Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [137]
Batman had gone through a number of permutations since Bob Kane created him, including a television run as a parody, and Miller saw potential for further development of the character, not as the heroic “Caped Crusader slavishly devoted to the law,” but as the “Dark Knight,” a wealthy vigilante working almost as far outside the law as the criminals he was facing. Miller’s Batman was in his late fifties, retired from crime fighting, haunted by his past, and angered enough by the present violent society to leave retirement. There were no POWs and BAMs in Miller’s version; Batman was as apt to throw a bad guy off a building as offer him a chance to surrender. In The Dark Knight Returns, Miller ushered in a Batman for adults, a female Robin, a seriously unfunny Joker, a Gotham City that was darker than ever, and action that moved at a breakneck pace from frame to frame.
Will Eisner lauded The Dark Knight series as a significant breakthrough in superhero comics—a move toward satisfying readers who had grown up reading Batman and were still fond of the character but now insisted on more realistic, mature stories. “The superhero largely survived because big publishers had the courage to have other people do adaptations of the superheroes,” he stated. “They had the courage to let Frank Miller take Batman and carry him on into another dimension, so to speak.”
Watchmen took superheroes another step forward. Like Frank Miller, Alan Moore was fascinated by the vigilante reputation of the superhero, and he too was intrigued by the possibilities of exploring the world as it would be without these costumed characters. Born in 1953, Moore had witnessed the clash between culture and counterculture, the evolving of the Beat Generation into the hippie movement, the mushrooming of radical politics, the growth of the music industry, the acceptance of science fiction and fantasy as serious literature, the use of psychedelic drugs as a means of expanding the mind, and the development and expansion of performance art. In short, he was far from the mainstream in his interests and work, and perhaps more than any comics writer, he was able to integrate a vast range of popular culture into his work. After gaining a lofty reputation in England, he began working on American comic books, bringing his esoteric ideas to DC Comics’ Swamp Thing.
Four years older than Moore, Dave Gibbons took a more traditional route to his success in comics. The prolific artist contributed to the popular Harlem Heroes, Dan Dare, Judge Dredd, and Doctor Who series in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s, and for American comics, he illustrated Green Lantern and Superman stories for DC. He and Alan Moore teamed up on several issues of Tharg’s Future Shocks before jointly tackling Superman in “For the Man Who Has Everything” in the 1985 Superman Annual, and they discovered that they worked well together.
Watchmen was a culmination of their experiences and a compelling combination of diverse styles and influences. Comic books had certainly never seen anything like the nonlinear, episodic storytelling that Moore brought to the series, a sort of Naked Lunch world populated by ex-superheroes, in which superheroes have been banned (or employed by the government), cynical politics dominate, and the world, as always, seems to be on the verge of extinction. Gibbons’s exquisitely detailed artwork, set on a traditional nine-panel page, came across as order amid anarchy, while Moore’s new mythology, propped up by literary and cultural references, fragments from popular songs, and even long prose passages presented as memoir, gave Watchmen a complexity never before attempted in comics.
The arrival of these and other graphic novels