I just finished re-reading Watchmen for the first time in many years. Every time I read I notice some new detail or nuance I had never noticed before. I used to pretend that non-comics readers might one day ask me to recommend a comic book or series to read, but that almost never happens. Over the years my choices have changed somewhat (and it would depend on that imaginary person's tastes in any case), but rarely have I considered Watchmen because it was not likely a non-fan could possibly appreciate it the way I appriciate it, but I have since changed my mind. It is so layered that a practiced reader couldn't help but appreciate it, maybe not in the same way I do, but in a way uniquely his or her own.
But I'm not here today to talk about Watchmen; I'm here to talk about what came after. I'm going to start with the nine titles collectively known as "Before Watchmen" which were released in 2013. I have read these series (and one one-shot) only once, in the order they were released. It struck me at the time that there should be an ideal reading order but, as I indicated, I have yet to even read any of them ininterrupted start to finish. By the time I am fiinished with thise phase of "Before & After" I hope to have a better idea of in which order to read the series. All I have now is a vague notion that Minutemen should be first and Comedian should be last. This is the order in which they were released:
- Minutemen
- Silk Spectre
- Comedian
- Nite Owl
- Ozymandias
- Rorschach
- Dr. Manhattan
- Moloch
- Dollar Bill
The series are either 1, 2, 4 or 6 issues. Because some are lengthier than others, some which started later ended sooner.
FIRST UP: Minutemen
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RORSCHACH #3:
The issue opens with the detective reading from Laura Cummings' journal in a diner in Hanna, Wyoming, her hometown. Hanna was the scene of a mine explosion in 1903 which killed 169 miners, followed by a second in 1908 killing 59. Laura's father was the caretaker of the cemetary in which the miners were buried. Shortly after Laura was born, her father became convinced that her mother was being mind-controlled by alien squids and killed her. He was a survivalist obsessed by the "alien squid invasion." From the time Laura was a little girl, her father trained her to shoot beer bottles off the tombstones. When she was little older, he revealed his underground arsenal. From that point he taught her all methods of armed and unarmed combat so that, by the time she was twelve, she could best any full-grown man in her father's militia.
Her father was an avid reader of Wil Meyerson's comics; not Pontius Pirate, but The Citizen. Eventually, he became convince that he himself was being squid-controlled. Unable to commit suicide, he convinced his daughter to shoot him and to make it look like a suicide. Before their aassassination attempt on candidate Turley, Laura and Meyerson visited her father's grave and she also hid her journal where a smart detective would find it.
RORSCHACH #4:
The detective interviews "Muscles, the Man Mountain," an amusement park strongman. When Laura Cummings left Hanna, Wyoming, she became a trick-shooter called "The Kid." As The Kid she developed a close friendship with the slow-witted strongman. One day, one of the park worker got drunk and admitted he beat his wife to death. After that, Laura told Muscles that she was going to kill him. In order to save Laura from getting into trouble, Muscles killed the man himself. After that, Laura convinced Muscles that he was Rorschach. Laura's father was obsessed with patterns, such as the pattern of the mine explosions in Hanna, Wyoming. He passed that obsession on to his daughter, and she determined that the reason the Watchmen (except Ozymandias) disappeared after the alien invasion is that Dr. Manhattan changed their bodies in order to disguise them from the squids' mind probes. She didn't think she was Silk Spectre, but she was convinced that Muscles was Rorscach, and convinced him of it, too.
From then on, she sent him to kill person after person she believed were being controlled by the squids. Eventually he was captured, but she got away. Muscles now believes that maybe he wasn't Rorshach after all, and eventually the Kid came to realize it, too. But the "real" Rorschach is out there, he believes, and the Kid will find him. When the detective tells Muscles that the Kid and a man dressed as Rorscach were killed attempting to assassinate candidate Turley, Muscles refuses to believe him.
RORSCHACH #5:
In this issue we meet candidate Turley, or I should say Governor Turley, for the first time. The detective meets with the same guy who assigned him to investigate the assassination attempt in #1, but I'm not entirely sure who that is exactly. I thought he was another cop, but he definitely works for Turley. They meet in Hollis Pub, but there's no indication this has anything to do with "Mr. & Mrs. Hollis." Turley is convinced that President Redford ordered the assassination and is using the FBI to cover it up, but there's no evidence to indicate that. Redford is on track to win his fourth term as President, tying Nixon, and, with the electoral votes of Viet Nam (the 51st state), chances look good.
The detective goes to the Governor's office and is frisked by Jacobs, the head of security. Jacobs is the man who fired six shots into Rorschach/Meyerson on the catwalk during the convention. We see a flashback to the assassination attempt from a different point of view. When the dectective first sees Turley, he is sitting on the toilet. Turley has a HUGE framed "smiley face" picture hangin in his office and met the Comedian twice during the war. The first time, Turley saved the Comedian's life. He considers it fortunate that the Comedian is no longer alive because, if Redford had an assassin of that caliber available to him, instead of a "cartoon man and a cowgirl" (as he believes), then Turley would be dead. Turley gets serious and asks the detective what he thinks of him. Instead of answering, the detective asks, "When was the second time you saw the Comedian?"
It was V-V-N night (the night the Comedian killed the woman he impregnated), but it was brief. The detective is frisked again leaving the office, and he later meets with the other guy back at Hollis Pub. The meeting when well and the guy informs him that Turley has given him full access to campaign funds to investigate further, including hiring assistants or paying witnesses. The detective refuses and walks outinto the rain. He often pictures Rorschach and the Kid in his mind's eye, and now they are walking behind him, laughing.
RORSCHACH #6:
At some point after breaking with Muscles, Laura initiates a correspondence with Wil Meyerson. The majority of this issue is them writing back and forth to each other, each page a letter with Jorge Fornés artwork adding additional layers of narrrative and meaning. This correspondence is very useful in revealing what makes these two characters tick. At his hotel, the detective recieves a package containing these letters, so the issue represents him readin them, Inside the package with the letters is a note which reads: "I have more. I will call you at your room tomorrow at 8 a.m. Answer. -- Carey" The detective uses some of the campaign funds (presumably) to bribe the desk clerk and the manager to see the hotels' security footage. There is a dialogue playing against the background of the detective's action which I think is the audio of a debate between President Redford and Governor Turley.
One thing we learn about Wil Meyerson is that he was living in the building outside of which Kitty Genovese was killed at the time of her murder. He was a young man living at home. He and his mother didn't see the crime, but his father did. they could all hear it, until his father closed to window. Wil admits to Laura that he created Pontius Pirate out of feelings of rage and impotence. Taking inspiration from his story, when Laura witnesses a man beating a woman in a motel room, she shoots and kills him from the parking lot. (she doesn't come right out an tell him that, but the illustrations tell the reader.) The Laura/Wil part of the story leads up to him inviting her to New York and them meeting face-to-face for the first time.
I realize I have been providing more summary than commentary for this series so far. I think this is the point at which I began to "lose the story" reading on a monthly basis. I hope you can see how that's possible.
I finally decided it was time to get to Rorschach. I read the first six issues this weekend and plan on finishing them next weekend (I read most of my comics on the weekend). I am enjoying it, as I expected. I am a big Tom King fan, but I had not seen Jorge Fornés' art before (which is not surprising since most of it has been on superhero comics I don't read). I find the art respectful of Dave Gibbons' work on Watchmen without being derivative. The alternate history is fascinating, just as in the other series. I am fascinated by the Presidential campaign (which is surprisingly timely, given that it dates from 2021, although I suppose King may have been inspired by the election denialism that followed the 2020 election) and the Rorschach identity mystery.
Looking forward to reading your thoughts on the rest of the series.
RORSCHACH #4:
….she determined that the reason the Watchmen (except Ozymandias) disappeared….
I am 99% sure that they were never referred to as “the Watchmen” in the body of anything I’ve read. It is only the title of the books. Am I wrong?
RORSCHACH #5:
They meet in Hollis Pub, but there's no indication this has anything to do with "Mr. & Mrs. Hollis."
Maybe it is named in honor of Hollis Mason, Nite Owl (I).
Am I wrong?
No, you are correct. I've been referring to them that way as a kind of "shorthand" so I don't have to write out all their names :)
After the Minutemen, the Crimebusters failed miserably, not even making through their first meeting. Other than Nite Owl & Rorshach and Silk Spectre & Dr. Manhattan, they never appeared together officially in anthing other than pairs. And after the Keene Act, only the Comedian and Dr. Manhattan were officially sanctioned; Rorschach was roguw and everyone else was inactive. The sloset to a group affiliation was the "quis custodiet ipsos custodes" grafitti.
RORSCHACH #7:
Whoa. I'm pretty sure now I must have stopped reading this series during its initial run with #6, because I would have rmembered this. Even yesterday I got the feeling I would have started "losing the story" at this point. Just as Watchmen featured comic creators such as Joe Orlando as background characters, so too does Rorschach. We have already seen IRL comic book creators such as Otto Binder and Frank Miller in the séance scene back in #1, but this issue brings Miller into the story more directly.
This issue opens with the detective knocking on the door to a house in Cheviot Hills, Ca. He is greeted by a man wearing a Rorschach costume. The man is Frank Miller. the detective is there to interview the only surviving member of the tape recorded séance. There is a large painting of the "Dark Fife" hanging in Miller's dining room. The Dark Fife is one of the first pirate comics characters, introduced in the 1940s, and one of the few that rivaled Pontius Pirate in popularity. Miller reimagined the character in The Dark Fife Returns in 1985. After some initial small talk, the detective begins interviewing Miller concerning what he knows about Meyerson and Cummings. (It was Miller who sent the bundle of letters to the detective in the previous issue.) The first appearance of Meyerson's Pontius Pilate, I'll just mention, is Astonishing Suspense #15 (based on the cover Amazing Fantasy #15, 'natch).
I don't know how much of Otto Binder's backstory is true, but in Rorschach, after Binder left the comic book field, he became an expert in UFOs. After he lost his daughter in an accident, he became convinced he could communicate with her using his knowledge of UFOs. He thought UFOs were linked to the dead, kind of like science angels he called "spirit men." Spirit men cannot speak through the vacuum of space, but that can affect electromagnetic energies. As Miller explains, "The idea is you ask a question into a recorder and you leave it going and then you listen back to the silence. What you hear, the scratches and noise on the tape from when you stopped talking... that's the spirit man's answer." (this is textbook pareidolia.)
Frank Miller did not believe any of this at the time of the séance; he was invited to attend by a friend and accepted because he wanted to meet Otto Binder. Then one day Rorschach and The Kid show up at his door. (Laura is a big fan of his work.) They have with them the tape recorded at the séance some 50 years ago. About a year after the séance, they explain, Binder sent it to Meyerson along with a note, but Binder died before Meyerson could respond. He couldn't hear anything in particular at first, but he listened to it over and over and over and over again over the decades until he heard it, too. Meyerson believed that the "spirit man" was Dr. Manhattan warning humanity about the alien squid incvasion, and that he himself was Rorscach.
The three of them then making another recording, asking the spirit man what they need to do to fight the squids. Miller explains that when Rorschach and the Kid left, they gave him the bundle of their letters because, "after they did what they had to do, they'd be dead and maybe someday people would want to know them. Understand them." Miller then plays the tape for the detective and asks, "You hear it? Clear as day. God talking. You hear what he's saying, right? What he told them, what he's telling us? Kill Turley."
RORSCHACH #8:
In this issue the detective interviews three other "persons of intesest." Each is seated in an interrogation room, across a plain wooden table, with their arms tied behind them. The interviews are presented in a unique way, in three separate tiers, each subdivided into as many as eight squares. The smaller pictures aren't necessarily squares, and the text appears in borderless panels designed to lead the eye through the page in the proper sequence. Also, the top tier is tinted red, the middle tier green and the bottom one blue. Being interviewed are Samuel Faider (Meyerson's lawyer), Jamies Knowles (his psychiatrist) and Danial Sahpiro (his handyman). All three were involved to some extent with some ptoperty Meyerson bought outside Santa Fe, NM.
The interviews are depicted in such a way that each flows into the others and the information gleaned from one complements what we learned from another. Basically, Meyerson and Cummings have rented a house sitting on a large piece of property and are in the process of constructing a stage and a tall tower some distance away. It is from this tower they practice shooting at a target on the stage. In hindsight, this construct obviously mimicks the dimensions of the convention venue where they plan to assassinate Turley, but the three men didn't think anything of it at the time. Meyerson is wearing his mask all the time at this point, but they don't think anything of that, either. the men seem to be very cooperative and forthcoming but, about midway through the issue, the detective gets up from his chair, walks around the table, and punches each of them in the face. It is clear at this point that, not only are they bound but they have also been beaten.
By the end of the issue we learn that Frank Miller had sent money to each of them, which is how the detective found them. the detective definitely believes they have been coached in what to say, and they definitely have been. They are followers.
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