WATCHPANELS, Part the Eleventh

WATCHPANELS

One compulsive reader’s observations ...

after gazing into Watchmen for the umpteenth time

Yup my friends, it's hard to believe that it's been a year since we discussed Chapter Ten of Watchmen.

Part the Eleventh

All right, I’ve got photons in my teeth and my wrist brace on ...

In another of Alan Moore's occasional Briticisms, we have Adrian Veidt say “disorientating” instead of “disorienting.”

Veidt isn’t out to carve “a headstone for humanity,” he’s just out to bury anyone who would oppose him. Sounds suspiciously like Khrushchev’s 1959 boast that the USSR would “bury” the West.

*hurm* Maybe Veidt is a pinko sympathizer!

Much has been made of Veidt’s looking right at the reader, as if he’s thinking it over. No, he’s not. This self-absorbed, arrogant so-and-so is probably just laughing at us! The smug jerk!

On the other hand, either Veidt or Moore have a pretty wicked sense of ironic punnery. Read the last two words, all by themselves in their own speech balloon. After all, what better phrase could describe the weather outside Veidt’s dome ... the weather which he hopes will kill Rorschach and Nite Owl ... the weather which will now kill his three faithful servants? (Hint ... it’s how his German parents might have pronounced it.)

Why, it’s a VEIDT-OUT!

I agree with those who wonder how Veidt could have given all his money away, yet have been able to travel the world over. I imagine Veidt is lying about the giveaway.

As a younger child of the ’60s, I’ve always felt disgust at the concept of using mind-altering substances. The older “kids” might do it, but all I saw of it was heartbreak, theft, and stupid behavior. Intended by Alan Moore or not, the fact that Veidt’s “revelation” was sparked by a psychotropic trip brings his purported intelligence down another notch – in my opinion.

Perhaps you can tell that for me, Ozzy’s shine is long gone. I don’t think he is ashamed at all about killing his three servants. It’s not like he hasn’t already numbered his victims in the millions.

The Black Freighter has “reaped the wealth of the Sargasso” which is east of US East Coast. In my heretical opinion, this is 1) an implication by Alan Moore that the ship swept the entire globe; or, 2) Moore simply threw the phrase in for its sound, without thinking that the Sargasso Sea is nearly antipodal from the East Indies.

Here’s a full view of Veidt’s Alexander the Great painting. Was Gibbons paraphrasing a particular painting? Here are a few of the approximately umpty-zillion images of the tableaux. But knot one of them (get it? knot one!) looks like the specific inspiration for Gibbons’s image.

... Which makes perfect sense, in one way! Because I can easily imagine that Adrian Veidt, the supreme egoist, commissioned the painting as a portrait in his own likeness!

I’m not too impressed with Veidt’s self-serving explanation. It’s a chronicle of his megalomania and his rationalization for deliberately abrogating the individual rights of not only the ones he murdered, but of the survivors.

The black spot on Dan’s left hand is some kind of missed blooper, according to Gibbons, as quoted in the Annotated edition.

And I’m sure you’ll agree with me that, despite his other shortcomings, in this sequence Malcolm Long, Bernard the newsvendor, and Detective Steve Fine act like true heroes, putting themselves into harm’s way for another, even though it’s dangerous.

Even if there’s no hope of succeeding.

But, back to Karnak ...

What is that design on the armor in the display case, left foreground? The breastplate looks like it’s depicting a man being swallowed by a tentacled plant!

Kind of like this man-eating plant!  http://tatintsian.com/ru/exhibitions/alexis-rockman-fresh-kills/works/?img=1

Or this one, from the 1957 schlockfest The Land Unknown.

Here is a mosaic of Alexander from Pompeii, supposedly copied from a painting from Alexander’s lifetime. it shows perhaps a more believable breastplate design.

The epigraph is in quotation marks in the comic, but not in bound editions.

Further, there is a comma after “Ozymandias” in the comic, but not in bound editions.

For a supposed scholar, Leslie Klinger makes a stupid error in his commentary on this page, in Annotated Watchmen. He gives the wrong acronym for U.N.C.L.E.! He’s not the first person to make the mistake of thinking that U.N.C.L.E. was part of the “United Nations.” Still, you’d think that such a “scholarly” work would have some factcheckers! As any Baby Boomer, or anybody with internet skills can tell you, it’s the “United Network Command for Law and Enforcement,” not the “United Nations Command”!

Thanks for stopping by. Only one chapter left!

  

Superman Is Back!

...And I've got him!

Yup, the door leading into the Fortress of Markitude bears a couple of posters.  The bottom one:

Here's a closer view.  The Interwebs tell me this promo poster is from 1993.  It's been on this here door since the Fortress of Markitude was established in 2004.

Tell me some of YOUR old comics-poster tales!