Yet More "Before Watchmen" Action

Nite Owl #2, by J. Michael Straczynski, Andy Kubert and Joe Kubert
Ozymandias #2, by Len Wein and Jae Lee
Rorschach #1, by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo
Dr. Manhattan #1, by J. Michael Straczynski and Adam Hughes
Minutemen #3, by Darwyn Cooke

Just in case you like comics but have been living under a stone, these Before Watchmen comics are DC's cash-in prequels to the popular Watchmen comic of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. To many they are something of a travesty, as taking characters created by Moore and Gibbons and giving them to other people is seen as a terrible form of creative theft, for all that Alan Moore in particular has made a career out of appropriating characters created by other people.

I like to think I have approached these titles with a somewhat open mind, but for the most part they are not that great. As I was saying last time, my original plan had been to buy all the issue ones first and then decide which, if any, were worth sticking with. Unfortunately, some of the issue 2s started appearing before the issue 1s had all appeared, forcing me to prematurely go ahead with some of the titles. This has led to good and bad results.

I was ambivalent about issue 1 of Nite Owl, but decided to plump for the second issue. Now my feelings are less ambivalent. This is pretty much a pointless filling in of back-story that never needed to be filled in. I will not be bothering with issue 3.

Ozymandias #2, like #1, has really gorgeous art. Really lovely. I think this would be worth buying even if it was just a succession of pictures of Ozymandias reading a book. It strikes me, though, that there is a slight woman-in-refrigerator aspect to this one. In issue 1, Adrian Veidt's girlfriend died of a drøg overdose. Now he has decided to become Ozymandias and to join the freaks fighting crime while wearing funny clothes. I am not entirely convinced by this. First of all, I always had the suspicion from real Watchmen that Veidt batted for the other team, though nothing was ever stated overtly. Secondly, his motivation for fighting crime there is presented straightforwardly as being to apply his amazing intellect to the betterment of the world by throwing bad guys into jail. The "oh noes my girlfriend is dead, I know I will fight crime now" motivation seems a bit petty for such an Olympian figure.

Still, the story bops along and the art is nice. And the art is not just pretty, there is some clever stuff in it as well, like the two page spread where a fight in a drøg factory is rendered in silhouette. I'm not sure what the fetishistic cover (a gasmask wearing women in her underwear pulling on a string looped around Ozymandias' neck) is all about - nothing like that happens inside and if you bought the issue hoping for something a bit saucy you would be rather disappointed.

Rorschach is one of the most fascinating characters of real Watchmen. On the one hand he is a maniacal thug, on the other a maniacal thug with an unyielding and uncompromising sense of right and wrong, albeit one that allows him to kill anyone who gets in his way and torture randomers to extract information. And he is a character driven by his own past (one whose adult life is arguably a pathological response to that unfortunate past). He is a character with the potential to front a title on his own. Unfortunately, Rorschach #1 is not that great. The story sees him chasing down some drøg suppliers, while in the background some other maniac is murdering women (prostitutes, perhaps) and cutting messages into their skin. The main story is a bit ho-hum, while the woman-killing nutter stuff is a bit distasteful, the classic comics thing of showing that someone is BAD by having them commit violence against women.

And the Rorschach art is all a bit lurid. I do not mean by that it is explicit and grotesque in what it depicts, just that the combination of art and colour is a bit too in your face. I reckon the character would be more suited either to something that is almost completely black and white, creating a shadowy noir atmosphere, or else drawn and coloured so as to emphasis his grottiness. This art does not suit.

With story and art failing to impress me, I doubt I will be bothering with issue 2 of Rorschach. And that brings me to the first issue of Dr Manhattan. Again, Dr Manhattan is one of the signature characters of real Watchmen. The only one of the superheroes with actual superpowers, a large part of the book follows this godlike individual's alienation from and then reconciliation to the human race. Presenting him in his own comic presents a challenge - what do you do with him? In this one they largely seem to copy the great chapter 4 of real Watchmen, following him as he jumps backwards and forwards over his own life. It seems very inessential, largely giving us stuff we have already seen (or slight variants thereof).

The only real difference is giving the character a tendency to go on about quantum mechanics in a manner not seen in real Watchmen - all that Schrödinger's cat stuff. This seems like fluff until he jumps back over his life to before his creation as Dr Manhattan, when he was still Jon Osterman, a physicist working on Government science projects in the 1950s. He comes up to the moment of his creation as Dr Manhattan, when he is accidentally trapped inside a field and apparently destroyed by the removal of his intrinsic field - only now the quantum dice somehow roll differently and he sees his younger self walk out of the chamber before it closes on him.

So he has created, or witnessed the creation of, a divergent timeline from the one in which he lives. That is basically the end of the episode and I suppose it is a pretty big cliffhanger. Given that Watchmen is itself alternate history, we now have another alternate possibly being presented to us. It's funny, but I was going to say that this title was as inessential as the others already mentioned, but writing this has got me thinking that maybe there is a bit more to it, so maybe I will persevere and have a look at the second issue when that comes out.

And finally we have Minutemen #3. I have already said that this is the one definitely interesting Before Watchmen title, and this continues to be the case, thanks to Darwyn Cooke's retro visual sense and focus on characters left rather undeveloped in real Watchmen. See discussion of previous issues here and here.

Ozymandias cover

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More issues of Before Watchmen

Nite Owl #1 by J. Michael Straczynski, Andy Kubert, and Joe Kubert
Ozymandias #1 by Len Wein and Jae Lee
Minutemen #2 by Darwyn Cooke

Danger, Danger, here be spoilers. Not spoilers to the Watchmen prequels, but to Watchmen itself. If you have never read Watchmen then don't waste your time reading about the prequels, get a copy of Watchmen and read that instead.

Yes, readers, three more issues of the widely hated prequels to Watchmen. Nite Owl seems to be primarily about dorky superhero Daniel Dreiberg, the second Nite Owl and one of the main Watchmen characters. It shows him at the point of taking over from Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl. He seems like an ironic version of a real life comics fan - whereas nerds now obsess about fictional superheroes, Dreiberg obsesses about real superheroes, in particular Nite Owl 1, seeking originally to become his sidekick and then carrying on his work when Mason retires.

In and of itself it is not unentertaining, but it is not really doing much more than pointlessly filling in Watchmen back-story. I did like how Mason is presented as being a bit more edgy than he is in the original Watchmen, with the Kuberts' art helping to make him feel like a more dangerous character. But I thought the straight lifting of a frame from Watchmen was a bit poor. Overall I would judge this title to be quite good, but I am not sure I will bother with #2.

Ozymandias presents itself as being Ozymandias recording his thoughts just before he triggers the climactic giant squid attack on New York. The framing device is something of a supervillain cliché/trope, but it does not really work for Ozymandias. His plan only works if no one finds out that he did it, so why would he record his thinking? That aside, the title is quite entertaining, mostly thanks to the art. It is sumptuous coloured work but has a stylised quality that stops it being merely pretty. The story is grand - part of it is rehash of the Watchmen stuff about Adrian Veidt travelling the world before he became Ozymandias, and then we have the now incredibly rich Veidt deciding to become a costumed crime fighter because his girlfriend dies of a drug overdose. That was a bit of a surprise - not so much the overdose, but the Veidt having a girlfriend, as I had come round to the idea that the character is meant to be homosexual (mainly based on the idea that he is a smart dresser and knows how to look after himself, unlike the other losers in Watchmen).

One thing that I find amusing about Ozymandias is that it is written by Len Wein. Wein was the original writer on Swamp Thing, the comic with which Alan Moore later made his US writing debut. Some people have objected to the Before Watchmen comics on the basis that it is just wrong for other creators to use the characters created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. As Moore had already taken over Wein's Swamp Thing, you could see this title as the favour being returned. Wein was also the editor on original Watchmen, so his involvement with these characters goes back a long way.

Again, though, there is the question of whether Ozymandias is doing anything other than providing an unneeded fleshing out of back-story already sketched in Watchmen. At the moment I would say probably not, but the art and feel of this are sufficiently strange that I will probably keep buying this one.

And then we come to #2 of Minutemen. The appearance of this issue annoyed me. Not because of anything contained in it, but because I wanted to read all the #1 issues of the Before Watchmen comics before having to think about which ones I wanted to keep buying, if any. But then this came out, before the first issues of Rorschach and Dr Manhattan. Bah. I bought it anyway. This continues to be an enjoyable read, set among characters who do not get too much of a look-in in real Watchmen, so you miss that annoying "yeah yeah I know all this" feeling. Instead we have the late 1930s heroes teaming up to fight crime and stuff. Only the team is being run to create favourable publicity for the heroes, ultimately as an income-generating project. Darwyn Cooke's vintage-themed art continues to be perfect for this kind of thing. The story is impressive too, particularly the later section where Nite Owl, Silhouette and Mothman investigate an unsavoury case of the kind that does not generate feel-good publicity.

I think of these three, Minutemen wins. It feels the most like something that has an independent existence from real Watchmen, even if it contains characters from it.

I should also mention the short Curse of the Crimson Corsair stories that appear in the back pages of each Before Watchmen title. They are two page episodes in an ongoing tale that is meant to be another of the pirate comics popular in the Watchmen world. They are drawn by John Higgins, original Watchmen colourist, and written by Len Wein. Back in the 1970s and earlier Wein would have been working on this kind of lurid fare, so this must be an amusing journey down memory-lane for him. I will need to read more of them before passing any real judgement on them.

More Before Watchmen chit chat coming soon… though not too soon, as I am skipping the second issues of Silk Spectre and Comedian.

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Nite Owl image source

Ozymandias image source

Three Issues of "Before Watchmen"

Minutemen #1, by Darwyn Cooke
Silk Spectre #1, by Darwyn Cooke and Amanda Conner
Comedian #1, by Brian Azzarello and J.G. Jones

Watchmen is the name of a popular comic written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons. If you have any interest in comics then you have almost certainly read it. It imagines what the world would be like if there really were weirdoes who dress up in funny costumes to go out and beat up criminals. It also has metafictional elements, being partly a commentary on the development of comics themselves up to the point it was created in the early 1980s.

People really like Watchmen. I will not go on about why people like it - if you have read it you probably know why already, and if you have not then I urge you to just buy or borrow a copy and read it. But people generally have a real fondness for the comic, which for many of them was a gateway into the idea that comics could be for adults while still referencing ideas originally appearing in comics aimed at younger people. So now, as the comics industry teeters towards extinction, it is not too surprising that DC Comics, Watchmen's publisher, have finally decided to try and milk its popularity by bringing out some more Watchmen titles - a series of prequels published under the collective title of Before Watchmen. Nor is it too surprising that this move has been greeted by many with a sense that some kind of terrible crime against art was being committed.

In some respects, the hostility felt by many to these prequels is a bit precious. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons did not create the characters of their book from nothing, but rather took a number of pre-existing characters, changed their name, gave them more depth, and threw them together into the Watchmen narrative. But creating these prequels does still seem a bit cheap and tawdry, a rather sad attempt by DC to wring a few more dollars from a book with the great virtue of being wonderfully self-contained. Given that so much of Watchmen itself is devoted to fleshing out the characters' back-stories through flashbacks of one kind or another, many wondered legitimately what exactly these prequels were bringing to the table - would they just rehash stuff that was already in the original book, would they ponderously expand on things that were dealt with lightly by Moore and Gibbons, or would they piss everybody off by daringly presenting us with material that conflicted with things that appeared in the original work?

Well, now we kind of know. Three issues of the prequels have appeared, with some considerable talents involved in their production. The results are a bit mixed, but fundamentally none of these titles are essential. The most enjoyable is Minutemen by Darwyn Cooke. That uses the framing device of the memoirs of one of the first generation masked heroes (also featured in original Watchmen) to bring us back to the pulpy adventures of him and his fellow fighters of crime back in the late 1930s. It meshes perfectly with Cooke's own retro-sensibility, his art conjuring up an image of the past that is both naïve and also aware of its naivety - you catch enough glimpses in the art and narrative to know that all is not actually rosy back in the golden age of the superheroes.

The other two titles are less interesting. Silk Spectre focuses on the two women (mother and daughter) who at different types adopted that moniker, but ends up being an unengaging tale of youthful revolt against an overbearing parent. The relative slightness of this title is particularly disappointing, given that it deals with two of the more interesting and complex characters of original Watchmen, with Laurie (the daughter) in particular being one of the more human of that book's characters. The first issue of Comedian, meanwhile, is a surprisingly bland look at what one of Moore and Gibbons' more bad-ass characters got up to in the early 1960s. It turns out he killed Marilyn Monroe, at Jackie Kennedy's request, in a slightly so-what manner. And contradicting something implied (but not directly stated) in original Watchmen, we discover that the Comedian did not kill JFK himself, nor was he even involved in any plot to kill the president. Having a scene in which an arch-cynic like the Comedian is shown being sad because of Kennedy's death seems like a deliberate attempt to deflate a character who originally appealed because of his amoral nastiness.

One thing that surprises me about all this is that each of the Before Watchmen titles is itself part one of a four- or six-issue limited series. And there are four more titles to come, as well as a single-issue epilogue. So DC are taking original Watchmen, first published as a twelve-issue limited series, and are producing 35 issues of prequels. That really is too much, even if the material was better than what has come out so far. I cannot but feel that DC missed a bit of an opportunity here. What could have been more interesting would have been a series of issues, each focussing on an individual Watchmen character (perhaps with different writers and artists) but with a linked thread running through them that resolved at the end in some way. Of course, that would basically have made the prequels a knock-off of Alan Moore's 1963 (a relatively underappreciated because un-reprinted limited series pastiching the early 1960s comics of the Marvel explosion) as well as a sullying of the legacy of original Watchmen, which would have made the whole project doubly transgressive.

As is, I really cannot see myself bothering to read all of the Before Watchmen issues. As a first-issue-fiend I will probably pick up each title's first issue and then stop. Of the ones that have come out so far, maybe I will keep going with Minutemen, but even that is not certain.

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Image sources:

Minutemen (Wikipedia)

Silk Spectre (Wikipedia)

Comedian (Wikipedia)