Show notes
Our walk through Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen ends with issue #12, “A Strong And Loving World.” Or does it? Because nothing ever ends? No, this ends, as Dr. Manhattan and Laurie Blake return to Earth to confront Adrian Veidt; and our assembled heroes are faced with an impossible decision. SUBSCRIBE TO WATCHMEN WATCH ON ITUNES, ANDROID, SPOTIFY, STITCHER, OR RSS. FOLLOW US ON TWITTER, INSTAGRAM AND FACEBOOK. SUPPORT OUR SHOWS ON PATREON. The theme music for Watchmen Watch was written and performed by Jeff Solomon. Plus, here’s a transcript of the episode, so you can read along as you listen: Alex: Welcome to Watchmen Watch, who watches it? We get ready to watch it as we’re coming up on Watchmen Watch on HBO, but first, we’re going to be watching a comic book which just kind of sits there. I’m Alex. Justin: I’m Justin. Pete: I am Pete. Alex: We are going to be talking about the final issue of the Watchmen comic, the 12th issue, A Stronger Loving World, as we wrap up our recap of the comic, and transition totally seamlessly into recapping the TV show, no breaks there, don’t even worry about it. Before we get into it though, I’m a little concerned here, I see you Justin, I see you Pete, our fourth co-host including- Pete: Come on man- Alex: … some of the biggest four people, isn’t here, what’s going on? Justin: Well, It’s a great day here. I actually have some very exciting news. Alan is here, Alan go ahead and introduce yourself. Hello… I’m just kidding, he’s not here. It’s- Alex: Man. Justin: … he bailed again. Pete: That was… Alex: That was fine. Justin: We’re doing this really insulting them. Alex: Yes. We do this over video Skype chat. Even though I can see you when you start doing that voice, I was like, I’m convinced he’s here. That’s how good your voice was. Justin: Yes, I am here. Alex: He’s here again. Pete is here. Justin: No, that’s just me. That’s how seamless when you’re a classically trained actor as I am, you can slip in and out of a character. Sorry, Alan Moore isn’t going to make it for the 12th and final time. Alex: Man, that is too bad. Well, hopefully I know how psyched he is about the show, he’s been out on the promotional tour, chatting it up, talking about what’s going on in HBO. Justin: He’s at a Buffalo Wild Wings premiere party for Watchmen. Pete: I’m going to be there for that. [crosstalk 00:01:48] Are you kidding me? Come on. Justin: He has a sauce that’s branded the Alan Moore nuclear explosion wings. Alex: I heard they’re also putting that on the Rorschach shows. Justin: Those are not shows. Alex: Yes. Justin: It’s tricky. Alan Moore has lost a step as a writer, especially when it comes to naming a product tie in appetizers. Alex: He used to be so good at that too. Justin: Yes. Alex: It’s surprising. Justin: That’s right. He was the one that came up with unlimited breadsticks. They used to be unlimited potential Doctor Manhattan breadsticks. Alex: That’s all- Pete: Were they blue? Alex: … why I always feel like it’s five minutes to midnight whenever I go to the olive garden. Justin: 100%. Guys- Alex: It’s the- Justin: … Their original slogan was, when you’re here, you have a blue dick, they changed it to family. Alex: I remember I went there one time and I was like, “Hey, we’ve been waiting for a while for our food, can we get our food?” And they were like, “You ate it 35 minutes ago.” Justin: That’s how they made a fortune in their early days. Alex: They get you, every time they get you, do you know who also gets you? Adrian Veidt gets you, Ozymandias gets you and he gets the entire world. He got them. He did the ultimate punked episode. He punked the entire world in this issue. Really glad I went for that reference. Justin: No, this is the context we should speak about this final issue. It is the ultimate punkting. Alex: When we left the characters of this book… I was about to say the what. Justin: When we left the characters, we said a hardy goodbye last day issue. And here we are, knock, knock, knocking on the character’s doors again. Let’s go inside, issue 12. Alex: Hello, Watchmen, you there? Justin: Hello Alex. Alex: It’s me- Justin: Alan Moore. Alex: Well anyway, New York got destroyed by a giant psychic squid that Ozymandias dropped there in order to create a fake alien invasion, which is something that we affirm in, we talk about more in this issue, in order to promote and cause world peace. Right now, Nite Owl and Rorschach are both at Adrian Veidt’s headquarters, they’ve just been told about his plan. Alex: They are pretty shocked at the end of this issue when it actually turned out to actually have happened. Meanwhile, Silk Spectre and Doctor Manhattan are all the way up on Mars, though they’re heading that way as well and everything comes crashing together in this oversized final issue. Before we get into it, this feels like a very dumb question to ask with Watchmen, having revisited the series, what’d you think about it? Alex: But really, I mean like, we’ve been talking about this all along, but I’m curious now that we’ve reached the end, now… and we’re going to go through the whole issue, and we’re going to walk through the issue, but what was your general take on it with this re-reading now in 2019? Justin: I think too, we change as readers over the years, obviously, and I haven’t fully sat down and read this in probably six or seven years. I do think, just as a fan of comics, the older you get and the more time passes, the more time that you live, a fan of comics are in the world where the political atmosphere chain is changing all the time. Justin: I think this comic deepens so much. I do think that happened. I think the topicality of reading it right now, in our political atmosphere, the current sort of a state of the world and with the series about to come out and sort of reframe this whole series, it’s an exciting time to read this comic. Alex: How about you Pete? How are you feeling about it now? Pete: Well, it’s a lot to talk about, but for sure, I mean the problem is, when you’re looking at a comic like this that was written so long ago, there’s a lot of bullshit that you have to kind of try to ignore like the female characters, the oversexualization, there’s a lot of bullshit, but- Justin: I will say that was there in the original read. They didn’t take any more women out. It didn’t use to pass the Bechdel test and then now suddenly has failed it. Alex: Well, I will say, this is coming right off of right before we taped, there was a thread in our patriot slack, about this very issue, which frankly I think is what Pete’s very rightly responding to and that’s something that we’ve talked about all along in the podcast, that this, it’s an incredible comic book, it’s an undeniable artistic achievement, but it’s also very much a product of its time at the same moment. Alex: I think something I struck by which you’ve talked about a lot, and you just mentioned Justin, is the very timeless aspects of the book in terms of criticizing society, talking about panic, talking about conspiracy theories that feel so relevant right now but to Pete’s point, same sort of thing that, yes, the female characters are absolutely underserved and I think from a 2019 perspective when we’ve seen… I’m not going to say infinite more but a lot more female creators and male creators also being more cognizant about these sorts of things in terms of creating books, we’ve certainly seen a revolution in comic books. Alex: I mean if you look at sales, the predominant force in comic books today isn’t Marvel comic books, it isn’t DC comic books. It’s Raina Telgemeier who is mostly writing graphic novels for, young females almost more than anything and that’s, if you look at the New York Times best sellers right now, that’s what people are reading. That’s what they’re being influenced by. Alex: In a certain sense this, just from the comic book perspective is responding to comic books that were coming out in the mid 80’s and before that and pushing those forward. A lot of, we’ve talked about over the course of the podcast, comics since then have been responding and riffing off of Watchmen, often taking the wrong lessons in terms of [uber macho 00:07:58] and dark, and grimness and all of these things, but to its credit, despite the fact that it does have some serious issues in terms of the female characters, which I think we’ll also get to later in this issue when we get to certain material with Sally Jupiter in particular, I think one of the most controversial things that happens in all 12 issues happens towards the end here. Alex: But there are also things that are still very relevant and from a modern read, again, like we’ve been talking about all along, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons are never telling you these are good people, this is the right way of doing things. Justin: I feel like the thing of taking the wrong lessons, this is not a misogynistic comic in that it’s like, hey, these characters are right, this is what’s happening. This kind of got to be like criticizes so much of the comic book industry and the character development that most comics were having in their pages back then when it came out. I agree the female characters are underserved and you don’t see them a lot but they have depth of character, they’re not just there as objects. Justin: And then the male characters are mostly horrible people and they’re shown to be that way, the greatest heroes are the most flawed. Rorschach in this issue, who is the only one that really has integrity at the end of the day, is just mercilessly struck down. I’m just saying, I think this comic is subverting a lot of the stereotypes, as well as it upholds them. Pete: Yeah, that’s true. But I mean, you’re right with a lot of things. The female characters, they don’t have conversations on their own. It’s always talking about… At the end, not to kind of jump ahead, but like you’re saying, she loves her rapist. I mean that’s like… it’s not well done. Justin: No. Well that’s [crosstalk 00:10:04]. Pete: I understand what you’re saying, but like there’s a lot of really fucked up shit. Alex: I get it. I’m on board with what you’re saying, Pete, for the most part, except for the, it’s not well done, because to Justin’s point, that this is very much jumping to the end and talking about the Sally Jupiter of it all but, it’s complicated emotions that she’s feeling. And I think you don’t have to agree with what she’s feeling, but it is a very, or it’s a very realistic thing for people to not feel the right thing all the time, to in fact have the wrong feelings about the wrong people. That’s how gas lighting works. That’s how abuse works, is that you feel something, or think you feel something towards your abuser, even if it’s not actually a good thing to feel, if that makes sense. Justin: It’s one thing to glorify what happens at the end, and I agree it is controversial. When she kisses that picture, it leaves you with a bad feeling, but maybe there… it’s hard to tell what the intention of that move is, but it’s definitely confusing and it’s… but it does feel like it’s coming from a place of the character, but the character’s wrong, in feeling that way, or the character is, I mean it’s hard to say that I guess, but the character feels, it makes you feel bad, about everyone’s lives in this comic. Alex: Yeah, I could be wrong, I’m trying to flip through the comic quickly to take a look at it. I guess she doesn’t have… for some reason I thought it was there, but I, don’t they mentioned til they give her nostalgia or something like that? The perfume, at some point in that scene, or am I imagining that? Justin: I think you’re imagining that. Dan’s wearing it when he’s with Laurie. Alex: There you go, that’s what I’m thinking of. I think what I take away from that scene, and we’re very much jumping to the end of the issue here, just to give you guys a little context listening at home, Dan and Lori are in disguise after everything else that we’re going to talk about at the issue, they go to visit Sally Jupiter, and chat with her a little bit. Laurie reveals that she knows her father is Eddie Blake. Sally starts sobbing, talks about the complicated emotion of it, and as Justin mentioned, ends up kissing the picture. Alex: What I took away from that is that feeling of nostalgia, right? It’s almost the same thing that Ozymandias is working for. The same way he’s talking about this very vague, wonderful, hopeful future, where everybody’s going to work together, when in practice, it may not turn out that way. Nostalgia is the same way, right? We have fuzzy memories, we think warm things about things- Justin: Well, and there’s another- Alex: Go ahead Justin. Justin: There another way to read it. I mean, I agree with you. There’s another way to read it too, she’s just seen her daughter who she thought was dead, surprised her by walking in, is in a relationship that ostensibly seems happy, they’re talking about having kids. Justin: And I think there’s something, it could just be she’s happy that she had her child, despite the horrible circumstances that, and relationship she had with The Comedian. Justin: Like a lot of great writing, it’s open for interpretation, and one of the interpretations is super fucked up, but there are others that you can take from that. Alex: Well, and the other thing we talked about back in the issue where it was revealed that Eddie Blake was Laurie’s father, when she realized that, I think there was issue nine maybe, maybe issue 10, and I think we disagree with this, but I still stick by the interpretation that, Eddie Blake does feel something towards Laurie and he feels kind of something, towards Sally, that doesn’t in any way forgive his actions or what he’s done or make him less of a monster, but that doesn’t mean he can’t also be passionate towards these people in the same way, though ultimately he is a bad guy. Pete, I interrupted you though. What were you going to say? Pete: Well, I was just going to say that, some of these things that happen are sort of awful. We’re trying to show these people as not good people, sure. But also all Laurie does is she’s just sleeping with dudes every time you see her, or she’s on her knees in a sexualized position, it’s like, if there was some kind of good quality that they would try to portray, I think it would just go a little bit easier with kind of being like, okay. Alex: Well I’ll tell you what, I will disagree with you at certain points on this issue in particular, that I do feel has a re-owning of the Laurie Blake character, and does push her forward into giving her much more agency, which we’ll get to in a moment. Let’s put a pit into this discussion, I’m sure we’ll re-visit it throughout the issue, and why don’t we jump into a page by page of what’s going on, real easy by the way, to get through these first couple of pages, I’m just going to say. It’s just real easy, just flipping right through them, just a bunch of destruction, squid legs, et cetera, et cetera. It’s great- Pete: It’s been fun- Alex: … just like- Pete: pale horse, we would love to see pale horse sold out. Alex: … Exactly. Has this series used full page splashes at any point previously? Justin: No, definitely not back to back. I think, that’s what is so amazing about this, is the way to sort of hold that back, and then to let Dave Gibbons just go to town here and the colors in these pages as well are just so amazing- Alex: John Higgins. Justin: We see little references to everything we’ve seen before. We see characters that we’ve met, who are now laying dead in the streets. It’s just such epic storytelling and Plate used it, just the right moment in the series. Pete: I mean, I’m def-, I’m sorry. Justin: Go ahead Pete. Pete: I’d definitely looked through it to see if there was anything like this, and the closest you get, is when they’re on Mars, but it’s not giant scenes like this. They thought about the paneli…
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