application/pdf
2036-461X
19333
14-15
en
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Space as History: Watchmen and Urban Imagery in Superhero Comics
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
10
Thematic issue / Section thématique
2010-10-01
2022-12-09
2010-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Federico Pagello
2010/10/01
Université de Limoges
2036-461X
14-15
en
Space as History: Watchmen and Urban Imagery in Superhero Comics
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19333/17207
10
SPACE AS HISTORY:
WATCHMEN AND URBAN IMAGERY IN SUPERHERO COMICS
Federico Pagello, Université de Limoges




  Within the superhero genre comics are mostly used to narrate stories. However, since comics
exist as a spatial narrative language, they are forced to simulate time and modulate the narrative
rhythm using space as their only resource. For this reason, comic theorists and scholars such as
Umberto Eco 1, Will Eisner 2, Scott McLoud 3, and many others have repeatedly pointed out how
comic artists create their stories by modifying the narrative structure, the layout of the pages, the
size of the panels, the style of drawing, etc. Therefore a master of this language, such as Alan
Moore, has to constantly try and break the storytelling conventions established by mainstream
comics. He aims not only at telling us stories, but also to express nothing less than his personal
conception of history itself. In fact, as many have noticed, Moore’s comics reveal an historical
Weltanschauung that can be associated even to Walter Benjamin’s philosophical perspective:

  Watchmen presents the baroque thesis that in order to understand humanity as a meaningful
  phenomenon, you must comprehend that time is an illusion and that everything is happening
  simultaneously. Henceforth in Moore’s work, history emerges out of individual epiphanies,
  moments of illumination and apocalypse through which concrete, singular events find them-
  selves meaningfully located within a sense of simultaneity, a perspective of totality. [...] Thus,
  Moore has developed in his work a theory of history as dialectical mediation, which he even-
  tually relates to the formal, stylistic elements of the comic book medium itself, as a kind of
  aesthetic apocalypse of simultaneity available to the reader 4.

   I will not closely discuss these philosophical themes, because Sean Carney’s essay is easily
retrievable on the Web and it seems to me one of the most insightful, as well as most scholarly
texts I have read to date concerning not only Moore, but comics in general. My paper will focus
instead on how Moore’s conception of comics and history is developed in the graphic novel
Watchmen 5, drawn by David Gibbons and film directed by Zack Snyder (2009), as far as it con-
cerns my research subject, namely the representation of New York City in superhero movies and
comics. In fact, in Watchmen as well as in most superhero narratives, these linguistic features and
theoretical issues are embodied in a specific subject, the image of the city, which is both a “phys-
ical” place and a spatial metaphor for the meaning of the whole superhero genre. As Scott
Bukatman has perfectly demonstrated in his Matters of Gravity: Supermen and Special Effects in
the 20th Century 6, in the classic DC and Marvel Comic series the urban environment is directly
connected with to utopian dreams of liberty from social and physical boundaries. In this sense,
the big city represents a crucial element of the ideological discourse of the genre. It serves as a
link between its fantastic characters and the urban environment. Metropolis, Gotham City and
New York all stand for an obvious metaphor of American culture and its democratic values.

CINÉMA & CIE, vol. X, no. 14-15, Spring-Fall 2010                                                  63
FEDERICO PAGELLO

  Watchmen clearly deconstructs this topos, showing a gloomy New York, which has nothing to
do with the 1930s or 1960s progressive ideals which were at the origin of characters such as
Superman and Spider-Man. To the contrary, Watchmen is a critical allegory that chronicles the
spread of 1980s neoliberal hegemony within Western countries. In this paper, I will therefore ana-
lyze how this conception of the city is reflected by the formal choices adopted by Moore, Gibbons
and Snyder.


The Superhero City
  Since their very first appearance in New York newspapers during the last decade of the 19th
century, American comics have always been strongly connected to the metropolitan environment,
not only because they were born within an urban culture industry, but also because the represen-
tation of the city immediately became one of their most reoccurring themes. From the Lower East
Side immigrant slums of Richard F. Outcault’s Yellow Kid (1894) to the phantasmagorical archi-
tectures of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905), American comics explored the
narrative and the visual potential of the modern metropolis (fig. 1). Later, the superhero genre was
deeply influenced by Siegel and Shuster’s decision to choose the big city as the natural setting for




 Fig. 1 – Winsor McCay, “Little Nemo in Slumberland”, in The New York Herald, November 20, 1910.

64
                      SPACE AS HISTORY: WATCHMEN AND URBAN IMAGERY IN SUPERHERO COMICS

their Superman. The image of Superman’s Metropolis could not help but remind the readers of
New York, which at the time was the skyscraper city par excellence. The two major comic pub-
lishers, National Comics (later known as DC) and Timely Comics (later known as Marvel), had
their headquarters in Manhattan and characters like Batman 7, the Human Torch and the Sub-
mariner lived out their fantastic adventures there. New York icons and colors thus became an
essential ingredient of the genre, expressing, as much as the superhero figure itself, the utopian
and ideological issues at stake.
   However, the depiction of the urban environment gradually emerged as a privileged subject
also for those authors and genres that aimed to offer a counter-image of the US landscape and
lifestyle. Since the 1960s, several underground comic artists, such as Harvey Pekar, the
Hernandez Bros, the World War 3 group, as well as the masters of the modern graphic novel, Will
Eisner, Ben Katchor, Chris Ware, Paul Karasik and Dave Mazzucchelli, gave us much more com-
plex and nuanced representations of the American urban environment, often reporting in a very
critical manner deindustrialization, suburbanization, gentrification and other dark sides of the
contemporary Western metropolis. It is in this different context that Watchmen was created.
Before writing this graphic novel, between 1985 and 1986, Moore had in fact already inaugurat-
ed his re-interpretation of the Golden Age superhero genre in Marvelman. He had expressed his
radical beliefs in V for Vendetta 8 and re-booted obscure characters such as The Swamp Thing 9
using a literary and philosophical approach. Already in these early texts, Moore had adopted a
spatial displacement of traditional American superheroes. Within the whole Marvelman series it
is impossible to find a single panel depicting the classic urban superhero scene. Moreover, the
plots deliberately reverse Golden Age archetypes. Another Watchmen achievement, the creation
of an alternate history can be found in V for Vendetta. The dark, repressive portrayal of London
in this graphic novel was a perfect antithesis of the New York superhero, as its Victorian hori-
zontal buildings aptly contributed to the oppressive atmosphere of this dystopian tale.
   Moore’s “revisionist” approach will always be a distinctive and lasting feature of his artistic
career because he is one of the most self-conscious comic artists in the history of the medium.
Revisionary superhero comics have been seen by the critics, most notably Geoff Klock in his
well-known How to Read Superhero Comics and Why 10, as a major trend in the contemporary
history of the medium: as we will see, Snyder’s film testifies that this renewal has perhaps final-
ly arrived to comic book adaptations as well. In fact, if we look at the evolution of superhero
adaptations on the big screen we can easily notice that there’s a rough symmetry between comic
book history and its contemporary Hollywood counter-parts. First came Superman (Richard
Donner, 1978), then Batman (Tim Burton, 1989), Marvel superheroes (Blade, Stephen
Norrington, 1997; X-Men, Bryan Singer, 2000; Spider-Man, Sam Raimi, 2002) and finally, the
most recent revisionist graphic novels (From Hell, Albert and Allen Hughes, 2003; A History of
Violence, David Croneneberg, 2005; V for Vendetta, James McTeigue, 2005; and Wanted, Timur
Bekmambetov, 2008). Donner, Burton and Raimi had therefore already established a classic
panorama of urban superhero cities (Metropolis, Gotham City and New York) on the big screen.
Donner’s retro taste, Burton’s dark style, as well as the 1960s light colors of Raimi’s films are
perfect representations of the classical conception of the superhero urban space, i.e. a spectacular
arena for the fights between superheroes and crazy villains, corrupted powers or mad scientists
(or capitalists/scientists). Snyder’s New York, to the contrary, resembles more the cities found in
other superhero movies or TV series; images either directly or indirectly influenced by Moore’s
work (Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalan, 2000; The Matrix trilogy, Larry and Andy Wachowski,
1999-2003; Heroes 11, Tim Kring, 2006-2010, and Wanted).

                                                                                                 65
FEDERICO PAGELLO

The Graphic Novel: the Grid and the City
  Any close examination of Watchmen must start from the extraordinary work that Moore and his
artist Dave Gibbons by focusing on the structure of the comic page 12. Choosing as their model
the Golden Age nine-panel layout of classic superhero comics (fig. 2), the authors utilized this
grid with unprecedented creativity and freedom, transforming its regular and symmetrical look in
order to undermine the conventions and clichés that were usually found in older comic books. The
narrative and visual “puzzle games” that were created with this potentially repetitive structure
were too many to list here, but most revolved around the idea of crosscutting and mirror-like com-




     Fig. 2 – Bob Kane, “Batman”, in Detective Comics, no. 28, National Comics, New York 1939.

66
                        SPACE AS HISTORY: WATCHMEN AND URBAN IMAGERY IN SUPERHERO COMICS

positions (fig. 3). Contemporary actions as well as past and present events are constantly shown
in parallel, while panels, pages and entire sequences are juxtaposed alongside in spectacular pat-
terns. Due to this strategy, the reading of Watchmen requires a much more complex approach than
a normal superhero comic book would. It asks its reader to follow several situations related to dif-
ferent time/space coordinates and very often forces them to reconstruct the linear sequence of
events later, by going back through the book and re-reading the text again. As a result the breath-
taking rhythm that typically characterizes superhero comics is impossible to find here. Watchmen
readers are forced, by the linguistic choices that compose the text, to slow down their reading and
are entrapped in a visual structure that mirrors not only the characters’ condition but also the the-
oretical and philosophical themes discussed in the narrative.
  When one thinks of Manhattan, it is impossible, if even unconsciously, to not have in mind the
grid that the city is based on 13. The numbered and regular streets and avenues that cover almost




Fig. 3 – Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, “Slam Bradley”, in Detective Comics, no. 2, National Comics, New York 1937.

                                                                                                            67
FEDERICO PAGELLO

entirely the surface of the island form an amazing visual pattern. Scott Bukatman noticed that the
newspaper grid (from which American comics probably inherited some of their characteristics)
could be related to the urban organization of US cities. He additionally outlined that the colorful
Sunday pages where comics originally appeared were often the only break from the boring
sequence of black and white columns 14. Superhero comics, with their phantasmagoric metropol-
itan landscapes, emphasized therefore precisely this subversion of the urban grid. While often
blocked by the nine-panel layout, even the earliest Golden Age superhero comics broke this rigid
cage to explore other spectacular solutions that cannot be found with the same regularity in any
other comic book at the time. In particular, we can find these solutions in the first Siegel &
Shuster works, especially those published before Superman 15, and in Timely’s The Human Torch,
The Sub-Mariner and other Jack Kirby series. From the 1960s onward, initially with innovative
series by Marvel and later with post-Neil Adams’ and Frank Miller’s works, that grid was total-
ly abandoned in the superhero genre. This was done with a coherence that most likely could not
be found in any other popular comic (just think about European comics for instance).
   Watchmen dramatically reverts this trend: it chooses the grid as its general pattern, and also
when it does not present the conventional nine panels, it still respects its deepest structure, using
panels which are multiples or submultiples of the standard one (figg. 4-5). The page layouts as
well as the representation of the city are then conceived to be an immediate expression of the
philosophical and political themes that the graphic novel is about. The grid and the gloom of New




          Fig. 4 – Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Watchmen, no. 1, DC Comics, New York 1985.

68
                      SPACE AS HISTORY: WATCHMEN AND URBAN IMAGERY IN SUPERHERO COMICS




Figg. 5-6 – Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Watchmen, no. 1, and Watchmen, no. 12, DC Comics, New York
1985 and 1986.

York are meaningful elements in Moore’s deconstruction of the ideological form and content of
traditional superhero comics because they make the creation of phantasmagoric sequences and
consequential utopian aspirations impossible.
   Furthermore, in Watchmen, an event that had haunted previous superhero stories eventually
happens. In other series superheroes had, for fifty long years, saved New York City from destruc-
tion. Every week, every month, they defeated crazy villains who schemed to erase the symbol of
American ideals. Yet in Watchmen it is actually one of these heroes who decides to blow up the
city and succeeds quite easily in his effort. This is why the six splash pages opening the final
chapter of Watchmen are so important (fig. 6). The splash page became a traditional feature of
action comics predominantly after Jack Kirby’s innovative work in the 1960s, but was used in
Timely Comics already in the 1940s. Their usual function, however, was to increase the level of
spectacle, astonish readers and speed up the rhythm of the narrative. But, Moore and Gibbons
used this solution to show a silent, terrifying scene of mass slaughter that pushed the reader to
reflect about the meaning of the pages. Therefore, the hidden Ur-event of the whole genre is rep-
resented through an unconventional use of one of its most common linguistic features that addi-
tionally interrupts the regular layout of the graphic novel itself. This image, never seen before,
was the ghost that obsessed the superhero genre from its very beginning. The bright mythology
expressed by the traditional New York superhero is thus replaced with Moore’s pessimistic view
of human history.



                                                                                               69
FEDERICO PAGELLO

The Movie: Flashbacks, Slow-motion and Backward Tracking-shots
   Given what I have said so far, it is easy to understand why Snyder’s film, being very faithful
to the original graphic novel, cannot be fully associated to any other superhero movie previous-
ly produced in Hollywood. Even if it could not imitate all the stylistic features of the original
text, the Watchmen movie is nevertheless one of the most faithful comic book adaptations ever.
Its zealous rendering of the main visual, narrative and philosophical aspects of the graphic novel
is really surprising. Moreover, its partial box-office failure can probably be related to the film’s
indifference to Hollywood’s current standards of action, sex and violence. Although in an
attempt to reassure the producers, Snyder craftily strengthened the few action sequences and
made the sex scene much longer than in the comic (where it is contained in one page only), box
office revenues dropped after the first weekend 16. This attests that Watchmen is not a conven-
tional superhero blockbuster and that it could not be easily appreciated by the average action-
movie fan. More importantly, Snyder’s filmic choices reveal a deep understanding of Moore’s
work in regards to the connection between the spatial language of comics and the author’s con-
ception of history.
   First of all, it is important to notice that Snyder takes advantage of our distance from the his-
torical setting of the story in order to increase the alienation effect of the alternate history’s strat-
egy. In 2009, Watchmen’s 1985 is not an alternate present anymore: it is an alternate past. Snyder
stresses this from the very first sequence when we see a character, the Comedian, watching some
dated (and quite kitsch) TV programs with a manifest satisfaction that immediately makes us
aware of the gap between our present and the diegetic events. The urban environment we are
going to see for the rest of the movie is therefore doubly far from our reality and the 1980s atmos-
phere reinforces its ambiguous charm. The Comedian lives in a luxury loft on the top of a tall
building. As a result we are able to see the night skyline in the background, i.e. a glamorous view
of New York. However, the character is suddenly beaten to death by an unknown aggressor and
thrown into the street. The camera follows him falling out of the window, until he sinks into the
darkness. From the very beginning, we are forced to realize that this city is not the same city we
have seen in other superhero movies.
   Immediately after this opening scene, the title sequence starts. It is a rapid resumé of the his-
torical events that have occurred between 1940 and 1985 in a Watchmen fictional reality. We see
the superheroes living through many important episodes of post-war American history; scenes
that give us several fragments of the familiar, yet estranged, United States. Thereafter what we
view is the search for the Comedian’s killer in New York by the main characters. This pursuit
leads us through dark alleys populated by lunatics and dangerous gangs, into decaying neighbor-
hoods filled with prostitutes and porn movie theaters and toward dreadful secrets hidden in the
most glittering skyscrapers.
   Many shots of the city are filmed through the enormous window of a skyscraper. We can there-
fore clearly see a quite depressed metropolis and a skyline that is much less impressive than that
of the real New York; a city dominated by grey clouds, the Twin Towers and a sky crowded with
anachronistic dirigibles. Once again, an alienation effect makes this metropolis both attractive and
disturbing. The World Trade Center silhouette is another reference that could not have the same
meaning in the graphic novel and it gives the spectator quite a strong sense of nostalgia. Likewise,
the clouded grey atmosphere strengthens this melancholic mood, while the bizarre dirigibles and
a huge pink elephant balloon seem to be glimpses of a scary future, ruled by hypocrite environ-
mentalist-corporate capitalism.

70
                        SPACE AS HISTORY: WATCHMEN AND URBAN IMAGERY IN SUPERHERO COMICS

   From a stylistic point of view, Snyder cannot obviously reproduce the graphic novel’s grid or
any other of its spatial tricks. The director therefore chooses to insist on three combined elements:
the flashback, slow motion and the backward tracking shot. The already mentioned title sequence
shows these solutions at their apex. Not coincidentally, this is the portion of the film where Snyder
was free to experiment in terms of film style, with no need to respect the original text in order to
condense the complex story (400 pages) into a two-and-a-half hour movie. This sequence is a long
flashback, made of static compositions and a succession of very slow camera movements – often
drawing away from the subject – that perfectly embody the whole movie’s aesthetic choice. Snyder
renders, in fact, the graphic novel’s sophisticated temporal and spatial structure by proposing an
intricate accumulation of flashbacks that undermine the conventional linear storytelling of the con-
temporary blockbuster movie. His constant use of backward movements, which stress the regres-
sive and dangerous direction of the story’s events, and recurrent use of the slow motion effect
remind us of the anti-naturalistic nature of this work and of the comic language itself.
   The final sequence shows us an apocalyptic scene: a giant crater in the center of Manhattan.
This last shot of New York adopts again one slow backward traveling shot above the ruined city
(as if the camera had quite literally become Benjamin’s Angel of History). Even if this is not a
flashback, its effect is precisely that of reversing the movie’s narrative. Just as in the beginning
of the movie we see again the Comedian’s yellow pin and we hear Rorschach’s voiceover.
Whatever happened between the beginning and the end of the movie will be totally forgotten, as
soon as Rorschach’s diary will be available to the public.
   It seems therefore evident to me that only through his use of film language and the representa-
tion of the city, was Snyder able to convey Moore’s idea that human history will be inevitably
catastrophic if mankind continues to put its destiny into the hands of political leaders and freak-
ish egomaniac individuals:

    Anarchy [...] is clearly the only way, the only morally sensible way to run the world. Everyone
    should be the only master of their own destiny, their own leader [...]. It is about 0,0000001 per
    cent of the world’s population that causes the 99,999999% percent of the world’s problems.
    And that tiny percentage [...] it is leaders 17.

  The same tragic events will repeat again and again like a flashback, progress will always turn
into regression like backward camera movements, the passing of time will be forever blocked by
an inescapable present that is like a slow motion sequence. The myth of the fast, exciting and pro-
gressive New York life-style depicted by previous superhero comics and movies, therefore,
appears here only as the childish dream of an oppressed and naïf American psyche.




1    Umberto Eco, Il mito di Superman, in Id., Apocalittici e integrati, Bompiani, Milano 1964.
2    Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art, Poorhouse Press, Tamarac 1985; Id., Graphic Storytelling,
     Poorhouse Press, Tamarac 1996.
3    Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Kitchen Sing Press, Northampton 1993.
4    Sean Carney, “The Tides of History: Alan Moore’s Historiographic Vision,” in Image Text:
     Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, Winter 2005, available at the address http://www.eng-
     lish.ufl.edu/image-text/archives/v2_2/carney/, last visit 5 June 2011.
5    Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Watchmen, DC Comics, New York 1986-1987.

                                                                                                        71
FEDERICO PAGELLO

6    Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century, Duke University
     Press, Durham 2003.
7    Gotham City is of course a nickname for New York, but the link between Batman’s city and New York
     City is even more explicit: in Detective Comics, no. 31, September 1939 (the fourth Batman story ever),
     we read “In a New York Night:” before “moving” to Gotham, there was Manhattan…
8    Alan Moore, David Loyd, V for Vendetta, DC Comics, New York 1982-1989.
9    Alan Moore, The Swamp Thing, DC Comics, New York 1983-1987.
10   Geoff Klock, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, Continuum, New York 2002.
11   Heroes presents many other similarities with Watchmen’s plot and themes, in particular that of a con-
     spiracy to destroy New York and establish a new political order. However, Heroes “political” back-
     ground seems to be much closer to American democratic ideology than Watchmen. Not coincidentally,
     while in Moore and Gibbons’ text the city gets destroyed, in Heroes the protagonists finally succeed in
     avoiding the explosion, as it was a perfectly American optimistic reply to the British, pessimistic graph-
     ic novel.
12   See, for example, Spiros Xenos, “Reading Space in Watchmen,” Watchmen Comic Movie, http://watch-
     mencomicmovie.com/downloads/reading_space_in_watchmen.pdf, last visit 5 June 2011.
13   About the symbolical meaning of the Manhattan grid see Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. A
     Retroactive Manifest for Manhattan, Oxford University Press, New York 1978.
14   Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity. Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century, cit., p. 187.
15   In their series Federal Men and Slam Bradley, created for Adventures Comics and Detective Comics
     between 1936 and 1937.
16   Whereas 300 (Zack Snyder, 2007) had a 65 million dollar budget, and earned 456 million dollars at the
     box-office worldwide, Watchmen had a 130 million dollar budget, and a worldwide gross of “only” 185
     million dollars (see www.boxofficemojo.com, last visit 5 June 2011).
17   “Alan Moore on Anarchism,” in YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKfF-nxjDi0, last visit 5
     June 2011.




72
