Isegoria

Before he devoted an entire work to obscure proto-superhero references, Alan Moore wrote Watchmen, which includes one important proto-superhero reference.

On the shelf of Hollis Mason — the original Nite Owl, turned car mechanic — are three books: his memoirs, Under the Hood; Automobile Maintenance; and Philip Wylie’s 1930 novel, Gladiator, which many argue is the original inspiration for Superman.

I didn’t catch the Gladiator reference in my first, pre-Google reading of Watchmen, decades ago, but my recent re-reading spurred me to move my copy of Gladiator to the front of my reading queue.

Reading Gladiator now, as someone who takes Superman for granted, is an almost disorienting experience; it’s almost as if Siegel and Shuster took Wylie’s work and surgically removed, even inverted, all of its dark, lost generation irony.

In Gladiator, the protagonist, Hugo Danner, is born in a small town in the Midwest — Indian Creek, Colorado — but his parents are a hen-pecked local college biology professor and an obsessively religious shrew of a woman — more backward and small-minded than salt of the earth.

Danner leaps across a river, jumps fifty feet straight up, lifts a cannon overhead with one arm, kills a shark by ripping its jaws apart, fells a charging bull with a fist between the eyes, and lifts a car by its bumper and turns it around in the road. “All of these were, in 1930, fresh and new and very exciting to read about,” Wylie’s biographer notes — but even though Superman goes on to do all of these things, the tone of Wylie’s novel couldn’t be further from a four-color comic book. When Danner joins the French Foreign Legion at the start of the Great War — which certainly sounds romantic, doesn’t it? — he ends up killing German soldiers. Many, many German soldiers. When his friend dies in an artillery barrage that he survives, he goes into a berserk rage and tears apart his enemies with his bare hands. It feels like digging his hands into warm cow manure.

Wylie’s original introduction to the Book League Monthly edition, from March 1930, makes it clear that Danner’s powers aren’t going to save the day:

A temperamental consciousness of material force brought Hugo Danner into being. The frustration of my own muscles by things, and the alarming superiority of machinery started the notion of a man who would be invincible. I gave him a name and planned random deeds for him. I let him tear down Brooklyn Bridge and lift a locomotive. Then I began to speculate about his future and it seemed to me that a human being thus equipped would be foredoomed to vulgar fame or to a life of fruitless destruction. He would share the isolation of geniuses and with them would learn the inflexibility of man’s slow evolution. To that extent Hugo became symbolic and Gladiator a satire. The rest was adventure and perhaps more of the book derives from the unliterary excitement of imagining such a life than from a studious juxtaposition of incidents to a theme.

Previous to the appearance of Gladiator, although not before its conception, I wrote Heavy Laden and Babes and Sucklings. Both ware realistic stories of people and places which I had known. The brief I held for realism convinces me less and less. Space is wide. Man is small. That he exists is romantic. The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose.

Philip Wylie is a fascinating writer, who didn’t restrict himself to science fiction, but whose science fiction works were highly influential. In addition to Gladiator, which likely inspired Superman, he wrote The Savage Gentleman, which likely inspired Doc Savage, and When Worlds Collide, with Edwin Balmer, which inspired Alex Raymond’s comic strip, Flash Gordon.

Edna Mode declared No Capes!, but years before The Incredibles, Alan Moore made a similar point in Watchmen:

Dollar Bill was one of the nicest and most straightforward men I have ever met, and the fact that he died so tragically young is something that still upsets me whenever I think about it. While attempting to stop a raid upon one of his employer’s banks, his cloak became entangled in the bank’s revolving door and he was shot dead at point-blank range before he could free it. Designers employed by the bank had designed his costume for maximum publicity appeal. If he’d designed it himself he might have left out that damned stupid cloak and still be alive today.

— Under the Hood, Hollis Mason

Domestic DVD sales fell 3.2 percent last year to $15.9 billion, the first such drop in the medium’s history, and this is a big deal, because DVDs can account for 70 percent of the revenue for a new movie.

So Warner is going to try a new tactic to revive it DVD sales. After Watchmen — based on Alan Moore‘s graphic novel — hits theaters in March, 2009, Warner will then release Tales of the Black Freighter — which is based on a comic within the Watchmen comic — five days later as a separate direct-to-DVD piece.

My first thought was Cool!, because I would have enjoyed, say, a “scouring of the Shire” bonus feature, so we could get the real ending of The Return of the King.

My second thought was Wait, this doesn’t make any sense, because Moore’s comic-within-a-comic exists purely to play with the comic medium. It provides a separate, parallel line of narration to events in the main storyline — it exists to provide subtext.

At least that’s what I remembered from two decades ago. So I decided to re-read Moore’s magnum opus and see it through fresh eyes — and I found that it’s very much a product of its time. More accurately, it’s very much a product of a progressive — well, left-anarchist, in Moore’s case — view of the Reagan-Thatcher years, with the following features:

• A sense of malaise, and a sense that we deserve this terrible situation — not because we’ve turned away from traditional virtues, but because we’ve devoted ourselves to violence, rather than caring for the poor, the old, etc.
• Sex as violence, with characters emotionally scarred by rape, child abuse, and uncaring lovers. Violent images in the media, within the comic, are closely tied to sexuality, and vice versa.
• Criminal gangs composed of white men and women with silly “punk” haircuts and outrageous sunglasses — and an occasional swastika. Crime is a right-wing phenomenon.
• A fear of all things nuclear and a clear distrust of all things military. Nuclear power exists to destroy the world.

In a video interview, Moore makes it clear that no one before him had applied a political or sexual interpretation to the genre, and his work on superheroes is a meditation on power.

How all this will translate to the movie — or movies — is an open question, but Moore and his fans have seen his previous works dumbed down terribly. Moore no longer wants anything to do with Hollywood:

I don’t see how adapting it [Lost Girls, another graphic novel of his] to another medium makes any sense at all. But that’s me. [...] My position is, I don’t want my name on it and I don’t want the money. [...] But I really doubt that any of my comics can be [successfully] made into films, because that’s not how I write them.
[...]
I met Terry Gilliam, and he asked me, “How would you make a film of ‘Watchmen’?” And I said, “Don’t.” I think he eventually came to agree with me that it was a film better unmade. In Hollywood you’re going to have the producers and the backers putting in their … well, I don’t want to dignify them by calling them ideas, but … having their input, shall we say.
[...]
I don’t have any interest in directing films of my work. If something worked perfectly in one genre, why is there any reason to assume it’s going to work as well or better in another genre that it wasn’t designed for?

Judging from the early preview images, Hollywood didn’t “get” some key elements of what Moore was going for. Nite Owl, for instance, is supposed to be middle-aged, retired from crime-fighting, and decidedly chubby.