The Moore Method: "I will give you bodies..."

Eve Tushnet sums up the (pernicious) binary that Alan Moore's Watchmen grafted onto the superhero genre in the 1980's:

With Great Power... comes the temptation to take responsibility for others. Moore reverses the classic superhero shtik--power is thrust upon you and so you have to save everyone. Instead, he says, power is seized by those whose darker motives push them to save others because they can't do jack for themselves.

She's right about what Moore's up to here--and the consequences of his "strong act of misprision" are explored in detail in Geoff Klock's How To Read Superhero Comics and Why...

Again--my take on superheroes is completely different! For me, the superhero concept deals with existential questions--not power relations. When that spider bit Peter Parker, he was granted the power to transcend the normal situation of the human subject in a technological society--not entrusted with a mission to "make the world a better place". The early Marvel heroes are alike in the fact that none of them (no matter how they got their powers) is in any way vulnerable to the worldly pressures that we have to deal with every day. They don't really get sick (I know, I know, Parker does get a cold every once in a while, but still!)--even though it's obvious they never sleep. They cannot be mugged. They cannot be arrested. As the Hulk demonstrates, even the army has nothing to say about what these characters can or can't do... In acquiring super-powered bodies, superheroes become "holy ghosts", rather than weak fleshlings, at the mercy of the omnipotent state. Every origin (or "conversion") story renders the protagonist entirely responsible for him/herself. They are deprived of the option to "blame the system"...their narratives dramatize our moral lives in impossibly pure form. It's not allegory. It's abstract art.

In Watchmen, Moore does give us a glimpse of this intepretation (Dr. Manhattan is exactly the kind of character I'm talking about), but he leads us away from it by consigning the "romantic" (as in anti-realist) figure of Manhattan to the margins of a very "realistic", Freudian world-snaphot, circa 1985. Of course "real" super-heroes would suffer from the types of psychological disorders that Moore's cast exhibits--but the point is that superheroes were never intended to serve the needs of psychologically realistic fiction! Spider-Man is not a real guy--he's a figure in a text! As readers of this blog know, I interpret the Silver Age Marvels as inheritors of the American Romance tradition, and when I say that, what I mean is--these characters don't put on their costumes in order to express their role vis-a-vis the socio-political/sexual power structure, they wear them (like Hester Prynne) as emblems of their independece from this relationship! That's why I say that my interpretive road through superhero history leads to Gruenwald's Cap and (especially) Morrison's Animal Man, rather than through Moore to Busiek and Ellis and more Moore.

You gotta hand it to the shaggy bastard though, he obviously struck a nerve (in a way that Animal Man just hasn't, to my everlasting chagrin!). And he--not Adrian Veidt--gave superheroes bodies that they were never intended to have! (while banishing the "incorporeal" Doctor Manhattan from the genre's landscape)

But that's enough of the meta-criticism. I'll have some very specific things to say about the text over the next few days--honestly, I'd forgotten how good this thing really is, regardless of how poorly it fits into the model of the genre that I'm trying to construct.

My first observation concerns "The Black Freighter" and its' relationship to Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner.