This week the movie version of Alan Moore’s beloved comic book opens in theaters across the country. Some say it will be wonderful others, like me, are approaching it with a cautious optimism. Regardless of what happens with the movie it started me thinking on how interesting it is to put the microscope of reality into the world of comic books. To take down the soapbox superheroes exist on down a peg and show them as flawed characters that only do the right thing if the choice benefits them. Sure Marvel has created a legacy by giving us flawed heroes but not real ones.
Marvel characters either try to do the right thing and fail or they do the wrong thing by accident. What Moore did with Watchmen was show superheroes as people that make bad decisions simply because it’s what they want to do. Often times these hard looks at comic characters require writers and artists to take them out of their main reality in order to tell the story without excess baggage.
Most comic fans would say I’m talking about DC’s Elseworlds or Marvel’s What If but that’s not exactly right. For the most part those titles deal with varying realities of specific characters e.g. Batman in Gotham By Gaslight or Spider-Man in What If Uncle Ben Had Lived. What I’m talking about are those few titles that make use of all the heroes and either reinvents them or the world they exist in. As a celebration of Watchmen and the coming Watchmen movie I thought I’d look back at some of the best examples of this idea.
One of the greatest and least known is Marvel’s Squadron Supreme, which actually pre-dates Watchmen by a year. Squadron Supreme is the story of a group of superheroes (obviously mimicked after DC’s JLA) that have decided the only way mankind can survive is if the heroes themselves bring about utopia. Leading this group is Hyperion the flying strongman who lives to do the right thing.
Clearly patterned after Superman, Hyperion is a man of steel without the ability to see both sides of a situation. Hyperion’s ego is limitless as is his conviction that his way is always the right one. Imagine how terrifying it would be if Superman stopped seeing us a adults in need of help but rather little children who needed to be told what to do.
Opposing the idea of a utopia mankind didn’t ask for is Squadron Supreme member Nighthawk. Being the only human on the team (Nighthawk uses fighting skills and gadgets, sound familiar) Nighthawk views the utopia idea as incredibly egotistical, an idea being forced on mankind instead of offered to them. Nighthawk, whose secret identity is the disgraced President Of The United States, quits the team and vows to stop it. From there the plot really begins to unfold as good intentions give way to mind control, group infighting and ultimately the downfall of the entire organization.
What makes Squadron Supreme so incredible is it was the first real look at how wrong mankind putting its faith in superheroes could be. Nobody on Squadron Supreme was evil or malicious but his or her complete dedication to the idea that they knew best was nearly as destructive. Soon any difference of opinion was seen as a dissention, jealousy starts clouding judgment and the very mankind Squadron Supreme is trying to help begins to resent their interference. This was a really hard look at how fast things can go wrong when fallibility is introduced to the world of superheroes.
In 1994 this idea was shined through another prism in the Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross mini-series Marvels. Where Squadron Supreme created an entire new world Marvels decided to show what the actions of Superheroes looked like through the eyes of the common man. No longer would we be riding alongside the heroes during their adventures allowing us to see them as they see themselves. With Marvels we saw superheroes as these god-like entities completely separate from the normal world.
The series is told from the point of view of photographer Phil Sheldon who witnesses major events in the Marvel Universe from the arrival of the android Human Torch, through the first appearance of Captain America and into the seventies Spider-Man world. Sheldon is at first untrusting of these Marvels as he watches Prince Namor and Human Torch battle each other leaving destruction in their wake. When Captain America arrives and the heroes join the fight against the Nazi’s Sheldon begins to trust more but by the end of the seventies when Spider-Man is unable to save Gwen Stacey Sheldon feels utterly betrayed by these heroes and resigns himself to hate them.
What makes Marvels such a welcome addition to these titles is the way Busiek presents the Marvel world to us. This is technically the normal reality these Marvel events take place in but reading it feels totally different. Without making up new heroes or a new world Busiek manages to make this series entirely different by removing the cornerstone of comic books: the inner dialogue.
Our understanding of the heroes we love comes from the fact that we share all their secrets even so far as hearing their inner thoughts. Marvels removes that entirely and we’re left only to judge by the actions we see heroes taking and that show them in a completely different light. So much so that even though the story re-treads well knows Marvel events the reader’s reactions to them is very different. This is a prime case where the writing really makes a powerful difference.
One of the best and most well known of these types of stories is Mark Waid and Alex Ross’s Kingdom Come a tale some say was almost as revolutionary as Watchmen. Kingdom Come gave to the superhero mythos an idea of time, a look at mortality through the eyes of the immortal.
Kingdom Come takes place several years in the future after a massacre at the Daily Planet by the Joker. The victims of that crime included Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Perry White. On his way to trial Joker is killed by a new hero named Magog who is then embraced by the public for his murderous deed. Already disheartened by the death of Lois Lane the idea that Magog is seen as a hero and not a killer drives Superman out of action as well as many of DC’s greatest.
Replacing the retired heroes is a younger group of super powered characters who, like Magog, are increasingly amoral and irresponsible. Whatever needs to be done to take out a villain is ok to them and the result of that thinking leads to disaster and death. Eventually Superman comes out of retirement and re-forms the Justice League to battle not only these miscreant heroes but also Lex Luthor who is thriving on the bloodlust shown by the younger generation.
The genius here is that Waid and Ross took from both sides of the coin by creating a world outside of the normal DC Universe but keeping the action within a universe they didn’t make up. We never thought about what would happen when the heroes we knew retired nor did we think how maybe a new breed of heroes would lack the moral compass of Superman and his peers. Much like Squadron Supreme this story took a look at how wrong things can go when superheroes begin to think that they can do no wrong.
Waid and Ross also bent the idea a little more by giving us people we could root for. In Squadron Supreme pretty much everybody screws ups somehow, in Marvels the heroes we have is all we get warts an all but Kingdom Come allows us a release. The heroes we have come to know and love rise to the occasion to put a stop to tyranny just as they always have. When their plan comes together you find yourself rooting for this title more so than the other ones, a nod to the magic of comic books and a really nice touch by Waid.
Kingdom Come crosses paths with Watchmen in an interesting way as well by looking at a world after the heroes we know have gone. Superman leaves a humanity he doesn’t understand behind, as does Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan. In Kingdom Come Batman is simply too driven to stop what he’s doing much like Rorschach and Wonder Woman is the only voice of reason ala Silk Spectre II. In both stories the heroes feel used, under appreciated and largely betrayed by a world they wanted to help. Kingdom Come simply ends on a more hopeful note than Watchmen does.
There are a few other titles in this realm that stand out like JSA: Liberty Files which re-imagines the Justice Society Of America as spies in the 1940s, there is also the Jim Krueger and Alex Ross series Justice though that is really more of an epic tale within the normal DC Universe. I’m sure there are some others I’m forgetting but none that touch these ideas with the same excellence as Watchmen, Squadron Supreme, Marvels and Kingdom Come.
What all of these stories have done for us is to humanize superheroes for better or worse. In doing that, at least to me, the writers and artists have created a stronger bond between these characters and myself. Through sheer creativity and will Alan Moore, Alex Ross, Mark Waid, Dave Gibbons, Kurt Busiek and others have given us a new way to look at a mythos started nearly fifty years before Squadron Supreme was even an idea.
So this weekend when you’re watching the Watchmen and discussing it’s merits and pitfalls don’t forget that there are other tales out there that set the comic book world on its ear. The Watchmen series was clearly the deepest and most brilliant of all of these works but that doesn’t make the other ones any less powerful or any less required reading. If you haven’t read them then run, don’t walk, to pick them up. If you have read these tales in awhile then dust them off and give them another look.
