Watchmen, by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

[Omphalos]

I know that I put this up about a year ago, but I have been thinking about trickster gods a lot lately for some reason. I redrafted this after a sleepless night in Seattle recently thinking about Loki and Coyote. I'd love to year your comments on this one. Not sure at all if I am off base here. The new parts are the last several paragraphs, though I tweaked everything.




I can plainly see that comic books don't get very much respect in literary circles. Not even in SF literary circles, and considering that SF is pretty much the dark horse of the language arts, that kind of confuses me. It just seems that stories told with pictures and speech bubbles get less respect in traditional literary circles simply because they have pictures and bubbles. At least it seems that way, because as far as I can tell, there is nothing at all wrong with many of the stories. Take Sandman, by Neil Gaiman for example. In 1991 one issue of that very popular comic book (#19, A Midsummer Night's Dream) was nominated for and actually won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. The members of the board of the World Fantasy Convention were so shocked that a comic book could win their prestigious award, and so determined to keep this heresy from occurring ever again, that the very next day they changed the rules so that a comic book never again could even be entered into the competition. I cannot imagine a story better suited to depict the real attitudes that publishers, critics and scholars have about comic books/graphic novels. And despite the fact that there are increasing numbers of stories published in this medium every year, I do not see things changing much in the future. But....that will not stop me, of course, from bringing you reports on the ones that I like. Watchmen, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, is in my opinion one of the very best that this sub-genre has to offer. It is the story of several emotionally damaged superheroes who soldier on after the forced demise of their team despite the fact that for all but two of them, maybe three, nobody needs them anymore...Please click here, or on the book cover above, to be taken to the complete review..

 

[HareBrain]

Interesting, but the end of the story still relies on the existence of the "other" - the alien monster. I'm not sure how far advanced Moore was in his magical philosophy when he wrote it, but I think if he had wanted to show a desire for eastern and western ideas to come together, he would have chosen a means of synthesis that didn't rely on having an enemy. To be a little simplistic, western religion is based on the existence of the "other", eastern on precisely the lack of "other" - I think that if Moore had been trying to do what you suggest, he would have done something a bit more interesting with the means Veidt used. Veidt hasn't driven away the warlike western god, he's just created a common enemy.

And for how long? How long would it take, in the absence of further alien attacks, for the various countries in the pan-human alliance to fall out again? No time at all, where the alliance was based on nothing more that a common threat. Moore must have known this. In any case, the use of the USSR to represent the "east" doesn't hold up - Russia is basically a western country, with a western religion and western modes of thought.

Interesting to wonder, though, how Moore would rewrite it now, more than twenty years later.

 

[Omphalos]

Great comment. Thanks!

Does Eastern philosophy really predicate itself on a lack of a belief in the "other" though? Isnt the belief that the "other" does exist, and that its the duty of the the enlightened mind to find common ground and minimize the otherness? Kind of like, otherness can exist, but its a state of mind that can be changed? I think that there is something to that, which means that elimination of otherness is a process and a state of mind both, not a given. And if so, it would be the extra-dimensional alien's turn next.

As to the Russian part, that is why I said that I wished the flag had been Tibetain. But I think that the analogy still works, and certainly fits in with the state of the world at the time the book was set.

 

[HareBrain]

As I understand it, otherness in eastern philosophy exists only as a state of mind; it's an illusion. Enlightenment is seeing through that illusion. Whereas Judeo-Christian religion draws a distinction between Creator and Creation, in Hinduism, for example, the creator god Brahma is only an aspect (as are all gods and everything else) of Brahman, which is the totality of existence.

This distinction between west and east is muddied a bit by western mysticism such as the Qabbalah, where union with God is the ultimate realisation.

You're right, it would have to be the alien's turn next, but there is no hint in the story of any process by which this would happen (apart from the existence of symbols of eastern thought), so to me, the evidence is shaky that this is what Moore intended. (Having said that, it's been a while since I've read it, so feel free to tell me what I've missed!)