Before Watchmen: Minutemen #5 - The Minutemen's Last Mission

[zapbiffpow]

In a departure from the classic saying, this is the one series I can believe no one's posted yet.

Not because the writing is terrible (it's not), or the art is sub-par (like hell it is), but because at all times the story's either so distrurbing or heartbreaking or controversial that it's hard to find which pages to post (i.e., the villain known only as The Friend of the Children.)

Before Watchmen: Minutemen #5 gives us the team's last moment as a unit. Four pages after the cut:



Here's what's happened during the series:

Silhouette - Murdered, mourned. I love how Cooke really expanded her back-story - she's now one of my favorite characters.
Dollar Bill - Shot dead, revolving door incident.
Silk Spectre - Quit after having avenged Silhouette, by way of 'taking care' of the Liquidator.
Comedian - Currently wetworks operative for the U.S. government.

The remaining Minutemen are just about ready to end the whole thing when they get an S.O.S from Bluecoat and Scout, a pair of heroes straight from the funny books who warn them of a Japanese plan to cause a meltdown in New York.

The target turns out to be the Statue of Liberty and the resulting radiation poisoning casualties, Bluecoat reports, would number in the thousands.

The Minutemen, although skeptical of the two, head for the Statue after the threat gets confirmed.



As the Minutemen hold off enemy gunfire at the base of the statue, Bluecoat is shot and killed, leaving Scout and Nite Owl to disable the nuclear device.

Then, in a freak twist of fate, Nite Owl is pinned down the stairs by the enemy he had shot to save Scout, forcing the kid to defuse a heavily radiated machine on his own.



This tearjerking sequence of words and images then happens:




This series has been executed so well it doesn't feel like a prequel or a fanfic anymore. Here's to Darwyn Cooke!

 

Comments

[arbre_rieur]

I found what Morrison said after that part interesting:

'Moore includes Geoff Johns among the “parasites” and “raccoons” rooting through his trash. Why? Because Johns seasoned his own epic expansion of the Green Lantern mythos with a couple of minor elements from Moore’s Green Lantern short story “Tygers” (1986) – a story that was itself created to make sense of a plot hole in the 1959 Green Lantern origin by Gardner Fox!

So, in fact, both Moore and Johns were simply doing their work-for-hire jobs by adding to and expanding upon the many-authored quilt that is DC, and specifically Green Lantern, continuity. In a shared narrative universe, such as those of DC or Marvel, any element introduced into the continuity surely becomes part of the backstory and is therefore available to other writers to build upon or incorporate. Johns’ Green Lantern work and the “Blackest Night” story in particular would have worked as well without any reference to “Tygers”, in fact. Why the sneering, dehumanizing putdown? Who chastises a man for the unspeakable crime of synthesizing prior elements of Green Lantern’s back story into his own fresh and personal creative vision for the character, m’lud?

Would Moore have appreciated a comparison to vermin snuffling among Gardner Fox’s garbage for treats when he brought Fox’s Floronic Man back from the archives to feature in a “Swamp Thing” (Len Wein’s trash!) story? What obsessive snouting around in the municipal tip does “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” reduce to if we regard Alan Moore’s endeavours through the same unforgiving lens he applies to Geoff Johns’ work?

Geoff Johns like the rest of us, has his own identifiable obsessions as a writer. He has his own interests, his own points of view, and his own way of articulating his ideas via his chosen medium. I know for a fact that Geoff has seen and done and endured things in his life that Alan Moore is unlikely ever to experience, yet Moore automatically brands him creatively bankrupt and tries to insists that Johns’ imagination is so low on fuel, it relies for sustenance on his own. If I can speak up for a friend, Geoff Johns, like the rest of us, like anyone who picks up a pen to earn a living, has plenty to say and, with all respect, he doesn’t need Alan Moore’s help to say it.'

[thezmage]

This is the part that seems most significant to me. What Johns did with Green Lantern was take concepts that were little more than named in Moore's story and expand them into elements that served the story he was telling. For Moore to try and take credit for them is creatively bankrupt, if not morally.

I've seen a number of Moore fans try to justify his response with the arguments that he hasn't read the stories in question and was only commenting on them because the question was asked him in an interview, as if a writer of Moore's caliber can't conceive of the words "I can't comment, I haven't read the stories in question".

[halloweenjack]

I guess the real question is, has the artist actually improved on the material, or have they diluted it with their own inferior product? "Tygers" does indeed fill that weird little continuity question of why Abin Sur had a spaceship in the first place, but it's much more than Moore earning his No-Prize; it's a nifty little story that takes great advantage of the medium and story length. I literally wouldn't trade it for everything that Johns has written about the Green Lanterns and assorted associated characters, the occasional bright spot such as Larfleeze and Dex-Starr notwithstanding.

Morrison's attempts to muddy the waters by attempting to claim that Moore's talking about the basic right to use pre-existing characters and situations, rather than the quality of those efforts, are indicative of nothing more significant than that he's Johns' co-worker and is defending the company brand. Yes, the self-proclaimed subversive rebel of St. Swithin's Day and The Invisibles is now the compleat company man.

[thezmage]

But Moore doesn't know the quality of the story, he hasn't read it. So he's clearly not commenting on the quality of it, merely the concept, much like you take Morrison to task for commenting on just above.

[halloweenjack]

OK, then, I think that Moore is commenting on what he thinks the likely quality of a huge crossover event from an eight-page backup story would be, and I think that he was right, given the results.

[thezmage]

Exactly my point, as long as you ignore everything in the Blackest Night event other than the name his comment makes sense. Allow all of the other stuff in the event in there and it's clear how little sense his comment makes and how inappropriate and just plain wrong-headed his comment is

[halloweenjack]

[thedude]Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.[/thedude] Blackest Night was successful, as that's measured in comics today, and obviously has its fans, but I found it to be yet another in a series of increasingly contrived mega-crossover events that had no real reason or purpose other than temporarily driving up sales.