The BW Review : “Before Watchmen : Minutemen” #6

So, this is it — the “no-holds-barred” (so we’re told, at any rate) finale to what has become, either by default, design, or — most likely — a little bit of both, the “cornerstone series” of the entire Before Watchmen prequel-a-palooza. I suppose now would be an opportune moment for me to take a bow, since as things turns out I had the “shock surprise” ending figured out more or less detail for detail, but ya know what? I’m not going to do that, for two reasons:

1. This issue actually left me feeling considerably better about this series than I had been, even though I could see the ending coming a mile away; and

2. Writer-artist Darwyn Cooke actually throws a little extra wrinkle in here that I didn’t see coming, and even though said minor twist actually ends up setting up yet another final (supposed) gut-punch that, to my credit (okay, I’ll shut up now — wait, no, I still have at least 3/4 of this review left to write, so I guess I won’t), I also predicted on this very blog in advance, for just a split second there it was enough to make me second-guess myself —and since surprises have been so few and far between in the world of Before Watchmen, a surprise that ends up leading to an ending that’s really not all that surprising  is still better than no surprise at all. Whew! Did that make any sense? It will if and when you read this issue, and if and when you’ve read my previous reviews of Minutemen.

For the record, though, if digging through those past posts is too much hassle,  I had prognosticated  that the other Minutemen would come to the realization that Hooded Justice was the child-killer that they had been hunting, off and on, throughout the six-issue run of this book (okay, fair enough — throughout five issues of it, since nothing happens in the first installment), that they would kill him themselves rather than turn him over to the cops, and that it would be revealed later, in one of the other BW books, that it turned out they’d actually killed the wrong guy. Apart from one or two little details (I won’t say which particular ones in case you haven’t read the book yet), that’s more or less how things play out here — but like I said, Cooke takes an interesting-enough turn on the way to arriving at this expected conclusion that I don’t feel to cheated as a reader even if I did see the whole thing (or at least most of the whole thing) coming.

So where does that leave us at the end of the day? Good question. Cooke really draws his butt off this issue, it must be said, and even though the art for this series has been of a generally high standard from the get-go, the extra effort he puts into this finale really shows — in particular, there’s a terrific  sectioned-up splash page featuring Dr. Manhattan  at the halfway point of this one that might be the best single image in any of the BW books, so that goes some way toward elevating my overall feelings about this title, as well.The variant covers by Cooke (see top of post) and Becky Cloonan (see below) are both pretty damn amazing, as well. The story’s been a mixed bag, to be sure, and was obviously constructed to be read in collected form since it isn’t paced or plotted to work particularly well in single-issue chunks at all, but you know what? I think folks who read this in the upcoming hardcover and eventual trade paperback collections are going to be pretty pleased with what Cooke has done here. The characterization has been consistent, we’ve gotten to know Hollis Mason and Byron Lewis, especially, a good deal better than we did before, and all in all the whole thing doesn’t feel like a giant, gaping, yawning waste of time.

Damning with faint praise? Possibly so. And maybe my expectations have been ground down so low under the onslaught of pointlessness that is the rest of Before Watchmen that even an okay series like this one seems better than it actually is when compared to its fellow travelers. Certainly there are more ideas and multiple layers of meaning and interpretation to be found on pretty much any given page of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ original Watchmen series than Cooke manages to fit into six entire issues here. At its best moments, this was pretty much just superbly-drawn, competently-written, straight-forward comics storytelling. At its worst, it had a tendency to drift into the realms of “why-the-fuck-am-I-even-reading-this”-ness that BW books such as Comedian, Rorschach, and Ozymandias have firmly planted their flags in and never left. But it didn’t stay there for too terribly long, and Cooke always managed to find a way to at least keep his readership engaged in the proceedings. That hardly makes for revolutionary stuff, by any means, and this series doesn’t really do anything to add to the Moore/Gibbons Watchmen legacy, but at least it doesn’t in any way detract from it, either. If you’re willing to settle for a decent-enough little story featuring  characters that first appeared in a timeless classic of world literature rather than holding out for, well, another timeless classic of world literature,  then you’ll be more than suitably entertained by Before Watchmen : Minutemen. If you were hoping for something more, as I guess to one degree or another we probably (and, let’s face it, foolishly) all were, I don’t know what to tell you — this is DC Comics in 2012.  A snappy superhero adventure yarn with pretty pictures is, sadly, about as good as it gets from them.

The BW Review : “Before Watchmen : Minutemen” #5

So, this is it.

For months now, those of us who are actively following the goings-on in and around the various Before Watchmen titles have been hearing stirrings about a “major revelation” to come in the fifth issue of Darwyn Cooke’s Minutemen series — one that would be “controversial,” earth-shaking,” and would form the lynchpin and/or turning point not only of this book, but of all the various other BW series, as well.

And sure enough, it’s in there, playing out over the last couple of pages following (well, following might be generous — to be honest, it feels more like a hastily-tacked-on “cliffhanger”-type scene) a  quite- nicely-done little stand-alone adventure story that sees our erstwhile, and heretofore mostly incompetent, costumed adventurers taking on a handful of Japanese “fifth column”-type infiltrators determined to unleash a deadly wave of nuclear radiation on New York City as post-war retaliation for the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s the Minutemen’s finest hour — and frankly Cooke’s as well, as it’s a tightly-scripted, impeccably-drawn affair that showcases his natural ability to tell  a traditional period-piece adventure with a modern sensibility at its very best.

There’s just one problem with this whole “major revelation” thing — it’s not in the least bit surprising. Seriously, Cooke’s been telegraphing this thing to us since the second issue, and all but hammered us over the head with it in the fourth. If you didn’t see this coming, well — I just don’t even know what to say, except that you’re probably the kind of person that can be trusted with even the most obvious of secrets. So maybe that’s a good thing.

All of which begs the question — why haven’t I chosen to spill the beans, specifically, on this “big” not–so-secret myself in this review? Well, two reasons, really — one, I do realize that there are folks out there who read a number of reviews of movies, comics, books, etc. before deciding whether or not to spend their money on them, and I can certainly respect that; and two, if you’ve been reading this series up to this point, it’s all so painfully fucking obvious that you flat-out don’t even need me to.

At the end of the day, then, Before Watchmen : Minutemen #5 suffers from something of a split personality. On the one hand, the first twenty-four pages stand up really well on their own as  a self-contained story. Cooke’s scripting is solidly professional, and his always-noteworthy art has never been better (the variant covers by Cooke and Michael Cho, respectively, as shown, are none-too-shabby, either), but the “moment we’ve all been waiting for” that wraps up the issue — in addition to reading like a quickly-slapped-together and hopelessly disjointed addendum to the proceedings — is, in fact, a moment that we’ve all seen coming from a mile away.

The BW Review : “Before Watchmen : Silk Spectre” #4

 

I hope I’m not giving too much away right off the bat here, but Frank Sinatra is dead in the so-called “Watchmen Universe.”

Okay, fair enough, he’s dead here in the real universe as well, and has been for a good long time now, but he died a lot sooner — and a lot more hilariously — in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ fictitious world than he did in ours. As a matter of fact, the Tarantino-esque one-two punch that does in the Chairman Of The Board in the fourth and final issue of Amanda Conner and Darwyn Cooke’s Before Watchmen : Silk Spectre miniseries is the single-most effective sequence in any of the BW books to date as well as being the only laugh-out-loud funny moment in any of them so far (it honestly wouldn’t feel out of place at all in, say, Marvel’s new ultra-absurdist Deadpool book) and it’s worth the $3.99 cover price in and of itself.

Fortunately, this book has some things going for it, as well, most notably Conner’s superb artwork, which started out great and has been getting more confident and assured with each issue. She’s saved her best for last, however, and really hits it out of the park with this concluding chapter. My only slight quibble is that in the final splash-page page panel that winds things up (the only splash in this series, come to think of it) she depicts Laurie as being considerably younger than she had appeared previously, which could be explained away as a realistic-enough choice on Conner’s part since this is an image of her iconic first meeting with Dr. Mahnhattan and depicting their age difference in such a stark manner would really drive home Janey Slater’s famous “chasing jailbait” line, but — she makes Dr. Mahnhattan look like some sort of love-struck teenager, as well. Seriously. He looks more like a blue kid sidekick than the most powerful man in the world. So the image, while amazingly well-rendered, is a bit of a head-scratcher.

Still, that’s it for gripes as far as the artwork goes. Conner’s pencils and inks, coupled with Paul Mounts’ superb colors, are all in top form here and I hope the two of them are teamed up on another project in the not-too-distant future. Now, as far as the story is concerned —

Well, whaddaya know? I don’t really have much cause to bitch on this front, either. Yeah, things get wrapped up a bit quickly and conveniently, and it does at times feel like Cooke and Conner are rushing to get things in the can ASAP before they run out of pages, but it at least all makes a kind of sense, and the characterization of Laurie and Sally Jupiter and Hollis Mason is spot-on throughout. Even when Mason is stoned off his ass (yes, you read that right). All in all, it’s an admittedly inconsequential, but nevertheless damn fun little read.

And that word right there — fun — is what sets apart not only Silk Spectre #4 (variant covers by Conner and Bruce Timm, respectively, as shown), but this entire mini- series as a whole from the rest of the Before Watchmen pack. Conner and Cooke didn’t set out to trump Moore and Gibbons here, nor were they so slavishly beholden to what had  gone before that they were hesitant to add their own stamp on the character. They just seemed content to tell a simple story well and have fun while they were doing it. The end result? The BW series that I frankly had the lowest expectations for going in has ended up (at least to this point) being the best of the bunch.

The BW Review : “Before Watchmen : Minutemen” #4

 

Now we’re getting somewhere! The fourth issue of writer/artist Darwyn Cooke’s Before Watchmen : Minutemen is certainly the best of this six-part series so far, but its success really does underscore some of the failures of the previous three installments, to wit :

This issue is jam-packed with plot and character development, traits noticeably lacking in this series so far, particularly in the first and third parts; the main storyline actually pushes itself to the forefront in a way it hadn’t before (okay, fair enough, it threatened to in part two, then retreated into the background again in the third — as for part one, hell, it didn’t even get started there); Cooke gives equal weight here to both “filling in the blanks” in Minutemen history and presenting a new, real, coherent for why he’s doing so rather than just engaging in said style of “storytelling” merely for its own sake; and rather than leaving tantalizing hints about some overarching reason for everything he’s doing just hanging out there in one issue (two) and forgetting about them completely in the next (three), he gets back to them all and seems to be actually tying them all together in service of some grand denouement of some sort.

In short, Cooke seems to be making up for lost time here, realizing that he’s wasted at least two of his first three chapters and needs to get things going if he’s going to wrap all this up in six parts. The end result is definitely a pretty good comic, but one that has to do too much because previous segments had done so little. Here, then, is where we get to a few “spoilers,” as well as where I lay out my “grand theory” as to what’s really going on here, so if you’d prefer to be kept in the dark about all that, don’t, as they say, “follow the jump” after the cover image reproduced below:

 

Okay, still here? Good. This is the issue where, in true “laundry-list” fashion : The Silhouette and her partner are killed, and we learn how they met in the first place; the origins of The Silhouette’s “save the children” campaign are revealed; we learn of a crime-fighting partnership between the first Nite Owl and Mothman and begin to witness the early stages of Mothman’s slide into alcoholism and insanity; Silk Spectre wakes up to what a ruthless bitch she’s been and decides to become a real crimefighter; we learn how and why Silk Spectre and the Comedian began to — ahem! — “reconnect” some years after he attempted to rape her; and we finally get back to those weird flashback sequences we first saw at the end of the second issue and start to figure out exactly what the hell they’re all about. Whew! And ya know — I can’t help but feeling I even left a thing or two out of that rather breakneck run-down of events, but whatever. I’m fairly sure the main points are all covered.

Now, with all that in mind, there’s nothing that happened in this fourth issue that’s caused me to think again about this “dark secret” the Minutemen are hiding that’s supposedly going to be revealed next issue and turn the whole “Watchmen Universe” on its ear. It’s been hinted at in the pages of Nite Owl and Ozymandias as well as here, so here’s my best guess as to what this “major revelation” is, just to get it down for the record : the child-killer that The Silhouette was looking for when she met her untimely demise is, in fact, Hooded Justice, and rather than risk the attendant bad publicity that would come with turning him in to stand trial for his crimes, the other Minutement are going to kill him and dump his body in the ocean or river or something. Honestly, does anyone see this thing playing out any differently? The only thing “extra” we may have learned to further back this theory up here in Minutemen #4 (with variant covers, as shown, by Cooke and — hey! how’bout this! — Steve “The Dude” Rude, respectively) is that HJ may also be the same Nazi slimebag who murdered the Silhouette’s kid sister.

So — that’s where we are, as I see it, and where we’re going, as I also see it. I would well and truly welcome comments from any readers out there who have any different ideas and can back them up with story angles I hadn’t considered, but I’m pretty confident in this “best-guess” scenario of mine. Roll on issue five and let’s see if I’m right! But before we get to that, we’ve got the next installments of all the other books to get through, including the fourth issue of Silk Spectre, which next week will become the first non-Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons Watchmen series to actually conclude and stand as a complete work in its own right, so good, bad, or (most likely) somewhere in between, it should at least be interesting to be able to evaluate it in totality and determine, finally, whether or not it ever really needed to exist at all.

The BW Review : “Before Watchmen : Silk Spectre” #3

 

While I’m understandably quite hesitant to say which of the various Before Watchmen series is the “best of the bunch” yet — for a couple reasons, one being that none of them are over and the other being that it’s frankly impossible to tell if some of them are even good or not at this point (although it’s fairly obvious that a couple just flat-out aren’t) — I do think it’s entirely fair to state that at this point Amanda Conner and Darwyn Cooke’s Silk Spectre has slowly, even imperceptibly, managed to establish itself as the most interesting of the bunch, which is rather saying something given that it suffers from one of the same narrative weaknesses so apparent in Cooke’s Minutemen series, namely : he gets what looks for all intents and purposes to be a coherent overall plot rolling in the second issue and then all but abandons it in the third.

If you’ll recall, last time around we were made privy to a scheme engineered by no less than Frank Sinatra himself to turn all the hippies in the Haight into rabid consumers thanks to a new strain of acid that the Chairman of the Board was going to distribute to all the “flower children” thanks to his stooges within the “flower power” scene, legendary LSD “cook” Owsley and offensively-lecherous-black-hippie-cult-leader-who’s-really-just-there-to-bang-all-the-white-chicks Gurustein. In this third installment, which starts with an extremely well-drawn-by-Conner acid trip that Laurie’s taking, we get to see just what effect said new strain of everybody’s (well, mine, at any rate — back in the day) hallucinogen has on the young Ms. Juspeczyk, and she has a brief confrontation with monsieurs Sinatra and Gurustein about it, but most of this issue is taken up with another new plot wrinkle altogether —

Apparently, after sitting last issue out, Sally J. decides she’s fed up with waiting and that it’s time to bring her daughter home. “Uncle” Hollis Mason’s “soft touch” approach isn’t yielding the desired result quickly enough, so our gal Sal decides it’s time to bring in the heavy hitters — in the form of The Comedian, who’s pretty much done a guest turn in every one of these books now. And while Conner draws Eddie Blake in an almost cartoonishly innocent fashion for reasons that, frankly, escape me, his characterization in her and Cooke’s hands in much more spot-on than it is even in his own series, never mind the others. The lengths he’s willing to go in order to insure his still-unbeknownst-to-her (of course) daughter’s return home are well and truly frighteningly amoral, and for those wondering just where the Alan Moore-Dave Gibbons Comedian has been hiding in any of the BW books, the answer is — right here.

 

The last point worth a mention here (guess this write-up’s gonna be quicker than I thought) is that Conner and Cooke close out — well, almost close out — the book on a very curious note indeed : they show us the origin of The Comedian’s “smiley face” button, which yes, sounds like absolutely pointless fanwank of the highest order, and in the hands of J. Michael Straczynski certainly would be just that, but here, in the unlikely pages of Before Watchmen : Silk Spectre #3 (variant covers, as shown, by Conner and Mike and Laura Allred, respectively) of all places, it’s handled just about pitch-perfectly and maybe even threatens to be a little bit — dare I say it? — touching.

So, that’s where we’re at with three issues down and one to go here, which means that Silk Spectre will be the first of these mini-series to end. Conner and Cooke have a fair amount to tie up, and I’m fairly certain that a number of key points will be left dangling for the other series to pick up on, but at least it looks like we’re going to have a story that follows something like accepted linear plot progression here and not the kind of ducking-in-and-out-of-various-career-highlights-and-lowlights that we’re getting over in Minutemen, Nite Owl, and, most unforgivably given its rather auspicious (as far as any of these books go) start, Comedian. We’ve had some decently-handled character development mixed with an unexpected amount of high weirdness, all presented, I must say, with rather lush visuals from Ms. Conner, and so far this is the one BW title that has managed to surpass my (admittedly limited) expectations for it. Strange as it feels to even type these words, I find myself actually, and actively, looking forward to seeing how this one’s going to end.

Which, of course, means that they’re probably going to end up fucking the whole thing up. But I guess a guy can dream.

The BW Review : “Before Watchmen : Minutemen” #3

 

Okay, so September’s nearly 2/3 of the way over and I haven’t blogged about squat here all month, but all that’s about to change. Here’s the plan, for those of you who may be interested in such things — yes, the never-ending “Comix Month” is finally over around these parts, with two exceptions — I have one book left over from last month I still need to write about, and I’m going to be keepin’ on keepin’ on with the Before Watchmen reviews for as long as I’m buying the books. Which may not be a lot longer, we’ll see. But I do admit I have some serious catching up to do on the BW front and that’s what the next few days are all about. We’ll be examining the third issues of Minutemen, Silk Spectre, Comedian, and Nite Owl, respectively, then diving into the one last “indie” publication I meant to get around to last month but didn’t, then it’s back to my “How I’d Relaunch The Batman Movie Franchise” series for at least a week or so — reblogged, as always, thanks to my good friends at Through The Shattered Lens, who I’m scribing said series for in the first place — and then we should be either at the start of October or pretty close to it, at which point, like every other fucking blog out there, we’re gonna talk nothing but horror flicks here for 30 days solid, with an emphasis on grindhouse horrors.

Sound good? Glad you approve.

So, without any further ado, let’s jump into the third issue of Darwyn Cooke’s Minutemen  series, which is now officially at the halfway point, and see just what your host had to make of things, shall we?

 

First off, let me remark on the fact that even though this book has no less than three people serving in some sort of editorial capacity on it — an editor, assistant editor, and associate editor, respectively — there seems to be very little actual editing going on, to wit : the first issue, which we already determined was essentially a complete waste of time, was pure set-up, and clearly intended to serve as an introduction to these characters for the, I dunno, two or so people out there who were buying this thing who hadn’t previously read the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons original. Yet come this third installment, we get a scene involving the Minutemen deciding what sort of punishment to dole out to Eddie Blake, aka The Comedian, for trying to rape Sally Jupiter, aka the original Silk Spectre, that is completely dependent upon intimate foreknowledge of the first Watchmen series since those events aren’t recapped here in the least! Talk about schizophrenic —

All that aside, though, Before Watchmen : Minutemen #3 (with variant covers, as shown, by Cooke and Cliff Chiang, respectively) isn’t a half-bad little read on its own merits, even though it pretty much completely brushes aside the entire plot “trajectory” that seemed to be forming in the last issue vis-a-vis the child abduction/murder the team — well, part of it at any rate — had been investigating. Instead, here Cooke plunges us into the Silhouette’s essentially solo investigation of a completely unrelated child exploitation case, and shows us how our erstwhile narrator, Hollis Mason (aka the original Nite Owl) gave her a helping hand. Along the way we get some glimpses into the pages of an old 1940s Minutemen comic that are kinda neat to look at even if the existence of said book rather contradicts established Wachmen continuity that superhero titles never really took off in this world where spandex-clad crimefighters were an actual phenomenon and instead pirate comics were all the rage — and we see a little bit more of the torch our guy Hollis was obviously carrying for Usula/The Silhouette on display, but there’s really not much more than that going on here. Cooke spends a lot of time playing the “ooh, what’s this mysterious scene I’m showing you glimpses of here” card with a sequence that basically has no mystery surrounding it whatsoever — the Silhouette’s lesbian lover is washing her up in the tub after a scrape with the bad guys, as is fairly evident from the first “teaser” panel and only gets more crushingly obvious with each successive one — and then, bang, it’s issue over once she recounts her story into a tape recorder and calls it a night.

All of this, apparently, is leading up to some major shake-up of the known foundations of the “Watchmen Universe” (a term I’m still getting used to using and, frankly, hate), but whatever that is — and I’ve got a pretty good guess — you can bet one thing’s for certain : we’ll pretty much be dropped right into the middle of it rather than be lead up to it in any kind of standard-plotting sort of sense, because this series is one incredibly disjointed affair that seems content to flit around and show us whatever brief “highlights” of various Minutemen capers that Cooke wants us to see before moving on to — well, more of the same. It’s competently, if less than compellingly, written, and the period-piece art remains a treat to look at, but on the old dramatic tension scale the whole thing still rates more or less a zero. Halfway through any series some sort of fundamental driving force behind the actual plot itself isn’t too terribly much to ask for, and so far Before Watchmen : Minutemen doesn’t really seem to have one. The fan geek inside me is still looking forward to whatever this big “revelation” that’s forthcoming turns out to be — again, even though I like to think I’ve more or less got it sussed out already — but it would be so nice if we got an actual, honest-to-goodness, goes-from-point-A-to-point-B story tying the whole thing together. Instead, it feels like Cooke had one big idea that he wanted to drop on us, and the other five issues surrounding it aren’t so much lead-up and aftermath to said “big idea” as they are just filler material to pad it out with. Granted, even one idea is more than some of these BW books have going for them, but on the whole it still ain’t a lot, especially if it’s been telegraphed throughout the various titles as obviously as I think it has. Darwyn Cooke’s got three issues left to prove me wrong and make a complete mockery out of everything I’ve said here, and I honestly hope he does so.

Comix Month, Take II : “Before Watchmen : Silk Spectre” #2

 

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. While the first issue of Amanda Conner and Darwyn Cooke’s Before Watchmen : Silk Spectre miniseries had a bit more substance to it than the previous week’s Minutemen #1, it still felt more or less like all set-up material and not much else, and it’s only with this second installment that it feels like we’re really getting into the teeth of the story itself. Which isn’t the end of the world in and of itself, I suppose, but it does mean that by the time we actually have some sort of clear indication of where things are heading here, the series is already half over, given that it only runs for four issues, but I’m beginning to realize — not that I actually condone this, mind you — that cheating the customer as far as getting their actual money’s worth from a book goes is part and parcel of the modern mainstream comics industry. But I digress (as I’m so often wont to do).

Anyway, a teenage Laurie Juspeczyk, sick of her retired heroine mother’s meddling in her life, has run away from home with her high school boyfriend, Greg, and now they’re in San Francisco during what I assume to be the height of the Haight-Ashbury period, living with some friends, one of whom has the incredibly stupid name of “Chappy,” in a communal-type Victorian house. Laurie’s got a gig waiting tables, they’re all getting high a lot, and man, they’re just being, can you dig?

There’s a dark shadow falling over the Haight, though — a cat who goes by the handle of (speaking of stupid names) Gurustein (a black hippie with a Jewish-sounding name, way to prejudice the reader against three groups of people in one go!) has devised a plan, together with local mobsters, legendary acid chemist Owsley (who actually makes an appearance in the book) and “Merry Prankster” Ken Kesey (who does likewise) to get the kids hooked on a new type of hallucinogen that will turn them all on to the groovy vibes of mass consumerism now that the corporate world is taking a hit thanks to the “peace and love generation” figuring out that we don’t all need separate washing machines, refrigerators, stereos, TVs, or even clothes and records! Sharing, in other words, is a real bummer as far as “The Man” is concerned.

All of which, goofy as it sounds, has some basis in reality. Sort of. There’s ample evidence to suggest that LSD itself was introduced on a mass scale by our good friends at the CIA in order to de-radicalize and de-politicize the emerging youth culture of the late 1960s before it could actually present a threat en masse to the status quo (after all, you’re less likely to give a shit about all the various causes you’re wrapped up in while you’re spending half the day in la-la land), and — sorry if this bursts anyone’s bubble — there’s also pretty solidly-sourced material out there indicating that leading proponents of “LSD culture” such as Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, and yes, even Owsley himself were, in fact, intelligence assets in one capacity or another.

Sure, this might all sound like it has nothing to do with a fictional “consumer drug” being developed, but it’s not as great a leap as it might first appear to be when you consider that the first few CIA directors were all former Wall Street men and that “The Company” has basically operated as a clandestine front to advance US business interests from its outset (and, yes, continues to do exactly that to this day). So things here aren’t nearly as far-fetched as they may seem, even if Cooke’s dialogue and characterization are, at times, painfully clumsy (he seems much more at home dealing with the ’40s than the ’60s).

 

Oh, and somewhere in the middle of all this Laurie has her first official “costume” made and goes out crime-fighting on her own for the first time, but that’s almost incidental, at least at this point, to the main thrust of the story here. Anyway, Conner’s art is, as I’m quickly coming to expect, gorgeous as always, it’s great to see her continuing to employ Dave Gibbons’ classic nine-panel grid while not being afraid to express her own style in her own manner, Paul Mount’s colors are flat-out superb, and both covers (as shown, respectively) — by Conner and Josh Middleton — wrap the whole package up in a pleasing form. Cooke’s scripting is still miles away from even attempting to  match Alan Moore in both form and execution, but this series is at least headed in an interesting direction, even if the going is a bit uneven and the gulf between the quality of the artwork and that of the story remains pretty wide.

Comix Month, Take II : “Before Watchmen : Minutemen” #2

So, now that we’re onto our first second issue (“first second”? That sounds inherent contradictory, but it’s not) of this whole Before Watchmen prequel-a-palooza, I have just one question (for now — I have a much bigger one that we’ll get to in due course) for writer-artist Darwyn Cooke and DC’s editorial “brain”trust : why didn’t you guys just start with this one first?

Seriously, this has all the makings of a fairly solid first issue — not a whole lot happens (still), but rather than a quick bit of pointless re-introduction to the characters individually (as if anybody reading this series wouldn’t already be familiar with all the principal players in the first place), this time around original Nite Owl Hollis Mason’s reminiscences take us back to the first-ever time the “mystery men” (and women) of days gone by functioned together as a group, a publicity-stunt fiasco of a “mission” that goes wrong, then plunges us, in fairly short order,  into what I assume will prove to be the meat of the story — a child abduction case first worked by the Silhouette, later joined by Mothman and our erstwhile narrator (for all the good they do), and soon, one would think, to involve the rest of the members of the team.

It’s still nothing spectacular by any stretch, but it’s an interesting enough little should-be-first-chapter that’s, unfortunately, seriously let down by a couple of questionable (to put it kindly) choices that Cooke makes at the end. If you don’t want things “spoiled” for you I suggest you stop reading right now (unless you just plain don’t give a damn, that is, in which case why are you even reading this at all ?), but if you’ve perused the contents of this book already, you probably share my absolute bewilderment at just what the fuck Cooke was thinking with those last few pages, to wit —

Our “heroes” enter a warehouse looking for a missing boy, while back at Minutemen HQ, that evening’s team meeting having broken up, Captain Metropolis coaxes Hooded Justice into hanging out for a little bit of lovin’ (there’s an off-”camera” exchange between the two where HJ tells Nelly to “silence your whining” that’s positively priceless) and gets considerably more than he bargained for when the burly fella ties him up to the bed and decides to show him how real closeted gay heroes go about this stuff.

Now, if the juxtaposition of gay sex, even (it could be argued) a decidedly less-than-consensual form of gay sex with child abduction weren’t offensive enough in and of itself, Cooke’s decision to throw in what for all intents and purposes appears to be a flashback to a circus scene in Germany where a child wanders off into some sort of nightmarish unpleasantness while we read a Robert Louis Stephenson nursery rhyme really muddies up the waters. When is this taking place? My initial supposition was that this was supposed to represent Hooded Justice as a kid, since there were vague intimations in Hollis Mason’s Under The Hood text pieces back in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ original Watchmen series that HJ might have been a famous German strongman named, if memory serves me correctly, Rolf Muller, and the style of dress and other period trappings clearly suggest a late-1800s time frame, but the scene the kid stumbles upon, which I won’t give away specifically, is more like something right out of the Third Reich, which would suggest that it’s happening roughly contemporaneously with events in this series. To further complicate matters, the appearance of a hooded figure in the distance could either represent a shadowy, mysterious personage that the young Rolf turns to for help, an anonymous friend who proceeds to rescue him from the situation (immediately burning this sort of archetype into his consciousness as a representation of justice, even a savior that, as time goes by, morphs into an unattainable sexual ideal for which he longs and/or strives), or maybe, just maybe, that hooded figure is our guy HJ himself, and the lost kid is the one the other characters have been looking for and, at the conclusion of this segment, find — hanging from a noose in the warehouse they’ve been casing, while HJ’s “costume-noose,” if you will, dangles over Captain Metropolis’s head as he’s being — uhhmmm — ya know, mounted.

Frankly, it’s pretty hard to comprehend what the hell Cooke’s driving at here in Minutemen number two ( the story in question being contained within only two covers this time around — the “main one” being by Cooke and the alternate being by Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, shown here in the order I just mentioned ‘em), but he’s playing with fire if he thinks drawing equivalancies between homosexuality, even sadomasochistic expressions of homosexuality, and child abduction and murder is, in any way, well — tolerable. The sad truth, even in this day and age, is that way too many people still assume gay men are child-predators, and guys who are into BDSM are probably viewed as being even more dangerous by Mr. and Mrs. Middle America. I’m probably the wrong person to be making this argument, being that sex with another man and sado-masochistic sex are nowhere to be found on my “bucket list” either together or separately, but it’s just a fact that gay folks, as well as folks into BDSM whether gay or straight, are just as harmless and “normal” as me or — I assume — you (whoever “you” might be). These people have to deal with enough prejudicial bullshit as it is, and this kind of thing doesn’t do anything to help matters at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Granted, you could make an argument that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons were playing with similar fire with the whole Comedian-tries-to-rape-Silk-Spectre-and-years-later-she-has-consensual-sex-with-him-and-gives-birth-to-his-daughter thing, but that was Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. They knew what they were doing and how to handle that dynamite with care and precision. So far, Cooke has done nothing to earn our trust to the same degree, and it’s that same level of belief in an artist’s ability  that’s required to not close the cover on this book with an unpleasant taste in your mouth.

So, the ball is in Darwyn Cooke’s court now (not that it wasn’t from the beginning, but you know what I mean). He’s delivered solid period-piece style art for the last two issues, and this issue things at least got moving story-wise, but he’s left some heavy, uncomfortable question marks hanging in the air here, ones that might reveal some seriously retrograde attitudes about both gay people and people involved in the BDSM “lifestyle” — questions that are doubly offensive to people who are both homosexual and into a little bit of rough fun. He’s gotta thread a really fine needle right out of the gate in the next issue, and the first two installments give no indication whatsoever as to whether or not he’s up to the task. We’re either headed for a complex story that challenges preconceptions in regard to sexual “norms,” or we’re headed into a deep morass of homophobic, anti-”alternative”-sexual-practices nonsense. I enjoy the feeling of not knowing where an artist is going to go with his or her work next, but I’m afraid I might have an ugly inkling as to what Cooke’s got in store. I sincerely hope he proves me wrong.

TFG Comix Month “Before Watchmen : Silk Spectre” #1

One thing I’ll say right off the bat when it comes to the first issue of the second Before Watchmen miniseries, Silk Spectre — the art, by the very able Amanda Conner (who also co-wrote the script along with Minutemen writer/artist Darwyn Cooke) is absolutely stunning. Conner utilizes the  familiar Watchmen nine-panel grid developed by Dave Gibbons (yay! glad to see it back!) in the original series, but whereas Gibbons put his grid to use depicting grim n’ grimy urban decay, Conner delivers a modern update on the good old-fashioned romance comics look, with smooth, flowing lines that capture the youthful innocence (and naivete) of her central character, a teenage version of Laurie Juspeczyk/Jupiter, better known to all of us Watchmen aficionados as the (second) Silk Spectre. The lush and wide-ranging palette employed by colorist Paul Mounts complements Conner’s guardedly-optimistic pencil and ink work perfectly, and the result is an evocative, even forlorn at times, visual feast. You get the sense from looking at this book that Laurie knows her innocence is coming to an end, and is both eager to cleave to whatever elements of it still provide her comfort, as well as to shed those parts of it that are holding her back.

And speaking of holding her back — that’s exactly how she sees what her mother, Sally, the original Silk Spectre, is doing by forcing her to become a second-generation costumed crime-fighter. While it’s painfully obvious to anyone with a pulse that Sally’s trying to relive her own youth vicariously through her daughter, it’s also abundantly clear that Laurie doesn’t want much to do with the profession her mom’s chosen for her, and that central tension is what will lie at the core of the book, at least by all indications from this first issue.If that sort of typical coming-of-age fare doesn’t grab you, though, then neither will Before Watchmen : Silk Spectre #1. Because the other various plot elements sprinkled in — Laurie being ridiculed at school over who her mother is and what she used to do for a living (both during and after her spandex adventuring career), then falling in love for the first time, then running off with the guy she’s so smitten with — are pretty standard tropes as far as this whole genre goes, as well. It’s not a bad read, per se, by any means, but it’s not a necessary one, either, and while it’s rather interesting, as an exercise in variety if nothing else, to see the teen romance thing filtered through the prism of the Watchmen universe, this first issue, like last week’s Minutemen premier, doesn’t really add anything to our knowledge and/our understanding of the character. It’s just telling some story from her youth that so far doesn’t seem in any way especially compelling, even if it is pleasant enough lightweight reading.And it’s that word right there — lightweight — that pretty much sums up my disappointment with the first couple installments of this Watchmen prequel bonanza in a nutshell. Both Minutemen and Silk Spectre have been throwaway reads that don’t do much apart from look nice and avoid explicitly contradicting what’s come before. They haven’t proven that these books actually have any point apart from crass commercial considerations (speaking of which, this also comes packaged in three different covers, as shown above, by Conner, Dave Johnson, and Jim Lee, respectively). Not upsetting the apple cart might be enough to satisfy some readers, but when you’re packaging your books specifically as an extension of the Watchmen legacy, it’s probably fair to say that a good number of us are expecting something more challenging, thought-provoking, and dare I say even revolutionary than what we’ve seen so far. We’ll see what the first issue of Comedian has in store for us later this week, and whether or not it can finally — hopefully! — justify why these titles are even being published in the first place. So far, though, it seems that Alan Moore’s — uhmmm — vociferous reservations about the whole enterprise were entirely justified.

TFG Comix Month : “Before Watchmen : Minutemen” #1

While most of the movie sites and blogs you might be reading are knee-deep in summer blockbuster reviews this time of year (and I myself have been, and will continue to, review such cinematic fare at the other site you can catch me on, namely http://unobtainium13.com), I figured here at my main online “hangout,” I’d devote the month of June to something a bit different — comic book reviews. Comics, you see, are my “first love,” media-wise, and while I don’t spend every last dime I have on them as I did in days gone by, I do find there are still a few reasons to go into the local comic shop once in awhile, even though, generally speaking, I could really care less about the entire superhero genre. Consequently, most of what we’ll be looking at this month won’t be adventures of men in tights and women in less-than-tights, and we’ll primarily be concentrating on, shall we say, “alternative,” “creator-driven,” or “underground” fare here — stuff the “big two” have no interest in but that provides just about the only ray of light in a medium that has become, at least creatively speaking, even darker than usual as of late. If names like Dan Clowes, Chester Brown, Joe Matt, Craig Thompson, Art Spiegelman, etc., are unfamiliar to you, my hope is that 30 days from now they won’t be, and that you’ll have found yourself sufficiently intrigued by my musings on these artists’ work to give some of what they’ve written and/or drawn a go.

All that being said, the book I’ve chosen to kick off this entire series with is the premier issue of writer/artist Darwyn Cooke’s Before Watchmen : Minutemen, which is, as you can no doubt guess, superhero fare published by DC. Granted, the promise from the publisher is that this is supposed to be intelligent superhero fare that’s a notch above its contemporaries in terms of having actual artistic value, since DC knows they’ve opened one hell of a can of worms by even revisiting the whole Watchmen universe in the first place and the only way they can keep readers who might be “on the fence” about the project on board is to give them a reason to keep coming back every week (the various interconnected Before Watchmen miniseries will be appearing weekly until they’ve all run their course).

Make no mistake about it, though — my view is that Before Watchmen is a morally and ethically bankrupt endeavor from the get-go, and I agree with those, Watchmen co-creator Alan Moore included, who think these books have no actual reason to exist and that their publication shows nothing so much as how empty the well of new ideas has run at DC (which is not to say that Marvel is any better — a quick perusal of their monthly output will show at a glance that their assembly-line-style product is, if anything, even worse than DC’s). Still — Watchmen is the pinnacle of this particular medium for me, and I love these characters. Moore and artist/co-creator Dave Gibbons (who has apparently accepted a half million bucks from DC to give these new “prequel” titles his blessing, money which Moore refused) blew my teenage mind with their book when it first came out, and it still holds up extremely well to this day. So while I fully well sympathize and agree with all the arguments against this project, I still couldn’t resist giving the first issues, at least, of the various titles a whirl. I don’t feel to good about being that morally weak, but there are times when my curiosity gets the best of my ethics.

Honestly, though, I should’ve known better. Cooke is a creator whose previous work I’m unfamiliar with (as is the case with pretty much all the writers and artists working on these titles), and his art has a pleasing 1940s look and feel to it, but right off the bat there’s not much doubt that there isn’t a fraction of the intricate visual language going on in this book that we’re used to from something that bears the name Watchmen. While Gibbons’ panels in the original series were densely-layered works that revealed more the longer you looked at them, Cooke’s images are pretty, but ultimately disposable. The convey the mood and atmosphere of a time gone by nicely, but they don’t stick in your brain and demand a thorough and lengthy appraisal.

Which, frankly, pretty well goes for the story, as well. Simply put, nothing really happens here. Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl, is seen sitting down, petting his dog, and writing his memoir, “Under The Hood,” chapters from which were presented as text pieces at the back of the first few issues of the original Watchmen series. We’re given brief glimpses of what said book has to say about some of the other costumed adventurers in the old Minutemen group, and that’s it. We learned a lot more about these characters in Moore’s text pieces, and all Cooke is doing is filling in a few blanks that we could just as well have surmised on our own. We don;t gain any new insight into what makes them tick, or even learn about exploits we didn’t already know about, per se — the entire issue is just a visual adaptation of stuff Moore either stated explicitly, or at the very least hinted at, 25 years ago.Furthermore, today’s “decompressed” writing style in mainstream comics, largely the brainchild of Grant Morrison, is a pretty transparent attempt to do nothing more than spread out what could, and frankly should, be a single-issue story out over the space of 5 or 6 issues, and it doesn’t suit the world of these characters at all, much less give the consumer good value for money. Frankly it’s a damn good thing that I wasn’t enthused about Before Watchmen, because then I would’ve felt even more cheated by a book I just dropped $3.99 on that can be read in ten minutes. As for rereading value — this issue certainly had none. I read it straight through again right after reading it and picked up absolutely nothing new, nor did I when I gave it a third go-round the next day.It’s certainly a far cry from the original series, which was so densely-packed with layer upon layer of meaning that each issue practically demanded rereading before you felt like you had a proper grip on everything you’d just taken in. And let’s not even talk about the “multiple covers” gimmick that DC in employing here (all three covers, by Cooke, Michael Golden, and Jim Lee, respectively, are shown here) in order to get you to buy this thing three times and pay inflated “collector’s prices” for the same book (the Lee cover is already going for $100 at my comic shop of choice).

In summation, then, let’s leave aside all the controversy for a moment, necessary as it’s been. Let’s pretend that somehow this whole thing isn’t a slap in the face to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (albeit a slap-in-the-face-with-a-check to Gibbons). Let’s, for the sake of argument, do exactly what DC is imploring us to do and “take this project at face value.” In that case, what we have here is a nicely-drawn, somewhat-competently-written (although the presence of things like shifting verb tenses lead me to wonder if it was really even edited) “flashback”-type story that does nothing more than tell us what we already knew. The Comedian was a bastard. The Silhouette was a lesbian. Mothman was a drunk who cracked up. Dollar Bill was a publicity stunt. Nite Owl was a good egg. That’s the most we can take from this book, and it’s shit we already had figured out. That’s the extent of the critical analysis we can take away from this first issue even if we play by the rules as DC sets them out.

But if we want to be realistic here, and admit that this prequel project doesn’t exist in a vacuum,  then even if we again leave all moral and ethical qualms about it aside (I repeat,necessary as they are, don’t get me wrong), the simple fact is that this book doesn’t do anything to justify its existence, as ultimately as prequels, sequels, and remakes must. DC can’t have it both ways. They can’t tell us not to compare it to the original Watchmen while trying to cash in on the name and the reputation of that seminal work at the same time. They can’t say “here’s a Watchmen spin-off, now please don’t compare it to Watchmen.” Sorry, but life doesn’t work that way — if you don’t want this book to be compared to Watchmen, then don’t call it Before Watchmen and don’t feature Watchmen characters in it. Simple, right? And so is Before Watchmen : Minutemen #1. Simple, quick, rehashed, uninvolving, and ultimately pointless.