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The Nightmare and the Dream:
A Literary Survey of Watchmen and Sandman
Comic Arts Conference 7/00
As a legitimate storytelling medium, comic books have a largely unrecognized potential for being genuine literature. The industry is at a crossroads where exploration of its academic value would be a boon. The promise of readership expansion - from its diminishing niche of the mid- to post-adolescent fanboy to an wider, older, and educated co-ed audience - lies in its repackaging format: the trade paperback. Found in accepted, commercial bookstores, the trade paperback presents comic plot arcs with unified creator teams and visions, already tested in monthly serial form. Of these offerings, many qualify for scholarly consideration. Two of the most celebrated, each extremely disparate from the other, are Alan Moore's Watchmen and Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. Both contain a bevy of literary elements and academic depth that serve as solid testimony for the rest of their brethren. Further analysis of the comic industry's trade paperback selections could enrich the study of the modern Western narrative and boost the quality and sales of this floundering, century-old publishing institution. Currently - that is, the beginning of the 21st century - comics are largely viewed by mainstream America as immature and without real merit. A large segment of the general reading populace views comics simply as childish marzipan, with simplistic good vs. evil themes and imagination-bolstering pictures. They are characterized as "'adolescent male power fantasies,'" says Marvel Comics editor Tom Brevoort. "While successive generations of creators have succeeded in plumbing new depths and crafting works of compelling beauty," the public reception of comic books is still mired in juvenile presumption. Writer Joe Kelly elaborates: The bias against comics stems from the belief that it's literature for the illiterate. Some believe that since the words depend on the pictures and vice versa, there can be no room for true drama, intelligence, character, etc…Unfortunately, in a lot of the mainstream comics, this is not far from the truth. If there are a hundred comics on the racks [only] ten of them could be called "literature." If [the comic industry is] ever going to gain widespread acceptance as a medium, we need to hold up more than five shining examples of comic literature. As Kelly implies, part of comics' misperception is the fault of its marketing. The chief buying audience has been winnied down to an elite few, the thin demographics of either fanboys or collectors. And, in the face of adult scrutiny and rival youth distractions (e.g. Pokemon, wrestling, and the Internet) fewer new readers are entering into the fold. Even as lack of business foresight has brought comics to this perilous stage, one of its additional grasps at the public dollar may prove its salvation. Comic books, even those made by one writer-artist, are commonly a collaborative process. Penciler, writer, inker, editor, and colorist are just a hint of the requisite roles involved in a ongoing project. As writer Jamie Delano warns, "a comic book is always a team creation... however frustrating that might be." Long-running comic book series are often passed from creative team to creative team with varying effects. Titles are commonly left in flux as companies ink contracts with different talents for varied amounts of time, based more often on their name recognition and sales than quality. Kelly believes that "the rotation of a creative team has a profound affect on how a book is received…Now, throw in editorial interference, and you have the recipe for disaster." Monthlies can die based solely on the interaction, implementation, and reception of a talented creative team. When one clicks, however, legendary work can be produced. The most effective monthly runs are often collected into mass-market trade paperbacks - and, among them often lie Kelly's "shining examples" of the medium. Penciler Dan Panosian states that "the trade paperback is probably the best thing to happen to comics in along time." By bringing comic books from the exclusionary racks and culture of specialty shops and into the legitimate venues of commercial bookstores, successful multi-month plot arcs - written with one meshed vision by one creative team - become the most viable entries into the collective consciousness' reconsideration of comic books. In his sequel to Understanding Comics entitled Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud speaks of two phenomena easily applicable to the trade paperback: [One goal of comics is] that the business of comics might be reinvented so as to better serve product and consumer alike…That public reception of comics could be improved to at least acknowledge the potential of the form and be prepared to recognize progress when it occurs. (11) In moving from periodical to book, an implicit claim of permanent worth [is] being made…Periodicals have traditionally carried with them the connotation of disposability; of temporary worth - while books [have] brought the promise of something more. (29) Bookstore chains such as Barnes and Noble or Borders can provide an outlet for quality comic creations to find new advocates and audiences. As Panosian says, "People will always respect and recognize quality," but only if it gets to them. Just as all that glitters may not be gold, evolving from specialty shop monthly to year-round bookstore shelf stock does not instantly make a comic book literature. First, because that would instantly relegate the continuous-run serial comics to the try-out forum for a presumably more favorable presentation - it implies that there is something wrong with the traditional comic book format. Second, those individual issues that are tapped for trade paperback collection may be selected based on popularity and/or sales, neither of which is exactly equivalent with quality. The history behind these repackagings is as important as their availability, their commercial rebirths. The final difficulty in naming comic trade paperbacks literature is the ambiguous definition of literature itself. There is no set method of identifying literature - centuries and libraries of discussion have addressed the issue with no one discourse or theory emerging triumphant. In "A New Frame For Comics," I attempted to create a laundry list of literary elements that most good works - works commonly accepted as literature - contain. That approach, while down to earth and unencumbered by conflicting theories, proved to be clumsy and rudimentary. Equally direct, yet far more condensed and weighted, are the comments of Peter Straub and Frank McConnell in their assessments of the Sandman series. McConnell writes that Sandman is "the stuff of which literature is made: Learned, complex, straightforward, funny, melancholy, and irresistibly humanizing." Straub's definition is far more the contrapositive: "If this isn't literature, nothing is." Other young mediums, comics' brethren, share the difficulties of being adopted into the nebulous literary tradition, hypertext in particular. Both share a muddled genesis, one emerging largely from the newspaper comic strip and the other from the electronic revolutions leading to and including the Internet. Like any medium, neither was made of whole cloth, but the earliest pioneering of both was practically accidental; both were the by-products of other exercises, comic strip repurposing and electronic exploration, respectively. In his book Hypertext/Theory, Professor George Landow explains that he wrote his previous work "in part to convince literary theorists and computer scientists that they have interests in common" (1). In arguing for hypertext's validity, Landow kindly includes comic books as a locale of "literature and the literary book" (7). Both formats, computer hypertext and comic books, share the abilities to carry a narrative text and, in fact, convey their stories through a series of jumps - comics proceed panel-to-panel using frames, while hypertext moves, as Espen J. Aarseth calls it, texton-to-texton (more popularly referred to as page-to-page on the Internet) using links. In a true hypertext web, there may be no concrete beginning or end, but rather a interconnected weaving of textons making closure problematic. Like "many [other] twentieth century print narratives," the ongoing monthly comic also complicates what J. Yellowlees Douglas calls "the traditional definition of closure," especially in a publisher's shared universe (164). But, most similarly, the two mediums are common subjects of academic and popular bias. The population-at-large feels they know what a comic book is and know what hypertext writing is - after all, they watched the Spider-Man cartoon and have visited their brother-in-law's Web site. In reality, the general public does not know the possible depths of either medium. And, as textual upstarts, both receive skepticism if notice at all from academia. Landow's comments on hypertext apply equally well to comics: If hypertext truly marks a major paradigm shift, then one can expect that most scholars, critics, and theorists of print-based literature will do nothing at all about it. They will avert their eyes, deny, when pressed that hypertext fiction or poetry is real fiction poetry, and in general express great affection for the printed book. (35) Even as a printed text, comics suffer the same prejudice. It generally "fall[s] between accepted categories," much like the earliest hypertexual books or telegraph devices described by Aarseth (80). Their functional similarities and shared difficulties may already be bringing the two mediums together. For "A New Frame For Comics" and this paper, I found a remarkable amount of data at Stuart Moulthrop's Watching the Detectives Web site and David Woxler's The Gaiman Archive; access to linked information made easy the research that a print resource would have complicated. Even during the Internet's commercial infancy, readers were using discussion groups like net.comics to discuss the monthly developments of the series; one insightful poster by the name of Jeff Meyer had the foresight to question whether their hypertext messages and guesses as to the Comedian's killer actually constituted the first "interactive mystery." He writes: Each issue comes out and the net shuffles through the clues, puts forth hypothesises and critically analyze them. A good deal of fun, much different than reading a mystery by yourself, and another sign of how good a writer and artist are Moore and Gibbons, respectively; a mental conglomerate of ~50 minds is looking over their work and running each little bit of plot through a sieve. Perhaps this potential kinship of comics and hypertext was part of McCloud's inspiration for suggesting that the next (r)evolution of comics be towards a highly digital, hypertextual product "for a new set of dreams to find new roads to a new generation in form beyond imaging" (237). Synergy, this time between word and image, is a defining characteristic of comics, but also a challenging issue when viewing comics as literature. Comics are the synergy of pictures and words; great comics, though, are the synergy of art and literature. By definition, comics are, as Wil Eisner put it, "the cross-breeding of illustration and prose" (p. 8). But, as editor Carl Potts says, this cross-breeding can create an new and magnificent creature: "The combining of graphics and written word creates a product that is greater than pure written word or pure graphics could achieve." The interrelation between the two channels allows for a wider palette of tools than what would be available to the writer or artist alone. Both McCloud and R.C. Harvey chronicle the different interactions and effects words and pictures can have on one and another, from the word and picture specific to the additive, parallel, and interdependent. Harvey says: …When words and pictures blend in mutual dependence to tell a story and thereby convey a meaning that neither the verbal nor the visual can achieve alone without the other, then the storyteller is using to the fullest the possible resources the medium offers him. (4) I do not see eye-to-eye with Harvey in his strict insistence that literary criticism "ignores the narrative function of the pictures in comics" or that "pictures are…as much a part of the story as the plot line;" I feel a work can be discussed as a whole without a systematic dissection or discussion of the channels (3). However, I wholly agree that the "mutual dependence" creates a uniquely crafted and powerful. For example, McConnell notes a moment that could only be properly portrayed in the duo-channel environment of comics: The Furies...chase down [Dream's] life throughout this book because he killed his son, Orpheus; at Orpheus' request, to be sure, but nevertheless, he has killed him...After he has left the sanctuary of the Dreaming, the fairy Nuala…asks him the question that may be the central secret of the tale. "You...you wan them to punish you, don't you? You want to be punished for Orpheus' death." And the next frame, Dream's response, is simple a wordless, tight close-up of his tortured face. (That's an effect, by the way, that neither novel nor a film could achieve with the same force, since a novel would have to describe his face, and a film could only give us an actor trying to imitate that bleak mask of regret. The comic...gives us the thing itself...) All of this could imply that comics cannot be literature, because, just by nature of their creation, they are something more; calling them only literature could be as confining as calling them only visual art. It is in this capacity that Harvey's comments make the most sense. Comics are neither only words nor only pictures. They are a combined medium, a hybrid. I choose to look at them from a literary perspective - this could be limiting, rather than reaching. The purpose of this paper is to document some literary elements of comics' "shining examples." These examples are only within public reach due to their publication as trade paperbacks. The first, Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, was a twelve-issue series originally published in the mid-80s. The second, Sandman by Neil Gaiman and various artists, was a seven-five issue series originally published in the early 90s. Now, in trade paperback form, they reside as whole, collected works, more available to the general public and more accessible to the scholar. From this foundation of literary elements - or object to it - it is my hope that greater, mainstream discussion unfolds and further trained research of the medium is conducted. Yet, even as I do aim to tease out literary elements below, at no point should it ever be inferred that the words and script alone are carrying the story. While I do not actually discuss it, Harvey and similar proponents may rest assured that I do not discard comic art's importance. As Eisner says, "the future of this form awaits participants who truly believe that the application of sequential art, with its interweaving of words and pictures, could provide a dimension that contributes - hopefully on a level never before attained - to the body of literature" (141-142). Comic books are synergy, after all, and from/in that synergy lies a great deal of literary wealth. Watchmen is both a comic book and comic literature. That is, it easily resides on multiple levels of awareness, including simply the surface level. One can not condemn the fifteen year-old who only wishes to read it as a really incredible comic book story. In fact, that's what it is first and foremost. Even in amidst all their depth, imagery, and thematic sleight-of-hand, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons allow it to be simply a comic; rather than be impossibly avant guarde, Watchmen's deeper levels and higher-order components have been so neatly tucked away or subtly woven into the fabric of the story that a surface reading of this near-Armageddon story should only provide an intriguing, light breeze of its profundity. As Aarseth says about the hypertext narrative Afternoon, "I felt…dead sure that important things were being whispered just beyond my hearing. I cannot deny that it was a very fascinating literary experience" (70).One can finish the story and walk away or submit to pursuing those whispers, following the metaphorical the white rabbit down the rabbit hole. When originally published, comic books, specifically the dominating superhero genre, did not generally warrant such analysis or literary benefit of the doubt. The industry had become staid, dominated by Marvel and DC as well as a tired set of guidelines for its storytelling. Easily, it was a creative nightmare, with revolution and rule-breaking as the best and only options out of the retreading funk. 100 Years of Comics credits Watchmen as "the first serious attempt to deconstruct the aging super-hero genre." This genre had grown into dominance over the last five decades thanks to the Comics Code's suffocating elimination of alternate genres from publishers like the Entertaining Comics Company. In response to the public outrage against comics brought on by Fredrick Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, the industry elected to self-regulate by means of the agreed upon elements of the Comics Code. The horror and pirate books of the Entertaining Comics were unable to be produced in light of the new sanctions, and EC As Amy Kiste Nyberg says in her opening to Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, "It is true that some companies, like William Gaines's EC Comics, were casualties of the new standards; in fact, most fan-historians focus on the demise of EC Comics as an example of the impact of the code" (Nyberg p. xi). McCloud says that, for some, EC "represented the high water mark of challenging stories and bold, innovative artwork" (88). Superhero comics flourished, entering into what most term its Silver Age, but it did so in bloodless, deathless, sexless, and shadeless security. The Code forced creators on an absolute moral straight-and-narrow with no room to test the boundaries. And, while Marvel's 1960s inception brought a strong dose of down-to-earth reality to the fantasy proceedings, very little changed in comic book themes and stories for the next 20 years . Breaking instantly from tradition, a death begins Watchmen: the murder of diplomat Edward Blake, aka The Comedian. Heroes in comics - then and today - rarely ever truly die, so, from the beginning, Watchmen set its precedent. Additionally, it would go on to realistically depict rape, murder, and the major fear of Cold War America, the possibility of nuclear Armageddon. Likewise, there would be profanity, nudity, alternative lifestyles, insanity, and outright immorality. None were done for pure shock value, but rather to knock down the naïve, over-pure walls of the long-untried superhero genre. Like its often-noted co-release, Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen heralded in a new era of commercial comic book writing: the deconstruction of the superhero. Watchmen's deconstruction and dissection of the waning genre was especially appropriate given its original subject matter and characters, the future of the defunct Golden Age Charlton Comics heroes. DC Comics had acquired the rights to the characters of Charlton comics such as the Blue Beetle and the Question. These heroes had roots extending back into the pre-Silver Age, dubbed the Golden Age, before the Comics Code. They had been constructed and written in a times of general innocence, where good always won and evil was always punished - it was from these Golden Age sensibilities that the Comics Code would later take its shape. In his initial notes on Watchmen, Moore says, "What I'd like to try to do is treat the world that the Charlton heroes live in exactly the same as our world, but to actually try to work out and follow through on the implications of the presence of super-heroes. You can't do that in the conventional super-hero comics." Thus, in the Watchmen-world, a world of real heroes, the Comics Code never existed. The appendix to "Fearful Symmetry" is a reproduction of the fictitious Treasure Island Treasury of Comics which reports that the US Government supported the industry rather than groups like the Catholic Church's National Office of Decent Literature or the Cincinnati Committee of the Evaluation of Comics - "The government of the day [had come] down squarely on the side of comic books in an effort to protect the image of certain comic book-inspired agents in their employ." Thus, pirate comics stayed aloft and vital, and the Silver Age of the comic superhero was never to be. Already, Watchmen can be read as opposition to the Comics Code and the foolish black-or-white morality on which it was based. While few things are clear-cut in Watchmen, a few traditional literary and comic book archetypes remain. Some, such as Nite Owl II, fit nicely at first into the Batman- and Iron Man-mold: independent, brilliant, and wealthy bachelor who secretly fights crime by means of his fantastic gadgetry. The Minutemen themselves are the classic Golden Age set of heroes. But, in both cases, the comic book archetypes are only set up that way to be knocked down. On larger scale, the Golden Age comic book hero is not unlike The Untouchables or the Revolutionary War Minutemen? All a team of ready-to-go, normal-human fighters, but seemingly immune to harm, corruption, or cynicism. Citizen-soldiers. Eager patriots, firmly rooted in the American principle of democracy and the power of a single voice. Again, the perfect long-standing do-gooders for Moore to pull the rug out from under. Moore, however, does create a new type of hero, one that would remain popular and become as tired as its purist predecessors: the ruthless vigilante. In the character of Rorschach, Moore creates a true psychopath. In his interview with The Telegraph Wire, Moore describes his upcoming creation, Rorschach: We've got some interesting characters. There's Rorschach who's a really psychopathic vigilante. Whereas in most comic books the psychopath will get angry, a *real* psychopath will break your arm and smile... or never react at all…Yeah. I've met a couple of psychopaths. They never growl, they never snarl, they never do anything outrageous…Absolutely placid. It's abnormal emotional reactions. That's what Rorschach is all about. Whereas Wolverine, the Punisher, and, to varying degrees, Batman had all been around for some time, Moore created the first mainstream psychotic hero. Combined with Frank Miller's Dark Knight approach to Batman that reemphasized his disturbed nature, the marketplace reacted garrulously and eagerly to the new design. The concept of such a character as a protagonist was very un-Code. Un-Superman, un-Captain America. But, it worked so well, too well, that it spawned a near-decade of pale imitators and grim-and-gritty storylines. Regardless, Watchmen made the Vigilante a comic book reality. Moore also pulled from the remarkably long tradition of the Christ Figure. Jon Osterman, dubbed Doctor Manhattan, is the only true superhuman on the Watchmen-Earth; that is, unlike Superman and his colleagues in the Justice League of America, he's a singularity. Second, he deeply wants to help mankind, yet finds himself further and further distanced from them. Forgive the pun, but the press does absolutely crucify the guy over the whether he is harmful to those around him. Third - and most important - is the origin of his power; his physicality was absolutely destroyed, leaving only his disembodied soul to resurrect a form for himself. He becomes a creature that cannot only turn water into wine, but make water itself on no less a hostile environment than Mars! His father was a watchmaker , he can walk on water and, most compelling, the name Osterman in German translates into "the Easter Man." In this case, I'm willing to enjoy the thought of Osterman as an intentional Christ figure if for no other reason than to fill what I feel is a quantitative lack of Judeo-Christian imagery most elsewhere in the book. But, rather than looking at characters individually, far more of Watchmen's subtext and themes can be derived from looking at them together; compare and contrast them as foils. As a superhero comic book, even one focused on the deconstruction of the genre, Watchmen is about good versus evil, bad guys versus good guys, and right versus wrong - Morality. And, largely, the reader needs identification of the characters' moralities to achieve his/her own position on the story. The great trick that Moore plays is that by latching on to any one of the characters, they truly do become a sort of moral anchor when their full personae is finally revealed. The characters' many shades of gray and personal secrets can our sink one's spirits right to the bottom of a nightmarish sea. Simply said, no one is completely moral in Watchmen, no one is completely innocent. Again, none of the characters should be wholly read as archetypal absolutes, since their beautiful complexity lies in the way each of them is flawed. Comparing them to each other best illustrates their juxtaposed strengths and weaknesses, and considering those comparisons best reveals the reader's own moral sensibilities. Moore has provided his own tricky Rorschach Ink-Blot Test that forces us to assign our own values and interpretations to the ink pictures and character sketches. First there is the partnership of Rorschach and Dan Dreiberg, Nite Owl II. This team is an awkward but complimentary one with their many polar opposites despite a similar goal of thwarting crime. The broad pairing may be one of the few chances the reader has to solidly root for a team; there has to be something about the literally dynamic duo that appeals to the reader, since Rorschach and Dan seem to cover the whole spectrum of both strengths and failings. To itemize: One is sane, in the traditional sense of the word, while the other is not. In addition, Kovacs had been abused and forced to live in poverty while Dan seems to have been raised in a world of relative comfort. It's no wonder that Kovacs adopted the Rorschach identity and forced himself to live by wit and body alone even as Nite Owl depends on gadgetry and surrogate mechanical strength. Likewise, Rorschach seems to live hand-to-mouth even as Dan has become fat. Yet, both fight crime, both uphold the law - whether that be the letter-of-the-law or the spirit - and both are initially without the capacity for love or intimacy. Rorschach longs for the abstract "American love," which he writes is now absent in the world (II.25.2-4); Dan literally cannot love due to impotency. The final difference between this odd couple is their respective views on the sanctity of life: Rorschach kills, Dan apparently does not. Should the reader, for this last reason, condemn Rorschach and his methods? Or is killing the guilty, thinning their herd, understandable? These are key issues to Watchmen overall and other characters like Ozymandias, The Comedian, the "Marooned" sailor, and even Bernie, the man-on-the-street vendor. Each of these men either preach or practice the principle that murder can be a justifiable act. In fact, even Laurie could be thrown into that mix, considering her attempt to shoot Veidt in retaliation for killing Jon in Chapter 12 - Likewise, Jon does the same to silence Rorschach. And, would Dan have accidentally killed that bar informant in Chapter X had Rorschach not intervened? Compare his throttling on page 16 panels 1 and 2 to the murder committed by the "Marooned" sailor just four pages back in panel 8 of page 12. It would appear that all of our supposed heroes have the intent and, sometimes, the capacity to murder. How do we as the reader judge them? First, focus on the pseudo-villains of our piece, Veidt and Blake, especially in the context of justifiable murder. What links these men and what separates them? Both are supporters of capitalism, Blake having fought for America and Veidt having profited off of it. They also have fought generalized crime, even if they enact atrocities on their own. Third, they both see "the big picture;" at the first and only meeting of Crimebusters, Blake opens Veidt's eyes wide to the truth that humanity's self-destruction is imminent. And, surprisingly, both express some unRorschachian uncertainty towards their actions - it is the actions themselves, however, that allow us to separate the men and individually judge them. Blake, the most "deliberately amoral" person Osterman reports to have ever met, has been an assassin, a soldier, a diplomat, a torturer, and a rapist (IV.19). He killed one Vietnamese lover pregnant with his son and raped Sally Jupiter - Silk Spectre I and another carrier of his seed. Horrible as it sounds, though, Blake's actions are human. That is, it is conceivable for a human to do such sickening things. Individual murders, individual assaults, individual atrocities. By his own admission, he says, "I done some bad things. I did bad things to women. I shot kids in 'Nam. I shot kids...But I never did anything like, like" (II.23)… ...Like Veidt. Blake may disgust himself, but Veidt disgusts him even more. For, Veidt commits inhumanities on a far higher level, both in scope, quantity, and motivation. In order to save humanity, Veidt will actively give people cancer. He will frame fellow crime fighters and jeopardize the lives of those close to him. He will blow up and poison his own employees. He will manipulate the laws of science and deliberately doom people to a lifetime of nightmares. He will kill three million New Yorkers all for "humanity's salvation" (XI.25)! His acts are far more massive than Blake's, Rorschach's, Osterman's, and Laurie's all put together, yet the reason for his genocide has a chance to balance it all out. Like the sailor in Tales of the Black Freighter's "Marooned," he commits his acts of murder and uses the bodies of the dead in order to save the living. Rorschach condemns him, Osterman seems to support him, and Laurie and Dan abstain, remaining silent. But, even Veidt has moral uncertainty over his acts. In words that echo the final panels of "Marooned," Veidt tells Osterman: Jon...I know people think me callous. But I've made myself feel every death. By day I imagine endless faces. By night...Well, I dream about swimming towards a hideous...No, never mind, it isn't significant...What's significant is that I know. I know I've struggled across the backs of murdered innocents to save humanity...But someone had to take the weight of that awful, necessary crime. I'd hoped you understand, unlike Rorschach... ...I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end. (XII.27) To this de facto admission of uncertainty, Osterman simply replies "'In the end'? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends" (XII.27.5). He seems to neither affirm nor condemn Veidt's act. And, Ozymandias, the smartest man alive, is left baffled by the statement. And, perhaps, bothered - after all, guilt never ends either. Let's make one last set of comparisons, a last round-up on the morality-meter, but include Osterman this time. Dan: Doesn't kill, but has been largely ineffective and pathetic since retiring. Rorschach: Does kill, has made some progress on crime, but does not fit in Veidt's world of manipulated peace. Blake has done even worse than just kill yet still cannot be part of Veidt's global prank, mostly because he understands it. Veidt is the worst killer of all, but is arguably pardoned by his motivation to save modern civilization. Then, there's Osterman who, over the last thirty years, largely shaped this rampant society while manning the power to avert any war and stop any crime if he truly wanted. In short, society is about to rip itself apart, yet Osterman remained as passive as Dan even though he has the power to make Veidt's plan obsolete and unnecessary. Without Veidt's redeeming rationale, is Osterman, in the end, WATCHMEN' s greatest villain? Probably not, but he is the closest to a true alien that appears in the book. His removal from humanity is even greater than Veidt's, his only tie being the physical sex with Laurie anchoring him to his fading humanity. Speaking of lost manhoods, Osterman's body was destroyed and he was, in effect, killed. Doctor Manhattan came into being when his empowered consciousness managed to piece a body back together, albeit blue and without pupils. He has gone beyond Veidt's status of human perfection - he's superhuman. And, as such, has lost his connection to the norm. In the series final Chapter "Stronger, Loving World," Doctor Manhattan speaks as if Osterman was some other person and confirms his disconnection with humanity as he scolds Veidt for trying to kill him: I am disappointed, Veidt. Very disappointed. Reconstructing myself after the subtraction of my intrinsic field was the first trick I learned. If it didn't kill Osterman...did you think it would kill me? I've walked across the sun. I've seen events so tiny and so fast that they hardly can be said to have occurred at all, but you...You are a man. ...And this world's smartest man means no more to me than does its smartest termite. (XII.18.1-4) Even though Doctor Manhattan - for Osterman now seems the wrong name for him - seemingly embarks to create new life at the story's end, he has become more of a curious god than a caring, empowered human; this nicely reflects the entire myth mentioned in the footnotes of the Watchman-God. Some discussion was made at the time of Watchmen's publication of Doctor Manhattan's omniscience - Was he limited to doing only actions he foresaw in his future? With all of his power, was he the one being without free will? "Everything is preordained," he says and that "There is no future" and "no past" (IX.5.3, IX.5.5). Yet he later admits to "thermodynamic miracles" and the possibility of things occurring that could never be expected (IX.26.5). Despite his generally accurate predictions and ability to glance through time, I do not think that his lack of action is due to chronological hand-tying; I think it is because of his own estranged view of mankind's worth. He does, after all, tell Laurie, "I changed my mind," and that even an individual human existence is worth something (IX.26.4). And so, Doctor Manhattan leaves to go and make life, if not for life itself - only to watch it tick. It would seem that gods in WATCHMEN are less concerned with helping humanity through life than towards death. Very little of the Judeo-Christian traditions are apparent in the story. In fact, the only overt allusions to either doctrine are Watchtower and krystalnacht, the destruction of Jewish shopkeepers windows and stores preceding WWII. Buddah is only portrayed splattered with blood at the scene of a particularly gruesome murder; Detectives Fine and Borquin investigate a man who killed his family and himself in response to his fear of on-coming global warfare. Some Eastern ideologies are mentioned, but, in Doctor Manhattan himself and the Watchman-God, there's the pervasive Egyptian theology to which Veidt subscribes. He rewards his manservants' devotion by giving them death. In fact, his whole plan derives from the fact that he sees the world aimed for death and destruction; Rorschach's analysis of Veidt's Egyptian decorum, specifically its own relation to watchers, says it nicely: Egyptian decor coloring logic...Recognize dog-headed bust. Anubis, watcher over dead. Whole culture death-fixated, obsessively securing their tombs against intruders...Didn't like thought of corpses being interfered with. ...Funny...Ancient pharaohs looked forward to end of world: Believed cadavers would rise, reclaim hearts from golden jars. Must currently be holding breath with anticipation. Understand now why always mistrusted fascination with relics and dead kings...In final analysis, it's them or us. (X.20) Rorschach's reaction to the Egyptian culture echoes layman Bernie's own pessimistic strike-first "final analysis" and the Watchmen--world's widespread belief of an imminent, costly global conflict. Yet, Veidt finds the Egyptian sentiment comforting, saying that "death wasn't morbid to the ancient Egyptians. They saw it as launching on a voyage of spiritual discovery" (V.13). Perhaps it is meant to be comforting, for the characters and readers alike. While Watchmen is still available today in trade paperback form, it should be remembered that it was written during the mid-80s, the height of the Cold War. Certainly, in a world where the U.S. won Vietnam and boasts the power of Doctor Manhattan, there would be a potential for even greater communist/democratic polarity. The presence of a god-like being has only made things worse, has only increased the tension. And, without any sign of other gods stepping in on Man's behalf, little sign of salvation seemed to be at hand. Even Osterman, arguably omniscient, says, "I don't think there is a God, Janey. If there is, I'm not him" (IV.11). At every turn, Watchmen argrees with Nietzche: There is no God. And, if there is, the answers for their world does not lie with a god, any of them.
An equally prevalent and highly related theme throughout Watchmen is a great bias not just against growth but against creation. Veidt does what he does to preserve humanity, yes, but it's a destructive act, not a constructive one. He destroys the beautiful Antarctic hothouse that took years to cultivate. The massive Mars fortress of Doctor Manhattan is reduced to rubble. All of the teams fall apart and rarely ever in the story, to paraphrase Mr. Yeats, does a center ever hold. Even the commercial products of their culture are based on things having passed or things being destroyed - on the transient: Mmeltdowns candy, Nostalgia cologne, and Pale Horse and Krystalnacht rock groups.
Even sex, the act of procreation itself, is tightly linked to destruction and/or violence in Watchmen. In the footnotes, I've already theorized that Rorschach's twisted mind is due to the abuse dealt to him by his openly whoring mother. Sex, violence. Missing writer Max Shea dies while fucking in the steerage of a cruiseliner. Sex, destruction. Blake rapes Sally Jupiter, Laurie's Mom, and is then beaten for it by a possibly sado-masochistic Hooded Justice. Sex, violence. After a flaccidly failed attempt to make love to Laurie, Dan dreams of them coming together nude only to be destroyed in a bomb blast. Sex, destruction. Rorschach finally flips while investigating the abduction, rape, and killing of a young child. Sex, violence. Laurie and Dan each demonstrate gender-stereotyped post-coitus acts after finishing off a pack of street thugs; exhausted, he rolls over while she lights up a smoke. Violence, sex. Moore seems to speak through Veidt as he comments on the television commercials: "You're ignoring the subtext: Increased sexual imagery, even in the candy ads. It implies an erotic undercurrent not uncommon in times of war" (X.8). The Freudian drives are apparently cross-connected in the WATCHMEN Universe; Moulthrop argues that even Veidt's destructive, teleporting monster is fashioned after female genitalia - not too far-fetched considering the many the mentions of motherhood and the womb concurrent with its sketching in the short span of six panels.
If Watchmen is the deconstruction of the comic book genre, then Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series is the remystification of the entire medium. Or, perhaps more directly, it is an elegant and eloquent demonstration of the storytelling breadth that a comic book can contain. The Sandman is not really about superheroes; it is about the superpowerful. Supernatural myths, old gods, ancient pantheons, and fantastic fables. It asks where have the gods gone, what influence has today's humanity had in their existences, and where have the unseen ended up in by the 1990s? In fact, that is the larger question of The Sandman: How much are we like the gods and how much are they like us? Further, The Sandman is about how these myths function in the modern world, both as characters and as stories. Because, at its core, that is what The Sandman is about - stories. Writing them, telling them, the forgetting of them, the recalling of them, the power of them, the abuse of them, the beginning of them, and the end of them. And, how stories - and their characters - remain yet change. Gaiman has makes us privy to the life, change, trials, demise of the most thematically suited mythic being - The Keeper of Stories and Shaper of Dreams, Morpheus. In terms of the comic book industry, The Sandman was there not to topple a decrepit, long-standing form like Watchmen, but to build a new one. In the years since Watchmen, more and more had been done to deconstruct the superhero genre, almost to the point of it being a new rule or cliché itself. But, little had been done to rebuild, to construct a new foundation. Enter Neil Gaiman, friend and pseudo-student of Alan Moore, offered a re-working of the Golden Age Sandman character after his successful Black Orchid series. Like the shift from Golden Age to Silver Age characters, Gaiman left nothing but a threadbare connection in place from the old, heroic Sandman to his new supernatural protagonist. While originally stationed within DC continuity, Sandman began to build a world of its own - access to other dimensions, the inclusion of other myths and theologies, even connections to the Bible. Soon, not only was Sandman a financial hit, but it also grew a cult following of non-comic reading fans and became the flagship title to DC's new mature readers line, Vertigo. It won numerous awards, including, to Harlan Ellison's "devilish pleasure," 1991's Howard Philips Lovecraft trophy for the Year's Best Short Story, one of the only comic books to ever do so in a standard-print medium; Ellison was delighted to see what he called "the new high water mark" triumph over the traditional medium and win the appreciation and scorn of its peers by "kickin[ing] serious artistic butt." MAUS may have won a Pulitzer, but The Sandman continued weaving its 75-issue multi-genre, multi-artist web for over six years - all of its threads collected in ten exceptional trade paperback volumes. Both in story and influence, The Sandman chronicles the end of the old dream and the beginning of the new. In Gaiman's new world the mundane and divine, mortals and immortals alike share an interplay of destinies - often the most human dilemmas are reserved for the meta-human. That is, most comics focus on the exploits of super-humans, but Sandman deals with either the purely human or those that never were; augmented humans are the province of the super-hero genre, not Sandman. These two extremes are actually more easily compared and exchanged than that nebulous, tired middle-ground. Throughout the series we find mortals in celestial predicaments and immortals in peculiarly human situations. Moreover, we witness each switch sides quite dramatically. After quitting Hell, Lucifer has Morpheus sever his wings so that he may walk amongst the humans free of his station. While, perhaps, not devoid of his former power, Lucifer now engages existence on a far more human level - and, through him, the reader may experience the commonplace with greater appreciation. From who else would an appreciation of God's beautiful sunset carry so much weight? When the former Lord of Hell and Leader of Heaven's Revolt says, "All right. I admit it…The sunsets are bloody marvelous, you old bastard," to God, it takes on more human power than perhaps any human character could ever embody. The mortal/immortal reversal is a prevalent theme through the entire course of Sandman. Destruction abandons his office to walk the Earth as any normal human. Likewise, lofty and powerful figures like Augustus Caesar, Pharamond, the First Conrinthian, and so many others have taken refuge among the lower caste, among the purely human. Conversely, there is a great deal of ascendancy. In The Doll's House, struggling adolescent Rose Walker discovers that she is a Dream Vortex, an elemental force with the potential to rip dreaming psyches and Morpheus' realm apart. Likewise, her brother is the vessel for two of Morpheus' errant nightmares, the pregnant Lyta Hall, and her dead husband; her grandmother is the original Dream Vortex and the unwilling mate of Morpheus' sibling, Desire. This, for certain, is not your normal family, but they do create a nice trend. Worlds End tells of Prez Rickard's afterlife confrontation with Boss Smiley and salvation by Morpheus. Richard Madoc is granted the curse of superhuman imagination out of vengeance for his mistreatment of Morpheus' ex-wife. Preludes and Nocturnes features the demented and hideous C-List villain Doctor D gaining access to Morpheus' power stone and wreaking incredible havoc. In the wings, a dying Matthew Cable from Moore's Swamp Thing gains a second-life as Morpheus' newest personal raven. Even the reader him/herself is given the honor to sit among deities and legends at Morpheus' funeral in The Wake. And, most pivotal to Morpheus and the overall plot of Sandman, Orpheus is granted a loophole into Hell by becoming immortal in Death's gaze. Consider the dual quests of Lyta Hall and Delirium in The Kindly Ones, specifically their reception by the reader. They are similar in circumstance but leagues apart in potential pathos. Both are powerful beings in their own respective worlds: Lyta was once the superpowered hero Fury - a remarkably appropriate moniker - and Delirium was once the Endless member known as Delight. Yet both suffered a terrible loss. Gaiman shrouds Delight's in secret - perhaps it was the death of the original Despair, perhaps it was the rise of greater lunacy in the world, who knows? For whatever reason, she is now the deranged Delirium and is desperate to find the dog that her missing brother Destruction gave her named Barnabas. Lyta's loss is absolutely clear - her family. What makes these two so interesting in The Kindly Ones is that both hunt for something they have lost, yet they must embrace their insanity in order to find it. Now, one might think that we mortal readers would care a little bit more about Lyta's pursuit of her family. Or, maybe, that we would be more awed and cowered by the supernatural, crazed wanderings of an Endless. The reverse happens, though. Lyta's plight becomes so vengeful, obsessive, and increasingly monstrous that her demands for Morpheus' death can strike the reader as excessive and inhuman. Even the one who defends her, the Thessalian witch Larissa, warns: And you...are a pawn...who briefly became a knight...or a queen. And you've just been taken off the board...As I understand it, your actions have ensured that you will never see Daniel again...I'd take a shower, and then start running, if I were you. Lots of people are going to want to hurt you for what you've done. Including me. (Kindly, 13.20) Just as sympathy for Lyta is hard to summon, pity for Delirium is as easy to experience as for an abused child. Something in her past - known only to Gaiman, who isn't saying - destroyed the beauty of Delight and left only Delirium in its wake. Now, powerful but pitiful, she incoherently searches for her four-legged traveling companion. And, along the way, she helplessly frets over her brother's situation like the kid sister that she is. Few things are sweeter in The Kindly Ones than when she does manage to find Barnabas in the care of a faithful street beggar. And, interestingly, few things more human. The human-inhuman reversal can also be found between many other pairings, but none more directly tied to the plot and theme of Sandman than between Hob Gadling and Morpheus himself. Robert "Hob" Gadling is mortal, but ancient. Like a few, select others in human history, he simply does not age or die. He has assumed multiple identities since his first life as a contemporary of Chaucer. Also in that time, he befriended Morpheus and they sit to have a drink together every hundred years. The friendship is natural enough, as these supernatural friendships go; both have seen generations pass, both have different names in different cultures and different times, and both cannot remain for long with a mortal woman - a particular fetish of Morpheus' it would seem. Yet, over their next several meetings, it is the godlike being that instructs Hob on the inhumanity of slavery, while Hob is the one that finds no passion to young Will Shakespeare's plays. The human is the one who observes objectively that life is full of pain and suffering; Morpheus is the one to have an emotional outburst during their sit-down in the late 19th Century. But it is in The Kindly Ones that their biggest reversal comes: mortal Hob warns the Endless that he can feel death coming for Morpheus - he can smell the stink of death on him, says Hob. The human not only worries about the pseudo-god, but manages to outlive him! Gaiman makes it clear that the death, maiming, destruction, and the overall manhandling of deities and myths are fair game, allowing the reader no easy assumptions in viewing each of them. Fate might be real, but absolute safety is not, regardless of one's spiritual/cosmic status. For one who does, indeed, change names and rule over a land of constant mutability, Morpheus is stubbornly focused on stability, almost to the point of denial. As Hy Bender points out in The Sandman Companion: One of the descriptions that most struck me [in Seasons of Mist] was the Sandman's: "Dream accumulates names to himself like others make friends; but he permit himself few friends." In contrast, the Sandman has a virtual army of names. (97) Throughout the series, several different characters comment on how nothing is forever; all things change. That's all according to Destruction in World's End, the Furies in Kindly Ones, and Lucien in The Wake. All things change. Dream, largely, did not agree, and many acquiesced that perhaps he was forever constant and fixed, including his ex-wife Calliope. Perhaps he had to be as the ruler of a always-changing land. But, maybe his most common name, Morpheus for "change," was a subtle hint of his own inevitable change from the years of imprisonment. He could not allow himself to believe that his imprisonment at Wynch Cross may have affected him; despite evidence to the contrary, he must believe that he emerged unscathed. Only once the Kindly Ones close in can he begin to confront his obstacle: Have you ever been imprisoned, Nuala? I was...I spent over eighty years in a glass bottle, like a genie...or a city ...I could have waited until the earth crumbled to dust. But still, I waited. I told Ishtar that she was wrong. That I was not changed. That I did not change. But in truth, I think I lied to her. (Kindly, 11.6) Once Morpheus perishes, Matthew asks Lucien, "Why did it happen? Why did he let it happen?" And, similar to Nuala's own belief - that Morpheus may have engineered his own demise - Lucien replies: Let it, Matthew? I think he did a little more than let it happen...Charitably...I think...Sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And, in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he would let himself change. (Wake, p. 59) Morpheus' inheritor, the child Daniel, takes on the role of Dream of the Endless, but neither the same name nor sentiment. No longer a baby, he says that he is "not Morpheus. I have no right to that name. I am Dream of the Endless: it is enough" (Wake, p. 26). He also does not share Morpheus' scars from Wynch Cross or his bias against change. Not only is he open to greater intimacy an compassion, as shown with his gatekeepers and Lyta in The Wake, but has learned from Morpheus' journey. Destruction says to Daniel, "I thought I'd stop by, give you a little advice. You've never been inclined to listen to my advice in the but, well: Things change, don't they?" Daniel, unlike his predecessor, agrees, acknowledging his prodigal sibling's words. "Wise lad," says Destruction (p. 75). Whether it be Daniel or Morpheus as the King of Dreams, the Shaper of Stories, Dream should embrace the notion of change because it is a key component of storytelling itself. At least, it is a fundamental element of Sandman's story, since Sandman is a story about stories. World's End alone consists entirely of stories. And stories within stories. And stories within stories within stories - etc. Whether beginning, ending, embellishing, or debunking them, Gaiman has Morpheus live up to his name as the Prince of Stories, and makes Storytelling the number one priority above all else. Gaiman is comfortable with freely co-opting, tailoring, and writing from all sorts of cultural tales. In addition, many of the mythos of which he writes seem to be in decline: the faeries have abandoned Earth, the Endless are in strife or missing, Christianity is largely altered by Satan's boredom and abandonment with Hell, Odin is hunting for options to Ragnarok, etc. Gaiman doesn't give a tinker's damn about what's sacred if it interferes with his story; in fact, his love of the story and his playing with the all characters, human and otherwise, is more of a commentary in support of Humanity rather than Divinity. Crafting stories makes humans like gods, especially those where the human writer can manipulate the gods freely. Unlike Watchmen, where Moore makes the gods absent, Sandman makes the gods as vital and as in jeopardy as the rest of us. In the Story, humans and gods are equal - we're characters. Even as it comes to its conclusion, The Sandman series seems so drunk with storytelling glee that many tales look to live beyond its confines even as Gaiman himself talks through it. Morpheus finds an end, true, as does Lyta Hall's quest, Zelda's ailing, and Alex Burgess' torment. But Daniel's reign just begins, Cluracan's Nemesis was just born, and Nuala's wanderings are never explored. Further, many threads of the tapestry remain unresolved. The ramifications of Hell's new management have not been addressed, the mystery employer of Puck and Loki remains unrevealed , Destruction's realm is still without a ruler, and Lucifer sets out for points unknown. The plot arc is complete for Morpheus himself, but obviously Gaiman felt under no obligation to tidily deal with the outcomes of his many secondary characters - perhaps for his own future use. Further, Gaiman takes the opportunity to comment on writing through Sandman itself. He uses the other characters in a postmodern capacity by talking through them in The Kindly Ones. As McConnell's testifies in his introduction: Notice that the conversation among the ladies at the opening is deliberately constructed to refer to the act of telling the final major tale in The Sandman series. "What are you making him them," asks Clotho of Lachesis in the third frame of the first chapter. "I can't say that I'm terribly certain, my Popsy," she replies. "But it's a fine yarn, and I don't doubt that it'll suit. Go with anything, this will." The story begins as a story about storytelling, but also as a story...in its own right...In fact eight of the thirteen chapters begin, in the first frame, with a thread of some sort sunning across the panel, and with a comment that applies equally to the telling of the tale and to the tale itself. McConnell's assessment is absolutely accurate. Each postmodern opening comments reveals a great deal of Gaiman's meticulousness and personal uncertainty in shaping this "fine yarn." An anxiousness begins Parts One and Two- "Is it ready yet? Are you done?" and "Well? How long is it going to take?" Part Three offers a cautious, delicate tone with, "It think it's going to be bigger than I had planned," and "I don't mind. As big as it needs to be." "I wish I could be certain I was doing the right thing," comments an angel at the beginning of Part Four, and a calmer and more evenly paced sentiment begins Part Five with "It's happening. Very slowly, but it's happening." Once past the half-way point and Part Six's intermission, the end is in sight by Part Seven - "I never thought I would ever get to this place," and "Destinations are often a surprise to the Destined." Part Nine warns that it's "almost time," - "Nearly. Very nearly," responds one of the other Fates - and Part Ten abruptly ends the metacommentary when the death-bringing Corinthian snaps the cord with a solid "There." The end is now assured. All Matthew can ask the reader by Part Twelve is "Still here, then?" a la Ferris Bueller. It's already a foregone conclusion by the time Part Thirteen opens with Dream just sitting there that he's waiting for his sister Death to arrive. The end, for Morpheus and the story, has finally, sadly come. Just as Watchmen has no gods and Sandman has a plethora, so, too, do they each have their mottos - "Nothing ever ends" and "Things change." The two works are very disparate, certainly; one a bleak nightmare with only salvation offered at the sacrifice of morality, the other a byzantine fantasy obsessed with storytelling as it births a new dream. But, together, as either literature, a commentaries on the comic industry, or exceptional stories, their wealth is difficult to be ignored. In fact, they can only be shut out of academic discussion if their fans and supporters cease reading and looking at them. Thankfully, their trade paperback status will aid in handing them to further generations - hopefully ones that include English class and university seminar students. Sources:
100 Years of Comics: Starlog's Millennium 2000 Series. NewYork: Starlog Group, 1999.
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