Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Watchmen

New For Patrons: Watchmen – The Definitive Collecting Guide

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Today I launched a somewhat unusual guide directly to Patrons of Crushing Krisis – Watchmen: The Definitive Collecting Guide.

“But, Peter,” you might say, “Watchmen is only 12 issues long. How does that warrant an entire guide?

I’m so glad you asked. This guide does more than break out the many ways the original Watchmen series is collected. It also has information about the genesis of the Watchmen characters. It explains the differences between the three different cuts of the film, including one that incorporates the Tales of the Black Freighter material. It covers DC’s 2012 return to the Watchemen with Before Watchmen.

Much like my Complete Guide to Batman by Grant Morrison, this page is something I’ve always sought on the internet but never quite found. I look forward to adding more to it as the upcoming Doomsday Clock event as it unfurls.

This guide will become available to the general public in a few weeks to coincide with the release of the first issue of Doomsday Clock. Want it before then? Patrons get early access to every guide, including extended access to special Patrons’ Choice guides like Scarlet Witch.

Watchmen – The Definitive Collecting Guide

The Watchmen comic books definitive collecting guide absolute, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics Guide to Collecting DC. Last updated June 2024 with titles scheduled for release through August 2024.

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen is widely recognized as one of the most classic single comic stories in the history of the medium.Watchmen Trade Paperback

The 12-issue series tells a story embroiled in all the worst fears of the mid-80s while drawing on a rich history of comic archetypes to create a world of characters who feel analogous to the casts of every major comics universe. It uses those archetypes, as well as the very format of the comic medium, to deconstruct the idea of superheroes – with graffiti in the background of panels rhetorically asking readers “Who watches the Watchmen?”

The same traits that make Watchmen a prohibitive classic can also make it a challenging for modern readers. That’s not just because they might lack the historical context or comics knowledge for this series. Instead, it’s because since Watchmen (and also The Dark Knight Returns, released in the same year) American superhero comics have evolved a sense of self-awareness that echoes the narrative tone of this series.

Watchmen existed for over 20 years as a completely self-contained series with some minor background material included in its collected editions. That all began to change with the 20th Anniversary of the title, which brought a modern restoration to its colors, continued through 2009 with the release of Watchmen’s film adaptation, and seemed to reach its peak in 2012 with a series of Before Watchmen comic books that expanded the universe of the original series for the first time.

However, DC Comics saved the biggest expansion of Watchmen for its 30th Anniversary, revealing that the actions of Moore and Gibbons’s characters had somehow created the “Rebirth” of their entire comic line. After a year-and-a-half of teasing, that story began to be told in Doomsday Clock, another 12-issue series that picks up from just after the final scenes of the original Watchmen to integrate its characters into DC’s current continuity. [Read more…] about Watchmen – The Definitive Collecting Guide

Comic Book Review: Secret Empire #0 by Spencer, Acuna, Reis, & Lanham – On bad stories, responsible portrayals, and Holocaust etiquette

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Should certain stories be off-limits?

Consider if you have ever watched a movie or read a book where you felt a certain story beat was in particularly poor taste. Perhaps it should have been avoided altogether.

Does that mean no author ought to attempt it again?

I find that to be a difficult question to answer. Personally, I loathe plots where someone who is abused comes to trust or love their abuser. I think that plot relies on outdated trope about the internalization of cruelty as a form of affection.

Creators ought to be wise enough to steer clear of that plot in most instances, but I don’t think it should be outlawed. I can imagine a time when you might want to steer into that curve – not to be divisive or subversive, but to say something about your flawed characters. But it’s not a curve that should be mistaken for terrific character development.

There are other plot points that result in me getting up and walking away from the book or TV show I had been consuming a moment prior, whether they be personally triggering, advocating harmful behavior, racist, sexist, homo- or trans- phobic, or just plain dumb.

I don’t think any of them ought to be off-limits. Writing a bad story is entirely up to you. I won’t stand in your way, nor should anyone else.

I do think some portrayals of plots ought to be off-limits – not by rule, but in practice –  because they irresponsibly normalize dangerous behavior without context. People are now savvy enough to understand how to reject dangerous stories at face value, but not all consumers understand how to reject dangerous framing of concepts.

This can be insidious. I cannot watch a TV show or a movie that portrays sexual violence with a romanticized gaze. If you are going to make the choice to depict a sexual assault, it should be viscerally disturbing to the viewer. Their gut should twist. Not because you are editorializing about sexual assault, but because that’s what sexual assault is.

It is the difference between my ability to endlessly re-watch Watchmen despite it disturbing rape scene and my inability to make it through the sexual violence in the first season of Game of Thrones. One was viscerally disturbing. The other one kind of wanted to be sexy. Yet, many people causally watch both the former and the latter.

(You can substitute another topic for sexual violence, if you prefer.

This week, the depiction of death by suicide has become a hot topic due to its portrayal on 13 Reasons Why.

Romanticized portrayals of violence or self-harm erode a viewer’s ability to discern the objective truth of an event in reality. The fictionalized version takes over – whether that’s the seductive ease of ignoring informed consent or the glamorization of suicide.

It’s not that people object to suicide as thematic content. It’s the way it was framed.

Last week, news broke that a new BBC show depicting the UK Black Panther movement was centering a South Asian woman as it primary protagonist rather than a black woman. Regardless of the dubious historical accuracy of such a choice, choosing to cast non-black woman as central to a black civil rights movement erases black women from their own history. We saw a similar act of erasure of trans women of color in the movie Stonewall.

It’s not that people object to non-black characters appearing in historic civil rights narratives. Is the lack of portrayal of black woman.)

Having established my particular dichotomy of offensive story vs. irresponsible portrayal, now let me lay this one on you:

Last year, Marvel Comics and author Nick Spencer made Steve Rogers – the original Captain America – a Nazi.

(Let’s not split hairs – Hydra is a Nazi organization whose ideals have been slightly sanitized for comics. More on that in a moment.)

He isn’t pretending. He wasn’t brain-washed. Hydra used the Cosmic Cube to retroactively change Steve Rogers from American boy with a heart of gold to Nazi-sympathizing double-agent.

On one hand, I don’t think Cap being altered to be a truly vile villain should be off-limits as a story. I don’t think making him the symbol of everything he has fought against ought to be immediately rejected.

On the other hand, Nazis. [Read more…] about Comic Book Review: Secret Empire #0 by Spencer, Acuna, Reis, & Lanham – On bad stories, responsible portrayals, and Holocaust etiquette