The Nite Owl/Silk Spectre aspect of this book is an "empowerment fantasy" (and I'm really not a fan of those), but the point is that it's a good empowerment fantasy--Moore is saying: "look, these people are doing wonderful things for their community and they're gonna fuck each other as soon as they're done. They aren't even gonna wait for the owl-plane to land." There's a darker side to this coin (i.e. some of the other masked marvels we meet actually seem to get off on beating other people senseless), but Dan and Laurie just get off on "making a difference", and this is made crystal clear in the wonderful bk 7 fire-rescue, which actually does give us something like that "lost innocence of the silver age" (are you reading this ADD?) that you hear tell of--but with a little sex... Gibbons' low-angle shot of "archie" taking off perfectly conveys the sense of liberation these characters must be feeling, and that shot from above on the top of page 23 is totally unexpected (I don't think I've ever come closer to feeling as if I were flying while flipping through a comic book) What clinches this scene for me is how Dan serves coffee to the besooted refugees. That's gotta be one of the kindest moments in the history of superhero comics--and I like to see kind people getting what they want, even if they roll over my vision of the superhero comic as inheritor of the American romance tradition in the process!!!
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1 - Al Barger
Co-incidentally, I just re-discovered my old Watchmen book buried in storage - and accidentally ran into a groovy little internet tidbit -- an unproduced 1989 screenplay for a Watchmen movie.