Before Watchmen: Minutemen #1
Jun. 29th, 2015 02:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
informationgeek posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
scans_daily
“I didn’t have a lot of input in it. To me anything to do with the movies – as far as I’m concerned, what Alan and I did was the Watchmen graphic novel and a couple of illustrations that came out at the same time. Everything else – the movie, the game, the [laugh] prequels – are really not canon. They’re subsidiary. They’re not really Watchmen. They’re just something different.
“So I was quite happy to say with the video game, yeah, I like that, and I don’t like that, and, that’s okay, because it wasn’t really anything that impinged on what we’d done creatively.” - Dave Gibbons
"You know, honestly, let’s cut through all the bulls**t, and let’s just say: to tell the reader a good story. Honestly, that’s such a trite, bulls**t answer, but it’s the truth of it, right? When you cut through all of this stuff, we want the reader to walk away from it feeling like they were told a good story, and that they felt something for the people that lived through it. Outside of that, it’s up to other people to decide what the thing is." - Darwyn Cooke
Writer & Artist: Darwyn Cooke
Colorist: Phil Noto
10 out of 30 pages
People around here have only posted bits and pieces of a lot of the various mini-series, but rarely did a full entry on them. As such, let's change that.
All of the Before Watchmen posts I do will incorporate stuff from previous entries and also panels that jumped out at me personally that will all fit within the page count. There's no recapping of the story, just highlighting stuff worth discussing whether it be good or bad.
We begin where it all started with the prequels, with Before Watchmen: Minutemen #1
I'll be covering the mini-series and smaller stuff in entries by following the publication order. As such, say goodbye to Minutemen for quite a while. Next week is Silk Spectre #1!
no subject
Date: 2015-06-29 09:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-06-29 09:55 pm (UTC)This is the series that decided to apologise for Eddie Blake raping Sally Jupiter, using the worst kind of "but he's really a good boy" logic, while over in "BW: Silk Spectre" he boiled the Jupiters down into a crazy irresponsible drunk child and a rebellious teen who just needs a strong father figure to set her right.
I have no respect for Darwyn Cooke after his part in this sterile cash-in, and I'm just glad that circumstance meant I never spent any money on his books before I read this.
no subject
Date: 2015-06-29 10:07 pm (UTC)Sort of. I don't have the hate towards these comics like others do, though I do get why. I do like Minutemen and Silk Spectre (the others I'm indifferent to a lot despite some nice artwork in some of them), if only for a certain amount of scenes, some characterization, and the artwork alone. I picked Before Watchmen because I wanted to replace Amazons Attack (since I'm wrapping up with it soon) with a series that is almost as controversial though opinions are incredibly split on it.
Though amusing enough, Wanted and Before Watchmen do share a common thread with a certain artist.
no subject
Date: 2015-06-29 10:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-06-29 11:32 pm (UTC)I know it's de rigeur to hate Before Watchmen on principle, but I just loved both the Minutemen and Silk Spectre minis, writing and art. I think they were both true to the spirit of the original. Yes, that includes Sally's love/hate relationship with the Comedian. Both aspects were right there, and every bit as intentionally problematic, in Moore's work.
Also, I like how the Minutemen series casts a different (but still in-continuity) light on Hollis's memoir excerpts in the original. Whereas the excerpts on their own make Hollis look rather naive and oblivious to what was really going on in some respects, Cooke's story portrays him in a more nuanced and multifaceted way, while still showing him as a decent man who's willing to compromise his integrity and honesty to a point, but not all the way.
no subject
Date: 2015-06-30 04:00 am (UTC)My first problem is that Darwyn Cooke gravitates towards writing a character type best described as "Cool Dads of the 1950's" and he hammers both Nite Owl and, more problematically, the Comedian to fit that mold. The former is merely an attempt to make the character more classically heroic, but as others have pointed out, Cooke's softening of the latter character borders on rape apologism.
My greater problem is the one that ruins it as a Watchmen story, and which was actually brought to my attention on this message board: Cooke misses the point of the Minutemen. In Watchmen the Minutemen are positioned as silly and ineffectual, as wannabe superheroes in a nominally realistic world would be. In Before Watchmen: Minutemen, the titular team ends the series by stopping the detonation of a nuclear device in the Statue of Liberty. It's a neat story, but it doesn't fit within the context of Watchmen, which rejected that kind of classic comic book-y stuff.
Ultimately Before Watchmen: Minutemen is a well executed story with great art and some cool ideas, and taken as its own animal it's pretty good, even if some of Cooke's writing tics are on full display. As a part of Watchmen though; it doesn't work, because Cooke tries to fit a classic style story into a universe designed to deconstruct those kinds of stories.
no subject
Date: 2015-06-30 06:08 am (UTC)Their first team 'raid' turned out to be a mistaken B&E on some kind of factory; those propaganda materials in-between panels were constant reminders of how different they were from what the PR machines kept cranking out; and Silhouette's branch of the story was about her realizing that, oh my God, most of these people don't care about stopping crimes that aren't newsfeed-worthy.
Plus the end of the series wasn't about them stopping that bomb: it was about Nite Owl and Mothman taking on Silhouette's 'Friend of the Children' case. And even that 'one last good deed' turned out to be a terrible, terrible misunderstanding.
For crimefighters, they all turned out to be (and I think were capably portrayed as) good-intentioned but ineffective in-universe executions of them.
no subject
Date: 2015-06-30 06:37 am (UTC)But.. Yeah. This and Silk Spectre - off moments and the complete unnecessary nature of the stories aside - were pretty much the only good things to come out of the 'event'. Ozymandias had some nice Jae Lee art, but the others were just pointless, and actively served to unmuddy the waters of the original book - even little points like the Comedian's entirely unsavoury joke about where he was when JFK got killed, which - as a I recall - Azzarello refashioned as a moment of sadness for him.
no subject
Date: 2015-06-30 08:23 am (UTC)As you say, Silhouette fairs much better, not least because they humanise her and her partner so well, which makes it all the more tragic that within the story their deaths are treated as just some kind of joke in-universe. Heck, even in the original comic their entire reference boils down to "were outed against their will, were fired and then murdered horribly by a wannabe supervillain". Complete with the ever pleasant Rorschach saying that they were "victims of their own indecent lifestyle".
I think that Minutemen could probably have done a lot better if it was more of less the same story but with original characters unconnected to the Watchmen universe.
no subject
Date: 2015-06-30 08:15 am (UTC)Overall the individual characters appear to have some more depth to them within this story, Silhouette specifically comes out well considering the entirety of her story within the original Watchmen was "was a lesbian, got murdered alongside her partner, was reduced to a punchline".
Though Sally Jupiter does fare better here than she does in Cooke's over BWM series about the Silk Spectre. In Minutemen her self-esteem issues are what lead her into getting manipulated into doing a lot of stuff by the men in her life, which again is a thread that carries back to the original story. Her relationship with Eddie isn't healthy, but Minutemen does at least try to demonstrate why she'd think that it would be a good idea to hook up with Eddie despite him being a thoroughly awful person.
Her considering him to be a "real man" despite his being a thuggish rapist, for example, isn't presented by Cooke as her making the right decision here. Same with Eddie deciding to get Laurie to go back to Sally in the second series, with his kidnapping and threatening to murder her boyfriend if he doesn't dump her and enlist in the army. He's a thug doing thuggish things, forcing her to go back to her hugely abusive mother.
It's Laurie's adopted uncle (the first Niteowl) that comes off better as he's willing to actually talk to Laurie and her new hippy friends like people to try and encourage her to go back to Sally. With Niteowl (forgotten his name) it's treated more as her decision, rather than Sally or Eddie's actively trying to remove Laurie's agency from the issue.
no subject
Date: 2015-07-01 09:55 pm (UTC)The first and only meeting of the Crime Busters was another story. The Comedian was acting like Hawkeye and/or Green Arrow, Dr. Manhattan was staring at Laurie, and Adrian was deciding to destroy a while city to save the world. Oddly, Rorshach saying "I'm not in this for the ink" was part of the movie, not the original series.