Watchmen at Thirty, pt. 2: Absent Friends

"What's happened to the American dream?"

"It came true. You're looking at it."

"Moore and Gibbons' exposure of the antisocial, fascist, and psychologically diseased implications of superheroes was chilling, especially to adult readers still fascinated by superheroes but no longer quite comfortable with the fascination."

The quote above - from either Morrison's Supergods or Jones and Jacobs' The Comic Book Heroes, I didn't write down which - cuts to the quick of how and why Watchmen hit the way it did thirty years ago. Thirty years before its arrival, Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent claimed to expose the Freudian catacombs and corruptive dangers of comics as an art form. And failed completely. Wertham's staff was too long; he was digging in the wrong place. Watchmen's excavation was far more precise.

Within five years of its publication, though, exposing the fascist implications of superheroes was no longer all that chilling or uncomfortable - it was the new norm. Well, I could put that better. What actually became the post-Watchmen norm was watered-down-Watchmen: all the sex and violence with little of the withering insight.

THE PLOT

Chapter Two is broken into three sections, each anchored by Eddie Blake's funeral.

In the first part, Jon teleports Laurie across the country to visit with her mother Sally, the original Silk Spectre. They bicker - the usual mother/ daughter stuff:

Laurie is horrified at her mother's lack of reaction to the news that Edward Blake has died. Sally seems almost sympathetic to and about the man who raped her. Sally declines to clarify things. As she looks at a picture of the Minutemen, she flashes back to when the photo was taken.

Another fine visual segue, (aka "a Watchmen segue") there, with Sally's line about the past getting brighter cutting to the flashbulb in the past. The motion picture comic manages to one-up things with the magic of cut-away and voiceover.  

In the comic, above, Laurie's "extinguished" line does not bleed over to the next panel. Whereas in the m.p.c.:

Sally's "I've got spots in my eyes" line is suggestive, as well, since the photograph is the prelude to Blake's sexual assault while she's changing out of her costume. The costumes are all-important here, especially when Hooded Justice comes in to see what's taking Sally so long and discovers what's going on. He immediately begins to beat Blake, whereupon things get even creepier: 

Blake is sent home, and Hooded Justice tells Sally to cover herself up. 

It's a disturbing and multi-faceted scene, even thirty years on, but as discussed by Atom and Carr here, these themes (the fishnet-stocking-and-bustier-wearing heroine "asking for it," the sadist who gets off on beating people up, etc.) have been played around with in so many different ways in the years since that it's difficult to remember or imagine when this was utterly taboo terrain in comics. (Nevertheless, I imagine it would necessitate the creation of a safe space nearby to be discussed in a college classroom in 2016.) As much as similarly-themed material proliferated in its wake, though, Watchmen represents a high water mark in the deconstruction of "suits" as sexual perversion. 

In the second section, each of the Crimebusters at Blake's funeral remembers a different moment they shared with the Comedian. 

Ozymandias reflects on the time the Comedian sabotaged Captain Metropolis' attempt at establishing the Crimebusters. The parallel in the "real" comics world would be the creation of the Silver Age: the first "modern" Flash and the emergence of Marvel. In the Watchmen-verse, the Silver Age is aborted. (How you gonna keep em on the Silver Age farm once they seen Doc Manhattan's penis? Not to mention rapes at the team HQ.) That Moore and Gibbons achieve this with avatars of the caped crusaders from relatively deep in the closet (the old Charlton heroes acquired by DC, lest we forget) is an added bonus.

I also liked this:

Ozymandias is the killer mastermind behind the whole plot and the figure in whom Watchmen's many genres - police procedural, sci-fiction, noir murder mystery, etc. - coalesce. So of course we see him at the funeral of his victim - the mastermind/killer in these things always shows up at the funeral.  

Also: have another look at the panels above. How many flashback-explaining-present-scenario Lost season moments are modeled on this sort of transition? A lot of them. When Lost was huge, I remember a lot of talk on the forums on how Watchmen-inspired it was, and (at least in the first season) it totally was. Chapeau, Lindeloff and the gang.

Next up is Doctor Manhattan, who remembers (some time after the Ozymandias flashback) the last time he saw Eddie Blake "in country." Things went a little differently in the Watchmen-world's Vietnam, as Doc Manhattan was around to intervene on the American and South Vietnamese side. As a result of having a super-powered giant at his beckoned call, Nixon never left the Oval Office. 

This was a conceit Watchmen shared with that other subversive groundbreaker of 1986. In Dark Knight Returns, Superman's working for Uncle Sam meant Reagan was President forever.

A very drunk Eddie Blake ruminates on how much he hates Vietnam before a heavily-pregnant woman appears. The child she's carrying is Blake's, and she confronts him. He rejects her, rudely. She slashes his face with a broken bottle, and he shoots her dead in anger, as Doc Manhattan watches. 

"You coulda changed the gun into steam or the bullets into mercury or the bottle into snowflakes! You coulda teleported either of us to goddamn Australia, but you didn't lift a finger! You don't really give a damn about human beings. I've watched you. (...) Soon you won't care about Sally Jupiter's little girl."

Later we learn that Laurie is more than just Sally Jupiter's little girl, which gives an even more jagged edge to this scene.

Finally, Nite Owl remembers the time he and the Comedian were called upon to help quell the riots that preceded the passage of the Keane Act. 

Nite Owl, as we'll see more of in later issues, is the insider/outsider narrator common to so much American fiction. This flashback establishes him as a reluctant participant in the sadism, sexual perversion, and fascism of his fellow "masks," but a participant nonetheless.

The final section of Chapter II involves Rorschach, who watches the funeral from outside the gates in his civilian guise as homeless apocalyptic riff-raff. 

When he sees Moloch - the super-villain he and his fellow Crimebusters put away back in the day - attending the funeral, he breaks into his house and assaults him to find out why.

Turns out Blake paid a drunken visit to Moloch shortly before he died, babbling about an "Island" and having learned some secret that dismantled his worldview. But what he actually saw or learned Moloch doesn't know.

The 18 panels of Blake's anguish (from Moloch's flashback) are a tad overdone to my eyes now. It seems a stretch to me that the Comedian would be quite so shell-shocked as he appears by learning what is going on at the Island (and elsewhere).

The issue ends with Rorschach going to the grave to pay his own peculiar respects and to mull things over in True Detective genre fashion. He tells the famous joke about the guy who goes to the doctor and says he's depressed, and the doctor says "You're in luck, go and see the great clown Pagliacci." The man breaks down and cries and says "But doctor, I am Pagliacci."

Just last weekend I heard Danny Clover tell the same joke on an episode of Broadway Is My Beat on audionoir. So I guess it's been around for awhile. What was interesting was how it was used on Broadway Is My Beat was exactly the way it was used in Watchmen #2: to emphasize an ambivalent mood over noiry-type music. Sure, you've got to imagine the music in Watchmen, but it's there. Anyway, it was a fun connection to make, standing in my kitchen.

And now it's time for:

At the last minute, Rorschach turns expectation on its head, though:

It's almost more jarring to see a positive (or at least non-negative) sentiment in the midst of Rorschach's otherwise-disturbed inner monologue.

~

"Absent Friends" deepens and darkens the journey begun in Chapter I. Thirty years on, it strikes me as not just just superhero deconstruction at its finest but Cold-War-nuclear-family-death-thrill-kill-cult deconstruction at its finest.  

Fantastic Four: 1962

And now for Part Two of -

in the 1960s.

Last time around, we learned of an underground race of nuclear-reactor-thieving monsters and a shape-shifting alien civilization that covets the Earth. Luckily the FF was around to effectively thwart them both. Over this stretch, we learn of an undersea civilization that declares war on the surface world and of more life in outer space, and Kirby and Lee continue to exponentially populate the Marvel Universe.

First came Hank Pym over in Tales to Astonish, then in rapid succession the Hulk, Thor, and Spider-Man (co-created with Steve Ditko), each in their own magazine with their own stable of associated characters. A significant expansion for the House of Ideas! 

It took very little time for Stan's knack for in-story cross-promotion to manifest itself:

1.  MYTHOS

The Fantastic Four-verse also expanded in '62, with the introduction of soon-to-be brand-visible elements. Such as:

THE FANTASTICAR 

I guess it's not the biggest deal, but I always liked it. If they ever get the movie right, it might make a fun ride for whatever theme park builds it.

THE BAXTER BUILDING

I love everything about this schematic. Keep in mind the first 30 stories are private residences.

This aspect of the Baxter Building - the FF having its HQ on top of other businesses and residences - was a throwback to Doc Savage, who did his business on the 86th floor of the (implied) Empire State Building. Where he had only a zenith mooring, however, the FF have rockets and Fantasticars.

UNSTABLE MOLECULES

"Flaunting tradition from the beginning, the Fantastic Four wore civilian clothes. When finally pressured to give them more traditionally recognizable superheroic costumes, Jack Kirby responded with functional blue jumpsuits that owed more to the Mercury astronauts than to circus acrobats." - Supergods, Grant Morrison

It's actually Sue who is credited in coming up with the costumes in issue 3, not Reed, but sooner or later, the unstable-molecules aspect of the FF's costumes (a Reed Richards invention) became standard issue Marvel wear. Well, except for Spidey. He hung in there with his thread and needle for decades to come.

There was some Kirby precedent for the uniform aesthetic from his DC work, Challengers of the Unknown.

THE YANCY STREET GANG

Snail mail trolling! Kirby often liked to recall his roots growing up in Depression-era street gangs in Brooklyn. Egged on by the Torch in issues to come, the Thing finally has enough of their taunts and sets out to thrash the little punks with his rocky fists. But he ends up taking a liking to and mentoring the rugrats instead. By the time I came along in the 80s, the Yancy Street Gang, having fallen out of use but still intermittently referenced, were an anachronistic source of confusion for me.

THE HIGH POINT OF 

THE HUMAN TORCH'S POPULARITY

Ah, fame, ya fickle jerk. At the end of '62, the Human Torch starred in his own series of adventures in Strange Tales, but it didn't last. The Thing, so far, has been the only original FF character popular enough to sustain his own series. Maybe that's changed in the years since I stopped reading Marvel regularly. 

So there's a lot of Johnny-talks-to-the-reader and pin-up stuff in these issues.

The Torch, of course, was a reboot of an earlier Marvel (Atlas/Timely) creation, the original Human Torch, Jim Hammond. No relation between the characters, although Hammond would return first as the body of the original Vision, then as himself. Captain America, the most popular of Marvel's 40s creations, would have to wait until The Avengers #4 (1964) to return to the public eye, but the seeds of his return were planted in 1962 with the return of:

NAMOR, THE SUB-MARINER: 

When Johnny storms off during one of the group's many spats, he ends up in the bowery - because why not? - next to a catatonic man. Naturally, Johnny decides to give him a shave with his flame-finger - standard practice, really, when sharing a cot next to a homeless man - and voila:

In the 40s, Namor threw in with Cap and the Human Torch because the Nazis threatened his undersea kingdom. 20 years later, he has amnesia and doesn't respond to being recognized. After Johnny douses him in water, he returns to his homeland to find it: 

"Here was a whole new complex of ideas: heroes who might be in the wrong, who are ambivalent about their enemy, who disagree about their plan of action, who are even caught in a romantic triangle with a villain." - Supergods again.

The romantic triangle business is more pronounced in these early issues than I remembered.

"I think you owe us an explanation, Sue."

Johnny's probably just being a bratty younger sibling, here, but their attitude is fascinating. Not that it's any of their actual business, but there are all sorts of reasons to lift an eyebrow at the idea of a relationship between Sue and Namor. No need to bother, though; Sue's being sexually threatened by a speedo-wearing outsider who has bewitched her with his seductive foreigner ways. A damn fish to boot, or half-fish - sure, he's a war hero, but no way, Runaround Sue. Burn the photo! Burn everything!

Doom sees it from the other side of things, once they team up.

After battling them to a standstill, like Godzilla Namor makes his lonely way back to the sea.

THE PUPPET MASTER 

AND ALICIA MASTERS 

The Puppet Master was never a personal favorite of mine. In some respects, he's the classic Lee villain: his motivations for his life of crime are not entirely unsympathetic, and he employs his talents in a rather uncreative fashion, giving us glimpses of a power that, better controlled, would far outmatch the FF - or most heroes in the Marvel Universe. 

But so it goes.

The Puppet Master is mainly around to bring his blind daughter Alicia into the dramatic fray. It is her Frankenstein-y affection for Ben Grimm that turns him into the lovable big-ol-monster-babysitter of Marvel Two-in-One and Hanukkah cards to come. 

But even more important than all the above - not just to the FF or comics history but to civilization itself - is the first appearance of:

DOCTOR DOOM

Doom's debut story is silly but perfect. He kidnaps the FF so that they can travel to the past in the time machine he's invented and steal the legendary treasure of Blackbeard. (He'd go himself, but he has to stay behind and "work the machine.") Reed knows Doom is a man of his word from their college days. They go into the past and easily enough overcome Blackbeard and his crew.

The Thing briefly goes native.

He later apologizes for betraying Johnny and Reed and throwing them overboard. "I just lost my dumb head for awhile."

Doom never gets his hands on Blackbeard's treasure - everyone escapes, and everything ends in flames. But we learn a lot about the guy. In pursuit of seemingly trivial objectives, he has the means and willingness to:

- neutralize the most technologically advanced building in New York.

- spirit away the world's only (at that point) super-team to an undisclosed castle stronghold.

- build sophisticated robot duplicates only to see them destroyed as decoys.

- come back and take your whole gd building if thwarted.

Not to mention, of course, this time machine he's invented - perfect but for the one flaw of not trusting one of his robot doubles to work the controls. Or complete the mission for that matter. Interesting commentary on the mind of Doom. 

I don't know how many times I read Iron Man (v1) 149-150, where Iron Man and Doom travel back to Arthurian times and mix it up with Merlin and Morgana and other intrigues, as a kid. Let's say dozens, and at least a half dozen times in the 21st century. And twice in the last year, at least. I love that story. There was a sequel to it for Iron Man 250, where they go into the future instead of the past. I had no idea that both stories were sequels (of a sort) to this first-appearance-of-Doom story. 

FF 5 (above) and IM 250 and 150 (l to r, below).

Doom's plans may be a wit wonky, but he goes about them with such stylish super-villainy. His hurling the Baxter Building into space remains a personal favorite of the genre. (Byrne paid homage to it during his run.) Kudos to Doom's engineering - or Reed's reverse engineering of it, or however the hell it survives the rigors of space and ends up so precisely re-attached to its original foundation - for getting it home safely.

Just "a hallucination resulting from the anxieties that plague our nuclear society."

Doom is defeated and adrift in space at story's end, much like Vader at the end of A New Hope several years later. And much has been made of the similarities between Darth Vader and Doctor Doom (as well as Darkseid and other later Kirby creations). Even if Vader/Star Wars is a deliberate mash-up of other things, so what? Most things are mash-ups of one thing or another. In these FF stories alone, we've seen Frankenstein, Doc Savage, Marvel's own Golden Age, and The Day The Earth Stood Still all recycled to great effect. Maybe Star Wars is a little more on the nose in its homage-making, but it owes no conceptual debt to Marvel or DC  anymore than it does to Carl Jung, Akira Kurosawa, or Alfred Lord Tennyson. Nevertheless, the similarities are fun to notice. 

When horribly disfigured by his Dark Arts practice, he takes to wearing a mask and suit of cloaked armor.

We'll be seeing plenty more of both Doom and Namor in the futurepast.

2. STORIES

Just a quick glance at two of them that I thought were fun. In issue 7, they again travel into space, this time spirited away to Planet X, a planet ruled by a highly technological elite who nonetheless only have a handful of spaceships: not enough to remove their planet's population from imminent cosmic disaster.

Kurrgo, the ruler of Planet X, figures Reed can come up with something with the advanced machines his ancestors built that he and his people have forgotten how to use. Sure enough, Reed develops a shrinking gas that allows the billions of Planet-X-ers to escape in the small number of spaceships available. He also invents an enlarging gas to reverse the effects once they get to their new homeworld. Or so he tells them. 

Add the 5 billion souls formerly of Planet X who have cosmic beef with Reed Richards.

The best of the FF of 1962 is probably issue 9, where the FF lose all their money thanks to Reed's putting all of the FF's funds - I guess Mister Smartest Man Alive thought diversifying your portfolio was a bum steer - on some sort of magic beans and losing everything. 

The kind of plot twists (and reasoning) I grew up with in Richie Rich comics.

Namor - watching the news in his undersea kingdom - hears about their bankruptcy and begins to plot.

Naturally:

I will never not be entertained by the dramatic reveal of a villain who responds with "At Your Service!" I just find that so damn funny. Extra points if they are removing eyeglasses or a fake beard while saying it. Anyway, Namor's plan is suitably ridiculous, involving Mister Fantastic battling a cyclops, but even though their lives were mildly endangered in the process, he keeps his word. Their fortunes are restored, and the movie does get produced.

James Arness and Amanda Blake from Gunsmoke, as well as Alfred Hitchcock, Bing Crosby, and Bob Hope are all seen hanging around "SM Studios."

3. COVERS 

AND SPLASHES

4. FROM THE 

FF MAILBAG

Sol Brodsky was Marvel's production director. Nicely done.

I assume Roy Thomas needs no introduction, but keep your eye on this kid - I bet he goes places.

~

Next Up: 1963. Lots more Doctor Doom! Rama-Tut! The Hate-Monger!