A recent twitter thread examining the public reception about Rorschach vs. author intent got me thinking about Watchmen again. When the movie came out, I went to a local comic book club meeting about the classic graphic novel. I was the oldest there; everybody else was roughly college age. It struck me that the whole giant subtext (or is it surface text?) about the Bomb was largely lost on them. That is, the pirate comic – Tales of the Black Freighter – as a metaphor for the fear of nuclear annihilation that was so prevalent during the Cold War, especially during Alan Moore’s childhood (the “duck and cover” years, even in Britain). It’s not about nuclear annihilation itself but about what the fear of it does to us. We (the poor shipwreck survivor, that is) will do terrible things to avert the object of our fear, even if it means enacting the very horrors we think the object of our fear threatens to deliver upon us.

Watchmen is a multi-level work, of course, but I think understanding the Bomb and its omnipresence during the Cold War is the master key to really unlocking the work, and not just because Doctor Manhattan is a walking representative of the nuclear program. While superheroes predate the Bomb, they really take off as a genre in the early-60s, when the Cold War is at full rev. The so-called Silver Age is actually the Post-Bomb Age, as attested to by all the heroes who gain their powers from the wayward atom. Moore clearly sees superheroes as being complicit in the whole Cold War scam. If they’re not always crewmembers of the Black Freighter, they’re at least patsies for the establishment’s war engine.

There’s a lot to be said here, and I don’t have time to fully work this all out. But:

* Ozymandias’ alien arrives in the form of a bomb, one turned on the American people.

* Rorschach, the one who resists the New World Order, is vaporized, just like as if he’d been at ground zero for the Bomb. The message is that only those who embrace the logic of nuclear superiority will survive.

In the end, none of us are free. We’re enslaved to the logic of the Bomb, the atomic clockwork. The less human Doctor Manhattan becomes, the less free he is, seeing all of time – and all our choices — as already having happened.

Watchmen is justly lauded for its formal complexity, but I suspect that one of the reasons its rings a bell with the literary establishment is this pessimistic outcome, so contrary to the usual message of heroism and derring-do that superheroes are supposed to deliver. Nihilism and exhausted outcomes are considered “realism” to modernist stories. This is, I suspect, another unexamined legacy of the Bomb.

(Below are some rough-hewn, unpolished thoughts on the state of myth in comics. They could also apply to other forms of pop culture, such as movies and music, which all suffer from the same affliction: the death of vision, or more precisely, the visionary.

This is just a draft, to get some initial thoughts down. To be revised later, as time and interest allows. But here it is, in case anybody is interested in this sort of thing.)

The ’80s revolution in comics — you know, “POW! BIFF! WHAM! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!” — marked the point at which the kids who grew up reading them and were now writing them began tailoring their work to match their now adult concerns. Alan Moore led the way, along with Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and others. It was an exciting, revelatory time for comics.

But in the long run, while one could argue that mainstream comics improved greatly, they also lost something valuable. Something they can’t really get back: their subversiveness.

Before the ’80s, comics were for kids. Everybody knew that. Sure, Marvel was changing things up, aiming their comics at college kids — sort of. They still had to have that bombastic, senses-shattering style that screamed out that these rags were just good fun for the kids, with some winks toward the budding adults. Nothing to worry about. These weren’t underground comix, after all.

Hidden behind the bombast, though, were some startling ideas: Captain America’s nemesis was — gasp! — Richard Nixon? A wizard’s tower in Cleveland, the “City of Lights and Magic”, was made of credit cards? The source of an alien’s superpower was “cosmic awareness,” which seemed an awful lot like that trip talked about by infamous Mr. Leary?

These ideas had frisson precisely because they came hidden between the lines of a superhero funny book. Between the cataclysmic punches and soap-opera melodrama, truly weird ideas were fermenting, brought to us by a generation of writers who had been awakened by the fervent concerns of the ’60s and who just had to invest some of these issues into their work. Steve Englehart, Jim Starlin, Steve Gerber, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Don MacGregor, among others — visionaries, all. But they had a barrier they couldn’t just break — the “comics are for kids” rule. They had to subvert it from within. Over at DC, Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams were being even more obvious, by turning Green Arrow’s ward into a heroin junky and raising a cop’s consciousness — Green Lantern, that is — with a road trip through troubled America.

Today, these sorts of topical ideas in comics appear where Stan the Man had always told us to stand: front and center. They aren’t subtext anymore; they’re the primary text of the comic. While this is often a great virtue, allowing comics to forthrightly tackle adult issues, it also means that superhero comics no longer have that subversive subtext or sense of shock when a startling idea bursts from beneath the four-color surface.

Much of this effect depended on style: the heightened action and overwrought dialogue, as if it were perfectly natural for people to go around emoting like wooden Shakespearean actors or tragic Homeric figures and treating every event like an existential crisis worthy of exclamatory oratory. In the “new comics realism,” this sort of Master Thespian behavior is, well, simply not done. It is an artifact of the artifice that Marvel adopted — led in this endeavor by Stan Lee —precisely to raise their kiddie dramas to heightened levels of intensity.

It is just this “mighty Marvel style,” in its faux Biblicality, that allowed for topical social concerns and alternative ideas to be invested into kids’ comics. It was a necessary factor for the sense of subversion so lovingly fostered by the ’70s writers, for investing the comics with an aura of importance. Style allowed for substance.

It is this heightened or elevated style that I miss in modern superhero comics. Writers like Bendis, Hickman, Millar, etc., are doing great jobs with their work. While it is somewhat ridiculous to call it “realist,” considering the content, in dialogue and characterization that’s what it is. It is more modeled on believable movie adaptations than on myth. It is part of the early-21st Century zeitgeist that demands pop culture be grounded in the real, as if we were watching through webcams or security camera footage. While this is certainly an evolution of the Marvel innovation to set stories in our world, in New York rather than fairy-tale Metropolis or dark-fable Gotham, it’s an evolution that has no revolution about it. It’s become boring.

I’m not trying to put the ’70s comics on a pedestal. Frankly, some of it doesn’t read so great these days. They’re kind of silly. Most modern comics are vastly superior in characterization, sense of setting, story structure, etc., etc. But most of them are missing that spark, that thrill power*, that sound of distant trumpets that heralds the arrival of myth to the stage.

We can’t go back, aping the style of ’70s-era Marvel. It’s time for a new evolution, a new language for superhero comics that evokes myth for modern audiences. A visionary style that eschews the new realism and reaches for the ineffable.

Who will lead the way?

* A term applied to the style adopted by the British 2000 AD comics magazine to give readers a sense of being in the club — what Stan Lee would call the cognoscenti.