so familiar with does a lot of work conceptually.

I particularly like the photo below from the film, depicting the Watchmen or Minutemen as it were, in their heyday before threats of nuclear destruction (among other things) fueled the trend of compromised morality. Behind their earnest veneers, and retro eye wear especially, seems to lie a sense of doubt and it is this doubt that ultimately comes to fruition for the readers. The Watchmen are not the upstanding citizens we assume them to be. Unlike Superman, Spiderman or Batman who ultimately use their powers for good, the Watchmen have a much more human like quality as shown by their many flaws.

So to answer the question: we watch the watchmen. Society watches the watchmen. Perhaps most importantly, the watchmen watch the watchmen.

The graphic imagery in the final chapter of Watchmen, shows New York in complete devastation as millions have died due to Ozymandias’s twisted scheme in order to create world peace. In the last chapter, there are graphic depictions of all the dead, as they hang from bodies or lie on the street and lay resting in their pools of blood. And a few other parts that standout in the drawings (that were most likely not coincidence) were the signs in the background of all the destruction; Madison Square Garden was playing “Pale Horse,” presumably a band but that also happens to be one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

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**I brought this up in class but I had already written it out as a blog and was just waiting on images so I decided to post it anyway

Watchmen is full of repeated images: the smiley face, the Nostalgia perfume bottle, and the "shadow" of the lovers in the alley. Each of these images is repeated and used purposefully to further the story, emphasize points, or raise questions. As I continued to examine and look for these images I came across another repeated symbol - the triangle.

The triangle is used primarily in Chapter 5, Fearful Symmetry. The triangles in this chapter and in parts of the novel are all symmetrical so the use of them in chapter 5 is probably a big part of that theme. The first triangle is found on page seven of chapter 5. It is framing the Buddha image on a poster that is splattered with blood.

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Watchmen is an exploratory vehicle, a vessel compiled out of text and images, whose mission leads it into uncharted territory time and again; the collection's dense narrative structure reveals the truth of this assertion. The ambitious designs of author Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons require a multi-faceted approach: imagine reaching the conclusion in a version of Watchmen without Tales of the Black Freighter. While such an approach possesses its own novelties, the story's climax would be far less exciting, the didactic message much weaker. Thankfully, the final interpretation contains not one, but at least four distinctive narrative styles, each recognizable according to its particular presentation and distinct purpose.

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Alan Moore’s Watchmen paints a very dark picture of the world. What amazes me is how little of the actual world Moore actually shows us. Outside the world of the Watchmen “superheroes” the only snapshot we get of the “real” world is at the newsstand. What is impressive is that despite this limited setting Moore still manages to create a very convincing portrait of the state of the world. He seamlessly interweaves many different techniques and mediums such as the dialogue of the news-vendor, the story line of the Black Freighter, and smaller background details in order to do this. In the panel below we see the ongoing “conversation” between the news-vendor and the words of the Black Freighter. The news-vendor is constantly preaching about the state of the world while the story line of the comic within the comic seems to mirror or comment on the happenings, turmoil, and plans of the Watchmen. Appropriately below the News-vendor runs the title The Judge of All the Earth. In the background a man is hanging a fall-out shelter sign, making us aware of the nuclear threat. Beyond that the ground is covered in litter and the headlines at the newsstand reflect the worst parts of human nature. In other frames the newsstand also displays copies of the New Frontiersman and ads for Veidt’s perfume Nostalgia.

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While I was reading the first five chapters of Watchmen, I noticed one thing. The Comedian did so many things to so many people almost as if trying to challenge them to kill him. The crazy part is: he was not ready for death when people broke into his house and proceeded to beat him up and kill him. This event is indicated by his surprise on page 2 and 3 of chapter 1. So why would The Comedian not realize that someone was about to kill him when he has made so many enemies. The first incident of The Comedian making an enemy occurs on page 22 of chapter 1 and then again when Sally Jupiter recounts her personal story to Laurie and to the audience on pages 4-8 of chapter 2. She reveals that The Comedian or Eddie Blake raped her after a photo shoot.

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Alan Moore's Watchmen was an incredibly groundbreaking series, ushering in a new wave of dark, self-aware, postmodern superhero comics, which subverted the tropes of the superhero comics of their past. Though it inspired this immediate trend, it's influence spread much more widely than that, affecting nearly every superhero film made since with it's believable setting, psychologically realistic characters, and serious tone. But the film on which Watchmen's influence is most apparent (aside from the later film adaptation) came from the unlikeliest of places.

The 2004 Disney/Pixar film The Incredibles at first glance seems incredibly different from Moore's dark vision: it features a bright, eye-pleasing cityscape, as opposed to Watchmen's corrupt view of society, good guys who save the world, instead of the morally ambiguous characters featured in Watchmen, and features typical Disney themes such as the value of family, and the importance of believing in oneself. However, once one looks beneath the immediate the surface, many similarities are apparent.

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In class today we talked about the trademark symbol for Watchmen being the smiley face with the blood on it. I commented that it reminded me of particular symbol in Stanley Kubrick's movie Full Metal Jacket, Pvt. Joker's helmet and peace symbol. Both tokens represent the same idea, the duality of man in regards to his ruthlessness but high value of kindness.

Watchmen often speaks about the great contradiction that is human nature. According to Moore's characters, people are violent, evil, and destructive beings who put a happy disposition over their grim and miserable lives. This concept is embodied by the blood-spattered smiley face. A cheerful and happy pin that still has blood on it no matter how pleased it looks.

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Perhaps I am revealing my ignorance, but while reading Watchmen I found myself perplexed by the symbol on Dr. Manhattan's forehead. This confusion was only heightened when it was revealed that he purposefully chose this symbol to identify himself.

So: what the heck does it mean? Well, I've done some research and found out. Now, I know this is not a scholarly source, but the wikipedia page for all the Watchmen characters is actually pretty extensive, detailed, and from what I observe, accurate-- this is where my quest began.

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Recently in one of my history classes we discussed the idea that no matter what, a person will ultimately end up analyzing what the see according to present standards. After reading a few comics in this class I realized that this statement can be applied to art, particularly comics. Subject matter, text, plot lines, drawing styles, and images are all mediums in the comic world that can-and often are-affected by our surroundings. Take for example this image from Neil Gaiman's work The Sandman Vol.4:

Now compare that image of King Morpheus to McCay's drawing from Little Nemo in Slumberland:

Both images depict the same mythical King, yet they are from very different generations. McCay created his drawings in 1906 while Gaiman drew his King Morpheus in 1992. Pretty amazing what 86 years can do to a guy

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