Somnopolis

Bill Willingham, creator of Fables, has given an editorial decrying what he describes as ‘superhero decadence‘. Namely an upsurge in comic book violence and a failure to properly uphold American values. It has been suggested this is a response to the upcoming release of Zach Snyder’s Watchmen, with many seeing the book as leading to the grim ‘n’ gritty era. This was my response.

Ok lets look at this. First off there’s Moore’s Dourdevil satirising the Frank Miller era

Then we could see John Totleben’s apocalyptic depiction of Kid Marvel’s destruction of London (that link actually features Kid Marvel’s death – as well as Moore’s penned death scenes for Rorschach and Krypto).

The difference between them is stark. Moore has often spoken about Watchmen has unleashing his ‘bad dream’, on the comic industry -

Blather.net:Yeah, at the time I was thinking “Well, this is the end of the genre,” you know?

Moore: Well at the time I think I had vain thoughts, thinking “Oh well, no-one’s going to be able to follow this, they’ll all just have to stop producing superhero comics and do something more rewarding with their lives” but no, what happened was that it just started a whole genre of pretentious comics or miserable comics – or you could even see, you look at the Image comics of the early ’90s, and you could see people who were predominantly superhero artists who hadn’t got much of a grasp of writing, trying to sort of lift riffs from Watchmen, Dark Knight, you know, those mid-’80s books. It was like looking at your deformed bastard grandchildren or something like that. Yeah, I think that David Bowie once referred to himself as “The face that launched a thousand pretensions,” and you can somehow kind of feel the same way [as] when I saw the actual effect of Watchmen upon comics [which] was probably a kind of deleterious effect, which is not surprizing I guess. Often the better works in any medium have the most negative effect. It’s paradoxical but you get, say, something like Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD comics in the mid-’50s, which to my mind if I had to pick one single comic book that was the best comic book ever it would be Kurtzman’s MAD, that was the best comic book ever in my opinion but the thing is that, brilliant though it was, it doomed us to sixty years of humour comics named after some sort of mental aberration or illness.

And afterward you see attempts by Moore to break away from the previously dystopic perception of comics, namely Supreme and the ABC line.

From Hell takes the gruesome murders of the Ripper and expounds upon them to see the changes made to British society as a result (apart from the grip of Ripperology on the popular culture, one can also trace the creation of a metropolitan police force and an evolution of tabloid culture to those events). The violence and horror has a purpose, there’s meaning to it. It’s not this.

Even Watchmen describes its heroes as either fetishists, mentally deranged or utterly disinterested in human behaviour, distanced fatally from human concerns. The violence does not glorify them – nor voyeuristically us the readers – it lessens them, as they’re caught in a self-destructive loop that will potentially destroy the very world they’re trying to save.

These freakish superhumans do not preserve the status quo, they warp and change it. In the end I believe that is what Bill Willingham is really disturbed by (if Paul’s assertion that this is a response to Watchmen is correct).