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The Human Stain:
Chaos and the Rage
for Order in Watchmen
Bryan D. Dietrich
■■ In “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman writes, “Distant and dead resuscitate,
/ They show as the dial or move as the hands of me, I am the clock myself”
(67). Here, as well as throughout Leaves of Grass, we find Whitman the transcendentalist equating himself with all of humanity, even the dead. Moreover,
he posits his gestaltness as time itself, as the ultimate extension of humanity’s
ordering principle. Whitman, as us, is history; we, as Whitman, are part and
particle of the universe, from its beginnings some fourteen billion years ago
to now. We are ourselves but we are also Law. As with Emerson’s notion of
the “transparent eye-ball”—a philosophy that asks us “to look at the world
with new eyes” (48)—Whitman’s worldview puts humanity in the paradoxical
position of both observer and observed, timekeeper and time, order and what
is ordered: chaos. The graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons assesses humanity’s status in much the same way.
A first encounter with Watchmen, originally published by DC Comics in
single magazine format from 1986 to 1987, is a little like running into Whitman
with a box of crayons and a wicked gleam in his eye. While Watchmen exists
as older cousin to the recent metafictions of writers like Shelley Jackson and
Mark Z. Danielewski, while it is clearly the grandchild of Postmodern masters
such as Barth, Borges, Nabokov, Vonnegut and Woolf, it is also great grandchild
Extrapolation, Vol. 50, No. 1 © 2009 by The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College
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of Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman. Though its authors hail from Britain,
it is a quintessentially American book. Not surprisingly, the paradoxes do not
end here. As with any significantly complex and recursive text, the minute
one sets out to reduce the infinite to the simple, sublimity to character and
plot point, the sand beneath begins to shift; iconic connections, metatextual
crosscurrents, all the subtleties of theme and symbol begin to tumble and lose
footing. Such distillation is precisely what a great work of art resists, and what
a postmodern text like Watchmen (a text whose theme is that very refusal to
believe in determinant meaning) resists most ferociously.
Darren Harris-Fain admiringly mentions Watchmen’s liberal use of flashbacks, multiple narratives and shifts in perspective, the very techniques which
Peter S. Prescott and Ray Sawhill describe as “overreaching” (71). Prescott
and Sawhill are, of course, terribly misguided. As is, for the most part, Fredric
Paul Smoler when he says in his review in The Nation, “the narrative tone is
melodramatic and hyperbolic, and the initial point of view seems blackly reactionary, but the melodrama seems a sensible concession to the tastes of the
intended audience, while the retro politics may be an effective way of teaching
people to read carefully” (3). What Smoler does not recognize is how those
“retro” and “reactionary” politics are constantly reassessed, questioned, torn
down and reconstructed by the symbols he doesn’t deign to discuss. However,
Smoler does go on to admit the “Ironies abound and are economically achieved
through the juxtaposition of the ‘documentary’ material and the orthodox narrative; the pleasures of the text begin to depend on them” (3).
The thrust of the text revolves around four, main, “living” characters—
Rorschach, Nite Owl, Silk Spectre II, and Dr. Manhattan—who are looking
into the murder of the Comedian, one of only two superheroes, including Dr.
Manhattan, who remain legally active in the world of Watchmen. The Comedian
(basically Oliver North cum Charles Bronson sporting a leather death mask)
has been killed, we find out later, by another retired and very wealthy hero,
Ozymandias. The reason for the murder is convoluted, as is the rest of the plot,
but in a nutshell, Ozymandias has planned to construct and teleport a fake extraterrestrial (one that will act as a kind of psychic bomb) to the center of New
York City where its “death” will decimate half the population. The goal of all
this “mad scientism” is not glory or wealth or revenge however—as would be
the case with most of, say, Lex Luthor’s plots—but rather to prevent global annihilation. Since this is the “real world” and the 1980s, Communist Russia and
America are, as usual, on the brink of nuclear war. In this alternate universe, the
threat of conflict is particularly acute due to the presence of Dr. Manhattan, a
man who has tipped the balance of power in favor of the Americans. He is, after
all, nuclear power incarnate, a kind of macro-atomic god who can alter reality
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at will. Ozymandias believes that by providing the world with an alternative
threat (i.e., aliens) he can save the many by sacrificing a “few.”
When the Comedian finds out—regardless, hitherto, of his pronounced lack
of conscience—even he can’t let such a sacrifice happen. So Ozymandias kills
him. It is against this backdrop that the story unfolds. For our purposes, the
most important characters are Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan. Rorschach (a.k.a.
Walter Joseph Kovacs) is literally a sociopath, a man who probably would have
ended up a serial killer had he not discovered a mask behind which he can act in
the name of the law. His idea of law, however, is not even so simply blurred as
Batman’s; it is, if you will, smeared and stained. One example comes midway
through the book when, in a flashback, we see him discover a child killer. In
utter silence, we watch Rorschach piece together the crime, mutilate the dogs
the killer has used to dispose of the body, apprehend the criminal himself,
handcuff him to a stove, hand him a hacksaw, and set fire to the shed where
the man is chained. He leaves the man a choice: cut off his hand and escape,
or die (VI.18-25). In this way, Rorschach defends his vision of Law. What we
see as shady at best, he sees as clear-sightedness.
Dr. Manhattan (a.k.a. Jon Osterman), on the other hand, breaks all the other
laws, those of the universe. He sees space-time synchronically, across the layers
of events, all things and places simultaneously. And he is able to do pretty much
anything he wills with matter. Yet, even with all this power, he at first chooses
only to act according to one government’s whims and, later, only according to
his own. In the end, he walks away from any singular, human responsibility
and wanders off to create an entirely new reality. Where Rorschach acts out
of a completely introverted vision of Law (seeing little but himself, his own
definitions, and acting on them), Dr. Manhattan does the same thing, but for a
different reason. Because he cannot see a self, because he is all selves and all
truths, all possibility and all reason, he too acts on what must be, by definition,
a singular (if infinite) vision of right and wrong. For the former, Law is definable, for the latter, infinitely recursive and indeterminate. Both, effectively,
arrive at the same answer to the problem posed by Ozymandias’s plan to save
the world through a dangerous lie. Both choose to let the lie stand. Rorschach,
because he can’t allow the lie and live, chooses death. Dr. Manhattan, because
it has always been a lie and never was, because all truths are equal, leaves this
universe for another of his own making.
Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan represent the extremes to which humanity
goes to understand and organize the world. Both exist outside of the Law, but act
in its name. Both break the law in order to keep it. Rorschach represents those
who would see no gradations of good and evil; actions are either damning or
redemptive, no middle ground. Consequently, Rorschach himself cannot adapt
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and, like Ahab, falls into final ruin when he realizes his uncompromising vision
must lead to global annihilation. Dr. Manhattan represents those who would see
all sides at once, the whole as well as the parts, what T.S. Eliot saw as “Time
present and time past. . . present in time future” and “time future contained in
time past” (117). Thus Dr. Manhattan, though he does act and react early on in
the story, finds, at the end, that he cannot commit; like Hamlet, he is trapped in
a hermeneutic circle that ultimately prevents him from taking a side.
Looking at the issue of scientific law, Brent Fishbaugh describes Dr. Manhattan as a man “who has become a scientist to the extent of losing his humanity,
his appreciation for the beauty of science” (10). “Rorschach,” Fishbaugh says,
“is all passion and no reason while Jon [Dr. Manhattan] is the exact opposite”
(10). However, the matter is a bit more complex than Fishbaugh suggests. Both
characters represent the law as well as its lack, the desire for order as well
as a willingness to go beyond. Seen together, they both become signifiers of
the same problem: interpretation. How do we know what is right and wrong?
How do we know what the answer is? Should we laugh or cry, now that the
Comedian is dead? Can we be, should we be, saved? Is there such a thing as
a Transcendental Signified? Thus, the unfolding of their respective stories is a
gradual illumination of what lies under the hood, what makes the world tick,
what is right or wrong about requiring what Frost called a “design of darkness
to appall” (396).
In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault writes, “it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying;
the space where they achieve their splendour is not that [space] deployed by
our eyes” (9). Here, Foucault is suggesting something about the ultimate failure
of signs, of representation, of the search for transcendental signifiers. Such a
discussion, of course, leads inexorably toward postmodernism and the realm
of phenomenology where meaning and being are so inextricably interwoven
that one must concede, at the extreme, no meaning at all. However, Ellen Dissanayake, a lecturer at the New School for Social Research in New York City,
argues, “As Homo aestheticus, we really require beauty and meaning—those
answers to human questions and desires that are to be found in (what should
be evident in the name we give them) ‘the humanities’” (3). Regardless, then,
of whether final, determinable meaning can be found in human constructs,
Dissanayake, along with innumerable others, argues that “art is intrinsic to our
specieshood” (225). On this same topic, Alan Moore himself says, “I would
like to think that this disintegration of coherence that seems to be going on
throughout our culture is part of some step towards some new kind of reintegration. I’d like to think that, but I’d have to wait before I gave any conclusive
feelings upon that. A lot of the time it does look like a complete breakdown to
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shambling idiocy” (“Mainstream” 94).
The search for order is doomed to failure. The search for order is intrinsic
to our being. These two notions—notions which, if both true, make the human race by definition neurotic (if not schizophrenic)—are played out with
exceeding visual and verbal grace as well as spiraling complexity in Moore
and Gibbons’s novel. Making use of Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan—two men
symbolizing two ways of seeing, two men for two eyes—Watchmen explores
the full implications of these apparently conflicting notions and the human
masochism they imply. However, beyond the characters, beyond the metafictional techniques (perhaps running parallel to, or becoming a parallax for,
both) the text also adopts a variegated complex of visual symbols to address
the notion that to be human is to be inherently visually impaired. We see as
if through a glass darkly, yes, but that glass through which we look is the human desire for order. That desire is in our blood, it is our blood, and our blood
cannot help us see.
This blood (Rorschach’s and Dr. Manhattan’s blood, the Comedian’s,
New York City’s, humanity’s blood), this desire to see which breeds blindness, is symbolized in a stain, one that first appears on a smiley face button
in Watchmen’s beginning panels and becomes a running motif throughout the
twelve-part tale. Here, the Comedian has just been killed, and his logo, a smiley face, lies blood-spattered in a gutter beneath the window out of which he
was pushed (I.overleaf-4). A streak of blood crosses the right eye of the face,
angling from upper left to lower right. We see this image or its variants (signs
and portents) more than fifty more times in the book. Taken together, the first
stain and its permutations underscore a postmodern theme that makes comedy
into tragedy and humanity into has-been heroes without costumes, without
cause, without any purpose but perhaps one: love. Love one another, that may
be all we can do, even if, as Rorschach writes in his journal, it doesn’t exist:
“American love,” he says, “like Coke in green glass bottles. . . .They don’t
make it anymore” (II.25).
■
■
■
Let us begin with the eyes, since this is after all a book whose theme
suggests something about how we see. Many of the images of (at least
symbolically) occluded eyes are thematically insignificant alone, but from the
scar running through the right eye of a punk biker at Happy Harry’s Bar and
Grill in Chapter I (I.14) to what may indeed be a similar scar crossing the same
eye of the child killer mentioned earlier (VI.23), from Kovacs’s (Rorschach’s)
eye bruise and band-aid seen throughout Chapter VI to his own smeared tears
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seen in flashback (VI.4), from eyes reflected in a bottle of Nostalgia perfume
(IX.24) to a badly weathered scarecrow (X.23) to a jack-o-lantern stained by
candle wax (VIII.12), we are bombarded with the symbolic loss of vision, with
the message that our sight is inherently impaired.
The transformation of the syntagm we first saw in the first panel of the
book takes place over a trajectory that encompasses the entire story. We see Silk
Spectre’s smeared makeup in Chapter III (8) and hair across one of her eyes
in Chapter IX (21), a variation repeated several more times, but notably with
a pirate (V.12) and with Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl, just before he is
killed, his sight occluded forever (VIII.28). We are reminded of the trope when
Kovacs burns a fellow prisoner with hot oil to the face (VI.12), when a prison
bar crosses the left eye of another of Kovacs’s enemies (VIII.15) just prior to
having his throat cut, again when, as a child, Kovacs puts out a cigarette in a
bully’s right eye (VI.7), and yet again when we see Nite Owl’s owl ship halfsubmerged in the river, a broken pier piling crossing its right “eye” (X.4). But
while these examples provide a context, a new syntagmatic structure of their
own in which the other examples move, the overall paradigmatic significance
can be most clearly seen in a sequence of variations involving the Comedian
(a.k.a. Edward Morgan Blake).
In the early 40s, the Comedian was a member of a superhero group called
the Minutemen. The flashback sequence that shows why Blake was expelled
from the group, a scene where he attempts to rape the original Silk Spectre
(Sally Jupiter, nee Juspeczyk), begins with Jupiter changing out of her costume in front of a large convex mirror ostensibly taken from the criminal
Moloch and labeled as such (II.5). Most interesting here is that as the Spectre
stands in front of the mirror, her hazy reflection in it recreates the smiley face
eye-stain in a fashion we will see repeated several times. This human specter
which occludes the eye clearly images our theme and is very quickly built
upon in the following panels. When the Comedian tries to rape her, the Silk
Spectre scratches his face, just below the mask covering his right eye (II.6).
Later in this same chapter, we see the Comedian shirking his obligation to a
Vietnamese woman who is pregnant with his child; when she confronts him, he
denies her and she cuts his face (same eye) with a broken bottle (II.14). Only
a few pages later, during a flashback of street riots back in the States, we see
the later incarnation of his Comedian costume fully for the first time. Here,
Blake stands on the front of the second Nite Owl’s Owl ship, covering the left
“eye” of the ship in much the same way as Silk Spectre crossed the lens of
Moloch’s giant mirror (II.16). His leather mask, designed like some bondage
loving scarecrow’s, includes outlines around both eyes, but the left is crossed
by a vertical oblong, again imaging both the smiley face and his own scars (if
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crossing a different eye) (II.17).
The scars themselves we don’t see fully until later in this same chapter
when Moloch (a now retired villain) recounts a late-night visit Blake paid him
shortly before his death. As the Comedian comes into the light, grabbing hold
of Moloch’s night clothes in a fashion similar to how Hooded Justice grappled
with him years before while stopping his intended rape of Silk Spectre, his
scars become painfully visible (II.23). They have torn the right side of his face
deeply, leaving a huge depression in his jaw, a partially missing lip, and a keloid
marking that stretches from the corner of his right eye clear down to his mouth.
We see them again in Chapter IX when Silk Spectre II (Laurie Juspeczyk, Sally
Jupiter’s daughter) confronts Blake about the attempted rape of her mother.
These scars, perhaps emphasized by his sexist and racist comments during this
particular party, make his whole face appear skull-like when he turns. Just after
Blake, rather circumspectly, reveals to Laurie that he is her father (a recognition
that she will not fully digest and understand until much later), she disgustedly
tosses her drink in his face, dousing the bottle scars that cover her mother’s
nail scars (IX.20-21). Stains on top of stains on top of stains.
The Comedian represents Watchmen’s first death. He also represents the
search for meaning that both Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan (and others) will
later have to face. Though he may be irredeemable in many ways—rapist,
murderer, terrorist, vigilante, king-maker—he is, after all, the first of Watchmen’s costumed heroes to discover the truth about Ozymandias’s plans, the
first to find them repugnant, and the first to die in order to bring them to light.
If it weren’t for his sacrifice, the death of comedy if you will, Ozymandias’s
engineered tragedy would not have come to Rorschach’s attention. Sally Jupiter
herself, Blake’s intended rape victim, says of him after the funeral, “Poor Eddie.” When her daughter questions how her mother could possibly pity such
a man, Sally says, “Laurie, you’re young, you don’t know. Things change.
What happened, happened forty years ago. . .” and later, “Listen, gettin’ old,
you get a different perspective. The big stuff looks smaller somehow.” Finally,
she says, “Laurie, I’m 65. Every day the future looks a little bit darker. But
the past, even the grimy parts of it. . . well, it just keeps on getting brighter
all the time” (II.1-4).
Clearly, Sally has let go of seeing Blake as would-be-rapist only. In fact
later, after the attack, he became her lover and the father of Laurie. Because
of this fact, Laurie herself will have to come to terms with the complexity of
seeing, of ordering her perceptions. How can she hate her father, particularly
when the encounter that led to her existence appears to have been consensual?
How can she still love her mother when she loved and now pities the man who
would have raped her? How can we, the readers of Watchmen, watch such a
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man and not despise him? How do we not simply laugh at his death? If such a
man can be redeemed, if, by the end of the novel, we find his story truly tragic,
then what does our sight mean? Perhaps it, like the Comedian’s symbol itself,
is always already tainted. Watchmen tells us that one way of seeing an event
is rare enough, but more, time can alter the valence of any perceived meaning
for any given event. One day, rapist. Another, lover and father. Yet another,
pitiable memory.
In Watchmen, in Hollis Mason’s autobiographical book within a book,
Under the Hood, he writes about an old friend who loved practical jokes and
erotic novelty items. This friend, Moe Vernon, found out one day that his
wife had been cheating on him. He discovered this news while in the midst of
a practical joke, while wearing, in fact, a set of false breasts. Mason says of
Moe, “He stood there. . . the tears rolling down over his multiple chins to soak
into the pink foam rubber of his bosom, making tiny sounds in his chest and
throat. . . . And everybody started laughing.” Mason, the original Nite Owl,
then goes on to write,
Maybe it’s safe to tell you why I’m crazier than Moe Vernon ever was. I didn’t have
a drawer full of erotic novelties, but I guess I had my own individual quirks. And
although I’ve never worn a set of false bosoms in my life, I’ve stood there dressed
in something just as strange, with tears in my eyes while people died laughing.
(I.29-30)
Whether the eye’s tears or the skin’s tears, real eyes or eye-like simulacrum, the
image of ocula obscura repeats in more ways than can be counted here. From
Laurie’s eyes reflected in her coffee and crossed by reflective ripples (III.10) to
Nite Owl’s steam-stained right eyeglass lens (VII.12) to a TV screen, itself a
type of lens, reflected in those same Owl-eye lenses (VII.15), we see our sight
affronted and attenuated, converted and conditioned both by what and how we
see. Finally, perhaps the most evocative sequence of eye occlusion symbols
occurs in Chapter VII when Laurie, having recently left Dr. Manhattan, stays
over at Nite Owl’s house. In this sequence, she has just discovered Nite Owl’s
basement and is poking around all the secret contraptions that he has kept (ala
Batman) even after being forced into retirement by the Keene Act which banned
all costumed heroes but two.
The first image we see is so close up as to be abstract. Only as we pull
away are we able to recognize the left lens of Night Owl’s distinctive goggles
hanging from the neck of his mothballed suit, the suit itself hanging in a closet
in front of his famous Owl Ship, now nearly derelict. All is covered in dust,
abandoned. Standing between this suit and ship, however, is Laurie, her finger
smudged with the dust of having just rubbed one goggle lens. The lens, stained
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everywhere now except for where her finger has passed over it, reflects the
“eyes” of the Owl Ship. The reverse stain on one “eye,” then, apparently occludes the reflection of another, reversed, “eye.” Left eye watches right eye,
removal of stain becomes stain, and then, to further complicate an already rich
matrix of inter-reflecting symbols, Nite Owl joins Laurie, and both are now
reflected inside the reverse stain on the goggles, apparently existing, full-body,
within the stain showing across the Owl Ship’s right “eye” or window (VII.
overleaf-4). Add to this matrix Laurie’s beauty mark, just below her right eye,
and the eventual entry of the two into the ship itself where they take up residence
behind the ship’s right window, and we have the two humans (who are arguably
more than human) reflected behind an eye that isn’t an eye in an eye that also
isn’t an eye and crossed by a stain that, well, isn’t a stain (VII.6-7). Nite Owl’s
own posture behind the window conforms to this reverse stain; thus he, and by
extension the humanity he protects and hides, becomes the stain.
Ultimately, this whole chapter is about what we hide and what we reveal.
It lets us into the heads of two rather broken individuals, Laurie and Daniel
Dreiberg (a.k.a. Nite Owl), and paints a heartbreaking and touching portrait of
what it means to be both hero and human being. The two are stumbling through
life, making few if any real human connections, even though they once chose
to save humanity. They have so descended into their alternate identities that
they cannot remember who they are without the costume, without the cape. In
fact, in order to finally consummate the love that has been growing between
the two (which may be little more than pity, at least at the outset), they have
to put on their costumes—have to go out, save others, before they can go in,
save themselves; have to be heroes again before they can be human, again.
They put on their costumes so that they can, ultimately, take them off, together
(VII.27). This chapter ends with our only partially costumed crusaders embracing, with Laurie’s elbow accidentally pressing the flamethrower button,
with fire erupting from the eye of the owl ship as it hovers over the city. Tears,
tears, scars, dust, fire, blood, flesh, even owls. . . . We see what is before us,
but, as the mysterious message from the stars says in Twin Peaks: “The owls
may not be what they seem.” Again, this complex and its final revelation of
humanity-as-stain is repeated many times later, but as with the Comedian, as
with Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan, the notion of seeing through a glass darkly,
of being unable to see what is right before us, of revelation found only after
re-veiling, is indeed revealing.
We are the shadows. We are the stains. We are what gets in the way of
seeing. We are what we see. Where Jon comes to find the sublime in the abyss,
Rorschach finds only darkness. Of course the other characters in Watchmen are
important, but it is these two apparently contradictory perspectives that provide
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the phenomenological underpinning of the novel. It is all too easy to forget this
now, what with the explosion at Chernobyl and the subsequent fall of the Berlin
Wall and the Soviet Union, but Watchmen is set in a time and place perceived
then as the End of Days. For some time during the course of the book, both
Manhattan and Kovacs see this possible future coming the same way. And
Ozymandias’s ostensible answer to the End? This, they also see the same way
until Jon makes the human connection that Rorschach cannot. To this end, the
book is full of images of shadows, stains to be interpreted like the patterns on
Rorschach’s mask. Is the abyss empty or full? Is the stain a beautiful butterfly
or a dead dog with its head split open? Is the future full of promise, or have we
used up our lease on this planet? Is there any more American love?
The dog just mentioned we see in chapter VI, the “Abyss” chapter. Rorschach (really Kovacs, now that he has been captured and “outed”) is asked by
Dr. Long to interpret some literal Rorschach blots (VI.1, 17). What he sees is
the skull of the dog he killed the night he “became” Rorschach. What he says
to Long is, “A pretty butterfly.” This same image of a face stained with blood
is reminiscent of the Comedian’s visage when he confronts Moloch or when,
in “Fearful Symmetry,” Rorschach finds the latter with a bullet in his brain
(V.24). It is the same visage we see when Ozymandias grabs the Comedian
just before he kills him (I.3), and also when he feeds his fake assassin the assassin’s own poison capsule (V.16). It is effectively the same stained face we
see in Kovacs’s memory of having fruit smashed in his face as a child, the day
he remembers being called a “whoreson,” being taunted about his mother’s
indiscretions, and getting even by putting out a cigarette in one of his tormentors’ eyes (the right one).
Of course the most obvious stains are ones that make up Rorschach’s mask
(VI.10, etc.) and the “real” inkblots (VI.overleaf, etc.); the idea of interpretive
malleability or infinite indeterminacy are never far from the fold here. But
perhaps the most interesting stains or blots are not about blood or ink. Chapter
six reveals one of the roots of Rorschach’s pathology: seeing his mother and
one of her cheap Johns having sex and casting a combined human shadow on
the wall (VI.3). The first thought of the young Kovacs is that the man is hurting
his mother. When he walks in on them to really see what’s going on, she loses
her “earnings” for that night and takes it out on her confused son. The next
shadow we witness is the one that more clearly and indelibly stains the young,
budding sociopath’s psychology. After saying, “You know what you just cost
me, you ugly little bastard? I shoulda listened to everybody else! I shoulda
had the abortion,” we watch Kovacs’s mother hurting him, but only in shadow,
very nearly the same shadow as what drew him to the room in the first place
(VI.4), save now the hurt is real, both physically and mentally. Again, when
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we see Kovacs/Rorschach extrapolate this latter shadow from the ink blot Dr.
Long shows him, he simply says he sees “Some nice flowers” (5).
We will witness this same image of the human shadow, or shadow human, many times throughout the novel, even in the final chapter, just before
his suicide-by-Dr.-Manhattan, when Kovacs stumbles across Dan and Laurie
comforting each other after they’ve discovered Ozymandias’s awful truth
(XII.22). The very next panel shows Rorschach’s mask, this time the ink blot
mirroring both what he’s just seen and what we know he saw as a child (23).
However, for this Kovacs, this Rorschach, the blot is just that, a blot, for he
can no more make connection with another human being, now, than he could
understand, then, what was likely at the root of his mother’s rage: shame.
Kovacs has no shame, only anger, and without shame, no pity. Without pity,
no redemption. Thus, only one page later, unmasked and angry, knowing now
that he cannot lie about what he knows, but also, somehow, that he cannot let
the world die just to serve his sense of propriety—his face contorted into the
face of the dog he killed, the face of Moloch, the face of the Comedian, of the
boy he was when he first let shame go and converted it to rage—Kovacs begs
for Jon to disintegrate him (24).
Other images of shadow humans, human stains, can be seen in the moment when Jon is himself disintegrated by light, by the experiment to remove
the intrinsic field from concrete block 15 (IV.8), in the skeletal dream Dan
has of himself and Laurie stripped to bone by an atomic blast (VII.16-17), in
the Hiroshima shadows some street artist has painted on the walls of alleys
of this world (V.11, 18), in the second time Jon is disintegrated, this time by
Ozymandias (XII.14), and, finally, in the last scene of the book’s ubiquitous
news vendor and the boy who has been reading Tales of the Black Freighter.
Here, the two otherwise minor characters are the first we see die at ground
zero, the place where Ozymandias’s nefarious, world-saving enterprise, erupts.
Here, both the boy and the vendor hold each other, like Rorschach’s mother
and her lover, like Dan and Laurie, like the shadows (real and imagined) of
Hiroshima, and wink out into blankness—the last image, one of light overwhelming darkness, of the darkness becoming a solid, singular stain, the exact
same shape of the blood stain crossing the eye of the Comedian’s incongruous
costume flair (XI.28).
This shape and the stain it implies is not just a repetition of the Chapter I
overleaf. It also repeats the first page of chapter XI itself, the empty space left
by condensation on the surface of Ozymandias’s Xanadu, his pleasure dome
(echoing Jon’s) full of tropical wonders and genetic creations, his Antarctic
retreat where the final confrontation takes place (XI.overleaf, 1). Again, like
the Owl goggles earlier, this stain is actually absence, and behind it we see
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flowers, green vine, a butterfly. As counterpoint to the final, same shape at the
end of this chapter, we must ask ourselves, is the stain empty or full? Is it even
a stain at all? Is it the end or beginning? And, given that both versions are effectively made of life, is it other, or is it us? Considering the fact that the final
chapter begins with the clock at Madison Square Garden (XII.overleaf-3), at
the scene of the murder of half of New York’s City’s citizenry, stopped at the
stroke of midnight, November second, All Souls Day, near signs reading Pale
Horse, Krystalnacht, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Utopia, Promethean Cab
Co.: Bringing Light to the World. . . . Considering the fact that the clock is
covered in the kind of blood that would, of course, begin with a similar stain
to what we’ve seen before, the idea that such a sign could ever mean life is
perhaps a strain. But remember that Adrien Veidt’s plan is to bring life out of
death, and remember too that all we have seen up to this point suggests that the
choice of interpretation is up to the one who reads the blots. The doctor may
have a preconceived notion of what we will say, of what that which we do say
means, but this does not make the blot any less our own making.
■
■
■
In May of 2002, Luke Helder was arrested for “placing pipe bombs in
mailboxes to create a ‘smiley face’ across America” (Barton 1A). An article
by a writer from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel claims, “The first 16 bombs
were arranged in two circles, one in Illinois and Iowa and the other in Nebraska. On a map, the circles could resemble the eyes of the popular 1970s
happiness symbol. The final two bombs, found in Colorado and Texas, form
an arc that could be the beginning of a smile” (1A). Upon his arrest, Helder
was described as anything but distraught: “His demeanor was very jovial. He
didn’t seem to be taking anything seriously at the time. . . . It was almost as if
we were old friends and we’d thrown a surprise party for him” (1A, 5A). The
great wonder of being mired in postmodern thought is that everything is about
perception and interpretation. The great terror of being part of the postmodern
era is that everything is about perception and interpretation. One man’s smiley
face is another’s lost arm, lost living, lost hope. Thus we arrive at the central
question of the Watchmen. Yes, the novel asks what is a hero, and even what
is a comic book, but it also asks, what do we know and how do we know it? It
is, as are most postmodern texts, a book about its own textuality. How can we
know what we think we know, when what we know is predicated on symbols
that cannot be “known”? And if we can know nothing, if nothing is true, isn’t
everything? Is Ozymandias sane, more sane than those who have attempted
to stop him? He is, after all, attempting to sacrifice millions for billions. Is
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Rorschach the least fragrant sociopath in the bunch? Is the Comedian really a
laugh riot, or should we weep over his demise?
Watchmen asks Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (Who watches the watchmen?). But it could just as easily ask what is watching, can we really watch
anything, is there anything to watch? Or, when we watch, are we really only
watching ourselves? As we have seen, the stained smiley face symbol shows
up, in pieces, many times in the book, but perhaps the most notable incarnations
appear whole, in toto, the entire set of syntagms together in one re-imagining
of the full syntagmatic structure. The first of these significant reimaginings
of the whole face appears on the first page of “Fearful Symmetry.” Each of
the eight syntagms—a circle, two eyes (one occluded), a smiling mouth, two
colors (yellow and black), and a stain particular in both its shape and color—is
present here, but disassociated from the others (V.overleaf). Ultimately, this
particular image is the upside down reflection of a sign for a liquor store called
The Rumrunner, situated just next to the villain Moloch’s skid row apartment.
The logo for the store, a double RR with the first R reversed, is situated just
above crossed bones, re-creating an image of the Jolly Roger so prominently
figured in the Black Freighter tales, as well as Rorschach’s stylized, signed
initials. Rain drops strike the pool of brackish rain water, scarlet neon from the
red-light district turn the water to blood, ripples create circles that both enclose
and occlude the “eyes” of the double R (our abstract skull), but we do not really
see a smiley face. What we see are portents and signs of the sign, portents that
connect the smile we do not see to a death that is only implied.
Much less abstract, if paradoxically more obscure, the smiley face appears
in full as the sun seen through a misted window in the chapter “A Brother to
Dragons,” the stain made once again by absence rather than presence, and
the smile made by a scud of clouds (VII.18), and again toward the end of this
same chapter as the Owl Ship in relief against the full moon, another scud
of clouds forming the smile, but this time the stain created by smoke from a
nearby chimney (VII.28). This chapter, saying what it does about two of our
main characters, is aptly bookended by these images. We make our faces, we
take them off, we put them back on. We, like Job, are brothers to dragons
and companions to owls (Job 30.29), we, also like Job, must decide how to
interpret our seeming fate, and we must recognize, as the companion essay to
this chapter intimates, owls sit at the right hand of Pallas Athena, goddess of
the mind. We must remember where she sprang from. . . the brow of Jupiter
(Sally or otherwise) whose planetary namesake sports the solar system’s largest “eye.” Like the narrator of “The Raven,” we must decide whether the bird
should overshadow our reason, take up dominion over Pallas (the palace) and
be seen as a harbinger of death (psychopomp), or whether we should, as Yeats
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implies about Leda, “put on its knowledge with its power” (212) even as it is
ravishing us.
The final four incarnations of the complete smiley face are even more interesting. We should thus analyze them one at a time. By the end of Chapter IX,
the crystal palace Jon has made of Martian sand comes crashing down around
him and Laurie. In the midst of this shattering existential exchange, the point
of view begins to pull back and back from the devastated construction, and we
see the two one-time lovers emerge into the Martian landscape, which, here,
as it turns out is in the middle of a crater. The crater is dotted with boulders,
two of them very large, and a curving ridge. As we continue to pull out from
the scene, continuing until we can see Mars’ terminator, it becomes clear that
the natural Martian landscape, this crater and its primary landmarks, form the
simulacra of a smiley face. More, the broken palace (pink due to its building
blocks) has fallen partially across one of the two boulders, forming a reddish
stain across the left “eye” of the crater, itself tinged yellow-orange due to the
sun hitting the Martian sand in just the right way (IX.27).
As it turns out, this crater actually exists on Mars, and it does indeed look
strangely like a smiley face, though the two “eyes” are not boulders but what
appear to be a mound and a smaller impact crater within the first. According to
Malin Space Science Systems, “There are a number of Viking Orbiter images
of Mars that, from time to time, have been invoked as examples of landforms
that look like familiar objects. One of the better examples is the crater Galle
located on the eastern margin of the large basin Argyre. The “face: was first
noticed in synoptic observations taken early in the Viking Orbiter 1 mission”
(“Happy”). Moore and Gibbons use this spontaneous Martian landform to,
again, suggest something about the nature of seeing. During this long “reveal,”
Jon and Laurie are discussing “Thermodynamic miracles, events with odds
against so astronomical they’re effectively impossible.” They are discussing
whether or not life is worth living, whether they should stay together or whether
she should go with Nite Owl, the man she may have fallen in love with, and,
finally, they are discussing Laurie’s memory of her biological father (the
Comedian) and how she should “see” him. The fact that this graphic simulacra
of a geological simulacra images a smiley face with an occluded eye only
serves to reinforce the notion that we cannot be sure what we see is “true.”
Further, the fact that we only see this real-life crater as smiley face because
we are hungry for order, awash in the desire to find ourselves (or evidence of
others like ourselves) among the stars, the fact that we look for order in the
middle of chaos because we do not want to be alone, is itself a part of the same
thematic matrix. We anthropomorphize more than just craters in this life. We
look for faces in stucco ceilings, we find Jesus in refrigerator mold, Mary in
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pieces of toast, Gods in random patterns of suns. We look for answers to who
killed the Comedian. We look for options other than nuclear annihilation. We
look for love among the ruins.
The fear of mutually assured destruction (M.A.D.) permeates Watchmen
just as it permeated the 80s culture from which it arises. In the novel, America
and Russia are on the brink of war, Nixon is as paranoid as ever (perhaps more
so, given that he’s had extra terms to continue as president), and signs of the
end are everywhere. Chapter X, “Two Riders Were Approaching,” begins with
a close-up of a radar screen (X.overleaf). At first glance, two tracking lights
moving across the face of this screen appear to be incoming missiles penetrating American airspace. However, the tracers are merely indicators of Air Force
One and Air Force Two arriving at SAC Norad since tensions between the two
superpowers have escalated. Eventually, Nixon disembarks and sequesters
himself in the underground facility to sit and wait out any potential hostilities. Nevertheless, to return to the radar screen, when we first encounter it, we
assume the worst. The bombs are flying, the Horsemen are coming, the world
is going to end. Yet the image presents us with a circle (the screen itself), two
eyes (the two tracking planes), and a smile (reflection of light on the glass
curving just below the tracers).
Here, the smiley face subverts our expectations. While our pre-critical
response should be one of terror and perhaps despair, the accompanying simulacra, the smiley face that appears with a second glance at the radar screen,
acts on us in exactly the opposite fashion from the first appearance of this
artifact of 70s kitsch. In its first incarnation, the smiley face sports blood and
is attached, literally, to death. Here, apparent oncoming death is reimagined as
“happy thoughts.” Such reconfiguration, such reinterpretation of the standing
symbols/facts, is precisely what Ozymandias is after. He intends to destroy life
to save it, to take away freedom in order to provide it, to become as God in
order to able to live as a man. It is left up to Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach to
interpret his actions. Dreiberg and Laurie, too, will have to decide what to do
with this information once Ozymandias’s plot is uncovered, but by this point in
the story they are too much in love to do anything but worry about interpreting
each other. No, it is Jon and Kovacs who will have to decide if the smile is a
smile, or if the world should be turned upside down.
Of the two, Rorschach has the harder choice to make. By the end of the
novel, once all is revealed—Ozymandias’s plot, his attempt to save the world
by killing three million innocents—Rorschach cannot not reveal the criminal
mastermind behind the largest mass murder in history. Regardless of what that
slaughter may mean for the history of history, how it may indeed bring America
and Russia together to face a common (if fictional) enemy, Rorschach cannot
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allow such vast mendacity (and in his mind, hypocrisy) to stand. In the final
pages of Watchmen, just as Rorschach appears to be leaving Ozymandias’s
Antarctic retreat, Dr. Manhattan confronts his comrade in arms and asks:
Manhattan:
Where are you going?
Rorschach:
Back to owlship. Back to America. Evil must be punished.
People must be told.
Manhattan:
Rorschach. . . you know I can’t let you do that.
Rorschach:
Huhhh. Of course. Must protect Veidt’s new Utopia. One more
body amongst foundations makes little difference. Well? What
are you waiting for? Do it. . . . DO IT! (XII.23-24)
And here, Jon blasts Kovacs’s atoms into nothingness. All that is left is a
smoking stain on the snow outside Veidt’s pleasure dome. The stain that was
Rorschach is the exact same stain we’ve seen before, but, more than this, the
smoke rising from the place where our objectivist has stood crosses the circular
opening into the dome. Behind the smoke on the left, an icicle descends from
the arch; behind the smoke on the right, the steering column of one of Nite
Owl’s hoverbikes rises. In the shadow of the light streaming from the dome,
these two verticals become black eyes hovering in the face of a circle of yellow light. The interior of the cylindrical opening shines, a wavering pattern of
reflection becoming the smile. The red-tinged smoke coming from one stain
becomes yet another stain as it crosses the eye of ice (XII.24).
This particularly convoluted re-imaging of the smiley face follows Rorschach’s fatal choice to maintain the integrity of his vision. Rorschach cannot
see grey, therefore we see red. It precedes Jon’s choice to leave this universe
and make a new one. Jon can see nothing but possibility, therefore he decides
to create even more. What are our choices? How do we see? Edmund Husserl,
founder of phenomenology, says this of human beings:
. . . I understand and accept each of them as an Ego-subject just as I myself am one,
and as related to his natural surrounding world. But I do this in such a way that I take
their surrounding world and mine Objectively as one and the same world of which
we all are conscious, only in different modes. Each has his place from which he
sees the physical things present; and, accordingly, each has different physical-thing
appearances. Also, for each the fields of actual perception, actual memory, etc., are
different. . . . (55-56)
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Basically, according to James M. Edie, Husserl posited that “a perceptual object
is nothing other than the system of all of its possible presentations. . . ” (115).
Edie goes on to say,
a perceptual object is both given and not given in the same perceptual presentation. It
is given as having many aspects that are not now presented but which could be. And
if other persons are present a given perceptual object is even presented as being de
facto perceived from other viewpoints which I could occupy in principle but do not
now and may never occupy.
This law of the infinity of the perceptual object pertains not only to the x limitpoint, transcendent to the perceiver, but is true of the perceiver himself. (116)
Relating this philosophical stance to Watchmen, both Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan “see” the same perceptual object, Ozymandias’s act. Both recognize the two
ways of interpreting it, understanding its presentation; it is both horrifying and
hopeful. But while Manhattan understands this polarity of possible meanings
as the-way-things-are, as ultimately perfection itself, Rorschach wants to flee
from said indeterminacy.
In this scene outside the Pleasure Dome, a scene with two (if only barely)
human watchers, the watchers themselves also become the subject of watching, of interpretation. Manhattan, the ostensible phenomenologist, reverts to
objectivism when he destroys Rorschach, yet his very action supports multiplicity by enforcing the singularity of it. Rorschach becomes purely subjective
(a stain to be interpreted) when he is destroyed, his lack of multiple meanings
(his death) now feeding more interpretive possibility than his life would have.
Up to this point, both have always already been stains, Rorschach with his
Rorschach mask, Manhattan with his lack of clearly defined human features:
one black (now red) dot, one pale blue one. These two stains interpret each
other both into and out of existence, even as they interpret another who does
not stand here with them.
In Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes, “Seeing comes before words. The
child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense
in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in
the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never
undo the fact that we are surrounded by it” (7). Jon and Kovacs are surrounded
by a world that always already exists, they stand beside a mock world that both
does and doesn’t, and they are fighting over a new world order that itself only
questionably exists (now that Ozymandias’s plan has brought peace). They, like
we, struggle to define what they should say about these various worlds, based
on an interpretation informed by the worlds in which they may only believe
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they have lived and (perhaps) still do. Sean Carney writes, “For Rorschach, a
world where meaning is only imposed by humans is a world without inherent
meaning, while Moore’s argument is that it is a fallacy to separate meaning
from the world in the first place: the world is made by the discovery of meaning
in it” (14). Should Jon and Kovacs frown or smile? What does the blot on this
world mean? What is the Word? Is it the beginning or the end? Behind them,
the smile smiles on, even though it, too, does not exist.
But this is not the last, full syntagmatic structure we see. The smiley face
appears one final time after Rorschach’s decision leaves the other masked super
powers, as well as the world’s super powers, to fend for themselves. Kovacs
may have abandoned this world (like Jon, if by different means), however, he
has left one thing behind: his journal. Just before he and Dreiberg had left for
Antarctica, he dropped his journal in the mail, only to be received by the tabloid
paper The New Frontiersman and subsequently shunted to their Crank File,
unread. In the final panels of Watchmen, the assistant to The New Frontiersman’s editor is left with his own choice. The editor wants filler for the next
issue since “nobody’s allowed to say bad things about our good ol’ buddies the
Russians anymore” (XII.32). Seymour, the none-too-bright assistant, is eating
a hamburger as he makes his decision. Standing over the Crank File, needing to
find some story to run, he is also wearing a smiley face t-shirt. Shortly before
he reaches out to pick something from the file (perhaps Rorschach’s journal),
ketchup spills from the burger and occludes his t-shirt’s right eye (XII.32).
We never find out what Seymour’s choice is; we are not told if Seymour does
indeed “see more,” but are left with one final thought, a quote from John Cale:
“It would be a stronger world, a stronger loving world, to die in” (XII.32).
■
■
■
Alan Moore has said
. . . with Watchmen, what we tried to do was give it a truly kind of crystalline
structure, where it’s like this kind of jewel with hundreds and hundreds of facets and
almost each of the facets is commenting on all of the other facets and you can kind of
look at the jewel through any of the facets and still get a coherent reading. . . there are
single panels there, single images, that somehow kind of tie up the whole book.
. . . it’s tailor-made for a university class, because there are so many levels and
little background details and clever little connections and references in it that it’s one
that academics can pick over for years. (“Blather” 3-4)
This near-infinite recursiveness of text, of metatext, is indeed what places
Watchmen at the top of the graphic novel tradition; appropriately, TIME recently
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ranked it as one of the top 100 English-language novels—and the only graphic
novel on the list—published since 1923 (Grossman). No other “comic book”
has even come close to the depth and complexity of Moore and Gibbons’s
masterpiece. Yes, the style of Watchmen, its clearly postmodern aesthetic,
makes rereading rewarding. As one recognizes early on, reading it for the first
or the seventh time, upon encountering some of the internet “readers’ guides,”
it begs for symbolic or semiotic cataloguing. But the style also serves its own
theme. Moore explains:
I suddenly thought, “Hey, I can do something here where I’ve got this radiation sign
being screwed on the wall on the other side of the street, which will underline the
kind of nuclear threat; and I can have this newspaper guy just ranting, the way that
people on the street corners with a lot of spare time sometimes do; and I can have
the narrative from this pirate comic that the kid’s reading; and I can have them all
bouncing off each other; and I can get this really weird thing going where things that
are mentioned in the pirate story seem to relate to images in the panel, or to what the
newsman is saying. . . .” And that’s when Watchmen took off; that’s when I realized
that there was something more important going on than just a darker take on the
super-hero. . . . (“Toasting” 4–5)
A comic the “academics can pick over for years,” a comic with “something
more important going on”. . . too like the theme of Watchmen itself, these claims
suggest that what we have been doing here is precisely what Rorschach and Dr.
Manhattan are doing in the novel. The details, we all hope, will lead to some
organizing principle, bring order out of chaos. What we may find however, along
with our comic cohorts, is that looking closely only makes what we thought to
be order more clearly chaotic.
Fredric Wertham, that infamous comic book naysayer of the 50s, thought
something very similar. According to Amy Kiste Nyberg, Wertham believed,
“‘Comic books have nothing to do with drama, with art or literature’” (94).
He thought the very act of reading comics stunted children’s development
and “prevented children from developing an appreciation for good literature.
If fed a diet of stories in which the solution to all problems is ‘simple, direct,
mechanical and violent,’ children will be unable to advance to more complex
works. . .” (Nyberg 94). Wertham, like Rorschach, looked for patterns in a
world he saw as decaying and morally bankrupt. He looked for reasons why
children were becoming, as he saw it, less and less empathetic toward others’
suffering. He looked for patterns in children’s behaviors and found one common
denominator: they were reading comics more and more, just as their sense of
propriety, their respect for authority, and their ethical foundations seemed to
be crumbling. “American love, like coke in green glass bottles. . . . They don’t
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make it anymore” (Watchmen II.25). In Seduction of the Innocent, Wertham
quotes a young boy who says,
I read one comic book where they tie people to the trees, tie them in front of stampeding herds. They tie them to the trees, then cut the trees and the sap runs over that
person and the bugs are drawn to that sap, then they eat the people. Sometimes they
torture girls the same way, by stabbing and beating them. They throw them in rivers
and make them swim where alligators come. Sometimes they hit them with weapons
on the back. They don’t have much on when they hit them with weapons. It excites
me a little bit. (55-56)
Wertham responds: “Is it not natural that the Rorschach of the boy shows hostility and aggression?” (56). While he claims to be “one of the first psychiatrists
to use [the Rorschach Test] in this country” (56), Wertham also “developed the
mosaic test, where patients assembled colored pieces of wood into a freely chosen design that could then be evaluated by psychiatrists. It became an important
diagnostic tool in his later work in forensic psychiatry” (Nyberg 87). Of course
Wertham’s “contribution” to comic scholarship is highly debatable, but so too is
the contribution of our main characters in Watchmen. At best, they do nothing.
At worst, like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, they may invite the very tide of
chaos they hope to stem.
In his search for order, one of the patterns in violent comics Fredric
Wertham found most disturbing was a tendency toward torture, particularly
eye trauma. Again, in Seduction of the Innocent, he writes, “The injury-tothe-eye motif is an outstanding example of the brutal attitude cultivated in
comic books—the threat or actual infliction of injury to the eyes of a victim,
male or female. . . . It has no counterpart in any other literature of the world,
for children or for adults” (111). Perhaps Wertham never read any fairy tales
or myths (“Cinderella” and Oedipus Rex come to mind), but his focus on this
type of injury says far more about his overall agenda, the symbolic resonances
he wants to invite, than it does about the depth of his “research.” Wertham
believed that comics were indeed injuring children’s eyes, their internal vision.
If they looked too long at the brighter, three-color lights of comics, they would
no longer appreciate the subtler shades of the true stars (real values, “real”
literature). His interest in eye trauma, then, has perhaps less to do with what
really happens or doesn’t happen in literature, and more to do with what he
believes is happening to a new generation of readers, eyes growing occluded
by the “stains” of Batman, Wonder Woman, and Tales from the Crypt, by any
comic that would, today, remind us of Tales of the Black Freighter.
Like his favorite inkblot test’s namesake, Wertham himself looked for
patterns, for signs, perhaps pointlessly. Later, he would write A Circle of Guilt
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(1956) and A Sign for Cain (1966) (Nyberg 100). All of his works, on the page
and in Senate hearings would be an attempt to impose order. We, too, can
look for order here (real or imagined): Rorschach, eye trauma, circle, sign,
stain. . . . But signs are signs. They evolve beyond their boundaries and their
genre. Sometimes they evolve beyond their creators. About the creation of the
Comedian, Dave Gibbons says,
. . . I thought, “He doesn’t look like a comedian at all,” and so, on a whim, I drew
a smiley face badge, just to lighten the overall design. It didn’t have any particular
significance to me, but Alan saw it and was inspired. . . . We decided to show the
smiley badge in a gutter full of blood, and then a splash of blood on the badge itself.
And when we thought about it some more, that smiley face became a symbol for the
whole series. It’s the simplest cartoon image; a configuration of lines even a baby
would respond to and smile. (Gibbons 80)
Such synchronicity would make Dr. Manhattan smile. It would make Rorschach
and Wertham wince. But this is precisely the point of Watchmen, of the Rorschach
test itself. We may see many things, we may not see at all, but we have to look.
We look because we’re human. In “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Wallace
Stevens ponders our human penchant for looking, our “Blessed rage for order. . . .
The maker’s rage to order,” our desire to make meaning out of meaninglessness.
Imagining a woman singing by the sea, he says, “The sea was not a mask. No
more was she. . . . For she was the maker of the song she sang. The ever-hooded,
tragic gestured sea. . . . And when she sang, the sea, / Whatever self it had, became the self / That was her song, for she was the maker” (128–30). Here and
in other poems, Stevens agrees with Husserl, with Watchmen, suggesting that
we make what we see, that there would be nothing to see if not for the human
looking. As a man living two lives (Vice President of an insurance company by
day, poet by night), Stevens understood masks, what lies beneath the hood, how
all of us, perhaps from the very beginning, have been making faces—God’s,
Ozymandias’, some alien evil’s, our own—out of nothing at all.
In 1961, Robert Fantz provided documentation that visual discrimination
begins in infancy, that infants actually seek out complex visual patterns, and,
when given a choice, seem to prefer what can be perceived as a “face” to more
abstract symbols. John Dacey and John Travers put it this way: “Infants. . .
show definite preferences based on as much complexity as they can handle. . .”
and, they note, “human faces are remarkably complex” (126). In a similar discussion regarding the evolutionary benefit of being able to recognize faces as
infants, Carl Sagan connects this ability to the phenomena of seeing a “Man in
the Moon” or a “Face” on Mars. Sagan writes, “As an inadvertent side effect,
the pattern-recognition machinery in our brains is so efficient in extracting a
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face from a clutter of other detail that we sometimes see faces where there are
none” (45). He also says, “The Man in the Moon is in fact a record of ancient
catastrophes—most of which took place before humans, before mammals,
before vertebrates, before multicelled organisms, and probably even before
life arose on Earth. It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put a human
face on random cosmic violence” (45). One reads these passages and thinks of
Ozymandias, of the “happy face” he puts on the violence he has orchestrated;
in fact, he says of his actions on behalf of the world, “I would trick it; frighten
it towards salvation with history’s greatest practical joke” (XI.24).
What are we looking for when we look for order? When we see patterns
in the woodwork, in ceiling shadows, in the craters of Mars, or even in comic
books, are we truly seeing what we think? Do we have a choice, or are we acting on something that is hardwired? Is what we see always already ourselves?
Like humanity, like the Rorschach/Dr. Manhattan binary, like the philosopher
Pascal, Moore himself seems to be trapped between two infinitely improbable
possibilities: “A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison
with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely
removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally
incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in
which he is swallowed up” (Pascal 72). In a single interview, Moore offers two
possible readings of reality. Of his graphic novel, Big Numbers, he says,
The reader turning the first page in issue two will come across a big full-page picture
of a coffee cup just after the milk has been put in. What is the semiotic information
that they’re supposed to get from that, just looking at that cold? It’s a massive picture
of a tea cup. it will mean nothing to them on one level; it doesn’t progress the story.
They’ll have to look for another layer of meaning. . . . The shapes that can be produced
on computers using fractal equations turn out to be the shapes that were previously
found in nature and assumed to be completely random. The shapes of clouds, the shapes
of coastlines, the distribution of stars, the distribution of blood vessels in the human
body, the shape of smoke, the way that a glass breaks, the way that fluids move—all
of these things that we previously believed to be random suddenly turn out to be following precise fractal geometrical patterns. . . . (“Toasting” 100–02)
However, Moore goes on to argue,
Yes, it would seem to be that there is an order that is inescapable. . . [but] that order
does not care about us. It is purely mathematical, and much too complex for us to
be able to predict. . . . It is beyond our control; chaos is part of the normal, natural
order of things. We can’t regulate chaos, we can’t impose our will upon the world in
the way that we’ve been previously trying to, which I believe that God recommends
141
Bryan D. Dietrich
we do in some of the early verses of the Old Testament. It’s simply not true that the
world is there for man to impose his will upon. (102)
Two eyes, two ways of seeing. . . . Clarity and obscurity, precipice and
abyss, the lie of love tiding us over between. . . . Throughout Watchmen, the
characters are looking for answers: who killed the Comedian? why? to what
end? They are looking for who they are—hero or antihero, self or secret identity,
first generation or later incarnation—who and how to see. They are looking
for order, looking for the very Law that they represent, but because they must
break that law in order to enforce it, the law itself, like them, is not what it
appears to be. In the book, each character comes to realize, in his or her own
way, that order doesn’t finally exist, except perhaps insofar as they are able to
define it. Ultimately, meaning is indeterminate. Nevertheless, it is the looking
that keeps them going, keeps them alive. “Distant and dead resuscitate, / They
show as the dial or move as the hands of me,” says Whitman, and, “I am the
clock myself.” Regardless of whether or not the pattern they seek exists—
irrespective of the fact that design or law or even love may be as much a myth
as Ozymandias’s fabricated alien, as his or Jon’s false Xanadus, as any lie we
fabricate from faith, from its lack—the characters that populate the world of
Watchmen find themselves in seeking. Thus, the text (even its own patterns
of symbol) suggests that looking for perfection, for order, for signs, is itself
imperfection, but, further, that this imperfection is glorious; it makes us human. Looking for meaning (comedy) in evolution (tragedy) is our design, it’s
in our blood, we are the stain. Watchmen, in its characters and in its symbols,
tells us that we must see what we see through the obscurity and glory of our
own seeing, must watch the large made up of the minute, the minutes become
men. We watch the watchmen. We are the watchmen.
Works Cited
Barton, Gina. “Bombs Were Meant to Form a ‘Smiley Face.’” Printed in The Wichita
Eagle 10 May 2002, 5A+.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin, 1982.
Carney, Sean. “The Tides of History: Alan Moore’s Historiographic Vision.” ImageText:
Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 2.2 (2006):1–41.
Dacey, John and John Travers. Human Development: Across the Lifespan. 2nd ed.
Madison: Brown and Benchmark, 1994.
Dissanayake, Ellen. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. Seattle: U
of Washington P, 1995.
142
The Human Stain
Edie, James M. Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Critical Commentary. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.
Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays. New York: Harcourt, 1980.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” Essays & Lectures. New York: The Library of
America, 1983. 5–49.
Fishbaugh, Brent. “Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen: Exact Personifications of Science.”
Extrapolation 39.3 (1988): 189–99.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New
York: Vintage, 1973.
Frost, Robert. Complete Poems of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1964.
Gibbons, Dave. “Interview.” Artists on Comic Art. Ed. Mark Salisbury. London: Titan
Books, 2000. 74–97.
Grossman, Lev and Richard Lacayo. “All-Time 100 Novels.” TIME (2005) .
“‘Happy Face’ Crater on Mars.” Malin Space Science Systems
Harris-Fain, Darren. Watchmen. Review. Reviews of Books. 410–12.
Hughes, Jamie A. “‘Who Watches the Watchmen?’: Ideology and ‘Real World’ Superheroes.” The Journal of Popular Culture 39.4 (2006): 546–557.
Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. F. Kersten. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1982.
Job. In The Bible. King James Version (1611). New York: American Bible Society,
1953. 371–90.
Moore, Alan. “Mainstream Comics Have, At Best, Tenuous Virtues: Interview With
Alan Moore.” The Comics Journal 152 (1992): 89–100.
———. “Blather: The Alan Moore Interview.” Blather (2000) .
———. “Toasting Absent Heroes: Interview With Alan Moore.” Comics Book Artist 9
(2000) .
Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 1986>.
Nyberg, Amy Kiste. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. Jackson: UP
of Mississippi, 1998.
Pascal, Blaise. Pensees. Quoted in “Nothingness,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Fall 2006 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta .
Prescott, Peter S. and Ray Sawhill. “The Comic Book (Gulp!) Grows Up.” Newsweek
18 Jan. 1988: 70–71.
Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark. New York:
Random House, 1995.
Smoler, Fredric Paul. Watchmen. Review. The Nation 10 Oct. 1987: 386–88.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1971.
143
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Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat P,
1953.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: Norton, 1973.
Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: MacMillan,
1974.
144
Contributors
Joshua David Bellin teaches American, Native American, and Environmental
Literature at La Roche College in Pittsburgh. He is the author of three books,
including Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation (2005)
and Medicine Bundle: Indian Sacred Performance and American Literature,
1824–1932 (2008). He currently co-directs La Roche’s interdisciplinary program in Sustainability Studies and serves as Vice President of the Citizens
Climate Corps, a regional grassroots organization dedicated to citizen education, empowerment, and activism to combat climate change.
Bryan D. Dietrich’s scholarly work has appeared in Extrapolation, Foundation,
Science Fiction Studies, American Literature, Studies in Short Fiction, the
American Journal of Semiotics, and the Journal of Popular Film & Television.
His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie
Schooner, The Harvard Review, The Yale Review, and many other journals.
Professor of English at Newman University, he has completed a book on Wonder Woman and is now working on one exploring the works of Alan Moore.
He has published two volumes of poetry, with two more due out next year
Carter Hanson is Associate Professor of English at Valparaiso University. His
research and teaching interests are Adolescent and Children’s Literature, the
English Novel, and Canadian Studies. He is the author of the book Emigration, Nation, Vocation: The Literature of English Emigration to Canada,
1825–1900, forthcoming in 2009.
Jennifer Malia is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Southern
California, where she has taught in the Writing Program, Thematic Option
Honors Program, and American Language Institute. Her research interests
include nineteenth-century British literature, science fiction, and Gothic
3
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Name 1
Student Name
ENGL 4200
Dr. Collins
25 September 2011
Annotated Bibliography: Maus
Chodoff, Paul. "The Holocaust and Its Effects on Survivors: An Overview." Political
Psychology, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1997, pp. 147-157. EBSCOhost, libraryproxy.sdmesa.edu/
login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.379198
9&site=eds-live.
Summary
In the article “The Holocaust and Its Effects on Survivors: An Overview,” Paul Chodoff
asks crucial questions regarding the psychological effects of the Holocaust on both
survivors who directly experienced the event and individuals indirectly exposed to the
horrors of the concentration camps. Chodoff begins by giving an account of a patient,
whose story he introduces as that of “a former inmate (Mrs. S) who was a patient of
mine” (148). After establishing an account of the Holocaust from this first-hand witness,
the psychologist Chodoff attempts to “describe some of the immediate effects” of such
experiences and “how prisoners responded to concentration camp stresses” (148). Next,
the author approaches the crucial question “Did it make any difference for survival how a
prisoner behaved in the camps?” (152). After explaining that survival was less about
“how prisoners behaved” and more about “luck, accident, and chance,” (152) Chodoff
investigates the difficulty which many survivors of the Holocaust experience in dealing
with what he labels as “survival guilt” (154), a form of psychological anxiety experienced
by former prisoners when faced with the task of adapting meaning to their survival
amongst the death of millions. Chodoff then compares and contrasts the symptoms of
another psychological issue which he terms “Concentration Camp Syndrome” (153) with
the symptoms associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In the concluding pages of
his article, Chodoff shifts focus from the survivors of the Holocaust to those who
experienced the Holocaust in another manner. Here, he includes a brief discussion
concerning the psychological effects on second generation survivors before moving on to
the effects that the Holocaust has had on post World-War II German society.
Evaluation
Paul Chodoff is a practicing psychiatrist in Washington, D.C., and is associated with the
Department of Psychiatry at George Washington University. His article “The Holocaust
and Its Effects on Survivors: An Overview” offers a unique look at the effects of the
Holocaust on survivors through the perspective of a psychiatrist. In writing his academic
article, Chodoff relies on his personal practice of psychology as well as with the
academic research of his peers. As in any patient interview, some aspects of the story
might not be true to the minute detail. Never-the-less, such interviews are a vital part of
understanding both the event in question and the psychological effects of it on the
individual being interviewed.
Application
Name 2
This article would prove beneficial to research involving the psychology of various
characters in Art Spiegelman’s Maus. In particular, the issues of “survival anxiety,”
“Concentration Camp Disorder,” and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder may be applied to
Vladek in order to explain his character and better understand the trouble he experiences
in applying meaning not only to his memories, but to the fact that he lived through an
event that millions of others did not.
Cohen, Steven M., and Leonard J. Fein. "From Integration to Survival: American Jewish
Anxieties in Transition.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, Vol. 480, 1985, pp. 75-88.EBSCOhost, libraryproxy.sdmesa.edu/login?url
=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.1045336&site=e
ds-live.
Summary
In this article, authors Steven Cohen and Leonard Fein introduce the idea that the Jewish
population in America has gone from a point of cultural integration and assimilation to
fighting for survival of religious tradition. In the beginning of the article the authors
discuss the transition into American society which Jews fought for upon immigration.
They claim that “Much of the American Jewish history-until the late 1960s- can be read
as the story of the Jewish struggle with the terms of the American offer.” According to
Cohen and Fein, “Most Jews…sought a workable balance between Jewish loyalty and
modernity, between authenticity and integration” (77). The authors go on to explain that
first generation immigrant Jews often struggled with the difficult task of assimilating into
American culture while retaining their traditions and identities. Next the article turns to
the second and third generation immigrant Jews. Rather than the task of integration that
plagued the first generation, the second and third generations are faced with the problem
of ensuring the survival of Judaism in America. Because of the removal of these later
generations from the integration period in Jewish-American history and their separation
from the atrocities of the Holocaust, Cohen and Fein argue that attempts to rediscover
and give meaning to the Jewish experience in the Holocaust are possible. The authors
claim, however, that studies and works on such aspects of Jewish history must be met
with the question “Is it good for the Jews?” By asking this question, the later generations
may ensure that their work benefits “the matter of Jewish group interests” (83). From
here the article enters the closing pages, plunging into contemporary political issues
facing the Jewish-American population, such as the debate over Zionism and America’s
support of Israel, before concluding with a final look into the cultural survival of the
modern Jewish-American community.
Evaluation
"From Integration to Survival: American Jewish Anxieties in Transition” was published
in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in association with
The American Academy of Political and Social Science. The article was written by
Steven M. Cohen and Leonard J. Fein. Cohen, Professor of Sociology at Queens College,
CUNY, also claims authorship of numerous works on American Jewish culture and
values. Fein is editor in chief of the independent Jewish magazine titled Moment, and
was formerly Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Brandeis University. Like
Fein, Cohen has produced numerous works in the field of Jewish studies. The
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collaboration between these two individuals expresses itself in the form of a wellresearched academic article that approaches the Jewish-American experience in the
twentieth century.
Application
The value that this article holds for a research paper regarding Art Spiegelman’s Maus
rests in the approach the authors take to explaining the Jewish condition in twentieth
century America. Cohen and Fein’s work focuses on the struggle of Jewish immigrants to
integrate into American society, a struggle that Vladek himself would have went through
in his life as a Jewish immigrant. Furthermore, the article looks at the second and third
generations of Jewish-Americans and the ways in which they develop meaning and
identity by re-visiting the events of the Holocaust. This aspect of the article directly
relates to Art Spiegelman himself, as well as his semi-autobiographical character, Artie.
Staub, Michael E. "The Shoah Goes on and on: Remembrance and Representation in Art
Spiegelman's Maus." MELUS, Vol. 20, No. 3, 1995, pp. 33-46. EBSCOhost,
doi:10.2307/467741.
Summary
In his article "The Shoah Goes on and on: Remembrance and Representation in Art
Spiegelman's Maus,” Michael Staub looks to Art Spiegelman’s Maus, seeking to explain
the ways in which the work represents the Holocaust, the story of survivors, and the
effect of the memories associated with those stories. Staub starts by declaring what Maus
does and does not do, and what the work offers to Holocaust literature. Next, Staub visits
the style of Spiegelman’s Maus, claiming that “Despite its unusual status as a comic
book, Maus remains remarkably traditional in its documentary strategies for relating its
oral narrative” (34). In the ensuing pages, he deals with the question of what Holocaust
literature offers us and how it can be evaluated, claiming that even the “characters in
Maus are continually questioning what value written representations have in the first
place” (35). Continuing with the theme of written representations, Staub turns to the
burning of Anja’s diary by Vladek, and the implications of such action in the minds of
both Artie and his father. After introducing the diary burning incident, Staub focuses on
the character of Artie and the difficulties he has dealing with his father’s memories, not
only as a fictional character but as an auto-biographical representation of Spiegelman.
Staub claims that “Maus is very much about the inability of art (or Art) to confront fully
or represent metaphorically a monstrous past.” He does not limit Spiegelman’s work to a
portrayal of the psychological effects of the Holocaust on individual characters. Instead,
he goes on to state that “it is also about the tensions involved in understanding” on a
larger scale “what it means to have a Jewish identity in a post-Auschwitz age” (37). In
the following page he continues this study of an over-arching meaning by arguing that
“the key issue” portrayed by the work is the suggestion “that identity can never be
understood as self-evident,” that “Maus works continually to disrupt comfortable
assumptions about where the differences between people lie” (38). He continues with the
idea “that ethnic identities are not fixed” (39), citing Spiegelman’s inclusion in Maus of
the decision regarding which animal he should use to portray Francoise, a French female
who converted to Judaism. In closing, Staub gives his interpretation of panels from the
first few pages of the eighth chapter of Maus, titled “Auschwitz (Time Flies).” Here,
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Staub claims that “the words Art speaks” in the panels in which Spiegelman sits at his
drawing desk, “identify the various temporal landmarks relevant to Maus” (43), primarily
the struggle with the memory of the Holocaust and his method as an author of
representing his father’s story in written form.
Evaluation
"The Shoah Goes on and on: Remembrance and Representation in Art Spiegelman's
Maus” was written by Michael E. Staub, who currently holds the title Professor of
English at Baruch University, CUNY. He has had several works on Jewish experience
and the representation of Postwar (WWII) America published, including his academic
article "The Shoah Goes on and on: Remembrance and Representation in Art
Spiegelman's Maus,” which was published in 1995 by The Society for the Study of MultiEthnic Literature of the United States (MELUS).
Application
There are several clear ways in which Staub’s ideas may be used as support for a research
paper on Maus. Staub’s attention to the significance of Maus to Holocaust literature
would prove to be helpful in research regarding the representations of survivor stories in
literary forms. Relating more directly to research on the characters in the graphic novel,
their actions, and how they react to remembrances of the Holocaust, the article would
prove helpful by assisting an understanding of the psychological difficulties of attempting
to add meaning to the memories of the Holocaust and the concentration camps. To give a
more focused example, Staub’s article would prove beneficial to research exploring the
effects on Vladek of Anja’s memory as represented in the burned diaries, and the
psychological consequences of his burning the diary.
Name 1
Student Name
English 205
Date
Annotated Bibliography: The Dark Knight Returns
Cook, Roy T. "Do Comics Require Pictures? Or Why Batman #663 Is A Comic."
Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism, Vol. 69, No. 3, 2011, pp. 285-296.
EBSCOhost, libraryproxy.sdmesa.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.
com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.23883664&site=edslive.
Summary
This article creates the argument that pictures are not necessarily required for
the definition of a comic and rather that dialogue drives a piece in some
instances far more than images do. In doing so the article redefines our
preconceived notion of the comic. The article uses the concepts of Scott
McClouds Understanding Comics to reinforce the idea a comic not necessarily
having to be a sequence of pictures or even pictures of any sort. Cook explains
that “There is another, more literal sense in which a comic can, intuitively, contain
pictures of nothing. This is where a panel depicts absolutely nothing in a quite
literal, metaphysical sense” (288). These merely help the mind comprehend
what the author would like through use of the narrative. By using the example of
Batman #663, Cook is able to express how the comic medium can be used to
more effectively convey the prose aspect. Cook goes on to describe the effect of
limited illustrations and their resulting effect stating that “These do nothing to
propel the narrative, and the reader is immediately struck by the fact that the
removal of these illustrations would detract from the plot minimally, if at all.”
(289). Lastly, Cook discusses the effects of a graphic novel with no text, and
uses various formulas and examples to explain how a work of literature would
still be work of literature since the narrative framework remains the same whether
it is conveyed by text or image.
Evaluation
Roy T Cook is a member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of
Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The article was published in Art &
Architecture Complete, a scholastic journal of note. The article is well written,
with numerous pieces of evidences that are properly cited and documented.
Application
I believe the best use of this work would be in a work evaluating the function of
art in comics and in close readings of individual’s panels. By removing the
relevant art from a panel, we can begin to analyze dialogue and prose more
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closely, thus creating a greater understanding of the meaning conveyed by the
work. Conversely this method would help us to greater understand the work in
the manner of a silent film. What is conveyed by the art that could never be
conveyed by prose in the comic medium? How would this change our perception
if we were to try and adapt a comic into the novel medium? A relevant analysis
would be the adaptation of the recent Marvel Comics storyline “Civil War” into a
novel format. This could lead to an interesting analysis of the conversion of
comics to films, and how much more important the dialogue or imagery becomes.
Crutcher, Paul A. "Complexity in the Comic and Graphic Novel Medium: Inquiry
through Bestselling Batman Stories." Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 44,
No.1, 2011, pp. 53-72. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/j.15405931.2010.
00819.x.
Summary
This article creates the idea that the unique use of dialogue and panels in comics
is akin to abilities of directors to create new perceptions of what can be done with
an established medium. Crutcher begins by tying his work to Scott McCloud,
who remains an authority in the field of graphic novels, by quoting that graphic
novels are “a ‘‘vessel’’ which visibly holds more actors and content than would
exist in or be necessary to compose literature or art, if not film.” (55). This
reference to McCloud is very important as the ways in which the content of any
graphic novel are portrayed is key to this article. In discussing Frank Miller’s the
Dark Knight Returns, the author discusses specific uses of panels and dialogue
boxes that create a new understanding of the “fourth dimension” (57) that comics
can uniquely employ. By breaking the “borders” or “boundaries” of a page as we
perceive them, the author creates a new feeling or urgency in the mind of the
reader. This is notably illustrated according to Crutcher in The Killing Joke when
“The Joker, photos of Gordon’s brutalized daughter, and Gordon’s screams
break panel borders and therefore disrupt the pacing” (59). This in turn creates
an entirely new understanding for the comic that would not presumably be
available to the reader otherwise. This breaking of conventions is what allows
the graphic novel to be innovative and consistently be able to redefine our
convention of what is a graphic novel.
Evaluation
The article states that Paul A. Crutcher has numerous degrees including:
philosophy, composition, and women’s and gender studies. He is a doctoral
candidate at Michigan State University. The article is published in the Journal of
Popular Culture. The journal has been in publication for a number of years. The
article is well written and shows strong insight into the subject matter and is very
well documented.
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Application
The article creates an interesting parallel with “Do Comics Require Pictures” and
creates a deeper understanding of the comic’s medium as a whole, and how the
use of the Batman character has traditionally been employed to break norms.
With the first article, you create this idea of what the prose can do with limited or
singular uses of art. Even black panels become important. By contrast, this
article creates an interesting dynamic in how the use of art can be employed to
create a more stunning effect. In essence almost rending the dialogue less
relevant, and creating emotion simply through the extreme proportions of
characters, or the breaking of boundaries. With this contrasting view on comics
and what they can do, we can do a further and deeper reading of The Dark
Knight Returns.
Tipton, Nathan G. "Gender Trouble: Frank Miller's Revision of Robin in the
Batman: Dark Knight Series." Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 41, No. 2,
2008, pp. 321-336. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/j.1540-5931.2008.00505.x.
Summary
This article delves into the implications of Batman’s Silver or Golden age comics
and his relationship with the younger Robin. It could be argued that the
relationship with the younger Robin was not as implicitly homosexual as the
article would argue, but the change to a female Robin in Frank Miller’s The Dark
Knight Returns to address this matter calls the entirety of the previous Robin’s
(as there were numerous) character history into question. The article states that
until this change, that the rumors were “routinely about the barely sublimated
homoeroticism extant in Batman’s relations with his partners/protégé’s/wards”
(322). With these kinds of rumors steadily growing why had writers never done
this before? Tipton creates a forceful argument for a homosexual reading of the
previous Batman relationships with Robin, and a more gender oriented analysis
of the female one. It becomes clear that the article does not wish to deal with
implications such as that “Batman and Robin were engaged in sexual activity;
nevertheless the odd (and ongoing) sexual ambiguity in their relationship is a far
cry from the relative safety of a father–son connection” (324). Instead it puts into
perspective the rationale behind these specific character decisions and how they
could be interpreted.
Evaluation
Nathan G. Tipton is an ABD at the University of Memphis with an emphasis on
Textual Studies. According to the article, Tipton has “published numerous
encyclopedia entries, book reviews, and critical articles” (336). The article was
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very straightforward and clearly written. Although the article has less works cited
than previous articles, they are very well integrated into the piece. The article
was published in the Journal of Popular Culture, a literary journal that has been
in publication for many years.
Application
This would be similar to what I have been discussing all semester, the ability to
put the graphic novel and comic’s medium into the same literary critical review as
other literature. By doing a gay and lesbian (homosexual) analysis of the piece,
and do it from a legitimate standpoint, I believe the medium takes a step in that
direction. This article would be a good jumping off point for a longer evaluation of
the Batman mythos, and it makes it clear that not a great deal of longer study or
academia has been done into the character of batman or his history. With this
article one could begin to do an in depth reading into the homosexual aspects of
super hero characters and their side kicks, and a gender analysis of why these
heroes are so predominantly male. A longer abstraction would be the analysis of
the female super heroes and why they are so rarely granted side kicks and why
nothing is made of their sidekicks being male or female. In terms of joining all of
the works in this Annotated Bibliography together, I would use it to analyze the
changing faces of the Batman series, whether it is in narrative, imagery or
characters.
Brody, Michael. "Batman: Psychic Trauma and Its Solution." Journal of Popular
Culture, Vol. 28, No. 4, 1995, pp. 171-178. EBSCOhost, libraryproxy.
sdmesa.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct
=true&db=sih&AN=9601232330&site=eds-live.
Summary
A psychological reading of the origins of Batman as referenced in comparison to
other similar events and comics. Divided into four sections, the article begins
with “Psychic Trauma”, explaining the psychological ailments of Bruce Wayne.
These are best described as “’death guilt,’ a state of mind the same researchers
witnessed while studying Holocaust and Hiroshima victims” (173). The article
moves into the section called “The Solution.” From this we learn that based on
his “death guilt” Bruce Wayne’s urge to fight crime is a “compensatory wish”
(174). The section entitled “Nontintegrated Personality” delves into the manner
in which Bruce Wayne remains in a less assertive state while in his public
persona, but then turns into a confident individual while he is Batman. From this
we can see that he has almost developed split personalities. In the last section
entitled “Discussion” Brody makes it clear that the personas of Batman are “more
a question of balance” (176). This lets us see that the troubled psyche of Bruce
Wayne makes it difficult for him to establish a strong personality in either one, as
he must constantly juggle the two.
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Evaluation
Michael Brody is a lecturer at the University of Maryland. His work as a Child
Psychiatrist also certainly gives him insight into the psychological trauma of
Batman as a child and gives his more credibility to write an article of this sort.
The article is well written albeit far more brief than any of the others.
Application
The use of this article could be used for another literary critique of the Batman
mythos and creates another foothold into the world of legitimate literature. The
work is relatively short but creates a striking picture of how Bruce Wayne creates
the Batman persona. This could be used in an analysis of many origin stories for
popular super heroes and could be used to analyze the techniques that current
filmmakers employ when creating the numerous “origin story” films that have
come out in recent years. In a broader sense, when trying to connect it to the
other articles, this article seems fit in with the reinterpretation of Batman. These
psychological issues are at the core of Batman/Bruce Wayne and the way in
which they are expanded upon or changed in each of the successive works could
create a better view into our understanding. The changes made in the dialogue,
characters, and text, could only be created by varying only so far from the
established norm and psychology of the character that any writer or artist mush
have a full understanding of. To vary from this known beginning would create an
entirely different character.