Watchmen

Unnatural narratology has recently focused our attention on unnatural representations of time. It is usually assumed that the ‘typical sjuzhet’ must be linear, while the ‘variable sjuzhet’ is unnatural and belongs exclusively to experimental works. Instances of time travel are also considered unnatural story elements that have been conventionalised by popular culture. In this article, these supposedly unnatural ingredients of narratives will be examined in the context of the semiotic potential and cultural tradition of European comics. I shall argue that a variable sjuzhet should be considered a natural quality of the medium because of its tabularity and its nonlinear organisation, and that most time travel that we find in comics is a mere extension of the motif of the ‘extraordinary journey’ and does not engender time paradoxes. Thus, it appears that, in the comics tradition, the graphic potential of time travel has predominated over scriptwriting complexities, highlighting the specificity of the ‘graphic imagination’.

Richards Reynolds (1992) has described the superhero genre as a modern mythology. He discusses how the genre often reflects the socio-political ideologies of society, and offers Alan Moore’s comic series Watchmen (1986-1987) as a key text which subverts the superhero identity. In Moore’s own words, his work on Watchmen is an application of the Solve of the alchemists’ Solve et Coagula to the superhero genre; the act of taking it apart and examining it (Graydon, 2009). Moore brings superheroes into a “completely new realm” (Kavanagh, 2000) by placing them into the real world and giving them “sexual neuroses, bad breath and anxiety disorders” (Leith, 2010). This creates grounds for rich reflection on the intersection between superheroes and real-world issues of identity and ideological power. The following will be a discussion and evaluation of the relevant literature around identity and ideology in Watchmen.

What makes an anti-hero a true anti-hero? Why is a mask so important for the superhero? Do heroines still wear high heels? These are some of the questions I try to answer in this interview published on A2 kulturní čtrnáctideník.
https://www.advojka.cz/archiv/2021/2

This colloquium paper is an attempt to reflect my thoughts on stories, and telling thereof using visual sequential art as the media. It also briefly discusses my understanding of the art form and its parallel evolution over time, in dispersed locations on the face of Earth, sometimes citing a few examples to illustrate the point, and at other times quoting the exemplars of the field to suggest the influence they had on ideas and perceptions of the followers, here mostly being the comic book readers and artists. The paper also towards the end opines on the current surge of graphic novels in the popular yet not so mainstream readership, India being the context.
Following is the sequenced outline of this colloquium, yet the subsections can be read on their own, irrespective of the order; coherence being subject to the familiarity of the readers with the media of sequential art.

1. The Inception
1.0 The Need To Tell Stories
1.1 In Early History
1.2 Medieval Make-believe

2. In The Modern Sense
2.0 Sequential Art, the Term
2.1 Modern Comics, an Introduction
2.1.1 Manga
2.1.2 Franco-Belgian Comics
2.1.3 American Comics

3. The Graphic Novels
3.0 Graphic Novels
3.1 Criticism of the Neologism

4. End Note.

The superhero wears a mask or a costume. The mask’s purpose is not only to hide who he/she is but also to show a completely new identity. The person behind the mask is forced to create a new identity after a tragic event, a trauma: the experience of absurdity. Batman lost his parents, Spider-Man his uncle Ben, Daredevil his father – there are hundreds of examples. I will also show that while the superhero stays in connection with his previous “human” identity (he has a double identity), the specific identity of the antihero becomes his mask – character. V (V for Vendetta) or Rorschach (Watchmen) are perfect examples thereof. Each of them finds itself in a new reality where the meaning the world has had until that moment gets lost. They must create a new meaning which involves a new identity and a new interpretation of the world. I will refer to F. Nietzsche's concept of the mask in connection with the pain and the absurdity of existence.
This new identity created by the superhero and the antihero is not a common one: it embodies a symbol, a supernatural force, an ideal. The superhero wants to be seen, but only in the way that he has chosen. With his disguise, he tries to deprive other people of the possibility to objectify him. He wants to be – and to be seen – only as what he has chosen to be. I will refer to J.P. Sartre and his concept of Subject (being-for-itself) and Object (being-in-itself), in connection of course with being-for-others.
Thanks to the connection of Nietzsche’s and Sartre’s philosophy I will show that the new identity taken on by the superhero creates a new meaning of the world.

Motion comics can be considered as an emerging form of digital animation that typically appropriates and remediates an existing comic book narrative and artwork into a screen-based animated narrative. One such example of motion comic adaptation is The Watchmen, which was released on DVD and is also available on the iTunes online store as a digital download. This article argues that this new hybrid media raises unique considerations in terms of adaptation, and therefore provides a brief summary of key debates in adaptation studies, with a particular emphasis on the issue of authenticity. This is followed by a study of conventional adaptation practices from a comic book source and the emerging digital post-production approaches of animators and creative practitioners in the motion comic field, including a discussion on the importance of sound.

Esta comunicación analiza dos de los once textos multimodales presentados al final de los capítulos del cómic Watchmen, de Alan Moore y Dave Gibbons, publicada en Brasil en 2011. Nuestro objetivo principal es entender el papel que estos textos, que consideramos paratextos ficticios, ejercen sobre la obra. Más específicamente, nos interesa analizar los diferentes géneros presentados en estos paratextos y de qué forma dialogan con Watchmen. En el caso de que se hayan estructurado de forma para presentar detalles en su arquitectura que anclan el en determinada situación comunicativa, tal como pregona la definición de texto para la Lingüística Textual (LT), creemos que por el hecho de que los géneros sean fácilmente reconocidos por el lector, trae mayor verosimilitud para la obra, además de contribuir a la construcción de ficcionalidad de los paratextos. Como forma de basar este análisis, se genera un diálogo entre literatura, lingüística y cócmics, usando los conceptos de paratexto presentados por Genette (1989; 2009); la definición de género presentada por Bakthin (2016) que los ve como tipos relativamente estables de enunciados y Ramos (2014); junto con los factores de contextualización definidos en la LT, por Marcuschi (2012), como uno de los principios de construcción textual de sentido; además de su contextualización y articulación con teorías de los cómics presentadas por García (2012), Mazur y Danner (2014) y Ramos (2014).

Pre-publication pages for a chapter in _Teaching the Graphic Novel_ (MLA). Carter reflects on teaching Alan Moore's _Watchmen_ directly after the attacks on September 11, 2001, and how that event informed his pedagogy, the class's reading of the text, and helped Carter see that graphic novel as residing in the "Prophesy Literature" genre.

Prova finale di tesi triennale in Scienze per la Comunicazione Internazionale dell'Università di Catania.
Il testo propone una prima parte incentrata sugli studi di traduzione a partire dagli anni '70, anni in cui i Translation Studies fanno da apripista alla nascita della traduttologia.
La seconda parte ripercorrerà velocemente la storia e le fasi che danno vita ad un fumetto, soffermandomi principalmente su come questo particolare genere letterario venga tradotto.
Nell'ultimo capitolo l'analisi della versione originale di Watchmen di Alan Moore e due delle versioni italiane, cercheranno di analizzare come la traduzione possa cambiare a seconda di stili ed approcci diversi

El final de la década de los ochenta representa un cambio histórico para las historias de superhéroes, y la concepción que se tenía de ellos; nos encontramos con que eran violentas, maduras, serias, para adultos y complejas.

Este trabajo es una reflexión analítica de cinco arcos argumentales fundamentales para entender la manera en que este cambio se estaba gestando: Daredevil: Born Again (Frank Miller, 1986), Spider-Man: Kraven’s Last Hunt (J.M DeMatteis, 1987), Superman: Man of Steel (John Byrne, 1986), Wonder Woman: Gods and Mortals (George Pérez, 1987) y Batman: Year One (Frank Miller, 1988).

""UEA Thesis (2011)

In this thesis I draw upon recent formulations of fantasy theory, from Rosemary Jackson’s psychoanalytic analysis to the socio-historical approaches of José Monleon and Mark Bould, and the poetics of fantasy literature of Farah Mendlesohn, to illuminate the interlocking political debates about fantasy fiction which are important to literary theory: whether fantasy is a minor sub-set of literature or the basis of all fiction; whether fantasy functions primarily as a satirical or utopian idiom, or as sheer escapism; and whether fantasy is a liberating expression of the imagination or a limiting and commodified form. ""

The full thesis can be downloaded via the UEA Digital Repository: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/19302.

Unhappy is the land that needs an anti-hero: a land in crisis, without a clear moral, without truths. The anti-hero embodies competing values; on the one hand, he is born of a crisis, on the other exasperates it, leads it to the extreme consequences.
During the 1980s these characters have their greatest success in superhero comics. The so-called Dark Age follows a profound crisis in American society, marked by the Vietnam War, the fear of nuclear conflict, but also by alternative cultural and social movements. A profound social transformation that inevitably brings with it a crisis of certainties, morals and values. Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, together with Alan Moore’s Watchmen and V for Vendetta, are the graphic novels that more than any other represent this transformation.
Today, the western world faces a new crisis. Economic uncertainty, mass migrations, encounters and clashes with different cultures, terrorism: our worldview and our truths are wavering. Superhero universe mirrors all of these. Antiheroes become more and more numerous, and superheroes lose a clear definition. Marvel’s Civil War, saga directly linked to the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent PATRIOT Act, is probably the most emblematic example, an ideal beginning of this new Age.
The historical moment is comparable to the Dark Age. We are not just witnessing a new proliferation of anti-heroes: even superheroes and the way we perceive them are changing. The line between superhero and anti-hero becomes confused. The classic superheroes have begun to kill – the latest Batman and Superman films are emblematic. Superheroes’ relationship with the mask, with society, becomes much more problematic and "anti-heroic".
I will refer to Nietzschean concepts, such as the mask, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the Übermensch, to distinguish the superhero and the anti-hero, in his relationship with the mask and the society, in his morality. Comparing Dark Age’s anti-heroes (Miller’s Batman, Rorschach, V) with contemporary films and comics like The Authority, Civil War, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight, I will show how our perception of anti-heroes and superheroes has changed.
https://www.uni-due.de/balc/superhero.php

The course focuses on the reconstruction of comic books’ role in American culture. Comics as well as graphic novels are often seen as purely American medium and thus it important to discuss its uniqueness and well as its place among other art-forms.

The definition of comic book as a specific form of art will be the starting point. During the first part of the course several schools of American comic books in historical perspective will be analysed from the popular superhero stories to underground ones. Our attention will be directed to the analysis of the evolution of the medium and its main genres.

During the second part of the course selected important comics and graphic novel will be thoroughly analysed. Special attention will be devoted to European, especially British authors who created their main works in US and became the force that revolutionised the medium (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Garth Ennis).

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon is not the original macabre tale of the high seas. There are clear antecedents of Pym to be found in the oral legend of the Flying Dutchman and there were perhaps published predecessors to it that Edgar Allan Poe read. Likewise, it is difficult to argue that Alan Moore's “comic book-within-a-comic book” Tales of the Black Freighter, a subplot of his graphic novel Watchmen, is the generic climax of such tales. Yet it does seem that the following argument can be made: Pym is part of the original set of coordinates that launches the pirate romance laced with horror elements off the dock. Freighter is one of the last instances of such a project sailing high upon the waves before entering the post-modern self-parodying shallows of Disney's PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN film series. There is nothing definitive in regards to sequential order in this sub-genre in these contexts. In a 2009 interview, Harold Bloom said of another Romantic sub-genre:
AVC: When you called [Blood Meridian] “the ultimate Western”, did you mean merely the paramount example of the genre, or its final expression?
HB: No, I meant the final one. It culminates all the aesthetic potential that Western fiction can have. I don’t think that anyone can hope to improve on it, that it essentially closes out the tradition. (Pierce)
Such is my argument with Moore's Tales of the Black Freighter. There will be more pirate fictions in the future, as with horror stories, and the twain might intersect again outside of a Disney film even. But such fiction will not be able to surpass what Moore and illustrator David Gibbons did in their novel. Freighter served as a commentary upon a story of power, the state, and the very nature of (wo)man's destiny in the universe, both in individually and as a class. It is an examination of humanity itself, told through the prism of a richly allegorical superhero mystery that remains as relevant as it was during the Reagan administration. Furthermore, because Moore's politics are explicitly on display in the book and are of the Left as opposed to the reactionary ideology espoused in Pym, a further dialectical relationship develops between the two texts.

Rather than a postmodern theme of recursive interpretation and destabilization of meaning, "Watchmen" is a comic book focused on the problems of power, in particular the principal-agent problem, and the impact of temporal constraints on the moral weaponization of power.

Neste artigo, discutimos as possibilidades do uso de Histórias em Quadrinhos para o Ensino de História, por meio da HQ "Watchmen" de Alan Moore e Dave Gibbons. Para tanto, consideramos o lugar social dos autores da HQ para verificarmos como o contexto histórico-social em que viviam influenciou na maneira como desenvolveram a sua obra. Do mesmo modo, lançamos a possibilidade de se utilizar "Watchmen" para o Ensino de História Contemporânea.

Polyphonic poetics is a reaction against authors dictating the thoughts of characters to support their own worldview and denying them a human being's innate free consciousness. Soviet litterateur Mikhail Bakhtin saw that Dostoevsky's poetics conceived of characters' consciousnesses that resisted ideological immanence by continually reacting to any limiting descriptions placed on oneself. Humans, therefore, are what Bakhtin calls unfinalizable. My research first argues that the poetics of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's groundbreaking graphic novel, Watchmen (1986-87), is also polyphonic. However, polyphony expressed in the graphic dimension brings new layer of meaning to philosophical implications of polyphony. How Moore and Gibbons conceive of characters through their revision of novelistic polyphony reveals an alternative explanation of unfinalizability than the one Bakhtin articulated about Dostoevsky's characters. Through a close reading of Watchmen and engagement with multiple theories of graphic novels and polyphonic poetics, my theory concludes with an explication of Watchmen, which suggests that unfinalizability is not an innate quality reminiscent of a soul, but a result of the consciousness being an impersonal site for different societal narratives to dialogically engage with each other. A person's consciousness remains elusive because for every narrative the mind evokes to help frame a particular memory or vision, a counter-narrative springs up to disqualify it. This paper contends that Watchmen's polyphonic poetics is based on an ontological viewpoint that reinterprets Bakhtinian human consciousness within postmodern philosophy.

Watchmen is a text which is undeniably engaged in the deconstruction of the superhero comic, and also in a criticism of the very idea of the superhero. However, this aspect of its narrative has been covered to the point of near exhaustion by academic critics and popular media commentators alike. This essay will not completely eschew this facet of the text, but rather than allow it to form the central thrust of the argument, it will highlight the ways in which Moore’s nuanced deconstruction of the superhero genre allows for other readings of Watchmen to emerge. It will be suggested that Moore demonstrates how the superhero comic, a marginalised form of publication, can be used to effectively confront the marginal status of certain groups within society, particularly women and members of the LGBT community.

Esta pesquisa tem como foco analisar os textos multimodais apresentados ao final dos 11 primeiros capítulos de Watchmen, história em quadrinhos norte-americana roteirizada por Alan Moore e desenhada por Dave Gibbons, publicada nos Estados Unidos como uma maxissérie em 12 edições entre os anos de 1986 e 1987. Nosso objetivo principal é entender o papel que esses textos, que consideramos paratextos ficcionais, exercem sobre a obra. Para a análise, será adotada a edição em língua portuguesa publicada pela Panini Books, em 2011. Nossa hipótese é a de que existam paratextos não ficcionais – que estão relacionados à obra publicada, como o título, prefácio, capa etc – e ficcionais – que foram produzidos no contexto fictício e não existem de outra forma –, tendo nosso corpus enquadrado no segundo caso. O que se propõe aqui é realizar um diálogo entre Literatura, Linguística e Histórias em Quadrinhos, usando os conceitos de paratexto apresentados por Genette (1989; 2009); os fatores de contextualização de Marcuschi (2012); leitura hipertextual, conforme Koch (2015) e Xavier (2005; 2015); intertextualidade, de acordo com Koch (2016) e Cavalcante (2017); além da contextualização do corpus de pesquisa e a articulação com a história e teorias dos quadrinhos apresentadas por García (2012), Mazur e Danner (2014) e Gonçalo Junior (2004), juntamente com Moore e Gibbons (2011), Gibbons (2009), Millidge (2012) e Hanna (2016) no aprofundamento sobre Watchmen. Os paratextos estudados apresentam representações de diferentes gêneros, que vão desde trechos de uma autobiografia, a correspondências, artigos de revistas, entre outros todos simulando uma verossimilhança com o mundo real. Ao considerar a complexidade da obra como um todo, a escolha da análise de uma parcela mais restrita do texto nos permite um maior aprofundamento do estudo em algo singular – como os paratextos ficcionais ao final dos capítulos – e ao mesmo tempo traz um novo olhar para o tema sob o ponto de vista da pesquisa acadêmica na área de Letras.

The antihero embodies competing values; he is the symptom of a crisis, and he exasperates it. During the 1980s these characters have their greatest success in superhero comics. The so-called Dark Age follows a profound crisis in American society, marked by the Vietnam War, the fear of nuclear conflict, but also by alternative cultural and social movements. Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, together with Alan Moore’s Watchmen, are the graphic novels that represent this transformation.Today, the western world faces a new crisis. Economic uncertainty, mass migrations, encounters and clashes with different cultures, terrorism, pandemics: our worldview and our truths are wavering. Superhero universe mirrors all of these. Antiheroes become more and more numerous, and superheroes lose a clear definition. Marvel’s Civil War is probably the most emblematic example.We are witnessing a new proliferation of antiheroes, and even superheroes are changing. The classic superheroes have begun to kill. Their relationship with the mask, with society, becomes much more problematic and "anti-heroic".I will refer to Nietzschean concepts, such as the mask to distinguish the superhero and the antihero. Comparing Dark Age’s antiheroes with contemporary films and comics I will show how our perception of “heroes” has changed.
Link: https://figshare.arts.ac.uk/articles/presentation/Marco_Favaro_-_What_if_Superheroes_kill_Evolution_of_Superheroes_and_Antiheroes_during_the_Post-heroic_Age/12562214

Watchmen (2019), created by Lindelof, is built on the personal and family history of Angela Abar (Regina King). The protagonist's personal events trace the history of the United States. On one hand the tv show places historical facts side by side with surreal cataclysms, on the other it gives a form to the collective feeling of injustice and invisibility at the origin of recent movements such as Black Lives Matter. This essay will focus on the journey of the protagonist as a journey through the racist history of the USA and on the destituent operations that the series carries out in relation to gender and bodies, founding myths and institutions.

Considero que puede resultar muy revelador un estudio de personajes, puesto que, en esta obra de Alan Moore, hay una ruptura con la visión del cómic popular del superhéroe y la estructuración maniquea del universo ficcional donde éstos se mueven. Sus protagonistas ya no son una representación del Superhombre, en el sentido en el que lo define Umberto Eco; no son modelos estilizados, unidimensionales, defensores de los valores de la sociedad, enfrentados a su alter ego, que deseaba desestabilizar dicho sistema para beneficio propio, en una representación del mundo verdaderamente maniquea.
Por contra, en Watchmen encontramos unos superhéroes sometidos a pulsiones humanas, llenos de contradicciones internas y que actúan en su propio beneficio, sin un interés tan claro por conseguir la permanencia de los valores de nuestra sociedad, ni con una visión dualista del bien y del mal. Una obra ambigua con un final que no consuela, como ocurre en las novelas populares.
El planteamiento es similar al que realizaron los griegos con sus dioses, humanizarlos, despojarles no de sus poderes, pero si de su carácter unidimensional y dotarles de los mismos yerros e hipocresías de los humanos. Su estructuración también corre pareja a la del panteón griego, puesto que en ambos encontramos dos generaciones divinas.
Son personajes redondos, personajes, que rompen los alineamientos del bien y del mal, pues tanto se alían en un momento como rompen las relaciones en otro. Así, encontramos casos como el Dr. Manhattan, que siendo el más poderoso, aparece como un títere movido por los demás personajes, o el Comediante, quien, similar a Zeus, tras su imagen de dirigente justo, llega a violar a una compañera, o Rorschach, un outsider, un marginado que se autoincumbra como justiciero, pero valiéndose de los mismos métodos que sus enemigos. Por lo tanto, este análisis de personajes en uno de las obras señeras de Alan Moore permitirá vislumbrar la complejidad de las obras del guionista.

Introduction to a special issue of Literature/Film Quarterly dedicated to a range of questions raised by Damon Lindelof's 2019 HBO television 'remix' adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen. The issue features essay contributions from Joshua Wille, Eduardo Navas, Aaron Taylor, Andrew Hoberek, and Sheila J. Nayar.

Available open access: https://lfq.salisbury.edu/_issues/49_4/watchmen_from_comix_to_remix.html

In this article I analyse a selection of Alan Moore’s characters and their vicious behaviour in three graphic novels that belong to the period when, according to Roger Luckhurst, a ‘contemporary trauma culture’ began to develop (2008: 2). I first centre on the representation of violence as a by-product of traumatic past events. Violence is thus seen as the result of a pathological personality that is developed after some traumatic experience that continues to flood the individual’s mind in haunting memories and anxieties. Violent protagonists like Rorschach in Watchmen, Sir William Gull in From Hell, or V in V for Vendetta, can be analysed with support from trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth or Dominick LaCapra.
The character of V will also prove helpful in identifying a second category of violence in Alan Moore’s fictions, that of terrorism. V is placed in-between the traumatized victim and the terrorist perpetrator, thus questioning clear-cut Manichean juxtapositions of good and evil. This second category of characters can be considered terrorists as they employ violence with political purposes, either to maintain the status quo by oppression and aggression, or to transform the political situation of the world by means of mass-scale assassination. In this group I will describe the ‘institutional terrorism’ of political leaders (Queen Victoria, Adam Susan). On the other hand, ‘subversive terrorism’ (1994: 6) is represented by Adrian Veidt in Watchmen, a character who becomes a mass-scale terrorist when he kills half of the population of New York in order to save the world from the escalating tension of the Cold War.
A third type of terrorist violence is described in the final part of this article. Social structures of patriarchal violence impose their values by means of a type of terrorism that is exerted at a microsocial level. For this part of the analysis I will draw on the idea of ‘microsocial terrorism’, understood as that sort of terrorism that takes place on a domestic level, inside the microsociety of the family, where women and children become terrorised by abusive patriarchal structures. This kind of terrorism finds examples through the analysis of the double standard of morality in From Hell; the slackness of the community confronted with the massacre of women like Kitty Genovese in Watchmen; and the domestic violence depicted in V for Vendetta.

The various experiments in community defense of organized groups in Guerrero and Michoacán, Mexico, to confront the insecurity produced by organized crime are occurring in a social setting in which legality and illegality are blurred-a grey area-as a function of regional economic reconfigurations that have fostered violence. The state uneasily tolerates the emergence of armed defense groups in the region by attempting to subject them to the model of citizen participation in security matters. Understanding these groups calls for supplementing current views about their various forms, which focus on their legality/ illegality, with an emphasis on the relationship between them and the society and its dominant actors.
Los diversos experimentos en defensa comunitaria de grupos organizados en Guerrero y Michoacán, México, para enfrentar la inseguridad producida por el crimen organizado ocurren en un entorno social, un área gris en la que la legalidad y la ilegalidad se difuminan en función de las reconfiguraciones económicas regionales que han fomentado la violencia. El Estado tolera con incertidumbre el surgimiento de grupos de defensa armados en la región al tratar de someterlos a un modelo de participación ciudadana en asuntos de seguridad. Para entender a estos grupos es necesario complementar los puntos de vista actuales sobre las diversas formas que toman, centrados en su legalidad o ilegalidad, con un énfasis en la relación entre ellos y la sociedad con sus actores dominantes.

En 1983 DC Comics le compró unos superhéroes a una editorial llamada Charlton Comics. Entre los personajes estaban Captain Atom (Capitán Átomo), The Question (La Pregunta), Thunderbolt (Rayo) y Blue Beetle (Escarabajo Azul). Alan Moore, un guionista británico, que ya venía triunfando y saltando de editorial en editorial debido a disputas por regalías y derechos de autor, dando a luz historias como las de Captain Britain (Capitán Gran Bretaña), From Hell (Desde el Infierno), y V for Vendetta (V de Venganza), entre otros éxitos, es contratado por DC Comics. Moore quería volver a trabajar junto al dibujante Dave Gibbons, y poder controlar a un grupo de superhéroes, sin tener que preocuparse por la continuidad entre títulos y con la potestad para hacer uso de ellos como quisiera, y los personajes de Charlton Comics encastraban a la perfección con su deseo, así que su propuesta original fue una historia basada en un mundo más realista que el de las historietas, donde apareciera por primera vez un héroe con poderes reales: Captain Atom. Quería explorar las reacciones sociales y las consecuencias políticas por convivir con un ser así. A ellos se unió el colorista John Higgins. Sólo le pidieron hacer un cambio a Moore: DC Comics no quería sacrificar los personajes recién comprados, así que Moore y Gibbons crearon nuevos héroes similares a los que ya tenían. Captain Atom fue el molde de Dr. Manhattan, The Question el de Rorschach, Thunderbolt el de Ozymandias y Blue Beetle el de Nite Owl. El resultado fue un gran éxito comercial y muy elogiado por la crítica, a pesar de que toda la historia sólo abarcó 12 números, publicados entre 1986 y 1987. Y al poco tiempo de haberse publicado el último número, el cómic fue recopilado en forma de tomo único, una modalidad aún bastante reciente para la época. "¿Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", es una paradoja planteada por Platón en su libro República. En inglés: "¿Who watches the watchmen?" En español: "¿Quién vigila a los vigilantes?" Esta es la frase recurrente que nunca se deja ver completa en el cómic, y es la gran pregunta que se hacen los civiles y que provoca manifestaciones de protesta. La historia comienza en New York, con la muerte de Edward Blake, o The Comedian (El Comediante). A partir de ahí, Moore y Gibbons fueron tejiendo una trama compleja que pasa por la década del '40, cuando un grupo de personas enmascaradas decide crear un grupo de justicieros conocidos como los Minutemen, compuesto por Captain Metropolis (Capitán Metrópolis), Silk Spectre (Espectro de Seda), Hooded Justice (Justicia Encapuchada), Nite Owl (Búho Nocturno), Silhouette (Silueta), Dollar Bill (Billete de Un Dólar), Mothman (Hombre Polilla) y The Comedian (El Comediante). Esta primera formación se dedicó a combatir el crimen antes y después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Con el paso del tiempo, el grupo comenzó a perder sus miembros, comenzando por El Comediante, tras su intento de violar a Espectro de Seda. Para

"In the composition of a bestiary of contemporary capitalism, the figure of the vigilante should be given particular attention. As a hybrid at the intersection of governmental police and civilians, the vigilante floats between forces which constantly redefine its position within the body of the Leviathan.

In the regimes of liberal and neoliberal securitization, the vigilante/overseer also takes the form of a set of dispositifs of security - as part of a broader discursive apparatus - which can control and influence the alleged natural movements of the market. Conversely, Anders Behring Breivik - who in July 2011 killed some ninety people in Norway - is only the most recent example of an introjected conduct which suddenly becomes ‘visible’ and crystallises in violent outbursts.

In the realm of popular culture, the “revisionist superhero comics” provide an appropriate model for our discussion of vigilantism. Frank Miller’s Batman: the Dark Night Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen were the first two manifestations of a superhero narrative which problematised the concept of vigilantism in the second part of the 1980s.

This article will try to answer the question “who are the watchmen today?”. In order to do this, the article will draw a red line between the different kinds of vigilantism detectable in Miller and Moore’s graphic novels, and it will also try to identify contemporary manifestation of the disciplinary subjectification we are enclosing under the broad definition of “vigilantism”. This article, moreover, will argue that since neoliberal capitalism is characterised by its application on a micropolitical level of society - something that Deleuze and Guattari understood well - vigilantism has become a set of “practices of the self” which aim at the production of docile-but-vigilant subjectivities. The “neighbourhood watch area” and “report suspect behaviour” we see every day displayed on the streets, or on public transport, are only two examples supporting our thesis. Consequently, the becoming-vigilante is a process that seems incapable of escaping monstrous metamorphosis."

Alan Moore, principal ejecutor conceptual de Watchmen -sin ánimo de quitarle méritos a Dave Gibbons-, plantea una obra que dentro de su fragmentación pretende ser unitaria. Esa sensación de unidad llega a través de los diferentes recursos narrativos utilizados por Moore...

Motion comics can be considered as an emerging form of digital animation that typically appropriates and remediates an existing comic book narrative and artwork into a screen-based animated narrative. One such example of motion comic adaptation is The Watchmen, which was released on DVD and is also available on the iTunes online store as a digital download. This article argues that this new hybrid media raises unique considerations in terms of adaptation, and therefore provides a brief summary of key debates in adaptation studies, with a particular emphasis on the issue of authenticity. This is followed by a study of conventional adaptation practices from a comic book source and the emerging digital post-production approaches of animators and creative practitioners in the motion comic field, including a discussion on the importance of sound. This article is a pre-publication version that can be accessed via Canterbury Christchurch Research and Theses Environment. Images contained within this document are used for nonprofit educational purpose and are copyright of DC Comics and Dark Horse Comics. Download the article at: http://create.canterbury.ac.uk/13408/1/13408.pdf

In Thomas Morus’ Utopia (1516) spielt das Religiöse eine merkwürdige Rolle. Denn so sehr der darin beschriebene Staat das Produkt menschlicher Vernunft ist, so sehr gehört zu seinen Existenzbedingungen die Erwartung eines strafenden Gottes. Die Utopier glauben, so Morus’ Erzähler, »daß nach diesem Leben Strafen für unsere Verfehlungen festgesetzt, Belohnungen für unsere Tugenden uns bestimmt sind«, und dieser Glaube ist wichtig, sagt er, weil den Utopiern ihre »bürgerlichen Einrichtungen und moralischen Grundsätze […] keinen Pfifferling gelten« würden, wenn nicht die »Furcht [sie] in Schranken hielte«. Das Grundprinzip von Utopia ist also nicht die Vernunft, sondern die Angst, und diese Erkenntnis ist hinreichend, um eine Linie von Morus’ Utopia zu Alan Moores und Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen (1986) zu ziehen. Immerhin soll auch hier eine perfekte Welt auf Angst gegründet werden, wenn auch nicht auf die vor einem Gott, sondern vor Außerirdischen. …

I argue that "Watchmen," comic and film, attempts to develop a response to the principal-agent problem by developing its technocratic theme via the relationships among the concepts of technology, power, time and ethics, and also, subsequently, that either the film or comic turn out to have different responses to this problem.