Comics Studies’ Next Wave

Ben Novotny Owen (bio)
Ohio State University

A review of Hoberek, Andrew. Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2014.

Andrew Hoberek’s Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics asks about the literary status of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s influential comic book series, Watchmen, to structure the four main topics of his book: the comic’s complex formal properties, the relationship of the work and its creators to the comic book industry, its implicit and explicit politics, and its impact on contemporary literary fiction in the United States. The framing idea for the book is that there have been substantive changes in the concept of literature in the United States and Britain since the mid-1980s. Looking at these changes through the lens of a single comic, even a well-regarded and much-read one, allows Hoberek to map the points of exchange between mainstream superhero comics and contemporary literary fiction.

In writing this history, Hoberek is characteristic of the current reflective phase of comics studies. Having established comics as a valuable field of study mainly (though not solely) within literary studies, scholars are now trying to open up the field to new approaches, and also asking how a comics-centered approach might reshape our understanding of adjacent “comicitous” arts (to use Colin Beineke’s term). Hoberek therefore attends to the formal properties of Watchmen not simply for their own sake, but also “in a way that self-consciously interrogates—rather than taking for granted—the concept of literature” (6). Considering Watchmen’s coda traces with considerable subtlety the afterlife of Watchmen (and the reflexive era of superhero comics it represents) in the work of several contemporary prose fiction writers: Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Díaz, Aimee Bender, and Rainbow Rowell. Hoberek is particularly invested in exchanges between comics and prose in which prose learns something important from the superhero genre. For example, he contrasts the use of superpowers as metaphor for character, which he sees operative in such books as Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, with the subjective examination of the experience of superpowers, which he sees in Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. The latter use—the idea that having a superpower might profoundly alter a person’s perception of the world and sense of self—interests Hoberek because it shows how one of Alan Moore’s primary innovations as a writer of superhero comics in the 1980s finds new life as a means of revivifying not just the appearance, but also the form of contemporary literary fiction. Bender’s attempt to render the experience of having a superpower, “the ability to read the emotions of whoever prepares her food,” leads to experiments with synesthetic prose “as a kind of formal metaphor for the difficulty of writing” about others’ subjectivities (178, 179).

While Considering Watchmen highlights the multiple ways in which the reconfiguration of the superhero genre emblematized by Watchmen creates new possibilities for literary fiction writers, Hoberek’s book is most valuable as a close examination of the work itself, providing three nuanced readings of the form, conditions of production, and politics of text. The first chapter argues that Watchmen “devotes itself to fleshing out the subjectivities of its characters” through experiments with comic book form (39). In this way, Hoberek argues, Watchmen follows the formula of high modernist novelists such as Virginia Woolf, whose “modernist experimentation in fact serves the ends of a more precise psychological realism” (39). In supporting this claim, Hoberek provides an overview of the formal techniques Moore and Gibbons use, particularly in the five issues (of the twelve issue series, later collected as a graphic novel) that focus on each of the main characters. So, in perhaps the most well-known example of Watchmen’s formal reflexivity, the fourth issue tells the story of Dr. Manhattan, for whom time exists as an already-complete whole, and who sees the human perception of time as moving forward as a narrow limitation. The chapter shuttles back and forth between panels depicting moments in the past and the future, all accompanied by Dr. Manhattan’s present tense narration captions. The effect, as Hoberek notes, is to make the character a self-conscious reflection of the experiences of a comics reader attuned to the affordances of the medium, able to flip back and forth or to cross-reference distinct moments in the story out of sequence. Hoberek is on fairly well-trodden ground in this reading, which has become something of a standard in analyses of the properties of the medium. The novelty comes late in the chapter, where Hoberek thinks about how other characters in the story might function as self-conscious reflections of formal properties. His explanation of the Walter Kovacs/Rorschach issue as an attempt to create a rounded comic book character by the deliberate refusal of mono-causal origins (be they heroic, psychoanalytic, or existential) is particularly compelling.

The second chapter looks at Watchmen, and specifically at the conflict between the characters Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias and Walter Kovacs/Rorschach, as “an allegory of the conflict between the work-for-hire creative talent of the comics industry and the corporations which by and large controlled and profited from their creations” (81). Hoberek sees this allegory as unstable, “torn between Moore’s idea of comics as literature, which … allows him to relocate agency to creators, and a more medium-specific celebration of the aesthetics and modes of production of comics themselves” (81). Essentially, the straightforward reading of the comic, that it is about the conflict between an author who has integrity and who controls his or her singular work and the corporation that seeks to market it and profit from it does not fit easily with its somewhat nostalgic vision of an earlier period of comic book production in which comics were regarded as improvisatory collaborations under difficult circumstances, rather than highly polished authorial works.

As Hoberek shows, the conflicting ideas of ownership and authorship here are not simply problems in Watchmen, but also in thinking and writing about comics generally. Open-ended seriality has been one of the hallmarks of comics storytelling in both newspaper strips and comic books since their beginnings. The advent of the graphic novel (a relatively new phenomenon in 1986 and 1987, when Watchmen was first published as a serial) challenged the centrality of seriality to comics. Hoberek is right that Watchmen, like the comics of Chris Ware—and, I have argued elsewhere, a large number of long comics produced by creators whose work spans the rise of the graphic novel—bears “the marks of this tension on its very shape” (100). The fact that single-volume works, mostly by individuals who both write and draw, have dominated critical discussions of comics presents a methodological challenge for comics scholars who wish to look at the medium more broadly, and yet solutions to that problem are far from clear.

Hoberek’s advocacy for thinking about Watchmen as a collaboratively-created work, deeply embedded in the corporate history of comics, is one promising approach. His account of the industrial origins of the series is admirable. Moore initially envisioned Watchmen as a reimagining of characters from the Carlton Comics company, rights to which DC had recently purchased. Vitally for Moore, several of these characters were created by Steve Ditko, the first artist to draw Spider-Man and, like Jack Kirby, an artist who left Marvel after disputes over financial compensation for his work creating company-owned characters. Hoberek shows that Ditko—independent creator and Randian ideologue—serves as a weird doppelganger for the decidedly radical Moore. He quotes an interview in which Moore states, “There’s something about his uncompromising attitude that I have a great deal of sympathy with” (86). In this, Hoberek finds an industrial explanation for Moore’s surprisingly favorable depiction of “Rorschach’s unbending integrity as a violent crime-fighter,” reading the vigilante “as a figure for the uncompromising artist and, more specifically, of the comic book artist for whom work-for-hire had historically meant a lack of ownership or control over his (usually) creations” (86). It seems to me that this thinking through of the ways in which comics symbolically mediate the collaborative and corporate elements of their own production offers a fruitful mode of inquiry, analogous to film studies’ embrace of the studio as a relevant frame of reference for understanding movies produced under the classical Hollywood system.

More scholarship in this vein—formalist, but well-versed in the history of comics— may well be on the way. Considering Watchmen is the first volume in Rutgers’ new Comics Culture series, and starting with a superhero comic marks out the series’ investment in examining genre comics that have, as Hoberek and others argue, thus far received less scholarly attention than single-artist “art comics” such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus or Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. The next two volumes in the series, on Wonder Woman and Archie, suggest the editors are interested in a project that expands attention to more mainstream genre comics.

Hoberek’s third chapter, on Watchmen’s political argument, is compelling and straightforward. Watchmen advocates a “left-wing anarchist populism” in opposition to the vision of the state under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. But, Hoberek argues, the comic “surreptitiously reproduces a key tenet of Thatcher’s own rhetoric, in the process demonstrating the link between the postwar countercultures, literary and social, in which Moore cut his teeth and the emergent neoliberalism of the mid-1980s” (120). This “key tenet” is the distrust of institutions as inherently repressive. Watchmen’s vision of individual action as the only valid response to a world in which all institutions are corrupt and repressive is largely compatible with Thatcher’s famous claim that “there is no such thing as society” (145–46). Watchmen opposes the expansion of corporate and police power under the Reagan and Thatcher governments, but fails to identify the degree to which its notion of individual agency arranged against institutional power — best exemplified by its cliff-hanger ending, in which the reader is left to decide what happens next in the story world — is a view “that Conservative ideologues might well have endorsed” as they sought to dismantle unions and the welfare state (145). The difference between Moore and Thatcher “is that Moore takes his position absolutely seriously while Thatcher observes it mostly in the breach, excoriating all institutions while demonstrating a willingness to support and even strengthen those (the police, the military, corporations) that are central to neoliberal capitalism” (143). What’s nice about this statement of Watchmen’s politics—particularly for a teacher interested in looking at Watchmen in the classroom—is that it opens directly onto one of the major questions facing the contemporary left: the difficulty of imagining satisfactory forms of collective action not based on coercion. This is of course precisely the problem David Graeber, for example, has taken up in his recent work.

The only significant reservations I have about Considering Watchmen amount to a quibble and a desire for something the book never sets out to address. The quibble is over the term “modernist,” and has to do with my disagreement with Hoberek’s claim that the mid-1980s mark comics’ “modernist era” (39). I would argue that comics have had several modernist moments over the course of their history. Not least of these would be the explicitly modern-art-informed newspaper strips of Lyonel Feininger or George Herriman. This is only a quibble because Hoberek is careful to define the sense in which he means modernism in terms of English-language novels of the high modernist era. The heart of his argument is the idea in Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” that “modernist experimentation in fact serves the ends of a more precise psychological realism” (39). This is very clearly something that Moore and Gibbons pursue in Watchmen, and might not apply to other periods of comics history. But other ideas that we associate with “modernism” seem deeply part of early comics history. Syncopation and montage, for instance, two techniques integral to the poetics of modern art, poetry, and film, are also basic to comics of the 1910s and 1920s, and arguments that comics artists arrived at these techniques without conscious deliberation about their own practice or its relationship to modern art are no longer tenable.

The aspect of Watchmen that Hoberek never addresses as fully as I’d like is its tone. Considering Watchmen is very clear in its explanation of Moore’s central formal breakthrough—that ostensibly unconnected passages of text and image, included in a single panel, can create unexpected ironies and resonances between the two tracks. So, for example, in the first issue a detective advises that he and his partner should let the case they are investigating “drop out of sight” over a picture of Edward Blake falling several stories to his death. The effect certainly amounts to an ambitious and self-conscious exploration of the properties of the medium. And yet because this text-image disjunction is one of the central techniques of the book—happening, in some cases, six or seven times per page—the text is constantly punning, effectively like a string of groan-worthy jokes from the back of Laffy Taffy packages. Whether this tone undercuts the seriousness of the comic’s philosophical and political intent, or whether it echoes the larger theme of our attempts to impose order on the universe as some kind of cosmic joke, or something else, it seems worth exploring. Watchmen is often placed alongside the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus to demonstrate that 1986 was contemporary comics’ year zero. It seems equally valid to put it alongside Spiegelman’s other great mid-80s creation, “The Garbage Pail Kids,” which also relied on a series of gross and extraordinary puns. It might be interesting to try and correlate the aesthetics of all three, as part of a broader inquiry into the place of extreme puns in 1980s culture.

Considering Watchmen provides a series of excellent readings of its subject, a thoughtful contribution to the study of contemporary American fiction, and an admirable demonstration of the best of contemporary comics criticism.