Each page was built around a repeating sixteen-panel grid structure that allowed Miller to slice and dice time and motion in a way that hadn’t been seen since Master of Kung Fu or Walt Simonson’s Manhunter strip. The closest cinematic equivalent was the split-screen technique, but there were only so many simultaneously moving images an audience could handle. A Frank Miller action sequence, on the other hand, could be comprehended not only as an analog full-page design but as a digital sequence—an animated mosaic of sequential tiles.
Tightly paced and timed cuts brought static images closer to animation than ever before. Miller might linger with a head shot of a single character over a dozen or more measured panels, focusing down on the maddeningly subtle gestures and changes of expression that helped build a tension so intolerable it could only be released like pressurized steam as an iconic full-page or double-page poster spread showing Batman and Robin in eye-popping visceral action. Miller paced the close editing of text and image to provide a galloping rhythmic beat, timing panels like the breaths and pauses of an artfully orchestrated heavy-metal symphony. Ever the innovator, he had developed another new art style for this project, and the line was blocky and aggressive, thrusting forward relentlessly through scene after scene of heart-stopping narrative choreography. From beginning to end, it was a tour de force that was not only conceptually bold but also tough and unpretentious enough to attract attention beyond its first enthusiastic audience of delirious geeks, who felt that Batman had finally received the truly serious treatment he’d always deserved. The book revived DC’s fortunes and put the company at the forefront of an astonishing new wave of masterpiece-level material.
After decades of hallucinogenic sci-fi, anodyne detective stories, mocking irony, and formula, the Batman had returned to doing what he did best in a bleak world that was easily recognizable from any nightly news broadcast as our own, on steroids and PCP.
The Dark Knight Returns opened with the sixty-year-old Bruce Wayne’s grudging survival following a race car crash, and it was clear from page 1 that here was a hero without a mission, and a hollow sham existence lacking in meaning. Without his Batman identity, which he’d retired after the death of Robin years previously, Wayne had become an aimless drinker, flirting with death while exchanging acidic repartee with his elderly butler. Outside, Gotham City boiled in a rising fever heat. The Joker had been reformed by a trendy psychiatrist who spouted pop-psych jargon and flaunted his successes on TV. The first image was of a burning, still speeding race car, and Miller took that elemental velocity as his gauge and standard.
The book was haunted by an all-pervasive media presence that marked its eighties origins. On dozens of pages, the sixteen-grid became rows of TV screens, each with a different media pundit spouting a different interpretation of the book’s unfolding events, from the self-styled Dr. Ruth–like “sex expert” (who was first to die when the return of Batman triggered the murderous comeback of his archenemy, the Joker), to the right-wing and left-wing commentators, pop-psych, weather, and cultural analysts, and vox pops that peppered the action. The device of the multiple screens provided a recurring ironic Greek chorus in The Dark Knight Returns, satirizing the attempts of jabbering “experts” to explain or package the archetypal epic forces erupting all around them, which escalated from the first book’s urban crime wave to all-out nuclear Götterdämmerung in The Dark Knight Falls. That fourth and final volume brought Batman’s struggle into the realm of myth and symbol as he faced down Superman for an apocalyptic battle royal on Crime Alley, where Bruce Wayne’s parents had been gunned down at the beginning of the Batman story.
The mercury rose as Miller gathered speed: Regular weather reports and carefully repeated establishing shots of the city’s gargoyle-haunted rooftops and water towers blurring under a white-hot sky kept up the pressure until the storm broke halfway through, heralding Bruce Wayne’s return to action as Batman, wearing the light blue and gray of the New Look and the Adam West years, even down to the yellow chest oval. Miller rationalized this as a target designed to draw fire to the hero’s chest, which was revealed to be heavily reinforced under the familiar winged symbol. For many readers, this was Adam West, grown older in a more oppressive and violent contemporary world. By issue 2, the yellow oval had disappeared, Robin had arrived, and the bat uniform got progressively darker and more somber before its final incarnation as a chunky suit of armor. Batman’s equipment was put through the same steroid filter, with the Batmobile emerging as a massive steel-plated tank with iron treads in place of wheels.
Miller’s Batman was a monumental physical presence who seemed hewn and hacked from granite and India ink. His Robin was new; a fifteen-year-old girl named Carrie Kelly who deftly subverted the Wertham dynamic into a quirky, funny, and warm father-daughter configuration. He added a camp and decadent Weimar-era menace to the Joker, bringing a twisted hypersexuality and feral horror to the crime clown’s arsenal of personality defects.
The thoroughly modern Batman of The Dark Knight Returns was an antiestablishment rebel and ruthless pragmatist, but Miller’s Superman was an idealistic government stooge in the pay of an all but mummified Ronald Reagan, president forever and ever, amen. A memorable sequence of panels introducing Superman to the story depicted a visual dissolve of the flag on the White House roof, where the rippling stripes of Old Glory morphed into an abstract close-up detail of the famous S shield. Miller’s Superman seemed a wry comment on the yuppie makeover of Superman. It was easy to imagine the clean-lined, hunky Clark Kent of John Byrne’s Man of Steel revamp growing into this compromised champion of the powers that be, serving the letter of the law, no matter how corrupt its administration became.
Most important, The Dark Knight Returns was good. This two-hundred-page slab of grown-up, layered, and ambitious grand statement was no easily dismissed throwaway story for children. It was as formally ambitious as any novel, as well constructed and exciting as the best Hollywood blockbuster; as personal as a poem, yet populist. It was hundreds of hand-drawn pages from a uniquely gifted young artist who was both determined to realize the full potential of his beloved art form and blessed with the talent, discipline, and vision to make that possible. Miller blended his influences from manga and bandes dessinées into a voice that was so definitively American, so flinty and self-assured, it became the sound of an era. Here was the new way to do superheroes. The deadlock was broken.
With a taste of Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and Taxi Driver, inspired allegedly in part by Miller’s own experiences as a young artist in the crime-ridden New York of the early eighties (including a mugging that some say provided the rage-fuel for this intense and driven piece of work), the artist single-handedly rebuilt the Batmobile, transforming High Camp Crusader to Dark Knight and paving the way for a grown-up acceptance of superheroes and the movies that were to follow.
As remarkable as The Dark Knight Returns was, the show had barely begun. The Dark Age was approaching the blue-sky peak of its trajectory and the purest expression of its spirit.
With revolution in the air, Alan Moore announced a new series that would change the way readers looked at superheroes forever.
The book was to be called Watchmen.
The “Watchman on the walls of Western civilization” was how the late novelist Kathy Acker generously and somewhat hyperbolically described Alan Moore. Watchmen had some of its roots in Moore’s love of the vast, intricate self-reflecting fictions of Thomas Pynchon and the intricately structured films of Nicolas Roeg, like Don’t Look Now. It had a lot in common with the work of Peter Greenaway too, recalling the British director’s coded, perfectionist universes of puzzles, tricks, architecture, and symmetrical doubling. With Watchmen, Moore delivered a devastating “follow this” to American comic-book superheroes. In its clinical artistry and its cold dissection of self-serving US foreign policy decisions in the guise of an alternate history of superhumans and masked crime fighters, it was delivered directly to the heart of DC Comics itself and allowed to
detonate there in the heart of the Man. Watchmen was a Pop Art extinction-level event, a dinosaur killer and wrecker of worlds. By the time it was over—and its reverberations still resound—the equation was stark for superhero stories: Evolve or die.
Watchmen began its stately, assured march toward the Time magazine Best 100 Novels list when Moore and British artist Dave Gibbons pitched DC a radical new take on a stable of characters that the publisher had acquired when Charlton Comics went bust in 1985. They included Steve Ditko’s faceless Question, one of his early stabs at developing a ruthlessly objectivist crime fighter; Captain Atom; the Buddhist-influenced Thunderbolt; the gadget hero Blue Beetle; and Nightshade, who’d been cofeatured in the captain’s book. Three of these were Ditko creations, and Watchmen would honor its debt to the artist with a reappropriation and intelligent deployment of Ditko’s metronomic nine-panel-page grids.
When Moore’s synopsis arrived, it outlined a twelve-issue murder mystery set against a familiar backdrop of Cold War nuclear paranoia, but located in an alternate history where the appearance of one single American superhuman in 1959 had deformed and destabilized global politics, economies, and culture itself. Constructed to be a complete novel, the original idea left DC’s Charlton acquisitions in a position where their stories had been brought to logical conclusions, rendering them more or less unusable, and so Moore and Gibbons were asked to rethink their pitch, using new analogues of the original Charlton cast. In the process of reinvention and reexamination, both men created a masterpiece: a complete and coherent work of fiction that would have been impossible with the limitations of the originals.
In Moore’s hands, the atomic-powered Captain Atom was rebuilt as Doctor Manhattan, a godlike blue naturist who wandered around naked for most of Watchmen’s three hundred pages, in another first for superheroes. Superman had worn his underpants on the outside; Manhattan dispensed with pants altogether. Moore rationalized the superman’s decision to let his balls hang low with the argument that a being of limitless power and intellect would have neither the desire to wear clothes nor any requirement for warmth. Tell that to the magistrate.
Manhattan was the only superpowered being in Watchmen’s world. The book’s other principals were all nonpowered crime fighters in the “mystery man” mold, with each character representing a bitter twist on a different superhero archetype, from Manhattan’s dehumanized cosmic god to Rorschach’s disturbed masked vigilante. Nite Owl was sixties Batman gone to seed—impotent and overweight, with his Owlship gathering dust alongside the rest of the owl-themed weaponry and equipment in his disused secret basement HQ. The Silk Spectre stood for every second-generation “legacy” superhero, from Black Canary to Kid Flash. Rounding out the cast were the world’s stupidest smartest man, Ozymandias, and the Comedian, an amoral mercenary representing the supersoldier type and the less salubrious elements of American foreign policy in general.
Watchmen would subvert all expectations, we were told, and beginning with the title, it did just that: There was no superteam called the Watchmen. The name came from the epigram quoted at the beginning of the book: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes,” or “Who watches the watchmen?,” written by the poet and satirist Juvenal of ancient Rome. This implied an understanding that “watchmen” equaled “superheroes” equaled “America.”
The “watch” invoked the nuclear Doomsday Clock, the book’s primary repeating motif, which lent its shape to the circular structure of the narrative. The so-called Doomsday Clock has been maintained since 1947 by the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago as a symbolic warning, its minute hand set closer to or farther from the midnight position, depending on the current likelihood of global catastrophe. In 1985, when Moore was writing the book, the clock was set at 11:57, but that would have spoiled his and Gibbons’s injury to the eye motif, so in Watchmen, the minute hand stood at a more positively secure 11:55. (Following the murder of the Comedian, which launched the plot, five central characters progressed toward the midnight of Watchmen’s conclusion.)
Continuing the innovations of The Dark Knight Returns, the cover designs for Watchmen broke new ground by depicting a close-up of a single significant object; this doubled as the opening image of the narrative, so that each chapter began immediately on the cover.
The title Watchmen was written in a vertical strip on the left-hand side, reminiscent of police tape sealing a crime scene, and the first cover showed a detail on a smiley face badge lying in a pool of blood in the gutter. There was a single oddly shaped splash of blood at a 330-degree angle—or five-minutes-to position—across Smiley’s right eye.
The image of the circular “face” was repeated across a multitude of graphic representations throughout the story, as a pulsing countdown toward utopia or Armageddon. Here it was a close-up reflection in a round goggle, with a fingertip smear drawn through dust on the lens to make the “minute hand”; there it was the moon, with a rising drift of smoke across the “right eye” cockpit window of the hovering Owlship, or the smudge of disintegrating human bodies, scoured to black powder in the same terrible five-to-midnight configuration. The scarred smiley motif also appeared as the murder victim’s own disfigured face. The Comedian’s scar was revealed, in harrowing flashback, as a gruesome reminder of his final encounter with a young Vietnamese girl he’d made pregnant. Callously dismissing her—“THAT’S JUST WHAT I’M GONNA DO … FORGET YOU. FORGET YOUR CRUDDY LITTLE COUNTRY, ALL OF IT.”—on the way to the first chopper out of Saigon, the brutal “hero” provoked the anger of a violated nation.
“I THINK YOU REMEMBER ME AND MY COUNTRY, I THINK YOU REMEMBER US AS LONG AS YOU LIVE.”
Cracking a bottle against the table, Glasgow pub style, she slashed the Comedian’s face, only to receive a hot bullet in the belly for her troubles. It was as if Captain America had gunned down a teenager carrying his child. The scar, the streak of blood, the minute hand, and the nuclear split in time were the cracks in the façade of the American Dream, and here were America’s heroes, baring at last their unexamined hearts to the microscopic scrutiny of Moore and Gibbons.
The first page, like all the others, was laid out on Ditko-vintage nine-panel grids. This was especially appropriate to the introduction of lead character Rorschach, Watchmen’s Question–Mr. A analogue, who dragged the idea of the masked crime fighter into the dark alleyways of abnormal psychopathology, depicting the urban vigilante as a paranoid, antisocial loner. In spite of Moore’s efforts to make Rorschach hard to like, the character’s inflexible moral code and refusal to compromise his principles turned him into the book’s star. In the gray-toned ambiguity of Watchmen’s bleak moral universe, Rorschach, with his dogged determination and clarity of purpose, was closest in spirit to the classic comic-book superhero—and, it must be observed, closest in temperament to his author, who opened the first historic issue of his masterpiece with a slow reverse zoom up from the smiley pin in the gutter to a broken penthouse apartment window overlooking a busy New York Avenue, accompanied by torn-edged caption extracts from “Rorschach’s journal”:
(illustration credit 13.2)
“DOG CaRCaSS In aLLeY THIS MORnING, TIRe TReAD On BURST STOMaCH. THIS CITY IS aFRaID OF Me. I HaVe SeeN ITS TRUe FaCe.”
The most prominent element of the picture was the smiley face badge in its puddle of blood, poised on the edge of the drain’s abyss, swept on a tide of gore, with its dumb, ignorant grin intact.
Panel 2 lifted us higher into the air above the drain so that now we could see the cracked flagstones of a city sidewalk. The badge was small but still clearly visible below; sunshine yellow contrasting against a sea of red. With ankles and shoes entering from the top of the panel, a man began to walk through the watery blood as it was sluiced off the curb by a jet from a hose. The journal entries continued:
“THe STReeTS aRe eXTenDeD GUTTeRS anD THe GUTTeRS aRE FULL OF BLOOD anD WHen THe DRaInS FINALLY SCaB OVeR aLL THe VeRMIn WILL DROWn.”
The
third panel, the last of the top tier of three, elevated our point of view to twenty feet above the sidewalk scene, with the drain, the gutter, the now tiny badge, the puddle of blood, the angry man with the hose rinsing the flagstones, and the second man, marching from top to bottom through the red puddle, with red hair and a homemade banner reading THE END IS NIGH—a detail with its own cascade of double and triple meanings.
“THe aCCUMULATeD FILTH OF aLL THeIR SeX aND MURDeR WILL FOaM UP aBOUT THeIR WaISTS aND aLL THe WHOReS anD POLITICIaNS WILL LOOK UP aND SHOUT ‘SaVe US’ … aND I’LL LOOK DOWn aND WHISPeR ‘NO.’ ”
In panel 4, both men were small and far below. The red-haired man with the placard left bloody footprints as he marched across the swirling mix of blood and water. An oddly designed delivery truck with a pyramid logo could be seen on the road, sending the first subtle signal that this seemingly familiar world of smiley badges and religious nuts might not be what it seemed. The accompanying captions talked about following “… In THe FOOTSTePS OF GOOD MeN LIKE MY FATHER anD PRESIDeNT TRUMaN.” (Rorschach never knew his violent, absent father, and President Harry S. Truman gave the order to drop the atomic bomb, the specter of which haunted the book.)
By the time we reached panel 5, the figures were antlike, although the blood and the placard man’s trail of footprints were clearly visible as the caption rolled on with phrases such as “FoLLoWeD The DROPPInGS … THe TRaIL LeD OVeR A PReCIPICe …”