The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 7

I thought I’d written about Alan Moore’s Watchmen more than once in this newsletter. Realized that with the exception of a sentence about how he uses time, I haven’t.

In a few weeks I’m DJing a keynote lecture. Going to spend the talking part of it talking about pop culture, and I expect to spend most of it talking about Watchmen. How Alan Moore wrote it as an attempt to show how there was one specific thing you could do with comic books you can’t do with any other medium, not with movies, not with novels, not with plays, not with music. And also as an attempt to show that comic books weren’t just for kids. When the book first came out in the mid eighties most of the people at Comics Archive (the shop I frequented for years) would be kids like me. By the time it closed down in the oughts, seeing 15 year olds was rare. Moore did this by stuffing the book full of extra content designed to draw the reader into the world he created—fake investigative journalism pieces, fake interviews and essays, even a comic book within a comic book (what would comic books feature if superheroes were real?). And he did this by dealing with the Cold War. The one honest to god “superhero” in the comic was (incidentally, like Godzilla) a product of Cold War experimentation.

Anyway.

As soon as I heard that HBO optioned a television show loosely based on the comic book I’ve been waiting. This isn’t the first time—there was a Zack Snyder movie ten years before the Marvel behemoth took shape. But as opposed to the Snyder film which sought (with one notable exception) to make a faithful reproduction of the comic, this series attempts to provide a “remix”, working with the world Moore created and some of the characters but set thirty years in the future (i.e. today).

The first episode came out last night.

….

The history of the comic book superhero begins with Superman. There were others—a simple google search reveals the existence of a character called “the Clock”—but for all intents and purposes it was Siegel and Shuster’s Superman, released in 1938. Now even if we were to start there we’d see that the history of the superhero reflects racial/ethnic politics. Siegel and Shuster were Jewish coming of age in a moment of state sponsored anti-Semitism. Superman’s “secret identity” wasn’t just a plot device. But if we stepped outside of comic books I’d argue that the first caped crusader wasn’t Superman or even The Clock, but rather the Klansman. And the first superhero movie (and the first blockbuster and the first modern film) was Birth of a Nation. Take a look if you don’t believe me.

While Watchmen the comic book doesn’t deal explicitly with race at all—there is one African American character, and one Vietnamese character (and I believe she only appears in a panel or two), Watchmen the HBO tv show pretty much begins with a sly Birth of a Nation shoutout, then moves into Tulsa 1921.

(One hundred years ago a few dozen cities erupted in white supremacist attacks against blacks. What happened in Tulsa is probably the worst instance—allegedly in response to an accusation of a sexual assault committed by a black man against a white man, white Tulsa residents destroyed its most prominent black residential/business area. Somewhere between 100-300 blacks were murdered and several thousand black men, women, and children were displaced.)

From a scene dealing with the Tulsa riots we move into the present day. With a police stop. Hip-hop blaring from the car speakers, the nervous driver putting both hands on the steering wheel so they can clearly be seen, the police officer interrogating the driver as if he were already guilty, Only the police officer in this instance is black, the driver white.

And it proceeds from there.

If the Cold War constituted the reality Alan Moore wrote with/against, the modern day rise of fascism and racism seems to the the reality Damon Lindelof seems to be working with.

It’ll be interesting to see where this road goes.

….

In preparation for the aforementioned lecture I’ve been looking at video from the nineties, trying to see what bits of sound I can use. In 1992 Reverend Eugene Rivers penned a letter to the Boston Review entitled “On the Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Crack”. Just like one can read Watchment the HBO tv show as an attempt to both respond to Watchment the Comic’s lack of racial politics and speak to today’s racial realities, Rivers letter was itself a response of sorts to a Cold War era Noam Chomsky article about Vietnam. For Rivers given the privileges black professors like Henry Louis Gates (then working to create what he’d go on to call a “dream team” of black intellectuals at Harvard’s Department of Afro-American Studies) had, it’d seem as if they’d have a special responsibility to speak to the problems of black life—then crystallized in the growing crack epidemic:

(I have to say that it’s a bit strange looking at all of this as if it were in fact history—although this was written 27 years ago I remember it as if it were yesterday.)      

Rivers would go on to end his letter with a call to a set of prominent Boston black intellectuals (Gates, Cornel West, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Glenn Loury, bell hooks) to host a series of conversations on the black poor with the hopes that such conversations would lead to substantial change in their conditions.

The first of these conversations can be found here.

It’s long but watch just a bit if you’ve the time. I’ll probably come back to this again, but it strikes me that there’s one word that, as far as I can tell, only appears once in the whole video, and then is only used by Appiah to talk about his role as moderator.

That word is police.

On that note, my name is Lester Spence. This is the Counterpublic Papers, lightly edited, with intermittent use of the Oxford Comma. Fall is here. Stop to take a look at the colors when you get a chance.