#I didn't realize I had an essay in me... I don't even particularly *love* Watchmen I just think Doomsday Clock sucked. XD

[theimpossiblescheme]

I feel like the biggest problem with Doomsday Clock is that it feels like the writers are trying to pass the buck.  It’s Watchmen’s fault that comics nowadays are so dark and gritty, they cry!  Deconstructions are inherently bad!

Which... no.  That’s not the fault of Watchmen.  Nor is it the fault of Swamp Thing, The Sandman, The Dark Knight Returns, The Death of Superman, or any other comic that came out in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s that set out to put the standard superhero narrative under a microscope.  They accomplished what they set out to do, which was tell a thought-provoking story, and sometimes that necessitated a darker tone.  You can argue about whether or not the individual stories are any good beyond that (it’s no secret that I’m not a fan of The Dark Knight Returns).

But the real problem, at least in my mind, were the shallow copycats--the comics that only saw the dark and violent set dressing and completely skipped over the actual writing and messages being conveyed.  That’s how we got shit like Youngblood and Frank Miller’s later output.  These books weren’t interested in telling a smart story about the nature of superheroes--they just wanted to show lots of blood, guts, and guns.  In my mind, those are a lot more to blame for the “current state of comics” than anything in Watchmen.

And to come back to Watchmen specifically, people forget that those characters were more than just “superheroes bad.”  Dan Dreiberg and Laurie Juspeczyk chose to be heroes because they genuinely wanted to help people, regardless of Dan’s disillusionment with people like the Comedian and Laurie’s complicated feelings toward her mother’s legacy.  Dr. Manhattan, who starts out as completely withdrawn from humanity and willing to commit massive war crimes because of his omnipotence, has his worldview kicked in and learns that life is worth preserving and caring about--he explicitly leaves the universe in the end so that he can create life somewhere else rather than continue to take it.  Everybody looks at Rorschach (who is admittedly a terrible person and notably never has the same character growth the other three I mentioned do) and assumes that the entire book is based on the premise that if people like him exist, superheroes as a whole are a terrible idea.  But in fact, most of the book is about people rejecting Rorschach’s worldview, about overcoming nihilism to decide that people are still worth saving.  It’s still a deconstruction of what vigilantism can lead to in the real world, but it’s ultimately a very optimistic message.  To steal directly from TV Tropes here, “Empathy is a hero's most important quality. Regardless of honorable intent, committing atrocities for the sake of the greater good never ends well; neither does singleminded, uncompromising adherence to a code. You can't solve the world's problems if you're indifferent to other people's suffering.”

That, to me, is still a message very much in line with most superhero stories.  Deconstructions don’t all have to be bleak and hopeless.  So blaming Watchmen and stories like it for bringing nothing but doom and gloom to modern comics--especially when poorly-written copycats were actually doing just that--indicates a fundamental misunderstanding.