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WIP (Work in Progress) Postgraduate Conference 2009School of English and Humanities

Birkbeck, University of LondonSaturday 7 February 2009

Archive of the Future: Watchmen as Historiographic NarrativeTony Venezia

Figure 1: Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, chapter XII: page 32 (excerpt). © DC Comics.1

The final panel frame from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen (figure 1) shows a disorganised pile of papers, documents and envelopes with a journal tantalisingly and prominently displayed. This provides a visual index of an archive. Scattered documents that demand to be sorted, arranged, and catalogued. Jared Gardner in a recent essay proposed that archives and archival narratives saturate contemporary comics. Gardner’s approach draws from Walter Benjamin in examining how fragments of the past intrude onto the present, and speculates that comics are in many ways uniquely capable of composing these archival narratives not just by making use of patterns of verbal-visual representations, of allusion, quotation and parody, but also by inscribing the subculture of collectors within their narrative structure:

Archives are everywhere in the contemporary graphic novel, although almost inevitably not the ordered collections of the academic library or a law firms records. These are archives in the loosest, messiest sense of the word – archives of the forgotten artefacts and the ephemera of American popular culture, items that were never meant to be collected. Indeed, it is their ephemeral nature, their quality as waste products of modern mass media and consumer culture, that constitutes the perverse pleasures for those who collect, organise and fetishize them.2

Gardner focuses on alternative comics by Ben Katchor and Kim Deitch, but this approach, the use of the archive as a model to explore history and historiography, is suggestive and can be extended to a reading of Watchmen, a more mainstream text. Watchmen is composed of a variety of textual elements that

1 Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (New York: DC Comics, 1987). All references show chapter then page number.2 Jared Gardner, ‘Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work of Comics’, in MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 52.4 (2006) 787-806.

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foreground the archive, most notably the use of prose insertions that complete each chapter – supplements from (auto)biographies, diaries, interviews, news reports, police arrest sheets, psychiatric reviews, marketing statements. The narrative also incorporates embedded modes of representation; photographs, television screens, computers, and other comics. Comics are associated historically with the genre of the superhero and Watchmen draws on the submerged assumptions of the genre, of authoritarian ideology and utopian gesture, to compose a historiographic metatextual narrative, a revisionary parodic world where the publication of superhero comics inspires a craze for masked vigilantes.

Figure 2: Rorschach’s journal, I: 11. © DC Comics.

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Figure 3: ‘At midnight, all the agents...’; Rorschach investigates, I:6. © DC Comics.

Moving from the last panel, to the opening page (see figure 2). I want to look closely at this page drawing on Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, a work of comics autocriticism. McCloud’s organising principle is that of ‘closure’ – not to be confused with Umberto Eco’s theory of open or closed texts. Closure is a cognitive process of perceptual completion.3 The reader plays an active, collaborative part in bridging the gap between comic panels by interpreting the separate moments as a continuous and unified whole. McCloud also allows that closure operates within the panel, usually the perception of images derived from fragments. With this in mind, we can look at this page, reading left-to-right, top-to-bottom. The page has a kind of cinematic grace, starting with a close-up and pulling further out panel-by-panel to widen the perspective. This gradual momentum utilises what McCloud calls a moment-to-moment transition.4 The close-up of blood in the gutter tracks back to reveal the street, the inhabitants, the panoptic perspective from a window in a skyscraper – the vertiginous scale emphasised by the widescreen panel at the bottom of the page. Closure also occurs on a semantic level in the association of word and image. The verbal narration runs parallel to the visual sequence, but separation of text and image is far from straightforward. Typographic elements are emphasised. Rorschach’s journal is a recursive intradiegetic text, the yellowed, torn pages indicating a fragmentary textual materiality. This is contrasted and differentiated from the other typographic elements – the word-balloon uttered by the man at the top of the building, and the placard declaring that ‘THE END IS NIGH’. Then there is the matter of what is being said, the verbal narration framing a right-wing, absolutist perspective: ‘Now the

3 Scott, McCloud Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperCollins, 1993): succinctly defined as ‘observing the parts but perceiving the whole’, p. 63. The term is derived from Gestalt psychology rather than literary theory. Following McCloud, it is now common practice to refer to ‘comics’ as a singular noun. (p. 4).4 McCloud pp. 70-4 for an almost Barthesian model of how visual narrative transitions work.

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whole world stands on the brink, staring down into the bloody hell, all those liberals and smooth talkers and all of a sudden no one can think of anything to say.’5

The blood is that of ageing masked vigilante Edward Blake, The Comedian. The smiley badge is his ironic symbol and a recurring visual motif in the text (as we saw in figure 1). Blake has been murdered, thrown from the window of his apartment. We later learn that the man with the apocalyptic hoarding is in fact Rorschach himself. Blake’s murder initiates the narrative of Watchmen. His body provides an absent presence, a gap that requires closure. Rorschach commits himself to solving the murder, his clothing signifying his status; the fedora and raincoat of the hardboiled detective, supplemented by his mask, an ever-changing emblem that both disguises him and gives him his name (see figure 3). There is a dual motion to crime narratives – the detective moves backward to uncover past events as they move forward. Typically, this is ideological, a double movement to contain disruption, followed by recovery leading to reinstatement of order.6 The detective resembles the archivist recovering fragments of the past to constitute a coherent narrative. This is narrative as historiography, the process of writing history from remnants and traces, and this process is problematised. The detective constructs a narrative in which they also participate, a partisan procedure. Rorschach pieces together the plot that leads to and beyond The Comedian’s murder. This investigation opens up the generic archive inscribed within the narrative. The superhero genre is a hybrid, a confluence of crime fiction with its emphasis on recovery, and science fiction with its accent on projection. Watchmen presents an alternate history, retroactively enacting this projection, presenting an archive of the future. The science fiction sub-genre of alternate history dramatises moments of divergence from recorded history, and the consequences of that divergence.7 Rorschach disappears into the text, subjected to textual reframing in the form of a psychiatric report. It falls to the reader to map these divergences.

Figure 4: Manhattan on Mars, IV:1 (excerpt). © DC Comics.

5 Watchmen, I:1. Coincidentally, McCloud’s chapter on closure and transitions is titled ‘Blood in the Gutter’, McCloud, pp. 60-93 (60).6 See John Scaggs, Crime Fiction (Routledge: New York, 2005), pp.46-7.7 See Andy Duncan, ‘Alternate History’, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp.209-19: ‘[A]lternate history reminds us that we all change the world.’ (p. 219).

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Figure 5: Semiotic chaos, X:8 (excerpt). © DC Comics.

There is a mobility of focalisation in Watchmen and Rorschach’s perspective of moral absolutism can be contrasted with those of two other characters. These suggest other figurative methods of closure. Dr. Manhattan (see figure 4) is the only genuine superhuman in the narrative. As Jon Osterman, nuclear physicist, his physical presence is dissolved in a freak accident. He is able to reassemble his body and subjectivity becoming Manhattan. His existence is crucial to the narrative world as he represents a point of divergence in the narrative. The only ‘real’ superhuman, he is capable of manipulating matter at an atomic level. His appearance renders the masked vigilantes superfluous. He is an embodiment of the science fiction trope Darko Suvin identifies as the novum, the new thing, a fictional component that dramatically alters its environment.8 Manhattan’s presence ensures that America wins the Vietnam conflict, and that the US has the edge over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Because of this, Nixon is able to change the constitution and stay on for a fourth term.

The second contrasting perspective is Ozymandias (figure 5), the superhero as an intellectual man of action. In Watchmen, superheroes are feared and loathed, rather than worshiped as implicitly authoritarian idols. Public pressure leads to legislation outlawing their activities. Manhattan and The Comedian continue as government sanctioned agents, Rorschach operates illegally, while Ozymandias reverts to his real name of Adrian Veidt and becomes a successful businessman. It is Veidt who orchestrates the masterplot of Watchmen, murdering The Comedian, and driving Manhattan into exile. He initiates an elaborate conspiracy by faking an alien invasion, which results in the death of millions to frighten the world powers into peace, creating a utopia on the foundations of the dead. Rorschach refuses to conceal this manipulation of history from the public and is executed by Manhattan, but not before mailing his journal to a libertarian newspaper.

8 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of Literary Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 63.

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These three viewpoints represent different ways of conceiving the historical. Manhattan and Osterman are distinct but inseparable, due to a unique temporal perception, experiencing time as a constant, able to step in and out of past, present and future. Holding a photograph of himself, he also experiences the moment of its taking years before. As McCloud contends, comics spatialise time9 in panels and page layout, and as such are uniquely placed to represent this peculiar perception. Panels are apprehended collectively, comprehended individually and interpreted sequentially. Veidt on the other hand acts by reading hints of the future from the flux of information viewed on banks of television screens, the multi-channel overload mimicking the mobile narrative focus and grid layout of the comics page:

MULTI-SCREEN VIEWING IS SEEMINGLY ANTICIPATED BY BURROUGH’S CUT-UP TECHNIQUE. HE SUGGESTED RE-ARRANGING WORDS AND IMAGES TO EVADE RATIONAL ANALYSIS ALLOWING SUBLIMINAL HINTS OF THE FUTURE TO LEAK THROUGH...AN IMPENDING WORLD OF EXOTICA GLIMPSED ONLY PERIPHERALLY. PERCEPTUALLY THIS SIMULTANEOUS INPUT ENGAGES ME LIKE THE KINETIC EQUIVALENT OF AN IMPRESSIONIST PAINTING...PHOSPHOR-DOT SWIRLS JUXTAPOSE; MEANINGS COALESCE FROM SEMIOTIC CHAOS BEFORE REVERTING TO INCOHERENCE. TRANSIENT AND ELUSIVE, THESE MUST BE GRASPED QUICKLY.10

Of course, this is exactly what Veidt does, acting as Nietzschean overman, vanguardist revolutionary and corporate entrepreneur ‘grasping’ the moment and acting quickly. Making sense of the semiotic chaos of historical representations is precisely what the reader does. As well as reading the comics page synchronically, enacting the closure McCloud proposes, we read the text diachronically, linking form to history. To quote Matthew Pustz from his cultural study of comic book fans:

[C]omics literacy is more than just knowing the transitions that McCloud explains or understanding symbols that serve as a quick shorthand for ideas and emotions. Literacy also includes specific knowledge about a huge body of texts with stories, information, character and even genres.11

9 McCloud, p. 100. See also p. 7: ‘Space does for comics what time does for film.’ cf. Will Eisner: ‘The act of panelling or boxing the action not only defines its perimeters but establishes the position of the reader in relation to the scene and indicates the duration of the event. Indeed, it “tells” time [...] Once established and set in sequence the box or panel becomes the criterion by which to judge the illusion of time.’ Eisner, Will, Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practice of the World’s Most Popular Art Form, (New Jersey: Poorhouse Press, revised edition 1990), p. 28.10 Watchmen, XI: 1. Interpreting this flow of content is obviously another example of McCloud’s model of closure.11Matthew P. Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), pp. 123-4. cf. Gardner: ‘Of course readers of comics are themselves (not always unfairly) stereotyped as obsessive collectors. Their desire to possess comics – to hunt down every stray work by a favourite creator, to contain and reassemble the scattered pieces of a fragmentary comics universe – is a familiar one for many readers (and one that has little, if anything, to do with fantasies about market value). It is the compulsive need to fill in the gaps, to make connections between issues (the serial gap inherent to comic production, mirroring and complicating the gaps between the frames themselves) that drive the “collector” in search of missing issues. Indeed the archival drive that motivates the form’s production and reception is a forge for the (always uneasy) collaboration between reader and writer that is central to the comics form.’ (p. 800).

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Figure 6: Hollis Mason’s autobiography Under the Hood, I: no pagination; Veidt’s merchandising, X: no pagination. © DC Comics.

This kind of historicized comics literacy is embedded within the prose inserts. These are integrated into the narrative discourse and also function to comment on that discourse. I’ve reproduced two extracts in figure 6. The first is from a fictional autobiography of the character Hollis Mason; then from one of Adrian Veidt’s company memos. Mason recounts how the publication of the first Superman comic in 1938 sparked a craze for masked vigilantes around America. Pulp fiction and superhero comics provide simplistic models for dealing with complex social conditions. Mason initially becomes a police man to confront as he puts it: ‘The pimps, the prostitutes, the protection artists.’ Inspired by reports of people emulating those comics heroes, he develops the masked persona of Nite Owl. The period from the 1930s to the 1950s is commonly referred to as the Golden Age of comics.12 In the context of Mason’s memoir, this seems an ironic title – the world of primary coloured morality is also the world of pimps, prostitutes and protection artists. Mason says he preferred the superhero comics to the pulps that they gradually supplanted, because comics dispensed with the ‘darkness and ambiguity’. Watchmen’s master narrative works to reinstate that darkness and ambiguity.13

12 Geoff Klock, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, (New York: Continuum Press, 2002), p. 2: ‘The golden age was the birth of the superhero proper out of the pulp novel characters of the early 1930s [...]’. Klock’s book is a fascinating, if flawed, Bloomsian intertextual study of superhero comics.13 Klock: ‘Watchmen return[s] superheroes to their pulp roots’, p. 76.

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In the world of Watchmen, masked vigilantes have their own fans, and Mason passes on his secret identity to a younger man, Dan Dreiberg. This is after all what Mason and Dreiberg are – comic book fanboys. This also subverts the typical comics practice of static historicity, of what Umberto Eco writing on Superman called an ‘immobile present’: the cyclic temporal continuity of superhero stories in which characters never seem to age.14 This isn’t the case in Watchmen which commences with a murder, and constructs an extensive fictional history archiving documents such as Mason’s memoir. Watchmen’s narrative continuity also breaks the cyclic time of superheroes by being published as a contained rather than continuous serial. Ironically, this has the effect of opening out rather than constricting the text. Watchmen was able to further exploit the textual materiality because of this as it was serialized without a letters page or adverts or an editorial page, the space was instead used for the prose inserts, which as we can see are interesting as much as bibliographic and typographic signifiers as they are for transmitting narrative information. Shifting attention to Veidt’s memo, we can see that it acts as a comment on the text’s own status as commodity, a substitute for those missing ads. Veidt comments that the American public has never really gone for superheroes and suggests marketing terrorist figures for a children’s cartoon, Moore’s blunt comment on crass merchandising. Now of course, you can walk down to Forbidden Planet down the road and buy these figures. Looking closely, we can make out trademark logos for some of the figures. Issues of copyright and trademark been important in the history of comics, and have plagued Moore’s career. Superheroes are reified archetypes, commodities generally owned by publishing houses. While superheroes are the mainstream of comics history, a history that forms part of Watchmen’s archive, the narrative also acts as host to other traditions.

Figure 7: The Silk Spectre’s guest appearance in a Tijuana Bible, II: 8 (excerpt): Reading Tales of the Black Freighter, III: 2. © DC Comics.

14 Umberto Eco, ‘The Myth of Superman’ The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, (London: Hutchinson, 1979), pp. 107-124 (p. 116).

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Two examples of counter-traditions to mainstream comics are shown in figure 8, in the appropriation of pornographic and horror comics. The first references notorious ‘Tijuana Bibles’. These were illegal, under the counter pornographic comics that made use of copyrighted comic characters, or famous people from the 1930s to the 1950s. They were a counter-tradition that ran alongside the Golden Age superheroes. By recontextualising copyrighted characters they anticipated pop art and the underground comix of the 60s.15

Here, a character reads one about herself. This method of recontextualising, finding new connections and analogies, informs Moore’s work throughout his career. The second is a more complex integration. A minor character reads from a horror comic at key points, and the text he reads is juxtaposed with the main narrative. The content features a man shipwrecked by pirates who races to save his family from destruction, but his obsession becomes the very instrument for that destruction. This micronarrative shadows Veidt’s masterplot. There is a polyphonic texture to this page where dialogue or narration from one scene overlaps on another. Word and image are disassembled and realigned and contrasted pointing to a wider web of connections, associations and allusions. In a world with superheroes there is no need for superhero comics. This is a rewriting of cultural history. Horror comics were behind the moral panic in the 1950s that led to industry self-censorship, particularly those by E.C. comics, which this embedded pastiche clearly resembles.16

Watchmen is a text about other texts, composed of other texts that constitute the plot, a comic about other comics and the cultural history they carry. This archival narrative foregrounds its textual materiality, and as the last panel showed gestures toward its own processes of construction. The gaps produced by serialisation await closure by the reader. The final chapter dispenses with a prose supplement. It ends instead with the shot of Rorschach’s journal waiting to be picked up in the news office, to open to the first page of the narrative. To paraphrase figure 1, it’s left in our hands. It falls upon the reader to connect these fragments to map these divergences and to complete a kind of provisional archival closure.

15 See Roger Sabin, Comic, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), p. 35. See http://www.tijuanabibles.org/ for numerous examples.16 See Sabin, pp. 38-40, and pp. 67-8. Cf. Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson; University of Mississippi Press, 1998) for a more extensive treatment of this historical episode. The prose supplement for Watchmen, chapter V, presents an alternative, fictional counter-history of comics: ‘[T]he close of the 1950s saw, E.C.’s line of Pirate titles dominating the marketplace from a near unassailable position. The brief surge of anti-comic book sentiment in the mid-fifties, while it could conceivably have damaged E.C. as a company, had instead come to nothing and left them stronger as a result. With the government of the day coming down squarely on the side of comic books in an effort to protect the image of certain comic book-inspired agents in their employ, it was as if the comic industry had been given the blessing of Uncle Sam himself – or at least J. Edgar Hoover.’ (No pagination).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Duncan, Andy, ‘Alternate History’, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp.209-19.

Eco, Umberto, ‘The Myth of Superman’ The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, (London: Hutchinson, 1979).

Eisner, Will, Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practice of the World’s Most Popular Art Form, (New Jersey: Poorhouse Press, revised edition 1990).

Gardner, Jared, ‘Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work of Comics’, in MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 52.4 (2006) 787-806.

Klock, Geoff, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, (New York: Continuum Press, 2002).McCloud, Scott, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperCollins, 1993)Moore, Alan, Gibbons, Dave (colourist John Higgins) Watchmen (New York: DC Comics, 1987).Pustz, Matthew P. Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press,

1999).Sabin, Roger, Comic, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art (London: Phaidon Press, 1996).Scaggs, John, Crime Fiction (Routledge: New York, 2005), pp.46-7.Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of Literary Genre (New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press, 1979).

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