To further identify the self- conscious intentionality of the cultural criticism of these two works, both Miller and Moore enact an analysis of the medium as it relates to other mediums and itself. In The Dark Knight Returns, Miller transforms comic book panels into television screens to represent media coverage of events in the series. Identified by McLuhan as a cool medium like comic books (a medium requiring participation), television news, with its talking heads directly facing the reader, doesn’t fare too well. Television personalities rapidly transition from stories of horrific violence to stories of uplifting human interest with affect to match each.27 The civilized notion of equal time opens up the possibility that everyone has a valid opinion; evil is pathologized as the result of mental illness that can be cured, and Batman’s notions of law and order are ridiculed.28Ultimately, the panel as screen is still a panel, and Miller, therefore, potentially levels similar criticism at comic books (now with no real morally centered heroes and a love of excessive violence). Much of the negativity has to do with the particulars of news coverage on television, but the series still forces the reader to contemplate the way that comic books works like television and participate with culture. Tim Blackmore states, “Miller’s unprecedented 16-panel grid works cinematically to produce a dark, claustrophobic world. The use of the confining screen also reveals Miller’s view of the TV generation: they can be convinced of anything with ease. The regular, unbreakable grid, is a symbol of how ordered and small the lives of people are” (43). The reference to the comic book medium is much more direct in Watchmen. Moore uses elements that run along with the superhero story that are: parallel (such as Hollis Mason, the first
Nite Owl, killed as an old man), meta- textual (such Tales of the Black Freighter comic book reader at a newsstand), and para- textual (such as excepts from the book Under the Hood or the newspaper The New Frontiersman, included at the end of each issue). In the world of Watchmen where superheroes are part of history, there are no superhero comic books and pirate comic books are the rage. With a youth reading the comic at a newsstand, panels of Watchmen represent the panels of his comic book, and text from the comic book overlaps scenes from the main Watchmen story line. Tales of the Black Freighter features a mariner who survives the destruction of his own ship by the Black Freighter and builds a raft of human bodies to travel home and warn his hometown about the Black Freighter. When he arrives home, he kills three people, including his wife, who he mistakenly identifies as the crew of the Black Freighter. At the end, the mysterious ship arrives to claim the mariner.
While the story resonates with certain other stories in Watchmen, the most salient features are the traditional newsstand context for comic book reading and porous membrane between the “reality” of the Watchmen world and the content of period horror comic books. The sense of comic books in each is potentially dark but also speaks to the power of a medium that encourages participation and a postmodern sense of constructed reality in line with new traditionality.29
Although both The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen are regularly credited with bringing realism to superhero comic books, realism is a slippery term, referring to artistic conventions that create a reality effect. Certainly, these stories lack most of the driven plot situations of the Comics Code era (such as Catwoman threatening Robin’s life so that Batman will marry her). However, as already mentioned, both creators work with existing characters and explore a thematic landscape created by the conventional superhero story. In each case, the illustration recalls more abstract (or as Scott McCloud would identify it, iconographic) art typically identified with the traditional work of illustrators such as Joe Shuster and Jack Kirby. While the color palate is more sophisticated, with both the use of secondary colors and monochromatic blends,30images are drawn to straddle a fence between a real world context and the abstraction (like traditional art does). Through his tenure on Daredevil, Miller seemed to be part of an industry- wide march toward greater realism ini-tiated by Neal Adams and John Byrne and later continued by Arthur Adams and Jim Lee.
However, with Ronin and then especially with The Dark Knight Returns, Miller incorporates the influences of Moebius and certain manga artists (Groth and Fiore 59) known for their more abstract and symbolic styles. Batman and Superman are block- like, often accentuating their size and creating striking shadow effects, and other characters like the president are near caricatures; as inker, Klaus Janson accentuates the rough edges of Miller’s pencils with jagged edges to lines and in some cases, lines on figures are barely closed. Dave Gibbons’s style is abstract as well, in a way that even better recalls the iconographic line drawings of superhero comic book pasts. While he develops exhaustively mapped cityscapes and heavily detailed backgrounds, his figures are rendered simply and iconographically in the tradition of Curt Swan’s illustration. While complex shadow- effects are sometimes used, all characters, especially in costume, resemble Silver Age superheroes in their design from coloring to cos-tume. Details are important as indicated by covers of the individual issues, close- up ren-derings of images contained at the beginning of the issues.31The page layout of The Dark Knight has already been mentioned, but Watchmen calls attention to its own construction with the “Fearful Symmetry” chapter, symmetrical in a methodical way (that recalls the construction similarities between oral poetry and comic book page layout). A more symbolic sense of the superhero world is developed with each superhero serving as a visual allusion
to other superheroes in the history of superhero comic books. Likewise, it reinforces the circular reading experience by layering certain images with subsequent new meanings. The blood spatter on the Comedian’s smiley face pin (a significant combination of symbols right there) recurs many times throughout the text; for instance, the embrace of the newsstand owner and comic books reader (as illuminated by the detonation of Ozymandias’s doomsday device) resembles the blood spatter and adds to its meaning. The smiley face itself is repli-cated with varying degrees of specificity, from the doomsday clock to the Galle crater on Mars to the smiley face on the sweatshirt of the assistant at The New Frontiersman. (The assistant drops ketchup on his sweatshirt in the exact same spatter configuration as on the Comedian’s pin.) For Moore (even more than Miller), superhero comic books are something other than other mediums that enable the creation and interplay of meaning in a way that extends beyond the literate world to encompass new traditionality.
In my estimation, Richard Reynolds description of Watchmen as a work that “transcends the accumulated myths through which superhero texts are read” (117) doesn’t work com-pletely. As noted, these two works seem to follow the pattern established in the early work of Miller and Moore and radically revise the superhero. However, as indicated by Moore in his estimation of The Dark Knight Returns, there is a double- play at work: “Everything is exactly the same, except for the fact that it’s all totally different” (italics are mine to balance Moore’s end of sentence emphasis, qtd. In Pearson vii). Like superhero comic book creators before them, their work is much more evolutionary than revolutionary. In addition to build-ing on the variation ethic firmly established within the industry (see chapter 6), they make more formal the narrative analysis of conventions particular to the medium and new tradi-tionality. While the resolutions of these series do not make definitive claims about the place of tribalism or bricolage in the Modern Age, they advance the sophistication of their craft and the self- conscious approach to the medium for an adult audience. As comic book his-torian Roger Sabin notes, “The effect of Dark Knight and Watchmen was ... not to revolu-tionize comics, as has often been supposed, but to introduce a new readership to these
‘graphic novelistic’ possibilities” (165). In addition to the newly developed direct market for these series mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, the expensive issues in each series, printed on high- quality paper, were soon after bound and marketed as graphic novels; as Sabin points out, the industry solicited reviews from mainstream critics and created adver-tising campaigns that extended beyond the direct market (165). As far as DC was concerned, the ultimate end for these works was general respectability, and the elusive marker of main-stream popularity and high culture : the bookstore. Certainly, the industry itself was impressed with The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen winning multiple Eisner, Kirby, Eagle, and Harvey Awards but this was extended in several notable ways. Together with Art Speigelman’s Maus, these two works led to the major articles in The Atlantic Monthly, Time, and Newsweek previously mentioned in this chapter (and arguably, eventually led to the continuing coverage of graphic novels in The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, and Enter-tainment Weekly). The Dark Knight Returns and Miller’s subsequent Batman: Year One became the new standard by which all Batman projects were judged not only for comic books but also for tentpole film projects (consider both Burton’s and Nolan’s Batman films as well as other similarly themed superhero films).32A special category was created so that Watchmen might receive the Hugo award (for science fiction literature). More significantly in terms of mainstream recognition, The Dark Knight Returns was identified by Time as one of the ten best graphic novels of all time, and Watchmen one of the one hundred best novels (not graphic novels) since 1923. Since so much of its traditional elements came from its
position on the margin of cultural respectability, this seems to suggest the end of superhero comic books’ connection to the traditional.
While it does do this in some ways, it is important to remember we have been working with self- conscious traditionality (or new traditionality) that technically does not require a marginal status to be traditional. However, there are several factors that cause superhero comics to remain central to at least the American experience of graphic novels and yet still outside the high culture of literacy. As previously mentioned, the direct market was a boon to DC and Marvel, struggling to maintain their hold in their long- standing markets such as newsstands and drug stores. They found success with releases intended as comic book store exclusives such as Marvel’s Dazzler #1. Eventually, this would lead to paradigm- shifting market experiments like The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. However, the direct market also had the potential to limit rather than expand the adult readership: “if the Direct Market can be said to have rescued the comic book from almost certain death, there are those who would say that the comics- shop distribution network ultimately isolated comics and their readers from the rest of the world” (Dean 49). With print technology much more accessible, black and white publications grew in number at the comic book stores, especially after the unexpected monetary success of the superhero/ninja Eastman and Laird’s parody Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This created a string of variations that were artistically protected as parodies but really were just variations on the same story: Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters, Pre- Teen Dirty- Gene Kung- Fu Kangaroos, and so on. As Gary Groth mentions, the creators’ rights movement may have intended to recognize creators and encourage cre-ativity, but it reinforced many of the business practices of the traditional comic book indus-try:
Eastman and Laird fulfilled the failed promise of Siegel and Shuster, resulting in a whole generation of “independent” creators with more righteousness than talent... This sense of entitlement was further exacerbated in 1988 when the Creator Bill of Rights (authored by Scott McCloud , et al.) debuted.... Careerist motivations took precedence over the love of art in the alternative realism, so in 1987 you had the twin disasters of a declining market for alternative comics — due to the B&W bust — and a proliferation of untalented entre-preneurial artistes enter into the market in droves [61].
Although they now identified themselves as artists, the creators that came to the fore in the direct market boom of the 1980s were thinking more like publishers (as they were work -ers who wanted to be rich). As Dick Deppey describes, this means responding to what is currently popular and producing more of the same: teenage, mutant, ninja superheroes (69).
Since no one was certain what black and white title might be the next big thing, comic book stores bought excessive amounts of new titles, as did comic book collectors. Of course, a collector’s market is a financial situation that works against principles of traditionality (where the first hand encounter is with the story rather than with issues), with variant foil covers immediately put into plastic slipcases to protect the quality of the collectible.33 How-ever, as suggested by the Groth quotation, the black and white publishers (and several other independent publishers) would ultimately fail as comic book stores and comic book collectors soon realized that they didn’t have enough money to buy everything. Since the rapid growth of these overcommitted publishers could not be sustained, they went bankrupt (often with their superhero line- ups purchased by other companies). The failure of these publishers (and the unintended success of an older corporate design to the industry) didn’t stop others in the 1990s from declaring their independence from Marvel. Although benefits were now
much better than in the day of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Marvel still didn’t allow full creative control or ownership of creations. A group of Marvels’ top creators, including Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane, left to form their own comic groups: Wildstorm and Image, respectively.34 Both comic groups enjoyed initial success (with Frank Miller and Alan Moore writing for both) but produced largely derivative superhero material. McFarlane would eventually run Image much like the big two, denying creators creative ownership that he had previously promised. Both new groups had financial hard times, and Wildstorm was eventually sold to DC. Ultimately, the problem was a reliance on the old style of comic book delivery: in monthly, pamphlet- style books to sellers who relied largely in monthly sales. The new level of artistic realism was impossible to produce in that time frame, and executives were former creators inexperienced at managing; comic book consumers hoping to buy monthly were frustrated with late deliveries of their titles. DC and Marvel still worked through the severely limited direct market of the 1990s but recognized that the new important destination for their superhero stories was as collected volumes in the bookstores and as always, licensed properties for other media. While many of the elements that would seem to lead superhero comic books away from traditionalism collapse upon themselves, there were many factors in play. Nevertheless, conditioned by the culture, superhero comic book creators tend to replicate the same stories and practices in situations that might seem likely to free them from those conventions. While the introduction of the comic book as graphic novel gives the medium a literate- culture level of respectability, we need to recognize that the audience that now seeks them out in Barnes and Noble has changed. As will be discussed in chapter 8, the ideas of digital culture first began to filter into the mainstream in the 1980s, and, as Foley suggests, the modes of thinking in traditional and digital cultures are remarkably sim-ilar. The growth of the direct market and bookstore market for superhero comic books coincided with the growth of: personal computing (DOS in 1981, the Macintosh in 1984, Windows in 1985, and tablet computing in 1993); the internet and related applications (Yahoo in 1994, Google in 1996, Wikipedia in 2001, and Facebook in 2005); and video gaming (Zork in 1980, Pole Position in 1983, Doom and Myst in 1993, and Grand Theft Auto in 1997). While the particular significances of some of these events will be discussed in the next chapter, here it is sufficient to state that graphic novels did not necessarily become more literate but that mainstream culture became more new traditional. The direct market wasn’t something that “isolated comics and their readers from the rest of the world,” because the world became more like comic book readers and would approve of the aesthetics of superhero comic books more than ever.
To conclude this chapter, I will briefly mention the subsequent trajectories of Miller’s and Moore’s careers in order to comment on how their examinations of traditional culture has continued to influence their work; in short, each has stressed different aspects of tradi-tionality in their work. Both Miller and Moore developed a contentious relationship with DC; Miller primarily over DC’s then new rating system, and Moore over the rating system and the use of the properties he created for DC. Both left the publisher to work elsewhere;
Miller with Dark Horse, and Moore with his own publishing house. In the interview col-lection The New Comics, Groth and Fiore were quick to suggest that both creators had intentions to move beyond superheroes but this seems to expose Groth’s bias against super-heroes more than actual facts. While Miller developed a hyper- violent, “comic noir” style with his well- known Sin City series and Moore developed several alternative projects, such as the erotica Lost Girls, both found themselves again working with superheroes in the 1990s, thanks to Marvel, Image, and Wildstorm. Miller worked with characters who made him
famous at Marvel, with Elektra Lives Again and Daredevil: Man without Fear, both of which accentuated the crime story aspect of his writing, with the superhero mostly in street clothes.
Together with guest work on Todd McFarlane’s Spawn and his own Sin City collections, Miller developed a notable attachment to the tribal “savage” out of place in overgrown civ-ilization. This sentiment reached a height in 1998 with 300 (the tragic and noble battle of Spartans unsupported by Athenian democracy) and in 2001 with The Dark Knight Strikes Again (a story of Batman’s defeat of a corrupt U.S. government and a parody of what the comic book industry did with ideas from The Dark Knight Returns). More self- referential and obviously militant, Miller’s work has become less palatable to his fans as have his post–
9/11 sentiments against Arab nations (in an National Public Radio interview comparing U.S.
citizens whiny about the war on terror to whiny Athenians).35In many ways, Miller seems to be less self- conscious about the type of analysis that he enacted in The Dark Knight
citizens whiny about the war on terror to whiny Athenians).35In many ways, Miller seems to be less self- conscious about the type of analysis that he enacted in The Dark Knight