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

[sadoeuphemist]

Yeah but even in that scene the real-life superheroes have all appeared and are all washed up already, so how is this kid still getting inspiration from the funnybooks?

[icon_uk]

Because the superhero comic book hasn't burst yet and those heroes haven't failed the way the real thing have? Probably on the way out, but not dead yet.

[sadoeuphemist]

But he was inspired by a comic book to dress up as a hero in real life. Which by then was already a disproved idea.

But more than that, I feel like this doesn't continue the themes of Watchmen at all in regards to superheroes. In Watchmen, superheroes could be really competent at fighting crime. The thing was, crimefighting wasn't actually that useful a skill. Crime is not a threat to the fabric of society, it is a necessary evil of society that is policed and punished by the state, and in fact real life superheroes led to protests that they were putting police out of a job. Superheroes had the most influence when they went to war, or when the leveraged their fame into a business empire.

The world of Watchmen wasn't a world that needed superheroes. Even though they lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation, it was brought about by real-life geopolitics that required real-life political and economic solutions. The USSR weren't a bunch of supervillians who could be brought down by the right hero. That's why even though Nite-Owl had a sci-fi Owlplane that could fly all over the world and blast through prison walls, he was impotent in the face of impending nuclear war. Even Ozymandias, who literally had a crazy sci-fi mass murder plot, scoffed that he wasn't a "Republic serial villain" because that was the closest comparison he had. You had costumed mob bosses and criminals, but supervillains with their doomsday plots simply didn't exist.

But Cooke's take seems to be going completely against all that, and saying that the superheroes were absolutely, completely necessary. It's just the government suppressing them, keeping them down. The Japanese during WWII have been transformed into terrorist supervillains who can set off a doomsday device in the Statue of Liberty. If the Japanese can pull off a plan of that magnitude, the government has to be crazy to marginalize and shut down superheroes, because without superheroes the world is going to slip into chaos.

I mean, this story is fine as a golden age tale of heroism and so on (although the heroes trying to save an American city from a Japanese nuclear device is complete bizarro history), but I have no clue what any of this has to do with Watchmen.

[halloweenjack]

The point that you make in the second-to-the-last paragraph is a good one, and kind of disturbing, really, although Cooke is careful to point out that the incident is a result of internment of Japanese-Americans, which could be his rationale for it not being seen as justification of same.

[sadoeuphemist]

Yeah, on one hand, Cooke is banging the American guilt drum pretty heavily, what with the internment camps, and the government hushing everything up because a Japanese kid helped save them, and the image of the kid dying of radiation poisoning prefiguring Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But on the other, the fact that a bunch of Japanese-Americans were about to set off a nuclear device in the Statue of Liberty helps justify the camps, doesn't it? And the monstrosity of using a nuclear bomb on a civilian population is mitigated by the reveal that the Japanese were willing and able to do the same thing to the US first.

This is the sort of story that would've been progressive in the 1940's, and I mean that literally. I'm pretty sure I've seen a golden age story with this same basic plot, the Japanese preparing a plot on American soil, the whitebread hero only stopping it with aid from "one of the good ones." But nowadays, this sort of thing is just cliche.

What makes it worse is that Hollis Mason, and the book in general, is so completely small-minded. He remembers back on a Japanese kid dying of radiation poisoning during WWII, and his immediate thought is of what a lucky bastard Dr. Manhattan is. Uh, Hollis, the guy was named after the Manhattan Project, there is a whole different set of historical events that should be coming to mind here!

Hollis is so small-minded that he can only conceive of the world in terms of superheroes. Someone invents the Doomsday Clock, to warn of impending nuclear war, and he says he wishes it could matter to him! This coming from a man who stopped a nuclear device from going off in New York, who's witnessed the effects of radiation poisoning first-hand! Everything to him comes down to superheroes: the Minutemen being disbanded, a Japanese kid dressed up as a comic book character, Dr. Manhattan. He is intellectually, historically, politically dense.

Again, it's the opposite of Watchmen. If Hollis had to think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had to think about hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians perishing in nuclear fire or dying just like the kid in the hospital bed, he would be rendered as impotent as his successor. So he doesn't think about it. He's a freaking superhero who believes that the Doomsday Clock is just another symbol. I don't know how much more idiotic he can get.

[silverhammerman]

I think you've got the timeline a bit messed up, this is set after the end of WW2, it's explicitly stated that the plan is revenge for the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, so it doesn't really justify the camps.
You're probably right about Hollis, but I doubt that we're really supposed to be reading this and thinking that Hollis is dense or not looking at the big picture. We're probably intended to just to see it as Hollis being broken by the human tragedy he's witnessed and the idea that heroism could go unrewarded. I mean, you're right about Hollis' view of things being narrow, but I think Cooke's intent wasn't for him to come off like as stupid or anything. Not that I think your reading of it is in any way invalid of course.

[sadoeuphemist]

You're right, you're right, I've hosed up the timeline completely. But a plot by Japanese-Americans to plant a nuclear device in the Statue of Liberty does justify the internment camps, albeit retroactively. If they can and will do that after the war's over, it's a good thing that the government was keeping an eye on them during the war, isn't it?

What's frustrating to me is that Hollis' myopia seems to be objectively justified. Cooke creates this supervillain bomb threat tailored exclusively to the superheroes, and the heroes perform admirably. Unlike Watchmen, where there are legitimate reasons that the public turns against costumed vigilantes, their failure is imposed from the top down, with an absurd government conspiracy to hush up the whole thing. This is a government that is simultaneously too incompetent to stop a nuclear device from being brought into the Statue of Liberty, but competent enough to hush up the whole thing completely.

Traditional superhero stories, with their focus on the individual, rely on the premise that the police, the army, the government, the state, are incompetent. Society is powerless and inert, consisting largely of innocent bystanders, and it's up to the superhero to save the day. Watchmen turned this on its head by showing the superheroes crushed under the weight of sociopolitical forces beyond their capacity to deal with. When Cooke mourns that heroism goes unrewarded, he's not talking about people trying to do their best in a complex world. He's mourning the heroism of those old superhero comics, with contrived supervillain plots, where the authorities are useless and cities are in constant danger of being destroyed, and it all falls on a single individual in a goofy costume can save hundreds of thousands.

And sure, that's what superheroes are about. But as a prequel to Watchmen, this all just comes off as shallow and artificial and regressive.

[drexer]

I've got to thank you for so cleanly putting forward what has been bothering me since yesterday when I saw this post. I did see that there was merit in the story, but its superposition with the Watchmen characters and scenes seemed uncomfortable and inadequate to me, and it is much like you said, the message that it tells is the kind of message that Watchmen itself took to its job of deconstructing.

If I might add a small point upon which my thoughts rested, was that it was with a very powerful intent that in Watchmen the only 'proper superhero story' was that of Ozymandias and its appearance was so well timed. For various pages Watchmen keeps building its story and its universe and convincing us that there are no such plots or stories, no grand intergalactic battles and doomsday villains, that when the events are dropped upon us with the impact of aliens, psychics, mutant squids and who knows what else, it breaks our perception of the world and of the context of those plots. It brings them out to be examined as a tool of the genre and how they fit when in a different setting, how their consequences are far bigger and the needs that motivate them are far greater.

What Cooke does here, shatters that whole context if taken seriously, because now Ozymandia's plot exists in a world where the government would take it seriously. It's working principle is in the idea that Watchmen's world would never think of it, because there it would simply never be a 'real' possibility.

This is also in part why I've always been so ambivalent about the change of that part in the Watchmen movie, because while in part I did not agree with a change of such a fundamental part of the story, cinema(even nowadays post-Avengers and DK) simply put does not have the story and genre conventions in which such a shattering of concept has an impact.

[halloweenjack]

They haven't been around for that long--just a few years, and IIRC they're still getting pretty good press. I think that it's mostly after the HUAC hearings a few years after that that the bloom comes off the rose.