“I wanted to kind of make this like, ‘Yeah, this is what Batman would be in the real world’. But I had forgotten that actually to a lot of comic fans, that smelling, not having a girlfriend—these are actually kind of heroic! So actually, sort of, Rorschach became the most popular character in Watchmen. I meant him to be a bad example. But I have people come up to me in the street saying, 'I am Rorschach! That is my story!’ And I’ll be thinking: 'Yeah, great, can you just keep away from me, never come anywhere near me again as long as I live?’” (Alan Moore in a 2008 interview)
It’s also confusing. And trite. And reads like a Watchmen fanficrather than a proper Watchmen sequel. Oh and did I mention that its a blatant slap in the face of creator’s rights and completely shits on the notion of respecting artists and their art?
Honestly, aside from some gorgeous artwork by the ever-talented Gary Frank, I don’t see what all the hype and praise towards Doomsday Clock is about. It’s just another shitty cash-in of an Alan Moore property and another mediocre piece of work by Geoff “How can I piss away all of the goodwill I garnered in the early stages of my career” Johns. It’s a shitty sequel to a book that’s already been beaten into the ground by a slew of shitty prequels and a shitty movie adaptation. If you looked up “beating a dead horse” on Google Images, Watchmen might as well be the first result.
There’s no reason for it to actually exist either. It’s literally just Johns shifting the responsibility of the past 6-odd years of shitty DC comics from The New 52 off of DC and onto Alan Moore, who literally had nothingto do with all of the problems DC has been facing the past couple of years. If Johns really wanted to be clever with the whole premise of “Superman essentially going against the forces that ruined DC”, then the book would’ve been Superman going up against Geoff Johns, Bob Harass, Zack Snyder and the various editors of the shittier New 52 books, all of whom have done muchmore damage to the DC Universe than Alan Moore and Watchmen have.
It’s ironic too. While Johns is now shifting the blame of the New 52 (a line of books hespearheaded and he contributed shitty books to) by using a cornerstone of contemporary American comics as a vessel for what amounts to an unoriginal fanfic, Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo (you know, the guys who made arguably the bestNew 52 book) are publishing what is easilythe most fun and creative book DC has put out in recent memory with their excellent DC: Metal series. And guess what: they didn’t have to fuck the corpse of an older, better book and shit on the notion of creator’s rights to do it.
In a perfect world, if DC really wanted a cute, smart, meta way of undoing The New 52 and reconstructing the superhero genre from Watchmen (for the second time, since Kingdom Come already did it first 21 years ago), than Doomsday Clock would’ve been helmed by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (both of whom built their entire contemporary careers on reconstructing superheros) and would’ve featured the Charleton characters of Earth 4 the duo reinvigorated to deliberately parody Watchmen for the excellent DC: Multiversity series. I can guaranteeto you weenies that in the alternate, better reality where that book exists, it would still be a better solution than the shit Johns is feeding us now.
But alas, we don’t live in a perfect world. We’re stuck in a world were the guy who wrote Flash: Rebirth, Superman: Secret Origin, Green Lantern: Rebirth, Blackest Night/Brightest Day, and so on, can phone it in to shift blame for his own shitty mistakes and jerk off the diamond-hard cocks of drooling fanboys who get off to watching yet another celebrated creator turn over the dead corpse of one of the most over saturated DC books and fuck it right in it’s gaping, crumbling asshole.
Don’t read Doomsday Clock. Go pick up Mr. Miracle. Or Blue Beetle. Or DC: Metal. Or Cyborg. Or Doom Patrol. Or Future Quest. Literally any book DC is publishing right now that isn’t a cynical, insulting cash-grab.
v for vendetta is a film with a female protagonist that criticises capitalism, condemns pedophilia, encourages the viewers to question their governments, has a central plot about how LGBT people are condemned in right wing societies (more than three LGBT characters are in it) and was directed by a trans woman and her brother.
why has this become a fuckboy classic
because they mistake V for the protagonist and Evey as simply the viewpoint character, wilfully ignore the part of the plot about LGBT discrimination, and concentrate on how cool V is with his mask and his government-rebelling plots.
What I find interesting is that - V is actually, imo, coded as trans, especially in the original graphic novel. Alan Moore claims that clues to identity of V ‘are all there’, which implies it might be a named character. If it was one, the only person matching would be Valerie, the woman whose journals V gives to Evey. Everything would match - Valerie was an actress, which would fit with both costume and tastes of V, and also why said letter was so important - and really, how the hell an occupant of a high-security concentration camp under constant observation had ability to write a letter, and also how a letter written on toiler paper would survive all these years, and burning down of Larkhill camp. (answer - by being written AFTER all these events).
Except, V appears to be male. Everyone is using male pronouns for him, in the movie he speaks in a masculine voice, and in the novel we do see a panel of his silhouette naked in Larkhill, and he definitely has a masculine physique.
But, if Valerie becoming V was metaphor for transition, that’d make sense.
That’s in addition to well, the fact that a lot of trans men begin their self-discovery as butch lesbians? It’d sure fit.
Why do I believe that theory? In addition to whole LGBT themes thing, and the letter thing, there’s one more reason. Well, I think this was skimmed by in the movie, but in the novel, we get a pretty solid clue. See, in the movie, exact nature of experiments performed on Larkhill inmates is kept rather dubious if I recall - we know they gave V abilities slightly above normal humans, but that’s it.
But in the novel, it’s more specific. So, what is the field of experiments that are being performed Larkhill concentration camp that they needed human specimen?
Hormone research.
V got strength to throw off chains of opression and fight back and yadda yadda, became a character who ticks off literally every single checkbox on definition of a superhero, including superpowers…
By literalfucking hormone therapy.
Administered to him, ironically, by the very oppressors.
From what I’ve read of Alan Moore’s stories, he doesn’t leave details up to a chance. Everything has a reason, and everything is interconnected with each other. And this, this doesn’t look like a bit of dark irony Alan Moore would pass up, since he loves that shit.
So, those are my reasons for this particular interpretation.
this is a really incredible
also I just wanted to add that both the directors are transgender woman, the Wachawowskis, and they also directed Matrix
Holy shot I did not pick up on this
I really don’t understand how anyone could not know V was Valerie. To me it’s as obvious as day. It’s actually somehow MORE obvious in the movie.
It became a fuckboy classic in the same way that Watchmen turned from a direct critique of Objectivism and a statement on How Superheroes Should Absolutely Not Behave, into a badly-understood blueprint for how a bunch of writers and fans decided All Superheroes Should Absolutely Be At All Times Because It’s Gritty And Dark And Realistic (including Zack “I never really liked comics except for Watchmen and also I want Warner Brothers to let me make a movie version of The Fountainhead” Snyder).
My dumbass reading this post: VALERIE STARTS WITH A V!OFCOURSE!!
There’s an oft-problematic sub-genre of superhero comics I’ve always had a particular affection for nonetheless. It’s a genre I have a difficult time even coming up with a name for; one where the nigh-incomprehensibly complex nature of a sci-fi/superhero setting and the gritty humanity inherent in “real life of superheroes” type content collide. Series like Transmetropolitan, Astro City, andPowers fall into that category, and those are some of the greatest comic series of all time. But there is one that I tend to forget about and, as a result, don’t often go back to: Alan Moore’s Top 10.
As a police drama set in a city where literally every resident is some sort of superhero, robot, mutant, monster, goddess, or alien, Top 10 hits a lot of zany-but-dark notes. But unlike the (truly brilliant) series Powers by Brian Michael Bendis, Top 10 is much more lighthearted in its take on “how do you do policework when suspects are superpowered beings,” and tends more towards “comics continuity gone wild”-type jokes and narratives.
Top 10 features a dazzlingly diverse cast in an almost unimaginably complex multiverse, but the stories that it tells are surprisingly relatable, due in no small part to the character-focused writing by Alan Moore. The art by Gene Ha crams nearly every page with enough Easter eggs and references that they sometimes come off as being from a Where’s Waldo book. But the comic also, like many of Alan Moore’s greatest works, tackles some very controversial issues in ways that can be (sometimes subversively) heavy-handed and trope-y. Though much of the more problematic content in these books does offer a nuanced and honest look at things like racism, sexism, homophobia, and police corruption, it also sometimes comes off as playing for pure shock value.
Note that this article is about the original 2000-2001 run of Top 10 (and to a lesser extent its prequel The Forty Niners) rather than the 2008-2009 run by Kevin and Zander Cannon (who also worked on the original).
“They claim their labors are to build a heaven, yet their heaven is populated by horrors. Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. A clock without a craftsman. It’s too late. Always has been, always will be. Too late.”
