Wired has an interview with “Watchmen” writer Alan Moore…
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/17-03/ff_moore_qa?currentPage=all
…and a four-page interview with “Watchmen” artist Dave Gibbons:
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/17-03/ff_gibbons_qa?currentPage=1
Alan Moore has become famous for his aversion to barbers comic book movies. His righteous anger towards Hollywood, and American culture in general, is a frequent feature of his interviews, although his moral authority in these interviews is generally deflated by their tendency to include a picture of the guy.
The Wired interview catches him in a slightly better mood, in which he consciously chooses not to rehash things he’s said elsewhere. His lament over the influence that “Watchmen” had on the comics industry makes interesting reading. He also make an interesting claim about American superheroes – that their appeal lies in the fact that, like America, they always have the upper hand in any military conflict.
It’s a clever interpretation, but to quote Iron Man, I respectfully disagree. Like many foreign observers, Moore seems convinced that all Americans are in love with power, dominance, and exploitation, and that expensive Hollywood action spectaculars made by a subset of Angelenos provide a complete and universal expression of the American mind.
But jocks and macho guys aren’t the core superhero audience. Sports heroes, cops, cowboys, soldiers, federal agents, SUV-driving CEOs … those are the heroes that appeal to the culture Moore intends to indict.
It’s the un-macho guys who dig superheroes, for two reasons. One is that superheroes are generally outcasts from society – a physical freak, or some nebbishy nobody with a “secret identity”. This is not a new observation.
The other reason – which I haven’t heard suggested as often – is that superheroes, like geeks, tend to have a very strange and specific skill, and not necessarily of the kind that makes one popular on the playground. And the superheroes who do possess physical might tend to be disfigured or handicapped by it in some way. While I’m not really a comics fan – I know superheroes mainly from film and TV – I humbly suggest that characters like Spiderman, Rogue, Professor X, Daredevil, Aquaman, Abe Sapien, and three of the Fantastic Four fall well outside of the lunkhead demographic Moore seems to associate with traditional superheroes.
If I have any issue with the traditional superhero as an icon, it’s for almost totally the opposite reason Moore does. I think that superhero stories pander not to the Budweiser crowd, but to a crowd that is overly fixated on the idea of being outcasts, spending too much of their adult lives picking at the scabs of childhood and high school. I’ve noticed some recent superhero stories struggling to have it both ways – needlessly crippling their central characters so that a self-pitying nerd audience won’t lose their ability to identify with them, while still trying to satisfy the power fantasies that are the whole point of superheroes in the first place.
By the time of the third Spiderman movie, I found it hard to belive that a character who spends so much time risking his life and engaging in physical combat should still be so gawky and maladroit and lacking in confidence. Anyone who can climb walls and leap between buildings should be a much, much better dancer.
Worse, look at Hiro on “Heroes”. Here’s a character who is clearly identified as a fan, who sees everything in terms of references to Spock and Spiderman and so on. Despite everything he’s seen and done, he still remains a naive, comic-relief fanboy, an observer rather than a participant. Notice how desperate the writers are to avoid letting him be a full-fledged superhero in the same world as the other superheroes – they banish him to Africa and ancient Japan, they take away his powers, they regress his mind to the level of an 8-year-old. Anything to stop him from growing up and joining the other adults, and thus abandoning the audience whose viewpoint he is supposed to represent. Claire the teenaged cheerleader has matured more than he has.
That’s the paradox of superheroes. For the sake of the core audience, they must always be wallflowers. They must never overcome the obstacles that bar them from inclusion in mainstream society, because they appeal to the feeling that acceptance and status are forever out of reach.
Stick that in your beard, Mr. Moore.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons interviews
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