Why Before Watchmen is a Good Idea

I don't want to sound like a Watchmen or Alan Moore basher (starting off a sentence like that is bound to put people on the defensive, so I want to acknowledge that as well as point out that I am a Watchmen fan), but there are a few things I think need to be addressed regarding Before Watchmen. The internet has already shot off a flurry of ideas and this news is stale, so I'm not attempting to add anything to the conversation here. Right now I want to address the following points

-Watchmen is a stand-alone work full of derivative characters

-Every argument against Before Watchmen because Watchmen is a stand-alone work is faulty at its core

-No one (including Alan Moore) knows if Alan and Dave would have done more work with the characters if DC had given them back to Alan and Dave in, say, 1989

-Anyone, including Alan Moore, who argues the previous point is claiming omniscience, which is the single greatest argumentative fallacy that exists

-Alan's Ad Hominem attacks against the DC creators are also hyper counter productive: Alan Moore is only known for comic work

-The Dark Knight Returns is a stand-alone work, yet it is not the only Batman (nor the Joker, nor Gordon, nor Robin) story people love that is also well told

-All-Star Superman is a stand-alone work, yet it is not the only Superman (nor Luthor, nor Lane, nor Olson) story people love that is also well told

-Straight up, Alan Moore has exactly one "original" work that I think is anything more than par for the industry (the amazing V for Vendetta), which means he is not the arbiter of brilliance and originality in comics

-Everything else he's done of any quality deserves to have the same vitriol spit at it that he spat at Before Watchmen based solely on his argumentative reasons against it

-Before Watchmen is a legit good idea and one that should have been explored previously (except for the Tales of the Black Freighter comic, which ruins a great deal of Watchmen's pace and was a poor idea from it's inception and prolly doesn't deserve a slot in the prequels)

-The previous requires a caveat: Before Watchmen is a legit good idea if all the books don't end with, "and tomorrow, Watchmen started"

-Alan Moore is overly attributed with all of the in panel cleverness, yet Dave Gibbons who conceptualized plenty of it feels sorely lacking in credit

-Dave Gibbons is working on Before Watchmen

These few points are ones I think should be chewed over when it comes to Before Watchmen. Yes, I'll be buying every single one of those books. Yes, I expect them to be of super high quality and caliber. Yes, I bet they're better than the internet says.

Further, as someone who is highly interested in comic books and the classroom, I find it lazy at best and loathsome at worst when it comes to using Watchmen as the graphic novel taught in classes. Seriously. Watchmen may have been amazing, but it has not aged well. Watchmen is now an artifact, no longer the critique it once was; Watchmen is the book comic book fans should love, but should not be used for non-comics readers. Why? Well, it's a critique of superheroism, a deconstruction of the pastiche super hero universes that went wildly out of control. Alan and Dave, when correctly applying a deconstructionist lens to the product, saw the major flaws and set about to address those issues. I'm sure when it was written (which was when I was in kindergarten... and I'm 30 now) that it blew those universes wide open. I've read a ridiculous number of academic articles on the issues (and book as a whole), and the vast majority of the reasons why it is held up in academia could be applied to the entire industry 20 years later. Watchmen is a big deal because of primacy. Yes, quality is a massive part of its success. But answer me this, academia:

If you are teaching Watchmen, why are you teaching graphic novels in the classroom?

This isn't to suggest comics shouldn't be taught in the classroom. Far opposite, I think the medium is far more powerful than literature in creating shared continuity and allows for more interactive development as a reader than passive experiences like film. But in my grad school experience and discussions with teachers who use Watchmen at the high school level, the response is the same:

"I don't know which super hero books are 'good,' so I teach the one everyone says is good."

Yet teaching a Cold War era story about super hero deconstruction in a world where super hero deconstruction is the only thing that happens in the world of super heroes (giant, huge, flashing bright light example: Nolan's Bat films) means that, perhaps, Watchmen is the book that should be taught last instead of first. Based on that argument, everyone's first glass of wine should be their best, everyone's first movie should be Citizen Kane (another classic piece of work that is held in far higher regard than it should be today), and everyone's first novel should be Ulysses. The issue with working that way is that these are products that demand previous knowledge of their respective fields in order to even begin to understand the depths and levels to which "connoisseurs" (and I am straight up using that term sarcastically since I rarely believe most self-proclaimed ones have actually done the content work necessary to refer to themselves that way) praise these products.

Plus, Watchmen is boring. You want to introduce comic readers or teach the medium to students with a boring example of the work?

The reason to teach the graphic novel to the reader should be for one of two reasons:

1. the medium needs an introduction (like arbitrarily, publisher-required defined genres differences) (like an intro course to Prose/ Poetry/ Drama, all of which are the same forms of writing haphazardly divided because publishers need to know which shelves to tell stores to stock them on or which search terms they should be categorized under on Amazon)

2. the content teaches the theme you are dealing with in the class (HELLO THIS IS THE REASON TO USE COMICS IN THE CLASSROOM BECAUSE THEY ARE AN AWESOME WAY TO EFFECTIVELY TEACH THEMES)

Here's a short list off the top of my head of comics that could be taught in the classroom instead of Watchmen (meaning they either deal with the deconstruction of a hero/ superhero, they have a heavy/ literary "feel", or they are simply good examples of the quality of the work in the medium and, thus, "teachable")

-DC: The New Frontier (Darwyn Cooke with Dave Stewart)

-All-Star Superman (Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely)

-Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (Frank Miller with Kurt Janson, Lynn Varley)

-The Marvelous Land of Oz (Shanower, Young, Beaulieu)

-Kurt Busiek's Astro City: Life in the Big City (Busiek, Anderson, Ross)

-Civil War (Mark Millar, Steve McNiven)

-The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Moore, O'Neill)

-Saga of the Swamp Thing (Moore, Bissette, Totleben)

-V for Vendetta (Moore, Lloyd)

-Kick-Ass (Mark Millar, John Romita Jr)

-Kingdom Come (Waid, Ross)

-Marvels (Busiek, Ross)

-Understanding Comics (Scott McCloud)

-Any of the Calvin & Hobbes collections (Watterson) or Peanuts collections (Schultz, tho I'd go with the stuff from before 81, when I was born... honestly, and this is so awful to type, I'd say the stuff before his bypass) or Doonesbury collections (Trudeau)

-The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes (Gaiman, Kieth, Dringeberg, Jones III)

-Bone (Jeff Smith)

-Wonder Woman (Azzarello, Chiang)

Those are the ones that I think would work as a substitute for Watchmen, not the only teachable books. I've left off plenty of other amazing reads that would be easily classroom justified or would work better if you could teach 5 or 6 graphic novels in a row (EEK THE $$$) or were teaching an entire class on the subject (the rest of The Sandman, Morrison's Batman: Arkham Asylum or Animal Man, Brubaker's Cap run or Criminal, Frank Miller's Sin City, Frank Miller's Daredevil, Waid's current Daredevil run, Geoff Johns' long form work, Bill Willingham's Fables, Brian Azzarello and Eduard Risso, Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo, plenty from Fraction or Hickman's libraries, stuff from Scott Snyder or Jeff Lemire, gruesome work from Garth Ennis, James Robinson's Starman, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's Spider-Man, major event books like Crisis on Infinite Earths/ The Death of Captain Marvel/ The Death of Superman/ 52/ Infinity Gauntlet/ Secret Wars/ Sinestro Corps War, and even my personal favorite work of all time, Walt Simonson's Thor run). Further, I hadn't even touched on artists like Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Will Eisner, Brian K. Vaughan, or Craig Thompson. There's no manga on the list. No Persepolis. No Maus. No American Born Chinese. No Smile. There's no Bryan Lee O'Malley (Scott Pilgrim) or Mike Mignola (Hellboy). There's no Mark Gruenwald, Chris Claremont, Denny O'Neil, Warren Ellis, Peter Milligan... and I haven't even gotten to the artists that I feel I've left out like the Kuberts, Rob Liefeld (I can hear your snickers and derision from across the internet and don't care), Neal Adams, Tim Sale, Carl Barks, Bill Sienkiewicz, Bill Sienkiewicz, Bill Sienkiewicz (so much love)...

Look, this is getting ridiculous. There are a stupid number of comics available in print and digitally that can be used to teach the medium in the classroom. Academics and fan boys, I just would like to say that Watchmen isn't a good comic to teach in the classroom and, honestly, it's starting to fray around the edges. It's why the movie came out and the prequels are coming out in the first place: the book has become dated as the medium evolved. We can no longer see Casablanca or The Godfather in all its brilliance. We can only see the artifact that remains, wholly appropriated by its medium and now a part of lore instead of a burning brilliance coming to life before our eyes. Watchmen's time has passed. If it hadn't, we wouldn't be getting all of these reinterpretations.

So, please, unless your class is about the genre of the superhero or teaching the graphic novel, leave Watchmen at home. Be less lazy and snag something from the list I left above or, better yet, find something perfectly suited to your class (how I encounter Smile and American Born Chinese!).

And if you're going to teach Watchmen, make sure to teach Mark Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme right next to it.

~ajc

P.S. I do love Watchmen and have read it over a dozen times (that's when I stopped counting). I just recognize it for what is has become and want the populations of the comic fandom and academia to do the same.