David Fiore finishes up his Watchmen blogging in the ridiculously high style to which we have become accustomed:
I prefer to think of Rorschach as Peter Parker, frozen in one of those lonely tableaux that conclude many of the Ditko ASM’s[…] imagine if no new “surprises” awaited that character, just an endless stroll through that same moody panel… that’s Rorschach!
and
The Nite Owl/Silk Spectre aspect of this book is an “empowerment fantasy” (and I’m really not a fan of those), but the point is that it’s a good empowerment fantasy–Moore is saying: “look, these people are doing wonderful things for their community and they’re gonna fuck each other as soon as they’re done. They aren’t even gonna wait for the owl-plane to land.”[…]Dan and Laurie just get off on “making a difference”, and this is made crystal clear in the wonderful bk 7 fire-rescue, which actually does give us something like that “lost innocence of the silver age” that we hear tell of…
Wow. I really can’t begin to describe how impressed I am with David’s work on this book over the last week or so. Every day he showed something about these characters that was completely unexpected, yet there all along, if we’d known where (or how) to look. Kudos, David! (BTW, David has now begun blogging Grant Morrison’s Animal Man. I haven’t read the series, so I’ll probably stay away for fear of spoilers, but if you’re familiar with it, my guess is this series of posts will be a goldmine for you.)
But just when you thought it was safe to go on the Internet without reading involved and fascinating analyses of seminal superhero graphic novels from the 1980s, Steven Berg at Peiratikos has started blogging the other side of the coin, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns! His first post, besides providing a terrific one-stop shopping list of all the Watchmenblogging done since Eve Tushnet started it all a few weeks ago, focuses on politics and psychology, and the impotence of both against Batman. The gist, I think, is that by the end of the book Batman has been freed from both–his secret identity “dead,” his superhero-warrior persona completely dominant, the outside world no longer has any hold over him whatsoever–he is at long last no longer conflicted but “at peace with himself.” (Interesting, then, that so many pointed to the lack of character reversals in The Dark Knight Strikes Again as a fault of that sequel, when it really is perfectly in line with the trajectory established in DKR. By the end of DKR Batman is freed from all external concerns–why should he be conflicted anymore?) Steven pays particular attention to the way that Batman’s detractors asssume Batman is completely accountable for his own actions, while utilizing pop psychology to explain and excuse the actions of even his most murderous enemies:
Dr. Bartholomew Wolper gives us Batman as