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Thursday, March 12, 2009

On Comics: The Watchmen

Posted by Bill Benzon on 03/12/09 at 12:52 PM

Over at OnFiction Kirsten Valentine Cadieux has three posts on the graphic novel version of the story – written in anticipation of the movie release. Here’s a passage from the first of them, The Watchment: Comics’ Use of Dissonance:

Fiction provides a venue for juxtaposing irreconcilable stories without all of the consequences of real life. The rigors of coherence and correspondence demand a certain restraint in creating such juxtapositions, but a central stock in trade of fictional construction is the paradoxes or contradiction that the protagonist encounters and must engage. Such dissonances provide excellent points of entry for some of the classics of the comics genre, and these dissonances also provide a subject matter that comics are pecularliarly well-suited to explore. The Watchmen takes as its starting premise the dissonance between the standard comics trope of “costumed heroes” and the perspective of comics readers. If those costumed heroes are to be judged from the perspectives of readers’ everyday lives, their long-underwear drama is obviously fanciful and somewhat ridiculous. Using as a starting premise this dissonance between a time when heroes made sense and a time when they seem weird, the cast of characters in The Watchmen are introduced mainly through the form of reminisce from retirement about the personal, social, and political changes that have contributed to this dissonance. Where once it seemed to makes sense for them to fight crime as heroes, does it now? Did it ever?

Here’s links to the second, Comics as Place, Space, and Setting, and third, Framing Stories of the Imagination.

Meanwhile, Michael Barrier quotes A. O. Scott from The New York Times and Anthony Lane from The New Yorker in the course of explaining why he probably won’t go see the movie, though he’s read the graphic novel twice. His conclusion: “Superheroes are to have fun with; give them serious work to do, and they simply look foolish, or repulsive, or, as in Watchmen, both.”

I’ve not read the graphic novel nor seen the movie – though I might do the latter. We’ll see. Meanwhile, if you’re itching to discuss The Watchmen, have at it.

Comments

I was reluctant to inflict my Watchmen posts on everyone here. Now I think I just might.

By Scott Eric Kaufman on 03/12/09 at 05:54 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Why the hell not? There seems to be a demand.

Not that we have to play to the public.

But also . . . .

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

By Bill Benzon on 03/12/09 at 06:00 PM | Permanent link to this comment

I no longer have any doubt that BIll enjoys seeing raging fights on his posts.

By tomemos on 03/12/09 at 08:55 PM | Permanent link to this comment

I put my money behind this SEK-sentence, as encapsulating in a single short sentence-and-a-half pretty much everything there is to say about the movie: ‘...the larger problem with Snyder’s aesthetic. He is faithful in act but not in spirit.’

Is there anything else to say, really?

By Adam Roberts on 03/13/09 at 01:25 PM | Permanent link to this comment

... apart from the fact that I use, inelegantly, ‘sentence’ twice in one, er, sentence back there. ‘SEKsentence’ ought to be one word, really.

By Adam Roberts on 03/13/09 at 01:26 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Many A.O. Scott’s criticisms seem to be almost an issue with the actual medium, or at the very least the actual comic.

See: Indeed, the ideal viewer — or reviewer, as the case may be — of the “Watchmen” movie would probably be a mid-’80s college sophomore with a smattering of Nietzsche, an extensive record collection and a comic-book nerd for a roommate. The film’s carefully preserved themes of apocalypse and decay might have proved powerfully unsettling to that anxious undergraduate sitting in his dorm room, listening to “99 Luftballons” and waiting for the world to end or the Berlin Wall to come down.

Hm.

By on 03/18/09 at 10:00 PM | Permanent link to this comment

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Thursday, March 12, 2009

On Comics: The Watchmen

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