After Watchmen: My Recommendation
March 13th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
DC Comics has a new initiative called “After Watchmen” which is geared towards folks who have seen the movie, maybe read the graphic novel, and are looking for something to follow up with. It’s a great idea, but somewhat flawed, in that it promotes only DC/Vertigo/WildStorm/Time Warner properties (which isn’t wrong on their part…it’s completely natural and acceptable). But, I think there are some of us in the multiverse that are willing to recommend other books that might be…more apropos in light of our experience reading/seeing Watchmen. For example, Tom Spurgeon, whom I’ve linked to many times, recommends Palestine. Unfortunately, this was the only example I could find immediately, but I’m fairly certain that there are more out there.
With that said, here’s my choice:
For some reason, whenever I think of Black Hole, I think back to a few interviews by Alan Moore where he’s said that he never intended for creators post-Watchmen to start off a sub-sub-genre of violent comics. Here, check out this excerpt from an interview he did with Salon.com:
“Watchmen” had a major impact on comics and the way they portray violence, turning the industry toward something grittier. Is that what you intended?
I don’t think we knew what to expect. We thought we were just doing an interesting twist upon the superhero story and it was only around about issue No. 3 when we suddenly realized that the way that we were telling the story was becoming very interesting and multilayered with a lot of new things that we had never done before. At that point perhaps we did start to have high hopes for what the book might achieve — maybe naively we thought, “Once everybody has seen ‘Watchmen,’ this will open the door for other people to free their imaginations up and do equally progressive works that will take the medium into countless other directions.”
But that isn’t the way the culture tends to work. You’ll get something like Harvey Kurtzman’s excellent “Mad” comics that, while being wonderful in itself, will condemn the humor comics genre to 50 years of magazines that are named after some form of mental illness and which feature stuff that is pretty much the same as “Mad.” But I guess that is always going to happen. You’ve just got to keep hoping for these kind of influence breakthroughs and the stuff that follows on from them is probably only of secondary consequence, you know. I mean, if “Watchmen” hadn’t come along, something else would have come along that would have been as violent or as dark and that would have done much the same thing to a lot of the comics. I’m more or less just beating myself up about it.
So, with that in mind, I tend to think that Black Hole is, in Moore’s words, progressive and imaginative. I like to tell customers that it’s “X-men if it were real,” which is a gross oversimplification, but it sells books, and that book deserves to be read. By everyone. Sean Collins and Dick Hyacinth have both discussed the book on Savage Critic(s) and they are better qualified to really discuss the book in detail. For now, just grab Black Hole and see where the comics industry, in Moore’s words, could have gone. It’s not a bad place.
Extra: Alan Moore discussing Watchmen on Comics Brittannia:
Extra 2: GQ Magazine picks 20 GN’s to read after Watchmen. Thanks to Tom for the link.
